36 Arguments for the Existence of God (29 page)

Jonas Elijah Klapper was locking his front door, and the crashing surf of Roz’s laughter was swelling, so that Cass thought he should look away as Professor Klapper got himself down the stairs awkwardly—the boots hadn’t been broken in—but found that he could not, for all its risks, avert his gaze. He half expected the hat to disintegrate as Klapper approached, for the mad mirage to yield to what was actually there.

Klapper placed the small suitcase he was carrying down on the sidewalk and stood beside the passenger door, his hands dangling helplessly at his sides, and the homunculus in Cass’s head broke off her laughter briefly enough to demand, “Why the hell doesn’t he open the door?”— which was enough of a cue to make Cass jump to action, leaping out of the car to scurry around and open the door for Jonas Elijah Klapper and place the bag on the backseat, taking care to keep his eyes away from the professor’s face, lest he see that the solemn expression he expected was there. But he did take a quick, furtive glance from close range, just to dispel any lingering doubts that his brain had been playing tricks on him, as when he was a child, lying on his bunk bed under Jesse, and the bathrobe hanging on the door had become an intruder approaching the bed, and Cass had known to pretend to be asleep but was terrified that his little brother would wake up and start screaming and get them both killed.

There was no delusion now. The
shtreimel
was the shape of a layer cake, large enough to feed a Hasidic family. Klapper had it pushed down on his high forehead so that it rested above his turbulent eyebrows and ascended to at least six inches above his head, making a man of five foot nine tower over a man of six foot two.

Cass got back in the car and buckled himself in. Klapper was having trouble with his seat belt, but Cass didn’t trust himself yet to lean over and help, so he sat quietly, staring down at his hands, and waited. Finally, he heard the click of success and turned on the ignition, carefully pulling away from the curb, trying to concentrate on his breathing like a woman in labor—no, like a Zen practitioner. He’d had a girlfriend in college, Felicia Lebowitz, who had been a yoga practitioner, and she used to say, when she was teaching him how to meditate, “If a thought comes to you, observe it and let it go,” or “Instead of thinking the thought, just let it be thought,” which he thought sounded pretty close to what was usually going on in his head, and it certainly had never led to any nirvana, and in all likelihood it wasn’t going to help him now.

He maneuvered through the traffic of Harvard Square, and there was silence in the car, but it was a thin silence, which couldn’t be trusted, and Cass realized that the thoughts in his head, the ones he was letting be thought without thinking them, came from a song he’d learned in first grade that was sung to a waltz with a Viennese lilt, the kind they play on the organ at ice-skating rinks—he and Jesse often went on Saturday mornings, and Jesse had been on a local hockey team until there had been an incident and he was asked to leave—and whose words were:

They were across the Larz Anderson Bridge now, heading for the Massachusetts Turnpike, and Cass was finding that his meditative techniques had not improved since the days of Felicia, and Roz’s laughter was still
dangerously coiling in the dark water beneath the thin ice, and he decided to visualize the cover that
Time
magazine had had a few months before, emblazoned with the word “
FAMINE
” and asking the question “Why are Ethiopians starving again?” with the picture of a mother staring down with eloquent sorrow at the dying child on her lap, his head bulbous compared with the shrunken body, the match-thin arms prematurely wrinkled, and his eyes filled with the precocious knowledge of his own doom. It was surely immoral to use an image of others’ tragedy to counteract the painful urge to laugh, but he was a poor meditator and a desperate man.

Somewhere around the Natick/Framingham exit, Jonas Elijah Klapper broke the silence.

“You are probably wondering how I procured these garments.”

Cass nodded, not glancing over, knowing that Klapper would understand and heartily approve his taking his driving so seriously.

“I had Ms. Cutter arrange for a car service to pick me up and drive me to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a store that specializes in Hasidic vestments. I was able to purchase the
kaputa”
—Klapper indicated his caftan with a flourish of his hands—“and the
shtreimel
—”he gestured upward to his fur piece—“at one place. I had to go to another establishment for the boots.”

Cass nodded his head again, his eyes fixed on the road. He had questions, but he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to ask them. For example, was it Marjorie Cutter who had located a store selling fur hats shaped like giant hockey pucks? Did they have his size of
kaputa
in stock, or did they need to special-order? Had the money for the car service to and from Williamsburg come out of the discretionary funds that Frankfurter had conferred on Jonas Elijah Klapper? And what species of dead animal was it that was perched on Professor Klapper’s head?

The professor removed the
shtreimel
, laying it carefully on his lap.

“It is toasty warm. I could have used such a defense against the elements back in frore February.”

Cass had a bad moment as the image came unbidden to him of Jonas Elijah Klapper clambering over the snowdrifts of Plotnik Quad dressed like a Valdener.

“Please be so good as to pull over at the earliest convenience.”

The Charlton Full Service Rest Stop was coming up, and Cass pulled off the turnpike and into the parking lot and turned off the ignition.

“In the zippered pocket at the side of my satchel you will find a large blue plastic bag. Please take it out and place this within it, and then carefully deposit it on the backseat. I know I needn’t tell you, Reb Chaim, that this
shtreimel
, which is Russian sable and made out of thirteen tails, represents an expenditure in the thousands.”

There was an answer to two of Cass’s questions, and to one that he hadn’t thought to ask.

“As long as we have stopped,” said Professor Klapper, when Cass got back behind the steering wheel, “I would like to use the facilities. I don’t know why they have chosen to make it such a trek to get from the parking lot to the rest stop. Please drive up to the building and wait for me in front.”

A young woman who was heading inside held the door open for the sad-eyed fat man in the splendid black robe and boots. Even though he waddled, you could see he had a great deal of dignity, and she thought he must be a religious dignitary, maybe a Greek Orthodox priest or a Wiccan. He passed through without acknowledgment.

As soon as Jonas Elijah Klapper disappeared into the building, Cass let the laughter that had been pushing up through his trachea come gushing out, gaining a new understanding of the cliché “to laugh so hard it hurts.”

When Roz’s laughter had finally expended itself, he found that he urgently needed to use the facilities himself, but he was nervous about leaving the car. It would be a disaster if Professor Klapper came out and the Lincoln Continental was nowhere in sight. Could Cass leave it illegally parked here and just dash in? But he’d have to leave it unlocked so that Klapper could climb in and wait, and he’d just been informed that the thirteen tails of Russian sable curled up in the blue plastic bag on the backseat represented an expenditure in the thousands. He compromised and left the locked car parked right in front, so Professor Klapper would see it when he got out.

By the time the professor exited, carrying a cone with a double twist of vanilla and chocolate ice cream—there was a Baskin-Robbins in the
plaza—Cass was sitting in the car, fully composed. He popped out and held the cone for Professor Klapper while he settled himself into the car, struggled with the buckle, and then reached out his hand for the ice cream. He tiled several paper napkins across the expanse of his lap and tucked one into the collar of his
kaputa
and proceeded to lick.

They spoke little on the way. Cass had gone from resisting the awful attack of laughter—a sort of Zen laughter demanding to be laughed even if Cass didn’t want to laugh it—to being overcome by a despondency that was like feeling sick before any of the symptoms had appeared.

He thought a lot about Gideon. He thought about that first night at The View from Nowhere, when Gideon had told him to go back to pre-med. How would Gideon react if he were to see Jonas Elijah Klapper now? Would it matter as little to him as the remarks of a random philosophy student in The View from Nowhere?
“Wovon man nicht
knows the first fucking thing,
darüber muss man schweigen?”
That was pretty powerful stuff, and it hadn’t shaken Gideon in the least. Gideon was brilliant, and he had seen fit to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper for the past twelve and a half years, and he was as convinced as the rest of them that Klapper was on the verge of a breakthrough of epochal proportions. Who was Cass to challenge that view? Was he so influenced by the sight of Klapper looking ridiculous—but why more ridiculous than the Valdeners themselves? why more ridiculous than the Rebbe?—that he was ready to throw up his hands and agree with Roz?

That had been Roz’s laughter, not his own. He loved Roz, but that didn’t mean he had to adopt her cynical view of Professor Jonas Elijah Klapper. Gideon and the rest of the seminar would only have been awed by Jonas’s capacity for throwing himself so completely into another Weltanschauung, appropriating it so that he could understand it as those within could not hope to, reading it as he read the great poets, so that they yielded their innards to him far more torrentially than the poets themselves could have experienced, so that he might crisscross all the vast reaches of human conception and see its arteries coursing with the ichor of psychopoiesis.

And if he’d charged the car service and the leather boots and
kaputa
and Russian sable
shtreimel
to his discretionary funds, so what? This was research as legitimate as any, a measure of the creative limits to which a
master like Jonas Elijah Klapper would travel, as daring an experimenter as any particle physicist with an accelerator—no, more daring, because it was his own soul that he offered up in the spirit of empiricism.

Jonas Elijah Klapper was like William James, who had experimented with nitrous oxide in order to determine whether it could induce something like mystical experiences. It could, he found. He wrote about it in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. Cass pictured William James, sitting in his worsted-wool vest behind a closed door in his office in Emerson Hall and stoned out of his gourd, a high-pitched giggle emerging from the spread of his long Victorian beard, as he tried to write down the metaphysics floodlighting his mind: “What’s a mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment … Agreement—disagreement!! Emotion—motion!!! … Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same! Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes! But— What escapes, WHAT escapes?”

You’d be laughing at William James, too, he chided himself, but William James would never have laughed at Jonas Elijah Klapper. The thought helped to sober Cass more effectively than picturing starving Ethiopian children, but it was a good thing that Professor Klapper, absorbed by the passing scenery, was disinclined to speak. The professor loved being driven in large fancy automobiles. Zackary Kreiser, who chauffeured him back and forth between Cambridge and Weedham, owned a cramped jalopy that rattled him to the limits of endurance. Might he prevail upon the university to procure a car of this model to be used soley to convey him between his place of work and domicile?

The professor was overtaken by a brief spasm of loquacity when he saw the forest-green sign announcing that they were on the Merritt Parkway, a scenic highway, he explained, landscaped with native plantings and shrubs, and the result of a Depression-era public-works project.

“To keep with the aesthetics, there were to be no intersections of local roads, in consequence of which sixty-eight bridges—no two of them alike, and with expert masonwork and ornamentation, some representative of the Art Deco movement, which was then in its heyday—were constructed to channel the local traffic aerially. I happen to remember the surname of the architect who designed all sixty-eight bridges, because it was so droll. The name was Dunkelberger.

“Imagine Dunkelberger as a man of letters, a man of the abstract instead of the concrete,” said Professor Klapper. “No one would have read him! But ‘designed by Dunkelberger’ has never stopped a motorist from traversing a bridge.”

And, succumbing to his wicked sense of humor, Jonas Elijah Klapper went into the contortions that were his laughter, and Cass, still harboring strange laughter within him, was happy to join in.

Cass comes up the back stairs of his apartment, which lead directly into the kitchen. He pauses at the stove to put some water up for tea and then goes into the living room.

Last night had been his second night of sleeplessness this week, and the deprivation is taking its toll. He had stayed alert during his early-morning taping of an interview for National Public Radio’s
The Cutting Edge
. The interviewer had introduced him in his famous plummy tones as “Cass Seltzer, the eminent philosopher and one of our deepest divers into the choppy waters churning between religion and science.” Cass has learned to take it all in stride, even the mislabeling of him as a philosopher, which used to embarrass him, making him feel as if he had illegitimately been awarded a few extra IQ points. He had rushed from the radio studio to Frankfurter’s campus, to teach his afternoon advanced seminar, “Psychology of Religion.” The topic today had been the Concept of the Quest in religious contexts.