by Joshua Cohen
It’s all in the hips, their bones softened in her own churning water, a heavy flow like the chugging of laundry, the colors, the whites and the deathblacks, a night. A give in the womb. Her lips open, her legs come through, but the inside of legs, their insides, ligaments to tendons sucked up then out feetfirst, coming through bound in veins…then, her thighs follow, their fat greases them through, here the bulge of her waist, there the lower half consuming the upper, the teethmarks of her panty’s band, their elasticized chatter; she leans up against the warmth of the washingmachine, which is on, the sounds of which, its regular rumblings turned shudders, are louder than hers, conceal, consume, the shakes of the floor, flakes of basement’s ceiling, plaster-skin peeled and the heat: Sabbath upon Shabbos of this has accustomed her to the quiet required; still, her bottom lips tend to bleed. Her breasts come through before her arms, the underneaths of inverted nipples, their reversed areolæ like drinkcoasters on cedarwood, wet, how she’d always have to remind, Wanda, too, don’t put a glass on the wood—then the arms, their fingers to elbows to shoulders, and at the last moment of hold, the last stain upon time, she throws the rag she’s been holding to her mouth to the mouth of the thrashing machine (later, to that of the dryer nextdoor); she opens the lid, the cycle stopped, closes the lid to begin the rumble again, and the heat. Her limbs aren’t broken, they’re too weak to break—complaining, overcooked—gone is the fatty droop, their deflationary birthdayballooning…and the batwings, too, the darkening cystics of their wens: first the fingers of her servinghand, her slicinghand, her fork and her spoon hand and that, too, of the knife to carve in the kitchen not to cut with at table, these without nails, stripped of their prints; and then, her elbows push through, are pushed knocked like her knees are into shoulders, her head nods through insensate, serously, viscous strandings from scalp, placental skull, the sac of her mouth a bubble to dirtily burst with a thermometer’s pin, a dimpling thimble, get a lick of soap, wash it all out…hair down the sleeve of her throat. The inside of her face is amniobathed, bared gel the quivering skin of the eyes, her nostrils denuded, flaringly roused by a smell like the scorch of detergent, a quick bleaching, a twitch of a moustache her lightened lashes and brows…her lips lick themselves as if she’s eaten herself, not quite, more like she’s gotten only a taste, a free sampling, and wants more, needs it: she holds naked fingers to her lips insideout, gazes beyond her blind to the crack of light coming in from the door’s draft, where it should be, should’ve been.
The Table
And then the table—you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?
Our sages tell us thusly: that she sat on the earth, as if in mourning already…as one authority holds: mourning herself, her kinder, the world.
And that then a root grew up inside her, filling her up.
Others say the following: a root hung from the lips of His mother, those lips some say—how it hung like a tongue, prideful, waggingly wild. As it itched, she scratched, the mouth of those lips, and at her womb, too, full of dirt. Mud, which was the dirt wet from her, which fell from there according to some, here where she walked wherever it fell, and that she followed this dirt feeling dirty, as still others interpret—as if hope upon hopes the trail would lead to somebody else, would track yet another, a fellow mother to dirt…to mud, to filth, though she seemed if she ever existed to be always behind her. As she swept herself, she followed herself forever, swept up after herself and before herself, too, a monstrous mopping, as she circled (and circled) the barren of garden, swept herself with a broom bound of thistles, a mop, while others say thorns, then scrubbed at herself with the sea, the scrub of a bush—most say it burned.
All agree—she was not yet His mother; as per tradition, not anyone’s yet but her own.
It all began with an itching: when she awoke in the mornings flat out on the earth she had scratchmarks, manicuredeep, on her thighs, then around the low of her stomach, that she’d scratch at these itches, then how she’d feel suddenly huge, and ashamed, and then vomit, which made her feel better, a little, vomiting dew the texture of morning, that she’d then in embarrassment—though no one else was around—wander away from her mess, further always to the root of her home.
And that the root then grew up to a trunk, that the root then grew out to other roots, too…the roots hung there in the air, the air was rootrent—that she walked around the undergrown garden, which was too sparse with growth too small to hide the huge of her nakedness now, and with a tree sticking out of her, treeing up…its trunk protruding unwieldy, must be careful, she’d fall.
That she’d stroke the trunk through the night, a new limb.
How its slow branching made her bleed, O the cut of its bark.
She was impure and had to immerse herself, she had to submerge herself and her tree in the ocean, to water it, then, to scrub from it its bark dead like a skin—to shed, it’s said, the snake of her limb.
There was a hollow inside, and how despite that she’d complain of an emptiness…the form of its hurt, and not hurt itself. Hard to explain. How she couldn’t stand, and so she’d lie down in the grass; she couldn’t bend, couldn’t lean, only lie. That was difficult, too. When wet, the trunk would swell inside her, and so she’d throwup into a basin, now a river to island her garden—or, how she’d vomit into the sky according to some, vomiting the sky itself others hold, constellations of mouthstuff, acidic stars.
One night, she was flung high up to the air toward the sky, as the tree grew to height, took root deep in the earth down below her up high, cubits above in the treetop, atop sore and there swayed by the wind.
How do I get myself into these things?
And how out?
She found herself talking to the tree, her voice was the wind.
And then she slept, head on moss.
And then woke.
She stood emptied out on the sturdiest of her limbs that she’d slept on, atop the tree she’d just birthed, and gazing out over the lie of the land.
And its beasts.
There was a husband in the distance, too, years ahead, decades and menses—in his hands, he appeared to hold loaves.
This tree is our house—it’s more hers.
Of the tree grown down from within her with her on top of the tree grown down and then out of her up.
One morning, she began her descent: plucking the stem from her navel, from the highest of her tree’s branches the umbilicus bud, the soft, downy, prettypink petiole blooming in white, pricked and ripped—then slinking her shimmying way, down past boughs wet with her, in a pomaceous tumble soon splitting her legs and, trunkhugging, the tightening hug of such thighs…until she touched ground, a firm footing, arrived. An apple as if a breast of hers or another belly went loose with the rock and the shake—gravity fell is how, and the fruit hit her on the head, then hit the ground and rolled over the horizon, the sun. She gave a yell, he heard her yell, then turned his head to her and realized by this risen sun how late in the distance he was—that he had to arrive, must…he’ll be late soon enough.
Her tree grew down ever further, then, how it drunk down even lower to stay: it branched into the earth, roots to vein the beneath, seeking a wet other than hers, its very source that had seeded—down into the sidewalks, the breakyourback cracks, down into the asphalt, the now landscaped lawn of the garden.
Knots widened into plates, boughs wound into bowls.
Kinder, which were leaves fallen in the wind of her yell, ribbed in fall—they went out to retrieve them, the many plates and the bowls, and then to forage for more, with always an appetite climbed up, clambered down, scavenged their meat placesettings from the northernmost face, dairy scarfed from the south of her round.
As it’s been said, her tree was their house, and still is: this room here the lowest stump of the trunk, the diningroom, the room in which we all dine…it’d been hollowed out by the kinder, woodstuff taken to dust fluffed their pillows, which’re buds never to bloom, for night’s sleep within their rooms ri
nged of grain.
And from all that, from the root, the first and the strongest, the taproot it’s called—only this table remains.
The rest having been sided in plastic, roofed in who knows menschmade or synthetic what else.
A table of room hollowed out from around the table of root, that’s how it happened—we’re told.
But, the question the scholia still ask, a table tabling what—what comes cosmologically next, the penultimate celestial course piled on?
What’s to be served on the table—what savory dish, what sweet sacerdotal…what are we having, what’re we having, what’re we having, Hanna?
Ima, all your kinder want to know. Tonight.
It’s been handeddown, then tossed around hotly, thrown in rage—that the rock of the Dome of the Rock, which is the domain of the Akeidah, the altar of the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac, and, too, if heretically, the purported site of the ascension of the false prophet Mohammed, due to an unfortunate leak in the minaret’s tip, a smallest sliver in the gild that let in the morning manna, was gradually eroded away, down to a grain of sand that, upon one morning’s dawn, went and drifted away on a westerly wind: and so what’s left, arching high above Jerusalem, is merely a dome, gilding nothing, stillborn, an idol kept from spilling itself to the street by only a wall thick with moss and graffiti, its cracks crammed with prayers suspected to be the only things still holding all up: the Temple’s precurrent platform, that dome atop, and the heavens themselves. Heaven. And it’s now and now only that reconstruction begins, with scaffolding and spackling, insulation and sheet—a different concern of conversion; according to our sages, they’re still talking, taking proposals, accepting suggestions, contract bids, a little help here, any ideas. We’re open, I’m saying.
Welcome to Palestein, the Resort State—a paradisiacal refuge once forsaken for exile, the diaspora’s good life.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the second assistant frozen foods buyer at the best, most centrally located supermarket in Greater Tel Aviv and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the second assistant frozen foods buyer at the best, most centrally located supermarket in Greater Tel Aviv verily said—
Nope.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the weekday resident pro at the Par-Shah Private Country Club and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the weekday resident pro at the Par-Shah Private Country Club verily said—
Sorry.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the head dayshift usher at the Mullah Moolah Multiplex and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the head dayshift usher at the Mullah Moolah Multiplex verily said—
Don’t think so.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to the thirdline buffet chef trainee at Tumbler’s in Jericho and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the thirdline buffet chef trainee at Tumbler’s in Jericho verily said—
Wish I could help.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to a roulette pitboss at the Vault in Hebron and verily said to him—
Have you seen Him?
And the roulette pitboss at the Vault in Hebron asked for an afternoon to review the surveillance tapes and talk to the host, I’ll get back to you then verily said—
No, but if we do, I promise—
you’ll be the second to know.
And then the Holy One Blessed Be He went to Him in the form of a bird I think a dove it was with the wings of a fighterjet and with the beak of an unmarried, unmarriagable virgin, and verily said—
Have you seen Him?
And He, verily—what could He say?
I heard nothing.
Not since has there arisen a prophet like Him, and never again…or, at the very least, not for a good long while—which is time enough to forget. Strangely or not so much, meaning expected, the holy and holying methods are proving inefficient, ineffective, too, until His God, and maybe, heretically, made in the Image of most of the other parties formerly interested, previously in pursuit, not a few of them no longer powerful, since ingathered into purgatorial failure—He just gives up, like He tried…abandoning the search just as B, Himself, once was abandoned, left limited in credit and options, unbasketed along the banks of the frozen Atlantic—not so much no longer believed in, but more to no longer believe in Oneself.
Walled in, and yet of the wall, too, towering majestically above the valley known as Hell…O the dwellingplace of Moloch, as has been most famously, as it has been most loudly, lamented by the prophet Jeremiah: this sepulcher doming the Cœnaculum within, alongside the tomb of King David, the Psalmist of Zion. Here let us sing of three rooms, communicating stonily mute, rendered dark by the cloying cloud of the drapes. A moon prior to B’s passage, twelve of them notables all take their seats around a table in this hall made of the rooms of the ultimate dindin, the Last Supper it’s known as, served upon the Seder of the first night of Passover as has been chronicled, too, in books finally forbidden, that and the site of the Holy Spirit’s visitation to the disciples seven weeks after, the day of their old Pentecost, unmarked, burnt from the calendar, its ashes forgotten. Apostles of a sort, He’s surely not among them, not gracing. Not fit to sit at table, to knock around ideas on last knees with the likes of His once could’ve been but now never future father-inlaw, Shade, no longer president of his nation, presently termed for the life of him the president of its Sanhedrin, with Congress converted. A Schade, though in losing his title he’s only gained power. What’s in a name: the new businesscards, for one, they’ll be back from the printers tomorrow.
An eternal, eternalizing idea, it’s said, Shade’s that of their Iscariot: we become humbled to prevail, we sin only to merit. Along with the envoys of Abulafia & Sons, Inc., their heads bent low, he’s in discussion, not prayer. Their muscle, enforcers interested both official and private, sit one room over atop the tomb of David itself, idly oiling their pistols, and smoking cigars as big as whole pickles, making their toilets and moves: ogling these newly Affiliated exnuns, here of the former Carmelite Order, old habits exchanged for new, bustling in and out of the meeting with ample vorspeizen, appetizing trays heaped with savory outlay: toothpicked olives dark and light and pitted and with pits, too, alongside platters of pickled everything else you’d imagine; plates sweetened & soured in every verity known, with many of them only dreamed up by catering last moon—though all of them new and old tending toward salt, their sweet more like halfsour, cheekhollowing, budtart, new green and dill, yes, though not only those pickled pickles, no, there’s pickled babycorn, also, and beetroot, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, mushrooms, peas, peppers, pomegranates, radishes, tomatoes, turnips, and watermelon still in its rind, the delicacy that is the aubergine pickle, as well, that’s eggplant, if you weren’t sure; the reformed nuns stooping to enter the room, still sexless and humbled, musty and modest and decalced if only from personal preference, each time coming and going back and forth and back again in barefeet they’re tripping over the threshold and scattering all: the room, the rooms, pooling in brine, both vinegary plain and whitewine, and so out then in again with them, and then again with another tray, yet another of them to drop, to scatter their heap; they’re wading through the thick wakefoamy juice waved by their long logged murky skirts patched out of wimples, trying to serve their refreshment amid the spicing flotsam of bayleaves, peppercorns bobbing, dried red chilies, celeryleaves, cinnamonbark, vivisected cloves of garlic, coarse salt, coriander, dill, fennel, ginger, and horseradish, onion, parsley, and thyme floating atop the floor’s pool. At one end of the marble table’s a projector, this paleotechnic failing machine whipping its exhausted fan intermittently on electricity wired from the bulbless socket above: it’s projecting transparencies onto the opposite wall, miscellaneous surveillance images of Him, and of His former owners, Master or Hosts if
you want, the official terminology’s TBD, interpreted—those of Laser Wolf (LAW), or he might prefer Glazer, those of the proctological family, too, them and their lawyers examining, then vague resource maps (oil and water) extending outward east the furthest known to what’d been Asia, an assortment of topographies and graphs, a Babel’s baffled charts; the bulletpointed, sevenday itinerary of an upcoming goodwill tour of Polandland entire, to be undertaken by Shade, and to be replete, they’re talking, with performances by yeshivish brass-bands and miscellaneous orphanages’ gleeclubs and choirs, summits with emissaries from seminaries, and meetings met with imported intelligentsia, promoting what they’re officially calling dialogue, cultural exchange, I don’t know…Shade, senior member of this assemblage as head of the Sanhedrin soon supranational, he keeps ducking down toward the table then almost under it as if he’s in the way of the image projected, fingering spiced at his nose, the shvitzy pimpling of forearm to forehead, tugs at the pants of his suit wetted through to the knees. Thinking why’d he go and agree to this meeting, this location, and with its timing so off: a tick too late of shade, this career’s blot, a soured stain; how he mustn’t lose the sun…it’s that he’s trying to follow its beam, windowed, slit, this ducking, dodging, feigning and feint, to stay within its lighted coddle. To keep low, if still wary of warming: the US of Affiliation shouldn’t know he’s here, or, if that’s impossible, then especially they shouldn’t know why, his purpose—his sitting down to break bread as much as covenant with these heathens, Philistines, meaning goyim he’ll Judas anyway. Silverpieces, futz them: the taste of coin in the mouth, a metallic bitter, too tart to talk anew. Fling a purse, and wing, he’s thinking that’s the schedule. Maybe it’s the symbolism, though, what stills. Its salty reek, the sulfurous retch: a time itself pickled, preserved, stuck fast in webs of herb, parsley/dill nets, onionskins…O to savor it upon the tongue, as the tongue, before the swallow and all’s forgotten, belched. He’s uncomfortable, feverish, tired from the flight. Hell should be this hot. And hell, he’s reminded, is only a valley away: just past the glassily shimmering walls, the arch widemouthed, the open lid of the nearest gate—giving way to the briny, brackish pit…