The Angel of Losses (19 page)

“It’s okay,” the man said, speaking softly to his wife, and then continued in Yiddish. She listened to him, and then she and her daughters looked at me—she wore a new, sad expression, the children a blankly curious one. And then she closed them back inside the house.

“He came here a couple of nights ago,” Aaron said to Simon. He squeezed his fist around the grease-stained bag. There was nothing sinister about the phone call in the yeshiva parking lot—he had forgotten his dinner at home. “He said he had found the rebbe’s library. Most of it. One book was still missing.” He shook his head. “But it’s impossible. It was destroyed in the war—if it ever existed at all.”

I nudged Simon, indicating that he should press him, when Aaron continued.

“You’re the one with the map, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is.”

“The map,” Aaron repeated, taking a step toward us, his eyes fixed on Simon. “With Akiba.” Aaron looked at me. “Nathan thinks he’s Akiba, but he’s Ben Zoma.”

WE DROVE BACK TO THE CITY. I WATCHED THE HOUSES SLIDE BY,
like the earth was coming apart one layer at a time and would soon release us to spin in the atmosphere. Like Rabbi Akiba in Holly’s painting.

We sat in silence until we got to the bridge, backed up as usual, and when traffic halted us over the river, Simon said, “Rabbi Akiba traveled the Middle East on behalf of a Hebrew general who revolted against the Roman Empire. That’s how he made it onto the map. Akiba thought the general was the Messiah.” He paused. “There’s a legend that Akiba took three disciples in search of paradise, but of course it was impossible for them to cross over.”

“Right,” I said. “One dies, one becomes an apostate, and one goes mad.”

“Ben Zoma is the last one.”

Aaron was wrong. Nathan knew he was no Akiba; he knew he would pay a price. That’s why he had told me that Holly would need me. He had found the final notebook,
The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses;
he knew exactly what the price would be and had already—perhaps—arranged to pay it. It was too late.

SO I THOUGHT. BUT AT THE HOSPITAL NOTHING HAD CHANGED.
The test results had come back inconclusive. Lab error. They had to draw blood again, and Eli, exhausted, didn’t even whimper when the needle punctured his skin. Holly had erupted in all the tears her baby was too weak to cry. She was in the PICU with him when I arrived, draped in blue paper, her scrubbed fingers on the glass between them.

My mother had been calling doctors and hospitals in Florida. She wanted to transfer Eli. “I want to be able to help Holly,” she said.

“So why don’t you come back here?” I asked, but she didn’t have to answer. She had always been the most accepting of Holly’s new life, however difficult an adjustment it was; but now, with Nathan’s disappearance, she was done. She wanted to get Holly and Eli as far away from his family as possible.

“He’s coming back,” I said. It had only been three days since Eli was rushed to the hospital, but time had dilated, strung out on the pull of his seizure, as irresistible as a black hole. Nathan’s absence was stretching toward eternal. Unforgivable. I remembered how angry I had been at Holly for taking the house, how I had thought of her pregnancy as a cheap shot, a petty victory over me. As if her choices had ever been about me.

“Oh, Marjorie,” my mother said. “It’s over.”

SHE WAS RIGHT. I DIDN’T KNOW WHERE NATHAN WAS. I DIDN’T
know how to find
The White Rebbe and the Angel of Losses
,
which might explain what Nathan was planning and how to find him, and I didn’t trust the old man to tell me himself what the angel’s price was. I didn’t even know how to summon him. I was at his mercy. I always had been.

But then I received a message from Simon.

Sometime overnight, Nathan had added himself to the map.

THE MAP WAS GROWING DAILY—MORE BIOGRAPHIES, MORE HISTORIES
, more ethnographies, more folklore—a sea of multicolored markers. I opened Nathan and Simon’s experimental layer, the Berukhim legends hinting at the location of the River of Stones. Nathan meant to solve the problem of graphing what didn’t physically exist; to chart a hundred distorted tellings, and then triangulate the path to the place they described, the edge of this world, the end of it. But Nathan couldn’t be hunting for a secret road in Asia. He was hunting for an access point to the angel’s magic, the light that illuminated paradise and burned in Solomon’s skin.

The rash of blue icons dotted nearly every continent but were thick over New York and its suburbs: the Brooklyn apartment where Holly and Nathan lived briefly after the wedding; his parents’ home and the school where Holly studied for her conversion; the dormitory where they met and the temple where they were married. The hospital where Eli was born, and where he was treated after he first fell ill. The hospital in Manhattan where he now slept amid the shudder of machinery. The Berukhim Yeshiva and my parents’ house. My university. My university library. My apartment.

Upstate New York: Nathan has only a few memories of his father, mostly the stories the older man told. The one he remembers most clearly is about a man who apprenticed his young son to a trio of dead rabbis. The boy joined them in a classroom deep in the cemetery earth, and they taught him to speak the languages of animals. Nathan grew up admiring the parents’ piety in relinquishing their son to the great sages. Is God the greatest father? Should we sacrifice our children to His glory? Is that what his father intended to teach him? Was he trying to teach him anything at all?

Mizoram, Northeast India: They translated, from the native dialect to Hindi to English, three traditional mourning songs that recount the tribe’s travels in search of a home, their time spent hiding in caves from hostile kingdoms, and how when they arrived here they saw words written in the trees, entreating them to settle. This was proof, Nathan thought: There is more to the world than even the faithful dare to believe, and his family is wrong about him, and his own instincts are sound. But, like always, the
moment of vindication burned so brightly, it was soon extinguished,
and again he felt doubt, and fear, and the need to search on.

Safed, Israel: Six hundred years after the great sages died, Nathan, having sensed a great chasm beyond the rituals and laws his family built as a bulwark against time, traveled across the world to pray at the graves of Karo, Luria, Cordovero, and Alkabetz. For the
first time, he rose at midnight to lament with the Berukhim Penitents, and when he blinked dust into his eyes, in tribute to the Messiah, lost in a great sandstorm, the grit in his flesh felt more real than most of his life had, and he threw more dirt in his face, more, he was hungry for more. For three days he ate nothing and drank little, and he sat by the tomb of the first Berukhim Rebbe, meditating for hours, inviting the great sage’s soul to join with his own and reveal his mystical knowledge—but he never did come.

I thought it was my own failing. I wasn’t holy enough. I wasn’t
ready. Now I know: He wasn’t there at all.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: His stepbrothers were drunk already, the reception hall littered with crushed plastic cups, and his cousins kept clapping him on the shoulder, the congratulations, the confessions of relief, and every smack and footfall and laugh echoed in the space that always encircled and separated him. The canopy was erected on the plateau halfway up the cement stairs, and the air was thick with lights and car horns from the rush-hour highway. When she joined me, everything around us, everything that came before, and even everything that will come after, fell away. I wore a brilliant white robe that will one day be my burial shroud, a garment of protection, not because of the knots or names sewn into it, but because of something that came from our love. The sun set on all of the guests, and the city too, and we were alone under a prehistoric sky of stars.

New Jersey: It rains for three days straight. The yard is spongy and the sky is like stone. I wait for the rain to pause to walk home from the yeshiva, and even so, my face and hands are damp by the time I reach the front door. On the third night I’m woken by thunder so loud and immediate that for an instant I think a tree branch has fallen on the roof above. Then the windows flash white and I realize it’s the storm. Somehow Chava sleeps through it, and I’m relieved. She’s seven months along and too uncomfortable to sleep most nights.

I go downstairs for a drink. In the unlit kitchen, the water in my tumbler is gray and bubbly. It makes me think of the sea, though it tastes clean.

“Are you ready to begin?” a voice asks. It’s so deep that I’m not sure I heard it or imagined it, but I’m startled all the same. There’s a figure sitting at the dining table, a book open in front of him. He has long hair, its ends lifting away from his shoulders, crackling with static. His skin is the same color as the water in my glass, and his eyes are as white as clouds.

I blink and the figure appears different: his hair in motion, a stream going down a hill, his skin bronze, blackened at his eyes and mouth, burning, his eyes purple, the sea flowing into the horizon at sunset.

Many of my classmates still see metaphors in our books, or think they describe a time that has passed. But nothing has ever passed. I believed and I prayed. I meditated by the tomb of the first Berukhim Rebbe, who commanded the angels, and now an angel has come to me.

“Yes,” I say. “I am ready.”

East Side, Manhattan: He looks just like me. We are the same. His brain builds itself by experience, the experience of listening to my voice and looking at my face. He looks straight into my eyes, and everything inside of him organizes itself according to my reflection. So it was I who did it, I thought—the misfiring in his brain anticipating the one in my own. I was certain I was having a stroke. My vision obscured by mist and the taste of smoke in my throat. I prayed for help—let me not abandon them, not now!—but it was the angel coming to me. It was him the whole time, half water and half fire, suffusing the great atrium, sealed in by night.

There were four notebooks. Marjorie found the first, and I found the third. Marjorie has the fourth too. The White Rebbe has given it to her. The second was lost to us, until I commanded Yode’a to retrieve it for me, just as the first Berukhim Rebbe commanded him so many generations ago. Nothing is lost to Yode’a, except the White Rebbe, who has concealed himself. (Though he is still here, close by, the angel is sure of it.)

I will do anything to save my son, but Yode’a can’t help me. He says the White Rebbe must bequeath his seal to me. I must prove myself to him. I must find him. Only the last of the line can help me now.

The entries were dated minutes apart, submitted at 2
A.M.
, except for one final one, which had been entered only a couple of hours earlier.

Coney Island, Brooklyn: Sam is alive. I gave him everything. I don’t want her to know what’s happened to me, but I want her to know
why
I left. Marjorie, you can find a way to explain, can’t you?

THE TRAIN ASCENDED TO THE LOWEST PART OF THE BROOKLYN
sky, traveling along a flickering filmstrip of orange leaves, brick walls with the occasional swoop of graffiti, smoggy wisps of cloud. The train slowly emptied of people as it made its way to the sea, and when it came to the final stop, I was alone. The sea air was edged with a familiar biological tang; overhead, gulls circled through exhaust clouds. I stared at the senior center, its flat, beige face and slack forest-green awning, its silver-framed doors propped open to reveal a fluid darkness. It felt like only days, not years, had passed since I last visited this place.

I stepped through the doors, into the same sea-green lobby with that same potted tree. I walked the hall, my heels squeaking on the linoleum, the fluorescents buzzing overhead. There were the same brown couches and plastic trees, the same vending machine and coffeepot. An old man sat alone, reading a magazine, a properly staffed chessboard beside him.

It was Sam. He looked up at me, his eyes huge and wet behind his glasses.

“Hello,” I said.

“Ohhh,” he said slowly, pitching his body forward, preparing to stand. I put my hand on his shoulder, encouraging him to sit back, and sat beside him. “You came. You found the old place.” He laughed—just a slight rustle in his throat. “The old man at the old place.”

I smiled weakly. His shoulder was just a bone under my hand; his chest sunken under his pale dress shirt. His right hand trembled, playing a vibrato against the threadbare upholstery. How long did it take for him to fasten all of those buttons hanging against his chest?

“How could I forget?” I asked. “How are your children?”

They were all well, his grandchildren in school, his daughter trying to convince him to move to a retirement home near their house in Connecticut.

“So,” he said. “What are you doing these days?”

“I’m working on my doctorate in literature.”

He smiled. “A professor. Your grandfather could have been a professor. He said he wanted to write a book about what’s-his-name. The traveler.” My heart caught. “Marco Polo.” And released.

“He never told me that.”

“Always writing in his notebooks.” His gaze drifted into the middle distance before him. “He asked me—he said if he went first, he wanted me to destroy them. Well”—he opened his hands to the plaster ceiling—“I didn’t expect him to go first. Still, Eli, I said, you don’t want to take all that away from your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. At the end . . .” He circled his hand, indicating a journey with many steps, and then looked in my eye. “Sometimes you don’t think right.”

“The notebooks,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. How did you know?”