Jews vs Zombies (6 page)

Funny, right?

But then the computer started emitting sounds. The other computers in the lab present similar symptoms. Akko lost his temper. At last he was able to show rage. There’s a good side to it, to see him in a human moment.

I’m scared.

T.

23.

The door fell.

In spite of the lamp in Shlomo’s hand, the outside seemed more lit.

The glee of autumn stars in Morocco’s sky, apparently.

The shining heaven above Essaouira.

Against the glare of the busted door a small figure shows.

Its stride slow.

The organs rigid, mechanical.

And still its face is unseen yet.

Shlomo takes out a small chain from his galabia’s pocket.

It shimmers. It has a certain glow.

He throws it. It wraps around the figure’s neck.

Shlomo cries: Shma De-Marach Alech!
⁴
Shma De-Marach Alech!

The figure continues to advance, oblivious to Shlomo’s cries.

Shlomo retreats.

He puts the lamp on the floor and takes a stool from next to the wall.

He raises it.

His silence releases Sultana from her short paralysis.

She bends to have a better look.

Now she screams.

24.

From: Tiberia Assido

To: Doron Aflalo

RE: Rose of Judea

I left Akko alone with his codes in the lab for several days and went on walks in the institute’s grounds. Akko suggested I take the laptop he prepared for me, with all the insane amount of security he put on it. Before I left he asked if the laptop was connected to the lab’s intranet. I haven’t turned it on since he gave it to me. There was enough computing for me with the computer that ran Malka’s module, may she rest in peace, and Ozymandias’s module, curse it.

Akko also said, strangely, that the programs’ codes in the cemetery cloud were corrupted. That they’re full of inexplicable characters. He said, “As if they’ve rotted somehow.”

I was hoping to have my spirit lifted by the gnaw marks autumn left on the trees, the seasonal decline in temperature, the pressure of coolness against the skin, and the architecture, by which I was enthralled when I first got here. Instead, I think of Israel, on my tongue the syllables of the month Tishrey are rolling. Before Rosh Hashanah we called our mother to congratulate her for the New Year. Akko was choked with excitement. He was stricken by longing. Then we called our father. I mean, I called. Akko still refuses to speak with him. Who would have thought we’ll all be here, in 2011, some years after the fall of Tel Aviv.

Well, the architecture is still lovely. The state centre’s game of perspectives are wonderful, I’ll give you that. The placement of futuristic buildings in the gloomy surroundings of New England as well.

I wonder if they burned witches here.

I think about your Sultana.

Where is the story going? I wait for the part in which young Shlomo is entering the Pardes and gets the knowledge of the Chain of Worlds, and becomes Rabbi SBRJ. That’s your intention, right? To illustrate the revelation of the Rose of Judea.

But why tell the story from Sultana’s point of view? Shlomo is the interesting character.

I don’t want to push you. I know you too well for that. But what happens here seems to stem from our efforts to find the Ursprechen of the Worlds. It seems we reached some forbidden zone. Years ago Akko told me that this knowledge has the price tag of loss, of guilt, and you said – bad luck.

Well, Doron, bad luck has caught up with us. And I’m scared.

I sit at a café in Cambridge, MA, and I write to you.

I need desperately to understand something. But what is it? This is the awful thing here, isn’t it? That we can’t identify the real mystery.Help me, Doron.

T.

25.

*Pardes (Orchard). Entering the Pardes: more than a few visitations of humans to the realms of angles in heaven are accounted for in the Jewish esoteric literature from the second half of the third millennium to creation. The literature of Hechalot (Palaces), for instance, is a detailed one. Yet the term Entering the Pardes is ascribed to one mystical experience only, the experience of four sages of the Mishna around the year 3890. The chronicles of the Entering are mainly reported in the tractate Hagiga in the Babylonian and Jerusalem versions of the Talmud.

No doubt an elementary form of experience is outlined in the exegeses. It’s possible that the four sages represent four different attitudes toward the place of mysticism in Jewish life: Akiva ben Yosef, who goes through the experience unharmed, is its exemplar. According to his method, Judaism is hiding the magical thinking at its base and sanctifies practices of study and memorizing instead. Shimon ben Azay died while entering the Pardes and left no evidence for his method. Elisha ben Avoya turned to heresy, id est, cancelled the validity of Judaism as a worthy practice for gaining wisdom. Of Shimon ben Zoma, it was said that he peered and was harmed or, in the common interpretation, lost his sanity. His experience is the most curious, for what is insanity in the context of mysticism?

The devotees of the Rose of Judea believe that the knowledge ben Zoma unveiled contains a different description of the structure of reality.

26.

When the features of the small figure are clear to Sultana, her scream dwindles and she gazes. Parts of the child’s body – it’s a child after all – are blue. An arm and half of the face. The expression is empty. The skin at the other part is sallow, pale, oozes viscous miasma. The right eye is buried in its socket, and worms twist in it. The bare teeth are spreading a sickly glow. And he, the child, doesn’t smile, but his lips are stretched in spasm.

He advances slowly, jerking. His arms are reaching for her. She’s unable to move. Even the stench and the whiteness of the worms turning in the right eye can’t force her nerves to shock her into motion. The child emits guttural syllables, indecipherable. He’s almost upon her; his nails are ready to cut her flesh.

And Shlomo pushes her aside and hits the creature with the stool. The blow is muted, not even the sound of a crushing bone, just a heavy note, the note of an object sinking in soft mud, in clay. The neck is crooked, the head lies on the left shoulder. His stretched lips stay the same and he keeps on moving forward in a rigid, stubborn walk.

Shlomo stands between her and the creature, blocks her view, but she knows nothing will stop it, that what drives it is beyond the decaying flesh, that the flesh is but a realization of a will. She knows that as well as she knows the origin of the organs that have been made into this shape, Hosea, and the baby she helped deliver just a while ago. Shlomo hits it again. Something like a fart escapes its body. The stench grows. The child-thing starts to shrill, a high pitched, ear-shattering shrill, like the cry of a prisoner being tortured in a concealed, underground cell. And Shlomo hits it again and calls to her. He says, get out of here Sultana, run.

27.

From: Tiberia Assido

To: Doron Aflalo

RE: Rose of Judea

It’s awful, Doron. I’m here, in the storage room of the lab, with all the pieces of useless equipment.

I’ve just arrived at the lab. Akko was crouched over his keyboard, motionless. I didn’t understand what he was waiting for. I haven’t seen him for a couple of days and he didn’t even turn his head to look at me. Then I realized the screens were all displaying the same words ARRGG, GRRR, ARRGGG, GRRRR, GRRR and some animation of a viscous liquid, a green-yellow jelly, shaking, oozing down the screen, the inside of the screen.

I approached Akko and touched his shoulder. His small body was rigid. His head moved, turned, like it was revolving on the spine. His eyes were opaque, and the skin bloodless, the face without expression. The smile, it had nothing to with the facial muscles. It terrified me. He didn’t say anything.

I retreated, stupid me, to the first door in my sight. The storage room.

It’s terrible. But the panic I felt before, when I walked around the institute, weakened. I’ve already dreamed this scene. I’ve seen it to its last detail, and I know the blows on the door are coming next.

In spite of Akko’s warnings, I connected ARRGGG the laptop to the lab’s intranet. So my GRRRR time is short. The ruined computers here start to hum*%*$#_)++

I’m thinking hard – Rose of Judea, the revelation of Ben-Zoma, the retrieval of the knowledge in Rabbi Shlomo Benbenishi’s era, in the 16th century. I’ve always been bad at pattern&$&$*%( recognition. There must be something ARGGRRR you can tell, some detail you observed, in the story GRRRRG that escaped me.

&what is in our investigation that raise the dead&

&and how to put them back to the dust&

&even the digital ones&

He###########lp me, Do***************ron.

Don’t leave me ARRGGG alone again, in half-light, as you did ARGGGRRR years ago.

Please, DoARRGGG GRRR ARRRRG ARRRG

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

28.

[Clear sky, in which huge stars are buried. The moon is like a Chinese brush stroke. Dark trees. A wind is passing through them. Light rustle, like a buzz. Sultana is running out of a hut. She’s terrified. She stops. A Man comes out from the shadow of trees.]

Sultana: Halt, you stranger, tell me who you are.

A Man: I am who I am. Though not whom you assume.

Sultana: And yet, someone you are, whoever that be.

Tell me who.

A Man: The shape, the speech

Are nothing but skin.

Sultana: Now I know, now

Sevenfold my fear grows. You are deceased.

A Man: I told you, body, looks, are but a skin

Which entities would wear to come here.

Sultana: Here. Where is here?

A Man: The Humilitas.

Sultana: My beloved’s flesh you wear, and he is not you.

Who you are, you stranger, tell me.

A Man: Centuries will pass before I’m born and for millennia

I’ve lived, I walked this world, the Humilitas.

Its paths of time are clear to me, I am at home

But this is not my home. The chains of human voices

Of human cries, I left behind, and even then

I’m force to cloak myself with them

If my will is to find my kind’s place within the Worlds.

Sultana: Your kind? Who are they? Who are you? The man

Who spoke from shadows, in this house. What

Was the faith of the dead infant?

Why was my boy snatched from me, and you show

Yourself in semblance of his dead dad?

A Man: Faith,

Conspiracy, simple and transparent, but as for you

Sultana: It’s wrapped in mystery. I do not wish to hear.

What do you strive for, devil?

A Man (laughs): devil I’m not.

Sultana (aside): Nor man he is. Oh Lord

Who torture us, who draw a line

Between the living and the dead which we

Crave to transgress.

A Man: Hush. Soon you’ll see.

Sultana: But Hosea, my son, and the unnamed child

You control them, the boy whose organs

You assembled and your will drives.

For what end?

A Man: I roamed Humilitas

In the third millennium I wore the body of

A Jewish sage, Rabba bar bar Hanna, I

Spoke through his lips, I thought warlocks

And magicians, I weaved my nets in silence

Now comes an hour I put to test

Will he transfer the knowledge destined

To give us life, if we chose wisely –

A child who was prevented from

The realms of death and a child dead

From womb.

Sultana: not a child was he

But demon.

A Man: There are no demons. Just folktales

Claiming them to be. No plan is fertile

Without misguiding and mischiefs, tricks

As old as humanity.

Sultana: Nonsense. Insanity.

A Man: My part I’ve done, woman, and so did you

It is my time to go back to my shelter in the shadows.