by Joshua Cohen
They follow the white lines for disembarkation…beyond the desks, receiving a welcomebasket, also, complimentary, gifted with oodles of ointments to apply to their new tattoos (add them up, subtract, make a mountain, sustain); they receive scraps of yellow circles and crosses and circles within crosses within circles, which are still symbols though they might symbolize nothing save the quality of having once meant, which they’re to attach to their new clothing with the needle and thread they’re provided, and display prominently at all times, everafter; they receive spoons, too, then they receive knots of rope in unpredictable lengths with which to hold up the new pants of their uniforms, predominantly comfortable, casual separates; they’re burdened, overburdened, with gifts (one per person, per family, it depends, what’s my mood), and everything’s dutyfree, save their own duty, which is to follow, then die. They-that-went-to-the-right are to report immediately to the baggageclaim; they-that-went-to-the-left, mostly the ill, the already neardeath, in wheelchairs, on crutches, stretchers, and hooked up to tubes and to tanks, are to remain where they are, as if they could do anything else, as if they would, being alone and barely able to remain at all, anywhere, to be met by a representative, shortly, we promise: the pairs are being split by a cast of Selektors, only the finest blue eyes for talent Holywood ever had.
Those who’ve arrived single are forgiven, always are.
Then, there’s Customs to worry about—upon a return that’ll never be, they’ll have everything to declare.
There Is No Monorail Service Today, an announcement, announcing itself, We Regret Any Inconvenience. Thanks, appreciated, sure you do. Menschs with anxious lowerlips and insomniac, daywide eyes stand at Arrivals holding placards with numbers on them, laboriously inked: #’s 4677-18/19, a wave/smile, a smattering of currencies and courtesies, the couple formerly known as the Hicks find their driver. These signs lead the responsorial of welcome: Hello, how was your flight, let me help you with that; the natives are almost excessively kind. The Sandersons meet their mensch: he has the face of a bird, once a bomb landed on his turnedaround cheek, don’t ask, you’re forgiven, he’s forgotten—and are soon en route, motorcaded. Now, drivers are giving them all their first of two options, either I can point out points of interest along the way, explaining to you notable history and geography, what else, architecture, economics, the fine arts, geology, local plant and animal life, you name it, no problem, or I can keep my two hands on the wheel and quiet, your choice. First the tour of this world then, arrival in the next. All their expenses have been paid, by them. They fixed the place up real nice, didn’t they?
Impressive.
Under its previous management, this land had been neglected, had fallen into disrepair, as it’s said. Then, and only after extensive foreign reinvestment, restoration, and the involvedly grantgranted international like…it’s been reopened, and expanded, only now as Polandland (an Americanization of Polyn, it’s said, a word easterly derived from the holy tongue rededicated to meaning: Po, meaning Here, and Lyn, meaning Stay a while, won’t you?), having annexed everything from ocean to ocean, the Atlantic to its other, having displaced its inhabitants at the pleasure of invasion, its new owners presently engaged in turning it into one of the top tourist spots in the world, second only to what Palestein had been, had tried to be, if only for a sun’s slower season—enjoyable, though forcedupon; an excellent final destination; as far as terminus goes, you could do worse for a grave…yesterday’s arrivals monorailed through the outskirts of Polandland, their faces held up against the speed of the glass with the ice and the misting, condensed webs and fiery cracking—though it’s been said that Polandland itself is only an outskirt of Polandland; its outskirts mark the arrowed Meeting Point of all Eternal Returns, past warehouses of factories, processing plants, industrial temples in which it’s said imperfection’s maintained: here the Wechselstube made of weather, Imbiss, Auskunftsplatz, everything rung around its Appell, there plaques screwed to the sky, Zimmer frei, advertising all species of dead, deadening, entertainment…
At one hotel or another, which are really fashionable barracks, doneup Nouveau Beaux, neoArt Deco, in the lobby—its floor underneath the mound of skirts, shoes, and stockings, inlaid with a cruciform mosaic of gold trimmed lavishly in silver and bulletholes—the wives strip for delousing; then, they’re shorn; some opt for a pedicure, others for only a gruff buff of their calluses; as bodied, they’re blushing; there’s a great washing of armpit and feet. Husbands, having been separated into yet another line, are mustered in an adjoining ballroom, its walls hung with tarps over heterodox tapestries and arras. Today’s the first the Sandersons have ever beheld each other naked, it’s more silly than sorry; they avert their eyes; paunches hang over endowments, a money pouch, their testicles, then contracting, broke; water rushes onto them, interrupting the triple winds, triple strings, much brass, a musical revival of the Romantically destructive: their happy shrieks are piped into the Square; the water’s halfway to ice, it opens up everything: like the air amid the airs, this water is both separate and one, both water liquid and water solid, of the ocean and not of the ocean, of the above and of the below. Then, once the ballroom and lobby have been depopulated, they’re deloused further, cleansed more completely, and with better service: they’re remanded to individual luxury stalls, marble, with floors heated, mirrors un-fogging; their pants, shirts, skirts, and panties, underwear, purses, wallets and watches, namedesigner, are left unattended on hooks, socks stuffed into the throats of their shoes gaggingly tied together then piled to one side for the rack expected in a matter of professional expediency: the bellhop’s on it; don’t bother, he’ll pick their pockets for tips. Management Assumes No Responsibility For The Safety Of Personal Effects.
There is an Ocean around Land, there are lands around a Land, there’s land around a village, there’re villages around land, there’s land around towns, there’re towns around villages, there’re villages around hills, there’re hills around a wall: the walls are walls…there are walls inside walls inside, in sediment layers, strata, concreting calcite, limestone hauled up from out the earth then stood on end around the settle. They-who-went-to-the-right, we need a name for them, the Rechts, let’s say, those righteous Righters of way…they’re at the westernwall, the outermost wall of walls, the westernmost limitation of the wall’s because circular infinite limit.
What’s the wall protecting, a Mister Dapper asks; these people, you know these Rechters…they’re always asking questions, to impress the others he asks the Guide in a loud sleepless voice—the inside from the out, he asks, or is it the outside from the in?
The Guide snorts, leads on.
A mensch reels in the ladders from the wall. Impregnable.
This is ritual. Everything is.
There’s an Ocean around Land, there’re lands around a Land, there’s land around a village, there’re villages around land, there’s land around towns, there’re towns around villages, there’re villages around hills, there’re hills around a wall, there’re walls around a city…this is cosmology, davka from dechn: the ether to the Leviathan, to the water to the rock to the angel to the earth; this is the ringing of the rings, the inlaying of the spheres, the way a city circles out like the trunk of a tree, annularly, the annual dendrochronologic decored to decode—and then inside, toward the Square, toward the middle of the Square, the meridian Mittel, a descent down its steps of an immaculate blackness, flanked by two columns recounting two histories both correct though conflicting…there they are, through the winding streets winding around then amid the limitless beauty of ruin, each street perfect in its distress, distressing, a creation impossible for a limited God—down the old Royal Way, the ancient coronation route from the Church in the Square up to the Castle above and there, upon the mountain, the hill, the burialmound, the pagan cinders still smolder, the ancient beheading route from Castle back down to Square one with its Church, at which we crown a new king, again, the son of the dead with whom all of this i
s now enacted again, reenacted, princely as proper; and we all say, There they are, through the narrowing alleys, the fallen and the narrowed, felled to sewers, drainage ditch, guttering runnel, cleaned now made sparkling bright and doneup in periwinkle, sunshine yellow #3, it might be…over the old masonry, the inlaid memory, cobbled crosses ringing the plinths, past the statues under tarps, too, and their horses in bronze and in coppery marble, through the smaller antecedent squares, kleiner rings, the squared circles squared, these triangulations of the Baroque condemned to fresh life and then, circled, past the tortuous birdcage, rococo’s ornate, in which the king would’ve kept those who’d blaspheme his queen or the princess the same, there past the souvenirshops and the stands, the huddled, huddling, stores, with their windows wellstocked, an inclusive assortment of creditcard decals prominently displayed—there they are, toward the Square, again and again all roads lead to the Square, roamcircling it, triangulating it with wander, inescapable once there and then…into the Square, across its meridian where, it’s been said, a great gnomon once stood, whether a flagpole, a cross, or a crucifix, who remembers, who lives, casting the entire spanse as a dial of the sun hidden by cloud, opposite the low strixed Six that’s the plaguecolumn it’s called, erected again to pierce the night air at halftime, its perimeter plexiglassed, an enclosure sponsored by whatever company or corporation, its pediment replete with explanatory plaques in seven languages, each translation preceded by the flag representing the country in which that language once reigned, long ago.
And we all say, There they are…alternately, hineni; to the center of the Square, to the infinite Square without center and there circling the square within, there they are—facing now the Astronomical Clock, which is the face of the Town Hall, bureaucratically blank, unremitting; Church spires and steeple shadow them, shade between the legs, as third arms—the infinite hands of infinite clocks clocking what time they have left, the too many faces, with too many names…the entire Square rendered a clock of clocks, a confusion—all of them timing each other; many standing and sitting and lounging a lean atop and against the statuary at the base of the Clock, until a municipal livestock inspector, maybe, a hiredhand, like everyone else here who has words and his orders, comes around and yells at them to move on in a tongue forever unknown.
There they are, by the Clock cuckooing every hour on the hour—the Church’s bells on a timer, too, to ring mechanically, every fifteen minutes, the quarters, four times, not much time, not much life.
Nothing left.
The Church itself a bell rung by the clapper of its cross.
There they are. Just one crack, all it takes, one crack more, more like the merest chip in a sett or a cobble, broken—the first imperfection not party to the Land’s ruin perfected, perfecting—and it all falls apart. Goes to pieces. Exposed.
In anticipation of their impending Tour, they adjust their glasses, which have been mandated, and straighten their uniforms, tuck their shirts into khaki slacks, skirts, zip up fleecejackets, and down; walkingshoes comfortable, check, cinch the belt, camera apparatus, no film, not allowed.
What else? The rules…
They await.
They’ve been flown in from cities—from the aeroports of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Forth Worth, Denver, Detroit, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., with flights to those points of international departure from the hubs of Minneapolis/St. Paul, New Orleans, Seattle, St. Louis, Honolulu, and Juneau, having driven or been driven to any of these points of origin from way out in Siburbia, from Longport, Margate, and Ventnor down the Shore, Joysey, from the City by way of those Rockaways Near and Far, these Five Towns, purely White Plains, deepest Scarsdale, easternmost Westchester, the Sleepiest Hollows along the Hudson due north…the liquidation of Central & Mountain, the purge of the West: a utility vehicle parked in a relative’s driveway in Los Siegeles so that they’ll only lose one is the thought…left there until a return that’ll never depart—a lonely unmarried nulliparous aunt driving them out to the facility in her wagon so that they don’t have to take theirs then leave it for whom, a taxi sold for scrap, a limousine junked, masstransit transfers to terminal feet…an extermination without resistance, except with regard to its price; with stopoffs where and for, urination at the Manfred “Manno” Marx Memorial Service Plaza located twenty or so miles outside the limits of Angels, horsefeed and watering at a condemned gas station in Danbury, Connecticut, caffeine, the succor of a last phonecall, a goodbye cry amid the glassed bosom of nowhere, now former, to be filed under “as, previously known,” yesterday’s, to be repossessed by the Affiliated; arrived tomorrow and whichever way at whatever aeroport then waited, soon to miss, everything, routine, ritual, the illusion of the interminable, the long for forever…they wait almost in a suspension, in a Messiah’s slow time, late and latening, in the lagging pace of quicktime, never enough—O never forget, never waste a forgetting: always a people in transit, in motion, on the move, with yesterday’s or tomorrow’s newspapers already to pass the time passing, to waste the time wasting, comics with their bubbles popped empty, glossed magazines, tabloids and rags, other miscellaneous leisure reading material of a let’s be honest fairly unimpressive intellectual level; then, they’re shuttled everywhere, shunted, to places only imagined, voicedover in advertisements, announcements, orders, the Law, dispersed beholden to all conveniences of transit to gates, at which they waited, and wait, patiently laughing at their passport photos, passing them around passing, impatient, waiting, still laughing, waiting to wait—then they left.
An Affiliated bled on fences everywhere, bleeds…a village becomes a town becomes a city, has a Square around a Church around a mensch there, an Affiliated—the others always lived downhill, though, where the sewage flowed to, flows, and everywhere is like that with huge fields between everywheres: a town bombed does not rebuild its Square—all roads there lead to all roads there, road, and not to expectation, a holy vacancy, holying, an empty nakedness, the void, denuded; the Church like an old giant roach, perched atop the head of an ancient snake…maybe the river that halves the town, swallows other snakes, the snakes swallow rats, perhaps, poison becomes poisoned, the snakes swallow plaguecolumns whole, slither themselves into the streets around houses, homes their doorposts once marked now spackled over in reddened black, scales.
It’s easier than ever to enter this city, this station, this stopover; everyone off—and they all have their maps still handydandy with Selected Retail Outlets writ large. There are separate marked gates, each reserved for each and every kind of ingress or egress, rest assured; abandon all hope, but not humor: there’s a Low Gate, for the penitent; here, the entrant or extant must stoop to enter and exit, if exit’s ever allowed…a process of humility, this purely indifferent deference, a making of modest if not an abject denigration; then, there’s a High Gate that’s the source of much controversy; two opposing interpretations obtain: the High Gate is for a pompous entrance, many hold, with hubris, intended for the use of the visiting clergy and for the accommodation of guest Heads of State; alternately, a few say, the High Gate is for the exclusive use of the awed, the obeisant and penitent, and here amid this modesty many have found an unseemly double of the Low Gate, though various mapmachers have agreed that the humility of the High Gate is a stranger, possibly holier, humility than that of the Low: this High Gate is so high; okay, everyone, How high is it…? disappearing into a cloudbank, that an entrant appears almost insignificant in comparison, is made to feel so, is made so. There’s a Wide Gate for a willful entrance, that’s for the young, and the healthy. There’s a Narrow Gate, which is for the intestate dead, who’ll never leave either: here, the entrant must squeeze past the others, with all the others at once (how it’s really no narrower than the Wide, only that more than one person may pass through at any one time), their arms held in, head to chest, must bow through the opening, soulthin, stepping down upon heads, the olden pave of each other’s sick skin.
And then there’s th
e Tourist Gate, which is incredibly low and high, incredibly narrow and incredibly wide all at once, whatever you want, we aim to please. Next to it, a bocher’s selling postcards imprinted with the likenesses of their parents’ parents’ parents unknown; there’s an older woman in a formless shift, skinned over tightly with one of her own products, she’s hocking tshirts, emblazoned with the slogans and logos of earlier regimes, acronyms who even remembers their alphabets, what’s that say, what’s that mean; there’s a crockery dealer, the tshirt saleswoman’s small, fat husband whose face has a hundred noses, all but one of them buboes: as for him, he’s selling the porcelain of their kin generations dead, commemorative plates, spoons from longemptied, raided, Kitschen cabinets; you better believe their stalls have all the relevant permits, notarized twice. A gaggle of Guides loiter there on the other side of the Tourist Gate, holding umbrellas though the weather’s not yet been scheduled. Sh, the storm’s not until Thursday. What’s your Friday look like. One of them waves to her Group, walks over to them, meet & greet. All the Guides are required to speak at least three languages and have at least three names, or it’s that they all share the same in three languages. Then there’s the language they talk amongst themselves, that and the language of money. Don’t make the mistake of pitying them—they’re all on enormous retainers.