A Heaven of Others by Joshua Cohen Page A

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