he orchestrated a spiritual debauch, with the runny-eyed scarecrow shuffling into the room.
“What did you mean,” Bernie still needed to know, “by ‘in a sense’?”
“Means?” the holy man knitted his parchment brow in an effort to recall where their conversation had left off. Then nodding his head he remarked off handedly, “Means I’m dead already and in heaven.”
It took Bernie the better part of a minute to respond. “Excuse me, Rabbi, but this isn’t heaven.”
Messalina was pulling the linen ephod over his head while the girl (“A dank, Cosette”) helped him off with his suit jacket and loosened his collar. The wash ‘n’ wear shirt was wringing with perspiration, clinging to his skeletal frame, inciting Cosette to flutter about him with a church fan emblazoned with an aleph in a cake of ice—presumably the House of Enlightenment logo. The lady with the chin tuck offered him a glass of tea with lemon.
“La chayim, Rosalie,” said the old man, popping a sugar cube into his mouth, his carmined lips forming a fishy oval through which to slurp his tea; then he returned to the subject of Bernie’s repudiation: “Is as good as.”
Taken aback, the boy nevertheless stuck to his guns: “No, it isn’t.” He was startled by the aggressiveness of his own rejoinder; where did he get the gumption? But he was thinking of Lou Ella’s daily catalog of disasters, the body counts she gleaned from the radio and insisted on reciting to Bernie to keep him informed. It was the ballast she provided to help tether him to his home planet—though didn’t the ills she listed also compound his reasons for drifting away? “It’s time for your catechism by cataclysm,” she would jauntily announce, to which Bernie might add for good measure various khurbanim, the horrors that had uniquely afflicted the Jews.
The rabbi had assumed a smug expression. “Ketzele, you can’t sit on two pots with one toches. Gib a keek on my boudoir over there.” Bernie glanced through the open French doors at the circular bed beneath its soft track-lighting, surrounded by velvet draperies, electronic monitors, and various gadgets on whose purposes he preferred not to speculate. “You’ll see I got your home theater complete with the ZipConnect CD stereo, the Sony subwoofer and digital tuner; I got your liquid crystal plasma TV and the webcam for broadcasting to my followers Rabbi ben Zephyr his intimate moments, so under their rebbe’s bed they don’t have to hide to get carnal wisdom. I got here your robotic massage chair.” Lowering himself with a deal of grunting into a padded swivel chair at the head of the conference table, as Rosalie, donning a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, pressed a button that made the chair vibrate. “In the p-parking lot I g-g-g-got a Ch-chevy Tahoe and the P-p-p-porsche car which my bodyguard Ch-ch-ch-cholly Side-pocket will learn me to drive.” Rosalie switched off the chair. “I got in the basement a infa-red shvitz, a frigerator stock full with smoked Nova and import schnapps; I got the ladies”—blushes all around—“to spoon-feed me and give to me the pills that will make to stand up again little Yankl. Takhe”—whispering, though what was left to be discreet about?—“they even change by me mayn vikele should I pish myself.” Bernie was close to clapping his hands over his ears. “I got students that like Messiah ben David they worship me. If this ain’t Gan Eydn, what is?”
The boy opened his mouth to object, something wasn’t right, but found no ready reply.
“I got also scheduled the Botox injection and the vein removal treatment to make me again young. This way will I live forever.”
“Wait a minute,” inserted Bernie, his head spinning. “I thought you said you were dead.”
“In a sense,” replied Rabbi ben Zephyr.
At that point Bernie groaned aloud: Was the rabbi playing with his mind? As if to confirm it, the old man grinned, scattering wrinkles like jackstraws over his hollow cheeks as he changed the subject. “Hey, Moishe Kapoyer, Mr. Upside-Down, you got yet a girl?”
Bernie made a mighty effort to respond in kind. “In a sense,” he said.
“Mazel tov,” said the rabbi, though whether congratulating him on the girl or his ironic faculty (touché), the boy couldn’t tell. “Are you shtupping her?”
“Pardon me?”
“What’s a matter,” the old man seemed concerned, “you ain’t with her yet a man? You’re old enough to pull your putz, you should be already a man. So boychik, you want maybe to borrow my pills?”
Trying to regain some perspective, Bernie asked