by David Hopen
“What does that mean?” Noah asked.
“Like a sacrifice.”
“Here.” Evan put his right palm above the goblet. He squeezed his pinky until he managed to extract five droplets from the coagulating wound.
Amir gagged. “That’s disgusting. I really hope you use new cups.”
“I maintain a very sanitary environment,” she muttered. “Now listen.”
“To what?”
“Shh.” She blew into the goblet and stood. Her eyes closed. She opened her mouth to speak but stopped herself. “He’s rising.”
Oliver withdrew a piece of Doublemint from his pocket and placed it in his mouth with as much noise as he could. “Nice, what does Sammy look like?”
“An old man,” the psychic whispered. “Wearing a mantle. But he’s—he’s not coming the usual way.”
Oliver elbowed my side. “Not coming the usual way. Like that one?”
She stiffened, turning her attention on Evan without opening her eyes. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“What you were. Who you are,” she said, speaking frenziedly. “And now he wants to know why you’ve disturbed him. He says you shouldn’t have brought him up.”
“Just ask the question,” Evan said.
“The questions,” Amir corrected. “All five.”
She folded the paper into fourths and deposited it into the goblet. Then she lit another match and dropped it in, too. “He’s angry,” she announced, her voice rising. “He won’t stop shouting.”
Oliver grinned. “What’d we ever do to him?”
“You didn’t obey! You broke the limits! You’re becoming—yes, yes, I know—an adversary to the Lord!”
“Okay, okay,” Amir said, covering his ears, “we get the act.”
The psychic ignored him. “She says so, too, you know. She says to stop. You’ll be ruined.”
Evan blinked. “Who says?”
She was convulsing now, her limbs shuddering with such intensity that she knocked the picture of her son off her desk.
“Ask it!” Evan reached for her hand. “Should I do it or—”
An earsplitting screech as Evan touched her. Her head lulled back. I thought for a moment that a vein in her temple would burst, showering us in blood. As it happened, though, she went silent, falling back into her chair, pale and panting. Just at that moment, her security alarm began to wail.
“Goddamn it.” She snapped to, forced herself up. The alarm was deafening. I crammed my fingers into my ears until she had punched in her code, restoring silence. “Sorry,” she said, slumping back down. “Happens randomly. Don’t worry, cops won’t call for at least half an hour. In case it’s actually real, you know, so intruders have time to ransack the place.”
“So,” Amir said, “that was totally worth the money, huh, Ev?”
“As I said.” She lit a new cigarette and reached for the wine. “Spirits are volatile. Never know what you’re going to get. And they’re possessive, no? They take right over. Did I give you a fright? Here, have wine, calm your nerves.”
We sat a few minutes, sipping wine from plastic cups. Oliver shared her cigarette. Evan didn’t drink, didn’t speak. We drove off as a police car appeared down the street.
* * *
“SO THE DRUG TEST?” KAYLA asked, bent over her palette. She’d taken me to a contemporary museum in South Beach, where we’d signed up for a painting class. There was a room in which a rudimentary robot, equipped with three arms and no legs, performed the wave to a dystopian rendition of “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” There was a room with a vintage film projector, rattling noisily, showcasing in rapid bursts the gestation of a human skull. By the time the class started I was nursing a modest headache.
“What about it?” I glanced over at the instructor, who was teaching us how to reproduce Frank Cadogan Cowper’s The Golden Bowl. Kayla was a rigid fundamentalist, imitating every stroke, line and angle, the result surpassing the instructor’s own work. Kayla had her maiden in a red turban and a golden, floral, bare-shouldered gown, eyes blue and piercing, brows lifted in unflinching defiance. Against a violet backdrop, the woman held out a golden bowl of votive fruit: grape vines, pumpkins, delicate peaches.
Kayla stole one of my brushes and, ignoring my protest, gilded her maiden’s gown. “Are you worried about it, I mean?”
“You seem to think I should be.”
“No, I’m just—I don’t want to see you jeopardize anything, is all.”
“I’m pretty confident it won’t be an issue.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing, let’s just focus on painting.”
“How can I focus with your monstrosity staring at me?”
“No art is monstrous.” I twirled a thick paintbrush into the lower right section of my canvas. Yellow and red spots landed on our smocks. “Didn’t you learn anything from the exhibitions?”
“In this case I disagree.” She leaned her head on my shoulder to examine my canvas. By now, I’d surrendered any hope of following instructions and was entertaining myself by experimenting with an abstract blur: phosphorescent gold trapezoids, a metamorphosed bowl, eruptions of green light, objects resembling broken crowns. “And now, after witnessing you paint, I wonder what I see in you.”
I saluted with my brush. “A misunderstood visionary, born too early. Tragic, really.”
The instructor shuffled over. She gave an envious grunt inspecting Kayla’s canvas but an alarmed gasp at mine. “What . . . have you done?”
Kayla smirked. “Enlighten us, Ari.”
I put my hand to my chin, suppressing a laugh, avoiding Kayla’s eyes. “Well, if you see here,” I said, gesturing toward the upper left quadrant, “this is Judgment Day, of course, evoking the feeling of the celestial encountering sinful physicality. And here, just over to the right, is an ode to the Deluge—”
“—to the left, you mean,” the instructor cut in, leaning over my shoulders, tilting her head at various angles, “here with the aquatic hues?”
“You’d think that’s water rising,” I continued, drawing muffled laughter from Kayla, “or the Ark, maybe, but no, this part to the right is more oceanic in a surrealist sense, don’t you think?”
I was given a death stare. “Not in the slightest. In fact, this is what I’d call a picture without meaning. But cruder sensibilities could perhaps see it in a . . . Kandinsky kind of way.”
“Right, Kandinsky,” I said. “Precisely.”
The instructor frowned. “You speak eloquently for a person who’s presented the world with such . . . well, filth.”
Kayla pinched my cheek. “Don’t get him started. He’s an English student. He turns all sorts of garbage into poetry.”
“Garbage?” I said as our instructor stalked off. “And you’re going to tell me your incredibly detailed, objectively impressive painting is what—spectacular?”
“In every sense of the word.”
“But what’s so different about these two canvases, if you really think about it?”
“Yeah, what is the difference between Rembrandt and a preschooler’s depiction of a smiling sun wearing sunglasses?”
“Fine.” On my palette I married yellow to indigo. “What do you see in yours?”
“I’m not as talented in that department, Mr. Seer of Judgment Day.”
“Which department? Literary criticism?”
“No, its close cousin, the department of bullshit.”
“C’mon, you’re the tutor. Show your student how it’s done.”
“All right.” She pointed to the maiden’s facial expressions. “So she’s gorgeous, obviously. But her real power is her negative beauty.”
“Now we’re talking.”
“I mean it. Look at her. She knows it just as much as I do. All that beauty, but she’s paralyzed, alone, caged.”
I swept my eyes over the woman. “Heavy stuff. I thought you were just going to comment on how she represents
Demeter and fertility and the coming of winter.”
“Quit showing off.”
“Sorry.”
“But you see what I mean?”
“Eh. I mean, maybe she is sad. But loneliness doesn’t have to be some moral defect. It can be . . . part of someone’s allure.”
“Being self-absorbed, beyond the grasp of anyone else, you think that’s attractive?”
“I think it’s attractive to be a rarity.” I observed her stance, her eyes. “And anyway, whatever she’s missing doesn’t matter. It makes her fuller, gives her suffering some dignity.”
Kayla snorted, plunged the brush into the jar. Muddied colors rose to the surface. “I didn’t paint her to have dignity. I painted her to possess her.”
“Yeah, well, even so,” I said, “it’s still there. Her nobility or, I don’t know, her magnitude. The feeling she’s been wounded and yet once you’ve seen her you never go back.”
“To what? Chasteness? Joy?”
I shrugged. “To whatever it was being only the person you used to be.”
We fell into silence, pink with embarrassment, seeking refuge in the act of tidying up and signing our names in the corner of our paintings. In a sudden, erratic movement, Kayla snatched the smallest brush, dipped it black and sliced a dark dash down the middle of the bowl.
* * *
“FOUR-FIFTHS OF THIS GROUP FAILED,” Rabbi Bloom announced at our next meeting. He pushed away his copy of Guide for the Perplexed. “I’m not certain whether this means this class isn’t working or if it’s more pressing than ever.”
“Don’t take it to heart, Rav,” Oliver said. “I fail tests on the regular. You get used to it, trust me.”
Evan frowned. “Four-fifths?”
Rabbi Bloom stirred his teacup. “Sadly enough, Mr. Stark.”
“How could one of us have passed?”
Oliver smirked, looking around the table. “Yeah, with all due respect, Rabbi, you’re the only person in this room who’d show up clean. At least I assume you would. I’m not one to judge.”
Noah placed a jug of Gatorade on the table. “So only some of us were tested?”
“Well, I was definitely tested,” Amir said miserably. “My mom slapped me across the face when she heard the results.” This reduced Oliver to a giggling fit, which he tried relieving by sipping on room-temperature water, only to spit up a mouthful.
Evan rested his gaze on me. “Eden?”
My face burned. Slowly, my friends turned their attention to me.
“What?” I said.
“Well done,” Oliver said, “but how’d you get fake urine? And why didn’t you share?”
I looked, too quickly, to Rabbi Bloom, as if expecting a private answer to what I was thinking. “I can assure you that collections were held under sterile and controlled environments,” he said officiously, pointedly ignoring my stare. “And in any event, it’s hardly anyone’s business whether someone else passed. I’d prefer you worry about the fact that you failed.”
Evan laughed. “Hardly our business? Rabbi, please tell us how Eden can possibly be the only person in the clear? Why are you protecting him?”
I said nothing. Certainly I was grateful to avoid being caught, but to a large extent I shared their dissent, or at least their confusion. What I rationalized, at first, as a spontaneous favor on Gio’s part now seemed increasingly suspicious. That Gio had somehow been directed to save me was implausible, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that Evan’s accusation was not entirely wrong.
“Gentlemen,” Rabbi Bloom said, “this is serious.”
“Well,” Oliver said, “let’s not be melodramatic.”
“This school has rules, Mr. Bellow,” Rabbi Bloom said wearily. “Abusing substances is no laughing matter. Experimenting with drugs for the sake of having fun is bad enough.” At this Rabbi Bloom gave Evan a cautious look. “Experimenting for other purposes is materially worse.”
“What about our colleges?” Noah asked weakly.
“We’re forced to draft a letter detailing the violation. The letter will be held in our records but will not be released unless there is a repeat violation.”
“Forced?” Evan gave a bitter laugh. “You’re hardly forced.”
“This institution has an obligation to disclose a pattern of disciplinary issues, Mr. Stark. I advise you refrain from such action if that concerns you.”
When we were dismissed we went out into the parking lot toward Oliver’s Jeep. Evan grabbed my shoulder before I could climb in, forcing me aside. “Want to tell the truth now?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, Eden, no bullshit.”
Briefly I considered admitting what had happened in the bathroom with Gio. But I didn’t trust Evan, and I felt perverse gratification knowing he needed something from me. “What do you think I’m hiding?”
“If something’s going on between you two,” he said quietly, “then it concerns me, even if you don’t understand why.”
I shook him off. “Funny,” I said, “because I’m pretty sure you’re the one hiding something that affects me.” I didn’t mean to say these words, but I was happy I did. His face went white. I turned my attention to the perimeter of the model temple.
“Careful, Eden,” Evan said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I brushed away, joined them in the car. Inside they’d already moved on to discussing Purim costumes. It was nice out, though a bit overcast, the sky hazy-gray. Oliver dug around his glove compartment, exhuming a baggie of weed. “Shall we?”
“You’re joking,” Amir said from the back seat. “Tell me you’re joking.”
We hesitated. Then, ignoring Amir’s moralizing, we smoked.
* * *
MORE THAN A WEEK WENT by and Purim was fast approaching. Growing up, Purim was my favorite holiday. Our community gathered in synagogue, twice, to recite the book of Esther, frolicked in costume, delivered gifts of food, enjoyed massive feasts. I loved the dancing in the streets, the shalach manot runs with my mother, the twenty-four-hour sugar high, the seudahs during which my father, refusing to drink more than absolutely necessary, would become flushed with wine and retreat early to bed. Torah Temimah actively encouraged us to dress up, though we were to choose strictly from biblical costumes, and to wander the neighborhood collecting tzedakah from drunken revelers. What I loved, I suppose, was Purim’s energy: alien and seductive, a day on which my life, to my relief, no longer quite resembled itself.
I felt no such ruach this time around, anxious as I was about my future. Still, holiday preparation was in full swing. My mother was doing her best to impress Cynthia, assembling hundreds of hamantaschen, including but not limited to chocolate chip, apricot, prune, poppy and peanut butter. Kayla, meanwhile, dragged me to a local thrift shop in search of coordinated outfits.
“We’ll need something literary,” she said, rifling through a rack of secondhand costumes. “Any ideas?”
“Not really.”
“And you’re supposed to be Hartman’s star?” She returned to her searching, hair whipping from side to side. “Personally, I’m torn between two.”
“Which?”
“Being a suffragette,” she said, “or biting the bullet and being Shelley.”
“Shelley is cool,” I said. “You can carry around an umbrella.”
“I said Shelley, not Mary Poppins.”
“For the west wind.”
“Clever.” She pulled out a Gothic Victorian-style dress and held it to her body. “But I meant the great Mary Shelley. The superior Shelley.”
“Oh.”
“This’ll do,” she said, examining the dress. “With a copy of Frankenstein in hand and some serious powder applied to the face.”
“Brilliant.”
“I’ll let you be Percy. Look for floaties.”
“Isn’t that sort of weird?”
“What?”
“To come as the Shelleys?�
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“It’s a Purim bit, Ari, not a marriage proposal.”
“I know, it’s just—”
“Scared your friends will mock you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
A row of masks: monsters, aliens, centaurs, bloodstained zombies. I picked a small skull from a neglected shelf. “How about this?”
“Don’t think that’ll fit your head. Your ego’s become too big.” She disappeared into a fitting room with the dress. “But be my guest and try.”
“No,” I said, leaning against the dressing room door. “As an accessory.”
“For what? A tomb raider?”
“It’s Yorick.”
She came out, frowning, in her dress. “You’re joking.”
I collected tacky medieval attire: hooded purple robes, black tights, a cheap crown. “It’s great, see?”
“You have to go as Hamlet, Ari? Really? Can’t you be the gravedigger instead?”
“It’s literary, like you said. And I like it better than being P.B.”
“Look, not to be harsh, but I really think your fixation with her is becoming slightly . . . unhealthy.” She twirled in front of a mirror. The owner of the store provided an approving thumbs-up. “You’re too hung up on her for your own good.”
“Come on,” I said, lowering my voice, throwing a suspicious glance at the owner without quite knowing why, “I’m not—”
She returned to the fitting room, changing into her clothing. “Could it be more painfully obvious who this is for?”
“It has absolutely nothing to do with her.” She tossed her outfit over the dressing room door. It landed on my head. “It’s just a funny costume.”
“Dress however you’d like,” she said testily when she emerged, rolling her eyes. The owner, ringing her up, gave me a sympathetic wink.
* * *
“WE ARE TO DRINK,” RABBI Bloom lectured in his office the following day, “until we no longer remember the difference between Mordechai and Haman, so Rava tells us.”
