by Dara Horn
“I couldn’t bear it either,” Elazar said. “And as a priest I’m not supposed to approach the dead.” She thought of correcting him, reminding him of how irrelevant it was: there was no more reason to remain ritually pure, no more Temple in which to serve. He needed no reminding. He paused, a catch in his throat. “But I knew it was coming. Last night I said goodbye.”
Rachel gulped dry air. “You—you were with him?”
“I live here,” Elazar said. “I’m his youngest student.”
“Elazar,” she whispered. “Why?”
He cast his eyes to the ground. “I’m not the best or the wisest, I know that. But I’m surely the most devoted. I followed him. I followed the story.”
All the anger Rachel had borne for the past seven years ignited within her, flaring in her body like a pillar of fire, a fire so all-consuming that she no longer knew who it was for—Elazar, Zakkai, Yochanan, the Romans, God, herself—and it no longer mattered. She had become a vast and towering rage that scorched the entire world.
“There is no more story, Elazar!” she screamed. “Don’t you understand? There is no more story! We’ve lost everything, everything! The story is over!”
Elazar stood before her, a young boy and an old, old man. “In that case,” he said softly, “maybe it’s time to begin again.”
CHAPTER
14
HER TIME
. . .
Rachel hadn’t expected it to look like this. She had imagined something like her seventieth son’s chemical laboratory, the one he built in the storage room in the back of her husband’s tailor shop: two narrow tables cluttered with old metal pots and glass jars and little burners, something always boiling and smoking and filling the room with acrid fumes, incense that might have once cleansed her soul but that instead made her struggle to breathe. But Hannah’s lab was completely devoid of smoke. Instead, as Rachel noticed while being led in by an unshaven man-child in a toothpaste-stained shirt, the series of small rooms were full of computers, along with countertops holding humming plastic boxes that might have also been computers. The tables and chairs looked surprisingly cheap. A basketball hoop was tacked to one wall above a wastebasket. Rachel sidestepped a wad of gum on the floor and stood still. She looked around at all these impossibly young people staring at their screens and felt a rush of awe she had not felt since the day she knelt in the sanctuary before Elazar’s father: mortal wonder and dread.
“Gram!”
Hannah rose from her cheap chair. Rachel trembled in her granddaughter’s presence. If Hannah felt the import of the moment, she didn’t let on. She craned her neck around the room. “Guys, this is my grandmother,” she announced. “She’s offered to help us out, so be nice!” The gaggle of half-adults at the computers nearby tittered a bit before resuming their glazed stares at screens. Their ease made Rachel nervous. “Come, I’ll take you down to phlebotomy,” Hannah said, and grandly took Rachel by the hand. The two of them walked on together.
“Most of the clinical stuff happens at the outpatient center next door,” Hannah explained. “We hardly ever take samples here; it’s only for special cases, when we need to follow up or the samples are really sensitive or something like that. You definitely qualify as a special case.” She waited until another woman passed them in the hallway, and then ushered Rachel into a little room.
Rachel sat down in the throne-like chair with its enormous armrest, next to a rack of test tubes. To her surprise, Hannah closed the door behind them and leaned against it, facing Rachel.
“Gram, I wanted to bring you here myself, because I wanted to give you one more chance to say no.”
Rachel grimaced. Was she being tricked? “I already signed all those papers.”
Hannah waved a hand. “I don’t care about the papers. I care about you.” She paused. “I want to be sure that you understand why you’re here.”
Rachel stared hard at her granddaughter’s face, her wide eyes, her smooth cheeks, her wet pink pearl of a lower lip. She was like a baby, impossibly young. Rachel pushed down compassion. She knew how to deal with children. “Of course I understand,” she said, and dug her fingernails into the armrest. “I hope you understand too. You and I have a deal.”
Hannah bit her beautiful wet lip and visibly swallowed, caught in Rachel’s glare. Finally she offered a tight, curt nod. She looked down at the counter next to Rachel and aggressively flipped through papers, an act. “The staff are going to come in and collect some samples to get us started,” she said, rattling off protocol. Then she looked up, and met Rachel’s eyes. “And then we’re going to—” She paused, her lips trembling as Rachel stared. “Then we’re going to—to see what we can do for you.”
What we can do for you. Rachel watched in wonder as her granddaughter hid her face, and blew out the door.
WHEN RACHEL RETURNED the next day—“just a quick follow-up,” Hannah had called it, “just a few more tests,” though there were many, several hours’ worth—Rachel was astounded by how familiar the lab seemed. Not from the previous day, since she was now mostly at the outpatient center, but from long before that, from a world seared into Rachel’s soul. Everything involved elaborate rituals, and familiar rituals too: the intricate purifications of specially designed vessels, the delicately worded vows she had to sign, the elite caste of select people imbued with arcane knowledge, the consulting of body parts as oracles, the long silent waiting for judgment, the obsessiveness involving blood. On her way to the lab that morning, Rachel had summoned Elazar to the tunnel. He had been begging her to leave again when she finally confessed.
Outside it was pouring. The rush of water rattled the tunnel’s empty pipes and made the dark space come alive. Rain made other people sad or irritable, Rachel had noticed recently, but childhood memories welled within her, and water falling from the sky still brought her a surge of hope. She shivered with the thrill of it, the thrill of what was to come.
Elazar was drenched. His jacket flowed with rivulets of rain, and his dark hair was plastered against his eternally crumpled forehead. She threw her arms around his neck and felt cold water slide across her skin.
“Every time I see you here, I feel sick inside,” he said. “You should be long gone by now, Rachel. You have no idea what kind of damage you could be doing.”
But Rachel no longer cared. She took his hands like a little girl. “I told Hannah,” she announced. “I told her everything.”
Elazar smirked. “So what?” The rain outside made him giddy too. “I’ve told people hundreds of times. Haven’t you? ‘Hey, kid, guess what: I can’t die!’ It does feel good to tell people, I’ll give you that. But it’s meaningless. They never believe you.”
Rachel clutched his hands, shaking with excitement. “No, Elazar. This time it matters. Hannah and I, we made a deal. A vow.”
“A vow?” The word burned in the air between them.
“Yes, a vow.” Rachel heard her own voice rising. She couldn’t help it. “A contract. An exchange. I’m going to give her what she wants. And then she’s going to make me die.”
Elazar looked at Rachel for a long time before laughing out loud. His laughter filled the tunnel like thick smoke. Rachel found it hard to breathe.
“It isn’t funny,” she finally said.
“You’re right,” he said, choking on laughter. “You’re killing your granddaughter, which is not funny at all.” He gasped for air, tears running down his cheeks. “You’re right, technically it’s not funny. But you have to admit there’s something hilarious about it. She’s dying to live forever, and you’re dying to show her how.”
Rachel dropped his hands. She stepped back, just slightly, and clenched her fists. “Don’t you understand? I’m not killing her, I’m saving her. That’s exactly why I’m doing this. To protect her.”
It still hurt him, the dropped hands, the slight step away. He squinted at her, shrunken. Her power over him amazed her. “How?” he asked.
“She was already going to us
e whatever she had from me, no matter what,” Rachel told him. “If that’s dangerous, which we don’t know—”
“Which we like to pretend we don’t know.”
“—which we don’t know, then she’s already in danger. But this way, at least there’s a chance that I’ll die. And if that happens, then there’s no secret for her to discover, nothing miraculous to prove. And then she’d be safe.” Probably. Maybe. Possibly. Rachel was blind, groping the curtain of darkness before her for some hidden pattern, some shape behind it. She listened to the rain she couldn’t see.
Elazar shook his head. “What makes you think it will work? You’re acting like we haven’t spent the last two thousand years trying. Have you forgotten all that? All those sorcerers, witch doctors, alchemists, healers. Centuries of quacks—”
“This is different,” Rachel said. The tunnel rattled, a crazed, joyous sound. Even Elazar’s face seemed brighter, water gleaming on his furrowed brow. Real hope was so alien to Rachel that it was frightening, trembling and luminous. “Hannah knows how to do this. She already saw the problem in my chromosomes. She saw it. No one before has ever seen it, not even close. This is real. She’s going to alter my genes or something. She already knows what to do.” She looked at her watch, a gesture that made Elazar snort. “I’m going there right from here,” she said. Her voice was louder than she wanted it to be. “It will probably take a while, weeks or months even, and this is only the beginning. I just—I just wanted you to know.”
Elazar snorted again. “This is nonsense, Rachel. It’s impossible.”
“Why should it be impossible? You and I are impossible. But here we are.”
“Here we are,” Elazar said sadly.
She felt the air between them shift, something in him yielding. She prodded him at his weakest point. “High priests used to have this power,” she said. “Did it ever occur to you that Hannah and people like her are the new high priests?”
Elazar looked at her with heavy eyes, his thick wet hair dripping on his temples. “Rachel. What’s the point?”
“I need to do this, Elazar.”
“But why?”
She hesitated. She had never tried to say it before, to give words to the bottomless darkness surrounding her, a shard of a girl caught in the world’s throat. “I just can’t bear it anymore,” she said slowly. “Being alive. Losing everything again and again. Every year, every day, I still expect it to get easier. But it doesn’t. It never does. Instead it just changes. Constantly changing, constantly in motion. Everyone else thinks they’re moving toward something. But you and I are the only ones who know we’ll never get there, that nothing is ever over. I feel like I’m always falling. I’ve been falling without landing for two thousand years.”
“Maybe you’ve been flying,” Elazar said.
Something in Rachel crumpled. She pressed her back against the tunnel’s wall and heard her mother’s voice: Don’t you dare believe a word he says! And then another voice, gentler, wiser: Don’t believe in yourself until the day you die. And then only rain.
“Listen, Rachel. I can’t make you do anything,” Elazar said softly. “I can give you every passport in the world, arrange everything you need, tell you everything I think you should do, and you’ll never do any of it. You’ll only do what you choose.” His damp face glistened in the dim light. “That’s exactly what’s magnificent about you. That’s exactly why I chose you. That’s exactly what I’ve always loved.”
He looked down at the tunnel’s floor. Water was draining in from the entrance, flowing in little channels past their feet. She leaned in and held him, pressing her cheek against his soaked shirt.
“I need to go now,” Rachel said.
“Come back soon, please. Don’t leave without saying goodbye.”
His body was trembling, but Rachel was still listening to the rain falling, eager for what awaited her. She kissed him and hurried back out into the rain, on her way to the new temple.
THE STAFF AT THE OUTPATIENT center on her third visit two weeks later warned Rachel that she might feel lightheaded, after they carefully removed from her body what appeared to be several quarts of blood. She put on a show for them, sinking into the chair and asking for candy. But when she reached her house, she had the thrilling thought that they were right: perhaps even before Hannah had upheld her end of the bargain, mortality was already sinking its talons into Rachel’s flesh. She was lightheaded, and imagining things. It otherwise made no sense for a rental truck to be parked in her driveway, or for Rocky and Meirav to be hauling a pile of enormous cardboard crates into her house.
She left her car on the street and walked up to them as they lifted one box at a time, hefting either end in a perfectly synchronized dance. Rocky was sweating, and exhilarated. They barely noticed her until she spoke.
“And here I was hoping that you were moving out,” she finally said.
Meirav laughed. Rocky lowered the box to the asphalt, shaking out his hands. “Dreams do come true,” he intoned cryptically.
This was annoying. “What’s in those?” Rachel asked.
“A mining rig,” Rocky said.
“A what?”
Rocky pushed one of the crates with his foot. “I explained it to you already, Mom.” To her surprise, he didn’t sound exasperated. His voice was level, mature, content. “Come in, we’ll show you.”
Bewildered, Rachel followed him and Meirav down into the basement. Her dead husband’s desk and the bins of toys that had cluttered the room were now stacked in a corner to make space for a series of tall metal and plastic machines, ensnared in a thicket of black wires. Only a few had been set up, and there was no strange blue fluid around their bases, but she immediately recognized it. The only thing missing from the picture she had seen online, besides the fluid, was Elazar.
“Where do you even buy something like this?” she asked. It already looked monstrous. And there were still a half-truck’s worth of crates outside.
“Normally you’d have to get all the components separately. But this one came as-is,” Rocky told her, beaming. “I bought it off that Spanish guy. That Arab guy. Whatever he was. I guess he needed to unload it. Great price too. Total fire sale.”
Elazar was dumping his machines? “Did you—did you meet him?”
“Nope. He just left the key at the storage place. Thus providing further evidence for your theory that he doesn’t exist.” He poked Meirav, like the child he once was.
“Rocky showed me the photo of him online, though,” Meirav said. “I told Rocky he had to trust that guy. He looked just like my father!”
“If your father was about thirty years younger,” Rocky interjected.
“And twenty pounds thinner,” Meirav smiled.
“And a twenty-first-century cryptocurrency miner,” Rocky parried.
“And alive,” Meirav added, and laughed. “Otherwise they’re exactly the same.”
Rachel leaned against the wall and tried to stop the room from reeling around her. Rocky noticed her alarm, and assumed it was his fault. “Before you ask, Mom, yes, this is the thing that needs cooling fluids and all that. But don’t worry, we’re not going to leave it on or anything.” Rachel nodded, as though this was her main concern. “And it’s not going to stay in your house. We’re just testing it to make sure it runs okay, and then we’re done.”
“What do you mean, you’re done?” Rachel asked.
“We’re bringing it to Rocky’s new office next week, when his lease begins,” Meirav said with a smile. “There’s a basement space there with a generator. He’s going to need to expand, but this is a good start.”
“New office?”
Rocky grinned, and looked like a little boy. “Meirav found me some investors,” he sang.
“What he means is that I’m his investor,” Meirav announced.
“Primary investor,” Rocky corrected. “It’s a new startup, so here we are, starting up. It’s not even for mining currency. It’s for this new protocol I’
ve been working on. It’s a set of algorithms that bakes different kinds of data into the blockchain so that anyone can—”
Meirav swooped in and took Rachel’s hand. Her fingers were warm and sweet. “Don’t bore your mother to death,” she scolded Rocky, and turned to Rachel. “Trust me, it’s a good thing. A really good thing. He doesn’t even need this rig, honestly. It probably makes more sense to get shares in a larger system. He just wanted a little extra independence on top of what I’m giving him.”
“Plus it was a total fire sale,” Rocky repeated.
“I guess we all want a little extra independence,” Rachel murmured, then looked at her son. He was radiant. “Congratulations, Rocky.”
Rocky colored, and grinned. It had been years since she had seen him so happy. He waved a hand. “Anyway, Mom, sorry to park it in your house. It’ll be gone next week. And so will I.”
“What’s all this stuff?” a little voice said.
Rachel turned to see her great-grandson Ezra standing on the basement steps, wearing his superhero cape. “What are you doing here?” she asked, and glanced at her watch. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“They had some stupid early dismissal,” Rocky explained. “Teacher meeting or something. Hannah forgot it was happening, so I went to pick him up. He’s been watching TV upstairs.”
Rocky had picked him up? This was even more astounding than Rocky moving out. Rachel had the sudden feeling that she had become a spectator in her own house, in her own life. I’m superfluous, she thought. She smiled.
Ezra had already flown down the stairs. His eyes widened. “What IS all this stuff?” he asked again.
“Computers,” Rocky said.
“That’s a LOT of computers,” Ezra murmured, awed.