But, then, ripeness is all, poet. All or nothing at all.
Moishe in Excelsis
MOISHE goes for the deal.
How can he not? In the infinite spaces of purgatory, this is certainly better than sitting in antechambers waiting for the verdict or — worse yes, as rumor would have it — being pounding by imps with every large and small, deep and scant misfeasance of which the imps or angels could dream. So Moishe will play antagonist to the Boss’s protagonist, rung the whole Job bit over and again, take sides, see if the matriarchs and patriarchs of legend are up to their reputation. Part of playing at Satan, of course, is to occupy an unsympathetic role; the antagonist has always had a bad press. The other part, of course, is to be engaged in utter reconstruction: one does not sit in purgatory, the deal has it, but allowed to replicate one’s life as one chooses. Lose and burn in the fires for two millennia, win and find a ticket into the ambrosiacal dome of Heaven … this is the deal which the Boss has offered. It is remarkable how one goes through Satans in this business, the Boss says with a wink. He seems to be pretty affable old gent although, as Moishe does not need to be reminded, thee is a famous mean streak.
So on to the cliffs, the passages, the lower depths of 47th Street. Will Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob come through? Will Job maintain his solidarity with the Boss? It is up to Moishe to have them undone, but he knows the prospects are not good. His judgment has always been suspect. Is this why he ended in purgatory? His ambitions were so modest, so scattered; why such a bleak and tremendous fate?
Traveling around, keeping an eye on all the possibilities. Trapped on the cliff, the unpleasant signs and portents everywhere. Moishe watched as Abraham, once a shepherd, now a freelancer, poised over his beloved son Isaac, prepared to cleave the lad for human sacrifice. The patriarch’s wrist trembled with indecision, but his eyes were firm, cast toward the heavens, syllables of Hebraic gibberish filling the dismal air. Crouched behind the thicket, the semipurgatorial Moishe Feyderman witnessed the scene so famous in all of the Biblical texts and commentaries, source of a thousand doubts and beseeching metaphors, observing that Isaac in this posture appeared almost comatose, the fear throttling his limbs, his posture making the rope unnecessary. A pathetic scene, Moishe thought; seedy father, needy son, both of them entrapped, embarked upon a ritual sacrifice which in a more enlightened time would have been truly recognized as lunacy. But there was none of that for Feyderman; this was the original, the Scriptural act itself, and as the highly aggrieved Moishe, wise to his disgrace, aligned to this Satanic rivalry, crouched in the thicket to obtain a closer perspective on the panorama of disgrace, he heard a sound of collision in the distance and then a high voice speaking behind the sky.
So here was the Boss, meddling again as he had meddled with situations throughout all of Book One, tilting the odds in his favor as he chose, leaving Moishe only with the hapless posture of witness. It was not fair; he should have protested immediately when the deal was being set, but who was he to argue with the Upper of Upper Management? The voice was uncontrolled, raving, bellowing. He brew polysyllables, not a one of which made any sense at all to the infuriated Feyderman, hammered to witness these unspeakable and confusing activities, hoping that Abraham would break the process this time. No such luck. Would never happen. Feyderman knew that it was the Boss’s voice telling Abraham to cease, telling him that his hapless son could be spared. Feyderman grasped the branches, leaned forward, absorbed as much of this as he could before utterly losing hope. There was always the possibility of change: the point of faith was that it needed to be reaffirmed constantly, needed, as the Boss had pointed out, to be readjusted. You had to see it as a living and continued testament, not as aged data. So Abraham was nodding furiously, tears of assent and acceptance seemingly clawed from the old man’s eyes, groans of enthusiasm or submission pouring from the Abrahamic throat. The eyes gleamed, were cast downward. Then Abraham strode toward the thicket, his steps determined, even frantic, and Feyderman prepared to deal with a confrontation he could barely comprehend.
No. He would not have to do that now. Abraham spared him, turned, strode pat without responding, and Feyderman could see at the end of the line of foliage the gigantic ram caught by the horns, twisted in the clutch of branches. The sources were certainly right on the ram, anyway. What a big son of a bitch this blown-up lamb was.
Isaac was weeping now, surfacing to an appalled consciousness, struggling in that emergent consciousness with the ropes while Abraham reached toward the ram, freeing it from the branches. The voice behind the sky raved on in Hebrew, but Feyderman, sunk in fury, gulping on his defeat and the Boss’s mad primacy, could not find a word he understood and discarded a posture of attention. Abraham, a small and slightly deformed man, struggled with the beast in the bushes. Feyderman had never seen anything like it. The whole matter was clearly unduplicable. It was remarkable, as the Boss had tipped him, when you got to the story behind the story.
Another confirmation of Satanic suffering. Despite the appearance of equity, it had all been structured against him.
Morton Feyderman, nee Moishe, had been placed in this incarnation at the practical inside job in the diamond district which had been his years before the cancer had polished him off and put him into the dismal and purgatorial condition. He factored and reconciled the books for several independent jewelers so that they, patrician in their high hats and frocks, could walk the street with diamonds in their pockets and make the instant deals. Nonetheless, the Feyderman life, reconstructed or otherwise, was unraveling for reasons beyond Biblical rivalries or reconstruction. Twenty years ago when he had gone through this the first time, long before the AIDS crisis and the other horrors, there had been a small cathouse on the third floor of one of the buildings in the middle of the block; a factor or jeweler could go up there during lunch hour, take one of the five or six girls, get his ashes hauled. Simple procedure for the bearded and beardless, the yarmulked or peyussed dealers and factors of that simpler time.
Feyderman himself had indulged infrequently and never in ways which could have risked bringing home a disease to the clamorous, now departed Doris. (At least he did not have to suffer his wife during this tour of replication.) But even at the time of his greatest confusion so long ago, when sex, diamonds and possibility had collided in his frame of consciousness over and over again, not even then had Feyderman found himself as bedazzled and chaos-laden as he was now.
To have gone through this once was a challenge; twice, however, went beyond all possibility of indulgence. In moments of brief repose or micro-sleep, Moishe could now find himself reliving, even more intensely and often in Hebrew, some of the most intense books of Old Testament and New, half-recollected narratives which he thought had been put away with his official change of name (registered in the Bureau of Names and Licenses and everywhere else: Moishe Feigelenbaum, now Morton Feyderman) but which had emerged with horrific validity during what he could only take as moments of fugue or induced amnesic state, sometimes a witness, sometimes as with the Pharisees an actual participant in scenes of such squalor and intensity that he would never have been able to gauge the sheer dimension of his fanaticism. Reconstructed, reborn, the Satan-identifying Feigelenbaum, now Feyderman, stumbled through these dream states in a subterranean fashion, looking for some larger effect which they might have upon what he now mockingly called his “outside existence.” As far as he could tell, there were no effects at all. He lived alone now as then, a barely assimilated Jew in a residential hotel, the room piled with pornography, familial scrapbooks and, recently, Scriptural sources and commentary. As before, he went from hotel to work, striding down 47th Street amongst the criers and chaos of the district, still took up his post in the morning, and performed acts of reconciliation.
Only the memory of the conversations with the Boss and the dreamlike Scriptural episodes seemed to have force. His life had otherwise shrunk to gray, shrunk to the swaddled dimensions which Doris had warned him so long ago were
his true destiny.
“Because you are a weak man, Feigelenbaum,” she had said to him during one of the last arguments, “and you would rather go along with what does not suit you because you are afraid of making a change.” Well, Jonah had make a change and see where it had gotten him. The Testaments, both of them, were littered with characters of various sorts who had looked for big changes, and almost invariably they had come to bad ends, winding up blind or on roads toward revelation or scuffling with lions for the edification of brutes. What was wrong with trying to get along? But the simple right triangle of the resurrected Feyderman’s old life, two straight lines leading toward the hypotenuse of resignation, had been scattered by this latest stuff, this dreaming business. Nothing met the standards of simple orderliness now; everything necessarily had slid from control in ways which bedazzled Feyderman, rendered stupefyingly irrelevant all of the easy and accepting postures of the Old Testament which he had thought in his pre-purgatorial existence had made any acceptance of the situation impossible. Becoming Satan had utterly bedazzled, not charmed, Feyderman; it was no real position for a man of even dark motives; it was a terrible circumstance for a man with a modicum of conscience and social responsibility.
But Feyderman was not religious, that was perhaps the reason he had been selected for this anti-textual posture and debate. He had long since emerged from his parochial background, found himself pointing out to Job (cunningly disguised as a Comforter and thus able to sneak around the edges of the situation) that Job was not handling the situation properly. This was one of those episodes in his own language. “Faith got you into this terrible condition, faith therefore cannot get you out,” Feyderman said. “You can’t put up with this kind of thing any more, you simply cannot.”
“Nonetheless,’ Job said, ‘one must try. One must hold on to constancy, yes?”
Once a famous cattleman, now a derelict reduced to scurvey and humiliation by the depredations of the playful and hitherto unchallenged Boss and by his own devices, Job sat sprawled in the courtyard, the mud in which he rested heavily covering his legs and giving him a distinctly earthy appearance. “Or don’t you agree with that? Would you have me change?” Job said. “In what way could I change?”
The other comforters stared pointedly and with some triumph at Feyderman, who seemed to have been carrying the conversation, at least to this point. “You must show me some defiance,” Feyderman said. “You can’t allow these terrors to assault you without response.” Oh, I could speak of resisting horrors. But I am here to put the best possible interpretation on events and hopefully to lead Job to action.
“Well,” he said, “it was just a thought. Of course if you want to continue to submit, no one can stop you.”
“Do you hear that?” Job’s wife said, peering through the tent. From the situation as far as he could deduce, Feyderman saw her as something of a Doris type, something of a sexpot past her prime but still in the battle, doing the best she could with limited and fading equipment. But this version of Job’s wife was nothing like that at all. She was a different kind of deal, one which eyes less Satanic and warped than his would clearly perceive as a remarkable woman, one of looks and valor. She was a transcendent comment upon and mockery of the denial of desire, Feyderman thought. “The man speaks truthfully. If I were you, I’d curse God and get out of this whole deal.”
Now you’re talking, lady, Feyderman thought. That’s the way to take the situation, isn’t it? Listen to the woman, Job. But the cattleman was an obdurate as the other comforters were mournful. None had anything to say. “Well, I’ve had enough of this,” Job’s wife said. “It is certainly enough for me.”
She retreated from the tent. Job shook his head and said something which Feyderman could not quite hear. Not that he was too interested. He struggled aloft, swaying in the mud. The other comforters looked at him uncuriously; then their gaze swung toward the flap of the tent through which Mrs. Job had exited. She was a distraction all right. Feyderman struggled through the heavy canvas, stumbled through the mire, found himself in a sudden sliver of light, perceived Mrs. Job standing naked, her back to him, her gown open, exposing herself to the sun in a marvelous, pagan way. Well, Feyderman thought, well enough of this, and he stumbled toward her hoping that the constancy of the situation would last at least until he had a chance to get there; but in the wind was the voice of the Boss, enormous, quarreling, filled with reproof. Beyond that, he could hear the starving and diseased cattle in the distance. So much for Satanic practice. Mrs. Job raised a hand in reproof, the Boss screamed, the cattle groaned, and Moishe inferred the message all right. It was not going to be possible. Job would not relent, nor would Satan spring.
As per his usual devices, the Boss had some new mischief prepared.
In his old booth, it might as well have been the hall of purgatory, probably was in fact. Feyderman found himself seized at last by impatience. Perhaps it was sense of squalor greater than any he had ever known. “Listen.” He said to the jeweler and to anyone else who might be listening. “I guess I just can’t handle this any more, you understand? I’m a foil and I don’t like it — a setup man, a straight man.” He put down his pen for emphasis, faced the jeweler. “I’ve been doing the best I can here, in and out of scope.” Feyderman said, “and I’m not getting anywhere at all; also I don’t think I can put up with the Street anymore. I’m tired, I’m legally dead, I hear the sounds all of the time. It’s just too much for me. I’ve given it everything possible and I think that’s enough. Don’t you think that’s enough?”
The jeweler looked at him solemnly, somewhat reminiscent of Abraham in attack mode before the voice had begun shouting its Boss’s Hebrew, but then again this was an illusion, a reconstruction, right? Right? Back to the District, that was part of the deal. Feyderman had all he could do to coordinate one time-scheme with the next, all that he could manage to attain was some crazed synchronicity. A synchronicity more allied to overlap, crazy synchronicity. The question of fusion was utterly beyond him. “I think I’ve got to get away from commerce of all kinds,” Feyderman said hopelessly. “I think I need something more, well, open air if you follow.” An open-air purgatory like a pretty graveyard, somewhere he could dance amidst flowers. Amidst flowers? Well, nothing that elaborate maybe, but it was a cause at which to aim. You had to have some kind of position, didn’t you?
The jeweler was still impassive. An illusion, then, the Boss’s temporal approximation of the District and its people, rather than actual tenants. The District was illusory, the real stuff was the deal Feyderman had made which more and more had been ripping at the hapless ersatz Satan’s illusion of control. He waved hopelessly and scurried through the thin aisles, dodging this chassis here, a jewelry model there, a group of gangsters as he made his way through the squalling and desperate corridors to the Street. Maybe the deal was imaginary and the District real, Feyderman thought, looking up at what seemed to be a curiously insubstantial sky, but that is not the way to bet. That is not the deal I would take; the Boss has other plans. Transubstantial, transubstantiating transubstantiation: that seemed to be the word he was seeking. Standing outside the Gotham Book Mart, WISE MEN FISH HERE, the famous sign flapping and flapping in the wind, Feyderman nee Moishe Feigelenbaum, inmate of purgatory; DEAL-MAKER AND DEVIL TO THAT FIRST AND LEAST MERCIFUL OF GODS, that Feyderman found himself greatly transported in that sudden wind to a high and desperate place, the solid thwack of the wood coming into his arched and awkward posture. Circled by the cries of Jews, the glitter of diamonds, the echoes of an old cathouse and the glimmering of all his accords, Moishe took himself to be at the precipice of the most profound epiphany of all. The Boss spoke to him, manifest then in insubstantive guise.
You lose, the Boss said. You lose, Moishe. They’ll always line up for me. I run the shop.
The Boss’s pleased giggle filled all of the high and dense places. Moishe had been waiting all of his life, it seemed, to hear that giggle, to be overtaken, and there it was.
There it was. You’re just another loser, the Boss said, and Moishe was falling, falling from the peak of that most glittering of epiphanies. Satan falling to the bowels of the Earth, past exile toward disgrace. The Boss let loose childish howls of triumph. No room then for Moishe in excelsis. Falling thus, he will not soon rise, and that is a certainty along with Job’s composure. Abraham’s patience.
Call the roll, the Boss cries. Call the next contender.
And new Moishe — old Moishe, really, how many can there be? — comes forth.
Heliotrope Bouquet Murder Case
1917
SCOTT Joplin observes the rehearsals and opening night of his opera, TREEMONISHA. It is a disaster. The small audience there because they know of him are disappointed with the lack of ragtime; the critics are appalled by his ersatz European style, a sweetish and decadent mixture of Romberg and Friml, Lortzing and Sullivan; watching the one performance of the opera from the rear of the hired hall Joplin feels the shame pulsing through him, the slow and anguished shock of lost purpose, public exposure, horrendous limitation. A REAL SLOW DRAG, the finale, arouses the audience only to a dull and incidental applause; in that scattering of sound Joplin can feel the waves of illness pounding at him, the syphilis that will kill him shortly galloping through the shelves and spaces of the body, the merry and diminishing blood carrying the parasite to new angles of achievement. Failure stalks the crevices hollowed out by the illness: standing there, looking at the actors trapped in the frieze and sudden light, Joplin feels that he is peering through the roof of the century; staring down, the strobes or angle light of his vision carrying him to the bottom of all purpose and in that cluster of damaged and destroyed purpose, the shuddering of the instruments for which he has apparently written so badly, he thinks that he hears the throes of ragtime hammered out by steel and wire, the real slow drag, the looping run of his own indignity massed at the excavated plantation, mourning the extinguished sun.
The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 45