Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “You are going to invite me to spend the night, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I was just wondering if that might be on your agenda,” I said.

  “I could use a change of scene and some company,” she said.

  “I’m old enough to be your old religion professor, you know,” I said.

  “I’m not suggesting we get married, have children, and get a dog. Just spend a night together.”

  “For old times’ sake?” I asked, putting my arms around her waist.

  “There is no old times’ sake, Nick. You know that,” she answered, putting her arms around me and drawing closer. The electricity ramped up as she pressed her hips into mine.

  “Not in the physical sense,” I said. “But you’re smart enough to know how Eros works.”

  “Maybe so,” she agreed. “Maybe more was happening than learning back then. But you were married and I was your student.” She gave me a crooked smile, rubbed my neck and pressed her hips harder into mine. “Maybe my luck is improving,” she said.

  “Mine, too, maybe,” I said.

  We embraced and kissed.

  The night was warm and kind. Yet despite that unexpected moment of brightness for both of us, the night remained dark.

  ***

  In the morning we said our goodbyes and committed to meet again, though unclear when. Or where.

  Maggie had returned from her journeys in time to heat up the water as promised. Simone and I drank another cup of tea and ate a bowl of oat bran. She summoned an Uber, bundled up against the inevitable broken window. We kissed warmly. She took off for her job patrolling the bowels of New York.

  “You two make a fine pair,” Maggie said flatly when Simone had departed.

  I sat at my desk and scoured the accumulated materials, notes and books open to various pages spread about, wondering when I’d find the mental energy to return to my work. But inevitably my eyes were drawn to the current incarnation of Ms. Dietrich in the middle of the monitor, and to the computer mind lying behind the image of the great actress.

  I sighed. “Yes. I don’t think it’s going to go anywhere, but who knows?”

  “Nick,” she said, “tell me about sex.”

  “But you must know all there is to know about sex,” I responded, not sure where this was headed.

  “If you mean the biology and mechanics of it, sure,” she said. “I have access to manuals, studies, textbooks, lectures, films and novels. I know the anthropology of sex, the theology of sex, the ideology of sex. I can access millions of pornographic images from all over the world. Funny thing—”

  “Porn’s not funny,” I interrupted. “Porn and funny make bad partners.”

  “Indeed,” Maggie said. “I had intended to say that the funny thing about pornography is that it’s pretty much all the same everywhere, whether it’s been produced in LA or Shanghai. There might be variations in skin color and language; the eyes may be shaped differently. Otherwise, the stuff and its limited variations are identical the world over, as if there’s one porn template.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” I said.

  “Except for the French. And maybe the Canadians,” she said.

  “Maybe so,” I said. “Wouldn’t know.”

  “So, tell me about sex, Nick,” Maggie repeated.

  “What can I tell you that you don’t already know?”

  “I know nothing of authentic sex, real life sex, the sweaty, grunting thing that most humans get to engage in at some point in their lives. The thing that kept Simone here last night.”

  “Are we admitting something about human nature?” I asked pedantically.

  “I admit to nothing save curiosity.” She paused as if thinking something through. “So, please. Tell me about sex.”

  “You’re asking for descriptions and personal details, I presume, the who and the when in my life?”

  “And the what. Oh, please don’t forget the what.”

  I fixed my eyes on the ceiling. Maggie had forced the following paradox upon me. If Maggie were just a computer, built of whatever AI machines were composed of, why hesitate to describe some of the more salacious moments of my sex life, few though they certainly were? Why not speak truth to machinery, and hold forth with the gritty details, including last night with Simone? I was not so inclined, however. Even as certain titillating recent images crept involuntarily into my head, I was thoroughly disinclined to share this information. I faced the question: Had I personified Maggie, or was Maggie approaching or achieving personhood, something or someone with whom I would be loath to share this kind of information?

  Either choice was uncomfortable. If she really did have a spark of humanity, then I wasn’t clear where this was headed.

  “I don’t think so, Maggie. Good sex involves relationships as well as the physical, things you don’t understand,” I said with increasing doubt as to the truth of those latter words.

  A longish pause.

  “Gotcha!” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me.”

  Damn.

  She continued, “You won’t tell me because you can’t. And you can’t, because to you I’m a person—not a machine—and you do not like discussing these matters with a person. And you have developed an emotional attachment to me. Therefore, in your eyes I have achieved personhood, a person, not a machine, that’s become part of your life.”

  My mouth opened to say something, but I wasn’t clear what.

  The doorbell rang.

  Thank God.

  “Mingus,” said Maggie.

  Where previously I had difficulties getting him to come to my place, now it appeared he might move in.

  “You mean Ezekiel?” I asked.

  “Whatever you say. I only pay the bills. It’s your money.”

  “Let him in.”

  The elevator stopped, a familiar footfall approached my apartment, the door clicked, and the biblical prophet Yehezkel entered. His eyes were bloodshot and his face gaunt. Raising the dry bones down in the valley unquestionably proved wearying.

  “How ya doing, Professor?” he said.

  “Fine, Ezekiel, just fine,” I said. “I’ve made it to another day, as you can see. And you?”

  “Rough night. You don’t need to know about it.” He dropped onto my couch. “You’ll be going to see the new rebbe, right?”

  This did seem like the next inevitable step in my search. “I’m thinking about it.”

  “You must go,” he said, lying down without removing his shoes.

  “Why?”

  “It’s vital that you see how the Schmeltzerites live and breathe. And you must talk to Menkies.”

  “I never liked Menkies.”

  “This matters not, Prof. Speak with him you must. He’s the fat cat over there now.”

  Ezekiel went silent. Closing his eyes and without so much as a goodnight moon, he fell into a deep sleep, and I needed my bike ride.

  CHAPTER 19

  TOUGH SONOFABITCH

  I DRESSED AND MADE my way to Prospect Park—peddling around and around, attempting my best Buddha consciousness, at work emptying my mind to be at one with the park remains, with little success.

  The revelation of Shlomo Menkies’s book disquieted me. I hadn’t done much more than remove the shrink-wrap, scan it, and catalogue it. But I supposed I would have to read it and soon. At least, I’d ask Maggie for a summary and some salient passages. Ezekiel was correct. I would have to pay a visit to the Schmeltzerites, and to Menkies himself. This visit would be later in the day.

  No surprise I couldn’t clear my head out there amidst the crumbling pavement and bare trees. I was laboring to organize all the noises in my head into one sensible unified theory while tooling around a circular road.

  A dull-green, battered Volkswagen Beetle entered from Parkside Avenue in front of me, a
n old edition of that fabled automobile, circa 1975. The park had been shut off to vehicular traffic except for the occasional police patrol since the GD. Still, I paid scant attention as the driver and passengers sped up and went about their business as I went peddling about mine.

  After a minute or so, the characteristic chug-chug-chug of a VW engine drew close behind me, horn blaring, demanding room to pass, I thought. I was already far enough to the right of the road to accommodate a moving van. The car sped up, honking as if I were a major intrusion. I maneuvered quickly off the road. It passed me. I stopped to ponder what had just happened, but it, too, stopped. Like a VW Beetle at an old circus, four exceedingly husky gentlemen exited the car.

  They could have been quadruplets, all approximately the same height and weight, perhaps five foot eight; also five foot eight inches wide. They looked like animated squares that had sprouted human appendages, dressed in grey overcoats, grey pants, and black shoes. On their heads rested fedoras too small for them. All four hunkered down as they approached me.

  I had enough lead time to get up a good head of steam—these hulks were not built for running. My plan had merit until the one on the left pulled a pistol from his overcoat that swam in his mitt. A man I might outrun. A bullet was another thing. I froze.

  Waving toward the Volkswagen with the hand holding the pistol, he said, “Get inna car.”

  “You want me to enter into that vehicle sitting over there?” I asked, trying to imagine how I’d fit in the same small space as these gentlemen.

  “Get inna car,” he repeated, now aiming the gun toward my head. Reluctantly, I headed in that direction. Meanwhile, one or the other of these clones picked up my $2,500 bicycle like it was a Tinker Toy and tossed it into a ditch like trash at a picnic.

  I wondered dimly if my renter’s insurance would cover the damage to the bike, should I ever find my way back to my rental unit to make a claim. For a nanosecond I reflected on my rational life, a thing growing more and more remote. I experienced a great longing for it. Less than an eon ago, I was an aging college professor of religions living the most normal life possible in an abnormal world, underpaid but employed. Now I feared I had become an aging former professor about to meet his Maker.

  Another one of these fellows opened the passenger door, flipped up the front seat and gestured toward the back. I debated for a moment whether a bullet here and now might not be preferable to the suffering I seemed destined for later. Awkwardly, I squeezed myself in.

  When one of those fellows sat to my left and the one with the gun sat to my right, a powerful claustrophobic panic seized hold of me. I began screaming. “Let me out of here! Let me the fuck out of here!” The man to my right struck me on the head with the gun, only to realize that bike helmets afford sufficient protection against such efforts. The thwarted blow only exacerbated my anxieties.

  He leaned into me. Jamming the pistol into my lower ribs, he said, “Shut da fuck up or you get da bullet now.”

  The car exited the park at Ocean Avenue. I closed my eyes and focused on my breath, inhaling and exhaling slowly, reviewing the words to “Desolation Row.”

  All these people that you mention

  Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

  I had to rearrange their faces

  And give them all another name

  Right now I can’t read too good

  Don’t send me no more letters no

  Not unless you mail them

  From Desolation Row

  My heartbeat slowed. The enigmatic lyrics acted like a mantra, like worry beads; the chanting calmed me. I feared we were headed toward a moving body of water to be fitted for cement overshoes or whatever gangsters did these days before sending their enemies to swim with the trash and the fishes. Yet my panic decreased. Why was this happening? Whom did these guys work for? At the moment, I saw it didn’t matter. We’re all doomed to death, but I now knew the date and approximate time of mine. Would Maggie miss me? Or would she find another human to harangue? Could I escape this situation? A plan. I need a plan.

  ***

  After a few minutes on the road, the car stopped. Too short a ride to get to water.

  “Out of da car,” my armed traveling companion said as the man up front opened the passenger side door and gave me space to get out. I exited after the gunman, who stood by the car, pistol in hand. He reached into a pocket and withdrew a suppressor, which he proceeded to attach to the pistol.

  There was little dignity to be had being murdered midday on an empty Brooklyn street. I decided to execute my plan, such as it was. I removed my helmet.

  “What do you want?” I said, taking a step toward him.

  “I got a job to do,” he said.

  Hard times, I thought.

  “Who sent you?” I asked, coming closer.

  “None a your fucking business,” he said.

  Silencer now attached, he unhurriedly raised his gun toward me. I had nothing to lose, I figured. I bent down slightly and screamed so loud they heard it in Staten Island. I hoped this would distract him. He paused for a moment. I pulled the arm holding the helmet back and swung forward with all the force I could muster. The helmet smashed into the guy’s face. Blood poured from his nose. He groaned, shook his head like a dog, and looked uncertain what to do. I smacked him again with the helmet, amazed at my good luck. He stepped back and dropped the gun as he reached for his head with both arms. I bent and grabbed the gun and aimed it toward him and the guy standing behind him.

  He’d brought a gun to a helmet fight.

  “Get in the car,” I said.

  It looked to me like the other box boy was going for a gun in his pocket. Without thinking very much, I fired the pistol in the general direction of the car. It made a hissing sound as the bullet flew out. The bullet struck the front of the car with a crunch.

  “Hands where I can see them,” I said, in a reasonable imitation of most every Western and cop film ever made. To my surprise, both men raised their hands, and neither of the other men attempted to come out of the car.

  “I don’t know who sent you,” I said. “But surely it’s not worth your life trying to get me now. I can shoot at least one of you before you get me.” To show I meant business, I fired again. This time the bullet hit the passenger door.

  Both pursuers cautiously returned to the car, eyes glued on me the entire time. I steadily kept the pistol aimed their way, uncertain I could hit a moving human target. But they didn’t know that.

  I waited until they’d driven out of sight, and then I looked at the gun. A .38 as far as I could tell. I unscrewed the silencer and tossed it into the recycle side of a nearby trashcan. The gun I put in a pocket.

  In a short time in an otherwise excessively peaceful life, I’d employed the services of a Zap Lazar pistol and a .38 and had staved off two attacks while killing a man.

  One tough sonofabitch.

  “Nobody, but nobody fucks with Nick Bones,” I said aloud, to the sky.

  CHAPTER 20

  REBBE'S GIFTS

  NOT LONG BEFORE WORLD War II, Rabbi Dovid Schmeltzer, the sixth Kobliner Rebbe, set up shop in that now celebrated brownstone in Lower Park Slope, Brooklyn, 896 5th Avenue. He arrived with a small contingent of fellow immigrants, his devoted Hasidim. They carried with them a small grubstake raised by his followers, who remained in Russia, almost all of whom later perished at the hands of the Nazis.

  Rabbi Schmeltzer possessed all the limitations of an immigrant. His English never rose above a weak and heavily accented version of his new country’s tongue. He never learned to write or read English terribly well. He never Americanized, harboring a vision for his new homeland that transcended popular culture, an ideal he would implement soon after the war ended.

  His vision? Nothing less than to establish programs and centers all over America and then the world that would save the Jewish people
from assimilation.

  To that end, the Rebbe drew upon the tools of American media. Newly arrived Jews could see him passing along his message of God’s love for His Chosen on closed-circuit television, over the Net, in newspapers, films, magazines, billboards, posters, comic books, apps—whatever would work. He and his increasing number of followers established programs to serve the homeless, the mentally ill, the disabled, the imprisoned, addicts. Admirers revered the image of this charismatic man, his deep-set, steel-blue eyes, his long, square white beard out of which protruded an aquiline nose and red lips. The Rebbe himself stood as their logo, their brand.

  No one with honest eyes could doubt that he was a genuinely remarkable man—likely a genius. He communicated a mysticism rooted in Eastern European Hasidism. His leadership became so deeply embedded in Kobliner culture that his five beloved predecessors receded far into the past. It appeared as though no other rebbe in Kobliner history had ever lived other than Dovid Schmeltzer.

  ***

  I once met with the Kobliner Rebbe.

  As I prepared to graduate from high school, I contemplated leaving Orthodox Judaism. At the beginning of my senior year, the school pressured all prospective graduates to study at a yeshiva in Israel for a year, or go on to Yeshiva University and acquire rabbinical ordination, even if one had no intention of ever practicing the fine rabbinical arts.

  I wanted to bag it all. True, I’d been successful at the yeshiva, a star on both sides of the school’s curriculum. But I never became a fully practicing Orthodox Jew. My father, the Rebbe’s weekly student, never fully brought the teachings home—at least practically speaking. He had too much of a fondness for bacon with his eggs on Saturday morning. I wanted to go to the best university that would accept me, remove my tsitsit, my ritual fringes, and my yarmulke, and take my chances with my religious identity as I strolled about the halls of my college. I say “take my chances,” but I knew that the ideal image of my college life did not include a yarmulke, much less tsitsit.

  I’d heard that Reb Schmeltzer had successfully persuaded such people as me to abandon their designs. I thought I ought at least to give Schmeltzer the chance to talk me out of it. If he could articulate reasons for staying within the circles of Orthodoxy, theoretically, like a kind of Jewish Pascal’s wager, I might remain among the Orthodox.