by Hopen, David
I didn’t respond right away, mostly because I couldn’t properly muster the energy to rebut his subtle criticism, partially because I knew he wasn’t wrong. “Whatever’s happened here,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “was probably bubbling beneath the surface the whole time.”
This made him visibly distressed. “You can look me in the face and claim my son hasn’t been replaced?”
“Abba—replaced by what, exactly?”
“I don’t know. Someone I don’t recognize.”
“Maybe,” I said, spinning one of the dishes before me, unsure why I felt the need to say this, “you just don’t quite know your son.”
“You could be right. Whatever’s wrong is my own fault. It was my decision to leave. It was my decision to go with this job and take the security of it and not have emunah that something else would work out. It’s just—I didn’t imagine,” he said, pausing ruefully, “what things could look like here.”
“For me? Or for Imma?”
This brought silence.
“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” I said.
“Do I have a real choice? This is no place for us.”
“Imma wants to leave?”
He refocused his attention away from the table. “People take measures to fix what’s broken. People make sacrifices for what’s best.”
“What about your job?”
He shrugged, gray-faced. He looked as if he’d aged substantially overnight, as if months of worrying over the fate of his family, longing for Brooklyn, distressing over money, shouldering the fragments of faith that had chipped away from the other inhabitants of his household had, at last, taken a toll on him. “I’ll find another.”
“I’m pretty sure you said there were no others.”
“Then I’ll be a janitor if it gets me out of Gehenem.”
“Right. And me? Do I matter?”
“You matter most, Aryeh,” he said. “You’ll finish your schooling, but then you’ll be an adult. The rest will have to be up to you.”
I stood to leave. He remained at the table, staring at the walls.
“Remember,” he said as I turned into the hallway. “U’vimakom shi’ane anashim, hishtadel li’hiyot eesh.” Strive to be human where there are none.
* * *
REMI THREW A PARTY SATURDAY NIGHT. She lived in a palatial Miami estate: two wings, four floors, land overlooking the intracoastal. The party was well attended—free-flowing drinks, earsplitting music—but I arrived irritated from bickering with Kayla. She’d refused to accompany me, had sworn, in fact, never to step foot at another of these events. Passive-aggressive discussions, hasty apologies, exaggerated sighs: I’d hung up on her and climbed into Noah’s car. Within an hour, however, mostly everyone had paired off: Noah and Rebecca disappeared, Amir rekindled with Lily, Oliver slunk off with Gemma. So it was that I found myself alone with Evan in Remi’s backyard, slumped beneath a massive palm tree, passing back and forth a bottle of Glenlivet nicked from Mr. White’s study.
“Eden,” Evan said, finishing a long sip, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “remember when we met?”
“How can I forget?” I took the bottle. “Actually, being drugged tends to have that effect.”
“Apologies.”
“You’re not forgiven.”
“Holding a grudge is beneath you,” he said quietly. “Anyway, it was a mistake. I was—jealous. Defensive.”
“What the hell were you jealous of?”
“Think about it from my perspective.” He stole back the Glenlivet, twirled it in his hands. “I’d returned from abroad to discover everyone talking about how some stranger had been quoting Shakespeare to her at pool parties. And then, believe it or not, that very same stranger was sitting with her at the piano.”
My neck burning, I dug a hole in the dirt with a fallen tree branch. Never before had we discussed Sophia so openly. At last, Evan had violated the unwritten rules of the game we’d been playing these long months. “Well,” I said, trying to match his candor, “turns out you had nothing to worry about.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Drunken shouts poolside. Silhouettes launched from diving boards. Evan grasped at his neck, looking uncharacteristically ill at ease. “Anyway, to some extent it was my own fault.”
“What was?”
“I should’ve figured you two would find each other.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Nothing, I’m drunk. Forget it.”
“Seriously. What’d you mean by that?”
“Just that if you and I had certain similarities, and if you were going to come to Zion Hills—”
I snapped the branch in half. “Enough with that, we’re not fucking similar. And unless you’re somehow responsible for my dad losing his job in Brooklyn, you have nothing to do with my family being here.”
He stared off into the bay. “Can’t argue with that.”
“So what’d you mean?”
“Drop it, Eden.”
I drank again. “You don’t say anything without a purpose and we both know it.”
Calmly, he rolled up the sleeves of his button-down shirt. “How is she?”
I snorted. “You’re not seriously asking me that, are you? I mean, shouldn’t I be asking you about her?”
“I was referring to your new situation. With the one who tutors you.”
“Pretty sure you know her name. You’ve been in school together for . . . only twelve years?”
“Sorry,” Evan said. “Kayla.”
“Things are fine.”
“Why didn’t you bring her tonight?”
“She didn’t want to come,” I said. “Not after Purim.”
His turn for the whiskey. “That’s fine,” he said, matter-of-factly. “You don’t love her.”
“Pardon?”
“You didn’t stay with her tonight.”
“Know what, Ev? Mind your own fucking business for once.” The whiskey was taking its toll, but I didn’t mind. “You don’t know anything about us.”
“I don’t claim to, Eden. I just know you.”
I forced a heavy laugh and, with effort, got to my feet, leaning against the tree for support. “You don’t know shit.”
“I know things about you because I recognize them in myself.” He requested my hand. I pulled him up. “Bloom sees it. And I think she does, too, even if she won’t admit it.”
“Good for them,” I said, despising myself for feeling waves of pride at this comparison, “but they’re very wrong.”
“We think similarly,” Evan said, indifferent to my reaction. “We feel discontent similarly. We idolize our mothers, we have issues with our fathers, we’re incapable of normal expressions of emotions, of loving easily, we’ve both been crushed by the same person. Why do you think Bloom’s been trying so damn hard to force us together? Pairing us in our little sessions, giving us the same readings, keeping you out of trouble just to piss me off—don’t you see that we’re his, like, little fucking experiments? That he’s been waiting to get his hands on two of us? That he likes to push us against each other?”
Strained silence. We stood staring at each other under the corona of moonlight.
“Evan,” I decided to say, “are you okay?”
He rolled his eyes. “Think I’m unhinged?” He snatched the bottle from my hands. “Noah does. Amir has for a while now. Shit, even Oliver probably does, not that it’d bother him.”
“Can you blame us? You’ve been acting—”
“Unstable?” he said.
“I was going to say deranged.”
Evan took another substantial pull. “Definitely took long enough, but I appreciate you, Eden.”
The shouts near the house died down. People returned inside. We were alone in the backyard. “Not what I asked, but glad to hear.”
“Know why I like you?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“That innocence everyone thought you had when you f
irst arrived?” He smiled to himself. “That wasn’t innocence or shyness. That was, I don’t know, that was fucking wildness lying dormant.”
“Wildness? What are you—”
“Wildness as in . . . alienation, let’s call it. Having something deep inside you that’s incompatible with the world you’re in. Being in agony because you’re dissatisfied with the basic rewards of order and pleasantries and the fucking—the convenience of unquestioned conformity to gray and lifeless things. Honestly, you’re”—he paused, smiled again—“I guess what I’d say is that you’re just as spiritually ruined as I am.”
“Well,” I said, after a few beats, “you really do know how to flatter a guy.”
Evan put the bottle to the floor and pointed to a motorboat docked by the water’s edge. “Forget about it. Let’s just—I don’t know, let’s take the boat out. I’ve driven it with Remi.”
“Sure you should be driving?” I asked uneasily, eager as I was for an escape from this conversation. The boat was sleek, fifteen feet long, big enough for three or four passengers. The name NESTOR was engraved on its hull.
Evan walked out to the water and undocked the boat. He climbed into the driver’s seat, revving the motor. “I’ve driven in worse states.”
Hesitating briefly, feeling stabs of drunken wretchedness, I threw myself into the passenger seat. In my haze I knew Evan was right: I was miserable, probably always had been, and I alone was to blame, not my parents, not Brooklyn, not my rabbis, not Sophia, not Kayla, not Zion Hills, not Evan. An immense, pulverizing cloud of loneliness descended upon me so suddenly that I began shaking. I told him to drive.
We shot into vaporous darkness. It was well past midnight. I put my feet up, folded my arms across my chest, feeling as if we were gliding through space. Wind ripped through us. I could feel my hair blown out, standing atop my head, the collar of my shirt against my neck. It was difficult to see ahead, but Evan maneuvered confidently. I finished the last drops of the bottle and deposited it in the water.
“I’ll miss this place,” Evan said thinly. He inhaled again, his face—angular, haunted—illuminated briefly by the flare of the joint.
“Florida, you mean?”
“I mean everything.”
“I thought you couldn’t wait to get out?”
“That’s how you felt, right? In Brooklyn?”
“I did. It was a mistake.”
“You aren’t happier here?”
Again I took the joint. “I thought I’d be given a new life here,” I said, coughing. “But I know now Brooklyn was never the problem.”
Smoke spiraled from Evan’s lips. “New life is a terrible thing to waste.”
“Listen,” I said, leaning forward. “I want to ask you something.”
“Now’s a good time.”
“I want to know what happened between you and Sophia,” I said. Something in my chest hurt. Devastating exhaustion came over me as soon as I said her name, an exhaustion I felt not in my body but somewhere beneath my skin. “I—I want to understand.”
He looked away, one hand on the wheel. He went on sucking the joint until there was nearly nothing left, then flicked the remains into the bay. “Something bad.”
I was on my feet. “Something bad? That’s all you have?”
“Some things are better off unshared,” he said calmly.
“I deserve to know.” All we could hear: my voice, the engine. All else, for miles in each direction, perfect silence.
“If there’s a single thing in this world I believe in,” Evan said softly, “it’s that we have no fucking idea what we deserve.”
“God, not that bullshit.” The moon, infinite and weak, folded in the distance. I returned to my seat beside him. “She wouldn’t tell me, you know. Purim night, about whatever was happening in your house.”
Evan increased the boat’s speed. “I was . . . helping her prepare.”
“For what?”
“Her Juilliard interview is in a few days.”
I felt dizzy, forced my eyes shut. Instead of blackness, I saw strange green phosphenes. “I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t envy me, Eden,” Evan said. “You should never envy me.”
“I still love her,” I blurted, words tumbling out against my will, my voice hollow and far off.
His teeth were of a pure white in the dark. He took out his lighter, switching the flame on and off. “So do I.”
I looked up to make out the jetties looming ahead: large, black, cavernous. “Let’s just go back.”
“We can’t.”
“I’m serious,” I said. Evan was pushing sixty. Wind cut my hair. My limbs were freezing. The stinging in my face was turning to numbness. “Turn around.”
“Can I ask you a question now, Eden?” Again he pushed the throttle, lurching us forward. My head snapped back and then forward against the dashboard.
“Ow, fuck!”
“What are your thoughts on Nadav and Avihu?”
“What?” I could feel my forehead swelling, a dim buzzing in my ears. I pressed my fingers to my head, checking for blood. “Jesus, Evan. Slow down.”
“Humor me.”
“What is this—another experiment?”
“Since the Sidgwick class, I’ve been wondering about them,” he said, raising his voice above the surging wind. “About what it means to communicate with God on your own. About what it means to be worthy.”
“Enough, Ev. For real. Let’s just—let’s go back.”
“Just hear me out,” Evan said. “You’re supposed to be the other thinker.”
“Know what? You were absolutely right before. I do think there’s something very wrong with you.”
We were skidding. The jetties weren’t far off. “Listen to me,” Evan said, “or I won’t stop the boat.”
“I’m fucking listening!”
“So Nadav and Avihu were allowed up Sinai, allowed to see God with clarity, and then?” He pushed forward, harder this time, nearly knocking us off our seats. “Then they were cut off.”
Fifty yards away now. “Evan,” I said, calming down, reminding myself he was trying to frighten me, “why are we talking about this?”
“Because I want to know your opinion, Eden. Why do you think they were cut off?”
“Why? Because they weren’t supposed to offer the sacrifice.” I clutched a hand to my forehead, which continued to bulge beneath my fingertips. I thought back to learning about Parshat Sh’mini in elementary school, about how Aharon, after being informed that his two priestly sons had been slain by heavenly fire for bringing an unsanctioned Temple offering, responds with silence. “It was an aish zara. A strange fire.”
Evan threw back his head. “A strange fire,” he said, laughing, “a strange fire.”
Thirty yards. “I’ll jump,” I told him. “I swear.”
“In Kabbalah, there’s a belief in two warring forces in the soul,” Evan said, eyes fixed on the jetties. “There’s ratzo, our desire to free ourselves from earthly concerns so that we can cleave to God, and then there’s shov, our desire to return to human life. Our whole lives, we go back and forth between these forces. So in my opinion? Nadav and Avihu weren’t cut off. Just the opposite. They nearly won. They allowed their ratzo to overpower them, they overstepped physical boundaries, they stretched toward transcendence, they made a sacrifice. But guess what, Eden? In the end, they just weren’t worthy. In the end, not everyone is strong enough or destined to see God.”
I was inches from his face. “This isn’t funny anymore. This is sick.”
“Don’t you want to see if we’re like they are?” Evan asked. “Don’t you want to see which of us is worthy?”
Ten yards.
“If you’re the worthy one you survive,” he said. “If you’re—”
I lunged for the steering wheel. An endless-seeming moment: night pitching sideways, the curious sensation of being lifted from my feet. I didn’t know whether I was vertical or upside down, the atoms in my b
rain felt as if they were being reshuffled, all I could make out were bands of electric lights. When the brightness dissolved I found myself beneath the water. Kicking, I broke through the surface, gasping for breath. Ringing in my ears, the chemical stench of gasoline and burning rubber, salt in my nostrils. I paddled several yards ahead, washing up headfirst in sand. Hot liquid poured from my ears to my back.
“Evan.” A pathetic whisper. My throat cracked. “Evan.”
Around me things were black, still, save for a small, crackling flame. Fighting to stay awake, the world spiraling on around me, I forced myself to think. I could see the boat, capsized, sinking into the water. I’d been ejected when we overturned, I told myself, launched into the water near the shore. And Evan? A body, only a few feet from where I landed, floating facedown in the water. Dark edges; my vision flickering. I could do nothing, and for a hideous stretch of time I intended to do nothing, my chin buried in sand, his body drifting peacefully. Man: I halt/ At the bottom of the pit . . . And shout a secret to the stone. Echo: Lie down and die. If I succumbed, if I tumbled headfirst, longingly, into unconsciousness, leaving Evan Stark behind—who would know? Justice, the voice told me, justice if he drowns. Man: That were to shirk the great work and then stand in judgment. Echo: Sink at last into the night. Heavy shadows falling, my eyelids falling. I was close now, sliding gently into opulent twilight. And then I rose, stumbling back through the shallow, dragging him ashore, sinking to my knees, striking his chest, knuckles raw. Man: What do we know but that we face one another in this place? Breathe, breathe, breathe, until he arrived, a suited man on a shiva chair, the man with my unremarkable eyes. Hands together in prayer, he recited these lines, over and over:
Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?
* * *
WHEN I WOKE I FOUND myself in a hospital bed, an IV plunged into my arm. I blinked at the bright lights, realizing where I was. Sudden panic washed over me when I remembered. I tried throwing myself from bed.
