The Sea Beach Line

Also by Ben Nadler

Punk in NYC's Lower East Side 1981–1991

(nonfiction monograph, Microcosm Publishing, 2014)

Harvitz, As To War

(novel, Iron Diesel Press, 2011)

Copyright © 2015 by Ben Nadler

First edition

Part of Chapter 2 was originally published as a short story, under the title “Krabov,” in the digital literary magazine
Mandala Journal
, a publication of the Institute for African American Studies, University of Georgia, in 2012.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents, either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Fig Tree Books LLC, Bedford, New York

www.FigTreeBooks.net

Jacket design by Strick&Williams

Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

ISBN number 978-1-941493-09-0

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10
  
9
  
8
  
7
  
6
  
5
  
4
  
3
  
2
  
1

In memory of Newt Johnson.

Contents

Book 1: The Yeshiva Bocher

    
Chapter 1

    
Chapter 2

    
Chapter 3

    
Chapter 4

    
Chapter 5

    
Chapter 6

    
Chapter 7

    
Chapter 8

Book 2: Knickerbocker Avenue

    
Chapter 9

    
Chapter 10

    
Chapter 11

    
Chapter 12

    
Chapter 13

    
Chapter 14

    
Chapter 15

    
Chapter 16

    
Chapter 17

Book 3: The Binding of Isaac

    
Chapter 18

    
Chapter 19

    
Chapter 20

    
Chapter 21

    
Chapter 22

    
Chapter 23

Acknowledgements

BOOK 1

The Yeshiva Bocher

1

IT CAME TO PASS
that four sages entered
Pardes
, encountering the divine. Ben Azzai died. Ben Zoma went insane. Akiva emerged with perfect faith. Elisha ben Abuyah “tore out the roots” of the orchard, and emerged with perfect doubt. From that point forward, Elisha's name was blotted out; the rabbis referred to him only as Aher, “the other.”

The story, just a few lines long, appears in both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, but I read it in a photocopied packet of Aggadot and post-rabbinic tales in a Jewish literature class in college. I had taken acid the night before, and when I came to class that morning I was in the posttrip void where colors and logic don't work quite the right way, and you can't sleep no matter how tired you are. I ran my fingers over the lines of the story. The Xerox toner felt thick on the paper.

The story opened up something inside of me. Piety didn't really interest me, but I was fascinated by the path shared by these four sages. They had entered the heavenly garden of
Pardes
, achieving the highest of mystical experiences. Most intriguing was Aher, who found his own individual truth, which led him away from the bonds of his society.

I had been taking hallucinogens regularly and recreationally for five years, since I was sixteen, but once I read the
Pardes
tale during my junior year, hallucinogens took on a ritual importance. They were a way to shake the dust off the world around me, to make the hidden signs on my path glow. My consumption increased dramatically. My mind felt like a local train that had switched to the express track and was picking up speed.

The class soon moved on toward modernism without me. We had briefly discussed Moshe Luzzatto, who heard the voice of a divine messenger in eighteenth-century Italy. I devoted myself to reading his guide,
Mesillat Yesharim
, hoping that if I listened hard enough, and behaved rigorously enough, I could hear the same type of revelation. Despite my lack of piety, I tried to heed Luzzatto's words as best I could, and follow “the path of the upright.” I started wearing a kippah, partly out of observance, because one had to live a righteous life before he could receive revelation, and partly because I saw myself as a character in a story and the kippah as part of my costume.

In the university library, I read books by other seekers and tried to find myself in their texts. I learned from Kafka—who learned from the Belzer Hasidim—that everyone had their own door to pass through. It wasn't always an angel or divine messenger who called your name. In Safed, Israel, a rabbi received a letter from Rebbe Nachman—two centuries after the rebbe's death. Then there was Philip K. Dick, who was struck with gnosis in the form of a pink laser beam. In
VALIS
, his sci-fi novel–cum–spiritual memoir, Dick's alter ego learned to thread together hidden narratives from symbols in the everyday world around him. I too believed that messages were waiting for me somewhere. I simply had to find them.

After Oberlin expelled me in the fall of 2004, I went to live with my mother and stepfather in New Mexico. We agreed that I needed to sober up and get healthier—I'd pretty much stopped eating or
otherwise caring for myself at school—before I tried to find a job or, my mother emphasized hopefully, reapply to college. I was all for getting sober and healthy; drugs had taken me as far as they were going to, and my brain felt exhausted and bruised.

In the beginning, my mother tried to get me to talk to her. We would go to brunch or a museum while my stepfather was busy with work, and she suggested on several occasions that I attend counseling. Mostly, though, I just spent time alone, walking through the arroyos. It rained every afternoon for the first month that I was there. In the evenings, the sun set over the mountains, painting an image of fire on the sky. Late at night, the coyotes howled like demons. I slept facing east so the sun would wake me.

Then, after two months in New Mexico, I received two signs. The first was a postcard from my father. Alojzy had not sent a postcard, or communicated with me in any manner, for several years. This postcard had been mailed three weeks earlier but had only just been forwarded from our old address on Long Island.

The postcard depicted a pinup-style tattooed mermaid with the words “CONEY ISLAND” in big block letters. On the back Alojzy had sketched a cargo ship, a heavy freighter set against a New York City skyline. Each cargo container, smokestack, and antenna was detailed, though it wasn't clear what flag the ship sailed under. The rough waters carried down to the bottom of the card, and the ship's wake bled off the left edge. Skyscrapers twisted together in the background, forming a latticework. Other than my name and old address, and Alojzy's signature—which stretched across the starboard side of the ship, where the ship's name would be—there were no words. A Brooklyn, NY, postmark was printed by the American flag stamp.

Two days after I received Alojzy's postcard, the second sign, a notecard from a Semyon Goldov of Brooklyn, arrived. It was addressed to my mother and folded into a small envelope:

            
Dear Mrs. Ruth Edel—

                 
I am writing you to sadly inform you that Alojzy Edel is missing, and can only be presumed dead.

                 
I have known the Alojzy for many years, and this is a great tragedy.