by Joshua Cohen
In a bad yarmulke, Ben nods His head along with the Service, under His veil under the veil of the sky, dully gray and webbed in fog—to trap the clouds to be sucked of their wet, then left for empty, a sunset’s clearing. As for the veil, it’s not for the stench of death, which has been frozen, but for the mystery, for the delectation of the assembled, the coverage columns fallen wide, a tumbled pantheon of typefaces jumbled, an edifice imposing of hype to raze; and to discourage invited paparazzi kept penned to the rear. Him, He’s perfunctory, disengaged. It hasn’t yet sunk in, and neither them. Without doubt, something must have been offered, some eulogy delivered, memories shared, a sermon, a drash, remarks if not extemporaneous then just scripted to sound; all have agreed, a Kaddish must’ve been said. V’imru, a new translation. Doctor Abuya stands unbowed atop the pulpit of piled coffins, comforted by the Nachmachen armbanded, hooded in black. Der mourns to their left, alongside the Mayor and the President and their wives and the swollen lips of their mistress’ eyes. Ben nods through the lull, the incessant lapping of the wake on the ice, the slow dumb thud thud dulling insensate thud, then the fierce rabid white withdrawal back into the swelled body to flow on amid floes and on further, among the floating glaciers and bluewhite golden bergs that don’t seem to receive or take the light of heaven but hold it, or emanate it, as if they’re but the fallen cooling and cooled flesh of the sun on a flank of the moon. Against this restless ebb, this wake endless, endlessly hazarded with icicled sharps, a slough of badeggy, brownblack pickleweed and sick saltgrass, decomposed phragmite, starvelimbed spartina, and trash above the enabling sink of the previous dead, two Kush attired in the deceased’s ripped, tattered black judges’ robes arise from their chairs, which are seats that’ve been hewed from ice by workers wielding picks at the dawn, and proceed to the bier of coffins stacked low before the coffined pulpit, stoop together toward the white, bend at the knees to bow, to lift the topmost casket: Steinstein small in a cold cocoon. A band plays on a barge far out freed in the open water, so southerly gone that no one hears its music, which has been programmed funereal, joyously sad: accordionwind, flutefog, sounding brass, timbrel with tinkling cymbal. A mandolin plink, the call of birds without sky. That’s no butterfly, He thinks, that’s only winded trash. A leaflet engraved by weather, denoting the agenda of the morning. Rest assured, there will be memorials. Blown city trash. An invitation to a light buffet. This is no metamorphosis. There will be no emergence. This, for however long, is an end.
Dark servants uniformed in old law robes blacker than a blotting sentence struck without names and proceeding somberly, the Kush in lockstep, lock and step, lockstep, flagbearers follow raising their standards, then the drums and fifes with which to taunt the gulls that whirl above in their own private, griefstruck revolutions: each, they test each step, every weighted forward, fraught, to test the ice whether it’ll hold their fall heading out by south, over the veining, the ice crackling like locusts underfoot and on fire, extinguished by the boot; they walk the body out, to freeze; then, at giving edge, the sinking vale, they go to heave, to throw this poor huddled Steinstein in an arc, like a white wished coin to plash down deep, to plop atop the sunken flesh, the last body atop this mass of limbs and hearts and minds, bobbing then bobbing then sinking forever sinking down, never to decay. A great clap, a crack and crumble, a final fall—the ice gives way, hot floes are let out loose and the Kush, they’re separated, the two flagbearers, each to their own floating island, iceislands enough for one; a wailing, then silent gesturing, as they float out beyond the ceremony’s appeal, their black robes billowing as if sails set for nowhere, if only off, far beyond the crusty barge, the marshy glut, their flags to merge with the horizon into a band of color colorless below the flag of dawning night. And then as if intended, too, He follows, as if pulled out, tuggingly towed who knows, Ben making His way seemingly somnambulant, a vessel Himself, out to the newest holding edge. As ordered, to honor tradition, He digs in the lone slit pocket of His new funeral suit for a handful of dirt, crystalline with frost, to toss to float atop the bare skin of the ocean—to scar. And then, when He turns around from His husky fling, the entire crowd’s dispersed; their backs are turned to Him, they’re making for the press conference already, for its warm buffet of unleavened bread, which is matzah, and boiled eggs and shank, bitterherbs to dip in water made bitter with their tears; the funerary sleigh’s retired to blocks of ice; the pulpit’s disassembled for future use; in an Islandround queue to the Great Hall, the invitees—as if on cue—stand mute, and bored; as they wait they use their programs to mop their icy shvitz, wring out print, headlines lined to forehead, Gothic wrinkles; they consult their watches unwound, hands clasped in pity then wrung in shame. He turns from them toward the ocean again and untucks His shirt, which is white and dressy and replete with a million, starnumbered tiny buttons too small for the bumble of His clumsy thumbs, exposes His navel, the proof of His humanity and the little stone He’s stored there. A lower, harder heart. A solitary island of floating ice; a lone white square of the ocean’s game; a souvenir yarmulke gusted from the head of a visitor then turned loose as litter upon the face of the deep; a tombstone estranged from its Steinstein, just one Stein of many lately, too many latter days. Pinching His pants at the knee, stooping over the open atop the thinning wick, then tweaking the stone from the gape of His navel, a mute name, an empty filling. Palming the pebble, the gravelet, He sets it gently atop the ice, purses lips and cherubically exhales, to blow the tiny island out, passing an offering to the horizon, eventually of the horizon, on this day passing over, this night—this Exodusk. A kiss as if in thanks for His fortune, the wetted recompense of lips. How He’s been saved, redeemed, what have you. On a merit He cannot claim, in favor of the dead who was a friend. Deal with it, why so sad. It’s that I maybe wasn’t worthy. Am not, perhaps. Condemned, to have been freed.
Tonight’s the night of the Second Seder, which is the justification for the first, a lately seconding assent—an evening’s afterlife of ritual, too much the forgotten night, and as such often slept through, ignored, its reputation that of mere repetition, the Law’s reinforcement intended only for the dense or pedantic, the masochistically foolish—to be conducted with and served to the visiting dignitaries and press inside the Registry of the Great Hall, check your coats and remember, save your stubs. Who gets served first, the question numbered after the fourth never asked by the kinder dead, and what—an incomparable dish, what else the final course, savored only as the last. After its plates are cleared and silverware stolen, what’s left’s only the Blessed art Thou. Disordered. Art Thou Blessed. The Seder desedered, desecrated. Thou art Blessed. A table leavened, lately risen so high that anything served atop it would be beyond anyone’s appetite. Stomachs eyeing swollen. That and there aren’t enough chairs. My condolences.
Ben turns, staggers palms to foot the ice, falling to His knees, He rights Himself onIsland, to His house and weeping freely. Teary as the way’s uphill: snow drifted to the edges, the fringe toward Joysey a precipitate pack. Not alone, He’s escorted home by His newest lookalikes—flanked by Mada, and a novice whitebread operative known de novo as Frank Gelt—past the lingering smoke, lightning flashes, the bulby horns of moonmade beasts; constellating fame lost in darkness encroaching, just a plague or two too late; the lens of sky shattering at the sight, the spectacle, believe it. To the shore of Joysey and, across the Island, to that of Manhattan and further, the uninviteds, the hangerson, fans, and the citified curious disperse homeward on skis and snowshoes, across ice salted, ice sanded; those who’d hoped for a miracle, say, a resurrection, are frustrated—it would’ve only disappointed, or so they promise themselves, assure, their newest rabbis agree, they always do, we’re sure; them sloughing off slowly, laggardly, diasporating, together, apart, into a diasporation further, unnamed, without number, into futures individual as purposemade, exiles none of them could ever hope to understand.
Which, nu, doesn’t rule out Submission.
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br /> Steinstein, says an approved mourner here with the appropriate pass inside the Great Hall, a weeper who’s on every list—now, he was golden. A blank check. This Israelien, He’s difficult, a tough sell. Doesn’t know how to do a soundbyte. Unquotable! Unphotogenic! Or if not Him, His decoys—how much they make an hour? Anyway, there’s not much to like about Him, you know? Hard to relate to. Too strange. Never know what that schmuck is thinking.
Doesn’t matter what He looks like, says his plus one pewmate, what He smells or sounds like, what He feels or even tastes like—I wish the kid had ten hundred, ten thousand fingers to sell off. As relics, you follow? They’re going to make a killing!
Hymn, if nothing kills Him first.
In His house, Ben lies atop the table He was born on, in the diningroom, flopped on a shard of dark tablecloth slipping from its top; then upstairs He’s embedded, upstairs-upstairs, on the decks’ deterioration, a mattress perched aslant a pitch of snowsuccumbing roof—what the media characterizes as “a period of recovery” calming soon, a sobless nap, a little healing schlaf.
For seven nights through Shiva, Ben’s dead to the world. And, too, to dreams, which despite our ignorance of any revelation they might offer to interpretation couldn’t be more terrible than what passes for His life, what’s passedoff to Him as life passedover, the unlivable liveddown, the divine decree of un-lovable fame as proclaimed by prevailing silence. The sun dawns day through the windows, Manhattan nights without phosphor or fuss—everything having been declared dimmed for the mourning, His and theirs. His sisters gather around the table, calling to stall, while unfolding fresh accommodations of cloth and pad, edible inveiglements, sexplay suasions—but no one can reach Him, nothing can talk Him down. The moon remains through the mornings, the evenings find that ancient ancestral plate, cut by its silver, as empty as ever, while the window between it and the polished tabletop on which He rests becomes as a shroud veiled over the most dire vision imaginable—unthinkable, tomorrow; to frustrate even the most adept prophet, whose rest’s given over to the workings of His unimaged God.
Morning after Shiva’s sat out Ben’s woken—rolled from the table of His room off the tables of the upper floors, forced back downstairs, to its waking life, the business of His state. He’s ushered atop a scale that eighth afternoon, unearthed from a cabinet in Feigenbaum’s bathroom for His weighing, a procedure to be done daily on orders, to regulate His gain, moderate appearance; this to focus Him on the public, His image, a girth even greater—to be worth His weight in gold; polished with publicity, the shine imparted with appropriate alchemy and management. No mourning, says Doctor Tweiss, that’s for Shiva’s sequel…starting tonight—people enjoyed it so much it’s been heldover, popular demand. Stand still, says the other doctor: don’t lean on the tables, you’re no leaner on the walls; stand straight. Stop that sobbing, each tear weighs a ton. And then we’ll do it naked. He weeps enough salt to deaden a sea. All who art thirsty, let them sip from His eyes. Their brows being plucked, their lashes slickly licked to flirt. Arrow the finger pointed, sucked to wipe from His face a smeared tear, a point of schmutz—it wobbles, steadies, wavers, shakes, the dial spins His sighs. Jesus, you’d think we were fattening you for the slaughter. That’s a joke. That, too. Please and thank you nice to meet you, good Sabbath a guten Shabbos. Shake. A fitting for the new more casual clothes to supplement the suit. And, thrown in as if a towel, a fresher, drier, veil. His number gotten, sized, He’s sent to His room again—to fling through the scripts received, proposals, projects, telegrams and letters. No one survives, they only inherit a different life. To be a star means this, to disinherit the darkness of the sky.
And then there is One. Me. Who else, who better. Ben, the son of sons. Uniqueness, a quality universally prized…rather, our universal constant itself: one hard breath amid the ether, through laughter or tears, I know, I know. One sun that wakes Him. An alarm, which functions in the time of the Messiah. Ringing. Tell the resurrected it’s time to tick to work. Stillborns off to school. Then, one moon that sleeps Him without dream. Between, one brunchplate, hosting a single bagel of a widening hole. In the afternoon, the larger of the last two knishes He knoshes, knowing his interlocutor’s respectful enough to have selected the smaller one anyway, in anticipation. Are you feeling well, are you feeling. One mountain in the distance, a singular pyramid of stone sheetrocked, it’s said. An oneway track ripped up under the progress of the train relentless, farflung out from behind the rear broughtup, the caboose He’ll hobo on, when soon. Give Him space and time and parents. After all, His people gave such ideas existence. That and the Temple, citybound—hosting one marble pedestal and its frayed vein itself hosting the infinite universe, its vaster gods. They couldn’t be here but they send their regards. And vengeance. One like the nation, under His invisible God indivisible, with liberty and justice for whom. As it’s said and never known. One as in chosen over the other, singled out but by whom and for what. Is the question begged. Because He’s unattached, a singlemon, an eligible match, maybe—meet my son, the Messiah, He’s free most Friday nights. Or, one like the Substance of Spinoza, the nugatorily negating immutable, the ineffably annulling…
Or else, He’s—heresy—just like everyone else…is everyone else. A multitude of mensch, and their achievements: Joseph the dreamer dreaming Joseph the interpreter interpreting Joseph the prophet; the brother who hides the cup, Benjamin fated unconscious to steal it, prophesized together again, reunited forever in Him. Like the chance of that choice, how many lives you’re allotted, how many eyes and mouths and noses—O does He pick! The fraternity’s mascot, the tribal runt. Alone again alone. I sit on my bed and ask it, are you my bed? And because it doesn’t answer me I’ll never know and sleep. A pillow. And its whiter dream. One as in one. One meaning one. One one. It’s you, everyone’s telling me, it’s your life, so many options, and with so much support, what don’t you understand, your problem—I want to say, it’s me. One in the same, as in the emotions of Pain and Hope, as defined by Spinoza; as in the ideas of perfection and reality as Spinoza once set out. As I’ve been told, I’m telling. One as in God Himself. As in His son, but let’s not go there…He remains upstairs. No one does. Upstairs-upstairs. I sit on my floor, a mockery of mourning—its carpet of stains, hall’s wood bemoaning in trodden groans its scratches and the rug. A fundament of doubt. There’s a noise from below, a spirited banging of the ceiling with ladles and with brooms. They say, intensely private. Sequestered, they say. Appreciates His quiet. I say…Alone. An entire house at His disposal. And make no mistake, it is disposal. Unable to leave, He isn’t allowed to, and He doesn’t allow Himself, not even His possessions—to leave an intimacy just lying about. As the only permanent of this exorbitant house—as Mister & Misses Israel Israelien, Homemachers, Copresidents of the Board for life of this singularly shingled siding—this dwelling good for an immodest family of tens, and fine, too, to house at least a hundred others, certainly, in relative comfort, a thousandplus under refugee conditions; as the only survivor of this plot, He still feels like the youngest son and as such, infinitely old in His loneliness, banished to His room, containment policies pursued, to keep His dirt there, never to infiltrate or taint. Their expectations. And their painful hopes. His mess is His, roomed. I sit amid laundry and wrappers and cartons and cans, lightbulbs and hoarded spoons, foreskins shed, tight shoes. I wait until I am called, and when I am called I will call that call temptation, and live out the rest of my days against it, which is only waiting. Or so I say, unsaid. At the door, an official knock, a bell. Downstairs, demons surge. It’s time for Him to wash, to dress. Their whispers jar the window. Into the pockets of the pants He steps into go whatever’s around. Mementos. A pocket is the room of a room. And over that He shrugs on, against all advice, which are orders, a fond found shroud that’d been His mother’s, a blustery blouse, Hanna’s maternity let out in pleats.
At the end of Shiva prolonged twice the traditional span to accommodate the sitting of
all these mourners, those who’d known a goy who’d known a goy who’d gotten them a foot in the mouthing door, Jonathans come lately and not come directly without pity wrought across their faces that isn’t merely makeup for the edification of the press over wardrobe, which is black as if the secretion of their nightly and mutual heart, with the Marys as hostesses, sisters and mother appealing, attending to the nervous network of guests, their needs of food, drink, and of memory providing, at the end of eating, drinking, talking, and the occasionally mispronounced prayer—davening—misery commiserated then calmed in that order again reborn, after the last guest leaves, forgets his coat then comes back and retrieves it from a Hanna disapproving with an amusedly severe if distracted glare for whoever at the threshold on the last night of official mourning sat out, it’s this knocking, then a ring on the bell, which sounds one tone long and loud and harsh. As if a final siren. Answered by himself with his own key, it’s Gelt, with a leavened chin and selfmade buzzcut, arrived only to whisk Ben away, in an open sleigh parked at the fence at the foot of the path since slated for preservation (the house registered a landmark, not just to His life or theirs, or as an excellent historical example of high exurbiated living—but to the Garden’s prophetic project, how well and thoroughly they’ve divined, recreated a past into a materiality that is both monument and future), bells a’jingle hollowly, wild dogs frothing a dash down the foamy, toothy spur, their tongues straining over the hillocks of drift and pile, whips of hitched and harnessed tails, up to the Great Hall and therein to Ben’s private wing, quarters established amid the remains of the Registry’s Seder. He shouldn’t be left alone any more than He already is, this on the recommendation of His employer/disciples, His meisterminders and mother. A chandelier weeping crystal. Floors marble, or marbled. Dust mounded against the walls, dereliction, the lapse that makes a Tel—and then the windows, which if undraped would give out onto the further scape of gloss and glass and metal: Manhattan; a coming world, beyond.