The Angel of Losses (10 page)

The screen door squeaked again. “What are you doing out here?” It was my mother, in her bathrobe, holding it closed at her neck.

I handed Eli to her. “Take him inside.”

She hooked the carrier in one arm, reached down to soothe him with her other hand. “Let’s all go inside. I’ll take him upstairs.”

“No!” Nathan cried, the chords in his throat strained in the dim light filtering from the second floor. He had always been skinny; now he appeared malnourished, sick. He breathed loudly through his nose, and then showed us his palms, begging us to wait. “The ritual isn’t complete.”

“You’ll make him sick,” Mom hissed. She glanced over her shoulder, worrying, I knew, that we would wake Holly. “Is that what you want?”

“He’s my son,” he said quietly, but I could see that he was furious, his mouth tight and his eyes burning.

“He’s my grandson,” Mom said. “And this is
my
house.” She turned toward the door, and Nathan turned away from us. He wandered to the back of the yard, his dirt-caked hands on his head. His friends stood in a silent cluster, their faces pale and eyes wide. I imagined them floating up into the sky like the three men in Holly’s painting, on the edge of a new existence, waiting for their fourth.

I CRASHED BEFORE DAWN, AND DAD WOKE ME MINUTES BEFORE
the guests were set to arrive. I had meant to pack the navy suit I’d worn to my oral exams, but I’d accidentally grabbed the black one, which I hadn’t worn since Grandpa’s funeral. I unrolled it on the carpet and stared at it, the shape of myself in mourning, as car doors snapped in the distance and unintelligible, happy voices filled the house.

Downstairs, the men were in the dining room, the women outside watching the children run in the yard, everyone waiting for the ceremony. I noticed the men from the night before standing apart, as out of place among Nathan’s family as I was. When they first met, Holly might have been the only one who didn’t disapprove of Nathan’s interest in the Penitents. She had always been curious about the secretive school, and unfazed by Grandpa’s slurs. Tell me more, she might have said, genuine and open-minded.

My mother handed me a glass of water and sent me upstairs, where Holly was feeding Eli in her bed. She didn’t look up when I entered, and I put the glass on the nightstand. “Can you do one other thing for me?” she asked.

“Sure, what?”

“Don’t talk to my husband,” she said, and spoke no more to me that day.

ON THE WAY TO THE TRAIN, I ASKED MY FATHER TO STOP AT THE
cemetery where Grandpa was buried.

“Sure,” he said. We had left the house early. My parents were flying back to Florida in the morning, and I wondered when my father would be back again—I suspected my mother would arrive alone for Thanksgiving.

Dad drove along the grassy planes of tombstones, and the road unfurled before us, less like a path and more like a tether with one end rooted in my chest. We went past the office, took the curve to the right. Dad stopped the car by the bank of mausoleum doors, flat and featureless as the Coney Island Senior Center.

“I wish you would look at Grandpa’s notebook,” I said. “Maybe something in there would be familiar to you.”

“He didn’t talk to me the way he talked to you girls,” he said. “He didn’t tell me anything, and he didn’t want me to read that book.” He insisted he had no memory of what happened at the end of that day long ago when we cleaned out the apartment. If he had said he was throwing them out with the rest of Grandpa’s unwanted belongings, then that must have been what he did; he didn’t know how one had managed to survive.

“Maybe his friend Sam, then.”

“I think he died last year.”

“You never told me,” I said. He just shrugged. “Then what about his children?” I asked. “You must have a phone number or a name. Someone called to tell you he was gone—“

“I don’t know,” he interrupted, and he sounded nearly as angry as me. His relationship with his father had always been formal, even cold. The only memories Dad shared were superficial—he’d smile wistfully over his sandwich and say, Your grandfather loved brown mustard, or shake his head at the sports section and say, The Yankees won again; I’m glad your grandfather’s not here to see it.

“Go ahead,” Dad said. “Take your time.” He wasn’t coming with me.

My grandparents’ graves were back beneath the willow trees that lined the edge of the cemetery. I walked over the dead, their nameplates lodged in the bright sod. Mud caked the surfaces of my grandparents’ grave markers. I got down on my hands and knees and scraped the dirt away. How long had it been since any of us visited? I began counting the years back, but then noticed the stones—tiny pebbles lined up along the edges of the plaques. Had Holly been coming here? I couldn’t imagine her visiting but not cleaning the graves, unless she had been too big to get down on the ground.

But someone had been here, just out of sight, marking the days.

Six

W
hen his shift ended, Simon met me at the carrel I was illegally keeping as my own, a splintered maple cubicle stacked with books and protected by a piece of card stock folded in half that read
RESERVED
.

“Did you make that yourself?” he asked.

“No, the provost issued it,” I said.

“On his personal printer.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I can’t believe that works.” He sighed.

“I have a roll of caution tape too.”

“You are out of control.”

“You have no idea,” I answered, turning over a fresh sheet on my legal pad. I had begun charting elements from
The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light
against what I knew about the Berukhim Rebbe. The dynasty of men who don’t die. The angels armed with swords and contracts. The White Rebbe must be a version of the Berukhim Rebbe, I thought, but I couldn’t rule out that it might be the other way around. The old man himself hadn’t confirmed that they were the same person, but he hadn’t denied it either.

Simon had been investigating the Berukhim Penitents and their angels, and I copied down everything he told me. That the mystics they descended from conjured angels as teachers, along with the spirits of dead sages, a holy magic of words and names and graveyard rituals. That angels are manifestations of God but sometimes misbehave and are punished. That they could be manlike, messengers, but they could also be physical forces, the energy that shapes babies in the womb or the pestilence that destroys a nation. That they sit on the juries that judge men’s souls, and if even one in a thousand votes to acquit, God acquiesces. That each person has four accompanying angels. That each of the first seventy nations had its own ministering angel, who lobbied God on its behalf, and who suffered if they sinned. That the Berukhim Rebbe said there was a seventy-first angel, the Angel of Losses, named Yode’a, who came into existence when ten of the twelve tribes of Israel were exiled by Assyrian invaders twenty-eight centuries ago.

“And that’s all I could find. It’s from a nineteenth-century biography of an eighteenth-century rabbi, one sentence in his correspondence,” Simon said. “But something else must have survived in the oral tradition. I could put your brother-in-law in touch with the student who collected that item on our map.”

“I’ll suggest that to him,” I said, and put down my pen.

“What exactly is he working on?” Simon asked, not for the first time.

I took my
RESERVED
sign and hit his knee. “Happy hour,” I said. “You need to relax. You need a beer.”

WE HAD A DRINK, THEN ANOTHER. HE HAD SUCH AN EASY
laugh, like Holly, or how Holly used to be—or maybe how she still was, with Nathan. We talked about the people we knew in common and how we came to be at the university. We went to dinner. We talked about work. Simon had joined his project as a technical expert, coding a visualization of myths about the Lost Tribes of Israel. The database encompassed Wandering Jews from legend and history who had searched for the missing Israelites, and he was captivated by the medieval scribes who had documented their travels across Christendom and the Orient, their tales a mix of meticulous observation and outright fantasy. Censuses and cartography alongside monstrous creatures, fabled cities, and messianic wonder-workers.

“I want to see the map,” I said.

He lived in a studio near the cathedral, a studio dominated by a desk with two flat computer monitors. They blinked to life when Simon nudged the mouse, one screen displaying a map of the world, the nations shaded in green and taupe, the other screen an array of menus labeled for nations, languages, centuries, and narrative classifications.

“Here, sit.” He offered me the computer chair. “This is the folklore map. Go ahead. Choose.”

I felt his weight on the back of the chair as he leaned against it. I keyed in “Wandering Jew” and scanned the country options. I clicked, lighting up England, a puzzle piece near the top of the screen, then selected Argentina, and the other corner of the map glowed. “The country function is a bit restrictive,” Simon said, reaching over my shoulder to uncheck my selections. “Try narrative classification; you’ll like that.”

The list offered poetry, legend, drama, pamphlet. Newspaper too. I clicked on it, eager for the contemporary and factual, and stars lit across the globe. I checked English under language, and the stars dimmed across Latin America, Europe.

“Go to Manhattan,” he said. I zoomed in until a star appeared on the southern tip of the green, streetless island and brought up a white text box.

A sensation was created in William Street on Thursday morning, by the appearance of a man with a long floating beard, and dressed in loose pantaloons, with a turban on his head. He carried in his hand a little Hebrew book, out of which he read to the crowd that gathered around him. He represented himself as the veritable Wandering Jew. Nobody knows who he is or where he came from.
A learned Jewish Rabbi was sent to converse with him, which they did in the Hebrew language, and the stranger was found to be perfect in his knowledge of that most difficult tongue.

The Rabbi tested him in Arabic, in Phoenician, and in Sanskrit, but soon found that the aged stranger far surpassed him in his intimacy with them all. The Rabbi invited him to his house but, said the stranger, “Nay, I cannot stop. The Crucified One of Calvary has pronounced the edict, and I must not rest. I must move on—ever on!” He was last seen on Thursday, but to where he departed no one can tell.

I scrolled to the bottom, where the source and date was noted in italics. The
Deseret News.
1856.

“That was a New York paper?” I asked. He was sitting on the bed now, a few feet away.

“Salt Lake City. Still going, actually. The Mormons were really into the Wandering Jew. And the Pennsylvania Dutch, for some reason.”

I voided the filters and the screen resolved into an impressionistic globe. “So you got a grant to track the Wandering Jew on Google Earth.”

“We got a grant to create a cross-referenced digital archive of folklore about the Lost Tribes of Israel. We have an undergraduate—he gets free summer housing as long as he can show twenty hours a week of research—so we got an extra unpaid intern. I give him all the Wandering Jew stuff to scan. I think he spends the rest of his time working for a law firm.”

“But the Wandering Jew—that’s a whole other legend.”

“What about Benjamin of Tudela, and Abraham Abulafia, and David Reubeni?”

“I don’t know those names.”

“Wandering Jews.”

I shook my head.

“I’m serious; they were real Jews, and they wandered around looking for the Lost Tribes, or the Messiah, or claimed to
be
the Messiah. You haven’t run into any of this, in your extracurricular research?”

“All I know about the Lost Tribes I learned from the guys with a megaphone and a map of Haiti on a Hundred Twenty-Fifth Street.”

“Shit,” he said. “I forgot about them. I should send our intern up there. They probably have pamphlets. The Black Israelites, right?”

“I don’t think they count.”

“But there are Lost Tribes in Africa—the Falasha, and the Lemba—you know they have the Cohen modal haplotype? It’s a genetic marker on the Y chromosome. The DNA stuff isn’t really my area. And they’re in the New World too, of course, which is sort of my thing. The Mormons thought—well, they still think—that the North American Indians were Israelites. And then there are the Jewish Indians in Latin America. Why are you laughing?”

“I figured out what you are now,” I said, and went to sit next to him on the bed. “You’re an obsessive.”

“No, I’m a completist. I spent a week this summer cleaning audio from a twenty-something-year-old cassette that I bought on eBay. The Pixies in Croatia. Now, you,
you’re
an obsessive.”

“I was,” I said. For the first time in years, I had put my academic work aside entirely. I had the notebook now—and the three other stories hiding somewhere. “I’m a completist now too.” Though even as I said it, I was exhausted by the litany of names, the clues that only led me back to Nathan and Holly, the world they were building with their son, which I would always be apart from. Maybe it would be easier that way, spinning in our own orbits, the space between us growing ever wider and colder.

I kissed Simon. We didn’t talk anymore that night.

SIMON KNEW WHERE TO FIND THE BEST NOODLES IN CHINATOWN,
the best tacos in Red Hook, and the best cannoli on Arthur Avenue. We went to movie theaters with curtained screens and spent consecutive Sunday mornings getting lost in the park. For almost a month I tried to have a different kind of life. I met with my advisor and improvised connections and theses until she let me go. I downloaded the baby pictures—copied to no fewer than twenty cousins and classmates. I read magazines and newspapers, so I could talk about all the things I had planned my life around ignoring.

I tried to forget the White Rebbe, his first meeting with the angel and the three stories still missing, but I couldn’t let him go. Every few days on the train I glimpsed a passenger with curling white hair in the passing car. In a diner I would hear a deep, rough laugh from the next booth, and my stomach would drop. “Do you know that person?” Simon asked every time, and I continued to answer no. If I got a good look, I saw it wasn’t him; if I didn’t, I was left preoccupied and unsettled.

I ate and I talked and I traveled the length of the city and back, but I couldn’t run away from the White Rebbe, from whatever it was that Grandpa had left behind.

“WHY THE LOST TRIBES?” I ASKED, PULLING MY KNEES INTO MY
chest under the sheets in Simon’s bed. The window was open, and fresh air, dusted with the amber of streetlights, blew around us.

“Diaspora studies. I think the lead investigator has trouble reconciling himself to the fact that the Jews—he’s Jewish—that the Jews are really mostly dead. He likes to thinks there are more still out there, waiting to be discovered in the Himalayas.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m just the computer guy.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Okay. I was into genealogy for a while. I made it back to the sixteenth century and an ancestor who learned his family—our family—converted to Catholicism during the Inquisition. He started practicing Judaism in the New World. It didn’t work out so well. The Spanish government in Mexico tortured him to death. They called him the Moor.”

“You traced your ancestors all the way to the sixteenth century?” That was more shocking to me than the Moor’s fate. My mother had a family Bible with four generations penciled inside; with my father, history ended with Grandpa.

“Yeah. You know, there are villages in Mexico where everyone lights candles on Friday nights, and they slaughter chickens like they do in Jerusalem; nobody could say why until the anthropologists came in. Now they want to be Jews, like their ancestors, instead of Spanish Indians.”

“I don’t think of the Jews as being particularly popular.”

“No,” he said. “But imagine you’re a poor Mexican hearing about the Israelis airlifting people out of Ethiopia.” He paused. “There’s this other guy on the project, one of the grad students. He’s a Hasidic kid from Brooklyn, and he went with our boss to China to meet the tribe of monotheists. He tested their rituals and prayers and whatever against the Bible, and their words against Hebrew. This kid has the whole Bible in his head. It’s incredible what they learn in their schools.”

Someday that would be Eli.

“So the project director is out there, getting DNA swabs, talking about Diaspora migration and prestige aspirations.” He traced my tattoo as he spoke, his fingertip cycling my shield, always following, always protecting me. “And this kid is looking for the Messiah. Because the Messiah can’t come until all the tribes return to the Holy Land, and as long as ten are missing in action, well. We’re fucked.”

“My brother-in-law would love to meet you,” I said. I could hear sleep in my voice.

“He’s looking for them too?”

“He was, I think,” I said. He had come home from India disillusioned—or so he said. “But anyway, what does this have to do with you and your family tree?”

He took his hand away. “I’m just the computer guy,” he said quietly. I opened my eyes. He had rolled onto his back, and now he stared at the ceiling as if something important was written there, something he could just barely make out. Then he turned to look at me, slid his hand back and forth across my hip. “I kind of like you.”

“I like you too,” I said, because it was the easiest response. I did like him. I liked him more than I had ever liked anyone, and in contrast the rest of my life felt more than complicated; it felt deeply, dangerously unsettled.

He smiled. “You’re a little bit like the Moor for me,” he said. “Someone I have to know, who will always remain just out of reach.”

Soon he was asleep. I settled in beside him and watched the lights from passing cars sweep over the ceiling until it seemed they followed the same rhythm of his breath, and then my breath too, and my mind slowed to a halt and the world slipped away.

THE VOICE FILLED MY EAR COMPLETELY, LIKE WATER FILLING A VOID.

“Arise!”

I sucked in a breath and sat up in bed. Simon was asleep beside me; beside him, the clock glowed 12:40.

I put my hand on Simon’s shoulder. “Wake up,” I said. His brow furrowed, but otherwise he was still.

There was a thunderclap, a flash at the curtains, and the voice shouted again. “She is in exile!” It was a man’s voice, raw, anguished.

I climbed over Simon and pulled on my clothes. I hiked the window open, hung half my body into the night. The city smelled burnt, and I wondered if the lightning had hit nearby.

The street was empty.

“Our holy house is on fire!”

“Simon!” I said. “Do you hear that?”

He turned over in his sleep.

I couldn’t bear to wait for the elevator, so I ran down four flights of stairs. The night was black and numbing; I felt like I’d fallen into the haunted lagoons of the White Rebbe’s story. The clouds were thick overhead, about to burst into rain. A group of girls passed by, all leaning into one another, speaking at the same time.