by Joshua Cohen
Don’t you think Garden, Inc.’s behind this whole mishegas, the Administration, too—you don’t think Ben’s smart enough for this kind of scam?
Glad you asked.
We’re presently engaged in a separate suit v. Garden, Inc., relating to product failure: the Hanna Wig™ (representation flaps it aloft, a dead thing, this kaporos of the presspool) is responsible for the fatal choking of my client’s beloved parakeet, Duke.
He straightens his toupee held down by his yarmulke.
They were very close—apparently, the bird knew her by name.
The woman’s first husband, an Affiliated by the name of Avram or Avraham, in the one time they ever took a vacation photos allowed release by his widow and her lawyerhusband: an apparently insolvent, incontinent, bonebald mensch who’s standing short even in his orthopedically reformed, Pittsburgh platform shoes and Cincinnatty cap, his frame largely fat, slowmoving, his pugilistically puffy face distinguished most prominently by its soured nose, an embittered, prickly pickled bird’s, it’s described. And soon, the rumor mill’s up and run by a blind, threelegged horse: how he’d been a travelagent, and that that’d been kosher, not a front, though he’d WITHHELD—diversifying his portfolio, selling illegal spices, Eastern Bloc paprika take to American table back in the alte days, his mittelmensch’s name it was that of Laser or Glazer Wolf though that’s probably an alias, also he’d owned & operated a chain of the bathroom’s in the hallway motels up and down the Gulf Coast (storage they functioned as, deaddrops to launder the stain: Szeged’s product being cleared out from Miami and up north through the service entrances, until a bust the year before his death—only a handful of bellboychicks had been caught redhanded; despite whatever deals were pepperdangled, it was all too spicy for anyone to talk). Not that my husband was ever aware, she’s sure of it. Anyway, he’s dead, spit spit spit, isn’t that enough of a punishment—and, nu, so her husband it’s revealed after further investigation, gravedigging into the unmarked files for the worst of the wormiest dirt, had forged bonds, would deliver them to associates bound in prayerbooks, opposite the Mourner’s Kaddish. He’s dead, spit, don’t spite his memory. My wife, also my client, maintains her innocence. Boilerplate. And then a boilerroom scam, hardselling off futures, options, foreign exchange, half the Dead Sea’s salt to every resident of Central Brooklyn, coldcalling at furious heat from a basement wholly unfinished just east of India, the one with the dot. Another rumor awaiting verification between a mouth and an ear has it that his brother, hymn, his widow’s brother-inlaw, also dead, had been a ritual slaughterer for a foreign interest shadily in the black. A former bombmacher with one finger left triggerhappy. Statesponsored assassination, it was. He had terrible gas.
No comment, she says in the line filing up the steps to the courthouse.
What she said, her lawyer says to the microphones, or else she denies, I’ll leave it up to you to decide…turning from the steps down below her grown full of truffled fedoras to trip and fall over this pig wrought if only ironically idolatrous in the form of a pushke, a charitable repository, a box tzedakah, and so stumbling upon even more litigation—sarcastically speaking, though if anyone takes them seriously don’t think they won’t serve: one of an inedible, incredible many of them these porkbarrelled porkbellies lined all the way up the steps in two rows on both sides of the line—little fourlegged piggypink banks soliciting for every cause under the expenditure of the sun.
For the Training of a Mute Cantor
For Tractor Parts Urgently Needed in East Texas
For the Int’l Brotherhood of Shriners to Visit Palestein
For Recently Affiliated Proctologists Wanting to Establish Galician Descent and Needing to Pay This Mensch You Know How It Is to Deal with the Papers
For this Woman Listen Her Name It’s Not So Important Whose Husband the Schmuck He was Affiliated and Died Old Story I Know You’ve Heard it All Before the Long and the Short of It Both but He Really Left Her Without a Shekel in Life Insurance and—the line’s essentially endless, and selfserving, snaking down the most civic of streets from City Hall to the Battery to wall all of lower Manhattan in bitch lately kvetch, advertised large; everyone complaining to bargain whether a plea or a promise, demanding a hearing, a ruling, advice, God the Law, someone asking is this goose kosher yet (it’s been spoiled a week she’s been waiting), another wanting to know if she should immerse her new plates in the sink or like what, you want I should go knock a hole in the ice of the Hudson, my husband won’t grant me a divorce, my son’s possessed by a dybbuk but the dybbuk’s better behaved than Sammy ever was, what should I do? I’m sorry, she goes on talking to an infertile woman seeking interdiction, divine or not, whatever you have, intervention, I’ll have what she’s having, a willing ear, an open coat to cry in, you call that a lining, call that a line—I placed all my trust in Him. He said pray, God I prayed. He said fast, futz me I fasted, right quick. I lost sleep over this. And weight, too, but that I don’t mind. I’m talking a moon of my life getting squared with the shylocks. He said if I call in the next ten minutes He’ll throw in a set of knives at no extra cost. A totebag our gift to you, an umbrella free I could really use now. Winter prevailing. A week later, still in line, her matter unheard by the court, she’s sleeping on the steps along with the other supplicants under the weather, that indivisible democracy the sky and its heaven holding their Law above nature’s, above rules & orders menschmade, tented out in the freeze under the waterproof of the lawyer’s suitjacket, spread over the hang of the higher step and held there in place by the sound sleep of another: his wife she’s moaning in dream, mumbling she’s talking, exposed…no widow, how she was only Abe’s lover, and one of many at that, what’re you talking suspected, we knew all along, his old shiksa receptionist, couldn’t you tell, I mean just take a look at those thighs—booking package cruises out of the Port of Miami by morning, afternooners he’d called them a quick shtup under the desk or in the trash alley adjoining the kurva, the slut, poo poo poo my wife, her lawyer says, notified Him in writing, a letter, notarized, it’s gotten a smudge damp if it’s not just all wet: her pilgrimages detailed, receipts stapled to prayers, itemized her 1.) hopes, & 2.) dreams, waving a sheaf of them under the nose of the press, sniffling, dripping ink to tissue the morning editions…Gottenyu, she’s saved everything.
Menschs in departmentalissue white, laundered daily at a host of area prisons, stream down the steps into morning, keep the supplicants in order with their shepherd crooks, comedy canes.
Ben needs to be found, the woman’s weeping drastic mascara by noon, and the court needs to find Him, hold Him accountable.
Clapboards clap board—we need to do it again.
Slate the docket.
He’ll pay for His sins upon the Day of Judgment, says an old mensch seeking a last name change to a calling surely unpronounceable. Little Timmy Czyczwitz-Szyszkowitz. If that’s still available.
Too late, she says stifling, too late for me.
A finger—which one, unwedded—over a handful of hours earlier for Ben way out on the coast, catching wind of what westerly passes for calamity these days: dirt unearthed to be made verity as scandal, a dungheaped museum or monument, the pile aside the wait of a grave…received ideas convening conventional wisdom, what courtroom’s that in, by closing an adjournment to truth too lazy to check up on or within which to bog down, just the facts.
Having arrived in the realm of Angels, He’ll read the news in the paper this homeless mensch, His benchmate, has folded into a skullcap over his burgeoning fro. His tallis a trashbag ripped through. Womenfolk poodle down the promenade, leashed to their menschs by tzitzit, tefilin, how they’re stalking their shadows, their noses buried a moshl, a nishl, in the middling pages of books. New beards scratch on old chins. An icy gust of skirts. Scarves and nippy mittens and hats.
This trouble out east, and the homeless know, breaks the ice, what a case…the Garden’s trying to put Him back in the news, keep Him in headlines.
Here, read my yarmulke, my kippah, my kopfcap you call it, and he takes it off to let Ben unfold it all for Himself. Total conspiranoia, the mensch goes scraping at his scalp. Turn it over. A2. Me, I’m not buying what they’re selling. Listen. My sister’s my sister, and always will be, but I’m not with her on this one: either she’s in on it, or she’s being set up.
Never mind, his sister, Abe’s exlover’s saying on the steps amid the plink of the pushkes. Abe would’ve married me. He couldn’t stand Elaine. Let me explain. Eileen, I mean. Whomever. Of Blessed Memory.
Ask Abe, the homeless says, if he was alive and he’d tell you. He’d be the first one. Abe, my brother-inlaw, okay, so maybe just my sister’s gentlemensch friend, but we’d met, over the phone, he’s good people. My sister, his lover, alright, his receptionist—she’s family but not to be trusted.
My brother? the woman’s spieling to a grand jury after the complaint’s finally cased itself in front of a judge. His health isn’t what it should be. A lawyer, too? If he was he never practiced. He had to quit after what happened happened.
Or, he never passed the bar. The firm that’d hired him to file had gone out of business.
The homeless turns to Ben and says, if you ask me, He’s not a False Messiah, a faked Moshiach, He’s no fraud.
It’s just.
You really want to know who He is?
Suddenly, a mortuarily fat and pale Oma sullen in a skirt three bolts of cloth past her toes tripsup to them then sits down on the bench between them, obstructing. You poor things, she says already tearing, becoming of charity the sight of them two, you’re not well, you have to take better care of yourselves; maybe you should both come back to my place, a shower, a hot meal, a bed for a schlaf.
O, I don’t know, his sister says, he went out west for a while, Los Siegeles, I seem to remember…she holds up admirably under Torque Mada’s inquisition, her lawyerhusband unable to make the session due to an unfortunate accident of the type pathologically reported within marks of quotation.
No, I don’t think so, that was so long ago. Who remembers. I was temporarily exhausted. Shleferik, those were the days.
The Oma goes to embrace the homeless mensch—you’ll make a success of yourself yet, ignoring Ben and His cry as, not to meddle in mazel, she throws a pinch of pocketed salt over her shoulder that sprays Him in the face, an eleemosynary lick at the eyes.
Ben’s stunned, rises from the bench then turns to confront, and there—beyond them, a miracle of decoration as she’s describing to the homeless her house in every amenity (you’ll have your own room, I can cook, I can clean, I can learn how to love), they’ve carpeted even the beach, the outermost world wall-to-sky…O the ocean forever—enough of it to still even the most determined of currents wandered from home and its humbler shore. Off with His shoes, both of them the laces of which He worries into a knot then holds the whole in a hand, He goes out to the sand and its give. A cool and cooling sink amid dunes…and the air, that weighted, saltfraught freedom—it’s always right behind you, a wonder. A bench become shrouded within the mist of the wake. A symbol, a sign, turn around, there’s no more.
Having made it through to the city of Angels—through the protocols of the city of Devils, it’s said, which is every other city in the world not gifted with this peace, such pacific quiet and calm, Ben’s arrived: the deadend, no pass, the end of one end, the other ocean, deeper and vaster than ever what He’d been used to before. He stands on the shore just taking it in, pajamapants under robe rolled to His knees, then over them—a wisedup if not yet wizened American boychick who should’ve been born with rivers in His veins and huckleberries in His eyes, lost once gone wading in a world ever stranger…fixes His self and senses to the waters’ descent from the sky, and with hands on His waist, legs held proudly if embarrassedly wide, soaking, submerging, icing His great Rhodes’ toes, their nails fallenin in the salt and polar suspension, toes then feet and then heels on up to His shriveling scrotum, tittytwisting numb grained with floes of ice atop the whiter sand, wondrous to Him in how naked it is and how placid. He wades to His waist, then stops, drowns no further. A beach behind Him seeming of one long grain, stretched out longingly, beached—a minyan of menschs in waterwings and varicose trunks engaged in prayerful splash; then beyond them, partitioned, screenedoff with cloud over which He can only tiptoe and squint: modest womenfolk, just girls if recently marriagable lazing on their stretch of sand set aside, simple, sallow, though gorgeous, too, though only their insides are tanned, if only with passion, their legs probably toned to perfection under their cabañas and umbrellas of skirt…He’s thinking, what Miami would’ve been without the deathrate. As here it’s open and pure, and all wrong: this is the wrong ocean, it’s false; this ocean has no history, is no revelation. A flock of schnorring seagulls takes flight, an eclipse of their wings, two-by-two pigeons following as Ben steps, without turning around, from the water to sand, one foot in each, nothing’s firm. He can wander no further, He can’t conceive of a further, has reached the edge, the limen littoral—genug, dayeinu, enough is enough. Must limit at the risk of destruction. Help me help myself. Know when to stop. Saideth Hanna, who was Israel’s wet frolic.
We here on land break like the waves, constantly, relentlessly—but to think that each of these private breaks is impermanent, soon assimilated back into the flow, and that all of this breaking, such cleaving, serves only to strengthen the race…at least, that’s what we’re constantly telling ourselves: you want out, you got out; forget, forsake, change your name and your address, your nose and your friends and those pants, see what I care, go and intermarry the winds…a foam of white about the mouth, an angry trickle, a receding life. Ben’s no longer as young as He once was, and spring, it’s forever past. Despondency’s to put it pareve, neither fish nor fowl, nor the milk of the fish, nor the milk of the fowl. Not the land nor the sea now, He’s returned to the middle, the eminent neither, call it the shore: hateful in its indecision, inconvertibly so, willfully unsure, and unsettling. To break or to cleave is the question of any next wave, curled like a questionmark, cupped—which is to ask thusly of its wake, quickly withdrawing: to cleave or to cleave, which will it be, to rend or, to hold fast. Depends how you ask it. What shades you put into your own private gust. Nowhere is next. He is where He is, and is lost.
Ben quits the shore as if leaving the presence of majesty, facelessly, in reverse, having done what He’s done, having had experiences, tales to tell the kinder, the grandkinder, the spiel of stories late at fiery night and, if ever, Shema—and it’s only then, when the ocean’s finally small, then the beach and its promenade bench out of mind, does He turn Himself around, to wander on east again, His nostrils winding fallen feathers from His progress, a weather of that and their gulls’ sullying shpritz to flap down upon His head as reminders, toward the quarter of His arrival. A memory of the first ocean to lap at the shore of His mind. The floor of all creation from whence we arose to beach ourselves back when, the seabedded bodies of His and our kind. Having nowhere else to wander, having exhausted this space in its manifold states, now only to head Himself back…where to head to what though’s the question, another, a last; to wander still and always. Return. A sigh awash with realization, kelpy knowledge. A homecoming, then, an ingathering to prodigal prodigy-hood, say—where I was still young He thinks, when loved and perfect and me…even if that might mean Joysey again. And to show for it all—to exhale the tongue, to save with His breath—only the salt from His tears.
In Holywood, map in hand, I’m being Frank with you Gelt searches out the homes of stars. Ringing bells. Knocking wood. He doesn’t have a hint, starts with an h, Holywood…hasn’t an inkling tip, not a twinkle of a notion of what he’s up against in trying to track Ben down, get Him home wherever that was, back to His intended safe without sound; doesn’t have any idea save that he has to do it, that the duty’s his and his alone, we’re counting on you Frank, get a clue (sold by the friend of a friend who’d fleeced him the g
olden map without key—doors unanswered; it’s a mezuzah, bulvan’s what they’re saying now, not a clapper!): the price on the oversized Israelien head more than Gelt would’ve earned in an eternity in the service of his nation, whichever it is, if it still exists in any form recognizable to the past’s pledged allegiance—and so to become his only country, this work, and his only governance, too, underworlded, with every liberty, without any law; soon less a nation than a borderless sheol, this labor he’s been condemned to by fifty fires wrangled by prison stripes…to smoke Him out of our hole. At Mittelwest’s what they’re calling it these days the trail’d gone like the weather, burrladen cold, chattering, showing nothing and telling even less: indications syndicate the possibility of Polonia, Chicago, Illinois, the magnetism of a third pole; the wild of the call, the beguiling sirens of the Canadian line—or maybe Kentucky, perhaps Tenessee, the O-hi-o, I don’t know.
Gelt’s made every mistake in the book thrown at Him, if the book is long and its font is small and its covers are to be found beyond the pale, bound only by oceans—without index or other direction, only following instinct, the offhand and onfoot, he’s hauled himself north or so to dwell unnoticed up in Mormondom a spell, old stomping grounds of Heber’s kin and kind, Gelt only guessing Ben’d think to hide it out there, a last preserve of faith against the relentless incursion of the Affiliate; Mormondom’s borders almost totally closed, and if you want to do it legally the paperwork’d take moons no one has, not to mention extravagant expense. And so Mormondom’s just the place for Ben if He could enter, it’s decided: how despite, Gelt should venture, gets the clearance of requisite backing, slips through a border checkpoint unnoticed, on a fake ID and an unmodulated, undifferentiatedly clumsy cowboy drawl on loan from a friend who’d worked with him for a year in Virginia ten floors underground in a room whose door was once stenciled humorously or not who could tell Intelligence, spends a Shabbos pursuing his meat around the salted rim of the lake.