CHAPTER

38

It was not easy to read about the suicide of a man who still meant a great deal to me, particularly given the grisly nature of the suicide. According to news reports, first responders had, in order to free Adam’s corpse from the machine, been compelled to break the machine into several pieces. “Nothing supernatural was found inside,” wrote a journalist who thought he was being funny. Rebecca comforted me and did not try to lecture me about how Adam had shielded a pedophile for many decades and so deserved to die miserable and alone. The next morning, I got a very unexpected email from my father, the first in three years apart from perfunctory congratulations on my wedding, inviting me to a funeral service he had organized for Adam.

The service was held in a small basement theater in the East Village. There was no one at the box office, though the door was open. No one in the lobby, either. I thought that I might have the wrong address, but I pushed through into the theater itself. At first that looked empty, too, but then I saw the back of a woman’s head. It looked like Leah. It was Leah.

It occurred to me, briefly, that this was an elaborate plot to kill me.

“I didn’t think you’d be here,” I said.

“Adam spent the last several years trying to help Ismail,” Leah said, without looking at me. “And playing him made me come into my own as an actor. I’m grateful to him, and I always liked him. I liked him enough that I’m distressed to see someone he hated at his funeral.”

“Not many of us get to curate our own funerals.”

“That sounds almost like something he would say, except clunky, and somehow totally wrong. All that time you spent with him, and you have no idea who he is.”

I didn’t want anyone to walk in to us arguing. “I’ve heard good things about your show,” I said.

Leah was doing a one-woman show—probably in this theater, I now realized—called Jane Payne, the real-life code name given to a female CIA agent who photographed the mutilated genitals of a terrorism suspect whom the CIA had rendered to Morocco for torture. Leah’s dream had become to use theater to bring American torturers to justice, and to free Ismail, among others. I had checked some blogs and the reactions to the play were quite positive, though I didn’t know for sure how things worked in the theater world, and whether people only said positive things and blew smoke up each other’s asses all the time like in most other professions.

“Thanks,” she said. She explained that the rabbi my father had hired had gotten cold feet because of Adam’s tattoo, because of his flagrantly blasphemous attitude toward the religion of his birth, because of his sacrilegious founding of his own quasi-religion, and because of the fact that his lifelong patron was a pedophile whom Adam had shielded.

“When you put it that way,” I said, “it sounds like he shouldn’t get a Jewish funeral.”

For the first time since I had walked in, she met my eye. “I’m not your wife, the one with the baby-murderer name,” she said. “I don’t find you or your jokes cute or charming. You’re a monster who put the love of my life in prison for no reason.”

This was a cruel thing to say, but I could not exactly say I did not deserve it. My father arrived and hugged Leah, and then he looked at me, and we were both unsure whether to hug, so we didn’t. He apologized for being late—a judge had kept him longer than he had expected and then he had to make arrangements for Adam’s body to be cremated, since no living relatives could be found who were willing to take responsibility for it.

He put his briefcase on one of the cheap, squeaky seats and then surveyed the auditorium.

“Seems awfully empty, huh? Well, I guess this is what we were expecting . . .”

With more grace than I could have managed, he took the stage and made us his audience.