The Mystics of Mile End (25 page)

“Coffee?” I ask, my voice pleasant and light.

She looks up at me, startled. “Oh, yes, sure—thank you.”

I set the mug down in front of her and begin to pour. I can feel the heat of her gaze on my face. Then, in a low whisper, she asks me, “How are you doing?”

I flash my brightest smile. “Fine, thank you, how are you?”

She doesn't answer. Instead, her eyes search mine for a clue. I watch the question flicker across her face:
Does she know who I am? Does she recognize me?

“Can I get you anything else?” I ask.

“No. Thank you.” She studies me for a long moment, then leans in confidentially. “I don't know if you know this, but I'm—I was—I was there at your dad's—”

“Sorry,” I cut her off. “I think you have me confused with someone else.”

It's as if I've slapped her in the face. She shrinks back into her chair. I hold her in the center of my sight line, daring her to chal
lenge me. After a second she wilts, drops her gaze. I smile broadly and walk away.

From behind the counter, I watch as Val gulps down her coffee and tries to keep her cool. Her hands are fidgeting around the mug, her lipsticked mouth trembling. The depth of her emotion surprises me, suggests that she had more than a fling with my dad, suggests that she loved him. A minute later, she drops some cash onto the table and rushes out the door.

I strut back toward her table and slide the coins into my palm. Then I reach for her coffee cup and on the rim I see them. Val's lipstick imprints. They leap out at me, Hod-Netzach, Splendor-Eternity, the complementary vessels that correspond to the two lips. Hod: transitory splendor—Netzach: enduring eternity—Hod-Netzach: the exact combination embodied by Val. Val who loved a man whose life was transitory, but whose impact on her was clearly so enduring, was clearly something she still all too keenly felt—

The key falls into my hand.

Dazed, I turn around. Brendan's left a scrap of paper on the table by the window. I glide over and pick it up. The magic square is huge, a grid of 15 by 15 at least, his biggest one yet—but how can he be manipulating such large numbers in his head? I add up the first row: 37. And the second row: 37. I try the third row and come up with 35. He must have made a mistake there. But then I try the fourth row and it's 81, and all of a sudden it clicks into place; the numbers shift and I see them the way he sees them, in color. I feel the beautiful calm blue of 6, the warm pulsating orange of 4, the vibrant zing of 3, and now I see what he's been doing—it's an image—blackbird swooping across cloudy sky—a pixelated reality composed entirely of numbers. The colors start to howl in my ears, filling my skull with their wild glow. From cornea to cochlea I'm bursting with it, my insides awash with light. And as quickly as it started, it subsides. The light drains from my ears. The cranial ache
fades and I am left with nothing but beauty. Beauty—Tiferet—the crossroads at the very center of the Tree, where conflicting forces of the divine flow collide, energies smashing into each other and synthesizing as one—one greater harmony, one more delicious key in my hand.

I can hear angry voices now. Lily's mother is here and she is counting down from three. Three. She stuffs the sketchpad into her daughter's bag. Two. Lily's fist clamps around her paintbrush. One. The mother slams the watercolor kit shut, takes Lily's wrist, yanks her from her seat. With her free hand, Lily just manages to grab the paint kit, her pudgy fingertips struggling to maintain their grip. She gets dragged out and the door bangs shut. In the echo I hear something calling me. Something that has fallen. I push open the door and step into the street.

And there it is. On the rain-bleached sidewalk, shining in late-afternoon light. A plastic watercolor kit, cracked open upon impact, dropped by two hands—two—two hands that correspond to Gevurah-Chesed, Severity-Kindness, the principle of disciplinary restraint and of the boundless love that's supposed to counterbalance it. Two pats of paint—Gevurah's red and Chesed's white—have popped out of their lining and landed on the ground. Crushed to pieces by a hurried heel, the colors dissolve into a puddle and form separate streams. The streams crisscross but the colors do not fade. Distinct rivers, red and white, race each other through the street, around the block, up that dark alley and down this one—and I chase after them because what else can I do? I follow them homeward and as I race I make a deal with myself. If red gets there first, I will be cruel to her. If white wins, I will be kind. I run until I am out of breath, my heart clenching and unclenching, the keys jangling in my brain, and then I am home. And white has won. I will be kind, I will kiss her on the mouth and speak, I will tell her everything.

But when I open the door, the apartment is quiet and empty, like a graveyard. The seven thousand tubes of paint are gone. The canvases leaning against the walls are gone. The clothes are gone, the suitcase is gone, and she is gone for good. Birds twist in the air above my head. The world dilates, then contracts to the size of a point. I stare down at the chessboard of a floor, all the squares are white, every move seems equally impossible and unnecessary. Checkmate.

S
he didn't take everything. I realized this after an hour or two or three in the dark. For example, the easel. It stood in front of the window, submerged in shadows. She had left a single canvas there, its face turned toward the sky, as if she'd hoped birds or pilots might see it and take notice.

When I first learned to read and write, I would make signs and put them up in my bedroom window, facing out. The first one said
HELLO
. The second one said
ANYONE THERE?
The third one said
IF YOU CAN READ THIS MY NAME IS SAMARA MY ADDRESS IS 5479 HUTCHISON MY PHONE NUMBER IS 514-482-9986 PLEASE CALL.

This last sign stayed up in the window for years. And for years nobody noticed it, because nobody in that neighborhood ever looked up. The hipsters all had their heads bent over cell phones. The Hasids shunted to and from synagogue with their gaze glued to the ground, the better to avoid temptation-inducing sights: a woman's little finger, a dress hung up to dry.

There was only one exception: Alex.

It had been ten years now. Ten years since that day when, pointing his telescope out at people's houses, he had first seen the sign in my window. Ten years since he figured out that he could call the house and, without saying a word, relay his messages with perfect clarity and zero chance of being overheard. Ten years since we'd started communicating in binary code, entire
conversations conveyed through the receiver in a pattern of rests and taps, zeros and ones . . .

I
n the hush of twilight I was painting Jenny's body. Covering every inch of her skin with paint. She lay on the bed, quiet and yielding. Naked. My brush skipped lightly across the contours of her face. Lips, lashes, nostrils, ears. Her blond hair took a long time, but I coated each strand with care. A canister of house paint sat beside me on the sheet.
TAUPE
, said the label, and my brush dipped again and again. Collarbone, neck, navel. Thirty-three vertebrae, they made the brush skip up and down, and then the small of the back. Hips, thighs, the place between the thighs. The soles of the feet. As I was painting the last of her fingernails, covering up the final traces of sparkly blue polish, I suddenly remembered that if you coat a person's body entirely with house paint, they will die. Panicking, I looked to her eyes for signs of life, but they were already painted over. I screamed, scratched at her face, dug for the human color beneath the gray. But all my nails brought up were sooty lashes, flakes of skin turned ash.

I
bolted upright, gasping for air in the morning light.

The back of her canvas was staring at me. If I turned it around, it would reveal everything she had been thinking and feeling for the past few months. Would it be an expression of hope and happiness in the face of intolerable despair? It would not. Would it be a visual valentine? It would not. I was afraid to look, so instead I lay perfectly still, the golden undersides of birds twirling above my head.

She would go to Kyle's house, I realized with a pang. Jenny would go to Kyle's and move in with her, because she would die before moving back in with her parents, and all her other friends had graduated and moved away, and where else could she turn? Nowhere.

The thought felt too painful to bear.

But when I got out of bed, I found, to my surprise, that it was bearable. Just. Even though being without her felt like nails digging through my skin, scratching at my face, her absence made it easier for me to do what I needed to do. In fact, the pain of this separation
proved
that I was well on my way. Jenny had been tethering me to reality. Now that she was gone—and I accepted she was gone—there was nothing to keep me from rising up the Tree.

And wasn't that, on some level, why I'd misread Yesod to mean a back-alley blow job—even though I well understood symbol and metaphor, even though my whole academic training had been about preventing me from committing
exactly this type of misreading
—because deep down, I'd wanted to push Jenny away? Because deep down, I knew that the Tree was a vertical tightrope along which only a single soul could walk?

Instead of getting ready to go to my morning shift, I got my backpack and pulled it into bed with me. I took out the pages of my father's manuscript and recorded my latest dream in the margins: taupe paint, blue nail polish, asphyxiation. Then I started reading:

BINAH-CHOCHMAH is the final complementary pair. In Chochmah—Wisdom—the blueprints upon which the world is designed first come into being. However, these blueprints remain at a stage of pure potentiality; only in Binah—Understanding—do they take concrete form. For this reason, Chochmah is referred to as “the original idea” and “the seed of creation.” It is symbolized as the supernal father.

From the depths of my backpack, my cell phone rang. I ignored it and frowned down at the manuscript. How was I supposed to get my hands on such abstract qualities as Wisdom and Understand
ing? What exactly was the difference between them, aside from the fact that one was about a potential reality and the other a concrete one? The rest of the chapter was not much help:

Some sages read the word Chochmah as
cheich mah,
“the palate of selflessness.” This reading refers to the mystic's ability to taste God as a result of having shed any remnants of the ego, as it is written, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalms 34). Chochmah is typically associated with the sense of sight, but the sages interpret this verse to mean that there is a sense of taste in Chochmah that awakens the sense of sight.

A sense of taste that awakens the sense of sight? Over the next few hours, I puzzled over what this could mean. I walked to the market and wandered the stalls. I brought grapes, then cherries, then strawberries to my mouth, tasting one fruit after the other. Nothing transmitted the spark I'd been expecting. The glossy skins were cold to the touch.

Dear Alex,

God is the space between signals—radio and otherwise. In the silence/static/synapse between a moment of desperation and a moment of revelation, that's where faith resides. And that faith isn't a waiting for God. That faith is God.

Do you remember the day of the science fair? I was so sure you and Lev were going to crash and burn. Calling the space station? Whoever heard of such a thing? But you sent your lonely voice out into space. Again you called and again silence and again you called and again
silence and again your lonely voice crashing into the silencesilencesilence and I couldn't stand to listen, stuffed my fingers in my ears, couldn't stand to watch, squeezed my eyes shut tight, and still you sent your lonely voice . . .

It hit the note of perfect faith. Van Gogh's high yellow note. I thought: Where did he learn faith like that? I thought: God is in this classroom. And then your call was answered . . .

I'm trying to have that same faith now. Sufficient faith to achieve the miracle. But it's hard. I'm more than halfway up, I'm stranded here and it's hard. Sometimes I think maybe you should be the one climbing this Tree. Between the two of us, you were always the more faithful.

D
ecember was making me crazy. The days were colder, shorter. The streets were choked, the buses were choked, and in spite of my resolve to remain empty and waiting, I was choking on my own eagerness. Where was the key to Binah-Chochmah? I read and reread my father's book, raking it for clues that seemed not to exist, so I ran my tongue blindly over random objects I encountered—a paring knife, a park bench—but not a single item responded to my touch. The world was a locket that had decided not to open.

I took refuge in every quirky behavior I had cultivated over the years as a way of making myself unknowable, a byzantine system of codes that no one could crack without the use of a primer or a magic decoder ring. I went to the library and trailed my finger along the spines. I ran warm water over my hands for hours at a time. I went to the downtown café and ordered a bowl of soup from the woman who had called out “Miranda!” in such a perfect voice. She asked for a name and I gave it to her. She waited, as if giving me a chance to correct myself, to call myself Miranda. I said nothing.
She said nothing. I stood at the counter and waited. It felt bad to be confusing her in this way, and I wouldn't have done it if it weren't strictly necessary, but it was, it really was. It was the whole reason I had come. I needed to hear the sweetest name, the name I'd been whispering to myself in the dark, finally spoken aloud.

“Jenny!”

She placed the bowl of soup in front of me. I resisted the urge to hug her. The bowl was steaming hot and I carried it to my table tenderly, like a newborn. For a long time, I simply sat in my seat and studied the vapors moving over the soup. I was searching for patterns in the chaos, for codes in the clouds, but the air around me was bereft of music. By the time I picked up my spoon, the soup was cold.