Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  But Benjamin. He’s still alive, pleadingly, isn’t He? Jesus, muttering Mary, we’ve received assurances, what about all those omens, those portents and signs (he’s stalling himself, trying to think what those were, might’ve been)—we’ve made all this food, two crates of wine; we haven’t even been paid.

  Don’t get wise with me, says the Keeper, suddenly suspicious when the talk gets to money.

  Weizmann begins to cry, too.

  Enough, the Keeper resists an urge to hug, rams his hands into the pockets of his uniform pants.

  If you want, I’ll let you in to talk to Security. Or the insurance people, the claims adjusters—if you want to file against the estate.

  Of course, I’ll have to take a peek in the trunk. That is, if you don’t mind. It’s standard procedure.

  And so Weizmann, weeping to wet his robe’s gilded frill, opens the driver-side door, pops the trunk into a storm: it’s fullup with oversized, overstuffed green trashbags holed and holding they appear to be weeds, acting as padding for plasticpacked frankincense, ziplocked myrrh its freshness sealed in; the stench hits the Keeper in the gut, he goes reeling, gags, recovers, pinches his nose, lifts the trashbags and roots around with his other hand amid wrapped and greasy platters of fish, white and herrings smoked and sturgeon, nova and kippered salmon and sable, alongside enormously risen loaves of pumpernickel and rye both with seeds, without; underneath, a shimmering: uncovered, it’s a glowing golden bundt cake, which illuminates his confusion, is pareve; the Keeper retreats a step, stares at the shvartze driving as if it’s all his fault and so the shvartze kills the engine, gets out, leaves the door open and beeping, proceeds somberly to the trunk, which he shuts as the similarly robed caterer in the backseat gets out, too, stands immediately behind the Keeper with his hands on the Keeper’s neck as if to assuage him by choking.

  They’re presents, he says dejectedly, for Him and the parents. His partners weep against the windows. And a bundt cake, consider it yours…the Weizmenn smacking palms against their heads and the Lexus, which is due back by noon.

  Standing together, soon holding each other, a huggy group weeping, as an ambulance registered to the Hospital Under the Sign of Everything, Long Island’s premium facility at which no insurance is ever sufficient, goes wailing down the lane, past them and their Lexus pulled to the shoulder, past the hut without a nod let alone a stop or even slowing, no appropriate decal affixed to the windshield of the vehicle, no licenseplate to put through the system, this is an emergency here, we have lives to save, or if not lives then at least our reputation for response time. We’re on the clock, better get out unwell or scram. Doctor Tweiss rides shotgun, the plasticsurgeon twin, we should hope (the other’s a psychoanalyst)—in suit, tie errant in the wind with his window aired down, he’s smoking despite the snow, the weathering gray, a monogrammed DT bag of tools on his lap open and bulging, the glint of stainless steel that blinds the eyes of the crying Keeper leaning up against the shut trunk as they pass: the guardrail’s up, had been up ever since this disaster began, with the cops in their flagrant, almost recreational careening into One Thousand a moment just after midnight’s cold stroke; the shrink who’s daylighting as the ambulance’s driver refusing to yield, driving his fraternal physician in gleeful violation of the speedlimit reduced to twentyfive inDevelopment; Doctor Tweiss attempting to steady his nerves and hands, with one holds onto the forked tail of his tie as if intent on hanging himself from the antenna above. He’s to snip the foreskin from the flesh of a newborn today, they call it a bris, they called it, this circumcision, an operation he’d never executed before but that, since last night’s phonecall in the middle of the president’s latenite address, he’d been thinking about, mentally occupying himself with, without sleep. His other hand smoking as its nails stroke at his nose as if it were the organ to be sliced and not an anatomy more hidden or intimate. With these people, he’s understood, it’d been the same as in the hospital, there were just a few blessings additional, which he’d been assured were unnecessary to the success of the procedure, its validity. Blessed art Thou. Blessed Thou art. Then a little of the woundsucking, that and the schnapps, which he’d had the ambulance stop for, and bought, then stuffed it into his bag with the steel—he’d kept the receipt, he’d be reimbursed.

  Though the entire operation’s unnecessary—as they’d discover upon arrival at the house at the address he’d memorized. Apple. Threethreethree. Though that’d never stopped him before, the lack of necessity of a paying procedure—why they’d hired him, whoever They ever were. Hello, speaking, no, that’d be my brother, yes, who’s calling, fine. Hanna and Israel’d asked their rabbi, also a dear family friend, Rabbi Sternstern his name was, who was dead, his own family, too, his wife and their eight kinder or nine who could keep count and his name, those and the wives and husbands of those kinder of his who were married as well, then their kinder those who’d had them along with everyone else, just last night: in dark socks sausagestuffed, with foothair and varicose veins, Rabbi Sternstern collapsed cold at the edge of his bed packing his bag for the morning, promising himself and his wife who was in bed herself though asleep that this’d be his last bris, the last circumcision he’d ever attempt and after retiring and not working as a circumciser, a mohel, for an entire year due to his nerves and an almost anesthetical fogging (instead outsourcing all the work in his synagogue to a young mohel imported from Teaneck who’d had a family young and large to support and old med school loans to pay down), but that he had to do this last operation himself, with his own two liveredly shaky, deliriously wrinkled hands because of the family, because of Hanna and Israel especially whom he’d converted himself, Israel, and their girls the twelve of them he’d studied with and the mazel that after all those prayers in his office and with the consultation of the doctor his brother-inlaw he’d recommended the parents had finally birthed a thirteenth, a son; how he’d said he’d live to officiate at the boy’s barmitzvah, too, a wedding, why not a funeral; how he died in a fall to the floor grasping and tugging the sheets and the bed’s blanket with him and so turning his wife over in her sleep and her death to fall herself off the edge of the bed, over her side, what’d been her side forever since ineligible, unmarriageable girlhood, to lie atop his body as if in embrace. Terrible, in that he would’ve done it for free, would’ve refused Israel inevitably attempting to pay him an envelope and its personal check or with cash and how Israel would’ve insisted, then he would insist himself and again and again no and then yes, then they’d drink to the health and prosperity of everyone gathered who were to be gathered together now only in death, which is the circumcision by angels of the essence that is divine in us all—like the pluck of a harp, the bris of the winged and glowing foreskin known as the soul.

  Doctor Tweiss, however, they paid, they whoever they ever are having arrived and too punctually too early that morning at the failing Tweiss Group off the Long Island Expressway at Utopia Parkway, their limousine out front parked across three handicapped spaces as if to make an impression—that luxury knows no boundaries, that wealth respects no borders; them whoever they are passing the arriving receptionist without nod, pass, grope, or even the most mere insinuation, two grim stooped giants and their wiry boss, smoothshaven, with those eruptive ears and the upturned eyebrows and plasticbags under his squinty eyes that held only contempt, who’d handed the doctors a suitcase packed full with money as if explosive (they were afraid to open it, their fear’d advised them to trust), then another of their party arriving professionally late in a livery of his own, apparently their new lawyer who had him and his brother Tweiss sign a disclaim of deutero forms before he let them go with the two and their employer, whom one called Das, another Der, and the lawyer Die, and whom the two of them Tweiss called nothing at all in their confusion, to the hospital to take possession of an ambulance that’d been gassed and reserved while the lawyer remained behind at their offices ostensibly to go through their files, he’d said, which meant they suspe
cted riffling through the most secret drawer of their receptionist whose breasts the lawyer kept describing in the air with his hands in unreliable gestures as the brothers gathered their matching coats up and left. An ambulance being driven by the psychoanalyst Tweiss costumed in the disguise provided by his closet and the approval of that receptionist’s purse, snappy cap, aviator shades—a goy who despite any pretension to the contrary doesn’t know his way around stick, now pulling up on a ruined transmission to the house huge and hugely vacant, screeching at the intersection of Main & Apple to stop short at the address at the furthest nest of the looparound, the twins thrown to the dash, smoke from the ambulance’s tires imbuing the air with the notion of burning corpses they’ve had to swerve to avoid. An expedition that’s to prove unnecessary, however, as not a soul’s at home, at least the door isn’t answered to their ringing, then their knocking of a brass ring distended from the lip of a decapitated lion—though they realize, now, that a newborn solely surviving couldn’t be expected to open the door on His own and admit visitation, put out the coffee and cake, and so they open the door with the copied key they’d been provided, let themselves in to search a stoop for a baby up and down all the floors: here baby, here boy, but find none and so without thinking much about why or what next, they lay waste to the refrigerator for brunch, sating themselves upon any leftovers leftover, then fall asleep atop the furniture to wait as instructed for further command.

  And like a visiting relative, an unwelcome guest, that Xmas just refused to leave: it never packedup its bags, bulging with snow to melt in the flee of the sun, never put on its cap and went out unafraid to greet the cold that was its own, its true home; it was endless, unbearable…what? It just sat around the house, turned to a puddle to profane the floor, having forgotten its own toothbrush and towel, it had to borrow, it clawed up the couch, stuck its snout into everything, became fattened on what was fed it, which was all we had then the furniture and lastly ourselves, and soon began to warm, to reek with putrefaction.

  It was Xmastime forever, for seasons at a time, at first deep into a month once known as January, a duplicitous, twofaced month named after that ancient Roman deity Janus, King of Latium, the God of beginnings, the God of endings, of gates like those to Developments and of doors like those set with knockers and bells, buzzers and intercoms and etched glass to a house since fallen, the patron of the bridge between the primitive and the civilized, between youth and maturity, too—a God whom no one thinks to worship anymore, a forsaken, spurned God, omnipotent and yet abandoned, omniscient and yet ignored; allpowerful, all alone: without Him no one knows which way to face, whether to the past or the future, or else just to stand forever upon the threshold searching this way and that, to waste an only life waiting for their very own end, however it would arrive and never too soon. It was anxious, depressing, it was Xmas into some say the next year, God, has it been that long, as the sun became split into suns, the freeze giving way to the humid and heat, the ice given notice, evicted, absorbed, poisoned with soot, snow melted to smog, though others hold it was Xmas deep into the year after that—who would swear to it, we all know how reliable the authorities can be, how much they’re to be trusted, how honest they are—the days’ debts to the world ingathering fatal interest, with no hope of paying memory off, and so the banks all went bankrupt then the market crashed and burned, valueadding no appreciable warmth to the scorch of the day; the looted metropolises leveled by bulldozers whose shovels had been emblazoned with the faces of fathers set sharp with the flaming teeth of their fathers before them…the world entire that was Siburbia razed to its very foundations of basement whether finished or maybe or not, which were cinderblock and brick and their cinders themselves leveled with palms become clammy with greed, demolished, reduced to vacancies of the earth, emptied lots marked for nothing, inhabited only by that that was no longer human: as no one worked anymore, as work had become life, had become mere survival. Kestenbaums roasting on an open fire…dairy products expiring, turned, were sold way past useby; cars became metal; teevees screened only snow in the unseasonable heat; shoes went thin then holed and then earth; clothes turned to rags then air and so everyone went naked at night, sweltering under the glare of an oleo moon. If you wanted to tell the difference between men and women and why would you; after all, they’re all goyim: the men were the ones with the nails of sharpened flint, who’d kill the other men with their nails of flint less sharpened against the curbs and the rust of the cars and the smash of the glass and the knife of the heat; they’d relieve themselves at the edges of ruined properties poorer of fence (impaled on the posts, their victims laidout across hedges grown wild); they’d attempt to sate themselves slovenly on what substances nosed out, snouted, raw or salted, and then, never full, never being able to differentiate appetites they’d smash in the strength that’s occasioned by rage the faces of others flat with the scuff of their hooves that they’d grown only to slip and slide to four legs on upon the asphalt and the glass and the metal; flatfaced women with the cancer cankering the puffs of their navels would whore themselves out for anything not so raw and not so salted, and when they were raped, and they were raped hard and raped often, and so had nothing at all to eat or drink whether it be raw or salted or anything else, they would sustain themselves by licking the stains of smoke from stray scraps of trash, glittery, littery wrappingpaper—that is, when they weren’t attempting survival through the suckling of shvitz from the hairs of their distended lips, though women raped into becoming mothers would occasionally maintain themselves, too, on their own offspring, pickled sweet in twindeckered sandwiches stacked high atop wonder white with the crusts cut, spread thick with lard, lashes of butter, fat dollops of mayonnaise without brand, snacking on their kin drooling saliva to shine their mammæ, which were headlights, twelvenippled, barebulbed. Their brilliantly pleasureless clitorides were shaped like the Popes…

  Offspring who’d escaped their mothers through matricide, which was the only way to escape them with the exception of killing themselves then each other stayed out, orphaned and unable to sleep just roaming the festive streets until late, occupying themselves by stringing up ornaments of testicles and skulls that they would glowingly impregnate with tapers rendered from the fat of abortions with lengths of hair for wicks and strands of hair and esophagi and intestine to hang glorious gore over the joyous proceedings, the sidewalks decked in pisspuddle, ornamented with the vomit and turd of perpetual holiday, the frayed and loosed ends of these umbilical strands tiedoff to garlands of desiccated dingleberries from the most diseased boughs and moldering branches of dying dingleberry trees topped with angelic roaches and other mutatudinously gigantic insects stripped of their wings and pointless stars, then wound around lampposts that’d wilted from the passion of their exertions, flaccid attempts on the sky, their jealousy of even the sun—decorations if they could be called such in appearance less like enormous rosaries than they seemed oversized adult products intended expressly for the stimulation of the anus. On allfours these offspring would promenade under these garlands proclaiming the worship of beauty, cheer and its happy cult, on spines of tar smashed open and meltingly gooey at base they’d often mistake potholes for wounds of potable sewer, slurping petroleum goop, they’d slip ’n’ fall to make easy prey for their relations and strangers alike, denizens of the streets and their lowering gutters strewn, too, with these tanned torsos these millions of them left amputated to gangrenous stumps ever grasping, heads still attached, nothing else: an eerie species of GrecoRomance, this dying admonition to pluck out your eyes if eyes they had anymore and not just slits, or holes, or rough ethers, at this sight of once full and whole people who’d had their limbs hacked from them or gnawed, their arms leaking at the shoulders, legs dripping at the kneel of their knees—they were sodomized in any available orifice with their own severed limbs, flinty sharpened hooves first then smacked about the face with the limply sopping appendage, sliced with metal, slit with glass, left to rock and rot, t
o occupy as entertaining spectacle their attackers whom they couldn’t even curse because despite the left heads, their mouths and tongues they weren’t able to even talk anymore, needless to say, that none of them were, that they were left languageless, rendered without speech, that they at the most generous only gestured and grunted at random, voiceless and languorously lolling like mute tongues themselves amid the humidity and heat and the damp stick of morning, the hour they’d traditionally air their sleek, ribworn flanks, deep into the long afternoons of dry scorch.

  It was that the next evolution of those who were unmarked rendered them unto animals, partiformed creatures, mutagen beasts, who were once inarguably Men & Women mutated then mutilated by their fellow mutants and by the mutilation, too, that is the passage of unsanctified time, therianthropes to the Gods who had forsaken them as the Gods had once been forsaken themselves; how they were burdened beasts without conscience, asses without soul and that this—with the covenant sundered and the death of the chosen and their rainbow choked by the pollutant clouds and the stars of the sky burnt out and the sands of the sea winded up and away to dust the furthest reaches of the primeval void—this was, it’s been said, only the possible, a small allowance or potentiality, just one way of the many infinite ways in which the world might’ve evolved, essentially hidden, Apocryphal; in the end, which was only yesterday, little more than a misnomer misnamed.

  Because this is what Was…how the world would create God as God had created the world, and then how humanity would create itself anew in the image of God in which it was originally created on the sixth day of In the beginning, upon which—now that it’s returned to us forever in the heart of the seventh—the nascent late sun would never dare set for fear of desecrating such Sabbath: