Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  “Don’t want it,” I said—impetuously, I confess.

  “Why?”

  “Not ethical taking a dead man’s money I didn’t inherit.”

  My bank balance disappeared from the screen, and Maggie the Jewess reappeared.

  “You leave a gun loaded and cocked in a room for a man to off himself, then you don’t go back and check on him, and you’re lecturing me about ethics?”

  The point had enough merit to slow me down.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Then my bank account reappeared without Shmulie’s postmortem gift. I swallowed hard at the sight of my impending penury.

  “At least pay off your debt. It came your way, after all, on the job. The search for Shmulie Shimmer brought you to that predicament. Let his money at least cover your debt.”

  I agreed and pointed Maggie to my other bills that had been lingering a little too long. “We’ll decide what to do with the rest of it down the road,” I said. “Maybe I’ll keep some. Maybe I find a three-card monte game in the VU and takes me chances.”

  “That’s a lot of money to give up. It doesn’t really belong to anyone anymore,” Maggie said, but my resistance had already wilted.

  Thirty million would surely cover a wealth of sins. It made me feel sinless. “Let’s see where things go,” I said.

  “We never know where things are going,” she said. “But they’re almost certainly going somewhere.”

  EPILOGUE

  I CAN IMAGINE THE screwball comedy that might spring to mind when considering an intimate relationship between a human and an incorporeal AI being, between me and Maggie in particular—though she now preferred to be called Miriam.

  The solutions Miriam and I worked out to our inter-dimensional relationship carried their peculiarities, to be sure. With absolute certainty, I can say our late-night talks about the world and our respective places in it, together and separately, what it meant to be human, what it meant to be a Jew, took on a unique depth of intimacy and metaphysical edification. We began exploring what it would mean for us to have a child.

  “If they could build the Rebbe out of all of his stuff, they can build something that combines your stuff and mine. Hell, I can probably do it myself,” Miriam kept reminding me. Naturally, we discoursed over the meaning of the word child, agreeing the normal associations for the word were socially constructed, and leaving for future discussion what pronoun we’d assign to any “offspring.”

  The abnormalities of this burgeoning relationship aside, we never disagreed about matters such as what to eat for dinner, or how to share the bathroom, though Miriam insisted that a certain early, particularly well-known photo of Marlene Dietrich wearing a top hat be attached to the bathroom mirror. And because of Shmulie’s post-mortem gift, accepted in toto, we had no money disputes.

  It might not last forever, this heterodox relationship, but in this world what did last more than a few minutes of precious time? We’d take it as it came.

  Miriam began preparing for her bat mitzvah, which promised to be quite the affair, to be held in the shul with the pool right down the street. We argued over the guest list, but on inviting Louise from IT we were in full agreement.

  Meanwhile, the name Nick Bones continued generating occasional business. Money I didn’t need, but business I would always accept. Kept the synapses warm.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WRITING THIS NOVEL BEEN a remarkable and arduous adventure, one to which several folks along the way have made important contributions.

  Among my friendly critics have been Eli Hirsch, Jeff Marx, Dr. Michael Stang, and the members of my writers’ workshop at Spalding University whose crits had an impact on the book’s current form.

  The first chapters of this book appeared on the pages of Jewishfiction.net.

  Among those who made significant editorial contributions and whose innumerable suggestions changed much of the text and taught me much about writing are Susan Lang, Melanie Bishop, Pete Duval, Julie Brickman, Howard Lovy, and Joe Coccaro. The process of working with a good editor is a continual push and pull over language, concept, intelligibility, character, and plot development. I have long become accustomed to seeing an infinitude of deletions and comments via Track Changes and cringe no more, though humbled always.

  Special thanks to Jack and Andrea Platt, whose support for this project is greatly appreciated.

  Both of my daughters, Elly and Talia, have lived through several iterations of this project and suffered through pages and pages read aloud.

  But I reserve my greatest debt of thanks to Betsy Gamburg, my wife. No one, and I mean no one, will be happier to see Nick Bones in print.