by Joshua Cohen
The two menschs turn to stare at each other; then the skinny turns back to calm a yawn into his fist.
Mister Jacobson, he says, it’s standard policy to ask you to leave the room for the purposes of this inspection.
Say no more. As if to say even more. Keep everything in confidence except my confidence in you.
I assure you, says the fat, it’ll only be a moment…and as the proctologist rises he asks after him, as if unconversant: just look at the thing, that’s the Law, that’s what you want we should do, sign a piece of paper, give you a stamp, a large one we have, your choice of inks in every shade of red—the skinny adding, we don’t have to touch it, I’m just saying…to say: we might get our hands dirty for the money, but dignity’s the rub. Don’t blame, or accuse, they’re only assuming, with blushes. May it please the court, they’re new to this if greedy. And though the proctologist’s standing he’s nodding dumbly, stalling; probing around obscenely in his pockets front then rear for a wallet, which he eventually samples from his pants, tacts from it a stack of new bills he lays on the seat of his foldingchair. Appreciated, he says and then why not lies a businesscard atop, one of his own, you never know, tempting the cozen of professional courtesy, I’d do well by you…then turns to leave them alone, a schmeck privacy their privilege: he’s escorted out the doorway in the company of the receptionist who’d showed them in, a mensch they’d had to hire because of their frummier clients, the more religious who wouldn’t deal with a woman unless a relation, then how it’d become too much, this hiring of everybody’s kind and gifted sister; and so this haughty, hubristic, hospitalityschool dropout, he heads the doctor back down the halls to the lobby, its newspapers, magazines, wife, which none of them ever change except in their moods, her using the frontpages of today’s still crackling Fire! as a crumbly napkin, a dozen or so deep into the complimentary refreshments: yesterday’s coffee, the rugelach of last week, disappointingly fruity ever since they’re out of chocolate.
The two menschs behind their sawhorse desk cleaning their glasses without glass with their ties, which are untied one starred the other striped, and frayed loose at lesser ends: their unfocused squint as if they’re always thinking, never not; then, replacing their glasses of only frames and then their ties, too, the greater end of each’s thrown back over their shoulders as if silken wings or the pursy ears of sows; they sit unsettled, hunched over their common desk of the converted door with its knob still installed at middle, which they both take turns touching at and turning, then both have a hand on it at the same time, on each other’s and how they’re stroking almost in reassurance, shvitzy to stoop forward and even nearer to one another, then to B, with their other hands holding up their heads: the listening position, it’s known as; futz conversate, though, the consultation’s theirs.
Stand up, please, the skinny says, come closer. And loosen your belt, says the fat…don’t worry, we don’t bite. Your shver, the tuchus doctor—he didn’t pay for that.
B approaches the desk, standing it feels to both a floor tall above the seated lawyers, staring out through the extensive glass behind them, with its view to Mitteltown’s rushhour…at the snow falling in a whitewashing squall (as if provender to livestock), at the sacrificial animals specied to servile dray: the mules, donkeys, oxen, horses hamed; the carts certified push, pull, and peddling, then those of the milkmenschs, too, the trundling delivery boychicks, the streetside prophets and the unrelieved, allrevealed schnorrers, the roiling moil of forms clad in daily black…and as the skinny he’s saying, nu, so drop them, a clattering comes dull from just behind—one of the two menschs standing amid the gusts of the doorway has let go of his pistol, and holds up his hands in defense; the other, however, ignores the order and the response of his partner, ranges his aim wildly around the room at the lawyers then at the tushy mensch between them with His hands on His corrugated belt, as if about to let loose with whipping…hymn, Hymies, they have to be—at least operative under an Affiliate acronym. As the first one who’s the second in command, he thinks, his partner’s assured him, backs himself from the room slowly with his hands still raised bearing too much white mortifying the cuff of his shirt against the suit’s black, dynastically classic and official as hell…the other’s still yelling at them all to get down, mutterfutzer, don’t move, freeze—it’s already frozen, makes no sense, this fall yourselves down upon your face, humble, scrape prostrate already shoeless, they’re stood on hopeless ground…and so the two lawyers lie themselves flat on the carpet unvaccuumed, their hands held behind their backs, the two of them yelling at the other two whichever variant of We gave at the office. Shut the futz up, which one of you’s which. B doesn’t lie down or even turn around, rollover, and this despite their orders armed with aim. Rather, He cradles His blackboard as if it’s His newborn, and then with head bowed down to chest as if to deference its breasty idols, vaults up and almost over the desk doored before Him but goes through the thing instead and flying, only to shatter Himself, too, stumbled through the window amid a nimbose explosion of glass, to fall through the air then down a floor giving way to floors after floors down through the weather and its own floating fall—to land unharmed atop a snowdrift, within it as an oversized flake foundered upon a swaddle soft and loosely packed. B to rise up gevalt the knees amid slateshards, the window’s wood and glass scattered across the walk, to leave His broken board, His bitten chalk, and huddle disappeared—seethed into Park Avenue and its heedless herds, the Mitteltowning swarm.
Though many think, all are right. And though many know, all are wrong. To think through His disappearance, to ask amid everything questioning else where He disappears to, when He does, and how exactly might He do it—that is, to create. It follows thusly—to purport to know Why? is only to destroy. To answer, therein lies the sin, unequivocal. Here, we’re creating a canon of our own, at the very least updating the one we’ve been born with, were born into, and so giving it life, a future if only in His death. Let there be a negative tradition. An inheritance owed. And it was, and still is. A living life against. Be not discouraged, though; interpretation’s acceptable to any question asked, is actually encouraged, rewarded in its own time, even if it be posthumous, praise be to He, Hallelujah…however, answers are still forbidden: they shall be destroyed, scorched by the sun of days, left in the valley to blacken the beaks of our vultures.
History is His, is ours, and not as a fixed sum, a known, but as a continuum, if darkened, a forever beginning, an unvoided void. And so it’s with a mind for this history, this past we might date and time by the deaths, inevitably, joyously, of our many martyrs, that B plots an end of His own. A Zionless plotz. Without these losses, no gains might be ours. Immortality is abominable to memory, also to banks and to the capacities of even our greatest synagogue and shuls, their oppugnant schools. But how to have an end to call His own, having been forbidden from calling, without tongue, His mouth the grave of a name. A death itself shrouded in the as yet unknown, graven upon tomorrow, buried in future, a coffin if falsely bottomed to the day before that…the thought now is Polandland, far toward the east, it having become too dangerous over here, too hostile, exposed. America, what’s next. America, vot ken you mach…and there, what—to begin again, to honor your self and your stubborn ambition with the perpetual promise of newness, the always novel, the once failed now all over again, there on the other older side of the ocean, here upon the olden, othered side of the sidereal deep in which His parents lie, and His sisters, His people fallenflung in a tangle of millions, sunken and yet still twinkling however many depths down or above, only to become swallowed up into the netted bellies of the fish swallowed by the fish that constellated constant Leviathan will upon the arrival of the next Flood swallow down into its belly of net, the underside of the moon without rainbow.
Polandland, where everything began, there it would end, if only for Him, if only for now…spin the globe, point a finger; on a long Shabbos afternoon to idly flip through an atlas, then stop and,
po or sham, that’s where history hails from, promise. Polandland, where everything’s, what’s the idea I’m thinking here, the ideal I’m saying, the word without chalk or board…where He can get Himself perspective that’s what, a sensibility, distance, remove—the wart of the word on the tip of the tongue, the pickled silver sliver of flesh, fishlike if headless, stilled, mounted in its setting of gold, having been excavated from the ruins of His house, dug from the scorched mouth of the earth—only for it to leave its limited time only exhibition in the Museum in the Park north from the Temple’s conversion, to make the rounds of every major metropolis, wandering city to city in its lingual stump, an equatorial twisting…to outlive infamy, outlasting even reality, on its way to becoming a symbol—with the mensch to whom it belonged to be remembered as a relic Himself, to be embraced but only in His toothy demise, its humiliation, whiteshrouded. A sickly veil. To then ask with this severance of His for another, if only He could, to wag its length into a question, to curl it, even at this remove, at such a sunder, around what appeal: to ask with it permission to leave, for leave to escape, to beg, beseech, bow down, to humble myself in the midst—a tongue that would be the brother of the snake of Eden treed before its Fall, a tongue with knees, I’m talking. Think of it, how to leave affairs all up in the air, rain-bowlike and at their highest arc, promising only the undecided unmade, the still unthought and forever unknown…redemption necessary to any expatriation, Him needing to be released from this bondage before He binds Himself anew (don’t begin when you haven’t finished, or—Hanna would often harangue along these lines); it’s maybe pitiful, perhaps abject, but faithful, respectful, honoring—this seeking of maternal permission, this wanting of a brotherly consent. To obtain His freedom from any Pharaoh with a heart significantly unhardened, melted to any sympathetic wet. To ask with a burnt, coalslowed tongue the only question to which an answer might be permitted, the answer of—do what you want, what you will, up to you. Affirming maturity. Independence. You’re on your own, grown up. I have a response. Anyone have a query? And if none would oblige? I’ll let myself go. Even more than I already have.
It’s tenable, many think, it holds—though so very difficult, involved to argue, but since when has that stopped any of us—that all of history’s happened to effect Him in the negative, much as it did Adam, time’s wearying wear on the first mensch, with everything his fault, faulting him, nothing to blame, with no brother whose mark would keep him; that when another first of a kind, Napoleon, suppose, he rode through the desert upon the horses of the great Alexander, thinking to conquer the bondage that was Egypt if only to bind it to him, to the West, then, and so to a few argue an even greater oppression—and you won’t find this in your al-Jabarti, try as you might—that one of the goys in his army went and stole a date from a stall huddled up against the edge of Cairo under the citadel of Saladin, stole a date that was poisonous, a date that it’s said killed the goy when he went to it for sustenance, this goy formerly a Venetian sbirro who’d been courting an Affiliated back home in the Republic once serene, them groping each other on the outskirts of the Ghetto Nuovo no longer gated what with the emancipation and this thanks to the campaign of that very conqueror being served in the east—the two of them Venetian and Affiliated still sheltered, though, hidden from all, declaring their love for one another under the protective ring of the Terza, a bell echoing far from the San Marco campanile; him stealing kisses and hugs and loving words from this ghetto maydel who after having waited for his return from the fight and having had none for a while went and married another Unaffiliated, who he was the dead goy’s brother who’d urged her to give up on his own brother for dead then took her soon pregnant west to an America that promised an ocean between them and the continent warring, which union of theirs and its consummating birth upon Manhattan Island led directly, some say, believe it or not, through splinteringly infinite causes of causality, gevalt, and through subsequent effects too numerously and, too, numinously insane to even allude to here, ask them, they seem to have all the answers, the charts and the trees, the graphs and riverflows—all leading to Hanna and Israel, a Developed cedar far from its Lebanon, palmed nearer to New Egypt, Joysey, and its tiny pines, branching out to bloom Him with the winter…a culmination, if culminating in disappointment, and for at least this Garden’s root, this trunk, final, that’s that.
And not just the past, others have argued, not just our history, no, that in truth everything’s been created for B—B as culmination, as the created creating, natura naturans who He hasn’t yet exorcised that particular endowment, impotently, a potentiality shed; B as an apotheosized beneficiary of all mundanity from Bereishit’s beginning to now, an old heresy: that even Genesis had been begun for His sake alone; that water, too, had been created then divided upon the division of the second day expressly for His tears at this, His departure; the moon made only for His night, the sun made only for His day, then the air smoking around Him, it feels to Him, American Him, decadent as excessively holy and holying Him—and then shoes, hymn, them as well, having been created for the sake of His feet alone, though cobbled too tightly, nu, though loosened without laces, the proctologist’s spare pair He’s walking in on His way south through what once was the Village; and then the snap-brim cap on His head, how that’d been taken from the proctologist, that also and maladjustedly tight, had been created only so that it would fly from His head on the wind as He makes His way down toward the Battery—His head uplifted, Him passing questioning unquestioned through the gate new at Wall Street, which had once been a wall erected to keep out the natives of Manhattan raised again with its name remained to limit the traffic of the Unaffiliated from the marketstalls trading Downtown; domain of woolybearded carders and dyers, tanners and tinsmiths, the young, fritcheeked blowers of glass and they, too, who drive no trade at all save that crazy and begging—that indeed, many believe, and though only lately, which is too late for most, that life entire had been created for the sake of His life alone; His existence in the world the world’s justification, its one and only its hosting of Him’s the heretical thought: interpretively, He didn’t die for our sins, and He won’t—it’s even worse, He’s lived for them; and the evil in this is that before He can question, He believes, becomes His own answer, and so swears by His own singularity, this deathly uniqueness, Hanna’s baby boy reflected in the mirror of sewerward ice, Israel’s special son in the shopfront windows that store for a moment His passage—this one life of His that’d once been advertised to all as a model, exemplary as itself emulatory, marketed to ever as symbol; an idol to be held high, Godlike exalted, and there worshipped as ideal, and yet still one life again, immortal, He’s thinking—the alwaysliving, don’t tempt, it’s mine.
To the port then, its pier. There to slip away, stow His flee, wharf a wander—to vag off baggageburdened, though there’s only a single small lawyer’s attaché in His hand, brokenclasped. Thanks to a deal brokered by the proctologist’s jilted daughter and a mensch who’s gone by the name, it’s been said, Laser Wolf (alias Hugh Bris, alias Nicki Noir, alias Anti O’Chus IV, alias Malachy Malachym, AKA Gory ben Davidson), it’s stuffed with the forge of nine nationalities, passports taking Him passage and without reservation under whichever names had been available lastminute—the shorter the better, how long it takes to memorize the newest pronunciations—their photos imaging the face of the most minor god known: a no one with nosehair, an anyone with earhair in the blurry, brutishly lit shots snapped in a booth west off Port Authority; an attaché lined with six diplomas’ worth is what it takes to read them of papers hermetically furled in fists and ribboned don’t forget me fingers: mutiple signatory honors and testaments, letters of attestation, of introduction, recommendation, resumes and titles, citations referenced to curricula vitæ—all dishonorably promoted to the nth degree, beyond credulity to hope. Never such a thing as too prepared’s the ticket, how B’s taking showy, matinee precautions: this false beard slash moustache ensemble, over the top then elas
ticized around His real, also from Eli, whom He’d contacted by messenger, a singing telegram He’d intended to cheer but had instead settled by cost for a mere note to be brought her by his brother, a quicksilver midget mensch in a red cap whose nose even redder below resembled an infected bell, that and the hands wrung overwrought, to say to her no hard feelings, to go soft and explain Himself, who He was and is, and then how generously she responded, with an uncle’s grandfathered briefcase she’d found in the closet, genuine calfskin as delivered, babied around in a new wardrobe Big & Talled it’s all sewn up, with her stitching into an inseam her best wishes in black thread; she’s helping out with the finances, too, scrimping everything her parents allow her, scrounging prospective dowry downpayments never more than bribes, bridal layaways her suitors hoping; that and any spare she manages to take in from knitting for the neighbors twinned with newborns just downstairs: just enough to tide Him over plus a few days, maybe a week at most from Sabbath to Shabbos then little more—nothing much leftover after paying passage, the grease of gratuities involved, the price of thanks to think, maybe a meal, I hope, a night in a room…
Manhattan’s tip, the prick of its tongue—it wants to say more but can’t because of the ocean, too bitter to speak. B makes it to the edge of the island from which He can’t find His own, disappeared. It’s a cloudy day, caught in overcast nets of smoke. The port, an immense planing of planks terminating in the ice’s horizon—ending as it, clouds tangled in rigging encrusted with barnacles, greenwhite stars, wispy cirri winds. A hawser choking the rust from its bollard—which the raincloud and which the snowcloud who can tell. And then, spearing the clouds, through the smoke, the masts: uprooted trees, made to wander upon the face of the deep. Through a lippy and bristly bustle of fishmongering, fishhandling, fishhaggling, fishy dealmaking, the hazards of floppy, soppy hands, fiddled fingerings, promises, swears and oaths, an immense dingen, all this thinging around, something stinks around here, something rancidly rotten; through a liveliness of livestock herded two by onboard bound for where, chaotic, this loading and unloading of slavish dray, from carts lade with variegate crates, a profusion of boxes stamped in languages as numerous as splinters in the planks, which way up and what’s labeled fragile on both sides of the frenzied line of ice chunked from the surface of the water then hauled handed in from one to another, to keep fresh the catch; bleeding puddles…