It is true that both ethics and religion aim at one thing—to raise man above the filth of the narrow self-love and bring him to the heights of love-of-others. But still, they are as remote one from the other as the distance between the Thought of the Creator and the thought of people.
—Ba’al HaSulam, The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose
I have a question,” Evan said.
It was a drab Tuesday. We were making our way, painstakingly, through The Methods of Ethics. Afternoon listlessness had overtaken the room: Oliver was too bored to muster sarcasm, Noah was sleepy-eyed from another extraordinary performance the previous night (seventeen points, ten rebounds, twelve assists) and even Amir, typically much too proud to admit something was difficult, especially if Evan understood it, was thoroughly lost. I’d been trying my best to stay alert, blinking away stagnant silences, resisting the soporific sound of rain streaming down the windows. Evan, meanwhile, had remained deferential until now, listening intently as Rabbi Bloom lectured, scribbling along the margins of his book.
Rabbi Bloom looked around the table before agreeing. “Go ahead, Mr. Stark.”
“You told us to keep in mind whether Sidgwick helps our cause,” Evan said slowly, “which is to say: does he lessen our religious doubts, our dissatisfaction with Orthodox Judaism and, by consequence, our personal unhappiness.”
Rabbi Bloom twirled a spoon through black coffee. “So I did.”
“Considering the energy in the room”—he gestured toward Oliver, whose head was buried in the fold of his right elbow—“I propose we move past reviewing Sidgwick’s arguments and actually address this question.”
“Very well,” Rabbi Bloom said. “Maybe we’re somewhat bogged down by the mechanics.”
“I didn’t make it past the first ten pages,” Oliver said without lifting his head. “I’m man enough to admit it.”
“Yeah, and I didn’t even understand the SparkNotes,” Noah said.
“For those of us who aren’t up to speed,” Evan said impatiently, “here’s how Sidgwick leaves things. Of the three methods of morality—”
“—intuitionism, the idea that I can figure out moral rules on my own,” Amir cut in, reciting eagerly from his outline. “Egoism, pursuing whatever makes me happy. And then utilitarianism: happiness for the greatest good.”
Evan rolled his eyes. “Of those three, intuitionism and utilitarianism can coexist, whereas egoism and utilitarianism cannot.”
“At least so far as he can prove,” Rabbi Bloom corrected.
Evan straightened in his seat. “Well, that’s the thing. He suspects egoism and utilitarianism can be squared. He just can’t demonstrate how.”
“So what good does that do in academic terms?” Amir asked. “If it can’t hold up to analytic philosophy, it isn’t rational.”
Noah rubbed his eyes. “Well, you can’t demonstrate God exists, right? And you still trudge along to minyan each morning.”
“That’s completely different,” Amir said. “That’s not logic, that’s taking a leap of—”
“Shut up a second, will you?” Evan said.
Amir, predictably, turned hazardously red. “So he’s running this class now? Does he always think he’s running this class?”
Rabbi Bloom, looking very much like Evan, raised a hand. “Let’s allow Mr. Stark to make his point,” he said. “But cordially, please.”
Evan looked as if he didn’t even register Amir’s reaction. “How do we reconcile self-interest and morality? We can’t. Not without God. God, Sidgwick shows us, makes it work. God shifts the paradigm.”
“Yeah, well, I still don’t see it,” Noah said.
Evan frowned. “Think about it. If we’re bound by reward and punishment, then self-interest reorients to something beyond the immediate world.”
“Sacrificing what you want in the pursuit of something quote-unquote moral is still in your best interest,” I said, nodding along, “because you’ll be rewarded for it in the World to Come.”
“Exactly,” Evan said. “So essentially, if God exists, doing what you want can still be considered moral. Really, almost anything can be made moral through access to God.”
A pause as we absorbed this. I watched Rabbi Bloom’s face darken.
“First of all,” Amir said hotly, “let’s note that you were the one denying God’s existence pretty recently.”
“That’s completely false,” Evan said. “If that’s what you came out with, then the whole thing went over your head.”
“Nothing’s over my head.”
Rabbi Bloom cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, please. Arrive at the point.”
“Whatever. Secondly, what he’s saying is cheating,” Amir said. “You can’t just resort to the supernatural, basically, so that things can make sense. That’s not how pure logic works. Even Sidgwick says so!”
Evan leaned backward in his chair. “But Sidgwick didn’t attend a yeshiva high school,” he said. “He didn’t wear tzitzit, he didn’t pray three times a day, he didn’t play Amish on weekends. Our whole lives are built on the premise that we believe in something outside of pure logic, so why wouldn’t we use that same reasoning when it counts most?”
Rabbi Bloom pushed away his coffee, as if losing his appetite. “What’s the upshot here, Mr. Stark?”
“The upshot is that God solves the equation. Without God, freeing the ego, the self, the force of your desires, is a dead end—we have to admit ‘an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct.’” I flipped to the last pages of the book to find these lines, realizing Evan was quoting verbatim. Rabbi Bloom, judging by the look on his face, was equally impressed. “So in that sense, Sidgwick’s totally right: divinity is what we can use to finally unlock our self-will.”
“You keep talking about making your own choices and expressing your will and whatever else,” Amir said. “But what does that even mean?”
“Our most basic human trait,” Evan said. “The fundamental part of being alive. The desire to live, to find meaning, to have power, to do what you think is right.”
Rabbi Bloom tried cutting in. “Perhaps let’s pause and—”
“And so what I was saying,” Evan continued, “is that Sidgwick’s insight is all great and important, but he’s still missing something pretty crucial, because he makes the mistake of postponing the fulfillment of self-interest until you’re rewarded in Olam HaBa. What we need to do instead of waiting for the afterlife is achieve fulfillment on earth, in the here and now.”
More silence. Amir looked horrified, but also as if he didn’t quite know why. Noah and I fidgeted in our seats. Oliver played with his gelled hair.
“And how do you aim to do that?” Rabbi Bloom asked, after a brief interlude during which he proved incapable of meeting Evan’s eyes.
“So that brings me to my question.” Evan reached beneath the table for his backpack, pulling out an old, leather-bound book. “You believe in Kabbalah, Rabbi?”
Noah eyed the book, frowned. “That’s not . . . the Zohar, is it?”
I’d never so much as opened the Zohar. My father, diligent Torah scholar that he was, forbade me from expending mental energy on Kabbalah when I could otherwise devote myself to the more rigorous and pressing universe of Talmud.
“Whoa,” Oliver said, cocking his chin. “Aren’t you not supposed to touch that until you’re forty? I thought it’s, like, basically voodoo.”
“Do I think it’s much more than mystical rubbish?” Rabbi Bloom smiled politely. “No.”
“But what if I found the morality offered by traditional Judaism to be restraining and unfulfilling?” Evan asked. “What if I thought it ignores your potential as an individual thinker?”
“In that case,” Rabbi Bloom said, “I’d probably tell you that you don’t understand traditional Judaism.”
“What’s not to understand? I’ve been living it for eighteen years.”
“Judaism does not seek to ignore the self, Mr. Stark. It seeks to enrich it.”
“But I very much disagree,” Evan said. “Because the Judaism you teach here relegates the individual to an afterthought. It cares little about how you feel. It makes you fall in line and sacrifice everything and wait patiently for the next world, where you can finally earn it all back, where all that suffering actually amounts to something. But does it give a shit about the self? Does it have anything to say when you’re alone? When you’re betrayed? When your mother dies?”
Unidentifiable heaviness flooded Rabbi Bloom’s eyes. “I know how . . . torturous your mother’s ordeal was, Mr. Stark. And so if you decide ultimately to take that personal hell out on God, nobody would deny you that right. Nobody here can stop you from doing that.”
Evan said nothing, eyes affixed to the Zohar. He rubbed his fingers together.
“But there are ways to heal,” Rabbi Bloom said. “There are ways to find strength within faith, even when faith is shattered, even when faith reduces, at best, to doubt. Nobody ever ought to feel overlooked in the service of God.”
“You don’t get it,” Evan said.
“What don’t I understand?”
“I don’t need platitudes. I’ve found my own way.”
“A way to what?” Noah asked.
“I’ve been working on it all year. He’s seen me,” Evan said, pointing at me. A pit deepened inside my stomach, thinking of his ramblings in shul on Rosh Hashanah and in the school library, Nietzsche in hand.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rabbi Bloom said, “and in truth, I almost don’t want to.”
Evan closed the Zohar. “I strongly believe that achieving fulfillment here on earth hinges on unleashing our capacity to become divine. In short? I think we should channel God to empower ourselves instead of allowing Him to crush us.” I thought, for some reason, of that line from Henry James: Just so what is morality but high intelligence?
Amir scoffed. “So now you’re, like—what? An esotericist?”
Evan shrugged. “I’m what he made me,” he said, nodding at Rabbi Bloom. “What loss made me.”
“Yeah, but, again,” Amir said, “this is really sounding like a bunch of Kabbalistic nonsense. Like, are you going to tell us you believe in fairies, too? Goblins, maybe?”
“I’m obviously not talking about magic and monsters,” Evan said. “I just mean, in a strictly Zoharian sense, that conventional standards require some . . . reexamining, let’s call it. Because nothing’s really evil absolutely, right? I mean, isn’t that what Eden argued in our moral intuitionism debates? And wouldn’t you agree, Rabbi, that anything, alternate realities included, can lead us to truth, even when they first appear off-limits?” Evan looked around the table and smiled. “It’s like what Yeats teaches and Nietzsche teaches and whoever else teaches. What Shir HaShirim teaches: Shkhora ani venavah. I am dark, but beautiful.”
* * *
EVAN HAD US MEET HIM at the lake Friday night, after our families finished Shabbat dinner. He wouldn’t tell us why. I hurried through my meal, much to my mother’s displeasure, interrupting my father’s long-winded monologue on Parshat Terumah, which questioned what it means for God—“Ain lo demut haguf, veaino guf”—to seek physical sanctuary and dwell in our midst. I bentched to myself and told my parents I was going to Noah’s for a classmate’s birthday dessert.
When we arrived, Evan was lying on a bench, joint in mouth. His right hand fidgeted with a strip of scrolled white paper.
“What is that?” Amir asked, after Oliver promptly snatched Evan’s weed.
Evan sat up, angling one leg on the bench. “This,” he said, handing me the paper to examine, “is tonight’s main attraction.”
Cautiously, I unrolled it, straining my eyes in the dark. “It’s blank,” I said, turning it over.
Evan extracted a pen from his pocket. “Not for long.”
“I don’t get it,” Noah said. “And my mom made slutty brownies tonight. Did I just give that up for nothing?”
“Dibs on leftovers,” Oliver said, standing on his tiptoes to put his arm around Noah’s shoulder. “Cynthia outdoes herself with those.”
“Sorry, dude. Rebecca’s family is over tonight, and her dad doesn’t take prisoners when those brownies are served.”
“Fuck me.”
“Um, back to the issue at hand, maybe?” Amir cracked his knuckles impatiently. “What are we doing here?”
Evan took back his jay and blew large filaments of smoke into Amir’s face. “I’m going to conduct an experiment I’d like you to witness.”
Amir swiped the air in front of him. “Oh, cool. Are you going to perform some Kabbalah for our entertainment? Walk on water? Maybe pull a rabbit out of your yarmulke?”
“No, as appealing as that sounds. I’m going to write the name of God on this piece of paper and then cast it into the water.”
Blank looks. Oliver retched, spitting phlegm into the grass.
“Think you’re finally starting to lose it, buddy,” Noah said.
Nervous laughter from Amir. “I mean, you’re kidding, aren’t you? Because I was definitely not serious about the Kabbalah shit.”
“I don’t think he is,” I said, wondering why it was that I’d felt compelled to decline Kayla’s dessert invitation and instead pay further testament to Evan’s volatility.
Amir’s laughter subsided. “And why the hell are you going to do that, may I ask?”
“To see what happens,” Evan said.
“The full name?” I asked.
“All seventy-two glorious letters.”
“My family does tashlich here, you know.” Noah placed his hands in his pockets, swaying slightly. “Maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, sacrilegious?”
“Most things we do are sacrilegious.” Evan twirled his pen through his fingertips. “But it’s not like that’s my intention. I’d say tonight I’m more interested in the question of, I don’t know, of worthiness, let’s call it.”
I unrolled the sleeves of my shirt so that they covered my wrists. “You want to know if you’ll be—what? Punished?”
“Okay, yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think you should punt on this little activity.” Noah looked at me for support, but I shrugged. “This could curse us.”
Evan stomped out the joint. “Since when do you believe in curses?”
“I don’t know, I guess I—” Noah ran his fingers through his hair, pulling strands down past his neck. “I just feel like some things you don’t do.”
Removing the cap with his incisors, Evan took his pen and, with careful, ornate handwriting, sketched out seventy-two Hebrew letters in red ink. “I was generous enough to supply extra paper,” he said, patting the pockets of his black jeans, “in case anyone wants to write their own?” Nobody moved, not even Oliver. Noah looked sick.
“Very well. You’ll live vicariously.”
Amir retreated a few steps. “And if we don’t want to watch?”
“Then don’t.” Evan walked toward the water. “Then leave.”
“Okay, I have to ask,” Oliver said, glasses fogged from smoke. “So, like, what if this works? What’s supposed to happen?”
“When Moshe did this,” Evan said, “he split the Red Sea.”
“And retrieved Joseph’s bones from the water,” I said.
Evan smirked. “Good point, Eden. Forgot that one.”
“To be totally clear,” Amir said, “you’re actually telling us that this isn’t some weird prank but that you actually intend to, like, perform a freaking miracle?”
“Well, no promises,” Evan said. “I just want to try my hand. See if I’m . . . spiritually strong enough, I suppose, to receive divine revelation of some sort.”
Amir nervously itched his beard. “I mean, guys, seriously, come on. How are we—how is this not really fucking weird?”
“Maybe what it takes to rise above ordinary life,” Evan said softly, “is something shocking and dangerous. You know how rabbis always teach that holiness is associated with separation? Kohenim are holy because they’re separate, the Beis HaMikdash is holy because it’s separate, God is holy because He’s separate? Well, follow that logic: divorce yourself from ordinary life and find yourself moving away from being human and toward something . . . I don’t know, something thrilling and risky and very much divine.”
Nobody responded. I wasn’t taken aback by the content of this idea, merely the latest in a sequence of increasingly bewildering theories on Evan’s part, but by the fervor with which it was delivered. Somehow I knew—somehow we all knew—that Evan, at last, was veering away from theoretical debates and into the realm of practical belief.
“You’d have to be pure,” I said, finally. “Only the pure are supposed to use the hidden name.”
“Let’s pray, in that case, that I am.” Evan kissed the paper and dropped it into the water. Noah turned away; I inched up the bank with Oliver and Amir, watching the white disintegrate under the stars. We stood in silence, long after the paper was gone. Finally, Evan cleared his throat and walked away from the water. “So that was anticlimactic.”
“What’d you expect?” Amir asked. “Prophecy? Bubbles in the water?”
“I hoped the ground would swallow me whole,” Evan said. “I hoped to meet Korach and the rest of his rebel army.”
“Maybe you had the wrong name?” Oliver said. “Who knows what God’s secular name is. Or maybe He has a middle name?”
“We shouldn’t have done this,” Noah said, to no one in particular. He kicked up patches of dirt, darkening his white Nikes.
“Now what?” Amir asked. “What’d that prove?”
Evan surveyed the heavens. Night air pressed against us. Dull moonlight shone down in silver glints. I was sweating. “Nothing.”
“You’re going to need a better experiment,” Amir said, “if you’re trying to prove any of your shit.”
“You’re absolutely right.” Evan lit a second joint, a lone light in the dark. “I am.”
* * *
THERE WAS A DRUG TEST at the end of that week. Mrs. Janice delivered the news, quite happily, over the loudspeakers: tests were school policy, selections random, cooperation compulsory. We were sitting in Mrs. Hartman’s class when we heard this, scribbling a mock AP essay, an analysis of Rimbaud’s “Delirium.” (Je croyais à tous les enchantements.) Davis, seated several rows before Evan, turned in his seat and grinned wickedly. “You’re done,” he mouthed.
Evan flipped him off.
Cold sweat broke out on the back of my head. I glanced around: Amir turned green, Noah drummed pen over paper, Kayla gave me a look of urgency. Mrs. Hartman peeked up from grading essays. “Is there a problem?”
Davis sniggered from the far side of the room.
“Something to declare, Mr. Davis?”
“I think,” he said, attempting to compose himself, “some dear friends may be in peril.”
I spent the day holding my breath each time another student was summoned. Oliver, of course, was among the first wave. (“I told them not to bother,” he said, shrugging, “to keep their little urine container and mail another bill to my old man.”) Evan was summoned, too, along with Gabriel, Donny, Niman and, to her amusement, Kayla. (“It’s fine,” she said, “expected, really. They need to balance clear-cut offenders with someone unable to so much as identify the scent of marijuana.”) Noah was a nervous wreck, insistent he’d lose Northwestern were he to test positive; when he was called he blamed Evan, rambling on about divine retribution for casting the name of God into the lake. I was increasingly nauseous at the thought of being tested, not because I was scared for my college prospects—I had none—but because I was desperately afraid of disappointing my poor mother. Drug usage, I knew, was something even my tireless advocate could not defend, and the thought of her fallen face was too crushing to bear.
The call came at the end of the day, as I was suffering through double biology. Dr. Flowers paused mid-sentence and frowned. “Better be clean, Eden. Good Lord, you better be clean as a whistle.”
“Yes, well, I am,” I said unconvincingly.
“Good.” She played with her chalk, white dust landing on her blouse. “Because I’m guessing you’re already skidding on thin academic ice.”
I caught Sophia’s eyes on the way out. She gave me a hopeful nod—hands at her side, those painted, frescoed eyes narrowed—but I made a point of avoiding her gaze.
Davis was the only other student in the office. I was greeted with a smirk. “Afternoon, Aryeh.”
“Here you go, Mr. Eden,” Mrs. Janice said, handing over a nondescript plastic cup, eyeing me suspiciously. “I’m sure you know what to do.”
“I’ll walk with you, old chap,” Davis said, empty cup in hand, shooting Mrs. Janice an unrequited wink.
“Surprised they bothered testing you,” I said, annoyed he was following me into the bathroom.
“What choice did they have? Would look odd otherwise, wouldn’t it?”
“What does that mean?”
He clapped my back. “These tests are expensive. Helps when people donate to the cause.”
“This is your family’s idea?”
“Hardly their idea, per se,” he said. “Though do we see anything wrong in bringing to the attention of the administration problems regarding the abuse of narcotics? It’s our civic duty, after all.”
“Civic duty. You’re a jerk.”
“Please.” He held open the bathroom door. “Don’t let this come between us. It won’t really affect you, will it? I know your friends are . . . astonishingly delinquent, but you don’t seem like the sort of fellow to get caught up in that, a guy from Teaneck.”
“Brooklyn.”
“Right, sorry. But I swear, truly, I’d no intention of harming you.”
I hesitated at the doorframe. “You’re after Amir?”
“Samson?” He scoffed. “Can’t stand the guy sometimes, but I respect him. And I know him. He isn’t foolish enough to be vulnerable. Stark, on the other hand?”
We approached the urinals. I took the one on the far left. Davis, despite an open row of urinals, took the one beside me.
“You really have to stand right here?”
“Come on, Eden.”
“I can hear you breathing.”
“A man’s got a right to breathe. Don’t be trigger shy on my accord.”
I fumbled to open the lid of the container and listened to his whistling as we filled our cups, my heart pounding in my chest. We finished and went to wash our hands, setting down our samples on the counter. I ran water, splashed my face, felt as if I were on the verge of hyperventilating. The door flew open. In barged Gio, vacuum in hand.
“You two—back to class,” he barked, plugging in the vacuum. “I got work to do.”
“Just a moment, Giovanni, my good sir,” Davis said. “We’ll be right off.”
Gio threw the vacuum to the floor. “What you say, Davis? Talking down to me? Talking shit?”
“Mea culpa, Gio.” Davis raised his arms in peace. “But please. Are the profanities necessary?”
Gio threw his sanitation gloves to the floor. “You walk around, doing whatever you want? I tell you something, little shit, if you think you—”
“Now, listen here,” Davis said, turning his back to me and jabbing his finger toward Gio’s chest, “you can’t talk that way to a student. My father—”
Allowing Davis to lecture on, Gio nodded, almost imperceptibly, at the two containers of urine at the sink. Staring in confusion, I realized what those head movements signified. I hesitated, despite Gio’s frantic blinking in my direction, until, my mother’s disappointment in mind, I switched the samples, just as Davis finished his diatribe and groped for the nearest cup.
“Okay, okay, you’re right, Davis, very right, now get out, yes?”
“Yes, well.” Davis took a deep breath, holding my cup. “I will be off, thanks very much.” With that, he stalked away, humming some Harvard ballad.
“That guy, huh?” Gio glanced under a stall to make certain we were alone. “Not as bright as they say.”
“Gio, I don’t understand.”
He stroked his chin. “Just take cup and be on way. My eyesight’s bad. Cataracts. Didn’t see thing.”
“Seriously, how did you—”
“Christ.” He grabbed the sample from the counter. “That story the rabbis tell? The flood and the guy praying and the boats come but he says no and keeps waiting and waiting until the bastard drowns? Where’s help, he asks God when he gets to Heaven, I wait for You, I turn down boats? Moral of story, very practical, don’t drown in own urine. Catch my drift?” He shoved the cup at my chest. Reluctantly, I took it, holding Davis’ warm, yellow liquid. I gagged. “Not a word, okay? Hand it in, run to class.” He swore in what I think was Italian. “They think I don’t listen but old Gio listens. When boat shows up, get fuck in, don’t ask questions.” With that, he moved me out of the bathroom and slammed the door.
* * *
DONNY HAD A BIRTHDAY PARTY on Saturday night. He was permanently grounded for his role in what had transpired after sunrise minyan, but his parents took pity and threw a small, contained backyard gathering, inviting just the basketball team. There was cake, some ice cream. We milled around the pool, aware of the Silvers’ inquisitorial looks, pretending we’d never before been to his house. (“What a lovely home, Mrs. Silver,” Oliver made a point of exclaiming early on, much to Donny’s mortification. “So tasteful. Can’t believe I’ve never been over!”) The party lasted fewer than two hours.
We were still hungry when it was over, so Evan suggested we try the late-night Israeli pita place. It was a small shop, two tables, tucked away in the far end of a dingy plaza. Next door was a neglected office with rusted windows and a lit-up sign that read: PSYCHIC VISIONS & READINGS.
“How does that place stay open?” Amir asked over a mouthful of shawarma. “Like, how has local government not shut that down?”
Tahina dripped from Oliver’s mouth. “Why should they?” He didn’t bother reaching for napkins. “It’s a legitimate business.”
“Yeah,” Noah laughed, “no different from that brothel in Key West you tried checking out.”
Amir shrugged, taking another bite. “In both places you pay to get screwed.”
“Cute and clever,” Oliver said, checking his phone. “You’re not going to MIT by any chance?”
Evan pushed his plate toward the middle of the table. “Fuck it. Let’s do it.”
I frowned. “Do what?”
“Visit the psychic.” Evan spun his knife absentmindedly. “It’d be fun to try.”
“Makes sense,” Amir said, watching the knife in motion. “Your idea of fun is re-creating the splitting of the Red Sea, so yeah. This is totally on brand.”
Evan checked his watch. “Come on, it’s not even midnight. We have anything else to do?”
Oliver tucked his phone back into his jeans. “Fine, I’m in. Gemma just canceled on me anyway.”
Noah picked at the scraps of his baba ghanoush. “Gemma?”
“We’ve been hooking up.”
“Since when?”
Oliver shrugged.
“Romance of our time,” Amir said.
“Thought that title belonged to Drew,” Oliver said.
Evan placed his palm on the table. Slowly, he allowed the knife to pass back and forth between his fingers. “Eden and whom?”
“Aren’t you getting with Gross, Drew?” Oliver said.
“Dude,” Noah said, “chill.”
Oliver raised his hands in protest. “What? Simple question.”
“Don’t phrase it like that,” Noah said. “And it’s not your business.”
“Sorry. Drew, are you not currently seeing Ms. Gross?”
Unsure how to answer, I nodded noncommittally, finishing my Sprite.
“Now that we’ve settled that important issue,” Evan said, increasing the speed with which he stabbed, “are we ready to go?”
“Jesus,” Amir said, cringing, “can you stop? I’m anxious watching you.”
Evan went faster. The serrated edge, at the very end of the cycle, nicked his pinky.
Noah recoiled. “Shit, you okay?”
“It’s nothing.” Red drops pooled into the web between Evan’s pinky and fourth finger.
We piled back into the Jeep and, the plaza looking sufficiently abandoned, broke out Oliver’s stash. Y100 was on, playing Kanye, proclaiming itself Miami’s number one hit station. The windows fogged. In the distance the streetlights glowed red.
When we finished, nighttime bent slightly, we pushed open the psychic’s door. Beads rattled overhead, announcing our arrival. The office was nearly pitch-black, save for the glow of a computer screen, reflected through a back mirror. The room smelled vaguely of dead flowers and burnt incense. Under the mirror, I realized, was a woman at a desk. She was tan, with sunspots and leathery skin. A turban sat on her desk, beside her computer.
Evan approached her. “You open?”
The woman glanced up at us and swore in what sounded like Romanian. “You scared the shit out of me.” She was wearing Beats, we realized as we stepped closer. She removed them and put her turban back on. “Apologies. I was doing some work.”
“You’re watching The Office,” Oliver said.
“I’m studying astrology, actually.”
“I literally see Steve Carrell’s face in the mirror.”
She swore again, minimizing the tabs on her screen. “Yeah, well. It was getting late. You boys here for a reading? Because I close at one.”
“Your sign says two,” Evan said.
“Tonight I’m tired, so. Quick reading but still good. Does that work? Perfect, take seats around my desk, yeah? You, strong one,” she said, pointing to Noah, “bring that chair from the front and we have five. Lovely.”
Noah dragged it over and we assembled before her. We could see, up close, that she had her nails painted black. She wore enormous hoop earrings and several low-hanging, fake-pearl necklaces. Astrology charts and hamsa hands and anti-vampire amulets adorned the walls. On her desk was a large bottle of wine, accompanied by a picture of a toddler.
“My son, Abner,” she said, catching me looking at it. “But let’s begin, yeah?” She screwed up her eyes. “When did we all last meet?”
Noah cackled. “What?”
“That’s how I start.”
“Oh, sorry.”
She gave an irritated look. “You guys been smoking?”
Noah shook his head spiritedly. “Course not.”
“Right. Well, want the usual package? Seventy dollars and I’ll read your palms, ninety and I’ll include tarot cards.”
“Quick question,” Amir said, leaning forward, “but do you by any chance know God’s secret name?”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’m surprised they didn’t teach that in witchcraft school.”
“I’m no witch, kid, I’m a healer. Or a, uh, what do you call it, a possessor. A spiritual ventriloquist. Don’t laugh, I studied hard for my degree.”
“Your degree?”
“College of Transcendental Pursuits. Graduated with honors.”
“Maybe we should apply there, Drew,” Oliver said. “Where is it?”
“Online. Anyway. Cash or credit?”
“We’re not interested in readings,” Evan said.
My phone buzzed. A text from Kayla: haven’t heard from u, so i’ll bite: where art thou?
“No phones!” she barked. “Screws up ethereal waves. Also, no recordings.”
“Sorry,” I said, holstering my phone.
Evan dug inside his jeans for his wallet. “How much to talk to the dead?”
“That’s what you want?”
“Can you do it?”
“Sure I can do it, but it’s, you know, a rare thing. People usually want something—comforting.”
Amir crossed his legs. “This isn’t comforting?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The future is one thing. The dead are unpredictable.”
“Right,” Amir said.
“Plus it’s a little frowned upon these days, to be honest. But if that’s what you want, I’ll do it. It’s more expensive, though.”
“How much?”
She examined us, calculated how much she thought we’d pay. “Two seventy-five.”
“Two hundred.”
“Two twenty.”
“Deal,” Evan said.
Amir laughed. “I’m out.”
“Yeah, same,” I said. “I can’t pay that.”
Evan rifled through his wallet and handed her a credit card. “My treat.”
“Okay, let’s go,” she said, putting on reading glasses to run the card. “Some ground rules. One, no refunds. Whatever you get, you get. I don’t control the deceased, I’m just a conduit. Once a woman came in and had me rustle up her grandmother and then didn’t want to pay because the old lady told her to screw off. Family squabbles are not my problem.”
“Understood,” Evan said.
“Second, summoning a spirit is very complicated. And it’s much more complicated depending on when they passed. Once a body is interred, the spirit roams earth for twelve months, yeah? During those months it’s much easier to summon, because the spirit is still restricted, whatever. But after that, the spirit is free and doesn’t have to show up when I call unless it actually wants to give over a message. Got that?”
“Yeah,” Amir said, “sounds super scientific.”
“It’s bad luck to insult a healer,” she told Amir. “Very bad.” Inhaling, she turned to Evan. “If he gets me pissed, I cannot perform with a clear head.”
“Let her do her thing, Amir,” Evan said.
“All right,” Amir said, “go ahead.”
“So, who do you want to talk to and did they die recently?”
We went silent, each thinking the same thing. The psychic frowned. “What’s the issue?”
Noah passed a hand through his hair. “Ev?”
“I think it should be Samuel,” Evan said.
I frowned. “Who’s Samuel?”
“Like the story in Navi,” Evan said. “When Saul is ignored by God and so asks the Witch of Endor to communicate with Samuel.”
A look of intense relief passed through Noah’s eyes. “Ah, okay. Yeah, I mean, incredibly random, but that works.”
“Of all the people in human history,” Amir said, “that’s who we want to chat with?”
“What about that dude you love, Ev?” Oliver asked. “Freddy from Prussia? The Marvelous Mr. Frederick the Second?”
“That’d be Friedrich Nietzsche,” Amir said, “of Germany.”
The psychic lit a cigarette. “Don’t know how I feel about that. He’s a downer, I hear. Care if I smoke?”
“I’d much prefer Shimon bar Yochai,” Evan said, “but I think it has to be Samuel.”
“Why Shimon bar Yochai?” Noah asked.
“He wrote the Zohar.” I looked up at Evan. “But this is why you wanted Pita Haven tonight, isn’t it? So we’d end up in here for another experiment?”
Evan didn’t blink. “Well, of course.”
“Son of a bitch,” Amir said, tapping his foot restlessly.
“It’s getting late,” the psychic said. “Let’s make a decision, yeah?”
“Wouldn’t it better prove your divinity if you merit summoning a different Samuel to shoot the shit?” Amir asked. “Like, I don’t know, Samuel Clemens, let’s say.”
The psychic nodded. “I like Twain.”
“Or Beckett,” I said.
“Or Adams,” Oliver said. “The real one or the cutie plastered on the beer bottle. Either works.”
Evan shook his head. “Samuel the Prophet.”
“Okay, Samuel the Prophet it is,” the psychic said. “Beautiful. So we use a very strict procedure. When the spirit comes, show respect. Don’t shout questions, don’t speak out of turn, don’t frighten it off. Only I can hear the spirit, but the spirit can hear all of you. Okay?”
“How convenient,” Amir said.
She reached inside a drawer for a sheet of paper. “Pass it around,” she said, dipping a quill into a bottle of ink, “and write your name and one question you’d like to ask our guest. Just one, since there’s five of you.”
I watched as Noah, Oliver and Amir each turned strangely quiet when receiving the quill and paper, avoiding eye contact, hesitating before writing. I went second to last. I tried, unsuccessfully, not to survey the questions above my slot:
Horrified at the prospect of what I really wanted to write being revealed, to Evan or to the others, I asked instead whether I’d find a college I liked and hurriedly passed the sheet to Evan, who immediately wrote something down and handed it to the psychic.
She scanned the list, powered down her computer. “Let’s begin,” she said, putting out her cigarette and lighting a candle. Producing a kitschy goblet from underneath her desk, she began muttering incantations, picking up the candle and allowing five drops of wax to fall into the goblet before adding five drops of wine. Eyes closed, she swirled the cup. “Last part,” she said, reopening her eyes. “Someone needs to make an offering.”
“What does that mean?” Noah asked.
“Like a sacrifice.”
“Here.” Evan put his right palm above the goblet. He squeezed his pinky until he managed to extract five droplets from the coagulating wound.
Amir gagged. “That’s disgusting. I really hope you use new cups.”
“I maintain a very sanitary environment,” she muttered. “Now listen.”
“To what?”
“Shh.” She blew into the goblet and stood. Her eyes closed. She opened her mouth to speak but stopped herself. “He’s rising.”
Oliver withdrew a piece of Doublemint from his pocket and placed it in his mouth with as much noise as he could. “Nice, what does Sammy look like?”
“An old man,” the psychic whispered. “Wearing a mantle. But he’s—he’s not coming the usual way.”
Oliver elbowed my side. “Not coming the usual way. Like that one?”
She stiffened, turning her attention on Evan without opening her eyes. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“What you were. Who you are,” she said, speaking frenziedly. “And now he wants to know why you’ve disturbed him. He says you shouldn’t have brought him up.”
“Just ask the question,” Evan said.
“The questions,” Amir corrected. “All five.”
She folded the paper into fourths and deposited it into the goblet. Then she lit another match and dropped it in, too. “He’s angry,” she announced, her voice rising. “He won’t stop shouting.”
Oliver grinned. “What’d we ever do to him?”
“You didn’t obey! You broke the limits! You’re becoming—yes, yes, I know—an adversary to the Lord!”
“Okay, okay,” Amir said, covering his ears, “we get the act.”
The psychic ignored him. “She says so, too, you know. She says to stop. You’ll be ruined.”
Evan blinked. “Who says?”
She was convulsing now, her limbs shuddering with such intensity that she knocked the picture of her son off her desk.
“Ask it!” Evan reached for her hand. “Should I do it or—”
An earsplitting screech as Evan touched her. Her head lulled back. I thought for a moment that a vein in her temple would burst, showering us in blood. As it happened, though, she went silent, falling back into her chair, pale and panting. Just at that moment, her security alarm began to wail.
“Goddamn it.” She snapped to, forced herself up. The alarm was deafening. I crammed my fingers into my ears until she had punched in her code, restoring silence. “Sorry,” she said, slumping back down. “Happens randomly. Don’t worry, cops won’t call for at least half an hour. In case it’s actually real, you know, so intruders have time to ransack the place.”
“So,” Amir said, “that was totally worth the money, huh, Ev?”
“As I said.” She lit a new cigarette and reached for the wine. “Spirits are volatile. Never know what you’re going to get. And they’re possessive, no? They take right over. Did I give you a fright? Here, have wine, calm your nerves.”
We sat a few minutes, sipping wine from plastic cups. Oliver shared her cigarette. Evan didn’t drink, didn’t speak. We drove off as a police car appeared down the street.
* * *
“SO THE DRUG TEST?” KAYLA asked, bent over her palette. She’d taken me to a contemporary museum in South Beach, where we’d signed up for a painting class. There was a room in which a rudimentary robot, equipped with three arms and no legs, performed the wave to a dystopian rendition of “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” There was a room with a vintage film projector, rattling noisily, showcasing in rapid bursts the gestation of a human skull. By the time the class started I was nursing a modest headache.
“What about it?” I glanced over at the instructor, who was teaching us how to reproduce Frank Cadogan Cowper’s The Golden Bowl. Kayla was a rigid fundamentalist, imitating every stroke, line and angle, the result surpassing the instructor’s own work. Kayla had her maiden in a red turban and a golden, floral, bare-shouldered gown, eyes blue and piercing, brows lifted in unflinching defiance. Against a violet backdrop, the woman held out a golden bowl of votive fruit: grape vines, pumpkins, delicate peaches.
Kayla stole one of my brushes and, ignoring my protest, gilded her maiden’s gown. “Are you worried about it, I mean?”
“You seem to think I should be.”
“No, I’m just—I don’t want to see you jeopardize anything, is all.”
“I’m pretty confident it won’t be an issue.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing, let’s just focus on painting.”
“How can I focus with your monstrosity staring at me?”
“No art is monstrous.” I twirled a thick paintbrush into the lower right section of my canvas. Yellow and red spots landed on our smocks. “Didn’t you learn anything from the exhibitions?”
“In this case I disagree.” She leaned her head on my shoulder to examine my canvas. By now, I’d surrendered any hope of following instructions and was entertaining myself by experimenting with an abstract blur: phosphorescent gold trapezoids, a metamorphosed bowl, eruptions of green light, objects resembling broken crowns. “And now, after witnessing you paint, I wonder what I see in you.”
I saluted with my brush. “A misunderstood visionary, born too early. Tragic, really.”
The instructor shuffled over. She gave an envious grunt inspecting Kayla’s canvas but an alarmed gasp at mine. “What . . . have you done?”
Kayla smirked. “Enlighten us, Ari.”
I put my hand to my chin, suppressing a laugh, avoiding Kayla’s eyes. “Well, if you see here,” I said, gesturing toward the upper left quadrant, “this is Judgment Day, of course, evoking the feeling of the celestial encountering sinful physicality. And here, just over to the right, is an ode to the Deluge—”
“—to the left, you mean,” the instructor cut in, leaning over my shoulders, tilting her head at various angles, “here with the aquatic hues?”
“You’d think that’s water rising,” I continued, drawing muffled laughter from Kayla, “or the Ark, maybe, but no, this part to the right is more oceanic in a surrealist sense, don’t you think?”
I was given a death stare. “Not in the slightest. In fact, this is what I’d call a picture without meaning. But cruder sensibilities could perhaps see it in a . . . Kandinsky kind of way.”
“Right, Kandinsky,” I said. “Precisely.”
The instructor frowned. “You speak eloquently for a person who’s presented the world with such . . . well, filth.”
Kayla pinched my cheek. “Don’t get him started. He’s an English student. He turns all sorts of garbage into poetry.”
“Garbage?” I said as our instructor stalked off. “And you’re going to tell me your incredibly detailed, objectively impressive painting is what—spectacular?”
“In every sense of the word.”
“But what’s so different about these two canvases, if you really think about it?”
“Yeah, what is the difference between Rembrandt and a preschooler’s depiction of a smiling sun wearing sunglasses?”
“Fine.” On my palette I married yellow to indigo. “What do you see in yours?”
“I’m not as talented in that department, Mr. Seer of Judgment Day.”
“Which department? Literary criticism?”
“No, its close cousin, the department of bullshit.”
“C’mon, you’re the tutor. Show your student how it’s done.”
“All right.” She pointed to the maiden’s facial expressions. “So she’s gorgeous, obviously. But her real power is her negative beauty.”
“Now we’re talking.”
“I mean it. Look at her. She knows it just as much as I do. All that beauty, but she’s paralyzed, alone, caged.”
I swept my eyes over the woman. “Heavy stuff. I thought you were just going to comment on how she represents Demeter and fertility and the coming of winter.”
“Quit showing off.”
“Sorry.”
“But you see what I mean?”
“Eh. I mean, maybe she is sad. But loneliness doesn’t have to be some moral defect. It can be . . . part of someone’s allure.”
“Being self-absorbed, beyond the grasp of anyone else, you think that’s attractive?”
“I think it’s attractive to be a rarity.” I observed her stance, her eyes. “And anyway, whatever she’s missing doesn’t matter. It makes her fuller, gives her suffering some dignity.”
Kayla snorted, plunged the brush into the jar. Muddied colors rose to the surface. “I didn’t paint her to have dignity. I painted her to possess her.”
“Yeah, well, even so,” I said, “it’s still there. Her nobility or, I don’t know, her magnitude. The feeling she’s been wounded and yet once you’ve seen her you never go back.”
“To what? Chasteness? Joy?”
I shrugged. “To whatever it was being only the person you used to be.”
We fell into silence, pink with embarrassment, seeking refuge in the act of tidying up and signing our names in the corner of our paintings. In a sudden, erratic movement, Kayla snatched the smallest brush, dipped it black and sliced a dark dash down the middle of the bowl.
* * *
“FOUR-FIFTHS OF THIS GROUP FAILED,” Rabbi Bloom announced at our next meeting. He pushed away his copy of Guide for the Perplexed. “I’m not certain whether this means this class isn’t working or if it’s more pressing than ever.”
“Don’t take it to heart, Rav,” Oliver said. “I fail tests on the regular. You get used to it, trust me.”
Evan frowned. “Four-fifths?”
Rabbi Bloom stirred his teacup. “Sadly enough, Mr. Stark.”
“How could one of us have passed?”
Oliver smirked, looking around the table. “Yeah, with all due respect, Rabbi, you’re the only person in this room who’d show up clean. At least I assume you would. I’m not one to judge.”
Noah placed a jug of Gatorade on the table. “So only some of us were tested?”
“Well, I was definitely tested,” Amir said miserably. “My mom slapped me across the face when she heard the results.” This reduced Oliver to a giggling fit, which he tried relieving by sipping on room-temperature water, only to spit up a mouthful.
Evan rested his gaze on me. “Eden?”
My face burned. Slowly, my friends turned their attention to me.
“What?” I said.
“Well done,” Oliver said, “but how’d you get fake urine? And why didn’t you share?”
I looked, too quickly, to Rabbi Bloom, as if expecting a private answer to what I was thinking. “I can assure you that collections were held under sterile and controlled environments,” he said officiously, pointedly ignoring my stare. “And in any event, it’s hardly anyone’s business whether someone else passed. I’d prefer you worry about the fact that you failed.”
Evan laughed. “Hardly our business? Rabbi, please tell us how Eden can possibly be the only person in the clear? Why are you protecting him?”
I said nothing. Certainly I was grateful to avoid being caught, but to a large extent I shared their dissent, or at least their confusion. What I rationalized, at first, as a spontaneous favor on Gio’s part now seemed increasingly suspicious. That Gio had somehow been directed to save me was implausible, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that Evan’s accusation was not entirely wrong.
“Gentlemen,” Rabbi Bloom said, “this is serious.”
“Well,” Oliver said, “let’s not be melodramatic.”
“This school has rules, Mr. Bellow,” Rabbi Bloom said wearily. “Abusing substances is no laughing matter. Experimenting with drugs for the sake of having fun is bad enough.” At this Rabbi Bloom gave Evan a cautious look. “Experimenting for other purposes is materially worse.”
“What about our colleges?” Noah asked weakly.
“We’re forced to draft a letter detailing the violation. The letter will be held in our records but will not be released unless there is a repeat violation.”
“Forced?” Evan gave a bitter laugh. “You’re hardly forced.”
“This institution has an obligation to disclose a pattern of disciplinary issues, Mr. Stark. I advise you refrain from such action if that concerns you.”
When we were dismissed we went out into the parking lot toward Oliver’s Jeep. Evan grabbed my shoulder before I could climb in, forcing me aside. “Want to tell the truth now?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, Eden, no bullshit.”
Briefly I considered admitting what had happened in the bathroom with Gio. But I didn’t trust Evan, and I felt perverse gratification knowing he needed something from me. “What do you think I’m hiding?”
“If something’s going on between you two,” he said quietly, “then it concerns me, even if you don’t understand why.”
I shook him off. “Funny,” I said, “because I’m pretty sure you’re the one hiding something that affects me.” I didn’t mean to say these words, but I was happy I did. His face went white. I turned my attention to the perimeter of the model temple.
“Careful, Eden,” Evan said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I brushed away, joined them in the car. Inside they’d already moved on to discussing Purim costumes. It was nice out, though a bit overcast, the sky hazy-gray. Oliver dug around his glove compartment, exhuming a baggie of weed. “Shall we?”
“You’re joking,” Amir said from the back seat. “Tell me you’re joking.”
We hesitated. Then, ignoring Amir’s moralizing, we smoked.
* * *
MORE THAN A WEEK WENT by and Purim was fast approaching. Growing up, Purim was my favorite holiday. Our community gathered in synagogue, twice, to recite the book of Esther, frolicked in costume, delivered gifts of food, enjoyed massive feasts. I loved the dancing in the streets, the shalach manot runs with my mother, the twenty-four-hour sugar high, the seudahs during which my father, refusing to drink more than absolutely necessary, would become flushed with wine and retreat early to bed. Torah Temimah actively encouraged us to dress up, though we were to choose strictly from biblical costumes, and to wander the neighborhood collecting tzedakah from drunken revelers. What I loved, I suppose, was Purim’s energy: alien and seductive, a day on which my life, to my relief, no longer quite resembled itself.
I felt no such ruach this time around, anxious as I was about my future. Still, holiday preparation was in full swing. My mother was doing her best to impress Cynthia, assembling hundreds of hamantaschen, including but not limited to chocolate chip, apricot, prune, poppy and peanut butter. Kayla, meanwhile, dragged me to a local thrift shop in search of coordinated outfits.
“We’ll need something literary,” she said, rifling through a rack of secondhand costumes. “Any ideas?”
“Not really.”
“And you’re supposed to be Hartman’s star?” She returned to her searching, hair whipping from side to side. “Personally, I’m torn between two.”
“Which?”
“Being a suffragette,” she said, “or biting the bullet and being Shelley.”
“Shelley is cool,” I said. “You can carry around an umbrella.”
“I said Shelley, not Mary Poppins.”
“For the west wind.”
“Clever.” She pulled out a Gothic Victorian-style dress and held it to her body. “But I meant the great Mary Shelley. The superior Shelley.”
“Oh.”
“This’ll do,” she said, examining the dress. “With a copy of Frankenstein in hand and some serious powder applied to the face.”
“Brilliant.”
“I’ll let you be Percy. Look for floaties.”
“Isn’t that sort of weird?”
“What?”
“To come as the Shelleys?”
“It’s a Purim bit, Ari, not a marriage proposal.”
“I know, it’s just—”
“Scared your friends will mock you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
A row of masks: monsters, aliens, centaurs, bloodstained zombies. I picked a small skull from a neglected shelf. “How about this?”
“Don’t think that’ll fit your head. Your ego’s become too big.” She disappeared into a fitting room with the dress. “But be my guest and try.”
“No,” I said, leaning against the dressing room door. “As an accessory.”
“For what? A tomb raider?”
“It’s Yorick.”
She came out, frowning, in her dress. “You’re joking.”
I collected tacky medieval attire: hooded purple robes, black tights, a cheap crown. “It’s great, see?”
“You have to go as Hamlet, Ari? Really? Can’t you be the gravedigger instead?”
“It’s literary, like you said. And I like it better than being P.B.”
“Look, not to be harsh, but I really think your fixation with her is becoming slightly . . . unhealthy.” She twirled in front of a mirror. The owner of the store provided an approving thumbs-up. “You’re too hung up on her for your own good.”
“Come on,” I said, lowering my voice, throwing a suspicious glance at the owner without quite knowing why, “I’m not—”
She returned to the fitting room, changing into her clothing. “Could it be more painfully obvious who this is for?”
“It has absolutely nothing to do with her.” She tossed her outfit over the dressing room door. It landed on my head. “It’s just a funny costume.”
“Dress however you’d like,” she said testily when she emerged, rolling her eyes. The owner, ringing her up, gave me a sympathetic wink.
* * *
“WE ARE TO DRINK,” RABBI Bloom lectured in his office the following day, “until we no longer remember the difference between Mordechai and Haman, so Rava tells us.”
“That’s why Rava is my hero,” Oliver said reverently. “I’m very machmir on that.”
“You’re machmir on that all year,” Noah laughed, “not just on Purim.”
Even Rabbi Bloom allowed himself a momentary chuckle. “A simple dictum to drink yourselves into oblivion, an activity of which Mr. Bellow seems quite fond, is hardly aligned with Torah values. The danger of doing so, after all, is made apparent in the Gemara.”
“The feast of Rabbah and Rav Zeira,” I said.
Rabbi Bloom nodded. “Rabbah, Gemara Megillah tells us, drank himself into such a stupor that he accidentally murdered Rav Zeira, only to pray, successfully, for his resurrection.”
“On-demand resurrection,” Amir said. “What a convenience.”
“When the next year came around,” Rabbi Bloom continued, “Rabbah again invited Rav Zeira to his seudah. But Rav Zeira declined with the perfect response: ‘Miracles do not happen every hour.’”
“Love it,” Noah said.
“The point, of course, is that there’s something deeper at play in a night of sanctioned drinking. Why are we encouraged to reach the point at which we do not know?”
“To set ourselves free from the everyday,” Evan said. “To separate from ourselves and see things in a new light.”
Amir bit at his fingernail. “Is this the Zohar speaking?”
“What sort of new light?” Rabbi Bloom asked.
“Alcohol is just another way to overthrow the burden of self-consciousness,” Evan said. “To move beyond our usual restraints. If we drink properly, we can enter a reverie of sorts.”
“We play characters, we drink, we step outside our bodies,” Rabbi Bloom said. “We do all this to peer beyond the self. And it’s cleansing, it allows for unique self-examination. But it’s also much more. It’s theater. It’s when we tap into unfettered creativity, when we are swallowed up in something greater.”
“It’s when we feel divinity,” Evan said.
“We do aim to feel kedusha. For when we’re dressed only in our bodies, we have a harder time elevating our vision. During Purim, while confronting the national tragedy that nearly resulted in our annihilation, we break with the routine to which we’ve become accustomed. Such is the inextricable link between Purim and Yom Kippur. On both days, averted disasters, flirtations with death, give rise to a new relationship with divinity. On Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gadol casts lots to determine which goat will live. On Purim, Haman, may his name be erased, casts lots to determine the timing of his genocidal decree. So on both days, human life hinges on caprice. But on a greater level, both days, in aspiring toward maximal holiness, demand rituals that defamiliarize the world as we know it so that we can give ourselves to creativity and godliness.”
“Jeez,” Oliver grumbled in the hallway after we were dismissed, “here I was thinking that Purim was all about watching my father drink himself under the table. Silly me.”
“Yeah, sort of ruins Purim for you, doesn’t it?” Noah joked.
“No,” Evan said. “Just the opposite.”
* * *
WE HAD MEGILLAH READING IN SCHOOL. Amir, dressed as Danny Zuko—leather jacket, laughably tight pants, hair greased into place, sideburns elongated to the appropriate length—read for us in the assembly room. Rabbi Bloom, as Herodotus (monk’s robe, fake beard, walking staff), presided over the service from the front stage. It was a rowdy reading, freshmen setting off sirens and shooting streamers at every mention of Haman, Rabbi Feldman, dressed as Waldo, chasing someone in a gorilla suit. Oliver, a sexy mailman, circulated flasks. Evan arrived as Harry Houdini, Noah and Rebecca as basketball player and cheerleader, respectively, Remi as Catwoman and Davis as President Taft stuck in the bathtub, rubber ducky and all. Sophia drew sharp breaths in a long, white sleeveless dress, embroidered in gold, with flowing silk attachments at her back and bright bracelets adorning her wrists and forearms. A golden, beaded tiara crowned her head.
“Who is she?” I asked Rebecca, attempting to contain my desperation, lowering my voice so that Kayla, to my left, wouldn’t hear.
Rebecca smiled knowingly. “Athena. What’d you expect?”
After the reading, Evan, to our surprise, announced he’d be throwing a party. I’d still never been inside his house and figured his rift with his father would make any sort of hospitality unpleasant. Yet, as he explained in the parking lot, while everyone shuffled into cars and headed toward his cul-de-sac, his father was away on business, leaving him free rein over the house.
I convinced Kayla to join. She was in a sour mood, displeased I’d actually shown up as Hamlet, a move I was already regretting. Typically, Kayla declined my halfhearted invitations to join my friends, yet tonight, after some prodding, she agreed. She piled next to me in Oliver’s Jeep, grimacing at the residual smell of smoke, her absurdly long dress folded over my lap.
Evan’s backyard was perfectly standard for the upper echelon of my friends. At the center of a large swath of grass was a circle of stones, inside of which was a stack of timber, positioned into a ten-foot-high teepee.
“A bonfire,” Evan explained as the backyard began to fill. He lit the center aflame and stoked the fire with gasoline. “Purim Same’ach to all.”
Students from all grades attended, still in Purim garb, hauling packs of beer and bottles of vodka. It was a strange sight: Cinderella, Pacman, a Hasid, Mickey Mouse, James Bond all dancing around the fire, swigging from bottles, sharing joints. Oliver was playing music from outdoor speakers. Amir broke out a guitar he found inside Evan’s living room. Having ensured the fire’s vitality, Evan disappeared into his house.
“Want something?” I asked Kayla, taking her hand. She was surveying the backyard in disgust: binge drinking, smoking, several couples utilizing the cabana, a sophomore already sick in the garden. I was reminded of the way my father examined the layout of the Harris barbecue many months earlier. “Maybe let’s get you a drink?”
“So this is what you guys do,” she said, gravel-voiced. “Like, is this just another evening?”
“What does that mean?”
“You really drink this much, Ari? Because, to be honest, I’m pretty . . . horrified. This isn’t you.”
I dropped the nearly empty beer can I was holding and, twisting my foot, crushed it into the grass. “Not at all,” I said, trying to sound light, jovial, kicking mud from my sneakers. “I never keep pace with these people.”
Oliver approached, with Amir, Noah and Rebecca in tow. He was swaying on his feet, shirt removed, a handcuff dangling from one wrist. “You know,” he slurred, pointing at Kayla, “I . . . I bet you still tell the difference.”
I couldn’t blame her for looking revolted: Oliver was gimlet-eyed, reeking of smoke, doused in sweat and vodka, his left nostril inflamed. “Pardon?”
He stifled a drunken belch. “Mordechai. Haman. Good versus evil. Ying and Yang. Methinks you’re not drunk enough for Purim.”
“I’m not even slightly drunk, thanks very much.”
“Leave her be,” I told Oliver, physically moving him aside. He nodded obediently, stumbling off toward another circle to recite the same line.
“Well, Kayla,” Rebecca said loudly, clearing her throat and observing Oliver out of the corner of her eye, “it’s nice to finally have you out with us.”
“Yeah, I mean, we’ve been asking Drew about you incessantly. All these excuses?” Noah said, bottle in hand, trying to sound inviting. “We thought maybe he was hiding you or something.”
“How funny,” Kayla said, brushing away, “no one seemed to ask a year ago. Or a decade ago. Excuse me.”
“Right, then,” Amir said as Kayla stomped off. Rosy-faced from Svedka, he poured himself another shot. “Merry Purim, kids.”
Rebecca elbowed my ribs. “You’re not going after her?”
“I’ll let her cool off,” I said, finding myself another beer. As I stared off into the crowd, cringing at the prospect of dealing with Kayla, I noticed the patio doors to Evan’s house burst open. A golden glint: dark hair, a tiara, a figure in white gliding through night. Before I could stop myself, I stole away after her.
“Sophia?”
She stopped abruptly in her tracks, her eyes—red slits, slightly puffy—tracing the ground. “Hamlet,” she said, finally glancing up. “Been a while.”
“Yeah, feels like it.”
“Guess you’re talking to me again.”
“It’s not like that,” I said awkwardly.
She dabbed slightly at her right eye. “Really? You haven’t been avoiding me at all costs?”
“Soph.” I poured the rest of my beer onto the grass. “I don’t really know what you expect from me.”
We watched the stream of foam dissolve into dirt. I closed my eyes, visualizing her bedroom, the way she undressed. I wanted to remember what it was to kiss her. I wanted confirmation that our relationship hadn’t existed only in the confines of fantasy. “That’s quite an outfit,” she said.
“Didn’t think you noticed,” I said lamely. Enormous waves of shame battered me: black, subterranean shame for my pathetically public display of affection, for standing with Sophia while Kayla wandered furiously, for losing Sophia in the first place.
“You didn’t think I noticed you at the recital, either.” Again, she swiped hastily at her eyes. “That feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?”
It did, I told her.
“You’re here with her?” she asked, puncturing a stretch of silence.
“With Kayla? Yeah, I am.”
She examined our surroundings. “Where is she?”
“Around. Circulating.”
Creed Sublime Vanille. Downturned eyes. Bare, slender arms. My heart attempted its desperate exit through my throat. “What were you doing inside?” I asked.
“I’m leaving now.”
I felt nauseous. My visual field temporarily threatened to disintegrate. “He’s in there?”
“You should find Kayla,” she said.
A great crashing from inside the doors: glass breaking against the floor. Over and over until, just as quickly as it started, it stopped.
Panicking, I moved toward the house. “What the hell was that?”
“Ari,” she said, quiet fear in her voice, “leave it alone.”
I tried the door, but it was locked. I hammered the curtained windowpanes, peered inside. No light, no sound.
A hand—gentle, flinching—on my shoulder. “Don’t go in.”
“Why not?” I turned to face her, but she had dissolved into the night.
A clear night, stars abound, rare for Florida. I was breathless, dizzy with anger. I reeled about, sweating from the damn fire—still burning, several freshmen tasked with adding fuel every so often—and joined Amir in one of the cabanas, hitting a joint with Lily and Gemma. I accepted two shots from a passerby, gagged on the second, dumped the cup on the floor. Pleurant, je voyais de l’or—et ne pus boire.
I spotted Kayla across the yard, chatting spiritedly with a junior, another of her math students. My vision swam slightly, the landscape tilting so that it assumed a fatigued, sunken quality.
“Should probably go after her,” Amir said, high-pitched. He passed the joint, his face frozen in a weed-induced, wide-eyed smirk.
I inhaled deeply. “Yeah,” I said, rising, coughing, “I should.”
“She’s your girlfriend or what?” Gemma asked, contorting her face with distaste. And then, whispering to Lily: “Talk about a fall from grace.”
Staggering slightly, I made my way across the yard, walking too close to the fire, around which people engaged in drunken simcha dancing. I loosened my robes, realized I was still carrying Yorick in my pocket. I rubbed his head and, gently, added him to the pyre.
A forceful hand on my midriff. Lips on my neck, a tongue probing my right ear. “Where’ve you been?” A low, seductive voice: the hair on my neck stood in place, my body falling limp. “Forgot about me?”
I turned. Remi, still masked, blond hair spilling over her black suit, held my body. “Eden?” She teetered backward, releasing my hand. “What the actual—” Her eyes narrowed in revulsion. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“What am I doing?” Goose bumps overtaking my arms, a feral stirring in my chest. “You grabbed me.”
“I thought you were Evan.” She rubbed her hands on her latex outfit, as if to disinfect them. The voice is the voice of Jacob, I thought, nausea building in my chest, yet the hands are the hands of Esau. “Jesus Christ. Just in the dark, from the side—you looked exactly like him.”
I kept moving, my head spinning perilously, approaching Kayla at the edge of the backyard, nearly tripping over a sprinkler buried in the grass. “Kayla,” I said, restraining myself from grabbing her hand, praying she hadn’t seen me with Sophia or with Remi, “hi.”
She nodded at her friend, who made a show of rolling her eyes in my direction before disappearing reluctantly. “About time, Ari.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Where were you?”
“I got—distracted.”
“You reek.” She fingered her copy of Frankenstein. “It really is frightening. You’re an entirely different person around them. I mean, you’d never in a million years act like this without them, would you?”
“I’m not,” I said. “I swear. I didn’t mean—”
She kissed my cheek, allowing her lips to linger over my skin. “I’m going to leave.”
“I’ll drive you home.”
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“Why?”
“You’re high, Ari!”
“Yeah, but hardly.”
“Not to mention you don’t have a car here.”
“True.” Running my fingers through my hair, trying to think on my feet, trying to sober. “So we’ll walk.”
“I’ve already called my mom.”
Confused silence. We turned to find Evan—black tailcoat, magician’s hat, shackles over his shoulder—striding toward the bonfire. He looked calm, as if nothing had happened behind those doors just minutes before, and carried a large, square frame, wrapped in a blanket. “Your attention, if you will,” he called out. Bodies moved gradually toward the fire, encircling him. Evan set down the object and instructed Amir—incoherently high, too high to object—to play on with the guitar. “After Purim,” Evan shouted, pacing before the fire, “we read of the Red Heifer in preparation of Pesach.”
“What is this,” Kayla whispered, “a sermon?”
Frenetic, drunken chords from Amir. “But on Purim, holiday of opposites, the Red Heifer, sacrificed to God as an atonement for our sins, finds its analogue in the Golden Calf, of all things, an idol, our most monumental sin. Why? Because purity and idolatry are two faces of the same coin. We must understand the relationship between what the Zohar calls leaving and returning, our urge to overcome this world and our urge to sanctify it. Now, seeing as we don’t have enough gold lying around tonight, I brought the next best thing.” He bent down, unwrapped the package: a small oil painting of a cubist bull, eyes crazed, legs splayed at excruciating angles, muscles rippling under its hide, a sword buried in its gray torso. “Our own bull,” Evan said, hoisting the painting above his head. His eyes resembled the bull’s: swollen, frenzied, pale-green in this light. “Our own way to mix kedusha and the sacrilegious, to purify ourselves through fire, to make ourselves a bit more worthy of seeing God. I hope my father doesn’t mind.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kayla said, “is that a Picasso?”
“Behold,” Evan yelled, tipping the painting into the fire, “the oneness that is hidden.” The music beat on, people screaming, rushing the bonfire, offering contributions—costume accessories, beer bottles, dollar bills, Amir’s guitar—our high priest at the center, watching Picasso turn to ash.