Visiting Professor (22 page)

“The fact you moved back upstairs speaks unfortunately for itself,” the Rebbe says without looking up. “For a shiksa,” he
adds, rolling his head mournfully, “Rain has a sensational ass.”

Lemuel is following his own thoughts. “If anybody was at fault, it was me. I do not love, I cannot live with, chaos.”

“Funny you should talk about living with chaos. I am in the process of finishing the rough draft of the last thesis I will
do for the Institute before I follow my Star of David to Brooklyn,” the Rebbe explains. “I call it
Torah as Crapshoot
.” He looks up from his carving, winks both
his eyes at Lemuel over his silver-rimmed spectacles. “Snappy title, even if it’s me who says so. I am toying with the idea
of maybe expanding the thesis into a book-length book, in which case I am going to retain the movie rights. With a hot title
like that, you never know how many millions could come your way. Today a modest chaos-related yeshiva in the heart of the
heart of Brooklyn, tomorrow a chain of chaos-related yeshivas linking Jewish outposts in the Diaspora.” He spoons two boiled
potatoes and some shriveled peas onto a plate. “Leg, or maybe breast?”

“Breast, thank you, Rebbe.”

“Left or right?”

“Left or right?”

“Where’s the advantage to being a consenting adult if you don’t consent?”

“That sounds like something Rain might say.”

“It does. She did. I was telling her about Onan being a pioneer in coitus interruptus when she came out with it.”

Lemuel eyes the two breasts without enthusiasm. “Left. Right. Either or.”

Using his fingertips, the Rebbe drops a guinea fowl breast onto the plate, sets it in front of his dinner guest and starts
to prepare his own plate.

“My launching pad for the paper, I take it for granted you want to know, is the story of the scapegoat—I’m talking Leviticus
16:8-10.” Inclining his head, closing his eyes, absently curling a sideburn with a fingertip, the Rebbe recites from memory:
“ ‘And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall
bring the goat upon which the Lord’s lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be
the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat
into the wilderness.’ “

Setting down his dinner plate, the Rebbe flicks on the radio, plays with the dial to tune in the classical-music station from
Rochester, then joins Lemuel at the table. He cocks his head toward the radio, listens for a moment, identifies the music.

“I’d recognize that with my ears closed. It’s Ravel’s ‘Valses Nobles et Sentimentales.’ The music haunts me—it was playing
on the radio the night I lost my cherry.”

Rolling his head in time to the music, the Rebbe meticulously half-fills two long-stemmed crystal glasses from a bottle bearing
the label “Puligny Montrachet,” clinks glasses with his guest. “
Le’hayyim
,” he growls. He closes his eyes, sips the wine, rolls it around in his mouth, swallows, nods in satisfaction. “It is maybe
a little on the young side, I could have let it breathe another hour or two, a good wine you can never open too early, but
it beats Manischewitz. … About the scapegoat,” the Rebbe continues, talking and chewing at the same time, “there is a Jewish
legend about Azazel, some say he was a fallen angel, some say he was a demon, either or, it doesn’t change the story. Every
year on Yom Kippur two male goats were chosen by lot, one for the Lord, the other, a scapegoat, for Azazel. The high priest,
I don’t envy him the job, transferred all the sins of the Jewish people onto the scapegoat, after which the animal, no doubt
staggering from the weight on its back, was driven into the wilderness and stampeded off a cliff to its death.”

The Rebbe peers at Lemuel over the drumstick he is gnawing on. “You are probably wondering, it is a relevant question, by
all means ask it, what coded signal Yahweh is sending to the resident scholars and visiting professors at the Institute for
Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies when He decrees that the goat must be selected by lot, which is to say, at
random. My thesis makes the case that Leviticus 16:8-10 should maybe be seen as the heart of the heart of Torah, more important
even than the manifesto of monotheism in Deuteronomy 6:4,
‘Shema yisro’eyl, adoynoy eloheynu, adoynoy ekh-o-o-o-d
.‘ … ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.’ In Leviticus 16:8, Yahweh, a consummate poker player, He normally holds
His cards close to His vest, always assuming He wears a vest, Yahweh, as I was saying, tips His hand. He wants to persuade
us to embrace what looks to us like randomness, and inasmuch as His randomness is a footprint of you-know-what, to embrace
chaos. If I’m on to something, and I think I am, He wants us to learn to live with chaos even if we are not comfortable with
it.”

“I do not see …” Lemuel blinks rapidly. He begins again. “How can it be possible to live with something if you are not comfortable
with it?”

The Rebbe picks with a fingernail at some guinea fowl caught between two teeth. “It becomes possible when you grasp that it
is chaos which gives zest to life.”

He spots a single tear welling in the corner of one of Lemuel’s bloodshot eyes. Embarrassed, he peels his spectacles away
from his face, noisily fogs the lenses with his breath and occupies himself polishing them with a napkin.

“What is your opinion of bacon-wrapped guinea fowl?” he asks, eager to move on to a safer subject. “You know the Yiddish joke
about guinea fowl? When a Jew eats a guinea fowl—ha!—one or the other will be sick.”

Neither man laughs.

Sighing, the Rebbe settles back into his chair, concentrates on the music coming from the radio. “In your intellectual hegira,
you have maybe stumbled across Ravel’s maxim?” When Lemuel hikes a shoulder, the Rebbe cracks a lopsided smile. “ ‘Order.
Routine. Chaos. Joie de vivre’—that’s his maxim.” Suddenly his bulging Talmudic eyes burn with secular discovery. “Could it
be … do you think it’s within the realm?”

“Could what be? Is what within the realm?”

The Rebbe’s palm slaps against his forehead. “I could kick myself I didn’t see it before, I could kick myself harder for seeing
it now, who needs this kind of information rattling around in his brain?”

“For God’s sake, what kind of information—”

‘The Gospel according to Ravel is pointing us in the direction of an awkward conclusion, namely, that chaos is not the pits,
but only a pit stop.”

Carried away by the logic of what he is proposing, the Rebbe bounds from his chair, circles Lemuel waving his drumstick at
him. His corkscrew sideburns dance in the air.

“Here we are, 5,752 years down the rocky road from Creation and the Garden of God, which happens to be, count them, 3,304
years after Yahweh personally hand-delivered the itemized list of do’s and don’ts to the first Jewish mountain climber to
conquer Mount Sinai, and we are still blind to the moral in Ravel’s music, deaf to the handwriting on the wall. Consider the
mouth-watering possibility, I’m flirting with probability even, that you weren’t out to lunch when you gave that insolent
after-lunch speech to the resident scholars and visiting professors at the Institute, when you startled them with the suggestion
that chaos was maybe only a way station.”

The embroidered yarmulke slips off the back of the Rebbe’s head. He snags it in mid-air. “The real terminus,” he goes on,
waving the
drumstick with one hand, the yarmulke with the other, “I catch a whiff of it when I read Torah, I feel it in my gut, I feel
it in my groin, may be joie de vivre! Oy, Lemuel, Lemuel,” he rasps, swept away on a tide of emotion, “consider also the possibility,
I’m flirting here with heresy, so what, I’ll take the plunge, that joie de vivre is maybe only a fancy French handle for pure,
unadulterated randomness.”

Breathing heavily, smirking in embarrassment, his hands spread wide, his sweaty palms turned up, the Rebbe backs away from
his dinner guest—backs away from the idea also. “I was talking hypothetical, it goes without saying. Any idiot knows there’s
no place in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn for pure, unadulterated randomness.”

Lemuel whispers huskily, “You almost reached the Promised Land, Rebbe. For God’s sake, don’t pull back now. I can say you
Yahweh is not as uptight as you think. Go with the flow. Make the leap.”

The Rebbe looks as if he has swallowed bacon. “What leap are we talking about?”

“The leap of faith. Pure, unadulterated randomness has to exist or nothing makes sense. If it exists, it has to be the work
of God. Hey, it
is
God!”

“You are off your rocker,” the Rebbe declares, patrolling the room. “If pure, unadulterated randomness, alias joie de vivre,
were really the terminus, life would be bursting with succulent alternatives. Faced with such a feast, we would go crazy,
not to mention hungry. Nobody would get an act together. Painters, terrorized by an infinity of possibilities, wouldn’t paint,
architects wouldn’t architect, girls wouldn’t give in and go to bed with boys, you, Lemuel, would never nibble on a drumstick
again. Your left, right, either or would miss the point, would miss the violence of having to choose, would miss the orgasm
that comes from having chosen. Oy, what words can I find to make you see the light? We think we are tossing lots for the scapegoat,
but Yahweh has loaded the dice, which is another way of saying He selects the scapegoat for us. You were right all along:
Yahweh’s randomness is fool’s randomness, which means His randomness is a footprint of chaos. Which means, thank God, that
everything under the sun is determined even if it’s beyond our power to predict what will come next. Left, right, either or
works because your choice is determined; therefore you don’t have to choose. Oy, how could it be otherwise? Where would the
Yahweh of Torah, this visceral avenger we know and love but don’t particularly like, where, I ask you, answer if you can,
would He fit into the big picture if pure randomness existed, if nothing were determined, if we had to pick and choose a thousand
times a day, if we, as opposed to God, were the real masters of our destiny?”

The Rebbe snatches a tabloid from a pile of newspapers he uses to line the garbage pail, flops into his chair, riffles angrily
through the pages. “Under my roof even food for thought turns out to be kosher,” he mutters. Something in the newspaper catches
his eye. “Oy vey,” he mumbles, his nose buried in the racing section, “there’s a mare named Messiah running in the fifth at
Belmont. Whether she’ll win by an eyelash or limp in last has already been determined. But can I risk
not
betting on her?”

“To lose one’s cherry” rings a bell. Lemuel wonders where he could have come
across the expression. Certainly not in his lost
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
. Nor does it sound like the kind of thing King James would have come up with in 1611. Which narrows it down to Raymond Chandler
and
Playboy
. Lemuel’s intuition tells him
Playboy
is the more likely suspect, which suggests that losing one’s cherry has sexual implications. But what exactly did the Rebbe
lose when he lost his cherry while Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” was playing on the radio? Having lost this cherry
of his, did the Rebbe then replace it with another cherry? In America the Beautiful people cried over spilt milk (an expression
Lemuel picked up from Dwayne when they were touring the E-Z Mart one day and discovered a puddle of milk near the refrigerated-food
section), but was it appropriate to cry over lost cherries? He makes a mental note to look up the idiom in the
Dictionary of American Slang
and add it to his repertoire. He can picture Rain’s face when she hears him respond to her “Z’up” with, “I went and lost
my cherry.”

Sinking wearily into a desk chair, Lemuel forces himself to concentrate on the sheriff’s serial-murder files. Details pile
up like slag on a heap. Many come equipped with a riddle.

Item: A handkerchief bearing someone else’s embroidered initials jutting from the breast pocket of the serial killer’s first
victim.

Item: Corrective contact lenses in the pocket of a victim with twenty-twenty vision.

Item: A ring, filled with keys that did not fit any known door in the victim’s life, clutched in a dead woman’s hand.

Item: A tiny battery-powered hearing aid in the pocket of a victim who was not deaf.

Item: A seven-inch cesarean scar on the stomach of a woman with no history of pregnancy.

Item: A package of undated, unsigned, explicitly heterosexual love letters hidden under the garbage pail liner of a victim
who detested women and was thought to be celibate.

Item: Seventeen gold coins buried in ice cubes in the freezer of a victim who qualified for food stamps.

Item: A vial of heart stimulants in the pocket of a victim with no record of a cardiac ailment.

Then there are fragments of fetishes: drawers filled with unwashed socks, closets filled with unshined shoes, cartons filled
with women’s underwear, shoeboxes filled with false teeth or ivory dildos or fingernail and toenail clippings, a valise brimming
with faded pornographic photographs of consenting adults engaged in impolite oral sex.

What does it all mean? Are the killings really chaos-related, as Lemuel suspects? Will the elusive threads of fool’s randomness
lead him to the chaotic origin of the crimes? Will they lead him to the single detail that will solve the puzzle and expose
the criminal? Persuaded he is on the right track, he plows on, rummaging in the lives of the victims with the single-mindedness
of someone plunging through the decimal expansion of pi toward infinity.

Well past midnight, Lemuel begins to have difficulty focusing on the print in the files. He strolls into the kitchen, lets
the water run for a minute before filling a glass and drinking. (Old habits die hard: In Petersburg, you had to let the water
run for four or five minutes to get past the rust.) Returning to the living room, he swallows a yawn, flicks on the Sony,
catches the tail end of the WHIM news bulletin.

“Weather in the tri-county on this next-to-last day of April is gonna be out a sight. If you’re tuned in, Charlene, honey,
you wanna go and inflate the boat and put it in the water. Blue skies up above, everyone’s in love, up a lay-zee river with
meeeee. Oh-oh. They’re going
ballistic in the control booth, which means we got us a hot phone call from one of our regulars. Hallo.”

“Like I happened to have the radio on, right? which is how come I caught you telling Charlene to go and put the boat in the
water.”

“Hey, where you been hanging out? We haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

“I been busy putting patches on my see-through shirts.”

With a pang, Lemuel recognizes the voice of the caller, crouches in front of the radio, turns up the volume.

“So what’s bugging you tonight?”

“Nothing’s what’s bugging me. It’s just the word
boat
made me nostalgic.”

“Did you use to own a boat when you were a kid?”

Rain can be heard snickering. “Me? Own a boat? You need a clue or two. I can’t even swim.”

“I don’t dig how you can be nostalgic for a boat if you never owned a boat.”

“Hey, if you can be passionate about someone who doesn’t exist, why can’t you be nostalgic for something you never had? Which
explains why some dudes are nostalgic for group sex or incest or hot pastrami sandwiches on pumpernickel. Me, I happen to
be nostalgic for boats. I always wanted to own one and sail off to the horizon.”

“What’s holding you back?”

“What’s the use? I had this friend who happens to be an expert on horizons, he knows more about them than you and me put together.
He says when you reach the horizon, he was speaking from personal experience, right? there’s always another horizon on the
horizon.”

“The trip could be a chuckle even if you never reached the horizon. Isn’t that so, Charlene?”

“Not. If you buy into America, you buy into the idea that it’s the getting there that counts.”

“You sound kinda down in the mouth.”

Lemuel, crouching, grabs a pencil and scratches “down in the mouth” on the back of an envelope.

“I go with the flow. Sometimes the flow turns out to be upstream.”

“Can you play that back for me slow like? Pay attention, Charlene, honey. Rain’s got herself what the heavy hitters call a
worldview which is definitely not mainstream. She goes with the flow even if it’s upstream. Ha ha. Hey, you still with us,
Rain? Rain? Well, what’d’ya
know? She must a been phoning from a booth and run out of quarters. Well, if you’ve just joined us, you’re listening to WHIM
Elmira, the station where consenting insomniacs listen to sleepers describe their X-rated dreams. I’ll take another call …”

Gazing into the Sony, trying to conjure up an image of Rain in the phone booth, Lemuel feels himself being sucked into a frightening
fiction. Medium shot of Rain in the booth, the phone cradled between her neck and shoulder blade, rummaging in her pockets
for a quarter, then hanging up in disgust when she can’t find one. Close in on Rain as she discovers the phone booth is jammed
shut by a coiled boa constrictor. She starts to pound on the sides with her small fists. Her breath fogs the glass, obscuring
her face. Lemuel could swear he hears her muffled cries: “Hey, Mayday, Mayday. I’m trapped in the goddamn booth, right? I
want out.”

Lemuel’s mind’s eye zooms out for a long shot. The telephone booth is lost in the heart of the heart of a lush garden. “I’m
trapped outside the Garden of God,” he hears himself moan. “I want in.”

On the radio, a caller with a vaguely familiar rasp to his voice is on the phone. “I couldn’t help overhearing your previous
interlocutor mention incest,” he says. “If God was really against incest, He would maybe have created two couples instead
of one in the Garden of Eden. Or better still, two Edens situated within commuting distance of each other, each garden with
one biologically unique couple in it. If He didn’t do this, we can assume it wasn’t because of a shortage of clay—I’m talking
Genesis 2:7, ‘And the Lord God formed man of the clay of the ground.’ We can likewise assume it wasn’t because He couldn’t
come up with a spare rib.”

“You don’t want to go and miss this, Charlene, honey. I got a live one on the line making the case incest is best.”

“I’m not arguing it’s best. I’m only suggesting that God may have been sending a coded signal to the resident
shlimazels
and visiting
shlepps
of the planet Earth when He created one couple in one garden—”

The host cuts off the caller. “So I’ll bite: What coded signal was God sending when He created one couple in one garden?”

The man on the phone can be heard blowing his nose a nostril at a time. “Like Moses,” he finally says, “I can maybe climb
a mountain and catch a whiff of the Promised Land, I know it’s right over the horizon,
I feel it in my gut, I feel it in my groin, but I will never actually get to kiss the ground. …”

“I must’ve missed something: What’s kissing the ground of the Promised Land got to do with incest and one couple in one garden?”

Over the radio, the hum of the phone line is replaced by the shrill pitch of a dial tone.

Lemuel senses the
sheriff come to life on the other end of the phone line. “You went’n what?”

“I went and solved the serial murders,” Lemuel says again. “I spent the last three nights combing though the files. I know
who the killer is.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“In Backwater. On South Main. In the apartment over the Rebbe.”

“Lock the door,” the sheriff orders excitedly. “Don’t open it for no one except my man Norman. He’ll be ‘round to fetch you
‘fore you can skin uh cat.”

“Fetch,” Lemuel repeats with interest. “Skin a cat.”

Twenty minutes later a blue-and-white cruiser with a yellow light pulsating on the roof pulls into the driveway under Lemuel’s
French doors. A moment later there is the pounding of boots on wood. Lemuel hears the Rebbe’s voice calling up the stairs,
“Where’s the fire, Norman? You’re knocking over stacks of books with the name of God in them.” There is an insistent knock
on the door. Lemuel unlatches the chain and opens it.

Norman touches two fingers to the brim of his hat. “Sheriff sent me over,” he explains. “Told me to bring you in dead or alive.”
Flashing a sheepish grin, he flexes his knees to adjust his testicles. “Don’t get nervex—he specified alive was his first
choice.”

“I will fetch the file folders and be with you before you can skin a cat.

Downstairs, Norman holds open the rear door of the car. Ducking, Lemuel slides in. He is surprised to discover two men sitting
in the car, one in front, one in back. The one in front, square-shouldered, square-jawed, unsmiling, twists in his seat.

“Mitchell, with two l’s,” he announces. “FBI.”

The pale man sitting next to Lemuel regards him through tinted eyeglasses as he offers a soft, pudgy hand. “Doolittle,” he
introduces
himself. “I work for A.D.V.A., which is a subdivision of PROD, which is a division of N.S.A.”

“Hey, you definitely have an eye for initials,” Lemuel says uneasily.

Norman slips into the driver’s seat, turns the key in the ignition, switches on the headlights and the overhead pulsating
light, flicks the compass attached to the dashboard with the nail of his third finger, then starts down the driveway toward
the street. “Sheriff figured as how you’d want to have a private word with these here gents while I was driving you in,” he
says over his shoulder.

“Let me fill you in real quick-like,” Doolittle tells Lemuel. “ ‘N.S.A.’ stands for the United States National Security Agency,
which is in the business of cryptoanalysis and traffic analysis. TROD’ is short for the Office of Production, which is in
the business of signal intercept. A.D.V.A., which I happen to run, is so secret I can’t tell you what the initials stand for.
We’re in the business of taking the intercepts provided by PROD and breaking Russian-language cipher systems.”

With an effort Mitchell twists in his seat again. “I pulled down a C-minus in my college math survey course,” he tells Lemuel.
“What you do for a living is Greek to me. Doolittle here informs me that you do it better than anyone else in the world. What
we want, what would give us pleasure is for you to come in from the cold and do if for the good guys.”

“Funny you should talk about the good guys,” Lemuel says. “My whole life I have been waiting for that piece of information
to rattle around in my brain. So I will bite: Who are the good guys?”

Mitchell does not look as if he appreciates Lemuel’s sense of humor. “We’re the good guys, sport,” he says with a tight smile.
“The bad guys are no longer players. We deported the Russian woman with the washed-out brassiere, we deported the Oriental
man who chats folks up with a stiff upper lip, we deported the Syrian exchange student who tried to talk you into relocating
to a mosquito-infested metropolis on the Euphrates, we have taken the two spaghetti types from Reno into custody for doing
sixty in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone and resisting arrest when we tried to show them the error of their ways. You will
not be hearing again from any of them in the foreseeable future.”

“On the off chance someone is interested,” Norman calls over his shoulder, “the straight stretch of Interstate right after
the next bend
is pointing like an arrow toward Jerusalem.” He taps the compass with a fingernail. “Six degrees south of east, magnetic,
as opposed to true. The sheriff and me, we went and calculated it on a Mercator map a the world in the office atlas just in
case the Rebbe gets himself rearrested again.”