Four New Messages

135 Pages·2012·0.67 MB·English

by  Joshua Cohen

Four New Messages
Also by Joshua Cohen
Witz
A Heaven of Others
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto
Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed
The Quorum
FOUR NEW MESSAGES
Joshua Cohen
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2012 by Joshua Cohen “Emission” appeared in the Paris Review; “McDonald’s”
appeared in Triple Canopy; “The College Borough” appeared in Harper’s Magazine; and excerpts from
“Sent” appeared in Denver Quarterly and BOMB.
This publication is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board,
through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota general fund and its arts
and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and
a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by the
National Endowment for the Arts; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from
foundations, corporations, and individuals.
To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-618-7
ISBN 978-1-55597-058-1 (e-book) 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2012
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012936219
Cover design: Alvaro Villanueva
Emission
McDonald’s
The College Borough
Sent
Four New Messages
EMISSION
This isn’t that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it’s
really just a story about yourself.
My story is pretty simple:
About two years after being graduated from college with a degree in
unemployment—my thesis was on Metaphor—I’d moved from New York to
Berlin to work as a writer, though perhaps that’s not right because nobody in
Berlin works. I’m not going to get into why that is here. This isn’t history, isn’t
an episode on the History Channel.
Take a pen, write this on a paper scrap, then when you’re near a computer,
search:
www.visitberlin.de
Alternately, you could just keep clicking your finger on that address until this
very page wears out—until you’ve wiped the ink away and accessed nothing.
However, my being a writer of fiction was itself just a fiction and because I
couldn’t finish a novel and because nobody was paying me to live the blank
boring novel that was my life, I was giving up.
After a year in Berlin, with my German language skills nonexistent, I was
going back home. Not home but back to New York, I was going to business
school. An M.B.A. It was time to grow up because life is short and even brevity
costs. My uncle told me that, and it was his being diagnosed with a boutique
sarcoma that—forget it.
Yesterday by close of business was the first time my portfolio ever reached
seven figures, so if every author needs an occasion, let this be mine. Sitting in an
office when I should be out celebrating my first million—instead remembering
these events of five years ago to my keyboard, my screen.
But as I’ve said this is not about me—no one wants to hear how I’m
currently leveraged or about my investments in the privatization of hospitals in
China.
I met Mono—I’ll always think of him as Mono—only once, a week before I
left Neukölln forever. Left the leafy lindens and sluggish Spree, the breakfasts of
sausages and cheeses and breads that stretched like communist boulevards into
late afternoon, the stretch denim legs of the artist girls pedaling home from their
studios on paintspattered single speeds, the syrupy strong coffees the Kurdish
diaspora made by midnight at my corner café and its resident narcoleptic who’d
roll tomorrow’s cigarettes for me, ten smokes for two euros.
I was at a Biergarten, outside on its patio overlooking the water. The patio
was abundant with greens: softly flowing ferns, flowers in pails, miniature trees
packed into buckets to cut down on the breeze from the brackish canal. It was
summer, still the evenings sometimes blew cool. Not this one. This evening was
stifling. A few punks, scuzzy but happy, sat mohawked, barechested, feeding
decomposing mice to their domesticated ermine. I was about to follow suit, had
my shirt halfway up my beergut when he sat down—just when the sun was
coming down.
Prose descriptions are safer than photographs (pics) and movies (vids). No
one would ever identify the hero of a novel, if he’d come to life, solely by his
author’s description. Let’s face it: Raskolnikov—“his face was pale and
distorted, and a bitter, wrathful, and malignant smile was on his lips”—is not
being stopped on the street.
Across from me Mono sat reading that novel, in English of course. And
English led to English—he asked what beer was I drinking, an Erdinger Dunkel,
and ordered the same.
To make conversation I said, Too bad we’re being served by the Russian.
The Turk—turning my eye to the eye of her hairy navel—is way hotter.
This is not to my credit. To his he just smiled.
It was a tight smile, lips chewing teeth, as if he wasn’t sure how fresh his
breath was.
I don’t know why Mono made such an impression on my premillionaire self
—maybe because when you’re young and life’s a mess, the world is too: young
and messy. It could also have been the beer, hopped on malt, its own head
turning my head to foam.
I was in my mid 20s, actually in that latter portion of my 20s, spiraling, like
how a jetliner crashes, toward 30.
But Mono was young.
He had his decade in front of him.
We covered 30: scary, scary.
Also we discovered we were both from Jersey—me from south, he from
central, but still.
Why here?
It was important to deliver this offhand. All expats worry about coming off
spoiled or ludicrous, insane.
Why I came here was to write a book, I offered, which isn’t working out.
He brought his mouth to his beer, not the other way around. The beard was
still growing in.
He swallowed, said, Achtung, and as the sun disappeared told me this story.
Back in Jersey—this was only two months before the time of his telling but
anything Jersey felt like years ago, amenitized among diners and turnpikes—
Mono was a deliverer.
Like a priest, delivering from sin?