by Sigal Samuel
Disappeared into the night—but why? Lev, sitting at his father’s glass-topped desk, rolled the pill bottle between thumb and forefinger. Glassman had been trying to get at this, he was sure of it. But what could he possibly want with a bunch of old pills? And besides, if Glassman needed something, why didn’t he just ask?
Then a dark possibility occurred to him: What if the old man wanted the pills for some unspeakable purpose—say, to put his wife out of her misery?
A light came on in Glassman’s house. He had obviously gone home. And so, even though a confrontation was the last thing Lev needed, he stood up, intending to go over and engage in just that.
But even as he stood, a silver car pulled up across the street. She’d come back!
He ran out onto the porch, waving at Val. A second later she emerged, waving back but without raising her palm up into the air the way people normally do. Instead, her hand made a sort of horizontal movement at waist level, awkward even from a distance. Then she walked slowly—hesitantly, Lev thought—up the pathway.
“Come in!” he said, gesturing her into the house.
Smiling faintly, she obeyed. But once he had closed the door, the smile slid off her face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “You look—”
“I lied.”
“What?”
“Before. When I was here. I lied to you.”
Lev didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“I told you I hadn’t seen your sister since the funeral.”
“You . . .”
“I did see her, yes.” Val’s cheeks were flushed—from cold, nerves, or wine, Lev couldn’t tell. “She was working at this café, not far from where I live, and I walked in one day and I saw her. I went up to talk to her, but she . . .”
“She what?”
“She saw me coming, and she ran into the back.”
Lev’s head was spinning. “But—then—how do you know she even recognized you?”
“I know,” Val murmured. “I just thought, you know, I just thought I should tell you. It didn’t feel right . . . lying to you.” But even now that she’d told the truth she didn’t look relieved.
“Wait a second,” he said. “You said she was working at a café? Which one? Do you remember the name of it? Because maybe I could go and find—”
“She doesn’t work there anymore.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I went back. I went back a few times, looking for her. In the end I even asked the girl who worked there, but she said your sister stopped coming to work a while ago.”
“Oh.” He sighed and turned his back to her, blinking into the darkness of the house.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He took a deep breath. “It’s not your fault.” When he’d swallowed the lump in his throat, he turned back to face her. She was looking down the hall toward the study, where a strip of lamplight shone out from the door. “That’s my dad’s study. Would you like to see it?”
Val shrugged, but her eyes lit up, giving her away.
When they entered the room, her jaw dropped and Lev smiled apologetically. “It’s really chaotic, I know. He was never very good at keeping things organized.”
Val didn’t answer. Instead, she wandered around the room, taking in bookcase after bookcase. Then she stopped, tilted her head sideways, stepped backward, squinted at the books, stepped forward again, squinted at the books, and stopped again, her face beaming.
Lev came up beside her. “What is it?”
“It’s just—wow,” she said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“Um. What is?”
“The books. The way they’re arranged.”
“But—they’re not arranged. It’s just a big mess in here. I mean they’re not organized alphabetically, or thematically, or—”
“Sometimes, if you look closely, there’s an invisible map hidden beneath the surface of things,” Val said. “Don’t you see it? They’re arranged geographically.”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him after her (there was that tingling at the base of his spine again), pointing toward first this shelf, then that.
“See? Here, for example. King Lear. That’s in England, right? But then, if you look one shelf up—north—yes, yes, here, you see, here’s Macbeth, the Scottish play. And then—go southeast—and now here’s Les Misérables, Les Trois Mousquetaires—voilà, all French, you see? Go east again, and here you have Nietzsche, Schopenhauer—Germany!”
And suddenly Lev did see. The whole study was a shining replica of the world, mapping the contours of countries and oceans and islands with books so precisely that, glancing around the room, he had the dizzy feeling that he was compassing the globe.
“But . . . why would someone do this?” he asked weakly.
“Because!” Val laughed. “Your father, you know, he always wanted to travel the world, to see it all! But then your sister was born, and you, and then when your mother—well, you know, when it became just the three of you—he realized that he couldn’t do a major trip like that. But—no, don’t look like that—it’s okay! Believe me, he didn’t even mind. You see? He found his own way to travel. As he did in so many things.” Her voice vibrated with admiration.
She seemed to be waiting for Lev to say something, but he was silent. He had been coming into this room for twenty years, and in all that time he had seen nothing in these books but chaos. Now a stranger swooped in and—in one second flat—she managed to see straight through to the secret order hidden within them.
She turned from the books to face him, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, and a sudden insight flashed inside him. Her tone when she talked of his father. More than admiration. So. Not really a stranger after all.
The moment Lev stepped outside the next day, he heard Glassman call him from the window.
“Boychick! Lev, come up here! There is something I want you to hear.”
Lev took the stairs up to the bedroom two at a time, feeling worried about Mrs. Glassman and the possible use of his father’s pills, and guilty that he’d let himself be distracted by Val.
When he entered, he found Glassman sitting once again at his wife’s side, his back to the door. This time, instead of waving Lev into the chair, he waved him onto the other side of the bed, where, at his urging, Lev perched uncomfortably.
“Mr. Glassman, I—”
“Listen,” Glassman instructed him hoarsely. “I want you to listen to her heart.”
Lev blinked. The old man waved him closer to the ancient woman, her face now deathly pale, her breathing troubled. And so, leaning over, Lev pressed his ear to her chest.
He heard . . . nothing.
No, not nothing.
A tinny, rattling emptiness. An absence so profound, it was almost a presence.
And suddenly he was eleven years old. Again he was wading through the peculiar weight, the muffled heaviness, of the air in the Glassman house. Again he was wondering how come Mr. and Mrs. Glassman’s conversations could never be heard filtering out through their open windows, despite how close-set the Glassman and Meyer houses were. And now, sitting beside the old man and his wife, he realized that not a single word had ever passed between them in his presence. Mrs. Glassman had never addressed Mr. Glassman directly, only Lev. She had lured him to her kitchen—the smell of freshly baked rugelach was a powerful, ubiquitous draw—with a kind of intensity he had thought was friendliness but now saw was desperation.
And Mr. Glassman, too—hadn’t he always called Lev in when there was something he wanted to communicate to his wife? Hadn’t he always communicated those things to her through Lev? Wasn’t that what he was doing right now?
“Lev,” Glassman croaked. “You understand now, yes? You remember the story? You see why I have to have your father’s pills? They will push the words from my heart. She has already emptied hers . . . and there is not much time . . .” His head fell into his hands. “All those years she knew, she knew to spend her
words freely, to talk to herself and you and everyone else, but I guarded mine and now she will leave and I will have to stay . . . but I cannot, I cannot . . .”
A clammy nervousness overtook Lev’s body. That was why the old man had stared at the pill bottle with such desire in his eyes. The pills were for him, not for her. He needed to catch up to her, to get all his words out in time, to die together with his wife.
Lev knew what the Torah had to say about such things. He knew, too, what the rabbis in his yeshiva would have to say. And yet, he asked himself as he gently squeezed Glassman’s shoulder and left him in the shadowy room, what kind of mensch, what kind of God-fearing boy, would it make him if he denied a man the right to cleave unto his wife, even in death?
Standing under a gunmetal sky, leaning against the cold bark of Katz’s tin can tree, Alex opened Samara’s third letter and his chest seized up with pure, unadulterated fear. Of all her strange dispatches, this one was the strangest. And the shortest. The use of mathematical notation, the & and = and ∞ and ± that normally would have delighted him, only heightened his panic now. The words in between were fragmented, scattered, nonsensical—she was eating nothing “except paper”?!—and one word was glaringly absent: I.
He and Glassman had just finished studying Binah-Chochmah, so he knew that Samara was moving toward Ayin, the vessel of ego-annihilation, a stage at which communication with others became difficult if not impossible. The idea of Samara detached from him, dangling in some lofty realm where he wouldn’t be able to reach or save her, terrified Alex. He stood under the tree, furling and unfurling the bird’s white wings.
“Alex!”
He stuffed the letter into his pocket just as Katz came bounding up the path.
“Hello, Mr. Katz,” he said in his best approximation of nonchalance. “How are you?”
“Thank God, thank God,” Katz replied, smiling as he struggled to catch his breath. “Your friend Lev—have you seen him recently?”
“No,” Alex admitted with a twinge of guilt. He’d been so preoccupied with Samara’s letters and Glassman’s lessons that he hadn’t been a very good friend lately. “Why do you ask?”
“He is acting . . .” Katz paused. “Not himself.”
“What do you mean?”
“He seems . . . disturbed. Something is bothering him.”
“How do you know? Did he say something? Do something?”
Katz shrugged. “Go to him” was all he added. “Or call. You should call.”
But the bird in Alex’s pocket flapped its wings. He needed to show Samara’s letter to Glassman right now.
As he turned away, Katz grabbed him by the shoulder and forced him back around, issuing an urgent whisper. “Please call.”
Alex froze. For a second he stared into those wild, crazy eyes. The bird fluttered its wings again. Shaken, he stammered, “I will,” and hurried down the street.
When Glassman opened the door, he took one look at Alex and didn’t even mention that Friday wasn’t their usual day for lessons. “What is it?” he asked as they reached the bedroom.
Alex pulled the bird from his pocket and waited while Glassman squinted at it. After a minute, the old man put the letter on the desk and sat down heavily. He placed a hand over his eyes, which scared Alex even more. “Is she in danger?”
Glassman squared his shoulders and said vaguely, “It is not always so easy to tell who is in danger and who is safe.”
Alex had to work to keep the irritation out of his voice. “I only care if Samara is safe. And we’re on Ayin now anyway, right? So, if you’re not busy . . .”
Glassman sighed and opened the book on the desk.
But the deeper they delved, the deeper Alex’s concern grew. “What’s all this about a person becoming akin to nothing? That makes it sound permanent.”
“Yes,” Glassman said. “It can be.”
Alex stared.
“Sometimes,” Glassman said, “it is difficult for the mind to rejoin the body, once the two have separated. What goes up”—he raised his palms—“does not always come down.”
“What do you mean? You mean she might never go back to normal?”
“It is hard to predict. If she has grounded herself, she may be able to come down.” Glassman sighed. “What you must understand is that the person, at a certain point, is no longer in control. When she decides to climb the Tree, at first, yes, it is by choice. But after a while . . .”
“After a while, what?”
“The climb—it starts to take on a power of its own. In the person’s mind, you see? Because once the person gives herself to this climb, once she sacrifices everything for it, it is no longer just she who is struggling to go up. The Tree itself is pulling her up . . . And it will keep on pulling her and pulling her, even if . . .”
“Even if what, what?”
“Even if she no longer wants to go.”
“But that’s—what you’re saying is—you’re saying she can be forced, psychologically, to keep climbing against her will?”
A strangled noise came from the doorway.
With a sick feeling in his stomach, Alex whipped around—and saw Lev.
It was impossible to tell how long he’d been standing there. But it had been long enough. Lev’s face was livid, his fists clenched. What was that in his hand? A pill bottle? Why was he carrying pills?
“Hello, Lev,” Glassman murmured.
Lev marched to the desk, snatched up the bird, and read the message scrawled across its wings. For a moment, the air around him seemed to crackle with electricity, as if his body were generating a private lightning storm. When he finally spoke, it was with a deathly quiet that was more terrifying than the loudest crack of thunder. “How could you keep this from me?”
“Lev, I—”
“This whole time, she’s been writing to you, she’s been climbing the Tree of Life, and you—” His voice trembled. “You’ve been hiding her letters from me?”
“I’m sorry! I’m really, really—”
Lev shook his head, one violent motion that cut into Alex like the sharpest gust of wind. “Are you crazy? Do you know how dangerous this is? It’s not safe, she’s not safe! You should have told me. I could have helped her!”
“I’m sorry! I didn’t want to bother you, you were already so worried and unhappy and this would just be one more—”
“Exactly! You knew how unhappy I was, you knew how much I wanted to hear from her! And this whole time, you just watched and—you said nothing!”
“I thought—”
“What? That you could help her more than I could? That you know her better than me? You don’t know anything about her! You think she’s in love with you? You’re so blind! Don’t you know—don’t you even see—”
Alex felt cold all over. “See what?”
Lev turned on Glassman. “And you!” he said. A look of fury passed over his face, a mixture of betrayal and hurt and anger and confusion that played out over his features and cast them, somehow, in a light of beauty.
Alex was filled with the terrible sensation of having knocked over a piece of glassware that has yet to strike ground. In that split second before it crashes into a thousand pieces, a pristine silence seems to be all that exists in the world. It was because that silence had lodged itself firmly in his throat that, when his best friend threw the pill bottle down on the desk and stormed out of the house a second later, all he could do was blink.
Lev slammed the door behind him. He paced the hall, cold fury like a hand at his back, driving him this way, then that. The framed photographs of his parents blurred in the edges of his vision as he whipped past, and that added to his fury—the sensation of looping ceaselessly between their two gravitational pulls, like some crazed planet that couldn’t decide which star to orbit.
Tears burned in his throat. How could they? His best friend and his oldest teacher. The only two people he’d thought he had left. Though he’d stopped being able to believe in God’s plan, he�
�d never stopped believing in them—their faithfulness, their good intentions toward him. But now.
He struck the tears from his eyes. He refused to be sad. He was done with sadness. Reaching into his pocket, he located the scrap of paper she’d given him. The scrap of paper with her phone number on it. He dialed and she answered on the first ring. Half an hour later, she was standing there in front of him. Val. Valérie.
He greeted her at the door with two empty wineglasses in hand. The wine was waiting for them on his father’s desk.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, smiling brightly and leading her into the study.
But instead of returning that smile, she inspected him gravely. The tips of her hair were very dark against her red woolen coat, and when she took the coat off and draped it over the chair, they stood on end, static fanning them around her face in a black halo. His pulse quickened at the sight of it.
“You’re lying,” she said. “Something is wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“But how do you know?”
“I know,” she said again, a tiny smile twinkling in the corner of her mouth, as though she was enjoying a private joke at his expense.
“Fine,” he said, turning his back to her and reaching for the wine bottle on the desk. He filled both their glasses and clinked his to hers—somewhat savagely—before bringing it to his lips and draining it.
She sipped her wine more slowly. He felt the heat of her gaze on his face. Whatever she saw there must have softened her because after a minute she said, “It’s Friday night.”
“So?”
“So it’s Friday night, and you’re a religious Jew, which means you’re not supposed to be using the phone. And yet,” she said, “you called me.”
The cold fury was pressing at his back again; it pushed the next words out of his heart, up his throat, and off his tongue in a voice that was almost a snarl. “Did my dad tell you that?”
“I’m sorry?”
