A Heaven of Others (5 page)

They ate (in heaven, no food is forbidden), though neither would fill.

As I turned to take leave of the boy the boy said to me Wait a sec.

I asked the boy Why? and the boy said to me You must wait here until I’ll return momentarily and so again I asked the boy Why?

And the boy said to me You have provided the meal of the two quailing eagles and so I must provide in return. Understand. Please and thank you. That you have given me a gift and so in return a gift from me is required. You get it. My man. Understand was what the boy said to me and so I said to the boy it’s not necessary and what’s more it’s not even wanted I said Don’t get angry with me because a wait and a return and its gift however required or merited will only delay me and I must not delay instead I must seek the Two Mountains and I must find the Two Mountains and the Valley between in which I must seek the man named Mohammed and in which I must find the man named Mohammed so as to set everything but everything right, please understand and yes thank you no you. Slap me one. All I have. But by the time I’d finished saying my meaning to him the boy had risen like smoke and was gone and many multitudinously beastly creatures, jackals, had surrounded the fire and prevented my leaving—
they were jackals
, but were odd, emaciated, crescentshaped and up on the hindmost legs of their twelve: they opened their great alabaster jaws to slash me to my stand, circling they were closing in on me constantly nearer and 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 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.

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 beard and their chins in

the cardinal direction of Miss Taylor, Elizabeth

emerging from the wavelets, foam on her nipples

and

all soaked to the bush but I don’t understand he

said, how heaven could be like…this,

how this could be…heaven,

and so I said as I would always say as I stood

up in the shul in Witz but here I was at the

beach (Netanya) I said his name was Nathan,

Natan I said you must trust, but also think because it

might not be my heaven, I threw off my black

unshrouding the bronze of my chest,

it’s her hell

L
imitation is what I now understand to be the sole attribute of God, at least the sole attribute of God or of a god we are able to apprehend, at least I am.

Allah says through the man named Mohammed through us and so through me. For Allah to say To us is to render us dead from the dead.

If we were to experience anything above and beyond the limitation of God we would be destroyed above and beyond any afterlife’s salvation or Savior. Above and beyond the succor of any appeal unheard. Above and beyond the Above beyond. And unspoken. No paradise can assuage the experience of the illimitability of God. Just as no Eden exists for those who know it as Eden.

As I am translating these thoughts from the air and from the wind of the air that speaks in no language, please excuse my attempts. Atone, repent. Repent for atonement. (And atone for you know.) All like the instructions given upon a box of frozen foods my Aba often bought for dinner when the Queen was away visiting her sister in Arad. Like gel for the last Wash your hands. Rinse and repeat. As we say when we’re live, don’t adjust your TV.

Understand I am making these translations to atone. Understand I am making these translations repent for my failure. Understand and do not pity, sympathize or empathize, identify with nor enable, me.

Who will translate:

To shove your gray tablets down into a moldy old sack wrought of skull, skin and hair, and especially after having held them aloft high above the dunes and the drops in pure, lifegiving sky, is not a pleasant duty but nonetheless duty. What Happened to your Face? the Queen would always ask and what would I answer. Tonguetied to the mullion of a window like the red rope of Rahab. What’s that on your Chin? the Queen would always ask, meaning my mouth, which once was unglassed and silent. But before I say anything, I want to say this: to my Aba, I’ve never smashed rock to make water flow flinty. No one’s ever wrought a calf out of nothing.

I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains (That Might Have Been Clouds), and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed and so neither did I then find any man by that name. Or by or with any name other. Truly. When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another. But a distinction must be made between limitation and weakness much like, in Hellenist heresy, the division obtaining between the light of the Gnostic
Pleroma
Aba liked that word in Greek And its warring dark and so might I mention that I had, I believe still have and will always have a brother whose name was David and is. A halfbrother actually if he ever was mentioned, he wasn’t. He was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen or eighteen years older than I suppose he still is. And if so then seething. Why I didn’t mention him before is that neither Aba nor the Queen mentioned him much to my memory and that this gloss unlike forgetting was not unintentional. Inexcusably unreasoned as this David was the son of Aba’s previous Queen, a woman who before I was born (of course, of course) had died of a disease that has afflicted many on earth and will go on afflicting them as long as the earth is not flat and is instead shaped like a secular tumor: “well-rounded,” periodshaped, musical-noteshaped, a blob of blue paint upon the neck of Ibrahim’s God—a disease afflicting though only the living (though need I remind anyone that there are less dead people on earth, or
in the earth
, than there are people now living), which begins gradually with the gradual growth of a third breast, an epiphytic or rather parasitic subspecies of maybe even sentient mammæ and a harder type one too, rather Lumpy and lumpish and Bumpy and
bumpisch
as Aba he once described it to me one Sunday as we were out walking and talking in the Old City having passed through the Jaffa Gate and walking when talkatively straight as my Aba’s appetite for history and its revelation would allow us to the Kotel, to the Westernmost, Wailingmost, Wallingmost limitation of our need he said it was A big black bumpishness that just grew larger or rather filled you largely despite what the doctors would empty, which despite the nail of any needle would never be enough to empty it all—Aba himself never went to doctors, he went to the Queen, by which I mean my first one and only his second—and so this Queen, that former Queen whom I never knew her neither her name even she was blackened as if burned like a bush once consumed, turned Big Aba once said and full of blackness (Aba saying this with a measure of ash and a shekel, one in each lung of his scales), first the big black bobbing lump then three big black bosomy breasts budded up on her who She was very beautiful and once a very very famous concert pianist too (according to the official photograph of her young in Romania Aba kept in the pantry locked with Göbbels, his gun), had three big black breasts that swelled to take over her entirety or rather the rest of her shriveled into, shrunk, was sucked into these three huge black boobing breasts that themselves merged into this one single unified huge hard black breast, A protuber Aba who he was THE professional tuner once said he became such as he was because
she’d been
THE professional pianist: One enormous blob ball of cancer Aba said once it was he Had to sit with and pet—as if to bounce?—all night and with the dipped then wrung out washcloth he applied to its
roundingly dull shininess
though In the morning it had lost its roundness, by then it had further dulled off to become this hulking huge big black square As hard as rockstone Aba he was pacing Around and around and glancing at nervously as if it had just fallen through the ozone on down from space, Aba circling Aba circumambulating seven times as she’d done for their marriage vows, then the shattering of the glasses of the seven subsequent nights of dinner and dancing in celebration of their blessedness praying prayers my Aba didn’t know he knew as he was circling all this time this monstrous circling this monstrously hulking huge big black square stone rock of death that had crushed and collapsed the bed, their marriage bed, which had been a gift from her parents my Queen, Aba’s second Queen she later threw out to the Poor her piano It was just sitting there in the room, Aba said foursquare her taking up the whole room entire until Aba he that afternoon said he just shut the door and locked it (as he had another piano to tune, to Take out of warp, had scheduled an appointment, always did or just always said so) and returned that night the eve of Passover to relieve the former Hadassah Medical Center nurse who she was now named Hadassah too, and Russian as well as short and Almost as bald as a hardboiled egg at the Seder Aba had hired out of the hospice, nightshift rotation and asked her to stay On Call until the very end with its ice on the lips and the huddling snuggle but found her the nurse gone when he opened the door to THE ROOM, in their room all there was in there was this K’aba black stone taking up the whole entire room and encroaching too, its death up against the wall of the open doorway As if threatening to spill its
immaculate hardness
over the threshold and into the hall as Aba once said—upon leaving the Kotel and returning home the way we’d arrived, through the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, toward Jaffa Road again and its walk to Tchernichovsky Street then down it—he Just slammed the door hard shut then locked it again and went to pace around and around nothing at all, to guard over nil at the funeral home, ANTSCHEL’S FUNERAL HOME the sign said that we would pass on the walk from the Old City to home if ever we took the shortcut we never did.