by Joshua Cohen
Feigenbaum lies small on the floor. Withered trees around His house shake, shiver, then still, their roots soaking in the rippled, dreckdappled reek…life renewing always; trunks wrapped a waste in leafy paper stained with fruit, moldy, spoiled. Feigenbaum, their shriveled fig, left sprawled for the avid plucking in an ocean of his juice, a dark milk without a wake: flooding past the closets for winter clothes and past the closets for spring clothes and the closets, the parquet to the rug, Hanna’s favorite, absorbent blue, colorfast and manufactured stainresistant, or so holds its hidden tag; flowing ambit to the frontdoor, then out it, engulfing the mat that says Shalom, down the stoop, down Nitz’s walk then, to pool around the slate islands of that path, past the dead grass and frozen sprinklerheads, the little stretch of sidewalk poured and its tiny curb of one block long if that, the limits of His recreation; up the halls to the familyroom, the halls to the livingroom, and the halls to rooms, for laundry, for guests, for company and brunch—up to lap His toes; Ben ensconced atop a couch, its cushions drenched to stuffing—to float the furnishings amid the room that would have been the den, at the height of the middle mullion of the windows. He reaches a worried hand over to the bobbing, wetly creaking endtable, to gather up the phone from its cradle; to rock to a reassuring tone; the sympathy of the directline…what to say, He dials nothing—the only call He can make, guess who pays the bills.
To report, what now…a disaster in progress, natural or not, a flood fatidic, another postdiluvial deluge: not the tenth plague, but the first before the first, Ur unnumbered because unknown as plague to now—ten generations after the Adam before His Adam, with the world begun already destroyed; no rainbow shall assuage. Then, days and nights to soften…the furniture soggy, sagging, broken: credenza floating tchotchkes, snoglobes and mugs, glasses and lamps of glass, coffeetable buoy sloshing with milk and sugar and coffee, books of photographs, albums, and books; oceanically unpaid bills, appliance warranties and instruction sheets, catalogs and magalogs; an operator’s His mother onduty, holds the unit from her ear, to save herself from the whispered fearsome kvetch—pitching into a scold’s geshray; then, informing Him with excessive patience, forced maternal reassurance, that assistance should be arriving momentarily, that grownups are on their way she means and, maybe, He should attempt to find a mop. Like it would be helpful. That, or perhaps you could bail yourself out with your mouth. But where would a mop be. If I were a mop. Ben flails across the room in thought. A broomcloset, or laundryroom, apparently. Who would’ve thought, which hall. Though such situation requires plumbing not a polish. His sisters arrive shortly thereafter—just here to cleanup, don’t mind us—which is discombobulatingly risky because all this’d been Wanda’s job. Her responsibility, this swabbing, and would’ve been this bailing with buckets out windows. Angels arrive a wing’s breath later, to remove the body; floating the corpse, in a wet procession, each to a steering limb and then, his head, guiding Feigenbaum out the opened door, and with them every sip of filth remaining, stopped, to tide: their fall down the stoop, to drain the house to dry.
And so it might be appropriate, with everything relative and all Einsteins now dead, to engage in what’s been called the pilpulistic: to pull on our beards, to tug at our locks, to split hairs as befitting us lesser creations, sundering God Himself, Who parted the Sea of Reeds only for us to cross over into the wilderness, still barren of our freedom. They’ve begun their dying, their relentless death, of all days on the Sabbath, the first day of this the first moon, which is known to us as Nisan, the moon of the night of the death of Abel Steinstein: a night different from all other nights, as it’s said, and yet, at least according to official Garden recommendations, to be kept distinct from Night, too, which is the capitalized end of Creation, dawning upon the destruction of the entire darkened world. Over the mornings ensuing, the issue of days as generations stillborn from the womb that is Shabbos, the toll rises to the rarified pitch of the sky, a hollow bell that is the sky, resounding its storm across the ice—crescent-tongued the moon, then convex, gibbous—as death echoes in the last words and loves of families, ingathers in sighs whole dynasties and denominations, hoards entire congregations and communities, Landsmannschaften, landsleit, kretchma, klaus and klatsch, neighborhood groups, benevolent societies and synagogue boards; their lives pile up, are piled, a copse of corpses, menschs with their kinder stacked a perch higher than the stripped remains of the Garden’s last orchards, its appletrees only bare boughs become so thoroughly diseased they’ve been rejected for use even as coffin stock, which frozen, freezing malady, as if Scriptural, too old to be known, hasn’t spared them from being uprooted anyway, sawed then snapped, suitable for kindling, firewood only, landscaped in neat rows at the westernmost perimeter of the Garden, in the Island’s backyard of His house atop the grave of the sandbox, amid the rusted remnants of the swingset, and the twisted knotted slide.
A final flush, then, and the bathroom’s left empty…its door shut, locked forever forgotten, struck from the blueprints, forbidden from memory: offlimits, closed for the cleaning, slippery when even thought of, if—Feigenbaum among the one’s too many lost upon the altared third of the month, those thousands of them, these tens, the hundreds losing their daily shadows and with them, their nightly lives, to the lighting then darkening of this moon passing through, this moon passing over, waxwaning its judgment, as if a selfeclipse; the remnant crescent of his body remanded first to the (easterly) Morgue, for processing: the cataloging of his personals, not much, blood drained and body cleaned to corpse, his photograph’s taken, his prints inked, and name entered into a ledger; only then, he’s hauled over the ice for commendation to the waters below. Feigenbaum, Fink, Finkel, Fischel, Fishl, Freud, Freund, and Friedland…
But before our loss can be massed, given one face and voice, any name representation, an inviolate symbol—we’re asking you, wait up, langsam just a moment, will you, shtum: we all must stand ourselves, alive, aware, out on the far ice to reflect above the tide. Namely, that it’s the destiny of every individual, of even the symbol, even the ultimate, to think their time the end, to think their world the last—and this especially today, especially fastdeadly, with everything In the beginning again at the already begun, history eternally returning as always, as eternally as ever but rather quickly, evermore and more quickly now, with a precipitate urgency, an Apocalyptic insistence. Now the time in which you live the time to end all times and Time; now the Never again. In mourning, standing atop the furthest spur of frost above the deep, they mourn themselves, a little soon: their failure, their ill luck, the ruinous stars above with their frustrated mazel. It’s understood, which means it’s itself mourned, our knowing hope, our dreaming: how we can’t all be prophets, we can’t all be priests, we can’t all be kings; that despite what the scholars once believed, there’s only one Moses; that despite what the sages once bowed down to, there’s only our God; thinking, too, if everyone’s their own Messiah, what’s that worth, what’s in it for me. Better to unify, best to hold One indivisible. Nowadays, there’s no why to wonder who, admit it, who’ll make it, whose testimony, whose witness—that’s been long worked out and over, it’s suspected; already taken care of, chosen long before any of us were ever born to live down any death. A statement is forthcoming.
Officially, anything still undecided is beyond any notion of help, of emergency response, beyond even a call to account. Rather, it’s an attempt to define innocence, to safeguard assets from liability, to prevent position, meaning Authority, from assault, that being held responsible narrischkeit, this blood on whose hands mishegas—the Administration to vouch for the water supply, the air quality, middlemanager magi seers at the National Weather Service through an order from President Shade reporting directly to the Garden, which issues its own releases on every bandwith unsunned, givingout the assurance of what lately passes for expected: only the cold and the coldly dark, a steel frost, an iron ice; but there’s a break on the horizon, they’re sure to be assured…th
ere’s bound to be, promised, a covenant fulfilled, just don’t ask us date or time. Nail what down—it’s excruciating, this call for exactitude, not a pleasant cross to bear. Though it’s important to remember, at least the FBs do, are reminding each other on their wandering whispering walks back from ice’s edge to the bunks of their barracks for Curfew, that of all people, organizations, or governments, Der has the most to gain from their loss, from ours of us; Garden, Inc., the very venture that ostensibly protects them, the party that would stand to make the most from their annihilation, as a total loss would make official, perpetually irrevocable, the reversion of assets, the manifold increase of the Island’s holdings in a wax: from obscurity, the mere lighting of a moon; an inheritance disinherited, to inheritance again. Not that any Authority more mortal is pleased, not at all, at least not publicly confirmed. No comment. As gossip becomes rumor becomes rule of Law, then eventually discredited, dismissed, overturned, it’s difficult to know what to do besides stand aside, sleep our dreams, wake, walk, and whisper, monger our gossip into rumors, while letting the course of events inhuman enact whatever punishment it is that might appease the anger of a God; render unto and all that—let the Lord exact the Almighty’s retribution, take enough suffering to satisfy them both, then make wing for day.
A mensch long of age, he seems older than three fathers and their fores. Brownsville, he’d been a Pitkin Avenue boy. He’d sold shoes, first as an assistant, as an employee of his own father, then, after his father’s death from being stepped on then walked all over one too many times by the local women and their creditor sons, as a small business owner—a prominent member of the local community, who’d had his own seat at the shul. A congregation. If you wanted decent shoes, you went to him. And when he said they were good, they were good. He was good to his wife, and he always thought he would live long because he gave to charity. If you gave to charity you would live a long life, because it says so in the books. But he never made the time to read them; his eyes were always tired, now the color of the cold. Seeking only a semblance of routine, the unexceptionally daily, he’s sitting a respite from the death of late, having his last pair of overstock salvaged shined by the new cobbler here who only last wax had been the lowly shiner, an assistant of sorts, an employee, if unsalaried, to the old cobbler recently dead who just a wane ago had reconditioned for this mensch the left heel on his issued pair, a limp. They both enjoyed whitefish sandwiches with coffee. Demoted. Left alone. How the polish is smeared, rubbed, elbowgreased, a shoulder’s put into it; the rag snaps, pops, the mensch slumps, the menschs—what’s reflected in the sheen of tongues are just their empty eyes. One gray the other dead, white and red and glasses. Another sits just as patriarchally, high up in the barbering chair, his cheeks receive a shave, he’s snipped, scissors’ tips to root around in the ears and up the upturned nose; locks are strengths, curls are bonds; a brush bristles his Adam’s apple, the stropped blade’s brought to neck, but even before the flick of wrist the mensch can give no blood—and neither can the barber, who until his promotion yesterday once swept the floors here, occasionally answered the phone, scheduled appointments, was allowed to work the register when slow. And yet another, this mensch nothing but a boy, a boychick he’s called, chubby, fat: wenwambly purses hanging from his limbs, sullenly pale suffused everywhere with a rosy rash, blushy in front of his bunkmates even in the sleeping dark he strips for the night and instead of wadding up his clothes as usual is reminded by the loneliness of his mother, their maid, then goes to fold his shirt and slacks, and before he can place them in his cubby—again and again, and the boy’s father, too, who’d been firstborn and had died before his own firstborn, three nights before, it’d been in the middle of a story for his bedtime. Once upon a, forgotten. Against tradition, against the Law, they’re using pyres once the coffins bottom out. In this weather, a lame and flailing flame. Millions shorn to hundreds of thousands, tens, tons then thousands on their own, fleshing out the world beyond, cremation’s cinder darkening, shadowing clouds to seed new storms. Witness strength given over to numbers, abated to dates, left as scraps of fact and figure for the gleaning of our widows dead, and yet on the wind, inconsolable; life left over to history, the inexorable future of posterity, inherited to memorious record, revelation of a mission they’ll force Him to accept, an identity we’ll force Him to force back on us, Ben, down our throats: talk and popularize, please, yak it up and smile, will you…go all God on them, on us, the whole Job job, prophetmode, jeremiad from the Rocky mountaintop, to the valley of dry bones and silicon clay, promote, protest, debunk, decry, anathematize and, Jeez; may you bless when you intend to curse, and may you curse if you intend to bless; always, though, be in the world, be of the world, be sure of that, be warned; remain in an orbit of sorts, in a perpetual flee, fleeing even from flight, to be a refugee from refugees from self, a survivor, a testimony, a witness to all this made so loud and so fervent, so vehement and righteous that your witness becomes this, that your witness becomes itself the tragedy, which then must be forever itself witnessed by your generations, if any, that ensue.
Midnight, the house’s second floor. Upstairs-upstairs, Ben’s standing on the deck. In a robe, with nothing underneath, and slippers, His mother’s. He’s facing the ice, toward the flame, a fiery pillar, a piling pyre. He feels at the rickety railing: a suicide, He’s thinking, up and over the edge, why not…dayeinu, which means Enough, His father would say, I’ve had enough, throwing up his hands, I’ve had it up to here, His mother would have said, then she’d raise a palm to her neck as if to slit herself to peace, a knife she’d been halving recipes with, a stirring spoon with which to scoop out the pregnancy of her stomach: suicide…an idea, He’s thinking nights now the only idea, like Masada, that windowless mountain out across the ocean, a last stand against the unsighted; the Island pushed up by tectonic pressure, tidal force, risen to a rock towering above the barren city; Ben atop, the FBs, too, waiting out their day a breath below the sun, a last gasp below the blade of the moon…days casting the lots of an earlier season, sharpening their own daggers on the summit, fasting themselves into heart, and sleepless, they’re starving, thirsty, lonelier than dead; the stars toll, the PA sounds from behind the clouds, the house’s intercom quakes the foundations of the sky: Curfew…them to plummet down the slope, to break the fast of their bones. Atop the deck opposite Liberty, one of two givingout from the room of His parents high above the house and the Island, He’s fixated on the flaming horizon, and there on an assembly of forms in every color never His: black, brown, beige, yellow a migrant red, the Kush just following their orders, as always, but now issuing them, as well, as if a Law given over to themselves in a million languages echoing equally to Him as they all mean the same, which is nothing—work; they’re rolling the dead out over the freeze, gathering them into shrouds of massive white, snowballing corpses turned over and around again in a wheelingly reeling processional over the ice thin and thinning thanks to their fire out to melt the furthest shore, a flame of bodies cracking the freeze under its heat, the funereal weight, crushed under the gigantically cyclical, cycling roll of disposal, to fall them hard into sharding spring, dispersing, down into the depths.
A slight splash—call it a clock, a serving plate once kindergarten art & crafted by Judith with hands and with twelve numerals, then hung upon the wall of the one and only kitchen; a clepsydra, the hollow drip of His parent’s whirpool Israel said as Hanna’d said jacuzzi: each hour, every minute, twice a second a burned body’s dropped through the ice as ash, its noiseless plash marking a slight on time…call it a calendar: the bodies daily stacked in a bonfire like the blackened boxes on the page of the month hung on the kitchen’s wall below that white plate’s shadow, which is round and without end. As has become tradition, an official count will be given come morning: a mechanically whistling voice, distorted, distorting; what souls remain stumble to inspection, of themselves, by themselves, from awake nights worrisome to fumbling to feet, with a pretense
to having slept an optimistic dream—for appearances, their own sanities, calm, what sake not or better; they try to wake their neighbors, their bunkmates, the stricken barracks. Sons and stepsons and grandsons, SonSons, halfbrothers and nephewcousins. Attention, good morning, there are now X of you left. Why. Zzz. Have a nice day, you thousands, you hundreds, you holy tens. Pleasanries, don’t mention. Attention, there are now only a handful of your kind left alive. A thumb that makes a mensch. A prophesizing finger pointing fault down the throat, to belch up a burning answer: who didn’t know me, who wouldn’t. Have a great weekend. Shabbat Shalom.
With death returned and all the preparations that accompany it like a mother that follows guardingly, witnessing, a step behind her son only to outlive him (to wash his body, to keep watch over the corpse, the smashing of a wombgrave, into the warmly unfathomed ice), Garden employees and Island staff, many of them insourced into this insanity—Mishegas, again, being the term currently preferred, though the Nachmachen might hold by Narrischkeit—from municipal jobs sectored private and exclusive in the wake of the disaster, they’re spending so much time burning and burying that things begin falling apart, melting, giving way, incredulously’s the joke, even more than they already are; the Schedule erodes, though in implementation only, as nothing can banish the record, the rule: security becomes lax; journalists infiltrate the perimeter under the passage of night, toss the gloss of their magazines and the folds and Shabbos inserts of their newspapers up and over the fences, the wires, and climb on over, crawl through tunnels dug through the frozen dirt with their pens, muddydulled nibs, flashbulb smoke the gathering clouds, the zooming lens of the moon; what they report back to the mainland makes no matter, it’s all entertainment: death as distraction, diversion, from more lasting change, meaningful purpose, the future’s promise of evermore destructive upheaval; sentries have abandoned their posts, guardtowers forsaken, circumcised without barb; the patrols late on their sweeps if they make them at all; nightly meals are even served irregularly, often pass skipped by the staff, never by the survivors, who wait whole hours for their feed, only to go hungry again at the appropriate time; unofficially forgotten about, their beds lie unmade, without maid, their linen dirty, shvitzed to filth; their laundry’s never taken out, if taken out then never returned; the FBs are eventually allowed to sleep in; soon, lights are never turned off, if turned off then never turned on; the Schedule still exists if only as idea, idealized but not implemented, extant but only as concept, countenanced only, recognized, to be sure, but within that recognizance lying only the negation of any power it’d had: this Law imposed now just a way to live, another imposition, one of many, merely a way to die, something we once knew, and occasionally remember, another world, that, theirs, another desert and its generation dead, deserted. Those who aren’t burying are already buried, or are burned and burying themselves, weather permitting: everyone from the longtoothed, shortorder cooks to the shippingclerks, the nurses and pursers to the valets of the latter, those who’d once been conscripted to care for the living, to indulge them—repurposed, made complicit with the cause’s discard, occupied with hiding not the evidence (as there is none: only healthy, successful people, provided for and pleasured, happified and fat), which as it doesn’t exist cannot be kept secret even from their God, but with hiding the evidence of the evidence inextant, the fallen, droppeddead rational, the then alive, now burnt, unexplained—all of them, that is, save the high staff, led by Doctor Abuya and the Nachmachen, who’ve been charged with taking care of PR: sounding out what this means, why it’s not bad because divine. Understand, there will always be those serious people—goys placid, imperturbable, without pleasures, kept around to take care of business, to make arrangements, organize futures; the lots cast delayed from last season to covert the plans, preparations, massing, assemblage, underground, in the tunnels, amid the earth revulsed and gray…President Shade and partners striking ironclad deals, hot and molten, plotting spin for when the globe holds its own.