by Joshua Cohen
Her hair is in her face, but those on second inspection are wrinkles.
Enough, she yells, so tell me about my father, will you?
All the patience of the hall turns at this noise, makes to mob the arrival, this whomever hunk promoted past them, unremembered from the haven of earlier rooms—thinking, here the potential for new information. Husbands and wives in for counseling and couples you can’t tell which they’re in for, in declining health whether psychological, physical, psychosomatical, psychophysiological, or only hypochondrial, hysteria termed as mere suggestion; their clothes as if their insides turned out, an airing messy, ravaged with aliment; their faces haggard, cheeks sucked shallow to image as if idolatrously the hollowness lately experienced within: neglected, they survive on nothing more than dust, which is both sustenance and an experimental drug, as a palliative unsurpassed, a universal prescription the ingestion of which—by salivaswallowing, snorting, fingering on the gums, the thumbing of which up the tush—induces a nostalgic quiescence, a wistful longing for the unknown or possibly never extant past; the doctors have it imported from overseas, a treatment intended especially for the edification of their longest lasting patients, at an expense said to be significant both financially and, too, for the mind and body; its only effect whether side or frontally lobed being a particular thirst, which as its specificity’s not yet been identified is impossible to quench.
Across from Ben leaning against a wall of the hall—another later clock.
Tick, tick.
Just a wristwatch tacked—a tock.
Waiting, it’s an exam of time and money, a test they’ll never pass—specifically, how precious is a life? It’s always the same, this waiting, amid ghostly gowned, suspended patience—shrouded in the fusc and noise of incomplete or false report—the expectation day after day, after moon, and in every line, in every office hour, the prison of the calendar box in which the appointment’s set down, as if scribbled into stone: it passes monstrously slowly, sacrificing its people to patients, its patients to victims, monotony deferred to nullity, a void, this grave for entitlement, an afterlife of modest proportions, attended to by the biting of nails, by unwarranted hunger, and that perpetually unparticular thirst. Without even the promise of Purgatory—it’s the purgatory of purgatory, which would find you finally guilty only if innocent of shuffle, fidget, twitch. An extension to be granted to boredom, indecision, to seek leave only for a rest—though if they sleep, Him or any of them, they might miss their name when called, or if (no one knows, though, upon which pad that disclaimer might be scribed); that is, if names are still theirs to have and speak and hear amid such desperation—the aim of which, as implemented from above, from below, can only be to depersonalize, to victimize human not into animal but worse, turned to mere number, into order, into slave. All names to become, after this, the wait itself, named Wait—after this assimilation into oblivious system, this initiation into nothingness, misfiled. It’s the latest in destructive: how the one solace He’s expected to derive from this is that of His own suffering, and that of others, expectant, too; there’s enough to go around and dizzying around and yet beyond Him, nauseous, a sensation worse than suspicion’s comfort, or the consolation of His fear; Him by now mature enough to know that all the kvetch in the world won’t hasten fate, thanks Israel, which Hanna never understood, how our noodgy push is fated to nil, no avail.
The office’s patients are joined throughout the following days and weeks by older wards of the Garden—terminals, causes lost to corpse—tapping last toes, pulling final fine hairs, teething the lip then a tongue to suck the dust and, also, to postpone, putoff, keep waiting every urge—waiting for Doctor Tweiss or his twin, for both of them or their receptionist she thinks she’s a nurse if she’s not too busy, to belch them out upon the Belt Parkway, beached; as if prophets spit from the innards of a Leviathan sustained on watery time, sundered upon a brutal clock—an end to office hours, when. A doctor heals but time does, too, depending on how devoted that doctor is to the treatment. It follows that this is how one remunerates the brothers for their work; this very waste their payment, earned in the professional discharge of a gross neglect. Waiting for an hour is good for a consultation of ten minutes, wasting three days away will get you a fullbody checkup—in the perfection of this transaction there being no insurance information to give, no forms to fill out, or checks to cut; them paying the outstanding balance in their deaths; the wait being the end of them as individuals, as people; accounted animals, counted breaths. Or else, in another interpretation: as no soul ever dies, they’ll transcend themselves upon the reckoning, taking leave of their ordinal, regularly scheduled forms, to become the wait itself, a reincarnation to total waste. With all the days of their lives and their nights, too, sentenced to the time that must be waited out by their generations ensuing, until their own demise, then that of theirs and onward, which becoming is and would be perpetual, forever—humble contributions to a charity eternal.
Enough, enough to say—it springs. Dayeinu. An explosion, we will be swallowed by the earth. Our core comes apart, a bomb up from the Apple’s bowels—islands its shards, the city a broken vessel. Repair, whether mend or heal, you do what you can, your best.
A new life seeps up from the void within…disperses out, under the permafrost—in veins, a straining snarl. Our foundations are rocked; smoky tufts, dusky mold; buds shiver into silvery crowns; ices crack westerly, wrack the Island in a jarring purge: spring, the season of crying, kicking rebirth…spring, the season of sprung quickly, cold stillbirth—their mother is the same. Their father, he’s late—we’re waiting on him still.
Nothing’s thawed, only shattered. The verdant’s humbled under the freeze, as not much more than a sign, foretelling of symbol…a future down and dormant, entombed in ice, season’s promise without warming to fulfillment. If promise is the redemption, then fulfillment is the Law; this is our tradition. In the clock that is its cycle, it’s the season of Exodus—in a more obliging time, the season that would stream dew down to the valley of the faithful, to flow its flight past blackened cataracts of spoiled manna, then over and around the desert winding itself its clay bed as serpentine as sin, to pool at the foot of Sinai, shining like a star under a latter moon; summer’s slow absorption of the wetted, wetting season: the weather and the Law, inseparable, of the same womb, that of Hanna’s Hanna. As a babe borne to His first spring atop this ancient rush, in a basket woven of His eyelashes floated atop a river of His tears—so early in life that everything’s a first, a fresh discovery, a blessing lying in the waiting, twophrased at the crossroads: first face toward the Great Hall, then bow, and then toward His house above the ice, to bow again at its path of slate, its driveway of tar, freshly shoveled daily…to holy every revelation’s what’s required, if not for Ben’s survival then to make their deaths more real—no matter how meager, no matter the futility involved. He divines the smoke from the fire, and differences the earth from the unappealable ice. And so He knows, as much, this season for what it is, for what it’s become, and so for what’s forsaken—this spring isn’t about rejuvenation, regeneration, a new compact, or covenant renewed: this disillusioning moon, it marks only a season more, another loneliness starmocked, shone deeper into the empty soul of life.
A last twinkling, then darkness.
As it will never be written: when cycles are stilled, their memories go on with their turning, overturning; then what was of this world is called inside, is locked indoors, sent to its room, to toss diurnal in colorful, too clowny sheets. Know this—that we live despite the season, its weather, the wasteful, wasting time. That we live because we stay inside—that only with roof and walls are our lives saved; on the lawn and behind its fence, the car parked, the gutters blooming, there we erect our truest Temple. As courses are made ritual, the rise and set of sun get timed to the face of a higher clock; its hands of rays spin, realigned, to tick away our time…until—an emergence…revelation, an inspired sensing. As a mensch m
ore than any otherness is both a part in a mechanism and an individual, a mechanism unto himself, both the cog of the clock and the clock itself with its two gnarled hands: one shorter to pull toward, opposite one longer to push away, that and the feet of a lion and with the tail of a viper, the time Ben spends in the Garden is made other from any hour known, is off the daily schedule. His are days sat out in this house alone He’s trashing, destroying, bringing it to the collapse of ruin: a house adrift on an Island floating in an ocean set in His sink, in the kitchen His mother once ruled as queen, out from under the timing scepter of her king—the third hand of the clock, pointing time independent and so perhaps to us erratically, but no less regulated, still within the same system, rooted to the same immaculacy and intellection, its floating face…squared by the lower tennis courts, their balls starring lazily over the nets windfallen, in the division of armies for snowball wars; the slides have been repurposed; the seesaws reeducated into catapults of frost; though the bases be stolen, no one has it in them to escape.
Indoors quick—and hide.
We have been warned, and warned again. Tonight, the only obliging outward sign, the lone telltale, is the newest moon returned. There are no more fillings of the sky, than usual. This moon filling itself with light, which is our essence, then this waning moon, waxing tidal death—the month the bodies, which had sunk then risen then sunk again, are consumed in full, the last one of them swellswallowed; treyf fishes stuffed to the gills freezing up onshore at the edge of the ice’s lap into open water, sharks with frost for fins skittering on the slick, flopping whales their flukes encased in hoar. As for the waters above, they’re drowning the stars—the dark to constellate the breaching of the astral ship, Argo Navis sinking, the ark of Noah, the vessel of Isis and Osiris…in our tradition, another New Year yet again. Vernal, and so unleavened. Unseeded, the spring of spring. Ahead into redemption. Nothing to sneeze at. A season of libels and of passings. And dadadadada. Of the seder, too, which is the order: wine, wash then green; wash and nosh. Fress your ess on nothing. But before, the streets split open, wheat that’s also ice springs up from the ground. A feather is plucked from its hide. A candle’s rolled. All that’s leavened becomes involved in an arcane exodus of sorts, sold to this goy hustling out of state for maybe less than nothing. A promise. Only a word. Equinox schquinox—what else could be its meaning, how to question winter still? Once each crumb is counted. Once each bread is broke. Swallow your tongue. Eat your teeth. Speak up.
It’ll be a fast plague. Swift, without mercy, a cold bloodless slaughter. As always, all will come too quick—is there any plague worth its lot of salt that doesn’t, that won’t, that just stands there like a pillar? Questions again, this being the season—the most pressing of which the least passing, the questions silent, implied, innumerable and so, numinous. As we sit at the Passover table topped with the yomtov tablecloth as yet unstained and the polished silver and the plate with the bone and the egg boiled hard in its mother’s own water, observe, the youngest among us should ask the oldest the following: how is this night different from all other nights? And how, for that matter, are nights different from Night? Not anymore they’re not. Have you been outside lately, you better believe it for yourself.
Then, the oldest should ask the youngest thusly: which son are you, and which not? I don’t know, all of them, none. Never again a time for resolutions. Never to begin anew. They should ask the youngest Him, which son will you be…and then—are you the One who doesn’t even know how to ask…what is a question? How to answer. Will you be at all. Or will you opt out. Don’t you want to be. When you’re all grown up to dead. Their seder to be interrupted—libelous, the matzah weeps blood. The seat at the head of the table is empty and will be forever, you’ll get used to it, I’m hoping. Think on it, Ben, my boy, my boychick, knowing that to think’s to remember, just as much. In the beginning, they died, them and their questions with them, and now they’re to begin dying again. When does it end? How? Never why. Who’s able to answer let alone think anymore with such moony racket? Remember me kindly when I’m gone.
It’s a spring in which nothing’s in season. Plant the ice, reap a frost. Unless we hoard hope, we’ll go hungry come the winter of winter. Ravenously, we’ll eat crow. Then God shall drink the air from thy mouth. A going within to go without drash…that’s the best we can expect: an exhortation to introspection, an offer soulsearching, tasked to the spirit; a custom, a commandment, a mitzvah…a recipe even, we’ll take what we’re given, we’re served—to go down into the barest cupboard in the deepest recess of the emptiest heart, to slop around for what, for mealy meaning, a pareve purpose hosted under this willfull, whirlwind moon; this lunation of denial, of limitation, waxed with worshipful privation, waned of empty reflection, empty of reflection…and so, where does that leave us?
Tonight, it’s the first of the first month, or of the seventh, depends on how you keep up, if and to what end. As this season features the fast of the firstborns, in memory of the dead kinder of Mitzraim, which was Egypt, and so of its Pharaoh and his sun, one day and its night in memoriam, tenthplagued, the FBs—young and old as if they still have a survival to prove; stepspooked, careful around the mirrored corners, migrained desperate, weak already, emptied—they fast almost the entire month, though not alone: in flagrantly mundane disregard of the law prohibiting excessive fasting, which archaic rabbinic ruling holds that such action serves only to lessen the holy, a new law is proposed, a ruling terrestrially lesser voted upon and approved with astonishing haste, which in its unanimity and the rarity of its passing speed seems as if made with the tacit approval of the Divine in us all; every day this month—which is known by the name of Nisan, meaning First Fruits in a language lost—is designated as a national fast day, as optional as life, as proclaimed by President Shade in an address from the Capitol to a joint session of Congress, which is now per an earlier ruling to be referred to as the Sanhedrin, exclusively and with all due respect: Der at one flank, the Doctors Tweiss become the Soygens General behind; this in support of UN (United Nudniks, it’s witzed) Resolution number doesn’t matter, appreciatively drafted then proposed by one Mohammed Arbas, the new delegate from the reformed State of Palestein, and cousin to its ruling class, the usurping Abulafias; a fast to be observed as per tradition inherited, in deference to religious precedent, from sundown to sunset, with those underage, pregnant, and/or suffering from medical conditions too agonizingly tedious to address personally, those abstaining acting on the advice of their personal physicians on the dole, and those who just don’t want to go hungry the whole month exempted, of course, forbidden from the option of indulging in the restrictive holy. Supermarkets are swept, mopped, then shuttered, themerestaurants shut, their burners cooled, fryers shushed; lonesome servicestations and truckstops since last moon their windows festooned with grabs of plastic grapes infused with Xmas lights aglow, darkened; everything’s unplugged, the water turned off or frozen in the pipes to explode; many take the opportunity to go out of business, invoke for themselves the broke of hope Chapter numbered Eleventh, go boardedup, condemned, especially if not kosher—the price for appropriate certification, a hechsher, being prohibitive due to current lack of a rabbinic council or other administrative body, that and the bribery involved; most everyone wanting to keep up with their friends the Joneses now the Jabotinskys, to look good for the neighbors, setting an example for the Development and their kind, they stay indoors, lock their cabinets, nail up their crannies and nooks, knot up their fridges, chain and bolt ovens and stoves, to feast on this fasting that—as we’re reminded in an address by President Shade, as scripted by Der and Doctor Abuya with the Nachmachen consulting—directs us away from the wants of the body, all those functions corporeal, to focus instead on the needs of the soul; though the knifesharp, teethsharp pangs the President feels later this first day, around 1700, wedgewoodtime, fineboned chinatime, serve only to remind him how famished he truly is, and, too, of the surplus stock hidden amid the
basement cubs of his mansion: the store in its recesses, overwebbed like the manifested back of a bill outdated—enough foods, flashfrozen at outlandish taxpayer expense, to last any Shade and his First Family consecutive terms bounteously in excess of the old legal limit.
O, do you feel it—there’ll be bodies on the golfcourse tonight (nine holes)! and heaped upon the diamonds, there to mark the fifty yard line…corpses benched in the piano practicerooms, piled into stacks in the dim of the library’s gym—to be winged away by women in white, first response angels, armandlegging their flock into the backs of covered sleighs, makeshift hearses; blinders on their ferocious horses, icehooved stallions stumbling insatiably across the dark face of the moon. In the Meat Commissary, a few boychicks getting their fill on the eve of the month, piling their plates high in anticipation of a first privation dawn morning, liningup miraculously to their mothers had they been alive for seconds at the saladbar, their imitation bacon bits spilling to the floor in an arrangement that can offer no interpretation…sniveling, pitfisted, prunemouthed and mucosal brats going under and blue then white in the heated pool during Free Swim—at meal, at prayer, at stool, asleep and awake, the Garden’s to be emptied, to be given over to the silent Edenic, a Paradise unpeopled; the Island to be purged of its natives, left for profanation, and that only by memory, a single lit house, the home of His heart. This month, Ben’s not allowed to leave without permission. Housearrest. Domestic murmur. With locks locked from the outside, alarm heavily armed. As of today, no more of His morning wanders, dawn spent rimming the shoreline, His prescribed perimeter exercises to keep down the weight; occasionally testing the ice: two, three tiny tentative steps out to wickworn melt, further, a bow then a crack, a brittle give…arm-in-arm with Steinstein, arm-in-arm their quick retreat. No more afternoon drives, putputt in carts for golf, two friends tempting the dusted roads, skidding into petrified underbrush, lowlying marcescence—ice the skeleton of trees, cage of bush, bone of shrub. No more evening sledding, piggybacked fast into roseate drifts. Smash. Draft. Snow lit from within. Inside seems always so inviting. Though cocoa’s left out hot on the table no longer. Thanks, Ima, same to you. The couches rest on the laps of the sofas. The carpets are the hides of clouds. Homebound, then, and with support staff otherwise occupied, Ben’ll keep the lights blazing past Curfew, candles rendered from the very fat of His boredom…