The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  Mr. Karp looked to his wife (who told him, “Don’t look at me”) to confirm that the man was speaking nonsense, wasn’t he? He had enough on his plate with his own affairs, which had lately come to include Rabbi ben Zephyr’s increasingly demanding commercial initiatives. Seldom deliberately rude, since you never knew who might be a potential client, Julius Karp thought that in this case he could make an exception.

  “The kid’s what?” he protested, turning again to his wife who perfunctorily supplied him with Bernie’s age. “Sixteen? Who’s normal at sixteen? So he sometimes drifts away to cloud cuckoo land. This is so bad?” He appealed once more to Mrs. Karp, whose blasé nod seemed to imply that narcosis was a Karp family custom.

  Mr. Murtha reminded them that, as a consequence of his condition, Bernie was also flunking out of school. It was the first his parents had heard of it.

  “What’s the matter with you?” his father sharply asked his son.

  Still marveling at the psychologist’s ability to control his quirks, Bernie was not altogether engaged in the dialogue. “I’m a dunce?” he offered reflexively.

  His father seemed to accept this as an adequate explanation, though he was aware that his son’s academic performance, never impressive, had reached its nadir since the thawing of the formerly cryonic old man. But since Rabbi Eliezer’s burgeoning fiscal empire had become (beyond the appliance emporium) Mr. Karp’s chief concern, the tzaddik was now above reproach in his mind.

  “It’s a phase,” insisted Mr. Karp. “He’ll grow out of it.”

  “That’s what he says,” replied Mr. Murtha, who, turning to share the private joke with Bernie, could no longer suppress a crescent grin that threatened to eclipse his face.

  Eager to escape, Mr. Karp conceded that some manner of professional attention was probably in order.

  BUT DR. TUNKELMAN, the family physician—the Tic Tac on his tongue failing to hide the brandy on his breath—gave Bernie a clean bill of health and pooh-poohed the idea that the boy might require psychotherapy. He assured the Karps that all the kid needed was a little more meat on his bones. Bernie was almost disappointed that they weren’t going to lock him up; he’d imagined himself chained to the wall of an asylum where paying visitors would view him on Sundays. It was an appealing image in its way, since he’d become partial of late to the notion of ascetic deprivation: Fasting, he’d decided, made him more responsive to transcendental phenomena. But at home the issue of mental imbalance, a taboo subject in polite households, was never mentioned, the prevailing attitude being that any problem if ignored long enough would simply go away. Besides, in view of his mother’s taste for sedation, the son was a regular chip off the old block. Meanwhile Bernie’s father was more distracted than usual, keeping (with the help of Mr. Grusom, his cagey accountant) the books for Rabbi ben Zephyr’s House of Enlightenment, which had recently moved to more ample quarters in a former Baptist tabernacle on a manicured knoll fringed in lilac trees. Julius Karp and Ira Grusom were working overtime to itemize the rabbi’s God-realization packages, from the economical fast-track to cosmic consciousness to the costlier but more scenic route to self-illumination.

  What had lingered most in Bernie’s mind since the family meeting with Mr. Murtha was the reference to his recent birthday (for which he’d requested a subscription to Commentary and received instead a new watch), because sixteen was three years past time for the bar mitzvah he’d never had. Suddenly he felt duty-bound to remedy the oversight. Unmissed at home, he took the hour-long bus ride downtown after school to the old Anshei Mishneh shul just off North Main Street. A rundown brick-and-mortar building flanked by vacant lots, it contained an authentic cheder Torah, a stuffy room with a coughing radiator, water-stained walls, and shelves crammed with moldering volumes of Talmud and Midrash. Acutely self-conscious at first, Bernie soon grew accustomed to seating himself at the long table, where he traced with his finger the Hebrew letters whose shapes left corresponding vapor trails in his brain. He liked poring over pages as brittle as autumn leaves while recalling the Talmudic dictum: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” The old men, often short of a tenth to make a minyan, welcomed him, inviting him to daven with them at their ma’arev prayers. A skeleton crew of old-timers fanning the dying flame of tradition in an otherwise assimilated Southern community, they made much of the serious young man come to study and pray. But while he enjoyed the liturgy, liked crowning his head with the dome of a kippah, Bernie felt himself to be a dissembler in their midst. His guilt was exacerbated by the silence he kept when he overheard complaints about the old fraud who’d set up a Kabbalah center in the suburbs, for Rabbi Eliezer had become a subject of much indignant chin-wagging among local Jews. And who, after all, was the party responsible for having unleashed on a gullible public the musty savant?

  But on the other hand, when Bernie thought about preparing for his belated bar mitzvah, Eliezer ben Zephyr was still the only adviser he cared to apply to. While his cool reception from the rebbe on his single visit to the center did not augur well for their future relations, Bernie had never developed the habit of holding a grudge. Besides, he still retained a blind belief in old Eliezer’s sagacity, and was determined to make another trip to see him in his new quarters, where they could perhaps start over from scratch.

  Then an unforeseen incident caused him to postpone the trip. It happened when, after hearing what he’d perceived as the music of the spheres over the school cafeteria’s public address, Bernie came back to himself inside a locker along an upstairs corridor. Light invaded the cramped space through a louver in the metal door that put him in mind of gills, so that he felt, due in part to the unnatural position into which his body was squeezed, that he might be inside the belly of a fish—albeit one with a Fiona Apple poster plastered to its innards. It was a peaceful notion and, done in as he was from his celestial navigation, Bernie made only a halfhearted effort to jimmy the mechanism that would have released the door from inside, had it not been locked in any case from without. Able at times to escape his own skin, he lacked the wherewithal to free himself from his present confinement, or even to bang on the interior till he was heard. Instead he adjusted his bones into a snug fetal tuck to await his discovery: Eventually caught, the fish would give up its prey. He was awakened from his brief nap when a crowbar jarred loose the padlock and the locker door sprang open, revealing the same prune-faced janitor who’d extracted him from the garbage compactor. A black man in a skullcap fashioned from a lady’s stocking, his querulous expression suggested it was more than his job was worth to have to attend to such affairs. He accepted with a brusque nod the thanks of the girl who’d apparently engaged his services, then departed, leaving her to ask Bernie, antagonistically, “How did you get in there?”

  Bernie confessed he hadn’t the least idea.

  The girl exhaled a puff of air that lifted the dark fringe of her bangs like a wave. “You’re that loser kid who’s always tuning out,” she accused, her accent bordering on a hillbilly twang.

  He saw no reason to deny it.

  “Of all the lockers in the whole damn school, why’d they have to stuff you in mine?”

  Again he was without a ready explanation. She stared at him another beat as if inspecting a rare insect, then demanded, “Well, get out!”

  He explained apologetically that he didn’t think he could move; he’d been in one position so long that his muscles had seized up. “What muscles?” she sneered, then reached into the coffin-size space, grabbed his arm, and yanked him until he tumbled onto the scuffed linoleum floor. From there he began the painful process of unfolding himself, looking up at the girl as he did so, noting that, no thanks to her makeup and scruffy attire, she was almost pretty. She wore torn jeans and a bulky, black leather jacket over a cameo-pink T-shirt, her feet (turned out like a dancer’s) shod in hooflike yellow clogs. Coltishly skinny, she’d converted a perfectly pleasing mouth into a crooked cupid’s bow with violet lip gloss, and her eyes, an aqueous jade,
were made aggressively feline by her shadowed squint. Harlequin bangs framed her forehead like a bouquet of parentheses. Her outfit was the kind some girls affected as a punkish fashion statement, though on her the clothes looked as if they might have come by their wear naturally. And while her accent typed her as working-class, the kind of poor girl who was automatically classified a slut in the high-school pecking order, her attitude dared you to classify her at all.

  Seeing that he was still having difficulty with his stiffened limbs, she took his arm again and hauled him to his feet. Bernie thanked her, registering the shock of prehensile female fingers on his flesh. Then the blood suddenly left his head and the girl had to support him once again lest he swoon, and when she removed her hands from his arm, he was a little regretful to find he could stand on his own. He waited for her to depart; she’d done her bit, shown him a kindness beyond the call that should make her feel pleased with herself—Bernie winced at his own cynical observation. Why didn’t she just walk away?

  Biting her lip as if literally chewing on a thought, she asked him—while passing students gawked at the girl who condescended to speak to Bernie Karp—in a voice just above a whisper, “So where do you go?”

  “Eh?”

  “Where do you go when, y’know, like when you go off the way you do?”

  Bernie suffered a tremor whose source was either the bowels of the earth or his own, he couldn’t have said. No one other than Mr. Murtha, who merely taunted him, had ever bothered to ask. He told himself it was intrusive; she had no right to pry; his exaltations belonged exclusively to him. But here was a girl his own age weathering the stares of her peers to inquire about his experience, and what he felt despite his best efforts to resist it was gratitude.

  “Heaven, mostly,” he replied. And there it was: the answer fluttering from his mouth like a moth he hadn’t known was trapped inside.

  “Cool.” Pronounced with the requisite nasal diphthong to rhyme with cruel, though from her it sounded a touch ironic.

  A silence ensued during which Bernie shuffled in place, wondering if she, too, were only mocking him. Feeling altogether too vulnerable, he was ready to walk away from her but found that he lacked the will; maybe the janitor would have to pry him loose again. Accustomed as he was to being the butt of jokes and abuse, what appeared on the surface as honest curiosity unnerved him. Yet he, who considered escape his signature feat, was helpless to devise a convenient means of extricating himself from her gaze.

  “So what’s it like?” she wanted to know, and Bernie felt as if he were being drawn out onto thin ice.

  “I can’t really describe it,” he stammered.

  She frowned. “What do you mean? You’re not allowed to describe it or you don’t have the words?”

  “Whatever,” was his witless reply.

  Her fierce squint returned. “Then what’s the point of it? What’s the point of going where you go?”

  This sounded downright combative. What’s the point of breathing? he wondered. What’s the point of being born? “What’s the point of anything?” he answered, marveling at the hint of anger in his tone. Did a thing have to be described to make it worth doing? Though he knew that his irritation at her for asking was only the corollary to his irritation with himself for his inability to explain; and it frustrated him to the point of tears that in the face of the great adventure of his previously uneventful life, he remained tongue-tied. Then the bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch period, and Bernie took the opportunity to say so long forever to the girl.

  But she was dawdling there in the glass brick vestibule amid the after-school stampede, the students dispersing toward their various clubs, cliques, and satanic cabals. Pretending not to see the girl, Bernie sloped toward the exit and nearly reached the threshold, where she managed as if by magic to plant herself athwart his path.

  “So who do you read?” she asked, adjusting the bulging book bag slung over her shoulder.

  He paused, looked askance at her, then recited a catalogue of immortals: “Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Nachman of Bratslav…” Thinking, That should shut her up; though why should he want to shut her up?

  Digesting the names without blinking, she inquired, “Do you ever read Herman Hessie?”

  He was unfamiliar with the author.

  “What about Carlos Castaneder or Autobiography of a Yogi?”

  “I can’t say that I have.”

  “They write a lot about altered states of consciousness.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah.”

  There followed an awkward silence the complement to the one they’d shared earlier that day, during which Bernie found himself wishing—though not as hard as he might—for another bell to ring. Still he could think of nothing to say.

  “You ever took LSD?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “You?”

  “Oncet.” It was a syllable from a foreign tongue. “I looked in a mirror and saw cottonmouths crawling out my eyes and nose, which is like pretty cliché. I can do better than that without drugs.” She sniffed disdainfully and Bernie involuntarily sniffed along with her. Who was this person, anyway, with her pudding-bowl hairdo and tomboyish manner, the green eyes that looked, despite the heavy hand with which she laid on her mascara, as if their severity were in the service of resisting tears? Her single earring was a silver ankh dangling from a safety pin, and Bernie wondered if her body bore strange markings in secluded places. He felt as embarrassed for her sake as for his own: since whatever her reputation, it would be compromised from now on for having been seen in conversation with the major laughingstock of Tishimingo High.

  But anxious as he was to part company with her, he was equally aware of the fact that she had waited for him; no one had ever waited for him before. He couldn’t linger, though; there was the bus to catch to the downtown shul, an afternoon ritual on its way to becoming routine. After a day in uncongenial classrooms, never mind Dumpsters and lockers, he was eager to return to the pages whose antique code he hoped, with the help of broken-backed grammars, soon to crack. Then the words, once he’d determined their meanings, would acquire the weight of the thing itself, words that didn’t so much denote as embody whatever they spelled. He was about to make his excuses—he had places to go—when she volunteered her name.

  “I’m Lou.” Her expression challenged him to make a remark. “It’s short for Lou Ella which sounds like Louella but it’s really Lou Ella.” Bernie was perplexed. “Two names,” she explained, her humorless lack of inflection coming on as provocative.

  “Right,” he said. Then to make up for not having asked, he asked her, “Lou Ella what?”

  “Tuohy.”

  He tried to wipe from his face the look that had congealed there—too late. “Excuse me?”

  “Sounds like somebody spit, don’t it? It’s a real trailer trash name because, hey, trailer trash c’est moi.” Again she seemed to be waiting in defiance for some remark. When it didn’t come, she added as if by way of vindication, “It’s Irish. The name, it’s Irish.”

  “Uh-huh,” was all Bernie could manage, thinking: This is getting out of hand. Here he was being shmoozed by a creature (make that critter) from a South he knew only from hearsay, the unreconstructed South of tarpaper shacks and cotton-eyed sharecroppers with teeth like potsherds. She seemed a misfit even in a school full of every variety of freak, but she was also a girl. She had legs, however gangly, and breasts, if barely developed, and no doubt what the rebbe would have called oyse mokem, a you-know-what. What’s more, she dared to talk to him even as she dared him to talk to her. Then before he could decide which of them was the more jeopardized by their mutual commerce, mirabile dictu, they were walking together into the cloudy February afternoon.

  IF SHE’D BEEN homely maybe he wouldn’t have felt so squeamish. But pretty trumped trailer trash, and he knew that if she’d wanted she could have run with the semipopulars; in her case outcast was something she seemed to have elected to be. As it
was, while Bernie never sought her out, she continued to turn up, and though he told himself she was a nuisance who distracted him from more pressing concerns, he was flattered by the attention she paid him. During lunch in the turd-green Nutrition Center where he was used to sitting alone over half-eaten fishsticks, or after school in front of the flagpole from which a disturbed student had once hanged himself, she would corner him. Usually she was on her own, though once or twice he’d seen her peel away from girls even more stateless than herself to catch up with him. She had followed him to the bus stop and on one occasion, when he’d foregone his afternoon trip to the downtown shul (on her account?), part-way home. He thought about telling her flatly to leave him alone, then thought better of it when he realized that he would miss her; yet he never felt quite at ease in her company. After their initial conversation concerning his trances the subject was never broached again, though Bernie knew it was always on her mind. Why else would she hang around? He could feel it in her vigilance: She wanted to be there when he lapsed into rapture again. But when they spoke, always sporadically—for neither seemed able to find a topic beyond the elephant in their midst—they talked mostly about neutral matters: the pathologies of certain teachers and classmates, the utter pointlessness of going to school.

  She never smiled, though once, acting on an erratic impulse, Bernie had tried to make her. “Two cannibals are eating a clown,” offering the single joke in his repertoire. “One says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’” Nothing, not a snicker, though his delivery wasn’t all it might have been; still, she needn’t have looked at him as if he’d passed gas. Occasionally she would volunteer some unsolicited piece of information about her past: She had come to Memphis from the Arkansas Ozarks when her mother landed a clerical job at Federal Express that had somehow fizzled, leaving her consigned thereafter to manual labor. She had no idea where her worthless-as-tits-on-a-boar father was, nor any interest in finding out. She missed the mountains and the piney woods, though she liked living close to the Wolf River, a minor tributary of the Mississippi which to Bernie’s mind was little more than a glorified drainage ditch. She didn’t actually live in a trailer, though their tract house—a shotgun affair in a treeless subdivision the other side of the interstate—was no more commodious than a double-wide. It was largely empty but for some sticks of rented furniture and the teething toys of her baby sister, Sue Lily, whom she adored and cared for while her mother was at work. Her room she described as if it existed in another dimension: how it was littered with books you had to pick your way through like “the fallen bricks of Jericho.” (She could be fanciful.) She recited their titles: Women Who Run with Wolves, The Celestine Prophecy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Mists of Avalon; she mentioned the divas she admired: Lotte Lenya, Avril LaVigne; the journal she kept; the poetry of Rumi and Arthur Rimbaud. Then, as casually as she might have asked him the time of day, she invited him to come see her room for himself. But that was later on.