Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

The motorcycle’s speed increased fifteen miles per hour. Those trucks kept barreling my way. I tried braking or steering off the road but couldn’t move my fingers and my arms. I tried closing my eyes, but they were, mysteriously, held open. A hot wind blew through my hair. Bits of sand flew into my unprotected eyes. A burning desert sun beat down on my head, my back, my legs. I was, I realized, naked. Meanwhile, those trucks kept charging, both drivers laughing maniacally as I was about to become one with them.

  A bright flash filled my eyes. I was now in free fall, the earth not terribly far below. A sound that might have been the engine of a small plane faded in the distance. Seemed I’d been pushed out of it. The head was once again in my face, eyeball-to-eyeball, shouting, “Pull the ripcord!” But I couldn’t wiggle a finger. “Pull the fucking ripcord, or you’re history.” This head-guy was annoying as hell. I thought, Why is he always yelling at me? I don’t even know his name. I’ll call him Mr. Head. A fine name, Mr. Head.

  Mr. Head wants me to pull the ripcord, I thought, but I don’t want to. Even if I wanted to, I can’t. Think. Think. Do I want to end up a red blob on the prairie? Hmm, nice song title, “Red Blob on the Prairie.” No. Don’t want that, too much to do. Shmulie. Got to find Shmulie.

  Shmulie’s gone and I can’t find him. Want to find him. No clues, only schmucks who drug me. Got to find him. Want to talk to Shmulie about Midwood, about Abe, about his mom, about Esther. Esther. Love that girl. Got to thank Shmulie for inventing Lerbs. This is fun.

  But I chanced to focus downward and saw Mother Earth approaching rather rapidly.

  Mr. Head was shouting, “Pull the ripcord! Pull the fucking ripcord!”

  Bob Dylan floated before me. The Bob Dylan of the 1960s, the one pictured on Highway 61 Revisited—young, skinny, hair every which way, sullen, wearing a flowing blue jacket.

  In a nasal twang he said, “Pull the ripcord, Nick, or it’s going to be Desolation Row for you.” Oh, that song. So dark, but with that faint ray of hope. That is what the song was about, wasn’t it? Or was it? Shit, I don’t know. That song, like Lerbs, had no meaning and every meaning all at the same time.

  Robert Allen Zimmerman wanted me to pull the ripcord. Well, then, gotta do it. Gotta do it for Bob. I made an astounding effort and managed to lift my right hand from my waist to my stomach. No farther.

  “Higher, man,” Dylan said. “To your shoulder. Pull the ripcord, or you’re gonna be knock knock knockin’ on heaven’s door.” Dylan knows. So much wisdom packed into the head of a Jew from Hibbing, Minnesota.

  But I couldn’t nudge my arm. Head-to-head now with Bob Dylan. With throaty passion he said, “If you don’t do something, Nick, it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

  Dylan himself was telling me I was going to die. Dylan the man, Dylan the voice of a generation or two, Dylan the Nobel Prize winner. That was enough for me. I made a laborious mental effort, and it hurt all over.

  “C’mon, Nicky. If you don’t pull that thing, there’s gonna be blood on the tracks”—now shouting.

  With inexplicable force, with pure will, I pulled at my arm. If a hand could crawl, mine did just that. Like a wounded spider, it edged up my chest, to my neck, over to my left shoulder. All the while it was the Fourth of July in my head and my virtual body was plunging toward an insalubrious end on the hot desert floor.

  Impossibly, my hand reached my shoulder and felt the ripcord. I managed to get my index finger into it, and I gave a bloodless tug.

  The parachute opened, yanking me so hard I rose a little into the cloudless blue sky. Then I started falling down, down, down. Not slowly exactly, but not a million miles an hour anymore, either. Then, wham! I hit the ground. My knees buckled and I fell hard. Unable to use my arms quickly enough to cushion my fall, I scraped my face on the hard dirt desert floor.

  I lay momentarily on the ground, the blue parachute falling around and over me, covering me like a grandma’s quilt. Beneath the parachute, Dylan made his last appearance. “Great job, man. Now you’re all tangled up in blue.”

  Bobby Zimmerman. I loved that guy, even during his born-again phase.

  ***

  I lay for a moment breathing hard, rubbing my injured face, and hazily realizing I had again disappointed the Angel of Death, who, for having observed me with hope, now set about seeking more reliable quarry. Mr. Head joined me beneath the chute. “Good going, Nick. You’re out of danger.” I thanked him and patted his noggin, and he, too, went his way, floating off into the sky.

  “You did well.” It was Maggie.

  I gave a bloodless nod.

  “I’ll be taking over from here, Nick,” she said.

  Crisis averted, the rest of my time under the influence of Little Rat Babies was astonishing. Maggie guided me to other surviving Lerbsites, places chockablock with opportunities to free the imagination and the soul. I visited with historical figures. I had quite the chat with Abe Lincoln, who was a stitch, a rapid succession of politics and country humor falling from his lips. I had a disputation with Muhammad, who, for an illiterate shepherd, was quite a debater, though quite humorless. Unfortunately, the Lerbsites where I might have chatted with Martin Buber and Isaac Luria had been shut down.

  I played Scrabble with Marie Antoinette. During our match her head kept falling onto her lap. Whenever that happened, I would reach over, lift it up, and fit it onto her shoulders. This was more than a little disconcerting, but not nearly as upsetting as her frequent use of French slang in the game, though I responded with Sumerian slang.

  I even ran into the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno. I had a few things to say to him, but no matter how hard I ran, I could never cross the room to reach him.

  One of my stops was the Garden of Eden. I became Adam, romping buck naked through the lush surroundings of a place inhabited by me and every imaginable animal. And Eve, of course, also buck naked—and quite the figure of first womanhood. The music of stringed instruments, violin, cello, classical guitar, harp, filled the air. When the serpent became involved, the music turned—bass, heavy, jazzy, and not entirely foreboding. I lost Paradise that evening, but not without first speaking directly to a not altogether angry God, and not without having my way with the planet’s first female.

  I left the site convinced that because of my encounter with Eve, images of Cain in medieval art bore my nose.

  Following my dalliance, I found myself contentedly floating around a dark, warm, starless universe. The colors were bright but not overwhelming. The music lacked the drama of my time with Mr. Head. Yet, I was having the most fun I’d had since, well, since I couldn’t remember. It might have been the most fun ever. No wonder people ingested this stuff like gumdrops.

  Celestial things passed by, and I floated around the spheres, wishing none of this would end, thinking I should try this shit again, stopping at just twenty-eight doses.

  Amid my reverie, a voiceless tone, as if an angel were whispering in my ear, advised me to travel to a place called Talmud in Tsvat. This could be interesting, I thought. With no more effort than thinking it, I found myself there, walking on solid ground in the northern Israeli city of Tsvat in front of a synagogue. The entrance was a white stone doorway, the jamb painted a light blue, Stars of David carved in white stone above, a window on either side of the door. A teal-colored sign to the right of the door read, Welcome, Nick.

  I was expected.

  Like much of my day facing new doorways, without thinking too hard, I entered.

  A classic Orthodox figure, eyes blue and passionate, met me inside. He had a white, flowing beard and wire-rimmed glasses, a white shirt without a tie, a black coat and a fedora. He looked at me with those eyes, and said, “Nicky, Nicky, my boy. Welcome to Talmud in Tsvat. Rabbi Hershel Israel at your service. Shalom Aleichem. We’ve been expecting you.” Me? “You have an appointment with the Rebbe.” I looked closely at Rabbi Israel. Do my eyes deceive me? It was Mingus, late
ly the prophet Ezekiel, dressed in the garb of an Orthodox Jew. When he saw my look of recognition, Rabbi Israel added, “And God blessed the chariot that brought you here.”

  Chariot? He could only mean the chariot at the beginning of his book, a symbol that blossomed into an early school of Jewish mysticism, Merchavah mysticism.

  “The Rebbe will see you now,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder and pressing me toward a door.

  There was only one rebbe in my life, the Kobliner Rebbe. The late Kobliner Rebbe, Dovid Schmeltzer.

  “Come this way, please,” Rabbi Israel-cum-Mingus said, and headed toward the back of the synagogue. Another door. I followed him in. The Rebbe sat in a leather chair, tefillin—phylacteries—on his forehead and left arm. He smoked a thin cigar and sipped a clear alcoholic beverage from a glass. On the large desk not far from him sat an open bottle of slivovitz. He put his drink down on the coffee table and stood up. He was shorter than I expected, as I realized when I’d first met him a long time ago. We hugged warmly.

  “Welcome to my world, Nachman,” he said in Hebrew, calling me by my Hebrew name.

  God help me. The dead Kobliner Rebbe inhabiting a VR site, smoking cigars, drinking slivovitz, and teaching Talmud to Lerbs trippers. Drugged, rescued from paralysis by Bob Dylan, having sex with Eve, and now I meet the dead Kobliner Rebbe. What a night.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked, pointing to the bottle of slivovitz.

  “No thank you, Rebbe,” I said. The last person I trusted to wet my whistle nearly did me in. On the other hand, that ill-fated cup of tea had brought me here. “On second thought, please.”

  The Rebbe poured a modest amount into a glass and pointed to a second leather chair. “Now sit. Sit,” he said. “I have two aytzas, some advice, for you. You’re going to appreciate these aytzas very much once you understand it.”

  I sat.

  He leaned into me, his eyes squinting, nearly shut.

  “My first aytza you already know.”

  Oh?

  “The sea will always split for you.”

  My word. I’d heard that very piece of advice a very long time ago.

  “My second aytza is a puzzle, so listen carefully.”

  He dabbed his lips with a napkin and said, “Here it is. In the Land of No Mind, the One-I’d Man is king. In the Land of No Mind, the One-I’d Man is king.”

  He spoke to me in Hebrew. As I translated, I heard the pun immediately, a play on that old saying by Desiderius Erasmus, “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

  With that bewildering advice, the Kobliner Rebbe and Mingus, his associate, and their otherworldly property faded, then vanished, and I once again floated in the serenity of the dark.

  I continued my wanderings, now too close to sober to become hysterical as the Marx Brothers tried squeezing me into a cabin on a ship while singing “Hooray for Captain Spalding, the African explorer.” Groucho, cigar in hand responded, “Did someone call me shnorrer?”

  By 7:00 a.m., the strength of the hallucinogen had worn off, and all of the wonders of life under the helmet faded. I still felt speedy, but the languor and all the illusions were gone. I lifted the visor of the virtual helmet.

  Things looked as I had left them eight or so hours ago. I had been smiling so hard all night my jaw hurt. The pain of the cyber-injury from my fall onto the desert floor evaporated.

  “Maggie,” I said.

  “Yes, Nick.”

  “I’m feeling better,” I said, standing, stretching, feeling no pain.

  “Oh, thank God, Nick.”

  “Thank you, Maggie. You too, Len. You saved my life.”

  Michael Caine now filled the screen. Len said, “I was merely serving you according to my program.”

  I said, “If you ever need a new home, give me a call.”

  “I’ve got her number,” said Len. “I might take you up on your offer should I be decommissioned, even though it means living in Brooklyn.”

  Everyone’s a kidder.

  Maggie said, “I presume by now you’ve deduced what three doses of Lerbs would normally mean.”

  “It means,” I said, “I would have died from suffocation. Or I might have gone mad from the hallucinogen effect.”

  Maggie said, “The literature was very clear on that point. Unless we were able to provide you with a superabundance of stimulation to raise the levels of functioning of all your body’s systems, you would have slowed down and just stopped working. I don’t think taking you to a hospital would have been a good idea, by the way. All the literature I read, and you know I read it all, indicated that the path we took this evening was the only possible way to bring you home in one piece.”

  “The Psycho Path?”

  “It is the most highly recommended of all OD Lerbsites. We can thank God it has not yet been eliminated. You will receive a hefty charge for their services, by the way. I presume you will agree that it was worthwhile.”

  “You scared the shit out of me, Maggie. But it worked. Using Bob Dylan was brilliant, by the way. Also, my daughter, Mingus, and the Rebbe all helped.”

  “Thank you. My idea. I know how much you love Dylan’s music, how much he is rooted in your psyche. But, Nicholas?”

  “Yes?”

  “I never used Mingus, nor a rabbi, and certainly not your daughter.”

  This left me wondering about the meanings of those encounters. As time, and this investigation, moved on, I would wonder even more.

  CHAPTER 17

  ROOT BEER

  I HAD A REMARKABLE amount of energy. I even felt chipper. I couldn’t recall the last time I felt chipper.

  The inevitable walk beckoned.

  But Maggie, who wanted the details of my visit to the VU, delayed my departure. I told her the whole story.

  “Not a den of evil?” she asked, incredulity in her voice.

  “Quite the contrary. It’s a small city coping with poverty and in its way struggling to build a just society. As you might say, for the most part, at least.”

  “I’m going to have to look into this. I don’t like being fooled, and I am usually not. But sometimes the layers of fake news fool even me. And there seems to be a boatload of fake news about the VU on social media.”

  I assured Maggie that I’d continue to rely on her word for things. I admitted I was chastened by finding a reality so completely different from what I’d expected. We chatted a moment about the society they were constructing; then Maggie shifted the subject.

  “Do you have any idea, Nick, what we can deduce about Shelley Tanzer’s behavior?” she asked.

  I did. But I wanted Maggie’s take. “Tell me what you think.”

  “Why would he do what he did if he had not been in contact with someone who ordered him to do it?” she asked. “Who would order him?”

  “Maybe Esther, maybe Shmulie—if he’s alive. By the way, I don’t take this fool’s idea that Shmulie’s dead for anything but a revenge fantasy. Why drug me? I wasn’t a threat to him. I didn’t mean anything to him until I showed up yesterday afternoon.”

  “If he heard from Esther, you know what that means?” Maggie asked.

  “Of course. That Esther has greater accessibility than she lets on. Maybe she still has a relationship with Shelley.”

  “And the key,” Maggie said. “What’s behind the door it unlocks?”

  “Too vague. Could the key be why he dosed me? To get rid of me?”

  “It’s for the future. But right now, my Nicholas, I know you have a job to do.”

  “Yes. I need to pay Lorraine a visit,” I said, recalling a familiar voice I heard in the midst of my Lerbs-induced lunacy.

  “Understandable. It has been three months and seventeen days since your last visit. When do you anticipate that you will return home?”

  “Not too lat
e. Certainly before dark. I haven’t biked for two days. But why don’t you just stay with me and we can review what you learned in your researches?”

  “I am aware, Nick, that it is imperative we have that discussion. I certainly have uncovered a great deal of information that I must pass on to you. Nevertheless, I think it incumbent upon you to see your daughter unaccompanied. We can defer our conversation by a few hours.”

  “You’re right, I guess,” I said, though I could have used the company. But there were some things a man had to do alone.

  “I know I am right. I am most of the time, almost always. Of course, if you need me for an emergency, I shall be only a call away. I shall never desert you ever again, Nicholas, not ever. Of that truth you can be abundantly certain.”

  There was a click and Marlene disappeared.

  ***

  I exited Wally’s Wireless and entered daylight. Bright rays bounced off the sidewalk and hit me in the face like a day at the beach. After blinking some of that light from my eyes, I got my bearings and headed north on Sixth Avenue for about a mile. The air was chilly, but I was so lost in thought I felt nothing.

  In the Land of No Mind the One-I’d Man is king, the Rebbe had said. No clue what or who a One-I’d Man could be or what a land of No Mind might amount to. But it must have been important, else why would the Kobliner Rebbe have said it?

  As I proceeded north my mood shifted from cheerful to despondent. Lerbs had left countless souls in hospital beds around the world, motionless, save for being shifted from time to time by hospital aides employed to flip them like flapjacks on a griddle. Euphoria morphed into morbidity as I considered how I barely escaped that fate.

  My mouth tasted like mothballs, and my stomach grumbled in hunger. I entered a coffee shop, one of only a few remaining in the city. Reasonable prices, bad coffee served in ubiquitous blue paper cups. I sat down on a round backless seat at the Formica counter. A lovely young woman ran a wet cloth over my bit of personal space. She was perhaps in her early twenties with a petite tattoo of a hummingbird above her left shoulder, a long piercing across her forehead, and lime-green lipstick, lately all the rage, that, oddly, looked good on her. She put the rag down.