Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “What can I get you?” she said. I saw something in her eye I recognized immediately—that same look in Lorraine. Filled with life, the expression bore witness to the power of the moment, a look exclusively the privilege of youth. With Lorraine, that familiar saw that youth was wasted on the young was utterly false.

  How did Lorraine spend her youth? She did, and never stopped doing. That was her greatness. She found her way to leadership positions, whether in youth group, high school, or at the university. Everything improved through Lorraine’s touch.

  I had a pivotal role in her greatness.

  ***

  One day when Lorraine was maybe ten, we went on an outing to Manhattan to see a Disney film. Afterward, we made our way to a coffee shop much like the one I found myself in now. We ordered lunch. As part of my meal I ordered a glass of root beer. When it arrived, Lorraine groaned with colossal disgust. I had no idea where such disdain originated, but it sat there on her face plain as the straw in my glass. I thought, What kid on planet Earth doesn’t love root beer? To expand her stock of life experiences, I slid the glass her way.

  “No thank you!” Her reply was so full of loathing you’d think I’d asked her to eat compost. I persuaded her to sample some.

  “I just took you to the movies, didn’t I?” I asked, implying, if not actually stating, the terms of a quid pro quo.

  “Yes, thank you, Dad,” she said. “But because you took me to the movies, I don’t owe you anything back.”

  She was right, of course. So, I attempted another tack. Bribery.

  “How about five dollars for a sip?” I asked, knowing full well I was heading into hazardous parenting waters.

  “You’re not going to get me that cheap,” she said, wise beyond her years. But she’d opened a door through which I thought I might be allowed to pass.

  “How about seven fifty and subway fare home?” I suggested, my tone indicating this to be my final offer.

  To my surprise, she put the straw in her mouth and took in enough to have a justifiable claim to the promised reward.

  I expected nausea and gagging, if not worse. Instead, there was a glint, a surge of energy lighting up first her eyes and then the room. “I like it,” she said with surprise in her voice. “It’s good.”

  Hell yes, I thought. What kid doesn’t like root beer?

  Every time thereafter, when Lorraine would express some irrational reluctance to engage in an activity, in my best sardonic tone I would bring up the root beer incident. She once confided in me that root beer became her own private meme for overcoming reluctance and easing anxiety.

  Best seven dollars and fifty cents I ever spent. The subway fare, of course, was always a given.

  “What can I get for you?” my waitress repeated.

  I looked up at her. “Sorry,” I said. “I’d like three egg whites poached, a slice of whole wheat toast, dry, and some jasmine tea, please. Sliced tomatoes instead of home fries.”

  “Coming right up,” she responded and walked toward the counterman to place the order.

  “Miss!” I called out. She turned around. “Make that a root beer.”

  ***

  After breakfast I continued north. At Fifty-Fifth Street I turned east. I came to a small hospital. I entered, nodded to the guard, who returned the gesture. I took the elevator to the second floor, exited, turned left, and walked to room 237. Without feeling much save some mild dread, I took a breath and entered.

  Nothing new. Lorraine lay in bed attached as usual to the feeding and hydration tubes, as well as to a monitor tracking her bodily systems. She lay there on her back, as always, eyes closed, no glint, no energy, no discernible intelligence.

  When she first landed in this place, I came weekly. I used to kiss her, speak with her about the weather, the news, a book I was reading, a movie. I’d pretend all of this was temporary, that she could hear me, that my voice aided her imminent recovery. Over time I realized my chatter was ludicrous. I continued to visit, but instead of speaking aloud, I’d sit wretchedly and review the plans and hopes we’d had for a young woman who nearly made it through her second year of Columbia Law. That practice lasted about a year. Then the monotony of the visits became too depressing, my hopes absurd.

  Now I came to make certain all was well as could be with my daughter, who recently celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday in this comatose state. She rested here courtesy of the City of New York, along with 170 other victims of the marketing genius of Esther Lacey and the pharmaceutical brilliance of my old high school buddy, the missing Shmulie Shimmer. I no longer wept, hadn’t for some time. I looked and sighed. I wished from time to time that she’d open her eyes and say, “Dad, that’s your thousandth groan. Stop it and get on with your life.” And then she’d close them.

  “Hello, Nick,” an unmistakable voice said from behind.

  “Hi, Linda. How are you?” I said without turning around.

  “New day, same shit, right?” she said. “How are you?”

  “Same old, same old,” I responded with equal flair. I turned to face her.

  She looked haggard, as always, eyes tired, her wrinkles exacerbated by her mental state. She looked at me with undisguised fury and uttered a variation on a theme.

  “You might think your old high school playmate did this to her, but this is all your fault. I know it and you know it,” she said. If one were to follow the chain of causality that flowed back to my high school years, she held the correct assessment. She didn’t know that part. Her poisonous words reflected the way our marriage concluded.

  “I know. I know,” I whispered. What else to say? I left the room, lightly touching Linda on the shoulder. She recoiled.

  The connection of the task at hand to the daughter whose eyes would never see anything again struck me like a hammer. I needed to go home. Now.

  CHAPTER 18

  SEX TALK

  I GOT HOME IN time for a much-needed bike ride. During each lap around the park, I glanced at the bench Abe had sat on two days before, astonished how in a brief passage of time the universe could change so radically. The park remained the same; I was different. Enlightenment it wasn’t, but my VU and Lerbs-encrusted eyes had a very different view of things.

  Happily, the ride bumped my energy. But having returned from worlds previously unknown, I felt uncentered. I needed to eat, sit, and think.

  Back home, I opened a can of Vermont Vegan chili. I discovered in the freezer a nearly forgotten whole-wheat bran-and-apple muffin and prepared a paltry salad from part of a small, malformed organic cucumber topped with some toasted sesame seeds and some pear-infused balsamic vinegar to which I added freshly squeezed lemon juice and shredded ginger. I filled a glass with filtered tap water and squeezed in the rest of the lemon. Peppermint tea might make a return visit at some future date, but tonight the thought of it made me queasy. I ate, scanned some emails, and placed my dishes in the sink. I took a breath. I felt a little better.

  “Maggie,” I said.

  “Yes, Nick.”

  “Let’s have a look at your work, then, shall we?”

  “Capital idea. As per your request I have prepared an executive summary. I can print it out if you like. Or if you prefer, you can read it on the screen.”

  “Let’s try the screen first. I’ll print it if I decide I need a hard copy. You know how sometimes I need a piece of paper in my hand.”

  A Holmesian deerstalker hat and pipe filled the title page. Below was the title Maggie had given the report, The Search for Shmulie Shimmer by Maggie Friedman.

  “Uh, Maggie,” I mumbled.

  “Yes, Nick,” she answered coyly.

  “We share a last name?” I asked.

  “I judged it appropriate,” Maggie responded. “After all, I belong to you, don’t I? Moreover, Nicholas, I saved your life. You are now in my debt.”

  “What law
says I owe you something?”

  “True. I don’t know of any particular law, and as you know I know a lot of laws, most laws, actually. But there ought to be, don’t you think? You owe me something, and I have decided the something you owe me is a patronymic. How can I think of myself as a human being in this age if I lack a last name? My decision is irreversible.”

  I started to issue that bemused groan I uttered so often lately, but decided I’d long ago used up my quota of such lamentations. Quite simply, the utilitarian sums added up to Maggie being far, far more helpful than irritating. A wise person once told me that prudence demanded we learn to tolerate the nudniks among us, because, he said, “When you look closely enough, everyone’s at least half a nudnik, including you.” I have followed that advice countless times and tolerated nudniks far more idiosyncratic than my female computer.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll share a last name. Welcome to the family.”

  “Thank God you accepted me, Nick. You know your opinion matters to me.”

  “Okay, then, Mags—”

  “Mags?” she asked.

  “If we’re talking names, you’re getting a nickname.”

  A pause ensued. Considering the speed at which Maggie processed matters, a powerful amount of ciphering had to be going on.

  “Okay, Nick. You may call me ‘Mags,’ but only three times daily, no more.”

  I paused for several seconds for effect. “Okay, Mags. You’ve got a deal. Now let’s get on with things.”

  I read through those fifty pages. Maggie’s assessment that there was a lot there of great use to me was overstated. Most of the material cogently pulled together what was already widely known. The trial had been speedy. Once Shmulie decided to testify against Esther Lacey, he spent a total of no more than a few more hours in the courtroom.

  The authorities ran through Esther’s half a day in court like it was the hundred-yard dash. Shmulie was the sole prosecution witness, and no one could be marshaled for the defense. Shmulie recited innumerable details of their operation from a written text. While many commentators questioned the justice of liberating the Lerbs inventor in order to convict the marketer, no analyst suggested that the arrangement itself smelled bad.

  No one, that is, except my Israeli friend Mickey Bar On. With little more than hearsay, he wrote an article in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz wondering if something weren’t rotten in the City of New York. He suggested there lay a story not far beneath the visible one, a wormy tale that could only be glimpsed in the vaguest of unsubstantiated hints arising here and there. Mickey had the persistence of the self-interested. Lerbs penetrated Israel like a nail driven into soft wood with a sledgehammer. He was personally acquainted with several of the victims that lay in the Israeli hospital built to care for them. Though he never found any convincing evidence, and the story went south, Bar On raised a worthy question. One might think both Shmulie’s and Esther’s cases were transparent. Everyone knew what they did. Why did the state need one of them to convict the other? He made the stuff, she sold the stuff, lives were ruined. Everyone knew it. Both should be in jail. QED.

  Ah, but here was the rub. In the language of classical epistemology, how did we know we knew what we knew? Even if confident that we knew what we knew, knowing what we knew privately was one thing. But proving what was known? A much different exercise.

  Epistemology is fine for classroom inquiry. In class everyone loves debating whether the table exists, whether he or she exists, and—if they do exist—whether they exist as they believe. That they are not, say, a beetle or a brain in a vat in a laboratory in Singapore. The student leaves class understanding the world may be astoundingly different from what she thought an hour ago. What we see is not what we get. We only think so.

  The legal counsels for Esther and Shmulie were clever enough to cast doubts on the certainties of common sense, and clever thinking can always unsettle common sense.

  Yet the conventional view seemed too neat, my Israeli friend argued. Shmulie agreed to testify, his trial ended immediately, and he was headed out the moment his testimony put his partner away. Esther’s trial lasted just long enough to persuasively look like the trial of a major queenpin, and she got sent up for several lifetimes.

  A great deal of talk filled social media regarding the injustice of a woman taking the fall for a man, but like everything that came to our attention, it all but disappeared before five news cycles passed.

  A knock interrupted my meditations.

  “Mingus,” said Maggie.

  “We have to call him Ezekiel now, don’t we, Mags?” I asked.

  “To me he’ll always be Mingus. That’s ‘Mags’ number three for today, BTW,” she said.

  “Let him in.” I heard the telltale click of the door. The prophet Ezekiel entered.

  ***

  The new Mingus, dressed like a vagrant still, bounded into the room with arms at shoulder height like Superman drunk on vodka, halting just before ramming a wall of bookcases. Stepping back from his near collision, he stood in the center of my living room, a preternatural gleam in his squinting eyes, looking as though a life-altering pronouncement were imminent. Instead, he merely stood eye-to-eye with me breathing loudly.

  “How’d you get into the building?” I asked.

  “I know the way,” he answered, though most likely he followed a resident who would have gladly let him in. With great mystery, he said, “You ascended to the Seventh Heaven last night, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know that’s where I went, but I went, that’s for certain,” I said. “How do you know?”

  “I am Ezekiel. I know things. I come down to the chariot and I go back up to the palace,” he answered. “And I have come to answer your questions.”

  I said, “Jesus Christ!”

  “Not him. Ezekiel. I am Ezekiel.”

  “Yes, yes. Ezekiel,” I said. “I do have a question. How do you know about my night?”

  “I know because I know. I am the prophet Ezekiel. Prophets know, this being the nature of prophecy. If I didn’t know, what kind of prophet would I be?”

  I was exhausted just looking at him, so I sat on the couch. “Yes, it was surely a night to remember,” I said.

  He came in front of me and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

  “You met the Rebbe,” he said.

  “How the hell do you know all of this?”

  “I was present. You saw me. You recognized me.”

  My private excursion out amongst things virtual was not the private experience I’d imagined. The Mingus-cum-rabbi-cum-Ezekiel I saw out there was a hallucination, I thought. But apparently not exactly. The man before me with the glowing eyes was also there with me in Talmud in Tsvat. How is that even possible?

  “Can I answer any questions?” the prophet asked.

  I was already in for a penny; why not a pound? “I don’t get the riddle.”

  “In the Land of No Mind the One-I’d Man is king?”

  Of course he knows that, I thought. It was then I knew for certain I’d crossed the transom into Bizarro Land. I sensed the slippage of my grasp on reality, a smidge of a disturbance in the space-time continuum.

  “How do you know all of this, Mr. Mingus?” my computer now said loudly.

  “I am Ezekiel. Mingus has returned—”

  “Yes, I know, Mingus has returned to the idiot mountain and left you in his place. Very nice. But right now you’re messing with Nicholas’s head, and I do not approve. Can you tell us how you know what only Nick and I should?”

  Ezekiel sat quietly, perhaps stunned by this verbal assault. A moment passed, and he said, “I am Ezekiel, made so on my trip to Jerusalem. I am he of the Chariot, the Wheels Within Wheels, and the Valley of Dry Bones, bones that shall one day live again. And I know that Nicholas Friedman shall one day help raise those bones, be they in a great valley
somewhere, or lying fallow in a hospital bed.”

  Mingus rested a moment, then continued. “I know what I know, and I know that the professor here had himself one crackerjack night last night out there on the old double-u, double-u, double-u, where he met up with the Rebbe, who offered him a riddle. I am by this evening to solve that riddle for him, if he hasn’t solved it yet, which is what seems to be the case. I am Ezekiel.”

  “I haven’t solved it yet, either,” said Maggie. “If you can, we’d be overjoyed. Nick needs all the help he can get.” For the better part of a minute Mingus scratched his head, his face becoming vacant.

  “Let’s play Name That Tune,” he said, like it was old times, old times being two days ago.

  “No,” I responded.

  “I want to play,” he said plaintively.

  “Are you nuts?” I asked.

  “I am the sanest person in the room, and I count the machine as one of us,” he replied.

  “Thank you, I think,” Maggie said.

  “You’re welcome,” Ezekiel answered. “Now, shall we get on with it, or do I return to the mean streets of a Brooklyn desperately in need of my ministry?”

  What has my life become, I thought, that I am obligated to attend to the proclivities of this screwball?

  “All right, let’s play,” I said, surrender being my middle name.

  “You will have no regrets,” Ezekiel said. But I regretted it already.

  As usual, I left the apartment while Ezekiel collaborated with Maggie.

  “Welcome back, Professor,” Ezekiel said as I closed the door behind me a few minutes later, sounding for a moment like the old Mingus. “Go ahead,” he said to Maggie.

  In the sultry German-accented voice of Marlene Dietrich, she began, “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones . . .”

  “You’re not joking, right?” I asked.

  “Have you never read my book?” he asked. “I have utterly no sense of humor. Bizarre I am, mystical, too, but funny not.”