by Joshua Cohen
The faster they go, Ben’s windows become ice and soon, halfsleeping, He has to pry His face away from the frozen. He has the compartment to Himself—the entire car’s His, it seems He’s alone in the train. To rouse, He goes out to the aisle—to explore, to forage for a diningcar, for food & drink, vendors, concessions He’ll compromise, if there is any diningcar, with waiters and a cook and a bartender, too, if there’s even a conductor, nu, if that’s not too much to ask, any official stoking the way and not just ghosts with the train itself a hobo between homeless worlds, condemned to the superstitious itinerant: a train that haunts the tracks desperate, enraged…all on its own, for Him and Him only. And so, to hope for an outside voice, whether it be live from the wilderness booming theology, or only temporally shrill and coming over a ceilinged speaker to tell Him what, where to stop, to get off for and just go. He makes way up the aisle, thrown from seat to empty seat, then enters the next car, one class upgraded from that of His board: it’s labeled on a sign as Levi and empty itself; the class of the car ahead He enters, it’s called Cohen, and is quiet, abandoned: this class the only class outfitted in plush, and there’s a tiny draft of heat, a lick up from the lowermost grill. And then the locomotive—but who knows how far the hierarchy extends in the other direction, eastward past the classless Israelien and further down the track again plunged into the unnamed, the unlabeled if not unmentionable rearcars, stretching to the intent or is it the purpose of forever—they’re packed, sardined to the gills: hymn, they’re the emes sardines there, herrings, also whitefish and sable, mamash salmon smoked and pastramitized, beluga sturgeon and its caviar, too, upward of ten kinds of roe, fish bound for the coast, preserved fresh in their unheated hold; they have to be in Holywood for tomorrow brunch; latterday lox flown in from parts east—the bris plate secreted deep in the dimly skinned hold.
Ben stays way up front in the Cohen car, that of the priestly class, despite His not being deemed worthy by whom: those who could, who would afford the price of such comfort, who are or at least were in a position to upgrade, produce the downpayment, submit to eternal scrutiny, entropic review…and even if He were so inclined, whose wheels would He grease, whose eyes would He have to oil to look other ways—nothing worse than being in a situation with no authority to bribe, you’re only alone if there’s no one to buy off…just those Orientals implacable, working their hammers of arm up down up down, through and past this scenery of movingpictures, Sunday matinee landscape panned over and around, again and yet animated again; enough to make Him nauseous…all this reek and dreck dripping from the train’s netherworkings, from between the cars, their toiletstalls, spraying to puddle with lubricants, those oils and greases underneath, fallen, goddamned the sign says it’s Occupied, as if He’s invading the opposite mirror—it’s Him inside squatting, shivering, hiding from no one save the shadows of His own inner fear, reflecting the outside world, its paranoid guilt how it both disrupts His gut then feels bad about it, apologizes with appetite, hunger, need; the toilet chugs, glugs, rumbles fouled bright blue like the water of the ocean further if ever, then overflows into the aisles, freezes slick to the floor. Around Him, passing overhead, through the poled wires both telegraph and phone, allpointsbulletins for Ben long put out, receiving little real response, only a titter of pranks, a smattering of honest tithepayers scared into visions. Hell, get them whoever they ever are nowadays, the Garden and the government and sum the world’s private capital, the international bountyset, the fortune and glory goys—get them desperate enough, they might even flag down a stretch of these trains, leash a few dogs down the aisles, shepherds sniffling under the seats, between the cars and then up on their roofs…but by that juncture, trackshift, lever pulled, flag up, routed on the wrong oneway past the last un-listed stop, He’ll be gone, hidden by a kindly bearded pointsmensch maybe, told to wait for the next train, for the one after that, in one of those tiny corrugated shacks that’s both the office and quarters, the desk astride the bed—then cradled tight amid the engine’s undercarriage, a shrunken shyly suckedup testis of the locomotive itself; to ride on, a splay of shadowed, perhaps only potential, stops later, further down the ghosted line, and then—another hiss, yet another lurch, a stop frail and still for here and now final, He leaps to the meager platform, makes on, oblivious of the absurdly narrow gauge of His escape, following only the map of that unsettled tum; and oblivious, too, to the workers—miracle migrants to the west’s newest expansion, the unlived but holyheld past—swinging back onto the train, which switches its orientation around to chug in the return direction, its locomotive downed, out of service, the train’s head and heart within towed now in reverse.
Bone voyage, the scowl of the wind. Blind Wiedersehn. It’s terminus, officially at least, and everybody off…for Him, though, there’s never a last stop, no final destination. Ben takes a breath around: the environs of this humpy dump of a depot littered with stakes—a grimed glimmer of gold, and silver, these railroaded claims delineating the hope had for clearing: these stakes pounded then left forlorn to mark nothing but their own abandonment, plots forsaken, the demarcation of a dream abused. Its true appellation, this junction jubilating a former wateringstop the locals that remain have taken to calling Bad Chan: there’s a mensch, the only mensch around, maybe the only mensch left, this letzing marshalik up on the forbidden rung of a stepladder painting in a bluff of choleric red a new name atop an old name and its beaten bandage of sign: Chelm, Hotzeplotz, anyone, Kasrilevke, Shnippishok…though isn’t that Maine, Neue England—tongue out, he hasn’t made up his mind. Open for suggestions. Closed Shabbos. Ben walks up and asks him what there is to do around here and the mensch scuts his way down without deciding on a designation, then disentangles from a tincan tub of signs on the porch of the sloughed slouchy depot one in the shape of an arrow he spikes into the stairside ice at a lean.
It says, Spa.
Why not, He thinks, revivifying, just the thing! To take the waters—where…the purest, repristinating air!
Ben transfers to His feet, following the directions intuited, maybe, mapped on His palms in dirt, in mud and the spew of the axles, shvitzing almost away in giddy excitement. He sets off for the colonnades, the rivering waters, rived, earthily heated and healing, medicinal, hundred percent hydroxygen for whatever might ail. To prescribe Himself a rest, His entire flee given purpose by the sudden prospect of pilgrimage, though the waters would probably be frozen, and the hotels might all be long booked. He walks the arrow, perhaps pointing wrongly or just down and out of light but finds no more signs, no higher, faster track, whether by way of faring or handoff, by night or because they’ve never existed—an indication of how elite this spa actually is—only overgrowth, dense wood without trail: hidden, recessed, a jewel set in a greengolden, lunesilvered valley always beyond; down gulches up gullies, 1 Mile’s what He remembers the sign having said, hymn, that or ten at the most, one for each toe, deep into the forest of petrified palm among which are scattered, protective in passage, a huddling minyan of redwood, displaced sequoias sufficiently withered—to pass through them, their arched hollowed trunks, dragging with Him a piece of baggage claimed at random, Lost & Founded through thickets through thorns, tearing straps and imitation hide, Injun luggage seamed, scraped, zipped with tears to obscure its multihued beaded monogram, CHAI (standing for Chief Had An Idea, though unfortunately for his people the Chief ’s was to pack up the prairie then move out to Palestein, abandoning his wife and nine kinder). Ben comes upon a river soon, a hot burbling brook slicing its way through nature giving way to the kemptness of grounds, winding a valley around, then cleaving a clearing—revealed, beneath the palms’ icicled fronds and shaded by their hang from nothing but the freeze unremitting, we’re talking nestled: the insanitorium, a fallenrates paradise, starting at threehundred shekels a night.
To soak it all in: all the promenading people in retreatmode, retired even from vacation, chazerai of chazerai they’re lolling around in the mud, penned like pigs but os
tensibly for their own health, can you believe, the young, kick-shaking spirochetal, the suspected syphilitic, paying homage and offseasonal doubleoccupany, too, to a gerontocracy of the hypochondriac with their own ibberbuttled elders to deal with, with enough of their own about which to kvetch kishkas’ deep: chemodialysis victims, we’re condolencing, poor diverticulitis schmucks become prisoner to their own waste impounded in bags hung heavily from bushes and the branches of trees; munificent municipal parks trailed through with every nature labeled, thoroughly marked, pasture stretches adorned with lifelong, ornately armed benches, inhabited by monuments, defaced these monumental menschs and their womenfolk sitting arteryhardened, encased for plaque’s posterity within the dreck of just visiting pigeons and gulls, waddling off their early feed only flakes of skin and nail peckedup, then passed through and out. And in the distance, on the opposite embankment, those grand colonnades, their columnal pitch and canopies grave and imposing, but ornamentally fragile, delicate in filigree as if of frozen winds, gleaming purely; to reach them, He has to cross the river thiniced over a slippery slip of bridge down a slated, turnedover leaf path littered, too, with souvenir sippingvessels, to shatter them underfoot.
Ben goes and books Himself into what just has to be the most expensive hotel on the boulevard, a wonder they have the room, though they assure anything for Him under the name of one Doctor Karl Young, with a tipped hand in thanks to Herr Portier and a promise to pay when He can—from the proceeds, hopedfor, of what’s to be His dissimulative hocking, schlocking, and petty steals: the claimed unclaimed dummy drummering luggage of a traveling salesmensch He finds here in the hall and wheels away to the hold of a service elevator, lost sprung open to be found stuffed with barters, that and the oddsending wampum of reliquary junk: shrunken skulls, baculumbones of coonschlong preserved in what dipped finger smells and tastes like snake-oil; the black currency of blond scalps; then the Hopi dolls and rattles He’d fingered from his Sabbath Injun host, to sell to an elderly spagoer as charms against death—and to sell, too, His parkingticket debts, He hopes, He’s trying, to the eventual spagoner’s gogetting son for either half or double, He’ll forget which, of what they would have cost Him if He’d pay. To live is to stay open, all weekday, all weeknight, to make the business. Checkout’s at noon. He scribes His name into the register an Xlike halfstar.
The hotel, it’s an enormous collapse of grandeur called the Grand, none other now that all’s kashered under new management, the only Grand they say, halfprice of thievery after the summer rush, two pools, one heated and with brunch included, the whole complex: mention this ad and get up to 10% off at our over 100 restaurants & shops. The lobby’s gorgeous, you should look it up one of these nevers: everything gilded and what’s not is vaulted if it’s not gilded and vaulted both, redwood and brass and steel, brushed just like the hair of virgins, marble veined like the legs of the old, and glass as fragile as their bones. After showering and toweling, which ministrations are hygienically overturned by Ben’s dressing as all He has for later’s the robe He’s been shrugging forever, He makes downstairs again to scare up a meal, wanders from the Grand lobby into one of the just ask them how many ball or conference rooms hallwayed off, a highly windowed, sequoiafloored, plastered paradise of ornately fruity moldings as the valances for bafflings hung, which serve to both dampen any happenings reverberous within, as well as they’re regional maps sponsored by the local Better Business Bureau—in which room, now, a handful of marks having been existentially Cained only to be soon enough enabled are being sermonized to regarding the seven or so but who’s counting highly effective prophecies of highly effective something or other’s, as will shortly be not quite forthcomingly revealed to such an uniformly out of work, out of time audience of this prepaid seminar in what’s promised to be high histrionic style by this schmuck of a mensch who needs no introduction, doesn’t want one either he doesn’t himself either script or vet, this mucky motivational speaker standing up front in postulant posture, embalmed in a suit on loan from the director of the least prominent area funeralhome his brother-inlaw; him a healer of faith for those who really have none to have become so sick with doubt that its sufferers they’re finding themselves here and in the pudged midsection of a workweek, to be preached down to with pitch amid the sideshow of slideshow (have you ever thought about the amazing opportunities to be found in—click—real-estate, such as—click—second homes—click—ski chalets—click—mountain retreats and—click—Island timeshares; what would you say if I told you that I knew a secret—click—a thousand shekel incentive up front, which is yours to keep—click—all your money down, we’ll halve your investment—), all coming complete with a regimen, a system, act now and receive as our free gift to you a stock of glossy portrait photographs as well as an autographed book he’ll let go for nothing wholesale—squint closely, he’s standing on its copies stacked—vanitypublished by an inexistent imprint of the Texas State Genizah, of which he’s not just a client but also the founder; Ben peeks His head in just as the mensch’s beginning, spitting shvitz into the antiquated mic exhumed from the air’s grave of local radio.
Trouble with your boss? he asks.
Yes!
Need to ask for that raise or vacation, you deserve it?
And verily the whole room shouts, yes!
Hymn…he milks it treyf, I can help.
As it is written in the book of our prophet Daniel: And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate and yadda and blah (he’s skipping, he’s flipping)…I’m about to reveal to you my failsafe method, proven then reproved, which has helped multitudes, I’m talking untold.
Are you ready?
Amen, they shout in response.
Week One: Confirm your Covenants! Those you make with yourself and those you make with others…
Hoping a light snack, those requisite refereshments to be served following, Ben pulls up a chair, gives attention as the mensch, he spits on…on Day One, flicks a slip of imaginary lint from his laminated red powertie, put yourself first! Follow my easy to follow assembly instructions to first identify your Four Beasts then, for the rest of the week, pour your determination out upon the desolate—and nu, take back control of your life!
Amen, they scream spittle to fleck the walls, stain apparitions, visualization techniques…shoes and socks and their crumpled creaseless, and pleatless, foldeddown waistband pants to the elasticized knee as bald as their heads to be soaked in saliva pooled on the floor, before we’re all done here.
Day One, 1st Step: as I’ve said, you must identify your four beasts—do you want an example?
Do we want an example? they answer and mean it.
My first beast is—
My second beast is—
My third beast is—
My fourth beast is—
2nd Step up up up the ladder: you’ve got to rank them, first for the least problematic, fourth for the most, hymn…murmuring, this might be too tough for this crowd and so again he asks, do you want an example?
Do we want an example? they answer.
But do you really, truly want an example?
Do we really, truly want an example?
Nu. For example, sayseth the suit…you—and he points prophet his manicure into the fleshmess, as if desperate accusation he asks, what’s your name, friend? Fat mensch in the rear. You, yes you to the right. Your other right. Sorry, didn’t know you were one person. God, you’ve just got to have problems…
Me, He says, hymn, my name’s, uh, er…J-Jacobson.
Take your time, Mister Jacobson…a stutterer, too, slow of speech, a Moses-on-the-make—haven’t I met you before. No? Don’t be so nervous. Where are you from and what is it that you do wherever that is, Mister Jacobson?
I’m from, hymn, a li
ttle town called Weissnichtwo, that’ll do, outside Weequahic, back east—and I’m, I’m a successful…
Aren’t we all? And that’s why we’re here.
An attorney, junior partner in a stable, very profitable firm—but I want to have my own practice one day.
I’m sure you will, Mister Jacobson…everyone, say Shalom to Mister Jacobson, and all of them say Shalom to Mister Jacobson. Nu. Mister Jacobson, you’re up, you’re on, your turn—now, your First Beast is…?
My first beast is probably my…um, er, my boss, Goldenberg, he’s founding partner, real senior.
Goldenberg, the mensch frowns, typical, and then your Second Beast, Mister Jacobson?
My second beast has to be my mother-inlaw—yes, that they’d buy…my third beast is my accountant at tax time, and for my fourth I’m going to have to go with an intangible—say, my inability to form lasting relationships.