Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  But Benjamin’s otherwise occupied, turned…to that incongruous wall just beyond: a height of irreconcilably colored bricks, loosening from their laying, their cracks covered over with paperings, scrawl—so much so that it’s all drossed, weighted down, leaning to topple with wind.

  This here’s my church, the goy says, replacing the apple and with a sweep of filthy hand beckoning closer, the fingers webbish and flicking dirt from their flail, HQ of LAFF’s what we’re calling it this week, the Libertarian Armed Faction or Front, haven’t yet made up my mind…you might know our work? Forget it…and he raises his rasp for His attention: I’m known as the Most rt. Irreverend Lemuel Leeds, Chaplain-in-Chief, Joysey Irregulars, the first, last, and only division of its kind, thank you kindly…Benjamin, though, He can’t be distracted, diverted, over here, this’a’way, despite how with hands and fingers and nails sharper than shivs or drops of weather and with slitted eyes and snakish tongue, too, Leeds persists in showing off his station, its militant amenities, the lately newest improvements he’s happiest about, the first line of trenches freshly dug, the dock only recently planned: what I’m saying is, you’re safe. Secure, for now. Amid this openness, veiled. A pox upon the shaved pate of the earth.

  At the foot of the wall, the lone structural survivor of disaster, a boiler’s bankrupting explosion, a gristmill’s wheel rolled amuck: a ruin of destroyed foundations, blackened bricks and gray, too, and others in all of near sunset’s shades held aloft with mossy mortar—are a number of portapotties, Chamber of Commerce white if sullied, and reeking of waste, piss, and antiseptic fluid, scattered amongst what have to be hundreds of monitors heaped haphazardly, their screens scoopedopen, the wiry guts and circuitry cleared, then refilled with sandy soil; they’re being used as planters, hosting the growth of what might still flower or fructify winter: tuberous roots, black and brown and other wasteshaded, turdy starchy things that’ll squat in the stomach for seasons. Benjamin extends a fat finger to knob, to turn their volumes up to silence, as if for the edification of a flock absent from the multitudinous religious furnishings surrounding: rickety pews arranged in sloppy rows, a rattily cushioned kneeler at front, a hassock turned splintery lectern topped with a rock to prevent it from being blown away that’s how grievous it is, and how weak. And then further, as He wanders a looping, around—the house, the old homestead failed by its flimsy wood and globbed white paint: on the inside of that wall outside papered and graffitied heavily with all manner of misprint and image, and there kept safe from the weather, Leed’s oversized trailer, doublewide, without hitch, surrounded with scrap and junk not waste or the dump of materials found but more like hunks and even rooms of the trailer that’ve fallen off over time, undersky. Off its cinderblocks, though, and sinking slowly into the wet, it strikes Him as nature itself, as if so overgrown and for so long it’s become, finally, organic, embodied, incorporated, ingrown: the stairs leading to the door are stumps; its roof the slatted rows of long dead trees the wind might’ve swept into shelter.

  But it’s the wall above that interests, that holds. Webstuck to it under kinks of spiderwork, nailed, screwed, needled and pinned, there’s everything you ever need to know (but, yes, were afraid to ask), the casebook displayed, the fact file. Benjamin approaches it again in His wend, slowly around and circumambulating around its corrupting presence amazed, what not to be by these skins, these hides, maniacal pagings parchmented by weather, burdening the faces of slagblackened, goldenbrown brick: windrustled tattery newsprinted images of white middleaged Midwestern balding and cleanshaven and glassesed politicians posed in meticulously managed stages of photogenicy and colors of tie blue and red, faced amid a clutter of magazine clippings, tearsheets of fawning, gawking celebrity profile: who adopted whom, who’s dating, who’s married, who’s all broken up; faded mugshots of movie and television actors and actresses and those ostensibly famous for doing nothing, for being nobody—an act, their eyes and mouths circled or xd out in black; above and below obsessive reams of mullet length statistics subtracted from the ERAs of assorted Yankels or were they Metz pitchers since traded in an unspecified though rare losing season, multiplied by a multitude of precipitate statistics for greater Berlin circa every year of the last war; a ream of passenger manifests, apparently, recovered from the wrecks of defunct, Russianbased aerolines who could read that language, that unalphabetical foreignspeak; timetables of garbage pickups for Harlem, New York, New York; a flapping, dogeared map of Mormondom, Utah, strung across to nails with human hair meshing together every known abortuary ever to offer that procedure of damning sin for under a grand out-patient; Leeds’ hands splayed open it seems what with the dirt prints that remain used as stencils traced in pen on a map of Joysey, superimposed atop National Parks Service and U.S. geological survey maps of the Kieferöde with areas of probable dog saturation labeled and keyed according to the phases of moon; pornographic stills of male and female minors, hairless and pigtailed both demandingly angled, cut up and remade halfsexed, quarterlimbed, their resultant anatomies sectioned, and labeled: hearts, livers, kidneys, and spleens, where they would be embellished, in chalk and charcoal, with various gematric inversions and retrogrades attempted with the mailing addresses and telephone and facsimile numbers of a host of Texas holding companies with interests in both oil and war; the ages, too, heights and weights of their CEOs along with the dates of their mistress’ birthdays, then stapled and clipped to an alphabetical list of and scripts for the medications they take for any sexually transmitted viruses they’ve been given by them; Leeds says, finally noticing Benjamin’s curious browse, did you know that when the Freemasons dedicated the Washington Monument, that it stood, what’s it now, 555 feet and 5 inches tall, all those fives, and that its base, you should be aware, is 55 square feet and then that the windows they’re set 500 feet above that base, too, isn’t that crazy, I’ll be damned—now, didn’t know if you knew this one, either: that if you take the base and you multiplied it by sixty, or in other words by five times the number of the year’s months, which are twelve, and you get what, 3,300, that that’s the exact weight in pounds of the capstone of the thing, like the pyramidschemes the aliens made, the allseeing eye up there, Ra the Sun God, the Cyclops on the paper money bill, you with me, if I’d had one I’d show you with all the poisonous spiders and Latin; follow me here, as the name Washington as you know has ten letters, of course, five times two, and that if you then take that capstone’s weight multiplied by the base yet again you get, just give me a second here, 181,500, that’s it, which is as we all know roundabout the speed of light in miles per second, the whole atomic project, this is nuclear now, you get it, no one survives; and then, that if you take Washington, the name, I mean, which has a numerical worth of 122, with W equaling 25, A, 1, S, 19, H, 8, you get me, alright, and then let’s say you go and take that 122 and subtract another seven first for the G in George Washington, and then again five, which is the governing number of the Monument, as we’ve found out, and also of the Pentagon’s pentagram, if I haven’t yet mentioned, which is the symbol of the devil, Satan 666 (and how many letters does George have? now you’re getting my drift) the dragon serpent and the fallen prince of this world taken times two for the division between the base and the obelisk’s top, between George you with me and Washington and what do you get, you get ten, also the number of the Israelien tribes and so of the sons of Jacob, too, of Israel the goddamned IRS ATF kikes and then let’s say you go ahead and map that onto the calendar, say, the 365 days of the year and what do you get again, you get 105, if it’s not a leapyear, that is, which is the day that taxes are due, you get how it’s all connected with the Vatican Mafia and, if you weren’t aware, the day Lincoln died the same day after having been shot the night before, which…not only nailed and screwed and stuck with web and spit to the wall but also stuffed, stuck deeply into its cracks, between the burnt, ferruginous bricks, as messaging mortar, as all that holds the whole repose upright, keeps it from falling from its own grace: as
a safe and secure depository for this madness, preventing it from becoming actioned into violence or humiliation upon the surrounding beach communities, exits north and south on the Parkway, just upstream, then down to the Delaware Bay. Far to the edge, a strip in white spraypaint, a thin listing stretch swathed entirely with naming displacements, interpolations of vowels:

  STEINSTEIN :: STINESTINE, STEINSTEIN :: STEENSTEEN,

  STEINSTEIN :: STINESTEEN, STEINSTEIN :: STEENSTINE,

  STINESTINE :: STINESTINE, STINESTINE :: STEENSTEEN,

  STINESTINE :: STINESTEEN, STINESTINE :: STEENSTINE,

  STEINSTINE :: STINESTEEN, STEINSTINE :: STEENSTINE,

  STINESTEIN :: STINESTEEN, STINESTEIN :: STEENSTINE,

  STEINSTINE :: STINESTEEN, STEINSTINE :: STEENSTINE,

  STINESTEIN :: STINESTEEN, STINESTEIN :: STEENSTINE…then above everything, at the very fall of the wall, the height of its highest loosening brick leaning to topple atop the slats of the trees roofing the trailer—it’s the head of a dog, killed in attack or that’s just how its expression’s been preserved for the mounting.

  And, what’s this is all Benjamin thinks to say, standing naked.

  Don’t you know, Leeds says on his way up the stumps to the trailer, figgering I’ll trust you—it’s the plan, understand.

  No.

  I’m just pulling your putz, son, what’s that they say, pishing buttons, and he gasps, leaning his head out the trailer’s lone window, also its chimney, and puffing smoke—this stuff was here when I moved in, you know, came with the wall…

  But you must be freezing, he tries to say, through deeply worrisome coughing: come inside, chow’s almost on.

  A trailer little more than an oven, its longways spanned down the middle with a flagpole fallen, suspended from window to window, one of its ends still topped with an eagle melted of wings: stolen from its stand outside the local euthenics school, a State Police outpost abandoned to tragedy and its rampageous dogs, a city hall with no city left to its name once the ironworks went bust, the mill broke down, rolled its stone to seal tight its sepulcher. It’s now the spit for the pig, the leftover half of a whole sow Leeds’d been feeding on the finely mealed remains of minority mutts then slaughtered just last week for his Xmas, since turned, a mite sour: an appreciably fat, devastatingly hairy faygele pinko of a sacrificial animal, an oinker one flank remaining being lashed with thick whips of greasy flame, a conflagration fed halfwise, crosssectioned, with bushels of leaves drifted down on wispy midnight wipings of dreck, then stoked, too, toward its premium rump, with its young—Leeds left its piglets inside as a sweetening. Kill and heat, a recipe as old as fire and death. To improve, he takes what’s left of the apple from his helmet, stuffs it into the mouth of the porker. A locomotive puff: a snout’s two smokestacks, one for you, one for me. Tickled pink, more like gagged. Pig, the food of the Gods, Leeds says as he heaps on it rocksalt that might be nits from his hair, the only white meat for me. Trichinosis, it’s government fearmongering, don’t be fooled, it’s all disinformation…subversion, a repression mentality—afraid of the psychic gifts, keep on giving. Benjamin freezing and unable to breathe. Mind it, will you? It just needs to warm up…and Leeds heads outside, returns up the stumped stoop with a canister of gas, pours it to empty over the spit; it flares, their meal singes; he leans over to savor and so basting the whole dish crude with his beard, then shoves an arm up the animal’s tract—it comes out utterly far from clean, so treyf ’s served.

  A table’s outside, one of the portapotties toppled lengthwise, halfway drained, and Benjamin’s sent out to set it.

  Plates? He asks again at the doorway and Leeds distractedly hands Him a sheaf of papers that comment last week in obituary, eulogistic columns.

  Utensils? Welltrained, brought up civil. And what does He get for His trouble, which’d been Hanna’s—only an annoyed eye, lilied disgust. Fork and knife…meaning, with what are we supposed to sup the food that God hath given of Himself unto us? With another one of God’s gifts, with two of them if we’re lucky, that of our hands that’ve been wrought in the image of His. Give me yours, says Leeds stomping outside, here hold mine—nothing weird about it at all. To say grace, then Amen, not a woman or an anything else. With his left he stirs at the tableside toilet, wrenched from the potty, plungering away at its moonshine brewing, pure grain, joy juice with just a dash of melted weather to taste. He offers Benjamin a preprandial sip from the rubberized font: al-cohol, he says, only good turn the Ayrabs ever done us, though why they won’t drink the stuff themselves, don’t ask me; goddamned diaperheads, sandshvartzes, though they have the right idea as far as Palestein goes, I say burn, baby, burn it all the damn down…not just in His throat, this rare heat: the smoke pouring pink from the trailer’s chimneyblack window. Leeds rouses from his squat atop the table’s disembodied potty, hunts a peck around, retrieves from a rut in his yard under heaps of fallen wall, amid paperings and jaculatory jot, a rusted chunk of chainsaw, takes it up the stumps with him inside, feels fingers over its tracks pushing splinters out and through, then revs with the ripcord, slices off a hunk of pork, taking a good stretch of his beard along with it, wiping, a napkin.

  At stoopfoot, Benjamin holds out His newspaper scraps—necrology plus erroneous sevenday forecast—rustling, shaking, already drunk. Leeds tosses to them a generous flank, then revs again for himself and slices, serves to walk his meal back outside. Hope you’ve worked up an appetite. Dig in. But He waits for His host to partake, which is more fear than respect, or pleasantry, Hanna’s polite. Leeds’ head rears up, dinosaurlike, as if a raptor rapt for prey, this old, oddly carnivorous bird: nearfeathered facialhair, thin wrinkle mouth its lips dripping grease, undifferentiated gross, strands of sinew stuck askew from between remnants of fillingful teeth, stoops themselves, stumps, ruts amid gums, nubby rots, or just one of them, or half, and a tongue, or else none at all maybe and tongue forked, perhaps, no tongues that aren’t meat just hanging from the hole whose, He observes, dentition lacks entirely, lost or pulled it’s anyone’s guess.

  Pork: Benjamin had never had it—who do you think He is, thank His parents, their rabbi, his insatiably parochial God—had never seen or smelled it, heard its own goddamned oink, never petted a specimen at the zoo, no, neither, but He anyway knew the restrictions, He’d been born knowing. He’d never not kept kosher, when and how the opportunity to pig out on forbidden foods? Wherefrom trefyheadedness, who would even think or ever could?

  He knows that His virgin doesn’t serve Him, that first taste, it’ll sicken, it has to, poison even, has already without it, a lip, a mere sniffling lung. All in His head, His head’s saying: psychosomatic the symptoms, the parasitic signs, a worming, and Benjamin’s feeling them, too, wriggling up His fingers, down His throat, furrowing the burrows of brain—imagining small, generically animated pigs pink as sin, shvitzing hot as psychedelically napalmed, turning flips in His gut, rooting around down there in the bile colonic, dirty snouts flaring deep amid the gastric denature: His stomach, the trailer, piglets nosing evidence from off the westernmost wall. An estimable mouthful, a steaming morsel—such virginal schmeck weighs upon His tongue yet to be downed, the meat and not the lingual anatomy that if swallowed itself would choke and make bestially dead, which is why the drink, grained booze more and more of it He plunges, too much and profane of a Kiddush, it’s never enough: L’Chaim, L’Avram, L’Benjamin, too…come on down’s the idea, the digestion’s fine—the flow tasting like antiseptic, thousandflushed with a tinkle of blue chemical toilet deodorizer, potpourri sprinkle, faint hints of moldy potato peel, onion-skin, and low notes of musky piss vintaged last week; it washes past, and with it the hunk of pork flows down whole to gag swallowed, without bitten chew; it would’ve snuck up again and out if not for a slap, quick and feely from Leeds leaning over.

  Perfidy, he says, you was hungry, then smiles, haven’t had anything, reckon, in a while.

  It slithers, a raw pink leeching the animal’s parasite’s parasite s
low in its own sleazy grease—to settle in His stomach, a fresh new infestation, this hosting warming Him wrong, an eating fever of fleischig, this meat shvitz and yet, amazingly, without guilt. Thus the squeal of revelation doth enter…pork! this stuff edibles incredible! It can’t be believed, what a ta’am, what a taste; Benjamin breathes. I’ve never had anything—what? Only a growl. He teethes into His next, tears at His meal with assenting nods of the head: one’s slob another’s primitive, and both He’s happy to be.

  Pork, Leeds says finally satisfied, proud almost as if he’s responsible not only for this specific preparation, a recipe he’ll secret if only for the kooky thrill of it, but also for the existence of the species entire: it’s the universal meat, after all…you know this, closest animal to us humans, it’s like cannibalism without the threat of prosecution, incarceration, all that prison raping to death—hell, even the darkies agree, they love them their white meat, finish it off with a little watermelon, spit them seeds out, grow their own, if not for the weather. And then you got those people that just went and died, you know, poor souls, the Affiliated they’re calling them, they didn’t know what they’d been missing these however many thousands of years, I done lost count since Christ; too occupied making their retirements, too distracted making the world turn on time, beats me, I’ve been beaten before. I’m glad they’re all dead and gone, serves them right; I hear you got just the firstborns left…you heard the one about that lastborn kid they think survived—they need to find that kid and give Him the business, the what’s what, just deserts. There’ve been rumors, you know about this—former Treasury secretary or head of the Fed out on this nowhere Island, New York, hope of hopes that hole gets totally wiped out soon enough, hand of God or earthswallowed, it’s done enough damage; anyway, this Das they call him, don’t know what it stands for if it ain’t his name or title, he’s out for the firstborns: if he’d do what I’d do then I wish him all the luck in the world…cowering, Benjamin’s a lump, stumped for the saying at the end of the portable, semipotable table, pottydrunk, stuffed on seconds and thirds, more and still nude.