Joshua Cohen - Witz

Officially, anything still undecided is beyond any notion of help, of emergency response, beyond even a call to account. Rather, it’s an attempt to define innocence, to safeguard assets from liability, to prevent position, meaning Authority, from assault, that being held responsible narrischkeit, this blood on whose hands mishegas — the Administration to vouch for the water supply, the air quality, middlemanager magi seers at the National Weather Service through an order from President Shade reporting directly to the Garden, which issues its own releases on every bandwith unsunned, givingout the assurance of what lately passes for expected: only the cold and the coldly dark, a steel frost, an iron ice; but there’s a break on the horizon, they’re sure to be assured…there’s bound to be, promised, a covenant fulfilled, just don’t ask us date or time. Nail what down — it’s excruciating, this call for exactitude, not a pleasant cross to bear. Though it’s important to remember, at least the FBs do, are reminding each other on their wandering whispering walks back from ice’s edge to the bunks of their barracks for Curfew, that of all people, organizations, or governments, Der has the most to gain from their loss, from ours of us; Garden, Inc., the very venture that ostensibly protects them, the party that would stand to make the most from their annihilation, as a total loss would make official, perpetually irrevocable, the reversion of assets, the manifold increase of the Island’s holdings in a wax: from obscurity, the mere lighting of a moon; an inheritance disinherited, to inheritance again. Not that any Authority more mortal is pleased, not at all, at least not publicly confirmed. No comment. As gossip becomes rumor becomes rule of Law, then eventually discredited, dismissed, overturned, it’s difficult to know what to do besides stand aside, sleep our dreams, wake, walk, and whisper, monger our gossip into rumors, while letting the course of events inhuman enact whatever punishment it is that might appease the anger of a God; render unto and all that — let the Lord exact the Almighty’s retribution, take enough suffering to satisfy them both, then make wing for day.

A mensch long of age, he seems older than three fathers and their fores. Brownsville, he’d been a Pitkin Avenue boy. He’d sold shoes, first as an assistant, as an employee of his own father, then, after his father’s death from being stepped on then walked all over one too many times by the local women and their creditor sons, as a small business owner — a prominent member of the local community, who’d had his own seat at the shul. A congregation. If you wanted decent shoes, you went to him. And when he said they were good, they were good. He was good to his wife, and he always thought he would live long because he gave to charity. If you gave to charity you would live a long life, because it says so in the books. But he never made the time to read them; his eyes were always tired, now the color of the cold. Seeking only a semblance of routine, the unexceptionally daily, he’s sitting a respite from the death of late, having his last pair of overstock salvaged shined by the new cobbler here who only last wax had been the lowly shiner, an assistant of sorts, an employee, if unsalaried, to the old cobbler recently dead who just a wane ago had reconditioned for this mensch the left heel on his issued pair, a limp. They both enjoyed whitefish sandwiches with coffee. Demoted. Left alone. How the polish is smeared, rubbed, elbowgreased, a shoulder’s put into it; the rag snaps, pops, the mensch slumps, the menschs — what’s reflected in the sheen of tongues are just their empty eyes. One gray the other dead, white and red and glasses. Another sits just as patriarchally, high up in the barbering chair, his cheeks receive a shave, he’s snipped, scissors’ tips to root around in the ears and up the upturned nose; locks are strengths, curls are bonds; a brush bristles his Adam’s apple, the stropped blade’s brought to neck, but even before the flick of wrist the mensch can give no blood — and neither can the barber, who until his promotion yesterday once swept the floors here, occasionally answered the phone, scheduled appointments, was allowed to work the register when slow. And yet another, this mensch nothing but a boy, a boychick he’s called, chubby, fat: wenwambly purses hanging from his limbs, sullenly pale suffused everywhere with a rosy rash, blushy in front of his bunkmates even in the sleeping dark he strips for the night and instead of wadding up his clothes as usual is reminded by the loneliness of his mother, their maid, then goes to fold his shirt and slacks, and before he can place them in his cubby — again and again, and the boy’s father, too, who’d been firstborn and had died before his own firstborn, three nights before, it’d been in the middle of a story for his bedtime. Once upon a, forgotten. Against tradition, against the Law, they’re using pyres once the coffins bottom out. In this weather, a lame and flailing flame. Millions shorn to hundreds of thousands, tens, tons then thousands on their own, fleshing out the world beyond, cremation’s cinder darkening, shadowing clouds to seed new storms. Witness strength given over to numbers, abated to dates, left as scraps of fact and figure for the gleaning of our widows dead, and yet on the wind, inconsolable; life left over to history, the inexorable future of posterity, inherited to memorious record, revelation of a mission they’ll force Him to accept, an identity we’ll force Him to force back on us, Ben, down our throats: talk and popularize, please, yak it up and smile, will you…go all God on them, on us, the whole Job job, prophetmode, jeremiad from the Rocky mountaintop, to the valley of dry bones and silicon clay, promote, protest, debunk, decry, anathematize and, Jeez; may you bless when you intend to curse, and may you curse if you intend to bless; always, though, be in the world, be of the world, be sure of that, be warned; remain in an orbit of sorts, in a perpetual flee, fleeing even from flight, to be a refugee from refugees from self, a survivor, a testimony, a witness to all this made so loud and so fervent, so vehement and righteous that your witness becomes this, that your witness becomes itself the tragedy, which then must be forever itself witnessed by your generations, if any, that ensue.

Midnight, the house’s second floor. Upstairs-upstairs, Ben’s standing on the deck. In a robe, with nothing underneath, and slippers, His mother’s. He’s facing the ice, toward the flame, a fiery pillar, a piling pyre. He feels at the rickety railing: a suicide, He’s thinking, up and over the edge, why not…dayeinu, which means Enough, His father would say, I’ve had enough, throwing up his hands, I’ve had it up to here, His mother would have said, then she’d raise a palm to her neck as if to slit herself to peace, a knife she’d been halving recipes with, a stirring spoon with which to scoop out the pregnancy of her stomach: suicide…an idea, He’s thinking nights now the only idea, like Masada, that windowless mountain out across the ocean, a last stand against the unsighted; the Island pushed up by tectonic pressure, tidal force, risen to a rock towering above the barren city; Ben atop, the FBs, too, waiting out their day a breath below the sun, a last gasp below the blade of the moon…days casting the lots of an earlier season, sharpening their own daggers on the summit, fasting themselves into heart, and sleepless, they’re starving, thirsty, lonelier than dead; the stars toll, the PA sounds from behind the clouds, the house’s intercom quakes the foundations of the sky: Curfew…them to plummet down the slope, to break the fast of their bones. Atop the deck opposite Liberty, one of two givingout from the room of His parents high above the house and the Island, He’s fixated on the flaming horizon, and there on an assembly of forms in every color never His: black, brown, beige, yellow a migrant red, the Kush just following their orders, as always, but now issuing them, as well, as if a Law given over to themselves in a million languages echoing equally to Him as they all mean the same, which is nothing — work; they’re rolling the dead out over the freeze, gathering them into shrouds of massive white, snowballing corpses turned over and around again in a wheelingly reeling processional over the ice thin and thinning thanks to their fire out to melt the furthest shore, a flame of bodies cracking the freeze under its heat, the funereal weight, crushed under the gigantically cyclical, cycling roll of disposal, to fall them hard into sharding spring, dispersing, down into the depths.