Chapter 58

Quentin did corroborate Fischer’s story, in a sense. The next morning, Bruno found him in the hospital, too weak to talk. He’d had a relapse of malaria.

It was a shock to see Quentin lying there, weak and disheveled. Whenever Bruno had encountered him before, he’d been well put together in his formal black suit and hair combed neatly back. Now he looked so different. Quentin was much smaller physically than Bruno had realized. Between his wild hair and all of the tubes and electronic gizmos, Quentin had the look of a madman under intense sedation.

It was too bad. Bruno would have loved to ask Quentin questions about Fischer. A sense of unease, if not actual suspicion, lingered after the previous night’s meeting. Fischer’s apparent nervousness, compulsive drinking, and evasiveness made Bruno wonder what he might be holding back. He seemed like a man under a great deal of pressure. No doubt he was. It was no picnic running a public company these days. But what if something else was going on? Quentin’s perspective would have been helpful. On the way out, the nurse informed him that Quentin had relapses every few years. They lasted about a month, but Quentin might be well enough to talk in a week or two.

Back at home, Bruno delved more deeply into the Kabbalah. Leaving behind the cheerful confines of Kabbalah for the Complete Shmegegge, he had made some sense of the ancient numerology in the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation. He’d dabbled in the kaleidoscopic delights of the Zohar, a candidate for the most eccentric book ever written. Now he was trying to fathom the mysteries of the Lurianic Kabbalah, which essentially taught about the flow of energy in the cosmos prior to Genesis. He had to admit, he was most intrigued by the terminology: the Ein Sof, or infinite nothingness; the tzimtzum, a cataclysmic cosmic contraction of the infinite; and Adam Kadmon, the primordial man who appeared in the wake of tzimtzum. He wondered if the physicists knew about any of this: the great searing light that had shattered the vessels, leaving divine sparks as part of every living being. How this cataclysm had shaken the foundations of the entire universe, causing the different realms of creation to sink down one level below their proper places—like your plumber’s pants when he’s trying to figure out what’s causing the leak under your sink.

All of this talk of 10 sefirot, four worlds, five levels of the soul, and how they interact was starting to leave him dazed. Bruno found his thoughts drifting to the long, dark tunnel under the Lenape King and how he felt when he saw the sparks of light as he approached the meeting house. He could feel the fear of the runaways and the anticipation of freedom; their tentative joy at the thought of finally being able to live with their loved ones in a place where no one could tear them apart.

That led to ruminations on his own ancestors, wanderers in the desert, who later wept in Babylon for the destruction of the Temple and the loss of home and freedom. Exiles across the centuries. Living in ghettos with actual walls of stone, within the greater, figurative ghetto—the Pale of Settlement. No wonder so many Jews had jumped at the chance to come to America. These immigrants started fresh in the New World and could barely tell you where they had come from. Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine? Political boundaries were always shifting: You lived in your town or village with other Jews; it almost didn’t matter who was in charge.

Bruno knew only that his great-grandparents had come from Eastern Europe. They migrated to Jewish neighborhoods in New York and Philadelphia and followed the classic occupations: butcher, tailor, silversmith, scholar.

His grandparents were born in America and he knew them. English-speaking, with some Yiddish, they were raised within the Jewish work ethic and its corollary, the paranoiac penny-pinching that seemed justified by the Great Depression.

His parents recoiled at the rancid breath of the shtetl, which still lingered about their elders. They fled the cities for the more gracious suburbs. High-quality education propelled them far beyond the traditional trades. They advanced to the highest rungs, buoyed along by a rising stock market and a decades-long housing boom. With the Depression and the war behind them, life was fun. And they enjoyed it. Why not? They’d paid their dues.

Then came Joey Kaplan and his cohort. Born into affluence and freedom, they quickly grew bored. They despised the beautiful suburban towns, with their neat gardens that their parents had sought out or created. “What’s not to like?” It was as different from the ghetto or shtetl as you could get. “Shame on you. How can you be bored? Remember, you have to work hard: Nobody owes you a living.”

Joey’s generation. They ran back to the city. Sought out the ghetto and mimicked its mores—sex, drugs, music—at the same time as they succeeded beyond their ancestors’ wildest dreams. They decried gentrification—it lacked authenticity—yet they wanted to live in style and comfort. Successful capitalists by day; cynical revolutionaries by night. Who did they think was buying the warehouse lofts and the condo conversions: Kansas farmers? Texas trailer trash? Their parents?

It was different than assimilation because you could consciously decide which elements of a culture to adopt. Your name’s Ben Glass. You’re from Newton, Massachusetts. You work at Citibank and drive a $70,000 German import. But you decorate your loft with bamboo and lacquer and watch anime on your plasma TV: so you’re practically a Zen master.

It was like genetically engineered culture. Start with your basic Jewish chromosome; splice in a kente cloth gene here, a chopsticks gene there. What have you got? A meshugge.

This was Bruno’s curse. It seemed to work for most people, but he just couldn’t handle the contradictions. The splicing was a failure. The grafts didn’t take. At the same time, the culture of his grandparents—or even his parents—wasn’t really accessible to him. He couldn’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew, except for a word here or there. His version of Jewish culture was Alan Sherman parodies and, “Did you know the Three Stooges were Jewish? Yes, even Curly. And from Philadelphia, too!” Where else could that lead but to ad agencies in New York? Looked at this way, his problems as a psychic weren’t all that significant. Even without them, he wouldn’t have fit in anyway.

Same with the Kabbalah. It was part of his culture, yet he had to approach it as an outsider. He picked up his book and continued reading where he’d left off. Apparently, God was willing to clean up most of the mess left by the broken vessels, but he required human help. As a Kabbalist, Bruno would be expected to “struggle with and overcome not only the historic exile of the Jewish people but also the mystic exile of the Shekhinah.” The Shekhinah, of course, was the Divine Presence, generally represented as a female.

Bruno saw that he’d also be responsible for performing enough good deeds to liberate the sparks and raise the universe back to its proper level.

He put down the book. He wouldn’t mind getting next to the Shekhinah. She sounded hot. But the rest of the job description seemed like a lot of heavy lifting and he doubted the boss would have much of a sense of humor. Maybe being a psychic detective wasn’t so bad after all.