Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  Jesus, my manners in heaven and Leeds gets up only half lucid himself, staggers into the trailer—you must be freezing, he says, ain’t no one yet used to a winter like this…scaring up on a kick, a flail rummaging, think I got an outfit around here somewhere, something from the good old days—he’s rooting amid slop, dripping, jars kept of offal, animal effluvia, raising his head to the wall of the trailer and its cross hung there, the crucifix for a scarecrow that’d never quite worked on the dogs, a scaredog, why not, frighteningly thin branches burdened with white; he rips the shroud off then crows out with the uniform of a Klansmensch—you’ll look just perfect in that hood, it’s very vertical, slimming, throwing it to Benjamin who shrouds it on over His naked; it’s way too tight, but it works. And you should definitely put on a new face, all excitement now, a little much fayg, what he hates—but something new, something different…stoops to grab up snow, under it a fist of sandy soil and below that, black, while with the other hand he frees Benjamin from the gagging peak, on backward, turn it around and try to find your eyes, the slits Oriental: this is so they won’t recognize you; and he begins applying the stain as liberally as his politics allow, digging the thick frozen grime into His face with greasy, rough-wrinkled fingers. I should remember you are who you are, and not this minority reporting out and about, else you’d be in a hell of highwater trouble…lucky for you the more bowls I drink the better my memory gets; what in God’s name was I saying, who are you? he goes as if to punch His teeth, the only light visible, though just knuckles his guest a dark dimple, Benjamin’s wide cheek he shrouds again with the hood he then pyramids high by the tip, its pointy white foreskin: don’t worry, son, I’m kidding, that’s just me having your rib…

  A smattering of shots, then two, three more and their echo, their echoes—Leeds falls to the ground, to the hole he’d dug for the face of his guest; it’s not that he’s been shot, as the blood about his mouth is the pig’s, underdone. Those swine after you, he says, don’t worry none, we’ll hold out, I offer full protection plans, no money down, sanctuary veritably guaranteed, this wall’ll never fall. I’m ready for a fight, a standoff, anything; we’ll hold here for months, years, Armageddon, we got enough pork—goddamnit, kid, he’s too loud now, smacking the earth and seeming to cry, I’m only a chaplain, ordained, licensed and bonded, but still…there are rules of engagement, there are dogs. Attack, will you. Fetch the yelps. Simpering whimper. Bitch out the bawls. Then, more shots, the undocumented calls of miniature, metallic, silverbeaked birds…a trampling of nature then fence. Benjamin gathers the hood tight overhead. Leeds quiets, puts a finger to his lips, raises another two to his eyes, with yet another finger points to the wall, sucks his thumb. He follows him, and they take shelter in silence: a squat behind bricks and trailer still puffing its signal…Leeds inconstant, disconsolately weepy one moment then all planning energetic the next. He beats out a march on his log, then springs up and begins searching himself flailingly, desperately behind his trailer the sloppy piles of trash—overwhelmingly papers and leaves fallen from potty refuse dumped black to freeze the baldness—for thrown bones or leftover flesh scrapped to serve, to appease the hungers of the howlings that near, then recede: the fierce howls and moans coming in waves too strong and too irregular for the creek, and in echoes of sounds too distantly dim, too muffled by the trees and leaves then dispersed by the wind to hear as to species or sense…only to near once again, a circling of noise and heat, a brutal noose of scurry and snap: this attack in its muster not animally savage, as would be expected, with barking and bite, but apparently organized, taken out back and executed with discipline—human’s the suspect, the goyim’s good shepherding…

  An hour hunts, stalks its approach in ritual ringings, a merging of smokes.

  Suddenly, a voice reveals through a megaphone:

  Send, it distorts, if a voice of God then the voice of a god testing, just sounding it out…an airhorn, then, so sorry, it says, I pressed the wrong button:

  Send, Send, am I doing it right, can you hear me, you can, Send the Minor Out, how’s that, and You Will Not Be Harmed And Neither Will He. Good. I’ve got it now. I’m alright. Be Reasonable. We’re Reasonable People. Or If Not Reasonable Then At Least We’re Trying. There’s No Excuse. I Mean Escape. I’m Sorry. I Apologize Too Much. My Therapist Says I’m Making Progress…enough. Don’t Get Wise With Us, You’re Grossly Outnumbered. Then, gevalt what next what next…there’s from nowhere, as if both visited down from the clouds and as cloud itself—smoke; not pigsmoke, smokesmoke; they’re setting everything on fire…it’s a strategy sieged without mercy, without appeal—if you can’t beatem, burnem, and so this tactically torched forest, the scorching of woods. All’s aflame, the tinder kindled, untamed: the wall’s caught and its craziness burns to growl big, a roar despite the pelting of sky.

  The toilets, they smolder.

  Never! Leeds says with regard to what, he’s already forgotten, but it’s the thought that counts to ten, nine, eight…then hesitates toward what would’ve been three—throws a grenade that soars up through the fire as if an expelled spark, a bomby wingless creature flying freely over the wall, lands…agents scatter, a smatter of suits and the flutter of ties like rare snakes, the grenade doesn’t—explode: goddamned clods, he says, pinecones, what, defective under battle conditions. A slash of tongues, a roaring, the roofing trees aflame and so they decamp westward behind the trash pilings that front the river further, cedarbrown beneath ice, a stilled running of rust. Our position still secure, Leeds yells into his fist, over, he hisses, a fiery crackle, a burning burr in his throat, the boozy dizziness and the womanly, weakening stress…remembers only then his Mwhatever the hell, remembers it’s all out of ammo. And has been for weeks. Three agents advance slow steady in lockstep, firing shots into twilight, downing stars to be culled for collection. They’ll be examined, byopsied by communists, Mexican migrant trash, aliens picking a new glowing fruit. Regroup, Leeds says, retreat, whatever; he rips off his helmet and punts it away, making contact with it at the brunt of its spike and so hurting his foot, which is bare and so, bleeding…the river’s our only hope, he says limping, gnawing his tongue—I’ll ready the vessel, you hold them off…but without saying with what He’ll defend, Himself and His host, his churchy compound and their Joysey land, besides, any better ideas, the chainsaw he shoves into Benjamin’s hands, Leeds scuttles scarce, into needly underbrush, the shorelining sparse, scurrying low, bareheaded balding and stooped: there to the stolen rental canoe loosely roped to a stump on the verge of the creek rearing his property—a vessel battered old, striped in white peeling paint, beat out of shape in aluminum.

  Benjamin follows behind, waddling in white vesture smeared over the slick and snowmuddied; His pointy hanging hood hooking in His lumber on a perimeter’s branch hanging low, snagging Him, choking, breathlessly bringing Him unbalanced to fall—rearing up the saw panickingly revved in His hands to tear from the ancient, ashy tree its moldy boughs and bark, them crashing down on Him to hit on a root exposed, jaggedly knobbed, knotted, to gash Him on His head, the saw remaining lodged in the trunk. An advancing agent in a suit and tie the black issue of what department there’s no time or clearance to tell grabs Him, lays Him out face up, lifts hood to air Him, shakes, slaps, He’s out. At Benjamin’s falling cry, Leeds turns from untying their canoe, his straddle of the gunwale with one foot to steady the thwart while with the other still bleeding he’s stomping to free all from the freeze, then—he’s frozen, too…shrieking, they’re agents, kovert kosher operatives, Gmenschs they are maybe diamond merchanting Hasids, perhaps Mormon Hasidim, militant lesbian activist fascists who the futz knows; him tipping, to almost wading, kicking hard at the ice into water surrounding the bob of the logged canoe, eventually freeing its hollow freeze, shoving it out then over the floeslick, to water open if sludgelike, thick like a pudding or iron soup, bog metal smelt and yet cold: grabbing the paddle by its shaft, choking up for the steering and heading upstream against flow, d
eeper into the woods, the Kieferöde dim, its piney hide. The canoe, though, throws all downstream, along with the under-current a tug imperceptible and yet stronger than him, fate implacable and should’ve been humbling. Leeds drops his paddle in midstroke to cup hands, yell again a last for Benjamin but by now he’s forgotten the name. Sounds like—I lost it; the whistling water, finally flowing out here, and whiter with force, a froth that’s rabid, that’s thirsty. Purifying, too, washing to swallow. All hands cupped to the bailing. More agents arrive onscene, commence laughing, they can’t stop…and, are you ready for this—it takes six of them, two to His legs, two to arms then two more holding up the saggingly white-sailed, surrenderflagged middle of Him to triage, to lift Benjamin then hump Him herniate through the woods to the clearing, along the way the agents surrounding His path, the trail newly marked, trod and fired, shooting stray at the dogs coming near, never close. Carcasses lie everywhere, theirs, being ravaged, teethtorn, and savagely pawed at by dogs still alive if only barely, though shot through themselves and singed, with others clear burnt, their hair hardened to an insectlike shell, a pest’s exomost skeletal. With existence at peril, they’re less inclined to attack (these instincts so terribly tough to stray lost); they sense out the danger, react with a low. Heads hung with night, they cower and bitch, drag themselves sorrily into loggy dens to recover, to heal; they’re slowed by the bullets lodged in their hindquarters, their flanks—there to lick at their wounds, though still hungry for anger they gnash, as if feeding on themselves never sated.

  And far below a raging helicopter—a robotic locust native to a local military installation who knows behind which stump or sump it’s been hiding, its spindly rotors wild with whirr—rising high then north by northeast again through space amid dark; humbling the supplicant trees, a forest bending from the copter’s cresting rise to bow low as in that dream of Joseph’s—it’s Leeds, hurling at them and God Who hovers above and below them, in every tree, as every leaf fallen and under every rock overturned, a handful of dumb, pathetic stones poached in his progress from river’s bottom and weighing down his vessel, his stolen rental canoe, aluminum and holed, weatherbeaten, shorebattered, snubbowed, which’s rapidly sinking no matter how fast he hurls them up, hurls them out; stones dropping, though, always just short of the airlift. One thrown directly up at the gyred glint above the wink of the moon falls directly down, hits him in the upturned face, knocking him over and out, to hold fast to the lip of the tossing, the rapidly whitewatering teeter, the river widening with the force of the current, if still cold and hazarded frozen, sharded sharply with ice toward the shores. He attempts both those banks at once in a flail, a futile grope, inevitably a doggiepaddle, is swept downstream, and further and brackish, toward the salting, the calming spanse of the ocean ahead—just over, it’s said, your run of the mill Joysey waterfall, this kill fluming logsplit, gaping its taillike spume spread as wide as the day; then over it he goes, hugely, whiskwhipped with a snap beyond the effervescent edge, aired to the rocks that rim the tidalpool below, not whirling but stillgray beneath a white unforgiving…to dash there, going under—then to surface; gasping a grasp at the stones he shrieks out of his own mouth now, as the canoe—turned birdy, as if a helicopter itself of one lone rotary paddle stilled by the gravity of the moon—comes down upon Leeds’ head, emptyfirst.

  III

  The hall is—what’s that they’re searching for, what is it that they always say—hushed; filled with bodies still alive if kept as cold as the corpses to which they’re related: this mass of firstborns ignobly birthed from one dream into another, huddled to the floor of the Registry for a meeting. They’ve been woken by sirens; sleep’s still in their eyes, night’s sand and damp in their knees and fingers—they’re so naked, they’re not even wearing their watches.

  It’s early.

  How naked are they? a voice might ask, a little late.

  But listen. All time has been confiscated, to be reset to the hour of the Garden, the timeless Edenic. No clock has ever hung here in the Registry, or been set atop the Great Hall, and no clock ever will hang, and none will ever be set. This is an orientation, in the other direction, the direction most opposite—not east by west cardinally but in time, the past, or in the eternity that is tradition kept daily…O think of the opportunity! think of the spoils to be unearthed in such still! And know, too, there’s no further contingency, this couldn’t have been planned for, mapped out, or plotted. Any better than it’s already been. Among this generation, who’s the prophet, tell me, the navi, I want to know, who merits a vision like this. Bring him to me and I’ll cut out my tongue, I promise, I will—I know I will.

  Hundreds of thousands of firstborn males have been forced onto this Island—ingathered they called it once, a making of Zion with their brethren left dead—and you thought seven seals and a prancing white horse were too much, nu.

  As for me, I wasn’t there—they left me home alone. I was gazing out my parent’s window.

  At a reflection, I don’t know what.

  Good Morning, & Shalom…eighteen mouths grilled in rust say at once from every recess of the space in a thousand languages, and this one, too, which is God’s.

  You are now in the Great Hall. Our program will begin momentarily. Until then, anyone know any jokes?

  That’s how you can tell they’re alive—that they finally silence the silence, ask each other in whispers then roars: the Great Hall, what’s so great about it?

  Hymn. Allow yourself to be told.

  In the beginning, there’s the schedule, which is the Law, they’re inseparable, of tablets—ten hours given down on metro Sinai. Mondays and Thursdays we wake, we wash, we pray and eat, then buss and clean, don’t forget to rag the sponge; Tuesdays, Wednesdays, sweep and mop, sinks and toilets, too. At every eve of the month, which is the new moon with its silver, you disinfect, you polish polish polish every other. Friday is Saturday, is now the Sabbath, which we call Shabbos. Observe it—it’s the only item on the agenda at which attendance is mandatory, wherever you are.

  To give you an idea—it’s month the fourth by the civil calendar, month the tenth by God; January’s being forgotten, keeping watch for future north and south, not east and west, and so the flanks are exposed, and the revolution enters through the sidedoor, the porchdoor, the basementdoor, the maid’s…is everyone with me?

  And all the heads nod, if only to wake. God, there must be millions of them, heads and necks thick and thin and hairy arms and legs, wandering to the Hall from their muster on the square, to receive the newest of gospels by gossip.

  To be precise, this is the Registry, historically the Great Hall’s main room and the Island’s most preserved from its previous function: plasterwalled, roofed with barreling brick; a balcony slithers around to strangle, a knife cutting the inside’s vaulting height. At one of its extremes, the east, which is the front they’re presently facing, there’s a dais, topped with the only podium to be found on the Island, fronted with the seal of this new tenant concern: David’s star revived, encircled with white in a sea of blue, a representation of the land upon which they’re being kept for observation, survival; this podium has to be schlepped from meeting to place, from gathering to session, briefing to conference—another’s in the process of being requisitioned, its sexagrammatic seal’s even now being stamped onto all. At the rear of the hall, westerly toward its door and the massing of those arrived late, laggard, and so not given shelter, made victim to the flog of the weather, a numbed mumbly muddle of disabled or otherwise ailing survivors, the incapacitated with walkers, in wheelchairs; gurneys have been rolled; they’re swarmed by devotedly uniformed, nametagged attendants, essentially strangers, and necessary medical equipment on rental.

  All of them, though, they’re naked not to be humiliated, only to be cleansed. To be briefed debriefed, their clothes, underwear and socks have been outsourced to sanitation, offIsland delousing, antiseptic douse; hosed, then machine wash again and tumble dry—how much they m
iss their maids, their hospice nurses, caregivers, bubbes and sisters, those inlaw, daughters and wives. Garments that require drycleaning have been marked and shipped accordingly. Everything will arrive back this afternoon by barge, it’s promised, unless the water’s frozen: the Hudson’s lower bay at whose Island wharf the last stragglers of the assembled stand, one foot to test the shoring ice. Thousands before them stand and sit and lean, as unhappy and nude as birth, as paled, only to be reborn here, to become initiated into this, the newest order—mourning. Though they could’ve staggered the orientation times, divided then subdivided them into groups, there’s no time, too much work: anyway, the totality’s what interests in this endeavor already failing, failed, the way information passes as rumor, whispers down the mob. And so morning for one’s been consecrated as morning for all—a host of histories lived simultaneously, symbiotically, Creation made coeval with Law. And this despite the cycle of any profaning, daily time—that of this continent or another the same, and, too, that of any family, work, or nightly love; all ingathered to this rationed, ruinous Island and set to an ultimatum’s test: forced union in damp, moldy quarters, early woken solidarity without brunch or even coffee yet, made subject to the life of a single people, its purpose…two clocks received into millions of hands: upon the metal mountaintop, the skyline’s Manhattan beyond—two cycles cast down to asphalt earth. Rain pounds rapt at hilly windows, its rap silenced by snow. All are encouraged to save their questions for later. Don’t waste them. Keep them safe.