Joshua Cohen - Witz

I’ll admit it, he says to Ben…I’m a late arrival, what of it — that Xmas, the night they all…you know, that just destroyed me.

What if it had been me, I was thinking…what’s my responsibility to the dead and why — provoking questions, know what I mean?

I was crushed, wasn’t comfortable with who I was anymore.

It’s guilt, insecurity, those old feelings of inadequacy, and so I’m having these procedures…the nose — it’s a solidarity thing; identification, status; and then I’m getting sliced, too, ritually snipped.

Nature’s raw law, the more primitive, the primal, the animal, that’s on the outs says the wife; she’s been after me day and night. I told her what they told me, that there might be considerable detriment to, nu, sensitivity, occasional hymn difficulty, you understand — a bit of impotence at first, nothing medication won’t remedy, I’m assured.

She’ll love it, I’ll live with it, we’ll deal. I’m the last in my office to have this done; the doctors’ve come highly recommended — I’m told they have a heavy hand; apparently, it shakes.

Nurse de Presser enters the room again, and escorts Ben through the door opposite, which gives out onto a room even smaller and dirtier — a closet’s custodianship of a bathroom, maybe, converted to dinge as if for the accommodation of a solitary and reflective wait with the preservation, or installation, of a plumbingless porcelain toilet upon which He sits with its seat down amid the intricate webbing and egglings of tiny spiders, and the lonely motes stuck for their sucking, fat fluffs of dust to be leeched of their defilement. He faces Himself in the dim — the wall’s lone hanging, a mirror unframed in which’s reflected only shadow. He tugs the chain to the bulb above, no luck. If there’s anything else here it would be only a form, derelict, forgotten: a mop, thinhandled, or a broom bristlehairy, gunked thickly with sopping sweep, leaned up against the wall at corner.

I’m next, it says, and so it, too, seems a person, but standing on his head. And no way you’re getting in front of me, no matter what, won’t let you…I’m sorry, pleased to meet you.

Ben reaches out to the foot offered and shakes it lightly bare in shvitzy greeting.

People don’t respect the old order anymore — you know, they never did.

Patience, patience, patience, a bissel calm?

By the time I get in to the doctors, I want to be sick enough to merit their full attention, that’s the goal, I’m talking totally out of it, some days I even wish I were dead…he sighs, knocks knees. I want to give them something to work with, wouldn’t presume to waste their talents and their time.

I’ve been standing like this for a while now; they say it’s good for you, for your head, helps with the memory, brings back whatever’s repressed.

Nurse de Presser returns, escorts Ben through the barren’s backdoor, on their way stepping on the goy upsidedown, giving him in his howl a leer to her legs, the darkred wounding between them; the door opening into the vivisection of a hallway, still unheated, and again travestied, the paint, paper, paste of its near walls hopelessly torn at as if with nails grown teeth; a hall labeled opposite the door with two signs shaped like arrows…what are their points, opposing — one declaring Doctor Tweiss and the other the same, though not evidencing that to the right’s the psychoanalyst, and to the left the plasticsurgeon, if and only if it’s not the other way around. Throughout this lowceilinged, linoleumfloored hall, people in multiple stagings of an evident distress (being clinical), or derangement (becoming pathological), pace a placebic back and forth, slip on slickshod poolings of their own urgent wastes, only to rise relapsed through the ambit between the two closed, and probably locked, doors, one at either end.

They’re confused, says the nurse in a tone that’s been memorized though not quite as well as that that she’s employing such to confide: her briefing, closenosed introductory remarks — not sure as to which of the doctors they’re here to see, and for what they’re here to see which of them about. I’ll make it quick, pay attention.

Those who arrive for psychological treatment, seeking help let’s say with a relationship or sexual issue, often enter the wrong office and emerge two, even three days later pregnant, or else with a larger bust or smaller chin; sometimes this solves their particular problem, whatever they’d thought that was, other times not; though not a few of the cases you’ll find have changed their minds on their own: headed for one, they turn right around and head for the other, which I don’t need to tell you would necessitate another appointment, requiring yet another wait; some cases, as I’ve said, are confused — noncompos, maybe, whether from a preexisting condition or not; but others, the poor wretches, are merely forgetful, meaning their memories aren’t what they used to be — and whatever they used to be, that they’ve forgotten, too; and then there are many just waiting for their insurance to be approved: they’re one form short, perhaps, a missed premium, it’s tragic.

You should be grateful, she says, you’ve been fasttracked, straight to the top. No one’s gotten so far, so quickly.

A hallway, a glorified madward, an asylum transplanted like a canker from the dimly far, catarrhcoughing past, to bloom here in a wintering of institutional white amid the the tubercular exurban; the asphalt just a block too far to be boroughed. People checking off their listless, a life too inconsequential to register on the Xrays on which they sit; a goy standing to piss through an eyelet ripped into the tip of his bandage, wetting the floor and its median rug opposite the entrance door, its purples and gold dampening richer with his wail: a rug the foreskin of a vast endangered animal, the doctoring brothers would often boast (a whale, the Leviathan, lion, bear, or just a costly imitation), luxuriantly soft, stretched as a welcome mat, wipe your feet split then nailed; translucently dark motifed with veins, rumor has it that if you stand on it long enough, it’ll become a carpet, wall-to-wall. You’ll have to excuse me, the nurse says over her shoulder as she escorts out the disturbance micturating still. Just a moment, for her to think of the appropriate delay: the doctors are now occupied treating each other.

A woman who’s known better days though her eyes seem to ask, but haven’t we all, approaches Ben as Nurse de Presser and her cropped charge disappear with a twitch behind the door, which is locked again, the goy’s urine foaming in from under the draft. I’m looking for Doctor Tweiss, she’s staring down to the puddling warm and her only in her slippers; would you be so kind as to point me in the right direction? What left to do but shrug. I was referred to Doctor Tweiss by a Doctor Tweiss — smiling half a tooth — and he, such a nice boy and single, can you believe, referred me to this Doctor Tweiss for a second opinion, who then referred me back to Doctor Tweiss for unspecified tests, and now that Doctor Tweiss, he must make a comfortable living, you think, such a wonderful soul that one he’s referred me to a specialist, a certain Doctor Tweiss whom I’m trying to find now, and I’m afraid I’m lost, and quite late for my appointment.

About to give a grin in response when another younger woman, only a girl spasms between them and asks loudly of Ben, Tell me about your father!

Myoclonic. Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a sigh?

Her hair is in her face, but those on second inspection are wrinkles.

Enough, she yells, so tell me about my father, will you?

All the patience of the hall turns at this noise, makes to mob the arrival, this whomever hunk promoted past them, unremembered from the haven of earlier rooms — thinking, here the potential for new information. Husbands and wives in for counseling and couples you can’t tell which they’re in for, in declining health whether psychological, physical, psychosomatical, psychophysiological, or only hypochondrial, hysteria termed as mere suggestion; their clothes as if their insides turned out, an airing messy, ravaged with aliment; their faces haggard, cheeks sucked shallow to image as if idolatrously the hollowness lately experienced within: neglected, they survive on nothing more than dust, which is both sustenance and an experimental drug, as a palliative unsurpassed, a universal prescription the ingestion of which — by salivaswallowing, snorting, fingering on the gums, the thumbing of which up the tush — induces a nostalgic quiescence, a wistful longing for the unknown or possibly never extant past; the doctors have it imported from overseas, a treatment intended especially for the edification of their longest lasting patients, at an expense said to be significant both financially and, too, for the mind and body; its only effect whether side or frontally lobed being a particular thirst, which as its specificity’s not yet been identified is impossible to quench.