to pick your way through like “the fallen bricks of Jericho.” (She could be fanciful.) She recited their titles: Women Who Run with Wolves, The Celestine Prophecy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Mists of Avalon; she mentioned the divas she admired: Lotte Lenya, Avril LaVigne; the journal she kept; the poetry of Rumi and Arthur Rimbaud. Then, as casually as she might have asked him the time of day, she invited him to come see her room for himself. But that was later on.
In the meantime she continued to ration the biographical tidbits that Bernie felt ashamed of not having requested in the first place. He knew she wasn’t naturally talkative, and her confidences, not easily rendered, were meant to provoke similar utterances from him. But he couldn’t get past the fact that she was a girl, and regardless of how dramatically his own life had been altered since the Great Thaw (his term) Bernie Karp had never mastered the knack of talking to girls. Of course this one was different; this one followed him around. He’d spent his years in a virtual sleepwalk, his small joys derived from spasms of passing interest that, always a secretive kid, he kept to himself. Now an immeasurable joy had awakened him to another reality and, friendless as he was, he had a desire to relate what he’d learned, but the vocabulary for communicating that information was unavailable. Once in a while, however, he might submit apropos of nothing some crumb of dogma gleaned from his reading:
“Did you know, there are 903 different kinds of death? The most difficult one is the croup, which is choking, and the easiest is death by kiss, which is likened to drawing a hair out of milk. This is from Tractate Berakhot, and from the medieval Sefer Yetzirat we read…”
She would look at him expectantly, but when the words, detached as they were from emotional moorings, petered out, her anticipation turned to disappointment and even scorn. So they walked primarily in silence along suburban streets, strayed through the thickety woods behind the school, and strolled beside the banks of the septic river through the remnant of a slate-gray February into an even bleaker March. Having abandoned his trips to the downtown synagogue and shelved for the meantime his plans for bar mitzvah, Bernie would sit with her in a booth at a coffee bar in the very strip mall from which the rabbi’s academy had decamped. It was clear to him that Lou was making sacrifices to be with him; he knew that even her lusterless friends now snubbed her, that those who’d written him off as a wing nut (which included all and sundry) now banished her to the same category. He felt he owed her something and resented that she should make him feel that way. At the same time he was thankful that she no longer interrogated him, though once as they sat nursing cocoa amid the strumming of a lank-haired folk singer to whom no one was listening, she had the temerity to ask him,
“So when do you reckon on leaving your body again?”
She might have been inquiring after his adherence to a railroad timetable. Bernie assured her he didn’t know, that anything might trigger an involuntary departure though he remained unable to take flight at will. Clearly impatient with his response, she said almost testily, “Let me know when you feel one coming on again.” Then prey to an apparent change of heart, she softened, hastening to add coquettishly, “And when you go, maybe you could take me with you?”
The question surprised and confounded him. Who did she think she was? Who, for that matter, did he think she was? It was enough that she pried into the private domain of his spiritual life; now she aspired to enter it physically as well? Again, as upon their first meeting, he wanted to flee. A sudden deep distrust of the girl stung his heart. Okay, so here on earth he was a dweeb, a regular kunyehlemel, but aloft he was something else: like in that tale of Rabbi Eliezer’s about the country that contained within it all countries, and in that country was a city that contained all the cities of that country that contained all countries, and in that city a house that contained all the cities of that country that contained all countries, and in that house a man who bore all this within him—and that man was he, the boy Bernie