Witz by Joshua Cohen

Author:Joshua Cohen [Cohen, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Humorous, Jewish, Jews, Jewish Fiction
ISBN: 9781564785886
Google: j-s-MceQ51oC
Amazon: 1564785882
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2010-05-10T20:00:00+00:00

A ray of light or shaft, with Him beneath, the disposition terrible. One leg of a ladder missing another leg and then, too, their rungs altogether, with Him beneath and passedout. A pole, and not that of the moustachioed, sausage-tongued nationality, those who once had been known as Poles, and so to be fatter and even taller and immensely hairier and more violent than that of the present species—but a pole like a totem, as in a lamppost, a telephonepole, above Ben, passedout about to cometo.

The mood, horrendous, don’t ask.

A pole just poling out there alone in the middle of the desert—O the West Pole, standing blown to bow in the cold wind of dawn, its shadow so long it reaches all the way to the easterly pole and right back around again, equatorial and such, gone global. As for the loose rag atop, that flappity schmatte: it’s flying the standard of a nation Ben’s never heard of before, a flag for a land He’s never even seen on the maps, a country maybe unconscious.

18, it says, where’s that?

Ask Aba—golf was his thing.

It’s freezing, and His robe’s no help, it’s wet, not fabricate but filth. It’d snowed, then icedover, and all the while the grounds’ sprinklers have been on, shooting their water to harden, to still, their sprays frozen insectlike, or into seacreature tentacles—coldhanging cages of flow, as if capturing air, imprisoning cold.

Ben on a golfcourse, His form a divot of earth.

The shadow is the pole and its shading flutter the poletop flag for the eighteenth hole He’s sprawledout atop, or below: comingto, goingout, Him coming and going again to where He doesn’t know which, nauseous, perplexed—an incalculable time dialed, teed upon the posts of His lie. On the head and the arms, there are wounds, there are scars, and then the shadow’s in a different lie from where He’d last left it, dimming across a hazard with the westerly swing of the sun. The light, His eyes…the kopf of His head. Ben’d been knocked-out: a prick of blood encircled by the red of unconscious scratch on an arm up near the hock of the shoulder…a doctor, it said it was, then there’d been a needle unnursed, its sharp tipped widely and as dark as the night. He’s hit that head, too—on a rung fallen from, knocked a dream. He tosses, numbed, though His numb also aching, and His putz slipping from its shorts, then pajamapants and mothering robe to writhe within the hole lubricious with ice melting from the friction: Ben rubbing up and down against the astroturf, and upon spurting He goes out again and when He comes to He’s shed a skin and soft again and there’s greengrass that’s strangely not God’s Third Day of the beginning creationary grass and the green, it’s a strange bitterherb in His mouth, between His teeth a tongue that’s jealous of wet. He spits to the wind, turf and leaves fallen, flails under the eyes of vultures perched on powerlines neighboring the fairway, aged and blistered buzzards out for fleisch, His or any.

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