Joshua Cohen - Witz

Feigenbaum lies small on the floor. Withered trees around His house shake, shiver, then still, their roots soaking in the rippled, dreckdappled reek…life renewing always; trunks wrapped a waste in leafy paper stained with fruit, moldy, spoiled. Feigenbaum, their shriveled fig, left sprawled for the avid plucking in an ocean of his juice, a dark milk without a wake: flooding past the closets for winter clothes and past the closets for spring clothes and the closets, the parquet to the rug, Hanna’s favorite, absorbent blue, colorfast and manufactured stainresistant, or so holds its hidden tag; flowing ambit to the frontdoor, then out it, engulfing the mat that says Shalom, down the stoop, down Nitz’s walk then, to pool around the slate islands of that path, past the dead grass and frozen sprinklerheads, the little stretch of sidewalk poured and its tiny curb of one block long if that, the limits of His recreation; up the halls to the familyroom, the halls to the livingroom, and the halls to rooms, for laundry, for guests, for company and brunch — up to lap His toes; Ben ensconced atop a couch, its cushions drenched to stuffing — to float the furnishings amid the room that would have been the den, at the height of the middle mullion of the windows. He reaches a worried hand over to the bobbing, wetly creaking endtable, to gather up the phone from its cradle; to rock to a reassuring tone; the sympathy of the directline…what to say, He dials nothing — the only call He can make, guess who pays the bills.

To report, what now…a disaster in progress, natural or not, a flood fatidic, another postdiluvial deluge: not the tenth plague, but the first before the first, Ur unnumbered because unknown as plague to now — ten generations after the Adam before His Adam, with the world begun already destroyed; no rainbow shall assuage. Then, days and nights to soften…the furniture soggy, sagging, broken: credenza floating tchotchkes, snoglobes and mugs, glasses and lamps of glass, coffeetable buoy sloshing with milk and sugar and coffee, books of photographs, albums, and books; oceanically unpaid bills, appliance warranties and instruction sheets, catalogs and magalogs; an operator’s His mother onduty, holds the unit from her ear, to save herself from the whispered fearsome kvetch — pitching into a scold’s geshray; then, informing Him with excessive patience, forced maternal reassurance, that assistance should be arriving momentarily, that grownups are on their way she means and, maybe, He should attempt to find a mop. Like it would be helpful. That, or perhaps you could bail yourself out with your mouth. But where would a mop be. If I were a mop. Ben flails across the room in thought. A broomcloset, or laundryroom, apparently. Who would’ve thought, which hall. Though such situation requires plumbing not a polish. His sisters arrive shortly thereafter — just here to cleanup, don’t mind us — which is discombobulatingly risky because all this’d been Wanda’s job. Her responsibility, this swabbing, and would’ve been this bailing with buckets out windows. Angels arrive a wing’s breath later, to remove the body; floating the corpse, in a wet procession, each to a steering limb and then, his head, guiding Feigenbaum out the opened door, and with them every sip of filth remaining, stopped, to tide: their fall down the stoop, to drain the house to dry.

And so it might be appropriate, with everything relative and all Einsteins now dead, to engage in what’s been called the pilpulistic: to pull on our beards, to tug at our locks, to split hairs as befitting us lesser creations, sundering God Himself, Who parted the Sea of Reeds only for us to cross over into the wilderness, still barren of our freedom. They’ve begun their dying, their relentless death, of all days on the Sabbath, the first day of this the first moon, which is known to us as Nisan, the moon of the night of the death of Abel Steinstein: a night different from all other nights, as it’s said, and yet, at least according to official Garden recommendations, to be kept distinct from Night, too, which is the capitalized end of Creation, dawning upon the destruction of the entire darkened world. Over the mornings ensuing, the issue of days as generations stillborn from the womb that is Shabbos, the toll rises to the rarified pitch of the sky, a hollow bell that is the sky , resounding its storm across the ice — crescent-tongued the moon, then convex, gibbous — as death echoes in the last words and loves of families, ingathers in sighs whole dynasties and denominations, hoards entire congregations and communities, Landsmannschaften, landsleit, kretchma, klaus and klatsch, neighborhood groups, benevolent societies and synagogue boards; their lives pile up, are piled, a copse of corpses, menschs with their kinder stacked a perch higher than the stripped remains of the Garden’s last orchards, its appletrees only bare boughs become so thoroughly diseased they’ve been rejected for use even as coffin stock, which frozen, freezing malady, as if Scriptural, too old to be known, hasn’t spared them from being uprooted anyway, sawed then snapped, suitable for kindling, firewood only, landscaped in neat rows at the westernmost perimeter of the Garden, in the Island’s backyard of His house atop the grave of the sandbox, amid the rusted remnants of the swingset, and the twisted knotted slide.

A final flush, then, and the bathroom’s left empty…its door shut, locked forever forgotten, struck from the blueprints, forbidden from memory: offlimits, closed for the cleaning, slippery when even thought of, if — Feigenbaum among the one’s too many lost upon the altared third of the month, those thousands of them, these tens, the hundreds losing their daily shadows and with them, their nightly lives, to the lighting then darkening of this moon passing through, this moon passing over, waxwaning its judgment, as if a selfeclipse; the remnant crescent of his body remanded first to the (easterly) Morgue, for processing: the cataloging of his personals, not much, blood drained and body cleaned to corpse, his photograph’s taken, his prints inked, and name entered into a ledger; only then, he’s hauled over the ice for commendation to the waters below. Feigenbaum, Fink, Finkel, Fischel, Fishl, Freud, Freund , and Friedland …

But before our loss can be massed, given one face and voice, any name representation, an inviolate symbol — we’re asking you, wait up, langsam just a moment, will you, shtum: we all must stand ourselves, alive, aware, out on the far ice to reflect above the tide. Namely, that it’s the destiny of every individual, of even the symbol, even the ultimate, to think their time the end, to think their world the last — and this especially today, especially fastdeadly, with everything In the beginning again at the already begun, history eternally returning as always, as eternally as ever but rather quickly, evermore and more quickly now, with a precipitate urgency, an Apocalyptic insistence. Now the time in which you live the time to end all times and Time; now the Never again. In mourning, standing atop the furthest spur of frost above the deep, they mourn themselves, a little soon: their failure, their ill luck, the ruinous stars above with their frustrated mazel. It’s understood, which means it’s itself mourned, our knowing hope, our dreaming: how we can’t all be prophets, we can’t all be priests, we can’t all be kings; that despite what the scholars once believed, there’s only one Moses; that despite what the sages once bowed down to, there’s only our God; thinking, too, if everyone’s their own Messiah, what’s that worth, what’s in it for me. Better to unify, best to hold One indivisible. Nowadays, there’s no why to wonder who, admit it, who’ll make it, whose testimony, whose witness — that’s been long worked out and over, it’s suspected; already taken care of, chosen long before any of us were ever born to live down any death. A statement is forthcoming.