Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  And then there are nine, and then the nine of them are not: Abe Weisenheimer who he owned his own business selling socks, a mensch who rented office space to the mensch who owned his own business selling socks, a mensch who ran the company that employed the mensch who rented officespace and storagespace to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose conglomerate owned the company that employed the mensch who rented officespace and storagespace and even furniture to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose bank gave a loan to the mensch whose conglomerate that it also had interests in footwear and ladies’ hosiery owned the company that employed the mensch who rented officespace and storagespace and furniture and other equipment/supplies to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose bank owned the bank and other banks too it took over that gave a loan at low interest to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats owned the rental company that employed the mensch on commission who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose governmental organization bailed out the mensch whose bank owned the bank and other banks too it took over and investment firms and brokerage houses that gave a loan at the lowest possible interest rate to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats and plastic toys made in Asia and various electronic hygienic devices owned the rent to own company that employed the mensch on low commission who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers and maintenance illegals to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose governmental department confirmed the appointment of the mensch whose governmental organization bailed out the mensch whose bank owned the bank and many other banks too it took over and investment firms and brokerage houses and a company that affiliated a consortium of independent traders that gave an enormous loan at the lowest possible interest rate to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats and tiny plastic toys made in Asia and various electronic hygienic devices and kitchen bathroom closetarrangement solutions owned the rent to own company that employed the mensch on no salary and the lowest commission who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers and maintenance illegals and tech support too to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, a mensch whose wife was sleeping with the mensch whose governmental department confirmed the appointment of the mensch whose governmental organization bailed out the mensch whose bank owned the bank and many other banks too it took over and investment firms and brokerage houses and a company that affiliated a consortium of independent traders to limit risk in speculation in India that gave an enormous loan at the lowest possible interest to the mensch whose conglomerate into footwear and ladies’ hosiery and mittens and gloves too and hats and little tiny plastic toys made in Asia and various electronic hygienic devices and kitchen bathroom closetarrangement solutions and replacement car parts and sheet metal and pitabaking and even seltzerwater bottling owned the rent to own company that employed the mensch on no salary and the lowest commission and without a phone or office of his own who rented officespace and storagespace and other equipment/supplies and supplied even temp workers and maintenance illegals and tech support and his daughter as a cashier too to the mensch who owned and operated his own business selling socks, who had employed in addition to that daughter as cashier, inefficient, possibly dishonest, two poor, perpetually underpaid when they’re not just unpaid salesmenschs dead, too, one of them known as Hill, the other as Shy of whom it’s been said he was anything but, waiting, just waiting…and then there are seven: a baubiologist and a color healer, then five in a developer of condops, and four his two copreneurs, an equalops equitizer and the poet who’d witnessed his postnup. And then there are three: Steinstein and, his name’s ben Zona…a stale, seedyeyed, bald marketing some hold second others hold third vicepresident for a munitions multinational once headquartered outside Tel Aviv. In the midst of this angst, they’ve given up, surrendered—their kibitzing, kibboshing; inspirational sermons, annulled; with no language in common communicating across the floor of their shared barrack, now the Registry of the Great Hall they’ve commandeered as their own as if in protest of their being avoided, ignored, by way of gestures, stroked hands, thrust fingers; then, forsaking their own beds hauled to opposite quarters of the Registry, ingathering the two together into one bedding down in the middle of the spanse, tucking themselves, each other, in under the same sheets, starched, staunching; then, the next night, which is three from the beginning of Passover they’re forsaking, too, for the comfort of only their blanket laid above the floor, and then the night after that, sleeping on the floor itself, naked without blanket: the other beds and their bedding having been auctioned off to other concerns—the Abulafias’ Palesteinian hotels, fivestarred it’s said as to rates they’re astronomical—have to make out, get out with as little loss as possible; they’re bundled near, lying far from the radiators, the thrones of warmth and the footstools of heat, exposed free from recreant shadows in the very middle of the Registry’s hulking arch, to huddle, tucked around one another, limbs intertwining, they’re moaning gums, problematic sinuses, sand on the tongue, stillborn dreams, until dawn, when only one’s woken. Attention! in an explosionary fuzz, and the boy turns over, farts his own announcement; feels his companion’s not there, that he’s alone and Godless with his mazel—which is to be consoled only in the company of guilt.

  Ben, the son of a friend. Of the family.

  And then there are two. Here to pay His respects, this a mitzvah in an hour of need. As much that binds them, cleaves; there’s an entire liturgy between the two, underspoken, unspoken, an understanding tacit, granted, taken; what’s to say, who would listen, who else would know to understand…and so they waste themselves and air and time, slinging shtick about girls, women, mnema, allowing the little history they have in common, the shared of the last couple moons: they tell jokes, kid, share boasts and bull. As would satisfy any justice, these witnesses are opposites (or it’s easier to represent them to be, now that it’s just them): one skinny and hairless, the other’s fatty and haired; one serious, relatively good with the manners, the other named petty or mean, though the word’s also loquacious; one of them intelligent, and the other not not, just uninspired, unmade or unfinished, not yet healed. Time, there’s still time, there’s stilled time in which to air. A repast reclined but underdone. It’s two days prior to Passover, two settings until Redemption, one for emptied each: they’ve been left alone; the guards have been withdrawn, perhaps on orders of, perhaps negligence, perhaps. Now’s a winged moment of facetime, a scheduled recess peace: a grave shaped like an ear, dug alongside a grave shaped like a mouth…they sit across from one another, fixed to the floor, as if already mourning themselves, what they had

  And then the next morning, there are two of them again.

  One is Moses and the other’s his brother—to stand at the throne of their Pharaoh, at the footstool and grovel for redemption, though silently, though disinherited again…the staff ’s lost, the tongue’s lamed: there are plagues, there is blood and there is black; nine of them would pass, to reveal the tenth, in which the firstborn are killed, sacrificed upon the altar of a People: the blood, the frogs, the lice, the flies, the hail and locusts and dark and death. Today’s the day all firstborns fast, though it’s only them along with nonessential personnel; and though required on pain of threat, of guilt, the public joins in, too: as the darkness settles in, to fill, to slake, to sate, and finally—to open your mouths, you two, get talking…If you die I get your shoes, if you die I get your hat, if you die I get your socks, if you, if you, your memory. All ears is still two. Remember the
time we, once I, do you remember, one time I, and the time we, and then that time. I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a friend, I never was, you were, what’s expected, who expects, what I always wanted was, what you never had was, who I wanted to, always—and, who I’ve become…Steinstein asks, what would your parents be doing right now, and yours, your sisters, how many you had, what did she look like, think I’d have a chance, any I’d’ve had—your brothers, what about them, what would you, wouldn’t you, we’d go to the, we’d sit on the, we’d stand at the, and just, and just, be together—the way Aba he used to, the way Ima she’d, how’d she look, think I’d have had a chance…we used to, would or should have, trips to Theme Parks, State Parks, Historic Battlegrounds, and the movietheater mall, the pretzeljar shoestore, summercamp sissy kissy and Sundayschool sickday blahs with the thermometer dipped into the pits to fever, it would’ve been, what would’ve been, what’s it to you, what’s not. I should have loved my parents more, I should have told them I loved them, more I should’ve more…why’d they die, why get a divorce if you’re just going to die, he worked too much, she worked too hard, I would’ve worked, too: why, if you’re just going to…what I’m saying is—what do you want to hear?

  Two witnesses, only one of whom will live to sanctify the new moon: Steinstein across His lap, Ben as if a mother to a son, installed in the Registry’s midst, absolved of illuminated exits. They sit nosing. A heaven either awaits or doesn’t, don’t get me started, already have. Begun, and duly begged. In case of emergency, break the glass of sky.

  You have a wonderful lap, Steinstein says to say anything, and what a sense of humor…I’m dying, I’m hungry, I’m thirstily tired—though he’s without suffering, they’re without pain; Steinstein’s only kvetch that of the holy imminent, the though sacred obviousness of oblivion. How I wish there were an afterlife after life, that I could believe. Me, too, like sign me up, put me down for one. Know any newer jokes. Setups. Punchlines with a swine kick to the gut. Or efficacious prayers. Then, a silence they attempt to eternalize by withholding from it breath. And from without, a thunderous whine.

  You won, Steinstein finally says, gasping his face lit, no longer the son but the ram that inherited his fire.

  His eyes ask, how’s it feel?

  No one won, you stupid mamzer.

  Don’t give me that stuff everyone’s a winner—that you can save for your fans: it’s crazy, you’re smarter than that, even you…without guards, without guns, no rental medical, no beeping blinking disturbance.

  God, he says, the deals, the fame and the Name, anything for the asking, it’s yours, and you get to live—love you, hate you, lucky schmuck, it’s impossible not to…

  They rock, until Ben to tell the truth wants to stop, wants to give up on this shuckling but He keeps on despite, goes on in spite, and so they sway together even faster, as if davening in unison, as One—as if in an attempt to merge, through singularity to save themselves from fire, the fiery ice, the Angel of Death…then, tiring and slowing, making lips, lying to eventually sleep, neck lain over neck and wounding with a kiss—to be sundered apart just past midnight. Paschal silence, lightning from the furthest white of the eye. Outside there are stormings of glass. As has become the practice of every eve plagued with their survival, the blood of imported lambs has been daubed upon the doorjambs, dripping a redemptive red from the mezuzahs why not, who’s it hurting. The welcomemat a puddle.

  Ben’s borne through the fence’s gate, up the winding slates to His house, on an Infirmary stretcher turned litter, sagging overhead; carried away by the Kush in a leaving difficult for all involved save the left for dead. Steinstein’s Angeled away to Tweiss autopsy then storage, iced in the overflow easterly Morgue, the afterlived warehouse of his Father as its only son. Fullup of recent stock, the bodies of the last week or so, inventoried, ritually prepared, have been cleaned out toward a clearing adjacent to the further dock, twelve bodies frozen southward to the tottering shed of the drivingrange, northward to the ravaged putting green, flagged offlimits, limitlessly: body after body atop body, glommed along the fence of His property at Island’s western edge, just inland from the ice’s slip to the shattered hole, its water and the oceanfloor, the fundament of shadows—the descent of the last before the last, the first before the last, the birthing of an end: spring’s, winter’s, winter’s winter, theirs and as theirs, ours; even panic having been displaced, with Ben left alone in, of all rooms and voiding spaces, the basement no longer to be feared.

  To need a rooting now, this firmness, to know His place at the footing of things, with nothing left to dread. Quickpoured black concrete. And so His mooning around these left boxes and trunks, these tapes and unscissored twines: Hanna’s forks shedding tines, knives dulling mirrors, spoons bearing bowls flattened to tables, handles rooting out so far as to become unknowable in whatever their useful, drawerward ends; heirloom sederplate emptied of egg and shank, of green and salt dipped twice, an order confused in this exodus, this exile to the Pharaohnic storehouse, Ramses’ granary holding as its only ware the sand of our Joseph’s dream; the World to Come up from the basement to save us from famine, from desert’s thirst, the privations of this, our latest diaspora, failed in that it was only temporary, seasonal though skimped on light and heat—the sun’s illumination coming in through the windows set at the rise of the earth’s backyard lighting the beneath from its always dark into a dim known that can only disappoint, a worrying mundane…this Passover also bringing the last guests of the Island’s guests to crowd the sky: their cold smoke from daytime’s cremains, from the snuffing of an ever stranger night.

  O spring! on whose unfledged leaves it is verily writteneth, ribbed on rib this prayer: All who art hungry, I forget—let them eat us, maybe; let them come and sit and belch and bench upon nothingness both savory and sweet; the table uprooted, the candlesticks barren, spare chairs down here the waterlogged lees of huge diseased cedars; the whole room—basement unfinished, partially unfinished perpetually, diningroom of the forgotten, recliningroom of the unreclinable and unimaged, the subterranean Heaven of heavens—revealed to Ben in mold, maggoty shag, walls mossed luminously, goatbearded, in iridescent filaments of morning…the entire house, even halflit, wildly en-gardened; strangled in vines as wide as halls, seeping reaches of rooms of one dew’s duration, to be effaced by clouds on the evening, wisped away, rustled forgotten, everything to be gotten rid of, junked, yarded and sold, storage unsorted, cycled to waste: cupboards to be bared to space upstairs, pantry left annulled…Ben bereaved. No different set of dishes wreathed in season, breakables and chipware, to be hauled in from the oilroiling air of the garage, down from the attic encrusted in barnacles to gather breath, entombed in their trunks and boxes of board, nailed and ducttaped, at the dawned rug of the stairhead, atop the carpet, wall-to-wall verdure of dust and mold for Hanna to vacuum no more: the rumbling in the distance the motor, the units of the baseboard heating, the basement’s hotwater heater, more like the final echo of the final storm—for today; a tumult of noise, of life woken and doing, a whirr all around, preparation’s stir gathering its pitch at the vault of the sky that arches, restless, never resting…His house itself now a vacuum, a limit of nothingness, a container of nullity, containment of the nil; the bag of the dispossessed to be gathered up at middle night with death at the door, knocking fists; His sole dispossessed possession, a mound of His father’s old briefcases here in a heap, along with Hanna’s purses, brokenclasped, out of favor, without the succor of candy or coin—essential inheritances, emptied of essentials. A stomach, a mind. Expectations of death dead themselves, voided, though their loss, which is the loss of their promise, is not quite as saddening; to be mourned, but mourned humbly: the idea that ritual couldn’t quite make it conscious enough, or explicit, that a year from winter to winter no divine would ever allow or oblige; anniversary desecrated, deprived in advance; the holy random reaffirming its faith in fate while destroying, debasing, our own; how the cycle couldn’t quite g
et the packaging right—not a bag, calfskin briefcase, or purse, but a nice neat little bundle of empty, wrapped in skin and tied with hair, left forgotten in a basement corner…Him turning the place upsidedown, insideout, and for nothing; Him searching, setting aside, in a fit, a maddened raising of heirloom dust. This basement eternally unfinished, this basement eternalizing the unfinished—its lowliest beetles and spiders and worms, its annelids dumb, search through the abandoned for meaning, night and day; day and night, making their ways through whatever remains. To seek out any prophecy left to rot by the rotted—to mourn a future frustrated in the retrospection of our death.

  O God of Mercy, God of Joysey, Protector of the stopsigns, Maintainer of the sidewalks, Guardian of the dumps, we commend ourselves to the charity of Thy asphalt, that Thou shalt grant us rest amid the rarest emissions of Thy firmament; and now let us open wide and say A then let us say Men, and then shut our mouth and its dark globe and be gone from this earth as were Thou those thousands of years ago upon its first Friday and our making. A funeral’s held at the eastern edge of the Island, the rim of the ice backlit with ocean, tainted by city: the cruciferous spires of the Church of Wall Street, the irreligious iron surrounding the hush of the Battery, there a thin slip of trafficked gray, a glimpse unremarkable, you’ll miss it if not careful: Whitehall Street, site of the first settlement of the Affiliated upon these shores…a swath of flowers, irises and roses still tastefully arranged but wilting their dyes, albescent purples, and blues hued whiter; wreathes are sulking, plasticine hollies and firs, evergreen like money, twisted then bent into hearts and circling circular voids, their silence; the sun with its moon the ghost of a ghost to the west and the birds, which fly low and sated, circle overhead lazily and heavied lower in the bowel, preparing to swoop down and peck Him to weeping. As the only one who might officiate, Ben officially demurs, has been advised to, then ordered; leave this to the professionals, son, and get busy regretting, crank out those tears.