It stared back at him with bulbous, bottle-green eyes.
A spade-shaped head, adorned with a menacing horn; jagged, protruding jaws. Remembering the red welt on the bar lady’s foot, he almost flung the insect away. But the jaws opened and closed gently, and he felt no threat. He fished his cell phone from his pocket to take a picture, and it appeared to comply: posing, rearing up to reveal its lacquered abdomen, its numerous legs flimmering.
“Sir.” It was the man from the front office. “Please.”
The insect parted its armor, extended gossamer wings, and flew away.
“Sorry,” Jacob said.
They walked back toward the gate.
“I thought you’d left hours ago. I almost locked up. That wouldn’t’ve been fun for you. We don’t open again till Sunday.”
“Depends on your definition of fun,” Jacob said.
The man looked at him strangely.
“Enjoy your weekend,” Jacob said.
Chapter fifteen
The apartment complex Sam Lev had lived in for the last twelve years belonged to a wealthy co-parishioner named Abe Teitelbaum. Abe and Sam had known each other since their twenties; they were long-time Talmud study partners, which explained how Sam had come to occupy the superintendent’s unit.
God knew he didn’t do any actual superintending. His expertise was limited to a memorized list of phone numbers. Called upon to confront a broken toilet or a faltering A/C, he’d say, “Right away,” depress the hook-switch, and dial the appropriate handyman.
Nonetheless, Abe took pains to frame the arrangement as a job rather than an act of charity, paying Sam a nominal salary and refusing to take rent, claiming that it had been deducted from Sam’s paycheck.
The apartment was tiny, fronted by a stamped concrete patio furnished with a pair of sooty plastic chairs and an equally uninviting bistro table. A terra-cotta planter contained a barren clod of potting soil. Jacob paused amid the splendor to silence the ringer on his phone and withdraw a suede yarmulke from his pocket. The leather was stiff and dry, permanently creased into a taco shell shape from having been folded and crushed at the bottom of a drawer. He tried without success to iron it out against his leg, then pinned it on with clips, conscious of its weight and the jutting peak. In his mind’s eye, he looked like a crested parrot.
Sam was slow in answering his knock. Worried, Jacob knocked again.
“Coming, coming...” The door opened. “Good Shabbos.”
His father wore a baggy gray suit, white shirt, black loafers, and anomalously large red sunglasses. The skinny end of his necktie stuck out below the fat end, and Jacob tamped down the urge to reach out and fix it.
“Sorry I’m late. I got stuck downtown and traffic was horrendous.”
“Not at all. I just got back from shul. Come on in.”
Jacob made his way carefully across the living room. Cardboard boxes stacked two deep and four high housed a motley library, traditional Jewish texts as well as countless works of physics, philosophy, philology, astronomy, and mathematics. There were also a number of books whose unorthodoxy Jacob had only recently come to appreciate: classics of Sufism and Buddhism, Christian mysticism and gnosticism. In third grade he had scandalized his teacher by bringing in a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for show-and-tell, resulting in a conference with Rabbi Buchbinder, the rosh yeshiva.
Eyes that read such nonsense should go blind.
On the car ride home, Jacob had sat curled up in the bucket seat, quaking in anticipation of ghastly consequences. They came to a stoplight and Sam reached over to take his hand.
Not everyone who wears the title of rabbi deserves it.
But he said—
I know what he said. He’s a fool.
At nine, this was a mind-boggling revelation.
The light turned green. Sam eased off the brake.
You can’t be afraid of an idea he said. Follow the argument, wherever it leads.
Another decade passed before Jacob realized that his father had been quoting Socrates.
But the weight of evidence seemed to fall in Buchbinder’s favor, because in the interim, Sam really did start to go blind. It began a few years after the show-and-tell incident: a sludgy spot at the center of his field of vision that gradually crept outward, sucking up shape and color. He saw better in low light, and had taken to wearing sunglasses, indoors and out; he kept the living room curtains drawn and the track lighting dim; he alone could navigate his library, by following the map in his mind; and while his vision appeared to have stabilized, that could always change: the condition was considered chronic and incurable and, best of all, heritable.
Yet more for Jacob to look forward to as he got older.
Insanity?
Blindness?
Why choose... when you can have both?
He said, “Someone walked you home, I hope.”
Sam shrugged.
“You went on your own?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Fine,” Sam said innocently. “I’ll drive.”
“Hilarious. Have Nigel take you.”
“He does enough.”
Jacob placed the bakery bag on the dinner table, which was laid with a white stainproof tablecloth, wine, and two crooked place settings. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffing. His father wasn’t so good at reading the oven knobs.
No burning.
No nothing.
“Abba? Did you put the food in to warm?”
“Of course.”
Jacob lowered the oven door. Foil-wrapped pans sat on cold racks.
“Did you remember to turn the oven on?”
A pause.
“Nobody’s perfect,” Sam said.
They began with Shalom Aleichem, a song welcoming the Sabbath angels. Jacob then fell silent, listening to Sam’s mellow baritone as he intoned Eishet Chayil, the closing section of the book of Proverbs, a hymn to the woman of valor.
It angered and awed Jacob that, after so many years and so much heartbreak, his father was still singing to Bina.
“Your turn,” Sam said. He reached for Jacob’s head but hesitated. “If you want.”
“Go on. I can use all the help I can get.”
As a young boy, he would listen to the parental blessing, mumbled from on high, the words of a marble-mouthed angel. Sometimes Sam would smile and crouch down so that Jacob could place his hands on Sam’s head and reciprocate with a solemn string of nonsense Hebrew. Kama rama lada gada Shabbos amen.
Now they stood with their faces inches apart, close enough for Jacob to smell his father’s Irish Spring, to be momentarily hypnotized by the flicker of his lips. Physically, Jacob favored Bina’s side, her dense, charcoal hair, delicately salted at the temples; her fluid jade eyes, even more unearthly than his; the open, questioning features that, on his face, plucked a maternal chord in women, endearing him to them at a glance, and later becoming a source of ire.
Don’t look at me that way.
What way?
Like you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Sam, on the other hand, was angular, whittled, with decisive bone structure and a mildly bulbous forehead — a brain outgrowing its housing. Jacob thought it was good his father had found an outlet in his writing; otherwise the theories and concepts and other bits of nuclear theologic cognition would pile up, pressure mounting, skull swelling and swelling until it ruptured, spraying gray matter and words of Torah over a half-mile radius.