by Joshua Cohen
B’s gasping to slurp, to suck it all up. Thinking God, the heat in here, the sop and the quiver, how it’s too much to swallow at once: the mountains around the valley, then the valley itself, and then the walls to rim again with their many gates and their seals—His tongue bursting them into blastings of wet, as if exploded grapes giving milk and honey that are both only salt and perhaps a century soured; then the walls again, always the walls of the walls, labial around and around without end, walls guarding from what or from who the cunnilingually chaotic Cardo, then the Shuk, with its waft of exotic spices to stifle…quarter to quarter to acknowledge with tongue the high, limbstraining arches, the climactic rubble, chips of blood and shards of discharge. Her hips as if handles to the jug of her, fill her up, stuff her shattered, He’s thinking, He’s not anymore. With His weak hand, He tweaks at her areolæ, while with the other and strong He lows down to her tush to finger around by the knuckle. He wails, inhales; with His mouth sieves and with His throat, He saves: graving the image of this pubic polis inside Him…her sand in His eyes to wind tears into wrinkles—furrows He’s plowing perpetually toward the floor of her fertile—and then, squinting as He nears as if gazing into His very own face, to head to that womb set inside the womb, ever deeper toward His issue, the bottommost basin, the ultimate depth of this valley sagging womanly into mattress, which gives underneath Him like the swallowing earth. He strains to tongue the Temple’s last wall, within her, westerly and hot, His length to mount the Mount how He’s in too deep, totally in, wombed to root at His shoulders, stooped with the ache of His arms that beat and clasp, then their hands—one of which is still fingering. B bent and about to loll down upon the mound with reverent tongue, the immaculate dome tipping the ruin of the Temple, hers, as if to lick away the gild, to wick each dram, every glimmer of waste—a ray of saliva from His tongue to kiss with eyes shut and heavy thick pant the hidden hold of the very Presence and His face reflected, secreted to sleep within the holiest of holes…He’s stuck, without breath, a stifling gag, He chokes panicked.
An abandonment, this escape…B’s mind having held its turn, unrevolute; a virgin transcendence—how everything fails…the forefinger of His righthand, knuckled up her tush, is rendered limp: analgesic, obtund. As for His tongue unpronouncing, it’s numb, too, paralyzed, flailingly within the strain of its veins, licking to stick to the roof of the mouth of the womb of His mother—this, in a sensational loss of sensation. In His need to please her, He’s forgotten Himself, and gone wanting: His forefinger then hand entire drops weakly to the mattress’ lip. His tongue hard and fat sticks fast between the presences of her hips. Due to His disposition, and despite their thrashing accompanied by an incomprehensible language of gurgles, it cleaves between her clitoris, which is understandably engorged, and her prepuce if He knows where those are, even what. Marys no longer sisters or mother responsible more like reverted, twelve shocked, freaking, screeching girls with their gnawed sharp fastflying manicures and their wighair afling, their falsies falling lump to the pits of their arms, mountains leveled, razed, terraces tumbled down from the lush, weatherhigh hills to the stomach’s desert, its flat unforgiving—they gather quickly, tightly, mind the flames assembling in a wreathe around Him; groping to still His limbs from their flail and from her, knocking over the candles to set the carpeting to smoke, to set fire, the mattress burning then their stockings and skirts catching, too, as they attempt half to put themselves out with their girdles and then with their nails to dislodge Him and so leaving scratches across the plains of His flesh, shiring along with Him their alarm, what has to be the strangest song ever sung in a land this poorly, hourly accommodated; as if pitched to sirens, geshraying…wildly the Hanna Mary has her hands on His fevered skull, attempts to slap Him loose, swatting the soundings echoing from within then through her as she sits up, bears down on Him between her legs snaked and slippery: His head, huge, as if a birthed tumor, a blond inner growth perhaps a bit balding upon aeration, receding in revelation, with the hairs of His neck tangled slovenly with the hair of His back, singed, scorched amid the sloppy flares of flesh that lap and lick their ways down the widening wick of his bottomless sit and hips, the waist and the bulge beneath it, His fat, furry middle melting into a shiny puddle of shvitz; the other Marys up and tugging at the Hanna Mary’s hair in altogether now one, two, Three, then off with her wig to grab at her real hair knotted underneath again one two, He’s hyperventilating is what His mother would’ve said if she were His true mother, overbearing as always and suffocant, nearly unconscious, or maybe she’s already dead—finally, and yet still feeling Him: the dread that midwifes any attempt at pleasure, attends every hope of fulfillment. As if expectant, virginred a flush, He’s overheated from gasping her hysterical air then the no air, from gorging on her juices and fruit, the sin of the apple…B’s complexion that humiliated shade, mortified but alive, still submerged: up to His neck in it, gagging on an odd mucosal mixture, saliva and female ejaculate flooding down His throat without the obstruction of acting tongue, but with the jaw lamely free to take in all at once without swallow. Now, some of the Marys are pulling the Hanna Mary by her natural hair, the other Marys pulling Him the opposite and pushing Him out, too, unnaturally—they hold, they cling, they’re clingers, they clutch, they’re clutchers, at His shoes, His socks fallen, then the toes and His feet and at joint of His knee, haunches, lardaceous lovehandles and shoulders, leaning away from Him from her with the force of their weight, not enough.
No time to assess the situation, nu, we understand—after all, postmortem is postmortem, after is the fact. Questions, did they ever have their questions, for everyone, who not—the cooperatively crazy mensch here at the frontdesk, the motel’s putative maids only illegals who they never cleaned, they’re merely homeless and every Shabbos or so paying what they have to use the facilities to bathe themselves, to wash their minds to purity…even for the schmuck who delivers them the ice hacked straight from the street to the hallways’ machines. What will free first, will prepuce give or will His tongue, which is affixed to which…will His tongue wag from between her legs forever and last days, or will He be condemned to wander around Purgatory, hymn, with an intimate aspect of the female anatomy flapping obscenely from Him, as if the flag of the surrender of His gape? B losing final air and as they’re tugging…His tongue’s stretching—bodylength soon, it’s a bodied double, distended far from its tumescence as if to paper the opposite wall, as if to lick it clean and further, wicking a thin dribble across the room, then drooling toward the door to the hall as if to collapse to corpse only while waiting for the elevator out of order. Expired. And so to residence in this motel for an eternity with no rates reduced, how they’ll pry the cash from His hands, the hock of His spoony cold. How to summon when you can’t even button, or ask for passing help in pressing. Questions, always questions: is the tongue I bought off what’s his name the real one or only a fake—refund, who do I kvetch to for my money back…but what about Her organ, where is it now—cold itself, between her smothering legs. The Hanna Mary wailing still to end all terror, writhing across the flaming mattress with a roll of her thighs around His skull as if to wring His neck—to kill a festive chicken, the screwy opening of a Shabbos bottle of His blood…Him thrashed from the smoke in His lungs, Hanna’s pooped how He’s soiled Himself, the mattress, its fiery floor—and then, with one last leaning tug, He, pops, off and out:
B birthed wet onto the motelroom’s floor, the notel: crying Mom without a tongue, and burning. The Marys scatter, fall, hit walls and bounce collapse…Edens of flow as the tongue falls, too, a flop past limp atop the lip of the mattress licking lameness into the airless room, which is so smoky as to seem the Mitteltown sky itself, just outside, walled behind the night: the tongue’s tip, though, stuck hard and fast to its vagina dark and tightening above. Utterly without life, the pile of flesh then falls from its soaked weight, plops in silence as a stump, majestically purple then darker—soon to be a coil of absolute blue roya
led to black, as if a turd unburdened, steaming, wound-flecked, left as a tip for the maid atop the taint of the carpet. Our mensch at the frontdesk having heard the resoundings of serious thump, just taking an interest in the integrity of the motel’s structure, you understand, its foundations not to mention its reputation, already shaky enough the both of them that its collapse or, suggestion, demolition might be welcomed, and how any felony charges of arson ever filed might be lost on their ways to the court, rest assured and a wink, or at the very least downgraded to misdemeanor material: an insuranceheap, lightningready, as it’s without reservations ever, without even the most grim glimmering hope of a star—its mensch weeping (according to what’s now his third statement taken) has already, by the first bumptious echo from ceilings above, in violation of the spirit of the first holiday he’s ever observed as much as this doing business is and with B, worked the telephones overtime, talking up the last of the media and its gossip columnists switchboarded condemned, in his whiny, hoarsely feminine garble: gutter press to swell up from sewers, assembling into swills of ink at the 10th Avenue entrance, photographers already gathering in the parkinggarage, in the lobby and at the door to His hall, their flashpot moons revolving around what lies beyond, giving light only to be reflected, never absorbed: they’re waiting for a uniform—but Authorities in observance arrive only later, well after the mandate of their departmental Lamentations—any angel with a warrant scrolling from the bell of its trumpet to blow the damn door down.
Example an editorial, then, for the Weekly Affiliated: a highbrow, low page-count rag light on advertisers of late and becoming increasingly desperate, only recently having been labeled by its myriad competitors and even those in the suffering if soon illegalized secular media as the quote Weakly Affiliated, unquote, a nickname that like all of them becomes less funny the more it’s invoked—an extraordinarily maligned and litigated writeup, an edit of which despite everything goes on to make syndicate (causing an entire chain to be silenced for a week, then shut down, its editors imprisoned, its morning edition torched with its stands), opening with a memorable phrase characterizing the tragedy as “Tongue-N-Cheeks,” then going on to note that “though He’s eaten of the forbidden fruit […] it’s not like He’s still enjoying its taste.” countered only a day later with an oped claiming, “If we have no pity, then we have converted all for nothing. Just as it takes more than a God to make a religion, it takes more than a religion to make a mensch.” Unofficial reports wander freely, and leaky…a drippy, slippery out of bounds: the chains and gags of wire, of summary frontpage, hovering above the fold, bolded and columnarly exalted…it’s impossible not to miss the management, to reconcile it with rumor: murder slash suicide pact gone wrong, shots fired, Metropolitan Gestapo headed up by the newly installed Des Moinesher Rebbe wading into the reportedly frayed hallway from out of nowhere (though he’s the son-inlaw of the Light of Kansas—traditions already generating, ambitions becoming dynasties becoming power)—arriving to find the assembled dead from gas, from smoke inhalation, a fire…Mormon kindernapping, ransom paid, hostage never returned, ransom never refunded, hostage involved in a tragic quote accident unquote, a quote unquote unfortunate incident, substances abused, and women, too, white slavery or Resistance supremacy was it, involved medical experimentation, on newborns, the unborn, Animalia, with regard to equine ejaculatory response, decapitation, castration, tongue severance, hotel falling in on itself, swallowed whole by the earth, flying ambulances of fire whisking away the Marys who immediately after in quotes themselves, “decide” to leave the employ of Garden, Inc. without settlement or severance further, granting no interviews save what’s reported in a statement so official as to be regarded as prophecy, as if dictated—but not read—moons before Av ever began…His mind is His slavery, His life, who He is, a slave, that’s who He was born to be. He needs a woman? Forget it. He needs a life! or so a woman who wasn’t there or even named Delilah recounts in rehearsal for The 18th Hour, we’re at 1492 on your AM dial, the host with the most with the radio face, a former plumber with the best, cleanest pipes in Passaic appearing in person like a down on his luck ventriloquist or his dummy and despite the suit (which just has to be worth hundreds), he holds her while she weeps away the show, then the theme music fades up, the On Air lights off themselves and the static comes in like the clouds, weathering patience…
Mary which one who knows as who has the time she thinks to save, plucks up the fallen, fusiform tongue and wraps its impressive length in the Business, others hold skimped Sports or Book Review, section of a newspaper dated a Shabbos previous, in one account, bylined by the owner of that very paper…though others hold rolled in a hospital’s fundraising newsletter left lying around by the last shoesalesmensch to slink this way (used to wipe the filth from his soles)—in pages palmed, ripped right from the book of Psalms: if I forget thee O Jerusalem let my righthand forget its cunting, let my tongue cleave to the Ruth of my mouth, it goes…saves it though, “apparently,” no reattachment surgery’s possible (even if the price’ll be lately right by the Doctors Tweiss): risk such a procedure He’s thinking and He’ll risk His freedom, to think if not His life, Him stumbling deranged mouth glop maniacal spew from out of the motel’s rear service entrance and onto the highway, miraculous you have to admit as do latter commentators that He doesn’t get picked up by Anyone, hauled in for a session, a little of the old Q. & A. even for just appearing in public like this, a dressing down for dressing up as His mother, actually in disguise as a Mary disguised as His mother, if you’re with Him: that old desertruined robe exchanged for a pink slip of housecoat clasped too huggingly tight with plastic flower buttons, forgetmenots but who remembers, dumpster’s sneakers over slippered raiment retained He’s traded in for heels, pumps one for each stumble of foot He’s tripping, falling, huddling past the assembled Law, the Media, who are the Law’s later interpreters, its reporters and photographers (many latearriving Affiliated journalists actually forbidding themselves from pen and camera due to the holiness of the Ninth, the wasteful nature of such observance distressing in this ridiculous ritual of these lensmenschs and shutterschmucks: how making cameras of their own filmless hands, they squint one eye then click with the finger)—they let Him pass as her, without inspection, whether to them a motel maid, a whore just off for the night or her grandmother’s sister, a voyeur onlooking, rubbernecking what with her head kercheifed, too, become babushkad, old and avoided as destitute and sick. He trannies away from the river in heels, the skirt of His coat shrived high by the wind. His mouth’s open in an attempt to air pain, and so exposed to the weather falling, the spitting drift, but no yelling’s to be heard, only the untastedness of the street wind and the avenue wind and then at their intersection, the resoundingly ringing silence of that angry greedy pud. What it resembles is a growth of goldbrick, a bellish bud or coin sored upon the middle of the mouth, deep inside it and secret, the ornament of His standing aleph, an uppermost putz only smaller and softer than most. What He wants to say with it, though, He doesn’t know, as He isn’t saying it, as nothing’s being said through Him—only this letter, the round of its soundlessness in search of a vowel, the translation of this search for bearings east, a new beginning voiced only in blood…B’s arms flailing, as if communicant and with His legs, too, His head, as if limbed directly to His mouth’s fingery stud, made veined to what remains: the stirrings of a torturous howl through the slip of parkinggarage, then down its slipping grade, the turns, the ramps on and off, waiting at the crosswalk for any light to change, Him an aleph splayed, waving finally with sound, Aaaaaa…all He manages, to echo across the darkened and utterly vacant 10th sad & 40th He doesn’t know which, He wouldn’t, dispersing, disappearing into a traffic of whirling ice, obscuring the noise of even the sirens.
His tongue to become a relic, to be exhibited first for a week at His home in the Garden, then taken national, eventually worldwide: to be paraded around from town to town, wherever pays, whether money or homage—as
an oracle, oracular; some swear ask it a question, it’ll answer without mind; miraclegranting others promise, perhaps prophesizing, presumably on mute if only for the exploitation of those who’d interpret: a week later and the night before its Garden unveiling, Doctor Abuya and the Nachmachen in blue & white matching scrubs stand a press conference over the stump, the withered flaccid flabellum as redeemed from Evidence of Metropolitan Gestapo with an outstretched arm clutching tongues of quiet cash, having been scooped from its jar of formaldehyde, then—as per Die’s specifications—set amidst a host of semi, hemi, and demi precious metals and gems, inlaid into a reliquary shaped like, of all things, a mouth: its dorsum veined in what’s passing for silver and gold, rocks of faux diamond studded in rows of teeth, viciously polished: hardcuts for canines, cabochons, wisdom pears, then assorted raw stones for far molars, good imitations at least, rubies faked with spinel for tonsils, unpolished hunks of malachite limning the wound to be found at oropharynx, at the velveteen depth of its setting, the red cushioning the bite—a baubled bibelot and prize for the mantel, the trophy of a world as fragile as glass; only after that stint at His house’s museum, when it’s sent out on exhibit, on a tour even less successful than that of its body had been, back when it’d been daily brushed then nightly mouthed and had talked the talk wellscripted: a show removed to a sideshow, remanded to freakshow, noshow…for now, they say, but just wait till we hit Berlin, they’ll lineup for anything over there: photographers asking for the reliquary angled so that the light hits it just so, that’s perfect, hold it, now smile and say—reporters asking the tongue enshrined questions who knows what it would respond, were a mind still sticking it out in thought.