had begun to think that he too, despite his tender years and lack of credentials, ought perhaps to consider starting a ministry of his own—concerning which he would also seek the rabbi’s advice. He’d come at an early hour, hoping to beat the heat and catch the old man before his day began with its busy round of self-ultimate classes and motivational talks.
Finding the glass doors to the foyer still locked, Bernie rapped on the panes, which rattled like distant thunder. Presently a broad-shouldered black man in a suit and mirrored sunglasses arrived to unlock the doors, releasing as he opened them a chilly blast from the air-conditioned interior.
“Can I hep y’all?” he asked in a voice that seemed to emanate from the bottom of an oil drum. When Bernie said he was there to see the rebbe, the man—a Bukharan kippah riding his shaven head, a walkie-talkie gripped in a hand wrapped in leather like a cestus—inquired if he had an appointment. “No,” said Bernie, “but we’re practically related,” and gave his name. “I’ll see can he see you,” said the security, looking askance at the boy, who caught his own reflection in a lens of the man’s glasses: a shnoz-heavy adolescent with a head of sprung curls, his T-shirt bellying about his much diminished frame. He checked the other lens in the hope of glimpsing a more imposing countenance, but the image was identical. The man spoke into his mobile instrument, which crackled affirmatively, after which he beckoned Bernie to follow his rolling gait past a gift shop stocked with an inventory of extravagantly priced books and arcana. They stepped into a glass-walled elevator that resembled nothing so much as a colossal ice cube. The elevator rose past the mezzanine, whose wide, sunlit corridor encircled the auditorium, to a third level, where a catwalk stretched over space to a vaultlike door. Exiting, Bernie’s escort crossed the resounding steel span and knocked. The jellyfish eye that winked from a peephole was made redundant by the sentinel camera mounted above the door, which rolled open on metal casters to reveal a zaftig woman in her middle years. She was wearing a floral print muumuu and smiling a ruddy-cheeked smile, her hair spooled about her head like pink cotton candy.
“Bernie!” She greeted him as if they were old acquaintances. “Our rebbe has told us so much about you.”
Delivered into her hands by the myrmidon (uttering a deep-toned “Peace be wicha” as he departed), the boy thought he might have recognized the woman from the old Kabbalah center in the shopping plaza, but in his memory all the ladies at the center looked alike. That impression was reinforced when another woman, similarly clad and with a face stretched tight from cosmetic surgery, took his other arm and also made over him as if he were kin. They conducted him into a commodious, cork-paneled room, the hybrid of a press box and an air control tower. Seated therein, yet another caftaned lady, headphones clamped over Medusa-like hair, manned a blinking computer terminal from which she too looked up to grin sweetly at Bernie. In front of her a row of thick windows overlooked an arena the size of a circus bigtop, its steep tiers of theater seats surrounding an Astroturfed paddock. A bank of video screens hugged the curve of the wall above the windows, each displaying a different aspect of the auditorium below. “Behold the pulsating nerve center of the House of Enlightenment,” announced the woman with the cotton candy hair in her role as tutelary spirit. Bernie had just begun to peer through the tinted glass into the amphitheater, where a trickle of devotees were beginning to assemble for the morning session, when he heard behind him a once familiar voice,
“Boychikl!” it croaked.
He turned to see Rabbi ben Zephyr himself entering from a private chamber off the control room. He was wearing a cap like a truncated mitre and a summer-weight suit of iridescent leek-green, while yet another female, trim in her tennis skirt, trailing a chestnut braid the length of her vertebrae, was placing an embroidered ephod over his head. There was a ruff of tissues stuffed into his collar to protect his suit from the makeup that the woman (really a girl) with the braid had begun to rub into his rutted brow.
“Hartzeniu,” he greeted, actually pinching Bernie’s cheek as he shuffled forward, “the prodigal returns. Looks like he could use something to eat, the prodigal. Messy…?” The cotton