The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  My mistake seemed clear in retrospect, as well as pathetically psychoanalyzable: it was fear of death, of the void, that had closed my ears to the true message of my heart, making me prefer the pretty lie of somethingness to the terrifying truth of nothingness. I would steel myself, now, against the comforting lie. I would not make the same blunder twice. Because, for all the psychopathic undertones to be heard in a man’s insistence that his heart was speaking, yes, actually speaking to him in human language, the murmur was beginning to sound like a promise: Stick with me and you’ll go far. Stick with me and you’ll fly straight to the top.

  There was, unfortunately, one problem. My body was habituating to my new fitness regimen, with the result that I had to run at higher and higher speeds to get my heart rate to the point where the words became audible. To keep achieving the necessary clarity of pitch, I would need to run impossibly fast. Yet, impossible or not, I had no choice: I was driven by a dreadful fatalism, a kind of two-plus-two logical implacability that is the way with all idées fixes. It spurred me on in the same way and for the same reasons that desire spurred lovers to enter into disastrous affairs: because the human brain seemed hardwired for this sort of obsession; because it was the root of all figures of beauty; because, as Marcus Aurelius said, it loved to happen.

  Singh stooped over me, stethoscope pressed to my chest, while I tried to breathe normally. I could barely contain my excitement. Finally, I was going to get some answers. But why was he still using the stethoscope? Why didn’t he just stand very still and, well, listen?

  At last, he straightened up and gave me a stern, doctorly look. “Have you been working?”

  “No.”

  “Doing any kind of physical exercise?”

  “No.”

  “Sexual intercourse?”

  “N-no.”

  He looked satisfied. “Good. Well, Mr. Meyer, you seem to be recovering nicely.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Very nicely, all things considered.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, naturally it’s not an overnight process, but I see no reason for con—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Can’t you . . . I mean, surely you can . . . Don’t you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The—murmur.”

  He smiled patiently. “Well, yes, the murmur is there, but as I said, it appears to be benign, if a bit—unusual.”

  “Unusual! Yes. That’s what I meant. Its—its unusualness. Its, ah, volume.”

  Singh shot me a quizzical look, then grabbed the ends of his stethoscope and raised them to his ears. But before they were even midway to their hairy destinations, I stopped him.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I thought I would have another listen, since you seem so concerned.”

  “Yes but, but, why do you need that?” I said, pointing at the instrument. “I mean, you said yourself, right before you released me—it’s audible.”

  His face now bore an expression that was akin, plus or minus an iota of condescension, to that of a kindergarten teacher whose young charge has just made a terribly cute mistake. “You must have misunderstood,” he said. “When I said audible, I meant audible with the stethoscope.”

  I chose my next words with great care. “So you don’t . . . hear . . . anything, now.”

  “No.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Right.” He paused. “Let me ask you something. Have you been exposed to any abnormally loud noise in the past few weeks? Rock concerts? Construction work?”

  “Yes, I regularly blast Metallica while performing crane demolition in my backyard.”

  “I’m just trying to rule some things out.”

  “Such as?”

  “Just conditions that are apt to produce ringing in the ear. Tinnitus, Ménière’s—”

  “So, what? You think I’ve got some kind of hearing damage, on top of everything else?”

  “Well, no, nothing’s certain, we’re just examining all the possibilities. Tinnitus, for example, has been known to produce certain musical hallucinations—”

  “So now I’m a madman.”

  “Please, Mr. Meyer, I’m only—” He sighed. “I’d be happy to run some more tests.”

  “No more tests,” I said, hopping off the examination table. “Thank you!”

  I drove home and contemplated the fact that the medical profession in this province—vive la patrie!—was clearly, undeniably, and most depressingly going to shit. I ate dinner alone and railed inwardly against the rabid medicalization of everyday life, the therapeutic society seeking pseudoliberations from pseudodiseases. And yet as soon as I retired to my room, I found myself—like so many bored midwestern housewives with nothing better to do than to self-diagnose into round after round of clinical depression—trawling the Internet for answers.

  “Tinnitus” yielded more than 16,500,000 results. After scrolling through paragraphs marked Objective Tinnitus, Subjective Tinnitus, Pathophysiology, Prevention, and Prognosis, I clicked on Notable Individuals. Van Gogh was there, along with Goya and Michelangelo. Bono, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Moby, Paul Simon, Barbra Streisand, Neil Young, Schumann, and old Ludwig van himself. For a moment, I felt better about the possibility of being included in such a lineup. Then, smack dab in the middle of the list, I spotted another name: Adolf Hitler.

  I closed the browser.

  The phone rang.

  When I went into the kitchen to answer it, the green numbers on the microwave gleamed at me in the darkness. The three digits—a 9, followed by a 1, followed by another 1—seemed eerie and full of import. Squashing that childish thought, I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  Silence.

  “Hell—”

  Suddenly it occurred to me. The perception of sound within the human ear in the absence of corresponding external sound. A persistent ringing in the ears. Wasn’t this the very definition of tinnitus? I broke out in a sweat. Was it possible that, all these years, I had merely been imagining the ringing of the telephone? It was not a wrong number, it was not a prank call—like the murmur, it was just your garden-variety, run-of-the-mill, materially reducible musical hallucination. Wouldn’t that explain why no one ever answered when I said hello? A conversation I’d overheard years ago, between thirteen-year-old Alex and Lev, loomed up—a frightening shadow puppet—against the black canvas of my mind:

  You’re not seriously going to go through with this whole bar mitzvah thing, are you?

  Sure I am. Why not?

  You believe in all that stuff? The burning bush? The big booming voice from the sky?

  Why wouldn’t I?

  Because it’s so—so—so unscientific! How can that not bother you?

  I don’t know. It just doesn’t.

  Have you ever heard of Occam’s razor?

  No.

  It means that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.

  Okay. So?

  So which is simpler? Which is more likely? That God sent your people into slavery to kill themselves over Pharaoh’s pyramids, spoke to Moses from a burning bush in the middle of the desert, only to make them wander for forty years and then get slaughtered six million times by, oh, more or less every nation on the planet? Or that the whole thing was one big delusion?

  I was delusional: Was that the simplest explanation? The blackness of the kitchen felt doubly dark, as vast and lonely as interstellar space. The room accordioned in and out, green numbers on the microwave throwing their feeble glow into the expanding void. No, I said to myself, and then I repeated it aloud: “No no no no no.”

  The doorbell rang.

  I froze. What if this was another hallucination? The latest instance of my sickness, my delusion? I dreaded the thought of opening the door to see only night, night, night, and to hear the stars in their thick vel
vet beds mocking me with tinkling laughs. But the doorbell kept ringing, and finally I marched myself to the front door and opened it.

  “Hello!”

  I couldn’t help it: I breathed a sigh of relief. “Ira. What are you doing here?”

  “I came to check up on you! And to bring you this,” he said, handing me a casserole.

  I groaned inwardly. Not again. When Miriam died, Ira and Judy had been relentless in their delivery of home-cooked meals like this one—a casserole every other day for a month—so that even now, my sharpest memory from that period was of a pile of Tupperware containers that overflowed the fridge and mounted on the kitchen counter—a kindness that took up too much space, intruded on our grief.

  “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come by for a visit,” Ira said, misinterpreting my silence. “Judy and I meant to drop something off ages ago, but, you know—”

  “Oh, no, no—thank you for this. It’s very kind of you—really, very kind.” I gestured inside. “Would you like to . . . ?”

  “Ah, sure, okay, thanks!” He stepped over the threshold and looked around. “It’s, ah, been a while since I’ve been here, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it has.”

  “Yes, mm-hm, well.” He turned his attention to the knickknacks and photographs on the credenza in the hall. He picked up a picture of Miriam, then put it down again.

  “This casserole looks delicious,” I said. “Thank Judy for me.”

  “Mmm? Yes, I will,” he murmured, apparently lost in thought. Then, with alarming abruptness, he turned around and swooped in for the kill. “David,” he said.

  “Ira,” I said.

  “Is everything all right? I mean, with you?”

  “Sure it is. Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Well, there’s the, ah, medical condition . . .”

  “Minor setback.”

  “Is it?” he asked. “I mean, can we expect you to be ready to teach again in September? Will you feel, ah, rested enough?”

  My eyes narrowed. “Of course.”

  “That’s good to hear,” he said. “I was starting to get a bit—concerned. It’s not like you to be late submitting grades, even given the, you know, the present circumstances. So I just thought I’d come here to make sure everything’s okay . . . as a friend,” he added.

  “Everything’s fine, Ira. Really.”

  But he seemed not to be listening anymore. He was wandering instead down the hallway, where a faint stripe of light was visible beneath the door of my study.

  I followed him. “Really, really fine; in fact I’m excited about this upcoming semester, I’ve got some fascinating new texts that I think the 505 kids are really going to plotz over . . .” I trailed off, allowing myself to be distracted and amused by the image of Myra Goldfarb plotzing—but this was a mistake. Ira was several steps ahead, opening the door to my study.

  “Mm-hm, yes—oh!” he gasped.

  I stood beside him and saw the room as if for the first time. The surface of the huge glass-topped desk was entirely covered with books. A zoo of loose-leaf papers, manila folders, gilded folios, cracked-spine quartos, and assorted paraphernalia was overflowing the bookshelves, stacked upon the windowsills, propped beneath the potted plants. You could barely see the furniture or the floor. To the untrained eye, the collection would have looked haphazard, but I knew there was a secret order hidden in the chaos.

  Ira appeared to have been struck dumb. He meandered over to the desk, to where the exam booklets that had no doubt occasioned his impromptu house call still peeked out from beneath the giant tissue box, but said nothing. Instead, he turned to the various sheaves of papers that all dealt, in one way or another, with the Tree of Life. He picked up a Xeroxed page from Shaar HaKavanot. His eyes flitted from right to left, reading the Hebrew passage for what seemed a long time. He swiveled around and stared at me strangely.

  “Ira?”

  “You haven’t been . . .”

  “What?”

  “You’re not toying with the idea of . . .”

  “What?”

  “Making the climb yourself?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You know I haven’t been interested in religious practice for years.”

  And as easily as that, he smiled. My lie had the convincing ring of truth because it was, in a sense, true: I may have been hearing God’s voice, but my interest remained at the level of the sublime, sky-scraping Tree of Life; I was not about to get down in the mud of thou-shalt-and-shalt-not Judaism. Normalcy restored, a cool breeze of relief entered and filled the room. It fluttered between us for a roundish minute, making speech superfluous.

  Escorting him to the front door, I said, “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Yes. Yes, we’ll be in touch. Thanks for your understanding, David. Take it easy now.”

  “I will. Good-bye.”

  The door closed behind him with a soft thump. I wandered back into the hall and stared at the photo of Miriam he had picked up earlier. Miriam would have been proud, he’d said on the night of the bat mitzvah. So proud. He was actually trembling, as if Samara’s reading had plucked at some innermost chord. But I had heard nothing, felt nothing. Or so I told myself in the days following the bat mitzvah, when a question dangled in the air of the house, in Samara’s downcast eyes, that I didn’t know how—didn’t want to know how—to answer.

  But I had heard it, had felt it—that desire to scream no no no no no, and yet, coiled within the no, an intricate sweetness, an ineffable yes. It had plucked at a part of me I had rejected, and that made me angry, and anger kept me silent. Yet now my heartstrings were murmuring against the silence; they were vibrating with the resonance of her question. And for the first time in a decade, I was listening. It was so loud I could barely hear anything else.

  Though I had come with the express purpose of breaking up with Val, we had somehow managed to end up fucking instead. A major setback, yes, but surmountable—perhaps even understandable in light of recent events. This had been the last hurrah, and now, well, now I’d exhausted my excuses and exhausted myself, and there was nothing left to do but cut the cord.

  I propped myself up on an elbow to contemplate Val, her ocean eyes and skyscraper eyelashes, her dark hair spread out on the pillow, her perfect breasts rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing. I felt a surge of preemptive sadness at the sight of the birthmark on her leg—how I would miss that pale blue dot! All the tiny streets and houses, rivers and forests, men and women and creatures on that imaginary continent—would they miss me when I was gone?

  “I—” I said. But then she was looking at me, and her eyes were gorgeously, irresistibly serious. Gravity was attractive—Alex had been right about that, at least. “Should probably get home,” I finished lamely.

  She turned her gaze back to the ceiling. “Why?”

  “Well, it’s almost ten thirty.”

  “Et alors?”

  “My kids will be wondering where I am.”

  “But your son is staying with his friend tonight? The astronomer?”

  “Yes, that’s true, but my daughter—she’ll be home. And I don’t really want her to see me sneaking back in the middle of the night, or doing the walk of shame at six in the morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, well, I’d prefer it if—I mean, I don’t exactly want her knowing. About us.”

  “She knows.”

  “There’s no real ev—”

  “She knows.”

  “But maybe she just—”

  “She knows.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What makes you so sure?”

  Her mouth contorted in a strange smile. For a while she was quiet. Then, in an apparent non sequitur, she said, “You know those old telephones they used to sell? The ones where you had to spin that plastic thing if you wanted to dial a number?”

  “Rotary phones?”

  “Yeah, exactly. When I was a kid, we used to have one of those phones. My mother kept i
t on a table in the hallway. And my father, he used to call her every day in the afternoon to tell her he loved her and he was coming home from work. Every day at five o’clock the phone in the hallway would ring. I remember my mother used to twist the cord around her fingers whenever she talked to him. I always thought she did that for fun, but later I realized—it was a nervous habit, you know? And she had a good reason to be nervous, I guess, because one day—I was eight years old—the phone didn’t ring. It was five o’clock and the hallway was so silent I thought maybe I had gone deaf. You’ve never had such a silent sixty seconds in your life.”

  She glanced at me, then fixed her eyes on the ceiling again. “My mother, I think she thought he was dead. She disconnected the phone from the hallway, dragged it into bed, and reconnected it. She stayed there for four days. Four days she didn’t move and didn’t say a thing. Like if she didn’t make a sound, she could freeze time and the phone would ring and he would come home again.

  “But the phone didn’t ring. It was locked in this battle with her, like it wanted to see, who would break down first and make a noise? And so for four days I prayed, please, Jésus, please, Vierge Marie, he doesn’t even have to come home, just let him call so at least we can get on with our lives. Finally, on the fifth day, the phone rang. At exactly five o’clock it rang. Nobody spoke—there was no voice at the other end, no ‘I love you’—but it was enough. My mother got out of bed. And every day after that, at exactly five o’clock, the same thing happened all over again. The phone rang and nobody spoke, but for the next twenty-four hours the look in my mother’s eye said: Enough. She could go on.”

  I said nothing. A moment passed. Then she said, in a voice that sounded, suddenly, terribly depleted, “Tout ça pour dire—I knew. Right away, from the first day he didn’t call, I knew it at 5:01. He was with another woman.” Abruptly, she sat up, gathering her knees in her arms. Then, thinking better of it, she lay back down again. “A daughter has a way of knowing such things. And once she knows them, she stops needing in the way she did before. Of course, she still needs, you and other people, future people, but. She will no longer say, ‘I love you,’ ‘I don’t love you’—even if she is very young, she will already be too old for words like that. She will not . . . subject you to that vocabulary anymore. So, you might as well stay, if you want to. I mean here, if you want to. You can,” she said. And I did.