May 8, 1999
Of those who’ve shut their eyes to the world with few or no regrets, it can be said both that their number is small, and that Leland Abdiel Bloom-Mittwoch Sr. was not among them.
At four in the morning on the fifty-fourth birthday he would’ve shared with his best friend, Reggie Marshall, Leland Sr. arrived in Tampa looking for a hotel. It didn’t take him long to find one, the bright lobby of which wore several dark stories like a tall hat. From the road it had reminded him of a picture book of his youngest son’s in which all the buildings had faces and spoke to one another; he liked that book, so he pulled in, parked, and removed his briefcase from the trunk. The kid at the front desk looked barely eighteen. She was rubbing the sleep from her eyes. He nodded at her with his best pitying face, set his briefcase on the counter, and asked if he could be shown a room.
“Yes you can,” she said, sounding obviously dissatisfied with her station in a way he himself had once been. She clicked around aimlessly on her computer and the machine made a sound like small waves crashing. “I have four rooms available right now, all on the fourth floor.”
“Does that floor have roof access?”
She looked both bored and confused by the question. “Yes, sir. Access to the roof is granted to any guest with a key.” She turned her attention to a little machine by the computer. Leland Sr. made sure he wore an expression he hoped reflected what a bighearted mensch he was. She produced a key and handed it to him. “And now you’ve got a key. Your room number is 402. Did you need anything else, sir?”
He took the key from her gently and shook his head. “No thank you.” Then he held it up next to his face and waggled it a little. “And thank you!”
Room 402 was well appointed: a single queen bed, a desk, a lowboy on top of which was perched a nice-looking TV. He turned on the TV and stopped on the station where a soothing female voice recited facts about the hotel as they appeared on the screen. Then he opened his briefcase. Emptied completely of the money, it felt lighter in every sense—its only contents now were his study Torah and the last twenty bag he’d ever buy. He keyed out a bump, inhaled deeply, and exhaled. It could’ve been better, that was true, but he was the beggar and not the chooser in this situation. He poured about half the bag onto the mahogany desktop and cut it up with his credit card. His blood, sludgy from the long drive, had begun to flow and his mind was restored to full operating capacity. Even room 402’s many shades of beige looked brighter. Outside he could see the electric pinks and reds of a sunrise. Now was probably the time, he thought to himself, if ever there was one. He railed the rest, grabbed his Torah, and, his blood pumping, climbed the stairs to the eighth floor.
The door to the roof opened with a smooth click. He’d hoped for more fanfare or at least more resistance. When he thought about this moment on his drive to Tampa he’d imagined something special would happen to mark the occasion. He’d fantasized about getting into a fight with a bellboy, knocking over a food cart and then beating it down the hall while someone screamed “Call security!” But that was foolish. He didn’t live in an action movie. G-d didn’t live in an action movie. Moses could never have imagined a copy of his words would wind up on the roof of a Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa so many thousands of years after he’d written them, and that they had was just testament to their long-enduring power. Leland Sr. wished he could’ve been chosen, called by G-d to write something like the Torah: long-lasting and capable of inspiring millions of people to greatness. But he hadn’t been chosen—that sort of thing wasn’t in his wheelhouse. This, what he was doing now, was the second-best thing he could’ve done in service of G-d. This had been in his wheelhouse from birth.
As he walked around the Hyatt’s roof, knocking on the giant exhaust vent like a building inspector, tracing with his toe a set of fingerprints some workman had left in the concrete, he made a little movie in his head with scenes of all the people who’d loved him. There was his mother, Sarah Bloom-Mittwoch, the wild, pessary-using Berlinerin Ashkenazi who had gotten knocked up by his father in 1944, a full eight years after they’d escaped Germany, the European continent, and being gassed. He could see her in a Cleveland hospital on VE Day, pushing him out furiously while a nurse held her hand and promised her he’d already crested, that the pain would be over soon if she could just try to push a little harder. And there he was sleeping in the nursery with all the other newborns, Leland Sr. Sr. regarding him through the glass, crying, and biting down hard on his Turkish cigar as news of the Allied victory in Europe came over the speaker in the waiting room.
There was his first wife, Melinda, standing on the Kent State Commons in the white frock she’d since lost or thrown away, her arms extended, the features of her soft face quivering and bursting and bleeding into one another as his vision began to scintillate with LSD. There was Leland Jr. when he was three days old and still helpless, sleeping in Melinda’s arms, both of them frozen forever in a rocking chair in the golden morning light that came in through the living room window. There was Natasha Marshall, Reggie’s widow, dressed in her favorite peacoat with the collar that hugged her chin, sitting at her desk with all the books piled up on it. And there was Diedre, his gas-pumping Bathsheba in high-waisted shorts, wiggling her freshly painted emerald toenails—there she was on the sofa in their bungalow, the infant Lee suckling at her milk-engorged breast, his small fingers folding and unfolding in the air.
He thought how there was no way to know how long loving someone could last, or whether it was even a good investment to begin with. That’s what kept people watching all those television soap operas. That’s what kept people praying in shul. They wanted to know how the other people and things they loved would turn out—whether they’d be destroyed by them or loved back. He turned to regard the rising sun. Below, the streets were already beginning to fill with morning traffic.
True to the rabbi’s prediction, the sunrise deepened to a violently dark purple. The clouds shifted apart. He thought he would faint. He thought he would drop dead. Every shameful, jealous, hateful thing he’d ever said or done in his life swam to the surface of his memory. His eyes watered with humiliation.
“This is too much,” he whispered. “I’m unworthy.”
From between the purple clouds emerged a Hand, palm upturned in compassion. “That’s not true,” the Hand said. “You are worthy.”
“And Reggie?”
“Absolutely worthy.”
He nodded, unsure if he should speak. The Hand remained hovering patiently over the city. Leland Sr. thought how incredible it was that this Hand had wrought the entire world.
Although he desperately didn’t want to, he began to cry. “I thought the plan for me was unspeakable,” he managed to say.
“So did Abraham when he bound Isaac,” the Hand replied. “So did Job as he endured those plagues from the underworld.”
Leland Sr. wiped the tears from his eyes with his sleeve. His face felt numb; from what, he couldn’t tell. “What do I do now?” he asked, though he knew what the answer would be.
“Come to Me,” the Hand said, making a beckoning gesture.
“And if I fall?”
“You won’t.”
About twenty feet stood between him and the roof’s edge. Between him and the Hand—impossible to tell. He breathed in and exhaled slowly. Then he clutched the Torah to his chest, ran, and jumped.