and turned turtle, clutching it in a bear hug as it spun out of the maelstrom and continued to sail downstream. A flash of lightning illuminated the bridge, the retired paddlewheelers moored to the Arkansas shore, and the supine old man in his crystal coffin whom Ruby had never quite believed in till now. There was a rending sound as if the Almighty had split his pants, another flash that sewed the water with silver, and Ruby saw that he and the rabbi were not alone in the stream. They were escorted by an armada of ice rafts released from the tail end of winter in the northern states on their way to dissolve in the Gulf of Mexico. Then a thunderclap and the sky cracked open, the deluge began, and both the youth and the old man he was riding were captured in a casting net tossed from a dinghy by a pair of colored kids.
2001.
Because the video rental store where Lou Ella worked featured only films adapted from Broadway musicals (the owner was an eccentric with a private income), there was a very limited clientele. As a result, Lou had a lot of time for reading. Lately, despite the dismay the book had caused Bernie, she kept returning to the less didactic chapters of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr’s autobiography, The Ice Sage. She especially enjoyed the sections describing the rebbe’s serial adventures before he was born as himself. For the infant Eliezer, a prodigy in the womb, had managed to elude the Angel of Forgetfulness, the one responsible for tweaking you under the nose at birth. This is the touch that causes an infant to forget its past lives and any interim time spent in Paradise. By curling his upper lip monkey-fashion over his philtrum as he was yanked from between his mother’s legs, the newborn was able to deflect the angel’s retrograde flick, thereby leaving him with a taste of heaven on his lips all his days. Consequently he remembered the entire genealogy of his previous soul migrations, his gilgulim. He recalled his humble beginnings as a locust that had participated in the ten plagues of Egypt, as a flea in the ear of the Prophet Habakkuk, a bat in the cave wherein Simeon bar Yohai spent thirteen years translating the natural world into holy writ. In his most ignominious embodiment Eliezer was a cat a Cossack hetman had sewn into the belly of a pregnant Jewess whose fetus had been excised. Thanks to an amulet blessed by a lamed vovnik, however, the woman survived and the cat was born as a human child, a pious daughter who eventually married and bore a litter of seven children, all given to burying their feces in sand. There were other human incarnations the rabbi recounted on the way to narrating his own, such as his birth to a poor Jew and his wife in the Transylvanian Alps. The baby was snatched from his cradle by an eagle and dropped over an Arabian desert where he landed in the common kettle of a Bedouin tribe who raised him as their own. But a nameless itch spurred him to wander through several countries, faiths, and lives until his soul was born again into the family of Zephyr Threefoot, a charcoal burner in the Polish village of Boibicz. There the eloi, the prodigy, was from childhood a prey to spontaneous ecstasies. He had always to check clocks to keep himself anchored in time, to wear spectacles in order to see individual persons and objects, since without them he saw everything in its cosmic unity. As a toddler he had on his own initiative slathered pages of Torah with honey and gobbled them up, so that by the time he was old enough for cheder he could regurgitate the entire Pentateuch.
“In those days you could say that me and God were thick as thieves,” the rebbe had written (via the medium of Sanford Grusom’s no-nonsense prose). “Together we performed your standard miracles and exorcisms; we healed lepers, vanquished werewolves, shooed away demons from circumcisions, staged mixers to introduce souls without bodies to bodies without souls—that sort of thing. And always I remained, as they say, a hand’s breadth above the earth.…” Then after a long and auspicious career that had drawn to him a circle of devoted followers, Rabbi ben Zephyr was at his prayers in his customary spot beside Baron Jagiello’s horse pond when a sudden storm came up.
The rebbe made it