Joshua Cohen - Witz

Promise me…it’s the mumbling fan, you’ll never seek me out.

Promise, humbling, and I’ll remember to you whatever you want.

Ben sits on a sofa in a room His mother called one room and His father another, couched alongside the telephone set atop its table of wood legged fickly ever since He’d stood on it to rip the intercom’s unit from the face of the wall. At the sound now — she knew how to cook, how to compliment, she loved you very much, Feigenbaum says, I want you to know we all did — He knows not to answer, to provoke; give the voice its privacy, a room of its own, the gut of the house and the hallway, it’s a throat. Where’s the head, it knows what a week it’s been…Feigenbaum unsteady, lubricated from the shvitz of his sit, cracks toes, uncomfortable upon this dumb tooth of bowl, chomping him, consuming. A stack of magazines to his left on the ledge, having been blown under the door by way of looser lips, and so a sister to thank, a drafty girl who might’ve called him uncle, alongside yellowing, wetmoldy newspapers, expanded editions for Shabbos, featuring the Arts and Stocks, now with full death statistics, please turn to page D1: a record skimmed for the past, scanned for the present, headlines at his feet he hasn’t yet lived down but through; pages upon pages wetted to harden thick into tablets kicked to the corner to crumble into kibble. Fluffy seatcover itches, a poor pillow. To scratch, to sleep deep in the wounds he itches out, there to never wake, to live within your hurt is to never be hurt again…it’s that as much as frightened. Old enough to know better, old enough not to care he does, or that he should, it’s this insanity, also, this mania recurring when it’s not a fixation, perpetual, digestively always; having been trained to the toilet late, in that flat waterheated, a tenement smokewindowed, shared with a hundred others, a hundred hundred, an entire family encamped in a crack of the bowl, urging him to pish, to get done soon, get it over; the night of his tush, eclipsing the day of his flush — all the days and nights of his sit, unrisen. It wasn’t a family down there, it’d been the apples his mother had sold, or his father, the apples his mother would sell to his father who’d then sell them out on the streets for rent and heat and light and water; bobbing, kept cold in the tank, corefresh. And then the snake, it would slither up the pipes, the pipe, winding up and through the crumbling bowels, three, four, five walkupflights stooped up the plumbing up past the rust and rot; shedding skin as it surfaces, half submerged, to coil in the bowl, which is so white and gleamingly pure that it feels, now, to be made of bone, jointed to his squat; this serpent swallowing itself, tightly, coldblooded and yet warmly, a scaly quivering turd, just waiting, to bite him in the tush as he sits himself to lighten, two marks, one for each cheek turned, poisons, or even worse: to crawl up into him, corkscrewy the hisser to wriggle up Feigenbaum’s puckered hole, to eat his fever from the inside out; intestines as a newest, shedless skin, to poison his vitals then out again, trailing from its tail his bile through any convenient membrane, maybe its head forking a tongue out one nostril, its tail flailing out the other; with his failing breath Feigenbaum to grasp at the never spooled, never started, and yet almost finished roll, to poorly wipe away the venous venom: his two hands wrapped in tissue as if they’re bandaged, absorbent wounds incurred in the intensity of his grip; an iron vise holding fast the ring of the seat, steadying the spin of the planet diseased within, his own stormy dungheaped heart.

To die, then, atop this modest throne, the toilet of the bathroom he’d chanced upon that mortal night, firstfloor. Return to seat, to bony sit, with even his discomposed decomposing now, the only thing left such cobble from his cheeks. He faces the mirror sprayed with errant soap and mold, green oxidate, takes in the hurt flushed deep amid the black basement septic of his eyes: bowlfleck, basinfilth; the wrinkles of his age twisted into horrible bolts: a burn of lightning, though the thunder comes up from the gut, a great whirring racket, his innards wheezingly wracked as if an obsolete technology. His hunch, too, and that he’s still in his hat. Even his nipples have fallen asleep. In the mirror he mouths to his mouth — a hallway desecrated, intestines rawthroated, hoarse. To go beyond the cry, nothing else to say. Borborygmus, borborygmi. Feigenbaum leans to open the cabinet under the sink: emergency rolls stored damply, ten of them he counts, once replenished by Wanda by the week, contingency for the pants caught down. Each square, a shroud for a soul. As if the page of the prayer required, he unfurls a quiet ply.

I’m sick in here, he thinks a sus, a murm.

He rocks himself, the baby of his pain, sets teeth, bites tongue and what…I’m sick, in bathroom or in body.

A moment of scrotal tingle, gastric fizz — his teeth tear lips, loosing proliferant perforations in his flesh…Felice, honey, his wife long dead unkaddished, I’ll be out, assurance, any moment now and then, another onslaught: gnash gulp hic and, finally — there’s a give, a slow slip, it’s first a rumbling, then a slick licking of insides clean, the bared mirror of the soul. Feigenbaum mouths a tongue of dreck, snakes himself a distended turd out from the tightwad of his pucker, passing whole as if — fear — it’s his own tongue he’d bitten without chewing, then swallowed down the throat, as the throat and out, digestion forsaken; this bullock’s tongue, bulrushed past reeds of pubic hair, in a stream hissing steam — his water turned to blood.

Can you keep it down in there?

A shout from the sofa.

Maybe I can’t — who wants to know?

Ben’s questioning voice, intercoming distant over the squeak of Feigenbaum’s shoes on tile, which won’t be shattered, no matter the footing. A lull, as flakes accumulate, a dusting of paper pills, dead skin, to go searching for coins under the cushions, worthless anymore. To make all our eyes into knees, then knuckle. Clasp and bow for prayer. Feigenbaum righting himself into a gag, then grubbing at the tank as his other hand armed with dignity — which are fingers kept with nails that’ve kept their neatness, despite attempts to fist himself to pure — gathers in the crumpled tissue desperate wisps of blood; stinging, lancinate…still seated, trembles, then with last honor unbends himself upright to gather his slacks to belt, cinches pinching — blood gushes down his chin, rushing out the hole, to gather thick amid the stubble. As if he’d cut himself from shaving, bum a wipe to wad it up. With a heave, he throws himself against the tank, flushes with his elbow, with his shoulder jiggles once the handle, twice; it’s locked…it’s clogged, he plunges with a shimmy of his sit, then with his fallen head; tosses his body entire into the bowl of waste, up and down again and up the suction, to flail again at flushing; it won’t, not yet; hurls himself full upon the mess, his face and mouths what word, what name, deep into that rising filth, the font fouled, a rabid stoup. He tries to say but can’t, his own mouth clogged, blood and gums and what teeth left are only dentures loosed: hardened hunks to texture stool, as if to solidify, to make material while around his head, what manner of watery dispersal; showered pissy and soglogged paper: fills his ears, his nose, and eyes, overflows his form, which is erected now with the force of plunge and suck — is finally stuffed up then straight down into the toilet’s hole, his feet kicking for the fixture, the sconce a step above his shoe; to dim discomfiture, the mothflown, heelsnapped glass. His mouth sucks blood, suckles bone…and then, an impossible mass floods up, erupts him from his shallow, to spit him out limp to the tile, grouted amid waves of putrescent wake rolling out and under the crack, to crash a floor beyond the threshold — the draft, its door, then out onto the parquet and down the hallway just polished by a sister, which…down all halls and all stairs leaky through their slots; out the doors and windows and the drains of the sinks onto, then, the scurryrattling rodents’ tail gutters, to foul the Island proper; to come, soon, to a calming tide, lapping gently at the sewered edge of the Hudson’s ice, which hardens it to death.