by Joshua Cohen
Ben holds up his hand to an elder withered to the perfection you’d expect to pay for in these parts, an Injun standing amid the throng, holding up and open his palm. In his other hand, he holds a miniature totem, topped with a scrap of plywood nailed, on which is scrawled an I…which must mean Information, indicative of progress, a palaver, and so Ben bows His head, like let us hold speech.
How, says the elder.
How what? He asks, thinking why not.
Howdy, he says, digging his totem into the ice and the dirt—donations are welcome, deal white with me, will you? He stands silent and straight and in-expressive as if a totem himself.
Ben forces on the elder a laugh, and he loosens up, pities with piety, waves Him over to meet his young squaw: a starved shy but pregnant girl, a refugee from the Navajo who despite their reputation for resistance, for violent survival, have all been already converted, he tells Him; then has Ben help shoe his horse while he—what else to do, not enough food—starts in with the nails on his kinder. If nothing else, he has a sense of humor. Not taking no, he offers Ben the freedom of his camp: lets Him sleep in line that night, the line that doesn’t move, as if anyone’d expected it to, the night that doesn’t move either, only its lights, which sway in the wind, which braid, as if to candle themselves with the powerlines, and then fire—lets Him sleep in the stow of a wagon on a heap of rank hay come loose from its bales, flameready, flecked pestilent with dung, nested infestation, the hatched eggs of vermin and varmint; amid the sleeps of the elder’s family of six with they threaten at least two more on the way, how they tussle in there, maybe even three by the end of the week—until just like tomorrow next Friday arrives, night, and with it as always the beginning of Shabbos again and so they prate at preparing wherever they stand, turning around to face east and now the Blessed art Thou firewater of its holy store are located, if at all, in the exact opposite direction. They’ll turn west again when the sun sets the next night.
You’re not safe here, the elder says preparing Kiddush that eve over what they’ve scooped of the weathering melt steeped with the peels of grapes saved and stored. I know who you are. I’m not just a native, I follow the news. And it’s not just my family, I fear for you, too. He holds aloft a murky tin cup, and there’s silence because none of them have yet memorized the blessing, the bracha. Over the washing, done from the depths of wheelrut puddles and hoofsinks, but before the breaking of bread, two cold loaves of corn, he takes Ben aside and whispers to Him: after we make Shabbos, it’s best you be gone, then returns to his kinder (his shayna shanya kinder), promising them—when we get to the store, I’ll trade up for more wine.
Ben sets out from the axis, walking two days, wandering three days, four, traversing four lines, arms, roads, and their people, kith and kined worlds…ways that might all be the same way, as the days of repetition lead toward the closing: blockade; with the meal spilled upon the ice then the savory salt, and there’s only one road left open…this the hardestrocked road, winding a way past the touristed ruins, originals destroyed whether by earthquake, fire, raid, or by time itself a God and then like Him or it reborn, again resurrected if only for the fast, distracted worship of weekenders ingathered; then, up to the so described, you sold me majestic vale of Third Mesa—how the pamphlets and brochures and catalogs available for a nominal investment of faith say windswept, say mighty with height, the site of the invisible archway by which the spirits of the dead might enter this world, and then exit, taking leave in a deep fall forever into the grandest of cañons. At least it’s not so small that you’d miss it.
To leave the line then, to forsake His personal migration, His own singular path or forgetting—repenting the axis entire, Ben takes off in any direction opposite, out, only out, into the open to wander again within the world of direction, of progress and forward, onward and upward due west. Yea though He walks through the valley of the shadow of death, how it’s worth it, there’s nothing much else to do. He heads toward the tinsel, Him fearless of evil, with only a rod and a staff, which are one and the same and discomforting, by now without an underwear change—out to Angels and its Holywood, passing over playa to plagued, past saltpillars of snow formed to His form and none other: apparitions, Himlike white specters, frozen in their own autochthonous escapes. Don’t look back. Don’t turn around. Every three or so steps, He shambles into a length of railroad track, 4 x 8½ gauge its iron quaking, hot to melt the fall as if a train’s fast approaching, though none ever does: tracks snaking over and under the dunes as if boundaries to invisible countries, borders writhing like worms strewn across the emptiness of the earth; the track rough, battered, barbed, occasionally surfacing, then submerging again, winding veinlike, mained, through the rises and falls of the sand in its dunes. After four exhaustive five exhausted days, fording washes dry turned tundra, sidestepping sidewinders, tumbling weeds and mossy boulders better hazards on a roll, Ben begins finding these longer lengths of track, then descent, and then nothing; hombre, we mean nil. Then, other even longer lengths of track ahead, these at an impossible angle of turning from any section previously found. These discontinuous stretches lie scattering the pale, small stitches on the flesh of the desert, as if holding together the grains below, binding the sand to the fundament, the grounded, down to earthed, wounded in valley—the lengths that once joined these sections made timeline of the discrete, gone, disappeared, maybe quakeswallowed: a punishment if not undeserved, how incurred. He nothing else to do follows the directions these markers might indicate to any mysticism inept; follows them far until they have Him at a loss, turned around on Himself and Ben has to rest and so sits down finally here—around this dim camp coiled in a valley between two risen dunes, one the sun, the other the sacralized moon. Sitting His legs crossed in the native style at a flame fricked of His own creation, sparked by two scraps of track, ties He lies with then falls asleep with in His hands, slitting both wrists with them and so becoming His own brother—to live for Him this life upon a shade’s awake. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them. Praise be to God.
Upon the morning, a good day to die (Shabbos the holiest of days according to our sages boding well for the disembodied, the living and the thinking and the unknowing, too—all holding expiration within the Sabbath’s bounds to be a wonderful omen, despite the suffer and sorrow of inexistence resultant)—having quit the line, forsaken the truck, his people, the world, and an inheritance of future worlds for himself if not for his own, pelted now in the pocked skin of a buzzard’s coyote tied around his neck, Kokuiena in chalk-bitten whiteface walks feet bared bleeding the day’s way up to the flat of Third Mesa: hours it takes him, moons and their illuminative suns before he ever arrives at this plat above his reserve; he paces himself, he must, it’s required, a mandate to take it slow and go easy, and so making those four stops along tradition’s hard pass, interrupting his ascent each pause to a quadrant, each a gesture to its own direction, its own wind—an acknowledgement or farewell, that’s the ritual; arrives atop the sky only at the time appointed, the hour he’d dreamt had been appointed, after having received visions, overdue bills, and a visit from a collection agency, you don’t want to know them. The higher you get, the greater the heaven, and the more you can find it within you, and within you to believe, too, in even your own shadow—how it gives him this riverrush of power, lording it over his past, as if a lower sky…dreamcatching shades of waving arms and hands, his fingers those dusky dun flocks of them splayed in benediction, a duchen, granting the blessing of death over pueblo and purchase: irrelevance, nothingness, dust to dust, smokestacks of cacti, cinders of scrub, driven snow ashes. Alone, he’s here to receive the arrival: Ben, Bahana…you know Him, me neither—and, too, to welcome the emergence of world the next, at last. Must ready yourself, must make pure, must not must at all. Still, it’s thoughts of her, stealing, his sister: mourn his Kuskuska (parents dead, everything they had, since then his heart as scarce as the earth); he’s lost her to them, his land and his people:
she’s far away now in Tucson, newlywed to a notable and working parttime at a mikveh, a kindergarten mornings, at least that’s the word, prophecy without postmark. Blanched by air this cast and rare, shadowed and shadowing he waits, and waits mightily; stands to face down the land: to gaze in all directions, which are none altogether, searching like a bird for its prey, the quarry of redemption, a Savior…a lamed weak Messiah just mincing in from afar, dragging Itself easy diseased, wounded as stationed and bloodily crowned—but for hours, hours then days and then a week of this moon it’s just desert, lack of faith. Must have just missed Him, must. How He’d been in the line, it’s been said, but oriented to the wrong wind, allied with an evil gust, turned around, lived against: they went west He went east, or the other way, too; a revelation denied him. After the death of his people through life they die once again; after faith’s lost, when memory itself goes forgotten, what’s left alone, him. Kokuiena. That and a sharp speck spied in the distance. A mote of the sun, just now rending a rip through a cloud…a push, a peck, then a beak—and suddenly, an eagle tears through the sky, shreds the gray with its wings flapping weather from one’s speed the other’s steer, snow and crests of cloud that swoop to him like snow, too, if not for the sun and its rising glare. Rattily rangy yet grand, despite the distress of its birth, it soars to eclipse even shadow, then hovers those ample and amply ancient wings any angel would kill for a span over and around the jut of the mesa and his standing stone. It holds in its beak a small black nothing, a moon defunct, a lunar rock only the size of an eye—a star lately fallen to dull…to blink, then to calm: it’s a yarmulke, nothing else, that the eagle’s glinting, gutripping talons tear from its beak, a yarmulke the vicious bald bird descends with, in a quickening, meteor’s motion, unforgivingly furious as if the animal’s ultimate plunge: a yarmulke as wide as the sky diving down, and at him, to drop lightly, with a plop, on his head.
A depot, an empty station. Ben waits for the fleck at the end of the sky: expectation, what might be a train might be only a blown speck of dust. He straddles a beaten bench unpainted and missing two legs. It’s been how long, a snow’s ever. Needled to the top of the only cactus here is a clock—a saguaro hosting the demoted if not forgotten station’s timepiece of only one hand, which is the hourhand, to the minute, or else it’s the second, up to whom, don’t think it ticks anymore: lightning struck’s stilled the mechanism; it holds an approximation of halftime. On the other hand, what’s the rush—frozen: that winded aleph from the east He hopes is a train comes no closer, but He’s done complaining for now, has hardened, holds puff and kvetch; think about it—at least there’s a bench, even if all it offers is splinter.
Here has no walls, no platform either, just this bundle of wood where a bunch of tracks, previously sunken, intermittently risen, converge then go on, track track, just metal and straight, far as west. Scattered haphazardly, protruding from the sand as if an alien species of arid growth, prickled in iron, unfinished, are levers and switches He has to rein Himself in from futzing around with, they tempt. His robe’s in tatters, draped around His head then cinched with its belt as kafiyah, to keep Him from sky. There’s no roof either to this, except weather, a snowball of sun beating cold.
What’s most disastrous, though, isn’t this lack of robing warmth, or of room & board, or companion, it’s the lack of a schedule—the affirmation of existence at the discretion of time. Know that in schedule is warmth, and that it is room and board and that it’s companionship, too, their hope. Ben searches for His in the sand, amid this dunedom chilblain and blown, howled and tossed and flungamong, a surface of shifting time and times, a confusion of stops and starts and both at once, at the mercy of unhoured weather. As if each sandgrain contained a number, a time number, a train number, a platform number and track number and the number of a stop, rownumbers and seatnumbers and letters, too, these letters and numbers engraved then effaced by the numb finger of a fiery gust. There are times of arrival and times of departure He sees, and sees prices, in what currencies and where to change to what, then transfers departing when for where, arriving who knows if at all, in a whirl, miragemotion, fluxed, mixed up with each other in the mingle of snows, packedoff, dispossessed, only to flake intercalated by the fix of the quarter, in precipitate wisps, drifted to nothing, the destruction of order, any system’s front passing through. Then, mindsick with dizziness to turn to the depot: thinking, where if you even wanted to would you pay, and who; He’ll be lucky if the thing arrives, the train, if once it arrives it ever leaves, if its cars are all hitched, if He’ll make His connection, where and to what. The sky doesn’t announce the stops anymore. No one is woken. Ben, His face, His nose, the only nail holding together the wood of the bench. A trainwreck, forgive.
The sound’s a hiss, undertongued shrill and then the smoky and fatty metal and meat smells seethed in a single stack, its vibrations opening the throat of the track into a quaking, mouthing fullvoiced, this wantonly gaping geshray. All aboard the morning, the desert. A locomotive comes into view, its single shining eye its headlight hulk and ever nearing as if the rising of the sun itself, illuminating the train of the engine: rusted loops and pulls and hauls soon slowing, now slowed, towing in the wake of its woke what brakes like an entire straightened equator, an endless end of the line, of coaches, passenger, cargo. A big old puffer, its 4-4-0 lead truck replete with snowplowing cowcatcher and towering inverse pyramidal smokestack to pulverize the sparks; Xmas Special classy, though izled aged, worked hard: its once neat forecab a memory of red trimmed in happy brass lately faded. It stops at Him as if for Him, sizzles. Ben tries to climb on and it snakes again, sisses, lurches a length, flings Him off. He gets up, tries again to clamber, another lurch, and again, He’s flung again—each time the stack’s smoke billows in regularly rolling puffs as if in mechanical laughter, tinged black. Making His footing, He finally swings on: rollingstock tumbling, without a ticket, to absquatulate paperless, without any documentation, official or not, neither destination. As for a passport, stamp this.
All pulls out, takes a turn, heads horizonways. Ahead of the train, its urge, far at the horizon—a tong of Orientals laying track out there, sloped amid the icy shimmer…they’re hammering in huff, laying track to the one track all the other tracks wind into, to pass through the tunnels of wind. Clad in silken skyshaded azure pajamas, sporting ponytails under dishpan strawhats don’t ask how they stay on they keep always, miraculously, a length enough ahead, a chug beyond then around the cliffed bend. They labor furiously, shvitzing to freeze a skin above their uniforms as thin as daybreak’s rashers, wielding hammers that might be their own arms distended, outgrown to smack the rails, the stakes and ties due west. All the wheels in a row, linedup on one of the infinitely interlocking, weaving tracks into one track, then past the horizon out again and in, disaster and its aversion, incidents of merging and splitting then merging again, until alone, finally, atop a lone slick track laid a length ahead of progress, laidout solitary through the forests then through the thinned forests and then the trees, who knows what trees, the grass and rubble, ruderal hope; the sadness inspired by trash that will outlive you, that must; to no purpose waste that can’t console…then, more grass in every shade of gray—and then trees again, all of them mere roots of His familytree, its fruit ripened to spoil, and then into the forest, its forests again and again: a landscape of repetition, an enumeration of repetitions enumerated, tradition’s ritual and its counting balm upon the heads of the fingers then kissed…folklore as an aid to sleep, the mythic soporific—the train kills the goyim, the goyim kill the goyim, the goyim kill the goy, the goy then kills the goat with his train, but they both die because the goy he also eats the goat, gevalt, which was ill, had terrible worms…and then, the odd stretch of fence, link or post, a trackfront house, a defunct yard whether for feed or lumber, the lot where better business practice comes to die; animal, that goat, cow, or chick, kinder and then again, emptiness; the iron, the steel, and the wood, the scorified energy,
relentless and yet still it’s a miracle that everything works—all of it more dangerous and terrifying in its sheer haphazardness, its stubborn slowness, a technical exhaustion, a mystery mechanized of steam and of smoke.