The Frozen Rabbi (46 page)
After a short incline, the tributary pipe spilled over a shelf into the storm drain proper, where he lowered himself into the deeper, broader conduit. But no sooner had he planted his feet on the sewer’s pitched bank, unhunching his spine, than he lost his footing and slid down the slope on his backside into a trough the mixture of rainwater and raw sewage. Soaked and slimed to the skin, he made an attempt to rise only to slip again, his floundering efforts to regain his balance reverberating in the concrete tunnel. The outfall from the previous night’s downpour had apparently backed up the passage, bringing with it a deposit of detritus that clogged the sewer like an unvoided intestine, and it took Bernie some moments to finally stand. Then, covered in muck as if he’d crawled from a primordial bog, he inched his way back up the slope to a less slippery purchase, where he cautiously began his forward progress again.
While the housing development above was of a fairly recent vintage, the sewer network beneath it seemed a holdover from some dark age. Unlike the sanitary system in Bernie’s own neighborhood, which transported sewage efficiently toward flush tanks and treatment facilities, this cloaca-like passage appeared to have survived from a time when plagues of yellow jack were bred in miasmal sinks below the ground. Slowly Bernie’s eyes, aided by tracers of light that penetrated the odd manhole cover, began to adjust to the gloom. There were other sources of illumination as well: sunlight slanting through the intermittent gratings, hanging pale-yellow parallelograms along the walls, whose fungus-laden masonry contributed to the atmosphere of a catacomb. Farther on, however, the floor of the tunnel itself began to come apart, breaking up like a fractured ice jam, where the stream of shmutz slopped over jagged concrete slabs into a cesspool. The pool, which contained the sediment of a wrecked civilization (TV chassis, dolls leaking electronic innards skittered over by rats as big as piglets), had spread to the width of a small lagoon; and beyond the lagoon the hydraulic cement of the sewer had given way to a pitch-black cavern like the mouth of Gehenna itself. It was a gaping blackness that seemed to beckon the feculent kid. Having memorized the coordinates in Rabbi Levi-Itzchok’s
Way of the Righteous Transmigrant
, which mapped the soul’s journey to infernal regions, Bernie was as much intrigued by subterranean as astral navigation, and had a powerful impulse to investigate. But wise to temptation, he realized he was peering into the darkness through the eyes of his nefesh, his spirit, which was inclined to see the mythic in the commonplace. He reminded himself that this was not the time for otherworldly spelunking; his first loyalty was to assiah, the literal world of action in which he still had urgent business to attend to.
He blinked, and the mouth of Gehenna reverted to a sewer tunnel, its ceiling invaded by plastic utility pipes and bundled cables. The cables hugged the wall for a dozen yards or so, then snaked around a corner into a downspout, which, as if following a thread through a labyrinth, Bernie squeezed himself into as well. Because the space was so tight, he had to slither on his belly through the narrow conduit, and while it contained only a minimal trickle of mildly contaminated water, he couldn’t avoid being further dampened and soiled in the process. Then the spout dead-ended in a vertical shaft like a chimney flue, where the
PVC
pipes and wires veered upward alongside a rusty ladder that led to a metal grille at the top of the shaft. Bernie mounted the ladder and clambered toward the faint glow that filtered through the grille, which he dislodged once he’d reached it by pushing upward with his shoulder and hands. Then he hoisted himself into the basement of Rabbi ben Zephyr’s institute. Here the cables branched around a light-studded panel of dials, switches, circuit breakers, and conductors that seemed to have blossomed directly from the tree of wires and pipes. So tall was the panel that it required climbing to a catwalk to gain access to its upper reaches, which included the main frame of a humming behemoth that Bernie assumed was a type of emergency generator, one that rendered the New House independent of the city’s power grid.
It was ironic, then, that having negotiated a sulfurous nether precinct to get there, he should hesitate upon surfacing into such a well-lit place. Because something in this glittering display of man-made energy harnessed by the rabbi for the sake of his mercenary program caused Bernie to lose faith in his own wizardly prowess; as if, before that wall of technology, he were reduced again to the talentless lard-ass he’d been in that distant time before the Great Thaw. Who after all was Bernie Karp, caked head to toe in filth, to think he could snatch a corrupt old man from being (perhaps deservedly) crushed beneath the wheels of justice bearing down on him? Was he supposed to throw himself between the spokes?
“I am,” Bernie had to remind himself aloud, “a wayfaring wonder whose origin is not known, and for me only the impossible has any appeal.” Then having said it made it true. Wasting no more time, he located a spiral stair which he ascended with pinging steps and opened a door into the wide corridor of the main-floor concourse adjacent the gift shop that doubled as a museum.
Determined not to dawdle, he couldn’t help observing that the shelves of books, baubles, and instructional CDs in their glass cases had been expanded to include various saint’s relics: vials and ampules containing the bodily secretions of a tzaddik whose every emission was precious to his followers. In the center of the shop, mounted on a plinth, was an installation featuring the original caftan and ratty mink shtreimel that the Boibiczer Prodigy had worn during his frozen repose. This tattered raiment hung on a pair of crossed staves that loomed above a Kelvinator deep freeze (heaped with plastic sirloins and hams) like a mast on a boat. Bernie was then visited by a brief vision of restoring the rabbi to the freezer in which both of them might sail through caverns measureless to man down to the Gulf of Mexico, where they would fetch up on a tropical isle. Perhaps Lou could come too. When the vision passed, the boy’s attention was drawn to a droning of voices, which grew in volume to a rolling din as he crossed the hall and opened the swinging doors. Poking his head into the great domed auditorium, he saw the large mixed gathering that swelled the galleries and lolled about the artificial turf in the arena where the rabbi’s bima stood. Rather than the sobriety you might have expected of a besieged population waiting for the axe or the tear gas to fall, most appeared as relaxed as a grandstand crowd at a sporting event. While some sang hymns and chanted or meditated yoga-style, many were content to nod in time to the beat of different drummers over their iPods. There was a good deal of snacking, each according to his means: some munching bagels with a shmear, others fried chicken and deviled eggs, while others in designer running suits pulled squab, Camembert, and truffle paté from picnic hampers provided by gourmet markets; they drank bottled water and sparkling wine. At least one young couple were openly necking. Somewhere in their midst a single voice—Bernie spied a character in dark glasses balanced on a chair—was raised in a rallying cry, insisting that given the world’s intolerance they ought all to take their own lives. “Let us die with dignity,” he exhorted them, appropriating the Hebrew term for martyrdom, but no one looked to be paying him any attention. Nor did they seem to heed the muffled harangue from the loudspeaker outside, but carried on in their holiday mood as, presumably, they waited for their charismatic leader to appear.
Bernie, however, lacked their patience. He darted back across the corridor into the elevator’s glass cubicle and rode to the top of the dome, where he crossed the slender steel bridge to the reinforced door. Then confronted by the door with its keypad combination, its peephole seconding the video camera angled above it, he thought twice before ringing the bell. What if they didn’t let him in? Secure in his virtually impregnable quarters, the rabbi may have issued orders to admit no one, not even a boy who considered himself family. Bernie stood there wondering if there were perhaps a prayer he might invoke to crack the code of the electronic deadbolt, or maybe a password of the kind his Grandpa Ruby must have uttered outside the doors of speakeasies. Then the heavy door rolled open of its own accord; flew open, in fact, to allow the headlong exit of a lady Bernie recognized from his previous visit by her candy-floss wig. Pasting himself against the rail to keep from being run over by the woman in her tearful flight, he turned to watch her drop out of sight in the lift, then looked back toward the open portal to what he thought of as Rabbi ben Zephyr’s bird’s nest. It was empty but for the snake-haired technician in her pastel jumpsuit behaving at her console like a pilot in the cockpit of a plane going down. She was at once appealing frantically through the mouthpiece of her headset for assistance and hammering the computer keys in what may have been an
SOS
, her fingers raising a clatter like artillery. As he stood at the threshold, Bernie fought against being infected by her obvious panic, wondering if the police assault was already under way.
Unobserved by its sole occupant, Bernie had advanced far enough into the skybox to steal a peek into the rabbi’s sleeping chamber, whose French doors had been left haphazardly ajar. Unable at first to trust what he saw, he rubbed his eyes with his fists, then squeezed them as if to drain their retinas of any lingering illusion. For there on the circular bed beneath the soft track lighting, an R&B singer crooning from an amp in the background, two women from among the rabbi’s circle of votaries were kneeling, working strenuously over the supine body of the naked holy man. Also naked, the young one called Cosette with the whiplash braid and the older one with the chin tuck whose name Bernie couldn’t recall were apparently trying to revive him. Cosette pumped the chicken bones of his arms, her pert breasts jiggling ornamentally with each effort, while her full-figured companion, quivering in every part, leaned above the rabbi and breathed into his mouth as if attempting to inflate a rubber raft. Both were performing their respective operations after a fashion that convinced the boy they had no idea what they were doing. Meanwhile the old man lay motionless, and if his virile member—trailing a condom like a stocking cap on a fireplug—were any indication, rigor mortis was already setting in.
Heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, let alone a multitude of collateral maladies, might have felled an old party well into his third century, especially one so renowned for his excesses. Nevertheless, as Bernie edged to within an arm’s length of the disheveled bed, still unnoticed by the women, the rabbi seemed to be responding to their ministrations, his blanched eyelids fluttering open. “Please God, he’s come back to us!” cried the older woman, getting hold of herself enough to remind him, “Rabbi, it’s me, Rosalie,” and to inquire, “are you comfortable?”
Then Bernie thought the old rascal might be looking past the women to wink at him with a sallow eye. “I make a livink,” he said, and closed his eyes again.
Kneeling beside the bed, the boy must have exuded a nasty stench, because the women, despite their intense preoccupation, took note of him. Looking up to see what must have appeared to her as some pitch-bespattered devil from the abyss, Rosalie covered her breasts and let out a shriek, then leaning over the edge of the mattress to retch, tumbled after in a dead faint onto the floor. Cosette screamed, “Mama!” and bolted from the bed to help raise the sullied Rosalie to her feet, the two of them staggering out of the room in each other’s arms.
Left alone with his rebbe, Bernie swallowed hard before speaking into the old man’s bristly ear: “Rabbi, can you hear me?” And receiving an encouraging “Nu?” continued, “Don’t you think it’s time you returned to the path of righteousness?”
His voice the wheezy wedding of a rattle and a sigh, Rabbi Eliezer answered: “Farshtunkener boychik, don’t make me laugh. There ain’t no path; there’s only the end of the road. What you call the path, it’s just messing around.”
Bernie considered the point, then concluded, “That’s only your ego speaking,” and reached over to peel off the flaccid condom.
“Ego shmego, so long as you got your health,” replied the rabbi just this side of a whisper. “Listen, kiddo, when comes to earth even a angel, he must wear the garment of this world.”
“Excuse me, Rabbi,” Bernie couldn’t help remarking, “but you’re naked.”
“So nobody’s perfect.”
“Rabbi,” urged Bernie in the language of a desperate apostle, “let me get you out of here, and we’ll do miracles. We can explore Ayn Sof, the Big Nothingness, together; we can be glorious nothing, you and me, like before we were born.”
“Psht,” from the rabbi; “give a listen who thinks he’s nothing,” he said, beginning to cackle broadly at his own joke, laughing until he choked, the tundra of his face turning a deep shade of cyanine blue. Then his body began to convulse, his paltry torso and hips flapping like a shopworn standard until he stopped breathing altogether and was still.
Bernie’s initial response to the sudden demise of the saint was denial, followed by jaw-dropping awe. It was his first encounter with actual physical death, and in some ways he thought it became the old bluffer, whose serenity recalled the original repose that Bernie had discovered him in before his thaw. Then the boy’s preliminary reaction gave way to its polar opposite, an overriding impulse to disturb that peace. The blood of the generations that had made such sacrifices to preserve the Prodigy intact was building to a boil in his veins. Had he presided over the tzaddik’s return to the world only to see him depart it in shame? Besides, Bernie found that he already missed the old man.
“I won’t let you go!”
He knew he would have to act quickly, even as the Boibiczer’s essence took flight from his spent anatomy. By now the authorities would have been alerted and at any moment cops and paramedics would burst upon the scene. In his mind Bernie had already done the deed; he’d made the transition and arrived at the destination through whose rheumy eyes he peered back at himself with abject longing. What he saw was a Bernie Karp who, though mantled head to toe in crud, was beloved of a girl and was a citizen of the sunlit world. How could he abandon himself when (it suddenly struck him) he wasn’t even finished being young? Struggling against the temptation to stay, he concentrated on the image of “the lamp of darkness”; he attempted to meditate on a verse from Proverbs, “In all your ways know him,” that was once a reliable trigger for launching him out of his skin. But it had been so long since he’d traveled that way and he’d acquired so much ballast in the interim. Bernie told himself the migration need not be permanent: The vessel he left behind might turn out to be proof against decomposition; it could even be frozen. He could return to his original self at his convenience, commute between one body and another, experiencing the best of at least two realities. All of which was finally beside the point, since he seemed to be stuck in the vessel he currently occupied. Of course, there was a surefire method of release, but that would be definitive; it would mean that in order to save the rabbi he would have to lose himself for good.