by Steve Stern
I was riding someone’s broad back through the inferno, gliding out of the Castle and into the street, where I half expected my conveyance to take to the sky. Instead, I was gently set down coughing and sputtering onto the curb, where I proceeded to swallow great gulps of air in an effort to displace the smoke in my lungs. Wiping my eyes with my fists, I turned in time to glimpse my rescuer—shoulders stretching the seams of a peasant shirt, a neck as thick as his shaven head—disappearing again into the Gehenna of the icehouse. After some minutes of throbbing anticipation I watched him reemerge, having apparently duplicated himself; for he was accompanied by his identical twin, the two of them straining under the burden of the scorched and dripping cedar casket. They set it down with a weighty thud on the pavement beside me, as from my slump I pointed with a cauterized finger toward the burning building.
“My papa,” I mouthed, and the stocky pair exchanged puzzled glances. Then they turned back toward the Castle just as a tremendous explosion rippled the surface of Canal Street like a beaten rug. A black cloud the shape of a giant cauliflower with a fiery stalk rose from the wreckage of the icehouse and merged with the sunrise over the river to the east. I leaned against the casket, pressing my cheek to its dampness, inhaling its mildewy odor as I sheltered from the hail of rubble. In the distance the sirens, whistles, and bells drew closer, sounding like a parade that heralds the end of the world…
2001.
…read Bernie to Lou Ella, as they sat in the crotch of a live oak in the botanical gardens or over a bowl of cobbler in a booth at the Dixie Café—while she assured him that, notwithstanding the cannibals, Ku Kluxers, and motherfuckers among her own relations, his family had a lot to answer for. Bernie, for whom his great-grandfather’s burning alive was also news, was inclined to agree; and the closer they came to the end of Ruby’s journal, the more he felt that answer should come from him. But not yet, not yet; there was more of the story left to read, and Lou Ella urged him to continue. She clearly cherished the time they spent tracing the history of the Family Karp’s peregrinations while she and Bernie themselves peregrinated about the city of Memphis seeking out the scruffier corners—abandoned recording studios and heartbreak hotels—where a sanitized present had yet to laminate the past. Both he and the girl were conscious of enjoying an interlude. It was a period during which Bernie Karp, energized by his affection for Lou, his almost lover, and by extension for everything else on earth, was changing in discernible ways. For one thing, he was no longer satisfied with the visionary journeys that now seemed to him so selfish and self-absorbed. Sure, it was nice to become one with the Godhead and all that, but in the end, as the sages said, “Life is with people,” and if you couldn’t take anyone with you, what was the good of leaving your body at all? That said, Bernie had no clear idea of what was next in store for him, though whatever it was he knew it would involve taking as Lou said “the bull by the pizzle.” Still, while Lou Ella had been instrumental in persuading him that he shouldn’t miss out on the experience of dwelling on earth, herself a prey to forebodings, she now campaigned actively to postpone whatever was coming.
In the meantime the world around them had begun to catch up with Lou Ella’s bleak assessments of its status. While Bernie might command in his flights an aerial view of history, Lou had her own brand of second sight and seemed not at all surprised when the world began to show signs of being in its final days. It was an attitude in keeping with her Pentecostal background, though she judged the rabid voices from that quarter as themselves material signs that the end was at hand. She was a complicated girl, at odds with her own fatalism, who seemed to take for granted the toppling of the towers by terrorists in New York City and the nation’s berserk response; she anticipated the thirst for vengeance that would fan the flames of an already smoldering planet, presaging a universal conflagration. In the name of protecting the homefront, faceless bureaucracies had overnight rolled back liberties to a degree that constituted a shadow police state, and the subsequent paranoid atmosphere left citizens unable to distinguish between real and imagined threats. There was also a crackdown on illegal aliens which, if anyone bothered to notice, the formerly frozen rabbi happened to be. Not that the current climate had put a damper on his enterprise; on the contrary, as fear gave a healthy fillip to the quest for spiritual solace, the times proved especially favorable for Rabbi ben Zephyr’s project. Citizens of the Mid-South flocked to the New House of Enlightenment in unprecedented numbers, and announcements in the papers, always interested in the rabbi’s proceedings, trumpeted his plans to franchise his ministry worldwide. Naturally, the more publicity he received, the more voices were raised in dissent of his methods. Aside from the cautionary bromides of the clergy and the usual canards regarding the Elders of Zion, there were those who attributed cultish tactics to Rabbi ben Zephyr’s community of disciples; there were charges by professed “escapees” from his center that the rabbi and his followers were guilty of coercion, brainwashing, and gross sexual misconduct. Nor did it help matters that the Boibiczer Prodigy had recently been heard making extravagant claims from his pulpit, including the not-so-veiled suggestion that he was, if not the Messiah himself, then at least a harbinger of same. All of which made its way into the local papers, invested as they were in keeping his controversy alive. Still, his defenders remained in the majority, always more ardent in singing their rebbe’s praises than his detractors were in citing his imperfections.
They quoted from the official tracts and testimonials disseminated by the House of Enlightenment, ghostwritten by Bernie’s father’s accountant-turned-publicist, the versatile Mr. Grusom. Then there was the rabbi’s own memoir, which you could now find on sale in chain stores and airport newsstands and which stood to become a classic of inspirational literature in the vein of The Prophet or Autobiography of a Yogi. Bernie had dutifully dipped into the slickly packaged Ice Sage as a companion piece to Grandpa Ruby’s journal, then passed it along without comment to Lou Ella, who had a peculiar tolerance for such narratives. She appreciated the gloss this one provided on the more prosaic chronicle outlined in Bernie’s grandfather’s ledger. Ostensibly The Ice Sage (also ghosted by Grusom, who convinced the rabbi that his original title, The Erotic Tzaddik, was undignified) was Rabbi ben Zephyr’s own version of his spiritual adventures during the time his body was immersed in the ice of a horse pond on Baron Jagiello’s estate. There, while his head was wreathed in a nimbus of static tadpoles and minnows, his spirit attained the highest rungs of the world to come. He’d sat in the celestial academies, participating in roundtable discussions with prophets and patriarchs parsing the thornier points of the ancient mysteries. Meanwhile his body had been carved from the ice and carted halfway round the globe. The family responsible for shlepping him about for the better part of a century was given short shrift in the rabbi’s recounting; they were merely a means to an end, and if he acknowledged their efforts at all, it was only by way of explaining his geographic mobility. Also, though the book was subtitled “Rabbi ben Zephyr’s Adventures with God,” God Himself was seldom mentioned. The text focused instead on techniques for overcoming phobias, realizing desires, and taking control of your life by exploiting the power of something called the Light of Creation. The hallowed mystical tradition was de-Judaized, its esoteric elements soft-pedaled in an effort to pander to a popular audience. Having perused as much of the memoir as he could stomach, Bernie couldn’t help feeling saddened by how the Prodigy had among other things co-opted his family’s history for his own purposes. But then it was the rabbi’s history as well, wasn’t it?—to bend, fold, and swindle as he saw fit. Still, the book seemed a betrayal of the days they’d spent together in the guesthouse and the basement rumpus room, that distant time when the hidden rebbe had condescended to instruct the boy in the ways of the inexpressible and to help him in his first limping efforts to translate his grandfather’s journal.
For all that, Bernie was worried about old Eliezer, just as he worried about a world that had
lately claimed his attention. It seemed to him that each time he looked up from reading to the girl, yet another international atrocity had occurred. Lou Ella would plead with him to keep his head down, don’t stop reading, and when he wavered, she pumped him with questions about the handwritten script: Why, for instance, had Ruby, whose native language was English, chosen to pen his confessions in a spiky Yiddish? She was convinced they would discover the reason if only they forged ahead; the tale was especially suspenseful now that Ruby and the frozen rabbi were headed their way—that is, coming to Memphis.
“How do you know?” asked Bernie, who translated haltingly as he went along and knew no more of his grandfather’s fate than did the girl.
“‘Cause I’m psychic,” she replied, one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching into the backseat to shove a pacifier in her baby sister’s open mouth. “And besides, they have to get to Memphis so your daddy who ain’t been born yet can meet your mama and have you.”
At that Bernie became thoughtful. “Do you know,” he mused, “I’m about the same age as Grandpa Ruby was when he killed his father?”
“It wasn’t exactly murder,” qualified Lou, though Bernie remained un-consoled. He gazed through the windshield at the passing rat-hole projects, where stray bullets from drive-by shootings nightly claimed the lives of children asleep in their beds, and somehow felt implicated in his grandfather’s crime. The guilt was perhaps an indulgence that helped correct the imbalance in his system, because lately he felt altogether too much at home in his own skin. It wasn’t right to feel so at home on a planet going to hell in a handbag. How could you reconcile, for instance, the precarious footing of current events with the scent of lilac that penetrated the brain like some metaphysical spice? Everything he observed had its extra dimension: a throng of starlings was a tattered flag whipped by the wind; the holes in a matzoh were a mysterious Braille. If he farted he recalled Isaiah: “Whereof my bowels shall sound like a lyre”; when Lou wiped egg from Sue Lily’s lips clouds passed from the face of the moon. The backwater of Memphis was a safe harbor on the coast of eternity where he lingered with the girl, his lust subdued now to an enduring affection. On the other hand, Bernie had a gift, and it seemed to him it was high time he used it for the greater good.
“Awesome,” said the girl, unimpressed. “So why don’t you get a job?”
Bernie agreed that that was probably a good idea. His attendance at school during what should have been his junior year was intermittent at best, and eventually his self-involved parents would return the phone calls from his teachers and his scofflaw existence would be exposed. When that happened he should be prepared to secure his own independence. Wasn’t it anyway shameful that he still occupied a room in his family’s house, where he spent his days riffling the books he’d “borrowed” from the genizah at the Anshei Mishneh shul?—texts for apprentice holy men whose pages were marked with hairs from his first growth of beard, their Hebrew characters becoming entwined with his DNA. At the same time, though she assured him it wasn’t a problem, Bernie was also ashamed that it fell to Lou to foot the bill for their junkets. She bought the gas for her mother’s Malibu and paid the checks at the Arcade Diner across from the train depot with funds from clerking at a video store after school. That meant their time together had become more compromised, limited as it was to the evening hours after Lou Ella, who’d finally acquired a license despite years of driving without one, had dropped her mother off at work. It also meant that Sue Lily was always with them, though Bernie had come to accept the toddler as a docile appendage of his darling Lou.
His attempts at gainful employment were disastrous. The first was at the Shelby County Fair, where a seasoned carny gave him a trial run at operating a game of chance. It was a classic sideshow hustle where the patrons hurled baseballs at pyramids of milk bottles filled with lead. With only three throws allotted to knock down three sturdy pyramids, no one ever won the stuffed animals displayed above the concession, but that was before Bernie’s term as concessionaire. Open to persuasion, he allowed the patrons to negotiate extra opportunities to knock down the bottles, and ended by giving away a number of grand prizes. He was in the process of handing over a giant panda to the son of a man who’d talked him into extra throws when the manager of the joint appeared, demanding to know what was going on. Bernie’s explanation resulted in the manager’s wresting the panda from the arms of the shrieking child, as the father threatened legal action and the employee was dismissed in opprobrium. His second job was as a day laborer at a midtown construction site. There he was asked to carry sheets of plywood to a carpenter’s station via a ramp extending over freshly poured concrete. On his initial trip, a sudden gust caught the plywood, lifting Bernie from the boards and casting him down into the wet foundation. When he presented himself thus encrusted to Lou Ella in the parking lot of her video outlet, she remarked that he looked like the statue from Don Giovanni and proceeded to worry grievously about the boy.
Whereas the boy, otherwise exuberant, continued to feel anxious about the rabbi, with whom he had yet to rule out the possibility of joining forces. He was aware of course of Maimonides’ criterion for humbug as stated in The Guide for the Perplexed: how if the claimant by his life or teachings subverts established moral norms, then you have evidence of deception. But Bernie still believed in the Boibiczer Prodigy even as he wanted to save the old man from himself. Meanwhile besides the clergymen and journalists, a number of local politicians, albeit leery of running afoul of their constituents, had joined the chorus of challengers to the rabbi’s legitimacy. It was only a matter of time before malevolent forces would conspire to bring down the House of Enlightenment, and Bernie might be called upon to rescue the rebbe from the brink of his own self-destruction.
“Cool,” said the girl, wondering who was more in need of rescuing. Because now that his appetite for the terrestrial had supplanted his desire for transcendence, while those opposing desires were challenged by his passion for Lou Ella herself, she fretted over Bernie’s vulnerability. Feeling in good part responsible, she no longer urged him to declare his powers openly; she abdicated her role as his conscience and pressed him to please just get on with reading aloud the tale of the patricide. Since their mutual absorption in Grandpa Ruby’s journal had increased, the absence of a physical component to their intimacy seemed almost irrelevant, and it was sometimes possible to think of their relationship as ordinary. Lou was surprised to find that she wished her friend to be ordinary, just as she wished (as did Bernie himself on occasion) that the old man had never been released from the ice.
“Cool, Uberboy, save the rabbi,” she said, “save the whole fucking world for all I care, but first finish reading me the story.”
1929.
After his head was stitched and bandaged, his burnt hands wrapped in gauze mittens, Ruby was commended by one and all for his good intentions. He’d been heroic, really, a fact that even his stricken mother seemed to register, the failure to rescue his father notwithstanding. His withdrawn silence at the funeral—a redundant affair, given the inventor’s prior cremation along with his factory—was interpreted as inconsolable grief. It was a surprisingly large funeral for a man with no close friends. The burial itself took place in the Mount Zion Cemetery, a sprawling necropolis located in the borough of Queens, on a hill with a view of the Manhattan skyline rising in the distance like spikes on a dragon’s tail. The entire dispossessed staff of Karp’s Castle, come to pay their respects, filed past the unvarnished pine casket after the rabbi’s graveside eulogy. Each man released a handful of earth in passing, which thudded hollowly atop the sealed casket containing the only identifiable remains of their putative boss: the charred violin scroll of a vertebra, an eggshell chip from his skull. The relict Mrs. Karp, whose natural pallor had retreated to a near transparency, was supported on the arm of her sister-in-law, Shinde Esther, both of whose parents had passed away the previous year and were buried in an adjacent plot. Flanking Jocheved and Esther
were Jocheved’s twin brothers, who had arrived from Palestine in time for the wholesale incineration of their sister’s life. Ruben Karp, his vacant expression at variance with his rakish head dressing and natty suit, stood apart from the others in the shadow of a stranger’s stone.
Jocheved’s brothers had come to America to help raise funds for the settlement movement in Palestine, which advertised itself as the advance guard in the establishment of a Jewish national homeland. Longtime veterans of the struggle to colonize Eretz Israel, Yachneh and Yoyneh, since become Yehezkel and Yigdal, had been elected to accompany the Zionist spokesman Zerubavel ben Blish on his tour of the Eastern states. Soldiers as well as pioneers, the twins served in a dual capacity, functioning as bodyguards if needed while applying, by virtue of their brawn, a little pressure toward encouraging contributions to the Yishuv. As it happened, the very first speaking engagement on Comrade ben Blish’s calendar was at the Baron de Hirsch Synagogue on the Upper West Side of New York, where Mrs. Shmerl Karp, deserted that Shabbos eve by her nocturnal husband, was also in attendance. A young man with the formal manner of an elder statesman, the bespectacled Comrade ben Blish took the stage after the service and the rabbi’s brief introduction, while posted on either side of him, like a pair of mamelukes with their folded arms and buffed heads, stood the imposing Frostbissen brothers.
