36 Arguments for the Existence of God (35 page)

There followed another protracted stare that lasted long enough for Cass to wonder whether the session had been concluded. It had not.

“I have made progress regarding other mysteries of the kugel.
Kugel
means, in both German and Yiddish, a circle, and the fact that the dish is called by this name, even when it is made in a square or rectangular pan, as my own mother most often prepared it, indicates we are dealing with the sacred nature of the circle. A kugel is always made with generous amounts of oil, which recalls the ritual of unction. ‘Messiah,’ or
‘Moshiach,’ literally means the Anointed One. In the Shabbes kugel one consumes and makes flesh the essence of the Qabalist message, that the created world is striving to repair the brokenness of the scattered shards, to unite the ten emanations, the Foundation acting to conjoin Beauty and Glory with the indwelling Immanence, so that the Anointed One will complete the sacred circle and repair the world.

“And yet one question of the kugel still remains: why the potato rather than the luckshen? I am vehemently disinclined to believe that, in identifying the potato with Yesod, the masters were resorting to its being a root vegetable. The potato’s significance is surely derived anagogically, and yet I have exhausted every numerical combination and rewording of which I could think, and have also dipped into the alternative methods of assigning numerical values to the letters, to no avail. There is a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that lists more than seventy different systems of gematria, and it might become necessary—indeed, I cannot see how it could fail to become necessary—for your research to take you there. According to one alternative system, for example, the value 1 is assigned to the first letter of the alphabet,
aleph
, but instead of counting the second one,
beys
, as 2,
beys
is given 1 plus 2—in other words, 3—and
gimel
is given 1 plus 2 plus 3, and so on, which is enough to drive one mad. To add to the complexity, the Qabalists often mixed and matched the systems, so that a word that is gematricized under one method can be held as equal to a word gematricized under another. A method of this sort must lie behind the potato’s enshrinement. I bestow upon you, Reb Chaim, a quest.”

Without having to unseat himself, Jonas retrieved six books from around his office, all of them in Yiddish, and handed them to Cass, pointedly indicating the door—he pointed—and sending the scholar on his way.

Roz had been delayed in returning from the Amazon, and when she came back she had been transformed. There were no more dreadlocks. She was deeply tanned and on first glance looked hale and hearty. But a second glance revealed that all was not right. She looked pale beneath the tan. There was something drawn and almost haggard in her noble face.

“Did you lose weight?” Cass asked when she answered the door of her apartment. She had just gotten back that day. She had been incommunicado while she was with the Onuma, and the only word that Cass had gotten from her was a quick phone call from the airport in Miami saying she was on her way home.

“Lose weight? I don’t know.”

It didn’t take her long—in fact, only till the next sentence—to tell Cass of her real losses. Tragedy had swept through the immune-depressed Onuma, a mortal outbreak of measles. The children had been particularly hard hit, including—and here her eyes overwhelmed with tears— Tsetse. Roz was in mourning.

She sat cross-legged across from cross-legged Cass in her apartment, which she always joked had been bugged by her landlords, the Wilde man and his wife, to keep tabs on their oestrous offspring, and she pulled out the few pictures she had taken on her previous trips of Tsetse, smiling with a mischief so delighted with itself you could all but hear the guffaws.

“And look at this one. This is him offering me a taste from the jar of peanut butter he had stolen out of my hut.”

Tsetse, with a solemn look, was holding out a piece of leaf dabbed with brown, to a Roz doubled-up with laughter.

“That’s why I stayed on longer. Absalom was trying desperately to get
vaccine sent in, by way of the missionaries, and then he and I went from village to village vaccinating. But it was too late for many of them, most of all the children.” She broke down and sobbed.

“Okay,” she finally said. “That’s it for me, at least for now. I’ve got lots more stories, but I don’t have the heart for them now. Tell me what’s been going on with you. Anything new?”

“I’ve been back to New Walden. Klapper wanted to go back for a Shabbes.”

“What? Without me? How could you?”

“I didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter.”

“That I can believe. So how was it? Did you see Azarya again? Did you get to speak to him?”

“Just a little bit, when I dropped Klapper off at the Rebbe’s house. Azarya let us in. He asked for you.”

“You’re kidding?” She still looked like hell, her face disarranged from her jags of crying, but she was smiling.

“I think he has a little crush on you.”

“Oh!” And her eyes, not entirely dried out yet, began to well anew.

“Listen, Roz, here’s something to cheer you. He knows how to read English.”

“They taught him?”

“He taught himself. From your map of the U.S. You said all the words as you wrote them down, and he memorized them and used the map to teach himself how to read.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me.”

“Did you test him? Did you see whether he really knows how to read?”

“Roz, I believe him.”

“What is it? What’s that look on your face?”

He told her about how the Valdeners had assembled in celebration as the sun sank, and about how the child, in his little
shtreimel
and pale-blue
kaputa
, was lifted up onto the enormous table—“it was bigger than your apartment and mine put together”—and how he had spoken about his angels.

“He calls the prime numbers ‘prime angels’ now. Prime
maloychim
. Roz, he knows that every composite number can be factored into primes.”

“How do you know he knows that?”

“Because, Roz, because …” Cass had to take a breath to control his voice and face before going on. “Azarya proved that there’s no largest prime number. He proved that there are an infinite number of primes. He used the factorization theorem to prove it. I’m pretty sure I was the only one there who had any idea of what he was talking about. His father didn’t get it. Azarya was so happy, thinking that he was showing all the Valdeners the wonderful thing that he had found and sharing it with them, but he was all alone. It was the most exhilarating and the loneliest thing I’d ever seen in my life.”

They were both churned up by emotional turmoil. Cass had never been able to resist Roz’s laugh. He wouldn’t have known, until tonight, that her tears had the same effect.

“You can laugh at me all you want,” she said in between their tears, “but I’m terrified for that kid. The fragility of children is the most terrifying part of this whole terrifying world.”

“Terrifying world? Come on, Roz! What happened to my fearless warrior woman, Suwäayaiwä? The wild Rastafarian who could set the Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values jiggling with terror?”

“How is the Klap?” Roz asked when she could find her voice again. “He enjoy himself in New Walden?”

He hadn’t planned on telling her anything at all about the irregularities of his professor’s behavior during the Shabbes at New Walden. But the poor girl so clearly needed a laugh that he poured it out to her, starting with his pulling up in the Lincoln Continental in front of the faux-English manor on Berkeley Place and beholding the emergence of Jonas Elijah Klapper in full Hasidic drag.

“No! You’re making it up!”

“I’m not capable.”

“Oh God! Did you get a picture?”

“I only wish! If I’d only known, I’d have brought a camera.”

“And send it to the Frankfurter Board of Trustees. Show them where their money is going!”

“The
shtreimel
was sable, Roz. Russian sable, with thirteen tails!” It was a long time before either of them could say anything again.

Roz had to have noticed that Cass’s attitude toward Jonas Elijah Klapper was not as reverential as it once had been. But Cass held off speaking of his more particular and personal misgivings. The topic was depressing. For the second time since coming to study at Frankfurter, he had to consider what to do with his life if he was no longer going to be Jonas Elijah Klapper’s student. He wasn’t ready to air his doubts with Roz. He knew that to bring them up with her was—“ipso facto,” as the Klap would say—to have made the decision to leave Klapper. And at this point, he realized, the hardest aspect of that decision was his abandonment of the group. Gideon had urged him, that first day, to quit while he was ahead, but that was so long ago, before Cass had become woven into the texture of their shared devotion.

He had shoved the books that Klapper had assigned him under his bed. He didn’t want to see them, and he most certainly didn’t want Roz to see them.

But, with her unerring instincts for fieldwork, she located them by herself. It was late morning, the light in Cass’s basement apartment the dirty gray of twilight that it achieved at its brightest. Roz called Cass’s digs “Suicide Manor” and claimed to be able to make out the chalk outlines of the body of the last tenant.

Cass was in the bathroom, and Roz was searching for a black thong that she had flung off an hour before.

“What are these?” she asked Cass as he emerged in his shorts. He only shook his head.

“Is this Hebrew?” she demanded.

“Yiddish.”

“You know Yiddish?”

“No more than you.”

“I know
mishegoss.”

“Me, too.”

“Craziness, right? That’s what
mishegoss
means? What’s it about?”

“I think he might be going off the deep end.”

“Might? Going?”

She was stark naked, having still not located the thong. She must have gone pretty skimpy in Venezuela, judging by her tan line.

“At least you’ve only wasted a year. Look at poor Gideon. He’s wasted
almost thirteen. He lost his poetry. He’s probably going to lose his wife.”

“Lizzie?”

“She’s had it. All that elaborate exegesis about every cockamamie thing the Klap says or does. Lizzie’s poured her heart out to me.”

“Fuck.” Cass sat down on the bed, dazed.

“Wow. I’ve never heard you curse. It’s disturbing.”

“Fuck. Fuck.”

“Really, really disturbing.”

“I can’t believe Lizzie would leave him. He’s going to be devastated. Lizzie is the center of his world.”

“No, she isn’t. That’s the problem. Klapper is.” She paused, but Cass made no response. “Seven good minds gone bad, wasting themselves on trying to figure out the Kabbalist meaning for why Nut Boy switched offices with his secretary. How long do you think a woman can listen to that?”

“Six minds. Six minds going bad. There’s no way I’m writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel.”

Lunatic
. That had been the word that had occurred to him in Klapper’s office. The Liminal, the Luminant, and the Lunatic. Cass had hastily disowned it.

But now the thought wasn’t just being thought.

Cass was thinking it.

The phone rings, and Cass is relieved. It must be a response to his desperate summons. But when he answers, he’s momentarily confused. It’s Lucinda. He calculates quickly. It’s 9 p.m. in Santa Barbara. Rishi must have given the keynote, and Cass hears the triumph restored to Lucinda’s voice. She had fanged the sucker. She had fanged him but good.

“And you’re not going to believe this, but
you
actually helped me out here!”

“Me?”

“Believe it or not! Or maybe your ne’er-do-well brother.”

“Jesse?”

“None other. You remember how I’d mentioned the Saint Petersburg Paradox to you, tried to explain that that’s what did Jesse in?”

His younger brother’s high-risk finance strategies had been responsible for Jesse’s briefly seeing the inside of a minimum-security federal prison for white-collar offenders.

“Yes.”

“Well, that had made me think through the SPP in a different way, and that’s exactly what I needed to squash that cockroach Rishi. I won’t go into the technical details, since you wouldn’t be able to follow. I’m not even sure how many at the conference followed. But Rishi did, and that was enough. He crumpled.”

“So it really was the anticlimax rather than the keynote.”

“It kind of was. Pappa told me if it had been any better he would have had to kill me!”

“And Pappa’s latent aggression makes you feel good?”

“Of course!”

“Okay,” he said, and then laughed, Lucinda joining in.

“You know, it was incredibly nice of you to devote all that time to the Saint Petersburg Paradox just to help me understand Jesse’s situation.”