Joshua Cohen - Witz

A searching of a newer weather. Another push for Why? What made them die. Was it something I said. Or did something. Or didn’t say. I love you. I renounce and yadda. And all an opinion requires is an opinion observed previously. Experts in quotes. A gene, a genome, which is the congregation of genes — a community of their genomes, a Jnome, say. Expelled from the midst. Researchers with eyes blackened from microscopic squint. Bruised tongue with a funny bone. Selfdestructive encoding from the sixth day of Creation — lies dormant on the seventh, inherited on its night. Late abortion by a rib. One doctor DDS, and probably also disbarred from an earlier career as a lawyer and, though briefly, imprisoned — he thinks it a reaction to whatever they’d sustained themselves on, the kosher, kashering food. Another doctor DPM and moonlighting lately as an accountant, dissents. And so to convene another cenacle of scholars. Then wait. Ideas, the ultimate in waste. Tenured philosophers and metaphysicians of the Continental school feel it wasn’t death, couldn’t be — that they’d only disappeared. Absorption. An assimilation, intractable. Rashed out to another existence plane. Palpated hard to dimension the fourth. Is that the best you can do. Group shrug. Mass Hysteria the foregone conclusion of the Free University of Leiden, stemming from latent fear of insignificance, what’s the term in Latin. University of Chicago cites ideal incest with the air. Who knows. And who cares, decisively. Who can read let alone understand these reports coming in by the hour, might as well be bound in skin and stitched with hair; these journals stretching to an impenetrable six, seven hundred pages, with prettily unfocused pictures and blurry charts to graphs and tables the university presses did up themselves and backward as the printers have just begun converting to a new language right to left what with the multinational publishing houses broke and gone. Speeches are broadcast, but the microphones aren’t turned on. Anything but apathy, that’s the idea, the thinking mensch on the street — apathy the breathless cause, though, and not the effect; that they died of apathy, let’s say, and so the reaction to their death must be the opposite, whatever antipode sanctified: enthusiasm, maybe, for their rituals, for their traditions…initiatives initiated, mantles taken up, causes championed to great effect. Accumulating interest. And verily interest would breed regard, would breed affection, then love, which is the sworn enemy of hate. Theirs a hate that had been a hatred of the self, however, which was only a love that should in theory kill, but paradoxically preserved. If only for a time. Dialecticians having a field day in a new field, which is rutted, smutted — the frontlawn seeded only with morning frost. Each half of any dialectic like one of two vases, blue or white, or both, gifts from who remembers — an uncle’s aunt, though she’d been married to — which Hanna always hated but placed on the table in the diningroom anyway, because something had to go there, anything at all…

A passingover, perhaps…an angel of God forbid to even think of it, death Itself — no Moloching matter. Or so announces the Honorable Meir Meyer, Mayor of New York, on the basis of information supplied by his staff, interns and unpaid. A thesis if you’re feeling generous, we’re just putting it out there, giving gnosis. That, and a collective allergic reaction amid the greater congregation. Bad milk; mutated poison secreted in the previous generation’s lacteal unmissables. And then, it’s gossiped, that the firstborns, they might have been the first to claim their chosenness, but they’re not firstborns. Impostors. Stand in proxies. The latest generation of secundogeniture. Seekers of fortune, profiteers. Opiners opine. Public intellectuals publicize. A malfunction in the mechanism of infridge units of water purification, another. Tampering down at the plant, etc. A reaction theory advances a week, half a lunation, a triggering agent hidden somewhere molecular or other, rendering it innocuous for drink to pass the lips of those for whom the Law’s without cause. Dribble. Mere chin music. Then, a Section A’s last page retraction of an entire moon’s worth of coverage, letting the metro area know they can’t believe everything they read. Tabloid advertorials headlining mass starvation. Overconsumption. To burn like a bush. Or a parasite’s parasite. Autopsies reveal nothing. Milkmuscled meatus. Shrinks analyze the dead upon metal sofas. It looks like a Rorschach to me. Now close both eyes and tell me what you see. A panel of mediums flown in from Anywhere That Sounds Good. Only to find that the Affiliated — they’re still around, why shouldn’t they be; that they’d only transcended human form, went on to exist in a galaxy popularly referred to as Memory (subsequently identified as dwarf spheroidal 3600, type dE0, though disputed). Under the crust of the earth, alternatively, secreted deep in its core, waiting out their day. Talkingheads and yesmensching no. And always with those suits: drycleaners must be making a fortune; salesmenschs, distributors, suppliers. Still, what of selfdestruction. Hardwired martyrdom. Mutation of the urge to submit. Give in, give up, relinquish or relent. An adapted strain of abnegation, anyone. Ritual mass suicide — this the thesis advanced in a private, independent study matchingly funded by the undeniably patronizing sponsorship of the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. All of them just transmigrating into the ocean at once to drown, holding their yarmulkes down on their heads against the tides. Though, what’s most revealing is this: that not one authority has the media audacity to suggest sin. Who’d the nerve; anyway, it’s called chutzpah now. And on primetime, publicized to an audience of fearmouthed, willing millions. Punishment. As in, Divine Retribution. Deserving. Wanting, needing. Had it coming, then it came. Ask for death, and thou shalt receive only death — and cards you can’t see to read, prayers and sympathy you can’t hear to thank, flowers you can’t smell, and brunch spreads you can’t taste, then a grave that will give you no rest.

Initial tests come up negative for nearly everything — except when a positive false or not would more effectively frustrate any effort to know, to put in perspective. Across the board for those who’ve failed their boards — levels are levels, the counts count, nothing’s found out of the recent reinterpretation of the ordinary. Livers are functioning, urea, uric acid…mensch goes to the doctor, doctor gives him six months to live, you know this, don’t you, mensch can’t pay the bill, doctor gives him another six months is how it goes. RH’s factored in, age, height, and weight, how much you need a name for your problem, too, how syllabically badly you want to be wronged. Another round of injections are prescribed: thinners, thickeners, transalphabetical vitamins, middles, downers and ups; pressurelowering meds are administered; gel’s smeared on nipples, hearts thump away. FB test subjects — initially a sample of thirtysix — are prevailed upon to urinate into a cup, one cup plastic for everyone that no one wants to hold, understandably, as they’re all going to go at once; they drool their warm piss all over their hands, each other’s. Prostates are groped, they give cough all at the same time then gag swabbed, their only culture that of the throat and unbecoming, without feeling; they’re poked, prodded, their fettles are fondled, levels leveraged…saliva samples are taken, and that of their colloidal, colluding sperm; the walls of their tushes each the lower and upper the hairily lipped are scraped for the petri, as fungi’s selectively tweezered out from under finger and toenails, then laid flat atop altars of glass for the sacrifice of institutional money, time, and effort; test after test, more tests than Abram ever had to pass to become Abraham, than ever Jabob had to endure to make us Israel if only in name and more trying, without thicketed rams, no angels stilling hands or laming limbs to save. Ratnosed, roachfingered goyim in white labcoats that’ve been tagged with more initials than God has names, paperputschers, pawing keyslaves, buttonclawers, they’re consulting their charts, a flow veining throughout the evidential body, illuminating only the black mass of ectoplasmic night: testing fresh FB samples, every six hours, three, then retesting again why not, those of the living to be compared with those of the dead, all in an attempt, but how, to fix that strange date in this, the strangest land. Idea is, they couldn’t live forever, could they; naturally or not, they as a people would die out, the thought. And then, let’s say they lived, wishful for argument’s sake or hope’s survival: they could intermarry, they could reproduce with us, meaning with others, and then what Lawwise. Attention, executively ordered, is being given to Xmas Eve of this year; Year 0 A.I. it’s been proposed to call it, After Israel or Israelien, depends (studies have been commissioned: how can we ever count again?) — but they’re too optimistic…Unaffiliated. As forecasts are at odds for the upcoming eve of Passover, and when not at odds then just odd, unrelenting in their manifold predictions: such obscuring fronts and systems, ever colder dates calculated for contrast, timetables and stats, too many numbers serving not to clarify but to darken with cloud, with spilled ink; with the government, Garden, Inc., and not to forget the people, too, the firstborns themselves whose inheritance however imaginary is, in the end, what’s funding this Island endeavor, attempting to ensure that their investment remains protected, tasking Der and the Administration behind him to ensure this never happens again; and that, as the President privately asserts, if it does, which might be inevitable, when it does, then they know not how to prevent fatalities, which might prove impossible, but how best to exploit a survivor, if any survivor there’ll be.