The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (28 page)

All at once the winds dropped. The lightning thundered off. The clouds slouched away under their dark shrouds of rain. Folks crept out of their houses to see if Beitzel and Mendel had survived, could be revived. They found the couple still writhing, oblivious that the storm had passed.

For nine full months, Yod-Beit’s belly swelled. Every day folks fretted over whether her naked rebellion with Mendel would beget a plague or just a lump of coal. The blacksmith was angered by neighbors’ slights, which he couldn’t quite refute. Beitzel simply smiled.

And then one morning, when the sky was as blue as a heavenly reflecting pool, Yod-Beit, fallen angel, delivered her husband an ordinary baby girl.

EDITORS’ AFTERWORD

Professor Jay Katz vanished on February 9, 2008, the day that he submitted these twelve tales for publication. On that date, he also sent a letter of resignation to his university, instructing the dean to disperse his books and incinerate his papers. Since then, there have been countless reports in the media, often spectacular, about the professor’s disappearance. As his editors, we feel obliged to attempt, as best we can, to set the record straight.

The first public report that Professor Katz was missing attracted little notice. A brief wire item appeared on February 23, after repeated inquiries by his university failed to locate him in Europe. While the article didn’t mention the professor’s extracurricular work on the Lamedh-Vov, a notoriously radical Hasidic rabbi named Binyamin Krupnik issued a statement the following day claiming that Jay Katz had been struck from this world as punishment by God. Purporting to speak on Yahweh’s behalf, the rebbe accused the scholar of betraying a sacred trust, incurring the heavenly retribution that his unholy activities deserved. Krupnik was then in hiding, wanted by Interpol for several kidnappings, so his statement put Katz’s disappearance on the evening news. That’s when we came forward, offering to share our author’s manuscript with select reporters, hoping to help in the search effort.

We would like to emphasize that we didn’t intend to abet Rabbi Krupnik by giving credence to his outlandish indictment, but neither were we trying—as others have suggested—to implicate him in our author’s disappearance. That accusation was made by Krupnik’s religious enemies, led by the reform rabbi Omri Zvi, who charged that Krupnik’s sect was threatened by what Jay Katz had learned. According to Zvi’s reasoning, a Lamedh-Vov comprised of gamblers and whores, let alone fallen angels, would make a mockery of orthodox dogma, undermining the political power of the religious parties in Israel. In other words, Krupnik was the one who’d banished Professor Katz from this world—by having him assassinated and laying blame on God. There was no more evidence of this than of Krupnik’s exalted claims, but the potential of murder, the prospect of martyrdom, made the story irresistible to talk shows and tabloids. Jay Katz’s destiny was out of our hands.

And then came the inevitable backlash, the denunciation of Professor Katz by secular critics, who called his tales fraudulent, saying that the cause of his disappearance was suicide: Jay Katz had made up his story about Yaakov ben Eleazer’s list of thirty-six, fabricating the tales in an attempt to revive a career gone stagnant, only to be overcome by guilt after he submitted the phony manuscript. First he’d resigned, and then he’d drowned himself. With each telling, the story was more elaborate. He’d heaved himself from a cliff. He’d thrown himself to the sharks. Several prominent academics, whose names we will not mention, began circulating a petition urging us not to publish this book. We have categorically refused—and been slandered on dozens of blogs as the real cause of his demise.

The fate of Jay Katz has now become fodder for conspiracy theories too muddled to describe. We would like to respond by referring readers to the professor’s own Foreword, in which he asserts his intention to continue pursuing stories of the Lamedh-Vov.
Do not seek me,
he writes.
I cannot say if I’ll ever return.
We would like to propose that the most likely answer to the enigma, more probable than divine retribution or political assassination or even professional suicide, is that Jay Katz is unobtrusively doing his work, quietly following the course set by Yaakov’s list. We are aware that his brief media celebrity, though now passed, would make this difficult, that a whole year without a single sighting would be highly unlikely. Yet there is another circumstance, which has not previously been disclosed in print, that may account for his preternatural stealth, if not explain it.

The university did not incinerate Jay Katz’s papers after he vanished, as he requested, yet all forty-three boxes are now missing from the underground warehouse. His academic records are also gone from the registrar’s office, though investigators have found no tampering with the locked file cabinets. Stranger, nobody who corresponded with him over the years has been able to find his old letters in their archives. Even the few pictures of him that have been published on book jackets and in newspapers seem blurrier than people remember, inexplicably vague. It’s as if some vast act of erasure were taking place, leaving behind only his accounts of Alef the Idiot and Chet the Cheat and Yod the Inhuman for people to contemplate. We are by no means a religious press, yet some of us have begun to wonder whether Jay Katz is being protected in some supernal way, hidden for the sake of his work, carried to the brink of anonymity lest anybody try to pursue him, or threaten his calling by regarding him as a ———

But such matters are beyond us. The Lamedh-Vov belong to another realm. We will not question what cannot be known.

—THE EDITORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Mac-Dowell Colony, the MacNamara Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the Corporation of Yaddo, as well as Modernism Gallery and the Judah L. Magnes Museum.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
ONATHON
K
EATS
is an artist, novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of the novel
The Pathology of Lies.
He is also the art critic for
San Francisco
magazine, a columnist for
Wired
magazine and
Artweek,
a correspondent for
Art & Antiques,
and a contributor to publications including
The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Popular Science, Prospect, Forbes Life, Art & Auction,
and
Salon.com.
Keats has been awarded fellowships by Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the MacNamara Foundation, and the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona, and has chaired the National Book Critics Circle fiction award committee. He lives in San Francisco.

A Random House Trade Paperback Original

Copyright © 2009 by Jonathon Keats

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Keats, Jonathon.
The book of the unknown: tales of the thirty-six/Jonathon Keats.
p.   cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-782-2
1. Jews—Fiction. 2. Antiheroes—Fiction. 3. Fables. I. Title.
PS
3561.
E
2526
B
66 2009
813'.54—dc22     2008016562

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