ben Zephyr’s bird’s nest. It was empty but for the snake-haired technician in her pastel jumpsuit behaving at her console like a pilot in the cockpit of a plane going down. She was at once appealing frantically through the mouthpiece of her headset for assistance and hammering the computer keys in what may have been an SOS, her fingers raising a clatter like artillery. As he stood at the threshold, Bernie fought against being infected by her obvious panic, wondering if the police assault was already under way.
Unobserved by its sole occupant, Bernie had advanced far enough into the skybox to steal a peek into the rabbi’s sleeping chamber, whose French doors had been left haphazardly ajar. Unable at first to trust what he saw, he rubbed his eyes with his fists, then squeezed them as if to drain their retinas of any lingering illusion. For there on the circular bed beneath the soft track lighting, an R&B singer crooning from an amp in the background, two women from among the rabbi’s circle of votaries were kneeling, working strenuously over the supine body of the naked holy man. Also naked, the young one called Cosette with the whiplash braid and the older one with the chin tuck whose name Bernie couldn’t recall were apparently trying to revive him. Cosette pumped the chicken bones of his arms, her pert breasts jiggling ornamentally with each effort, while her full-figured companion, quivering in every part, leaned above the rabbi and breathed into his mouth as if attempting to inflate a rubber raft. Both were performing their respective operations after a fashion that convinced the boy they had no idea what they were doing. Meanwhile the old man lay motionless, and if his virile member—trailing a condom like a stocking cap on a fireplug—were any indication, rigor mortis was already setting in.
Heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, let alone a multitude of collateral maladies, might have felled an old party well into his third century, especially one so renowned for his excesses. Nevertheless, as Bernie edged to within an arm’s length of the disheveled bed, still unnoticed by the women, the rabbi seemed to be responding to their ministrations, his blanched eyelids fluttering open. “Please God, he’s come back to us!” cried the older woman, getting hold of herself enough to remind him, “Rabbi, it’s me, Rosalie,” and to inquire, “are you comfortable?”
Then Bernie thought the old rascal might be looking past the women to wink at him with a sallow eye. “I make a livink,” he said, and closed his eyes again.
Kneeling beside the bed, the boy must have exuded a nasty stench, because the women, despite their intense preoccupation, took note of him. Looking up to see what must have appeared to her as some pitch-bespattered devil from the abyss, Rosalie covered her breasts and let out a shriek, then leaning over the edge of the mattress to retch, tumbled after in a dead faint onto the floor. Cosette screamed, “Mama!” and bolted from the bed to help raise the sullied Rosalie to her feet, the two of them staggering out of the room in each other’s arms.
Left alone with his rebbe, Bernie swallowed hard before speaking into the old man’s bristly ear: “Rabbi, can you hear me?” And receiving an encouraging “Nu?” continued, “Don’t you think it’s time you returned to the path of righteousness?”
His voice the wheezy wedding of a rattle and a sigh, Rabbi Eliezer answered: “Farshtunkener boychik, don’t make me laugh. There ain’t no path; there’s only the end of the road. What you call the path, it’s just messing around.”
Bernie considered the point, then concluded, “That’s only your ego speaking,” and reached over to peel off the flaccid condom.
“Ego shmego, so long as you got your health,” replied the rabbi just this side of a whisper. “Listen, kiddo, when comes to earth even a angel, he must wear the garment of this world.”
“Excuse me, Rabbi,” Bernie couldn’t help remarking, “but you’re naked.”
“So nobody’s perfect.”
“Rabbi,” urged Bernie in the language of a desperate apostle, “let me get you out of here, and we’ll do miracles. We can explore Ayn Sof, the Big Nothingness, together; we can be glorious nothing, you and me, like before we were born.”
“Psht,” from the rabbi; “give a listen who thinks he’s nothing,” he said, beginning to cackle broadly at his own joke, laughing until he choked, the tundra of his face turning a deep shade of cyanine blue. Then his body began to convulse,