Jacob's Ladder

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  On the first day of spring, when the air was saturated with moisture and the sun couldn’t penetrate the heavy curtain of mist, Yurik was in the so-called Shooting Gallery, where a charming, jovial dealer named Spike had agreed to meet him. The Shooting Gallery was a place where drug addicts could get a fix inconspicuously, off the streets, without getting busted.

  He had agreed to meet Spike at two, but it was already four and Spike hadn’t turned up. Yurik started to get anxious. The landlady of the apartment, who was a very young girl, was pallid as death; people paid her for the use of this shelter for drugs. She hadn’t left the house for a long time; she couldn’t even eat anymore. A guy lying on a mattress handed her an ampoule—containing not what she needed, but something similar. Everything unfolded like a slow-motion movie. She spent a long time trying to puncture her arm with her shaking hand, sobbing and gasping, and finally ended up shooting up in a vein in her hand—there were hardly any others left to choose from. A minute later, she slumped over, her eyes rolling back in her head slowly. She had overdosed.

  Just then, Spike appeared. He saw the girl lying in a heap and felt her pulse; it registered as only the faintest thread. He picked the girl up, set her on her feet, and ordered Yurik to walk her around the room. He himself ran out to score some cocaine to add to the other stuff he had on him.

  Yurik tried to lead her around the room, but she could hardly walk. She dragged her scrawny legs across the dirty floor, like a limp rag doll in his grip. They walked, or shuffled, in this way for twenty minutes, and then for twenty more. Yurik forgot that Mickey was waiting for him. He was consumed by only one thought: was the girl still alive, or was he dragging around a barely living corpse?

  Spike came back. Yurik thrust the girl at him, and grabbed the dose for Mickey, saying he couldn’t stay a minute longer—Mickey was waiting.

  Yurik never learned whether Spike had been able to bring the girl around. When he got back to Chelsea, Mickey was sleeping peacefully. Yurik didn’t try to wake him. Mickey slept for another hour, then another. When Yurik touched him again, Mickey was not yet cold, but he was no longer alive. His face looked peaceful, his expression a bit mocking, and Yurik, after a moment of panic, felt a surge of calm acceptance, and relief. He grabbed his guitar and started playing, singing the words he still remembered from his youthful Beatlemania.

  First he sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” then “She’s Leaving Home.” Suddenly he remembered that he had sung these songs years ago, when his grandmother Amalia died and he was still a boy. How long ago it seemed! It was almost as though this had happened not to him but to someone else. And he felt a deep sense of loss, and mourning.

  The entire New York music community came to say goodbye to Mickey. Everyone who was still alive, in any case. AIDS had reaped a rich harvest during those years, and drug addicts and gays were in the front ranks of its victims. Mickey’s mother and sisters came to see the departed—a poor Puerto Rican family that had turned its back on him thirty years before. They showed up hoping that they would inherit something, but there wasn’t anything to inherit. There was no money, and they didn’t know that the apartment belonged almost wholly to the bank. They thought Yurik was Mickey’s partner, but Yurik didn’t care. Even if it had been true, it wouldn’t have damaged his reputation in any way.

  It so happened that Yurik got the most valuable inheritance of all from Mickey: his various friends. They were world-famous musicians, and street musicians, famous only on a single street corner or square in the Village, or at a particular subway station; they were DJs, producers, owners of recording studios, and the countless others who drive the wheels of the vast music industry. For the last year of his life, Mickey had seemed to want to vouchsafe all the people who visited him into Yurik’s keeping, and at the funeral, which many of them attended, they greeted him and offered their condolences.

  After the funeral, they went to a private club in Chelsea, where they drank and jammed the night away together—greats and nobodies alike. The slightly acrimonious, sardonic Mickey, a fan of folk and world music, would have been pleased. His Puerto Rican kin beat out the backbone of the music with their ridged wooden güiro, an elderly Indian man produced cosmic twangs and trills on the sitar, and a swarthy hunchback, most likely an extraterrestrial, drew forth psychedelic sounds from a wind instrument that resembled a sheaf of pipes, both diminutive and large. Yurik played, too, his own composition, which he had been working on for the entire year. In memory of Mickey.

  For it was Mickey, who had lived so easily, so lightly, and had died so painfully, who had instilled in Yurik the consciousness that, in the highest sense, music had no authorship. It was a gift, and an ability to read the divine book, to transpose a universal sound that needed no notation into the language of paltry musical instruments, invented for the convenience and purpose of transmitting supremely important messages—messages that could not be conveyed in any other way … And the best ears, the best hearts and souls of this spiritual dimension called music, listened to Yurik’s song that evening. And heard it.

  That day marked another change of direction in Yurik’s life. He received several tempting offers, and chose the one most interesting to him, though least promising from a financial perspective—an almost unknown band that performed funk covers from the seventies.

  They rehearsed on 125th Street, on the outskirts of what was then still the “ghetto”—where, at the subway exit, a stream of Columbia University students headed in one direction, and a stream of African Americans headed in the other. The demarcation line was both visible and palpable.

  Yurik detested racism, and white racists, but he and another guitarist, a Japanese guy they called Suzuki, agreed to be met at the subway entrance by Abe Carter. In this neighborhood, racism demonstrated its lesser-known reverse side. Abe, their black bass player, was their protector and guide into the interior, a rough neighborhood where Chuche, their singer, and Pete, their drummer, were waiting for them in a dilapidated apartment with boarded-up windows. After the rehearsal, Abe accompanied them back to the subway; there was less chance of their being jumped if they were to cross paths with a local gang.

  They rehearsed for three months, almost daily, and at the end of it achieved a truly smooth, tight repertoire, not just a collection of random numbers. Yurik was giddy with delight, and felt like an athlete before the deciding match.

  On the evening before a gig that had already been announced, their singer was killed in a street brawl. It was like a plane crashing during takeoff. They spent a week in that wreck of an apartment, never leaving it, saying goodbye to Chuche: they drank, smoked, shot up, played … Yurik was badly shaken. First Mickey, and now Chuche … Death was hovering nearby, as though wanting to get to know him. The drugs these guys used were different, more potent and lethal. On the eighth day after the funeral, when days and nights in the decaying apartment had all blended into a single stream of swirling darkness and bright color, Yurik came to his senses and felt a rush of fear. He grabbed his guitar and went to Long Island—to save his own skin.

  They didn’t expect him. Martha was almost reconciled to the fact that the boy had gotten out of hand; but, from an American perspective, he was already grown up. His arrival was inconvenient. Another guest was staying in Yurik’s room: Grisha, visiting from Israel. Yurik collapsed on the leather sofa in the living room, without even bothering to take a shower, and slept for nearly twenty-four hours. Before falling asleep, he managed to tell Martha that his friend had been killed.

  “A trauma, yet another trauma,” Martha said to Vitya, reminding him of the previous tragedy of Mickey. Vitya agreed absentmindedly.

  Grisha, who had previously been very stout, had slimmed down over the last ten years and recovered his youthful slenderness. He was the father of six children of various ages. “Trauma,” he said, “is an invention of that most unreliable of sciences—psychology. Everything is a matter of biochemistry and life experience.”

  Though Martha
had worked in administration at the university for many years, she had been trained as a psychologist, and was surprised: why unreliable?

  By now, Grisha had the answers to every possible question. “Because it’s not even science! It’s a delusion. There are precise, stable phenomena or systems: biochemistry, which is obvious, and not yet thoroughly understood, and the programmed behavior that corresponds to it. What does trauma have to do with it?” He ended by saying peevishly, “Everyone went crazy over Freud. Some sort of global delusion. Mystification at its worst … The chemistry of life, that’s what it’s all about.”

  Yurik was lying facedown. His tired hair, which hadn’t been trimmed for more than two years, spread over the pillow in dank, heavy clumps. The clothes he had shed lay in a pile on the floor and stank. Martha gathered up the smelly heap and took it away to launder it. Before putting the clothes in the washing machine, she turned the pockets inside out. When she found two syringes in the pocket of his jacket, she recoiled in horror.

  For two whole days and nights, with just a few short breaks, the conversation between Grisha and Vitya continued. They hadn’t seen each other in three years, and corresponded infrequently; now Grisha was inundating him with what seemed to Vitya to be pure balderdash, in which he saw no meaning or logic. Grisha had played too big a role in his life for Vitya to be able to dismiss him out of hand, however. It was because of Grisha that Vitya had been able to relinquish his world of abstract dimensions and sets and devote himself to more concrete tasks, and he was happy and grateful for this. Now Grisha was the one spewing all kinds of abstract nonsense that was completely beyond the bounds of anything Vitya considered to be science.

  “Vitya! There’s one science. There’s only one science in the world. We have to reject all the old thinking and retain only three disciplines: mathematics, biology, and physics. And the name of this new science is biomathics.”

  Vitya looked sleepily at the slightly agitated Grisha. What did he mean by biomathics? Why did he want to throw all the sciences overboard?

  “Our world is created by God according to a single plan. The first pages of the Torah offer a modern scientific description of the origin of the universe, the earth, plants, animals, and man. It was not only the Torah that the Creator dictated. All life in the universe, on our planet, is the unfolding of a single grand text. We are all merely trying to decode it and read it. And the only purpose of man is to read this message.”

  “Grisha, these are just very generalized claims. They have no immediate bearing on human activity. They don’t contain any revelations or discoveries. What’s the main point, the essence of it?” Vitya said, trying to bring his friend back down to earth.

  Grisha had already gotten a lot of flak about these very notions from their brethren in the scientific community, which Vitya could not have known. He had come seeking support from his friend, thinking perhaps he could recruit Vitya to his cause. By now Vitya had become the leading expert on the computer modeling of cells. In Grisha’s mind, the two new tables of the covenant were the Text and the Living Computer.

  Grisha sighed. The crowd, as everyone knows, does not heed prophets. They either mock them or stone them. In Israel above all. Especially in Israel! During recent years, he had expended so much energy wrestling with and trying to master the Text that he thought to be pre-eminent in the world, the Torah, and had come to the conviction that it was only a digest, just commentaries and references to an even more important Text. Grisha found no sympathy for his convictions among his fellow scientists, nor among his religious teachers. Only one mad Kabbalist from Tsfat, the head of a nonexistent school, welcomed Grisha’s ideas. In Vitya, who was not in the mainstream of the scientific establishment, which Grisha viewed as science fiction, Grisha had expected to find a sympathetic listener at the very least. Instead, he encountered only perplexity. But he still didn’t abandon hope.

  “The thing is, Vitya, that the primary alphabet of the Text was discovered only in 1953—that was the four-letter code of DNA. Even Watson and Crick didn’t realize they had discovered the ability to read the Divine Text. They had the most convincing argument in favor of the existence of God!” Grisha blushed deeply, raised his gaunt hands in the air like a street preacher, and exclaimed convulsively: “A conclusive argument! The ultimate argument. And they didn’t see it!”

  “Wait a minute,” Vitya said, trying to pacify the overwrought Grisha. “Maybe Watson and Crick never needed this concept of a Creator? Actually, I never needed it myself. Not in the least.”

  “Vitya! You wait a minute! Do you really not see that our world was created by the One and Only God according to a unified plan?” Grisha blurted out, now even more incensed.

  Vitya was sitting in a deep armchair, his knees nearly level with his chin. Yurik, one leg lolling on the floor, slept on the divan next to him, and Grisha circled around in the small space between the coffee table and another armchair, piled high with freshly laundered sheets that Martha hadn’t had time to fold and put away in the cupboard.

  “For seven years, I’ve been studying the Torah. I’m standing on the threshold of a discovery. Perhaps I’m one of the very few who are in a position to be able to compare modern discoveries in biology—the Science of Life—with the text of the Torah, which represents a paraphrasing of the genetic code of DNA. Today I’m convinced that many of the claims of the Five Books of Moses allow for direct experimental examination by modern scientific methods.”

  “Hold it,” Vitya broke in impatiently. “I usually start from what I know. I can’t follow your logic here. You’re talking about things I know nothing about. I’m completely in the dark here. I’ve never in my life read any religious texts, and I have no desire to. Never have. You probably need to talk to Martha about this; she’s a believer.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean!” Grisha almost shouted. “This is one of the most important ideas. Today, at the end of the twentieth century, through the evolution of human consciousness, the speculative thought of the ancient philosophers coincides with religious thought. We are at a unique point in the evolutionary history of humanity. It is a new era. All the discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, and science in the highest sense have no authorship!”

  His final desperate yelp awakened Yurik, who couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. But the words, sounded by a rather shrill male voice, seemed to be meant for him in particular.

  “There is a Divine Text! And human evolution has only one goal, one task—to lead unfinished, incomplete Creation to a state in which man learns how to read it. All the alphabets, all the signs, all the numbers, music notes, et cetera, were invented by us so we might carry out this task.”

  Yurik dragged his head off the pillow. The shape of a button was imprinted on his cheek. The first thing he saw was an unfamiliar Jew in a yarmulke, with a graying, turned-up beard and a hand upraised.

  Man, I’m tripping, he thought. When he noticed his father sitting behind the seething Jew, with a sullen look on his face, he was reassured. Okay, then, I’m not tripping.

  Yurik propped himself up on his elbow, and sat up. The Jew stared at him in surprise. Grisha, who had already spent about twelve hours in this living room, had not noticed Yurik sleeping nearby on the couch.

  “My son, Yurik,” Vitya said dryly.

  “My God! That’s Nora’s son?”

  “Well, partly mine, too.”

  “Amazing,” he said. “So you’re here in the States, too? You’re the spitting image of Vitya. No, no, you really look just like Nora. And I’m Grisha Lieber. I went to high school with your parents. Have they told you anything about me?”

  Yurik suddenly felt good.

  “I liked what you were saying just now about authorship,” he said. “I also think that there’s no real authorship. Music exists somewhere in the heavenly spheres, and a musician’s job is to hear it and write it down. But since I’m a jazz musician, I know how much of the music stays out there, untranscribed, and
lives only during the moments of improvisation.”

  Grisha was very glad to have received this unexpected moral support.

  “Don’t worry, it’s in a secure repository. Everything has been written down. You see, you see, Vitya, your son immediately grasped what I’m talking about! The world is a book that we only learn to read letter by letter. We try, with the help of our alphabets, rudimentary sign systems, to read texts of enormous complexity, which exist beyond the limits of our own consciousness. Take Plato!”

  At this point, Vitya, who hadn’t read a word of Plato since the day he was born, lost all patience and shouted: “Martha! How’s the dinner coming along?”

  Grisha stopped importuning Vitya; he had found a marvelous listener in Yurik. He laid out his entire theory to him, offering Yurik a whole slew of new information—for the most part, all of it from the high-school curriculum. The school textbooks were dull, however, and the knowledge they contained was completely at odds with the things Yurik was interested in. So, recognizing that he had found an avid listener in Yurik, for three whole days—with breaks only for meals and a bit of shut-eye, right up to the moment he left—Grisha told Yurik, who was stunned by the plethora of information, thrilling things at which he could only marvel.

  Beginning with the Law of Correspondences—the universe, the cell, and the atom are all constructed according to the same principle, “As above, so below; as below, so above”—advancing to the rhythmical character of the natural processes, from the rotation of the planets to the respiratory, circulatory, and other rhythms of the human organism, Grisha led him to the notion of informational energy and formulated the First Law of Thermodynamics.

  “Let me remind you,” Grisha said, in a voice slightly hoarse from his nonstop monologue, “that Lord Kelvin, in the middle of the last century, expressed the notion that the Creator, when he created the world, endowed it with an inexhaustible store of energy, that this divine gift would exist for all eternity. But he couldn’t be more wrong!”