The Frozen Rabbi (17 page)

He made a stab. “It’s got something to do with chlorophyll.” And on second thought: “Or is it fluoride? Something they put in the water so you can’t have babies?” More laughter, though some of it cautious, as if he might after all be correct.

Realizing she’d given the class too much rope, Ms. Drinkwater tried to reel them back in, calling on a pet student who could be relied on for a rote response. But the damage was done and the class remained ungovernable, passing notes and tossing parts of dissected crayfish until the bell rang, when the teacher asked Bernie to please stay behind. By now he knew the drill. She would express an obligatory concern for his pathological woolgathering and send him once again to the nurse’s station, from which the flinty Ms. Bissenet would pass him on to Mr. Murtha, the school’s resident psychologist. Mr. Murtha, whose years of dealing with troubled adolescents had left him a little unhinged himself, would welcome him back like a long-lost nephew. Prefatory to nothing, he would lecture him on the significance of the new millennium and the need to be prepared for the coming apocalypse; then having sown sufficient confusion, he would conclude that their talk had done them both a world of good. That was how it had gone after the day in study hall when a coalition of jocks and preppies had consigned an oblivious Bernie to the top of the library bookshelves; and again after he’d been found in the trash compactor by the janitor, Mr. Spiller, who came that close to turning him into bonemeal. So the boy had no reason to believe that today would be any exception.

“What’s new, Bernie?” inquired the psychologist with an immoderate grin, as if a melon slice had been wedged between his cheeks. “Still having your,” making rabbit ears with his fingers to signify quotation marks, “out-of-body episodes?”

Bernie allowed that that was the case.

Mr. Murtha licked a pinkie to plaster a cowlick that refused to lie down, giving his unruly hair the look of ruffled feathers. He loosened and tightened the clasp of his string necktie as if playing a slide trombone. “Why don’t you describe again in your own words what you think is happening to you?”

Bernie scrunched his face in thought. Gone was his wary impulse to keep everything secret; and there were times of late when he felt almost reckless, almost ready to tell the world, while on the other hand he suspected he may have already confided too much in this dickhead. “I think,” he said after some consideration, “I’m starting to outgrow myself.”

“Uh-hmm.” The psychologist nodded before letting his grin expand beyond the diameter of his freckled face, the melon slice becoming a canoe. “Looks to me like you’re shrinking.” And it was true that, since he was no longer tempted by the greasy diet that had sustained him since infancy, no longer particularly interested in food at all, Bernie’s physique had become almost angular. The psychologist leaned back in his chair, twining his fingers behind his head. “Y’know, Bernie, I get all kinds in here—kids that whittle their own arms to bloody stobs, kids that want to blow us all to hell, bad seeds with eyes like lizards and no conscience to speak of. I see girls who soak their tampons in liquid methedrine, boys who can’t keep their peckers in their pants, but I never had one yet that couldn’t keep his soul in his body. You know what I think, Bernie?” He seemed to be waiting for Bernie to venture a guess.

“You think I’m a wack job?”

“Did I say that?” gasped Mr. Murtha, capsizing the canoe. “I never said that.” Fluttering his eyelids. “But now that you mention it…”

Then he let the boy know, entre nous, that he viewed Bernie’s spontaneous fugue states as good practice for the Rapture, that maybe there was hope for at least some Jews in these final days. “However,” said the psychologist, “much as I’ve enjoyed our little sessions, let’s face it, we’re getting nowhere.” Raising himself to a posture of official rectitude, Mr. Murtha then declared that, in his capacity as protector of the emotional welfare of the students of Tishimingo High, it behooved him to notify Bernie’s parents of his disorder.

If in agreement about little else, Mr. and Mrs. Karp showed a solid front in their antipathy to the school psychologist. It was inexcusable that he had dragged them away from their busy schedules (Mrs. Karp had had to cancel an electrolysis treatment) to inform them of what they already knew, that their son was subject to daydreaming. But despite their obvious resistance, Mr. Murtha, in his ex cathedra mode, delivered his diagnosis with unfazed equanimity.

“It’s my opinion that your son,” shooting Bernie a sidelong grin that the boy expected to spread out of all proportion, though today the psychologist managed to keep it in check, “your son is suffering from a rare strain of what might be termed static epilepsy—that is, epilepsy minus the grand mal seizures but still a variety of what we call saint’s disease…”

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?”