by Joshua Cohen
As for her name, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel or Leah—they’d decided early on Rubina, and so beginning the cycle of resurrecting the dead, as if a Messiah’s remaking: her named after Reuben, though his name was Reuven, her mother’s side her greatuncle, never knew him, you never do if you have their name’s how it is, how they always die before you’re ever born to their calling. She has his lips, too (erogenously rued); it’s awful, you give someone a name after another, suddenly that someone has another’s lips and eyes (hyperthyroidal, exophthalmic), her nose, or hair. How that last Shabbos’ night she’s left alone if still, distantly, ghostingly, mothered at the table already emptied and even sponged in the diningroom, the tableroom, the we sit and eat and drink here and be a family sustaining ourselves altogether here room, sitting at the place at which she always sat, facing Hanna now resting herself upstairs to the left of her father gone, too. Then the boy, Benjamin’s His name’s what she knows not His namesake. All’s cleared, except her bowl of soup, lentil, taken with a large dose of salt. The warmth had left, her and the soup unspooned. Upstairs-upstairs, the pillows were waiting, holding her form.
Eat your soup! Hanna’d said, you eat nothing, I want you to eat up, I need you to do it for me…two spoonfuls, at least one or a half, you’re old enough for me not to have to—should I heat it up?
And how Rubina a little late to mature begins crying again, seasoning the soup already, I’m sorry, she’s not, just a pinch overseasoned, doubledipped, too, with a lapse of the pepper when Hanna was called to the phone.
Israel again—again late.
You, you’re as thin as a snake…I’m asking you to eatup, please, a something, just a little something, for me I’m your mother, but nothing. As if too tired to hold even her spoon’s silver, its bowl weighed down by only the light it scoops from a far sconce, she’s exhausted, with no expression of response, then, thrusting the white of her wrists out, her pure upturned hands, she rises from the table, walks to the hall, seemingly somnambulant (her face fine and un-lined, slenderwaisted nose, greatuncle lips though that mensch, he was actively sensuous, loved him his women and girls and his food and drink, and her introverted ringlets of hair, corkscrewy enough to take up a tangle of it with which to open a bottle of wine), up the stairs to her room, which she enters with feathersteps, then lies down: enters not through her door, as there’s no door to her room, it’s just curtained, and the old curtain from the shower downstairs the stronger defense, against what—Israel having hung it in punishment after Josephine had found her inhaling inside, smoking what; her form as if gusted, through the hallway and into the sheer, and then through it, oneirically, in a gauzy meld (at least that’s how it’s been filmed, softfocus, soundtracked with an orchestra of strings divided more than could be any family, tribe, or her nation), disappears into sleep, fade to black: despite or perhaps thanks to such state, which is medicated to numb—generically zaleplon, with zolpidem occasionally mixed—to share her angels as if these halved wingless pills offered in return for fast friendship with Lilith, the Mother of Night, to hold wild heavens of sleepovers, gossiping over junk manna until dawn upon the winds of the harp. Rubina had had it all, had possessed the stuff in the veins, the life and its generational furtherance—all the living branches of our bodied tree, veined out from her heart to the tips of her fingers and the pleasurable bud between her thighs and her toes: it’s that she could’ve engendered, barring the effects of an unfortunate endometriosis—and maybe that’s why she slept so much, always tired…that’s what the doctors decided, not depression or smoking or drugs or the college degrees her car required or whatever else the shrinks shrank from her, the pulse always in her protuberant eyes and the burnt broken wing of her mouth—but sensing that she was of no use, perhaps knowing this only on her last night as if it were a void just discovered within her in bed and about to sleep for her last, found deep in her womb as a hunger, a lower thirst, having hidden to maturity in a hollow, the death grown bare, her barren. Ours will be the world of the bloodless. Ours is the world of no claim.
Why is that this time of year would be family, would’ve been, the holidays and their own familiar family that once a year and every year subsume our own and lesser, ingathering the schedule: All who art offering us seats at their table, which is always longer and wider than any of ours and, too, with leaves that extend so far and almost irretrievably out as to accommodate people who yearly are strangers to us and who not only look like us but also think like us and how they even like the same foods as us and have brought the flowers and wine—all that essing and fressing from Sukkot on down to Simchat Torah, that indulgence we then work off our waists and our hippyhips with a dance, the hop hop then smack smack of our palms, their fronds, against the face of the moon waxing gluttonous, eight days fattened from its new…this they have to know, not to understand, just to know: the ritual, the life that was Tishrei or is, the first of the months begun over again, after a year spent intertestamentary—sit down, have a seat, I’ll tell you what, you can even keep it, it’s yours, we have many more like it, and who knows if there’ll ever be other guests; a cycle ending with the month known as Elul only to begin again with I think Nisan, not sure, it’s been too long this forever; this year every year, this life every life, for immemorial made of lists and threats, impulsive shopping; the months made moons to wane away the time, the set then rise of coming sun whenever least convenient…Hanna lowering herself exhausted deeply and demonstrative into a chair, mundane, there at the kitchentable, profane, on the first regular old nonholiday, nonsacred autumn afternoon that’s fallen after everything, after the New Year with its ten days tonguing away at Yom Kipper’s privation, Yom-Keep-Poor then Sukkot the holiday of festive gathering outside in the sukkah under the harvest of stars, the dancing again and the singing observed what with the Torah then all over again and then, weekday, no day at all, at least nothing special, and, if just for a moment—there’s nothing…nothing to prepare, nothing to do, nothing expected of her and, too, nothing to observe for herself or her others save this immaculately slow slow lowering of her spine into that everyday chair in that brunchdrunk, salt-shaky kitchen over which she sweeps back the hair and the wig, a breath, mops brow, a moment only of exasperated existence then, what do you know, it’s the Sabbath again, Shabbos again, who has a choice, is what she’s thinking, who can choose or would want to: ticked time to prepare again, tocked to slave, to suckle; there’s so much to do, and so much less time is what the clockface questions: to bake or not to bake, chicken; Simone needs you to sign a form allowing her to attend a trip to a museum; Liv wants you to sign a test an A in history why not an A plus, she’s asking; no time for scolding pride though as Judith, hymn, she has this little seepy weepy problem that she’s locked herself alone with in the bathroom; blood, I’m scared, what is it, Ima, what’s happening to me…it’s a boy.
An emptiness, the Shabbos of a school not just off or out of session for the day or holiday but abandoned…B busts the locks then barges through the chill, seeking only shelter: an empty class. It’s just down West 90th, a girl’s school without girls or anyone; poshish, tony, the first school Rubina had ever attended, though through kindergarten only: she’d been an only daughter for a year before Simone was born, she’d been a citygirl, for six snobbed years before Liv ever joined them and made them sisters more than just to one another—then they moved down to Joysey together, way before the days of the house and the lawn and the basement and the twocar commute. Simone and Liv and the rest unborn had been too young for anything, though, and had stayed at home and unmade, but Rubina—this had been her world five days a week, fullday. Too huge to fit behind a student’s desk He destroys to splinters, He sits atop the teacher’s for a rest.
To think: this is what it would’ve been like to live in a city, to be native to this shtus, at home here, a life lived quick and quickly wise…how this is where He would’ve gone to school, too, to yeshiva, though in the boy’s wing, which is just next door, life’s alwa
ys just next door, He’s thinking—had what happened never happened, that is, had we never moved out and then, died. A mind denied Him—this school the repository of yet another inheritance deferred. The shelves are empty of books, bookended loss; it’s dark in here, better not to tempt the fluorescents—the sweep of the floor, its pencil shavings, chalk remains from the happy clap of appreciative erasers smeared into the spirals of shoes out on permanent recess, their tag you’re it, and skip and jump. Dust gathered thickly on the scarred faces of desks, chewing gum’s wadded on the plastic panels of the ceiling gnawed with wet, snapped pointers heaped at the radiator as kindling, an old flag hanging in flags, a globe’s smashed in, world flattened; calendars fade into maps, so tired, the round white eye of the clock’s shut stopped; there are charts here and there are graphs and there are trees here, a mess of corkboard herald, pushpin fame, gold stars spangle the wall, they fall from their walls from up high near the waterlogged ceiling, below the paper trim that scrolls out the math and the alphabets: A a, B b, C c…B turns His head to follow the tongue of paper around and around, tongueless trying to sound its letters out now, right to left, Aleph, Bet, the latter the letter that begins His own name, ending in a grunt—call me that…in His turn facing front again, to take in the tablet before Him.
A chalkboard, effaced in clouds to bear heavy weather over the metal of its lower lip, hosting in the beveled curl its scowl, a single wisp of chalk—but no eraser. A blackboard scarred in white, balmed with the puff of gray clouds at its margins, wiped into winter at its center by a palm licked slick, dispersed with the tail of a coat, dispelled with a flick of the cuff: its surface entire a great whirlwind of days, of weeks, or moons, their record scribbled, rescribbled, worn, scrawled into palimpsest then rubbed thin to a unity, dappled pure, this sky streaked light over dark. He jumps from the teacher’s desk to stand, to grab at the chink of chalk. Then, with a fierce stub thrust, He rips the board from the wall; flaking plaster, screws stripped from wood on brick, it comes off in His hands. He ties it around His neck with a ripped stripe of the flag He halves, tying with the more modest fray the wisp of chalk to a boardtop eyelet: leaving the classroom, then the school itself, heading out into the interpreting world, stilled in Shabbos silence. B spits on a finger to erase, a clean slate, saliva daubed with blood. A thumbprint’s trace. Upsidedown, it doesn’t matter…I will write myself.
The sightings taper off to a worm. People have other appetites now…and even the most recent pilgrims, thanatopsical tourists with serious possibly illegitimate income to dispose of packagedin from Hotzeplotz to here, to Miami, their reservations made moons ago, nonrefundable deposits put down, to pay admission as much as their homage at the refurbished sites—nu, even they’re reluctant to make the trip and, if they do, just think of the money they’d lose, then they never purchase souvenirs for anyone of any relation more distant than that of a mother or wife, even splurge on dessert at the still swanky yet woefully understaffed Restaurant Under the Sign of the Imperfectly Toned Pectorals, at which establishment an Oriental tourist of the name Jacob-san, after having waited for over an hour for his order to be taken, then forgotten, then taken again, excuses himself in advance of any question to the paunch of mensch dining at a neighboring table, then asks him in a perfectly unaccented phrasebook grunt what the guidebook has thought fit to omit…ach, what in hell does the name Miami actually mean?
And the mensch, up for either Freeholder or Freeloader your choice with two sides potato and greens he ashes his cigar on the wall-to-wall, answers the tourist fanged through the tines of his fork that Miami, that’s just old Injun talk, means only Miami, thank you, it’s appreciated, forget it, don’t mention and returns to his brisket they call it secretrecipe, really choppedsteak marketprice-gouged. Jacob-san tucks his napkin under the straps of his photo and video equipment just as, a miracle, his order arrives, miraculous, too, that the kitchen’s made no mistake: it’s the house specialty, a heaping portion as prepared in the spirit of the old Gospel of Lukewarm, an oftrecommended, incomparably of the moment, most artistic and between you and me delectably profitable selection of savory: the Garnish Plate, which is a dish of horseradish, roots only, each of which’s gotten sliced into the face of a panoply of public figures lately vilified (and accompanied by an indifferent dipping sauce, pareve), as featured, in order alephbetical, on the last page of the menu above the reddened white of the winelist discontinued. Jacob-san forks into their version of the Pope, Pius Zeppelini da Foist newly displaced, become an encyclic salesmensch some joke and it is, a lifeguard to the canals of the ghetto at Venice others might laugh, whatever the giggly rumor no longer in favor despite his conversion, which was only lipservice, most think, suspected reversion, a cryptogoy (according to sources formerly of the dissolved Washington nunciature, Shade had offered a deal, either accept a God without a son or face, or face that son disinherited’s death); he foists the root onto his tongue, keeps his mouth shut about it, masticates thoughtfully.
In New York, where Jacob-san’s due next week if the itinerary’s subject to no change or lastminute holiday cancellation let’s hope to take in the lower eastern remnants of all’s usurped birthright, they’re only a step ahead of the (expected, please) throngs, out erecting Affiliated Monuments out of almost any tenemental, slumlordabove wreck: dedicating plaques, plinths, and statues (replica souvenir statuettes to be made available posthaste, bobbleheaded, skinchangeable, they’re just waiting for the shipments to arrive from the overseas shvitzshops this Jacob-san’s brother helps to manage back home), just a moment before any line should begin to form east from Broadway: an experience in the finding of unfounded memory, an only knocks once opportunity this, to be ingathered again, to become disembarked upon whatever passes for diaspora nowadays, onto this Island offIsland, as were their now again assimilated forefathers way back when, here to wander map in hand and foot in mouth the Heritage Trail, its serpentine ways, alleys and streets, avenues and drives—snakeskin cobblestoned, coldblooded paved, then graved over in an asphalt currently being torn up all over town—of a heritage just about everyone claims nowadays on penalty of, like how not to…to follow the trail of the crumbling bread even the crows won’t peck at, or whatever else that intermittently winding substance our most observant of streetschleppers and sweepers’ve been noticing lately, it’s worrying—though just short of them filing an official report, those dashes and dots of drip dropped up and Downtown this lonesome stretch of barrengardened, coldflat Orchard Street: a secret message of what, encrypted for whom. Anyway, is it even Orchard Street…isn’t it maybe Grand, or Delancey I’m crossing, Division dividing Essex or Essen, hesternal Hester heading western to where, I don’t know, no street numbers I’m seeing, O show me the signs—Second Avenue I know at least, I see they’ve renamed it Avenue Bet, First Avenue, Aleph, I get it, nu, I can count, but this is easier than ever, and southward unceased…who’s been down here before who’s native, who knew, who could ever hope to? Not Him from Siburbia, not used to such mess made of grid, such rank dissolution of order. He retraces steps, trails His own trail, how to get out and where to, wandering amid His own waste, wallowing amidst His own slime, the prints of His shoes swirling His progress He loops up then around, lost again, looks around. He’s lost sight of the skyscrapers Uptown—landmarks, occidental enough, when what He requires is an orientation. Where was that knishery my Aba had loved, that place he’d mentioned once to Ima how he’d go entire blocks out of his way just for their shtikel a pickle? Their bagels, bialys? Anyone who wants to find Him has only to follow His loss, the drop of His drip. Mine. That’s how I find myself, here.
B’s begun trailing this slime behind Him—it might’ve been something He ate, some’ve suggested, a schmear gone wrong: just the last day or so, a viscous and humiliate secretion. He hasn’t yet been to the doctor about it, why, too many conditions to consult, who would treat Him and live, after all, who can trust them, and who’ll pay the bill—this perhaps the relapse of a familiar syn
drome, yet again returning familiarly, Tweiss shy: with etiology merely another waitingroom for those with more time than pain, them and the already eulogized, too, in short, the headshrunk, it’s a latent fear of diagnosis He’s suffering from, a fear of treatment, if you want, the generic idiopathic, and sticky, stinging on its way trickling out; this slime, His trail, the solution He’s marking out from the swell of His rear. Once it leaves Him, slowly gloats down His legs then out their pants to meet the pant of the air, it tints a Radzyn royal blue, with a fading hint of Tyrian purple, reflected in the rear of the clouds below the tush of the sun: it’s the shade of techeles, that’s the term in the new language old, apparently a substance the rabbis once lived to leech, a dye obtainable only, it’d been thought, from the hypobranchial gland of the ancient Murex trunculus, dug from that highspired, whorled shell of the snail He appears to have turned into; Him mated with some seep of truculent slug a moon matured from estivation, the dwelled shell atop His back as if a worried hump, a hidden house of burden, with which to wander in search of home, in homing seek of search, all the while His true home just behind Him, if only He could turn; or maybe, as others have said, mystics and their interpreters as argaman in the face in argument as the substance He’s secreting, it’s that upon His return He’s gone the faller, and tumbled hard, into the possession of an angry purple dybbuk, a previously unclassified yet malevolent species of porphira: trailing His wander to stain the pavement in indigo at dusk, dibromoindigo lightening as dusk later turns to light, at dawn. Don’t misrepresent with misheberach, B seems to be seething a substance so supernatural that it’s only later identified, by many amateurs since experted, as that invaluable mediating enzyme known to us as purpurase, the active ingredient of that regal shade so valued by the Romans, and long sought after by our rabbis and us their students, too, scavenging at seaside for any shell washed up from the hoarding of the Flood, and further, less secret: by innumerbably unregenerate generations of the postdiluvian inilluminated, who would use the dark to dye the knotted fringes on what many would have known as a scapular, a lesser lighter shell to be borne by the body, over the skin, with an aperture here, too, but now cut through its very center, to accommodate the swell of a reverent head whose lips would kiss the fringing knots throughout the balming bind of prayer. To today’s observance, however, they’re known as tzitzit—the thin skin a grandfather would keep hidden under the black of his caftan.