The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  The next morning, I got home at eight o’clock. Val’s assurances notwithstanding, I had timed it so that Lev would be at the synagogue and Samara would be asleep. But when I tiptoed down the hall, I heard a steady stream of music leaking from Samara’s bedroom. Because it was unusual for her to be awake at this hour, never mind listening to dance club electronica, I wondered if she had put on the music to muffle the sounds of my arrival. Maybe she knew, but didn’t want me to know she knew? I crept into my study and closed the door.

  I sat down at my desk. It should have been a peaceful moment—usually, when I did this, it was with the feeling of a sailor setting foot on terra firma after a dangerous and grueling time at sea—and it would have been, had the eighty ungraded term papers not been staring back at me. I picked one up at random, then put it down again. Yes, I decided, it was time for a run.

  I had barely left the house when I started to sweat in the mounting humidity. On Bernard, a few cars whizzed past, but on the whole the streets seemed quiet and deserted. Grateful for the silence, I began to pick up my pace, racing until beads of moisture soaked through my T-shirt, sticking it to my chest and shoulders. The old rush was coming back. And along with the rush, that torrent of whispers, the throbbing of voices on membranes, the knocking of breath on all my most internal doors.

  Aaaahhhh . . . It was Ani, and I opened my arms wide, embracing absolutes, embracing all the deities, and with them authority, meaning, quest, self, eros. And then, in the next instant—no, I was wrong, it was Ayin, it was really Ayin after all. The self was fluid and fragmented, there was no authority, no unified I, everything was thick with threat and Thanatos. And then, in the next instant—

  I stopped, trembling and furious. What good was a message from above if it couldn’t even be decoded? What good was a signal if it was always getting drowned out by interference? Couldn’t the powers that be afford better equipment—was heaven so murky as that? My hand curled into a fist and began to beat my breast. Out, damned dybbuk! Out, out! But it would not out, and all of a sudden doors were opening and voices were pouring all around me, cries of Gut shabbes! were filling the air, and I found myself surrounded by the thick morning traffic of Congregation Toldos Yakov Yosef.

  A young Hasid paused on the steps of the synagogue to study me, his expression neither malevolent nor benign but, perhaps, simply curious. I realized that my fist was midway to my chest—I must have looked like a worshipper begging forgiveness for his sins—and dropped it, embarrassed. Then I recognized the person staring at me.

  It was Lev. My Lev.

  My jaw dropped. Of all people! Look at him: already he was wondering what the hell I was up to; any second now he’d be walking toward me, ready to turn the interrogation lamps of his eyes on my squirming, sweating face. For one wild second, I considered confessing—the murmurs, the vessels, the Tree of Life—but no. I’d already confused one kid’s religious development; did I really want to make that same mistake twice?

  I fled.

  Racing down the busy avenue, I didn’t ease up until I’d rounded the bend onto a familiar tree-lined street. The sounds of church bells and crying children filled the air. I strode with eyes down, searching the pavement for tectonic instabilities, praying that one of its cracks would open up and swallow me, Korah-style. And so it was a while before I registered the fresh cacophony of voices now assaulting my ears and looked up.

  A large knot of people had gathered around the base of a tree. Katz’s old oak tree. Many of the bystanders were muttering in barbed tones; some of them were pointing.

  Hanging from the branches were the innumerable tin cans that had been piling up in Katz’s yard for months. Long pieces of twine linked each can to several others, giving the impression of a gigantic spider web suspended in midair. It made you think of the tin can telephones that every child seemed fated to make between the ages of eight and twelve, as if to signal their entrance into the burgeoning mastery of technological adolescence.

  As kids, Lev and Samara had suffered many frustrated attempts before realizing that the twine connecting the two cans had to be pulled extremely taut in order for the device to work. Now, squinting up at the tin cans in the branches, I noticed that these strings were pulled taut. Katz had done his research. Or someone had done it for him.

  To a certain kind of eye the device might have possessed a crazy, quirky beauty—you could imagine it striking the fancy of the twentysomething hipsters living in the Plateau—but no such eyes were in attendance here. To the Hasidic citizens of Mile End, the device was simply a property-value-lowering eyesore, and an example of the individualist spirit that plagued the non-God-fearing world with socially useless and sinful frivolities.

  Katz was sitting on his front porch, taking in the crowd from a safe distance, rocking back and forth and muttering to himself. What was he saying? Trying to read his lips was like playing charades with a partner who didn’t realize there was a game going on. Two words. First word: one syllable. Please. Second word: one syllable. Call. I stared at his face. Please call? What was that supposed to mean? Was he actually expecting someone to call him on that crazy contraption? I turned my back on the scene and trudged homeward through the dizzying heat.

  Dinner that night was a somber affair. Samara and Lev chopped vegetables for a salad, handed each other ingredients for the pasta they were cooking, and later, when the meal was served, passed each other dishes without recourse to words. I saw for the first time that their bodies spoke the secret language of ballet dancers and synchronized swimmers and Trappist monks: they moved together in a practiced state of unfocused attention that allowed each person to anticipate the other’s needs. Even before he knew he wanted the mashed potatoes, she was passing them. Before she could point at the jug of lemonade, it was halfway to her hand. How long had they been speaking this esoteric family language? I tried, and failed, to parse the syntax of their silence. And so they ate and I ate and they spoke their comfortable creole while my paternal pidgin, with its reduced vocabulary and limited grammatical structure, flopped and flapped its way across the table, a series of unfunny jokes and halfhearted anecdotes and lame questions that they, perhaps as a courtesy to me, interpreted as rhetorical.

  I could tell from Samara’s flushed cheeks that she had heard me come in that morning. I could tell from Lev’s downcast eyes that he had seen me flee the scene. We didn’t mention these things. Instead we sat, and strands of silence floated up between us, linking me to her to him, a silver web suspended over the table, capturing everything, communicating nothing.

  Then dinner was over and the kids were clearing up, she rinsing dishes and he loading them into the dishwasher, their custom from childhood. And because they did it as a matter of course, did it without needing to be asked, I permitted myself a moment of relief over the fact that my parenting-by-proxy—leaving them in Ira and Judy’s unneurotic care—had worked out well enough after all. But the moment evaporated quickly and left something darker and colder in its place. If I were to suffer another heart attack, lethal this time, they would probably make out just fine without me. Taking small sips from my glass of water, I watched the scene as if from above, an awkward stranger beholding a family portrait months after it is taken. And I wondered: Was this what was meant by out-of-body experience? Was this what it was like to die?

  On the third Sunday afternoon in August, Val invited me to a picnic on the mountain. She was looking especially pretty that day—like one of Sappho’s maidens—in a pink sleeveless dress, delicate golden sandals, and a thin embroidered headband that might well have come from Sardis. It was impossible to turn her down.

  The punishing heat would have been intolerable were it not for the shade offered by a clump of trees near the gazebo. To cool off, Val opened a bottle of chilled Maudite. We clinked glasses. “L’chaim,” she said, with a wink.

  And then we ate—strawberries and zaatar bread, the light, insubstantial diet of lovers. She leaned over to kiss me with her ruby mouth and I
made a game of plucking berries from between her lips. Her iridescent throat had never seemed so lovely or so worth biting.

  When we were done picnicking, Val lay down in the grass with an arm over her face, her strawberry smile still visible. I was happy to let her lie there for as long as she liked; merely to sit beside her had become, suddenly, reason enough to live. Visoring my eyes with one hand, I peered out past the gazebo to where a large group of people were drumming on tam-tams and dancing. Men, women, and children, in various states of undress, losing themselves to the music. A dizzying spindle of sound, a sort of counterfeit rapture. This kind of bacchic frenzy put me in mind of Euripides—the Ancient Greeks called it ekstasis, literally to be outside one’s self. And though I had no desire to join in the frenzy myself, I was able to appreciate, at least abstractly, the appeal of such an altered state. There was relief there, I thought. There was release.

  But my appreciation ceased to be abstract and became instead alarmingly concrete. Against the sea of rapturous faces all blurred in anonymity, one face stood out in sharp relief. Samara was dancing with her eyes closed, her mouth parted in a strange smile. Otherworldly. Detached. Terrifying. I battled the impulse to run up, grab her by the shoulders, shake her until she fell out of it. It was a smile I had never seen before, a smile she would never want me to have seen. For this type of situation, we had a strict protocol. That protocol was: don’t talk.

  And so I added the smile to the litany of things we did not talk about, which by this point included but was not limited to: Jenny, music, bicycles, my health, intellectual elitism, Kraft Dinner, Zionism, her mother, bat mitzvahs, Shakespeare, my sexual activity, her sexual activity, Alex, Winnie the Pooh, saltines, capitalism, loneliness, the relationship of Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, wrong numbers, the color blue, The Birth of Tragedy, her friends (or lack thereof), her marketable skills (or lack thereof), Popsicles, Volkswagens, swing sets, lepidopterology, the correlation between intelligence and melancholy, Vincent van Gogh, drugs, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” collapsible telescopes, the name Miranda, chess, Djuna Barnes, flying, and the theory of evolution.

  These were the sticking points in our conversations, the unsayable, unvisitable black points on the map, which had at first required sharp detours and violent twists of the steering wheel and which we had later learned, by means of a stunning array of conversational acrobatics, to avoid entirely. And yet, precisely because these points were unvisitable, they had, over the years, begun to exercise a strange power over my imagination. They were blacker than black. Their shadows shone, bright with excessive dark. They stood out sharply on the map and formed a collection of points that the human brain, geared for gestalt, longed to link together. It was the same impulse that had made our forebears connect the dots in the sky into the imaginary pictures we now called constellations. The same impulse that had driven us to search for codes in the Bible, and that would one day drive us to see poetry in nucleotides, reading Rubaiyats in sequences of G and A and T and C, as if meaning could be genetically encoded in verse. It was an irresistible temptation and a fatal idea.

  After some time, Val sat up. She took out her cell phone and said, “Can you excuse me for a second? I have to make a call.” Her face, which had been so radiant a moment ago, was suddenly overcast, little bits of cumulus clinging to the corners of her eyes.

  “Sure,” I said. “But why not make the call here?”

  “No reception. I’ll be right back.”

  She gave an apologetic little wave and I watched her golden shoulders recede into the sunlight as she walked down the grassy slope. She came to a stop about thirty feet away, far enough that I would not be able to overhear. But, strangely, she didn’t appear to be saying anything. Her back was only half turned to me, and in the bright light I could clearly make out the outline of her lips, which weren’t moving.

  On impulse, I took out my own cell phone and, doing so, noticed two things.

  The first was that the phone had perfect reception.

  The second was the time.

  It was exactly five o’clock.

  I was overwhelmed with compassion for the eight-year-old girl she had been, admiration for the choice she had made. To think that all these years she’d kept up her daily devotion—it was all I could do to leave her secret unsung. When she came back up to me, I took her phone-holding hand and kissed it with something like reverence. She looked at me quizzically but said nothing. Soon she was buried in her Eckhart again and I was fanning the ungraded term papers out on the grass. In the space of five minutes, I had graded all eighty of them. Though the gesture reeked of the stickiest kind of poetic self-indulgence, though my better judgment warned against it, though it was probably professional suicide, everyone got an A.

  That night, alone in my bed, I woke suddenly. The clock read 4:58 A.M. I lay still for a moment, trying to figure out what had woken me, but there was nothing. No loud music. No slamming doors. The house was silent.

  But it was like the silence that follows on the heels of a power failure, when the hum of refrigerators, the buzzing of streetlights, the whole concerto of urban living goes missing, the volume of the world dipping down to a level you never thought possible. That was it, I thought: something, some noise, had just gone missing.

  After a long moment, I realized what it was.

  My heart had ceased its murmuring. For the first time in weeks, I couldn’t hear it at all.

  I frowned. Rationally, I knew that the disappearance of the murmur should have come as a welcome surprise. Instead, it came as a tremendous letdown. That whispered message had been my golden ticket, my shortcut to the top of the Tree! Without it, what did I have? Nothing.

  No, not nothing. I had a middle-aged, middle-class, suburban life. A family. A girlfriend. Everything I had ever been taught to aspire to. But I had been promised the holy of holies, highest of heights, and the idea of being shunted back to the via media was unacceptable.

  An hour later, I was running. It was barely six o’clock and already the heat was oppressive. The sky was gray and low. My heart rate was ramping up. I forced my body through wall after wall of humidity, reveling in the sensation of speed, motion chasing blood out of tired muscles, adrenaline ripping through arms and legs. My shirt pasting itself to back and stomach. Even my eyelashes dripping sweat.

  Now the sky was darkening with an influx of clouds, and I was racing fast beneath them.

  The thrashing of ventricles and aortas was gratifyingly audible again. Audible but still unclear, because one moment the muscle was saying Ani, and the next moment—Ayin. This time I would press myself up against the cool, viscous membrane that divided something from nothing, being from nonbeing, existence from void. I would outrun my body’s limits, I would—

  My heart spasmed. I clutched at it and gasped for breath. This pain was not pleasure. A point of fire pierced my chest. I fell to my knees and shuddered. Something inside me was turning, twisting, burning. I gasped again and wished for water. I thought: This is it, this is it, but where is the Angel of Death? And, in search of his face, I looked up.

  A shadowy, ancient man was turning the corner. Black coat. White hair. Just as I’d always imagined. He whipped past, a single hand extended into the air—he was beckoning me up into the sky—or was he shaking his fist?—and then he was gone.

  Katz’s tree loomed over me.

  The web of tin cans still hung there, taut and tense and waiting, as if expecting a call at any moment. Something—it might have been a moth or a butterfly, or even a small bird—whizzed past my ear and landed with a ping in one of the cans. The soft wing flap was a ripple in the air—delicate at first, localized—then thrumming from can to can, from branch to branch, until the whole tree sang and groaned.

  A door banged open and Katz burst out of his house, looking to the tree with deranged rapture. A gust of wind ruffled his clothes and swept the yarmulke from his head, but he didn’t bother to run after it. He was moving his lips in
response to a conversation only he could hear.

  The wind grew rougher, encircling him in a private whirlwind as he—what was he doing? He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, like a synagogue worshipper hearing Holy Holy Holy. The bounces got bigger; he was leaping, lifting, impossibly light on his feet. It looked as if he might be taken up, Elijah-style, and I craned my neck skyward, scanning the clouds for a chariot of fire or an unidentified flying object that might whisk him off into the lofty regions he so clearly wished to inhabit.

  Then it rained.

  As the humidity broke and the heavens opened their windows wide, emptying themselves of water, I squinted hard at Katz. If I tilted my head to the left, I could just make out his shape through the downpour. He was rising and falling, running and returning, up and down and up and down and up. And suddenly it all came clear—I had my answer—not Ayin or Ani, not either/or, but both/and. Ayin-Ani-Ayin-Ani-Ayin-Ani-Ayin-Ani and my soul a boomerang back and forth between these two poles forever.

  But it was not forever.

  My heart was exploding, my heart was on fire, my heart was cloven in two.

  The pavement felt cool and welcoming against the base of my skull.

  I had wanted an answer. But how I suddenly loved the question, black coffee and the smell of books, and a fine wine on a white tablecloth, and middle-of-the-night bicycle rides, and middle-of-the-way forays into old age, and the pale blue dot on Val’s left leg, whizzing away into infinity, and the new manuscript waiting to be written, and the old silences waiting to be spoken, and the girl attacking her copy of Žižek with a highlighter, and all the trunk drawers full of jewelry and sadness, and the telephone ringing all day, and my children. My children. And Valérie saying, “You might as well stay, if you want to. I mean here, if you want to. You can.”