Schrodinger's Gat (13 page)

When he finishes, he turns and smiles at me, beckoning for me to come in. I approach the bed and see the woman that was in the picture with Tali. She looks much the same, but more peaceful. She seems to be in a deep sleep.

“I’m Rabbi Freedman,” says the man, standing to shake my hand. “You are a friend of Beth’s?”

“
I … know her sister, Tali,” I say. “My name is Paul Bayes.”

“
Ah, Tali,” says the rabbi, nodding.

“
You know Tali?” I ask.

“
Sure,” he says. “I’ve known them both for years. Tali’s a sweet girl.”

“
Have you heard from her recently? In the past few days?”

He shakes his head.
“No, no. But Tali never had much use for me.” He shrugs as if to say
what are you gonna do?
“Why? Has something happened to Tali?”

“
I’m not sure,” I say. “Nobody has heard from her for a few days.”

“
So you came here to look for her?”

“
Honestly, I’m not sure why I’m here. Looking for clues, I guess.”

He nods, seeming to understand.
“They are close,” he says. “Tali, she makes other people’s burdens her own.”

This guy knows Tali all right.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” I say, “what happened to Beth? What’s wrong with her?”

“
Overdose,” he says. “Xanax. She had a prescription, of course, for anxiety. She’s been in a coma for six months now. I come once a week to read to her and pray.”

“
Oh,” I say. I don’t have to ask if it was accidental. I know enough about Xanax to have a rough idea how many you’d have to take to slip into a coma. After a moment, I say, “Is there anything that can be done?”

“
Sure,” he says, smiling. “I’m doing it.”

He reads another psalm to her and then we sit quietly for a while. Finally, I say,
“What made her do it?”

He sighs, shakes his head. He doesn
’t speak for a long time. Then he says, “You know what’s wonderful about children?” he says. “They don’t understand the distinction between what’s
in here
–” he thumps his chest – “and what’s
out there
. They just
are
, you understand? A child is only aware of right now, the continuous interplay of the ego and sensory phenomena. They have no sense of how big the universe is or how small they are in comparison. A young child feels like she’s the center of the universe, and in some ways she’s right.

“
Eventually, of course, children grow up, and a big part of growing up is building a sort of mental wall between what’s in here – me, myself – and the outside world. It’s tragic, in way, because dreams and imagination are often casualties. Dreams span the two worlds, you see, the
in here
and the
out there
. We tell children to use their imaginations, to hold onto their dreams, but what we really mean is that if they’re going to have dreams, they should reel them back behind the wall. Because if you’ve got breaches in the wall where your dreams can get out, then stuff from outside the wall can come in through those breaches too. So there’s the real world and there’s imaginary stuff, and you want to make sure you know which is which, because otherwise you’re going to get taken advantage of. And I say it’s tragic, but really there’s no way around it; the world is no place for people who can’t tell the real from the imaginary. There are bad people out there who will use the breaches in your wall to get to you.

“
The absolute worst thing that can happen to a child, though, is for one of those people to come along while the child is happily constructing her wall and say, ‘Your wall is in the wrong place. Here, let me help you.’ Essentially what this person is doing is defining new boundaries of reality. Not only that, but he’s actually redefining
who she is
in relation to the rest of the world. And usually what he does is to build her wall in such a way as to specifically let in the sorts of people the wall is meant to keep out. Eventually she realizes that her wall is all wrong, but by then it’s too late to do much about it. She withdraws as far as she can inside the wall, but it doesn’t really help, because this horrible mess of a wall is still there.” He stops for a moment and looks into my eyes. “Do you understand, Paul?”

I nod dumbly.
“Are you … that is, should you be telling me all this?”

“
I’m not revealing anything that was said in confidence, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he replies. “And I don’t have any solid evidence of what happened. But I’ve seen and heard enough to know.”

A queasy sensation has taken hold in my gut. Puzzle pieces are falling into place. I understand the sadness on Beth
’s face in that picture and I understand the hunted look in the eyes of her mother. That helpless old man in the chair hadn’t always been so helpless.

Now I also understand Tali
’s need to do something,
anything
to make things right, even if she’s doing the wrong thing half the time. How long was Tali aware of what was going on with her sister? How long did she have to sit there and do nothing, because there was nothing she could do? I reflect that Tali started tampering with events shortly after Beth’s suicide attempt. Tali probably just couldn’t take it anymore, sitting at Beth’s side, once again unable to take any meaningful action to help her sister. She had to do something, even if it was wrong.

“
Did Tali …” I start. “That is, was she …”

“
I don’t think so,” says Rabbi Freedman. “Tali won’t open up to me, of course, but I’ve dealt with enough of this sort of thing that I can usually see the signs. In my opinion, Beth was the only one of the two who was …” He trails off. After a moment, he adds, “That isn’t to say Tali hasn’t suffered greatly. Being a witness to great evil and being unable to do anything about it … it’s a heavy burden.”

“
I should go,” I say, getting uneasily to my feet.

“
I was just about to leave myself. Would you care to get a drink with me, Paul?”

“
Um,” I reply, a little disconcerted by the thought of going out for drinks with a rabbi. “Sure, I suppose.”

We leave the hospital
and the rabbi takes me to my car. I follow him to a local bar. On the way over, the openings to a lot of bad jokes pop into my head, but I do my best to ignore them. I meet him at the entrance and we go in and find a table. “So, Paul,” says the rabbi when we’ve gotten our drinks, “what’s bothering you?”

Jeez,
is it that obvious? I shrug. “I’m worried about Tali.”

“
You barely know Tali.”

“
She … had an effect on me,” I say. “I suppose you could say I’m smitten.”

“
Or infatuated,” says the rabbi.

“
‘Smitten’ makes me sound less creepy.”

He laughs.
“You’re not a creep. I’ve known a lot of creeps, and you’re not one.”

“
That’s good to know. Maybe a schmuck, then.”

“
Maybe,” he says, smiling. “I can’t blame you for being smitten by Tali, though. She’s quite something. Has she really gone missing?”

“
Seems like it. She was supposed to meet me for dinner on Wednesday but never showed. Her boss, Dr. Heller, hasn’t seen her since Monday. I stopped by her parents’ house, but …”

The rabbi shakes his head.
“The mother, Sarah, she’s a not a bad woman, but she’s weak-willed. The opposite of Tali, in many ways. She takes the path of least resistance. And the father …”

“
Yeah,” I say. “He’s one of the creeps.”

“
To put it mildly,” says the rabbi. “He’s got dementia, Alzheimer’s. The
Paskudnyak
. He forgets, thinks his daughters are still little girls. He doesn’t remember any of it. There’s a Yiddish curse,
Zol er krenken un gedenken
. Let him suffer and remember. But his slate is washed clean, and he’s not even dead yet! I could kill him, you know? But vengeance belongs to the Lord. Anyway, you were telling me about Tali.”

“
Not much else to tell,” I say. “Nobody seems to know where she is. I’ve been stood up before, but I just didn’t get the impression …”

He shakes his head.
“If Tali said she would meet you, she planned to meet you. That girl, I don’t think she’d tell a lie to save her life.”

“
That’s pretty much the impression I got,” I say.

“
So what’s bothering you?” he asks.

I
’m confused. “I just told you, Tali is missing. I’m worried about her.”

“
Tali is a smart girl. She knows how to avoid being a victim. I suspect that whatever trouble she’s in – if she is in trouble – is of her own making. And you can’t save her from that.”

“
Maybe,” I say. After a moment, I add, “She saved me from mine.”

“
Really?” he says. “How did she do that?”

“
It’s hard to explain,” I say, haltingly. “I was considering suicide. Tali talked me out of it.”

He smiles.
“That’s Tali,” he says. “She doesn’t tolerate quitters. Why did you want to kill yourself?”

“
Do I need a reason? I don’t mean to be glib, Rabbi, but if you’re going to insist on being reasonable, why not ask me what reason I have to live? It goes both ways, right? If I need a reason to kill myself, don’t I need to have a reason to go on living?”

“
Life is its own reason,” he says. “All living creatures want to live. They can’t help it. Only human beings can employ reason, and only human beings commit suicide. That’s because reason, if left unchecked, can cause a person to doubt his purpose. The universe is just as absurd for a snail as it is for a human being; the difference is that the snail doesn’t care.”

“
But when you say life is its own reason, what you’re really saying is that life just
is
. That it just goes on
without
a reason.”

“
What I’m saying is that meaning is not reducible to axioms.”

 
“So the answer is not to think too much?”

“
The answer is to subjugate reason to a higher purpose. Do you know the story of Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac?”

“
Sure,” I say. “God commands Abraham to kill his son, but at the last minute God changes His mind and provides a ram for him to sacrifice instead.”

“
We cannot know the mind of God,” says the rabbi. “So we cannot say whether He ‘changed his mind.’ But we know that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and that Abraham apparently intended to do as God commanded. Once Abraham had demonstrated his willingness to obey, God relented. Scholars disagree on the meaning of the text, but the most common interpretation is that God was testing Abraham. So, we should ask, what is the nature of this test? In short, I would argue that it is a matter of forcing Abraham to choose faith over reason. Abraham was a good man, and a reasonable man; he knew that murdering his son was wrong. There was no way for him to rationalize the act in his mind. It simply was not reasonable. But Abraham believed, despite the obvious irrationality of the act, that somehow things would work out for the best. He had enough faith to overcome his reasonable objections.”

“
Thus setting the precedent for religious fanatics and suicide bombers all over the world,” I say.

“
The existence of counterfeits doesn’t disprove the existence of the genuine article,” says the rabbi, unfazed. “Plenty of schizophrenics claim to hear God speaking to them, but hearing God talking to you doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a schizophrenic. Nor does it mean you’re an unstable religious fanatic. It could simply mean, as with Abraham or Moses, that God is talking to you.”

“
But the outcome is the same, right? Whether Abraham was schizophrenic or a prophet, he heard a voice telling him to kill his son. Frankly, I’d prefer to think he was crazy. The alternative is that God is evil. Or insane. Sorry, I don’t mean any offense. I just …”

“
No need to apologize. But you’re mistaken. The outcome was not the same. If Abraham had been crazy, the voice in his head wouldn’t have told him to stop. Isaac would have died.”

“
So Abraham is only an attempted murderer. And God isn’t evil; he’s just a sadist. Or indecisive.”

“
Or perhaps He was merely trying to communicate something very important to Abraham. That even when human reason fails, God will provide a way.”

I shrug.
“Seems like a pretty cruel way to make a point.”

“
Human sacrifice was common among the tribes in that area at the time. The remarkable thing about the story, the reason that it is still told today, is that God relented in His demand. The story contrasts the true God with other gods by showing that He is a God of love.”