No. Whatever happens, I will not seek relief from one nightmare by reentering another no matter how much fodder for invective and vilification the experience might provide. My appetite for the offbeat notwithstanding, I would leave Gehenna well alone. Gehenna and its foul, sweltering air, its teeming masses of unwashed bodies, the hideous insects, the gruesome vultures, the green sludge that oozes like the River Styx under a bridge to nowhere, the helpless poor devils who toil without respite from dawn to dusk in an endless and futile transfiguration of birth and death, all the repugnant features of a dysfunctional world I had overlooked as I acted the enforcer in a pit of decadence and filth I mistook for my own exotic playground.
I learned long ago that “exoticism” is a fabrication. It doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s a myth, a collection of far flung places filled with “quaint and friendly (but inferior) natives,” facades manufactured mentally and quickly desecrated physically by misfits and drunks in search of Shangri-La, fragile would-be paradises first sullied by the sword and the cross, by colonialism and proselytism, and later scarred by land speculators and the tourist industry.
Gehenna, like all the palm tree- and hibiscus-fronded archipelagos to which I had retreated in search of Nirvana, was supposed to be foreign and exotic, not recognizable and eerily familiar.
I had fled to increasingly remoter shores, only to find, daubed with different hues, couched in dissimilar tongues and customs, the same stinking quagmire of human misery, superstition, fear, jealousy and obstinacy against the blows of man and nature, of doleful apathy, of absurd hopes and broken dreams, of pain and despair.
I had romanticized the prosaic and the macabre, aware, as I did, that my words, however compelling, and despite the vehemence and passion with which they were voiced, would change nothing.
What happened to the optimism, the zeal, the élan that once inspirited me? Why have disgust, rancor and indifference replaced empathy? Is it age? Is it the realization that I had been screaming at the deaf and gesticulating before the blind and petitioning the dumb and the heartless? Is it the pervading squalor, the immovable structures and rampant corruption in realms so lacking in self-respect, ambition and initiative that they wallow in their own dung and keep faking a smile? Is it the terrifying thought that I had been speaking to myself? Imagine how much time, effort, passion and paper were wasted in the process, how many sounds of anger and pity and disgust and espousal and rejection I had uttered in vain.
*
The elders, the self-righteous poltroons that they are, did not summon me. They rendered their verdict and notified my parents in writing instead. Beaming, tears of joy welling in their eyes, my father and mother took turns hugging me and heaping words of cheer and relief.
“They all voted to expel you from Ein Sof.”
“Say that again.”
“You’re being sent back to Yesod. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“What!”
“Yes. Look, it’s all here,” said my father waving a piece of paper. “They said that anyone who would go to such lengths to defy tradition and jeopardize the social order by challenging it must be mad or desperate. Claiming to be erring on the side of clemency, they settled on ‘desperate’ but ventured that desperation can lead to madness. They cited ‘an intractable incompatibility with the exigencies and rigors of life in Ein Sof’ and voted unanimously to send you back to Yesod where your ‘anarchism and apostasy are tolerated or better understood.’ They added with noticeable sarcasm that entropy -- or a sudden onset of wisdom -- would eventually bring you back you to Ein Sof and deliver you into the bosom of the family.”
*
“This means that....” I held my head, fearing it might begin to spin like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. I thought I was losing my mind. “This means that....”
“Yes,” my father roared with joy, elated that I had grasped the significance of the elders’ verdict.
“So we are destined to go through yet another goodbye,” I said, wanderlust and sadness wrestling for control of my battered emotions.
My father waved his hand. “Don’t be silly, it’s just au revoir. Unadorned. Guileless. Down to earth. Low key. Just the way you like it.”
“Yes, but....”
My mother smiled and gently placed her hand over my mouth. “There’s nothing to say, nothing to do but come to and pick up where you left off. Think of it as a fresh opportunity, the kind of pristine horizon line you’ve always chased after. No immovable mountains, just the open sea.”
“And you two?”
“Our time is up. We belong to your past. We’re living on borrowed memories. It has its comical side,” my father quipped.
“And the ‘clan’?”
“What about it?”
“Why do you put up with all the bullshit?”
My father looked elsewhere.
“You don’t understand.”
I understood perhaps better than he could ever imagine, with a keenness and sensitivity only empathy and similarity of circumstance can inspire. Like father, like son. I had taken shortcuts. Unlike my father, I had defied reason and sidestepped convention, veering away from a course I knew I was not qualified to navigate. Fearing failure, I had circumvented well trodden lanes and cut my own footpaths. I would often boast that I thrived on adventure when, in fact, it was a fear of commitment or a lack of faith in the constancy of my own objectives that catapulted me from one castle-building venture to another. Insufficiently schooled, ill-suited for commerce, undisciplined and ferociously eclectic, I would become what I am less by conscious choice than wishful thinking and naiveté, youthful immodesty and haphazardly self-created opportunities. Necessity, in my case, was the mother of invention. My father, a disciplined and scrupulously honest man, had no use for artifice. He conquered his demons far from public scrutiny. Like my mother, he accepted his lot.
“But....”
“Let Abraham explain,” my father counseled. He’ll do it with far more grace and eloquence than anyone I know. After two centuries of forced silence, he’s earned the right to speak for all of us. He will not deceive you.”
We hugged, my father, mother and I, and we lingered for a moment clasped in a silent embrace like epiphytes clinging to the tree of life.
“We’ll listen to Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky,” I said to my father as we parted.
“And to Ravel and Debussy and Fauré,” said my mother.
“And to Satie and Milhaud and Poulenc,” I added. “We’ll make it a gala performance.