Mr. Adelstein was ambivalent about this area, especially when Mordecai was new to it. When Mordecai had his nose broken by a gang of muggers, his father was less than hesitant to applaud his intuition. The incident occurred in 2005, on Vinati's corner. It involved a brick.
I can imagine Mordecai growing up in this house. I can see Mr. and Mrs. Adelstein bringing home the new baby from the hospital, being welcomed with balloons and adoring relatives ready to peer past the blue blanket to see the wingless putti with his eyes barely open. They clamor for a glimpse, speak, like Mr. Adelstein, in that stereotypically Brooklyn Jewish accent, and argue about the food, or perhaps just food in general (“You think they have the best babka in the city?” “I know a great butcher who used to run place in the Village; best pastrami you ever had” “Bad kugel? Such a thing is an impossibility”). I can see him in the crib, the young mother fawning over the potential of her first child. I can see him at three running from the kitchen into the living room and jumping on the couch, perhaps on one of the beds upstairs. I can see him in the years leading up to puberty, studying the Torah with his father and preparing for his bar mitzvah at the desk by the record player. I can see him at the age of fourteen, watching the television in the den, which is adjacent to the parlor in which I find myself. I can see him as this man's son, and I can begin to understand just who he was.
But it's not really him, is it? It's me. I see myself doing all of these things, and I imagine myself doing these things. I am both performer and audience, protagonist and spectator. And yet it's all false; because I can't be him any more than I can be Chuang Tzu, let alone the butterfly he once dreamed himself being. To be him, to be anyone else, would mean to not be myself; even if I knew all of Tzu's experiences, even if I knew what he knew about himself and the butterfly he believed himself to be, I would still be the one experiencing the dream, thereby making it profoundly different. I would have to sacrifice myself to truly understand someone else. And, even if this were possible, how could I be said to be the one experiencing the life of anyone but myself? I have ceased to exist; therefore, I have ceased to have experiences.
And then it occurs to me: The Bay Ridge Collection was not meant to be seen as a collection of his work. His goal was to attract people, to awaken them so that they would scrutinize the writings on the walls, to see that they were a part of a community. And he did this simply by drawing attention to what was already there. So it wasn't an end; it was a means to a larger end that had nothing to do with himself, let alone fame or notoriety.
“You appear to have stumbled upon some revelation, my boy,” Mr. Adelstein says after what I realize is a long period of introspection on my part. “What have you realized?”
“I finally get it.”
“Get what?”
“That the content of his work is completely irrelevant. It's the context. It's all context. That's what Faxo meant.”
He nods slowly. “You must explain yourself better than that.”
“I can't. It's just that I realize that he said all he needed to say. He could have said it with a single stroke of the pen. The exegeses, the papers by Winchester, the theses by grad students: they're superfluous.”
“You sound like a man I once knew.”
“Dick Keens, right,” sarcastically.
“No,” he says with perplexed eyes. “Lev Reichmann. His father was a rabbi. He planned to be a rabbi, but he couldn't deal with all of the reading and the Rambam this and Saadia that. So he went into business. He owned a hardware store on Flatbush Avenue. Great man, great man. He moved down to Boca just a few years ago.”
“But you knew Dick Keens, right?”
“Of course I knew Dick. He was a very close friend of the family.”
“And the A-R-E?”
“The what?”
“You don't have to play coy with me,” almost coquettishly. “I know all about it. I even went to one of their festivals.”
He stares to me for a good ten seconds. “It sounds like you enjoyed yourself.” He pauses. “What on Earth is the A-R-E?”
19
It took about four days to write the article, from Wednesday night until Sunday. I sent the finished manuscript in an email to both Sean and the magazine just after seven in the evening.
The few fragments of biographical material came from what I had learned from Willis Faxo, Mr. Adelstein, and a few other people I met over the course of the week following my visit to Isaac’s home. As Mordecai did not leave behind a journal or a diary, these people were really all I had to go on. (In fact, the typical wealth of memorabilia that one assumes will be left behind by the average American corpse was completely lacking. There was a box devoting to clothing (which included the ragged, gray sweatshirt that I had expected to find); a box that was comprised of a small number of photographs and personal papers, most of which were financial; a box of art supplies; a chest that contained cooking supplies and eating utensils; a duffel bag with probably five hundred CDs without jewel-cases; and an assortment of miscellany that had been placed in one box prosaically labeled Stuff). I found an iPod that had never been used — or, if it had been used, it had been taken out of its box, turned on, puzzled over, gazed at with chagrin, and finally stowed in a drawer or a place for safe-keeping. According to Mr. Adelstein, Mordecai never owned a computer, did not like computers, and refused to learn how to do such things as navigate the Internet or check his email. He was more of a Minimalist than a Luddite. Still, it did come as a surprise when I learned that he did not own many books (though his father, it should be said, did have quite a collection, which is probably where his son drew a majority of his references). Mr. Adelstein told me that I could take anything that I wanted from the estate of the deceased. With the exception of a Poot Moint album, I declined the offer.
Mr. Adelstein pressed me on the issue of the A-R-E as another storm front moved in. I apologized for being unable to verify what the letters stood for, adding that the name is as ambiguous as the group itself. “The first person to tell me about them said that the initials stand for the Acolytes of Risus, the Enlightener.”
Upon hearing this, Mr. Adelstein searched through his library and finally produced a leather-bound edition of Apuleius' the Golden Ass. He quickly found a chapter describing a festival dedicated to Risus. From what I gathered, the entire community came together to play a joke on the narrator. He, the narrator, ended up being tried for taking arms against three intruders in true Quixote-fashion. It wasn't until fairly late in the trial that the three lacerated wine sacks were produced, much to the amusement of the crowd. The narrator, as one may expect, did not find much humor in the prank. Mr. Adelstein also showed me an earlier passage from the book, one in which a witch “bepissed” a man who later relayed these soggy events to the narrator. According to Mr. Adelstein, this book is akin to a novel in many forms, though, he argued, the modern novel didn't actually appear until the time of Cervantes. “So perhaps the battle against the bladders is really an homage to Apuleius,” he said. “Still, I find it funny that the novel, in its earliest form, is almost always something of a travelogue.”
Isaac was a veritable library, as Faxo had told me. We listened to old jazz records (he was a huge fan of Lee Morgan, particularly the album The Sidewinder) and talked about philosophy, theology, art, and literature. A bottle of eighteen year old scotch was produced once the rain had passed and the sunlight began to paint the walls in pastels and ocellated shadows, as the neighbors came home from work and dinners and dates to resume lives no less quiet and quaint than those lived out in the suburbs of Westchester and Nassau, came home to houses that held disparities to the adjacent houses only if one knew the occupants, the histories of the homes themselves, the things that cannot be revealed by a simple once-over. For whatever reason, I remember thinking of the Golgotha of 17th Street.