Who alone suffers, suffers most i’ th’ mind,
Leaving free things and happy shows behind.
—Shakespeare, King Lear
I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I had a conference in Manhattan; on a whim, I boarded a subway during a free afternoon and found myself ascending on Fiftieth Street. It rained on and off as I walked the streets of Brooklyn, trying to find the new apartment, receiving confused stares from black-hatted yeshiva students. I wandered past the old places, past my house and local restaurants, past Torah Temimah and the park where we’d played ball. I kept thinking that, even in the rain, it wasn’t all nearly as gray as I remembered, but beautiful, in fact, full of life, joy, purity. I thought about the feeling I had before I moved, standing in my emptied room. It is, more or less, the way I’ve felt since I saw Noah lowered into the ground.
Outside the apartment building I bumped into a man with a large black coat and payot at his shoulders. He held hands with a toddler and was sweaty and disheveled and looked as if he were running late. He gave a brief glare, muttered rapidly in Yiddish. It was, I realized, my old friend Shimon Levy.
“Shimon!”
He stopped in his tracks, surveyed me up and down. I was clean-shaven, my hair cropped. I wore a brown bomber jacket. His eyes went to the thing missing from the top of my head. “Aryeh?” A low, awed voice. Blessed are You, Lord, who revives the dead.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. We shook hands. “Is this your son?”
Shimon played uncomfortably with his payot. “My youngest.”
“You have more?”
“Baruch Hashem,” he said. “Three beautiful children.”
“Wow, I—that’s incredible, Shimon. Really. Who’d you marry?”
“Remember Esther Leah Epstein? Reuven’s cousin?”
I bent over to face his son, who eyed me suspiciously, lollipop in mouth. “Shalom aleichem. What’s your name?”
The boy shut his eyes, cleaving to Shimon’s legs.
“Yossi.” Shimon put his hands on Yossi’s neck. “I’m surprised. Usually he takes to strangers.”
I straightened. “I’m so happy for you,” I said. “Sounds like you have a wonderful family.”
“The Rebonu Shel Olam has treated me with abundant chesed.” He paused, checked his wristwatch.
“So,” I said, glancing around, “you live nearby?”
“Over on Cedar. Near the yeshiva.”
“Do you work there?”
“No, I’m in kollel. For parnasah, though, I’m an electrician.” Yossi, from below, yanked impatiently at Shimon’s tzitzit. “But where are you now?” He lowered his voice, shielding Yossi from my answer. “Your father I see in shul.”
“I’m still in school, after all these years,” I said. “But somewhere far away.”
“Still go to libraries, then, yes?”
I smiled. “I do.”
“The libraries—those books—they worked out for you?”
My scarf fluttered in the wind. Above us, a roiling sky. “No,” I said. “Quite the opposite.”
He glanced down again at his son. “When did you—stop?”
“I’m afraid that’s not a simple question.”
“But what happened to you?”
“Something I’m trying to forget,” I said in a quieter voice.
“Do you think”—Yossi tugging violently at his legs now—“do you think you’ll ever return?”
I studied the face of my oldest friend’s child. After a long pause: “Yes, actually,” I said. It was true, I realized then. It had always been true. “I will.”
We hugged, said goodbye. I watched him go, watched him gather Yossi into his arms and kiss his cheek. The last time we parted, I’d escaped, like I’d always wanted, and he’d remained behind. Shimon Levy, in the years since, had uncovered the inexhaustible dream: family and community, faith and culture, stability and kindness, order and depth, the courage to live as we all might, were we conscious of infinitude’s daily touch, were we liberated from longing, were we content to beat interminably at some ideal. I, in turn, roamed through wet streets, looking on at the world around me, discovering what a monstrous thing it is to be alone. Hillel cautioned against separating from the community, and yet Hillel hadn’t lived my life. The rain resumed. I decided to walk back to the train.
* * *
WE HAVEN’T SPOKEN ONCE IN the last seven years, Evan and I. Occasionally, I’ve considered sending emails—composed when the sleeping pills don’t work like they used to—though I always delete them in the morning. I don’t do this because I miss him or feel sorry for him or have something to tell him. I do it because Evan, I know now, is like I am, or rather I am like Evan. Amir and Oliver found happiness; Evan is the only one, I suspect, who suffers like I do. This is why I was secretly and perversely delighted when, last week, I received the following letter:
Eden:
I hear you’ll be in the northeast. I wonder if you’d entertain meeting me. There is, I imagine, much to say.
—E.S.
Attached was a picture of the five of us. I’m not certain when it was taken, though I had a feeling it was from Remi’s birthday party, considering we were all wearing dark suits. It was a relic. There was Noah, front and center, taller than we were, handsome and beaming, his blond hair the brightest part of the photograph. He had one arm around Amir, who wore a sly half smile, and the other around Oliver, short, well manicured and, chin up, defiant. On the far right was Evan, unsmiling, hair gelled, eyes dark and knowing. Then on the left, almost an afterthought, I stood, smiling uneasily, noticeably out of place. Scribbled on the back of the picture was a tag from Euripides: “Terrible is it to desire it . . . but also terrible not to desire it.”
* * *
I MET HIM AT SOME quiet bar near Union Square. Hardly anyone was there. He arrived before I did and picked a table in the far back. I almost didn’t recognize him. His hair was at his shoulders now. He had a thick beard, the sort people grew in mourning, which worked to cover the entirety of his scar, save for a small patch just under his eye. His skin was ruined, he looked a great deal older. He had a cane leaning against the table and, apparently, something of a nervous tic that caused his fingers to quiver slightly. He didn’t notice me until I sat across from him.
For a long while we stared, said nothing. He didn’t offer his hand; I was glad, because I wasn’t certain I’d accept. Finally, he smiled—a worn, sad smile—and cleared his throat. “Still drink whiskey?”
I nodded.
He limped over to the bar, returning with two tumblers. “On me,” he said, handing me the drink.
“What do you want?”
Several times he blinked. I got the sense he couldn’t control it. “Never one for small talk, Eden.”
“Neither are you.”
He put down his whiskey. “I’m not actually supposed to drink. Stomach’s fucked. Never been the same since.” He was referring, I assumed, to the time he entered the fire.
“Thought maybe it was because you’re back in rehab.”
Another self-hating smile. “No more rehab.”
“Tell me,” I said, “how was prison?”
“Prison was—difficult. Prison was remarkably unenjoyable.”
“And afterward? Where were you then?”
“You didn’t follow along in the papers, with the rest of Zion Hills?”
“Can’t say I did.”
“There was some time in a ward,” he said. “And that was also rather unpleasant.”
I spun my tumbler in careful circles. I found these rotations oddly comforting, probably because they reminded me that I was, in fact, grounded to my own world, one that existed quite apart from his, and that seeing Evan again need not diminish my sense of self-sovereignty. “Are you—crazy?”
He leaned back in his chair, winced slightly, readjusted his positioning. “Some people in my life seem to think so.”
“And what do you think?”
“I say we all went a bit mad.”
“What are you doing in New York?” I asked.
“Just passing by,” he said. “I’m not really here.”
We drank more in silence. It occurred to me that the last time he and I had shared a drink was on a motorboat.
“So,” he said eventually, “do you speak to anyone anymore? Oliver?”
I laughed slightly. Shortly after high school, Oliver visited Israel on some half-year traveling program. Within weeks, he dropped out of the program and entered a Beit Medresh in Har Nof. He married his rabbi’s niece and never came back. Apparently he now has several young children, teaches cheder. His eyesight never returned. He wears thick, tinted glasses and goes by Eliyahu Elisha, his Hebrew name. He and I, as I consider during late-night musings, traded lives. He, like Shimon, got the better deal. “Only Amir, really,” I said. “Though less and less these days.”
“He’s in medical school, isn’t he?”
“He just finished,” I said. “Helped that he graduated college in three years.”
“Of course he did.” Evan put fingernails to his teeth, only to pull away his hand. “I hear he’s getting married.”
“He is.”
“Good for him. He’s always been the one who coped best, hasn’t he?”
“Turns out he’s the greatest of the five of us,” I said. “After Noah, at least.”
The name drew silence. I strained to make out the music in the background. I watched waiters roam the room. I found it simultaneously beautiful and devastating to consider that the other human beings around us had no knowledge whatsoever of our two lives.
“With what happened, though—you have to question that sometimes,” Evan said, “don’t you?”
I blinked into my tumbler. “Question what?”
“Well, I mean, Amir survived . . . untainted, it sounds like,” Evan said. “He wasn’t wounded. He’s had all the normalcy, all the success.”
“If you’re actually suggesting that Noah was impure or defective or whatever the fuck you believe because he—”
Evan put up a hand, the way he used to. “There’s a world of difference between being not pure and being impure, Eden.”
I shook my head. “I’m not talking about this.”
Evan allowed his gaze to move about the room before returning to me. “All right, then what about you, Eden? Still seeing someone special?”
I chewed on the insides of my cheeks. “No, I—that didn’t work out.”
“For now, at least. How long was it?”
“About a year and a half.”
He touched his cane, as if for support. “What happened?”
I didn’t answer, so he lit a cigarette. He did so, I noticed, with his old Cartier lighter. “And Bloom? Ever hear from Socrates?”
“Here and there,” I said. Rabbi Bloom resigned after the fire, taking up an ad hoc lecturer position at Rutgers. From time to time we exchange letters. He visited once, when I was a college freshman. We walked the campus, went for coffee. I tried thanking him, right before he left, for helping me get there but failed to find the words. Sometimes I send updates—about my dissertation, not life. He responds, without fail, quickly and with detailed, handwritten notes, pointing out arguments I perhaps hadn’t considered, books I might find useful. I don’t listen to his recommendations. Mostly it’s an excuse to talk to the man. “What about you?”
He put a finger to his scar, though I wasn’t certain if he realized he was doing this. “It wasn’t his fault, what happened to us.”
“Well, of course not.”
“He thinks so.” He chewed his lip. It was a familiar act. I put the tumbler back into motion. “And for a while, I did, too. Now I don’t. Now I realize the man was more of a father to me than Julian ever was.”
“Yeah? What about all that Nietzschean gibberish about self-creation? About being your own father?”
He shook his head with distaste, allowing the cigarette to dangle from his lips. “That’s not for me anymore.” Smoke twined between us. The smell nauseated me. “So I looked you up online. I even read the description about your research.”
“I’m flattered, truly.”
“Hegel, tragedy, guilt, sentiment.” He smiled. “Have I taught you absolutely nothing?”
A friend once warned Tennyson that humans cannot live in art. After college, however, I set out to do just that. I’m writing on what Coleridge calls “implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.” My aim is to prove that, in Hegelian tragedy, moral intuition mandates a belief in the inevitable triumph of our ethical institutions, even at the expense of a hero’s self-destruction. What I mean by this is that sometimes the world demands one person’s devastation so as to secure salvation for everyone else and prevent the unraveling of what has, until now, been holding us together. I like this idea. The department claims to like it, too, if I ever finish the project. “I should hope not,” I said.
“An inveterate idealist, you are. Maybe that’s a good thing. Actually, probably, it’s a wonderful thing.” A waiter, frowning, requested Evan stop smoking. Evan apologized and put out the rest of his cigarette. “Know what I believe in?”
“I can only imagine.”
“How about this? I believe certain people are damned to be unhappy.”
“So?”
“Don’t you agree?”
I wanted to be embarrassed by the question. I wanted my cheeks to redden the way they used to when I’d first arrived in Zion Hills. As it was, I didn’t flinch. I caught a glint of my reflection through a window behind Evan’s head. Studying my features, I missed my childhood in Brooklyn more intensely than I ever had before. “Sure I do.”
“What do you do about the solitude?” He stirred his drink. “I mean, maybe you should marry her, after all.”
I looked away from his face. “Pardon?”
“It’s just that, for me, the worst horror of all, even after all these years?” He looked at me with defeated eyes. “It’s that feeling of moral aloneness. It’s always been the feeling I’ve never gotten rid of.”
I finished my whiskey, crossed my legs. I prepared to submit the question I’d been wondering, with varying degrees of intensity, for some seven years. I’d been able to bury it for temporary stretches, even as I knew this question—properly or not, meaningfully or not—measured my existence. Faced with the prospect of vocalizing it now, I found it resisted simple articulation. “If it never happened,” I said, slowly, struggling for words, “I want to know how you imagine things would’ve ended, if left to—to a natural course.”
“Natural course?” Evan smiled pitifully, sipped. “You, of all people, don’t really believe in life divorced from divine intervention?”
“No,” I said, “but I believe in a life divorced from what you’ve done.” I started thinking about things I’d lost years before. I thought about that winding staircase and about what a casket looks like lowered into earth and about a pomegranate bleeding in my hand. I thought about how I felt more Jewish now that I was alone and capable of relinquishing my birthright than I ever did in Brooklyn or Zion Hills. I thought about how surviving requires finding something that possesses the mind so thoroughly that nothing else matters. I thought about how sorrow, in the final analysis, probably does elevate, so long as you convince yourself that being untouched by yearning means you were never really worthy of experience. I thought about how we never really do manage to recover fully from whatever first wounds us. I thought about how human memory probably has a habit of rendering things more profound than they ever really were. I thought about how some find God while trying to lose Him and how others lose God while trying to find Him.
“Ari,” Evan said, his voice thin, “do you ever miss it?” He fumbled for a second cigarette, though didn’t light it. I felt, for the first time in many years, an urge to become excessively drunk, but I didn’t touch what remained in my tumbler. Something in me had been gone for quite some time now, but in this moment I felt its absence most profoundly.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
“But that clarity, that recognition of looking upon the most beautiful thing either of us or any other human will ever see, that sense of—of divine intoxication?” He removed his unlit cigarette from his mouth, stored it in his pocket. “That’s what it was, Eden. Divine intoxication.”
“You know what Oliver told me, after I first found him?” I asked this in a voice that wasn’t mine. “He said we weren’t supposed to see any of it. And he was right, I think. That’s why everything happened.”
It was hot, suddenly, even with the light fading around us. After the long pause: “Ever think about returning?”
“Yes,” I said. “Nearly every day.”
“I’m going back.” He finished his drink and stood. “Forever.”