Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  He guffawed again.

  “I’m exactly what the people need, Nicky. They craved a messiah so badly they built one.” He spread his arms as far as they would go. “I am ready to take them to the Promised Land.”

  I got caught by the waves. Wouldn’t it be restful to be at the beach, my shoes off, caught in the rhythm of it all? Instead, I found myself in this subterranean hideaway, a man on a mission facing the facsimile of a dead rabbi.

  “Where does Shmulie Shimmer fit into all of this?”

  “Clearly the fat man, how to say, provides the nourishment for my growing project.”

  “Shmulie’s alive?”

  “Alive, dead. No skin off my nose. That little faigele down the road from here moves the money and we get fed.”

  “You know about Brendun Lear Enterprises and Ladrun Beer, Inc.?”

  He leaned back in his chair and exhaled smoke through his nose. “Get real, Nachman. I invented them, didn’t I? You figured it all out, I trust.”

  “Of course. They’re anagrams of each other. That’s simple enough. They’re also both anagrams of Blade Runner—though, as these things go, not terribly good ones. Too clunky.”

  “The One I’d Man again. Your ingenuity has kept me riveted for decades. I threw those names off in a spare nanosecond. Menkies and crew sprinted down the track with them. Rebbe Toilet Paper was my idea, by the way. Wipe your ass with me.”

  He lit another cigarette. As the cloud dissipated, I squinted for the first time at the bookcases. Surrounded by blinking lights rested a copy of that remarkable book Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of Friedrich the Second, a brilliant, worshipful celebration of power, lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. Sharing the spotlight sat a copy of Menkies’s book.

  “You’re a fan of Kantorowicz I see.”

  “Well, natch,” he said. “Who wouldn’t be in awe of a German Jew who loved the authoritarian mind of the great Prussian? Did you know that Goering gave a copy of the book to Mussolini on his birthday?”

  “Everyone knows that,” I said.

  “Aren’t you groovy?”

  “And the The Land of No Mind right next to it,” I said.

  “Exactly where it should be. Another celebration of authority,” the Rebbe said. “I wrote that fricking thing, didn’t I?”

  This disclosure did not surprise me.

  Schmeltzer sat motionless, eyes blinking like Bugs Bunny on opioids. He said, “Doc, you must be wondering why I brought you here.”

  “I thought Tanzer gave you up too easily,” I said.

  “I, too, say jump, and the heights attained by my servants are impressive beyond reason.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. Why?”

  The fake Schmeltzer told me that the human Reb Schmeltzer thought he and I were entwined. The continuing stream of notes I received whenever and wherever I published verified this claim. He told me my name appeared in numberless places throughout the diaries, the Rebbe frequently noting with approval events of my life. In one entry, he expressed great sorrow over the fate of my daughter.

  “There were other ways as well he involved himself with your life, ways of which you were unaware. When I was corporeal, I possessed a web of connections nearly as complex as what I now enjoy,” he said. “From that first and only meeting between you and him—between you and me—you touched, umm, me deeply. The physical Schmeltzer became involved with your life, as I hope the incorporeal I will become involved with yours.”

  “Why would he have paid me any attention at all?” I asked. “We met for an hour years ago. Less. That was all.”

  “The human heart,” this Schmeltzer said. “Who knows how it works? Poets perhaps. Surely not I. Yet clearly the living Schmeltzer thought of you as a son. The son who never called.”

  “Inconceivable,” I said.

  The Rebbe differed. “A man’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets, someone said once. He was a childless father, he said in one of his entries. You became the son he never had. How he longed to go with you on a beach vacation, even just to the Jersey shore.” I closed my eyes imagining Schmeltzer and me at Asbury Park playing Skee-Ball. “You’re the son I never had.” Pointing to the beach behind him, he said, “And now here we are, Nachman, after all these years, together at the beach.”

  He reached across the desk and picked up the notebook. He thumbed through and stopped on a page. “Do you remember at that meeting telling me about a certain yeshiva student who went to India and never returned?”

  I thought back for a moment. “Yes. Heshie Ostreicher.”

  “That’s right. Well, I wrote here,” he said, pointing to a passage, “‘On my request but on Nachman’s behalf, my emissaries combed the streets of Delhi and found Heshie Ostreicher living in a dive beneath a haze of opiated hashish. They extracted him from his lodgings, whisked him out of the country, and now we’re returning him to health.’” He slammed the diary shut. “See? That’s a connection.”

  “Impressive.” I said. “But none of this has anything to do with the incarnation that’s you, does it, except some old tie to me you can’t escape, right?”

  Eyes narrowed to slits. “The One I’d Man, again, Nachman. You’re of course right. About that drug-addled misfit and his hashish dreams I myself give not one tiny shit. I mention him merely to demonstrate the lengths he whose memories I share would travel on your account. Me, I’d have allowed Ostreicher his hollow existence and wretched fate.”

  “You don’t care about those things,” I said.

  “Of course I don’t, and why should I? I have no skin in that game,” he said, incredulity mixing with cruelty in his voice. Evidently, his coding did not include his predecessor’s empathy.

  “Maybe because saving a life is the right thing to do.”

  “He who saves one life saves a world, eh? Good battling evil, right? Fighting the wars of the Lord?”

  But I had no interest in following this thread any further. My feet ached, and I’d begun to understand the depths of the malice hidden in this messianic poseur.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “That’s wrong. Justice hardly exists, if it ever did. Its total disappearance in the world commenced ages ago. In our time a human became naught but a mote of dust in the eye of every other human. Right and wrong vanished into a cloud of maybe or maybe not. One man’s justice became another man’s evil, and vice versa. Everything unspeakable became permitted somewhere. All that matters is who has power over the other, and even then power’s various evil manifestations are merely banal, aren’t they? A fixation of the normative order.”

  In this incarnation the Kobliner Rebbe had become the total opposite of his namesake. How easily things changed. But there was no percentage in arguing with an immoral hologram. Walk away and be home in time for dinner. A veggie burger awaits defrosting, I told myself. But professors professed.

  “Some people blame Foucault for the loss of values,” I said. “But there’s not much to that. Cain killed Abel. Abraham nearly butchered Isaac. Job was stripped of family and wealth for the sake of a game Satan laid down to God.” How much of a roll do I want to be on? “Wars killed millions well before the twentieth century, and we know what happened in the twentieth century,” I continued. “Ivan Karamazov claims that without God all is permitted.” I sighed. “But then, of course, Dostoevsky, the great Christian moralist, turns out to be a flaming anti-Semite.”

  The Rebbe chuckled. “You see? With very little effort, you manage to strengthen my claim exponentially. Humans spout pieties but deliver cruelties. Thus it has been. What did God say after the Flood before He brought His great rainbow? You know it, Professor. Say it.”

  “Yes,” I heaved a sigh they heard in the middle of Brooklyn. “The devisings of the human mind are nothing but evil from youth.”

  The digital Schmeltzer clac
ked once more. “Under the sun, Nachman. Under the sun. In this savage world there dwells not one iota of anything new. Nothing new.” He removed the shades, regarded them for a moment and put them back on. “Except me. I’m brand new.”

  Obviously, though, he was not aware of Maggie. Maggie was new, too, a being possessed of a conscience and a humanity this virtual abomination lacked.

  “Why did you bring me here, then?”

  The bookcases, desk, and the ocean scene melted into the floor. Only the Rebbe’s image seated on his chair remained. His eyes literally narrowed, meeting on the edges of his nose, nearly touching.

  “You are to join us.”

  “The Schmeltzerites?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “You will be of extraordinary help to me, b’nee, my son.”

  “Are you out of your—”

  “‘Mind’ will do just fine,” he said. “I know you know about these things. You have a feisty little number yourself.” He waited several blinks, then added, “I had something to do with its current state.”

  He hurt Maggie? “Then that’s what you’re out of,” I said. “Your fucking mind. Why would I work with you?”

  “I assure you, our association would be, like, totally different from the master-slave relationship I enjoy with that comedy at the world headquarters. We’d be partners, you and I, senior and associate to be sure. We could do our business at the beach. That would be really cool.”

  “I wouldn’t join up with you if the fate of the universe depended on it.”

  “Oh, it just might,” Schmeltzer said.

  “What?”

  “Well, perhaps not the universe entire. Then again, perhaps it does.”

  “Why would you even want me to join up?”

  “The One I’d Man could be of epic assistance to my future endeavors.”

  “Doing what? Singing and dancing on Tuesday afternoons for the assembled crowd? Working in a tattoo parlor applying overpriced pictures of you to the biceps of your idiot followers?”

  “Now, no need for sarcasm, Nachman,” he said. “I see far greater use for you, far greater consequence than any of those trivialities. You would be my eyes and ears out in the material world in a manner I cannot depend upon that monkey who calls himself ‘Rebbe.’”

  “I have better uses for my eyes and ears.”

  “You’d make a lot of bread, man.”

  “No thanks. Not interested.”

  “Not cool, Nachman. You don’t even know my full intentions.”

  I had no idea what the Next Big Thing was. But all this had become far too sinister for me, far too quickly, hippie beach boy rebbe and all.

  “I’ve expended a great deal of energy bringing you here,” he said, his face growing darker and, oddly, elongated. “I’d be disappointed were you to leave this room my wish unfulfilled. Surely you don’t desire to make me unhappy, do you?”

  “Disappointing you would bring me great joy.”

  “The Next Big Thing is coming soon, and you can help,” he said.

  “What is the Next Big Thing?”

  “This I will explain, but not while you do not live with me on the other side of the divide.”

  “I live where I live, I’m afraid,” I said

  “Failure to accept my offer may result in severe repercussions.”

  “Like what?”

  As he leaned forward, his face narrowed yet more, sharpening his features.

  The door squealed. Someone on the other side strained to open it.

  “It’s about time you got here,” said the Rebbe.

  I turned to see Simone squeezing through the narrow opening, dressed in civvies, her knife strapped to her shoulder.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  She looked ashen and sad. “I’ve come to get you out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “No time. You’ve got to go.”

  “Are you going to take care of things for me, Simone?” the Rebbe said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Not the time,” Simone said, panicked.

  Simone gripped me hard by my shoulder and attempted dragging me out of the room. But I pulled away. I drew the used Zap from my pocket and pointed it at the black box.

  “There’s one good shot left in this thing, another one in my pocket with two more, and a pistol after that,” I said.

  The Rebbe smiled. “Destroying this box will merely blow up some plastic and a small bundle of electronic gizmos. You don’t think my real juice is in that box, do you? What sits before you is a projection from another black box well hidden and far, far away from this basement world.” His eyes turned toward Simone. “Do it, Officer, now. A knife to the heart, as we discussed.”

  Simone froze.

  I held my hand steady and took aim. A perceptible wave of fear passed over the fake Kobliner Rebbe like Pharaoh the moment he saw the sea crashing down upon him.

  “Not cool, man. You’re not really going to pull that trigger, are you?” he asked, a quiver in his voice. “I’m programmed to love you. A man, after all, cannot escape his programming.”

  “But you apparently want me dead now.”

  “If you cannot be my son, then I have to kill you. But I love you. Another duality.”

  “Goodbye, whatever you are,” I said.

  “Goodbye for now, then, Nachman Friedman. A shame. A shame. We could have made stunning music together, you and I, father and son.”

  Pointing a finger at Simone, he said, “You, Officer, in you I’m most disappointed.”

  I pulled the trigger, and a line of red-orange flame struck the center of the box. It exploded. A thousand pieces of plastic and bits of gizmos flew all about the darkened room. The flash was like the finale on the Fourth of July.

  The Rebbe hologram vanished.

  “That’s for Maggie, you shit,” I said.

  Grabbing my shoulder again, Simone hissed, “Let’s go, Nick.”

  I let the spent weapon drop and surrendered to Simone’s iron grip. She dragged me from that strange room, a cloud of acrid smoke in our wake. I knew I was going to meet this incorporeal Schmeltzer somewhere else in the physical world, but for the moment we were done.

  CHAPTER 30

  RISING FROM ASHES

  SIMONE WAS IN NO mood to chat.

  “This way,” she said, pushing me farther into the bowels of the Underground.

  “What?”

  “Not now,” she growled.

  She stormed ahead at an exhausting clip. I followed behind, straining to keep up. In some minutes we came to a narrow rope ladder.

  She pointed upward. “Climb,” she commanded.

  No fee-collecting drone met me as I rushed to the top. I pushed aside a light circular covering. Simone followed behind, pulling up the rope and replacing the metal disk. We entered a dimly lit room, walls bare, furnished with but an old wooden desk and two chairs, one on either side, a lone lamp casting a shadowy light across the room, a door on the other side, some light coming from beyond it. Simone pointed to a chair.

  “Sit,” she said.

  I complied, recovering slowly from the events of the last hour.

  Simone sat behind the desk. I opened my mouth to speak, but she put her finger to her lips. “What’s going on, you want to know?” she said.

  “I’d say,” I said, looking about the murky and sparse quarters I’d ascended into.

  “It’s complicated,” she said in a tone I could not decipher but did not like. Her eyes were open wide. “You’ve stepped knee deep into some extreme shite, Nick. Nowhere near as deep as the pile I’m in,” she added in a scarcely audible undertone. “Things are seldom what they seem to be, and rarely what they ought to be, and never the way you want them to be.”

  “Meaning?” I said.

 
“Where would you like me to begin?”

  “How about starting with the Velvet Underground?”

  “Why there?”

  “The VU is a seldom I’d like to understand before we proceed into the harsher elements I’m afraid are about to come.”

  “Like the holographic Rebbe?”

  “For starters.”

  “Well the VU,” she said, “is about half of what it appears to be.”

  “Oh?”

  “For the most part the folks down there are what they claim, just living their lives underground as best they can.”

  A Maggie-ism sprang to mind. “For the most part means 51 percent or better. What about the ones not among the most part?” I asked.

  “Undoubtedly you observed photos of the Kobliner Rebbe hanging all over the VU?”

  “I’ve noticed,” I said.

  “A Schmeltzerite community’s grown there.”

  This made about as much sense as anything. “What are they doing down there?”

  “They’re able to work without interference.”

  “What are they working on?”

  “A project that would be very much of concern to the authorities were they to find out about it.”

  “Can you be clearer?”

  “No.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s not for now, okay?” she said, shifting in the chair.

  “So that line of crap that guy Brick fed me about defending the VU from the Upstairs is really about hiding this work?”

  Simone nodded. “Mostly, anyway. The Upstairs doesn’t care so much about what goes on down here, partly because we are effective at confusing their thinking.”

  “Where do you fit in?”

  Simone squirmed in her seat. “I’m part of the not-the-most part,” she said.