The Comedown

  “Hi!” Ari said, and they all turned to look at him.

  “Oh, hi!” the woman responded, and he could tell from her response that she wasn’t sober. He himself had never been drunk or high or in any way mentally altered in his life, not even on Simchat Torah, and his first thought was: How is she feeling right now?

  “You must be the rabbi here?” she asked, her speech loose.

  Ari, flustered, nodded.

  “This is Lee, my son, and Maria. And this is Lee’s friend—”

  “Tweety,” the genderless kid said.

  “And I’m Diedre,” she breathed. “Lee and Maria want to take a look around, if that’s all right with you?”

  “Of course! Did you know that today marks the hundred-year anniversary of the temple’s construction?”

  The Lee kid’s eyes widened meaningfully at Diedre, who, now that Ari was seeing her up close, had some crow’s-feet around her eyes, some wrinkles at the side of her mouth. He bowed his head and breathed in quickly, then bit his lips and exhaled, looking brightly at all of them.

  “Listen—I have a little work I need to take care of in my office. Just give me a knock if you need anything.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much, Rabbi—”

  “Ari Kamzin.”

  “Thank you, Rabbi Kamzin. I’m Diedre, by the way, if I haven’t already said.”

  “Great! Pleased to meet you all.”

  Two steps away and he’d already forgotten their names.

  In his office, he booted up the computer, a desktop model from the early 2000s badly in need of replacement. As the computer ran a tedious virus scan, he thought about how much or little he should watch what the kids and the mom were doing. Maybe he’d offer to drive them home, or to the hotel they were staying at if they weren’t from around Heimsheim. He furrowed his brow as the computer made its crinkly waking-up noises. His thoughts were punctuated by a loud thunderclap, and lightning illuminated the windows of the temple. His heart began pounding. Storms like this always served as a reminder of his insignificance, the horrifying possibility that everything he loved could be taken from him in an instant. He fished his phone from his pocket and texted Shosh: Running a little late—some people from out of town came to visit the temple for the centennial. (Guess I’m the Shabbos goy!) Will be home w/in the hour. Love you and Lina.

  He shuffled through a stack of papers that he was sure contained Stefan’s invoice. If it wasn’t in there, it would probably be in the file cabinet, filed away already. He was always imagining he’d paid bills he hadn’t paid, which made him look cheap, which made him worry that other people thought he was cheap. He tried to pay Stefan on time as much as possible, but there were months that he’d forgotten until halfway into the next month, and he found Stefan and told him how sorry he was and cut him a check for time and a half. Poor Stefan. He was always smiling and waving his hands and saying, “No sir, please don’t worry about me, I know the money’s coming.” Which was incredibly generous of him, considering this was his livelihood and his whole family probably lived paycheck to paycheck. Ari couldn’t imagine life without Shosh’s salary. How would they buy Lina’s clothes and food? How would they keep up with repairs on the house?

  He found Stefan’s invoice and remembered the woman and the kids. He groaned internally. These people probably wanted a tour of the temple. It was a historic landmark, after all. On more than one occasion people had wandered in looking for tours. Maybe he could make Stefan a tour guide and pay him double. It was a funny idea, not the kind of thing he’d actually do, but nice enough to think about. Some people actually liked that mystical stuff, paid good money to hear it. If they started charging for tours, would they no longer be tax-exempt? Shosh would probably know. She always knew about things like that.

  He cut Stefan’s check and looked at his phone: We miss you, Shabbos goy! She always knew how to make him smile, his Shosh. Back when they’d first met he’d been a nervous yeshiva student and she’d been the daughter of a prominent Miami rabbi. She wore a long black wig—it would take him years to find out that her real hair was dirty blond. He remembered when she’d invited him to her family’s Seder. While her mother prepared the Seder plate, he’d watched as Shosh searched for bread crumbs under the couch. He’d asked if he could help at all and she’d looked up at him and said, “Yeah, could you check the bathroom door jamb?” He tried to keep himself from laughing. What family got bread crumbs in the bathroom doorjamb? But he did as he was told. He’d loved her way back then. He knew he’d marry her when she lay down on her stomach to stick a feather duster under the couch. He spent more time looking at her that day than he did checking anything in the doorjamb, so when she sat up and caught him she hissed, “Ari, doorjamb!” Years later it became a joke between them. Did you hide the salt again, Doorjamb?

  He texted her back, I’m not your Shabbos goy, Doorjamb! And then for fear it sounded too harsh: Hehehe. It was strange to him, this family, appearing on this day. It would be a lie to say he didn’t want them gone, which was ungenerous of him. He didn’t want them gone, really. He just wanted a little quiet time before he had to pack up and go home and help Shosh change and feed Lina. Just some time to apologize to Stefan when he came in to clean, some time to reshelve his books and tidy his desk and take a lint roller to the parochet in front of the ark. He had no idea why or how, but those curtains were always full of fuzz at the end of the week, fuzz and the stray hairs of congregants. Which was strange, considering how far from the ark everyone sat. It was like a fuzz magnet, that thing.

  And then the mother approached him and spoke the name he’d grow to hate.

  “We know this was probably before your time, but have you heard of someone named Leland Bloom-Mittwoch? He used to be a very devoted member of this congregation.”

  Leland Bloom-Mittwoch. It was a bizarre name. An unforgettable one. If his dad had mentioned that name in passing, Ari was sure he would’ve remembered it.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I recognize that name.”

  There was the sound of keys at the back door. Stefan was just arriving now, late from working his other job. How he worked two cleaning jobs was entirely beyond Ari, who usually couldn’t be bothered to clean his room. Shosh liked to remind him how messy he was, which didn’t exactly help motivate him to clean, but she did have a point. He was probably the messiest person he knew outside of his old college roommate Levi (he slept in his dirty laundry!) and his daughter, who was constantly puking on herself. You complain about their spit-ups now, but you’ll hate it when they get older, his father had told him. Unlike his father, Ari had resolved to hate nothing about his child. Or children, if Shosh decided she was up for it.

  “Are there any records we could look through?” the intelligent-eyed girl was asking.

  “Records we don’t keep, I’m afraid,” Ari said.

  He was getting agitated now. He had other things he needed to do. For instance, the mikveh bath needed cleaning—he’d be sure to tell Stefan. The drains had been clogged for a while and he’d done nothing to fix them. Plus the check, plus he needed to get home to Shosh and Lina ASAP. Why didn’t he just man up and show these people the door?

  “I wish I could be of more help to you,” he said. “I have to go help the janitor quickly, but I’ll be right back.”

  “Take your time,” she said. “And thank you.”

  Stefan was in the janitorial closet in his white jumper, digging for supplies. Ari never knew why he wore that jumper, especially given that he didn’t work at the kind of place that would require him to wear a jumper, but he figured Stefan had his work outfit and his civilian outfit and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. Ari himself had a work outfit and a civilian outfit. His work outfit was his robe and his civilian outfit was a ripped T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants that said Brandeis down the side. He secretly hoped Lina would go to Brandeis, though he’d be fine with whatever college she chose. He wouldn’t pressure her to be just like her pare
nts.

  He apologized for the late check to Stefan, who told him it was “no big deal.” Stefan was too kind for his own good. Too kind and caring and selfless. He was the sort of guy who would be taken advantage of by someone other than Ari, someone who exploited foreign laborers by withholding an unethical amount from their paychecks.

  As Ari left the back room he realized he’d forgotten to tell Stefan about the mikveh bath. No use beating himself up—if he’d let it go this long, what was the harm in letting it go another day? None of the women in the congregation observed niddah laws anymore, and those old enough to care about the mitzvot probably didn’t menstruate anyway. A few of the young women had gotten into reclaiming it as a feminist ritual, but that had only lasted a few months and no one had said anything about the drains. It hadn’t come to Ari’s attention until he’d tried the bath out himself one night and found a giant knot of hair floating over the mouth of a drain. Why he hadn’t made a note to himself then and there to get the drains fixed, he had no idea. Maybe it was because the mikveh was old-fashioned and putting time into it would make him look like a man overly concerned with women’s cleanliness, like the nonfeminist he didn’t want to be. His phone buzzed, probably from Shosh.

  “Do you folks need any more help?” he called as he made his way back to the sanctuary. He stopped at the entrance, eyes wide. In just the few minutes he’d been gone, the room had been torn apart: benches opened, cushions flung willy-nilly, the rug rolled up, tiles dislodged from the floor. And the family had disappeared.

  “Stefan!” he yelled. “Stefan, we’ve been robbed!”

  * * *

  A week later he still hadn’t recovered from the embarrassment of crying wolf. He couldn’t look Stefan in the eye: all Stefan would see, he was sure, was an overdramatic boy-rabbi with absolutely no street smarts. It had taken the two of them ten minutes to determine that no valuables had been stolen, that the safes in Ari’s office and the programming office were both uncracked. The place was a mess, but Stefan had put it back together speedily, insisting all the while that he didn’t need overtime. Ari decided to pay him time and a half just to be safe. Ari hadn’t gotten home until ten that night, Lina long asleep. He tried watching TV with Shosh but lost track of the plot and fell asleep on her lap. She was forgiving, his Shosh, but he knew there was only so much coming home late and passing out she could tolerate. She had told him when she was pregnant that the fact that her hours were more flexible than his didn’t mean she wanted to raise the kid on her own. He had been so obliging, so in tune with what she was saying, but now he was slipping. And all because he thought he’d been robbed by three kids and a drunk lady. The height of stupidity. A side effect of male privilege, as his best friend at Brandeis, Shelly Ruderman, used to remind him. “You are a straight white man, Ari,” she would say, “so if you make any decision without someone else’s input, it’s going to be stupid.” Such as the decision to cry wolf to Stefan and stay late scouring the temple for “evidence.”

  A week after the centennial, he was leading the congregation through the Aleinu via muscle memory and using his mental energy to determine how to be a better father and husband. There were some men in the congregation he truly admired, men he could tell never disappointed their families. Like Ben Wasserman, who managed a Menards and whose twins Ari had seen through their b’nai mitzvah. Or Louis Rust, who had four kids under the age of ten and never forgot to bring his mother to services. What did the Bens and the Louises know about manhood that Ari had never learned? Was it how they carried themselves, shoulders back, hair parted neatly, beards well trimmed? Was it their salaries, their degrees? Was it how well they probably communicated with their wives? Would Shosh prefer to be with a Ben or a Louis, someone who would come home on time and put Lina to bed and then have sex with Shosh against the dresser like they did in the movies? Was Shosh secretly ashamed that she had chosen the gawky yeshiva student who fell asleep with his head in her lap? Would she make this clear to him by having a years-long secret affair with a Ben or a Louis?

  Horrible thoughts. He was having horrible thoughts because that horrible family had torn up his sanctuary.

  The Bens and the Louises were looking at him pleasantly now as they sang the Aleinu, their wives and children singing along, the youngest ones’ eyes wandering as they pretended to sing. Ari had been young in temple once, a little boy in a kippah already memorizing prayers when he could barely walk. When you’re young enough, temple is a soothing place, somewhere to go and chant and watch burning candles flicker in the distance, a place where it seems like it’s perpetually bedtime but things are just interesting enough to stay awake for. Whenever he was leading services and saw that look of sleepy wonder on Lina’s little face, he knew she was feeling what he once felt and his heart swelled. He wouldn’t be like his father, interrupting that beautiful haziness between sleep and wakefulness with a command to sit up straight and pay attention. He wouldn’t be the kind of father who made his child recite kaddishes in the car on the way to services. He’d become a rabbi in spite of his father, not because of him. Shosh was always telling him it was in his blood, which he guessed was easy to believe, but he really would never have cared about tikkun olam if it hadn’t been for the way he’d felt in the temple when he was little, like G-d was whispering kind words to him through all the cracks in the floor and shining warm orange light through the stippled glass windows. That was all him, not his father. He told Shosh, “If I didn’t believe in Yahweh, I don’t care what my father said, I would’ve been the rebellious son who went into orthopedic surgery or dentistry.” That always got a laugh out of her. When she laughed at his jokes he knew he must be doing something right. Could a Ben or a Louis make her laugh like that? He doubted it.

  He scanned away from the Bens and Louises to the other congregants, like Tim and Isaac Rosenberg, whose wedding he’d officiated. He’d like to see his father marry a gay couple. He’d like to see his father do a lot of things, like recognize the existence of black and brown Jews, or make the temple wheelchair accessible, or buy art for the walls that wasn’t all European-Ashkenazi, or do more to restore the temple than install gray-brown shag carpets in the offices.

  His father was everything about the faith that Ari hated, all the oppressive and exclusionary rules he was trying to unlearn every day. Luckily he had the grace and patience of congregants like Tim and Isaac to help him in the unlearning process. If it wasn’t for congregants like them, he’d be at risk of becoming one of those bearded, bifocaled rabbis who was always quoting Talmud to make people feel bad about themselves and their decisions. So what if someone is gay? Or doesn’t want to be a boy or a girl? Or can’t afford to stop working on Saturday? Who was he to judge? He was just a spiritual vessel whose profession it was to make some incredible people, Jewish people, aware of their unique covenant with G-d and their earthbound duty to make the world a better place. He was like a mailman. Or a garbageman. As long as he showed up and did his job and didn’t make waves, everything would run smoothly.

  Who was that, though, sitting next to Isaac? She was a large woman, very overweight, but he didn’t mean that in a judgmental way. He himself was a little plump in the middle and even though Shosh was sometimes on him about losing weight, he knew that people can just be born a little heavier and there’s no harm in that. The woman had thick blond hair tied up in a shape like a turnip. He didn’t recognize her. Neither did he recognize the man sitting next to her, reed-thin with a patchy beard and huge eyes like he’d been drugged.

  After the service, Etta Gorstein held his hands in hers as she always did and told him how beautifully he sang, and Tim and Isaac congratulated him on another enchanting Shabbat. The overweight woman grinned and introduced herself: her hand was thick and damp.

  “I’m Melinda,” she said. The thin man offered his hand, a disturbed look on his face. “This is my son, Leland.”

  Leland.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Ari said, aware that he was doing his
Unfriendly Voice, which Shosh said was different from his normal voice in that it was two octaves lower and made him speak slower.

  “The synagogue is beautiful,” the woman, who was clearly a goy, said. “I’ve never been in a place this, um, majestic before.”

  “Mom,” the son said under his breath.

  “It’s very old,” Ari said quickly. “A lot of history here.”

  “I can only imagine,” the woman said.

  “Well, thank you for coming,” Ari said. “I hope you enjoyed the service.”

  “Oh, but, um—” The woman tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

  His worst nightmare. He touched his phone in his pocket. He would call Stefan. He would call the police.

  “We’re actually here with a question for you.”

  “Mom,” Leland said again, louder.

  “We were, um, wondering if you remember someone coming here named Leland Bloom-Mittwoch?”

  “No!” The woman, her son, and a few of the straggler congregants jumped. “No,” he repeated, trying to say it cuttingly. “If you are in any way associated with the people who came here last week—”

  Now the son was taking an interest in the whole thing. “There were people here last week asking about Leland Bloom-Mittwoch?”

  Who were these people? It had been so tedious to get those tiles back into the floor last week, and it had taken Stefan a whole day afterward to regrout them. “Yes. And they tore up my sanctuary. I’ll call the police. I’ll actually call them if you try anything.”

  “No, no, no.” The woman held her hands up like he’d accused her of having a weapon. Her son did the same. The son especially looked like he’d lived a hard life, had that hollow-cheeked meth-smoking face Ari sometimes saw on shirtless young men pushing grocery carts along the side of the road. The grocery carts were usually full of nongrocery items: cans of spray paint and ashtrays and giant bags of rock salt. Why these young men were always in transit, Ari had no idea. He liked to imagine they had girlfriends (or boyfriends!) waiting for them at home, cooking meth like some people cooked dinner. He would teach Lina not to ignore these men, to give them whatever change she could spare, to offer them rides in her car if they looked particularly desperate. Well, maybe not rides in her car, that probably wouldn’t be the safest. But at the very least compassion. At the very least a noncondescending smile. Tikkun olam.