by Joshua Cohen
Doctor Tweiss stands whitefaced not in mortification but makeup, facing them with his hands on his hips, his script flapping behind him like the wings of the angel he’ll never be, or ever merit…and right on cue—In Mitten Drinnen, as it’s been blocked for a wide shot, Int.—OFFICE—Hymie [silent] pulls a pistol from the holster at his shoulder; his partner waves him down.
Just think about it, the first Hymie says: male newborns, newly born without foreskins. We’ll inject the birthright, naturally chosen in utero, in vitro, in whatever we trust: Affiliation to go from strength to strength, hazak l’dor, from generation unto generation, a Messiah engineered for every age…music gimcrack and gilded rises from the vents, along with a gas scentless, colorless, maybe even effectless and so just pumped in for the sheer shorn folly of it, the trebly paranoia: revelation brass muted by cymbals strungup to ethereal harps. Salvation’s proposition is once-in-a-lifetime, Doctor…you’re mad, mishugenahmost! who sent you? PAN OUT. The Acronym, Doctor, the representation, yours, ours, and so why not everyone’s, too, while we’re at it…the idol of Name, of the Name that is all names of the letters that are all letters—the Name, Whose every letter holds its own names inside and then letters inside those, too, Aleph, Bet…get my drift, you got snow on the brain: all that unknowable and inextinguishable stuff, the ineffable Name of Names, as represented in letters of letters, nu—does that answer your question…as either Doctor Tweiss or his stuntdouble (a divorced former camera-mensch with bad knees from years spent stooping to film XXX scenes in and around San Fernando), anyone but his twin Tweiss who can’t be bothered just now, falls through the doorway to the hall, its rug sloppily thrown above the marbleized linoleum, Properties’ salvage, and smacks the soundstaged ground with his knuckles; the agents crack theirs, ask to use the phone, call their agents…it’s almost a wrap; the unions are going restless and tired; all that’s left of the catering bagels are holes; the continuity girl’s gotten pregnant by the boom; there’s no more coffee, but there are planes to make to the coast.
Doctor, the Hymie says out the side of his mouth, cupping the receiver while he’s still on hold to the muzaked tune of three shekels a minute, we’ll have ourselves a Moshiach, with all rights reserved, all patents pending, whether you’ll help us or not. CUT—how the first is by default the deepest, a fade to black and then, the scenic horizon of credits…or is this just a rehearsal for the futureful real? As for the other Doctor Tweiss, whose scenes have been left on the cuttingroom floor, there just wasn’t the interest, he didn’t test well, one Tweiss is enough—he’s been overheard in voiceover (and even once glimpsed matchedcut, amid dust’s dissolve) through their office’s intercom system, surveillance cameras footaged in black & white he’s occupied flushing any samples at hand—semen, and blood, down the toilet he sits on; a wipe, and they wrap.
To the south, which is for why always west, or should be, into illimitable Freedom…mapcalled, flatcolored Fleedom—the House of Bondage, a new essen&M themed leather joint risen at the Mexican border: a place friendly for a rest, an inexact shave and a wash, a sip cerveza and a hot meal on the way outcountry; a bar & grill, a waystation and hideaway, too, made of metal, roofed and walled, of the refuse of repentant bikers that’s piled out back, as well, and, also, in the sandlot up front—riders hunkered down around their flaming wrecks, Harleys smelted to holy. To the north, then, and to the east, which are the same directions, which is—a grayhaired exheavy in a visor and ten cableknit sweaters for the cold stands a soar atop his private, No Trespassing mesa, keeps his head down, his eye balled, swings himself out into the sandtrap we call the desert, a sunset pastel, and then in disgust at his shot and with the weather, throws his driver up to the sky to tangle with a bolt of lightning come down—and from it, the neon…necromantic, illuminating each and every failure, among them one (Emanuel) L. Leeds, the Good and rt. Irreverend L. survived, today the appropriately yarmulked and side-lockladen Rabbi El he’s aliased as (a costumey disguise, though he’s liking it perhaps a lach too much), bedding down in the back of a jeep he’ll hotwire from its unfortunate owner tomorrow, up on the sixth floor of the parkinggarage of the Al-Cohol Hotel & Q’asino, kept warm by a bottle of Vat 613 and a pack’s worth of smokes flavored besamim he’s rolled himself. They’re out for L., and L.’s out for Him, too—can’t stand the memory of that Joysey humiliation…reeling tales as tall as Him about the One that got, gevalt, away to a host of obliging or just pitying unionists: Double Triple Quadruple Pay / We Ain’t Gonna Work on Sa-Tur-Day, them striking out for the picket-line that hazards the tourists’ turquoise rim of the moon; their ostentatiously jewelried rep giving good quote…“we don’t believe in an end to God’s bounty, or in a border to our country, either, America, the world.” Which by an estranging yet commodious rictus brings us westward ho, which is southbound, again, as it’s been said with a smile, and, if given to belief in all the signs that bedevil the toothless, tongueless, gaping beyond, the north and east, too, all of it together and around again if the mystic’s your thing, also if not: silver highways that, if you obey the recommendations of their contingently blinking advisories, if only you would heed their wondrous warnings arcaned in ways symbolized of arrows and stars, promise to take you out as far as the garden of Angels, which is Holywood, the second city that is all cities, but is all other cities perfected, made irreal: apparently, a place of pilgrimage, the developers now sell it as, per the glossed propaganda a mystical shrine, in which dream need not be its own fulfillment, no matter how common its interpretation nor how brute its price. Here there are intersections and there are causeways and byways, there are interchanges and coded connections, known only to the select under hidden numbers, by secret names. To approach this wisdom, it’s said, you must follow the wide wave of the desert, then turn—averting disaster—just before its break, forsaking its spill over the concrete and the meridian there, to abandon its wake that drifts sand as if stars to constellate the further beach, which gives itself over to the Pacific as a grave, the bottommost burial of the world…this is the ocean, the other ocean. A rumbling wave prays in thanks for the sacrifice of the shore, the land, the dry earth. As here, as much as everywhere else, the heavens open: every weather crowded into cloud. It’s Friday already, it’s the Sabbath again, and we tumble into its fissure, timequaked—the void of yet another Shabbos.
Here, one line of many, infinite, or, in another interpretation, the one and only line—this leading to the nameless, perhaps stockless, and so just reliant on false word-of-mouth, OffReservation liquorstore (a line that alternates lame hosses and lamer pickup trucks with the odd pulling, motorpuling tractor modified into a snowplow thrown in to keep it interesting, everyone awake, at attention)—snakes through the early evening’s long quiet plaining to holy. A slight past the line’s middle three eligible Injun bachelors in ripped wifebeaters, two of them in meshbacked caps over slick mullets, hurry to replace a gutted tire on their white Silverado, while Kuskuska her name is she sits I’m too pretty, smart, important, and female to deal with ya’ll in a battered bluecollared recliner nailed down to the flatbed and facing exhaust. Atop this poor sprung stuffless throne she’s just singing along; all the radios are on and are loud.
He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when He comes
When He comes
O He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when He comes
When He comes
O He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain, He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain, He’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when He comes
O when He comes
He’ll be ridin’ six white donkeys when He comes…
As for this mountain she’s singing about, listen up: in our lifetime it’s winding down, eroding, been sanded away…today, it’s just another mesa, if a mesa made special, sacred, not in its appearance under any light whether of night or day or else in any other apparency, but only as it’s a landmark spiritual, a placemarker, as it’s said—the site of an emergenc
e, onto the shores of our world. You following. Stay with me. Now, be you chaver or chazer, this here is the harder world, be ye warned, a dimensioned world, textured, heavy-fingered and greedy of palm, it touches all surfaces, strokes: its topography one of pain, of sorrow and suffering, but it’s also another opportunity, after those of their worlds previously squandered—realize the plan or prepare for yet another destruction. All of you with husks in your ears, with shells over your eyes, you’ve been warned. Ignore at your own peril, gringo, Bahana—you White Mensch from Across the Water whose appearance, it’s said, means the end of this world, marks the beginning of the next, whatsoever it be, they hope good and soon.
In the beginning of it All how they, too, had their own void, believe it, space without form, everyone did, each to their own, the same, equal and endless. Then—we appeared…we appear only in order for the world to have appeared to us, and so it follows—dispersion; their Eden already a diaspora: they emerge from the water onto the land to be robbed. Their womenfolk raped. Their legacy up in unproverbial smoke. A noise comes from behind a star: a siren, civilization’s cry, which destroys, decrees future governance; over the mountains, the bleat of the cavalry’s horn—it’s the voice of the God of the Universe, Nature Itself saying to them, go forth: follow each your own star…and then when that star stops, wheresoever it might end or fall, settle there, this is what I’ve decided. And so they make their migrations, four ways to the wind. That’s their myth, no stranger than any other, admit it. They’re the Hopi, the unchosen chosen. Welcome to their world, dwell in peace. Reservations unnecessary, hunt yourself into a quarter, gather, and settle. Pitch your wander. Make yourself at home.
What you should expect: to begin with, the color of this world is yellowed white, its tree the juniper, its bird the owl as wise as age, perched on its winged laurels; its animal the mountain lion that paces starving and droughted, inexorably tracking its prey elusive if not yet extinct through what are called the pasos, which are the four directional arms of the Great Swastika, north, south, east, and west: these the very routes of the Hopi dispersion, their camp to be centered at this, the apex of the bent cross, the dead middle of this peopled line. Here is the seat of the planet’s rotation, the spiritual magnet that once attracted the New Aging rabbis’ sisters and thinhaired, wireglassesed aunts out from Angels, Desert Hot Springs, Arizona’s rocks Bell and Cathedral, Sedona and its outlied environs, and even parts aged further east—here the intersection of the vibrations of the Twins, the Hopi deities of our fallen equator. From here, the middle of the map that is the Swastika, the migration can be mirrored in two directions: there were the Hopi who’d turned right, the clans of the Bear, the Eagle, Fire and Water, Whatever, That One, Why Not, and Sure; while those who’d turned left provide for the reflection of the form: the clans of the Crow, the Bluebird, the Butterfly, What He Said, Without a Doubt, Definitely, Absolutely, You Got It…others still splintering off from the Swastika, to live apart, in inhuman cities and outerboroughs, in godless Developments scattered to the judgment of every scarcity’s wind. This reflection into four arms symbolizes, too, the quadrants of the worlds, those quadrantworlds destroyed—all of us living despite our wander within the meaning of the last square, its intent the greater, the darkest. Cradled in the bosom of the swastika. Confined by the total wall of this cross.
Among us, her…Kuskuska, otherwise known as Jane. In Hopi, it means Lost: named after the locus of our previous existence, the world from which we’ve just fallen; known, don’t ask why, as Kuskurza. She waits in the line, which is according to many, if you ask them and even if you don’t, the longest, most crowded arm of the swastika, to the liquorstore and from it, impatient for it to open after its enforced Shabbos closing, sitting sidesaddle on the recliner in the flatbed its tire now replaced, her feet surrounded by wildflowers, sienna and sepia dead. She stops her singing only to mock a yodel at Kokuiena, also known as Dick, her kin at the wheel and not going anywhere, idling, wasting gas, exhorts him to just honk the horn, will you, spook the horses, those strawberry roans and pregnant rasps she’s sure are to blame for slowing everything down up ahead; how she won’t turn around, though, and face front to get an idea of what lies in store, or else to envy, to covet those closer: how she only faces the rear and smiles her fortune despite bad dentistry at the poor parching behind her. A noxious wind’s up, waft of el chupacabra’s stank breath, the icy abrego of a season displaced, thick with sand and debris, fear and hate, and, God, when you think about it, the next world isn’t the last of the worlds or her problems, they won’t be…there are more to come, too many, she’s had it already, enough. We’ll never make it, not us. Kokuiena leans out the window and turns to Kuskuska and asks her with his sorrel eyes, pleadingly, like I know all that myth shtick and the government and the wars, hymn, unemployment, privation, martyrology’s ganze geschichte but, nu, sis, how’d we ever end up like this. Worlded. Take a number. Get in line. But Kuskuska’s lost in her own, thinking maybe, just maybe, give me one good why not and she’ll light out for Phoenix: temping receptionist, secretary, maybe get into the hospitality racket, a moon or two getting settled and who knows she might even make waitress or maid, the aboriginal who checks coats; anything to get out of here, far enough away from Hotevilla and environs and, gevalt, she has no idea how to even begin telling her brother a thing like that.
Kokuiena, bareboned, knifecheeked, with sockets shadowing the pale, the rashraised stubbled chin, the shallow chest heaving its fluish sigh, paws his ponytail, then takes it around his neck to his mouth to suck on its tip; it helps him remember the prophecy: how he’d been called, by the Chief over to the public telephone eavesdropped upon by the immortal operator, She of the 0 sunning out over Holbrook, frozenly nooned in the sky a hundred or so unmarked unmade miles away, past Oraibi Old and New and its mesas and their secrets he was told what would happen and then, the extension just died, beep beep beep and please press # for interpretation, a pounding…how a voice he’d never heard before deep and grave, yet un-characteristically white, had told him about a member of a foreign tribe headed this way, and had mentioned a reward, said it would be a formidable service, then described a Bahana named Ben, a Redeemer, a white mensch who, and it’s not like he’s sure how, is not a white mensch: a paleface with a red heart and lips blue from the cold who’d one day arrive in the plaza, who’d show up when one notch knifed into the stick—the last line past the last day, a moon from now with the tribe entire, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters all out to welcome this Messiah, imagined, their arms out laden with greetings, with gifts, here at Yellow Stone, there at Pointed Rock, Where the Ray of the Sun Goes Over the Line to the Place, south of Oraibi proper. He’s been tasked to search for this Ben, He Who Comes In Peace we’ve been waiting for for so long—and so what, to scout around, to ask questions, follow trails, which is futzed: tradition says He’ll come to us, not us to Him…how unexpectedly, He’ll arrive in the Plaza, which one you’ll know on that day when, middance and with the fire tamped down, the Tourist Kachina will remove its mask in front of the uninitiated kinder: a star shining brightly blond, the elders all masked in their finest white rubber, their eyes’ slits rounded and rung in corny plastic, threechinned husky, falsified faces grinning widely to expose an endless imitation ivory dentition, their dark naked torsos below bedecked in photographic and video equipment, bandoliers of film canisters, in their hands they’ll wield rainbow umbrellas while dancing dementedly, opening and closing their thrusts and parries upon thuds of foot raising the dust of the earth—this Kachina an advanced incarnation of their only spiritual future, lately channeled to this world not out of a wanting for myth, or from any metaphysical need, but because that’s what the audiences pay for, that’s what the tourists demand; and then, how there will be no more ceremonies, there’ll be no more faith, and, after a time, the elders say the wheel will renew itself, that it must, and then…how it’ll begin all over again, shakily spoked, the crossed axle of the baldest tire—another
emergence, meaning other migrations…and these outlining an even greater swastika, another settling—and yet another death. Would you believe it. Who ever heard.
A white who’s not white, don’t ask Him to explain…He, shtum and on foot, arrives in the axis. Here in the middle of the newest tundra, in the middle of the middle of no money, that’s one thing, no warmer woolen sweater or sweatshirt, fleece or Hanna’d say pullover or anything like that, that’s another, it’s freezing out, the middle of middling nowhere, now what, now nothing. What might be the wind’s Ben complaining. Having wandered through the night, toward the end of the temporal Sabbath, lo He beholds lights in the distance, a twinkling grace saved from perpetual powder, strung out to dim poles a God knows where, and’s not telling. Through the lenses of His glasses, frozen with fog, He makes out a line of vehicles, raggedly running and not, motley: golfcarts registered to corpses, asses liened off neighbordebtors, repod burros, donkeys and horses, ponies and mules, loadfoaled, collapsing beburdened, pickup trucks, sleighs yoked to tractors hitched to their owners and hauling forever, heaps of hide, spring and sprocket who could ever hope to name anything but a mechanical apology, I’m sorry geared to strip down—all given the pallor of exhaustion in three coats of dull finished with wan under the dim lights of the highway that haven’t yet been cut off by the state to discourage such driving on Shabbos. Them waiting, as it’s been handeddown, whispered down the line, for Molly Mashke’s OffReservation Schnapps Emporium to open when the sun’s finally set, and so contrary to the concern’s NonStop reputation, it seems to be a roundabout 24/6 operation. Hoofing it across the gulagish in search of the open, amid all this open, the finding lost amidst the found, only to become blocked, stopped, disallowed: verily it comes to pass that Ben wanders straight into this line lining across His path and forever and pathless; that His line has in the midst of such freedom come to intersect the line of these Injuns, innumerable and thirsty and prepared to pay through the throat for the sanctification of quench, and to intersect it exactly at its midpoint, halfway between the last thirsty Injun (of course, it’s tempting to speculate, as have many of our best and brightest, that these Injuns are linedup in order of thirst, of desire), and the threshold of the elusive, perhaps merely mythic, liquor purveyor; the line winding down the road, or the line is the road, slick sprinkled with cornmeal against skidding, slippage, to keep anyone from tailing them to harm through their wait, their patience this Shabbos, for its three soused stars, the hungover light of the sun. Ben can discern only animals and vehicles and their idling people in both directions: no end of the line and no beginning either, on this disembodied arm of this swastika mirroring all; and further on down the line, Mexicoway, so far as to be certainly foreign: Heber backtracking north with Mada in their limo requisitioned on the moment in Siegeles spurred hard, brakeless, its transmission on the clunk, and behind them Frank Gelt in a rental Hummer (on his way out to check on an Angels tip his convertible unreported stolen outside a Barstow motel, creditcards, too, he left in the glovebox at Needles so he pays all plus extra mileage in cash, saves receipts, prays reimbursement); they’re trafficjammed, fisting their horns thinking instinct they’re back in the city where when you make noise, you make life go; the lights getting greened in jealousy at the very red of impatience, the lanes only what’s made of them, lane; and then behind, far far behind and there unsuspected, almost at the border where they’ve bought with favors forged documents with which to evade recognition, the Marys, in the van in which they’d followed Him on tour (thanks new plates): they’re still costumed though off the clock, most of them lying atop a Hotel & Q’asino mattress gutted of stuffing in the bay in the back, its hubby, orificetight space studded with pillows in the style of an Oriental harem, perfumatory, tented with stolen towels and sheets; like everyone else—and though for them there’s no money involved only guilt in the gut, Hanna’s, them made family to disappointment, in themselves and in Him—they’re determined to find Him, to bring Him on home; forget bounty or bonus, it’s a duty, a love…His mother and sisters to pass the long while holding shiralongs, playing guessinggames, I’m thinking of more than twenty questions with the answer always Him, taking turns sleeping in the rear as Rubina usually or is it, as it’s jammedup and waiting and honking Batya just now, but how she’s too young to drive, idles them out of gas.
