Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  And then, to the west, which is the secular directional, the way of the fallen, out at the furthest edge of the Island, marking the nearest, anchoring preserve of our float from the vale of Joysey and its rim of oncegreenery—the State Park blanketed by ash, hacked picnictables scavenged by locals for their wood: the fuel of Hoboken the fences of Weehawken…portapotties toppled, swingsets mournfully rusted, the playgrounds’ hanging ropes noosed, twisted into hideous knots, their worn tires the nests of malevolent storks—the view from Ben’s house, His parent’s, His bedroom above.

  On the third of the newest month, Feigenbaum sits, downstairs still, has survived.

  On the toilet, in its spare bathroom down the hall to the door to the garage and subsisting this entire time on breath. Only groans. Noises that hallway to Ben on the wind…these singly plyed moans being questions, how to answer: Dad, where are you, how are you, Israel, Yisroel, Aba Aleichem. He resists, and is silent, makes instead to follow the origin of the echo, its whispering that ends in the blackened brick of the fake fireplace with shuttered flue, in the familyroom, unknobbed from the speakers of the screen; a voice in the livingroom, from the den, as if the words spoken—words that sound to Him like names, His Aba’s, Ima, sisters, PopPop, DadDad, Zeyde, Saba—are only the manifestation of prophetic delusion; as if they’re the words and names and memories only these links in weedy, rusted chains, sent out to bind, tongued to noose around His neck and legs and arms to drag Him down, submission—don’t look for me, an origin, a source…the chain says hissing its way around His waist and around again to knot at navel, as navel, you’d better not if you know what’s good.

  Are you God? He asks.

  Are you?

  To be drug by the voice out of the kitchen then to the stairs, hesitation whether up to the bedrooms, or down to the basement: how Ben fears being taken down there, despite the assurance of any bind, curiosity’s hogtie—down there who wants to know. It’s always beyond, though, this mourning, as if otherly dimensional, a hidden call coming from the stairs and further left past the porch with its brittle wicker, two rockingchairs without cushion out of season, a low table topped with shells Liv’d found at the beach that summer once, and a sofa, which now all seem made of braided strands of flowingly immobile ice, screens for the windows to be put up to give air to spring still propped against the furniture as if windows in the negative, unyielding nothingnesses, hard voids as black as holes; then, at the end of the hallway the door stripped of stain, the welcome mat, Shalom, the entrance to the triplewide garage. Three doors along the hallway to the right. To open one a linen closet, the folded cloths, the deaths of moth, clean and bright and fresh. Another, further along the hall the closet of dirty linens, balled placemats and coverings, heaps of messy drools. And then, to try the door to the last right against the wall and the end of the hall with its descent three steps down to parking. A static shock, it’s locked. Jigglejiggle, knockknockknock.

  It’s not my fault, the voice says as if softer and further away than ever…I’m sorry.

  I asked to stay here…I told them, it’s better for my condition.

  First floor last bathroom, his accidental discovery that Sabbath, that Shabbos, the last and just in time, tenks Gott…an emergency, and to think of what could have been: a trickly blush upon his crotch, Felice his wife Israel’d always forget her name would have said a shame, he’d have said a Shanda; an embarrassment: to have spilled his filial fill to further arabesque a plush rug of the Orient warming the tiles of the hall. Here, Feigenbaum lives as if he’d asked for it. Too late for remorse, turned to rage in the full flush of his senility: possibly depressed, though lacking clinical confirmation, he squats. Woodpaneled, lilymirrored, hung with a kitschily antiquarian map of Jerusalem framed in metal, purchased by Hanna at an auction to benefit charity, the synagogue: kinder without stomachs, cancer of the conscience, the birth defect that is guilt, converted to regret. Feigenbaum, he hadn’t even wanted to accept the invitation, standing, the welcome openarmed, but didn’t know how to say No, which naming word was first spoken on the eighth day of Creation—Eve to Adam, God to…

  I was born, came over here, you wouldn’t understand, no one ever does…worked selling luggage, suitcases, trunks out on Orchard Street, I made what I made then married and got old. After I smashed my hips, my wife moved us down here to a facility, relocated was what she’d say. I went to a shul, I went there to daven, you say synagogue and pray; Shalom’s its name I forget, Anshei Bergen County, my wife liked to sit up front where she could see the rabbi, hear the cantor, the chazzan I’d’ve said if he hadn’t been so terrible, but me I stood in back. One night, this stranger comes over to me and asks if I have a meal, I say no but he insists. I come, I sit, I go to the toilet, the bathroom, here…an intention just to visit, to stop in, say Shabbat Shalom then quiet, let his wife do all the talking. His wife, if he couldn’t please her better to become a chair and die of splinter. From her, how he became habituated to keeping not only the seat down but the lid as well, his head. Felice, she’s the one they came to like—the Israeliens inviting her back week in week out with him lugged along as baggage, furniture delivery. Felice, the one they liked to ess a fress with, to talk hands with and to; the one they always asked to stay later whenever he would ask to leave. And how every day here since has felt like Shabbos, this bathroom more and more like home. His last how he knows it, feels it deep among his issues both various and vascular. A sit eternal, with the feet already dead: ten corpses cold in ragged socks heavied with his shvitz. A rack of tortured washcloths, a counter with a sink, brightened with flowers, who knows what brand they’re called; a mirror draped in towels. To find nothing new under the overhead light: floors are white, shoescuffled. In appearance, he thinks, this bathroom the same as it’d been previous to its recreation, its resurrection, always, though how different in its feel: othered, unsettling. It’s not the fanned air, the pressure required to relieve; neither the worry for an emergency of tissue—amply stocked under the sink, twoply as if earth and sky, like waters; anyway, there’s nothing yet to clean, no need for Ben to haul down to the basement for any rolls of more, chaperoned only by His fear—the hum of the ventilation as sudbued as ever, pitched as dulcetly as its previous whirr; the same gurgle of the tank; the light, unobtrusive. It’s that he’s been revealed, or so it appears, a voice, a visitation—whoever that is with the footsteps flatly thudding. Feigenbaum sits with his elbows on his knees. Mortification, a birthright—and such a pain in his bowels, his head lapped in his hands.

  O Felice! how fare the toilets of thy heaven; enlighten me as to the quality of the thrones of my Father—are they not warmed by the breath of stillborn babes? is the paper not pressed of the wings of angels? is their flush not the flow of the rivers of Eden—the Pishon and Gihon, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Hudson and the East? Why not accustomed to such by now, this life lived in hide, a locking squat, this hurt on pain of passing, the unsettled intestinal of his punished gut, the lower glower the inheritance of generations of persecutory kashrut since wiped from the tush of the earth. That and he’s hemorrhoidal, too, yet another intolerance (impotence), incontinence once even, never again, you name it, ever since he’d been weaned from his mother—out of the womb and into the toilet, a stallguest, to become an intimate of a leftover world. But it’s more than that or revelation by unnamed others, the rebuke of footsteps, and their thumping voice—it’s what they have to say: hot air up from under the draft of door, word whispered around of a plague returned, more virulent than ever, and adapted to resistance, and so resistant to resistance, strained into power, mutated beyond all conscience, made only to destroy; the gossip of a Steinstein dead, corroborated by the loud cries and whimperings of a lately disconsolate host—enough worry to rip a hole in the silvery lining of even the ironmost stomach, tract life through then grunt. Heavy figs of hairy branch and bough dangle over the edge of the seat. Feigenbaum scratches at what itches. He shifts, restless, unease, a tense, and almost
…there are limits, breathe there must be. To think—a thing this large through a thing this small, this you didn’t have to tell Ben’s mother, you don’t have to tell his wife, they know from passing, dead down below: forget heaven and follow the pipes. Almost…but why still this pishy push and pull, what could be left inside: empty, he feels, he’s nothing, the ash of ash and tired, sustained only upon the shoedust and that overhead light. Partibirth. Stale air. Stillshat. He’s passing his innards, must be—his drecky, wasteworn soul.

  Promise me…it’s the mumbling fan, you’ll never seek me out.

  Promise, humbling, and I’ll remember to you whatever you want.

  Ben sits on a sofa in a room His mother called one room and His father another, couched alongside the telephone set atop its table of wood legged fickly ever since He’d stood on it to rip the intercom’s unit from the face of the wall. At the sound now—she knew how to cook, how to compliment, she loved you very much, Feigenbaum says, I want you to know we all did—He knows not to answer, to provoke; give the voice its privacy, a room of its own, the gut of the house and the hallway, it’s a throat. Where’s the head, it knows what a week it’s been…Feigenbaum unsteady, lubricated from the shvitz of his sit, cracks toes, uncomfortable upon this dumb tooth of bowl, chomping him, consuming. A stack of magazines to his left on the ledge, having been blown under the door by way of looser lips, and so a sister to thank, a drafty girl who might’ve called him uncle, alongside yellowing, wetmoldy newspapers, expanded editions for Shabbos, featuring the Arts and Stocks, now with full death statistics, please turn to page D1: a record skimmed for the past, scanned for the present, headlines at his feet he hasn’t yet lived down but through; pages upon pages wetted to harden thick into tablets kicked to the corner to crumble into kibble. Fluffy seatcover itches, a poor pillow. To scratch, to sleep deep in the wounds he itches out, there to never wake, to live within your hurt is to never be hurt again…it’s that as much as frightened. Old enough to know better, old enough not to care he does, or that he should, it’s this insanity, also, this mania recurring when it’s not a fixation, perpetual, digestively always; having been trained to the toilet late, in that flat waterheated, a tenement smokewindowed, shared with a hundred others, a hundred hundred, an entire family encamped in a crack of the bowl, urging him to pish, to get done soon, get it over; the night of his tush, eclipsing the day of his flush—all the days and nights of his sit, unrisen. It wasn’t a family down there, it’d been the apples his mother had sold, or his father, the apples his mother would sell to his father who’d then sell them out on the streets for rent and heat and light and water; bobbing, kept cold in the tank, corefresh. And then the snake, it would slither up the pipes, the pipe, winding up and through the crumbling bowels, three, four, five walkupflights stooped up the plumbing up past the rust and rot; shedding skin as it surfaces, half submerged, to coil in the bowl, which is so white and gleamingly pure that it feels, now, to be made of bone, jointed to his squat; this serpent swallowing itself, tightly, coldblooded and yet warmly, a scaly quivering turd, just waiting, to bite him in the tush as he sits himself to lighten, two marks, one for each cheek turned, poisons, or even worse: to crawl up into him, corkscrewy the hisser to wriggle up Feigenbaum’s puckered hole, to eat his fever from the inside out; intestines as a newest, shedless skin, to poison his vitals then out again, trailing from its tail his bile through any convenient membrane, maybe its head forking a tongue out one nostril, its tail flailing out the other; with his failing breath Feigenbaum to grasp at the never spooled, never started, and yet almost finished roll, to poorly wipe away the venous venom: his two hands wrapped in tissue as if they’re bandaged, absorbent wounds incurred in the intensity of his grip; an iron vise holding fast the ring of the seat, steadying the spin of the planet diseased within, his own stormy dungheaped heart.

  To die, then, atop this modest throne, the toilet of the bathroom he’d chanced upon that mortal night, firstfloor. Return to seat, to bony sit, with even his discomposed decomposing now, the only thing left such cobble from his cheeks. He faces the mirror sprayed with errant soap and mold, green oxidate, takes in the hurt flushed deep amid the black basement septic of his eyes: bowlfleck, basinfilth; the wrinkles of his age twisted into horrible bolts: a burn of lightning, though the thunder comes up from the gut, a great whirring racket, his innards wheezingly wracked as if an obsolete technology. His hunch, too, and that he’s still in his hat. Even his nipples have fallen asleep. In the mirror he mouths to his mouth—a hallway desecrated, intestines rawthroated, hoarse. To go beyond the cry, nothing else to say. Borborygmus, borborygmi. Feigenbaum leans to open the cabinet under the sink: emergency rolls stored damply, ten of them he counts, once replenished by Wanda by the week, contingency for the pants caught down. Each square, a shroud for a soul. As if the page of the prayer required, he unfurls a quiet ply.

  I’m sick in here, he thinks a sus, a murm.

  He rocks himself, the baby of his pain, sets teeth, bites tongue and what…I’m sick, in bathroom or in body.

  A moment of scrotal tingle, gastric fizz—his teeth tear lips, loosing proliferant perforations in his flesh…Felice, honey, his wife long dead unkaddished, I’ll be out, assurance, any moment now and then, another onslaught: gnash gulp hic and, finally—there’s a give, a slow slip, it’s first a rumbling, then a slick licking of insides clean, the bared mirror of the soul. Feigenbaum mouths a tongue of dreck, snakes himself a distended turd out from the tightwad of his pucker, passing whole as if—fear—it’s his own tongue he’d bitten without chewing, then swallowed down the throat, as the throat and out, digestion forsaken; this bullock’s tongue, bulrushed past reeds of pubic hair, in a stream hissing steam—his water turned to blood.

  Can you keep it down in there?

  A shout from the sofa.

  Maybe I can’t—who wants to know?

  Ben’s questioning voice, intercoming distant over the squeak of Feigenbaum’s shoes on tile, which won’t be shattered, no matter the footing. A lull, as flakes accumulate, a dusting of paper pills, dead skin, to go searching for coins under the cushions, worthless anymore. To make all our eyes into knees, then knuckle. Clasp and bow for prayer. Feigenbaum righting himself into a gag, then grubbing at the tank as his other hand armed with dignity—which are fingers kept with nails that’ve kept their neatness, despite attempts to fist himself to pure—gathers in the crumpled tissue desperate wisps of blood; stinging, lancinate…still seated, trembles, then with last honor unbends himself upright to gather his slacks to belt, cinches pinching—blood gushes down his chin, rushing out the hole, to gather thick amid the stubble. As if he’d cut himself from shaving, bum a wipe to wad it up. With a heave, he throws himself against the tank, flushes with his elbow, with his shoulder jiggles once the handle, twice; it’s locked…it’s clogged, he plunges with a shimmy of his sit, then with his fallen head; tosses his body entire into the bowl of waste, up and down again and up the suction, to flail again at flushing; it won’t, not yet; hurls himself full upon the mess, his face and mouths what word, what name, deep into that rising filth, the font fouled, a rabid stoup. He tries to say but can’t, his own mouth clogged, blood and gums and what teeth left are only dentures loosed: hardened hunks to texture stool, as if to solidify, to make material while around his head, what manner of watery dispersal; showered pissy and soglogged paper: fills his ears, his nose, and eyes, overflows his form, which is erected now with the force of plunge and suck—is finally stuffed up then straight down into the toilet’s hole, his feet kicking for the fixture, the sconce a step above his shoe; to dim discomfiture, the mothflown, heelsnapped glass. His mouth sucks blood, suckles bone…and then, an impossible mass floods up, erupts him from his shallow, to spit him out limp to the tile, grouted amid waves of putrescent wake rolling out and under the crack, to crash a floor beyond the threshold—the draft, its door, then out onto the parquet and down the hallway just polished by a sister, which…down all halls and all stairs leaky through th
eir slots; out the doors and windows and the drains of the sinks onto, then, the scurryrattling rodents’ tail gutters, to foul the Island proper; to come, soon, to a calming tide, lapping gently at the sewered edge of the Hudson’s ice, which hardens it to death.