* * *
One morning Richard Konigsberg surprised me at the apartment. He arrived at the building and buzzed on the aged speakerphone. It squawked like a duck with rusted vocal cords. Richard pressed the button over and over again. I knew what he was doing. He was making sure I was irritated. He said he enjoyed making people turn acid like vinegar, because vinegar was how you cleaned the urine and fecal matter of the world.
I met him in the lobby. He was not his usual self, looking listless and distant. His face was there but the eyes seemed reeled back into the head. His physique had lost much of its authority. The lines of his body and the void that surrounded him now all ran into one another, as if he had been left unfinished by some attention-deficient painter.
“Did a gold digger clean you out?”
“No, the Big Nonexistent did.” He jerked his thumb upward.
His declaration came at around the same time a pair of toddlers across the lobby ran to the grand piano. They bashed their heads upon the lower octave.
I took Richard by the elbow and led him to the café attached to the building. I sat on the inside so he was facing the window. He made me switch seats.
“Twenty years old,” he sighed into his latte. “In the military. Got blown up in Afghanistan.”
“Who?”
“My son,” he croaked.
“Your son? I didn’t know you had a son.”
I stared at him with a lump in my throat, the force of his announcement pounding through my body. We had never been men who dealt with the unexpected. Everything we did in life was the consequence of careful planning. Yet here we were, over the period of a few months, coming to each other slammed by the unpredictable.
Richard tried to keep his lips together, but they insisted on ripping their sutures. He choked a little. “I didn’t either. I slept with this stripper in Chicago. She knew the whole time I was the father. But she didn’t want to be connected to a Jew. Can you believe that? The kid was broke, so instead of college he became the few, the proud, the dead. Here I was. With all this money. He could have had it all.”
Richard’s face collapsed upon the bones. He was a bighearted man, gregarious and caring, who had been destined to go out as a shooting star, or in some orgiastic storm. But that was not what would happen now. He would shrivel up and become silent and find that when he tried to flick his eyes toward a fine female, his eyelids and his pupils simply wouldn’t react. Here and there around Philly there were losers from Atlantic City who went and drowned everything in one fell weekend, and came back and sat in Love Park, or on the stone benches at Eakins Oval, and just rocked back and forth, without an identity, without money, the only papyrus in their possession the four-chambered one in their chest. That was what would happen to my friend.
“I’m speechless,” I said. “What now?”
Richard’s weakness spread like spiders on the web of his wrinkles. “I’m leaving for Israel,” he said at last. It was the only firm thing he had spoken.
“What’s in Israel?”
“What’s in America?”
I felt insignificant; not only because I couldn’t be of any use to him, but because my years of doting on him hadn’t led him to think of me as a son. He was leaving everything behind without considering the possibility that I could fill the void.
I sat silent, desperate to find a way to rip off the wet sponge affixed to my skull. The jolt that Plutus had given me was a gentle stab compared to the waterboarding Richard received. I saw him seated before me, hemmed in by the limitations imposed by family and community. He seemed unsuited to the moment, like he was an aristocrat in a prison. The reason he had avoided a wife and family his entire life was precisely because he knew that they would cause him to give up his universality, his social breadth, and become a narrow man. That was why he had never considered moving to Israel, despite many of his acquaintances having left for Tel Aviv. “Israel is a narrow little place,” he used to say, referring not to the geography, but to the feeling of being hemmed in by his people. He had always been scared of being crushed by the weight of a “We.” All his life he had struggled to be the autonomous “I,” and that was why he had thrived in America, which was an ideal place for those who could subsist alone. But now, upon finding that all this time America had been playing him, that he had been the victim of a twenty-year-long hate crime, one that concluded with the death of a son he never knew in a war that he had never paid attention to, it wasn’t a surprise that Richard was going to the place where he could lose himself in homogeneity, in the inexorability of an eternal race, under the asphalt blanket that others in his tribe had hung for them to take shelter under. Was this why Zionism had been created? To give an aggrieved Jew like Richard a place to go and wail?
“You need to sue Plutus for discrimination,” he said suddenly, as if remembering that our relationship was built around him imparting wisdom to me. Any other arrangement was not consistent with who we were. “You aren’t the only American Muslim confronting nonsense like this.”
I didn’t have the energy to fight him. How was I to explain that I was an apatheist, indifferentist, materialist. The closest I had ever come to letting someone define me by an origin other than America was when I told some people I was West Asian, which covered anything from the Red Sea to the Himalayas, everything from Israeli to Iranian to Indian.
“I don’t like your terminology,” I replied.
“Sometimes you just have to become what people want you to be and then become a better version of that to get your revenge,” he said.
“How did that work out for you? Could you erase the hatred they have poured into ‘Jew’? Wouldn’t it have been better if you had hidden your origin in something, like I am trying?” I thought about Chagall. When things were safe it was no big deal to believe that you ought to express your heritage. It was only when you got accused that you regretted giving up your hidey-hole.
We sat and murmured at each other. I expressed more condolence about his son; he told me not to overthink it. To change topics up a little, he told me about his exit plan. He had liquidated his shares, turned over management of a firm to a partner, and moved out of his apartment. He was on his way to hand his car over to the new owner and had stopped to give me a backup key to a storage room he’d rented over in Cherry Hill. I was struck neither by the finality nor the alacrity of it all. Richard was different from me. When he had a grievance he found a solution to it, rather than the gray abeyance that I languished in.
I tucked Richard’s key into my pocket and walked him to his car. He had gotten a ticket for running over the meter by five minutes. The blue and white citation was tucked under the windshield wiper, slapped by the breeze. “Let me cover that,” I reached forward.
He hit my hand and pulled me into a hug. “Don’t save me,” he said, “if you won’t save yourself.”
I was comatose in his arms. How similar Richard and I were. Both of us without children. We would have made terrible pioneers, terrible settlers. In the self-replicating mechanism of America we were aberrations and anomalies. Eunuchs unable to bring princes forward. Condemned to prop up people who did not owe us and we didn’t own.
A couple of uncles who couldn’t spawn.
* * *
That night Marie-Anne and I went to Rembrandt’s for dinner, where we shared a shank of lamb and played a game of trivia. Afterward we walked along 22nd Street, along the massive walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary. The snow was piled in giant oily black mounds along the curbs. Marie-Anne had her hair up and wore a cardigan with a long skirt. I was in a tan corduroy jacket with elbow pads.