by Dara Horn
“I want to hear more,” Dr. Moskowitz said, “but I have to ask you a clinical question before we go further. Do you ever have thoughts of killing yourself?”
Rachel nodded. “All the time, but it won’t work.”
Dr. Moskowitz pursed her lips. “What do you mean, it won’t work?”
“I mean there’s no point in trying. It’s just a fantasy.”
Dr. Moskowitz made a note on the clipboarded paper propped in front of her. She seemed relieved. “It’s very common to have suicidal ideation without ever acting on those thoughts,” Dr. Moskowitz said. “You’re very brave to share that with me.”
Either brave or stupid, Rachel thought. Of course, everything brave was also stupid. Sadly the same could not be said of the reverse.
“So tell me about this—this negative behavior pattern,” Dr. Moskowitz said.
Rachel drew in a breath. “Well, I was widowed a few years ago,” she began.
Dr. Moskowitz held her pen still. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Grief can be devastating.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Rachel muttered. The doctor looked alarmed. “I mean, that’s not my”—what was the term on the form in the waiting room?—“my chief complaint.”
Dr. Moskowitz tipped her head, as if listening to the wind. If only all these people knew how familiar they look, how unoriginal they are, Rachel thought—and if only they knew how miraculous that was, how they lived and lived again, how no one ever really died, how no one was ever alone. But Dr. Moskowitz was still waiting, listening.
“After my husband died, a man came to see me—a man I knew from before I met my husband. An—an old flame, as they used to say.” She winced, trying to remember what she had chosen as her birthdate on the intake form. She had made herself about sixty, she recalled. It was irritating, constantly adjusting herself—her clothes, her hair, her words, her ideas, everything that was supposedly a personal choice. No one had any idea of how thick a layer of arbitrary conventions enshrouded a naked soul.
The pause as Rachel thought this through was apparently some sort of clinical indicator. “People often feel they need permission to move beyond their grief,” Dr. Moskowitz prompted. “I don’t know you yet, so I shouldn’t say this, but I see you’re struggling, so I want to start off by saying that it’s very normal.”
Rachel shook her head. There would be a lot of garbage to unload before this woman could scrub down her brain. “My problem isn’t that,” she said. “He and I—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Dr. Moskowitz said, “but can you give me this man’s name? It will make it easier to talk about it, going forward.”
Rachel considered coming up with a fake name, but the name burned through her throat, searing her lips. “Elazar,” she said, and shivered. It was the first time she had said his name out loud to anyone but him in over a hundred years.
“I’ve never heard that name before,” Dr. Moskowitz mused. “Is it Spanish?”
“Yes,” Rachel lied. She was still shuddering.
Dr. Moskowitz noticed. “I can see he means a lot to you.”
“He and I have a—a history.”
“Tell me.”
“Isn’t this is a fifty-minute appointment?”
Dr. Moskowitz laughed. “Just give me the highlights then. When did you first meet?”
Rachel bit her lip, as she did every time she heard a question beginning with the word when. “Oh, a long time ago,” she muttered. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“Well, how old were you, about?”
About was right, Rachel thought. Who was counting? Elazar was. Three years at the women’s baths, she heard Elazar say. That’s how old. “About sixteen,” she answered.
“Oh my. That is a long time,” Dr. Moskowitz said. “So you were high school sweethearts?”
Rachel laughed. “Something like that,” she said.
Dr. Moskowitz nodded, taking notes. “And I’m guessing you were in love with him at the time?”
Rachel dropped her eyes to her lap, to the skirt made of some bizarre material someone had concocted in a laboratory, and suddenly remembered the day her mother heard and believed a rumor, how her mother, before beating her with a leather strap, had forced her to sit on the floor, where Rachel had stared down at her own dirty skirt—pure linen then, never mixed with wool, and woven with her own hands—while her mother spat venom, shouted until her little nephews and the two house slaves gathered to listen: Are you going to tell me that you love him? What does that even mean? Do you love him the way you love God? Who commanded you to love him? You can’t be his wife, so you want to be his concubine? How can you love someone without a contract? Are you crazy? Don’t you understand what he can do to you? To think how irrelevant that fury was, how commonplace love had become, a box you checked on a form. Now no one but a psychiatrist would even have a reason to care. Rachel said nothing.
“I understand this is difficult,” Dr. Moskowitz said when Rachel remained silent for too long. “We’re often shaped by our early experiences, more than we might want to admit. And there’s no need to go into detail now. But keeping in mind that those early relationships can be very, very intense, full of wild emotions and complicated sexual dynamics and probably also full of mistakes and regrets, would you say that this was a normal teenage romance?”
Rachel felt herself peering down at her lap again, a habit of centuries. But then she looked back at Dr. Moskowitz and spoke. “If a normal teenage romance involves me giving birth to his child, and then him having my husband murdered, then yes, this was a normal teenage romance.”
Dr. Moskowitz stared, slack-jawed. Her pen fell to the floor. “Wait. What?”
Rachel waved a hand. “He didn’t murder my husband who just died. I was married before.”
“Wait, stop. This man—Elazar—he murdered someone?”
“He didn’t do it himself, he just turned him in to the authorities. He said he didn’t know it would happen that way. But it was obvious. It was obvious!”
“Wait.” Dr. Moskowitz folded and floundered like a fish caught on a line, keeping her eyes on Rachel as she bent over and desperately felt the carpet for her pen. “This was—where did this happen?”
Obfuscation came easily to Rachel. “Overseas.”
Dr. Moskowitz glanced at the paper in her lap. “In Latin America? I’m guessing—during a junta or something like that?”
What’s a hunta? Rachel wondered as she nodded.
Dr. Moskowitz had gathered herself now. Rachel could see her settling back in her chair, resuming her professional pose. “I understand this is painful. You said you have—” Dr. Moskowitz tried to say.
But Rachel had more mental garbage to unload. Hannah was right: there was something beautiful about dumping it all. “He denied he did anything wrong,” she continued. “He still denies it, even now, even when everyone is dead. I should have listened to my mother. My mother knew who he really was—she told me he was a bastard, and that bastards always have something to prove.”
“Wait, wait. You said you and he have a child?”
Rachel swallowed. “A son.”
“And your son is—does he—”
“He died a long time ago.”
Dr. Moskowitz didn’t even mumble a consolation this time. She tipped her head back, like a little girl looking for a lost balloon in the sky.
“See, there’s no one else left in the world who knew me then,” Rachel said. “Not even a child. Everyone from then is gone except for him. He’s the only thing I have. And he ruined my life.” Rachel heard her own words and felt like she had turned into one of her grandchildren, those insanely selfish creatures who actually believed they had lives independent of anyone else’s. He ruined my life. The idea was ridiculous, indulgent, insulting. Her mother would have laughed, a long cruel laugh. She felt like laughing at herself. But she needed to tell someone. “I know people often complain about other people ruining their lives,” she continued. “But no one in
the world has done what he did to me. He didn’t just ruin my life. If he had just ruined my life, at least my life would have eventually ended.”
“Everything eventually ends, Rachel,” Dr. Moskowitz said in a quiet voice. Rachel thought again of that long-ago daughter, the one touched by an inhuman kindness. “It may seem like a curse, but it’s also a great mercy.”
Rachel nodded. “Exactly,” she said, and clutched the armrest of the chair. “That’s the mercy I need. I need this to end. But the only way it can end is if I die.”
“It can feel that way, in the moment,” Dr. Moskowitz said. “And it can be very, very hard to see beyond that moment. But there really is something beyond that moment, and you can get there.”
Rachel could almost feel that lost daughter touching her, gentle fingers clutching her arm. But she needed to be free, and the last thing she needed were those stupid gentle fingers holding her back. “No, Dr. Moskowitz, I need you to listen to me. My problem is that I can’t die.”
Dr. Moskowitz leaned back, her pen poised above the paper. “Tell me what you mean by that.”
Rachel took a breath. “I mean that I can’t die. At first I didn’t know. I just thought I was lucky.” She paused, thinking of how to continue.
“Everyone feels invincible when they’re young,” Dr. Moskowitz offered. “It’s often only when someone our own age dies that mortality feels real.”
But Rachel was no longer listening. “I just thought I was lucky,” she said again. “It wasn’t obvious, at least not right away. I still got hungry and thirsty every day like everyone else; I still had the same body, the same feelings. Years passed, and I even looked older, my face sagged, my skin loosened, my hair got lighter and thinner—maybe just from being exposed to the sun, or maybe it was more from suffering than from age, I don’t know. It was enough that no one who knew me noticed anything strange, and at first I didn’t either. But nothing else changed at all. Illnesses didn’t matter, injuries didn’t matter. Then there was a plague, whole neighborhoods were wiped out, but nothing happened to me, or to him. And then years after that, the city was besieged and everyone starved, but for us it was irrelevant. When the city finally burned I saw that it wasn’t my imagination. I stepped through the fires and walked out the city gates.”
Dr. Moskowitz tried to speak, but Rachel would not let her. “Later I understood that it was the opposite of luck,” she said quickly, “and that was when I started trying. I’ve tried over and over again, everything you could imagine. The only thing that works is if I’m burned alive, but even then I just wake up somewhere a few miles away, with a fresher face. That’s my only way out. Then I can flee, I can change countries, I can at least pretend to start a new life, but only until he appears again.” Dr. Moskowitz, Rachel saw, was furiously taking notes. She felt buoyed by Dr. Moskowitz’s moving pen. “That’s the negative behavior pattern I meant,” Rachel added. “I always go back to him. Every time. He offers me money or help and I take it; he offers me comfort and I take it. I can’t stop myself. No one else in the world knows what I’ve suffered, no one else in the world understands. He’s the most awful person in the world, and I’m as much in love with him now as I was when I was a girl.”
Rachel was surprised to find herself fighting back tears. “Dr. Moskowitz, please, please help me,” she begged. “I need you to make me stop loving him, and I need you to make me die.”
Dr. Moskowitz looked up from her papers, her face still the same open maw of pity. But this time her voice was careful, contained, pressed wine dripping from the stomping trough down to the vessel below it.
“Rachel, you’ve been through a lot, and you’re obviously a very brave woman,” she said. “But grief can be very damaging, and in some cases it can even be deranging. Especially when people blame themselves.” The doctor rearranged her papers on her lap, pulling out a small bluish pad and scribbling numbers and illegible words. “I’m putting you on lithium,” she said. “It’s a low dose to start, just to see how you respond to it, but I think we’ll raise it within the next few weeks.” She tore off the page and handed it to Rachel, an offering. “I think it will bring you some relief. Once you’ve got that relief, we can work together on these—these challenges you’re facing. You’re at a stage in life that’s very difficult, when it’s very hard to change. Here’s your receipt too, for insurance. I’d like to see you again next week.”
Rachel took the papers mindlessly. On the second page, Dr. Moskowitz had checked a box next to Bipolar Affective Disorder, and another next to Psychotic Disorder, NOS. Rachel laughed out loud. “I feel better already,” she said.
Dr. Moskowitz looked confused as Rachel left. When Rachel got home, she slipped the papers into the back of her bathroom drawer, where they belonged, the same sort of spot where she once had kept bones and vials and parchments from holy men.
The following week, when she dropped off Hannah’s sons at her house, she mentioned it. “I saw Dr. Moskowitz a few days ago,” she said with a smile.
“Really? Are you okay, Gram?”
“I am,” she said. “I’m just old. And that means it’s very hard to change.”
And then she went to see Elazar.
CHAPTER
4
MORTALITY
. . .
What reasons are there for being alive?
The more Rachel considered it over the centuries, the fewer she could think of—and those she did think of were contradictory at best:
To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. She did, once. She remembered being a little girl, when the world was full of the weight of God’s presence, bowing down and pressing her forehead against a stone floor, imagining her future children promised to the service of the Lord. She remembered opening her eyes after an illness as a child and feeling each limb of her body pulsing with life, her mother’s words in her ear: “God has healed you.” She recalled seeing her oldest sister, the one who had died young, slipping into her room one night years after her death, promising Rachel that God would bless her; Rachel had risen from her mat on the floor and followed her out of the room only to lose sight of her, but then awoke with a feeling of invincibility, a certainty of a shining future. She remembered the first rains after a drought, dancing on dry ground with her mouth opened toward the skies as fresh cool raindrops pitted the dust, hearing the raucous songs of everyone around her thanking God for their rescue. She had once given all her heart and soul and might to that love, knowing there was nothing else. She still knew, when she walked through the woods and climbed up to sit on rocks older than she, that there was nothing else. And she knew it, too, because of Elazar. But in the years since those times, that love had too often seemed sadomasochistic: seductive, cruel, and irresistible. In other words, like Elazar.
To serve others. This was a somewhat more compelling reason for living, and in any case it was the default for anyone with as many children as she. She had spent endless years, genuinely endless years, doing nothing else, swallowing bile every time she heard a supposedly older woman say, “Enjoy them; it goes by so fast!” At one point she tried to estimate how many thousands of times she had nursed an infant, how many meals she had cooked for others, how many spoons of medicine she had raised to other people’s lips, how many withered hands she had held at bedsides, how many bodies she had buried in the earth. The sacrifice was bottomless, heavy labor cast into a void. Often she felt like a bridge that stretched between two worlds, bearing the weight of those who passed from one to the other. But what was the point of being that bridge when she was never able to cross over herself?
To experience joy. A nice idea, that pursuit of happiness. When people first started considering it, just a few recent centuries ago, it had the advantage of novelty. Why not experience joy? That first morning of flowers blooming in a garden, that first touch of someone’s lips on yours, or that first moment of holding your child, when your body became the gateway to the world, an
d from it, pure light. The problem was that those moments unraveled before you, the petals dropped to the ground, the children and lovers grew older and older until they inevitably drifted away, and then you wondered why you had bothered, if all was destined for the void. The lovers repeated, and she loved them all the same, deeply and honestly, with variations so minor that only those living for less than a century could see them as important. This one was all tenderness; that one preferred to pounce. This one hung around like a stray starving puppy; that one kept leaving the room or the house, needing to be alone. This one was faithful; that one a craven cheat. After hundreds of years, these details that most people spent their lives exploring were only details. Every man was finally just a man, then bones, then dust. And the children repeated, which haunted her most of all. You could have sworn you had had this same wild son or this same hotheaded daughter before, maybe more than once, wearing different clothes. But you could never tell them.
To build for the future. She remembered finding this compelling, once. She recalled one of her father’s heroes, a crazy sage named Honi the Circle-maker, who once drew a circle on the earth, stood inside it, and told God that he would not leave his circle unless it rained—and it did. That legend was silly enough, but what disturbed her was the story of how Honi once saw a man planting a carob tree, a tree that wouldn’t bear fruit for seventy years. When Honi asked the man why he was bothering, the man said, “I myself found fully grown carob trees in the world, and as my parents once planted for me, so I will plant for my children.” A fine idea, Rachel had thought long ago. As one of her bumbling recent grandchildren put it, I just want to feel like I’m leaving the world a better place than how I found it. A fine idea, if one is planning on leaving. In fact, that was Honi’s problem. In the next part of the story, which she remembered her father copying down long ago, Honi fell into a deep sleep and woke up seventy years later, to find a man harvesting the carob tree’s fruit. Honi asked the man, “Did you plant this tree?” The man answered that his grandfather had. But then the story took a turn for the worse. Honi went back to his own house and discovered that his children had died, and only his grandchildren were there, none of whom would believe he was Honi. His students at the academy where he had taught were likewise dead. The new students enjoyed quoting his ideas, but they too were annoyed by this crazy person claiming to be Honi. Eventually Honi asked God to kill him, because he realized he had become superfluous. Which in fact was the entire purpose of life, to live in such a way that one made oneself superfluous. And therein lay the root of the problem. There was no point in any of it, none at all, unless one had plans to leave.