The Mystics of Mile End (19 page)

She gave an apologetic little wave and I watched her golden shoulders recede into the sunlight as she walked down the grassy slope. She came to a stop about thirty feet away, far enough that I would not be able to overhear. But, strangely, she didn't appear to be saying anything. Her back was only half turned to me, and in the bright light I could clearly make out the outline of her lips, which weren't moving.

On impulse, I took out my own cell phone and, doing so, noticed two things.

The first was that the phone had perfect reception.

The second was the time.

It was exactly five o'clock.

I was overwhelmed with compassion for the eight-year-old girl she had been, admiration for the choice she had made. To think that all these years she'd kept up her daily devotion—it was all I could do to leave her secret unsung. When she came back up to me, I took her phone-holding hand and kissed it with something like reverence. She looked at me quizzically but said nothing. Soon she was buried in her Eckhart again and I was fanning the ungraded term papers out on the grass. In the space of five minutes, I had graded all eighty of them. Though the gesture reeked of the stickiest kind of poetic self-indulgence, though my better judgment warned against it, though it was probably professional suicide, everyone got an A.

T
hat night, alone in my bed, I woke suddenly. The clock read 4:58
A.M.
I lay still for a moment, trying to figure out what had woken me, but there was nothing. No loud music. No slamming doors. The house was silent.

But it was like the silence that follows on the heels of a power failure, when the hum of refrigerators, the buzzing of streetlights, the whole concerto of urban living goes missing, the volume of the world dipping down to a level you never thought possible. That was it, I thought: something, some noise, had just gone missing.

After a long moment, I realized what it was.

My heart had ceased its murmuring. For the first time in weeks, I couldn't hear it at all.

I frowned. Rationally, I knew that the disappearance of the murmur should have come as a welcome surprise. Instead, it came as a tremendous letdown. That whispered message had been my golden ticket, my shortcut to the top of the Tree! Without it, what did I have? Nothing.

No, not nothing. I had a middle-aged, middle-class, suburban life. A family. A girlfriend. Everything I had ever been taught to aspire to. But I had been promised the holy of holies, highest of heights, and the idea of being shunted back to the via media was unacceptable.

A
n hour later, I was running. It was barely six o'clock and already the heat was oppressive. The sky was gray and low. My heart rate was ramping up. I forced my body through wall after wall of humidity, reveling in the sensation of speed, motion chasing blood out of tired muscles, adrenaline ripping through arms and legs. My shirt pasting itself to back and stomach. Even my eyelashes dripping sweat.

Now the sky was darkening with an influx of clouds, and I was racing fast beneath them.

The thrashing of ventricles and aortas was gratifyingly audible again. Audible but still unclear, because one moment the muscle was saying Ani, and the next moment—Ayin. This time I would press myself up against the cool, viscous membrane that divided something from nothing, being from nonbeing, existence from void. I would outrun my body's limits, I would—

My heart spasmed. I clutched at it and gasped for breath. This pain was not pleasure. A point of fire pierced my chest. I fell to my knees and shuddered. Something inside me was turning, twisting, burning. I gasped again and wished for water. I thought:
This is it, this is it, but where is the Angel of Death?
And, in search of his face, I looked up.

A shadowy, ancient man was turning the corner. Black coat. White hair. Just as I'd always imagined. He whipped past, a single hand extended into the air—he was beckoning me up into the sky—or was he shaking his fist?—and then he was gone.

Katz's tree loomed over me.

The web of tin cans still hung there, taut and tense and waiting, as if expecting a call at any moment. Something—it might have been a moth or a butterfly, or even a small bird—whizzed past my ear and landed with a ping in one of the cans. The soft wing flap was a ripple in the air—delicate at first, localized—then thrumming from can to can, from branch to branch, until the whole tree sang and groaned.

A door banged open and Katz burst out of his house, looking to the tree with deranged rapture. A gust of wind ruffled his clothes and swept the yarmulke from his head, but he didn't bother to run after it. He was moving his lips in response to a conversation only he could hear.

The wind grew rougher, encircling him in a private whirlwind as he—what was he doing? He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, like a synagogue worshipper hearing
Holy Holy Holy.
The bounces
got bigger; he was leaping, lifting, impossibly light on his feet. It looked as if he might be taken up, Elijah-style, and I craned my neck skyward, scanning the clouds for a chariot of fire or an unidentified flying object that might whisk him off into the lofty regions he so clearly wished to inhabit.

Then it rained.

As the humidity broke and the heavens opened their windows wide, emptying themselves of water, I squinted hard at Katz. If I tilted my head to the left, I could just make out his shape through the downpour. He was rising and falling, running and returning, up and down and up and down and up. And suddenly it all came clear—I had my answer—not Ayin or Ani, not either/or, but both/and. Ayin-Ani-Ayin-Ani-Ayin-Ani-Ayin-Ani and my soul a boomerang back and forth between these two poles forever.

But it was not forever.

My heart was exploding, my heart was on fire, my heart was cloven in two.

The pavement felt cool and welcoming against the base of my skull.

I had wanted an answer. But how I suddenly loved the question, black coffee and the smell of books, and a fine wine on a white tablecloth, and middle-of-the-night bicycle rides, and middle-of-the-way forays into old age, and the pale blue dot on Val's left leg, whizzing away into infinity, and the new manuscript waiting to be written, and the old silences waiting to be spoken, and the girl attacking her copy of Žižek with a highlighter, and all the trunk drawers full of jewelry and sadness, and the telephone ringing all day, and my children. My children. And Valérie saying, “You might as well stay, if you want to. I mean here, if you want to. You can.”

A
tower of casseroles teetered on the edge of the sink, their aluminum foil pans glinting in the sunlight. I reached out a hand to steady them, then grabbed the counter and steadied myself.

The doorbell rang. I walked past the kitchen island, piled high with deli meats and specialty salads, fruits and chocolates, through the sea of people who had brought these trays and platters and baskets, and who were now clutching me by the wrists, murmuring traditional blessings.
May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem
.

Opening the door, I just had time to see a miserable-looking Jenny sandwiched between her parents before Judy fell upon me with a hug that choked the air from my lungs.

“Samara!” she cried, very close to my ear. “I'm so, so sorry. Your dad was
such
a good man.
Such
a good man. I just couldn't believe it when I heard. If there's
anything
you need—”

“She needs air, Mom!” Jenny said, pulling Judy off me. I shot her a grateful look.

A solemn Ira held out an offering and said, “This here is for you and Lev.”

A casserole. “Thank you,” I said. “That's very kind.”

“The least we could do,” he said sadly. “How are you two holding up?”

At that moment, Lev appeared at my elbow. Judy now fell upon
him, exclaiming over the beautiful eulogy he'd given, and her praise saved me from having to answer Ira's question.

Behind Lev, Alex stood looking inconsolable, as if the man we'd buried an hour ago had been his father, not mine. As I raised my hand to give him a small wave, Jenny grabbed it, thinking I'd reached out for her. She led me into a corner of the living room and leaned in to kiss my mouth, then remembered where we were and pecked me on the cheek instead.

“Sorry about my mom and dad,” Jenny said, taking the casserole from my hands. “I'll put this in the kitchen for you. Have you eaten anything? Can I warm a bit of this up for you?”

I nodded, because it was easier than forming the words
I'm not hungry
. She turned and wove her way through the crowd.

Someone touched me on the shoulder.

“Sama—” Mr. Glassman said. Before his mouth could fully form my name, his wife shuffled up behind him, leaning heavily on her cane and murmuring, “If it is not true that
p
if and only if
q
then either we derive
p
and not
q
or we derive not
p
and
q,
and therefore . . .” When she reached me, she took my arm—whether to stabilize herself or comfort me was unclear—and gazed at me with such profound sympathy that I worried I, and not she, might fall over.

“Mrs. Glassman, hi, you really didn't have to come, I know you haven't been feeling—”

The ancient woman made
pshaw
ing motions with her free hand.

Mr. Glassman said, with a tight smile, “My wife is doing very well, thank God. Already she is mostly recovered from the stroke, you see? The only thing is, she forgets sometimes to take her pill in the afternoon . . .”

Mrs. Glassman reached a trembling hand into her purse, retrieved a pill bottle, and shook a pill into her palm. “Samara,
neshomeleh,
you have for me some water maybe?”

“Of course, I'll bring you a glass—” I said. Mr. Glassman reached out an arm to stop me, keep me there, tell me something—but I cut him off with “I'll be right back” and hurried off.

In the kitchen, Jenny was placing a gigantic serving of casserole in the microwave. I filled a glass with water and was just about to dredge up the energy to tell her that I'd lost my appetite when Lev came up behind me and said, “There's someone in front of the house.”

“Who?”

“I don't know. She looks kind of familiar, but I don't know. Can you come see?”

I asked Jenny if she would take the glass of water to Mrs. Glassman. She headed off in search of the tiny woman while I followed Lev to the living room windows.

“See?” He pointed. “That woman in the silver car?”

I nodded.

“Who is she?”

I shrugged.

“She was at the funeral, too. Why is she just sitting there? Why doesn't she come in?”

I said nothing. I'd recognized her instantly: my father's lover. An hour ago, she had shown up at the graveyard, pacing the periphery of the crowd. Throughout the burial, her shadowy presence hovered at the edge of my vision, a wretched someone in a black dress who didn't say a word to anyone, but whose silence screamed sadness, whose body radiated loss.

I didn't have the heart to explain who she was to Lev.

Luckily, I didn't have to. As if she sensed we were watching her, she turned her key in the ignition and drove off. My chest felt tight.

“Are you okay?” Lev asked. “Did you know her, or what?”

“I—”

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I whipped around.

“Samara,” Mr. Glassman said, “I was hoping to talk to you, if you have a minute? Just a minute? I wanted to—”

“But if
p
and
q,
then not
q
or
r,
so we can assume either not
p
and
q
or not
q
or
r
. . .”

“To return something to you and also ask if you may be able to help with—”

“I—” I said, looking around wildly.

My eyes landed on Alex. He must have seen the panic in my face, because he came toward me and said, “Sorry to interrupt, but can I borrow you for a second, Samara?” and, before anyone had a chance to object, he was leading me down the hall.

“You looked kind of trapped back there,” he whispered as we came to a stop in front of the study. “Lev and I can handle the food and everything, if you want to escape for a minute?”

I nodded at him—full of gratitude, but too breathless to say thanks—and ducked inside. The door clicked shut behind me.

I leaned against it and surveyed the room. There was the majestic desk I'd marveled at as a child, the thick shag of the carpet I'd played on while Dad studied, the endless rows of books along whose spines I'd trailed a reverent fingertip. Dust motes spun lazily through the air. Tears surged up my throat. This was the first time I'd been in here since—

On his desk, books were scattered across the blotter. The books he was reading right before he died. When he collapsed in the street, his last thoughts had probably been of them.

A wild and terrifying anger ripped through me—after so many years of leaving us alone, he'd gone and left us alone again, really alone this time, and forever—and all because he insisted on running! Even after the heart attack, even after the doctor's warnings. Had he stopped for one second to consider what it would do to us if he died? No. He cared about running, so he ran. It was suicide—
literally that's what this was—so why wasn't anyone calling it that? And why had I clung to a childhood grudge instead of trying to warn him, stop him, talk to him—

My hands began to shake. Eyes stinging, I paced the room. No, I thought. Don't cry. Not with everyone out there. If you let yourself go now, how will you pull yourself together?

I reached for a tissue from the giant box on the desk, and there it was.

A manuscript lying on a pile of term papers.

Something out of Nothing,
the title page said,
by David Meyer
. I flipped to the next page and found a drawing of the Tree of Life.

I flipped the page again and read the dedication.

For my daughter
.

I froze, then read it again. And again. And again.
For my daughter
.

Then somebody knocked and Jenny's voice called, “Samara?”

I hid the papers behind my back just as she opened the door.

“What?” My voice boomeranged around the room, ramming me right between the eyes.

“Alex told me you were in here,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Are you coming? I warmed up that casserole for you.”

“Casserole?”

“Yeah—the one my parents brought?”

“Oh. Right. Sorry. I'll be right there.”

She smiled softly and turned away, leaving the door ajar. I waited a few moments, then hurried to the front closet, stuffed the sheaf of papers into my backpack, and zipped it up tight.

I heard quick, shuffling footsteps out on the stoop and took a deep breath to brace myself against a fresh onslaught of casseroles, or deli meats, or other unwanted offerings. But by the time I opened the door, whoever it was had already gone.

I stared down at the welcome mat and tears sprang to my eyes.

There, unaccompanied by a note or card, sat a perfect yellow lemon.

O
ver the next week, I paged through the manuscript whenever I had a moment to myself. Which wasn't often: the day after the funeral, I had packed my bags, taken the bus from the house in Mile End, and moved back into the Plateau apartment I shared with Jenny. I couldn't stand to be in the house a second longer, couldn't stand Lev's sad gaze following me up and down the halls. But now I had Jenny's gaze trailing me around our much smaller apartment.

Worse, school had started up again. It was the first week of September and the last year of my undergraduate career. I was enrolled in five courses: Literary Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Materiality and Sociology of the Text, a Milton seminar, and (at Jenny's urging) a 300-level art history course called The Female Body in Postmodern Visual Culture. I couldn't bring myself to care about any of them.

The theory class was the worst. Professor Zimmerman spent exactly two minutes going over the syllabus—it ranged ambitiously from Plato to Foucault—then spent the next twenty-five minutes reading aloud from Roland Barthes's
The Death of the Author
. “‘In precisely this way,'” he declaimed in his reedy voice, “‘literature (it would be better from now on to say
writing
), by refusing to assign a “secret,” an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.'”

I glanced around the class in search of the mutual eye-rolling this bullshit deserved. Instead I found thirty heads nodding solemnly and in unison.

Finally, with five minutes to spare, Zimmerman looked up from his Norton anthology and asked what we thought. A preppy student I recognized from my philosophy elective last semester raised his hand and said in a loud, confident voice, “It makes total sense. Everyone knows that a book is just a tissue of signs and there isn't actually any objective meaning to it. Like, the whole modern notion of the Author as this thing that decides the meaning of a text—it's just such obvious bogus.”

“Yeah,” added a ponytailed girl to his left, “I mean it's just an outdated concept, right? Like the whole idea of God? Because, fixed meaning, that's basically what religion is all about.”

“Very good,” Zimmerman said. “As Barthes explains, reading a text is not about finding a single, objective, ‘theological' meaning—the message of the Author-God—lying beneath the surface. On the contrary, it's about carrying out a systematic
exemption
of meaning, which—”

But class time was over, and the rest of Zimmerman's sermon was drowned out by the sounds of thirty chairs scraping backward on worn linoleum. Students shuffled, robot-like, to their next classes.

Outside Moyse Hall, I pressed my forehead against a cold stone pillar and squeezed my eyes shut. The harsh fluorescents had imprinted themselves on my retinas and I could see dashes of white light, like the dividing lines on a road. The voices in the lecture hall had crammed my skull with noise. An angry ache gnawed at my gut. All those nodding heads, those eager faces. How could they get so excited about such stupid ideas? What was so wrong with meaning? Why should we view a refusal to fix it as “an activity that is truly revolutionary”? If Barthes really thought a text gave him nothing, the revolutionary thing would be to make something out of it. I opened my eyes and walked as quickly as I could away from campus, toward the Plateau.

H
annah looked up as I came into the café, a huge smile spreading across her face. “Hey!” she cried from behind the counter, putting down her dish towel to pour me a cup of coffee. “How was your first week of class?”

“Terrible,” I said, taking the drink with a grateful, tired grin.

Hannah had been slipping me free coffee since she first started working at Two Moons Café back in our first semester at McGill. We'd been assigned to the same room in one of the on-campus dorms, and we'd quickly become friends, despite—or maybe because of—our opposite personalities. Born and raised in Vancouver, Hannah had never even left the West Coast until a week before school started. Her hippie parents believed in the gospel of urban farming and organic food, and the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree. Hannah had spent her teenage years helping them tend their plot in the local community garden, tagging along to Ashtanga yoga classes and developing an interest in Reiki. With tattoos on her arms and feathers in her blond hair, she was the most balanced human being I knew—and also the most talkative. After the funeral, she was the person I most wanted to hang out with. Her laughing eyes and simple chatter put me at ease; they made it possible for me to say nothing without being rude, and nothing was exactly what I wanted to say.

Surrounded by the free spirits and flower children who typically populated this café, we spent a few minutes talking about my new English classes and her political science ones. Then I excused myself, saying I already had a bunch of reading to do. This was technically true, even if it wasn't exactly the type of reading I knew she was imagining. She waved me toward my favorite table by the window.