candy lady—whose name, the rabbi offered in an aside, was Messalina—snatched a tray of fruit danishes from a conference table in the center of the room and presented it to Bernie, who declined; his stomach was too skittish for food. Still, he was grateful for the exuberant welcome that had replaced the raillery he’d encountered on his prior visit.
“How are the folks?” asked Rabbi Eliezer, waving away the hand of the girl wielding the powder puff. “Don’t tell me. Your papa’s got up his sleeve another investment scheme, and your mama, she comes to the noon minchah meditation. A dedicated lady, is raised now her conscious almost to the third degree. Soon she don’t mind no more the hot flash or the droppéd womb. How do I know? What don’t I know,” wriggling his crooked fingers spookily. “Also, they had me last night in their house to supper. And where was you that ain’t never at home? You still with the knee-jerk assumptions to glory, or did you go back to touching yourself all the time?”
Speechless in the face of such a barrage, Bernie concluded that celebrity had improved the rabbi’s disposition. When he found his tongue, he admitted that, yes, he did seem to be living in at least two worlds at once. “I keep, y’know, stumbling into paradise.” He chuckled self-consciously, wanting suddenly to tell the old man everything: how conventional reality now seemed to him almost negligible, except for the existence of the girl; but the rabbi was wagging a finger like a windshield wiper in front of his nose.
“Barney—”
“Bernie.”
“Bernie, paradise is where already you are.”
Uncrossing his eyes from their fix on the ticking finger, Bernie wondered if the rabbi were speaking to him in earnest or in his capacity as peddler of commercial illumination; then he scolded himself for thinking that there was such a distinction. “Still,” he submitted in a lower key, “I keep having these, y’know, experiences.”
“Hust,” exhaled the old man, and there was the finger again, this time pressed against his desiccated lips. “There’s physics you can take for them, the experiences.” Then he cackled with a hilarity that was seconded by his ladies.
A good sport, Bernie nevertheless responded with a touch of defiance. “The visions, when they come, they swallow up every part of me but my body.”
“Nu,” replied the rabbi patronizingly, his eyebrows opposing slopes, “visions.” The ladies also looked on with undue fondness. “Sweetheart,” said his mentor, “visions I dispense here like shalachmones at Purim; it ain’t so special, the visions.” Then sotto voce, “But don’t tell to my congregation this.”
The note of confidentiality heartened the boy enough to ask the first of his laundry list of questions: Did the rabbi’s “congregants” ever bring back any, um, like gifts from their meditative flights?
“What are you kidding?” The rabbi was incredulous, or anyway pretended to be. “What you think, dveykuss, which you call it conscious, is a cruise ship to the Bahama? Conscious… ness? is the end of the line; you get yours and you’re a satisfy customer, end of shtory.” One of the women had stuck a lit cigar in his mouth, which he clenched between rows of shiny new ivories.
“But”—Bernie was thinking of the wisdom that the masters would retrieve from their excursions to the celestial academies—“the tzaddiks…”
The old man harrumphed. “What tzaddiks? There ain’t no more tzaddiks. I was the last one and I drownded in the century before the century before this.”
“But Rabbi,” Bernie begged to differ, though the rebbe’s painted fetish of a face posed a weak argument, “you’re still alive.”
“In a sense,” said old Eliezer mysteriously.
“What do you mean?” asked Bernie, perplexed.
“Rabbi,” Messalina respectfully interrupted, “you shouldn’t tire yourself out. It’s time to go down and meet your flock.”
The old man lifted and let fall his scant shoulders, as if to say, I’m a martyr to my public, and took a last puff of his cigar before handing it back to the buxom lady with the reconstructed chin. As his attendants escorted the rabbi out the door, Bernie thought he resembled in his vestments an oversized playing card: The joker, he said to himself before guiltily banishing the thought. He stood wondering what to do next, when the snake-haired woman at the computer terminal, removing the headset to introduce herself as chief technician, invited him to watch the rabbi’s performance from the skybox. She explained that the holy man’s words would be videotaped for uploading onto his website, where his wisdom could be disseminated throughout