Joshua Cohen - Witz

Ben, the son of a friend. Of the family.

And then there are two. Here to pay His respects, this a mitzvah in an hour of need. As much that binds them, cleaves; there’s an entire liturgy between the two, underspoken, unspoken, an understanding tacit, granted, taken; what’s to say, who would listen, who else would know to understand…and so they waste themselves and air and time, slinging shtick about girls, women, mnema, allowing the little history they have in common, the shared of the last couple moons: they tell jokes, kid, share boasts and bull. As would satisfy any justice, these witnesses are opposites (or it’s easier to represent them to be, now that it’s just them): one skinny and hairless, the other’s fatty and haired; one serious, relatively good with the manners, the other named petty or mean, though the word’s also loquacious; one of them intelligent, and the other not not, just uninspired, unmade or unfinished, not yet healed. Time, there’s still time, there’s stilled time in which to air. A repast reclined but underdone. It’s two days prior to Passover, two settings until Redemption, one for emptied each: they’ve been left alone; the guards have been withdrawn, perhaps on orders of, perhaps negligence, perhaps. Now’s a winged moment of facetime, a scheduled recess peace: a grave shaped like an ear, dug alongside a grave shaped like a mouth…they sit across from one another, fixed to the floor, as if already mourning themselves, what they had

And then the next morning, there are two of them again.

One is Moses and the other’s his brother — to stand at the throne of their Pharaoh, at the footstool and grovel for redemption, though silently, though disinherited again…the staff ’s lost, the tongue’s lamed: there are plagues, there is blood and there is black; nine of them would pass, to reveal the tenth, in which the firstborn are killed, sacrificed upon the altar of a People: the blood, the frogs, the lice, the flies, the hail and locusts and dark and death. Today’s the day all firstborns fast, though it’s only them along with nonessential personnel; and though required on pain of threat, of guilt, the public joins in, too: as the darkness settles in, to fill, to slake, to sate, and finally — to open your mouths, you two, get talking…If you die I get your shoes, if you die I get your hat, if you die I get your socks, if you, if you, your memory. All ears is still two. Remember the time we, once I, do you remember, one time I, and the time we, and then that time. I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a friend, I never was, you were, what’s expected, who expects, what I always wanted was, what you never had was, who I wanted to, always — and, who I’ve become…Steinstein asks, what would your parents be doing right now, and yours, your sisters, how many you had, what did she look like, think I’d have a chance, any I’d’ve had — your brothers, what about them, what would you, wouldn’t you, we’d go to the, we’d sit on the, we’d stand at the, and just, and just, be together — the way Aba he used to, the way Ima she’d, how’d she look, think I’d have had a chance…we used to, would or should have, trips to Theme Parks, State Parks, Historic Battlegrounds, and the movietheater mall, the pretzeljar shoestore, summercamp sissy kissy and Sundayschool sickday blahs with the thermometer dipped into the pits to fever, it would’ve been, what would’ve been, what’s it to you, what’s not. I should have loved my parents more, I should have told them I loved them, more I should’ve more…why’d they die, why get a divorce if you’re just going to die, he worked too much, she worked too hard, I would’ve worked, too: why, if you’re just going to…what I’m saying is — what do you want to hear?

Two witnesses, only one of whom will live to sanctify the new moon: Steinstein across His lap, Ben as if a mother to a son, installed in the Registry’s midst, absolved of illuminated exits. They sit nosing. A heaven either awaits or doesn’t, don’t get me started, already have. Begun, and duly begged. In case of emergency, break the glass of sky.

You have a wonderful lap, Steinstein says to say anything, and what a sense of humor…I’m dying, I’m hungry, I’m thirstily tired — though he’s without suffering, they’re without pain; Steinstein’s only kvetch that of the holy imminent, the though sacred obviousness of oblivion. How I wish there were an afterlife after life, that I could believe. Me, too, like sign me up, put me down for one. Know any newer jokes. Setups. Punchlines with a swine kick to the gut. Or efficacious prayers. Then, a silence they attempt to eternalize by withholding from it breath. And from without, a thunderous whine.

You won, Steinstein finally says, gasping his face lit, no longer the son but the ram that inherited his fire.

His eyes ask, how’s it feel?

No one won, you stupid mamzer.

Don’t give me that stuff everyone’s a winner — that you can save for your fans: it’s crazy, you’re smarter than that, even you…without guards, without guns, no rental medical, no beeping blinking disturbance.

God, he says, the deals, the fame and the Name, anything for the asking, it’s yours, and you get to live —love you, hate you, lucky schmuck, it’s impossible not to…

They rock, until Ben to tell the truth wants to stop, wants to give up on this shuckling but He keeps on despite, goes on in spite, and so they sway together even faster, as if davening in unison, as One — as if in an attempt to merge, through singularity to save themselves from fire, the fiery ice, the Angel of Death…then, tiring and slowing, making lips, lying to eventually sleep, neck lain over neck and wounding with a kiss — to be sundered apart just past midnight. Paschal silence, lightning from the furthest white of the eye. Outside there are stormings of glass. As has become the practice of every eve plagued with their survival, the blood of imported lambs has been daubed upon the doorjambs, dripping a redemptive red from the mezuzahs why not, who’s it hurting. The welcomemat a puddle.

Ben’s borne through the fence’s gate, up the winding slates to His house, on an Infirmary stretcher turned litter, sagging overhead; carried away by the Kush in a leaving difficult for all involved save the left for dead. Steinstein’s Angeled away to Tweiss autopsy then storage, iced in the overflow easterly Morgue, the afterlived warehouse of his Father as its only son. Fullup of recent stock, the bodies of the last week or so, inventoried, ritually prepared, have been cleaned out toward a clearing adjacent to the further dock, twelve bodies frozen southward to the tottering shed of the drivingrange, northward to the ravaged putting green, flagged offlimits, limitlessly: body after body atop body, glommed along the fence of His property at Island’s western edge, just inland from the ice’s slip to the shattered hole, its water and the oceanfloor, the fundament of shadows — the descent of the last before the last, the first before the last, the birthing of an end: spring’s, winter’s, winter’s winter, theirs and as theirs, ours; even panic having been displaced, with Ben left alone in, of all rooms and voiding spaces, the basement no longer to be feared.

To need a rooting now, this firmness, to know His place at the footing of things, with nothing left to dread. Quickpoured black concrete. And so His mooning around these left boxes and trunks, these tapes and unscissored twines: Hanna’s forks shedding tines, knives dulling mirrors, spoons bearing bowls flattened to tables, handles rooting out so far as to become unknowable in whatever their useful, drawerward ends; heirloom sederplate emptied of egg and shank, of green and salt dipped twice, an order confused in this exodus, this exile to the Pharaohnic storehouse, Ramses’ granary holding as its only ware the sand of our Joseph’s dream; the World to Come up from the basement to save us from famine, from desert’s thirst, the privations of this, our latest diaspora, failed in that it was only temporary, seasonal though skimped on light and heat — the sun’s illumination coming in through the windows set at the rise of the earth’s backyard lighting the beneath from its always dark into a dim known that can only disappoint, a worrying mundane…this Passover also bringing the last guests of the Island’s guests to crowd the sky: their cold smoke from daytime’s cremains, from the snuffing of an ever stranger night.