Joshua Cohen - Witz

No, as Adam Steinstein reminds everyone — in his rage ennobled, matured, barmitzvah or no a mensch already, canny and strong, he’s toughened — it’s me who’s suffering, it’s me who’s down and out, left all alone, me and not you…that the Abel who died had been his cousin, his and not yours, yours and not theirs: Abel obituaried and eulogized, who’d enjoyed the sport of princes, which is pingpong, and the sport of kings, too, which is pinball, an A student who’d hoped one day earlier to find the cure for the cancer that’d killed his grandparents before his parents would’ve died of it themselves, only to die from what at the peak of their health, at the height of that late and perpetually latening winter — to find that cure perhaps under the fluff of his pillow, vialed alongside the fallen blood of a pearly tooth; Abel who’d left no parent behind to be proud of his prodigious intelligence — you’ll excuse, please, a schmeck of exaggeration postmortem, won’t you, hab rachmones, pity, pity, shalt thou pursue. Abel who’s dead, which is sure, that much can be said, through the wind and snow and the dark and ice that freezes in the air the echoes of familial howl; the calls in and warm, the calls home, officially motherly exhortations, ostensibly fatherly threats; inscrutable Cain the distanced shadow of the deceased, beckoned through the wilderness of the city to the Island to meet his brother, to become there his murderer and his heir. Abel’s face smote down in his meat his plated anger, a sacrifice atop an altar of brisketcuts, the table’s least desirable, the most fatty of them their tips welldone, overcooked dry, brisket blacked to char in its own blood that no one here will ever eat again, you can’t hold it against them — blutbeef sopped with a gravy the organic aspirations of which are, let’s be honest, fooling no one; served up with the plump of dumplings, alongside just defrosted, coldcored mixed vegetables, which are harder than teeth though just as filling. Eat up. Fast down.

With no news of infirmity let alone of recovery, of survival, with no news at all, an impromptu vigil’s candlelit into mass mourning, barefoot on concrete around Steinstein’s — Adam’s — stripped mattress hundreds of beds bunked south of his cousin’s, empty now forever; a Shiva extended, FBs flocking to the appropriate barracks to pay their respects, their tribute though who knows him — to pay memorial donations of sweater lint and good will to a fund established in anyone’s name; there to trip through the formulas of condolence, offer sentiment, apologize; Nilesized baskets arrive at all hours from without, cosigned cards and wreathes and cooperative gifts: Mail Call’s siren signaling the arrival of carepackages sent by interests wholly charitable and only partially specialinterested, concerned not with wellbeing or appetite but with the states of their forsaken souls; the FBs showing with weeds thawed and tied with grass into bouquets, a bulrush on cattails to wrap, papyrus; foods stolen from the commissaries, pocketed for a present to the bereaved: forget this fasting; you’ve already been punished, might as well go forth and sin. A gathering staying up late, refusing to disperse at Curfew, don’t mind me stands in the dark. Steinstein sleeps under the sag of his bunk, on the floor, which is barren, cement clumped with dust, a position mandated by tradition for those in mourning, those who find themselves exhausted while down on their knees, praying their search for a lost pair of shoes. A rabbinate in attendance, a few thousand of them resident from Rabbi to Rebbe on down to fallen Rav — everydenominational like the mint they would’ve been charging had this tragedy been graven upon the past, a prior season; ordained up to their ears, their solicitous eyes, their lips pursed in an Amen before their mourner blesses grief — here to assist Steinstein with whatever his spirit’s unable to bear. Since his upper bunkmate native to Moscow, or Odessa maybe he’s saying, doesn’t speak his language yet, this tongue native to and predominant in the Garden (rather, the earhaired, nattily suited mensch knows his Russian, a mouthful of scatological Yiddish), he’s rotated out, switched the second night of Shiva, which means To sit with a rabbi who’d known — by his own admission, perhaps a bintel briefed too forthcoming especially when in front of the microphones and cameras — a friend of Steinstein’s, Adam’s, father’s roommate through two years of medicalschool from which the rabbi then not yet had been expelled for worrying experimentation, try offprescription abuse, trying out a host of psychopharmacologic solutions upon the person of his future wife, the rebbetzin. Rabbi and Steinstein sleep near one another on the floor, freshface buried in beard — late night struggling, early morning tensed, limbs aching, with toes exposed freezing, they’re shivering but nervously, too; hot, wandering palms stroking shush…

Witness, too, the perhaps anapocryphal Powers that Are sitting around a table topped in glass, rung with the orbits of sloshing coffee cups, water glasses, and the dew of their pitcher, scattered with stray tobacco, ashtrays overflowing with gray; overtired, occipitally headached and parched, they’re ringing galaxies of smoke around this room underground through the night into morning: Der and the Doctors Tweiss, seated alongside the theological legation of Abuya and the Nachmachen, a rowdy gang of insourced maturation experts, too, adjustment authorities, enablement profs, armchaired academicians roused from their laureate sleep, tenured doze, summoned away from tomes or midnight weaknesses for string quartets, pipe tamps, and whiskey snifts, vaunted pundits syndicated out the mouth, payper politicos, image consultants, brand managers, then an entire jury of Goldenberg Esq.s their dictaphones infundibularized in the flowers of their lapels, a stenographer and a notary public; they’re desperate to be anything but desperate, how now anything goes: gaudily attired gypsies, lisping mediums, psychics, séancers, crystalballers, and tablerappers…Ben’s at home still, sleepless in His bed and alone again after His nightly sister’s left, left Him and herself as His sister — too shockdistracted, onedge at threshold, wasted afraid with the door halfopened, halfshut and with the nightlight glowworm on; nothing to do but keep awake, which means you’re alive, living to grieve again another day. At who knows when too early, redrimmed moon the morning, a hulkingly anachronistic darkness enters the house, a trespass intruder with its own set of starry keys — it has to be a golem, it’s silent. It’s palming a flashlight, he is, its taped shem of a nametag indicating ownership, Steinstein ; its small spot of light comes sweeping over the kitchen, illuminating scurried forms, the escape of loosed household pests, roaches on the tails of mice being swallowed by rats, imported from Manhattan…the tables, the chairs, the blinding door of the fridge, the breakable junk, the broken; a viscous mountain of trashbags not yet curbed to the enclosure to the west of the house. He makes his deliberate way to the stairs, past the dim footlockers arranged at the foot: Hanna’s packingcrates, with dishes never to basement; then up the stairs, down the halls with their mirrors still draped past the sisterly rooms their doors shut and locked, sidestepping the mudtaint, soiled snow tracked in without wiping feet, desquamated foreskins and scaly foodwrappers and single sheets of toiletpaper trailing to the end to ply its door, Ben’s, which could’ve been shut and locked, too — though not to them, nothing is.

Hamm taps the flashlight on His head and says it sounds something like downstairs, softly, get dressed…at least put on some pants.

I won’t beg — you’re coming with me.