The Comedown

by Rebekah Frumkin

  The greatest thing in his shitty little life.

  He stood to get another slice of cake. The children mobbed him, dampening his overalls with their soaked clothes, singing a disjointed chorus of “Happy Birthday.” He waited until they’d finished and sent them back in the direction of their parents, who sat at round tables by the vegetable garden. Audrey called after him but he pretended not to hear.

  In the barn, he cut to the front of the cake line. May smiled when she saw him, handing him a slice.

  “Here comes the birthday boy!” she chanted. “Here he comes!”

  “Do you think I’m a coward, May?” he asked.

  “Of course not. What makes you ask that?”

  “I didn’t save my family.”

  He looked at May, hoping she’d be soft-faced, understanding. Instead her eyes were flat.

  “Now is not the time to think about that, Rich.”

  He shook his head. “I’m Reggie,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  Reggie went back outside, pretending not to hear May calling after him. Everyone looked different to him, strange, like he was just meeting them all for the first time. He could feel himself settling into himself, sliding back into his skin. They were part of a cult. They all wore the same outfits and they sat in circles singing about Jesus and did whatever May and the doctor said. He had been living in a cult. He dropped the cake on the ground and balled his hands into fists. What the fuck am I doing here? His voice was back, his mind was back. He hadn’t thought like himself in thirty-six years.

  He stood in the sprinkler, grabbing Audrey by the shoulders and kissing her wet forehead. At arm’s length she looked like an aged child.

  “Richard, what’s wrong?” she asked. “Why are you acting like this?”

  He hung his head. He knew but he didn’t want to say.

  “Richard?” she asked. “Can we talk about this later?”

  He nodded. He went to their room, where he listened to the sounds of his birthday party ending, confused residents asking Audrey where he’d gone. There was a knock at the door, probably May, and he didn’t answer. He took the bullet from his pocket and rolled it between his thumb and index finger. The doctor had no idea what he’d done, giving this thing to him. If it weren’t for this motherfucking two inches of lead, Reggie would’ve never been Richard. He would’ve gone back to Cleveland and, despite the danger of Shondor, the fear that had paralyzed him all these years, he would’ve saved his family.

  His family. The money.

  Everything from his old life was a puzzle. The money hadn’t been meant for him—it’d been meant for the goons he’d killed, the fake-Irish ones Shondor and Sunny hired to kill him. The car bomb had been meant for Sunny’s family, not Sunny. Shondor was always five fucking steps ahead. Shondor probably knew that if the goons didn’t kill Sunny when they showed up to collect their payment, then Sunny would kill himself because his family was everything to him. He knew that on the offhand chance Reggie showed up instead of the goons, Sunny would kill him out of loyalty to Shondor. So worst-case scenario, Shondor has to pay some goons to take out Reggie and Sunny. Best-case scenario, everybody dies and Shondor keeps his money.

  It was a good plan but it hadn’t worked. Because they’d been thrown in a swamp. Shondor always gave bodies with no outstanding debts a proper burial, whether he hated them or loved them like family. If he’d gotten the money, Reggie and Sunny would’ve gotten their own plots and pine coffins. Which meant something had happened that not even Shondor could’ve anticipated. He’d gone over the details in his head before, but now one missing piece finally fell into place.

  The junkie. Leland.

  He lay on their bed staring at the ceiling, the bullet in his hand. Back when he was who he used to be, he would’ve done something big right about now. He would’ve kicked in a door. He would’ve fucked up someone who owed him. He would’ve gone down to the scrap place where Leland worked and fucked him up, too. The bullet felt hot; it hurt to hold. His temple twinged. His vision fogged and he massaged his crooked face. Audrey was lying if she said she loved this face.

  * * *

  She came back to their room after dusk, after extinguishing the campfire around which they’d all been roasting marshmallows, after helping the parents put their children to sleep. She didn’t want to face him when he was possessed by his disturbances: she felt helpless and frightened and a little jealous of his dead wife. Maybe she’d tell the doctor he needed a sedative for sleep. Maybe she’d be more forgiving when he woke up in the middle of the night. He was a loving, righteous husband fully deserving of her compassion. She’d been stingy with it lately: her jealousy, her unwillingness to speak about what troubled him. She would change. She nodded to herself, picked a flake of burnt wood from her overalls. She would change. She knocked on their door and opened it, singing “Richa-ard! We missed you out there.” But the room was empty. She found a note on the bed: I’m sorry. Love, Reggie.

  EPILOGUE

  June 12, 2009

  Unlike the more modern synagogues in north Florida—the no-frills cement ones built by the Jewish retirees who’d floated south from New York and New Jersey, with Reform rabbis who wore guayabera shirts and kept kosher one day a week—the Temple Chaim Sheltok predated both World Wars.

  Chaim Sheltok himself came from a clan of Jewish Hasidim who lived in a town called Heimsheim in the south of Germany. The Sheltoks were a family of tailors, then called the Schneiders. In 1861—ten years before German Jews would be granted full civil rights after the Franco-Prussian War—a group of Gentile students destroyed the Schneiders’ shop and set fire to their house, leaving Chaim’s grandparents dead and Chaim’s father badly burned on the left side of his face. Shunned by the residents of Heimsheim as a freak and a cripple, Benjamin Schneider traveled to Belgium, where he found menial work as a cook on a fruit ship. He was paid thirty-five francs per trip, and the ship made four or five trips a year, often to the sorts of tropical places that only seemed possible in storybooks. After a few years of being beaten for refusing to cook pork, Benjamin scrambled off the boat in Havana, hid in the basement of a church, and stayed there for two and a half days, emerging only when he was sure they’d written him off as dead. He used the last of his strength to tear up his clothes, kick off his shoes, and begin begging for food and water in the street. If asked, his name was Benji Sheltok. The people of Havana took pity on him, and within a week he had a place to stay. Within two years, he’d opened a tailor shop, married a Cuban shiksa, and started a family.

  Lore had it that young Cordaro Sheltok emerged from his mother’s womb speaking Yiddish. Embarrassed by his apostate father and his own status as a half-caste according to the Halakha, Cordaro changed his name to Chaim when he was nine and began attending Jewish services every Friday. When the congregation sang their kaddishes in Spanish, he belted his in Hebrew or Yiddish. He knew his Talmud better than the community elders, and would sometimes even correct the rabbi on particularly difficult passages. Fortunately, the rabbi was a good-natured man who encouraged Chaim’s passion. He considered the boy’s gift for languages miraculous, his intellect messianic, and as Chaim grew, so did the rabbi’s love for him.

  The rabbi was an emotional man, frequently reliant upon his wife to ground him. He told her about Chaim, and even allowed her to watch them debate a passage of Talmud. She agreed that the boy was impressive, but pointed out that since his mother was a Gentile, he was not a Jew. The rabbi went to sleep that night convinced of her argument but when he awoke the next morning, he knew she’d made an error in judgment. Determined not to be on the wrong side of history, he assigned Chaim a Torah portion and gave him his bar mitzvah the following year. He told his wife that a truer Jew had never been born, and perhaps the occasion of Chaim’s birth would someday prompt revisions of the Halakha.

  When Chaim was fifteen, the rabbi told him he was a gift from G-d, the last true hope of the Jewish people, a potential prophet of infinite wisdom
and compassion. He told Chaim that he had to strengthen the Jewish presence in America, the youngest and most powerful nation in the world. He said that for Chaim to do this was to fulfill his destiny. All the rabbi asked was that Chaim send for him and his wife when he got there.

  After all these years of watching him grow, the rabbi and his commonsense wife, childless, had begun to think of Chaim as if he were their own. His wife had even relented to the idea that the Halakha might be wrong. Prudent though she was, she still believed in miracles, and if a boy like Chaim could be the son of ragged-faced Benji Sheltok and his goy wife, then miracles were perhaps more common than she’d ever allowed herself to believe.

  At age sixteen, Chaim jumped on a tobacco freighter bound for the United States. By the time he was discovered, the ship was halfway to Miami and nobody had the heart to throw him overboard. He was put to work cleaning the decks and commodes: work that he did with alacrity, knowing that he was fulfilling a divine prophecy. When they landed in Miami, Chaim repeated his father’s strategy of eighteen years prior, bolting from the boat before anyone could catch him. It was said he ran fifty miles without looking back, stopping only when the sun had finally set. He slept, his back to the trunk of a palmetto tree, and then awoke after five hours and ran another fifty miles. When the ground gave way to swamp, he began to swim. He did this for days on end, inexhaustible, guided forth by the hand of G-d. He was stung by mosquitoes, attacked by flying spiders, and nearly lost his left foot to an alligator, but he emerged from every night’s rest with his wounds completely healed. On the tenth day, he stopped running. He knew he had reached the place where his temple would be built.

  He called the place Heimsheim after his ancestral homeland and wrote to the rabbi with his good news, telling him to bring his wife and send for Jews from all over the world. Without his knowing, Chaim’s rabbi had begun publishing essays about him—these he now sent to Chaim with pride. The story of Chaim’s quest had appeared in Dos Yudishes Folksblat, a Yiddish paper in Europe, and he became something of a minicelebrity in the Orthodox community. An eager group of Lubavitcher Hasidim traveled all the way from Brooklyn to meet Chaim in Heimsheim, and by the time the rabbi and his wife arrived in Florida, aided by the donations pouring in from around the world, construction had already begun on the Temple Chaim Sheltok.

  Although the assembled were of relatively humble means and their materials unrefined, the temple took on an elegant, palatial structure that Chaim attributed to the guiding compassion of G-d. As they worked, a small town sprang up around them. Hundreds of Jews—American Orthodox, European Hasidim, African Sephardim—journeyed to witness the construction of Temple Chaim Sheltok and to meet its overseer, the young messiah. Many of them stayed on to help.

  On the evening of June 12, 1909, the rabbi and Chaim were dissecting their nightly passage of Talmud before Chaim repaired to his bungalow and the rabbi to his, where his wife was already asleep. The temple’s outer structure had been finished, and the next day the crew was to begin construction on the roof. The rabbi asked Chaim what kind of roof G-d had told him to build, and Chaim responded that the roof would be dome shaped, like the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Taken aback, the rabbi asked Chaim why and Chaim reminded the rabbi of the Foundation Stone at the Dome’s heart. “Like the stone, my heart has been pierced by the lack of love in this world,” he said. Impressed once again by his former congregant’s wisdom, the rabbi blessed him and the two parted ways.

  When the rabbi awoke the next morning, it was to a great commotion. His wife pulled him by the hand to their front door, telling him they were lucky to have lived in this age of miracles. When the rabbi laid eyes on the temple, his heart nearly stopped with disbelief. It had been finished overnight. What’s more, the wood and plaster they’d used had been replaced by marble. He ran inside, where men, women, and children were rambunctious with joy. It was just as majestic as the outside, its most incredible feature an intricate image of Jerusalem done in blue, white, and gold tile on the temple’s domed ceiling. The rabbi heard a child call out, “It’s magic from another planet!” Everyone was too stunned to correct him. The rabbi’s eyes filled with tears. “Chaim!” he shouted. “Chaim!” The other congregants in the temple heard the rabbi shouting and began to shout as well. In that morning’s rhapsodic confusion, no one had seen him.

  But Chaim was not in the temple, and he was nowhere in the town, either. He was gone the next day as well. The next week he was still gone, and then the weeks of his absence accumulated into months. The residents of Heimsheim searched the Everglades. No one had seen him. Some of the more morbid Heimsheimers began to whisper that the rabbi was a wicked man who had murdered Chaim in a fit of jealousy. Others suggested that Chaim had somehow been subsumed into the temple by G-d, and this was how the structure had been completed so quickly.

  A year after Chaim’s disappearance, the rabbi died of grief. In the vacuum of leadership, a young man named Abraham Kamzin stepped up. Kamzin had been first in his class at his Moscow yeshiva, and had been ordained by the Russian Orthodox rabbinate shortly before making the pilgrimage to Heimsheim at age twenty-nine. He was accepted by the community, and served competently as its rabbi until his death in 1939, when his son Abner took over.

  By the end of Abner’s tenure in 1968, the Temple Chaim Sheltok’s miraculous origins were widely regarded as a hoax, Chaim Sheltok himself believed to be a legend cooked up by Hasidic mystics who refused to live in the twentieth century. Abner’s son took over and told his congregants in his no-nonsense manner that the beautiful temple had been built by German-American plutocrats in need of a nice place to worship while they turned the Everglades into condos and resorts.

  By June 12, 2009, the hundred-year anniversary of the temple’s completion, the place had fallen into gilded disrepair. The rabbi was now Abner’s grandson Ari, a young man who’d recently put a halt to his father’s baffling and exclusive tradition of holding services in Yiddish and Hebrew. Although he’d been raised in the Orthodox tradition, Ari had rejected what he considered the Orthodoxy’s willful parochialism, outrageous sexism, and snobbish, covenant-bound exceptionalism. He believed in the freer attitudes of Reform Judaism. He led his services in English and welcomed Jews from all walks of life.

  As luck would have it, the temple’s centennial fell on a Friday, so Ari had organized a small commemorative party for after the week’s service. The party was over before sundown, and he was the one left to sort the uneaten cookies back into plastic Tupperware containers, fold up the tablecloths and retractable tables, and sweep the floor. As he was headed to the janitorial closet to grab a broom, a knock sounded at the front entrance. It was strange since it was late already, but thinking it must have been a congregant missing a purse or cell phone, he opened the door.

  In front of him stood a kid who couldn’t have been older than twenty and a girl who looked sixteen but whose intelligent eyes disarmed him. Between them stood a third kid who looked neither male nor female.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. Just his luck that these people would wander in now.

  The boy-kid nodded and then pressed his lips together, hesitant. The girl spoke for him: “Do you mind if we come in and take a look around?”

  Ari had hoped to close up and head home to his wife, Shosh, and infant daughter within the hour—the two had gone home immediately after the service because his daughter had begun crying in a disruptive way—but the kids standing in front of him seemed so sincere. Where were their parents?

  “Please, come in,” he said. It’d begun to rain and he felt better about the charity of his decision. The kids pressed in, smelling of incense and grease and sweat. The girl thanked him profusely, and he told her it was no problem. “We’ve been on a road trip,” the genderless one explained. (Ari was proud that he thought of the kid as genderless and not as a freak, as his father almost certainly would have.) “We went all the way to New Jersey from Ohio and then down here.”

  “I’m just going t
o head back there and grab a broom,” he said, pointing in the direction of the janitorial closet. “But feel free to make yourselves at home. I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.”

  The kids nodded at him, and he headed to the closet, which he frequently had trouble opening. Stefan, who came to clean the place once a month, always managed to get it open so smoothly—how? They both had the same set of keys. Then, as he fiddled with the door yet again, he remembered with a small gasp that he’d forgotten to pay Stefan for last month’s service. He’d gotten the invoice and put it on top of the computer in his office—why hadn’t anyone reminded him? He shook his head, remembering that this was no one’s job except his own. Just because he was the rabbi didn’t mean his congregation had to do all the work for him. That was a holier-than-thou habit he’d picked up in yeshiva that he was determined to shake. The last thing he wanted was his child memorizing Torah for her bat mitzvah with some ideas about how being the rabbi’s daughter made her superior to other children in the congregation. Or worse—how being an observant Jew made her better than, more faithful than the many secular and observant-but-non-Jewish friends he hoped she’d someday have. Broom in hand, he vowed to himself (as he had many times before) to work hard to unlearn all his old habits.

  He reentered the sanctuary smiling. Across the room, the boy was being hugged by a very small woman, smaller than he was, who was whispering “You piece of shit” into his hair and crying what sounded like tears of relief.