by Joshua Cohen
Ruth said, “What’re you talking we’re staying?”
David said, “Can we change suites anyway?”
Ruth said, “But you hate it here and I have a son,” and then to the concierge, “No offense, but he hates it.”
The concierge said, “And if I may ask, please, what is wrong?”
Ruth said, “This is who you’re asking what’s wrong?” and then to David, “What aren’t you telling me?”
David said, “I was hoping to relocate to the class or pricepoint just below whatever it is we’re in currently.”
After the concierge checked the availabilities, he mentioned having noticed that they hadn’t yet registered for any of the activities or excursions offsite—he was wondering whether David and his wife might be interested in touring the ruins, which weren’t merely fascinating but precolumbian?
David said, “Not just now,” and was drowned by his phone, whose ringtone he’d changed from Ether Funk to Hatikvah.
“Snorkel, scuba, hanggliding, parasailing.”
Ruth said, “Wife?”
The concierge said, “Have I mentioned the ruins, which can also be done on horseback?”
Ruth snorted and went off to her facial.
David headed to La Cantina for cigs and a refill of his vodkabottle and drank and smoked between a sandtrap and clay.
He returned to the room only after dark to recharge and found Ruth gone—her suitcase inclusive. Though she’d left his ticket on the bed. Atop it glittered a stretched and shredded ring. A plastic ring.
She’d had trouble taking off her bracelet.
—
The laws of the dead are for the living—who else is going to follow them?
Yoav?
The corpses of Jews have to be washed, they have to be wrapped. They have to be sat with around the clock. A Jewish corpse can’t be left unattended, from the last breath to the last graveside spade of soil. A body unattended is a body unlocked, a doorway without a door—evil will just sneak into a cavity.
As for the burial, it has to happen the day after death or, if that’s Shabbat or a holiday, the day after that. It can’t wait until the World Cup’s over or for cheaper airfares. For when the criminal suits cede to the civil suits, inquiries, probes. Or for when the verdicts are returned for the guilty and not.
Certainly not.
Uri remained drawered in the morgue.
Yoav’s only visitor was a woman whose name, unyieldingly, was Dina.
This was the nature of their tribe: there was always a fair chance that the woman responsible for your fate had the same name as your mother. If he squinted he might even hear his mother’s voice, saying she was visiting from the consulate, in New York, acting on orders from the embassy, in Washington.
To be spoken to in Hebrew was a relief, after all that interrogation in English: the language of consistency, the language of pertinence.
Yoav repeated his account and then asked about Uri, his body—Yoav’s tongue pounding in his mouth like boots on the ground.
Dina told him that the body was evidence now and that while the law here routinely respected religion, that was mainly if not exclusively in situations regarding diet and clothes, and though a petition for release of the body could be filed, it couldn’t be by Yoav, who wasn’t next of kin. She consoled him with a courtdate and though she said she’d rather not speculate, she speculated, and said he’d be deported.
“Where deported?”
“Israel—where else?”
He stopped himself from asking how his father was.
He dreamed he was on the plane already. Which was like still being in jail, the same amount of legroom, had to cramp your head down. He was bitched in the middle of a three-row between an older couple reluctant to request he switch and sit on the aisle. It was only when he’d recognized the flightattendants as being Uri’s sisters that he recognized the older couple as being Uri’s parents, despite never having met the lot of them. All the other passengers, being served pillows and meals and drinks by the flightattendants, were Dugris too. All the extended family. A reunion atmosphere prevailed. With relatives digging into foiltrays of steaming fleshes, coffee or tea, coffee or tea, soft beverages iced with 9mm rounds, clinking. Everybody was being served except him. Then everybody had finished and was standing, blocking the emergency exits and washrooms with chat, catchup, commiseration, and, during turbulence, and the flight was turning turbulent, they grabbed for one another, as 9mm rounds rolled down the aisles. Relatives, trying to return to their seats, were falling. Luggage rattled out of the overheads. The plane was upended and a riot of prayer. Yoav was one of two seated, harnessed. The hatch to the cockpit was ajar. Inside, Uri was sitting. Uri’s dead corpse. He wasn’t stowed down as cargo in the belly of the plane, but leaned up against the indicators, as pilot. He wasn’t infantry anymore, he was flying. His chest was blown bloody open and his breastbone was the controls. His ribs had been opened and driven into the plane, had been welded and wired into the plane, to become its yoke or stick, an intimate apparatus of its navigation. As he slumped, with loss of blood and altitude and speed slumped, the plane bowed its forehead to the earth.
The day of the funeral, Yoav slept late. Wrapped naked in a sheet with an army rapping at his door.
—
David had never been to town before, to this town, and only now understood why it wasn’t one of the recommended excursions. It’s not like the concierge was in a position to tell guests what to do when they weren’t quite convinced of the wisdom of using creditcards.
He was trying to get interested in the sites, but after doing the church the only structure left was the fort, a decaying, colonial-era complex, all of which was closed except its giftshop and prison. He dropped an American quarter into the box, took the worn steps spiraling him dizzy to a dank chainbound cell—made it all the way up and down again in the span between bells.
He wobbled back to his pension, where dollars were accepted and passports weren’t scrutinized.
Back to the room, one room, where every effort to forget himself ended in a nap.
He wasn’t technically a fugitive, just loathed. All his voicemails were from (212) SIM-ONYI.
When the sun went down, he went out to a restaurant, the one that hadn’t yet made him shit, and sat on a steeringwheel stool reading the resort’s copy of last Sunday’s Times, eating soggy pork tortas and drinking tequila and mezcal until the restaurant had turned into a bar and he wasn’t understanding even the paragraphs he’d memorized, the sentences were blurry and he was drunk and white in Mexico and odious. The cigs here all scalded the tongue and were over too fast.
It was stupid to have come here, if not suicidal. An imperiled Jew should just jet to Ben Gurion and beg asylum, but that option wasn’t his. He was a Jew who couldn’t seek refuge in Israel. Who needed another Israel, who needed an alternate. So why not Campeche? La cuenta, por favor?
He took his second shower of the day, then gave the shower a bath, cleaning plugs of pork from out of the drain because he’d vomited.
He walked the streets, trying to recall the kaddish. Passing into slums, into fields. He was searching, vaguely, for the ruins. Not the ruins they’d tried to get him to horseride to at the resort, but other, lesser ruins—in the fort’s giftshop, he’d noticed a postcard of them, a tiny formation of disintegrating pyramids and he’d asked where they were and the woman had tried to sell him the postcard, which David refused, and a map, which he already had.
He’d unfolded it and she’d pointed to where, a brown pyramid, which marked a site of historical interest, the storage of the dead. And it’d seemed walkable.
It’d seemed along this road—a road without Jews. The sun was sowing him a migraine.
He passed winnowed fields and a dusty closed store with a stilled barberpole out front fitted with a strip of rough cloth that might’ve been a severed pantleg or sleeve flapping to indicate the vagrance of wind and claiming all this territory under the
sovereignty of the forsaken.
He met an old woman whose cheeks were studded with brown dotty moles and pointed at the map, “Piramida?”
“No sé.”
The rest of the fort was slowly reopening after some holiday or scheduled restoration work that, if it’d been completed, he wasn’t noticing, as he walked the ramparts and petted the cannon. He walked all the way around and then ducked into one of the battlements, some semicircular chamber shaded by a dome, and he pressed up against the slit between its stones, that mossy gap through which conquerors once shot fire. It wasn’t much of a view, it was more of a defense than a view. All it gave was a sliver of water, which toward dusk was crossed by a boat.
He wasn’t acquainted with many at the masjid anymore. They weren’t his folks, most. Their soupkitchen was unwelcoming and poison. The rest of the neighborhood had it in for him too, but he trusted it not to go snitching. He’d pay calls to his house, which had become just a lot, and it wasn’t even evident which lot it’d been, because no traces of demolition remained and also, his brain. There were just two blocksize construction sites now, facing each other, hoarded faces expressionless, the machinations behind them concealed and, once he ventured behind their fencing, sedent, idle. So, anyway, the world was upsidedown. The world was turning backward. He’d be wearing his clothes in the regular way until they were soiled and then he’d be turning them insideout and wearing them until they were soiled again and except for the stitching the insideout and regular would be identical, and if the occasion was bundling in a storm drain or bedding down beside Spring Creek, whose icy rail flowed through the sewers of Brooklyn and into the train tunnels of Queens, he’d wrap himself in broken unspoked umbrellas. He slept by day so as to stay awake all night and use the cover of darkness for his errands. Pulling behind him a shoppingcart or, when that got snatched, pushing a heapy babystroller up over the ties, he’d surface from the tunnels. Under the attainder of all weather. Under the plundered light of the moon. His home had become the A Line, which plunged subterranean between the stops at 80th and Grant, past the wall of that red stone called bluestone behind the Chase Bank branch at Drew. He had a crack, a chamber, dry enough, patched with books from the library. The trains would pass just by his cheek, gusting cold. More on weekdays, fewer on weekends. His calendar. He remembered he had to go to the library, there was something he’d forgotten, something due. But he couldn’t stand, he couldn’t even sit up. Being hungry was like being hit but never feeling it, never feeling anything. He had papers in a bag for a pillow. He wetted his lips with the thaw. He lay on his side as a light like rising mercury rose up the rumbled track and a breeze bore him on to where there wasn’t any winter.
To BC, DC, and MC
BY JOSHUA COHEN
Moving Kings
Book of Numbers
Four New Messages
Witz
A Heaven of Others
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto
JOSHUA COHEN was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. He has written novels (Book of Numbers), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, London Review of Books, n+1, and others. In 2017 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.
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