Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  The woodsman’s son never noticed the bed, being too occupied growing his fortune, taking ore from the mine he worked in and piling it up, ore into ingot, into a huge new house with vast windowed rooms and whitewashed cabinetry with a silver filigreed tea set including matching kettle and minuscule handled bathtub for cream and bronzepotted rubberplants that grew to outlandish heights and editions of books in foreign languages that were about sex but served their women readers morals at the end, and he only used his father’s shack as a shed for his wife’s pampered, preciously fed livestock and, subsequently, for his newly acquired telephone the elaborate size of the automobile just then being invented but an ocean away that no auto could cross.

  And this son, who worked his way up through the mines from working down in one up to soon managing the one he used to work at, eventually had two sons of his own and the older son one day looked at the headboard of the bed they kept for the family’s babies to sleep in and for the importuning use of visiting relations and guests, in the rarest moment of Sunday repose looking at his grandfather’s carving on the bed’s headboard of a man among trees and saying to himself then aloud and in quotes, “I see a man among the trees. My grandfather carved into this bedhead a scene of himself going out among the trees to cut one down to make of it the bed my father was born in. It is no more difficult than that, yet neither is my life. I have married well a landowner’s daughter and, like my father before me, have worked in a mine and now manage the mine my father managed, my life has been work, not as much work as life had been for my father or grandfather, but it has been a success because of them, their sorrows.”

  His brother—who was younger, a redskinned diminutive regarded as unmarriageable, born late in their father’s middle age—scoffed at what his brother had said and said instead, “You have no senses besides your eyes, brother! You’re made entirely of surface! This carving our grandfather carved on the headboard of our father’s bed quite obviously depicts the peasant or workingman imperiled in a forest of giants—in a forest of towering landowners and Titans of industry like your father-inlaw—and he, the symbolic proletarian, is dwarfed by them, in their shadow he is dwarfish and inconsequential. Indeed, this carving must represent to us the coming war where the poor who toil in the fields and in mines like ours will revolt against the rich who own the fields and mismanage the mines and after that war is ended no man will ever be lost in the woods of another’s exploitation.”

  And then there was a war. And both brothers fought in it but on opposite sides, the older brother compelled to fight in time but the younger brother an eagerly early volunteer for the Revolution that came through their country like a flood and like fire. And though the older brother—that pressured conscript fighting on the side of the greedy landowners and factory management—died in combat with a bullet just a screaming kopek paid to one ear, the younger brother survived and was in his medaled survival happy to decamp to a smaller apartment when his family’s house was nationalized by the State after that war of class struggle concluded.

  And so leaving behind everything for the comfort of the State—the tables and chairs and loveseat for the State to relax in along with a footstool upon which the State could rest its feet if it would expropriate any feet—the brother wracked with considerable guilt took with him and his nursemaid wife only the bed that was soon to be their daughter’s—their daughter who grew up tall and silently beautiful and unlike her mother, who was the daughter of a Revolutionary mine secretary, was very wellschooled, having been sent away to university in the capital city to study biology and squint around with microscopes but for only a year before she had to return home with another war, this time an international war beginning because it was time for her to get serious about the future of building her country and life, which meant marriage.

  And she saw in the bed in her parents’ house she returned to, the bed she’d almost forgotten from childhood, in its headboard carved with the scene of the man wandering alone amongst the wood trees at night—a symbol of sorts, though when she was younger she could not define it or untangle the meaning of her sadness. Her switching the radio off to better look at it long late at night, lying with her head of long straight brownblonde hair mussed against the foot of the bed in the style of its wavy grain, in her maturation seeing in the carving of the carverman lost amid the immense trunks of trees a symbol for, yes, that was it, existenz (the university had given her that foreign word as a dowry), for man’s essential predicament in the universe, how we are lonely and lost to wander among trees so immense as to be incomprehensible around us, not sure how we got into the woods or how to get out of them if ever, and she saw that that carved man—she didn’t know he might be the carver himself, her greatgrandfather—was actually all men and all women too, unfixed, inconstant, errant in nature just like the boy she flirted with declaimed: “On the branch bare and lone/trembles the belated leaf,” a young man who wrote her extensive letters though he lived just across the courtyard, who smoked cigarettes he rolled with great fast skill and drank deeply from a flask and scribbled his own poetry with jetliner imagery and attended the movies regularly (but he’d never hold her hand during the newsreels).

  She married him when he came back from that next war alive, marrying him because just as the only expression of wood is in its carving into a thing, the only expression of love can be marriage. And if a man who should be dead lives, then when he comes back from his war wounded—even if wounded in only his youth—a monument should be erected to him. And there is no better monument than a child—not wood, not even granite.

  She took the bed with them as a cradle, moving it into their apartment they were reassigned to on the outskirts of their city (the country’s second city: this was the city of culture, not the city of business, though in truth neither could lay claim to either). An old inconvenient wooden bed hauled incongruously up to the eighteenth floor of a prefab prestressed panel tower above a playground poured to harden around a gnarled jungle gym and rusty teetertotter teetertottering, a shattered liter of milk frozen into a purple skating rink in the light waned through the birches—it was the oldest and, given years, only wooden thing in their apartment of metal things and, given another decade, plastic clothing and plastic plates and plastic bottles and plastic glasses.

  But her daughter, her daughter of flesh and not of plastic, the daughter’s daughter when she encountered the bed throughout her lazy childhood—sitting on its lapse as if a couch to watch across the armlengthwide apartment the television set no bigger than a keyhole—decided that its headboard depicted no symbols or representations at all, that there was at base nothing to that headboard’s carving but a man standing in the woods, nothing but a man on one hand and the woods on the other and one was in the other and surrounded by it and that was the way it was and would be forever and nothing meant anything or could be signified. This was what she concluded—she who did not know trees, she who could not identify which trees if any in particular had been carved into the headboard’s wood that was of a type she could not identify either. She stared at it inattentively over Tokyo cartoons about undersea robots dubbed into sibilant Slavics and would think only that it was nice, the bed, that it was nicely comforting but also old and disgusting and a disgrace to the new that could not be afforded or even enough manufactured in the days when she sat on it painting her toenails with seagreen and white housepaint, affectionate tokens from the building’s manager who was infatuated with her and sat with her in silence watching her read her tricolor Femininka magazines and drinking with her tea with “cognac” (which he’d also brought, provenance uncertain).

  Watching the television she would, when bored with the program or news, which was often because the programs were always boring and the news was nightly a lie, turn to nap her kohlrimmed eyes on this bedhead and muse to herself as if making a program inside her own head fair and uncarved, “What is that man in that forest thinking, is he thinking at all and what is going on with him that he�
��s in the forest to begin with?”

  But more often, dulled, she’d say dully to herself, “That is a man in the woods and that is all he is, that is a man in the forest and that is all he ever will be—he will never do any better!”

  She’d say to herself, “He will never get out,” as if she’d do any better, “like me he is stuck!”

  She was herself like wood this daughter but like deadwood because she’d been chopped from the roots of her life and left unwatered to wither and die. She was hardened like bark (those were the stockings she stole from a friend), but absent mostly as if without sensation, which is to say that to men she was attractive because inaccessible in her emotions, her life passed her by like the jungle scenery in the background of Tokyo cartoons, her eyes glozing into knots and her mouth into a knot and her clear skin was in the mornings brittle but furrowed and rough in a wild way as if she’d been lasciviously dreaming and once a man—the building manager Blatnoy, a frustrated engineer who used to work in a warehouse but also on the side for extra money and goods fixed audio/visual equipment for the Politburo’s connected (he connected them), he’d eventually become her husband spastic and fat in a camouflage vest its pockets bulging with tools—raped her not on that old wooden bed she’d inherited and used as a television sofa and outdated newspaper rack or on the newer metalframed bed in the bedroom she shared with her mother but instead in the kitchen where all political movements are birthed, him bending her over the plastictopped table then over the range, amid the greasy knobs she gripped as he left of himself inside her a puddle (but this had become a Kommunalka apartment, so rape went on while a lab chemist ate her cold supper in the hall, while the widowed librarian they were forced to take in last month accused in raucous tones the cosmetologist next door of toiletseat theft).

  Her daughter that was made that day she gave birth to nine months later into 1989, not in their apartment—their apartment that was anyway no longer communal after her husband had managed to clear their cotenants out into other units in the building and, once they were finished being built, into neighboring towers newly irradiating from the dusty grassless central square of the complex—not on her old metal bed and not on her older wooden carved bed either where even a mother as late as her own had once given birth, but instead in the municipal hospital in a hospitalroom with three other mothers and one doctor collectively pushing, pushing more. A flat bland brown building, the hospital, with curling edges as if it were peeling—like a propaganda poster from the wall of the sky.

  The daughter she gave birth to, though she resembled initially a wad of chewing gum, grew up—her ridges stretching into shapely arms and legs, the bubbles in her inflating further into impressive breasts. She was to be a person of more plastics and faster cars, of more freedom. She would live to enjoy the openness and transparency of fallen walls and no dictators with birthmarks in the shapes of tropical islands on their balding heads telling you anymore what dates and coal production facts you had to memorize at school, while, if you had the money, there was travel available to such tropical islands and any movie or book you wanted was yours if you wanted it and even if you didn’t it could be yours still, you could have any food and drink at any restaurant or club because you could hold any job and start any business and could say whatever it was you wanted to say—“Fuck my elected representatives,” “Empathy is Evil,” “World War II never happened”—it no longer mattered in any sense of mattering.

  But to her for whom communication was not a juicy long letter written invisibly in citrus or milk but instead a quick click on a keyboard, Dear New York! Dearest Turkey!—to her for whom free and openbordered choice was not a matter of allegiance or belief but instead a test of her appetite or depravity, for her the bed kept in the hall she used to sit on when she tied her shoes whenever she went out, the bed acting as bench under which she kept her shoes for them to sleep if they were tired, for her it was a bed and nothing else—in her childhood she’d hardly registered its existence, you would’ve had to have asked her, pointed it out to her and asked her about it—and the carvings on it were just that, carvings, it didn’t matter what was depicted just that the thing itself was an antique, maybe, and did it have a value, could we sell it, where could we sell it and what kind of money could we get for it? For her the man there was a picture of a man and the woods there a picture of woods and the wood was wood with the value of wood and rather it was the value of the depictions that in her adolescence began to interest her—that a picture could have a value separate from that of its materials she was just becoming aware—when her mother by the year 2006 had gotten sick with a hardness and a rigidity like wood in her stomach and then in her breasts and regularly she had to go to the hospital again sunk in grass faded thick and long like the hair she lost and the weight and her color, this time not to give birth again, not to foal even her tumors, but only to die— Which brings us to the purpose of our story …

  This story will not end as it began. No more trashy tellings like this, no more folktales. Here is a folktale that will end as a story, as a novel if we’re lucky, but still nothing to compare to the audio/visual.

  Better to just show the bed! Fairies! Better to roll around on the thing and hear it sing! O spirited sprites!

  There once was a folktale, but its telling had been forgotten over the course of generations. One day, however, a story was written about a lost folktale. Does it seem that what had been lost is now found? or only, like bone chips and deer tracks, explained?

  “Once upon a time there was a bed.” And it was old and slept on as if sleeping itself down through the generations. And the generations generated because everyone married to have children and some of the children were born on the bed and some of the children only slept on the bed intentionally or not in the midst of watching television or listening to dance records or reading, God forbid, reading, and the children were always young but the bed kept getting older. It was falling apart at its seams, at its supporting beams, its boards would creak and give with loose joints, with loose joists, its nails snapping in two. And the parents of the children became grandparents and they too were falling apart—like beds themselves, sleepers fit for the coffin’s lid with splintered limbs and the feeling of an ax pain brought down between chin and chest, termite infestation in the liver.

  With her mother cancered in the hospital and dying, this daughter who’s young and beautiful, this skinny gracile sylph nymph left alone for week three of chemotherapy invites over to the house the friend she’d met that evening at a popular pub whose theme was Dublin, “the friend” who doesn’t speak her language and is from another country but still has many dealings with modeling “representatives” “representing” “many” “regional” “publications” and who before leaving his home in American Ohio maxedout a credit card on camera equipment, a light and a microphone to tape to it, which all he trundles up the steep stairs to her mother’s apartment (her father, the engineer, had abandoned them both a while back under circumstances that even the most omniscient of narrators would blush at), hauling this gear with the help of his, “the friend’s,” local pardner, a parttime “event promoter” who also drives their van parked outside and alternates, in their movies, his penis.

  When the foreigner had made her the offer at that fancily priced Dublin pub that evening, she’d offered to his pardner who spoke her language as his own, It might be fun? and the pardner agreed.

  If I like it in life, why wouldn’t I like it when we’re filming?

  No reason, no reason at all.

  Not wanting to befoul her mother’s bed—which she lately thinks of as her mother’s sickbed where the woman lies usually so pierced with thermometers in every pit and fissure as to vomit their mercury into the nightstand’s drawer—she leads her guests to the television’s bed, that old wooden heirloom she insists on in a moment, a moment of dignity when “the friend” says, Fucking nice bed! I dig the carvings!

  She sits down on the thing and he stands ac
ross from her an elasticized waistband’s reach from her nose as they begin with their talking, the script they’re scripting as they go along ignobly worthless and, I’m 16, no say you’re 18, I am 22 years old and say, “This is my first experience”—and suddenly, the rehearsal’s spilling into the rehearsed as he holds her and presses his beery lips onto her he’s taking off her clothing and putting his fingers into her and working around her clitoris with the knot of his thumb. Grk, grrk. Foreplay giving way to penetration as in he goes and out he goes and in, the noise from the bed overwhelming, its protestations offensively loud—her as amatory amateur and him as professional “friend,” they’re fucking the bed apart, the bed will be fucked apart. Grrk, grrhk, with each motion of their fuck being filmed by the pardner who stands across from them in the hallway on a chair pinched from the kitchen then up on the windowsill with a pointed shoe like a crowbar prying at the door—coming in close to zoom in, then going farther away again for a wide shot, and closer, and farther, and closer, and far, with each motion the sound of the dying bed overpowering any sounds they’d make, even any sounds that could be overdubbed by them or pretending others in vanside postproduction.

  The bed wrecked in its throes, the noise of its legs and spine as if the chatter of the girl’s rickety bones—an agony of creaks, a brutish splintering of howls and gurgles—them going back and forth and back as the pardner with the camera, lights, and sound, pulls in, pulls out, in again then zooms out on the fourhorned raging bed wobbling mortally, it has knees now, it’s on all fours now as they fuck on all fours atop it, ripping out tufts of mattress hair and popping buttons like whitehead pimples and, though we never know her real name just her naked beauty (how when she’s on top her tits turn dizzying circles, how when he doggies her her breasts hang down like lucent bunches of fruit, like lamped grapes the veins), though we never know her real name just what she’d told him her name was or what his pardner had told him, interpreting, when he’d asked her just like they’d rehearsed, “My name is Moc” (practice it, pronounce it Mots), she perhaps knows his name, because 12:46 in “the friend” shrieks—we can just barely make this out above the bedsounds—Say my name! Say my name, bitch!