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

remnants, the remains of all flesh, their iron lengths tapering violently to the dullest point possible that still would pierce skin if with the most martyring of pain, points dappled with manifold shards of rust, strands of sinew, hunks of tendon smeared with yellowish and oily fat, spiraled serpentine in intricate nearly King Solomonaic ornaments of hair in many hues: a lightly spread carpet hovering just above the slumberous bed, a netting of heads’ hair and toupees’ and wigs’ meshing in a rumor of transparency, in the sheerest shades of black, lightest gold, gingy red and gray to smoke’s white floating just atop these nails pointing every which way as if in the shock of total accusation, the sting of absolute blame?
    He stood at the lip of the Valley of Nails and said his Salaam then was quiet. We are all the saying of Allah in the voice of the man named Mohammed and so when I say my Salaam to the man named Mohammed I am saying it in his voice and It is Allah that is saying It, through me, for me and as me as well. However I must say it too. My mouth must submit. And so then he said his name on his own. And his address. His Aba’s telephone number, his Queen’s maiden name, which had been Federman, and that of his Queen’s mother, his Queen’s Queen’s (Smilowitz), the half he remembered of the many digited identification number of the MERKAVA Mk. 4 V-12 diesel 48 round he remembered, for such was the tank that his Uncle Alex known as Sasha to everyone but him had half driven through the streets of Gaza at night (before he’d been fully desked) and around its fences around and around them all over again, his tank itself a fence, a fence of one plank in the morning merging into a fence of all tanks and again, Salaam Salaam Salaam Salaam and Salaam to which there was no answer but wind.
    A stirring in the Valley, a living presence that then incredibly without disturbing the nails, their disposition and without, either, the warning of a rattle, the dull clinkclank of slimy chains—enormously a serpent slithers out of the Valley its naildark tail’s forever length scraped and sliced both by the nails it lived among and by the nail it was, rendering its skin always in a state of shed, always in many states of many sheds no longer. The snake hisses me in, intimates I would say that it would guide me in and through, would lead me to the Valley’s other lip and so to my salvation. I say Yes I say and as the serpent hurls itself at me (as if it’s a great effort to strangle me in), as it lunges directly at me on its one good hind leg—upon its vertiginous volutinous treetrunk that also resembled the corkscrewily coiled pod of a carob wilted—I jump away, I turn and run as if it’s not heaven but the weekend and I’m still in sneakers not schoolshoes or those shoplifted and naked now, turning again to face the snake from atop a promontory of salt excommunicated from heaven’s face where I’m standing, panting, only to behold it fallen limply to the ground, its tongue hanging out in a vicious fork fading from pigpink to darkness distended from the lip of the Valley, as dead as I stand.

Beit
     
    I am of rabbis
    a scholar to Torah and other
    words, noted in my day
    (which was long ago now)
    and still in this day
    by some who pray at
    my grave because they
    can’t pray to me as I
    am dead in this heaven where,
    when soon after my
    death a student of mine my
    greatest student died and visited
    me, found me on a beach-
    chair on an approximation of the
    beach with its ocean (Netanya)
    alongside a film star or starlet I
    never know which her name is, was Elizabeth
    Taylor and though
    she’s dead to look at she looks pretty
    good in a light whitish thong and blindingly
    bleached sunglasses as my student,
    my greatest student he approached, sat
    down on a just-then-materializing beach-
    chair and said:
    Rav, Rabbi, it’s so good to meet you again and
    here, but I don’t understand he said
    throwing his tricolor