CHAPTER 29

THE KEY

FOR THIS VISIT I took some precautions. In my back pocket I carried my adoptive pistol. Just a few blocks north of the university, I purchased two Deluxe Zap Lazar pistols for the price of one, each good for two shots.

My entry in the VU transpired uneventfully. Once again, I met the police drone; rather than deal with any aggravation no matter how limited, I once again paid the price of admission and walked those darkened tunnels toward Shelley’s hovel. The few people I passed on my way manifested no special interest in my presence as they faded in and out of my sight.

I found Shelley’s place easily and pulled back the door and entered without permission. For a moment, I was alone with all the Phantom of the Opera memorabilia.

“Welcome back, Professor Friedman. So nice to see you again,” boomed Shelley from the darkness in the rear of his apartment.

I looked around but couldn’t see him. “Come out, Shelley. We need to chat.”

“I’m stayin’ where I am, if you don’t mind.”

“I’d prefer not.”

“What you want?”

“The terms of your employment with the good folk in Lower Park Slope. I’d like to discuss them.”

“With that monkey Menkies and his gang a happy idiots?”

I sat and talked to the ceiling. “They pay you handsomely.”

“Yeah, and they give me free Rebbe Toilet Paper. Some hot stuff, lemme tell you.”

“I believe you receive a good deal more than that.”

“Aright, maybe so. It’s none a your fucking business.”

A refrain I’d been hearing a lot lately. “Sheldon, it’s become my business.”

“It’s Shelley, Professor. No one calls me Sheldon, save Ma, and she’s dead.”

I turned and there he was, his hair still a lengthy mess, arm in a sling. He wore an ankle-length smoking jacket, which, as best as I could tell in the semi-darkness, was maroon velvet. In his mouth sat an unlit pipe, bringing images of Hugh Hefner gone to seed.

“Okay, Shelley, then. Shelley, what do you do for the Schmeltzerites to earn that enormous salary?”

I stood and faced him. I stepped closer.

“By the way, Professor, I’m happy to see you survived that little trick I played on you the other day. I kinda knew you would, you know?”

“How?”

“I just knew you would. I got my contacts up there just like everyone else. I knew you’d survive.”

“What do you do for the Schmeltzerites, Shelley?”

“Oh, you know, a little a this and a little a that.”

“What do you do for them?”

“Say, Professor, you wouldn’t want another cup a tea like the last time, would you?”

“I think not, Shelley. I’ve sworn off peppermint tea. Your job. What is your job?”

“Professor, I don’t owe you nothin’.”

“I think maybe you do. I don’t want any tea, and I don’t want any bullshit. Tell me what you do for the Schmeltzerites and Shmulie Shimmer.”

“I tole you last time, Shmulie’s sleepin’ with the fishies next to a couple old rusty Chevies.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Den where is da fat fart?”

“I don’t know, but I think you do. Not only do you know where he is, you manage his money. That much you already told me.”

Shelley took a step back and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a little boy wilting beneath the unwelcome attention of a grown-up.

“The truth, Shelley. I want the truth. You owe me the truth.”

He removed the pipe from his mouth. Holding the bowl, he pointed the stem of it toward me. “I already said I don’t owe you nothin’. I got orders to feed you dose pills.”

“Whose orders?”

“Can’t say.”

“Or won’t say . . .”

“Have it your way, Prof.”

“Who gave the order?”

Tanzer looked hard at me, taking several long breaths before answering.

“Menkies.”

“Menkies?”

“Yeah, him. He tole me put the triple dose in your tea.”

At the time I drank that tea, Yitzi Menkies had appeared nowhere on my radar.

“Which brings me back to my question,” I said. “What kind of work do you do for Menkies? It’s a lot of money he pays you. Enough to underwrite a revival of Phantom.”

He looked to the ceiling as if in a reverie. “Broadway’s gonna make a comeback,” he said. Returning to planet Earth, he said, “How ya know how much he pays me?”

“I have my sources. I’m asking the questions.” I was growing impatient. His actions had endangered my life—under orders, apparently, but he’d been a compliant fuck. I removed one of the Lazar pistols from my pocket and pointed it at Shelley’s forehead.

“Easy, Professor! Put that damned thing away. They’re dangerous. You saw what it done to that guy here the other day.”

“Damned right they’re dangerous.” I waved it. “Look, Shelley, I’m getting tired of this. I owe you nothing. You owe me everything.”

Shelley stepped back, his hands up midway. “Now, Professor—”

“This is the Velvet Underground. I kill you now in this room with the door closed, no one’s going to find your sorry corpse until after I’m long gone back Upstairs.” I erased the space between us and pressed the device hard into his forehead.

“Okay, okay. Yeah, they pay me. You’re right. They pay me good.”

“That I already know. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I’m just the middleman. Yeah, I know about Shmulie’s money. I tole you last time I took care of it when he was in business. I take care of it now when he’s, ah . . . ah, who the fuck knows where he is?”

“You don’t know where Shmulie is?”

“Look. I get an order from those nutcases over there in Brooklyn, you know, to transfer over money, how much money, and I push the right buttons and a lot of money moves.”

“Where?”

“You know, like where they tell me to.”

“Where?”

“Where they tell me is where they tell me, you know? Some big long number. I dunno what magic place it goes to.”

“Okay, Sheldon.”

He looked offended. “Aw, come on. It’s Shelley, Professor.”

“Shelley. Tell me what you know about Brendun Lear Enterprises and Ladrun Beer, Inc.”

“Yeah, well, the first one, that’s what they call what I run. The other one, they control that over there. Got nothing to do with that. That’s what they do.”

A window of unknown proportions was beginning to pry open. “Do you have any idea what this company does? It surely isn’t a brand of beer.”

“What do I know? I just press a few buttons and money goes from one place to them Schmeltzers and they do what they do with it.”

“That’s your job, transfer the money on command?”

“Well, like I tole you the last time you was here, I do a little investing, make sure the money earns money.”

“Who else works with Shmulie’s money?”

“Just me. I don’t think even Shmulie knows, uh, knew, everything about his money. Only me. He never cared so much for the, you know, the specifics.”

This was weird. “How come they trust you? You’re just a miserable little shit, after all.”

“C’mon, Professor, you don’t gotta get insulting. I mean, I jus’ tole you for the second time I know where there’s billions. That makes me kinda important, don’t you think?”

“What do you have on Shmulie?” I asked.

“Like, what do you mean?”

“I mean, Shelley, why you? How do you get to be the gatekeeper?”

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s cause of some things I know.”

“You know what?”

He squinted. “Things.”

“Shmulie things?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe means maybe not,” I said.

“Maybe not, then,” he said, and we weren’t getting anywhere.

There was that other matter that remained from my previous visit.

“The key, Shelley. Where’s the key?”

He pointed to a rawhide cord around his neck.

“I’d like it,” I said.

“Won’t do you no good,” he said.

“Give it to me,” I said.

He pulled the cord over his head and handed it to me.

“Sides, I got another one,” he said.

“Now take me to the door it unlocks,” I said.

“You’re shitting me,” he said. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you don’t want me shooting up this place and you with it,” I said. I took aim at the famous poster of the Phantom bent over a vulnerable and impassioned Christine Daaé hanging prominently on the wall, and I pulled the trigger. That bright orange-yellow stream of light shot out of my hand and incinerated the picture. Unhappily, it began to incinerate things around it as well.

Tanzer grabbed a blanket from the couch, ran over to the flames, and banged on the wall with his one good arm until he succeeded in extinguishing the fire.

“Shit fuck, man, you din’t have to do that,” he said, quite out of breath.

“You’re correct,” I said. “But I’ll do it again, if you don’t tell me about this key.”

“Can’t do it, man,” he said.

“Where’s the door this key unlocks?” I waved the Zap around the room, seeking my next target.

“Aright. Aright. I don’t really give a fuck, anyway. Those two guys messed up my place, now you want to burn it down. What do I care? C’mon. Gotta clear the smoke outta here, anyway.” He opened the door and turned left, maroon robe, pipe in his mouth and all. “Coming, asshole?”

I followed him out of his apartment, and we walked down a tunnel. The musty odor of underground civilization brought Simone to mind. The occasional handcar passed by, their drivers off to deliver this or that to who or what. Hi ho.

After fifteen minutes or so of walking deeper and deeper into the maze, Shelley said, “Just around the next bend.”

Right beyond that curve stood a large sky-blue door surrounded on both sides by white stone with a large mezuzah affixed to the doorpost. I’d seen this door, no mistake about that. This door had formed the centerpiece of the objects under observation in room 42 at the World Schmeltzerite Center.

“Here you go, Chuckles. Hope you’re happy with what’s inside. Now will you leave me alone?” Tanzer turned his back on me and slouched off to manage Shmulie’s billions and revive theater in New York City, his robe wafting in the breeze.

***

The key fit the lock like my fifty-dollar green shark-skin bar mitzvah suit, with plenty of room to maneuver—though, like me in that baggy garment, the key felt at home inside that hole. I jiggled the key one way, then another, and it fell into place. I heard a slight electronic buzz as I turned it, and some mechanism moved. I turned the metal door handle and pushed. It gave way, but I had to push it hard with my shoulder. Finally, it inched open wide enough for me to squeeze in.

***

Weakly illumined as it was by the few shards of dim light filtering in from the outside, I had no sense of the room’s size or content, save that near me sat a small black box resting atop a table perhaps three feet high.

A loud click came from the box. An explosion of green light shot out of it toward the back of the room. I smelled sea spray. Out of the light, a familiar inlaid mahogany desk materialized, behind it a leather chair, and behind it a row of bookcases crammed with an infinitude of tomes. A placid ocean view appeared in the background, sand and sea, soft waves ebbing and flowing, making a low, calming sound, the sun setting. From the left, a figure casually walked behind the desk. He was dressed for a day at the beach, teal swim trunks down to his knees, sandals, sunglasses, and a flowered shirt. Atop his head rested a bright, multi-colored fedora. He carried a surfboard with Ron Jon’s Surf Shop written on the back. He leaned the board on the desk, pulled the chair out, and sat down in one smooth motion, uttering a low groan. He removed his shades.

“Oy, my back,” he said.

I knew that man well. I had visited with him just the other day while traveling the stratosphere at the end of my Lerbs trip.

“Shalom, Nachman Friedman. We meet again,” said Rabbi Dovid Schmeltzer, son of Mendel, the late Kobliner Rebbe. His eyes once again focused on me, his silver cigarette lighter to his right, a pack of Camels behind the lighter, a cup of black coffee in front, steam rising insistently. A notebook lay off on the corner. This was at first glance the living Kobliner Rebbe, projected from somewhere, come to converse with me.

“I hope you don’t mind my break from traditional rebbe garb. New times have freed me. My life’s a beach,” he said with a giggle.

My mouth hung ajar. Dead now for a while, yet there the Kobliner Rebbe sat, speaking to me as an aged beach bum.

“Rebbe?” I managed to utter to the holographic image.

“Yes,” he said, smiling playfully. “And no.” He removed his hat, revealing an equally colorful yarmulke that covered his white hair. “Ich bin. Auber ich bin nicht. Do you remember?” he asked.

How could I forget that strange note in Yiddish a few years back when the Rebbe-as-Messiah dispute filled the Jewish world? I couldn’t interpret those words then. I surely did not understand their meaning now as I stared at a man I’d thought long dead. Could Menkies’s fantasy be true? No. Not possible.

Aside from the peculiar attire, something else was amiss. Every image of the Rebbe I’d ever seen—Maggie might say I’d seen them all—reflected an unaffected depth of spirit, whether on video or in a photo, in paintings, and certainly in person. Call it the man’s vibe, his aura. Call it something numinous. Whatever the word, the Rebbe’s trust in the transcendent shone through like daybreak. The rendering of the Kobliner Rebbe before me possessed no such spark. Someone spiritually empty, someone cold, sat behind the Rebbe’s old desk.

His eyes blinked a constant and perfect rhythm, each blink a replica of the previous. And the steam rising from the coffee formed a repeating cloudy pattern. In every superficial respect, the image duplicated the Rebbe flawlessly. Even the small black dot peeking beneath his mustache in the middle of his upper lip sat precisely where it ought to have. But the Kobliner Rebbe it was not.

“You’re not Reb Schmeltzer,” I said.

He nodded, eyes glistening amusement.

“Very good, Nachman,” he said—in English, I realized, not Hebrew, still with the trace of an accent. “I would have disclosed myself to you soon enough. But you did not need my help. Unquestionably, you are the One I’d Man. You are the king.”

“Who are you?”

“As I said, Nachman, I am, but I am not. I live a duality. Dualism always seems to define my condition. In my life and now in this afterlife.”

He picked up a cigarette from the pack on the desk and lit it with the silver lighter. He exhaled far too much smoke for one corporeal cigarette and set of lungs. He heaved a sigh of pleasure.

“Far out. It’s a trip, man,” he said as the last of the smoke poured from his mouth and nose. “Cancer I don’t have to worry about anymore, Nachman. I’m as dead as they come. So, it’s tobacco city for me. I even switched back from Marlboros to filterless Camels.” He looked at the cigarette. “It’s not real, anyway, is it? My current interior life is totally virtual, man. Isn’t that cool?”

“Who are you, then?” I asked.

“As I say, I am Schmeltzer, more or less. Of that you can be certain.” He sipped his coffee and grimaced. “Too weak, dammit. They can’t seem to get the program to make coffee taste like Starbucks. Some people thought that stuff tasted like burnt garbage, but to me it tasted the way coffee should, always good to the last drop,” he said, taking another sip. “What can you do?” he asked, shrugging.

He sipped and puffed for a few moments, the smoke defining the quarters he occupied in the room, then continued.

“I am an amalgam, you see, of the flesh-and-blood Radbam. I have been filled from top to bottom with the contents of my prodigious writings. My letters, public talks, diaries, journalists’ accounts, videos, books about me. Not to mention the many wonder tales attributed to me, some so wild I could have never imagined them much less performed them. All of that constitutes me. Heavy, no? In a way, I’m more Schmeltzer than the flesh-and-blood guy ever was. Even my love of the sea,” he said, pointing to the ocean behind him. “All I ever wanted was to bag it all, run away to California, and hang out, hum melodies and drop acid with Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, meditate with Ram Dass, and study Zen with Alan Watts. Damn protocol.”

Puffing some more, he lowered his head, and, leaning on his palm, he playfully stared at me, eyes raised. “Would you like to hear the letter I wrote to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City the day I got off the boat in 1934?”

I shook my head. I’d read it a long time ago.

“Oh yes, I see you mention that letter in a paper of yours. Clumsy of me.” He pointed his left index finger. “And now I sit before you. Every word I speak, every motion I make, every step I take are syntheses of all that’s been programmed into my unimpeachable memory,” he said with a dubious smile.

What I saw, by definition, was heartless, physically, but I also felt it metaphorically. Suddenly, I craved Maggie’s presence. No doubt she’d illuminate.

“Who might your creators be?” I asked.

The Rebbe pointed to a beach chair sitting not far from the desk.

“Pull it over and sit down, my boy.”

I went to comply, but when I reached for it, my hand passed through like it was a fog.

“Oh yes, oh yes, how foolish of me,” said the Rebbe, giggling. “We occupy different planes, you and I, and the chair exists on mine. Groovy.”

I straightened.

“My creators?” he continued. “Dualism again. There are creators. But once created I have, you might say, become the creator. I’d gladly reveal the names of my assemblers.”

“Not necessary,” I said. “I don’t care about everyone who turned a screw or plugged in a chip to produce you. I’m interested only in knowing whose service you are in.”

A ripple passed through the Rebbe’s holographic body. My remark seemed to entertain him.

“You don’t get the whole picture yet, Nachman. Let me explain.” His fingers drummed on the desk. “I serve no one. No. I’m melech hamoshiach, the King Messiah. The role I once eschewed I now embrace with all my heart, or would, if I actually had one. I’m embodied in ones and zeroes, to be sure. What better condition is there for the being connected to the totality of all Being and who speaks to and for the universe?”

That sounded no less like gobbledygook coming from Reb Schmeltzer than from Reb Menkies, though from the man now accepting the messianic mantle the line at least carried some gravitas—even if dressed for surfing in the Pacific Ocean.

“Your builders devised you to be independent?”

“Not exactly. Not independent. Superior.”

“Superior to what?”

“Don’t you mean, to whom?”

“To whom, then.”

A brief electronic croaking followed as if the holographic rebbe was clearing its throat.

“Them.”

“Who?”

The Rebbe issued a shrill snort that bounced around the room like a ball. He took a sip of his coffee and leaned back.

“To begin, I am well served by that comical little hazar fresser, that pork eater, who occupies my previous residence, the one who enjoys his bacon sandwiches for luncheon and pays himself more dinero in a year than I ever saw in my lifetime. He and I have more than a bit of a relationship, you see.” The mechanical eyes shifted downward for a moment. “Menkies conceived me. He lacked the brains to do the work, but he had just enough of them to build the team that assembled me.”

The hologram stood and came to the front of his desk. With his hands he boosted himself on it and leaned toward me, attempting the old intensity, perhaps.

“After concocting that ludicrous story of my resurrection, he started freaking out all over the place. He couldn’t go much farther down the road he was paving without help.” Here the Rebbe began chortling. “So in a way, you see, Menkies really did resurrect me. The little shit built me to run him. That piece of it was a special part of the program. My coding includes a craving to control. There you have it. The human condition in a nutshell. A man just wants to be told what to do.”

“Meaning?”

“Obvious, isn’t it, Nachman? I run him. It was all the good Rabbi Mush’s doing.” Another cigarette, another gargantuan cloud of ersatz smoke, the odorless fog touching me.

“Without me, you know, these so-called Schmeltzerites would still be spending their time eating ribs and burnt-end baked beans at Fette Sau’s in Williamsburg on Friday nights instead of internationally vanguarding something new. Which is what they do through my messianic interventions in their otherwise meaningless lives.” He sipped the coffee and grimaced.

“Okay. So, they still love Fette Sau’s, best ribs in Brooklyn,” he admitted. “I’ll never get my mind around a bunch of guys in streimels ordering ribs on Friday night and humming melodies, but I don’t control everything. Some delusions of freedom must remain. Humans are fond of their delusions.”

The hologram returned to the chair, put his sunglasses on, and turned toward the ocean. “I never made it to California. Well, once for a meeting of my emissaries. But I never got to Venice Beach to hang ten and smoke weed. Bummer.”

He turned back. “But I did accomplish something my former self could not, something a scholar like you would love to know about.”

“And are you going to tell me?”

“I think so.”

“Well?” I said.

He turned back to me and folded his hands atop the desk. “I have a small truth to tell you, Nachman. I believed for a long time I was the Messiah. I acknowledge this in several diary entries. But the old me was afraid of the role, so I remained silent while occupying flesh and blood.”

“Silent? Why?”

“You know why. You’ve written on it. Because all the old messiahs crapped out, did more harm than good. So, I kept it my secret to the grave, and never acted on it.”

He reunited with the ocean view, now a full moon rising.

He was right, of course. The history of claimants to messianic thrones among the Jews was the story of disasters, big and little, mostly big—gargantuan, actually. If what this Schmeltzer said was correct, the old Schmeltzer repressed an impulse to that role for the good of his followers, knowing some ideas were best left as ideas. But this new Schmeltzer’s constructors erased that repression, and out popped a thing that declared itself to be the redeemer of the Jews.

He turned back. “I weekly feed Menkies bits of goo with which to nourish his flock,” he said. “He engages in building for me a herd out of which I am making the Next Big Thing.” He smiled as another ripple coursed through the scene, beginning at one end of the desk and concluding at the other. “Every Tuesday afternoon he dresses up like a clown. To that crowd of cretins that rolls steel balls in their hands, he says ‘Jump,’ and they say, ‘How high, rabbi? How high?’”

He guffawed again.

“I’m exactly what the people need, Nicky. They craved a messiah so badly they built one.” He spread his arms as far as they would go. “I am ready to take them to the Promised Land.”

I got caught by the waves. Wouldn’t it be restful to be at the beach, my shoes off, caught in the rhythm of it all? Instead, I found myself in this subterranean hideaway, a man on a mission facing the facsimile of a dead rabbi.

“Where does Shmulie Shimmer fit into all of this?”

“Clearly the fat man, how to say, provides the nourishment for my growing project.”

“Shmulie’s alive?”

“Alive, dead. No skin off my nose. That little faigele down the road from here moves the money and we get fed.”

“You know about Brendun Lear Enterprises and Ladrun Beer, Inc.?”

He leaned back in his chair and exhaled smoke through his nose. “Get real, Nachman. I invented them, didn’t I? You figured it all out, I trust.”

“Of course. They’re anagrams of each other. That’s simple enough. They’re also both anagrams of Blade Runner—though, as these things go, not terribly good ones. Too clunky.”

“The One I’d Man again. Your ingenuity has kept me riveted for decades. I threw those names off in a spare nanosecond. Menkies and crew sprinted down the track with them. Rebbe Toilet Paper was my idea, by the way. Wipe your ass with me.”

He lit another cigarette. As the cloud dissipated, I squinted for the first time at the bookcases. Surrounded by blinking lights rested a copy of that remarkable book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of Friedrich the Second, a brilliant, worshipful celebration of power, lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. Sharing the spotlight sat a copy of Menkies’s book.

“You’re a fan of Kantorowicz I see.”

“Well, natch,” he said. “Who wouldn’t be in awe of a German Jew who loved the authoritarian mind of the great Prussian? Did you know that Goering gave a copy of the book to Mussolini on his birthday?”

“Everyone knows that,” I said.

“Aren’t you groovy?”

“And the The Land of No Mind right next to it,” I said.

“Exactly where it should be. Another celebration of authority,” the Rebbe said. “I wrote that fricking thing, didn’t I?”

This disclosure did not surprise me.

Schmeltzer sat motionless, eyes blinking like Bugs Bunny on opioids. He said, “Doc, you must be wondering why I brought you here.”

“I thought Tanzer gave you up too easily,” I said.

“I, too, say jump, and the heights attained by my servants are impressive beyond reason.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. Why?”

The fake Schmeltzer told me that the human Reb Schmeltzer thought he and I were entwined. The continuing stream of notes I received whenever and wherever I published verified this claim. He told me my name appeared in numberless places throughout the diaries, the Rebbe frequently noting with approval events of my life. In one entry, he expressed great sorrow over the fate of my daughter.

“There were other ways as well he involved himself with your life, ways of which you were unaware. When I was corporeal, I possessed a web of connections nearly as complex as what I now enjoy,” he said. “From that first and only meeting between you and him—between you and me—you touched, umm, me deeply. The physical Schmeltzer became involved with your life, as I hope the incorporeal I will become involved with yours.”

“Why would he have paid me any attention at all?” I asked. “We met for an hour years ago. Less. That was all.”

“The human heart,” this Schmeltzer said. “Who knows how it works? Poets perhaps. Surely not I. Yet clearly the living Schmeltzer thought of you as a son. The son who never called.”

“Inconceivable,” I said.

The Rebbe differed. “A man’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets, someone said once. He was a childless father, he said in one of his entries. You became the son he never had. How he longed to go with you on a beach vacation, even just to the Jersey shore.” I closed my eyes imagining Schmeltzer and me at Asbury Park playing Skee-Ball. “You’re the son I never had.” Pointing to the beach behind him, he said, “And now here we are, Nachman, after all these years, together at the beach.”

He reached across the desk and picked up the notebook. He thumbed through and stopped on a page. “Do you remember at that meeting telling me about a certain yeshiva student who went to India and never returned?”

I thought back for a moment. “Yes. Heshie Ostreicher.”

“That’s right. Well, I wrote here,” he said, pointing to a passage, “‘On my request but on Nachman’s behalf, my emissaries combed the streets of Delhi and found Heshie Ostreicher living in a dive beneath a haze of opiated hashish. They extracted him from his lodgings, whisked him out of the country, and now we’re returning him to health.’” He slammed the diary shut. “See? That’s a connection.”

“Impressive.” I said. “But none of this has anything to do with the incarnation that’s you, does it, except some old tie to me you can’t escape, right?”

Eyes narrowed to slits. “The One I’d Man, again, Nachman. You’re of course right. About that drug-addled misfit and his hashish dreams I myself give not one tiny shit. I mention him merely to demonstrate the lengths he whose memories I share would travel on your account. Me, I’d have allowed Ostreicher his hollow existence and wretched fate.”

“You don’t care about those things,” I said.

“Of course I don’t, and why should I? I have no skin in that game,” he said, incredulity mixing with cruelty in his voice. Evidently, his coding did not include his predecessor’s empathy.

“Maybe because saving a life is the right thing to do.”

“He who saves one life saves a world, eh? Good battling evil, right? Fighting the wars of the Lord?”

But I had no interest in following this thread any further. My feet ached, and I’d begun to understand the depths of the malice hidden in this messianic poseur.

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s wrong. Justice hardly exists, if it ever did. Its total disappearance in the world commenced ages ago. In our time a human became naught but a mote of dust in the eye of every other human. Right and wrong vanished into a cloud of maybe or maybe not. One man’s justice became another man’s evil, and vice versa. Everything unspeakable became permitted somewhere. All that matters is who has power over the other, and even then power’s various evil manifestations are merely banal, aren’t they? A fixation of the normative order.”

In this incarnation the Kobliner Rebbe had become the total opposite of his namesake. How easily things changed. But there was no percentage in arguing with an immoral hologram. Walk away and be home in time for dinner. A veggie burger awaits defrosting, I told myself. But professors professed.

“Some people blame Foucault for the loss of values,” I said. “But there’s not much to that. Cain killed Abel. Abraham nearly butchered Isaac. Job was stripped of family and wealth for the sake of a game Satan laid down to God.” How much of a roll do I want to be on? “Wars killed millions well before the twentieth century, and we know what happened in the twentieth century,” I continued. “Ivan Karamazov claims that without God all is permitted.” I sighed. “But then, of course, Dostoevsky, the great Christian moralist, turns out to be a flaming anti-Semite.”

The Rebbe chuckled. “You see? With very little effort, you manage to strengthen my claim exponentially. Humans spout pieties but deliver cruelties. Thus it has been. What did God say after the Flood before He brought His great rainbow? You know it, Professor. Say it.”

“Yes,” I heaved a sigh they heard in the middle of Brooklyn. “The devisings of the human mind are nothing but evil from youth.”

The digital Schmeltzer clacked once more. “Under the sun, Nachman. Under the sun. In this savage world there dwells not one iota of anything new. Nothing new.” He removed the shades, regarded them for a moment and put them back on. “Except me. I’m brand new.”

Obviously, though, he was not aware of Maggie. Maggie was new, too, a being possessed of a conscience and a humanity this virtual abomination lacked.

“Why did you bring me here, then?”

The bookcases, desk, and the ocean scene melted into the floor. Only the Rebbe’s image seated on his chair remained. His eyes literally narrowed, meeting on the edges of his nose, nearly touching.

“You are to join us.”

“The Schmeltzerites?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “You will be of extraordinary help to me, b’nee, my son.”

“Are you out of your—”

“‘Mind’ will do just fine,” he said. “I know you know about these things. You have a feisty little number yourself.” He waited several blinks, then added, “I had something to do with its current state.”

He hurt Maggie? “Then that’s what you’re out of,” I said. “Your fucking mind. Why would I work with you?”

“I assure you, our association would be, like, totally different from the master-slave relationship I enjoy with that comedy at the world headquarters. We’d be partners, you and I, senior and associate to be sure. We could do our business at the beach. That would be really cool.”

“I wouldn’t join up with you if the fate of the universe depended on it.”

“Oh, it just might,” Schmeltzer said.

“What?”

“Well, perhaps not the universe entire. Then again, perhaps it does.”

“Why would you even want me to join up?”

“The One I’d Man could be of epic assistance to my future endeavors.”

“Doing what? Singing and dancing on Tuesday afternoons for the assembled crowd? Working in a tattoo parlor applying overpriced pictures of you to the biceps of your idiot followers?”

“Now, no need for sarcasm, Nachman,” he said. “I see far greater use for you, far greater consequence than any of those trivialities. You would be my eyes and ears out in the material world in a manner I cannot depend upon that monkey who calls himself ‘Rebbe.’”

“I have better uses for my eyes and ears.”

“You’d make a lot of bread, man.”

“No thanks. Not interested.”

“Not cool, Nachman. You don’t even know my full intentions.”

I had no idea what the Next Big Thing was. But all this had become far too sinister for me, far too quickly, hippie beach boy rebbe and all.

“I’ve expended a great deal of energy bringing you here,” he said, his face growing darker and, oddly, elongated. “I’d be disappointed were you to leave this room my wish unfulfilled. Surely you don’t desire to make me unhappy, do you?”

“Disappointing you would bring me great joy.”

“The Next Big Thing is coming soon, and you can help,” he said.

“What is the Next Big Thing?”

“This I will explain, but not while you do not live with me on the other side of the divide.”

“I live where I live, I’m afraid,” I said

“Failure to accept my offer may result in severe repercussions.”

“Like what?”

As he leaned forward, his face narrowed yet more, sharpening his features.

The door squealed. Someone on the other side strained to open it.

“It’s about time you got here,” said the Rebbe.

I turned to see Simone squeezing through the narrow opening, dressed in civvies, her knife strapped to her shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

She looked ashen and sad. “I’ve come to get you out of here.”

“Why?”

“No time. You’ve got to go.”

“Are you going to take care of things for me, Simone?” the Rebbe said.

“What?” I said.

“Not the time,” Simone said, panicked.

Simone gripped me hard by my shoulder and attempted dragging me out of the room. But I pulled away. I drew the used Zap from my pocket and pointed it at the black box.

“There’s one good shot left in this thing, another one in my pocket with two more, and a pistol after that,” I said.

The Rebbe smiled. “Destroying this box will merely blow up some plastic and a small bundle of electronic gizmos. You don’t think my real juice is in that box, do you? What sits before you is a projection from another black box well hidden and far, far away from this basement world.” His eyes turned toward Simone. “Do it, Officer, now. A knife to the heart, as we discussed.”

Simone froze.

I held my hand steady and took aim. A perceptible wave of fear passed over the fake Kobliner Rebbe like Pharaoh the moment he saw the sea crashing down upon him.

“Not cool, man. You’re not really going to pull that trigger, are you?” he asked, a quiver in his voice. “I’m programmed to love you. A man, after all, cannot escape his programming.”

“But you apparently want me dead now.”

“If you cannot be my son, then I have to kill you. But I love you. Another duality.”

“Goodbye, whatever you are,” I said.

“Goodbye for now, then, Nachman Friedman. A shame. A shame. We could have made stunning music together, you and I, father and son.”

Pointing a finger at Simone, he said, “You, Officer, in you I’m most disappointed.”

I pulled the trigger, and a line of red-orange flame struck the center of the box. It exploded. A thousand pieces of plastic and bits of gizmos flew all about the darkened room. The flash was like the finale on the Fourth of July.

The Rebbe hologram vanished.

“That’s for Maggie, you shit,” I said.

Grabbing my shoulder again, Simone hissed, “Let’s go, Nick.”

I let the spent weapon drop and surrendered to Simone’s iron grip. She dragged me from that strange room, a cloud of acrid smoke in our wake. I knew I was going to meet this incorporeal Schmeltzer somewhere else in the physical world, but for the moment we were done.