Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  To His left, a golfbag lies empty at the verge of what had been a sandtrap. To His right, an iron numbered nine as if in designation of the shadow of its future hour—and then a driver, which is crossed over the iron to form an X, marking what geary spot, amid the dot dot dotting of balls. Ben rubs Himself, rubbing to itching, He has to, to scratching again, to raw. He sits up, stares. The links’ve gone to dreck, which is pretty much par for the course: wind’s up coarsened from the hoard of the traps, whiting out the arroyos, bunkers, and cañons menschmade and those that are merely the obstructions of nature; easterly as far as the wedge of horizon, these pyres of clubs and bags, leisure dolmens, puttered obelisks, jutting up from the snow littered as if in offering with gloves quickly stripped, shed headcovers, upended stands; golfcarts overturned as if abandoned at the score settled on total disaster, imminent threat disrupting all shadows, their teetime; and then, furthest to the west, a forever spanse of evergreen snows, moneyshaded from astroturf leak—the leachate tainting of the real by the fake.

  Oy, the back of my knees. Ben rises to survey the lay: as if a landfill in its wastefulness, almost otherworldly as uninhabitable, too cold to breathe…this terra terribilis gone incognito without the usual atmosphere of polyester admixed with plaid. As He rises, He’s scratching still. What is it, it’s horrible. A mold forming around Him, a bushy cloud or monstrous fur, the seeped whitening green of His sleep, staining the robe, sucked onto the skin. He itches, it feels, even unconsciously, in His unconscious, its recognizance in the waters hazarded over with ice: to let fly with nails at your reflection, the burn in your brain—it’s leprosy, Ben, this land lepromatous; you’re going to have to trust us on this, we’re all doctors here, at least we’ve all been to doctors; take off your robe, put on this gown, you’re on holied ground: sit down, let’s answer our questions.

  What’s given Him this leprosy, assuming that’s what it is? Los Siegeles, babele, Los Siegeles, the last He remembers. What’s the line, what’re the real odds—on survival; how He’d wandered feverish, dazedly delirious, to here, this golf links, to the south, the west, between them and both, dreamlessly scratching itching and raw, unkempt to His fingernails gnawed, tearing a drip precious of vein? Had He been walking, what, two, three, four days due southwest, half through the iced desert, over freeways newly tolled but who has the nerve to pay, in doing so just denying an inheritance lately received: withhold your right over every head, not chutzpah and yet neither is it cheating per se, only it’s a sin not to bargain, to handle as well as the truck, abandoned and lost—over ticketed ways high and low, banditbound interstates, routes fined, polared to pot…was it a drink and its poison He’d been slipped, comped to conk out, the seizing of shikker—a bartender He’d paid to be serviced by, only to be taken for all and for nothing? Whatever image He might try to mock of Himself gets subsumed in the fame, sublimated, otherwise Affiliated, never at fault. What Ben last remembers: betting the bank on red 18, or, then nothingness: dropping some dry drink, something too ginned, or overly vermouthed, a drink altogether too expensive and refined to ever be indulged upon His own free will and separate check, there’s no way He’d ordered it for Himself, no way He even knew of its existence (Israel drank wine, Hanna had sipped Israel’s), attempting a splurge only to spill the dribble over His robe, soaking His socks, puddling slippers. Bookies to creditors. Dealers untipped. Bellboychicks and cocktailmaydels. Foxtailed waitresses. BunnyBens, and then what. Then abducted, but how, only to wake up here rawly rufescent, with this futzed fuzz on His skin. He holds at the pole for support, then with a sigh lets it go and stands upright alone and unsteady, wavers like the flag veiling His eyes, nearly falls a foot into the hole below, staggers then rights Himself again, tries to breathe deeply.

  Fore! is said or only heard. A white shot shrieks through the sky: a whining whiz, this dimpled ionomer incoming, a golfball to hit Him on the head, lay Him out sprawled—His head on the green again, a rising welt to hazard the forehead, His feet chipped in the direction of the penultimate hole, arms strewn to fingers pointing to far groves withered around water frozen at the longest drives of horizon. Ben comes to, then, to hooting, scraping from the treestand that shades the neighboring rough; a riled noise coming closer, the strangling shake of bare boughs, white, and the swinging scurry of fur. Another weather begins, a hail of golfballs bearing down on Him as He stands yet again and staggers dazedly from the flag and its hole to where par three should be, should’ve been if ever landed and ended. He’s dodging this plague of balls like fallingstars or planets, dropped, getting hit in the face, breast, and crotch; stumbling midfairway toward a precipitous rise in the greened snow and there, the protrusion of a coontailed antenna, bent by the wind; to kneel atop that very hunch, prostrate upon the unlandscaped to dig out amid the pelt a golfcart buried, to turn it upright with all His strength, to kick at tires, knock icicles from hood, then rev—to head, is the thought lazy, tired, nauseous, necrotic but also fuzzily numbed in a personal hoar, this private ice of mucoid scaly fungus, across the countryclub restricted no longer, puttering quickly toward the 19th Hole Greenhouse He espies for the refreshment of safety.

  Goddamnit no stalling, balls boinking, boinging, every cartoony sound from the roof of His ride. Ben putts ahead at fullspeed, whatever He’ll make if He floors it, He does as if His foot’s accelerating strata down through the ground, a deep dig into earth cleated with skulls still with their caps on. His skin’s on fire, despite a fervorless fear in His veins. All around Him, the astrotruf ’s peeling its planet: ailing, occupied with shedding itself, with shedding the sheds, in an affliction that’s merged a mess into a unified albescence upturned and shot through with green, an alien mold spored out from under the valleyed snow and the sand of the sandtraps and from around the perfectly elliptical extremes of the ponds, left for the disease that shatters ice in removes, their own sheered removals, both epigenous and dermal and further below, the course entire a fluctuant surge: mounds falling from mounds, rises and dips and verges pocked, sopping a sort of freeform verdural, in a scarification fungally frozen, tongued sick with a fever, blown hot and cold; the soured fairways say, Aahhh…despite being a golfcourse, can you believe, there’s not a single physician around.

  And so any diagnosis must be a consultation made brief with belief, an experiment of the etiologically theological, what we’re talking is a matter of faith. If, as it’s been said, God is everything, both a maker and a ruler, a judge and a king, then He must be a dermatologist, too, accredited by His own infinite wisdom, insured by His own illimitable might—after all, Who can know the world and its skin and the creatures that infest it as us better than the One Who created them all, only to wrong us with sickness, punish with disease. Mycobacterium leprae might be the verdict, then, Ben’s suspicion confirmed: endemic to this desert, an ailment of the links sinned entire—but if so then leprosy of a divine diagnosis, a leprosy of a Scriptural strength. Metastasized, exteriorized, a blight out of body—retributively, the disease of Miriam, the sister to Moses, the illness that’d pillowed her outside the encampment, delirious under the sun, lately absent.

  Ben reaches the Greenhouse if it still has enough walls and enough of a roof to be called or considered any kind of a house, though greener than ever from the slurry of turf: it’s fallen, a skeletal stress of twisted trophies and signage tangles, the remnant of banquet facilities with legless chairs up on splintered tables, locker modules ripped from the setting of their rooms then arranged in the showers, as if metallic megaliths and trilithons intended for the worship of pagans. Inside, which is now its outside, the same, everything’s in a feverish splotch, made lesion, numbly ashen, and flaky. Pusssoaked shammies. Pinkgray flesh flayed loose on clubs and barbarous spikes. Ben parks the cart and wades in in search of food and drink. And the more He stands gleaning through the rubble for any perishables that might’ve preserved, even the alcohol, a light Kiddush from the bar forever closed, the hackedup cherrywood with its bacillarylike rows of bottle
s not cellared—how He burns more and more, a skinpeel, it’s unbearable, maculamade, that and a flow of blood from the nose, epistaxis the name; inflammation from nodule to plaque, His nostrils impassable, the same with His sinuses, His throat a stack puffing, a blowsy chimney on fire itself.

  A crackling barbed rustle, then a prickle of shrubs, a mustering sound…as over a slicking hump He’d driven around once the concrete barrier of the parkinglot fronting the lazaretlike, leprosariumal Greenhouse and all in a tizzy tripping and falling over fallen and tripped parts of themselves, deforming in a partiform peel—the feral caddies klutz in on Him, pariahs in a panicked charge; they’re hurling golfballs at the misered glass the edifice has left as windows, as walls, sharding into stings, to embed amid the loosening of limbs; they the frontline, they’re tearing under their armpits with grownout nails and fisted tees wedged to nest between the knuckles remaining; caddies devolved, grown apelike, primalputsched, silverfurry with the molder of fervent, feverous illness, they’re sharp of tooth and eyed in wild suppuration, overworked yet underpaid, never tipped enough to stave off their eventual, inevitable revenge: some weak ones hanging by the stumps of near trees, wrapping their wounds one by one in the club’s insignified linen napkins so as to be prepared at a moment or signal, for a last assault, a final attempt—to swing for the groin or the throat; others scramble up trees shaggy with snow, drooptrunked, for a better position from which to sling their pocketed balls, smashing even the heads of their fellows, the stronger ones having hopped the lot’s perimeter hedge to swarm through the remains of and tumular over this Greenhouse fallen, its sharp edges of metalmade detritus: counters’, chairs’, tables’, slicing them flanking Him at all ruin’s routes, fall’s momentary escapes, with exits left unilluminated; they’re wielding gripless sand wedges, drivers and irons numbering high into the sixthousands, woods and putters, their bags’ umbrellas, poisonously ferruled, ribs spooked out to corner Him to carcass, to whip Him into submission with gratis towels knotted from the laundrybins of the lockerroom showers, soiled and un, wetted hard then rolled, and then there in the last stall with its spillsticky floor and its soapdish bitten to muffle to punch and kick at Ben, as if to infect their own form, sustaining toward what if not death…their knuckling tees, their fingers and toes only missing, not missed.

  Ben makes for an exit, from them and His fear, the scabrous heat piling piteously through the scaly, hairy rubble, the caddies assailing from the rear: His momentum knocking them to impalement on unframed window mullions, lepromatically ferruginous supports, squamous stang and transom, upended foundations studded with infecting nails of just rust, crushed by blocks in cinders; heads through what’d been the club’s kitchen and its service entrance in a vaulting slide over the meridian counter, banging Himself on the hanging pans and pots and skillets, on His way grabbing at the handles and knobs of bins and cabinets and pantries abandoned, looted empty of goods canned, preservativebalmed in case of Apocalypse or Sunday shortage, then out the door to flee the course entire; lunging over the fence at the rough’s rough edge, there falling into a neighboring yard, getting mired in a swimmingpool dry though filled with the pasttime of personal days—innumerable faked sick leaves’ worth of golfballs lost, fouled globes.

  Ben’s clambering over the slippery mount, atop, near giving up, balls giving way bumptiously under His effort, the righting rump; then, a last, lumbering thrash, and He emerges to hurl Himself over the pool’s far ledge—on His gut, slit, a fish floundering fluke, the catch of last days to fin up onto dry land upon two legs now to fly through the house (its screendoor, open, its door-door, open); then, as if Friday’s first course belated, through the blessing of a family’s kitchen, around its middle countertop and there parents and kinder gathered in their service of Havdalah, meaning To make distinct, to keep kadosh, or segulah separate the mundanity of tonight and its tomorrow from that or the sanctified of another tonight, that of its sacred today—Havdalah the candled conclusion of the Sabbath with its Elijah arrived as Him, scaring the gehenna out of this newest Affiliate, Ima, Aba, their two point five kinder, upsetting their braid of fire to consume the cabinetry, to tarnish with smoke the cups for Kiddush, its wine inflamingly holy, to incense the box of spices at which we nose at Shabbos’ end, as if to revive ourselves after an illness.

  A few clicks up the high dry you bet Jurassic it once was a river—now only a moat without the water or bridging courtesy to freeze, a snowedover safeguard of the turreted monstrosity above: a forbiddingly outlandish stucco manse, pinkening with the dawn though perched resident heavens higher out on that thar mesa, which juts up majestically from the very middle of an enormous cañon sunk around it, a socket of this cold and blinded earth. This the estate of the legendary Lee Sure, a former Holywood actor, producer, director you name it who’d retired his own household name for a new home out here only a moon ago, deserted his career in its recent crisis to zone this plot his own; dedicating the future development of this scenic openness around him as a sanctuary for fellow moviefolk blacklisted for their refusal to convert. He’s a hefty and tanned goy, threechinned, fourbanked, presently a mere two laps and a length or so into his daily routine in his pool dramatically overheated when what do you know the poolside numberless telephone rings. His wife, Lara née Busch of the once prominent militaryindustrial Buschs, maybe you know them or better—she sits alongside the unit ringing without registering any interest, even awareness: a woman sunned to small under artificial lamps, pruned, heated to petite…the morning is, in her words to her Kush of almost every morning when and if the medication takes, perfect, am I right? Above the sun a yolk hidden forever within its cloudy shell, never to crack down upon us its warmth, though as she says she only eats the whites, dear, she reminds again her servant who she’s just sounding him out for the umptillionth time and only today, I only eat the whites…this the first day for her outside in a week: the new agoraphobia drug’s finally spaced her (a tumult, a whirlwind of late the reconstruction of its disaster psychologically requiring a host of special prescriptions and proscriptions both phoned in and forged: how they’d finally cashed out of the city, which’d meant Angels, last moon, headed out to the desert to get away from this next generation of players like Spielgrob, Kinoff, Joshuabaum, P. A. Yuccabaum, all the freest agency of their wives present and ex, to live heightened security and alone in this mansion they’ve been renovating forever, it already seems, what with memory, way back since the beginning of western time, ever since this mesa had been no more than a dunghill, and the immigrants laboring no more than dark scurrying dreams), she’s dulled insensate though perched purty in a freshly oiled chaiselounge under sunlamps set in the shade of the umbrellad highdiving platform facing her darting husband deaf to the telephone again with its insistent rattle, a needy baby cribbed upon an elegantly fineboned wicker cart to her side that also holds, on its topmost shelf, the remains of her brunch: bacon and sausages and slices of contraband ham for the protein, hold the salt, with blood pressure onefortysomething over a hundred causes heart disease served up still beating if slowing apropos a white plate trimmed with three eggs scrambled to the texture of her brains; dear, I only eat the whites (cholesterol)…can’t be bothered to answer the phone, too much trouble, how could she on a day as perfect as this, so stressfree, am I right, and so the Kush obliges—how can’t he and keep his employ, still run his illegal smuggling operation of goyim fleeing, running, swimming, over to Mexico out of the caves of the valley below; he drags Sure in to the concrete shore with a hook used to retrieve cocktail glasses sunk to pool’s bottom.

  Telephone for you, sir, the Kush says and, is it important? is what Sure yells strangled, his ears sloshingly full up with scald, I gave specific instructions only to be disturbed if it’s important.

  Is it important? the Kush asks into the business end, the receiver black and lost under the lobe of his ear, the glint of its enslaving stud. A moment of bated listening to the breathless way they still talk it back east, which
Sure should be able to hear even from where he’s sitting suited, goggled, and waterlogged, at the lip of the pool with his feet dangling in the water it costs him don’t even ask what a fortune to heat. Keep it just at 100º. And then, it’s important, the Kush vouches, tucking the phone under his jaw.

  Is it urgent, though? Sure asks as he towels his pecs, kicking up with his toes small waves against the filter.

  One moment, sir, the Kush asks, is it urgent? another moment for the Kush to say, it is urgent, sir.

  Hokey doke, says Sure, then on a scale of one to five, no, better make it one to ten, how urgent is it? With one being forget about it, and ten being my God is on fire. Ask him that, he says as if in challenge, a coldweather throw-down…tousles dry his hair, jumps in a regimen such as was once recommended to Rabbi Hillel, up on one foot then down on the other to unclog the ears as the Kush he goes and asks what he asks, on a scale of one to ten, sir, exactly how urgent is this?