Bee Season (36 page)

“Prasadam.”
The more uncertain Saul is, the more he tends to phrase his questions as statements of fact.

“Food that has been spiritualized. Next to chanting, it’s one of the most important ways to get close to God. If you’d like, I could cook enough for all of us so you can try it.”

Saul nods his assent. “And after dinner we can talk?”

“Sure, Dad. I’m looking forward to it,” Aaron says, terrified.

In school, Eliza thinks of the letters that could aid her mother: injections of B for steadfastness, tincture of Q to remind her of her family. Eliza imagines herself as a letter doctor, curing the world’s ills with the properly administered consonant or vowel. This idea carries her through recess without one intruding thought of her father or brother or the electric tension that now crackles beneath the surface of even their most casual words.

When Eliza comes home from school, Saul is waiting. They jump into the exercises with the enthusiasm of swimmers the first day the pool is open, only coming up for air when the smell of food reaches them and they realize that dinner is ready.

They emerge from the study to the smell of incense. Aaron stands proudly beside a stove steaming with three pots. When they bring Aaron their plates as instructed, he carefully spoons food onto them, mindful not to mix the contents of one pot with the other.

“This is chick peas in
ghee,
which means butter. This is zucchini, and this is rice.” Aaron is grinning so hard that it is difficult for him to speak. Eliza cannot remember the last time she saw him looking so happy. “Before we eat, I’d like to say a few words of thanks.”

Faster than Saul can respond, Aaron begins.

“This material body is a lump of ignorance and the senses are a network of paths of death. Of all the senses the tongue is the most voracious and uncontrollable. But Kṛṣṇa  has sent us this very nice meal to help us conquer the tongue. So let us take this nice food to our full satisfaction, glorifying his lordship, Radha and Kṛṣṇa, and in love call upon Lord Chaitanya and Naityananda to help us.”

Eliza does her best not to giggle. Saul stares as Aaron begins to eat, studiously ignoring them both.

“Lump of ignorance? Paths of death? Do you hate yourself that much, Aaron?”

Aaron blushes deep red. “The body is part of the material world, Dad, which is an illusion. What’s important is to get beyond the body in order to be close to God.”

“But didn’t God make our bodies? By scorning the body, aren’t you actually scorning God?”

“Can we please eat first and have a discussion later?” Aaron’s voice has leapt to a register he thought he’d left behind with the end of his growth spurt.

“Of course,” Saul says, taking a forkful of chick peas and discovering as Eliza already has, that they crunch between his teeth. He quietly replaces his fork by his plate.

“Aaron?” His voice is gentle now. “How long did you cook these?”

Aaron is stubbornly crunching away, ignoring the fact that what he has cooked tastes nothing like what he has eaten at the temple. “I thought I cooked them long enough. They looked done.”

The chick peas are awash in melted butter, which has started to congeal on their plates. Eliza turns her attention to the zucchini, which is overcooked but at least easy to chew. Saul has given up on dinner altogether.

“Didn’t you taste them to make sure?”

Aaron explodes. “You’re not
supposed
to taste them. Okay? There are rules. You don’t know anything so how am I supposed to talk to you? Don’t eat it if you don’t like it. Go back to your meat. I’m going to eat in my room.” He takes his plate, which he has just piled with burnt rice and limp zucchini, and marches up the stairs.

When the house has stopped echoing with footfalls and Aaron’s door has slammed shut, Saul looks at Eliza with a sad grin.

“Will you help me clean up the kitchen? We should go ahead and save this food even if no one ends up eating it.”

They clear the table in silence. When her father starts on the pots, Eliza can’t stay quiet any longer.

“Dad? What do you think Mom ate for dinner?”

Saul doesn’t pause in what he’s doing, takes in the question as if Miriam is a completely natural topic of conversation.

“I don’t know, Elly, but I bet you it was better than this. You want me to make you a hot dog before I go talk to your brother?”

“Dad? When can we see her? When is she coming home?”

Saul turns off the tap water and bends down so that his face is level with his daughter’s.

“Elly, I don’t know, but it might not be for a while. She’s not accepting any visitors right now, not even me.”

“The doctors won’t let her?”

“Actually, it’s not her doctors.” He had decided this was more truth than his children needed, but his anger gets the best of him and it’s out before he can stop it. “She’s not seeing anyone because
she
doesn’t want to.”

Eliza makes a small O-shape with her mouth but no sound comes out. She asks her next question to the floor.

“She said she didn’t want to see me?”

Saul puts his hands on Eliza’s shoulders but it’s like touching a small stone statue. He wants to whisk up her small body in his arms and spin counterclockwise to roll back time.

“No, Elly, she didn’t say that. She just doesn’t feel well enough to see anyone yet.”

Eliza’s voice, when it comes, is very small, could almost be mistaken for a trick of the wind.

“Is she very angry?”

And now Saul does scoop his daughter up, but she is dead weight in his arms, reminding him too much of Miriam. He quickly puts her down again.

“I don’t think she’s angry. I just think she’s confused.”

“I think she’s angry,” Eliza says, barely any louder, such that Saul has to kneel down again and ask her to repeat it.

“Why do you think she’s angry?” he asks, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice, but it’s really hard because he needs to not have to worry about her. If he can have that one thing, he knows he will be okay.

Eliza shrugs. Saul pats her on the head and tells her everything will be fine. He suggests she practice on her own in the study while he talks to Aaron upstairs and that he might be awhile. She says okay even though she’d much rather he admit the cause of Miriam’s anger. If her father would just acknowledge that losing the people they love is the temporary price they must pay for their efforts, they could at least agree that it is a sacrifice worth making. Because once Eliza reaches God’s ear she knows she’ll be able to get her brother and mother back. She knows this as surely as she knows that the time is now, that tonight, to drown out the discussion that will be going on above her, she will advance to the next book on her father’s shelf.

Saul’s presence a floor above puts a fluttery feeling in Eliza’s stomach. She feels certain that the nervous click-click of her teeth is Morse-coding her intentions up the air vent to her father’s ears. Eliza presses her jaws together to will the shivering to stop, to coax her body into her service.

Though her father’s and brother’s voices have been reduced to murmurs, Eliza can read the tenor of the conversation from their tones. She can tell her father’s voice by his low-pitched certainty, his longer, carefully measured cadences. By comparison, Aaron sounds like a frightened bird, his voice coming in short, sharp bursts of sound that, from below, sound to Eliza like her own fears made manifest.

It takes a moment for Eliza to steel herself to touch the book containing the last steps toward
shefa.
Its unshelving has become a test of personal worthiness. She has convinced herself of the possibility that it won’t yield to her touch.

She half hopes for this failure. She is young enough to be discomfited by the idea that her father’s knowledge is finite. If she has overestimated her abilities, she can reinstate her father as personal guide and sage. It will be a relief to place herself once again under his guidance, to know she is meant to follow and not to lead. When the book slides from the shelf to Eliza’s hand without fanfare or paper cut, Eliza quickly postpones the moment of truth to the book’s opening.

Because there has to be a moment of truth. This is the only way Eliza can reasonably invest this volume with the power her father ascribes to it. In a quick revision of her expectations, Eliza decides that anyone can hold a book; the trick lies in opening it. If she isn’t ready for the book’s contents, her own unpreparedness will serve as the most effective of locks.

Eliza carefully grasps the front cover between thumb and forefinger. For a moment she merely holds her fingers there as if they have come to rest. She is unsure whether or not she wants the book to let her in.

When Eliza finally does open the book, its spine creaks like a volume twice its size, as if the power of its words has lent it extra weight. Its pages give off a fresh paper smell tinged with a bitter hint of ink, its innards not having been exposed to the world long enough to dull the scents of its birth. The pages remind her of the sheltered parts of her own anatomy, the paleness of her inner arms and tummy, skin that rarely sees the sun. There are no smudges or fingerprints marring these pages, none of the stray drops of coffee that had marked her father’s presence in the last volume. Though Eliza cannot read the Hebrew, these letters lack the insectile coldness of the temple prayerbook, reminding her more of trees than beetles. The four letters from her most recent permutations jump off the page to greet her, as if she is viewing the book through 3-D glasses. She is comforted to realize that within this strange alphabet she has made a few friends. As Eliza continues through the book the wide, pristine margins lend the impression that she is striking out onto freshly fallen snow. Though her father has translated these words, it is clear he has never tried to follow them. He never made it this far.

The voices from Aaron’s room have become more regular, regaining tones of normal conversation. Even when Eliza presses her ear to the vent, she can’t make anything out, leading her to wonder if sound, like helium, is lighter than air. Realizing that this could work to her disadvantage, she covers the vent with a cushion from the sofa to prevent her own sound’s escape.

Life of the Future World,
though a slim volume like its predecessors, is more difficult to understand and filled with depictions of
shefa
that surpass even her father’s enthusiastic representations.
Shefa,
as portrayed by the book, will allow Eliza to see all of creation, which it compares to looking into a mirror and seeing both one’s own face and “the faces of all who pass by.” According to Abulafia, Eliza will not only hear but see God, who may take the form of anything from a young boy to a sheik to an old man.

The actual Hebrew word she’s supposed to permute to achieve all this is itself a puzzle, is in fact not a word at all. The Name of Seventy-Two consists of three Torah verses of seventy-two letters each, which she is supposed to combine into seventy-two specific triplets. Each letter is pronounced with its own special vowel, in addition to a specific head movement. While Elly is coordinating all this she must also pay attention to her breathing, Abulafia requiring a certain number of breaths for every triplet set.

It’s a lot to have to do. Every skill Eliza has attempted to master, both with and without her father, is called into use. She cannot even start with the Name itself, but must first permute other words with pen and paper until the pen falls spontaneously from her hand. Eliza thinks of the Ouija board she and Aaron once used to attempt to contact the ghosts of their grandparents.
I Don’t Know
was the pointer’s answer to their every question, leading Aaron to wonder if ghosts suffered from amnesia and leaving Eliza to concede the possibility of moving something without meaning to. The
Future World
makes it clear that unintentionally releasing her pen will have much graver consequences than putting words into the mouths of imaginary ghosts:

The power of your imagination will overwhelm you, weakening your intellect until your reveries cast you into a great sea.

Even if she manages to drop the pen when she is supposed to, her reward for doing everything right seems even scarier than her punishment for doing something wrong:

This is because your soul is separating itself from your body as a result of the great joy that you experience when you perceive and recognize these things.

Eliza is beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t seek her father’s help after all when she reaches the only words with the power to sanction her highest ambitions. She has always known that these words would be the sign. Their presence in the middle of the page, as if they have been waiting for her all along, validates both her secret book borrowing and her desire to continue as she has been, alone. They are the words she has been praying to hear through years and years of silent
Amidahs
:

Remove your shoes from your feet, for the place upon which you stand is hallowed ground.

At which point she loses her trepidations as quickly as her sneakers.

Though the cushion over the air vent now does little to muffle the increasing noise from her brother’s room, Eliza is blissfully unaware of the angry voices upstairs. She is so engrossed that she wouldn’t notice Saul were he to burst through the study door, wouldn’t hear the sirens if the house were aflame. Hundreds of hours of study and practice are finally coming together into a synchronous whole. The only thing now standing between her and transcendence is the memorization of the Name of the Seventy-Two in its triplicate complexity.

By the time Eliza finishes, she feels as if she has eaten a large meal rather than read a small book. Before returning
Future World
to its shelf, she copies down the triplets and their accompanying vowel sounds, her concentration now lessened enough to hear the ongoing argument above her. She hears Saul yell something about Aaron ruining his future, Aaron stridently insisting that Saul doesn’t understand. By the time an upstairs door slams and footsteps sound on the stairs, Eliza has finished her copying and has replaced the book on its shelf. Saul yells something about Aaron trying to avoid the issue by leaving, forbids him to take the car keys. Eliza sticks her head into the kitchen to see her brother standing by the door to the garage.