by Joshua Cohen
After the meal, which had been abundant in courses (and too expensive, too, as completely treyf), and then after the caroling, the wassailing then the caroling again are finished, done as ham, the guests retire to their rooms: donors from interests both strange and stubborn, not just eccentric and racist, let’s say, or bigoted and big with ideas but altogether insane—they’re equipped with sketchy maps to their accommodations’ shadows, having been overnighted for their own safety: too risky to venture a return to the city from such a celebration and so late, the ornaments they’d hung would show in the shine of their eyes, marking them for yet another detention, for a punishment that just has to be worse; they find their long, slow, tortuous ways some flashlit, others candled, they’re sluggish they’re sluggishly drunk: their forms full of shepherd’s pie, their arms and legs heavy stumps of yulelogs, stuffed with turkey their brains a mess of oldetimey puddings and chutneys, sweetbreads for stomachs churned with intoxicant nogs how they’re bumping and knocking, they’re disrupting all—or else, maybe it’s one of the birds, another creature stolen away on the tree imported, eluding Customs, to infest the Garden and breed here, to be fruitful and multiply then subdue with destruction…maybe it’s that first flake that all had been waiting for, are still waiting for now, that first perfect flake, earthfallen, perhaps it’d gone missed, as it kissed the ground, or the highest spire of the Great Hall, it’d melted into flame; or it’s that at around midnight that night, a candle’s upset, on a sill, our scholars say one perched at the portico window directly behind the tree, its ornamental drop of fire wicked to catch on tissue, some have said, while others hold by a ribbon or a bow—all agree, though, that soon the Baum itself catches…secreting sap as the tinsel brings the flame roaring up to the tapered top from the trunk below: within a moment, there’s a burgeoning fire, forecausting, smoke billowing to gather its night’s night sky amid the Registry’s vault…
Warmed under his bed’s burlap canopy—army surplus from a former campaign, he’d served but found no action—Die’s woken…it’s hot, much too hot and he’s angry already, you know how much heating runs him, he rises, to have a word with Maintenance, puts down his teddy and tucks it in then stomps from his room still in his pajamas. The air’s thick with the scent of singed pine, which is so pleasant and seasonal, then heavier, too heavy, too weighty and black, it’s choking with smoke, and so he hurries from the hallway of his quarters to the balcony and then down the grand staircase, its fasteners coming loose under his run, a carpet of stairs gathering around his fuzzy slippers slipping, bunching, unfurling into rolls of red as if a scroll of the Law soaked in fiery blood underfoot and him falling, then recovering on allfours before righting himself amid a mess of alarum: the Registry, an ocean of smoke…the Baum burning like a mast lightningstruck, its ship sunk out in the ice, being circled by shrieking birds their wings flaming. A pillar. The signal for help, or for helplessness. He escapes alone, rousing no one, not every mensch for himself but every mensch for me, and goys, too, who not: stumbling out the doors, a handle scalding his palms to modest him with mark, a flail to hide his face, scratching at his eyes then sucking at his fingers. He makes it out, under the overhang of the Great Hall then across the lawned square and through the makeshift manger, trampling the poultry spooked and squawking, eweing lambs and that lifesized clayfaced babe swaddled in their white and then, beyond, rims the docks and coffined barges toward then around the flagpole barren, fingering with scorched sucked fingertips the lone purplehearted medal he sleeps with dangling from him hotly and without sound, while with his other hand fingering the moustache applied somatically, as if swiped from the deepest pit of prior knowledge: a thin wisp of dreck foraged from his rear.
Halt! a young, lanky, redeyed buzzbald guard yells…who goes there? as he’d been trained: which is heartening, especially when you’re the boss inspecting; except when you’re fleeing, that is, and you realize that everyone you hired the military refused—how they can’t even tell there’s a fire.
It’s me…Die says, you know me, soldier; he holds up his hands, halfsalute and halfsurrender, then waves them toward the smoke.
You? What a dreck disguise! the guard says very funny, tell me another, and he lunges at Die who dashes away in the return of his arrival, the guard following in pursuit his sidearm drawn but don’t worry, there’s been no money for ammunition in a week.
In his quarters, at the far southern wing of the Great Hall, Mada hadn’t slept, had smelled smoke, tasted it, breathed in suspecting the worst then tripped an alarm; the detectors have never been inspected: no rain from the roof, no sprinklers shpritzing; nothing’s up to code. He’d telephoned the firedepartment, ordered Gelt and Hamm quartering down the hall to rouse everyone, a room to room sweep for guests, to triage them out to the lawn and the ice of the square’s the plan as laid and sleeping; he’d go for the boss, personally, then with him underground, to meet up in the Temple as per protocol exigent. But Die stands outside already, shocked immobilized at this, the image of his panicked form—gazing at himself in a vast window falling whole from its mullions then shattering from the face of the portico wall, his own face burning, lit with shards of flame raging, his guard overtaking him to jump directly into the fire, its Hall, hoping O God to save himself from his reflection, too. Firetrucks are delayed, due, at least in the findings of one inquiry posthumous, executed with a holy indifference, ritually pococurante, to disagreement over emergency jurisdiction, whether Joysey should respond to this disaster or Manhattan, New York State (that it’s Xmas just isn’t a reasonable excuse anymore, is what, we’re tired); the ice, it’s a problem unto itself, it’s not only slippery but too thin and the trucks too heavy, many suspect they’d fall right through, the frazil, the nilas…how the firemenschs would have to hook & ladder themselves on out. For the record, though, a few trucks do arrive, but the Garden’s guards end up slowing them well in advance of the perimeter, pull them over, push for inspection, interrogation, in doing so just following orders, standard practice in the event of siege, compound infiltration, contingent upon what’s contingent, a tactic of delay long reserved for this capacity—until the Army or National Guard would arrive on Shade’s orders, whenever, never: guards roadblock all emergency response at the edge of the ice and go about demanding, examining papers, keeping them waiting, stripsearching, taking bribes, baksheesh, bar them despite, impede every entrance with their guns loaded if only with a wasting list of questions, tonguetipped bulletpoints; the Main Guardhouse down toward Island South surrounded by a squadron of firemenschs uniformed in payos and yarmulkes, making all the lewd gestures you’d expect with their hoses in response to subjected measures, as the flagrancy spreads past them, with an explosion from the western wing of the Great Hall that whirlwinds a host of debris high into the night, even out over the ice to threaten their vehicles, up also toward a low gated fence and its scar of lawn, then up its slate path, wickpulsing, melting the protective plastic slipcovering ice, up to the stoop to His door, yellowgold if on its way to tarnish: His house, His sisters’, too, which Israel and Hanna had paid off long after lawschool, partnerships junior, senior, after all those loans, those payments, the mortgage made month in moon out, it’s going up, too—nothing will be spared; insurance—it’s only a dream.
As for Joysey, it’s irretrievable, fogged in smoke. We’re talking banks of the stuff, a run on them, craziness in a last hurried looting of the air for air. Flames consume even the silent bushes, the few remaining shrubs along the Garden’s waterfront. Here still in pajamas under his gown, Die with a cap atop his bald shaped like the moon slouching back toward black—who could take orders from one so appareled—how he suddenly realizes, with the fall of wax on his hand, that this entire time he’s been holding a candle, clutched from his nightstand as he rose into flight: a separate lone flame, having served to illuminate his escape until now; it still hasn’t gone out, but rather’s been melted to his forefinger, and what’s troubling is that he can’t feel its burn. He
sits on the icy earth rocking, shrouded in bedsheets Mada’s draped over his shoulders. Chattering, the bite of frost. Soon, and in gross violation of standard ops, he’s surrounded by the faithful surviving: Hamm, and Gelt (an expanse of singleply sucked from the jut of the latter’s weak heel, the whitened sick tongue of his slippers—he’d been disturbed on the toilet), along with a smattering of Kush daughters in only their sequined bedclothes blown suggestively tight in the wind that’s helping the fire along…suddenly turning around in the opposite direction at the sound of another explosion, wondering where Wall Street’s gone, whether Mitteltown’s made off along with it: Manhattan’s skyline nothing but a dark horizon, a burnt finger poked through the smoke it’s accusing; and so already, the assignation of blame, and this with the flames still the rage. Firemenschs having been finally admitted on order of Mada who’s taken initiative when no one else can, they’re inventing a chain of command and with it, attempting to strangle: they’re massing around their trucks schmoozing, kibitzniks, they’re arguing with one another over where their water, which as it’s little is precious, is to go next, and who, for that matter, gets to determine the flow: they trip over their own hoses, they’re flung into the air with variable pressures of spray, their nozzles spouting what water in chains binding whether misered or—as the fire melts the ice, and the melt is tapped—wastefully massive: dousing Israel’s books burnbound, Hanna’s albums of photographs lain open to surge, the kitchen wretched apart in slivers of tile, a gasleak, a rupture in everything’s main, the livingroom a soaked inferno of sofas, charred furniture antique as of yesterday hacked apart with, oyf kapores—axes; hidden under the seared doormat of His house, a scalding key that unlocks no secret…all of it gray on the way to white, in this return to purity, to void: a burntoffering to be refused by God, returned to us on earth as half ash, half watery carcass.
As the sun rises a slight clearing, again the blur of Manhattan’s very south, a wisped glimpse of Joysey beach, crabgrass and the hummocked dune beyond of industry’s smote sprawl…the Great Hall’s revealed, lost, the ghost of its guests, completely cinderdestroyed, utterly unutterably tinder: to go the way of the lives it once hosted, whisked up vaultways through smokestacks of smoke with smoke pouring through them ever exalted; its remains fall apart in the hands, fall through the sifting of fingers and stain, memory, until washed away through a melt in the ice, a hole—a polynya, a negative island. Spotfires rumble at perimeter, pockets smoldering, fume. Stray doorknobs tumble hotly across the square fronting foundational ruin. Tanks go out then the melt reserves, exhausted; eyes and mouths hold the only water and are losing it quickly; through a thinrimmed, dangerous opening whether melted or smashed with axes or trucks what with the weight of their tires, they’re soon pumping the lower Hudson directly, bailing the bay, it’s too late…reinforcements have been slow to arrive, thanks in part to a few guards at the Joysey approach still screening: orders are orders, always just following the order of orders, the protocol of detritus, procedure sunk deep in pondy pits, dug out by hoses by their steady focus and pressure, to be followed only by a directive to preserve—the Administration to take over the Island, to oversee it personally, Shaded protected, an army of agents safeguarding schlub and rub, keeping the remains from any element that hasn’t yet savaged: lengths of flute, revetments fallen, crumbs of column lining the edge of ashen decline to ice melting, melt melting…the door to His house, goldenyellow—Hanna had chosen the color, Israel’d hated it, a landmark argument (she’d called the Koenigsburg’s crying, the shoulder that was Edy’s phone, cradled between the ear and the shoulder with both multitasking), let’s not get into it, not the right time—it’s being carried by two firemenschs one on each side, carrying it to salvage: they heave it to a hulking sledge, to totter atop a mound of similar relics; still in its frame, not yet unhinged, it’s just hanging and so opening nowhere, without an up or down or an in or out or anything, melted from its wall of morning: it’s the same shade as the dawn, the color of fire, a bruised fruit sunrisefire, morning’s purge, the shake of dead branch, from its bark a page blank, aged to brittle—and an island, an Island is the only darkened thing, and darkening still, as if its own shadow, its blackburn a castdown remnant of the night; it lies in the bay becoming ocean as a wound, an openly weeping wound, floating always at the edge of this hemisphere, turning, only to teeter upon, then fall from, the very edge, right off this flattening world—never to heal.
Offshore, Liberty stands untouched, and untouchable, if already tarnished, and as such modest in her grief: arrayed in mourning robes, this metallic sackcloth, her torch a memorycandle snuffed in bronze for safety. As for her book—even if burnt, it’s still open. And as for that other monument, the tree, their Baum outlasting if only by a moment, a mere speck in the Island’s eye, all those other baums, and bergs, too, these krantzs and zweigs dead themselves, stumped graveless—once standing flagless, rude and proud in the midst of the Registry of the Great Hall halfextinguished, it’s a nothing now of choking, clawlike roots, to be upended for the mulch. Understand, this is assimilation: the transference of one element to another, one state as to its voided other, fire to smoke, tree to ashing away on the wind that seeds, and sorrows…O if only that smoke, that ash, it all, could be reassembled into the lost, but how, made manifest again and whole through some, any, allied alchemical effort…to be made then remade in perpetual recreation, what would that cost, what would that be worth—what’s a resurrected life, especially when you have to buy new possessions, when you have to chase after new desires by which to become possessed all over again? Air hovers, impacted, tight—heavy, as if the sky’s one spanless angel’s wing beating its hot thick breath against the faces assembled, too near, the holiness, it stifles. Guests standing outside loitering an uncertain future amid the certain morning, in diverse prodigalities of undress, they stare themselves into a mindful wakefulness, they have to, force themselves already to a newer purpose, inevitable and yet clutching anything they can: souvenirs, mementos mori, one mensch’s treasure another’s pagan trash, it’s said, jewelry, complimentary towels, bars and bottles of shampoo and soap emblazoned with the Garden’s seal—a tree’s star lonelier only than the Island upon which it stands, or stood, its logos the illiterate wind…grouphugging especially one another, themselves in their distress and shock as the monkeys now, the apes great and not so much, those forefathering creationary chimps, escaped from their subterranean vault, the Garden’s until presently secret Scriptorium in which they’d been enslaved and set to parchment copying, churning out their soferwork, the scrolls that are the Torah’s law: they’re flinging palmed wells of ink at everyone, hollering they’re hooting, swinging up from foundations revealed, grasping at beams and columns both falling and fallen to swing themselves, each other, with linked hands and arms from rafter to gird, antenna onto aerial then struts, with their quills as if daring letteropeners held between teeth, the Nachmachen alone in their midst and unhooded trying in vain to bribe them down and calm with the promise of a single banana he’s managed to save, just a peel, he’s sorry, from the Commissaries’ compost still flaming. Then, up from the deepest remains of underground life, as if the very unconscious of the structure destroyed, here comes the canine: dogs redeemed from the Kieferöde wildly spoiled by primal nature and yet retrained to work for their keep, hauling the sleds and the dead, with a pack following of the firemenschs’ dalmatians converted during the very siege of this catastrophe to the collarless cult of madness and so, to an impure, slobbering mate, they’re on fire and yelping and tearing through the assembled froth how they won’t tame down.
Metro Gestapo arriving only now, they slimily insinuate themselves, as if only to prove their mandate, attempting to stun, restrain—impossibly, which is possibly only for the cameras closing in, how they’re uniformly heroes, expecting the martyrdom of sudden fame, or promotion to a desk. Survived only to be taken from the Joysey wood, never lost their instincts, these dogs are here treeing what domes
tication’s being called for: the microphone menschs, the skied and skated lights and sound—dogs freakishly howling at the rising sun, snouting out its shine from behind the smokecast weather. They begin with their ripping and tearing, and then—even the hulkingest two or three encircled in the square, these specimens almost monstrous, worked muscular and venegeful, they’re swallowing up the evermore arriving medics, doctors, nurses, and miscellaneous disaster professionals, volunteer spectators by the hundreds if not thousands and more having sleighed or skied, skated and snowshod in from Joysey, smoked out of the city, melting into a stream sourced from all its fivealarmed boroughs: these dogs, they’re gulping them up, gnashing the gawkers then swallowing down…the terrible gape of their jaws, their mawgasps, a grum whinny, such pain in their haunches—aflame; Gestapo and those immediately, provisionally, deputized don’t let it go to your head, they’re trying their damnedest to subdue with smallarms fire, which only slows, though, and angers more, these mutants trudging on, doggeda-head and always toward the ice, Manhattan’s skyline fray. A coldbottomed, darkmorning hell of monkeys frantically freed and jumping up and down atop canine backs, dogs and bitches, too, with pups hanging from their teats, distended, burning they’re squealing at suck, biting on for their lives, chewing blood into milk, swinging, six on each at least and gnawing one another, as if leashed, by their teeth, they’re pendulous in the air, and tenuous there—and then, a gullscattering smatter of heavier weaponry, a cannon, must be, gross bombinations who can tell from whence they come whether over the ice from the Battery or from Joyseyways, and with their paws placed forward a first step from the rim of Manhattan’s ice, the dogs totter, lean, and slowly, one by one, fall, raising steam, a surface splash, crushing their pups to drown them, they fall dead the monkeys, too, what with their weight and fall how they fall through the ice now, to the water below, to begin their slow hairy sinks; firemenschs gathering throughout the paddly, madly shrieking descent of that afternoon and later even, quieting, as the dogs’ bodies fix, and the monkeys’ fix, too, then freeze; only to become melted, though, amid the roasting of marshmallows, certifiably kosher, speared on sticks of Israelien furniture—armchairs, desklegs, bedlegs—in the dusking dying flames set upon their flesh.
