The Frozen Rabbi (18 page)

“Eh?”

“Where do you go when, y’know, like when you go off the way you do?”

Bernie suffered a tremor whose source was either the bowels of the earth or his own, he couldn’t have said. No one other than Mr. Murtha, who merely taunted him, had ever bothered to ask. He told himself it was intrusive; she had no right to pry; his exaltations belonged exclusively to him. But here was a girl his own age weathering the stares of her peers to inquire about his experience, and what he felt despite his best efforts to resist it was gratitude.

“Heaven, mostly,” he replied. And there it was: the answer fluttering from his mouth like a moth he hadn’t known was trapped inside.

“Cool.” Pronounced with the requisite nasal diphthong to rhyme with
cruel
, though from her it sounded a touch ironic.

A silence ensued during which Bernie shuffled in place, wondering if she, too, were only mocking him. Feeling altogether too vulnerable, he was ready to walk away from her but found that he lacked the will; maybe the janitor would have to pry him loose again. Accustomed as he was to being the butt of jokes and abuse, what appeared on the surface as honest curiosity unnerved him. Yet he, who considered escape his signature feat, was helpless to devise a convenient means of extricating himself from her gaze.

“So what’s it like?” she wanted to know, and Bernie felt as if he were being drawn out onto thin ice.

“I can’t really describe it,” he stammered.

She frowned. “What do you mean? You’re not allowed to describe it or you don’t have the words?”

“Whatever,” was his witless reply.

Her fierce squint returned. “Then what’s the point of it? What’s the point of going where you go?”

This sounded downright combative. What’s the point of breathing? he wondered. What’s the point of being born? “What’s the point of anything?” he answered, marveling at the hint of anger in his tone. Did a thing have to be described to make it worth doing? Though he knew that his irritation at her for asking was only the corollary to his irritation with himself for his inability to explain; and it frustrated him to the point of tears that in the face of the great adventure of his previously uneventful life, he remained tongue-tied. Then the bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch period, and Bernie took the opportunity to say so long forever to the girl.

But she was dawdling there in the glass brick vestibule amid the after-school stampede, the students dispersing toward their various clubs, cliques, and satanic cabals. Pretending not to see the girl, Bernie sloped toward the exit and nearly reached the threshold, where she managed as if by magic to plant herself athwart his path.

“So who do you read?” she asked, adjusting the bulging book bag slung over her shoulder.

He paused, looked askance at her, then recited a catalogue of immortals: “Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Nachman of Bratslav…” Thinking, That should shut her up; though why should he want to shut her up?

Digesting the names without blinking, she inquired, “Do you ever read Herman Hessie?”

He was unfamiliar with the author.

“What about Carlos Castaneder or
Autobiography of a Yogi
?”

“I can’t say that I have.”

“They write a lot about altered states of consciousness.”

“Really.”

“Yeah.”

There followed an awkward silence the complement to the one they’d shared earlier that day, during which Bernie found himself wishing—though not as hard as he might—for another bell to ring. Still he could think of nothing to say.

“You ever took LSD?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You?”

“Oncet.” It was a syllable from a foreign tongue. “I looked in a mirror and saw cottonmouths crawling out my eyes and nose, which is like pretty cliché. I can do better than that without drugs.” She sniffed disdainfully and Bernie involuntarily sniffed along with her. Who was this person, anyway, with her pudding-bowl hairdo and tomboyish manner, the green eyes that looked, despite the heavy hand with which she laid on her mascara, as if their severity were in the service of resisting tears? Her single earring was a silver ankh dangling from a safety pin, and Bernie wondered if her body bore strange markings in secluded places. He felt as embarrassed for her sake as for his own: since whatever her reputation, it would be compromised from now on for having been seen in conversation with the major laughingstock of Tishimingo High.

But anxious as he was to part company with her, he was equally aware of the fact that she had waited for him; no one had ever waited for him before. He couldn’t linger, though; there was the bus to catch to the downtown shul, an afternoon ritual on its way to becoming routine. After a day in uncongenial classrooms, never mind Dumpsters and lockers, he was eager to return to the pages whose antique code he hoped, with the help of broken-backed grammars, soon to crack. Then the words, once he’d determined their meanings, would acquire the weight of the thing itself, words that didn’t so much denote as embody whatever they spelled. He was about to make his excuses—he had places to go—when she volunteered her name.

“I’m Lou.” Her expression challenged him to make a remark. “It’s short for Lou Ella which sounds like Louella but it’s really Lou Ella.” Bernie was perplexed. “Two names,” she explained, her humorless lack of inflection coming on as provocative.

“Right,” he said. Then to make up for not having asked, he asked her, “Lou Ella what?”

“Tuohy.”

He tried to wipe from his face the look that had congealed there—too late. “Excuse me?”

“Sounds like somebody spit, don’t it? It’s a real trailer trash name because, hey, trailer trash c’est moi.” Again she seemed to be waiting in defiance for some remark. When it didn’t come, she added as if by way of vindication, “It’s Irish. The name, it’s Irish.”

“Uh-huh,” was all Bernie could manage, thinking: This is getting out of hand. Here he was being shmoozed by a creature (make that critter) from a South he knew only from hearsay, the unreconstructed South of tarpaper shacks and cotton-eyed sharecroppers with teeth like potsherds. She seemed a misfit even in a school full of every variety of freak, but she was also a girl. She had legs, however gangly, and breasts, if barely developed, and no doubt what the rebbe would have called oyse mokem, a you-know-what. What’s more, she dared to talk to him even as she dared him to talk to her. Then before he could decide which of them was the more jeopardized by their mutual commerce, mirabile dictu, they were walking together into the cloudy February afternoon.

IF SHE’D
BEEN
homely maybe he wouldn’t have felt so squeamish. But pretty trumped trailer trash, and he knew that if she’d wanted she could have run with the semipopulars; in her case outcast was something she seemed to have elected to be. As it was, while Bernie never sought her out, she continued to turn up, and though he told himself she was a nuisance who distracted him from more pressing concerns, he was flattered by the attention she paid him. During lunch in the turd-green Nutrition Center where he was used to sitting alone over half-eaten fishsticks, or after school in front of the flagpole from which a disturbed student had once hanged himself, she would corner him. Usually she was on her own, though once or twice he’d seen her peel away from girls even more stateless than herself to catch up with him. She had followed him to the bus stop and on one occasion, when he’d foregone his afternoon trip to the downtown shul (on her account?), part-way home. He thought about telling her flatly to leave him alone, then thought better of it when he realized that he would miss her; yet he never felt quite at ease in her company. After their initial conversation concerning his trances the subject was never broached again, though Bernie knew it was always on her mind. Why else would she hang around? He could feel it in her vigilance: She wanted to be there when he lapsed into rapture again. But when they spoke, always sporadically—for neither seemed able to find a topic beyond the elephant in their midst—they talked mostly about neutral matters: the pathologies of certain teachers and classmates, the utter pointlessness of going to school.

She never smiled, though once, acting on an erratic impulse, Bernie had tried to make her. “Two cannibals are eating a clown,” offering the single joke in his repertoire. “One says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’” Nothing, not a snicker, though his delivery wasn’t all it might have been; still, she needn’t have looked at him as if he’d passed gas. Occasionally she would volunteer some unsolicited piece of information about her past: She had come to Memphis from the Arkansas Ozarks when her mother landed a clerical job at Federal Express that had somehow fizzled, leaving her consigned thereafter to manual labor. She had no idea where her worthless-as-tits-on-a-boar father was, nor any interest in finding out. She missed the mountains and the piney woods, though she liked living close to the Wolf River, a minor tributary of the Mississippi which to Bernie’s mind was little more than a glorified drainage ditch. She didn’t actually live in a trailer, though their tract house—a shotgun affair in a treeless subdivision the other side of the interstate—was no more commodious than a double-wide. It was largely empty but for some sticks of rented furniture and the teething toys of her baby sister, Sue Lily, whom she adored and cared for while her mother was at work. Her room she described as if it existed in another dimension: how it was littered with books you had to pick your way through like “the fallen bricks of Jericho.” (She could be fanciful.) She recited their titles:
Women Who Run with Wolves, The Celestine Prophecy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Mists of Avalon
; she mentioned the divas she admired: Lotte Lenya, Avril LaVigne; the journal she kept; the poetry of Rumi and Arthur Rimbaud. Then, as casually as she might have asked him the time of day, she invited him to come see her room for himself. But that was later on.

In the meantime she continued to ration the biographical tidbits that Bernie felt ashamed of not having requested in the first place. He knew she wasn’t naturally talkative, and her confidences, not easily rendered, were meant to provoke similar utterances from him. But he couldn’t get past the fact that she was a girl, and regardless of how dramatically his own life had been altered since the Great Thaw (his term) Bernie Karp had never mastered the knack of talking to girls. Of course this one was different; this one followed him around. He’d spent his years in a virtual sleepwalk, his small joys derived from spasms of passing interest that, always a secretive kid, he kept to himself. Now an immeasurable joy had awakened him to another reality and, friendless as he was, he had a desire to relate what he’d learned, but the vocabulary for communicating that information was unavailable. Once in a while, however, he might submit apropos of nothing some crumb of dogma gleaned from his reading:

“Did you know, there are 903 different kinds of death? The most difficult one is the croup, which is choking, and the easiest is death by kiss, which is likened to drawing a hair out of milk. This is from Tractate Berakhot, and from the medieval
Sefer Yetzirat
we read…”

She would look at him expectantly, but when the words, detached as they were from emotional moorings, petered out, her anticipation turned to disappointment and even scorn. So they walked primarily in silence along suburban streets, strayed through the thickety woods behind the school, and strolled beside the banks of the septic river through the remnant of a slate-gray February into an even bleaker March. Having abandoned his trips to the downtown synagogue and shelved for the meantime his plans for bar mitzvah, Bernie would sit with her in a booth at a coffee bar in the very strip mall from which the rabbi’s academy had decamped. It was clear to him that Lou was making sacrifices to be with him; he knew that even her lusterless friends now snubbed her, that those who’d written him off as a wing nut (which included all and sundry) now banished her to the same category. He felt he owed her something and resented that she should make him feel that way. At the same time he was thankful that she no longer interrogated him, though once as they sat nursing cocoa amid the strumming of a lank-haired folk singer to whom no one was listening, she had the temerity to ask him,

“So when do you reckon on leaving your body again?”

She might have been inquiring after his adherence to a railroad timetable. Bernie assured her he didn’t know, that anything might trigger an involuntary departure though he remained unable to take flight at will. Clearly impatient with his response, she said almost testily, “Let me know when you feel one coming on again.” Then prey to an apparent change of heart, she softened, hastening to add coquettishly, “And when you go, maybe you could take me with you?”

The question surprised and confounded him. Who did she think she was? Who, for that matter, did
he
think she was? It was enough that she pried into the private domain of his spiritual life; now she aspired to enter it physically as well? Again, as upon their first meeting, he wanted to flee. A sudden deep distrust of the girl stung his heart. Okay, so here on earth he was a dweeb, a regular kunyehlemel, but aloft he was something else: like in that tale of Rabbi Eliezer’s about the country that contained within it all countries, and in that country was a city that contained all the cities of that country that contained all countries, and in that city a house that contained all the cities of that country that contained all countries, and in that house a man who bore all this within him—and that man was he, the boy Bernie Karp, when he was enraptured. Nothing in the world he’d inhabited these sixteen years was as real as his extraterrestrial forays; everything else was phony: his neighborhood, phony; the houses with their plantation colonnades and lantern turrets, phony; his family was phony. Nothing could touch the places he’d ascended to for authenticity. While on the other hand, nothing on earth—he had to concede—was quite as real to him as Lou Ella Tuohy. But nobody could accompany him on his excursions, and if he had been able to take her with him, which was impossible, wouldn’t he be depriving the planet of a precious natural resource? It was a sentiment he could no more articulate than he could explain where it was he went.