Here I found myself laughing as uproariously as I had when I’d left Jinx’s savior and my impostor in the hotel dining room the day before, and, for the moment, I could go no further.
“What’s so hilarious?” asked Aharon, smiling at my laughter. “His mischief or yours? That he pretends to be you or that you now pretend to be him?”
“I don’t know. I suppose what’s most hilarious is my distress. Define ‘mischief,’ please.”
“To a mischief-maker like you? Mischief is how some Jews get involved in living.”
“Here,” I said, and, laughing still, laughing with the foolish, uncontrollable laughter of a child who no longer can remember what it was that started him off, I handed him a copy of “The Ten Tenets of A-S.A.” “This is what she left with me.”
“So,” said Aharon, as he held between two fingers the document whose margins were filled with my scrawl, “you are his editor, too.”
“Aharon, who is this man?” I asked, and waited and waited for the laughter to subside. “What is he?” I went on when I could speak again. “He gives off none of the aura of a real person, none of the coherence of a real person. Or even the incoherence of a real person. Oh, it’s all plenty incoherent, but incoherent in some wholly artificial way: he emanates the aura of something absolutely spurious, almost the way that Nixon did. He didn’t even strike me as Jewish — that seemed as false as everything else and that’s supposed to be at the heart of it all. It isn’t just that what he calls by my name has no connection to me; it doesn’t seem to have any to him, either. A mismade artifact. No, even that puts it too positively.”