by Joshua Cohen
To the laundryroom, then, and only the scrap of a sock, PopPop limping with it to the kitchen, wiping at his forehead. To open the fridge and there, emptiness, save takeout or delivery discard, containers and bags, foil, waxed paper, wet receipt and grease, sop rung around where a tray once fell, its form held in gravy as if the outline of fatty chalk after a crime. The table, cleared clean. Count them, the chairs are all there and pushed in. It’s been wonderful to make your acquaintance, Das whispers down the hall. Again, hoarsely, I want to assure you we’ll do our best to keep you and your grandson happy, and safe. Tread, such a plodding. Trust me, he’s saying even softer and nearer, you’ll get your explanation. At kitchen’s threshold, he stops; he could do better with the posture, stooped to the clink of his honors. PopPop, he’s stricken. As Das smiles, flaking moustache, clicks heels. The frontdoor’s still open from how he’d come; the boots squish.
PopPop dodders down the hall, back to the room, his wife’s dead now Benjamin’s disappeared, to touch at the head of their bed, the pillow filthy in its case on which whoever it was had just sat. From there, a sudden sodden heat clambers up his arm to shut itself mad into his heart’s inmost chamber. Pop-Pop gives a shudder, a tingle, his arm numbed: MomMom’s pins & needles, prickling flesh from the shoulder’s hock down through the elbow, funnily boned to his fingers, stabbing the writing on the wall, or grabbing at the paper’s pattern of flowers—a consolatory bouquet…to seek support, to stand, live on. Ten minutes downstairs, it’s colder up where, clammy Miami, alone, not safe, never happy. As in time, this is an infarct—these are comments his women once made, these were cues: earthshaking, his wife; unstable, his daughter-inlaw…
Whether judged or not, whether meriting or no, though it’s not up to us—if it was, then…PopPop’s dying. Despite lust for Arschstrong, known as luxuria, or gula, greed’s avaritia, the lazy like—and who knows if in reward for the grace that’d been their one week together, him and Benjamin’s—he the shirker, he the enlightened, the weekday modern and Sunday skeptic dies now how he began: within the tradition he’d once forsaken. All’s vanity, pretense, mere role. It’s dramatic, theatrical, geriatric stock staged for the footlit curtains closing up north and Downtown, Second Avenueways, which though in hiding an illustrious street is at heart a vein that, unlimited, exposed, flows south through the island of his native Manhattan then on down the highways of the coast to bind New York’s beginning to Miami’s deadend—the lifeline, the timeline interminable, the intestate Interstate…the aired path of the snowbirds’ perhiemate migration, and the wavelength of the radio and television signals he’s channeling, too, on their frequency their cries, their overwrought shows.
An honorable, traditional death, heldover for reruns—in that it all takes nearly an hour, in one account, while others hold two or ten times that much and more; or else, in some interpretations given over to the mystic lacking a timeslot, he’s still dying and always will be forever, replayed without redemption, eternally, infinitely, heaven or hell. PopPop staggers from bedroom to bath, its chest of pills, tablets engraved with milligrams of saving hope. Dropping them scattered. To steady atop a mountain of rug tripped over then drug, through the hall, its wall and switch he flicks to dim the light appropriate to such serious passage. A shout to the livingroom, a scream to the kitchen to echo tintinnabulatory within the suck of the sink. PopPop beats his breast, this dizzies him, unsupported with this drumrolling beat he falls, flamed across the livingroom, the familyroom, the den, and the backstage, too, of all other rooms besides, their capacity of other dimensions, mystical, mystifying: his drop to the sofa taking another hour itself, with gravity only just awake, waiting its weather patiently out on the balcony.
Want to talk gravity? eulogize death itself! Talk about PopPop’s fall from that couch to the one floor of the rooms that are all themselves only one room stageset and propped whirling around taking twice the hour of his previous fall, how it feels; he rights himself amid a cushion’s cradle, tearing pillows to the floor to better comfort his demise, the mourning impending. How many days dailied and their nights the run, the rushes, not rushed enough. Upsets furniture. Upsets the janitorial staff, working disposal floors banged below. A wild animal it sounds like. Though a sign out front says, No Pets Allowed. Pop-Pop collapses again with a breath, gathers a loose strand of strength, the fringes of the slipcover, bunching the cut of his robe and the pajamas he on weekends shrouds about in; writhes on the pillowed floor with thumbs in his lapels, exhorts in a voice infused with temporary wisdom tempered with what tempers all the residents of his apartment tower, all the elderly almost over lives facilitated below, to free themselves from sin and do remember him kindly; addressing himself to the Staff Physical and SpeechLanguage Therapists, too, Psychogerontologists and even the hated Leisure Director who’d once revoked from him his pool privilege, in punishment of an accidental locker pish—to him as to others PopPop sermonizes; advice he dispenses, honors he bestows; every scrap, rag, rind and peel of inspiration on pain of insight his life has saved up for now, hoarded from sources both ancient and popular, Scriptural quotation and advertorial slogan, catchphrases dropped for commercial taglines cut, over the years stored up in the gray ham beating between the blue-screened, whitewashed walls of his skull. He turns a trip, this somersault to stand, stumbles again to flip and walk on his hands a stunt, his robe falling open around him, this cheap cotton Wardrobe & Makeup melting…where’d he get this stuff—saved up in Storage?
Naming friends and enumerating enemies, for the cautionary benefit of neighbors downstairs floors forever and his unsuspected Arschstrong, too, his lover and would’ve been his and Benjamin’s heir—PopPop doling out wealth he doesn’t have to people he doesn’t really know, never really wanted to anyway; leaving his sun to his SonSon, and may the larks flown south for the winter serve as witness, let their worms live enough to attest. A window, PopPop stands a last, gropes at the sill. Violas swell from a rooftop string-section, behind them winged woodwinds chirp about balconies. From the elevator in the hall, through the door still open, a chorus rises up from the depths, the basement sauna and surrounding pools lap and wading baldly cast with swimmers synchronized, taking a diver they’re swooning pruned the Kaddish, in harmony to the hunk of lifeguard doing a version of faygele in a shrilly brilliant cameo whistle…
He’s dying! my God, he’s dying!
PopPop tearing at what’s left of his hair as if tugging from his head his own response with the dandruff, yelling: I am having a heart attack! I am dying!
As old as death this fall again, back to the kitchen—what a stunt this brunch’s fling, in truth a jump or pounce, prat and rattling glass, rupturing the last act (another halfhour); leaning limply on a doorknob turned with his weight to humble him to knees in the hall, an other hand reaching into the air, still and stale—a wreck, this underventilated apartment with the heating way up and the impotent sun spurting itself through the unwashed, unshaven skylight—his head held snobbish, as if to face away from his wriggling toes, gnarled in yellow nail, he can’t bear them, the weakly veined and restless legs and breathless crotch, in an always last attempt to right himself, to rise. A farewell as extensively meant as Shalom in its every translation, its rewrites, kick-starts, punchups and toneddowns, tightly mouthed: with blessings and curses for all, for relatives, friends, for even just the relatively friendly, the acquaintance and the stranger among them; with obsecrations and wishes, goodbye, the sigh of its syllables again: Sha-lom…his eyes opening after the style of his lips, to the mirror above, around and whirlwinding, to pronounce to himself in reflection an invocation of the worth of his mother, to commend his corpse and soul condemned if soul he has to God. He says his goodbyes now a third time absolute, absolving any prompt: Shalom, Shalom, Shalom…shutting eyes, mouth, face grayed above the flush of heart.
Throughout PopPop’s facility, from towertop to basement bottom, mourning’s been underway for a week already: Unaffiliated though eligible, still attractiv
e and accommodating with money and recipes of their own widows beyond and below, those inveterate cookers and cleaners who’d moved here maybe to land for themselves on Florida’s fishy shore an Affiliated husband, his fortune, their luck, these survivors of intermarriages and failure—they’re out on their own decks below his and rending ritzy their fresh laundry mourning white with spare falseteeth, tearing their sheets and assorted feminine unmentionables to shreds before hanging them out to signal what distress or sentinel under the cool of the coming moon. All day they’re lolling low their sad sag, over their precariously frowning railings like petulant lips, they’re sobbing, weeping the age of water, their flabby hands held to faces shaken out into faucets of flesh, one eye of each the hot water, the other the cold and so, it’s lukewarm tears they’re sprinkling all over Miami, as if to purify or douse. Upon their hair, which is wig, or dyed, ashes heap, luminously scorched particulate blown from the pile of corpses burnt at the furthest edge of parkinglot and, too, atop the roofdeck of the adjacent garage—a great cremate, as who has the time or resources for mass burial. Despite surgery electives and pricey, painful injections their faces, they’re fallen—on the knees of the nose, their cheeks begging for it (compliments)—on the form of a wiry, uniformed official below with the brass, the moustache’s rank, giving orders to the limos parked in the drive. As smoke from the bodies burns off into night, PopPop manages, just manages, to scroll open an eyelid, a brittle curtain or carpet soaked of its red; and with it attempts a wink that’s only to resolve into a roll, dull—which failure damns and so feels itself death; the end of an end come the credits, the stars.
All air’s grounded the days following disaster…not days but an afterlife, which is indivisible, and so even if heaven then truly hell. An avenue, they emptily follow, a street, without escort, the city beckoning: a dark ancestral finger curled to coax, both to bring near and to scold. Laning, leathern strips of tar. A fringe of ice, a knot of tree. Their prayer is only a siren. Two limousines alone together, pass each other, are passed, a gleam of fender, grazing mirrors, bumpthumping and cutting one another off, northeasternward, far up the reach of black, this dim span of everlast cold; the aired flat earth of the seaboard in all its binding chains, a franchise of the known: gas stations lately condemned, treyf eateries just out of business, prospective lots of forested nowhere, On This Site Will Be Built nothing anymore, a plot zoned fallow, this strip retstripped. Though through Maryland at the exit for Silver Spring, while others hold by Virginia and headed toward Fairfax or Langley just south of Washington the district, the government limousine swerves from the highway, the other vehicle stays its course more east and northernmost, on into the day mapped white in noontide light—up and always up the Interstate abandoned, plowing past stakes of evergreen loneliness, relieved every mile or so by pits of firewall dirt.
To follow is to lead if in the direction most opposite, an ordinal most opposed—the route of the landrover in reverse, an Exodus rewinding itself through a desert of ice: snowstorm, galling winds. Hail the hardness of stone the size of the sky falls to the windshield, trapping darkness in the web of its shatter. Our driver, a Mormon minor who seems as young as all Mormons most probably are, and every schmeck as innocently perfect, turns into a skid without concern, his face frozen blond and harmless; then, evens out again with a slight sigh to ride the middle of the highway without end, without middle; the fall effacing lines, the lanes useless, with shoulders slushed to watery shrug. Benjamin in the back, there are two others waiting for their introductions; one seated shotgun, next to Heber the Mormon: he’s the shvartze we’d been getting at earlier, name of Sonny Hamm though he’s known also as Testicles, to be pronounced in a manner more philosophical or poetic than most—Greek, though his people long ago came up from the South, the capital of Africa; the other’s seated alongside Benjamin, hidden with Him behind the window that tints to separate front from rear, two zones of temperature and volume of radio static: a foreigner, the name’s Torque Mada. Despite the smile, the lips as tight as scars, he keeps on his head that fedora without apparent humor. Maybe he’d been told to suit up like this, for the sake of impression: doublebreasted, pocketwatch that needs always winding, the sparkling piss of its chain. It pinches. A sensation of slow burning, a headhaze, a rise in His gerd. He’s slumped against the window, His bones feel weather-made. Awake as of just now, the last pothole, tires’ slide—feeling the slow flow of power channeled once again from the beat of His heart, recovering from the injection that’d fallen Him with midnight, the secularized eve of the New Year. Assimiliated to who knows how or when, there hadn’t been a struggle. He’s kneading at an arm, up toward the pudge that falls from shoulder, its bandage unremembered: a sanitary strip profaned in image with a wondrous array of popular animated characters He can’t hope to know, He’s too young—ratty mice, cats and dogs, and piglets.
In one interpretation, you can forget pain, uncomfortable’s the worst.
Benjamin shifts to make sucking flatulent noise on the wide leather seat. His glands feel hardened, swollen inside Him just under the skin pricked, as if balloons of condolence, inflated with bile. I’m sorry, get well soon. His throat’s thorned, His mouth a bouquet of tongues, wilting flowers. A limousine a womb, its mother luxury—offering every amenity without such twin of guilt: there’s the latest model television screen, which is blaring technological snow, racked alongside a stack of recent magazines and newspapers headlining the tragedy throughout the last week of shock, onto specifics, statistics, facts, then the editorializing calm that is the grind of daily blame; and then a bar, too, from which He retrieves a can of soda in a flavor purporting to be diet, pops the top, proceeds to spill atop a skidding rumble half the thing all over, PopPop’s robe and Israel’s shirt underneath that are actually two robes and two shirts held together only with hope, the pants that’d been three pairs of Arschstrong’s before the surgery to his gut and its effectual weightloss, which’d been extensively scarring—a deepening stain aired as if the twin or mate of the blood let from the road’s shoulderborne, rubberravaged corpses stacked for disposal and slicking the freeze, their flow sustaining the grass giving way to stumps, the stubby trunks of trees the pubic pines of the earth, the needled gravel, which is the death of the earth, its own grave.
Revived, and sticky with thirst, amid the trickle of waking, His having to go, Benjamin flings kicks at the partition, slings fists against the window inside.
Are we there yet?
And silence.
How about yet?
Which we ask when we’re nowhere, lost to the void to be mapped between dislike and hatred, betwixt irritation and rage.
To count the licenseplates, to bitch the taunting signs. Patience, patience, shalt thou pursue, to pacify, subdue. To memorize the miles, then recite their wear. Only the idle shall distract the idle, and none shall inherit the perpetual revolution of the earth. A tire, enumerate every tiresome turn.
Mada finally faces Him and says, be quiet, sit still…your grandfather’ll be waiting for you, we’ll be there soon enough.
I called him my PopPop—shows what you know, schmuck.
Mada taps down the window inside the limo, taps on the shoulder the shvartze seated up front.
And why didn’t he ride with us…I’ll give you one guess, you putz. Hamm, Mada says, we need more, another one quick—three ccs or so should do it, thinking, stat.
Thinking, too, He might not even remember. Both can only hope. It could’ve been worse, it could’ve happened to me.
I need to pee, Benjamin says and holds at Himself. A rummaging up front, clammy hands, a testicular bag. Hold it in, Mada says again, biding time, as if anything you want to hear’s already been said by better. Benjamim flails, turns to grope the stranger’s suit, His hands pale, His loins tensed. A rumbleseat, up and down as if to nod—it’s urgent.
Jesus goddamned, the shvartze says from his search his head down, we’re out of tranqs; must’ve used them all up just to get Him o
ut of Florida.
I need to pee!
Who knew He’d be this big?
Now, I need right now—oowww, and Benjamin hits His head on the headrest in front; in pain scrunching His face so that His glasses pop from their ears’ safekeeping, to tumble to His lap.
I’m blind, my bladder, too—my everything’s complaining!
Heber from behind the wheel lowers the rear windows to let in the air and wet, the frozen issue of their unholy union. He’s like this little kid, who says, he does, and without taking his sunglasses from their mirror of the darkling road, who’s like a grandfather, too, His own, and with the worst qualities of both; the Mormon just making a suggestion—piss out the window, will you?
I won’t have Him urinating all over, says Mada and he ups the windows on his own, dusts the snow from his hat, which is still on his head despite the wind and his seatmate’s own gusting.
Hamm, when are we expected?
In this weather?
Heber tears the meridian, ripping the shift, and He’s either thrown or throws Himself along with the motion to wedge within the void of the window separating front from rear, not to be raised.
Another thing, Benjamin says from His hang with His body halved, I have to shed…it’s personal—you wouldn’t understand.
A flake, a fall—you would?
A sign flashes from out of the mist, and on Mada’s order Heber swerves from the Parkway exiting into the turn, through the lower lot then skidding to stall just in front of the northbound entrance to the concrete bunker reststop, with such force that Benjamin pudge and all’s set free, unstuck—sent flying through the void separating Him from the shielding’s sprawl, the wipering arms, the obscenities that madden the dash, His legs straddling the head of the shvartze thrown, His teeth gnashing themselves mourned at the wheel.