by Joshua Cohen
Their nametags, also, say obviously enough Benjamin Israelien, but underneath that writ expected are their real first olden names they’re given over to slowly forgetting, from which they’re changing, converting; what used to be referred to as their appelations Xtian, Unaffiliated, and then the names of their goyish hometowns; example: Harry, Mizpah, Larry, Shiloh, Gary, Lodi, here with his lovely wife, Vicki, doneup in drag.
My name, He says, is Jacobson, hymn, Jacobson, Esq., why not, from where or, more perfectly, from whom He gets it and what else (name, life—nomen est roaming, perhaps), He doesn’t know—and then there’s the touchy issue of quote His accreditation end quote; Jacobson, Esq. just once overheard and now, underspoken—the name, it’s been said, of His father the lawyer’s old lawyer of his own according to the will Israel’d left they’ve since scrapped. Elaine falls for it, asks Him to spell it all out for her: and He tries, capital-J-AC-O-B-S-O-N comma space capital-E-S-Q period.
And where am I from—Wishniak Hill, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s in Joysey, where else should it be? and Explain shrugs, goes and pens it onto His tag.
Hello, My Name Is: and yadda, she pins it to His lapel, its spike sticking through His bathrobe, His breast (later observers would describe Him, Him as Him—as if they’d known, or could’ve told the difference if only to tell it again well after the fact—as the height of inappropriateness, here in a house robe piped in pink, over His mother’s own robe trimmed in purple, both rattytatty, and holed), pricking Him to weep, His sacred heart. To pump Himself, then, from this nick of a question, Ben asking, what’s in a name—whether an inoculation against self, or a sanguinary palm smeared to mark the forehead in confusion, disbelief…blood, Ben thinks: maybe mine aren’t just impersonators; Jesus, do you think so they’re clones? Could be, could be worse. Holding Himself against the pain, the pains of both wound and thought, He tongues lips, sets teeth. Elaine hands Him a program. Explain blows a kiss to His booboo, is what she says from lips swollen with enhancement, botulinum, collagenital. He opens the paper to read right to left. How late tonight there’re still two midnight sessions to choose from: Doctor Tweiss’ scheduled to talk in the Shishak Suite about minimally invasive surgical options to, and He’s quoting: Get The Most Out Of Your Sinuses; competing with his brother Doctor Tweiss who he’s up late doing the Ramses Room in a discussion of the Metametymparapsychologyality of (Im)personational (Im)personation: An Excursus in Pretty Pictures & Lite Muzak; please pick up your vouchers from Registration, it’s urged.
Fat, frizzy almost menschs swarm Him away with them into an elevator then upstairs to either or both sessions included (How To Be Two Places At The Same Time: A Seminar for Expectant Mothers; a prerequisite for How To Do Two Things At Once II: A CrashCourse, kneepads not provided), but the food—it’s back down on the floor below buttoned the lobby’s L. Ben jiggles a flabby wriggle from their frazzled, cuticlebitten grasp, attempts to take the elevators again and this direction down, but the doors’ve already shut, fallen. He rests Himself against the buttons to summon the lights, God forbid walk a floor. Suddenly, the hallway’s hobbled through with Bens halting with walkers and quadcanes, disabled to wheelchairs (electric and wheeled by Himself, by His own best companions both in drag and in friendship, and in the spirit of charitable help), incarnations of any fate that might be His, forever robbed of their futures—with their constant flowmasks or nasal cannulas hooked up as if by strands of saliva to little, wienerlike oxygen tanks tubing attendance, and, too, them lying their spacesaving, moneysaving accommodation in the Q’asino’s sprawled ballrooms and hallways and even in the elevators He’s waiting for still atop a host of rental and stolen stretchers hauled, gurneys rolled on casters that squeak to suspect an infestation of mice from function to food again and again.
A ding, the elevator doors open with Him about to step inside but instead He’s crowded back and out by more Bens piling out, too many, too much even for Him who’s been Himself all His life—what little of life there’s been, both personally with regard to fulfillment and, also, speaking of time. Huffpuff Ben goes to find the door to a stairwell in case of divinely intercessory fire and there in the hall tries at the handles and finds one unlocked and so opens it, He’s sorry: inside the room and sitting on a twinbed’s a mensch, a nearmensch, an almost there, close but not quite, who he looks though—superficially, the suspicion’s only a feeling—just like what His twin would’ve been in reflection, in a mirror hutched on the opposite desk; he’s naked from a hotwaterwasting, fogmirrored shower now drying and draping himself for modesty’s sake with a pair of tzitzit that barely hides the wound of a circumcision that just has to be recent. To this particular Benjaminite’s credit, even his squeal retails real—Him fleeing from the sound of His own voice, through the hall down to its end trying all the doors along the way, locked jimmies locked, then tries the last, the one whose name is Stairs lettered in the holy tongue, too, across its window in red, shoulders into its give to tumble down a flight to a landing whose door opens back into the lobby. But it’s an emergency exit, rigged, wired, and so above there’s an alarm ringing like slots ping in zeros of sound, an openmouthed, untongued everymensch for Himself, no one gets out of the desert alive—people flinging aside even panic, fleeing themselves as one self that is Himself, too, to lobby exits lit and conspicuous, blatant and yet too narrow to accommodate such padded passage as if the very openings, the needle’s eye gateway, to Heaven Itself, which is bright and cold and pavedover with tar…Ben approaches the desk and without really asking Himself what He’s doing asks for a vehicle, demands as if with all the credit in the world behind Him anything with wheels and like now.
And what’s your name, sir? the ancient, fisticfaced hop wants to know.
And the mensch laughs a scar until Ben gives up Jacobson, Esq., with what room I forget…no, #108, the number of the room from which He’d just been evicted by ululant force. The hop sobers professional as the sprinklers rain down on his head and the water gathers in the cistern bowled between his prognathic lower lip and his gums. He nods Him out with a you’ll have to speak with the valet through the revolving doors through which He spins planetarily, revolting around and around, then finally outside and dizzied, lit and alarmed into night, its vastness human and waged: starryvested valets at their stands, amid intricately stranding constellations of velvet, webs suspended fine and strong between tarnished poles. Police arrive as wolves, with the tails of scorpions and the disgruntled foreheads of fathers at the siren of fivetrumpet alarm. He rips His nametag from His robes, throws it to the sidewalk, stands out unacknowledged. Then, bends His knee to pick up that nametag, walks over to the trashcan aside the entrance, throws it properly away—Hanna would be proud, would’ve been.
Ben outside and alone takes in the Strip, the hotels with the velouring plush of their high, brightchandeliered halls; their checkeredpast gaming-floors, their chipped pools, sexually voluble fountains; the honeymoon suites up above, where Moloch beds down with Mammon, their minted offspring incubated in vaults, coins awaiting their sacrifice within dimly fluoresced lairs underground. He mingles amid this jingle and jang, tourists the spume and the flash and the flicker. We Buy Your Old Currency, a lit billboard speculates then squelches to urrency, urgent. Gold accepted, in lieu of jewels. Whores solicit the favors of unpatrolled corners and curbs halfextorted; who knows what sex they are or might think to be, they’re heaped in His clothes and hijacked tablecloths over what’s hoped are shapelier bodies. Firemenschs loiter among them getting paid by the hour, standing around like hoses stopped up, with their tainted dalmatians like swollen hydrants to be tapped for their foam. Despite the panic, impersonators fleeing, others are still just arriving, Bens perpetually coming and going—from their sad vans and paneled sedans, station wagons lonely with only the driver’s seat ever occupied; they’re uniformly falling apart, upholstered in delusion, but mufflered in dream—if not evacuating or hauling the wrinkles of their luggage to and from porters no longer wait
ing around for their tips, they’re honkskronking a nap on their horns on their ways waiting to pull in and out of the horseshoe blocked, too, by tethered and poorly shod horses and donkeys and mules with their bales of haphazard hay, their sirens of whinnies and brays. Ben whispers to a slot attendant who just now lucky for one of them happens to be on break who whispers Him, then, to a cage cashier with illegibly tattooed knuckles just punching in with a particular valet, caped and capped, who whispers Him to negotiate: two shekels large in His own denomination a no go, three shekels, I can’t hear you, what else, you drive a hard—nu, I’ll see what I can do…how much they’re talking for a pickup, what’s spare at the moment, a dumb, lumbering truck, a paleotechnic Henry Ford model the only vehicle he can part with at this hour, tonight with its alarm and for any price (part of which he has to kick up to the goy he’d punched in), deal or no steal; last week its owner had run up a tab, having jumped bail after being euphemistically too energetic in the way he’d talked to the officer; then, skipped out on his bill with a creditline you couldn’t use to pick up your mother, without a kidney, short sperm, and two pints of blood; he used to be a priest or a preacher’s the word, they have it tough nowadays, you know how it is…
And so to begin in with the handling, kicking the tires of a transient deal: they ding around birthrights, fling wrongs, sly lentils, a large bowl of His lot taken with doubly dipped doses of salt. The valet doesn’t believe who Ben is and so He tells him He doesn’t either, then backs the goy into a corner and opens His robe. A circumcision convinces—especially of the one actually doing the severance. Touch it, He tells him, tug it, shift it and tear: it doesn’t hurt, the emes, no fooling—it’s just skin, it flakes off, yours to keep.
Through glint and glit, Heber’s swerving the limo around and He realizes upon dodging its hood then the sweep of its lights that Hamm’s probably even now up in the pentpyramid, attempting to evacuate His person downstairs. Bombsquad shows up only to fill out their insurance paperwork on the dash of their truck; anyone got a pen, we’ll take turns. And so Ben hides as much of Himself as possible behind the hollow of an ivylocked column, which is maybe unnecessary and what’s more thirty bits of silver neurotic what with the other Bens betraying around—how hiding’ll just make Him all the more findable, found…emerging only when the valet’s gotten the truck out of hock to the headwaiter and lot then waves Him from the cab over to the edge of the sidewalk, the further curb where they idle at the head of a motorcade of who gets to be first response. A vehicle not usually recommended for the Affiliated, furthest thing from, but it works; one maladroit emission on wheels, mobile death. Ben gets up into the cab, the truck sags, belches exhaust on its chassis. It’s cancerously blueblack, with a filthy, fatty white interior, lipoid pleather that’s not quite fake as it’s not quite trying for real. A custom job, coming to ruin: the eagle once fossilized upon the face of its hood has flown, its nest left to the weather, peeling piscine finish in rusty scales, even the scabrous metal itself flaking away, gloss to dross; the rims churning chromed: lick my mudflaps, they say in flashy roman—without honor. At least there’s a full tank of gas.
The valet leaves Him honored, happy to be of help and with a wish of good mazel, no thanks he’s pleased only a thumb held up in front of a wink (and so, obscuring his recently hirsute face from surveillance). Proudly, the goy struts back to his stand engrossed in Ben’s outermost robe, hotelcomplimentary, and daubed in His blood, its left pocket hanging fully low past its purfle, heavy with the skin of His shed. Once unobserved, how it’s humiliating, though: Ben gets the hulk out of park, takes a moment to realize the emergency’s on, releases it, stiff footwork on the pedals, starts and spurts, stalls, starts and stalls on—trying to remember Heber’s lightly natural routine, that mechanical ritual as unconsciously observed too many mornings in transit, if most of them dreamed halfway to sleep (an inheritance, this techincal debility: like everyone else in their Development, His parents only ever drove automatics: the vans and the minivans, too, the rovers and even Israel’s promotional sportscar that he’d had out on lease for all of a month before being rearended by a towtruck out on the GWB, then trading it in on Hanna’s insistence for a practical coupe with no soul, prone to every complaint ever insured by the responsible, to be handeddown to Rubina, Simone, and Liv in their turns right and left—a fray amid the wires of veins, it must be, this disconnect deep in the blood); He manages how to have it going, to keep it going, soon gone…to turn it around the drive’s short learningcurve; then eventually—heading out.
Ben without chauffeur, though it can’t be too hard, just follow the nose of the road, hound it out. On the wing of a prayer: check mirrors, burn maps. He’s got a ways to go nowhere, both pursued and pursuing…Him to be forktrailed, coattailed by drones, Bens not created by God but recreated by the science of fame: His replica becoming their replican’t, willingly, with each of them lapsed, failed failures, messes and wouldaBes, Messiahs-in-training untamed without name. Wandering throughout the whole of the desert, New Mexico, Arizona, south by southwest, until—ultimately, a landmark’s required: the West Pole, a totemic redwood, a giant sequoia flagged with a flag; having been driven out from the buffet, denied the breaking of the fast the evening next (says the Law, the groom must go without on the day He’s to be married), which reminds: driven, too, from Lillian Shade, almost, not quite, Israelien, which would’ve been real Schade, who tomorrow early would’ve made her arrival on Aeroforce Aleph, its descent better classified, into the semaphored lights: their message, stay away, go back from whence you came, but then the glide to a stop, the gangway would be hauled up and who’s going to be there to greet her and her First Family once this gets out, makes wire and with it, stifles, strangles—an understudy public, a lesser name fallen from the agenda’s marquee? Off the strip, they’re waiting with new letters to hang. Meaning, runawayed. The wind, blowing colder than ever, winds its way into the loosest slots in town, as they’re sold—all proceeds going to the charity of a blind eye, the moon’s. The syncope, the tone: a howl with the windows darked down. Finger a shekel—call your mother goodbye one of these nevers. Tell her you’re not coming home.
To set out through tunnels, over the underpasses, loop around then turn without signal. To drive through the night—no, not to drive but to truck…that’s what the goyim say, what they once said and fast, virilely hard and long, Unaffiliated with the caution required: due westward ho, and once nowhere then deeper, ever further into its myth, its fantastical lore—sandshifts…Sabra prickly pears, Mesozoic lizards, cacti, and the threat of wily coyotes, existential roadrunning past repeating scenery repeating and repeating again, deanimate and so no longer funny but wasting—O the barren Midbar, the gulag that borders Siburbia; the whole contiguous country out there, how it’s one enormous golfcourse…neglected, defiled, destroyed—one hole let’s say three par of a course that breadths the universe entire, it might; or, our earth’s the ball, and it lays foul, from where it must be hit, again…a west to which the sun’s set to putter around in darkness, to waste its waning years paying bills by memory to waking, making increasingly conservative investments in day. Here, where everyone retires—Ben trucks, and Ben lives.
At the outskirts, the ramshackle gird of the grid, of failures and fallings, car carapaces, dungbeetlelike burnt like scarabs, swaying palms trunked in plaster, splintered rust…Ben pulls into the lot of a roadhouse being converted into a synagogue to turn Himself around after He misses a turn, and prays, if just for a moment. May my memory in this town be for a whammy, for any who might so deserve It—unto a double, what’s to lose by being so generous, no jackpots, no wins shalt ye merit. Then, behind Him, once pulled back onto the road prominently marked to give itself unto the altar of highway, as if a secular offering to the earth: there’s the call and the echo of fire…lighting up the desert in the rearview mirror and reflected, the same, in the windshield in front and there in His face, it’s a fireworks show; the night before the night, but still,
a display almost divine in how violable, without distance. Huge trinities dazzling, they’re banging, they’re bursting, such warming, nostalgic salute—not ending but beginning again, not a covenant new or liturgical levin but a reminder that rainbows can be made by us, too, here and now. Not the engine backfiring, Ben—it’s the rocket’s reddening glary that’s sparkling blue, which once fired to fizzle is white, the ash of their promises made: another whiz, yet another big bang…halos exploding, a sundering of air and a coming together again, both at once: dumped clumps of gunpowder lit hissily to pop, poking holes in even the most spacious of skies, holes that are the skies in the sky—heavens, Heaven, that most blessed of the firmaments known, and the only. O’er amber wanes of grave.
An apparition above, a starry conjunction, a convergence of smokes: the lights fade into darkness, total, leaving only tracework, a serpentine sigh…a gray wispiness, a winding sinuousness, then—space, the emptiness ensuing punctuated only by the twinkle of a planet. Mars, if He had to war with guess, a mote of lava in the eye. In its entirety, though, this smoke’s a known form: half of infinity, a feminine slither—it’s a questionmark that’s up there, and who are we not to oblige? Who’s He not to make manifest any portent above? And so, what’s Ben doing, where’s He headed and why? Hazy, still, hidden in wind…you don’t think you’ll get away that easy, do you? simply disappear into ranks, the hierarchy, no? any route, which way high or free, which interstate of hundreds, of thousands? what about the symbolizing signs, the thisway thataway arrows, ten miles always to the next, ask directions, shun pride. You don’t think you’re your own keeper now, do you? Haven’t you perused at any length the books they’re called Exodus, Leviticus? Numbers, when your own is up, cataloged under As good as…check the topmost drawer of the nightstand at any schlumpy motel. Don’t you know from the desert, the boiltongued, locustlidded suffering before the Law—though that’s all a moon ago, and the suffering, it goes on, forget unabated, we’re talking redoubled the stronger. He has sand in His mouth, rolls up the windows and the windshield is fogged. More importantly, is He headed for a mountain? Paramount as Sinai. If so, then why and for what? Where’d all those years go just like that and a whole generation dead in demerit? Anyway, what Law is there left to receive, and who are you to receive it? No offense. None taken. The smoky tail of the snake that’s only tail puffs, anguiform purls away, but the planet that gave period to its mark still remains. Punctuates void.