by Joshua Cohen
Mos-s-t importantly, keep everything in pers-s-pective…then the snake slithers back down the way it’d arrived, though it disappears into a pucker, flicking up the hole in his tush—forty years-s wandering the wilderness-ss, a generation dead, and you think you’ve had it rough?
Try an eternity being me.
Hey Hierophanatics! History’s ready, willing, and parable, are you? parabolic, that eternal arc—perpetually relimned, always rainbowed realigned: surveillance aeroplanes ziz overhead, dive down; the zatzatzat of helicopters through cloudcover, their rotors hacking air through a smokebank. Postmortem reports conflict with the broadcasts, contradict our intelligence, which is preferred by nine out of ten, blow our hopes for a sustainable crisis all to futz, Kingdom Came. Contrary to information previously invented—there’s less rape, and even less torture; certainly lesser crimes than are reported, at least those perpetrated upon any humanity worthy of them—as for the rest of the beasts, no comment, next question. Suffice to say, there’s no mad Golgotha stand. No Hail Mary last ditch trenchmouthed teratological fight. Zoglandia rid of all the perfidifiers, it’s been easy and fast, too easy and too fast it’s simpler and quicker to state, which might imply to any dissent a specie of problem, a disconnect amid the chatter of wires, a true resistance still lying in wait, Underground. But rest assured, you—you in your new homes, tucked into your new beds, dreaming new dreams of even newer homes and even newer beds and ever newer kinder tucked within their own dreams, which are yours, too—that it doesn’t, that every once in a while we just get lucky, having barely begun just when victory’s ours, the world already ended on us. This is the first time in our history that we have had so much power, and yet there’s no one left to inflict it upon, which is strange. What hasn’t there been: none of those rumoredly huge hostile armies, welltrained and kept at the ready to outnumber even the most mystical permutations of hope; no ridges clouded with enemy stormtroops recruited from unworlds imagined or not, overcasting in their shadows the valleys we held; no strike force so elite that we can’t reveal even to you its designation, falling its heroes so deep up the river we’d have to deny their very existences, the rivers’, too—first response dead thousands on the uprooted fields outside Austerlitz only a myth, a legend merely useful, parabolic in the extreme, reinforced by a detachment from the 18th irregular regiment of the Very Idea, routed from Hell, the Middle Finger of the Hand of God—Whose lips presently wail the bugle call, sevenvalved echoes of Jericho off the tremulous walls, if any still stand, a sentinel if not for peace then for still.
Threestar General Ariel Support dips a schmeck tabak, an imported brand he plugs deep in his cheek; riding shotgun, he sneers spit to his underlings as they make their seventh and ultimate rotation around the perimeter. At Camp, action’s calming, becoming routine: the horizon’s a mass of hair, of blondhair, of yellowhair and goldilocked, flaxen, platinum, and towlike, ginger, and strawberry sunned, auburn and otherwise Caucasianally burnt: plaits of the stuff, reeds and weeds of it, tangles thicketed, brambles barbed wiry.
Fire from the sky and all that mishegas, the General’s yelling over the engine with the windows cranked down, then we’re hauled in to deal with the mess, that’s the infantry, son…he’s preaching to his driver, a recent enlistee just in from Monsey or Muncie (check his mailcall, a relation once shipped him a challah postmarked Walla-Walla)—you should’ve talked to a lawyer before you signed up. Visibility edging the rim of zero, the same nullity as that of the temp. General Support’s in field camos, his neck and ears warmed with the worn of a stolen chinchilla. Their vehicle’s a wonderful new feldgrau Mercedes, shanghaied just last week outside Marienbad and ingeniously refitted: a turretmounted machinegun, a handful of surface to airs. Support’s spitting orders for an end to what’s been a cursory search: interlocking circles of like Mercedes and caterpillaring tanks never to make butterfly rank, to converge treads and wingless tires at the apex of Zaol II, is what it’s known as—to ensure no one’s survived.
After this last and seventh panzerpass through, this Camp’s to be closed, Zaol officially decommissioned, demoted to the status of field. Then, to be reconstructed, though first, it has to be cleaned: that’s why this maternal embed’s been ordered, maids to be parachuted in later today. Millionthgeneration transplanted maybe they’re Romans pouring dead into northeastern morning, scorched in the freeze. After all, someone has to pick up after them, and their own mothers, they’re dead…someone has to tidy up, featherdust if fosterly at dawning’s remains: they’ll be dressed appropriately for the wetwork, babushkad in shifts, armed with brooms and mops, dustbusters and vacuums galore. Infantry’ll provide support from the ground, in contact with the cover Above. A winged formation suddenly swoops, everyone raises their heads and gasps deep. Call it the Last Crusade, Support’s saying, those used to be Abulafia bombers—Jerusalem fell in a day. This revamped Holocaust has forced them to reexamine their relationship to regression, technology as the way to best preserve the tradition—we got the best military in the world, Support’s saying, forget that it’s the only one now, all its hardware and more menschs than we know what to do with. Answer me, son—what’s the idea of a past when it’s not invoked against any hostile present? with only them making the history now, imposing the history, with only us left? That wasn’t a question—at ease. Have to rethink, rework, back to the modernly basics—rekindling advancement, the resurrection of progress in light of the exigencies of the pure. It’s inevitably fast, in the wink of an eye. We’ve radared Judea. Behold Samaria in all its missiled glory, which severs the earth from the heavens above. General Support straightens his yarmulke, which is fastened around his head on a leather thong tied with a bow under his chin. As for his driver whose name Support doesn’t remember, never knew—as they slow to a stop, he fingers his tzitzit for luck: they’ve been made to stop bullets; his tefillin are bandoliers, one boxed onto the arm he doesn’t shift with, the other piled atop his head, which is shaved and nodding along. All this is an assimilation. Don’t ask—it feels natural enough.
Goddamnit, General Support yells to himself, he yells everything, can you believe? Their dreck stunk in a week. We didn’t even have to fight over Shabbos…turns to his driver idling their Merc: you ever look deep into those eyes, son, I mean deep, cold and blue, unfeeling, stupid, I’m talking animaldumb? Nothing’s there, empty, knockknock, nobody’s home. He opens his door and jumps out to what’d been base camp HQ, his paunch wobbling crazily on impact, he’s put on twenty pounds since assuming command. He spits another thick wad, on a boot, then steadies himself amid the swirly dust and the skeletal sky, places that boot dripping on the tush of an old pair of uniform pants, issued by the renewed Levi-Strauss. He scans the goy’s number from the label—the name’s “Dowd, Peter Paul,” then radios into the SS, those Scrimpers & Savers, an unofficially cracked, ragbony platoon flown in from Upper Merion’s King of Prussia and Affiliate malls up and down the Siburban seaboard, northeast; the emes, a squad made up of the cheapest rattiest bastards ever raised by the most mental of mothers Rodentia: I’ve got clothes to cash, he says, I’ve got your pants here, your jeans, denim, real nice, say, tenthousand pair, decent condition, need a bit mending, shirts, too, size (checks a few collars from Dowd’s fellow grave) mostly XtraLarge, socks and shoes salvageable, Over, why not. Why’d we bother to clothe them, don’t ask me. Or bathe them and house them or what. I don’t give orders, I follow. Wallets and watches are mine, Over, but you better get here right quick for the organs—this Dowd’s passable young, liver and kidneys’ve got years.
At the further curve of their furthest circumambulation, way past the perimeter fence, into the spill of latterdays’ death—last nights ordered a rush, a mad frothing into morning’s calm bed, strawstrewn with dawn’s reddish strandlings, its braided rivers of blood…how they’d been directed to martyr quickfast, doubletime before that doubling month of Adar returned, and with it its moon ordaining that newest of holidays, the festival of Purim red
edicated, with the Sanhedrin proclaiming it V-Day—the impassioned observance of our most recent miracle lately usurping an olden salvation, the random succor of lots (who gets to scavenge, who goes without); then beyond…Zaol I–VII, each encampment circumscribing the victory in an inset of rings, as if targets rippling out from camp to camps over fields that are field, plod after plot of this soaked, soaking earth, anything but plain—matted a rasp in barbarous curls, ringlets, snips, spikes, licks, and locks; a harvest wildly wilted this devastatingly untonsured spanse of wildform growth, this if not yet thinning, blondbrowning ground. A scatter of jaundice, scalps expressionlessly blank as picked clean of features…and then atop this all, red heifers, which are less prized nowadays considering they’ve been bred by the hundreds of heads, leaning to fat from their previous starve, they’ve been engineered to graze hereupon, to grave, teething up the crown of the crop: this yellowed to blond, this dark ginger darkening in its tear to dreck’s brown, exposed, with highlights of light henna, last dye grown out, still growing out even in death, lightest red streaked skylike with peroxide. Hair, coming up from the fields, as if grown by the very bald of the earth: there are heads buried down there, they’re up to their necks in it, mouthed nosedeep, at the eyes and then deeper toward the brittle crown, the pastured scalp; not screaming or shouting for help, not even blinking eyes or crinkling ears with wrinkly foreheads, no pain, and not much face left to time or interpret with: worms make their wriggly hurtles from nostril to nostril, socket to whistle of air between what teeth remain. Bodies planted, many suspect they’ve been purposefully planted: be patient, your certificate must be still in the mail…as a reminder to whatever fight might remnant a muster, a Resistance, Underground the underground, a.ny a.cronym that might never have had any name, whether boulder or bold, under which to wig or disguise (it was all, it’s been said, this sick Kapo’s idea, the work of the Austiner Rebbe, unofficially held to be one of the most vicious schmucks ordaining around).
Now, heifers don’t teethe—they tear by shaking their heads, No…denial, declination, as if they’re answering the only question they know: are you yet sated; meaning, hasn’t this been enough…they shake their own heads to shake the heads up and out of the ground, all recognizably mangled, a few still necking onto torso or limb, but most severed, decapitated, bulbously without body—corpses to be zipped up in unmarked shrouds then sold backcountry, to General Support’s old fratfriend, the Rebbe, who it’s been said brokers the deal with his brother, socalled, in truth that’s a rumor a ninetyyearold Palesteinian woman who keeps herself in a suite at the King David Hotel equipped for OR, vitals to be transplanted, alien blood contaminant, an impurity, spreading…as for the heifers, they don’t bite, son, they chew, I mean with their teeth, those dozens of them—they munch at the skull to swallow it all mealy and mushed, on down to the rumen, the reticulum, which is the ruminant’s primary stomach of many, too many; as many stomachs as there are heavens and more, there where these heads would further soften, loosening skin, bone and brain if only for all to be sent back up as cud, cycled, as if to return sustenance back to the earth, as if kvetching, not warm enough, overdone, a petty complaint, says General Support—it’s bitching, forgive them: then, they’d be chewed again, he goes on explaining to anyone he’s ordered to listen—how he’d raised cattle back home on the farm, remembering to his menschs a ranch out in Texas with a hundred head as he tells it, twice that on another occasion, down by the border I’m talking, a youth spent at Mexico’s edge…by the molars, he says, then swallowed back down to the reticulorumen, that’s its name, there past the papillæ, don’t ask, they resemble fingers, like tickling, you know, the acids, a giggling like, then the omasum, you with me, that’s where the water’s absorbed, the abomasum next, finally, the true stomach, the last in the ebb and flow of digestion until the intestine (right here—and he traces its snake down and around the stomach of a teenaged girl who’d died preggers), down that tract then muscled out the other end, he says, dreck and so forth, and then everything begins again, the cycle, sustenance and waste, the most intimate kind of return. Goddamnit, he says, ain’t it gorgeous? Nature, what nachas. This time of year daddy’d be preparing for spring. Insemination time, breeding the chattel. He was the first in the state to give up his pigs. We’re all very proud.
Heads litter the fields of the field as far as the wind. Aeroplanes, they’re no longer surveilling, they’re bombing again, friendlyfire, not quite: clearing the air to the east, destroying what evidence (of just one mensch’s interpretation of inhumanity, we’re talking the Rebbe’s, Protector of this particular quarter), along the way racking up not a few casualties civilian and service; besides the ostensibly humanitarian quorum of motherly maids, airdropped earlier and presently busy at their stations of triage, dusting at pants, removing pants, with their retractable rollers removing lint from garments deemed particularly valuable (at least with solid potential for resale: ostensibly unisex sweaters, sportsjackets, women’s wear, skirts and sundresses wrapped in unlabeled plastic, then hummered on out), nominally Affiliated peasants of almost every precarity’s allegiance are being exploded high from the earth that birthed them in what’ll have to be described as a regrettable instance of pilot error, or mechanical failure, whatever else the addressing of would help us improve what we do while at the same time justifying our taking the lives of these witnessing wretches—more work for the burntembered cows, whose own sacrifice, it’s argued, remains sacred only in how it might, through the absolution of their digestion, obliterate any ashed traces of this operation, our officialized sin the only merit of which has been the thoroughlessness of its execution: to breakdown, ferment then calm with muscles and water, this wasting away, to a soil, to soil—only to grow, which is to dissent, yet again…honorary menschs promoted poor of family, of language and nation, withered stalks impoverished by order and fear into ghastling groups, then assigned to their own dizzying but dwindling clocks of clearing and wood, equipped with pointed staves to pick up sharpfirst what inhuman trash’s been left behind from the camps and, offtime, as slaves, tolerated, to gather for their own any blown crust—what even the heifers won’t low to consume.
A headlong incendiary, no greater than the others except in its threat, only nearer. An aeroplane flying low flying wildly, as if almost out of gas its engines down stalled, heaving forward, convulsing, its womb opening slowly, to birth: a bomb on your house, a bomb on your heads, one for each ear. A lone, ribhuddled heifer, the most starved around, the weakest and slowestdriven, the gruntiest, runnysnouted runt, it’s tearing at this huge hulk, an enormous round of gleaming ordnance or mine netted underneath a knot of corpses, an alien body amongst bodies hard and strange, a pearly prickly fallen thing presently parturient from a tangle of fleshy kelp and weather: two keratinous juts coming out of its sides, curving up to the sharp taper of blades; twin chitinous growths, cutting the air to pierce at the sun—strongstalked, one’s a rock, the other’s a stone. Or else, they’re horns. Around these volutinous spans as white as bone, streaked with blood, a mass of lackluster, thinning more than ever but lately kinky hair, unremembered this shade the dark of underground night, such a saddening change from the previous blond, and lately infested, too, with every kind of louse known to mensch and mouse alike: a few lousy species no sage has yet managed to identify, other louses they don’t even know yet exist, though no one does, and the lice hardly know themselves: they’re just simple creatures; all they want is to steal life from the living, their existence an effortless halflung, to suck the blood of a host—which explains these stains trailing to blemish the crescenting moons that are icicles; that are horns. Up from the unbarbered forehead, which is peely and flaking and dandruffed with drift. About that head proper—amazingly, a miracle, we’re speechless, please, still, give me a moment, I’m being torn up…the horns, they’re grown from a head, and the head, it’s grown, is growing still, from a body, out from the earth, a wrigglingly living wracked sac of a soul: it’s B, me, o
ver here, the Untermensch, unto the mensch under the Under-mensch, udderly menscheddown, demoted and dirtied, I’m full of filth and sick horny, having buried myself to hide, amid a copse of corpses, for safety, to think and rest up, to wait it out, eternity and all, just my luck.
My hide uncovered, and with what left of my hair stuck fast in the heifer’s hurl, about to be ground down into the cycle of putrescent swallow and putsch (it can only be hoped)…I raise my head then my body to elbow the earth, to toss from me the corpses that skeinstick my legs, go to poke at the dumb, animal eyes of the heifer with my not sure which they are whether of brilliantined bone or extrudingly calcified brain, newly grown out, you like them, what do you think: windsharpened, weatherfrozen, their weight, the cumbersome balance…goddamn it, they’re giving me a terrible headache. Attacked, wounded staggery and flabbily farmisht for a fodder on its slip-shoddy hooves, the heifer lets out a rounded vowel, a planetary low, which is swallowed into the echo of the explosioning around us; its mouth opens wider, more, as if to take my head in all the way as a cork to its call; it tears my hair to throw me up not into its gape but onto its back again, hairy if warming…I’ve been here before. I’m saddled in reverse, my face to face the heifer’s tush, my eyes, my nose, my mouthy ears, how to tell it to you so fetid with flies, with maggoted dreck…the entire field around us as if flesh itself suppurant with flesh reeking, putrid, a skin smutted with bodies bombed to fly high and land messy and the butchered carcasses of big innocent cows, turned the same bruisy colorlessness of the blasting around; with the cinerulent singe of such undone, letdown, blowncrazy hair filling the air with a gas of bright blond; how we’re wildly spooked through all this in a stampede of one and of me not guiding but turnedaround riding, more like holding on not for my life but by instinct, with one hand on the nape of the heifer’s neck as thin as a sinew of spine and the other why’s it gripping hard to one of my horns as if I’m riding, I’m guiding, myself—our lonely trek out toward the open, with our four horns slashing at the slash of the wind, how we separate the smoke from the flame.