Freeze Frames

by Katharine Kerr

  “Hey, I take it I’m invited to this kaffeeklatsch?”

  “You’ll take it whether you’re invited or not, won’t you?” the rabbi says. “I know you. Tiffany, come along, my dear. Oh, and by the way, my name is Akiba.”

  Picking up speed the streetcar runs past. Since here on a Saturday it’ll be a long time before the next car, Tiffany decides that she might as well go along. If nothing else, she is curious as all hell . . . She hears herself use that image, feels her mind shy away out of some brute instinct, some impulse that seems to come from the deepest level of her mind, as if the neurons and the axions themselves recognize Mr. Nick Harrison, as if her very DNA fears him and his bleached unblinking stare.

  Yet the cafe they find is so ordinary, so normal in every detail, that Tiffany feels that sudden insight slip away and fade. Scented with steam and peanut oil, the narrow little place sports pale green walls, hung with pictures of Mexican scenery and calendars of girls holding bottles of beer. Neo-samba music pounds out of the speaker panel hanging over the back door. Behind the counter a old woman is twisting won ton; a young one polishes an espresso machine with a spotless white rag. She turns and smiles, tossing the rag down, as Tiffany and the two men come in. The three of them slip into a bright red poly-foam booth while she brings menus, which the rabbi waves away.

  “You got any coffee today?” Tiffany says.

  “Sure do. Hawaiian, the dealer told me. Maybe it is. Wasn’t gonna ask too many questions.”

  “Well, as long as it’s coffee.” The rabbi seems honestly puzzled by this exchange. “Coffee all round, then, with milk for them, but not for me, and I suppose, pastries?”

  “Pan dulce or pork buns?” the waitress says. “All we got left.”

  Nick snickers with a twist of lip.

  “Just the sweet bread, miz. Though I dunno.” This last to the rabbi. “You can’t be keeping kosher if you’d eat here. And with me.”

  The rabbi ignores him, struggles with a coat pocket, then brings out a wad of dollar bills, which he tosses onto the table. The waitress stares, wrinkling her nose against a smell of mould and damp earth.

  “Cash? I dunno bout that. Lot of paperwork for three coffees.”

  “It’s not good?” The rabbi sits up straight and glares. “It’s old, yes, but they said it should still be good.”

  Nick covers his mouth with a paper napkin and chokes back laughter. Tiffany uses her good hand to sweep the wad back to the old man.

  “I’ll pay,” she announces. “Just bring the coffee, okay? And I’ll get out my card.”

  Her turn for the struggle, with her wallet stuck deep in a pants pocket, but at last she frees it from her keys and pulls it out. When she looks up, her prize in hand, the girl is back behind the counter, fiddling with the machine. Her head reflects, a stretched balloon-shape, on the copper cylinder. Nick leans forward and jerks a thumb at the rabbi.

  “Where you get those bills? The earth spirits dig them up for you?”

  “Of course. A tin box that someone buried during those riots they had in New York. So the spirits can’t keep track of currency laws! What do you expect from them, anyway?”

  Nick snorts. It is at this point that Tiffany begins to wonder if she’s hallucinating the entire scene. The cafe, of course, is real—she’s passed it and looked in many times—but these two men might be elaborate constructions of her own mind, as detailed and solid as those memories of the drugstore. Never before has she hallucinated an event in the present moment rather than the past, although, she reflects, for all she knows she has indeed done so and simply never caught herself at it. This hallucination theory pleases her much more than the idea that she might be having a snack with the Devil and Rabbi Akiba, the great Talmudic scholar, or was he a Kabbalist? Both, Tiffany thinks. It seems to her that she has two sets of memories, broken shards dating back to her time in Israel, when she felt obliged to learn a little something about the history and great men of the place that she just might die defending. Which was he again? She knows she read it somewhere, can’t remember, only sees in her mind words that tell of men in black sitting under trees and discussing holy things. Whether those things were the sobrieties of earthly law or ecstatic visions of the throne of God she no longer knows.

  Doubtless it doesn’t matter, either, because she wants to believe that this elderly man in black does not exist, no matter what name he might attach to himself. Unfortunately, the waitress returns with three cups of coffee, one black, on a flowered tray and a chipped plate of pan dulce, smelling of cinnamon and oranges. Tiffany cannot make herself believe that she’s hallucinating the waitress, especially when the girl takes her debit card in warm fingers, or that the waitress hallucinated the order. Tiffany turns her head away to avoid looking at the row of red numbers that blink on the transmit box hanging from the girl’s belt. She does, however, remember to take her card back.

  “Three cups ’spresso, thirty bucks. Plate a pan dulce, three-fifty,” the waitress says. ”That be all?”

  “Thirty?” Reb Akiba snaps. “Tiffany my dear, I can’t let you pay for this. I meant this to be my treat.”

  The waitress seems to be about to speak, then shrugs away a problem that’s not hers to solve. She heads back to the counter and picks up her polishing rag again.

  “Look,” Nick whispers. “Tiffany can use that cash on the street. Plenty of places that’ll take it, no questions asked.”

  “Paying a debt isn’t breaking the law, no matter what the tax-collectors here think of paper currency.” Akiba flashes him a surprisingly youthful grin. “I know what you were trying to do, creature, but what’s that phrase? No dominoes.”

  “No dice.” Scowling, Nick shoves the wad of bills back in Tiffany’s direction. “Take it, kid. Won’t do him any good.”

  With a glance in the waitress’s direction—she is studiously ignoring them all—Tiffany pockets the bills. At this point it occurs to her that she might indeed be having real coffee with real men while hallucinating or distorting their words.

  “Uh, look,” she says. “It’s hard for me to really understand you guys, okay? It’s the wiring. When you been dead a couple of times, you kinda lose parts of your brain,”

  “Oh, I know, my dear, I know. I’ve died, too.”

  “Long time ago now,” Nick puts in. “What? Couple thousand years?”

  “Something like that. You lose track. It was before the Romans took the Temple, wasn’t it?”

  “How could you forget that? Jeez.”

  “Wait a minute,” Tiffany says. “I thought Rabbi Akiba lived in the thirteenth century.”

  “No, my dear, you’re confusing the real me with the fictional version in those books by that Sephardic weirdo. The Zohar. And Moses something.”

  “De Leon,” Nick says. “But I don’t get it. How you could lose a piece of big data like the year you died?”

  “You do forget those things. Dates, names, details.”

  “Details? When the Temple went down is a detail?”

  “It’s become one now, yes. Besides, how would you know? You’ve never even been alive to die.”

  “Uh, excuse me?” Tiffany breaks in. “I’m not understanding you. I can kinda tell.”

  “You’re understanding us perfectly well, my dear. You simply don’t want to believe you are, and I can’t say I blame you.” Akiba frowns into his coffee cup. “I think I’ll let this cool a little.”

  Automatically Tiffany drinks some of her own coffee, not, of course, that she can taste it. She can, however, feel the heat and register a certain sharp sensation which, she supposes, once would have been bitterness.

  “But anyway,” Nick says. “We don’t have a lot of time. You going to start, old man, or should I?”

  “I will. You’ll only interrupt soon enough.” The rabbi picks up a circle of pan dulce, blesses it under his breath, and breaks it in two. When he hands half to Tiffany, the suddenly warm bread smells of roses. “Tell me, my dear. Do you find yourself ge
tting confused these days? Are you suffering from bouts of disorientation?”

  He sounds so much like a TV commercial that Tiffany nearly laughs. To cover she takes a bite of the bread: still tasteless. Somehow, she realizes, she’d been expecting it would be otherwise after his blessing.

  “If I could simply cure you, believe me, I would,” the rabbi says with his mouth full. “Can’t.” He swallows quickly. “No, I wasn’t reading your mind. You spoke aloud.”

  “Damn.”

  “Don’t say that here, please.” Nick is grinning. “It gives me ideas.”

  “Shut up, you. But Tiffany, my question?”

  “Well, yeah, I do. It’s the brain damage.”

  “Do you ever feel that you should be somewhere else? Or that you’re in the right place, but things are wrong around you?”

  “At least once a day. My doctor says . . . ”

  Nick is grinning; Reb Akiba is smiling but in a sad sort of way, all at once Tiffany can’t remember what she was going to tell them. She is possessed by a sudden idea, that everything Dr. Rosas has told her is not so much wrong as irrelevant.

  “I don’t suppose you know much about physics?” Reb Akiba goes on. “Quantum physics. The interrelationship of waves and discrete particles. How God created the universe with the letters of the alphabet.”

  “You’re mixing metaphors again, old man.” Nick winks at Tiffany. “You gotta watch him, you know. He does it all the time.”

  “Shut up, wretched creature! Let me start again. Tiffany, you must have read some Moses de Leon. How?”

  “I ran across him when I was stationed in Israel. I was there for a real long time, you know. I decided I wanted to learn Hebrew, so I could talk to the Israeli pilots and support people. In their own language, I mean. Like, a lot of people spoke English, but not real well. And so, I took this class, and I made some friends, and one of them belonged to this Kabbalistic study group. She didn’t tell me much—”

  “Not to one of the goyim,” Nick mutters.

  “That old secret knowledge slur? The lore’s all been published in books, English books.” Reb Akiba fixes him with a nasty look. “So don’t overdramatize, will you? Her friend probably just didn’t want to bore the poor girl stiff. Tiffany, you must have read de Leon in English.”

  “Yeah, I did, just some selections. My friend gave me some books. I mean, when you’re just sitting around, waiting to fly, you’ll read anything, you know? Just to kinda keep your mind alive. But what’s goyim? That’s not a Hebrew word, is it?”

  “No, dear, it’s Yiddish. A dead language now. But—”

  “It means,” Nick interrupts, “people who aren’t Jewish. I mean, it meant that when the language was—”

  “Will you shut up?” The rabbi’s voice growls like penned thunder. “As long as you keep interrupting we’ll get nowhere.” He glances Tiffany’s way. “He can’t help confusing things, you know. It’s in his nature.”

  Much to her surprise, Nick winces and pouts.

  “It’s not like I want to. It’s not fair.” He looks at Tiffany with watery eyes. “Part of my punishment. It has a rotten sense of humor, if you ask me.”

  “It?”

  “He means the Godhead. He can’t say the name, you know.”

  “’It’ suits It better, anyway,” Nick snaps. “It can’t be a he or a she or even a they. It’s beyond all that—dualities, categories, all that stuff. And jeez, It never lets you forget it, either. It stinks smug, I tell you. So what’s It doing with a name, anyway? I mean, look, if It’s transcendent It’s transcendent, and there’s no two ways about it.”

  When Tiffany laughs at the joke, Nick grins; he would seem charming if only he would blink his eyes.

  “You’ve disrupted the line of thought again,” the rabbi says quietly. “Now where were we?”

  “Moses de Leon and quantum physics,” Tiffany says. “You asked me what I knew about quantum physics, and somehow or other we got into Kabbalism.”

  “Perfectly logical connection,” Nick mutters.

  The rabbi waggles a hand at him for silence.

  “Well, I don’t know much about either,” Tiffany says. “I read just a little bit when I was in Israel, about Kabbalism, I mean, ’cause Miriam was into it. I took a lot of science in school, because I was on the Air Service track, but I don’t remember it now.”

  “What’s the cliff between Air Force and Air Services?” Nick says.

  “None.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  They stare at each other for a long moment. He knows. Oh God, he knows. Suddenly she remembers a detail, no, not a detail: the crux, the all-important thing, the one overwhelming difference. Air Services planes always go fully armed. Lots of women pilots in the Service. Combat pilots. All of us. Failure? Oh no. I shot them down. Oh my God, I shot them down. No way that power plant shoulda gone up like that.

  “Come on, Tiff.” The Devil is smiling at her. “Level with me. You know—”

  Tiffany cannot speak, cannot stop him, cannot save herself.

  “Shut up, creature!”

  Nick bites his lip hard and falls silent.

  “That’s better.” Reb Akiba gives him a brief, approving smile. “Parallel worlds, Tiffany. What about those? Alternate universes. Ever hear of them?”

  “Well, yeah, but they’re not real, are they? I mean, it’s just one of those ideas math makes you get. Logical necessities? Oh, hell, I used to know the right name. Something like, null-content concepts? No, that’s not it, either.”

  Akiba sighs.

  “Let’s try the alphabet instead. Twenty-two letters, well, twenty-six here in your country. Right? Yet hundreds of thousands of words. It’s all in the way you mix them up, all in the pattern they make. Rabbi, rabbit. If you had an infinite number of letters, wouldn’t you have an infinite number of words? Worlds, words. Not a lot of difference there, either. Well, It, the Transcendent One, created an infinite set of letters. So the words It spoke became infinite. Sometimes these names shift back and forth, or they split into new words, because It is pure possibility. And because It is It, what It speaks as possible becomes actual. Likewise the quantum equations. They shift, open possibilities, possible events, possible objects. But they can’t all be actual—not in the same world. Somewhere they have to be actual, mind, but not all in same world.” He pauses, taken with a thought. “I don’t suppose there’d be room.”

  Tiffany stares in complete and utter incomprehension. In her mind she sees a picture of the rabbi carrying a rabbit; nothing more.

  “On the other hand,” the rabbi goes on, “not all possibilities do become actual. Words, worlds, all created out of the same pieces, the same letters, but some don’t make any sense. When you mix up letters randomly, a lot of the combinations you get won’t be real words, right? Rabbi, rabbit, but not rabbo or rebbot. And it’s the same for worlds. Now, I don’t know why. The Transcendent One never spoke those names, I suppose. I never asked It.”

  “Messy, that’s all it was.” Nick’s voice drips contempt. “Jeez, a lousy mistake, leaving half-realized possibilities lying all over the universe. Sloppy.”

  “Hah! And I suppose you could have done half as well?”

  “I never said that! I just pointed out Its lousy mistake, and It’s been hounding me ever since.”

  “Poor little snakey-wakey.”

  Nick starts to make a sound very like a hiss, then chokes it back. Reb Akiba laughs. Tiffany begins to feel that everything she’s ever believed or thought, the totality that she calls mind, is shrinking, fading, growing smaller and smaller, turning to a tiny core or kernel, as small as a mustard seed. Do something. Say something. Take control of this talk. Something.

  “What mistake?”

  “When It didn’t know Its own strength.” Nick jumps right in. “When the vessels broke and the worlds-to-be all shattered. None of this crap woulda happened, you know, if it wasn’t for that.”

  “I wouldn’t call that a mistake.” The rabbi
snaps. “Neither of us are in any position to judge why It does anything.”

  “Oh bullshit! Or course it was a mistake. There was law, there was order, there was light, waves and waves of wonderful light—and all of a sudden, bang! The vessels shatter! Chaos! All these messy forces! Discrete particles! Messy little souls running around everywhere! Alternate universes! Quanta! Photons!” Nick turns dramatically in the booth toward the aisle.

  “Don’t spit!” Reb Akiba barks. “We’re inside, you know.”

  “Sorry.” Nick collects himself with a cough. “This argument’s just so familiar. I keep thinking we’re all sitting around under those plane trees again.”

  Tiffany glances toward the counter to find the two women staring, the stack of wonton skins, the bowl of filling forgotten between them.

  “Look, you guys, maybe you could like keep your voices down?”

  “Of course, and my dear, you have my apologies.” The rabbi glances at the women. “And so do you, dear ladies. I’m afraid that my students here take all these abstract things rather seriously.”

  The old woman grabs the bowl, slaps the stack on top of it, and heads, with slow dignity, toward the back room. The waitress smiles.

  “Padre, you guys be from Berkeley?”

  “I’ve taught there, yes. At the Theological Union.”

  “Oh, well. That explains it, then.” She picks up her rag and goes back to her polishing. “They all nuts, in Berkeley.”

  Although he makes an effort to hush his voice, Nick is glaring as he leans across the table.

  “What makes you think It had a reason?”

  “And did I ever say I thought It did? Just the opposite.”

  “In civilized company the word ’why’ generally implies a reason.”

  “Since when are you civilized company?”

  They glare at each other over raised cups of coffee. Tiffany feels pain running from one side of her forehead to the other. She finds the tennis ball in her pocket, wraps the fingers of the bad hand round it, and begins squeezing; oddly enough, the exercise helps her headache as well. Reb Akiba turns to her and frowns in thought.