by Hopen, David
“So he had you hang back, alone, to hint at some conspiracy?” Amir on the floor, back against the wall, shook his head irritably. “Or maybe you expect us to believe he actually came right out and admitted he fixed the election against you?”
“Well, I wasn’t alone at first,” Evan said. “But yes. More or less.”
“Ah,” Amir said, laughing spitefully. “More or less. He communicated it wordlessly in your shared unspoken language, is that it?”
“What do you mean you weren’t alone?” Noah asked.
“She was there, too,” Evan said.
I kicked at an empty Zephyrhills bottle with my sneaker. “Sophia?”
Evan rummaged in his backpack for a joint. He lit, took a sharp drag, sent a jet of smoke in my direction. “That’s right, Eden.”
Noah glanced my way when he thought I wasn’t looking. “Why would he want you there with Sophia, of all people?”
“Bloom, if you haven’t yet realized, enjoys pushing me,” Evan said.
Oliver laughed. “To try and get you guys to make out? Sorry, that was Freud speaking. I think I meant make up.”
Evan blew more smoke. “Just understand that he wanted me to lose and her to win.”
“But why?” I asked, more frustrated than I ought to have been. “What’s his motivation?”
“To humble me. To challenge me.”
Amir stood. “If this was actually fixed, what makes you think you would’ve won?”
“I mean, let’s be reasonable,” Oliver said. “You saw how the crowd reacted to that speech?”
Amir flashed Oliver the finger.
“Besides,” Oliver continued, “Bloom knows he can’t control Evan.”
“Why Sophia, then?” Noah asked. “Why not Davis or Amir?”
“Because he knew it’d hurt,” Evan said.
“Bloom’s trying to hurt you?” Oliver snorted. “Get the fuck outta here.”
“Maybe she just beat you.” I found myself inexplicably on my feet. I resisted the urge to sit back down. “Maybe people respect her. Maybe they didn’t want you.”
Evan placed his palms in the air. “Maybe, Eden.”
We were silent until the bell rang, concluding lunch. Amir moved for the classroom window. “I just have to say—did I not warn you? Did I not tell you this would happen?”
Evan blinked. “What you told me, actually, was that Davis would win.”
“No,” Amir said, “I told you we’d both lose. I asked you not to do it.”
“And I told you I needed it.”
“But why the fuck do you need it?” Amir shouted. Several sophomores in the outer courtyard of the model temple below glanced up at the commotion, only to duck off upon spotting Evan. “Tell us why.”
Evan said nothing.
Amir clasped a hand around his own shoulder, trying to calm himself. “Tell me.”
My shirt was darker. I realized with alarming indifference that it had started to rain.
“Don’t you realize?” Evan asked. “Don’t you realize what Bloom let my father do? What everyone in this fucking town let him do?”
Amir was quiet at first, as if considering this argument. “That’s the thing about you, Ev,” he said, after the pause, climbing through the window. “Somehow you’ve convinced yourself that you’re the only one who’s unhappy.”
* * *
OPENING NIGHT WAS LATER THAT week. We played Richmond, a charter school with an historical basketball ineptitude.
“Remove their organs!” Rocky commanded in the pregame huddle. We circled him, as per his instructions, while he performed his best attempt at a war dance. He claimed this spiked adrenaline. “Pillage them!”
We were playing in Richmond’s undersized gym, which was a good forty-minute drive from the Academy. My parents drove out to watch, despite my insistence it’d be a waste of time.
I was right. The game was uneventful. Noah started in marvelous fashion, scoring our first seven points and, on one play, blocking a shot deep into the crowd. It was over early, Noah making certain we led by a cool fifteen at halftime. I was the lone person not sent in for garbage time, even as I tried to guilt Rocky by catching his eye.
“Not worth worrying about,” my mother maintained on the drive back. “It’s only your first game. He’s just preparing you.”
I had my head against the window. “I did tell you I wouldn’t play.”
“Aryeh, at the end of the day, you don’t really think this matters?” My father was in the passenger seat, visibly annoyed to have been dragged out in the first place. Basketball, he made abundantly clear, was Bitul Torah, a shameless waste of time. “My own son, surely, doesn’t believe we’re placed on this planet to put a ball through a hoop?”
* * *
AFTER ENGLISH THE NEXT DAY, a lecture about melancholy in As You Like It, I wandered into the library during a free period to study for an impending biology quiz. Seated alone at the back was Evan, hunched over a book, taking copious notes. I took the seat across from him.
He looked up, blinked. “Eden.”
“Writing a paper?”
“Just a treatise,” he said.
“That doesn’t look like Gemara.”
Annoyed, he lifted the cover: On the Genealogy of Morality. “Ever read it?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“And Bloom thought you’re well read.”
“I thought so, too. That’s not for class, is it?”
“You sound disconcertingly like Amir. This is personal research.”
“About?”
He lowered the book, looked at me daringly. “Would you say you’re pretty interested in yearning as an organizing principle of human life?”
I remembered how he quoted from Antony and Cleopatra at Oliver’s party and again found myself suspecting he had somehow read my Academy application essay. I frowned, mentally articulating my accusation, if this even constituted an accusation. It felt wrong to have my privacy invaded, but it felt worse knowing Evan might have gained access to useful information about me. I tried brushing away the thought. The scenario was highly implausible, probably impossible, and the mere mention of longing, especially given Evan’s affinity for cryptic questions, was not itself particularly unique. “How do you know what I wrote—”
He put up his hand, cutting me off. “Whatever you’re winding up about is unimportant, Eden. Just answer this. Do you believe in a supreme value?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheeks. My face felt flushed, as if I’d walked into an examination unprepared. “I believe in God.”
“Okay, great, but whatever’s at the root of God. Whatever God embodies. A single, all-encompassing good. The center of all things.”
I took out my biology textbook, flipped through it. “I could probably be talked into such a thing.”
“Now what if we are that value?” Evan said. “What if we are the ones who dictate meaning for our own lives?”
I looked back up at him. “Who’s we? You and I? Humanity?”
“Self-interest.” He spun his ballpoint pen through his fingers. “The will of a single human being.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“No? What, then?”
Protists are eukaryotic organisms. Protists are not classified as animals or plants or even fungi. “I don’t know. Anything else. Charity. Love. Self-sacrifice. Raising children.”
He shook his head. “Living without limits. Having the courage to say yes to yourself. Recognizing that human will, unleashed appropriately, defines value.”
I smiled pleasantly. “I guess, to me, that’s just not, I don’t know, super convincing.”
Evan stretched, arching his back. “Nietzsche rejects one of the basic human premises we hold most dear.”
I glanced about the library, envious of all those engaged contentedly in trivial tasks, like actually completing homework or formulating sufficiently flirtatious text messages. “Which is?”
“The atomistic sou
l.”
“You’ve lost me,” I said.
“The classical idea of the soul—that it exists, that it animates our body. That it’s something indestructible and indivisible. You believe in all that, Eden?”
“Sure.” Protists are typically unicellular. They exhibit structural and functional diversity. “I think so.”
“Nietzsche doesn’t. Nietzsche thinks that whole idea should be forgotten.”
“And you agree.”
He dabbed his fingers with his pen, inking his fingertips with small, black circles. “For a while I did. But not anymore. Now I believe the opposite, actually.”
“What’s the opposite?” I asked. “The good old-fashioned immortality of the neshama?”
“Sure,” he said. “To put it crudely.”
“Do you also believe in Olam HaBa, then? Or whatever other version of eternity?”
Evan’s phone, stationed facedown on the table, buzzed several times, but he ignored it. “It’d be comforting to believe in that, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “But if you believe in everlasting souls, don’t you kind of necessarily have to believe in the afterlife?”
“Yeah, in some capacity,” he said. “Maybe just not the one they teach in Brooklyn. Clouds of glory. A stadium filled with tzadikim. Shabbos multiplied sixty times over.”
“I see. So what do you believe in?”
“I don’t believe in a literal afterlife,” he said, fingering his book. “Or, at least, a postponed afterlife. I think the whole business of eternity is available in the here and now. I mean, isn’t it kind of strange, almost ugly, to imagine ascending into infinity—to do nothing? To sit quietly, obediently? Why can’t immortality, divinity, spiritual fulfillment, whatever the hell you want to call it, why can’t it be something we accomplish here on earth? We claim to want independence, but we’re too damn frightened to seize it when it’s staring us in the face. Why don’t we just take it?”
I pressed my temple. “I—you’re asking why we don’t just take what we desire? Maybe because there are morals. Just because we have a soul and therefore the potential for godliness doesn’t mean we can go around doing whatever we want.”
Evan smiled impatiently, as if this was simply an exercise in leading me toward something I could digest in uncomplicated terms. “So instead?”
“Instead, hopefully, we do what’s right.”
“That’s the thing.” He rotated his head, making sure we didn’t have eavesdroppers. “If we are, in fact, the source of our own values, then we are what’s right. Those desires we’re too scared to pull off? Well, by definition, they are profoundly moral.”
“Yeah, that’s just . . . that’s ridiculous.”
“Why’s it ridiculous?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How about because we have good and we have evil?”
“Good and evil, virtue and sin, mitzvah and aveira. Those are tired terms, Eden. Objectivity just reinforces the old way of thinking, the way that makes us defer and deflect. But the real heights? Those are what we find in between.”
“Like what?” I asked. “What are the real heights?”
“How about being able to move toward your self for once, not away from it.”
“Yeah, well, sounds to me like embracing that inner self thing might be kind of dangerous.”
“Something can be true in the highest degree and still be dangerous, can’t it?”
I was beginning to feel nauseous. I wished I’d never joined him.
“Take the sun, Eden.”
“The sun?”
“The more you see,” he said, matter-of-factly, “the more your vision is destroyed.”
“Sounds like a pretty dumb analogy.”
“Apply it to God, then. Complete truth obliterates. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
I stared blankly.
“Right, I forgot, you’re an empty vessel, you’ve never seen a movie. Okay, in terms you’d grasp? Think Lot’s wife turning to look. Orpheus turning to look. The men of Bet Shemesh gazing into the Ark. Uzzah touching the Ark. The list goes on, but always it’s the same: you see God and you’re destroyed.”
“Not everyone,” I said. “Not Moshe.”
“Precisely.” Evan slapped the desk hard enough to receive a scowl from the librarian. He nodded his apologies. “Not the exceptional. They aren’t harmed.” He lowered his voice to a careful whisper. “Our ability to survive intense truth—and this is the trick, Eden, follow me here—our ability depends on the strength of our souls. And the strength of our souls is proportionate to how much truth we can withstand. So, how do we know? How do we know how much we can take?” His eyes were blue, eerie. “It’s a fucking question, Eden,” he said, after our uneasy pause.
“I don’t know, Evan.”
“We test ourselves. We see whether we’re destined for that kind of freedom.”
“And how do we test ourselves?”
“I’m still perfecting some details.”
“Yeah,” I said, “why do I feel like that’s . . . well, kind of a worrisome thought?”
“It’s not worrisome at all,” he said, speaking to himself through me. “All we have to do to test ourselves, really, is to suffer. And relax, Eden, don’t give me that look. I’m not suggesting self-flagellation here. I’m mostly referring to, I don’t know—shedding, let’s call it.”
“Shedding?”
“Yeah, making a sacrifice. Getting rid of what we love. We’re all stuck to something, imprisoned to someone, but if we get rid of it?” Evan shrugged. “We’d unleash ourselves.”
“Great, I think I’ve heard enough.” I began gathering my biology notes to go elsewhere, anywhere. “But I am super happy to hear you’re now, I don’t know, a full-fledged ascetic.”
“Believe me,” he said. “Most people find it hard, getting rid of everything. Not everyone, though. Not me. And not you.”
The library lighting was making my eyes sting. I crammed my textbook into my backpack, desperate to get away from him. “Do me a favor, Evan? Leave me out of your weird fantasies.”
“Just answer this, Eden. Answer it honestly, no pretending. Did you find it hard to leave home? To say goodbye to everything you knew?”
“That has nothing to—”
“Of course it does. You and I, we’re accustomed to solitude. That’s an asset, because it brings us closer to what I’m trying to do. But it’s the few who do matter that make shedding nearly impossible.”
I stood, turned to leave. “I don’t know if this is all theoretical daydreaming or if you’re actually . . . planning something,” I said unsurely, “but if it’s the latter, maybe just—don’t.”
Evan smiled coldly. “What choice do we have? Otherwise we’ll spend our whole lives yearning.”
* * *
READING IN BED LATER, STARING out through my window at the limpid night, I thought more about what Evan had said. He was right: I was habituated to solitude. Or, at least, I had been for much of my life. But he was wrong to insist I craved loneliness when, in fact, I hated the disease. I liked having friends, real friends, and I was growing to appreciate the person I was around them, even when it meant accepting that I was dangling in a world in which I’d never fully belong. I liked community. I liked the comfort of confiding in people. I liked feeling, for the first time, rooted in kinship, anchored to something concrete and familiar, no longer constantly adrift. Whatever plagued Evan, whatever crisis cornered him into isolation, had nothing to do with me.
To affirm this thought, I rolled over on my side, reached for my phone and, inhaling deeply, called Sophia.
She answered on the first ring. “‘How does my good Lord Hamlet?’”
“Hey,” I said, taken aback she’d answered so quickly. “I’m not calling too late, am I?”
“You think it’s appropriate to call at this hour?”
“I, uh—” I checked my bedside digital clock. “Shoot. I’m sorry, Madam President.”
<
br /> Her mirthless laugh. “It’s nine-thirty, Ari. I was joking.” I imagined her lying in bed, ankles together, textbooks piled high, moonlight trickling over her. “What can I do for you?”
“Yeah, I—just a quick question. For school, I mean.”
“Oh, for school? How surprising.”
“What—you don’t think I like talking to you?”
“I think you love talking to me,” she said. “You love it so much you make up excuses to do just that.”
“Excuses?” I was thankful she couldn’t see the color of my face over the phone. “Wow. What an accusation.”
“Poor kid. You’re probably madly conjuring homework questions this very second, sitting there in your pajamas—”
“Pajamas? Whoa, who says I wear pajamas?”
“My apologies,” she said, laughing slightly. “Hate to be presumptuous.”
“I happen, for your information, to be wearing a highly trendy outfit.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“Basketball team sweatpants. Nike. Sponsored by the Bellows, no less.”
“You’re right, undeniably sexy. And your shirt? Don’t leave me hanging without a complete image.”
I glanced down at my chest. “No shirt.”
“You Casanova. Trying to seduce me?”
I put my phone on speaker. “It’s not working, is it?”
“Why the sudden loss of confidence?”
“Did you like it?”
“I like when you’re yourself.” This somehow ordered neurotransmitters to dispatch throughout my body a sensation of tingling that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, just the tingling of someone coming to life. “Anyway. Probably enough phone sex for tonight, right? Let’s calm you down. We don’t want you too riled before bed.”
I grasped my hair with my fingers. “Right, of course.”
“So what was that urgent question?”
Far-off chirping. Iguanas, I figured, the sort that tended to congregate in Noah’s backyard, slipping through the golf course fence, scaling his roof, migrating across the street when they felt like slumming. “Uh,” I said, quickly opening my notebook, searching for something adequate, “yeah, so on the practice quiz, number forty-seven, the one about organizing the vessels from highest to lowest carbon dioxide concentrations—”