A Heaven of Others

by Cohen, Joshua

  I find here I am assigned eighteen mothers. As round and as pure as ostrich eggs, they are as round and as pure as the eggs of ostriches are my eighteen mothers and more, maybe more (I only say eighteen because only that means them all). Ostrich eggs burst fat filled with fat white grapes filled fat with enormous opalescent pearls or are they ostrich eggs I don’t know, I’m not sure. Eighteen eyes white around but black in the middle, Cancer Aba would have said if he wasn’t dead, living in another heaven, I hope. It is convenient that in this heaven we all speak or rather we all understand the same language or at least I understand what they let said to me and It all sounds—almost—like the tongue of America. Anyway all here are merely spoken through (and Queen Houri supports this, no, she embodies), and so our mouths open only to allow a saying that has nothing to do with the apparently individual or previously individuated entity doing the saying, mouthing and blah blah who says. Not the man named Mohammed, who has been shut up now in perpetuity (that is, the man named Mohammed has been shut up, not his mouth). Rather the One always saying the saying through them, through the man named Mohammed then through them by which I mean through us and through me (and does Mohammed picky and choosey through like the Queen did with me and the front of the newspaper?), that first sayer of sayings is said to be an entity that has been named by Who or an entity that has named Itself Allah. It is not to Allah however that we meaning I should address my appeal. I find myself saying this: it is not befitting Allah that Its words should be flung back at It. In your face. As if beets I’ll never eat. I remember. Like shoes to the Poor.

  As these mothers, my mothers, have no individual names or ever had, or at least refused them and still do, they asked me all as One—and so as nothing and so as no one—to say to them Houri. A name.

  We are a virgin was what they said and I suppose they knew that I was one too. We would be your lover and remain virgin forever they said but soon knew—through Allah? through the man named Mohammed?—that I needed a Queen more, a Queen and more: a Queen who is also her own attendants, her court and her courtiers, her subjects and guard.

  Listen. When I ask them Are you my mother? or Will you be my mother? one says Yes, another says Do you want me to be, a third says Only if you will be my son, and a fourth Only if you will not be my son, and a fifth If that is who I am, and a sixth If that is who I am not, and a seventh If that is how I can best serve you, and an eighth If that is how I can best be served, and yet another If that is who I was, and another If that is who I was not and another If your father is God, and another (Only) if your father is not God, and that all of these promises, these blessings and curses course out, all saying the same if in words that appear to oppose—as if their very answers were only random words of a sustained prophecy fled into sound, propheticules just flowing through them like the fulminant foamings of watery wine: out from between their wide parted rubies that mouth long reaches of let’s say tentacle, of binding fringe, of curly lock these endless shafts of air that serve to vibrate a pitch in the air sympathetically all these pitches all wavering as if the rib of a leaf in a storm or the quivering cord by which sustenance would come up from the womb, though I still hear them now in my memory and will forevermore as strings not of puppets or universes but of an enormous piano emanating from the very massing of their mouths—the huge concertgrands Aba used to work on when he wasn’t called over to fix and tune a grandQueen’s fungiform upright—a huge skywide, skylong piano is what I heard and still hear that was strung with strings that were invisible, gusted not only from their very mouths but also as if from their always moist, tuned, tightening and loosening vaginas, from their also always moist, tuned and tuning, tightening and loosening anuses and nostrils and even from the very mutilated wombs of their navels, an A 440 Hz streaming out from their stomachs at the deforming scars of their umbilici, out from between the cleaved halves of their ebonite rubies studded with beryl and carbuncle this A down lower an octave below the middle of All, A the highest string of the Cello entry from behind pain: which was Aba’s favorite poem this A the Queen once played fluming von hinter dem Schmerz: coursing a vast candle wicked apart into plaits of hair to braid with the braids then braiding into a bow of one enormously strong length of flame sounding deep and too low maybe even for any perception except that of rabid dogs on fire, a ray of molten brass it seemed to part the iron clouds that would rain down nails to sound dumb pluck strung out to my own imperfection, out to the exploded hole in me in a too deep thrumming low rumble that seemed to harden into the pipe of an organ, into a diapason of thread knotted to a needle of only an eye, the vibration of the jagged wound in my stomach sounding a hollow note pitched so terribly beyond everything so as to blow the world entire back to void again, the universe crumbling, walls tumbling around the perimeter of Jericho where I’ve never been but an Uncle of mine Alex and the glass he brought back, the Bohemian crystal from the vacation years he took to Prague, the MOSER glassed in our pantries back home (back apartment) on Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, all spidering into a web that was also the constrictive coil of an enormous serpent and its even more enormous hiss giving way only to silence, totally pure silence and still, the truest void though still unnamed and formless. Naked too. And nude.

  This was how their saying was said to me or at least how I then heard it.

  But to demur: It might be that in the wrong heaven I can only be wrong, and that this Queen of mine is actually clothed, or more accurately that all of her clothing, from the veils that admit only her eyes down to the sandy hems of her garments, actually comprises her nakedness, and further that her nude is just the accumulation, is merely the layering of these garments that are more like winds composed of such proverbial sayings that blow cool the heads hanging heavy from the boughs and branches of the Tree under which they all sit. Under the Tree that (do I trust myself?) grew them, a Tree that fruits virgins: first stemming their heads, then the secretion of their fluted columnarly delicate necks, the breasts blossom, the stomach rounds to pucker the navel, the vagina blooms expectantly until, so heavy, they fall to the ground to sit around the Tree with their sisters.

  This Queen, this total massing of women, though they are virgins, is no substitute for the Queen who is immensely beautiful, who was. Because there is one flaw here that cannot escape—because it cannot bear—notice even in heaven, even in a heaven that is wrong, indeed a flaw that might be the very thing that renders them sisters, their relative scar: because when a virgin falls from the tree, having hung upside down for a longer time than any alive could ever hope to measure, with her own, to span, with her own, the virgin falls suddenly, almost unaware, or as if consciousness—hers—didn’t exist until this fall to the ground, which is sand. And so unknowing, unaware, the virgin falls with no ability or else, if you prefer, acknowledged forewarning to protect herself, and so with no help, inexplicably or not, from her sisters, hits invariably hard, a fruit bruised, on the fanatically exposed root structure of the tree, on the razoredged manicured nails of her sisters, upon the gems that star the tree’s trunk, and so each virgin, each of these sisters that are all of them a mother, has a flaw and will always: a dune on her nose, a gash royally smashed upon her forehead, a scar piercing the ear to the lip (it’s a long fall, taller than ten times to what I would’ve grown), a poked in eye or inverted nipple, a caesareantype incision inflicted by a single, windsharpened blade of grass, all imperfections, regrettable though never disqualifying blemishes on these most unbestial of creatures (women in shape, not in manners), which the Queen, my true Queen dead and in the heaven of her own belief, would have frowned a dark rainbow upon, betokening a covenant of disapproval and whether rightly or wrongly thought such physical imperfections a sign, a manifestation of an immemorial inner problem, the gradual emanation of a spiritual decay that would eat the woman alive, the women, eventually, and then any man she or they might ever have touched.

  I am in the wrong heaven I said to Queen Houri.

  I walked in strang
e to them shoes around and around the trunk of the Tree around and around their infinite ring (or at least never remembering one of them the women twice in thrice and more around) and around the trunk of the Tree and said to them I was embraced by explosion into this paradise that is yours and not mine, that I do not belong here because you say I don’t belong here (I listened), and that I am I only because you are you.

  Why? Queen Houri asked as one.

  Why not become one of us?

  And as the sound stretched across their infinite mouths, the softly grown heads of the Tree shook the question to the ground as if No.

  Yes asked the virgins, their sisters grown from the Tree Why disappointed?

  Just as death is a renunciation of life they said I have now only to renounce that that’s survived it. Me. But you can’t.

  Why bitch? Aba would ask.

  He meant the Queen would say Why complain?

  But Queen Houri, the fullgrown virgins to ripeness, picked up the gems penning in their ring (excess flesh that turned to jewel in their hands), and with them pelted the heads and partiformed faces of their becoming sisters because these still growing, nascent virgins are not only not permitted to say anything but, further, are prohibited from even eavesdropping upon any of the sayings of their fully formed, allrealized sisters below much as Aba he once said that Other people believe if you eavesdrop on (which?) heaven God throws down flaming stars aimed at your head, which in my case has since been blown up. But these rocks and stones like the fluorescent pebbles I used to scoop from the fishbowl where I kept Dag and the other Dag after the first Dag died and we flushed him away, plunging him into Aba’s oozy smell, into the woozy wake of his turds these hot, hard and dirty implements are aimed not only at the soft of their heads, the ears of those who could and so would listen in—as if they could help it, this happy patronization of their newfound protrusions—but are aimed also at their bodies, at their own lesser wet voids, everywhere and so maybe it is from this very hurling and lobbing that their flaws exist but are perhaps only evident when the virgins hit ground. And as hard as virgins. And are thusly explained, said so away.

  But none of this had been explained to me as one woman, a portion of Queen Houri—a toe of the Queen, I like to think, a majestic thumb, also I might remember the one who arose from the midst of her sisters to Meet and Greet me upon my arrival at the laddertop shoestore—arose to escort me right out of the Jerusalem Above and its valleys, the sand beyond the sands beyond the city limits to a Fountain because my questions had seemed to her, as they must have to them, quite physically thirst and the water to be obtained there and there only—have I mentioned that most of this heaven is quite obviously a desert?—would answer all for me, questioned. Please I said as the Queen would have had me say Thanks. Would quench or so it’s said and it was. But as this feminine thumbtoe escorted me up and down dunes, around and around dunes then in and out of the valleys sanding between them, as she with we walked farther and farther away from the remainder of the Queen that is Houri—she unshod, me in shoes so as not to lay skin upon foreign sand—she grew more and more naked, more and more whisperweight and transparent and, after a time I could not ever hope to translate to you even if I had half of my decade back in which to do it, I turned around at the very top of a dune, saw the previous dune through her, then saw her no more.

  With her disappearance I could not hope to find the Fountain but shade.

  Up ahead, after walking longingly, was shade but a curious shade of it: a shade with nothing in evidence to produce the shade, with no shading entity discernible between the shade, which was the darkness delineated upon the sand of one indisseverable grain, and the immaculate golden plate above that served up nothing at all. Save light and warmth unfulfilling.

  I stood in this shade shaded by nothing then I lay and then I slept, I must have slept and when I awoke there was no shade but I was under the wide longribbed leaves of another tree. However its leaves, which were generous fronds of palm, provided none of the shade I had so enjoyed previously: the setting of the golden plate proceeded on its natural strength unabated, and it was as if the shards of the plate now smashed on the knife of the horizon had stuck through the palms, had pierced them through and so pierced me too, stigmatic under this element of shade that provided none, having no purpose for any incarnation but its own. An unimpeding impediment. A stumble without snare.

  After the golden plate smashed then ashed away to the white darkness of smoke I slept again and did not dream of the Queen, neither of Houri, but instead of an unmanned caravan of approximately let n equal x thousand pregnant camels that was approaching me from afar (the direction from which it was arriving I’d titled Fast, the other I would name Fleet), the humps as dunes dispossessing themselves of earth and moving on always, a sandscape perpetually in motion so as to appear only the same again and again—repetition as ritual, wandering the only, which is favored, method of stasis, the Latinate nunc as Aba always said Whether permanens or stans. What it was was just camel after camel after camel bobbing up and down as if lifejackets made exclusively for the rescue of hunchbacked Ukrainian cleaningwomen down and up on the driest landed sea imaginable—such was my dream of the camels always approaching as if when they’d ultimately approach, finally arrive, then and only then would I finally awake, knowing this to be the Truth of the True as it’s said though it seemed as if they’d never approach, until they actually had approached, arrived and lay down in darkness in no shade just in front of me, in a semicircle around this tree providing nothing for no one, folded into squats atop their spindles, nosing at each other and nuzzling flanks as I struggled, fought against this dream, into waking at the image—not the mirage—at this the image to be found reflected down deep in the deepest well of the mind the recognizance of which should have signified the end of my dreaming, must have and must still, but my struggling, all my fight, was in vain: because I would never wake up, because I wasn’t dreaming, it was never a dream and still isn’t.

  The camel caravan had arrived and I was awake all the while for all.

  Alef

  I am the ass

  they whoever they ever are

  would pack with explosives

  would burden with explosionary material

  fertilizer bombs, nail-

  packed explosives until

  the guards

  the security

  the patrolling police and the

  ordinary everyday citizen

  they began beginning and so

  they whoever they ever are

  instead of packing the explosives atop

  me or at my sides in beastlike

  breastlike bags

  they whoever they ever are

  began instead

  stuffing

  the explosives up inside of me

  into my ass and so

  stuffing

  me full

  there is no why

  I am relating this

  I just am

  A Pilgrimage

  It would seem simple, it would. You go toward the Two Mountains and the Two Mountains come toward you. As they come, you become. You come toward the man and the man goes toward you. As he becomes he, I become me. Ingathering, he’d honk at the doorway. Aba would make the sound of the horn with his tongue thrust dumbly out of its mouth like a camel’s or bird. Shoes I’d say, I can’t find my shoes. I can’t find, then I’d find them. He’s coming was what Aba would say to the Queen who had Heard it all before. Me too, I’m going, Me three. I was always late for school, I was always the first one home. Then dinner. You eat your beets and the Queen lets you watch cartoons is how it went. Or the Queen lets you watch cartoons and you’ve eaten your beets is how it should go. Should have gone, bath, lastly bed. But I never kept that half of the haggle.

  Are you coming? one virgin had said to another Is he going with us? all had said to each other even as I left them and so all of Queen Houri had said to me and even I’d said it too, whic
h is to submit as I set out to seek with the help of a thumb.

  Walking I left.

  And submissively long.

  The way they said it, it seemed so simple, it would. Any direction to one destination. Every cardinality to a capstone. Shoot an arrow then follow it long. Walk on your hands clad in the gloves of assassins. Go down and submit. But exodus is never that simple.

  They were the camels. They had ridden me out to the Fountain at which I drank without quench. They had ridden me out to another Fountain, then a third. And still no. Water gushed out my jagged hole, a sprung with no spring. Again and again I explained to them and so to myself what I called just like the Queen called any thousand of hers My Predicament What’s his Problem? What Happened to my Pants? then one camel drew with its foot in the sand a map effaced quickly by wind. Cloven over. And so it drew it again, or attempted to, and then again, each time the map only one-ninth, or one-seventh, finished, then the erasure from wind. Complete. I’m talking utter. Then two camels worked on the map, each at an opposite end, and the map was then one-third-finished, or two two-sixths-whole, then the wind again and then nothing. And so three camels and then four, each from its own gusting quarter until again with the wind and so it took seven of the camels all hoofing it simultaneously to all together complete the map I had by then memorized in whole as I had had it in part. As for why the camels couldn’t ride me out there themselves, it wasn’t ever proposed. Into never, I left.

  Having been directed to the Valley between the Two Mountains, I followed. I was to seek the man named Mohammed. There he would help me, It was said he would have to, said by Allah. Transfer me to the afterlife most appropriate to my previous Yes. No questions asked. Having answered none, I went. Having substantiated nothing, I submitted. This man named Mohammed would rectify this mistake—mine, his, or that of no one, none other’s. This mistake as unmistaken as all divine, but a rectification had been made necessary still. Not an apology. A mere reparation. Miser it a healing. A whole. Not on faith, to go on desperation.