A Heaven of Others by Joshua Cohen Read Free Book Online Page A

tighter, furling always as if a scroll of living, sinewy parchment on which was written I would say inscrutable laws (an alphabet of rips, slashmarks, selfinflicted bites, cuts and ingrammatical tears), coming closer ever closer just to smother me into sustenance, theirs, until I could stand just in the fire itself and atop its very flame, which I did knowing I could survive the fire longer if not by that much than I could survive, have survived the fifty it seemed jackals they seemed that they were constantly circling me and closing in on me and so I stood in the fire that instead of burning me or further charring the exploded and so already burnt, died underneath me to a pillar then an ashy wisp in the air and all was again dark and only the sound, the smacking screech of the jackals, which were manifestations of their hunger as insatiable as Time, said to me the jackals still were, where they were still and that I was not theirs, I mean yet.
    I stood in the pit ringed with a tire and there awaited the return of the boy.
    But just as boys lack so does heaven.
    Heaven has no continuity. After before. Heaven has no consequence. No cause of causality. Without let’s say Æffect. A covenant broken. An upheaval, overturned twice. For one: After living a life of morality an eternity is necessary in which to become accustomed to amorality. This is why many of the righteous become many of the wicked in heaven and why they are punished there. Here is why hell, which is as amoral as heaven, hosts more of the righteous than he will encounter anywhere ever.
    Morning if you will, the golden plate returned but empty as always.
    He walked long and unshod to the Two Mountains to their Valley and so to the man named Mohammed. As he had nothing left of the supplies packed for him by Queen Houri (scavenged willowpills, gnawable hides, scraps of bark, dried beetles and a small sackling of orificial lint), he was again hungry, thirsty and exhausted now too, despite passing wonderments on his way that he had never once before wondered, and that (and the hunger and thirst) (and the exhaustion as well) might have been why they did him nothing at all: For one, the calves that dwelt in the abandoned enormously abaloneous shells of extinct snails enriched him to nihil. For another, neither the rams trumptrumpeting his arrival (rams that to communicate blow and intake through their own horns as their sole means of respiring, horns that in this heaven are attached to these rams, which are so breathing and so communicating understandably endangered, in the reverse of their terrestrial disposition). Nor the fallen brigade of just pubescent boys with wicks set into their nipples, waxen wicks dribbling a sexual sebum from the dead middles of their intumesced areolæ, the wicks fuselike, first pubes first braided then lit—or else the ancient people desiccated to the ostensibly leprous, stuffed with earth (heaven’s provision being the opposite of terra’s: instead of burying a person in the ground heaven burying the ground inside of a person), their arms out legs spread, leaking earth and spitting worms through green mucous reddening membranes while shouting to him screaming at once in a vomitus of that fishbowl gravel and routedirt, Salaam Salaaam Salaaaam—all this rendering him no whys, maybe also because his eyes were fixed as ahead as ahead can ever hope to become fixed in a desert: he had sought and he had found the Valley of Nails.
    This was the Valley between the Two Mountains that had been going to him as he had been coming to it.
    Dwellingplace of Mohammed, who would right wrong, who would left right. Place of Mohammed who would map the nonexistent. Ruled by Allah the inextant, who would teach the dead.
    But was heaven, was the true heaven if it even existed, worth this descent, such a fall through the Valley of Nails, of rusty, bent battered nails, of all these old oxidized, dead senseless, headhammered to wilting nails bloodcaked, dripping