The Mystics of Mile End

by Sigal Samuel

“That I’m religious. Did he tell you that?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he must have mentioned it at some point, I guess. Why?”

  A deep V had appeared between her eyebrows. He said, more calmly, “No reason. I was just wondering, you know, what he used to say about me. What he thought of me.” Sitting on the edge of the desk, he put down his glass and gave a sad little grin. “I miss him, that’s all.”

  The V vanished from her forehead. She put her glass down next to his and perched beside him on the edge of the desk, where, very briefly, she hesitated. Then she reached out and touched his hand. He laced fingers with her, and found that her palm was warm. Her pulse, beating against his thumb, was racing. “I miss him, too,” she whispered.

  He looked up.

  Their eyes connected.

  And in that instant, he could tell she saw something in his gaze that troubled her—but before her brain could process it and tell her body to stop him, he leaned in and kissed her.

  Val’s mouth was petal-soft, and for one full moment it surrendered to his mouth breathlessly, passionately, almost gratefully. As if these were the lips she loved and had missed all these months. Her cardigan was slipping off one shoulder; he brushed it aside and ran his fingers over her skin. He brought his hands to her hips—and felt her body seize up beneath his touch. She froze, her torso ramrod-straight, before pushing him off with both hands.

  “You knew,” she said.

  He stared down at the carpet.

  She took his chin and forced it up. “This whole time, you knew about your dad and me, and you didn’t say anything! And now”—she gestured at the space between them—“now this?”

  With a violent downward motion, he shook his head free of her grasp.

  In a whisper that was suddenly strangely kind, strangely devoid of anger and full of pity, she said, “Why? Why would you want to do a thing like this?”

  His mouth broke open and an anguished noise escaped him. “Because,” he groaned, “I didn’t want to believe anymore . . . I needed to not believe . . . and I just had to do something not good, so I could prove to myself that I don’t believe. I needed to do something so bad . . .”

  He stopped. How could he explain it to her? How he’d needed to do something so bad he’d be shut out of faith for good, no more looping back and forth. How seducing his father’s lover was the worst possible thing he could think of to do. How he’d come to her seeking his own perdition.

  A look of astonishment came over her face. “No,” she said. “I won’t let you. I won’t let you do this to yourself. Do you hear me?”

  Lev said nothing.

  “Do you hear me?” she repeated, louder now.

  His throat felt tight.

  “Do you hear me?” she said, and this time she took him by the shoulders and shook.

  At her touch something in him released. Tears came to his eyes and he didn’t try to stop them. He was nodding, laughing and crying, his shoulders suddenly wonderfully light. He had spent the past few months dangling over the edge of an abyss, psyching himself up to jump—and just when he’d been about to do it, Val had flung out an arm and caught him. And in catching him, in refusing to let him go through with his self-destructive plan, she had performed an act of kindness that he now understood was the very mirror and mechanism of God’s kindness. It was not from on high but from on low, not through miracles but through human hands that the divine plan was carried out.

  The people in Glassman’s story—the ones who had words to describe every experience under the sun—he envied them. Right now, he couldn’t find the words to thank her. But they would come. And when they did, she would be around to hear them. So, instead of speaking, he shot her a smile. This time, she returned it.

  Sitting with his back to the window the next day, Glassman watched the late-afternoon sunlight brushing his wife’s skin with gold. It was unseasonably warm, but he felt cold all over. Earlier that day the nurse had said his wife probably wouldn’t make it through the night. Glassman had pressed his ear to her chest and inwardly agreed with the nurse’s assessment. The heartbeat was so hollow that he was struck by admiration for his wife’s diligence. She had expelled those words, all right. Had disposed of them thoroughly. In her veins and arteries, the blood was running freely now, not a single noun or verb to slow its passage from the heart.

  She had expelled the unspoken punctuation of life long since: The exclamation points she’d used up in their lovemaking, nights when they gestured wildly on each other’s bodies. The commas she’d baked into curled pastries, never-ending rugelach whose trips in and out of the oven broke each day into smaller, more digestible clauses. And the ellipses, those she had been expressing all winter long. Because what was this extended sleep if not one last protracted pause before the sentence of life was studded with its final period? After months of waiting, a beautiful and forgiving full stop was finally coming into view, and at the sight of it Glassman breathed a sigh of relief. He was all eager anticipation to end this passage and come up, flush left, against the first paragraph of whatever story awaited them in the next new life.

  On the nightstand beside the bed the bottle of white pills beckoned.

  He picked it up but did not open it. For a few minutes, he allowed himself the pleasure of floating out into a future he knew he would not inhabit. Allowed himself to picture Alex knocking on the door, climbing the stairs, entering the bedroom. Finding his teacher. Retracing his steps only to return minutes later, breath short and eyes wide, with his best friend. They would stand in the doorway and survey the scene. And what a scene it would be! On the bed, his dead body splayed out. His exploded chest unburdened. The raw flesh of his heart sluggishly leaking the last of what was spattered all around the room. Words. Sticking to the sheets, hanging from the bedposts, clinging to the grooves of the rolltop desk, plastered to the window. All the words he would never have been able to pump from his heart in time if it hadn’t been for those little white helpers, contracting the muscle faster and faster and—

  The sound of a car honking outside roused him from this fantasy.

  Rising from his wife’s side, he went to the window. A taxi had stopped in front of the Meyer house. The car door opened and a girl he vaguely recognized stepped out onto the curb. She had pale blond hair, and deep concern was etched across her face. She waited, apparently for someone else to step out of the car.

  When nobody did, she reached her hand inside and helped another girl from the cab. And this girl Glassman recognized instantly, his breath catching in his chest. Joy flared up inside him. But a second later it was snuffed out again. Because, looking at her, he knew immediately that something was wrong.

  Samara stood stock-still on the sidewalk, her hair blowing out behind her in the breeze. Her gaze dull and hollow. Her mouth a thin, flat line. She was staring straight at her childhood house, and yet her face registered not even the barest recognition.

  Lev hopped down Katz’s front steps with a smile. At the curb, he turned around and saw the man waving from the window. He waved back, his heart full of gratitude. He had been nervous about coming over here, afraid of the reaction he might get, but Katz had accepted his apology instantly. The sick fluid of dread running through his body dissolved and made way for relief. A few weak rays of light landed on his skin and he savored them, bending his steps toward home.

  But when he rounded the corner, the smile fell from his face.

  Jenny was pounding on the door and ringing the bell. His sister stood absolutely still, staring into space. Her gaze passed over him and in it he saw neither love nor remorse, just a terrifying nothingness. He felt the dread seep back into every corner and crevice of his body, spilling out onto the sidewalk in a long, dark shadow.

  Jenny turned and saw him. “Lev!” she called, relief flooding her face as she ran to meet him. “Thank God you’re here, I need your help, I don’t know what to do. It’s Samara—she showed up on my doorstep, and she fainted, and since then she’s hardly spoken or
eaten or—”

  But he was running past Samara, running past Jenny. Climbing the steps to the door, turning his key in the lock, stepping over the threshold. Jenny scrambled up behind him, grabbing his shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” she cried. Her eyes were full of fear and her fingernails were digging into his jacket. “You can’t just leave us here! You need to help her!”

  “I am,” he said before pulling away and racing into the darkness of the house. “I’m calling Alex.”

  Ten minutes later Alex was at the door, rain drizzling down the neck of his yellow raincoat, fists balled up tight in his pockets. Lev opened it before he could knock. “Is she okay?” Alex said.

  Lev led the way into the hall, then raised a hand to scratch at the tiny scar above his brow. “I don’t know,” he murmured, blue eyes blinking fast. “She won’t talk. Not to me, not to anyone. She doesn’t even really move that much, except when someone kind of pulls her along. Jenny brought her here, and they’re in her old room now, so.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Alex asked, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.

  “Talk to her. Try to get her to talk to you.” Lev studied the floor, shifting his feet. “You . . . I mean . . . you’re the only one who really knows what’s going on with her, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess. But, honestly? I don’t really know that much.”

  “But you know what she’s trying to do and . . . you probably also know why?”

  “It’s—I don’t know if you know this, but—it’s something your dad was working on. The Tree of Life, I mean. Before he died, he was writing a book on it, and I think—I think maybe he wasn’t just writing about it, you know?”

  Lev’s gaze shifted over to an old photo of his dad on the credenza—and stayed there.

  “Lev? What is it?”

  “Nothing . . . It’s just—I just remembered—before my dad died, I saw him once in front of the yeshiva. He had his hand raised to his chest, like this, and he looked like he was . . .”

  “Was what?”

  Lev ripped his gaze away from the photo. “Praying.”

  “Praying? Your dad?”

  Lev smiled faintly.

  “Anyway,” Alex said, “I think Samara is trying to finish what he started. And I think the reason she sent me those letters was because she needed to—ground herself, sort of. Tie herself to something, or someone, before she got too high up. Sort of like ballast.”

  Lev blinked. Alex was hoping he wouldn’t ask why Samara would want to tie herself to him and not her own brother—and, luckily, he didn’t. Instead he led the way to Samara’s room.

  Samara was sitting cross-legged on the bed with her back against the wall. Jenny was leaning over her and whispering in scared, pleading tones.

  Lev cleared his throat. “Alex is here.”

  “Oh!” Jenny turned around. “Hi. Thank you so much for coming.”

  Alex nodded, wondering why in the world she would thank him for coming. Of course he’d come. Where else would he be?

  “I think Alex might be able to help,” Lev said. “Can we maybe give him a minute alone with Samara?”

  “Of course, of course,” Jenny said, smiling gratefully at Alex on her way out the door.

  Alex edged closer to Samara. Her skin was paler than he’d ever seen it. She was thinner, too. Her dark hair, which had always been full and wavy and beautiful, looked stringy now, as if she hadn’t showered in days. The sight of her sitting like a statue with those empty, unfocused eyes pained him, and he looked away toward the window. The old paper sign was gone from it, but he could still see the gummy residue left behind by the Scotch tape that had held her message in place all those years. Please call. And he had, easily deciphering her series of taps and rests, the long strings of binary code through which she conveyed her innermost thoughts. But the silence emanating from her now was different. There were no ones, just zeros. One big zero, to be precise. A zero so large you could crawl through it.

  Was that what she was trying to do? Crawl straight through silence, straight through nothingness, to the other side?

  Chilled by that thought, he glanced over at her bookshelf, seeking comfort and familiarity. Sure enough, there were all her old books, lined up in a row in the order he knew so well. Five volumes of the Pentateuch interspersed with the five volumes of Scientific American he’d given her: her way of telling him without telling him that religious mysticism and scientific study weren’t as distinct as he liked to believe. On impulse, he trailed a finger along them. Samara’s body suddenly shivered, as if he had run a finger down her spine.

  He crouched by the bed. “Samara?”

  Silence.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Silence.

  “I know you can hear me.”

  Silence.

  “Listen, I got your letters. I know what you’re trying to do. But it’s enough now, okay? You’ve gone far enough, don’t you think? Lev’s getting scared. And Jenny. And me, too. Do you think . . .” He watched her closely. “Do you think you could come back now? Please?”

  For a second, he thought he saw a flicker of recognition in her eyes. His heart lit up with fire—but in the next second her eyes went blank, and a thick fog of silence blanketed the room.

  He panicked. All this time he had assumed that he was the one who would be able to save her. That was why she’d sent him the letters, wasn’t it? That was the simplest explanation. All things being equal, the simplest explanation tended to be the right one. And yet here he was, helplessly rocking on his heels, babbling on and on, hardly knowing what he said. Trying to drown out the silence. But the silence was winning. It was becoming acrid, corrosive. It burned his throat and bleached his insides. Maybe he couldn’t save her. Maybe no one could. He fled.

  When he found Lev and Jenny in the living room, the naked hope in their faces was almost more than he could bear.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t . . . she wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Jenny burst into tears, dissolving before his eyes, her shoulders crumpling under the weight of her sorrow.

  She wept for a long time, tears rolling freely down her cheeks. And the more she cried, the more the darkness was washed from his eyes, ebbing away in small, cold waves. A strange lump was rising in his throat. He was slowly coming to understand that, even if Samara did return, she would not be returning to him.

  He looked at Lev and saw a deep sympathy in his friend’s face.

  “I’m going to get help,” Alex murmured. “I’ll be back soon.” When he left the house a moment later, the cold rain that sluiced through his raincoat and bit into the back of his neck came as a beautiful distraction, an exquisite relief.

  Someone was knocking on Glassman’s front door, but it took a few seconds for the sound—desperation on wood—to register in his brain. Even then, he did not rise from his wife’s side. Because, just then, he had his hands full: in the left, his wife’s palm, and in the right, a pill bottle.

  When the knocking stopped, Glassman breathed a sigh of relief. But a second later he heard footsteps clambering up the stairs.

  “Mr. Glassman!” Alex’s voice ricocheted off the bedroom walls, hitting him between the shoulder blades. “I’m so glad you’re still up. I need your help!”

  But Glassman, his back to the door, did not respond.

  A floorboard creaked as the boy stepped into the room. “Hello?”

  Glassman’s fingers tightened around the pill bottle, hiding it from view. “Go away,” he said. “I am tired.”

  “But—it’s Samara—she’s back, and she won’t talk to anyone, and . . .” The boy’s voice faltered, close to hysteria. “I don’t know what to do. I mean, I explained to Lev what was happening at least, but—now what?”

  Glassman didn’t answer.

  “Because I mean, before, when I was here, you said she might not be able to come down, and you were right. She’s—stuck. But there must be something you can do,
right? Some method, some way of helping her? Please, just tell me. What should I do?”

  Glassman saw a wretched road forking at his feet. He was being forced to choose between the dying and the living. Between his wife and Samara. He loved them both, wanted to travel both paths simultaneously, but with every passing second he could feel the boy’s impatience growing, could feel the pressure mounting to choose, choose already! Left, right, left, right, his eyes flicked from side to side. He heard Alex take another step toward him and the pressure broke him and he blurted, “Come back tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” Alex paused. “If I come back tomorrow, you’ll help me?”

  He had struck out on a path. Now momentum compelled him down it.

  “Come back tomorrow,” Glassman repeated.

  The boy hesitated. “Okay. I’ll come first thing in the morning, I guess. Are you okay?”

  “Thank God,” Glassman said. “Thank God.”

  “Okay. Well. See you tomorrow, then, Mr. Glassman. Good night.”

  The boy left.

  Glassman listened to his receding footsteps. As he heard the front door click shut downstairs, his shoulders relaxed. In a way, he was glad Alex had come. At least now he could be sure he and his wife would be found quickly, before they had a chance to decay.

  On the bed, their dead bodies splayed out. Just that. Nothing more.

  Because, of course, he knew. That story about the human heart and its ration of words? It was just a story. Just a meshuggeneh story. But it was the story he’d signed on to, because that was what he’d thought she wanted, that was what he’d thought she needed—a story that would justify a life of silence. For sixty-three years he had lived by that story. Sixty-three years and no “I love you,” no “I hate you,” sixty-three years without—without even “hello”! What would he not have paid for this one little word, this one little nothing of a word? Hello! And still he did not break the contract. Not even inside his own head! He thought: She wants silence? I will give her silence! He thought: She wants to believe in a meshuggeneh story? So I, too, will believe. And he had gone on believing for so many years that to abandon the narrative now, at this stage, was inconceivable.