Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  Even with all this happening, PopPop says in interruption of his own humming, I should wish you a happy and healthy, pursing among his hides for a late holiday tip—may this year be better than what’s passed, and not wanting to waste an egg on the boy, with stiff nervous fingers finds a dime to drop to his pocket.

  PopPop leaving behind him a beach on his heels, from the blowsy elevator to tread the wet over the carpet laid intermittently rumpled with dune to the door to his penthouse, an opalescent sun its button of bell whose plaque underneath, if rung, proclaims in text and sound, POP—POP (has that ring to it, doesn’t it? he’d said to Benjamin, icebreaking, shattering stuff, this getting to know you), makes as if he’s digging himself out of his pants again for his keys amid the loose change and changeless sand as the door to the elevator shuts, and the metal with its urchin descends. Then, he frisks toward the only other door on the floor, opens it to the stairwell and falls down a flight edged in green railing and emergency lights, tripping over the threshold and out the door a floor below klutzy footing until steadying in front of another, pants, pauses, sucks air, straightens his hair in the nameplate’s reflection, ARSCHSTRONG writ in wrinkles across the forehead, untucks, then tucks in again the tails of his shirt, tries to put a hand in any pocket of his vest, then realizes he hasn’t yet slit them. A hand unpurposed is as a deliverance withheld and so he knocks, redemption, as ordered knocks three times more, knock knock knock then—an arthritic shuffle; an eye’s squint through the peephole; a surgical procedure this unlocking of nine locks, and then there’s the deadbolt to think of; a gentle gentile appearing simultaneously young and intensely old, not as much newbornlike as a fetus overstayed, a fruit gestated to sensate and so, overripe, he slights the door, draft, light, plucks from his mouth a slick and yet rough prune for a tongue, and through the sliver with all along the chain still on leans slowly to lick at the tonguing returned of his lover, who just darkness ago had been the repressive responsible for Benjamin who should already be sleeping upstairs, dreaming of anything other than this, God forbid. Then, Arschstrong withdraws, shuts door, undoes the chain in a rattle, opens wide: PopPop, with his hands out in front of him, his late offering bagged, a fresh hatch of Nest Eggs.

  A happy and a healthy, Adi, let auld acquaintance blah blah, I should feel lucky to be alive. A wonderful New Year, though that was probably months ago now; here’s to new beginnings, and to my Benjamin, too, a comfort in our winter years…once I get named guardian, the papers go through, the accounts revert—just think of what we can do: I’ve never been to Greece, have you, never been to the Islands, don’t even know what they mean by the Islands when everyone’s always saying they’re going to the Islands. Venice, never been to London, Paris either, or Rome, Minsk or Pinsk, with you I mean, what’s Siberia after all without you?

  Tonight to be the last of their assignations, each of which would satisfy thrice per lunation: sessions of sex slow and dry, despite any lubrication—and they’d tried them all to rashes, allergies, itch, once’d even made their own out of PopPop’s liposucked fat—unabashedly analytical, measured in how hot (tush temp.) and dry, their orgasms later noted in a leather ledger Arschstrong keeps in the kitchen in the drawer along with the pen and the knives, though they engage themselves down the hall in the bedroom, sunk amid hazards of splintered wood packingcrates, looseflapped cardboard boxes, scuffed suitcases and trunks, socks swallowing socks, balled into bulges, tight and dark wads stuffed to puff used underwear scattered sexually negligent, with talcum powder just everywhere, a dusting of weatherform white dirtied with dust, as if neglect purified; as they’re switching positions from the favored Thrombosed Mosquito to the exceedingly advanced Reciprocal Six Handled Spoon, Arschstrong spurting a last helping of glide onto the rub of his lambskin, Pop-Pop asks he can’t help it:

  You’re leaving me, why?

  I’ll kill myself, it’s something I said, something I did—Benjamin, He’s only temporary.

  Relax, says Arschstrong touching a shaky finger to the head of his lover, I’m only moving across the hall. You remember the Golden-Schlitzpickels, they died, you know, like so many, too young, it’s a sin, and with an oceanview…

  Theirs is three times the size!

  So is mine, Arschstrong says as he enters.

  Dead of night arrives, that inviolate guest, unseen, unheard, leaves like stealing, having pocketed the clock. Balls fall, inexorably. They lean on one another, sucking each other’s shvitz, gasp air recirculated, the soul of the ducts. Then, as if variety’s been made mandatory to pleasure, they retire their silence to what Arschstrong’s always called his Florida Room, in an apartment in which all the rooms are actually, technically, Florida Rooms, there to admire the haze of their engaged reflection in the glass that is the furthest wall, which would slide open on its greasy track to reveal just past the patio used for storage only—skyline, frozen. What a view, away from the ocean, toward the parkinglot, plow and corpse, the weeping palms of Babylon, the street that whites west toward the highway. Miami sobered this New Year, unforgiving of revelry, left corkless, without bubble; there are no lights from up here that aren’t sirens, the lingery grope of emergency pulse; the balloon of the moon resoundingly popped, by the darkness.

  After two attempts, one culminating in mutual cum, Arschstrong invites PopPop to stay, he’d never done that before; theirs has always been strict congress, sweet, quick, though not as hurriedly harried and awkward as the inevitable exit to follow. To get older is to get none the safer in your own skin…PopPop’s flattered, a gratitude perplex; if an apology, he’s uncertain whether it’s been offered to him or by him, for such premature arousal of every suspicion, that scare with the socks, the underwear, the powder. In a corner, a plastic plant ornamentally webbed with teabags patient for repeat steeps. To warm them, Arschstrong heats a pot, weak mint they sip in an ocean of lull, lazing about the sofa’s plastic slipcovered lump, surrounded by the floats of garmentbags, toiletrycases, scissors, tape and twine. With a pillowcase spared to shammy and what’s left in the kettle, Arschstrong removes PopPop’s sandals, washes his feet, individually the toes then, dispensing with the other foot’s plug, puts a shoulder into it deep into the hiccoughing flesh, rimming the void, pale and wrinkled, lies on a knee his other hand, its wristwatch just ringing midnight, an alarm preset, a shriek of the veins that strap down the arm, binding his grip to the battery of the heart. As if to insinuate that PopPop should leave, please and thank you, Arschstrong giving justification to this madness, abrupt, by saying time for pills his and yours, his toilet, beautybed, a call to his daughter out on the other coast of estrangement—and this with the pillow’s shammy still dripping onto the floor from which the rug’s been removed, rolled and hogtied. PopPop steps into his clothes, takes up his saggy bag and in that lean kisses at his lover still sitting, out the door then up the stairs one dainty step after another through the door to his, which he unpents quietly, not just tiptoed but discreetly up on his pedicure, so as not to rouse Benjamin, who’d stayed up midnight late though locked in, forced to keep company and amuse with whatever belongings of MomMom’s PopPop couldn’t sell, didn’t, no one’d yet offered the right price, no one would: hummel figurines forever unparented, earth thrown into a kiln then fired to kitsch, pastel samplers and quilts, unfinished knit caps and booties, which bled yarns for the grandkinder of friends, not her own; then, on a highest glassed shelf, a furbish of spoons silver but tarnished, souvenirs brought back from the vacations of others, always, to remember to her where she’d never been, never would be, which was most everywhere outside Florida and northeastern environs. To try the knob, to make sure of its lock by bolt, and, satisfied, quietly, to his room, to become naked again but alone, hanging each piece of his suit up on its designated hanger, PopPop falls onto the bed and asleep over the covers, to turn from one side to the other along with the year, the millennium, all.

  If in our sleep we dream of dreaming, and of nothing else, then we might understand the terror of
the times; it’s the failure of disaster—which, like every unwelcome guest, like the guest that is sleep, arrives always an hour too early, during which you’d hoped to prepare, wash and clean, skim the newspaper, have a bite of something to eat. We lie poorly; we toss, we turn—and even our turns are turned, a last leaf fallen as flake, blown in its cycle back to the very beginning of mornings, time and again if only in each iteration estranging, as any ending’s already known, is thought of nightly and always, just disbelieved until the grave, the sittingroom, standingroom Shiva, the mourning of neighbors, of family, friends; the impertinence of year over year ringing real from our guts empty but churning, the imposition unsettling, a calendar left blank with no lineage to mark the days or the numbers, or else rived altogether too many times and again into black, which is total: two different cycles, run both at the same time yet opposed, wash and spin dry, permanent press and delicates, that was Wanda’s department, as it was Arschstrong’s: how he used to take care of laundry for PopPop, the cooking, the cleaning, what not, for sex a kneel and a mouth and for worries, an ear he couldn’t hear out of without the ringing buzz of his aid. Another knock, yet another and again and the tired old nude wipes himself from the toilet, green fires of money lap from his sit, there’s more where that came from stacked in the shower, behind the pink curtain, watermarking the tub with its filth. Finally out of the closet—all of his closets have been cleaned out. Arschstrong walks from bathroom to bedroom in which he painstakingly puts himself through a suit three decades old, he hasn’t in years, gathers his handluggage packed (a horde of what matters, his passport, license, new limitless creditcards that just came to mild interest, plus toothbrush and paste to be carried on); only then does he go to the door, no need to peep himself prepped as he knows who it is, and if he doesn’t then the stranger can’t be worse than expected.

  Hallway’s full of suits, two of them, one of whom, an immaculate, towering shvartze, ports his luggage, overpacked, to the hall’s furthest elevator, service, while Arschstrong, accompanied by another foreigner, with his pleasantries he must be Mitteleuropan, he thinks, takes the residential, whose scamp operator’s been financed to take the remainder of the night off, before being forced, bound, gagged then broomcloseted. While descending, this foreign goy in the pinched fedora hands over to Arschstrong an envelope in which as agreed are the surveilled, images disagreeably focused of him and Pop-Pop, naked, engaged in a joy named in memory of that urbis that once neighbored Gomorrah, which has no sin left to its name. A limousine idles in the drive, ahead of another, this second limo shabbier, scratched at the doors, fender dimpled and two lights smashed out, the latter plateless, too, though registered to the federal government. All shaved skull and sunglass pincenez, a voluminous leather duster over his suit and tie, which are black, the shvarzte opens the limousine’s door, Arschstrong simpers inside, the limos pull out, in poor, skidding formation, disappear into one another then into pitch, whose direction is always northeast. One limousine to go further, though, as north and as east as the Delaware and the mouth of the Parkway, all the way back again to the state of Benjamin’s birth, which is Joysey, if a Garden itself then a paradise barren, Eden bereft—a scrubscape of low malls and gnarled, haggard, known better days pine; while the other limo relents earlier, as if it can’t take the cold or the time, takes the turn from the lightless interstate to Washington’s rural if still subdivided environs, Arschstrong in its rear sucking fingers, the attaché held on his shivering knees. He’s liveried to an impressive rancher vacated upon this clear and bright Sunday morning, with his kinder and their own out tending to church (even Arschstrong once married, for what he thought of as normalcy, only protection), at a special vigil this Sabbath never again, a service of solidarity being held for the victims of recent events, and so he waits, sits on their porch and wastes himself in wicker alongside the bowl for the water and the bowl for the food of their dog, who’s absent itself, scavenging bodies. He’ll ask to stay, for acceptance, to live here, spin out his span however long it’d be, and please not too revolute painful. An hour later a metallic gray minivan makes time through the artificially greened, rolling in it Development and even before it manages and on problem brakes to slow to a stop, grandkinder—his, he realizes—spring through the windows, hope they’re already open; kisses one for each then one for the wife of his son (reminder, ask him for her name), a handshake, maybe even a hug for her husband who’d rejected him now returned if too late and inside, Arschstrong nodding, as if gathering the tense urge of the lips; he lightens himself in their kitchen, atop their table synthetically topped, mounding a mint of money before he falls into a chair he’s sure is there but isn’t and so onto the floor where he remains sprawled, and weeping.

  First and false, this day of new beginnings, up and fortified with bran for brunch, a sit on the toilet, girded loins not quite proverbial, fresh resolve along with an argument against such headlined in memoriam above the folds of the morning papers. To unlock Benjamin’s door at seven sharp, the same hour at which he’d free his late wife His MomMom, to put her to work, daily tasks since his lover’s, or once; to wake Him and say, another day—the clock poured in fresh sidewalk concrete to still history at now, to sink the past in the ocean of present…getup, washup, dressup, eatup—over the fruitplate, a diet, we’ll talk strategy for the lawyer, our appointment’s on Monday at nine.

  Into the bedroom and instead of Benjamin in bed, His MomMom’s—there’s no outsized infant lump or toddling lunk, but a shriveled pucker of a person with a head shaped like an egg, as it’s brilliantly bald, set with eyes and nose and a mouth like the cracks made by the earliest of beaks. Or, it’s a worm, wriggling that head as round as the world, and as swollen. Its glabrousness goading. Who else, PopPop thinks, what else to suspect: maybe one of the more senile residents around here, old Mister Alzheimer, perhaps, wandered home to the wrong unit, it’s happened before, it’ll happen again but he won’t recall when. PopPop checks for a wheelchair, a walker…tries it on, this variant of take my cane, hold it or, I’m just happy to see you, then laughs at the thought, offers him a sleeve, a cuff of the hand; and, as he extends himself as if to shake, he can’t help himself, he begins tapping a finger as if to break with nail this squirming shell and emerge from it a SonSon.

  It’s good to meet you, too, Mister Israelien…or, it’s what’s his name, snap, a crackle and clap, eyes shut—PopPop a lifelong sage of the news, a frontpage scholar, recognizing the former secretary of the Treasury, has to be, he’d just spent time with him on the toilet, over a bowl of black flakes, this I’m not sure we’ve been introduced recently promoted from his previous Administration position to sit at the edge of His bed, a dead wife’s. What’s his title, the new one, the mind’s going, gone: Secretary of Affiliated Affairs, that was it, a novelty breakable for the cabinet, moldy, locked. How to describe him: he looks like an egg, though his dewlap like the testicles of a turkey. Everything above the lips squints in slits—that dry, thin wisp of fec. Dreck, that’s that smell; our charge’s laid, needs his changing. PopPop sniffs. A moment ago, Das—that’s it, that’s his name or an acronym or abbreviation for what, at least that’s what the networks had called him, the President, too; as for what he’s really called, Keiner or Keynor, who can remember—he’d snuck a knuckle up and into his seat, emerged fisting an incontinent clod, then stroked on its black as a moustache. Distinguishing, reassuring, security smeared. He’s smaller than you’d expect, and especially unimpressive sitting, arrived in the uniform, fulldress, of an unspecified military: head skewed between uneven epaulets, the rest of him bound in frayed sash; the pants straining, but the jacket baggy at the chest doneup civilian custom: its lapels luxury enough to accommodate his many badges, citation, ribbons, and medal.

  His boots have marched in mud over the tile, which’ll never again be as clean as it was.

  For you, this Das says, I’m here in person, the voice the tinhorn tinkle of his own decoration. This is sensitive: we need to brief
you, find out if you’ll be cooperative. We hadn’t anticipated so many, all these surviving firstborn—least of all a relation…and there isn’t much time.

  PopPop pinches pants to kneel at his visitor’s feet, between those blemished boots, and there on his plastic patens, the tray of the new knees bearing atop a hip or two probably needing to be replaced again, too, and sometime soon—to grope beyond darkness, feeling under the bed, and through the trash there, wrappers, the remains of food hidden, no slippers, no shoes.

  We’re sorry it had to be this way, we didn’t know if you’d be willing, but let me assure you, Mister Israelien, you should be—you shouldn’t worry. You have my word: everything will be provided, your meals, accommodation, a seat at the table—I’m saying, the choice is yours, but we’d love to include you in our plans. Behind the door, PopPop righting himself, nothing. We’ll be waiting for you in the lobby, take all the time you need, say ten minutes…you might want to pack heavy, it’s even colder up there. In the closet, lost luggage. You have a jacket, hat and gloves, a warm winter coat?