Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma and Other Stories

by Alex Shvartsman

  “You must understand,” he said, “that Kabbalah is, at its heart, an exact science. Talmudic scholars used a lot of metaphors to describe things the modern scholars are only now beginning to explore at the most sophisticated levels of theoretical physics. The Almighty designed the universe to operate under strict logical rules, like a computer program. Think of Kabbalah as a developer toolkit that can modify small subroutines within that program.”

  “All right,” I said, “let’s say for the moment that you’re right and shelve the argument as to whether the universe has an intelligent designer of any kind.” I shifted in the armchair. “You’re saying there is this Book of Fate and that angels spend one week every year writing down the destiny of every human being in the world, and that whatever they write down is locked in for the next year. Did I get that right? And, if so, how is this even remotely related to science?”

  “Again, much of that is metaphor. Many of the ancient cultures were aware of this phenomenon and explained it using whatever imagery their contemporaries could understand.” Adler laid things out patiently, like a parent explaining to his kid that there’s no such thing as Santa Claus. Except this was, pretty much, the exact opposite of that. “The important thing for us is that there’s a record—think of it as a database—of people’s fates, determined a year in advance. And there’s a ten-day-long window during which this record can be altered.”

  I felt like a film crew for one of those “gotcha” reality shows should burst from the bedroom at any moment. Still, I’d seen him do the impossible with my own eyes. Also, he’d extricated Greg and me from a very hairy situation. Least I could do was entertain his theories.

  “What about free will? I seem to recall that being an important tenet of Judeo-Christian philosophy.”

  “Free will isn’t limitless,” said Adler. “For example, you can’t fly out the window, no matter how much you may want to. Free will manifests in dozens of smaller decisions you make every day. Those choices won’t alter what’s written in the Book of Fate, though many believe that they have a direct effect on what is to be written down for next year.”

  “And you want us to get in there and rewrite your future so that you can become what, a king of the world?”

  “Nothing like that,” Adler said. “We’ll introduce small changes that should fly under the radar, lest they’re discovered and corrected. For instance, you could alter your brother’s life trajectory by eliminating his drug addiction.”

  Adler said this almost casually, but the bastard knew exactly which buttons to push, knew that the possibility alone would force me to consider his proposal even while it still sounded more than a little crazy.

  “Why me?” I asked. “Why not some hacker or hardware whiz who already buys into all this stuff?”

  “Because you’re both a hacker and a hardware whiz. You’re the best there is,” Adler said. “I checked. Also, as an atheist you shouldn’t have as much difficulty with the philosophical implications of my plan.” Which begged another question.

  “What about him?” I asked, pointing upward. “How can you, as a religious man, justify going against the wishes of the guy upstairs?”

  For the first time since we met, Adler didn’t have a smooth, ready-made answer. He sat on my couch, silent, but his mind was somewhere else entirely. Finally, he spoke so quietly that I barely understood the words, “I have my reasons.”

  I let the matter drop.

  I slammed the dusty old volume shut and tossed it onto the table in frustration.

  “I need a break,” I said, rubbing my temples.

  “Careful,” Adler said a bit louder than usual. After a few months of working together I’d learned to decipher the subtle hints of emotion hidden behind the man’s calm façade. I was fairly sure that I detected a tiniest bit of annoyance in his voice. “Sorry,” he added. “We’re taught to revere books in my culture.”

  “My bad.” I got up to stretch and massaged the back of my neck. A glance at the wall clock confirmed what my weary body already knew; we’d been at it for most of the day.

  When I’d signed on to Adler’s mad scheme, the first order of business had been for me to learn the bastardized version of Hebrew the kabbalists used as their programming language. Each of the twenty-two hieroglyphs was a letter, but it was also a concept, and a number, and contained far more meaning than anyone should expect from a single character. Learning to comprehend this stuff was slow going, to say the least.

  And while I was learning it, however slowly, I made no progress at all at deciphering Adler himself. I researched the man online the minute he left my house on the day we met. There was a famous kabbalist named Nathan Adler in Europe a few hundred years ago, and a number of our contemporaries shared that name, but my new acquaintance wasn’t among them. He used an alias, which meant that he had something to hide. Such as, perhaps, the alterations he intended to make to this Book of Fate.

  After a short break, we delved back into the study session, only to be interrupted by the chime of a cell phone. Adler fished the device from the inner pocket of his jacket. I perked up. In all the time we’d spent together, his phone had never rung before.

  Adler picked up and listened intently to whomever was at the other end of the line, his jaw clenched. At times he replied in brief bursts of Yiddish, his voice monotone as ever. The conversation lasted less than a minute.

  “Something’s come up. I have to go,” Adler said once he’d hung up the phone. “We’ll pick this up again, tomorrow.”

  Adler departed in a hurry. I was left sitting in the empty house. Greg was out, working his shift at the part-time job he’d found, stocking the produce section at a local supermarket. Greg had managed to stay off drugs and out of trouble since our close encounter with Coins, and was genuinely trying to put his life back on track. So I sat in the living room alone, trying to figure out what Adler was up to.

  On impulse, I ran outside and dragged my Honda CBR out of the garage. I got on the bike and sped down the street, hoping to catch Adler before he reached the highway.

  Adler drove a twenty-year-old Buick Estate Roadmaster, a station wagon with stripes of simulated wood grain on the sides. There aren’t many of those on the road, which made Adler a lot easier to follow while keeping my distance. It also helped that the tinted shield of my bike helmet completely obscured my face.

  Adler got onto Route 9 and took it all the way north to Outerbridge Crossing, across Staten Island and into Brooklyn. He parked in front of the Maimonides Hospital and rushed inside.

  At the front desk, Adler had to sign in. I watched him go up the elevator before I walked up and, with a friendly nod to the guard, signed in as a visitor myself and scanned the previous entry for the name and room number.

  Breaking into the hospital network was a breeze, once I found a courtesy Internet terminal in one of the waiting areas. I learned that the sole occupant of the room in question was Mrs. Sheila Horowitz, sixty-four years of age and recuperating from surgery.

  Sheila’s prognosis wasn’t good: stage four pancreatic cancer. A malignant tumor had grown on her liver, unnoticed until it was too late. Doctors had removed the primary tumor in surgery but it had already metastasized. She likely had between six months and a year to live—and that’s assuming she recovered from the invasive surgery. It was still touch and go, for the moment.

  Adler—or was it Horowitz?—was beginning to make sense to me now. He wasn’t out to cheat the universe of its plan for some sort of personal gain; he was trying to save his wife. There aren’t a lot of things in life powerful enough to cause a man of faith to go against what he saw as the wishes of his creator, but love certainly qualifies.

  I sympathized with their plight and was ashamed because, in some conflicted way, I was comforted by the knowledge of it. This meant Adler’s reasons and motivations were only human, after all.

  Adler and I spent the summer working feverishly to prepare ourselves. According to the kabbalist, the window
of opportunity to alter the Book of Fate was coming up in late September. The next year’s fortunes would be written down between the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Adler couldn’t wait another year, and now that I had figured out his reason, I understood why. Frankly, I couldn’t take another year of preparations myself. As difficult as it was to learn the language, that was child’s play compared to mastering Kabbalah’s practical applications and building the hardware.

  Greg seemed content working his menial job, watching sports on TV, and chasing after women. He was doing well in that last department, if any of his constant bragging was to be believed. He never brought anyone over to the house, but he stayed out overnight at least once a week. Greg’s wasn’t a life I would find fulfilling, but he appeared to be happy and that was good enough for me.

  So when he didn’t come home one morning, I wasn’t worried. But he didn’t show up the next day either, and didn’t return my phone calls. By then I became concerned enough to go look for him at work.

  I spotted Jose, Greg’s co-worker and buddy, stocking shelves in one of the aisles. I walked over. “Hey, is Greg around?”

  Jose wiped the sweat off his forehead with a sleeve. “Nah, man. I haven’t seen him in a while—not since he got canned.”

  “What? When was this?”

  Jose gave me a surprised look. “You mean you don’t know? It was just over a week ago. One of the supervisors walked in on him shooting up heroin in the stock room.”

  “Shit.”

  Greg was using again and, like any resourceful junkie, he was hiding it pretty damn well. I’d tried everything I could think of to help my little brother—from dragging him to AA meetings, to paying for fancy detox clinics. There was literally nothing I wouldn’t do to help him get clean. But I couldn’t spend my life watching over his every move. He was an adult now, and he always found a way to screw up.

  Jose patted my shoulder. “Sorry you had to hear it from me, man. Greg’s a decent sort. I hope he works everything out. Tell ‘im the guys at work are wishing him all the best. We didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, the way the management booted him that day. At least they didn’t call the cops on him, so that’s somethin’.”

  I thanked Jose and headed out. I rode around town, checking some of Greg’s favorite haunts, but there was no sign of him. His phone must’ve been off—the calls went straight to voicemail. By the time I exhausted my options and returned home, it was a little past noon.

  “Where have you been?” Adler said to me in lieu of a greeting. “We have less than a month left and you’re wasting half a day on who-knows-what.”

  I told him.

  “I’m so sorry, Michael,” Adler said. “Addiction is a powerful thing. It’s all too easy to relapse. Things will be much better for him once we succeed.”

  If we succeed. And even then, that was a month away. Greg needed help now.

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Why don’t you fix him? Melt away his cravings like you did that gun.”

  “I would if I could.” Adler frowned.

  “If you’re concerned over my motivation, then I assure you—”

  Adler cut me off. “You should have a better understanding of Kabbalah by now than to expect this of me. It’s not some fairy tale magic. I can’t wave a wand and change the man’s soul. There’s only one method that I know of to cheat fate, and we’re already working on that.”

  I growled in frustration and punched the wall hard enough to leave a small indentation in the sheetrock. Was Adler truly powerless to help Greg, or was he holding back in order to keep the stakes high for me, keep me focused on his scheme? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. Unlike any kind of a higher power, I had no influence or control over Greg’s destiny. And the best way to help him was for Adler’s plan to succeed. I rubbed my sore knuckles and sat down to work.

  The machine we built was a thing of beauty.

  Well, not exactly. It was a jumbled mess of wires and microchips fused with equal parts solder and magic, a do-it-yourself project if there ever was one. It was a labor of love and countless hours of hard work and, to me, that made it beautiful.

  Adler and I jury-rigged a spell-casting interface. I could input and store the complex symbols of power and the computer would convert them into the metaphysical programming language of the universe. The Buddhists had the right idea with automated prayer wheels powered by water and wind. This was taking the same concept to another level. Cutting-edge processors would fire off incantations exponentially faster than a human being ever could. If any manmade device could pick the locks on heaven’s door, this was it.

  We finished it with a couple of days to spare. We did as much theoretical testing as we could and the results were promising. Until the ten-day-long window Adler referred to as the Days of Awe opened, all we could do was wait.

  I was decompressing and enjoying some much-needed time apart from Adler when my cell rang and Greg’s name popped up on caller ID. This was the first time Greg had bothered to touch base since he’d disappeared nearly a month ago. I worried about him constantly, even though this wasn’t the first time Greg had gone AWOL.

  “Hello?” I picked up the phone with a mixture of relief and indignation.

  “Hello, Michael.” I did not recognize the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Who is this? Where’s Greg?”

  “Gregory sends his regards. He would very much like for you and I to meet.” There was a hint of an accent I couldn’t quite place. “Please join me at the coffee shop on the corner of Main and Tyson.”

  “Put Greg on the phone.”

  “Coffee shop. Fifteen minutes.” The line went dead, and no one picked up when I called back.

  Ten minutes later I was at the café, nervously shuffling my phone from one hand to the other and studying the other patrons from the corner table. I knew the place well. It was only a few blocks from my house, and I frequented it in the mornings. I wondered if the caller had known that.

  A tall bearded man in his forties approached my table with a foam cup in each hand. “Medium French Vanilla, light and sweet.” He set the cup containing my usual order on the table in front of me.

  “Where’s Greg?”

  “My associates have him,” the man said cordially, as if he were discussing a piece of furniture. “He’s safe and secure. Relatively speaking, of course.” I still couldn’t place the man’s accent. His skin tone and facial features hinted at Middle Eastern or Persian ancestry.

  My first instinct was to lash out at him verbally, demanding answers. Instead I remained silent. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  “You’ve made quite an impression on the local criminal element,” the man continued in the same conversational tone. “A man who calls himself Coins had some fascinating stories to tell about an encounter at your residence. Stories that ultimately reached the ears of my associates and piqued our interest.”

  The man sat down across the table from me and sipped his drink. “Coins was surprisingly subtle and creative in his revenge scheme against you. He tracked down your brother and reintroduced him to the world of narcotics. As I understand it, the first dose was administered under duress. After that, Gregory’s inner demons took care of the rest.”

  He took another sip. “In no time at all, your brother was willing to share with us every little detail he knew about your plan. In exchange, we had Coins ply him with whatever pills and powders he desired.”

  Before I knew it, I was on my feet, leaning across the small wooden table, my jaw tightened and my fists clenched.

  The bastard didn’t even flinch.

  “Easy,” he said as I struggled to control my temper, to stop myself from lunging at him. “Let’s not forget that we still have Gregory. You’ll have to play nice, if you want him back.”

  I stood there for a long moment, awash in the smell of roasted coffee and the sounds of the early afternoon crowd. Ordinary people were going about their everyday live
s, unaware of the terrible cruelty of this stranger’s soft-spoken words. He had my brother. Taking a swing at him wasn’t going to change that. The fight left me and I slid back into the seat.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” I said through my teeth.

  “My name is Ajit Singh,” he replied, “and I’m a mystic, just like the one who calls himself Nathan Adler. I’m no admirer of the man, but I must give credit where it’s due. His idea is daring and ingenious. Visionary, even. In fact, my associates and I like it so much, we’re going to annex it.”

  He produced a sheet of paper with names and notes handwritten neatly in tiny block letters.

  “If your machine succeeds at affecting what’s etched onto the Pillar of Destinies, we want you to make the following changes—and nothing else. You may aid your brother and even help yourself to a modest amount of fame or fortune, but you are not to enact any of the alterations Adler asks of you. Understand?”

  “The man’s wife is dying of cancer,” I said. “All he wants is to save her.”

  “Is that what he led you to believe?” Singh laughed in my face. “Adler hasn’t been married for over two hundred years.”

  Adler and I scheduled our attempt for the day before Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment.

  As I mulled over what Singh had told me, I read up on the subjects of destiny and kismet. I found references to a pre-ordained recording of future events in almost every ancient faith. An obscure splinter group of Singh’s people, the Sikhs, believed that Guru Nanak etched what’s to come in marble upon a pillar that rose to the heavens. The Islamic concept of Taqdeer spoke of “The Preserved Tablet,” adjusted annually by Allah based on one’s deeds and performed rituals. Other traditions were bursting with stories of people’s futures recorded by deities or spirit guides or blind scribes. But none of it held the answers I sought.

  Singh demanded that I say nothing to Adler. I needed the kabbalist’s help in the final preparations for the ritual, which forced Singh’s people to keep their distance. Even as we made painstaking preparations, I agonized over what to do. I still hadn’t made up my mind by the time we were ready to begin.