by Joshua Cohen
Forgive Him for His
S .
silence…
Forgive Him for His
T .
Forgive Him His
U .
Forgive Him for His
V .
Forgive Him His
W .
Forgive Him His
X .
xenophobia,
what else in the X’s?
Forgive Him for His
Y .
Forgive Him for the sake of His
Zion.
And ONE…
O forgive Him our Horde of Hosts,
Thou Lord of Losts,
Who art in Leaven—
O let us be risen, too!
And let us say,
AMEN!
2
IV
A miasma of gray puff and cloud congestion, an exhaustion overhanging the water, which is ice…everything that’s not burning has already burnt. Ash has fled the air under the headcovering of night.
It’s earliest morning, and through its darkness waning an apparition comes forward, anomalous because it’s dark itself amid dawn; it comes starkly, with unrelenting drive, with pitiless force, as if the blackest god in the sky; it pierces the cloudbank, a ray of negative light, then screeches sideways, hisses, honks, comes to rest at Ben’s feet. It’s a limousine, a new one or the Joysey old repaired. Frank Gelt emerges from the gloom, holding open its door. Hamm lumbers from behind, bows for Ben His head and stumbles Him inside, choking, barely breathing from the fume. He’s veiled, still; He can’t use His eyes, His lids give only black. Again with the veil, it’s precautionary, not that it doesn’t also make for laudable mystery, suspenseful. A thing. Doors shut, lock. And then the limo, a refitted chariot charred with sunrise’s flame gone out, wheels around, heads to return in the direction of its arrival: straight ahead, star-bound, fading at a falling skid out over the ice without yield, hurtling offIsland, unstoppably fast, deathbringing, leadenfooted out over the sand over the ice then over the slick skin of tar.
Ben presses His veil up against the window tinted with weather, which passes for air thickly viscid, the limo passing through clouds, muscled intestines giving way to the cranial gray, bloodied iron, lifecold steel, metal limbs this rusted meat…the city once dead just now being reborn, hulking in the effort of its breaths ever higher above the grossest of streets: glaring heights of lipidic marrow, vertical artery, glassy and gelatinous organs peeking through insatiable tumult; fogflecked the digestive din, pulsing penetralia oozing light…the neon clot of billboard and sign; the mucilaginous asphalt, the strut, truss, and trestle; millions of links to the chain around Manhattan, binding this island of the Island in coils of burbling, gurgling cloud the limo bursts into air, as mere puffery, nothing.
Welcome, Ben. New York, it’s about time. This is what you’ve been missing, what you’re missing still, blind to all this, witless. The city of the windows of the house, the city of dreams and day, the world He’s been waiting for through glass and air for days and nights, and still denied Him, the city incarnated previously only through glimpsed Garden views and bunkbedded gossip, the memories of surviving FBs then dying, now dead; this city the repository of all dreams, and of dream itself, a holy of holies, a blessed covenantal ark of two of every kind and more, too many—each, though, an unknowable island unto itself, floating purl in the air on the sea on the earth itself floating within an emptiness, an Island alone in the universe as cause of its own belief, belied, its wisdom shrouded in distance, remove, exile, cloudbank, smoke and ice: each one of us is an Island, nothing too original about that, but each of one us is an Island with a city atop, building a city atop; a mensch building his city ever higher and forever, a huge high world of a city in the head of every one of us, shored in with skin and wharved with bone. All the lanes and towers and scrapers and panes, their scale’s been known, has been registered, at least suspected, of nights and days immemorial and insomniac through the windows of the bedroom of His parents—O but the people, Other people, their lives, that doing going life, that’s what’s worth it, that’s what would’ve riveted: people wanting and needing and loving and losing; it’s noble, this wanton heedless loss; it’s incredible, this loveless need. Though they seem not people but animals, hopeful beasts, hoofing and snouting out their crude existences, stuck in the mud of their own minds, their mindlessness, seeking only to satisfy the barest, the basest—survival: the awareness that they are, they recognize that, and that they must be—that, too; and then, that their purpose is that they must keep on being until, and in the face of it All, which is a thousandeyed, a millionmouthed, with too many ears to pierce into servitude, and too many feet to knowingly toe. It’s amazing to some, how humbling, debasing, destructive if one isn’t strong; others think it grand, life in this bestial city, that it’s exciting, ennobling, inspirational even. God bless them, God save them and keep them—they know not what they do; they know not who they are, only if. For them, for now, that’s enough.
Animals, mewling punching kicking beasts and curs. Animals, but animals with beards, suddenly with sidelocks, animals adorned in fringes, clothed in black, in new boots and hats and wigs, which are black, too, and even laundered; their hides the purest snow. Without, everything’s slushy, sullied, trashed. Horse dropping desecration. Old oil on the quivering gelled surface of the eye. Lenses smudged in ember, whorled fingerprints of ash. Gray burrows into drifts of boot and cart. Filling letter slots, mailboxes, even mouths to stut and spit, silence, then, as if in a renewed language, an attempt to expound again. Arguments batter every corner. These animals never relent. As the limousine takes turns, rights lefts, makes drastic swerves, turnarounds, Us and loopdloops, it passes packs of seething envy, parts resentful mobs to leave them in its wake exhaust to breathe on—the window cracks, a stone’s been thrown, or has fallen as hail, be charitable. The city has chosen, it’s changing: bodies dumped to bump drifts of fall long cleared; apartments have been repainted, appliances replaced on warranty usurped. Restoration’s in the air, He’s sensing even without a face…Ben’s limousine swerving as if driven by the quick pitiful flicks of His searching head, His form, Him an entrapped wounded mammal attempting only to window a view through the veil. They hurl into embankments, stagger around in skid to seek a throughstreet, a shoveled path, a route alternate if wild: maps are useless, fit for kindling, to stuff into shoes for warmth. Understand, there have been casualties, with service down if not delayed: the numbers have been unordered, readdressed, the grid has come undone. Junk juts up from pilings midstreet, mounds of sooty clump, dark humps of tar macled with ice in glittery brilliance. The limo takes a wide turn, cuts across meaningless lanes to curve into a straightaway, pacing itself against the Parkside sprawl, lined with streetlamps that’ve wilted from the crooks of bishops into logs obstructing, laid frozen across Fifth Avenue from sidewalk to the sewer. The Park’s overgrown in icicle fang, a flank of clods and butts bearded in white, rising to overflow the walls that stand to stop the spill from threatening the lane: walls of fieldstone, filthed, themselves walled with heaps of trash. Ben hauls over to the window facing, collapses against its blind: Uptown, the arching arctic crests and crowns, the dusted trails with the Reservoir rinked; low gusts winding frost along the floor of the Park, through tunnels, over bridges, then across its lawns, their bushes and shrubs snowed as if to cool and blameless monuments, freshly flush with light. Untrafficked, it’s this pure polarity by day, a golden pale suffused by latter dusk—with a strange and utterly clear crystal coddled deep and cold within.
Through the mist, this hulking ice preserve—a sudden spurt of metal, then the estrangingly sunsanded stones of Jerusalem: here, a towering assemblage of brute rock arrayed in courtyards, gated in blocks of ice never to melt, everlasting, or so it’s said. This, the once and future Temple, to be risen Solo-monaic in its particular design, Scriptural in its general layout, and updated to modernity in every other amenity known to mensch and God alik
e. At the foot of its stairs and their twin plinths makeshifted with fiberglass fronds, twin lions prowl starving, guarding only their own skeletons: they’re joined to the stairhead by links of ice in a chain of ice, frozen around their manes. From this ascent, an upward airing—spires to lance the sky, to thrust their wound and drag the heavens down: banks of clouds fallen, dispersed into the Temple’s wings to be nested on all sides in courtyards of their snow, circling ever more sacred, to be centered evermore holy, ringing around the steaming freeze of the altars and lavers. All here, within, however, is of this other substance, this openness divinely synthetic whether of glass or weather, this material that is both of them at once, and neither—in that the inmost walls of the Temple are not walls but screens or scrims of this wondrous transparency; a thoughtless clarity, though as solid as study, and as thick as its books; walls through which any supplicant—speeding to the site, His limo heading into the Park on the sole access road to park itself wide at the very foot of the edifice, unfinished—could gaze his or her prayer directly into the middle of the structure, through each circumambulating courtyard, tripping, slipping, past every barrier of the sacred and then, beyond; walls, though, through which only the one true supplicant, it’s been said, Ben, could find His way beyond all mist, the mystifying freeze, straight into its generative core, the coldest inner sanctum: a block or cube of this icy substance; some say hollow, others say not, but a block nonetheless—the barren womb of the Temple’s heart, the seed to this total husk. As Mada comes quickly official down the stairs to greet, a mass of surrounding workers in their blue reflectored hardhats and whiteblue parkas drop their picks and shovels and make to restrain the raving lions, which lunge weakly to take nips and nibbles, only to soon tire, quiet, and muzzle themselves with nuzzles of the limo’s tires smoking, sniffing, licking, then lying down against the heated hull asleep.
The Park—a world Hanna had freshly laundered, laid upon the table of Manhattan, a cloth usually reserved for festive use, for company, now here without guests for the glorification of its centerpiece, the Temple. A towering worship of Babeling chutzpah. Ben’s escorted up its steps, almost slips, regains the landing, a mustering for workers and supply, stands small before the freeze. A threat to melt with the rise of any morning’s sun: GrecoRoman pediments topped with gilded domes, minarets held up by columns their canopies heaped hectic with frozen fruit; styles melting into the style of styles, into a pure if meaningless grand, nonsensical, less complex than merely complicated, more interests, many inputs: hundreds of commentaries have been going into its construction, are still, and there are even more designs to come; melting into each other, into themselves, and away, in a pomposity of rubble, alternately modestly plain, and ostentatiously ornate: a construction out of every century, and of none at all, in appearance an albino or transparent roach grown gigantically ancient in the sky; a monster, then, or its fossil, set with unimaginable cubits of inaccessible chamber, gates that give out onto portals, which give out unto walls, its entire phenomenon overwhelming by committee, with apparently infinite seemingly only ornamental pediments and plinths suspending emptiness over trembling void, its buttresses not buttressing but bowing, not flying but falling to porticoes, which are being lined with a statuary that to remain permissible must retain facelessness, as if a gallery of the disappeared, the dispossessed, as if niches and arcades for the unformed and unknown; the structure entire and the hope its unfinished implies a mess of every style that’s ever occurred to money, every style ever evident, possible, and especially attractive, to wealth and associated intimations of posterity potential on the agendum of its legion backers and benefactors, its myriad donors and trustees, whose exalted names—those of revivified Palestein, the Abulafias, illustrious above the others—would have been carved in fiery gold upon the cornerstone, had anyone thought to lay one.
Ben’s escorted up, through the excessive doors, which have to be edged open by the harnessed tug of a unionized team who pause every exertion or so to mob Him and His massing twelve bodyguards unveiled, Ben’s rebuffing lookalikes accompanying, for autographs they won’t grant, and miracles He can’t. His breath comes short and private. Up a flare, as if a tongue on fire, a redcarpet leading into the outermost courtyard that feels as if it might melt under His stride—is already melting, squishing underneath with each step, a seepage; the entire space behind Him, in front, under and above, hewn of that outlandishly modified ice that seems as if it, too, must return to a form of water, of air, to nothingness, forgotten, only to pour out new histories to be decided upon the next hardening, the cycle coming—a world destroyed with its faithful then flowing only to solidify all over again, reformed. Ben’s led with His hands out in front of Him, to touch, to feel, to mold: Him to grope through openings forever made and unmade, perpetually unfixed, past walls hung with the fresh flayed skins of test sacrifices, flapping animal tatters, dampened imageless coverings and curtains in a knotted wash, a fraying whorl: through halls left unfinished in holy negligence, secreting the odd ornament or gingerwork, molding, swirls, whirls and flumes, flows and risen waves, Him flailing past candleboats, votivelike buoys, copper basins, casks and flasks and censers, then at the far reach of an inner courtyard, a tarp-shrouded, twinesecured package resting upon a wooden pallet—the Ark of the Covenant, on permanent loan from the Vatican, courtesy of the Pope, Pius Zeppelini. It feels as if this whole edifice around Him, behind Him, in front, above, below, is about to collapse with His progress, to drain away in His passage, swirling Him filthy as profane, profaning, toward the gutter and the sewers, to gurgle out to ocean. Dizzying. And inspiring of guilt that His presence might signal such disaster. A shofar blast, an avalanche. Three short toots followed by one long moot, a tekiah to sound destruction. Ben tries not to breathe, concentrating Himself on following the carpet. Through another momentary gateway, He’s entering the Innermost Courtyard: full of drift, a vastly unsullied spanse—expansively fictile, a world of snow and flake, of gusting dust, germing in white and clearer, to a bluish glassiness, suffusing…the weather here, as it appears this enclosure has its own, is not fall but the scrim of fall, its skin’s fall, this sheer air paling, and then again vivid, revelatory in changing skies, prismatic but always pellucid, like a piacular rainbow whose only color is light in every shade. Set against the furthest wall, another set of doors, also steel though these significantly smaller than those of His initial entrance, now requiring His stoop slid down a flight of stairs—there, under the ice, Der stands decorous, impeccably impatient, leaning against the arch leading to the Holiest of Holies.
Inside’s laidout like a synagogue, a frozen shul grand and heavened with a divinity of outside light, sun and moon; its arched entranceway a soar, then the stadiumed sanctuary tapering, fluming itself intimately, into a modest front: a raised platform topped with pulpitry twinned at opposite ends, facto-rynew still in their swaddles. Between the pulpits, there’s an iron bank vault with combination lock, coming covered with a veil of its own, the ark of the Ark, the hold of the Law. A ruck of work rattles this holiness; it’s whisperish, hurried—this quick, cool chatter of labor, indistinct, as if a weather holding words inside its womb; such air keeping of secrets, freezing them, stilling Ben’s own tongue, to lick silently at His veil. Der escorts Him down the stairs past tiers of pews presently halfinstalled, their auxiliary aisles filled with scrap, cedarwood planks and troughs of coruscant nails. Upon the walls of the shul, scribes aloft in slings from scaffolds and with picks and hammers are rapping into that forgiving substance the names of the Affiliated dead—those of New York’s greater metropolitan region—to eventually, annularly, wind their way around the space, from floor to limitless sky: a miraculous racket, in that it doesn’t bring the house to fall, and they’re only on the B’s…
A hunch rises from a middle pew, a rare woman, if old and dumpy—she’s a yenta, a matchmaker, don’t hold it against her.
There’s silence, as the offer’s His or Der’s—she’s been kept waiting
for over an hour.
It’s about time. Who would say this, if not her?
How long were you going to make me wait? Or this?
Hanna, for one, if she hadn’t been dead, her weight leaned up against the ovenunit, the rangy stove with its four burners crisping curiosity atop while her son, her only son in older age if ever He’d make it He’s in for the weekend, just visiting, doubling up on a family reunion with an amorphous sort of business conference He won’t talk about, He shouldn’t, just sitting at a table in a kitchen in a house that once was His, no longer, at His size sitting around the table, sitting around the house with that laugh even younger than Him by now, grayaged and wrinkled, He’s worlded down, ground meat into a miser, miserable amid the dust, a loser and filthy still, morose and fatter than ever, dissatisfied with even His more rewarding dissatisfactions, His attainment to mediocrity, employment/maritalstatus; until, this sour older barren bitch as thin as a spine He’s too ashamed of her to bring her home who’d guilted Him into a commitment while it’s He who should be committed—into the minimum compatibility of a ring that’ll tarnish her finger upon the morning and a ceremony inviting at least the two of them, a rabbi and then her only friend whom He hates who hates Him worse; entirely unhappy, lifeless though unfortunately still alive, interested in nothing save what He’s forking away at, whatever Hanna’s served Him, leftovers foiled and heated then blown upon cooling, better than anything He could ever make, than even she the new she knows how to, neither can cook, He’ll never get past the microwave, the defrost stage, flashes of 12:00, the toaster and just add milk…