by Joshua Cohen
East of our maps, Hic sunt serpentes…Here There Be Serpents coiled into currents, baring fangs of wake, venomous rips whirling around the throat of our Island, to skirring, to choke. Here’s a small island just off the coast of another small island that itself is just off the coast of an enormous country known as America—situated in space as in time just opposite the enormous green goddess with that torch of hers and that book, too, from whose pages our maps have been ripped. Manhattan’s a mammoth compared with this neighboring clod, this island we call it though it’s barely an isle, more like a breathless speck split nearly in two by a sip of water, into tablets, with a sullied tongue pronouncing profaned names, forked baybrackish, sundered churning, churlish. A slip, it once had accommodated the docking of vessels, ships like the Vaterland, the mighty Leviathan, the stalwart Amsterdam, and the Westerland, the Gellert, the Thingvalla, the Mohawk, the entire Moravia fleet out of Hamburg, the Norddeutscher Lloyd’s Kronzprinz Friedrich Wilhelm, the SS Whatever on down the wavylined, watermarked Manifest of Manifests, all of them descendants of the colonizing Saint Catherine (patroness saint of libraries), which steamed in the very first stock: immigrants who’d intended only to arrive, up top; down below, emigrants who’d intended only to leave; up top, immigrants who’d thought only of the future; down below, emigrants who’d thought only of the past…immigrants who’d honored opportunity, emigrants who’d prayed their lives away to the historical failure of gods ever older and dumber—arriving all day and through the night, too, in these ships and impromptu brigs and barques, their steerage made democratic meat, shipments if only for the slaughter that is the new, always, the lavish luxurious quarantine that is this particular exile. An enfranchised garage, a Cadillac parked deep in the crotch. Judge not lest, though—after all, they knew their mythologies, their archetypes, the windy symbols and the manifold, though onesunned, doldrums of fate: having crossed the river that is the ocean to die here, they’d lacked only the coins to blind their eyes, which would undoubtedly be earned in due time—found on a sidewalk, in a sewer, under the tongue of a wifemouth, in the pocket of her professional “father.”
A slip iced, frozen into a field, landscaped with salt and sand into a neat square that separates the Great Hall from the squat ruinous barracks beyond—now housing the surviving firstborns, all of them male, menschs ingathered from all the world over to attain the protection of this primal estate: the Hospital rustjointed, the Commissary burntover; the tumuli of outlying buildings intended in their conversion for the forgiveness of staff, the insensibility of freight, crammed atop this fill like centuries of graves of centuries, necropolis rocks atop stones atop trash cramped atop the swell of this speckle, an isle sliced down the middle as if gutted for hidden treasure, which is what—only water, frozen below the lives stilled, the shocked hearts and minds of those latest arrivals still being received for the processing. Huddled hassles burning to earn free, tempesttossed Lazaruses, poor, not for long, tired, they’re always, regime export whored over to this teeming shore for a purgatory of examinations, questions, questions, sessioning questions, exams, What’s your name, your date and place of birth, have you been promised a job here, have you been promised a husband here, what do you do, are you an anarchist? these days, how can you not be; do you happen to believe in a God…followed up by a host of hearings, appeals, held in the presence of interpreters American now for maybe a week, directing their pleas at the Officers who seemed themselves gods but not to be believed in only to fear, stationed chalkfingered, busily moustachioed at the door—which is not golden gleaming but whitewashed; its shine, it’s said, comes off with blood.
A rumor was, you enter America through the mouth of the Green Eve—the exit for New York is through her, you know where.
It’d been said that Columbus, the first of their kind ever to schlep to these shores, had been buried in her pedestal, which is the shul upon which Liberty stands.
The first thing these indigenes did was change coin, barbaric practice—conversion, to redeem their souls from the shadow of their passage, to give salvation another name, yet another number and face. Money in a pouch worn around the neck, a talisman: be careful, suspicious, trust no one, know not even yourself…your left hand a stranger to your right long may it be lost; brothers, cousins, a plumber in Brownsville who sponsored your visa, he happened to’ve been given the same last name as yours, no relation save that he was the only one of ten Buchalters to answer your letters sent out as blind as you’ll be soon enough: into the wide and unknown and unknowable, unreadable, just keep your mouth shut and they won’t know your language, your cries, that of a baby just arrived to meet its father remarried, refathered, and with a roomful of new daughters of sons (kitchencornered like a roach, like a rat, toilet closeted down the hall), an uncle of late only a series of letters himself, but in the wrong ink, in the wrong hand and unsigned, Dearest Yossele without love, with demands, or just silence, rejection, better to be left alone conjugating the following verbs: To conjugate, To deport, b’shalom…to be sent ashore, dashed, sundered, washed up, your money in a pouch worn round the neck, nametag which day of the week, meet me at the port in winter at the pier, I’ll be the one in the hat—to flee from the very face of their interrogating oppressors, whose faces were theirs even then and still are, clutching what they can from their klatsch, a few rags you’d never call clothes, quilt of feathers, a rye whiskey, a necklace of sausages, money in a pouch worn round the neck, the fee for their freedom and not for their life, which if we’re talking money is frankly a waste, all these dollars a head, the littlest son traveling hidden pouchswaddled, wounded round the neck; their documents in hand held out over land as bridges of bone, of skin and hair, in wagons, in carriage and britzka, cart and droshky, laundaus hauled by horses lamed and of relations, on sonback, on brotherback, and on foot, to go among swindlers, smugglers, robbers and thieves, evils both amateur and official, travel bureaus, shipping company representatives, I want a new globe…midnight flights from burning houses cool of hearth, border crossings only a matter of stepping high over an obstructing stump; swim through the fog, piss out the flame, make no more smoke than do they.
Furtively they trek overland to the ports, to the pier, money father’s money our money mine it’s all mine in a pouch wound round the neck to choke I can’t breathe it’s the air, it’s suddenly fresh! bribes and fares, trains and hay, pump trolleys, basket and blanket hides and ruses, tradetricks and secret signs and shibboli, Uwaga! Pocig, Achtung! Zug, ! , signs such signs, inns with a highest window open just enough for that to be a sign, too, lofts, luck and prayer, which if answered is luck, the prayer that is sickness and the luck that is unremitting disease: trachoma, a disease of the eye that’s treated with silver nitrate, the same compound of chemicals used to treat photographs, to develop ourselves in their image, favus, tinea favosa, a scalp infection that results in the making brittle of hair, eventually in jaundiced balding, and can only be treated with carbolic oil, which had often been tinctured into a syringe, then injected into our hearts to kill quickly, overwhelming with pain; the survivors live on lice that themselves have lice, atop cots in ship’s bowels amid the knots of intestinal hammocks, the menschs here the womenfolk there, separation by bulwark, holy freight, sacred stock, the sanctuary of an overturned lifeboat, a boat within a boat stacked atop a ship that goes somewhere upon which one can go nowhere, lolling depression in swells, seasick and hungry and thirsty with water all around—the ocean an eye tearing in salt; to drink from an eye is abominable, as your throat might be slaked but your tongue will be blinded—and then again, that enormous and rusted metal idol standing atop a pediment tiered in the excrement of tired gulls, grasping a torch and a book, which is this book and all other books, too, neither burnt, nor yet burning.
Yet another flight, a stampede, a rumpus, a regular old Kessel Garten, you know it? First and Second Classes disembarking themselves orderly first and second, thirdly the steerage last, ruddering columns buttressing cots in t
he bowels of the ship without limb, the sway of unsettled stomach rigged of hame, of hammock emptily swaying under the weight of unregistered ghosts, phantoms released on no one’s recognizance, specters without papers made of ashed papers, to float over the gangplank the bone of a Cossack, his horse, the hamate, the hanging halyard, the Gibbet, fallen masts a pier, the gangway to barge, the pier, walk, scuffle, drag deathmarch, todes babycrawl, the threshold, door, stairwell, into the Great Hall’s receiving, this the last station left in which to smooth out your skirts, to tuck in your shirt if shirt you have, if not your flesh, fluff your breasts, pinch your cheeks rosy; these bars and barbs, this wire, these pens, gates and their kept doctors, interpretercousins, guardbrothers, inspectors; the language of languages…take a deep breath, hold it in, let it out; you’re dead, there’s no second opinion; look at this eye chart, read the last line aloud, S Z C Z E D R Z Y K; do you know what it says, asks the doctor, know it, the immigrant says, he’s my uncle! Lipschitz, don’t give me lip, bei mir bist du sheyn fergessen, Welcome to America, Maran Hagaon Harav Avraham Halevi Moylvintldik…Shalom, Murray Gone; Hello, My Name is (Race Suicide), this naming death that’s named itself only after weeks, over months, after maybe even seasons of wait without name, not just unknown, inexistent, suffered and suffering just to enter, to be: many only to be turned away, and without their identities redeemed, sent back, RETURN TO—Isaac, or maybe Jacob—SENDER, reverted back to themselves, those unlucky few without name or a prayer, cast deep down into the real again, stowed home, lost to the generations to come; the map’s dot a speck of lint, a mote of dust, blown away, becomes a ruin, a coordinate fallen to time, desolate, wrecked, left for the waste upon which it rests. From south elevation, the Great Hall’s a mess, a mumble of lines, a jumble of Babel none too towering, instead laid vertical, fallen in every dialect’s design: Austro-Hungarian railroad shed, Ottoman slit, Russian Orthodox thrust, Parisian frill. Death by Renaissance in brick without hearth, as if tumbled from sky and only then, suntinted, threealarm red though fireproofed, the stucco façade mottled, jaundiced, its foundational limestone pissstained, its portico that limb distended from socket, wicked, a hand outstretched, to point away, to dismiss, to order, accuse…or else, arrival depending, to greet, to welcome, Shalom; to clasp warmly, give us a shake; below four massive turrets risen as lesser towers, the last survivors of the sprawl fallen below; their flags: tainted in blue, white, and red; the knives that pierce them wound, too, the mist, which is the breath of the ocean, guarding the Registry, the Island entire, from the gray occupation of clouds.
And it’s the same with every foaled load, whether it be boat of sea or boat of land, which is train, or even plane at the aeroport beyond, far out amid the majestic land known as Queens; whatever substance arrived upon, whether it be land, sea, or air, it’s cleaved—they come between. Our island lies halfway between the city, also an island, and Liberty’s woman: she’d been a gift that was also a sacrifice, as if Odysseus’ famed token to Troy, a huge hollowed naked apparition, Rhodessa’s her name, standing out there on the furthest, as if to demarcate our world, upon the first island they pass, no matter their mode of arrival; out so far in the ocean and free as to be almost Joysey—perched just off its banks and barges, its splintered docks, ramshackle warehouses of tumbling store. Between her reach and the spires of the city, our island stands guard, keeps the watery gate, the defense of a pomp once ruined, modest in its glory renewed—at least, no longer sinking; an occasional Atlantis disappearing at hightide, a breathing chest, a pound of flesh, now shored up from the drownless delectation of the parasites it once hosted with dirt dug from under the earth and out from under the ocean surrounding, from the tunnels that would accommodate the traffic of great steel snakes, girded with trash then the flesh of the dead. Their gravestone this Great Hall, a hunk of officialdom made angelic with the addition of two wings, one to each side of the main expanse: a body sprawled, a cruciform corpse, two flightless wings terminating in the talons of those four towers; three porticos top the middle plinth, the head—doubtless, a touch of significance is always involved, a meaning lost on all but the mute and the dead—three porticos of three vaulting windows, Beauxbrilliant, deco’s imposing, and then around that, nothing, emptiness, voided only by trees, scrubby and yet undaunted, survivors themselves, upward growths of salted grasp, weathered whitegray, deepgrained, dustthick: poplar, oak, evergreen firs, they’re all one tree as much as the arrivals can think of them to care; trees nothing but Tree to them in the Platonic ignorance of languages busied being forgotten already—all trees, that is, with the exception of the apple, red and rounding Eden’s, symbolic of their imaginary sin, spitefully generous in its polar fruit, freezerotten hardpitted product their kinder try to bite, lose a tooth on, in anger bombing the orbs at each other’s heads; their bodies to be laidout cold atop iced sprawls intersected with coils of barb, spurs of galvanized iron, scrapped tin, loosened slabs of rafter like ribs, the quarters of the surgeon, the enginehouse thistle, electric and steamplant, furnaces beyond toward the baths to be stoked with stacked wood, bagged coal, mountains high of excess brick, leftovers baked in the cloudless sun, fallen stones and shoring rocks, pallets of glass, plasticwrapped and tarped, readied for an installation forever postponed, reconstruction stalled, put off until the end of time, an overhaul overhauled, a maintenance neglected, forgotten worksite in wasted daylight, bereft by bureaucracy, beset by neglect and trash; grisly verdigris, caltrops of cable and wire, gaping shafts and moaning ducts, hoistways left open to dizzying tumbles, uncovered sewers to fall into and smash a last leg, guttergraves…
Inside it’s unlit, peeling plaster as if the rind of the walls, chairs broken without back or legs and so not really chairs but stools or just mushrooms wrought of wood and barnacled metal, crumbling drapes, shattered glass. Dorm beds, column after column of them, line the floor; the air above infused with the exhaust of their springs; bumcold radiators sheltering mice, shadowing their secretions, turdpellets like bedbugs crushed. Dreams, being the annulment of slights incurred by day, make for the rubble of rumbling night: the bedding stained in blood and cum, mosquito leech and that of unseasonal greenheads, pinched ticks and lice, piss and fecs, mucus, vomit; loneliness given the ceiling lies so high as to be sky, the walls tubercularly white, offbronchial, pearls in the lungs, breath, breathe, at least try to.
Then, a light suffuses, is sustained, fluorescence, the flicker of bulbs just as the sun begins its weary rise: slightness and slowness and torpor, the rise fall rise of respiration, guts, weight they’ll lose then die of their loss, igniting, illuminating the space amid snoozing sounds, cicadan snore, cricket stridulation as if in the summoning of smoke: this barracks room one massed breath, an industrial maw, opening, opened, its teeth leaning columns, bent and bowed columns, its gasps steaming stains on the walls bitter with humours and mold; bed after bed, ten-by-ten in ranks, ten-by-ten again, rows, of what are really upgraded cots, iron sag, rusted to give under slumber, green creak for the horny. And then, in the cots—they’re forms; in appearance only bedclothes stuffed with flesh, bledclothes, though with noses that peek above trims, mussed sheets, fake feather pillows, comforters of imitation down in the shape of people, cast in the shape of beds, concrete slabs they feel, immobile, corpsed dead as cement. An exhausted form twitches its feet, its toes, one two three, slowly, then three four five, individually one two three four five to prove he’s alive—to whom; that he’s separately willed, even special, as if singled from among this mass, leans toward the form directly to the left, the mensch, if we might judge by the bulge from under his sheets, his drunk and tented lust, the sexual clump, grapeleaved in fitted, flat. He grunts, then as if to say hello, to introduce himself he farts, a poof, a toot, is answered by that mensch neighboring, a response given upon permission, shameless, with another fart, this rip huge, Rrrrrrrip! an enormous sortie wet and thick, which tears a hole right out of his uniform pajamas, this sound echoed six beds down then maybe two over with another, i
s dueted with, a ffrrip, and yet another, pow, pow,—and—pow from opposite sides of the barracks, a barrage of miniexplosions, from cot to cot echoing against the corroded collapsing wet walls, stacked booms rocking the lower bunks, bucking the uppers, bombs from the rafters to incise there their own dark graffiti, signing a scatology’s name. How all this seems almost coordinated, prearranged, if you’re that species of paranoid, how couldn’t they be: Affiliated, neurotic, too; though if you’ve been strangely calm here, confident from the first or already resigned, then now appalled’s being contracted into the bargain, disgusted, given the very randomness of this rearending assault, such lack of control, this chaos—a cacophony of bursts and bops, of salvos percussive, sallies of bangs and syncopated, syncopating bings, in their fading sound, the foggy fade of their echoes, giving way to a host of hissy almost silent farts, some snakelike, others barking or crazily purring; flatulisms serving to both make a haze and, also, to pierce it, stifling even the smoke with its maker, the flame. Then, a rapid sweep coming down the aisles, boom boom baboom, the strafing of morning, machinegunned repeatrepeat, ratatat of fire that even if friendly seems no less dangerous or revolting: farts raising sheets, fitted, rising sheets, flat, bubbling covers, burbling blankets, in gastrointestinal whumps, lower tract lumps, milky eruptions, redeyed evacuations, pyloric blockages, buildups and then, explosion! p-pow! the glorified dorm reverberating in a rousing finale, rolled bodies corpsed on the floor, from forms picked clear up and off beds, shot spumed into air then slumped back down to bounce thud and sag, launches and falls selfpropelled, the trajectory of methane released, ricocheting ping and pop, cracks and snaps in a confusion, offtime, out of time, a dense swirl of emission, the barracks a hellish, burning pit, and then, as suddenly as all began, and cutting clarion through din and fog, there’s a siren, alarm…Reveille!—wake up! Boker both tov and or, rise and shine and give God more than your gases. Time to toss and turn, to rub, sit and stand, time to wake for those left alive, time to remember their dead: to live their wake in the mourning of mothers and fathers, of their sisters and brothers and cousins, first, second, third, aunts and uncles and who knows more removed, how half and inlaw, whoever that was, I’m not sure…survivors to noose themselves up to the rafters with linings of quilt and collar and cuff. Then, to stand upon the freezing floor of their barracks, to stand on their own two feet for a moment and imagine they’re not animals—to undress of pajamas, only to hide their nakednesses in the underwear and socks they’ve been supplied, too. Even as their family’s laid to rest on the floor of the ocean surrounding, submerged deep amid the numberless drops that star that lower sky, dead, diffuse—every single one and engaged one of them, each affianced and married one, each one widowed, widowered, twiceseparated and thrice-divorced, dead; all of them, that is, except these very menschs, those who were firstborn and still are, those of the inheritance, which is this and this only—this Island, this life; lining their ways, two-by-two, out to the baths, to stand under the showers and wash away their guilt and their dreams, which have been found guilty themselves.
