by Joshua Cohen
The Church, too. Ringing.
Isn’t that delightful, Misses Jones asks everyone…nu, wasn’t it, she demands, just incredible, hymn—and as if in thanks for such a display she goes searching her pockets the nine of them for a spare coin to toss to the busker, a streetmusician still playing amid the echo of the bells, those onehanded, clapped clocks, these flutes and splits of champagne and Sekt, bubbly bottles, magnums, jeroboams, rehoboams, and methusalehs even rimmed with wet fingers, ringing a dry and fruity accompaniment to the tutti orchestra just tuningdown, too, that and his sister’s sweet, ethereal mezzo; in hat and sunglasses, she’s most definitely blind, though whether her handicap’s a condition preexisting or yet another directive from Management’s for the moment unclear, and who would presume to insult. As she gives, so does Mister Jones, and the others, they just have to keep up: hoping perhaps not as much to express their gratitude by charity as to obtain for themselves a pardon, at least the assurance of any afterlife preferable to light touring in hell. In this, discretion’s of the utmost importance: the Sandersons lower their eyes, pretend to search around in their purses and pockets before doing as the others do, as the Joneses have done, which is to remove scraps of clothing, strands of their hair, their shoes even, then the ropes of their belts, the only donations left them. Underground, an employee rewinds the Square Sounds, sets it for repeat, a circumambient loop cycled down from the pitch of the dogs…the orchestra dimming din to moos, even oinks, oathed obtestations, the blessings and curslings of commerce returned: May you grow brains! Market’s moody mistrust (mark madness, ruble rage, the zealotry of złoty, the grunting of groschen), as Mister Sanderson approaches the musician’s singing sister, slowly, he’s muttering his appreciation to himself as much as to her—thinking, perhaps she’s deaf, too, thinking aloud, just listen to her do that dies iræ and illa—he holds out his hand and with it holds hers, presses a rag of lining, from a pocket of his pants, into her palm hot with lint, then nods over his shoulder to his wife who she’s nodding to him; the musician’s sister drops their tips, buttons, snaps, zippers, and hems, into one of three pockets of her vest, each one set aside, earmarked, as it’s said: one for her, one for her brother, her lover or maybe he’s both, and of course one for Management, always.
Atop the viewing platform of the spirant spire of the easternmost and yet also northernmost, as it’s alternately compassed it’s breathed, magnetically imposing tower of the clockfaced, clockhandtall Town Hall, Mister & Misses Sanderson the two of them, Misses especially, in excellent physical shape, more than able to manage the centuries of steps spiraling their way to the culminant top…a dizzy cornute, a shofar’s staired chute—they stand gazingout through the telescopes mounted: they veer far to the mountains first, focus, the hills, stomachlike imperfections, these pregnant, tumorous, cystlike, or otherwise cancerously raised from the pale of the land skinned around, and then further, focusing, squinting…behold, a stretch of spines, prickles and thorns, ensnared, ensnaring, as far as east and as north, their sprawl left whitened out of the maps once provided, the map they’d purchased at the aeroport back in Topeka, which they’d been required to purchase, a provisionary splurge—a whiteness, which seems, initially, only a haziness of the eye…this glaze, glaucomally dim, the gradual graying of day, the freezing dusk of an incoming headache—I think I have to lie down…a patchwork of briar and bramble, hooks and snares and of starthorns. Here are the quarters of Polandland they haven’t the time, nor the permission, the permission that is time, to visit: the Lumber Yard (everything here’s labeled, and large, signs in every language to satisfy even the most impotently compelled of the curious), in which the wood’s apparently, according to their Guide later asked, dried for clarinetreeds, for the planks that husk the hulls of boats; then the Gut Mill, in which strings for violins are made, alongside the workshop for knots in the suiciderope…the Ink Distillery, the Nib Works—and then further…if glassneared: out warring the mittelground gone already lost, overlooked—this to which they’ve been made the mere witness of two whose testimonies would stand if only together, as observers only if twinned and with the testified third taking the trinity starred, with them left alone in a garden in which to observe only the sin of each other, it’s said: a son possessed by a wife who’s a ghost, a holying spirit, a soul incarnating a faithful entwined…it’s all coming together, a convergence of sorts, dazedly stooped atop the Town Hall to squint themselves stupid against the gaze of the darkening wind—the cloud pouches, the black rim of their squint: a horizon that’s a hill, with a swarm of night presently tumbling over its height…young kinder with their camp counselors, too, matching in their white & bluecollared shirts, screaming and shouting and having what’s been called, oy, the time of their lives: they’re streaming down the slope latterly cleared of alders and catkiny birch for their gallows, to fall down to the rocks and stones of the valley below and its shadow, the sun’s risible grave—even their orphaned kinder have been ingathered, too, each to their own special programs, their own particular schedule, sensitive to their limitations, whose not, forsaking history for the unique requirement of the young, those at heart. This hill, lastlit, and membraneous as if the rising of the moon—if sectioned conically, maybe, if we’re to be obliged by these workers espied, just off to the forests (in a veer of their scope, working their ways around the shroud of the sky—though with no further focus on what this all means), carting with them their twohandled, manyteethed saws as if the trussed remains of wolf trophy, its flesh for the sacrifice, then the feminine meat of the pelt with which to hide nakedness from the lusts of those whom that flesh would sustain, and their gods…there to clear land for whatever facility’s next, wherever’s next stop to last—if sectioned conically, we’re saying, this hill whether concavely or convex, into a crosssection, a slice taken out, only a sliver, a glassy rind or a peel: that portion removed would be a lens, and so perhaps could shed a ray of light, could straighten and narrow the light now dying, upon the tumult planned just beyond.
Grown below, a ritual clamor: the thrones are being reseated, the bear and the lion are chewing the scenery; between fanging at each other, that is, and keeping from themselves and their schlock postcard prey a hovering, twoheaded eagle: whose claws clutch two gold constellations, that of the hammer, and the brilliantly sharp, horizoning sickle. A scythe, harvesting souls: a reaped vista vast with its armies just massing, partiuniformed, ununiformed, tatterdemalion nighthooded and grim, scarred with elaborate insignia of their own private winter’s invention, already exhausted in their hearts and minds just by the effort it took, it takes, to get lined, accounted for, at the ready. Misses Sanderson swerves from them—better to ignore until even ignorance’s no longer an option: in favor of collecting, if only for the grandmothered attic of her mind, a host of rare, deepbeaked, earthturning birds, carrier butterflies their wings mounted a span across rivers and streams to facilitate pillaring, their bridging cocoon…her scoping the metallic, mechanized work of what she’ll think of as oddlegged, scurrying spiders, her delicate, birdboned face with its fluttery eyes fortified into the spin of their webs, the last caught light of their barbs. How she nods to her husband: a herd of ragged kine, see, Samuel, how they’re grazing on wire, upon heaps of moldering scrap. Lately, she’ll take any wonder as sign, anything fantastic as expected, deserved—Samuel, just look: the making real revelation of another living thing, however mythical, however purposemade, wrought if only for the spectacle of their paying indulgence—a miracle, she says, this place has it all, thought of everything: a ram ensnared in a thicket, look, and missing its horns; sheep sheared naked, then garbed in the skin of the Unicorn, see; locusts, my God they’re locusts, Samuel…storks on parade; geese born of barnacles, grown from a remained grove of trees, hemiformed, varibirthed, the progeny of Ziz or from zat; deer sniffling the moist streaks of snails; gelatinous worms splitting earth; ostricheggs boiling on the back of the salamander, slithered from flame; an ass without rider talking its own tou
r to itself, if only to remember its remarkable name—ask Miriam, she’s reminding, if she doesn’t know no one does…sly like a fox, it’s swinging a rooster dead overhead the swine of the Romans, suckling süss its perfidious Sus; a calf brightly gilded, tethered to the goat of Azazel—how she wishes she had that fieldguide to flip through, but she’d left it back at the hotel, the only thing in their safe—secured with only the thinnest of threads, reddening then whitening then reddened again, its needle lost to a camel’s pass, the hump of the hillocked horizon: it’s incredible, Sam, just amazing, a caravan of mountains, a procession of clouds—all how they’re leading themselves, led by nothing, toward the sheer edge of the land, a divestment, this divergence, clearing out before their contracts expire, their fortyday, fortynight creation to fall, yet again, from this world, everflattening…further even to where it’s just a blip of the eye, at the tear of a lid, it’s the Behemoth, fashioned from Golemic clay, searching the earth it’s of for the love of its impossible mate: Titus’ gnat perched as a sentry atop winged and wingishly bearded Nebuchadnezzar, powerfully lionlegged, pitifully lion-tailed, heading out toward the oceans, the ocean…to where the Leviathan lies, swallowing forever the whale of Jonah, which itself is forever swallowing the Foundation Stone, the nesting place of the raven, with the dove hovering its reassuring attendance above, flown from its blackened arked cave strewn for the sleeping with eggshells and ashes, where sitting now until perpetually swallowed is only the wisp of an Adam—yet another Guide, the most senior, the first: sitting as straight as a knife for a finger he splits the tongues of the snakes that wriggle up from his throat, wiggle out his mouth then onto his lap, slicing off their arms and their legs, then offering their loss to the beaks of that white raven and that black dove above, to fly their slithers off to any ultimate shore, to poison the final void there to sin…
Again they present themselves at the Cemetery, a full five minutes before the hour appointed: a clock cheeked big and bloated, its hands expanded, as if the two hands together they’re a belt with not enough teeth, stretching as far as it can go, about to snap off the scale into…they’re full to groaning of traditional delicacies, the very best of the regional kitchen, their fingers and lips wet and salted, their kinder messily smacking a snack, licking two scoops each for dessert—might we recommend the Creamatorium, MAP 3D? Can I borrow your book? Can I hide with my guide? A young mensch squats in front of the gate presently open, shuckling lowlife and sucking away, at a cigarette he’s rolled like his mother flakes pastry, like his favorite barmaid flicks her tongue at his…slowly coming apart.
We’re closed today, he says, keeping his eyes from the smoke—closed, the appropriate state of the eyes for memory’s opening.
Smoke required, too, and so, the puffed tone.
No, it’s not, says Kaye, then nods at the woman who’d supported him earlier, who over the course, third, of their meal has become his fiancée. Maybe they’d let them marry at the church in the square.
Who to ask?
We’re undergoing repairs, the mensch says, reconstruction, please consider a donation, you know the spiel, I’m on break.
No, says Kaye, I don’t. What gives? He turns to the Group, it’s his Group he’s thinking of it as, he lets himself think, if only for a moment, a shut of the eyes this meditative minormorphosis, a protomorphosis, perhaps, come unto the minatorily mundane, whichever’s opposed and so comfortable, known: his Group that’s beginning to lose interest in the Cemetery, though, any at all, really, beginning actually to lose interest in even being a Group, would just as well give up on it, individually, call it a day, without loyalty, go back to the hotel, take a hot shower and—suddenly, the mensch springs from his squat, steals Kaye’s hat from his head (a new, spooning bowler he’d upgraded to upon arrival: a pity, its brim had been bending just perfectly, upturned and immaculately round as if a haloing smile), then steals through the gate, leaving it open and then into the Cemetery itself, disappears behind bars, imprisoned by trees. Nothing obstructing their entry, Kaye walks in heavy, freezing shoes two, three steps to the gate but as he reaches for its handle to open it wider to allow his fiancée to pass through gently first, a gale swings it away from him, fled: rudely shut, rustily latched, locked in an untoward kissing of metal; and so he tries for it again, tries at it, the hefty knocker founded obscene as a fist, the handle yet again an extended palm cast in iron but empty, still nothing, then remembers, the first mensch’s key, in that memory withdrawing a hand to knead the full, lumpy hurt of his stomach as if to heal a bloating of boils, their expression, a carbuncle’s emote, an indignity lanced, brought to a head from which he’s soon weeping; that, and he’s developing a troubling rash. He falls on the gate with forearms, elbows, shoulders, the edges, the sharps, but no one answers, none opens, then presses the full but also emaciated, increasingly fevered, almost tubercular weight of his body against it, catarrhconsumptive and bleeding its time what a waste of good scrofula, such a squander of nodes…it won’t budge, and so he turns to be comforted by his fiancée, Faye her name is, stepping into a mudpuddle that wasn’t there before, he hadn’t noticed: it’d probably been secreted from below, piped up from an underground tank designed especially for this muddying purpose—it creates business for the hotel shoeshines, keeps the rag industry going through a tough patch, scuffed, supports Polandland’s polish; and then there’s his hat to worry about, food poisoning, indigestion, or an allergy, maybe. All at once the skies open, nature ungated, the Group huddles together under the gate’s overhang…as a girl with hot rubor eyes and dark hair that’s inseparable from her dark, deepnecked dress makes her way past them, topped with—it seems like, Kaye’s hat. He twitches ticks to the front of the shiver, yells out to her in a voice of hoarse ice, the expected: that’s my hat, you’ve got my hat blah, but in response she just stops, turns to face him, shakes her head sultry, even more hair tumbles loose to the sky the hat flies to, coldly brimmed by the wind, swooned up through the air. Then she reaches among the pockets of that dress, which is slinky, formfitted by gusts, and empties herself, untucking: coins and bills omnidemoninant, (telephone numbers of and mail from the) presidents of shipping concerns and inspectorate bureaucrats, produces from her bosom a key on a chain inscribed with the legend: Room 50, hands it to Kaye with a whorish leer that makes Faye jealous enough to slap the wet from his face.
And surely—the key opens the gate.
Nu, fill in your own personal details, your own private designs—these coincidences have been keeping culture going for ages…it’s a paradox, all of it, it’s easy to think, in that it’s a parable, too, and as such, parabolic: always returning to whence it arose; a parable in that while it might make sense within its own system, which is closed, it won’t be applied outwardly, however you try, nothing corresponds…though how can anything be both paradoxical and, also, something else, in possession of any other quality, hymn, not so simple’s the thought: if it’s paradoxical, it’s only that, and nothing else, only a paradox, and then not even that, too. Kaye knows only this—he wants in. But there’s always a tug, isn’t there, the chain and its decapitated ball with a face, without eyes, without mouth…Faye his fiancée seething but dumpish, petulant, pouting, with the rest of them almost wholly disinterested now, though anyway becoming herded behind him—and so, to narrate themselves on. Kaye steps toward the gate, halfway through it, making it to the middle of the arch, between its archings, just as a mass of people stream out, umbrellasfirst, an even earlier Group or groups nearly impaling then trampling this Group, his, trying to make their way past in orderly file, trying to make their ways through, to insinuate themselves if only halfheartedly—but the other Group’s too strong, too willful, and anyway wanting out of the weather and home, their hotels, the ferrules of their umbrellas too sharp, too accurate, and black with hate, they beat them back, gouge eyes and navel, prick and slash. Finally, the old mensch with the one leg that this time around it’s the other he’s missing, him with the moles and nose
and bifid beard, and a crutch stripped from birch, shuts the gate behind the Group just departed, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, points at Kaye, grins angrily.
You’re late, he says along with the bells of the Church, ringing out in echo Kaye loses count how many tenored times; the mensch winds from them, their toll toll toll, his pocketwatch, chained inconspicuously what with the heady medal and the beard obscuring, setting himself five minutes early just to be sure.
We were here, Kaye yells, nodding fiercely to his fiancée and faithful others, jealous friends, hers, for support.
And then the mensch shakes his watch to his ear, you were early then, he says, whatever makes you feel better.
Kaye throws up his hands, and his fiancée with that earlier episode obviously forgiven places a palm on the back of his neck, which is soaked: he grabs the bars with his fingertips, claws…they’ve been caged in the open, are starving and thirsty again, and afraid, it’s contagious, this fear, this conspiranoia, made animal amid the human surrounding—Kaye shakes the bars and growls like the beast he’s become, aguish, abject, like the creature they’ve made him to be. A mutant, a changeling, a cockroach if insects have hats, if even they might deserve, might merit the commandment of cover. Here’s yours back, the mensch says removing his own, the highpeaked, mothworn relic of a war too anciently besides the point (the thrust finger, whose) to matter which cause he bled for, survived; he throws it up and over the gate. Management Assumes No Responsibility For The Safety Of Personal Effects—Anything Found Will Be Held Until Your Death, After Which It Becomes The Property Of Polandland.