City of God Read online

  Jesus, I think I am going crazy.

  —The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards

  ME AND MY SHADOW

  Me and My shadow,

  Strolling down the avenue.

  Me and my shadow

  Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .

  And when it’s twelve o’clock

  We climb the stair

  We never knock

  For nobody’s there

  Just me and my shadow

  All alone and feeling blue.

  The song speaks of oneself shadowed by loneliness

  The singer of the song may be a shadow of himself

  He could be singing, “Me and the me that’s a shadow of me,

  We are here in this nameless avenue

  We don’t see anyone else in view,

  Must be they’re under the apple tree

  Left the whole damn city to my shadow and me.”

  He is saying the Fall of Man is misery:

  “I hear no footsteps but my own

  And the avenue goes straight on down between the tall buildings

  For miles and miles, and the lights turn green

  And the lights turn red,

  As if it mattered, as if there were metered taxis and trucks and cars and buses

  Bumper to bumper, hellish ruckuses

  Of horns blowing, cops blowing their whistles

  A river of people, eddying souls

  The avenue flowing as far as you can see with millions of folks none of them me.

  But that’s not what I see. I’m all alone

  I’m casting my shadow on a sunny pavement

  Scuttling along in the street of my enslavement chained to my shadow, bone by bone.”

  And then the singer hears the clock strike twelve— is it noon or the midnight hour?

  Is it the end of time, the end of the time of His patience?

  The singer’s way to heaven is an open door in space.

  He thinks, If there’s no heaven beyond this door—

  If there is nothing more for this poor mortal, why have I been brought here,

  What is this life for?

  (tentative applause)

  But think for a moment what a shadow portends

  The sun is in its heaven, that’s what that means,

  This may not be the world that’s on your string

  But this is God’s world, there is goodness there is sin

  We have to learn the difference again and again

  Your shadow is the Good Lord’s light not passing through you,

  You are dense, you’re opaque

  that ought to tell you something, for God’s sake!

  At twelve o’clock when my time comes to an end?

  I know that I will climb the stairway to heaven!

  I will hear them say, Don’t bother knocking the gate is open!

  I will feel His warm celestial light shine down upon me

  And when I turn around my shadow will be gone!

  Sent back down to bring another soul along!

  O happy day, when the bell begins to toll for all the world’s poor souls—

  I can tell you they won’t be feeling blue

  When they find out it’s His glory they’ve been strolling to!

  (enthusiastic applause)

  The singer is saying, “Of all the troubles I’ve seen

  The last and worst is the trouble of never again having someone to tell my troubles to.”

  In fact he’s saying, “I’d be trouble-free

  If I had someone to listen other than me.”

  This is a mourning song of love lost

  Remembering a time of past happiness

  When he was one half of a fine-looking high-stepping couple enjoying a walk on the day of rest

  Where now he has only his own pale shadow for company.

  And it’s not as if this isn’t some festive scene everything in color, alive and humming with other fine-looking high-stepping couples on their Sabbath walk under the flags in the warmth of the morning sun

  So that it might be an Easter parade of the city’s population—

  Not at all. The rest of this city is turned out in its best

  Whereas for him, singing a dirge of his soul’s lost romance

  Alone, independent, he’s atonal, he is dissonance.

  And when he reaches the destination of all shadowed beings,

  the most silent and mysterious of buildings,

  Before he can knock the door swings open

  And he steps into the darkness of the shadow cast by God.

  And the singer has to acknowledge as he steps through the door,

  “In His shadow I am nothing, don’t even have my shadow anymore.”

  (a few hands clapping)

  Shadow me,

  shadow you,

  what’s a shadow

  gonna do. . .

  Up at dawn,

  hides at noon,

  evening comes

  does the moon

  Go to ground,

  make no sound,

  mourners done,

  shadow’s gone.

  —What if there’s no heaven, just a door?

  —I don’t even have my shadow anymore. . .

  —We don’t know the glory we are strolling toward. . .

  —Gone, shadow’s gone.

  Me and My shadow,

  Strolling down the avenue.

  Me and my shadow

  Not a soul to tell our troubles to. . .

  ( wild acclaim)

  —That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated. . . is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.

  Einstein was one physicist who lived quite easily with the concept of a Creator. He had a habit of calling God the Old One. That was his name for God, the Old One. He was not a stylish writer, Albert, but he chose words for their precision. One way or another God is very old. . . because archaeologists in the fifties discovered a sacred ossuary cave of the Neanderthals on the Tyrrhenian coast of the Pomptine Fields in western Italy. They found the skull of a male buried within a circle of stones. The cranium had been severed from the jaw and brow and used for a drinking bowl. That’s how old God is. So Einstein is right about that. And One. . . because God is by definition not only unduplicable and all-encompassing but also without gender. So the phrase is really very exact: the Old One. Not much in the way of a revelation, of course. Albert thought of his work in physics as tracking God, as if God lived in gravity, or shuttled between the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, or could be seen now and then indolently moving along at one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second. . . not exactly the concerned God people pray to or petition, but, hell, it’s a start, it’s something, if not everything we have if we want to be true to ourselves.

  —Heist

  Wednesday

  Trish giving a dinner when I got here. The caterer’s man who let me in thought I was a latecomer. Now I think about it, I was looking straight ahead as I passed the dining room, a millisecond of time, right? Yet I saw everything: which silver, the floral centerpiece. She’s doing the veal paillard dinner. Château Latour in the Steuben decanters. Oh what a waste. Two of the hopefuls present, the French UN diplomat, the boy-genius mutual fund manager. Odds on the Frenchman. The others all extras. Amazing the noise ten people can make around a table. And in this same millisecond of candlelight, Trish’s glance over the rim of the wine glass raised to her lips, those cheekbones, the amused blue eyes, the frosted coif. That fraction of an instant of my passage in the doorway was all she needed from the far end of the table to see what she had to see of me, to understand, to know why I’d slunk home. But isn’t it terrible that after it’s over between us the synapses continue firing coordinately? What do you have to say about that, Lord? All the problems we have with You, we haven’t even gotte
n around to Your small-time perversities. I mean, when an instant is still the capacious, hoppingly alive carrier of all our intelligence? And it’s the same damn dumb biology when, however moved I am by another woman, the tips of my fingers are recording that she isn’t Trish.

  But the dining room was the least of it. It’s a long walk down the hall to the guest room when the girls are home for the weekend.

  We are on battery pack, Lord, I forgot the AC gizmo. And I am exhausted—forgive me.

  In the E-mail:

  “dear father if u want to no where yor cross go to 2531 w 168 street apt 2A where the santeria oombalah father casts the sea shels an cuts the chickns troats.”

  “Dear Reverend, We are two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (Mormon) assigned to the Lower East Side of New York. . .”

  “Dear Father, I am one of a group of your neighbors in nearby New Jersey who have taken a Sacred Oath to defend this Republic and the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ from alien heathen interlopers wherever they may arise, even if from the federal government. And I mean defend—with skill, and organizational knowhow and the only thing these people understand, The Gun that is our porrogative to hold as free white Americans. . .”

  —This afternoon as we lay side by side on our backs Moira told me about herself: She grew up in a working-class family in Pennsylvania. She went to Penn State for two years before dropping out and leaving for New York. She thought a job in publishing would be nice but in the meantime was working as a temp in a corporate headquarters when her future husband, the CEO, happened to notice her. I knew the rest of the story: He had her assigned to his own secretarial staff, took her out a few times, proposed, and set about terminating his twenty-year marriage. You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement. In another era, spats and top hats, he might have gone to the theater and picked out a girl in the chorus line. We are not so flamboyant now, we have culture, real art hangs on the office walls, we sprinkle our dinner parties with novelists, filmmakers. We know who Wittgenstein was.

  For her part, Moira severed the little connection she had with her family by not inviting them to her wedding.

  And that is the genealogy of her serene certitude, and her charming air of being unimpressed to be among them, that the men and women of our set, myself included, found so intriguing.

  I feel deceived not by her but by appearances: how real they can be in my America. I feel no animus for her husband, I hardly know him. He’s a powerful figure in business often quoted in newspaper articles about the economy. She said he is a child who needs her unceasing admiration and praise. He worries constantly about his position in the business world, she has to listen to his anguished reports of matters she does not really understand and suffer his wild private swings from vanity and pride to whining self-doubt. He is afflicted with nameless fears, he has night sweats, and often expresses his dread that everything he’s made for himself, everything he owns, will one day be taken away from him. Including me, she said by way of conclusion.

  She turned on her side. She was smiling. Including me, she said again, whispering and then putting her tongue in my ear.

  —When a song is a standard, it can reproduce itself from one of its constituent parts. If you recite the words you will hear the melody. Hum the melody and the words will form in your mind. That is an indication of an unusual self-referential power—the physical equivalent would be limb regeneration, or cloning the being from one cell. Standards from every period of our lives remain cross-indexed in our brains, to be called up in whole or in part, or to come to the mind unbidden. Nothing else can as suddenly and poignantly evoke the look, the feel, the smell of our times past. We use standards in the privacy of our minds as signifiers of our actions and relationships. They can be a cheap means of therapeutic self-discovery. If, for example, you are deeply in love and thinking about her and looking forward to seeing her, pay attention to the tune you’re humming. Is it “Just One of Those Things”? You will soon end the affair.

  —Heist

  Yesterday, Monday,

  voice mail from a Rabbi Joshua Gruen of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism on West Ninety-eighth Street: It is in your interest that we meet as soon as possible. Clearly not one of the kooks. When I call back he is cordial but will answer no questions over the phone. So okay, this is what detectives do, Lord, they investigate. Sounded a serious young man, one religioso to another, mufti or collar? I go for the collar.

  The synagogue a brownstone between West End and Riverside Drive, a steep flight of granite steps to the door. I deduce Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics. Confirmed when I am admitted. Joshua (my new friend) a trim five-nine in sweatshirt, jeans, running shoes. Gives me a firm handshake. Maybe thirty-two, thirty-four, good chin, well-curved forehead. No yarmulke atop his wavy black hair.

  A converted parlor cum living room with an Ark at one end, a platform table to read the Torah on, shelves with prayer books, and a few rows of bridge chairs, and that’s it, that’s the synagogue.

  Second floor, introduces me to his wife, who puts her caller on hold, stands up from her desk to shake hands, she too a rabbi, Sarah Blumenthal, in blouse and slacks, pretty smile, high cheekbones, no cosmetics, needs none, light hair short au courant cut, granny glasses, Lord my heart. She is one of the assistant rabbis at Temple Emanuel. What if Trish wore the collar, celebrated the Eucharist with me? Okay laugh, but it’s not funny when I think about it, not funny at all.

  Third floor, I meet the children, boys two and four, in their native habitat of primary-color wall boxes filled with stuffed animals. They cling to the flanks of their dark Guatemalan nanny, who is also introduced like a member of the family. . .

  On the back wall of the third-floor landing is an iron ladder. Joshua Green ascends, opens a trapdoor, climbs out. A moment later his head appears against the blue sky. He beckons me upward, poor winded Pem so stress-tested and entranced. . . so determined to make it look effortless, I could think of nothing else.

  I stood finally on the flat roof, the old apartment houses of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive looming at either end of this block of chimneyed brownstone roofs, and tried to catch my breath while smiling at the same time. The autumn sun behind the apartment houses, the late afternoon river breeze on my face. I was feeling the exhilaration and slight vertigo of roof-standing. . . and did not begin to think, until snapped to attention by the rabbi’s puzzled, frankly inquiring gaze that asked why did I think he’d brought me there, why he’d brought me there. His hands in his pockets, he pointed with his chin to the Ninety-eighth Street frontage, where, lying flat on the black tarred roof, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment, the eight-foot hollow brass cross of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, lay tarnished and shining in the autumn sun.

  I suppose I’d known I’d found it from the moment I heard the rabbi’s voice. I bent down for a closer look. The old nicks and dents. Some new ones too. It was not all of a piece, which I hadn’t known: The arms were bolted to the upright in a kind of mortise-and-tenon idea. I lifted it at the foot. It was not that heavy, but clearly too much cross to bear on the stations of the IRT.

  How did Rabbi Joshua Gruen know it was there?

  An anonymous phone call. A man’s voice. Hello, Rabbi? Your roof is burning.

  The roof was burning?

  If the children had been in the house I would have gotten them out and called the Fire Department. As it was, I grabbed our kitchen extinguisher and up I came. Not the smartest thing. Of course, the roof was not burning. But modest as it is, this is a synagogue. A place for prayer and study. And as you see a Jewish family occupies the upper floors. So was he wrong, the caller?

  He bites his lip, dark brown eyes averted from the cross. It is an execrable symbol to him. Burning its brand on his synagogue. Burning down, floor through floor, like the template of a Christian c
hurch. I want to tell him I’m on the Committee for Ecumenical Theology of the Trans-Religious Fellowship. A member of the National Council of Christians and Jews.

  This is deplorable. I am really sorry about this.

  It’s hardly your fault.

  I know, I say. But this city is getting weirder by the minute.

  The rabbis offered me a cup of coffee. We sat in the kitchen. I felt quite close to them, both our houses of worship desecrated, the entire Judeo-Christian heritage trashed.

  This gang’s been preying on me for months. And for what they’ve gotten for their effort, I mean, one hit on a dry cleaner would have done as much. Listen, Rabbi—

  —Joshua.

  Joshua. Do you read detective stories?

  He cleared his throat, blushed. Only all the time, Sarah Blumenthal said, smiling at him.

  Well, let’s put our minds together. We’ve got two mysteries going here.

  Why two?

  This gang. I can’t believe their intent was, ultimately, to commit an anti-Semitic act. They have no intent. They’re not of this world. And all the way from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side? No, that’s asking too much of them.