Joshua Cohen - Witz

A slight splash — call it a clock, a serving plate once kindergarten art & crafted by Judith with hands and with twelve numerals, then hung upon the wall of the one and only kitchen; a clepsydra, the hollow drip of His parent’s whirpool Israel said as Hanna’d said jacuzzi: each hour, every minute, twice a second a burned body’s dropped through the ice as ash, its noiseless plash marking a slight on time…call it a calendar: the bodies daily stacked in a bonfire like the blackened boxes on the page of the month hung on the kitchen’s wall below that white plate’s shadow, which is round and without end. As has become tradition, an official count will be given come morning: a mechanically whistling voice, distorted, distorting; what souls remain stumble to inspection, of themselves, by themselves, from awake nights worrisome to fumbling to feet, with a pretense to having slept an optimistic dream — for appearances, their own sanities, calm, what sake not or better; they try to wake their neighbors, their bunkmates, the stricken barracks. Sons and stepsons and grandsons, SonSons, halfbrothers and nephewcousins. Attention, good morning, there are now X of you left. Why. Zzz. Have a nice day, you thousands, you hundreds, you holy tens. Pleasanries, don’t mention. Attention, there are now only a handful of your kind left alive. A thumb that makes a mensch. A prophesizing finger pointing fault down the throat, to belch up a burning answer: who didn’t know me, who wouldn’t. Have a great weekend. Shabbat Shalom.

With death returned and all the preparations that accompany it like a mother that follows guardingly, witnessing, a step behind her son only to outlive him (to wash his body, to keep watch over the corpse, the smashing of a wombgrave, into the warmly unfathomed ice), Garden employees and Island staff, many of them insourced into this insanity— Mishegas , again, being the term currently preferred, though the Nachmachen might hold by Narrischkeit —from municipal jobs sectored private and exclusive in the wake of the disaster, they’re spending so much time burning and burying that things begin falling apart, melting, giving way, incredulously’s the joke, even more than they already are; the Schedule erodes, though in implementation only, as nothing can banish the record, the rule: security becomes lax; journalists infiltrate the perimeter under the passage of night, toss the gloss of their magazines and the folds and Shabbos inserts of their newspapers up and over the fences, the wires, and climb on over, crawl through tunnels dug through the frozen dirt with their pens, muddydulled nibs, flashbulb smoke the gathering clouds, the zooming lens of the moon; what they report back to the mainland makes no matter, it’s all entertainment: death as distraction, diversion, from more lasting change, meaningful purpose, the future’s promise of evermore destructive upheaval; sentries have abandoned their posts, guardtowers forsaken, circumcised without barb; the patrols late on their sweeps if they make them at all; nightly meals are even served irregularly, often pass skipped by the staff, never by the survivors, who wait whole hours for their feed, only to go hungry again at the appropriate time; unofficially forgotten about, their beds lie unmade, without maid, their linen dirty, shvitzed to filth; their laundry’s never taken out, if taken out then never returned; the FBs are eventually allowed to sleep in; soon, lights are never turned off, if turned off then never turned on; the Schedule still exists if only as idea, idealized but not implemented, extant but only as concept, countenanced only, recognized, to be sure, but within that recognizance lying only the negation of any power it’d had: this Law imposed now just a way to live, another imposition, one of many, merely a way to die, something we once knew, and occasionally remember, another world, that, theirs, another desert and its generation dead, deserted. Those who aren’t burying are already buried, or are burned and burying themselves, weather permitting: everyone from the longtoothed, shortorder cooks to the shippingclerks, the nurses and pursers to the valets of the latter, those who’d once been conscripted to care for the living, to indulge them — repurposed, made complicit with the cause’s discard, occupied with hiding not the evidence (as there is none: only healthy, successful people, provided for and pleasured, happified and fat), which as it doesn’t exist cannot be kept secret even from their God, but with hiding the evidence of the evidence inextant, the fallen, droppeddead rational, the then alive, now burnt, unexplained — all of them, that is, save the high staff, led by Doctor Abuya and the Nachmachen, who’ve been charged with taking care of PR: sounding out what this means, why it’s not bad because divine. Understand, there will always be those serious people — goys placid, imperturbable, without pleasures, kept around to take care of business, to make arrangements, organize futures; the lots cast delayed from last season to covert the plans, preparations, massing, assemblage, underground, in the tunnels, amid the earth revulsed and gray…President Shade and partners striking ironclad deals, hot and molten, plotting spin for when the globe holds its own.

And then there are seventytwo, then fifty of them, and then only thirtysix of them left living: it’s that fast, death, and that remorseless…three minyans they make, six menschs just hanging around, wondering what you want with them. Hope not much, may ye expect even less. A legacy: each of the lasting survivors now has effectually unlimited resources, all to themselves…more beds than bedheads than sleeping nights, mattresses numbering into the tens of thousands per survivor, a surplus supplied with hundreds of thousands of pillows, each having been stuffed with the dreams of and fluffed to a head slumbering elsewhere, eternally if they so believe, and they don’t, generally speaking (Garden psychologists have decided not to relocate the FBs any closer to one another, have decided not to allow them to relocate themselves — their beds are their beds, to remain in their areas, disheveled and empty once departed, never remade). As always, routine, the survivors wake to wash in the Shof, in the thousands of sinks made available, under thousands of faucets steeped deep in a million rituals of leak; this perpetual gaseous drip throughout morning and night, its sound the only noising, to be clouded over by a mass of flatulent snoring come Curfew; hundreds of thousands of towels per head hang like flayed skins from their racks, each monogrammed for the Garden, an initial tattoo; then, once showered, groomed and perfumed, it’s out into day: to their meals, if they’re served, activities, if they haven’t been cancelled, to their prayers preempting, which are still foreign to most but becoming less and less fervently doubted with each passing service; thanks to the laundry, clothes are claimed ever newer; never to be caught dead in the same outfit twice, is what; designers are traded, accessories are bargained for, namebrands coveted at premium theft; once neatly arranged, folded and stacked within the cubbies of the departed, any forfeiture’s heaped around the barracks in wrinkling mounds, each article still individually labeled. It’s these labels that prove the most disturbing; names, last name first — as if in answer to the writing on the stalls, the wallscrawl, the questioning messages, disembodied echoes of the graffiti that’d accumulated on their cubbies, also, and on their bedframes, amid the rafters, where not: nicknames, endearments and obscenities dead, Sascha, nie vergessen, demain, Someone wuz here, Someone luvs another, NAC, TAC, AUS, SCH, the initials on excess undergarments, boxerbriefs not quite clean, not quite white, the wrong size; on garments freshly washed and pressed to the unmitigated approval of any mother, though never worn due to lack of proper occasion, or a looting of irregular cut: labels tugged from tags on swimwear elastic, tongued from the mouths of undershirt collars, on bright polyester pullovers, on fleece and flannel, on woolen sweaters infested with moth and lint, elbows as bald as an uncle emeritus, on threadbare cardigans the color of dog vomit, on promotional clothing courtesy of insurance concerns and pharmaceutical companies defunct, their fluorescent logos fading, faded, on pants with bare crotches, suitslacks with frayed cuffs, crusty socks, shoes without soles; these labels personalizing a universe of their private tchotchkes as well, on the little they’ve been allowed to keep, small stakes they’ve managed to secrete and preserve: on the inside covers of books reread and on radios alleared, on cups and mugs and on bowls mouthed and lipped a spoon, on sunscreen, on insect repellent and on medications prescription and non, on lamps lit and unlit and on violins who knows how to play those clarinets, on housekeys, carkeys, on wives’ brooches and breastyjeweled rings — slopped atop to bunk the beds of the departed in vast junked pyramids, falling to the floor overnight, to be scavenged by any who’ll wake to know morning.