Joshua Cohen - Witz

Across from Ben leaning against a wall of the hall — another later clock.

Tick, tick.

Just a wristwatch tacked — a tock.

Waiting, it’s an exam of time and money, a test they’ll never pass — specifically, how precious is a life? It’s always the same, this waiting, amid ghostly gowned, suspended patience — shrouded in the fusc and noise of incomplete or false report — the expectation day after day, after moon, and in every line, in every office hour, the prison of the calendar box in which the appointment’s set down, as if scribbled into stone: it passes monstrously slowly, sacrificing its people to patients, its patients to victims, monotony deferred to nullity, a void, this grave for entitlement, an afterlife of modest proportions, attended to by the biting of nails, by unwarranted hunger, and that perpetually unparticular thirst. Without even the promise of Purgatory — it’s the purgatory of purgatory, which would find you finally guilty only if innocent of shuffle, fidget, twitch. An extension to be granted to boredom, indecision, to seek leave only for a rest — though if they sleep, Him or any of them, they might miss their name when called, or if (no one knows, though, upon which pad that disclaimer might be scribed); that is, if names are still theirs to have and speak and hear amid such desperation — the aim of which, as implemented from above, from below, can only be to depersonalize, to victimize human not into animal but worse, turned to mere number, into order, into slave. All names to become, after this, the wait itself, named Wait — after this assimilation into oblivious system, this initiation into nothingness, misfiled. It’s the latest in destructive: how the one solace He’s expected to derive from this is that of His own suffering, and that of others, expectant, too; there’s enough to go around and dizzying around and yet beyond Him, nauseous, a sensation worse than suspicion’s comfort, or the consolation of His fear; Him by now mature enough to know that all the kvetch in the world won’t hasten fate, thanks Israel, which Hanna never understood, how our noodgy push is fated to nil, no avail.

The office’s patients are joined throughout the following days and weeks by older wards of the Garden — terminals, causes lost to corpse — tapping last toes, pulling final fine hairs, teething the lip then a tongue to suck the dust and, also, to postpone, putoff, keep waiting every urge — waiting for Doctor Tweiss or his twin, for both of them or their receptionist she thinks she’s a nurse if she’s not too busy, to belch them out upon the Belt Parkway, beached; as if prophets spit from the innards of a Leviathan sustained on watery time, sundered upon a brutal clock — an end to office hours, when. A doctor heals but time does, too, depending on how devoted that doctor is to the treatment. It follows that this is how one remunerates the brothers for their work; this very waste their payment, earned in the professional discharge of a gross neglect. Waiting for an hour is good for a consultation of ten minutes, wasting three days away will get you a fullbody checkup — in the perfection of this transaction there being no insurance information to give, no forms to fill out, or checks to cut; them paying the outstanding balance in their deaths; the wait being the end of them as individuals, as people; accounted animals, counted breaths. Or else, in another interpretation: as no soul ever dies, they’ll transcend themselves upon the reckoning, taking leave of their ordinal, regularly scheduled forms, to become the wait itself, a reincarnation to total waste. With all the days of their lives and their nights, too, sentenced to the time that must be waited out by their generations ensuing, until their own demise, then that of theirs and onward, which becoming is and would be perpetual, forever — humble contributions to a charity eternal.

Enough, enough to say — it springs. Dayeinu. An explosion, we will be swallowed by the earth. Our core comes apart, a bomb up from the Apple’s bowels — islands its shards, the city a broken vessel. Repair, whether mend or heal, you do what you can, your best.

A new life seeps up from the void within…disperses out, under the permafrost — in veins, a straining snarl. Our foundations are rocked; smoky tufts, dusky mold; buds shiver into silvery crowns; ices crack westerly, wrack the Island in a jarring purge: spring, the season of crying, kicking rebirth…spring, the season of sprung quickly, cold stillbirth — their mother is the same. Their father, he’s late — we’re waiting on him still.

Nothing’s thawed, only shattered. The verdant’s humbled under the freeze, as not much more than a sign, foretelling of symbol…a future down and dormant, entombed in ice, season’s promise without warming to fulfillment. If promise is the redemption, then fulfillment is the Law; this is our tradition. In the clock that is its cycle, it’s the season of Exodus — in a more obliging time, the season that would stream dew down to the valley of the faithful, to flow its flight past blackened cataracts of spoiled manna, then over and around the desert winding itself its clay bed as serpentine as sin, to pool at the foot of Sinai, shining like a star under a latter moon; summer’s slow absorption of the wetted, wetting season: the weather and the Law, inseparable, of the same womb, that of Hanna’s Hanna. As a babe borne to His first spring atop this ancient rush, in a basket woven of His eyelashes floated atop a river of His tears — so early in life that everything’s a first, a fresh discovery, a blessing lying in the waiting, twophrased at the crossroads: first face toward the Great Hall, then bow, and then toward His house above the ice, to bow again at its path of slate, its driveway of tar, freshly shoveled daily…to holy every revelation’s what’s required, if not for Ben’s survival then to make their deaths more real — no matter how meager, no matter the futility involved. He divines the smoke from the fire, and differences the earth from the unappealable ice. And so He knows, as much, this season for what it is, for what it’s become, and so for what’s forsaken — this spring isn’t about rejuvenation, regeneration, a new compact, or covenant renewed: this disillusioning moon, it marks only a season more, another loneliness starmocked, shone deeper into the empty soul of life.

A last twinkling, then darkness.

As it will never be written: when cycles are stilled, their memories go on with their turning, overturning; then what was of this world is called inside, is locked indoors, sent to its room, to toss diurnal in colorful, too clowny sheets. Know this — that we live despite the season, its weather, the wasteful, wasting time. That we live because we stay inside — that only with roof and walls are our lives saved; on the lawn and behind its fence, the car parked, the gutters blooming, there we erect our truest Temple. As courses are made ritual, the rise and set of sun get timed to the face of a higher clock; its hands of rays spin, realigned, to tick away our time…until — an emergence…revelation, an inspired sensing. As a mensch more than any otherness is both a part in a mechanism and an individual, a mechanism unto himself, both the cog of the clock and the clock itself with its two gnarled hands: one shorter to pull toward, opposite one longer to push away, that and the feet of a lion and with the tail of a viper, the time Ben spends in the Garden is made other from any hour known, is off the daily schedule. His are days sat out in this house alone He’s trashing, destroying, bringing it to the collapse of ruin: a house adrift on an Island floating in an ocean set in His sink, in the kitchen His mother once ruled as queen, out from under the timing scepter of her king — the third hand of the clock, pointing time independent and so perhaps to us erratically, but no less regulated, still within the same system, rooted to the same immaculacy and intellection, its floating face…squared by the lower tennis courts, their balls starring lazily over the nets windfallen, in the division of armies for snowball wars; the slides have been repurposed; the seesaws reeducated into catapults of frost; though the bases be stolen, no one has it in them to escape.