on earth, herself a prey to forebodings, she now campaigned actively to postpone whatever was coming.
In the meantime the world around them had begun to catch up with Lou Ella’s bleak assessments of its status. While Bernie might command in his flights an aerial view of history, Lou had her own brand of second sight and seemed not at all surprised when the world began to show signs of being in its final days. It was an attitude in keeping with her Pentecostal background, though she judged the rabid voices from that quarter as themselves material signs that the end was at hand. She was a complicated girl, at odds with her own fatalism, who seemed to take for granted the toppling of the towers by terrorists in New York City and the nation’s berserk response; she anticipated the thirst for vengeance that would fan the flames of an already smoldering planet, presaging a universal conflagration. In the name of protecting the homefront, faceless bureaucracies had overnight rolled back liberties to a degree that constituted a shadow police state, and the subsequent paranoid atmosphere left citizens unable to distinguish between real and imagined threats. There was also a crackdown on illegal aliens which, if anyone bothered to notice, the formerly frozen rabbi happened to be. Not that the current climate had put a damper on his enterprise; on the contrary, as fear gave a healthy fillip to the quest for spiritual solace, the times proved especially favorable for Rabbi ben Zephyr’s project. Citizens of the Mid-South flocked to the New House of Enlightenment in unprecedented numbers, and announcements in the papers, always interested in the rabbi’s proceedings, trumpeted his plans to franchise his ministry worldwide. Naturally, the more publicity he received, the more voices were raised in dissent of his methods. Aside from the cautionary bromides of the clergy and the usual canards regarding the Elders of Zion, there were those who attributed cultish tactics to Rabbi ben Zephyr’s community of disciples; there were charges by professed “escapees” from his center that the rabbi and his followers were guilty of coercion, brainwashing, and gross sexual misconduct. Nor did it help matters that the Boibiczer Prodigy had recently been heard making extravagant claims from his pulpit, including the not-so-veiled suggestion that he was, if not the Messiah himself, then at least a harbinger of same. All of which made its way into the local papers, invested as they were in keeping his controversy alive. Still, his defenders remained in the majority, always more ardent in singing their rebbe’s praises than his detractors were in citing his imperfections.
They quoted from the official tracts and testimonials disseminated by the House of Enlightenment, ghostwritten by Bernie’s father’s accountant-turned-publicist, the versatile Mr. Grusom. Then there was the rabbi’s own memoir, which you could now find on sale in chain stores and airport newsstands and which stood to become a classic of inspirational literature in the vein of The Prophet or Autobiography of a Yogi. Bernie had dutifully dipped into the slickly packaged Ice Sage as a companion piece to Grandpa Ruby’s journal, then passed it along without comment to Lou Ella, who had a peculiar tolerance for such narratives. She appreciated the gloss this one provided on the more prosaic chronicle outlined in Bernie’s grandfather’s ledger. Ostensibly The Ice Sage (also ghosted by Grusom, who convinced the rabbi that his original title, The Erotic Tzaddik, was undignified) was Rabbi ben Zephyr’s own version of his spiritual adventures during the time his body was immersed in the ice of a horse pond on Baron Jagiello’s estate. There, while his head was wreathed in a nimbus of static tadpoles and minnows, his spirit attained the highest rungs of the world to come. He’d sat in the celestial academies, participating in roundtable discussions with prophets and patriarchs parsing the thornier points of the ancient mysteries. Meanwhile his body had been carved from the ice and carted halfway round the globe. The family responsible for shlepping him about for the better part of a century was given short shrift in the rabbi’s recounting; they were merely a means to an end, and if he acknowledged their efforts at all, it was only by way of explaining his geographic mobility. Also, though the book was subtitled “Rabbi ben Zephyr’s Adventures with God,” God Himself was seldom mentioned. The text focused instead on techniques for overcoming phobias, realizing desires, and taking control of your life by exploiting the power of something