The Mystics of Mile End (24 page)

Brendan came up to order a drink and Hannah started to prepare it. He had his notebook in hand and I asked if I could see what he was working on. When he showed me a giant grid filled with digits, I recognized it as one of those magic squares, where each row and column adds up to the exact same number. Impressed, I said, “You must be really good at math.”

“Actually, I'm pretty much the worst in my class.”

“Seriously? But you're always messing around with numbers.”

“Numbers don't like me, but I like them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of synesthesia?”

I nodded. “Why, do you have it?”

“Yeah. For me, numbers have colors.”

“Really?”

“I know, it's weird, right? When I look at a number, all of a sudden I can see a color—or, well, I can feel it. Like one thing triggers the other thing in my head, and then it just seems so obvious that six is blue, or that three is green, you know? It's kind of hard to explain.”

“No, actually, I think I know what you mean.”

Hannah had finished making his drink. I turned to give it to him—

And then the door opened, and a woman walked in. A green dress swirled about her knees. Her dark hair fell a few inches below
her shoulders. In her arms was a stack of books. As she placed them on a table, she blew the bangs out of her eyes with an upward puff of air. Then she walked toward the counter. Toward me.

The teacup slipped from my hand and fell to the floor, shattering.

“What the—?” Hannah said, but before she could even turn around I was racing to the bathroom, locking myself in a stall, a flood of hot tears gushing up my throat.

I lowered the lid of the toilet and sat. Fists clenched, heart racing. My breath came in sharp staccato rhythms that ripped the oxygen from my lungs instead of filling them with air.

It was her. She was wearing a different dress now—not the black one she'd worn at the funeral, or the black one she'd worn at the hospital—but I recognized her. I'd have recognized her anywhere, even though we'd never been introduced, even though I'd only ever heard her name spoken in muffled tones, late at night, through closed doors. Valérie, for the most part. On occasion, Val. And once or twice, Valkyrie.

I remembered the rumors I'd heard floating around the girls' bathrooms at McGill (“Did you hear about David Meyer's latest love interest?” “
Another
student?” “Yes! Another one!”), rumors of the kind I'd been hearing since my first year of undergrad. It hadn't exactly come as a shock—I'd been all of twelve years old when I figured out why Dad “worked late” so many Friday nights—but the campus gossip had rankled. As had the smell of her perfume on his shirts (which, no, Lev, I couldn't bring myself to want), as had her insistence on stalking us the day of his funeral, when she had shown up first at the burial site, then at the
shiva
house.

And now she was
here,
and I had no idea what to do. She might know things I didn't know about my father's climb up the Tree. Clues that could lead me to the second vessel—the vessel I was failing, so pathetically, to find. But at that thought I squared my shoulders, clenched my jaw. Why should I go running to her for
help? My dad's lover, the keeper of his secret life, a life he obviously valued more than his family because he spent so much more time with her than he ever did with us?

When I finally unbolted the door and reentered the café, she was gone.

The room was peaceful. Behind the counter, the floor was clear; Hannah had swept up my mess. She had gone back to stacking cups, placing them in the precarious pyramid that I would never even dream of attempting but that she pulled off beautifully, effortlessly. The cups sat atop one another high up on their shelf, their angles straight and stable. I smiled at the sight. And then, just like that, I saw it. Not the cups, but the sheaves of light pouring off them, funneling and streaming into the sky. A perfect foundation, a model of balance—and in my fingers, vibrating with that familiar golden hum, the key to Yesod.

A
s Jenny and I rode the bus to Mile End for Lev's birthday, she stared stonily out the window, her hands folded over a cake box, while I pondered the key.

After the way it had appeared to me freely, it seemed even more absurd that I'd ever tried to wrest it from Tyler. The idea that these keys could be
wrested
at all was a mistake I'd picked up from my dad—I saw that now. You couldn't force the universe's hand. It didn't work that way. But if you waited in utter emptiness, the signs would come to you . . .

The bus pulled in to the stop beside Katz's house. When we got out, I stared at the tin can tree on his lawn. A bitter laugh escaped me. Jenny threw me a weird look, but I couldn't help it: it had put me in mind of the mystical garden where, according to the old folktale, four entered and only one escaped unscathed. How arrogant my dad had been! To think he could succeed where men so much greater than him had failed,
and by skipping most of the steps!

The door opened and a smiling Katz appeared. As he waved, I felt a sudden urge to run up the path toward him. This time I could offer him something far better than a bunch of sour lemons, good only for keeping his simple faith intact; I could give him a sweet revelation that might actually propel him forward. You didn't get back to the original Tree by tinkering with real trees; you emptied yourself and waited! I raised my hand to return his wave and took a step toward him—but Jenny grabbed my elbow, pointing toward my house.

“Come on,” she said. “Lev is waiting. You know, your brother?”

As I let myself be turned away, Katz's smile faded.

Now we were walking up to the house; now Jenny was ringing the bell. The door swung open and she greeted Lev with a bubbly “Happy birthday!” He tried to take the cake box from her, but she swatted his hand away, laughing. While she hugged him, I thought how well the two of them had always gotten along. The fact that he was hugging her at all was proof of this: his orthodoxy barred him from touching any woman outside his immediate family, but he'd always made an exception for Jenny, who'd grown up alongside him. Who was like a sister to him. Who was—as I knew he knew, even before I'd gotten up the guts to tell him—dating his sister.

I followed them into the kitchen—where, unexpectedly, Alex sprang up to greet us.

“Hey, Samara, good to—” he said, and then he saw I hadn't come alone. “Oh, hi, Jenny.”

We sat down to eat. Lev passed around the wine and the bread but didn't recite any blessings. I stole a curious glance at him—had he just forgotten?—but he wasn't making eye contact. I moved food around my plate while Jenny did her best to keep the mood light. She skillfully avoided, in her chatty way, any topic Lev and I might potentially find depressing, such as the ozone layer and melting
ice caps and urban sprawl and the fact that we were both now orphans. The morbid irony of celebrating somebody's birth just a couple of months after the person who gave him life has died—she skated around that, too.

When it came time for dessert, she left the kitchen and returned with a Black Forest cake in hand and a huge grin on her face. Lev laughed. She'd put two lit candles on top, the ones shaped like numbers that you see at little kids' birthday parties. She placed it on the table in front of him, a pair of glowing twos reflected in his eyes.

“Make a wish!” Jenny said.

Lev closed his eyes and blew. Then Jenny plucked the candles from the droopy frosting and handed a knife to Lev, who cut four slices. She gave one of these to me.

“I'm not hungry,” I said.

Jenny studied my dinner plate. “Sam,” she said quietly, “you've barely eaten anything.”

“I'm not hungry,” I said again.

“Okay, but. You still have to eat. Your body needs food.”

I shrugged. “People are more than just bodies.”

“Well yeah, sure, okay, but I mean—”

“Hasn't there ever been a moment in your life when you felt really separate, really far away from your own body?”

“That's really not the point, though, is it, because you—”

“I have,” Alex said suddenly, and we all swiveled to look at him. A smile spread across his face. “It was on my ninth birthday. My mom got me a telescope as a gift, and that night was a clear night, so she helped me set it up on the balcony. She was too tired and cold to stand there searching for stars, but I pressed my eye to the lens and moved the telescope in these really tiny, patient increments across the sky—and then, all of a sudden, I was right smack-dab in the middle of the Pleiades! They're just seven stars, but they
filled my whole field of vision and—I think I forgot to breathe! My feet, it was like they weren't even touching the balcony anymore. I was just up in the sky, surrounded by stars on all sides, totally unaware of the physical—”

“Exactly!” I cried. “It's exactly like that. You get to this place, it's beyond the body and you just—it's just the best feeling—you don't even want to come down because it's so clear up there and everything down on Earth looks so totally unimportant, so pathetic, really, and—”

I faltered. Alex and Jenny and Lev, all of them were staring at me strangely. All of them afraid. Then I realized that I was standing up, though I didn't remember having left my chair, and my voice was piercing, though I didn't remember having raised it. “Anyway,” I said. “I'm just not very hungry tonight. But you guys have cake—I'll get these dishes into the dishwasher.”

I took the plates and scurried off to the sink.

“Let me help you with that.” Alex appeared at my elbow, lifting a dish from my soapy hands and loading it into the dishwasher. He whispered, “Are you okay?”

I looked from him to the dishwasher and back again—and thought I'd never felt better in my life. I'd been so sure there was nobody I could talk to, nobody at all who could possibly understand. I'd been wrong. I'd forgotten about Alex.

B
ack home, around midnight, I got an e-mail from Lev.

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subject:
Something I forgot to tell you tonight

At yeshiva we started learning about the Resurrection of the Dead that's supposed to happen when the
Messiah comes, which my teacher says could be any day now. Which made me think, hey, maybe I shouldn't give all Dad's clothes away! Because what will he wear when he gets resurrected? But then we got to the part in the Talmud where it says the dead will be resurrected wearing their clothes. So I asked, what do you mean, the clothes they died in? The rabbi said yes. A picture popped into my head then of Dad wearing his jogging clothes, that sweaty T-shirt and gray gym shorts for all eternity, and I burst out laughing. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. My classmates all take this so literally, you have no idea. As if Dad is just going to magically reappear out of the blue one day, like a zombie? It's weird. Although, on the other hand, I guess maybe it's not any weirder than him just disappearing out of the blue one day. Right?

P.S. Normally I'd talk to Mr. Glassman about this kind of thing but Mrs. Glassman just had another stroke and now the nurse says she's in something called a “persistent vegetative state,” which is another thing I forgot to tell you tonight.

P.P.S. Something you forgot to tell me tonight is “happy birthday.”

I hit Reply. Then I hit Discard Draft. On the clock radio, one minute, then two, then three ticked by. I reached under the bed and retrieved the letter I'd supposedly sent to Lev weeks ago at Jenny's urging. Really, all I'd managed to do since then was fold the Tree of Life sketch into a paper crane.
Dear—,
it said. I grabbed a pen and completed the salutation.

Dear Alex,

Remember that day we sat in front of the dishwasher and you taught me to listen for the patterns in the chaos, like SETI scientists do? Remember how I had you feel my pulse and you couldn't believe it because I'd gotten my heartbeat to mimic the pattern in the dishwasher noise, all its whirs and clicks, its 0s and 1s? I never told you how I did it—never had the words to thank you—but now—

I know you weren't at my bat mitzvah but if you had been you would've heard it in my voice. How I let my heart fall into sync with the rhythms of the Hebrew words, and then with the rhythms of the hearts of all the people in the audience, and then once I did that—once I was in—all the noise fell away and I was able to speak to all of them (well, all except one) so that they'd really hear me. It was terrifying, tying my heartbeat to theirs, feeling all of that emotion pour through me. But I did it anyway, and do you want to know how?

There's a trick, a very simple trick that I learned that day in front of the dishwasher but later made myself forget. Here it is: Stop. Just stop. Stop thinking that you're going to crack the code. Stop trying. You're not going to crack anything. The code is going to crack you.

That's something you taught me, even if you didn't realize it. Which is why I owe you my thanks. Because you made it possible for me to do this. To climb the Tree of Life.

I'm two vessels up now. I see signs and symbols everywhere. Leaves swirling in the streets, vapors moving over a bowl of soup, cloud formations solidifying and
dispersing—everything is full, overfull, ready to explode with meaning at the slightest pinprick. I've combed through my father's book, read the sections on the upcoming vessels. Hod-Netzach. Tiferet. Gevurah-Chesed. I've got them all memorized. I'm ready, now all I have to do is wait.

S
uddenly, it begins.

I am behind the counter at Two Moons. The door opens and there she is. Val. Valérie. She sits down at the one free table, glances nervously at me. I'm about to retreat to the bathroom, but then I remember how well I'm doing on my own now and I think: I don't need you; I don't need to run from you. I pick up a mug and a fresh pot of coffee and march straight toward her.