Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “In a perfect universe, yes,” I said. “But I’m feeling the need to see Menkies in person and soon. After he and I speak, if necessary, I’ll read the book.”

  “Nick?”

  “Yes, Maggie?”

  “How do you plan to get to the Schmeltzerite Center? You will recall, I’m certain, your bicycle was seriously damaged in that inexplicable attack on your person yesterday. Would you like me to call Uber?”

  After that green Volkswagen drove away, I’d returned to where the attack took place and found that being tossed into the ditch rendered my bicycle unusable. No time for repairs.

  “Not necessary.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “I have a contingency plan. Not to worry, my dear.” I began putting on my outdoor gear.

  “You know I lately always worry about you, Nick.”

  “Worry less,” I said, wrapping the scarf around my neck.

  “I’ll try, but you know I can’t. I’ll never cease worrying about you. Won’t you share your plan with me?”

  “No.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Some corners of my life belong to me alone.”

  “I do not like the sound of this, Nicholas. You know how being evasive heats up my wires, or would, if I had wires, which I do not. No, boss, I do not like the sound of that at all.”

  Boss. A new wrinkle on the path of Maggie’s evolution.

  “I may let you in on my mode of transport upon my return, Maggie.”

  “If you return, Nick. If. Your track record for returning on schedule has lately been erratic. You could bring me with you, you know. I’d happily enter any device you’d care to bring.”

  “I could, but I think I’ll go solo.”

  “You’ll be traveling without me under my strenuous objection, Nicholas. This time no snit, just a strong note of concern.”

  “Noted and appreciated. With the territory I’m entering, I’m confident I’ll be back well before dark with my limbs and mind intact.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear,” said Maggie.

  “Whoever He may be,” I responded.

  “Whoever He or She may be.”

  Mingus’s groan filled the room, but he remained deep in slumber.

  “When the good prophet here wakes up,” I said, “tell him he can help himself to anything he wants in the kitchen. You’ll help him make coffee?”

  “As you wish,” she said.

  “Then it’s down these mean streets I go,” I said.

  “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,” Maggie said. “A bit of the old Raymond Chandler as you again head off into the wild blue.” She knew the source and the full quote at once, my own personal Bartlett’s Quotations. “Farewell my complete, common, unusual man.”

  My transportation plan wasn’t exactly inspired. An old bike sat in an alleyway leaning disconsolately on the wall a few buildings down, unused, undisturbed, and, inexplicably, unlocked and unstolen. I walked over to the bike and looked it over. Serviceable enough. I looked to the left and to the right; I glanced up. No one had their attention focused outside on this gloomy day. I took the bike into the street and headed toward Lower Park Slope.

  I turned right at the corner of Garfield Place and Fifth Avenue, and not too far down the street I spotted the building, the former Kobliner World Headquarters. Impossible to miss. The structure had been painted firetruck red, and shone into the neighborhood like a drunk’s nose after a two-day bender, a beacon of nuttiness to the Western world. I pedaled over and pulled up.

  The basic design of the interior remained as my distant memory recalled. A pushka was exactly where the other one had been over forty years ago, only this one was downright monstrous, a wooden piece of art in the shape of the resurrected Rebbe. One placed one’s gift through a slot in the Rebbe’s mouth. General design aside, the place couldn’t have been more different. I passed a small nest of tables bunched together on my left, the seats filled with men and women drinking coffee and smoking hookahs.

  Dozens of Schmeltzerites walked about, exuding a commanding sense of purpose and energy. People ascended and descended stairs reminiscent of an M. C. Escher painting, speaking on phones or texting, crisscrossing the floor, an unambiguous air of cheerfulness on the faces of everyone who passed me by. Everything was working. Everything is working!

  After the Great Debacle, machines stopped working properly, and people were jobless and without hurry because there was just nowhere important to go. People traveled from one broken thing to another. Not here.

  The interior walls were riotous. Bright pastels blinded the eye, one wall orange, another green, another red. I wondered how the undead Rabbi Schmeltzer liked the new color scheme. Had they consulted him on one of his nocturnal rambles? Gracing one of the walls hung an immense painting of the Rebbe, perhaps fifteen by ten feet.

  Though there remained a few remnants of the past, hardly anyone bore the appurtenances of ultra-Orthodoxy. For the most part, the side locks were gone, the long black coats were gone, the beards—either short, well trimmed and stylish, or untrimmed and long—gone. Most men wore nothing on their heads, not a fedora, not a yarmulke, not a baseball cap. Women dressed casually, most in a fashion the old Kobliners would have characterized as immodest. One of them approached me.

  “May I help you?” she asked. By her voice I recognized her as the woman on the phone.

  “I’m here to see Yitzi Menkies,” I said.

  “The rebbe? Do you have an appointment?”

  “You told me he’d see me if his rhythms were right. You said he never makes appointments.”

  “I know. Needed to ask. It’s etiquette.”

  “We spoke maybe an hour ago.”

  “I know, Nicky. I recognize your voice,” she said as we shook hands. “Today the rebbe’s rhythms are especially good. You’ll see. Check the beis midrash.” She pointed up the stairs. “Second floor to the left, first door on the right.”

  Halfway up the stairs I realized she’d directed me to the room that once was the Rebbe’s office, the room in which I’d met with him half a lifetime ago.

  A shrill buzzing emanated from the Rebbe’s former office, bees at war. I entered and was greeted by a loud dissonance that hurt my ears worse than the paint down below had hurt my eyes. The room was packed tighter than a refugee’s valise. Every which way were people, three dozen at least in a room meant for fewer than ten, all of them squeezed around three tables. I glanced at the books on the table. A large selection of the previous Rebbe’s prodigious output graced these tables. No surprise. The True Judaism, Jacob’s Blessing, Riding Down in the Chariot, The Trials of Job, The Path to the Truth and so forth. On one side of the room, a glass case housed the copy of the Bible with the Rebbe’s commentaries—Menkies’s copy, the one the Rebbe held in his hands the night of his first return, opened, a card beneath read, to the page the Rebbe studied that night. On the wall directly behind the Bible, framed and under glass, hung the note the Rebbe was said to have written while Yitzi Menkies was at the shul. A great miracle happened here! a card beneath declared.

  Besides the Rebbe’s writings, religious books from any tradition imaginable graced the tables: The New Testament, the Quran, the Bagavad Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the writings of Bhu’olei, books on Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Zen, Sikhism, the religions of indigenous peoples. A book of photographs graphically illustrating the sexual methods of the Tantra lay opened to a page displaying a particularly difficult position. Beside it sat a copy of the Kama Sutra.

  The people studying these books comprised a melting pot of humanity so broad it took my breath away. Blacks, whites, Asians, Latinos, dressed in a potpourri of styles. Schmeltzer welcomed all.

  They studied in traditional yeshiva fashion, two or three learners squeeze
d into a group, side by side in this crowded space, one of them sitting on a table facing a partner, everyone arguing exceedingly loudly over the meaning of the text.

  A man sitting alone in a far corner caught my attention. Hunched over a book, he was short, thin, and familiar, well into his eighties.

  A hand grasped my arm from behind. “Nicky Friedman?” the voice said. I turned and beheld, unmistakably, Yitzi Menkies. Yitzi, not terribly good looking as a high school student, had become ugly. His head had a flattened, oval shape. His small eyes and mouth were close together with a short nose in between, and his beard consisted of several long individual hairs that never added up to a bush. A certain grayness had settled upon him. He wore jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt that in large letters declared, I’m the Big Cheese. Likely he failed to grasp the irony.

  “Yitzi,” I said, without enthusiasm at this long-lost face.

  “Nicky! Nicky Friedman! What a wonderful surprise. You came to talk to me?”

  “Yes,” I shouted above the din. “Is there someplace we can go?”

  Yitzi pulled a phone from his shirt pocket to check the time. “Can’t talk now, Nicky,” he yelled. “Time for our afternoon devotions. Care to join us? We can talk afterward, over lunch.”

  I did not care to join the gang for their service. I had enough trouble with the regular variety. But I remained, reminding myself I was a scholar of the world’s religions. My observer glasses on, I could treat the experience as something worthy of study. No one asked me to believe, just listen. Who knew, I might even get a paper out of it: “My time among Schmeltzer.” Unusual for that moment in my life, I began writing the preface in my head, and thinking of sources I’d need to consult.

  Before he left the room, I had to ask. “Yitzi,” I said, though it strained my vocal cords. “I have a question.”

  “What is it?”

  I pointed to the older fellow with the unkempt grey hair I’d spotted in the corner. “Is that—”

  “Yes,” he shouted. “It’s Dylan. Coming here for years, you know, decades. Not so often anymore. He doesn’t live in New York and now it’s hard to get here. He studies a little, meditates a little, prays a little, writes a check. He doesn’t talk much, and we don’t bother him. Just another guy learning with us. Sometimes he brings Paul Simon.”

  Telling me he’d send someone to guide me to the service, he excused himself. I squeezed my way over to Dylan and looked at what he was reading. The book of Ezekiel. I tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up with irritation.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I wanted to say hello.”

  “I come here to be alone,” he said and turned back to the book.

  “I only wanted to say what a great fan I am.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and tried returning to the book, but I had to ask.

  “Why Ezekiel?”

  “The dry bones, man,” he said. “The chariot. Everyone waking up to a new life after death. The best metaphor. I read it over and over again. Over and over again.” He looked up at me directly in the eye. “Just trying to get to heaven before they close the door,” he said, returning to the text.

  “Oh, and Bob?”

  No response.

  “Thank you for telling me to pull the ripcord.”

  Nothing.

  As I left the room to find my escort, I thought I heard Dylan’s nasal twang respond, “You’re welcome.”

  A young man loitering outside the door approached me.

  “Name’s John,” he said. “You’re Nicky?”

  “Nick,” I said. “You’re taking me to the service?”

  “Yeah. Come with me.”

  He guided me downstairs to a room loaded with perhaps 200 wooden chairs. Only a few were currently occupied. He showed me to a seat on the edge of a row near the front and hurried off on other business. The windows were covered with heavy black curtains. The walls were packed with photographs of Schmeltzerites praying, studying, distributing literature on the streets of cities all over the world, all with giant smiles. In the front of the room hung a photograph of Reb Schmeltzer shaking hands with Menkies. Probably fake, I thought.

  The photo evoked a memory. Back in high school we had various names for Menkies. Among them Mush. Among the worst of the pranks we played on him occurred at the end of a school day. For reasons lost in time, a few of us, including Shmulie, were among the last to leave school. We spotted Menkies at his locker, and—I am not proud of this—we lifted him up and stuffed him in, closed the door, and left. How were we supposed to know that he wouldn’t be discovered until early evening by the night custodian? Not long after that, Yitzi Menkies discovered his affinity for the Kobliner Hasidim and began spending Shabbat with them.

  Now look at him.

  ***

  People started streaming into the meeting room. Some I recognized from the beis midrash. Others had come just for the service. Soon not an empty seat remained in the house.

  “Is there a prayer book?” I asked the young man to my left.

  “No prayer books on Tuesdays,” he answered. “Every Monday night Reb Schmeltzer comes to Reb Yitzi in a dream. Tuesdays the rebbe tells us the dream and what it means.”

  The young man reached into a pocket of his pants and pulled out three large ball bearings and began rolling them in his right hand. His eyes closed, he quietly chanted a word I could not make out. I looked about the room. Many others appeared to be engaged in the identical activity.

  The lights dimmed, the room darkened, and all chatting ceased. A spotlight shone on Reb Schmeltzer’s photo, the eyes of fire staring down. A male voice over a loudspeaker announced, “Ladies and gentlemen. We thank you for coming to our afternoon devotions here at our world headquarters. We’re grateful you support us in your hearts and souls with all your might, and for your support from your purses and wallets. Please deposit your gifts in the Rebbe’s mouth on your way out. Accepted forms of credit are especially welcome. A gift of at least five hundred will earn you a copy of all of Reb Schmeltzer’s posthumous commands to date, including today’s, personally autographed by Reb Yitzi . . . And now, with our business out of the way . . .”

  A dramatic pause led to such total silence I could hear the low timbre of metal balls rotating in hands throughout the room. Several bars of the Schmeltzerite theme again filled the air. “It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you the man who first met the Rebbe on that darkening Friday night, the man who week after week brings you Reb Schmeltzer’s sacred messages. My friends . . . Reb Yitzi Menkies.” Deafening applause and adulatory shouts filled the room.

  My God. Ratsy Yitzi’s a rock star.

  The spotlight swiveled stage left, revealing Yitzi Menkies standing at the doorway. He’d donned a top hat and tails and carried a cane. He wore white gloves. He held the cane out with both hands, elbows stiff, a rodent ready to rock and roll. For several long seconds he stood motionless, staring wide eyed at the congregation. The music ceased, and he moved center stage.

  “Friends,” he began as he tipped his hat. “Last night I had a wonderful dream. A beautiful dream. A fantastic dream. The best dream ever. I was sitting, I say sitting, sitting at a campfire in the woods so far away. Sitting among the greats, the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, Moses and, and, ah yes, Muhammad.” He executed a couple of unrecognizable dance steps. His toes tapped as he did a 360 to moderate applause.

  “Where’s the Rebbe?” the crowd called out. “Where’s the Rebbe?” They knew their cue.

  “Not yet, not yet, not yet, my friends. Not yet. The Rebbe comes; oh, the Rebbe comes. But not yet.” He slammed the cane on the floor so hard it bounced up. He caught it, put it down, and leaned on it, crossing one leg behind the other. “There I sat at that fire, the fire of God, oh yes. What else could it be but God’s very own hot blaze, unconsumed? I said to Mary—‘Mary,’ I said, ‘is Jesus, I say, is Jesus, your son, really
the Son, I say, really the Son of God?’”

  “What she say? What she say?” the crowd asked softly.

  “She said, ‘Yes, Reb Yitzi, yes, my boy Jesus was the Son of God. But you know what?’

  “‘What?’ I asked.”

  “What, what?” asked the crowd.

  For the love of God what, I thought.

  “‘I am the daughter of God, and you, Yitzi Menkes, are God’s son, too. And all of your devotees and your devotees’ friends and your devotees’ friends’ friends, they’re all the sons and daughters of God. We all have ISE. We are all the Children of God.’”

  “Inner Spiritual Essence,” said my neighbor.

  “Hallelujah!” shouted the crowd.

  “And I asked the Virgin Mary, ‘Virge,’ I said.”

  “Virge. That’s a good one,” my neighbor said.

  “‘Yes, Yitzi,’ she said.

  “‘If we are all the children of God, but so many say so many different things, then who’s got it right?’”

  The room fell silent. The ball bearings ceased their clacking, the birds ceased chirping, and all creation froze in its tracks. Yitzi stepped toward the congregation, dead on.

  “Do you know what she said to me?”

  “What? What?” came the thunderous response.

  “She said to me, ‘You do!’” A collective gasp. “‘Yitzi, you have been given the gift that altered humanity. The Rebbe gave you messages, and not for the Jewish people alone, but messages for all the men and all the women who walk this Earth.’”

  Applause filled the room, and Yitzi bowed low, hat in one hand, cane extended in the other.

  A fellow to my left leaned over and said, “It must be true. A month ago Muhammad said the same thing.”

  Yitzi stood up, placed his hat on his head, tilting it forward rakishly. He continued, “‘Thank you, Mary,’ I said. We all sat, listening to the crackling of the fire, feeling its warmth. Out of the darkness, yes, out of the deep darkness stepped the Rebbe into the fire’s eternal light. And don’t you know, we all rose and greeted our risen rebbe, hugging our melech Moshiach, who turned to me and said, ‘Welcome, Reb Menkies. I have come with news for you.’”