called the Light of Creation. The hallowed mystical tradition was de-Judaized, its esoteric elements soft-pedaled in an effort to pander to a popular audience. Having perused as much of the memoir as he could stomach, Bernie couldn’t help feeling saddened by how the Prodigy had among other things co-opted his family’s history for his own purposes. But then it was the rabbi’s history as well, wasn’t it?—to bend, fold, and swindle as he saw fit. Still, the book seemed a betrayal of the days they’d spent together in the guesthouse and the basement rumpus room, that distant time when the hidden rebbe had condescended to instruct the boy in the ways of the inexpressible and to help him in his first limping efforts to translate his grandfather’s journal.
For all that, Bernie was worried about old Eliezer, just as he worried about a world that had lately claimed his attention. It seemed to him that each time he looked up from reading to the girl, yet another international atrocity had occurred. Lou Ella would plead with him to keep his head down, don’t stop reading, and when he wavered, she pumped him with questions about the handwritten script: Why, for instance, had Ruby, whose native language was English, chosen to pen his confessions in a spiky Yiddish? She was convinced they would discover the reason if only they forged ahead; the tale was especially suspenseful now that Ruby and the frozen rabbi were headed their way—that is, coming to Memphis.
“How do you know?” asked Bernie, who translated haltingly as he went along and knew no more of his grandfather’s fate than did the girl.
“‘Cause I’m psychic,” she replied, one hand on the steering wheel, the other reaching into the backseat to shove a pacifier in her baby sister’s open mouth. “And besides, they have to get to Memphis so your daddy who ain’t been born yet can meet your mama and have you.”
At that Bernie became thoughtful. “Do you know,” he mused, “I’m about the same age as Grandpa Ruby was when he killed his father?”
“It wasn’t exactly murder,” qualified Lou, though Bernie remained un-consoled. He gazed through the windshield at the passing rat-hole projects, where stray bullets from drive-by shootings nightly claimed the lives of children asleep in their beds, and somehow felt implicated in his grandfather’s crime. The guilt was perhaps an indulgence that helped correct the imbalance in his system, because lately he felt altogether too much at home in his own skin. It wasn’t right to feel so at home on a planet going to hell in a handbag. How could you reconcile, for instance, the precarious footing of current events with the scent of lilac that penetrated the brain like some metaphysical spice? Everything he observed had its extra dimension: a throng of starlings was a tattered flag whipped by the wind; the holes in a matzoh were a mysterious Braille. If he farted he recalled Isaiah: “Whereof my bowels shall sound like a lyre”; when Lou wiped egg from Sue Lily’s lips clouds passed from the face of the moon. The backwater of Memphis was a safe harbor on the coast of eternity where he lingered with the girl, his lust subdued now to an enduring affection. On the other hand, Bernie had a gift, and it seemed to him it was high time he used it for the greater good.
“Awesome,” said the girl, unimpressed. “So why don’t you get a job?”
Bernie agreed that that was probably a good idea. His attendance at school during what should have been his junior year was intermittent at best, and eventually his self-involved parents would return the phone calls from his teachers and his scofflaw existence would be exposed. When that happened he should be prepared to secure his own independence. Wasn’t it anyway shameful that he still occupied a room in his family’s house, where he spent his days riffling the books he’d “borrowed” from the genizah at the Anshei Mishneh shul?—texts for apprentice holy men whose pages were marked with hairs from his first growth of beard, their Hebrew characters becoming entwined with his DNA. At the same time, though she assured him it wasn’t a problem, Bernie was also ashamed that it fell to Lou to foot the bill for their junkets. She bought the gas for her mother’s Malibu and paid the checks at the Arcade Diner across from the train depot with funds from clerking at a video store after school. That meant