by Steve Stern
Bernie, however, lacked their patience. He darted back across the corridor into the elevator’s glass cubicle and rode to the top of the dome, where he crossed the slender steel bridge to the reinforced door. Then confronted by the door with its keypad combination, its peephole seconding the video camera angled above it, he thought twice before ringing the bell. What if they didn’t let him in? Secure in his virtually impregnable quarters, the rabbi may have issued orders to admit no one, not even a boy who considered himself family. Bernie stood there wondering if there were perhaps a prayer he might invoke to crack the code of the electronic deadbolt, or maybe a password of the kind his Grandpa Ruby must have uttered outside the doors of speakeasies. Then the heavy door rolled open of its own accord; flew open, in fact, to allow the headlong exit of a lady Bernie recognized from his previous visit by her candy-floss wig. Pasting himself against the rail to keep from being run over by the woman in her tearful flight, he turned to watch her drop out of sight in the lift, then looked back toward the open portal to what he thought of as Rabbi ben Zephyr’s bird’s nest. It was empty but for the snake-haired technician in her pastel jumpsuit behaving at her console like a pilot in the cockpit of a plane going down. She was at once appealing frantically through the mouthpiece of her headset for assistance and hammering the computer keys in what may have been an SOS, her fingers raising a clatter like artillery. As he stood at the threshold, Bernie fought against being infected by her obvious panic, wondering if the police assault was already under way.
Unobserved by its sole occupant, Bernie had advanced far enough into the skybox to steal a peek into the rabbi’s sleeping chamber, whose French doors had been left haphazardly ajar. Unable at first to trust what he saw, he rubbed his eyes with his fists, then squeezed them as if to drain their retinas of any lingering illusion. For there on the circular bed beneath the soft track lighting, an R&B singer crooning from an amp in the background, two women from among the rabbi’s circle of votaries were kneeling, working strenuously over the supine body of the naked holy man. Also naked, the young one called Cosette with the whiplash braid and the older one with the chin tuck whose name Bernie couldn’t recall were apparently trying to revive him. Cosette pumped the chicken bones of his arms, her pert breasts jiggling ornamentally with each effort, while her full-figured companion, quivering in every part, leaned above the rabbi and breathed into his mouth as if attempting to inflate a rubber raft. Both were performing their respective operations after a fashion that convinced the boy they had no idea what they were doing. Meanwhile the old man lay motionless, and if his virile member—trailing a condom like a stocking cap on a fireplug—were any indication, rigor mortis was already setting in.
Heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, let alone a multitude of collateral maladies, might have felled an old party well into his third century, especially one so renowned for his excesses. Nevertheless, as Bernie edged to within an arm’s length of the disheveled bed, still unnoticed by the women, the rabbi seemed to be responding to their ministrations, his blanched eyelids fluttering open. “Please God, he’s come back to us!” cried the older woman, getting hold of herself enough to remind him, “Rabbi, it’s me, Rosalie,” and to inquire, “are you comfortable?”
Then Bernie thought the old rascal might be looking past the women to wink at him with a sallow eye. “I make a livink,” he said, and closed his eyes again.
Kneeling beside the bed, the boy must have exuded a nasty stench, because the women, despite their intense preoccupation, took note of him. Looking up to see what must have appeared to her as some pitch-bespattered devil from the abyss, Rosalie covered her breasts and let out a shriek, then leaning over the edge of the mattress to retch, tumbled after in a dead faint onto the floor. Cosette screamed, “Mama!” and bolted from the bed to help raise the sullied Rosalie to her feet, the two of them staggering out of the room in each other’s arms.
Left alone with his rebbe, Bernie swallowed hard before speaking into the old man’s bristly ear: “Rabbi, can you hear me?” And receiving an encouraging “Nu?” continued, “Don’t you think it’s time you returned to the path of righteousness?”
His voice the wheezy wedding of a rattle and a sigh, Rabbi Eliezer answered: “Farshtunkener boychik, don’t make me laugh. There ain’t no path; there’s only the end of the road. What you call the path, it’s just messing around.”
Bernie considered the point, then concluded, “That’s only your ego speaking,” and reached over to peel off the flaccid condom.
“Ego shmego, so long as you got your health,” replied the rabbi just this side of a whisper. “Listen, kiddo, when comes to earth even a angel, he must wear the garment of this world.”
“Excuse me, Rabbi,” Bernie couldn’t help remarking, “but you’re naked.”
“So nobody’s perfect.”
“Rabbi,” urged Bernie in the language of a desperate apostle, “let me get you out of here, and we’ll do miracles. We can explore Ayn Sof, the Big Nothingness, together; we can be glorious nothing, you and me, like before we were born.”
“Psht,” from the rabbi; “give a listen who thinks he’s nothing,” he said, beginning to cackle broadly at his own joke, laughing until he choked, the tundra of his face turning a deep shade of cyanine blue. Then his body began to convulse, his paltry torso and hips flapping like a shopworn standard until he stopped breathing altogether and was still.
Bernie’s initial response to the sudden demise of the saint was denial, followed by jaw-dropping awe. It was his first encounter with actual physical death, and in some ways he thought it became the old bluffer, whose serenity recalled the original repose that Bernie had discovered him in before his thaw. Then the boy’s preliminary reaction gave way to its polar opposite, an overriding impulse to disturb that peace. The blood of the generations that had made such sacrifices to preserve the Prodigy intact was building to a boil in his veins. Had he presided over the tzaddik’s return to the world only to see him depart it in shame? Besides, Bernie found that he already missed the old man.
“I won’t let you go!”
He knew he would have to act quickly, even as the Boibiczer’s essence took flight from his spent anatomy. By now the authorities would have been alerted and at any moment cops and paramedics would burst upon the scene. In his mind Bernie had already done the deed; he’d made the transition and arrived at the destination through whose rheumy eyes he peered back at himself with abject longing. What he saw was a Bernie Karp who, though mantled head to toe in crud, was beloved of a girl and was a citizen of the sunlit world. How could he abandon himself when (it suddenly struck him) he wasn’t even finished being young? Struggling against the temptation to stay, he concentrated on the image of “the lamp of darkness”; he attempted to meditate on a verse from Proverbs, “In all your ways know him,” that was once a reliable trigger for launching him out of his skin. But it had been so long since he’d traveled that way and he’d acquired so much ballast in the interim. Bernie told himself the migration need not be permanent: The vessel he left behind might turn out to be proof against decomposition; it could even be frozen. He could return to his original self at his convenience, commute between one body and another, experiencing the best of at least two realities. All of which was finally beside the point, since he seemed to be stuck in the vessel he currently occupied. Of course, there was a surefire method of release, but that would be definitive; it would mean that in order to save the rabbi he would have to lose himself for good.
On the night table next to a plate of divinity sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar (or was it cocaine?), Bernie spied a silver bucket containing a gallon jug of Manischewitz chilling in a niche chipped out of a king-size cube of ice. The steel pick used for the chipping was left sticking upright beside the bottle, and with a bravura gesture he leaned forward to yank it from the ice by its wooden handle. He raised the pick in front of him and heard a voice in his head pleading temporary insanity. “I can’t do it by myself,” he
conceded. Then wiping his eyes, he took the tzaddik’s stiffening fingers in his left hand and folded them around his right, the one that held the instrument, which—begging Lou’s forgiveness—he plunged to the hilt into his own heart. A jolt as from a horse kicking through the skin of a drum shivered his chest, which exploded in a Pandora’s box of pain. The blood spurted out like crude oil, further blackening the mud that daubed his jacket, and he no longer knew whether or not he remained on his knees. His nerves and sinews sang like live wires, his body demanding its right to relax into oblivion, his veiled eyes to survey the road to the Other Side—which passed through such picturesque vistas. Still he fought to complete the procedure in the seconds of consciousness left to him: A decision had to be made as to which of the rabbi’s apertures was appropriate for the transference of Bernie’s own immortal soul.
He’d already said so long to himself when he perceived through his dimming sight the old man’s yet standing organ, which prompted the memory of a venerable Yiddish expression: “Er toyg nokh,” as was said of libidinous elders: He’s still good for it. This seemed providential enough, though nearly as great as his pain was his revulsion, which he dismissed as a residuum of the late Bernie Karp. Nevertheless, as he fell face-forward, holding his nose to keep his neshomah from escaping his nostrils, Bernie was relieved to recall an alternate text: “Mouth to mouth do I speak with him,” as the Lord said of Moses, whom he awarded the death by kiss.
Later.
At the trial the rabbi showed no remorse, nor did he demonstrate any emotion readily identifiable to the mob that thronged the courtroom. Denied bail, which he’d never requested, he was trundled out of his cell at the Shelby County jail in a standard issue orange jumpsuit that ballooned about his broomstick frame. Guards led him mincing in his shackles behind the bar and seated him at a table beside his court-appointed counsel. From this vantage he viewed the proceedings with an expression of mild amusement, the way a sleepy child gazes into an aquarium. When asked at his arraignment how he pleaded, the old man, as if offered two equally delectable morsels, seemed unable to choose, and so an obligatory plea of not guilty was submitted. Hence the trial, during which Mr. Womack, the prosecuting attorney, a bald man of impressive girth whose every gesture seemed practiced, introduced a raft of evidence—largely fabricated but passionately maintained—to the effect that young Bernard Karp was the victim of a ritual murder. The boy had been degraded and defiled, made to perform unnatural acts, then murdered sacrificially so that his blood might be utilized in further satanic ceremonies. The prosecutor drew heavily on translations of old czarist documents called protocols to support his charges, and relished describing in salacious detail the compromising situation in which the police had discovered the old man and the boy. A number of witnesses from local law enforcement who’d been at the scene of the crime were on hand to corroborate the prosecutor’s characterization of the event.
The attorney for the defense, Mr. Frizell, an oily jackleg in mismatched plaids going through motions for his minimal fee, took pains (small ones) to point out that the prosecution’s claims had been widely discredited since the Middle Ages; that in any case the blood libel—and here he seemed to contradict himself by giving credence to the very phenomenon he meant to debunk—involved gentile victims, “Jew-on-Jew crime” being virtually unheard of. But the imaginations of the jury, hand-picked for their ignorance, had already been ignited, and as the prosecution’s case also included the establishment beyond a reasonable doubt of motive and opportunity, combined with a dramatic exhibition of the murder weapon itself, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Rabbi Ezekiel ben Zephyr, old as he was (though how old no one could say), was sentenced to life imprisonment for actions so distasteful that the judge, the Honorable Schuyler Few, made a show of spraying his mouth with antiseptic after speaking their name.
“By the authority vested in me by the state of Tennessee,” pronounced Judge Few, “I hereby sentence you the accused, Ezeekyul ben Zefire, to be confined to the state correctional facility at Brushy Mountain for the remainder of your natural life, with no recourse to parole.” Later on, in response to criticism of his failure to impose the death penalty, the judge maintained that a slow death in prison was a crueller fate than the gas chamber, which for the rabbi’s people might be interpreted as a type of a martyrdom. Still, there were those who detected a tincture of mercy.
The trial lasted only a week, in the course of which the media circus was unrelenting. The austere, oak-paneled courtroom was packed every day to capacity, the bailiffs hard pressed to silence a crowd sometimes as unruly as spectators at a bearbaiting. Meanwhile the press had a field day parsing every nuance of the case, the conservative papers weighing in with a vengeance in favor of the rabbi’s execution (some of the yellower journals even suggesting the resurrection of a time-honored tradition involving lampposts and trees), while the liberal press, which had no local representation, derided the kangaroo atmosphere of the courtroom and deplored the rabbi’s demonization, at the same time conceding that the accused might in fact be a demon. Nobody really questioned the old imposter’s guilt. Though most of his followers distanced themselves from their leader after the murder, a steadfast few helped fill the pews and carried placards outside the courthouse reading FREE RABBI BEN ZEPHYR. Frequently interviewed by reporters, they mouthed the kind of gnomic catchphrases that lent substance to the belief that they were under some type of mind control.
The Family Karp were in daily attendance, a bench behind the attorneys’ tables having been reserved for them throughout each phase of the trial. They sat, Julius and Yetta, stiffly during the proceedings, their faces gone slack from the effort of trying to sustain the proper balance of outrage and grief. Still in shock from the turn of events that had taken their only son in so terrible and untimely a fashion, they were nearly as crushed—God forgive them—by the rabbi’s spectacular fall from grace. It was an attitude that neither could admit to the other. But while they tried their best on principle to abhor the old man, glaring daggers at the kippah—raffish as the dented cup of a black brassiere—that rode the back of his head, they fell short of invoking the rancor they sought. Despite the volumes of affection she expressed for her boy and her guilt over all the occasions she’d failed to declare it, Mrs. Karp confided to her husband in a moment of weakness that “the rabbi must have had his reasons”; and while he pretended he couldn’t believe his ears, to his shame Julius secretly concurred. Their daughter, Madeline, was also present for a time, summoned from her career as artist’s model to the funeral of her brother. A nuisance in life, her little brother had proved an even greater posthumous embarrassment owing to the public manner of his demise. But the girl nevertheless dutifully attended the funeral and stayed on for the commencement of the trial, even consenting to pose in all her pneumatic shapeliness for the newspaper photographers. After a few days, however, she became disgusted with her parents’ inability to muster sufficient loathing for the defendant, and told them as much. When they responded that she should bite her tongue about things she didn’t understand, she called them gross, and as the entire courtroom turned to watch her oscillating departure, sashayed again out of their lives.
Arrayed in a Zorroesque outfit complete with piratical headscarf that constituted her widow’s weeds, Lou Ella Tuohy was there as well for every stage of the court case, sometimes with and sometimes without her baby sister of indeterminate age. She bagged school to attend and called in sick at the video store—whose hands-off proprietor told her not to worry; he would institute an honor system until she returned. Throughout the arguments and counterarguments, Lou sat in the gallery among reporters and curiosity seekers, snapping her gum and wondering exactly what had happened to shatter her world. Having never before seen the rabbi in person, she was intrigued despite herself by his benign appearance. A wizened old gargoyle with drooling eyes and yellow beard, sunken cheeks shot through with broken capillaries like purple spider webs, he nevertheless seemed possessed
of a dormant vitality. Though stunned beyond apprehension by the ghastliness of what he had allegedly done, Lou—like the Karps, whom she’d thus far avoided—was unable to hate him with the fervency she felt he deserved. Her purpose was to mourn Bernie Karp with all her might, to miss him to the point of obliterating herself, but whenever she looked at the pacific old perp in chains, she was incapable of believing that Bernie was actually gone. This was identical to the feeling she’d had when viewing his cosmetically enhanced likeness in its open casket on the eve of his burial. So-called evidence aside (the evidence being patently a crock), she could conceive of no reason why a doddering holy man should want to murder her boyfriend. Would he even have had the wherewithal? What occurred at the New House on that calamitous November afternoon remained a mystery; the trial resolved nothing, and when the verdict was read and the rabbi hustled off toward his detention, it was his presence that she found herself missing, while she asked Bernie’s forgiveness for her wicked inconstancy of heart.
Even before the trial, at the farcical funeral, Lou had failed to summon what she assumed was the appropriate degree of grief. Bernie’s burial had taken place on a rainy morning in a treeless cemetery whose tombstones appeared to be marching lemminglike downhill toward the Interstate. Due to their proximity to the highway and the rain drumming the striped marquee, the small group of mourners huddled amid a crush of monuments caught only snatches of the rabbi’s graveside eulogy. That was no great loss, since the rabbi from Congregation Felix Frankfurter had clearly not done his homework where the dead boy was concerned. He began predictably enough, his face severe beneath a snap-brim fedora, hands thrust into the pockets of his Burberry coat, by asserting that “the Lord has a plan,” then seemed at a loss to say precisely what that plan might be. Swerving unexpectedly from convention, he began to speculate with an astonishing lack of compassion that “the boy must have been guilty of grievous sins in a past life to have been struck down so prematurely in this one.” Those mourners who had bothered to follow his words—among them the quack psychologist and a few teachers from Tishimingo High, plus some parents who’d twisted the arms of their offspring who remembered the Karp kid (if at all) only for his narcolepsy—exchanged discomforted glances. They avoided making eye contact with the boy’s family, who cupped their ears to hear what they thought they must surely have misunderstood. For the rabbi, changing tacks again, suggested that in any case young Bernard was well out of it “since this world is essentially God’s bedpan.…” Were they witnessing the man’s sudden loss of faith, or mind? In the event, as if having concluded that his voice had been hijacked by another, he clapped a hand over his mouth and remained silent. His thunderstruck expression was captured for all time by press photographers, who’d been standing by for every Bernie-related incident since the murder.