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

opportunity, perhaps burdened or curseladen with the opportunity to know itself, to know within, in depths denied to the living. To the floorless ocean floor of all mind from whence we arose to beach ourselves back when. Maturation to infinity means evolution, though not of the kind they taught at the school on Tchernichovsky Street the Queen, for one, didn’t want me to know about but that Aba he never seemed much to mind: Galápagolgatha & co., all that business with the ape monkeys mating abominably with their cousins the chimprillas, hooting themselves into pillowy moustaches, argyle, paisleyhatched, widowsheaved, fleurs-de-lis socks limp like intricately patterned foreskins retracted from their tushwiping, opposable paws, armpitsniffing themselves into most auspicious bank and clerical positions, nits and grubs being rendered vital to the matrix of State, a centrifugal integration of instinct as opposed to the six nightless days of Creation and only then, the prime eternal seventh of rest—Shabbos, when the true effort actually began.
    To say again because repetition. Because repetition is the death of death.
    To say maturation to infinity means an evolution beyond who you were born to be. Means a boiling to the point of air. Means an assimilation to the sky and its vault. Never forget the vault. To say an escape from all conditions and contingencies inescapable in life. A means of divestment, of all assets to prove anything but. A denial of inheritance. Dissent from who. A negation of lines, fences, walls in the shade of their very existence. Exigencies. Means that though I am in the wrong heaven it is only because I think this is the wrong heaven (and so to say that once I believed the wrong heaven was possible, that wrongheaveness was in fact fungible, a presence the universe does not contradict nor even challenge). Doubtless I will mature past all thought at some future of eternity. Now. Or other. Soon in the oases’ prism of soon, I await. An I, I wait doubtless.
    Listen and I will say what I have said. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I’m not. Jewful and Jewless. Listen. Then hear. Understand. To be religious in heaven is to be truly fanatic. Every day is no day and is Sabbath. There is no more reward. There is nothing to live for and no whys to pray. Listen in no heaven am I named what I once thought my name was. What once I Jonathan knew my name to be. What my Jonathan had been according to those who had named me (Aba and the Queen, after my greatgrandAba dead) and not what my name is of myself. My name for myself is now merely Listen, to follow the laws, which are merely the hatreds, of the living while in heaven is to disrespect your own death. To adapt. No longer. To survive. Not anymore. In no heaven is my Aba my Aba, and the Queens here are no Queen of mine. To be forever estranged, even amid your own congregation, and to be forever wandering, even within your own encampment, and only because they make me a stranger, and only because they make me a wanderer, they who would be I only if, I who would be they only why—the selfelected elect, the selfchosen chosen, the selfrighteously rightful inhabitants of this heaven who are still religious, amazingly so, even here, who have here become even more religious, ever more religiously religious, amazingly so, especially here. Listen to my mouth disembodied. Hear through my ears, one pierced, the other is shredded. Understand through me exploded, dispersed, ensharded, in pieces. That parts of me: a finger, a toe, a nose or else a liver, an antique residue of our anatomy: a spleen—they are still occasionally what those alive would regard as sentimental. Nostalgic. But this too will pass. Sometimes the death of these habits or traditions or laws (whatever you want to call them, they’re called) saddens me in the extreme. Other times the passing of these frequencies, these