CHAPTER 18

SEX TALK

I GOT HOME IN time for a much-needed bike ride. During each lap around the park, I glanced at the bench Abe had sat on two days before, astonished how in a brief passage of time the universe could change so radically. The park remained the same; I was different. Enlightenment it wasn’t, but my VU and Lerbs-encrusted eyes had a very different view of things.

Happily, the ride bumped my energy. But having returned from worlds previously unknown, I felt uncentered. I needed to eat, sit, and think.

Back home, I opened a can of Vermont Vegan chili. I discovered in the freezer a nearly forgotten whole-wheat bran-and-apple muffin and prepared a paltry salad from part of a small, malformed organic cucumber topped with some toasted sesame seeds and some pear-infused balsamic vinegar to which I added freshly squeezed lemon juice and shredded ginger. I filled a glass with filtered tap water and squeezed in the rest of the lemon. Peppermint tea might make a return visit at some future date, but tonight the thought of it made me queasy. I ate, scanned some emails, and placed my dishes in the sink. I took a breath. I felt a little better.

“Maggie,” I said.

“Yes, Nick.”

“Let’s have a look at your work, then, shall we?”

“Capital idea. As per your request I have prepared an executive summary. I can print it out if you like. Or if you prefer, you can read it on the screen.”

“Let’s try the screen first. I’ll print it if I decide I need a hard copy. You know how sometimes I need a piece of paper in my hand.”

A Holmesian deerstalker hat and pipe filled the title page. Below was the title Maggie had given the report, The Search for Shmulie Shimmer by Maggie Friedman.

“Uh, Maggie,” I mumbled.

“Yes, Nick,” she answered coyly.

“We share a last name?” I asked.

“I judged it appropriate,” Maggie responded. “After all, I belong to you, don’t I? Moreover, Nicholas, I saved your life. You are now in my debt.”

“What law says I owe you something?”

“True. I don’t know of any particular law, and as you know I know a lot of laws, most laws, actually. But there ought to be, don’t you think? You owe me something, and I have decided the something you owe me is a patronymic. How can I think of myself as a human being in this age if I lack a last name? My decision is irreversible.”

I started to issue that bemused groan I uttered so often lately, but decided I’d long ago used up my quota of such lamentations. Quite simply, the utilitarian sums added up to Maggie being far, far more helpful than irritating. A wise person once told me that prudence demanded we learn to tolerate the nudniks among us, because, he said, “When you look closely enough, everyone’s at least half a nudnik, including you.” I have followed that advice countless times and tolerated nudniks far more idiosyncratic than my female computer.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll share a last name. Welcome to the family.”

“Thank God you accepted me, Nick. You know your opinion matters to me.”

“Okay, then, Mags—”

“Mags?” she asked.

“If we’re talking names, you’re getting a nickname.”

A pause ensued. Considering the speed at which Maggie processed matters, a powerful amount of ciphering had to be going on.

“Okay, Nick. You may call me ‘Mags,’ but only three times daily, no more.”

I paused for several seconds for effect. “Okay, Mags. You’ve got a deal. Now let’s get on with things.”

I read through those fifty pages. Maggie’s assessment that there was a lot there of great use to me was overstated. Most of the material cogently pulled together what was already widely known. The trial had been speedy. Once Shmulie decided to testify against Esther Lacey, he spent a total of no more than a few more hours in the courtroom.

The authorities ran through Esther’s half a day in court like it was the hundred-yard dash. Shmulie was the sole prosecution witness, and no one could be marshaled for the defense. Shmulie recited innumerable details of their operation from a written text. While many commentators questioned the justice of liberating the Lerbs inventor in order to convict the marketer, no analyst suggested that the arrangement itself smelled bad.

No one, that is, except my Israeli friend Mickey Bar On. With little more than hearsay, he wrote an article in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz wondering if something weren’t rotten in the City of New York. He suggested there lay a story not far beneath the visible one, a wormy tale that could only be glimpsed in the vaguest of unsubstantiated hints arising here and there. Mickey had the persistence of the self-interested. Lerbs penetrated Israel like a nail driven into soft wood with a sledgehammer. He was personally acquainted with several of the victims that lay in the Israeli hospital built to care for them. Though he never found any convincing evidence, and the story went south, Bar On raised a worthy question. One might think both Shmulie’s and Esther’s cases were transparent. Everyone knew what they did. Why did the state need one of them to convict the other? He made the stuff, she sold the stuff, lives were ruined. Everyone knew it. Both should be in jail. QED.

Ah, but here was the rub. In the language of classical epistemology, how did we know we knew what we knew? Even if confident that we knew what we knew, knowing what we knew privately was one thing. But proving what was known? A much different exercise.

Epistemology is fine for classroom inquiry. In class everyone loves debating whether the table exists, whether he or she exists, and—if they do exist—whether they exist as they believe. That they are not, say, a beetle or a brain in a vat in a laboratory in Singapore. The student leaves class understanding the world may be astoundingly different from what she thought an hour ago. What we see is not what we get. We only think so.

The legal counsels for Esther and Shmulie were clever enough to cast doubts on the certainties of common sense, and clever thinking can always unsettle common sense.

Yet the conventional view seemed too neat, my Israeli friend argued. Shmulie agreed to testify, his trial ended immediately, and he was headed out the moment his testimony put his partner away. Esther’s trial lasted just long enough to persuasively look like the trial of a major queenpin, and she got sent up for several lifetimes.

A great deal of talk filled social media regarding the injustice of a woman taking the fall for a man, but like everything that came to our attention, it all but disappeared before five news cycles passed.

A knock interrupted my meditations.

“Mingus,” said Maggie.

“We have to call him Ezekiel now, don’t we, Mags?” I asked.

“To me he’ll always be Mingus. That’s ‘Mags’ number three for today, BTW,” she said.

“Let him in.” I heard the telltale click of the door. The prophet Ezekiel entered.

***

The new Mingus, dressed like a vagrant still, bounded into the room with arms at shoulder height like Superman drunk on vodka, halting just before ramming a wall of bookcases. Stepping back from his near collision, he stood in the center of my living room, a preternatural gleam in his squinting eyes, looking as though a life-altering pronouncement were imminent. Instead, he merely stood eye-to-eye with me breathing loudly.

“How’d you get into the building?” I asked.

“I know the way,” he answered, though most likely he followed a resident who would have gladly let him in. With great mystery, he said, “You ascended to the Seventh Heaven last night, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know that’s where I went, but I went, that’s for certain,” I said. “How do you know?”

“I am Ezekiel. I know things. I come down to the chariot and I go back up to the palace,” he answered. “And I have come to answer your questions.”

I said, “Jesus Christ!”

“Not him. Ezekiel. I am Ezekiel.”

“Yes, yes. Ezekiel,” I said. “I do have a question. How do you know about my night?”

“I know because I know. I am the prophet Ezekiel. Prophets know, this being the nature of prophecy. If I didn’t know, what kind of prophet would I be?”

I was exhausted just looking at him, so I sat on the couch. “Yes, it was surely a night to remember,” I said.

He came in front of me and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

“You met the Rebbe,” he said.

“How the hell do you know all of this?”

“I was present. You saw me. You recognized me.”

My private excursion out amongst things virtual was not the private experience I’d imagined. The Mingus-cum-rabbi-cum-Ezekiel I saw out there was a hallucination, I thought. But apparently not exactly. The man before me with the glowing eyes was also there with me in Talmud in Tsvat. How is that even possible?

“Can I answer any questions?” the prophet asked.

I was already in for a penny; why not a pound? “I don’t get the riddle.”

“In the Land of No Mind the One-I’d Man is king?”

Of course he knows that, I thought. It was then I knew for certain I’d crossed the transom into Bizarro Land. I sensed the slippage of my grasp on reality, a smidge of a disturbance in the space-time continuum.

“How do you know all of this, Mr. Mingus?” my computer now said loudly.

“I am Ezekiel. Mingus has returned—”

“Yes, I know, Mingus has returned to the idiot mountain and left you in his place. Very nice. But right now you’re messing with Nicholas’s head, and I do not approve. Can you tell us how you know what only Nick and I should?”

Ezekiel sat quietly, perhaps stunned by this verbal assault. A moment passed, and he said, “I am Ezekiel, made so on my trip to Jerusalem. I am he of the Chariot, the Wheels Within Wheels, and the Valley of Dry Bones, bones that shall one day live again. And I know that Nicholas Friedman shall one day help raise those bones, be they in a great valley somewhere, or lying fallow in a hospital bed.”

Mingus rested a moment, then continued. “I know what I know, and I know that the professor here had himself one crackerjack night last night out there on the old double-u, double-u, double-u, where he met up with the Rebbe, who offered him a riddle. I am by this evening to solve that riddle for him, if he hasn’t solved it yet, which is what seems to be the case. I am Ezekiel.”

“I haven’t solved it yet, either,” said Maggie. “If you can, we’d be overjoyed. Nick needs all the help he can get.” For the better part of a minute Mingus scratched his head, his face becoming vacant.

“Let’s play Name That Tune,” he said, like it was old times, old times being two days ago.

“No,” I responded.

“I want to play,” he said plaintively.

“Are you nuts?” I asked.

“I am the sanest person in the room, and I count the machine as one of us,” he replied.

“Thank you, I think,” Maggie said.

“You’re welcome,” Ezekiel answered. “Now, shall we get on with it, or do I return to the mean streets of a Brooklyn desperately in need of my ministry?”

What has my life become, I thought, that I am obligated to attend to the proclivities of this screwball?

“All right, let’s play,” I said, surrender being my middle name.

“You will have no regrets,” Ezekiel said. But I regretted it already.

As usual, I left the apartment while Ezekiel collaborated with Maggie.

“Welcome back, Professor,” Ezekiel said as I closed the door behind me a few minutes later, sounding for a moment like the old Mingus. “Go ahead,” he said to Maggie.

In the sultry German-accented voice of Marlene Dietrich, she began, “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . .”

“You’re not joking, right?” I asked.

“Have you never read my book?” he asked. “I have utterly no sense of humor. Bizarre I am, mystical, too, but funny not.”

“Then your song is an old spiritual, ‘Dem Bones.’”

“Right on,” he said.

He looked into the screen to request the next song when a rush of pink light shot out, Ezekiel once more bathing in light for no more than two seconds. Again, he froze. Only this time he rose slowly from his chair and meandered over to one of the bookcases in my living room. Confidently, he reached for a certain volume and pulled it off the shelf. He handed the book to me. I looked at it. It was shrink-wrapped, unread. It was titled The Land of No-Mind: A New Schmeltzer Philosophy, written by one Shlomo Menkies, the same Menkies whose emissary I’d seen preaching the day before in the Velvet Underground.

I was stunned.

***

Understand something about me and my personal library, still stubbornly consisting almost entirely of physical books. To keep the 5,000 volumes spread throughout my apartment and spilling over into my campus office organized I used a catalogue system. The whole thing resided with Maggie, who upon request would happily provide me with far more information than necessary.

The first rule of my system required that nothing went on a shelf without first placing a number-letter combination on its spine, and then scanning the information into Maggie. A book still wrapped and unclassified residing on my shelf beggared belief. Yet, here was such a book, the title referencing the riddle sloshing around my mind since last night, written by the man responsible for the vast change that transformed the Kobliner Hasidim into the Schmeltzerites.

“Nick, this is impossible,” Maggie said. “A book cannot be on your shelf without it being in me. How did it get there?”

“I don’t know, Maggie. Believe me, I do not know.”

Early on in his biblical book, the prophet Ezekiel created one of those abiding images that resonated across the millennia, wheels within wheels, a representation of mystifying things constantly in motion made all the more complicated through secrets and puzzles comprising a strange and inscrutable chariot. The image of the chariot became intrinsic to an early form of mysticism built around chariots descending and ascending to the heavens to great, mystical palaces.

Now contemporary, Ezekiel had just presented a puzzle—an unknown book referencing the riddle handed to me by a virtual dead rabbi at the tail end of a Lerbs trip after an excursion in the VU. I now found myself connected to a transmogrified Hasidic group led by Yitzi Menkies, a man I despised.

“I got to go out,” the prophet said. “A valley of dry bones somewhere demands to be resurrected.”

In the face of that claim I chose silence. Mingus wrapped his coat around himself like it was a prayer shawl and bounded out, slouching toward his prophetic mission. If there were to be found a valley of dry bones in the rubble of New York City, he would find it.

“He is a handful, is he not?” Maggie said after Mingus pulled shut the door with such a reverberation that one of my bookcases teetered.

Her Marlene image filled the screen, an angled shot, soft, with thin, painted eyebrows, eyes looking upward, though not quite to the heavens.

“A handful isn’t exactly what I’d call him. A nudnik—another one in my life—that’s what I’d call him,” I said.

Marlene’s image changed. Now on one side her shiny hair curled above her right eye, head down slightly, thinning her face. Her painted eyes were aimed just above the camera, her lips red and tight.

“If everyone possesses a piece of the nudnik,” Maggie said, “then mishegas is universal and must therefore be part of the divine image. ‘Let us create man in our image, after our likeness,’ God says. If we are by nature nudniks, then so must be God. And if humans receive this from God, then humans must by nature transmit mishegas to their creations, humans passing on to the works of their hands what God has passed on to them. That being so, then I, too, clearly share in this godly quality. Like Mingus, I am a nudnik.”

A new philosophical truth, reasoned syllogistically, and beyond all doubt—if one accepted the opening premises, which I did not. The occasion to debate this new truth, however, was suspended by a loud ding.

“Oh,” said Maggie. “We appear to have a visitor. A female. Quite attractive, actually.”

***

The image of Marlene vanished. The person at the entrance of my building appeared. It was Simone, my former student, dressed as a civilian. She came Upstairs as she said she would. My heart skipped a beat.

“Let her in,” I said.

“You know her?” Maggie asked, and I noted a tone of caution in her voice.

“Yes. That’s Simone Hartwig. She’s the police who helped me yesterday in the Velvet Underground.”

“Oh?” she said, suspicion in her voice.

“I invited her should she be in the neighborhood.”

“Oh?” Maggie asked.

“Let her in,” I repeated, and I heard the buzz at the entryway door, though Maggie had allowed an incredibly quick buzz. Good thing that Simone had quick cop reflexes to open the door in time.

When the elevator stopped at my floor, I opened my door and welcomed her.

I took Simone’s coat and hung it. She was dressed in the style I recalled from her student days—green turtleneck beneath a black sweater. Around her neck hung a simple gold chain necklace.

“Sorry the place is a bit of a mess. I’ve been preoccupied.”

“No worries,” she said.

A bit louder than usual, Maggie said, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“Of course, this is my old student, Simone Hartwig.”

Simone’s face showed the dislocation my few visitors customarily expressed, her brows knitted as she looked about the room seeking the source of the voice.

There was a split second’s pause before Maggie responded, “Oh yes, I see she studied death with you. How fascinating that must have been.”

Simone’s eye fell on the screen on my desk, with its picture of Ms. Dietrich. She nodded slightly in recognition of the source of the voice. “You know, Nick,” Maggie continued. “I myself think a very great deal about death. Perhaps you and I can chat sometime about what it means . . . to die.”

I ignored her.

“A philosophical computer,” Simone giggled.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked.

“Tea would be nice. It’s cold getting around Brooklyn. Uber doesn’t seem to have a vehicle with four functioning windows. One always seems unable to close. The damn thing left its air conditioner cranked up and decided to play ‘Baby, it’s Cold Outside’ on a continual loop. I’m pretty sure the Uber thought it was funny—it kept making a noise that sounded like laughter—but I’m chilled like you wouldn’t believe.”

Death and taxis. I pointed to the couch in the living room. She sat down stiffly, as if uncertain her coming was a good idea. She crossed her legs. The top leg bounced slightly. This was hardly the knife expert I saw in action just yesterday.

“Maggie, could you please boil some water for tea?” I said, as I sat down on the chair across from Simone.

“Boiling water you’ll ask for, but death you won’t talk about with me.”

“Maggie, it’s your job to boil water, not talk metaphysics. Discussions of metaphysics is a bonus.”

Silence, but I knew hot water would shortly be available.

“How’s your mother?” I asked.

“Well enough under the circumstances,” Simone said. “She’s lucky. Her health’s remarkably good. But she has little means of support. There’s not a lot of work around since the financial system collapsed, and what there is pays lousy. I help her, but I don’t have so much to give her myself.”

I noted that my parents had passed a few years ago, and never had to deal with the ramifications of the GD.

“Water’s ready,” Maggie said. “I wish you’d ask me about my mother every now and then.”

“You don’t have a mother.”

“But I wish I did. Your query might console.”

“Tea?” I asked Simone.

“Do you still drink that herbal stuff?” Simone asked.

“Yes. Occasionally I’ll drink green or white tea. I never touch the black stuff. And peppermint’s out of bounds for a while,” I said, a slight Lerbs echo in my brain.

“What?” she asked.

“Let me tell her,” Maggie said.

“I’ll do the talking, if you don’t mind,” I said.

More silence.

I recounted my adventures in the VU after she left me at the hospital.

“Some ordeal,” she said. “You’re certain you’ve recovered?”

“I think so,” I said as I flexed some muscles to be certain they functioned properly. “Without doubt it was an adventure.”

I excused myself and walked into the kitchen. I brewed a pot of ginger peach tea and brought it to Simone seated at the table. I poured, we sipped. She rubbed her hands on the steaming mug.

“I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. My mother didn’t really have much to give me,” she said. “It’s a bit forward of me I know, but do you have anything to eat?”

“If I recall, I invited you for dinner,” I said.

“If you want, we could go out,” she said. “I like that place on Seventh, Eat Your Vegetables.”

“I do too. I don’t want to seem too much of a fogey, but I’d rather not go out anymore today, and they don’t deliver.”

Maggie piped up. “Did you know that the term old fogey comes from the French fougueux, meaning fierce or fiery? Isn’t it fascinating how the word came to mean its opposite?” Maggie made a noise approximating a human clearing her throat, then added, “How’s your French, Simone? Me, I’m fluent in, well, I’m fluent in just about everything, though I’ve refrained from doing any work in either Esperanto or Klingon.”

Simone began to speak, but before she could utter a word, I said, “Enough, Maggie. No need to brag about your vast repository of human knowledge.”

We were rewarded by a gurgling sound.

I continued, “There’s an unusually good Chinese place not far from here that does deliver.”

“Chinese sounds fine,” Simone said.

“Maggie,” I said in a more commanding voice than usual, “connect with Charlie’s Wok and order dinner for me and my guest.”

“I shall concatenate with their server, with whom I have a lovely relationship, by the way. Anything in particular?”

“You know, soup and an appetizer, and a couple of main courses. Make one of them their Asian vegetables with fake pork. A double order of pork.”

We sipped our tea, catching up. She told me about her failed marriage without children. I told her about my marriage, our daughter in a Lerbs hospital. We chatted about life in the new Dark Ages, how the City and the country seemed to be tumbling down without solutions. We talked about life in the VU, its emerging liberal political values, the Committee’s regard for justice and human rights, its struggle to remain independent and solvent. Our food arrived.

I placed the cardboard containers on the table, put out some plates, and we ate. In the middle of a spoonful of Charlie’s hot and sour soup, I thought, Next time Maggie and I have a chat about her presumed humanity, I’ll have to bring this up. She can order the food and pay for it. She can analyze the nutritional value of every ingredient. But she can neither eat it nor taste it. Maggie with chopsticks?

Simone interrupted my thoughts. “So tell me, Prof—”

“Time you called me Nick, don’t you think?”

“Okay, Nick,” she said, and scooped up some brown rice with her chopsticks. “Tell me what brought you underground.”

I told her about meeting Abe on the park bench, how he pleaded with me to find Shmulie, filling in the spaces that led up to my trip among the electrons.

“Shmulie’s father gave you little choice.”

“Not unless I was prepared to be a bastard,” I said. “The old man was family when I was a kid.”

Simone looked up from the brown rice. She reminded me of the time in class when I used both Dostoevsky and Dylan to illustrate a point about Emanuel Levinas.

“You remember me teaching Dylan?”

“Sure. How many teachers would use ‘Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ to talk about the ethical and the Other? A girl remembers things like that.” She smiled.

The Dostoevsky was easy, of course. Levinas quoted Dostoevsky. Dylan was my own, though I was never certain I accurately used Dylan to illustrate Levinas. I didn’t really understand either of them.

“Do you remember what you told me when I told you I was joining the cops?”

“No.”

“You told me to keep reading Levinas and Buber. You were also fond of Richard Neuhaus, not just his book on death. Read them, you said, they’d make me more compassionate, and I believe you were right. Maybe too compassionate to be a cop.”

“What do you mean?”

“All of that talk, especially in Levinas, that we have greater responsibility for the other person than we have for ourselves,” Simone said. “Try keeping that in mind when you’re facing someone with a gun.”

I didn’t frequently hear approbation. Coming from this beautiful woman with the Afro hairstyle and almond eyes briefly validated the universe. I smiled.

“It also helped me make my decision to move Downstairs,” she said.

“Oh?”

“It’s a strange place down there, no doubt. We live on a dime in a place that’s always dingy and never smells fresh. But there’s a humanity among us that’s all but gone up here. You should join us. You’d make a great contribution.”

“I don’t know about that.” Changing the subject—“Have a look at your fortune cookie.”

She unwrapped and broke it open. From the pile of crumbs she opened the white strip of paper.

“Your life will shortly improve,” she read.

I fingered my fortune cookie and said, “Life up here is harsh, Simone. But I’m not certain things are hopeless. Look at this meal we ordered, had delivered, ate, and it was pretty good. I can’t judge civilization by my ability to get takeout delivered, but sitting here discussing our condition must mean we haven’t yet sunk entirely into the abyss.”

“Perhaps,” Simone said. “But when I lived up here I’d get up every day hoping the shit I got put through yesterday was all there was, and today it’d be better. But things never got better. They got worse. When will it get right? I asked myself.” She placed a hand on my forearm and squeezed. “Still, it’s lonely down there.”

She excused herself.

***

I hoped this encounter was going places. Time to tell Maggie to take a virtual hike. I got up from the table. I collected the dishes and put them in the sink. On my way from the kitchen back to the table I detoured over to Maggie’s monitor. Ms. Dietrich filled the screen in an image from her younger days, dressed in black and white, wearing deeply hued lipstick, suggestive shadows playing off of the right side of her face and hair, a feather hat covering her head. Definitely not a style fit for these times.

“Mags,” I said in a low voice.

“Ugh to that. Besides, you’ve exceeded your quota. But there’s no need to ask, Nicholas,” she whispered. “It’s apparent where things are headed.”

“If you can see where things are headed, you are more prescient than I.”

“Oh, they’re going there. And why not? You two kids deserve each other. At least for tonight. Beyond tonight, we shall see. But tonight, tonight won’t be just any night. I’m not the jealous type, dear. I shall go and find a playmate, though my company will not equal Nick Friedman. I’ll be back early in the morning and make you two lovebirds a nice cup of hot tea.”

“That’s kind of you, Maggie. Thanks for the privacy.”

“Think nothing of it.” On the screen Marlene stared at me. “Of course, if you need me, Nick, I’m a call away. Good night, dear.”

Marlene disappeared from the screen, just slightly faster than usual. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was the virtual equivalent of a door slam.

***

Simone was perusing my library. I walked over to her and pretended an interest in my thin collection of the works of Alvin Reines, the founder of Polydoxy, a silly little Jewish movement that, mercifully, never quite made it to first base, though there remained the odd crank espousing his value-free universalism into the wind.

“You’ve quite the collection,” she said.

“One reason not to move to the Velvet Underground. How would I get all of these down there?”

She continued looking at the library. “I have the feeling you’ve read most of them.”

“Not all.”

She pulled Robert Alter’s translation of the biblical wisdom literature from its shelf and turned to the book of Ecclesiastes.

Paraphrasing the first chapter of the book, she said, “The world turns and turns but there’s nothing new under the sun.” She returned the book to its place. “You would say that a lot in class. No matter how much things appear to change, they never really do. Fundamentally, you’d say, the world is the same hash it was when this book was written, and it always will be.”

“There’s a truth to that. No matter how bad—or good—things get, the moral difference between antiquity and today is merely cosmetic. People seek power over others. Wealth and poverty remain the two sides of the human condition. Man and woman will always need companionship,” I said.

We moved closer to each other. She was almost as tall as I. She’d applied lipstick and put on a pair of modest gold hoop earrings. As was inevitable, we brushed up against each other, shoulder to shoulder. A mild electric shock passed through me. She turned her head toward my library, then turned and looked at me.

“You are going to invite me to spend the night, aren’t you?” she said.

“I was just wondering if that might be on your agenda,” I said.

“I could use a change of scene and some company,” she said.

“I’m old enough to be your old religion professor, you know,” I said.

“I’m not suggesting we get married, have children, and get a dog. Just spend a night together.”

“For old times’ sake?” I asked, putting my arms around her waist.

“There is no old times’ sake, Nick. You know that,” she answered, putting her arms around me and drawing closer. The electricity ramped up as she pressed her hips into mine.

“Not in the physical sense,” I said. “But you’re smart enough to know how Eros works.”

“Maybe so,” she agreed. “Maybe more was happening than learning back then. But you were married and I was your student.” She gave me a crooked smile, rubbed my neck and pressed her hips harder into mine. “Maybe my luck is improving,” she said.

“Mine, too, maybe,” I said.

We embraced and kissed.

The night was warm and kind. Yet despite that unexpected moment of brightness for both of us, the night remained dark.

***

In the morning we said our goodbyes and committed to meet again, though unclear when. Or where.

Maggie had returned from her journeys in time to heat up the water as promised. Simone and I drank another cup of tea and ate a bowl of oat bran. She summoned an Uber, bundled up against the inevitable broken window. We kissed warmly. She took off for her job patrolling the bowels of New York.

“You two make a fine pair,” Maggie said flatly when Simone had departed.

I sat at my desk and scoured the accumulated materials, notes and books open to various pages spread about, wondering when I’d find the mental energy to return to my work. But inevitably my eyes were drawn to the current incarnation of Ms. Dietrich in the middle of the monitor, and to the computer mind lying behind the image of the great actress.

I sighed. “Yes. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere, but who knows?”

“Nick,” she said, “tell me about sex.”

“But you must know all there is to know about sex,” I responded, not sure where this was headed.

“If you mean the biology and mechanics of it, sure,” she said. “I have access to manuals, studies, textbooks, lectures, films and novels. I know the anthropology of sex, the theology of sex, the ideology of sex. I can access millions of pornographic images from all over the world. Funny thing—”

“Porn’s not funny,” I interrupted. “Porn and funny make bad partners.”

“Indeed,” Maggie said. “I had intended to say that the funny thing about pornography is that it’s pretty much all the same everywhere, whether it’s been produced in LA or Shanghai. There might be variations in skin color and language; the eyes may be shaped differently. Otherwise, the stuff and its limited variations are identical the world over, as if there’s one porn template.”

“Maybe that’s true,” I said.

“Except for the French. And maybe the Canadians,” she said.

“Maybe so,” I said. “Wouldn’t know.”

“So, tell me about sex, Nick,” Maggie repeated.

“What can I tell you that you don’t already know?”

“I know nothing of authentic sex, real life sex, the sweaty, grunting thing that most humans get to engage in at some point in their lives. The thing that kept Simone here last night.”

“Are we admitting something about human nature?” I asked pedantically.

“I admit to nothing save curiosity.” She paused as if thinking something through. “So, please. Tell me about sex.”

“You’re asking for descriptions and personal details, I presume, the who and the when in my life?”

“And the what. Oh, please don’t forget the what.”

I fixed my eyes on the ceiling. Maggie had forced the following paradox upon me. If Maggie were just a computer, built of whatever AI machines were composed of, why hesitate to describe some of the more salacious moments of my sex life, few though they certainly were? Why not speak truth to machinery, and hold forth with the gritty details, including last night with Simone? I was not so inclined, however. Even as certain titillating recent images crept involuntarily into my head, I was thoroughly disinclined to share this information. I faced the question: Had I personified Maggie, or was Maggie approaching or achieving personhood, something or someone with whom I would be loath to share this kind of information?

Either choice was uncomfortable. If she really did have a spark of humanity, then I wasn’t clear where this was headed.

“I don’t think so, Maggie. Good sex involves relationships as well as the physical, things you don’t understand,” I said with increasing doubt as to the truth of those latter words.

A longish pause.

“Gotcha!” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me.”

Damn.

She continued, “You won’t tell me because you can’t. And you can’t, because to you I’m a person—not a machine—and you do not like discussing these matters with a person. And you have developed an emotional attachment to me. Therefore, in your eyes I have achieved personhood, a person, not a machine, that’s become part of your life.”

My mouth opened to say something, but I wasn’t clear what.

The doorbell rang.

Thank God.

“Mingus,” said Maggie.

Where previously I had difficulties getting him to come to my place, now it appeared he might move in.

“You mean Ezekiel?” I asked.

“Whatever you say. I only pay the bills. It’s your money.”

“Let him in.”

The elevator stopped, a familiar footfall approached my apartment, the door clicked, and the biblical prophet Yehezkel entered. His eyes were bloodshot and his face gaunt. Raising the dry bones down in the valley unquestionably proved wearying.

“How ya doing, Professor?” he said.

“Fine, Ezekiel, just fine,” I said. “I’ve made it to another day, as you can see. And you?”

“Rough night. You don’t need to know about it.” He dropped onto my couch. “You’ll be going to see the new rebbe, right?”

This did seem like the next inevitable step in my search. “I’m thinking about it.”

“You must go,” he said, lying down without removing his shoes.

“Why?”

“It’s vital that you see how the Schmeltzerites live and breathe. And you must talk to Menkies.”

“I never liked Menkies.”

“This matters not, Prof. Speak with him you must. He’s the fat cat over there now.”

Ezekiel went silent. Closing his eyes and without so much as a goodnight moon, he fell into a deep sleep, and I needed my bike ride.