The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

  This state of bliss lasted exactly three days. On the morning of the fourth day, my phone lit up with a text from Lev. Mr. Glassman asked about you again today. Wants to know how you are. What should I say? Also, charity drive is tomorrow so I’m giving away all of Dad’s clothes. Unless you want to keep something?

  I hurled the phone across the room.

  Jenny glanced up, startled. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  She studied my face. Then, in a quiet voice, she said, “I think we need to talk.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Yet you hide it so well.”

  “Sam, don’t get all sarcastic. I know it’s only been a few weeks since the funeral, and everyone grieves in their own way, but you need to stop taking it out on me. Okay?”

  I glared at her.

  “And you need to start . . . Well, don’t you think it’s time to rejoin the land of the living?”

  Blood was pounding in my ears.

  “What I’m saying—what I’m trying to say—is that you used to be so—ambitious. I mean—motivated. You had all these projects and like, goals, but now—”

  “I’ve got goals.”

  “Name one.”

  “I’m climbing—” I screamed, but stopped myself. I’d been about to say: I’m climbing the Tree of Life! Which I hadn’t meant to say. Which I hadn’t even really realized I was doing. Yet now that it popped into my head, I thought: Of course that’s what I’m doing! My father’s attempt to reach God was cut short, but I’m still here. I didn’t choose this path, but it’s chosen me—and I’m going to go all the way.

  “You’re climbing . . . ?” Jenny repeated uncertainly.

  “I have to go,” I said. And I left.

  I had the morning shift at Two Moons. For three uninterrupted hours, I served decaf lattes and cappuccinos as if nothing at all extraordinary were going on. I withstood Tyler’s flirtatious grins and did my best impression of a normal person, and this was very convincing, because it was a trick I had perfected over the years.

  With the morning rush over and a deep lull setting in, Tyler left me to watch over the café alone. Behind the counter, I pulled the sheaf of papers out of my backpack and read, not my dad’s words, but a dream I had recorded in the margins of his manuscript.

  Everything was made of light. Above my head roots reached toward me like tiny outstretched hands. I gripped them and they pulled me up. When I climbed into the branches, I saw that they bore a luminous kind of fruit. Except that it wasn’t fruit, exactly. It was books, and the books too were made of light. There was no breeze, but the pages were rustling, and they looked delicious. Irresistible. I slithered across a branch and plucked a book off its stem. I took a bite—and my eyes popped open.

  This was something I had started doing recently. Writing comments in the margins. At first it was just thoughts that sprang to mind as I read, but after a while I started scrawling down everything, especially my dreams. Getting them out onto the page helped to clear my head. But it was more than that. All my life my dad had locked himself away in his study, spending hour after hour writing manuscripts like this one, while I waited outside the door. Now he was the one outside the door. I was the one scribbling furiously all over his book. Covering his words with my words, glossing his dreams with mine.

  The yellow-haired boy who reminded me of Alex came up to order a blueberry smoothie. He paid and I asked him what his name was, even though at this café we didn’t do that thing where you call out the customer’s name. He told me it was Brendan.

  A minute later, I took the drink to Brendan’s table. He was poring over that notebook of his, completely engrossed. I stole a glance at the page and noticed that it was full of numbers.

  I stared, remembering the day I met Alex. The day he taught me to crack binary code.

  But this was a memory, and memories generated thoughts, and thoughts generated other thoughts. Because I couldn’t afford to ruin the empty state my mind had achieved, I shook the memory off, tapped Brendan on the shoulder, and handed him his drink, barely acknowledging his smile. Then I headed back behind the counter where, with no more customers to serve, I took up my father’s book again and read the next chapter.

  YESOD is the second vessel from the bottom of the Tree. Literally, it means foundation. Just as a building’s foundation is its grounding, its connection with the earth, Yesod grounds the divine realm of the upper vessels in the physical realm symbolized by Ani. It is what guarantees balance and stability, prevents a structure from collapsing.

  So far, so good, I thought. Foundation, balance, stability—this doesn’t sound too difficult. But then, a bit farther down, I read something that left me feeling cold with dread:

  All the vessels are associated with human organs; Yesod is symbolized as the male phallus. Since this organ corresponds to the reproductive ability, it is the foundation of all future generations. Yesod’s primary association, then, is with male sexuality.

  I shuddered at the thought of what I’d have to do next.

  Even though it seemed obvious what I needed to do, I didn’t make my move right away. I had to be patient and wait for the perfect opportunity. The trick would be to make him think it was all his idea.

  Two weeks later, Hannah called to say she was sick and Tyler would need someone to help him close up. The only catch was that Lily, Hannah’s niece, was supposed to spend the afternoon at the café that day. Would that be a problem? No, of course not. Lily could be a difficult kid, but her mother would pick her up no later than five—could I watch her until then? Of course I could. Hannah thanked me profusely, coughed, and hung up.

  Perfect.

  When I got to the café, Lily didn’t seem to be in one of her difficult moods. She sat at a table, set up her sketchpad and watercolor kit, and ignored me. Every so often the paintbrush would fall from her pudgy fist, and she would stare off into space, kicking the table leg or picking her nose. Then she would get a second wind and begin a new painting. Hours passed. Customers came and went. Clearly Lily had zero interest in talking to me, and this suited us both perfectly. But then, just before five o’clock rolled around, she put down her brush, waved me over, and told me to look.

  I looked. In her hands was a painting of a house and three stick figures—father, mother, and little girl. I smiled. The mother and the little girl had been drawn to scale, but the father loomed impossibly large; he measured as high as the house.

  “That one’s my dad.”

  “Oh.”

  “He left.”

  “Oh?”

  “But he’s coming back.”

  “Oh. That’s nice.”

  “He’s coming back,” she repeated, and her voice reached for but failed to hit the note of perfect faith. As if aware of her own failure, she let her voice fall into a colder, meaner register. “Where’s your dad?”

  “My dad? He left, too.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  I said nothing.

  “Hello?”

  I said nothing.

  “I said, is he coming back?”

  The word NO ballooned in my head, but right at that moment the door opened and Lily’s mother walked in. She marched toward her daughter and ordered her to pack away her things. Lily picked up her brush and started to paint flowers by the house. Her mom counted down from three, her voice growing harsher with each number. Three. Two. One! Only then did Lily surrender her brush, leaving her mom to grab her watercolor kit and yank her toward the door.

  As much as I hated watching the kid be dragged out like that, I was glad she was gone. The café was empty now. It was five o’clock—closing time—and there was no one left but Tyler and me. The sun was sinking and I urged it to sink faster; darkness would make it easier for me to do what I was about to do.

  As we wiped down the tables, Tyler grinned at me and I grinned back, then lowered my gaze to telegraph shyness—a look I’d perfected over the past tw
o weeks. When he asked if I smoked, I lied and said yes. Did I want to join him for a smoke behind the café before heading home? Sure, why not. He turned off the lights, then placed his fingers on the small of my back, as if I couldn’t figure out how to make it out the door and needed to be guided.

  We emerged into the gold autumn light of the alley. Leaning against a brick wall, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a pack of smokes. He put one between his lips, then held another out toward me. But instead of taking it, I opened my mouth slightly. He raised his eyebrows before slipping the cigarette between my lips. I leaned toward him. He lit my cigarette and his, took a deep drag, exhaled.

  I faked an inhalation and glanced around. The sunlight—there was still too much of it. It glinted off everything: nearby garbage bags, shards of broken beer bottles, black asphalt. Tyler was talking now, saying something about how good his brother used to be at sports. Immediately, I tuned him out. This wouldn’t do, this image of Tyler as an actual person, a person who had a brother. I focused my attention on his stubbled chin, where the dying light was making the tiny reddish hairs gleam.

  Tyler dropped his cigarette onto the ground and stubbed it out with a toe. I did the same. I pretended to shiver, nestling closer to him. Laughing, he took off the jacket he had on over a T-shirt and draped it around my shoulders. I put my palm on his neck and he grinned. And then, with the confidence of a prince collecting his birthright, he leaned in to kiss me.

  I pushed him off with a single outstretched hand. He opened his mouth in protest, but my hand was already moving down his chest. I grabbed his belt buckle and yanked it toward me. His body froze, eyes filled with disbelief. I sank toward the ground.

  I saw myself unbuckling his belt and I died. I saw his pants swirling around his ankles and I died. I saw my knees jammed against the pavement and his cock in my mouth and I died. But I repeated the word Yesod in my head. I was ready to Yesod Yesod Yesod all night if I had to. He vaulted above me, I arched under him, sweat pooled in the salty cradle of my neck. I was so close but still not close enough. And he, he was getting too close; I begged him in my head, Not yet, not yet, not yet. Not until I’ve done what I came here to do. He didn’t listen; he came, and still I hadn’t found it. If his body contained the secrets, it was not divulging them, but I was determined and my tongue wrapped around his cock, slipped over his kneecap, darted along his inner arm, dipped blindly into the concave shadow of his elbow, pushed into the space between each knuckle, all the while with an ear trained on the skin the way a safecracker presses his cheek to metal as he listens for the sounds of the twisting dial. Click-click I’m searching for the combination click-click I know it’s here somewhere click-click I keep expecting it to surrender to my touch, but the safe remains uncracked, the body keeps its secrets.

  The clock radio read 3:02 A.M. I needed a shower, so I peeled off my clothes and turned on the tap. The water hit my body and pierced the skin, each drop pulling up flesh with the force of a thousand fishhooks. I wanted to stay there forever, washing the stench of this day off me: the blow job, and then all the bars I’d gone to, all the drinks I’d poured down my throat in an effort to drown out the taste of Tyler, which was the taste of my own stupidity. Had I actually believed I could attain a mystical key via the power of a back-alley blow job? My reading of Yesod had been laughably simplistic, and so, standing in the shower now, I laughed.

  When I finally stepped out, wrapping myself in a towel in front of the mirror, Jenny came up behind me. I turned.

  “Hi.”

  I laughed.

  “Samara.”

  More laughter.

  “Are you drunk?”

  I couldn’t help it; I laughed even harder.

  “Come to bed.”

  Her tone was so uncharacteristically sharp that I stopped laughing immediately. But not because I was unhappy; on the contrary, this made me extremely happy. I was an orphan and finally she was treating me with the bossiness that orphans secretly crave.

  I followed her meekly to bed. She leaned down, brought the covers up to my chin, then stopped. She sniffed the air above my head. Suddenly, I became intensely aware that I had forgotten to wash my hair. Could she smell the betrayal on me? She settled herself in the chair by the window and ordered me to close my eyes. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep—I was still too buzzed—but I obeyed for the sheer pleasure of it. If she knew that I had cheated, she said nothing to indicate it.

  But when I woke, I saw her suitcase standing open in the middle of the apartment. Clothes spilled out of it, as though she’d decided to leave but had lost the nerve before she could finish packing. I hated her for her weakness. The apartment was empty, she’d gone out, and I hated her for that, too. “Leave, then! Leave!” I wanted to scream at her, because I knew she never would; that was the reason I loved and hated her so much.

  I dragged myself out of bed, my feet landing on a black square tile. It gave me a weirdly constricted feeling. In this apartment, options were limited. You could only move across the chessboard in specific, preordained ways. This was sometimes awkward: if you wanted to get from the bed to the fridge, you had to do it in a series of L-shaped moves, even though the shortest distance between the two points was a straight line. Some objects were beyond reach entirely. Could you touch the easel, for example? You could not. You could see it, it was right there by the window, but it stood on a white square and you could only travel on black. What about that person beside you, could you reach out and graze her shoulder? You could not.

  Sometime later, Jenny came home. Her eyes were red, her arms full of groceries, and I knew she had told Kyle everything. She put the bags on the table and pulled items from their dark interiors. She placed each item in the fridge slowly, carefully, with a painstaking precision.

  Every chess player knows that in an end game pawns suddenly become very important. Winning the game often involves advancing a pawn to the center of the board. To do this, it sometimes becomes necessary to sacrifice the queen.

  One day in November, Hannah and I worked the same shift at Two Moons. It was late afternoon, and the place was calm, just a handful of customers reading or talking in the crisp autumn light. As I rinsed and she stacked teacups, Hannah kept up a stream of chatter about this versus that type of yoga, the healing properties of various crystals. I thought for the hundredth time how grateful I was for her voice, spilling on and on like thread off a tumbling spool.

  Brendan came up to order a drink and Hannah started to prepare it. He had his notebook in hand and I asked if I could see what he was working on. When he showed me a giant grid filled with digits, I recognized it as one of those magic squares, where each row and column adds up to the exact same number. Impressed, I said, “You must be really good at math.”

  “Actually, I’m pretty much the worst in my class.”

  “Seriously? But you’re always messing around with numbers.”

  “Numbers don’t like me, but I like them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever heard of synesthesia?”

  I nodded. “Why, do you have it?”

  “Yeah. For me, numbers have colors.”

  “Really?”

  “I know, it’s weird, right? When I look at a number, all of a sudden I can see a color—or, well, I can feel it. Like one thing triggers the other thing in my head, and then it just seems so obvious that six is blue, or that three is green, you know? It’s kind of hard to explain.”

  “No, actually, I think I know what you mean.”

  Hannah had finished making his drink. I turned to give it to him—

  And then the door opened, and a woman walked in. A green dress swirled about her knees. Her dark hair fell a few inches below her shoulders. In her arms was a stack of books. As she placed them on a table, she blew the bangs out of her eyes with an upward puff of air. Then she walked toward the counter. Toward me.

  The teacup slipped from my hand and fell to the floor, s
hattering.

  “What the—?” Hannah said, but before she could even turn around I was racing to the bathroom, locking myself in a stall, a flood of hot tears gushing up my throat.

  I lowered the lid of the toilet and sat. Fists clenched, heart racing. My breath came in sharp staccato rhythms that ripped the oxygen from my lungs instead of filling them with air.

  It was her. She was wearing a different dress now—not the black one she’d worn at the funeral, or the black one she’d worn at the hospital—but I recognized her. I’d have recognized her anywhere, even though we’d never been introduced, even though I’d only ever heard her name spoken in muffled tones, late at night, through closed doors. Valérie, for the most part. On occasion, Val. And once or twice, Valkyrie.

  I remembered the rumors I’d heard floating around the girls’ bathrooms at McGill (“Did you hear about David Meyer’s latest love interest?” “Another student?” “Yes! Another one!”), rumors of the kind I’d been hearing since my first year of undergrad. It hadn’t exactly come as a shock—I’d been all of twelve years old when I figured out why Dad “worked late” so many Friday nights—but the campus gossip had rankled. As had the smell of her perfume on his shirts (which, no, Lev, I couldn’t bring myself to want), as had her insistence on stalking us the day of his funeral, when she had shown up first at the burial site, then at the shiva house.

  And now she was here, and I had no idea what to do. She might know things I didn’t know about my father’s climb up the Tree. Clues that could lead me to the second vessel—the vessel I was failing, so pathetically, to find. But at that thought I squared my shoulders, clenched my jaw. Why should I go running to her for help? My dad’s lover, the keeper of his secret life, a life he obviously valued more than his family because he spent so much more time with her than he ever did with us?