Vigil

by Robert Masello

  “No, I’m not having any hallucinations,” he said, once again carefully skirting the truth. “Everything I hear, and see, is real.”

  From the look on her face, his powers of persuasion still needed work.

  As did his patience. Sitting, now, in the dining room of the Sutton Place apartment, it was all he could do not to bolt from his chair. But the price of living here, Ezra reminded himself, was enduring the occasional scene like this.

  His father sat at the head of the table, in a silk smoking jacket—since when had he started wearing those?—and Kimberly sat at the other end, with her perfect hair and makeup and outfit. Ezra was stuck in the middle, and in jeans and a Gap sweatshirt he was feeling distinctly underdressed.

  Gertrude put the bowl of sautéed potatoes and onions down by Ezra’s elbow—“Eat all you want,” she said, “but save room for dessert”—then turned back toward the kitchen door.

  “That will be all, Gertrude,” Kimberly said, quite unnecessarily, as the door had already swung shut behind her.

  Ezra took some of the potatoes and onions, then tried to pass them to Kimberly, who held up her hand as if he were trying to pass her a bowl of rancid milk. He handed them instead to his father, who had to pull back on the sleeve of his too-tight smoking jacket in order to reach them.

  “I had a chance to talk to somebody in the Israeli embassy today,” Sam said, portentously.

  Ezra kept his head down and ate his veal and potatoes.

  “They’re not going to pursue the matter,” Sam said.

  “What matter?” Kimberly asked, sipping her wine.

  “The matter of Ezra’s criminal trespass.”

  Here it came. First Dr. Neumann, and now his father. Was anyone ever going to let it go?

  “Criminal trespass? Where?” She looked at Ezra with what might have passed, if he hadn’t known better, for maternal concern. “What’s this all about?”

  “You want to answer that, Ezra?” his father echoed.

  “If you spoke to the embassy, then you already know all about it.”

  “I want to hear it from you.”

  Ezra took another quick bite—there was no telling how much longer he’d be at the table—then said, “I knew what I was doing.”

  “Don’t you always,” Sam replied acidly.

  “They’ve got so many rules and regulations over there about where you can go, what you can do, who you can talk to, that if you observed them all, you’d never get anything done.”

  “Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, they have all those rules for a reason? That maybe the government of Israel knows more about how to run things than you do?”

  “They know how to run a government—and even that’s debatable—but they don’t know a damn thing about what I do.”

  “And what is that, Ezra?” Kimberly interjected. “I’ve never been exactly sure.”

  Ezra turned toward her; for once, he thought she was actually speaking the truth. She didn’t know, and even if he told her, in a million years she would never understand. Still, he had to say something. “I look for answers to the big questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “The biggest. Why are we here? Is there some purpose? Is there a God, and if there is, how can we discover what he wants from us?”

  “Those are big questions,” Kimberly said.

  “But you’re not going to find the answers,” Sam interjected, “skulking around in the middle of the night at highly restricted holy sites. That whole country is a tinder-box, and somebody like you, doing whatever he wants, paying no attention to the authorities, can inadvertently blow the place sky-high. It’s a lucky thing you didn’t.”

  “There was never any danger of that.”

  “That’s not what the Israelis think. If I hadn’t pulled the strings I did and gotten you out of there, you’d be sitting in a jail cell in Jerusalem right now.”

  That much, Ezra had to concede, was probably true. The problems he’d had with the directors of the Feldstein Institute paled in comparison with the trouble he’d stepped into at the Dome of the Rock.

  “It might interest you to know,” Sam went on, “that I’ll be making a substantial contribution to the re-election campaign of the mayor of Jerusalem.”

  “Maybe you can swing a real estate deal there,” Ezra said, and regretted it even before his father’s fist had hit the table so hard that a lighted candle fell out of its holder.

  “You think this is some joke?” Sam shouted, his face turning the crimson of his jacket.

  Kimberly grabbed for the hot candle rolling across the tablecloth.

  “You think I’m always going to be around to clean up your messes, to bail you out and make things right? What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Ezra wiped his mouth, folded his napkin over, and put it on the table.

  “Answer me!”

  “I assumed that it was a rhetorical question,” Ezra replied.

  His father looked apoplectic.

  “Sam, your heart! Calm down,” Kimberly said.

  “What do you care?” Ezra said to her. “You waited around for my mother to die, now you’ve just got one to go.”

  “You lousy son-of-a—” Sam shouted, jumping up, but Ezra was too fast. He was out of the room and halfway down the hall before his father had unsnagged the sleeve of his jacket from the arm of his chair. He could hear Kimberly trying to settle him down with “Let him go” and “Don’t make this worse than it is.” For perhaps the first time in his life, and wouldn’t you know it was right after he’d insulted her, he was actually grateful for Kimberly’s presence.

  When he got to his room he locked the door and waited, breathing hard, to hear if he was being followed. How old was he, he thought? Thirty years old, and here he was, acting like some grade school kid running from a spanking. He put his ear to the door, but the apartment was so vast, and the dining room so far away, he couldn’t hear a thing. What had just happened? What had he just said? He could hardly believe it himself. He’d been so careful, so far, to mind his manners and stay out of everyone’s way, and now, in a couple of minutes, he’d blown the whole thing. Not that he cared all that much about his rapport with Kimberly; that had never been great. And his relationship with his father had been deteriorating for years. But what he did want was a safe haven, a place to do his work unmolested, unhampered—and until a minute ago he’d had it. Had he just chucked all that out the window with a few ill-considered, inflammatory remarks?

  At least it appeared the battle was over; no one was banging on his door. But his heart was racing and he could feel the blood pounding in his temples. He had to calm down, especially if he still had any intention of working that night. He went into the bathroom, threw open the medicine chest, and took a couple of the Xanax he had gotten Dr. Neumann to represcribe. He swallowed a couple of the quarter-milligram tablets, went back into the bedroom, and flopped down on the edge of the bed. In fifteen or twenty minutes, he’d start to feel the effects.

  He shouldn’t have made that remark to Kimberly, about her waiting for Sam to die, too. Until that point the situation had been salvageable. But among the many things he’d never forgiven his father for, Kimberly was at the top of his list. While Ezra’s mother had been suffering through years of surgery and chemotherapy, his father had been increasingly remote, even uninterested, and it fell to Ezra—and even his Uncle Maury—to be there for her, to comfort and take care of her. In fact, on the night she died in her private room at Sloan-Kettering, Sam was nowhere to be found; Ezra had called home, had spoken to Sam’s secretary at his office, had called the Metropolitan Club, but Sam was missing in action. Later, he learned that his father had been holed up at Kimberly’s place, a tidy little maisonette he had purchased for her on Beekman Place. While Ezra’s mom was breathing her last, Sam was probably breathing hard over his very accommodating advertising exec.

  But as he calmed down and took stock of the situation, Ezra realized that if he ke
pt the lowest profile imaginable, and maybe even found a way to apologize (though how could you ever really claim you hadn’t meant to say something so pointed?), he might be able to hang onto his little sinecure. He’d had plenty of blowups as bad as this one over the years with his father, and his stepmother would probably be as anxious as he was to pretend it had never happened; it wouldn’t do her any good to be perceived as having come between Sam and his son, no matter how estranged they were. And while Ezra recognized that most sane people in his shoes would be moving out and finding a new place to live, for him it wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t as if he had money of his own, or even a credit card; everything came from Sam, doled out by one of the drones in his business accounts office, and the last thing Ezra wanted to do was stir things up and have to ask for a new deal. Sam might let him be if he stayed where he was, comfortably under the radar, but if he started asking for more, it could get tricky. His father might even cut him off completely and demand that he get a job.

  And as far as Ezra was concerned, he already had a job—the most important one in the world.

  As the Xanax took hold, and afforded him this new and more serene perspective, he felt himself relaxing enough to think again about that job—and the work he’d been planning to do that very night. The house was quiet now—for all he knew, his father and Kimberly had gone out somewhere—and nothing was standing in his way. He got up from the bed and walked to the French doors that opened onto the small balcony; he opened them and stepped outside. Far below, the taillights of traffic on the FDR made a bright red ribbon through the night, and across the river in Queens, a silver cross, barely visible, was illuminated high atop the bell tower of a church.

  The night air was bracing. He felt ready to get to work.

  Stepping back inside, he shut the doors, then pulled both sets of curtains closed. He’d asked Gertrude to put up a second set so that no sunlight would penetrate the room; she’d looked at him quizzically, but done it.

  In his workroom, he turned on the lamp attached to the drafting table, then knelt down by the toy chest and opened it with the key he’d found taped to its bottom. There, right where he’d concealed it, among the comics and bongos, lay the cardboard tube.

  He popped the lid off one end of the tube and removed the cheap papyrus scrolls he’d bought at a gift shop just before leaving the Middle East. The top one was Anubis, the jackal-headed god, weighing the soul of a dead man. The next was Osiris, presiding over the creation of the earth and heavens. But it was the third, in its own cellophane wrapper, coiled around the others, that he was after—and this one he removed as delicately as he could. Tossing the other two scrolls aside, he laid this one reverently on the clean, flat surface of the drafting table; the surface of the table was tilted just a few degrees, to make his work easier.

  Not that it would ever be that.

  What he had in his hands, smuggled out of the archives of Hebrew University, where they had yet to be assembled, much less understood, were the fragments, the strips and bits, of a scroll undoubtedly more than two thousand years old. Scraps of parchment, some connected, some loose, together they constituted what Ezra was convinced was the most sought-after and elusive prize in all of biblical scholarship. Other scrolls from the Dead Sea that had already been pieced together, translated, and read alluded to this scroll. Indeed, there was an Ethiopic translation of it dating from the fourteenth century. But that version, in the estimation of most scholars, had been heavily edited over the centuries by church copyists; appalled by the relentlessly occult and speculative bent of the original Aramaic text, they had exercised their own judgment and cut out what offended them. No, not until now had anyone ever been in a position to piece back together the original, to decipher and read what had been known for millennia as the Lost Book of Enoch.

  But then, no one had ever been looking for it among the ancient scraps of routine documents—the bills of sale, the marriage contracts, the business correspondence—where Ezra had found it. Was it serendipity or something more? Ezra often wondered. For there, buried in the detritus that Ezra had first been assigned to catalog, he’d stumbled upon this incomparable jewel. Had it been overlooked entirely, lost in the jumble of more mundane stuff? (The Cairo Genizah alone, for instance, contained more than fifteen thousand documents, many still to be studied, dating from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries.) Or—as Ezra had come to suspect—had it been hidden there by some predecessor, decades before, who for whatever reason had been unable to complete his crime, or trumpet his discovery? Scroll scholarship was rife with such skullduggery—which might have been one reason Ezra felt so at home there.

  Putting on a pair of the surgical gloves he’d bought, he carefully unrolled the largest segment of the scroll that was still intact, but even this was less than eighteen inches across, and only an inch or two wide. The pale yellow parchment, lying flat on the drafting table, was the color and consistency of an autumn leaf that had been pressed between the pages of a book long ago. A tissue-thin filament, it was probably papyrus, as were most of the scrolls, but Ezra could not be completely sure; some of the earliest finds had been on animal skins, scraped and pounded and stretched until they were as smooth and fine as almost any paper made today. If he hadn’t had to leave Israel under such short notice, fleeing like a thief in the night, he’d have found a way to use the lab facilities at Hebrew U. or the institute to determine just what this text was written on.

  But wasn’t that just one more example, he thought, of petty bureaucracy impeding the progress of human knowledge? Nothing made him angrier.

  Still, this was no time to let anger get in his way. All things considered, he’d done pretty well; he had his prize, he had a place to work in private (tomorrow, he reminded himself, he would have to start mending his fences), he had no other pressing duties to take up his time. If left to his own devices, he’d piece together and translate the lost scroll that, according to legend, made the Book of Revelation read like a fairy tale.

  Carefully lifting another scrap of the parchment between his gloved fingers, he laid it on the table and gently flattened it with his fingertips. It was densely covered, as were all the fragments of the scroll, with the distinctive Aramaic script, which was darker, closer, more square than the more common paleo-Hebrew or Greek uncial. How did this piece of the scroll, ragged at all its edges, fit together with the rest, and what, once it was translated and properly placed in the body of the entire text, would it say? What would it tell us of the War in Heaven, the word of God, the Apocalypse?

  As Ezra touched the edge of this small fragment to the longer strip to see if they were meant to connect, something flashed in front of his eyes, like a blue spark, and his fingertips suddenly tingled. He sat back and caught his breath.

  Had that just happened?

  He blinked and rubbed the tips of his fingers together. It wasn’t a painful sensation, by any means, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant, either. There was the faintest whiff of cordite in the air, and his fingers felt—and there was no better way to describe it—as if they’d just come into contact with a live electrical source.

  TEN

  When the alarm clock went off at seven-thirty on Saturday morning, Carter didn’t understand it.

  It was Saturday.

  Still half-asleep, he rolled over toward Beth and slipped one arm under the blanket, around her waist. As his hand slid lower, she caught hold of his wrist.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?’ she mumbled, her eyes still closed.

  “What?”

  “You have an appointment—remember?”

  Now it came to him. Nine o’clock sharp, at Dr. Weston’s office. For the much-dreaded sperm test.

  He withdrew his hand before things got any harder to undo, and Beth, perhaps to make it even easier, rolled away to the other side of the bed. Carter lay on his back, thinking about the next few hours. First, the test—then a trip out to Kennedy Airport. Russo’s flight was due in that afternoon. />
  He rolled out of bed, padded barefoot across the hall and into the bathroom—Beth had bought him slippers, twice, but he never knew where they went—and flicked on the light. He was wearing only the plaid boxer shorts he slept in. Doctor’s orders—only boxers would do.

  After a quick shower and even quicker breakfast—coffee and a Pop-Tart—he caught the IRT uptown, arriving at the doctor’s offices a few minutes early, which was just as well since there were reams of forms and questionnaires to fill out about his health history, his family’s health history, his present medications, his insurance coverage, and so on. When he was done, he turned the paperwork over to the nurse at the reception desk, who glanced over a few of the pages, checked for his signature at the bottom, then said, “And you have not had an ejaculation for at least the previous twenty-four hours?”

  Carter was tempted to say it was a close call, but decided against it. “No. I haven’t.”

  She made a notation on his chart, then led him down a narrow corridor—muted lighting, gray carpeting, no sounds at all—lined with white, numbered doors. She opened one, and inside the small cubicle he saw a chair, a wall-mounted TV, and a night table stacked with pornographic magazines.

  “The TV has a tape preloaded,” she said, “and you just have to press the On button to start it. The magazines are also there for your use.”

  Carter, who hadn’t even thought about what to expect, was nonplussed.

  “Please try to capture as much as you can in the receptacle,” she said, handing him a plastic cup much like the ones, he thought with horror, that were used for salsa samples at his favorite fast-food Mexican restaurant. “When you’re done, bring it back to me.”

  Carter stepped into the room and the nurse closed the door. He looked around and didn’t know where to start. How in the world did you get from here to Eros?

  Still, fifteen minutes later, he poked his head out the door, looking for the nurse, but there was no one in sight. Concealing the specimen cup in his hand, he went back to the reception area, where a couple of other patients were now waiting. The nurse who’d shown him to the room was talking to someone on the phone.