A Heaven of Others

by Cohen, Joshua

  Beit

  I am of rabbis

  a scholar to Torah and other

  words, noted in my day

  (which was long ago now)

  and still in this day

  by some who pray at

  my grave because they

  can’t pray to me as I

  am dead in this heaven where,

  when soon after my

  death a student of mine my

  greatest student died and visited

  me, found me on a beach-

  chair on an approximation of the

  beach with its ocean (Netanya)

  alongside a film star or starlet I

  never know which her name is, was Elizabeth

  Taylor and though

  she’s dead to look at she looks pretty

  good in a light whitish thong and blindingly

  bleached sunglasses as my student,

  my greatest student he approached, sat

  down on a just-then-materializing beach-

  chair and said:

  Rav, Rabbi, it’s so good to meet you again and

  here, but I don’t understand he said

  throwing his tricolor beard and their chins in

  the cardinal direction of Miss Taylor, Elizabeth

  emerging from the wavelets, foam on her nipples

  and

  all soaked to the bush but I don’t understand he

  said, how heaven could be like…this,

  how this could be…heaven,

  and so I said as I would always say as I stood

  up in the shul in Witz but here I was at the

  beach (Netanya) I said his name was Nathan,

  Natan I said you must trust, but also think because it

  might not be my heaven, I threw off my black

  unshrouding the bronze of my chest,

  it’s her hell

  Limitation

  Limitation is what I now understand to be the sole attribute of God, at least the sole attribute of God or of a god we are able to apprehend, at least I am.

  Allah says through the man named Mohammed through us and so through me. For Allah to say To us is to render us dead from the dead.

  If we were to experience anything above and beyond the limitation of God we would be destroyed above and beyond any afterlife’s salvation or Savior. Above and beyond the succor of any appeal unheard. Above and beyond the Above beyond. And unspoken. No paradise can assuage the experience of the illimitability of God. Just as no Eden exists for those who know it as Eden.

  As I am translating these thoughts from the air and from the wind of the air that speaks in no language, please excuse my attempts. Atone, repent. Repent for atonement. (And atone for you know.) All like the instructions given upon a box of frozen foods my Aba often bought for dinner when the Queen was away visiting her sister in Arad. Like gel for the last Wash your hands. Rinse and repeat. As we say when we’re live, don’t adjust your TV.

  Understand I am making these translations to atone. Understand I am making these translations repent for my failure. Understand and do not pity, sympathize or empathize, identify with nor enable, me.

  Who will translate:

  To shove your gray tablets down into a moldy old sack wrought of skull, skin and hair, and especially after having held them aloft high above the dunes and the drops in pure, lifegiving sky, is not a pleasant duty but nonetheless duty. What Happened to your Face? the Queen would always ask and what would I answer. Tonguetied to the mullion of a window like the red rope of Rahab. What’s that on your Chin? the Queen would always ask, meaning my mouth, which once was unglassed and silent. But before I say anything, I want to say this: to my Aba, I’ve never smashed rock to make water flow flinty. No one’s ever wrought a calf out of nothing.

  I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains (That Might Have Been Clouds), and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed and so neither did I then find any man by that name. Or by or with any name other. Truly. When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another. But a distinction must be made between limitation and weakness much like, in Hellenist heresy, the division obtaining between the light of the Gnostic Pleroma Aba liked that word in Greek And its warring dark and so might I mention that I had, I believe still have and will always have a brother whose name was David and is. A halfbrother actually if he ever was mentioned, he wasn’t. He was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen or eighteen years older than I suppose he still is. And if so then seething. Why I didn’t mention him before is that neither Aba nor the Queen mentioned him much to my memory and that this gloss unlike forgetting was not unintentional. Inexcusably unreasoned as this David was the son of Aba’s previous Queen, a woman who before I was born (of course, of course) had died of a disease that has afflicted many on earth and will go on afflicting them as long as the earth is not flat and is instead shaped like a secular tumor: “well-rounded,” periodshaped, musical-noteshaped, a blob of blue paint upon the neck of Ibrahim’s God—a disease afflicting though only the living (though need I remind anyone that there are less dead people on earth, or in the earth, than there are people now living), which begins gradually with the gradual growth of a third breast, an epiphytic or rather parasitic subspecies of maybe even sentient mammæ and a harder type one too, rather Lumpy and lumpish and Bumpy and bumpisch as Aba he once described it to me one Sunday as we were out walking and talking in the Old City having passed through the Jaffa Gate and walking when talkatively straight as my Aba’s appetite for history and its revelation would allow us to the Kotel, to the Westernmost, Wailingmost, Wallingmost limitation of our need he said it was A big black bumpishness that just grew larger or rather filled you largely despite what the doctors would empty, which despite the nail of any needle would never be enough to empty it all—Aba himself never went to doctors, he went to the Queen, by which I mean my first one and only his second—and so this Queen, that former Queen whom I never knew her neither her name even she was blackened as if burned like a bush once consumed, turned Big Aba once said and full of blackness (Aba saying this with a measure of ash and a shekel, one in each lung of his scales), first the big black bobbing lump then three big black bosomy breasts budded up on her who She was very beautiful and once a very very famous concert pianist too (according to the official photograph of her young in Romania Aba kept in the pantry locked with Göbbels, his gun), had three big black breasts that swelled to take over her entirety or rather the rest of her shriveled into, shrunk, was sucked into these three huge black boobing breasts that themselves merged into this one single unified huge hard black breast, A protuber Aba who he was THE professional tuner once said he became such as he was because she’d been THE professional pianist: One enormous blob ball of cancer Aba said once it was he Had to sit with and pet—as if to bounce?—all night and with the dipped then wrung out washcloth he applied to its roundingly dull shininess though In the morning it had lost its roundness, by then it had further dulled off to become this hulking huge big black square As hard as rockstone Aba he was pacing Around and around and glancing at nervously as if it had just fallen through the ozone on down from space, Aba circling Aba circumambulating seven times as she’d done for their marriage vows, then the shattering of the glasses of the seven subsequent nights of dinner and dancing in celebration of their blessedness praying prayers my Aba didn’t know he knew as he was circling all this time this monstrous circling this monstrously hulking huge big black square stone rock of death that had crushed and collapsed the bed, their marriage bed, which had been a gift from her parents my Queen, Aba’s second Queen she later threw out to the Poor her piano It was just sitting there in the room, Aba said foursquare her taking up the whole room entire until Aba he that afternoon said he just shut the door and locked it (as he had another piano to t
une, to Take out of warp, had scheduled an appointment, always did or just always said so) and returned that night the eve of Passover to relieve the former Hadassah Medical Center nurse who she was now named Hadassah too, and Russian as well as short and Almost as bald as a hardboiled egg at the Seder Aba had hired out of the hospice, nightshift rotation and asked her to stay On Call until the very end with its ice on the lips and the huddling snuggle but found her the nurse gone when he opened the door to THE ROOM, in their room all there was in there was this K’aba black stone taking up the whole entire room and encroaching too, its death up against the wall of the open doorway As if threatening to spill its immaculate hardness over the threshold and into the hall as Aba once said—upon leaving the Kotel and returning home the way we’d arrived, through the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, toward Jaffa Road again and its walk to Tchernichovsky Street then down it—he Just slammed the door hard shut then locked it again and went to pace around and around nothing at all, to guard over nil at the funeral home, ANTSCHEL’S FUNERAL HOME the sign said that we would pass on the walk from the Old City to home if ever we took the shortcut we never did.

  David was not spoken of (and is obviously not spoken of anymore, in this way, by this family), because at the age of eighteen, which is the age of induction into military service that for him would have most probably meant Uncle Alex’s Givati Brigade whose symbolic mascot is the farting fox plumed in a purple beret, he forsook Jerusalem and the Eden surrounding for a position in Hollywood across the finger of sea and the hand of the ocean—exchanging our trees for their open palms—where he met and then lived with and maybe still lives with a fellow Hollywood transplant, an aspiring Movieperson whose sex meaning gender was less important to Aba and even to the Queen (Aba’s then-new-Queen, my own) and still would be, if only, than the religion—sexual orientation—this Movieperson subscribed to, subscribes. An affiliation this Movieperson’s name and his way of pronouncing it Her apparently made quite clarion clear. A lifestyle that David’s severing of phone cords and unreturned postcards made even clarion clearer though not the clarionest, which was Aba’s refusal to ever think or even know of him again as his son and the Queen’s full support of such a decision, which might have made her love me even more, which was Nice.

  But Moviepeople and my halfbrother are not important as such. What is important is that I, a son of my Aba’s old age and the Queen’s hopeful youth, did not enter into the Valley of Nails to save myself from the inexact succor of this heaven, my hell. What David did and maybe still does is David’s, and it’s my parent’s life to have thought that a weakness, a flaw. In that standing at the lip of the Valley of Nails I had a revelation. A revelation not swallowing of the earth but my own. Whatever David did or did not do—and I never knew him before the now in which I know all—was done, or undone, to others too, no matter intention. Not the sex but the dodging, the flee. Which if not unforgivable has passed unforgiven. I must never forget. That I have only myself to answer for. Now.

  That I am alone here with no parents.

  With nothing to dodge, nowhere to flee.

  And a stranger only insofar as I am thought strange.

  His turning back from the lip of the Valley was not weakness or failure. Neither was it limitation however. As that might is not of me or ours. Rather what he did was give choice to choice, put question to question. What I did I did, and is done. Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again. And that it is not for the living to judge any of the sacrifices that others are bound to make to keep living, we all are—which is what Aba always said about Cain and Abel in answer to my question as to why I didn’t have natural brothers? as I’d always wanted one or more of them, any thousands of millions worldwide the Queen always said she’d been asking ever since I knew it was moot.

  Listen, when one choice is a Jacob and when one—the other—choice is an Esau, I sought the brotherhood merited in, and gracing, surrender.

  Listen we can say limitation too, when we say about the borders of Heaven, the lines of demarcation, even of, yes, inevitable, attrition. To say Heaven is borderless, without borders as if they were unnecessary, superfluminously superfluous, is to say the thing that is not. Or at least A thing that is not. Rather Heaven only appears, is only sensed first dully and then, once accustomed, dimly perceived and then said to be—known and—understood, as borderless. In life. Indeed Heaven must be understood as borderless if it is to have any borders at all, with its reflection holding as well: that because Heaven does undoubtedly, indubitably, have borders, it must be first sensed only dully, then, once accustomed to speculation of such kind, dimly perceived then said to be understood—by those alive, on earth still, with no opportunity to truly know All—it must be understood or at least said To be understood by the living as limitless, illimitable, encompassing All, absolute, totally without end. (After all it’s only because the possible not to say probable human span is not eternity that humans such as I once was ever valued our lives.)

  But let us drop our other weapons and ask: then where, exactly, are these borders? the endlands of Heaven? what do these boundaries consist of? when were they mapped out, demarcated, drawn in the sand? and who guards them who guards the guards and all of what’s required to pass? questions the—an—answer to which might be this: that Heaven is wherever both bodily and of-the-mind the people of any given Heaven might dwell. And how is the population decided? How is a particular demographic arrived at? Outside this encampment, In the beyond, there Heaven does not exist. Through time, through dimensions and their lands, a Heaven’s size, its volume, a Heaven’s space, its mass and its density, its purchase and purview is that of its inhabitants, its incarnates or more faithfully to all its incarnators if you will say It along with me. Wheresoever they might roam and wander, so roams and wanders Heaven. How and what they think and know (what they think they know), so is the sum thought and knowledge of Heaven. Why they, so why Heaven. Who they, Heaven. As, Heaven.

  Indeed the walls of Heaven, which are walls, quite physically, actually, appreciably, walls, move with the people, up and rearrange themselves, reposition, set incursions, Interfada hazarded against and within the Infidelis as We the people as the Americans say set themselves toward realization, toward truest experience of Heaven, and so wall in and wall out that that is made false, rendered untrue, anew each edging of the golden plate—or dish—serving up no sustenance at all. Insubstantial. In fact under this quite contested, controversial, interpretation, the vast golden plate is not necessarily a dish of gold or a plate (which would explain say some newly arrived proponents of this interpretation why it serves up strictly nothing, or nothingness), rather it is an always moving, always wandering, always movable, always wanderable, hole in the wall that is the sky, a necessary hole allowing no escape into the light and warmth that both says and means death from this Heaven this hole in the wall of vaulted sky guards more securely than any quote truer unquote wall in its stead, any repair, any vaulting sky in its place, could ever hope to.

  Because Allah says through me Who can sense walls in such darkness? That such a hole is necessary, a prerequisite, to our knowledge of the wall and as importantly of what it walls in and out. Up and down. I think of David sleeping, a wall suspended horizontally just a breath, newborn, above his sleeping form. And nearer, so near that when he awakes, when he opens his eyes, their lids become stuck in a crack, become wedged, in a crack badly mortared, mortally, between two immense, possibly loosening, stones. The wall halves his Hollywood room. No one lives above. It would be disrespectful to place feet upon his wall—a floor without anything atop, not even a rug, a shelf without a book, merely a rung left ladderless—one night, I know, the earth will quake and he’ll breathe this wall in. Deepening sleep. Try to say a throat of breathed stone.

  Alef

  On Rosh Hashanah, which

  means the head

  of the year in that language the

  new year in Heaven, which

  does not know
from new

  years we still try to observe it’s

  funny, our habits don’t

  die like we do

  On Rosh Hashanah,

  which means the head of

  the year in that language in

  Heaven you can ask for

  God for one thing

  On Rosh Hashanah,

  which means the Head

  of the Year in that language

  in Heaven you can ask

  God for one favor,

  one lack,

  won’t insult Him by asking for that assuredly One thing only that might be missing,

  that you might be missing,

  even in a heaven that’s yours—

  People ask for

  Everything on that Day of Days,

  Ask for bad knees again, bad teeth, ask for

  Car problems, erectile dysfunction, ask for

  Everything except what they

  need.

  Maturing To Infinity

  A boy grows. It’s inevitable as is any Aba’s pride, by which I mean heartache—the two of them panned, weighed in honest enough scales slung across the gray dead of his eyes. A boy grows because he must. To know the earth from further. Height marked short above the threshold, at seven, eight years a full two hinges tall. A screw stripped to posture. Turn the knob. A boy matures. Even in heaven. Even in the wrong heaven, which, in the endless end, is more a question of Who. Behold the Who becoming another Who who by the time he’s become yet another Who is by then wholly unknowable. Me. Open the door. An eternal boy matures eternally. What do you want to be when you grow up? the Queen always asked though she had all the answers, as if breasts to suck to satisfaction, hers as much as mine. A nipple doctor? A slip ‘n’ fall lawyer? Wait. Maybe a government minister? An Israeli perhaps? A Semite? I know—a Jew?