1999.

The evening after their return from Las Vegas, Mrs. Karp served a dish of meatloaf whose fetid taste no one could stomach. “Don’t blame me,” she said, still woozy from jet-lag and the phenobarbitol of the night before. “I’m not the cook.” Nettie was the cook, a hard-bitten, church-going woman with swollen ankles, who had once barged into the bathroom where Bernie sat in flagrante with a lingerie ad torn from a newspaper. “I ain’t seen nothin’,” she assured him, and slammed the door, though she tended to avoid him ever after, as Bernie did her. Sometimes she could be heard muttering under her breath about the trials of working for “Jewrish” folk—though there was nothing especially Hebraic about the Karp household unless you included the old-world relic in cold storage, which Nettie, if she knew anything of it, never mentioned. But she was familiar enough with the deep freeze, and had taken out the ground beef for the meatloaf that very morning, still (as Mrs. Karp attested) frozen solid.

Mr. Karp tugged at a drooping earlobe as if to aid his powers of deduction and asked his son, “Bernie, was there any kind of an electrical failure during the storm?” For he and his wife had returned from their weekend trip to find evidence of the tempest’s damage strewn all over town.

Bernie replied that yeah, there had been a kind of an electrical failure, then immediately had second thoughts.

“Eureka!” declared Mr. Karp in full gloat. “The meat in the freezer must have thawed, then spoiled, and froze again. Mystery solved.” He showed horsey teeth, then frowned at the realization that the family trove of turkeys and roasts, now tainted, would have to be jettisoned wholesale. “Tell Nettie to clean out the freezer bin in the morning,” he advised his wife, who told him to tell her himself.

The next morning, having complied with orders, Nettie toiled up the carpeted staircase to report the outcome of her appointed task to the missus, who was reposing in her aerosol-scented bedroom with the curtains drawn. Mrs. Karp, still in her dressing gown at half-past eleven, looked up vacantly from the steamy pages of a novel by Arabesque Latour, as the bull-necked servant informed her, “He gone.”

“Who gone?”

“The man in the ice box.”

Mrs. Karp raised a tweezered brow, let it drop, and resettled herself on her chaise to continue reading. “Good riddance,” she was heard to say to herself.

But Nettie was unappeased. Having apparently mustered all her tolerance to abide the old man in the freezer over the years, she was past consoling now that he was at large and possibly dangerous. Grumbling that it was more than her job was worth to remain in their employ, she plodded down the stairs and out of the Karps’ haunted house forever.

That night Mrs. Karp served her family a meal of canned applesauce and pork ‘n’ beans that she had been compelled to prepare herself.

“What’s this?” asked her husband.

“It’s called dinner,” replied Mrs. Karp.

“Maybe at the county penal farm,” said Mr. Karp, pleased with his riposte, “but on Canary Cove”—which was their bosky residential enclave—“we call it something else.”

When she was satisfied that her husband’s patience was sufficiently stretched, Mrs. Karp plumped her frosted shag and explained that Nettie had quit.

“That’s impossible.” For Nettie had been a fixture in the family for nearly a decade.

Mrs. Karp gave her signature shrug, as if to imply that the impossible had become the order of the day. Then she let it drop that the maid was upset on account of the disappearance of the frozen old man.

“What’s that you say?” exclaimed Mr. Karp in disbelief. His wife asked languidly if he were deaf and repeated the information, which her husband challenged. “Do you think he could just up and walk away?”

Mrs. Karp shrugged why not.

For the second time in as many months, Mr. Karp was moved to interrupt his evening meal with a peevish harrumph. He rose, removing the napkin from his collar, descended the stairs to the rumpus room, and returned after some moments to announce, “This is a calamity,” though without much conviction. He sat back down and heaved another sigh, which seemed to signify (along with his puzzlement) a measure of heartfelt relief. Because if the heirloom had truly vanished—never mind how—it was now somebody else’s responsibility, for a change. Of course, as head of the family, it was incumbent upon him to get to the bottom of this enigma, wasn’t it? He couldn’t in good conscience simply let the matter drop. “Bernie,” he asked, “you don’t know anything about this business, do you?”

Since his father’s words were more statement than question, rather than contradict him, Bernie assured Mr. Karp that he knew nothing about anything—a response nobody would gainsay. Then he darted a glance at his sister, whom he had silenced with threats of revealing her late-night basement trysts. Clearly counting the minutes until she could quit this bughouse and return to college, Madeline took the cue from her loathsome little brother and volunteered her ignorance as well.

Mr. Karp made an authoritative moue, which his wife parodied with a lopsided face of her own, and that seemed, for the moment, to be that. Then it was as if the thing in the basement had never existed at all. Bernie, too, was greatly relieved, feeling that he now had a license to continue his sub rosa relationship with the defrosted old gentleman he was harboring in the guest-house apartment behind the family domicile.

Bernie himself would have been hard pressed to explain why the secret had to be so diligently guarded, but aware that one person could not technically belong to another, he nevertheless felt that the rabbi belonged to him. It was an attitude he’d conceived almost from the instant the old man had emerged from the freezer, when Bernie had overcome his initial repugnance to swaddle the rabbi’s frail bones in bath towels. Then he’d outfitted the creaky old party in a pair of his father’s flannel pajamas before installing him in the guest house out back. This was the independent efficiency unit that had remained unoccupied (excluding Nettie’s periodic dustings and Madeline’s romantic rendezvous) since the death of his Grandpa Ruby soon after Bernie was born.

During his first few days in the world the hand-me-down holy man had remained in a relatively stuporous condition, stunned and cranky after his sudden awakening, while his convalescence stirred the boy to action as nothing in his experience ever had. At first he’d brought the rabbi table scraps, which were meager during the period between Nettie’s departure and the hiring of a new maid-of-all-work. Later, squirreling away portions of his own meals in napkins, Bernie was able to smuggle the old man more substantial fare: a sparerib, some boiled shrimps in cocktail sauce, a nibbled ham and cheese omelet, cookies rich in butter and animal fat. Weak from having fasted for over a century, the rabbi could at first only manage to pick at the food, but soon his appetite returned with a healthy gusto and he began to gobble up everything the kid set before him. Bernie, whose religious education was limited to a few Bible verses from his forgotten Sunday school days, nevertheless sensed that these offerings might be in violation of some primitive dietary code. Feeling he ought perhaps to research the rabbi’s care and feeding, he made an unprecedented excursion to the library at the suburban temple his family attended on high holidays, where he checked out an illustrated volume entitled To Be a Jew. Perusing its pages, the boy came to understand that he’d been sustaining the old man on filth. Though his vocabulary even in his native English was not extensive—conversation was never his forte—Bernie made an effort to apologize to the rabbi for his trespass in the droll language he had begun to pick up snatches of.

“Ich bin nebechdik, rabbi,” he offered in an unusual foray into humility, and further testing the water, “Hab rachmones?”

“Moychl,” responded the rabbi dismissively, slouched in a morris chair examining the piping on the lapel of Mr. Karp’s cotton batik bathrobe. “A deigah hob ich.” And as he was himself a quick study: “Takhe, think of it nothing.”

After that Bernie tried assiduously to separate meat from dairy in the dishes he smuggled to the old man. Viewed suspiciously by the lady volunteer at the temple library, who was unaccustomed to borrowers of any age, least of all adolescents, Bernie checked out several kosher cookbooks and, despite having never made anything more ambitious than toast, expressed his readiness to attempt broiled udder, stuffed spleen, tripe, liver, lungs, and pupiklekh. The recovering rabbi suffered the kid’s good intentions with a minimum of irritation but asked when he might have the opportunity to taste again “the insects from the sea.”

These were the great days for Bernie Karp. Nothing in his listless history (or anyone else’s he knew of) had prepared him for such an event, and it seemed to him that prior to the rabbi’s resurrection nothing of note had happened in his life at all. It was as if he’d only been marking time, waiting all his fifteen years for the rabbi to come forth from his retirement. While the old man lay in bed regaining his strength, or sat sunk in his chair by the window in a shaft of sunlight that made his paltry bones appear as nearly pellucid as the ice he’d emerged from, Bernie would coax him to converse. Normally reticent if not downright fractious, the boy was at times a little stymied by his own uncharacteristic behavior, but his newfound curiosity had acquired a momentum that would not turn around. It was an awkward process in the beginning, since neither understood the other’s spoken language; in addition, the old man, who appeared perpetually vexed from his rude awakening, could be moody and not always inclined to indulge Bernie’s efforts to draw him out. But in the end he tolerated the kid’s graceless gestures and crude indications and with a little persuasion would return them in kind, until they’d commenced an exchange that passed for communication. At length, each had gathered enough scraps of the other’s mother tongue to allow for a tentative dialogue. Bernie was delighted by his gradual acquisition of his guest’s fruity idiom, but even more than with his own, he was impressed with the rabbi’s rapid and seemingly effortless progress. Of course Eliezer ben Zephyr—it had taken the old man a while to recall his own name—had the added advantage of exposure to the TV, which had captivated him from the moment he’d tumbled out of the freezer.

It had been Bernie’s inspired idea to lead the rabbi, once his stick legs were ambulatory again, back across the covered walkway into the basement whose ground-level entry was at the rear of the house. Not only did the television in the rumpus room give the old man a leg up on the language, but it also introduced him to a culture he might have been ill equipped to apprehend at first hand. It was a culture that seemed to intrigue him as much as his own murky origins interested Bernie, who pestered the rabbi for information about his past at every opportunity. Such opportunities had to be taken more often than not during commercial breaks, though commercials could provide their own brand of entertainment, discouraging interruptions. But over time the two developed a kind of quid pro quo, as Rabbi Eliezer put more questions to the boy about America, which he’d come to understand was the place in which he found himself.

It seemed to fascinate him, this America, or at least the part of it that he viewed through the bowed window of the cabinet that was the centerpiece of the rec room, the passage to and from which was Eliezer’s only exercise. Having initiated the rabbi into this passive orientation to his new world, Bernie was a little chagrined that, fresh from an immemorial slumber in one box, he was so quick to be transfixed by another. But whatever pleased Rabbi ben Zephyr (and subdued somewhat his crusty exterior) was also gratifying to the boy. In the omnipresent news broadcasts the old man showed little interest: The relentless advance of the Horsemen of Apocalypse was already a stale subject on earth even before the rabbi had entered his suspended condition. But about the splenetic woman who conducted a daily din toyreh, splitting hairs over laws concerning two-timers and clip artists with the perspicacity of a Daniel; about the smug gentleman who encouraged public loshen horeh (gossip) and orchestrated encounters between parties guilty of mutual betrayal; about the portly schwartze who invited intimate confessions from her guests and wept openly over their Job-like afflictions; about antic surgeons, garrulous chefs, faithless couples, deceitful castaways, teenage exorcists, and the Jew repeatedly duped into fornicating with shikses, old Eliezer was deeply inquisitive. He was especially interested to observe the willingness of citizens to air their indiscretions in public forums.

“If a man to other men will sell his wife,” he might ask in the crossbred Yinglish to which Bernie was starting to grow accustomed, “is not obliged Reb Springer to cleave open his breast and tear out his farkokte heart?” “When they shimmy, these daughters in their supple skins in the orgies of the MTV, do not their fathers say already Kaddish for them?”

Such questions and a score of others Bernie was hard put to answer; the permissiveness of his culture, from which he felt himself unfairly excluded, was something he and everyone else took for granted. But what struck him most about the rabbi’s inquiries was that, prickly as the old man could be, he seemed more interested in than outraged by what he witnessed on television. In fact, there was an empirical tone to Eliezer’s interrogations, as if he already acknowledged the old judgments to be obsolete and was anxious to learn the nature of the new in a depraved western world.

After several weeks of this routine it was clear to Bernie that the rabbi had recovered sufficient strength to leave his confinement and walk abroad. But despite an intermittent restlessness, the old man showed no inclination to travel farther from his bed than the paneled basement across the way, and the boy, happy to prolong their present circumstances, did not encourage him to do more. Meanwhile Rabbi ben Zephyr continued his acculturation on the sofa in the rumpus room (where Bernie’s parents never ventured), absorbed by the parade of assumed infidelities that turned out to be misperceptions; the heated embraces in which the lovers were most certainly not thinking of Torah; the ads for depilatories, male enhancement, and bladder control. Mostly the old man watched with an owlish objectivity, though once there came a moment when something in the hysterical nature of the canned laughter, provoked by a German coinage, clearly disturbed him. This was when the Jew who fornicated with shikses made a joke about his girlfriend’s gaudy earrings, which clattered like a Kristallnacht.

“Vos iz Kristallnacht?” the rabbi asked Bernie a bit rhetorically, since he was unaccustomed to receiving satisfactory information from that quarter.

And it was true that only a few weeks earlier the blockish Bernie Karp would not have been able to provide an adequate answer; but owing to the Judaica that the rabbi’s venerable presence had prompted him to bring home from the Temple library, the boy was now prepared to marshal a response. In fact, he had a large book with shadowy black-and-white images, which he showed the old man. Eliezer studied the book as intently as he might once have pored over holy texts, and Bernie thought that here was the rabbi in a posture that bespoke his authentic past. Of course, the rabbi was unable to interpret the English captions, but while he seemed enthralled by the documentary photographs, he declined with a firm shake of his head Bernie’s offer to read to him. Then, without a word, he closed the book and shoved it aside, turning back to the TV, which he gazed at as one might look toward a sunrise from the prow of a ship. It was at this juncture that Bernie chose to ask once again how the rabbi had survived so long in a block of ice.

Appearing at first to ignore the question, Eliezer scratched a cheek whose skin flaked into his beard like blistered paint, then said, “I was fed on visions that even The X-Files and Extreme Makeover, l’havdil, couldn’t touch them.” But having admitted that televised fare fell short of the spiritual reaches of his once glorious meditative flights, of the life of the spirit he claimed now to have had his fill. Just then there came on the screen a commercial in which a man in a sharkskin suit, eyeglasses sliding down the slope of his needle nose, earnestly promised not to be undersold. Opening the doors of refrigerators and ovens to display their spacious interiors, he intoned, “Don’t be square; be sharp, shop at Karp’s…”

The rabbi groaned oy and switched channels with the remote, in the use of which he’d become quite adept.

Surprised at his own unwillingness to let the matter go, Bernie pressed the old man for details of his visionary experiences. Without deigning to look at his questioner, Eliezer answered in due course, “Maybe on TV you don’t see them, the Merkabah or the Throne of Glory; you don’t see the divine ponim—which it is the face of God—but I seen already the face of God, and I can tell you it ain’t that pretty.”

A little chilled by the old man’s disparagement, Bernie nevertheless remained single-minded. He persisted in his haphazard reading exclusive of the rabbi’s supervision, feeling that, in his sallies into the world the rabbi came from, Eliezer ben Zephyr was still his mentor and guide.

From the well-endowed library in the prairie-style synagogue a shady half mile walk from his home, Bernie checked out the standard Weinreich Yiddish grammar. The volunteer from the Temple Sisterhood, a maiden lady whose helmet of hair was riveted to her skull by plastic barrettes, seeing that the book had not been checked out in living memory, gave him a regular third degree.

“It’s not for me,” Bernie assured her, concocting a story about his father’s wanting to get back to his Jewish roots—getting back to one’s roots being a fashion frequently touted in celebrity interviews. Why he didn’t confess his own desire to decipher what his dead grandfather had scribbled in his ledger book, he couldn’t exactly have said, though his instinct was not to arouse suspicions. Besides, embroidering the truth was a talent for which Bernie had only just discovered he had a knack, and it was bracing to realize more of his hidden potential. His answer had merely elevated the inchworm of the librarian’s brow. Once home he was frustrated by the grammar’s initial inscrutability and thought he would never get past the alef-bais, but with dogged perseverance he eventually began to make some progress. While he still got nowhere with the spiky cursive in Grandpa Ruby’s age-yellowed ledger, Bernie was at least able to reconstruct in his mind the night the rabbi had tumbled forth from the freezer—when the old gent wondered aloud, on looking about at the beaverboard paneling, the beanbag pouffes, and the bowling-pin lamps, whether he was dead and the insulated cabinet was his casket. Had he arrived at last body and soul in gan eydn, in paradise?

And was Bernie, he had inquired, a zaftige malech?

“Nisht kayn malech, Rabbi,” Bernie would have apprised him if the scene were repeated. “I’m no angel. Ich bin a yiddisher kind, a Jewish kid.”

Now he was a little sorry that the old man had been disabused of his original illusions. He almost wished he could take back the information that, rather than paradise, Rabbi Eliezer was in Tennessee.

Never more than a mediocre student, unmotivated and lazy, Bernie was becoming daily more driven in his pursuit of the knowledge that would help him understand old Eliezer’s provenance. Seated beside the rabbi on the harvest plaid sofa adjacent to the squawking TV, he read his parents’ copies of The Joys of Yiddish and The World of Our Fathers, books that were standard issue in Jewish households but appeared never to have been opened in this one. He read their coffee-table edition of Abba Eban’s Heritage, a profusely illustrated history of the Jews that was a companion book to a TV series, videos of which were available in the Temple library. But Bernie never bothered viewing them: there would have been little opportunity to watch them on the downstairs VCR without interrupting the rabbi’s programs, and besides, he was coming to prefer the printed word to the video image. Unsatisfied by the generic texts on his parents’ sparsely populated shelves, however, he lugged home from the Temple library (to the librarian’s tacit disapproval) several moldy volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s comprehensive history of the Jews. These Bernie entered gingerly at first, feeling like an interloper in their forensic pages, then impressed himself by devouring the books as greedily as the doughnuts he’d habitually bolted in the days before the rabbi’s defrosting. In fact, his desire for physical nourishment seemed to have been deposed by his burgeoning intellectual appetite.

In the Graetz history there were references to other books of dubious repute, with bizarre titles such as The Cockscomb of Rabbi Yahyah or The Book of the Face that gave Bernie a peculiar itch. They were books the author of the magisterial history derided as hokum, though the boy, whose association with the wayward rabbi had given him a taste for maverick perspectives, couldn’t help but be curious. They were books of hermetic mysteries and forbidden knowledge, some of which—The Book Bahir, The Sefer Yetzirah—Bernie was astonished to find in abridged translations in the Temple library. Only, this time when he tried to check them out, the librarian sniffed her displeasure and told him to wait, then marched out of the glaringly lit room and returned after some minutes with Rabbi Birnbaum himself. He was a man in his middle years with a hairpiece and an artificial tan, his heliotrope shirt open at his slightly crepey throat to reveal a gold mezuzah.

“So… Bernie, is it?” placing a ring-laden hand on Bernie’s shoulder. The boy nodded. “What seems to be the problem?”

“There’s a problem?” asked Bernie, somewhat disingenuously.

“Miss Ribalow here says you want to check out the Zohar?”

Bernie repeated his refrain, “It’s not for me,” resisting an urge to pry the rabbi’s jeweled fingers from his shoulder. Again he explained that his father wanted to “get in touch”—that was the phrase he’d heard bruited about—with his Jewish heritage.

The rabbi exchanged meaningful glances with Miss Ribalow, both of them familiar (as was the entire congregation) with Julius Karp’s aggressive TV marketing campaign, which seemed incompatible with the notion of a spiritual quest. But in the end the rabbi delivered some sanctimonious banality about the function of a lending library in a free society, and issuing a transparently breezy caveat—“Tell your daddy not to conjure up any whatchamacallem, any golems, heh heh”—permitted Bernie to check out his heretical volumes. Back in the basement the boy opened them with the same palpitating excitement he’d felt when opening Madeline’s underwear drawer, but even in their abbreviated English editions, the books were impenetrable, full of sphinxlike symbols and cryptic diagrams. Bernie assumed that the books contained recipes for spells and incantations meant to result in supernatural effects; and though he’d never been especially superstitious, he wondered whether, if you followed the recipes, it might be possible for a person to enter a trance that would allow him to, say, survive a hundred years undisturbed in a block of ice. But his ignorance of mystical discipline prevented him from exploring further, and Bernie was mortally frustrated at having arrived at such an impasse. The keenness of his frustration amazed him, and he could scarcely believe that his desire for the flesh (and intimate garments) of young girls had been so readily replaced by a hunger for obscure learning.

He appealed again to Rabbi Eliezer. There was a joke among the congregants of the Reform synagogue the Karps annually attended that their temple was so progressive it closed its doors on Jewish holidays. While an exaggeration, it was true that the time-honored traditions of the Jewish people, largely expunged from the synagogue liturgy, had scarcely left a dent in Bernie’s consciousness. But the unlighted past, as represented by the fusty rabbi, now consumed the boy’s waking hours, and though most of Eliezer’s tutelage consisted of unhelpful remarks made during the less sensational TV ads, Bernie credited the rabbi with the responsibility for all his new knowledge, and thought of himself as the holy man’s protégé.

When the preoccupied Rabbi ben Zephyr waved away his solicitations, however, Bernie made a deliberate pest of himself. While the old man was absorbed in watching Your Money or Your Life or The Killing Machine or the yeasty sitcom Menage à Melvin, Bernie would station himself next to the sofa and practice religion. Experimentally, he donned the accessories he’d obtained for Eliezer, who seemed to have no use for the stuff. These included a silk kippah, a striped prayer shawl, and a set of leather phylacteries with whose complicated straps Bernie wrestled as with serpents—all items purchased with several installments of his allowance from the gift shop at the orthodox shul in its crumbling downtown quarters, to which Bernie had made a Saturday-morning sojourn by bus. Thus attired, the boy would take up a borrowed hymnal and, nodding as he’d seen the men nod (like bobble-headed dashboard figurines) in the shopworn shul, recite the phonetically transcribed Shmoneh Esreh, a prayer intended to be said silently. The rabbi managed for the most part to ignore him, so long as he stayed out of his direct line of vision, but when Bernie began showily attempting to read in their original the Hebrew books that had already defeated him in English, an irked Eliezer was finally distracted. Provoked by the kid’s clumsy progress, the old man reluctantly disengaged himself from Love Bytes, a soap opera he followed religiously, and condescended to advise Bernie regarding a few shortcuts to enlightenment.

He bade the boy to sit on the carpet between him and the TV, whose volume he turned down but not off, and admonished him, “Everybody that don’t stop searching after things too hard for him, or seeks things that from him should be hid, it’s better he should never be born.” That said, he told Bernie that the criteria for studying the mystical texts were three: one must have at least forty years, a wife and family, and a paunch as a hedge against involuntary levitation. “To my knowledge only the belly you got.” And it had begun lately to shrink. Then Eliezer told the cautionary tale of the four rabbis who entered paradise: how one dropped dead, one went meshuggah, the third forswore his faith, and only the sage Rabbi Akibah escaped in one piece—“and you, sweetheart, are no Akibah.” But as the boy remained rapt, showing not the least inclination to heed his warnings, the rabbi emitted a sigh, then proceeded to explain the notion of the Etz Chayim, the Tree of Life—each of whose branches, called sefirot, corresponded to the rungs of Jacob’s Ladder, which corresponded in turn to their respective astral realms.

“The rungs for all I know are shoyn farfoylt. Nu? they’re rotten already. The nimble can still ascend, but they break from under your weight every rung, which it means you can’t come back again down.…”

Eliezer’s nasal voice, despite the jumbled syntax and foreign phrases, was melodious to Bernie, who hung on every syllable, oblivious to the TV dialogue that filtered through. In this way, over a number of days he lost count of, the boy was initiated into certain mysteries. He was introduced to the kabbalistic concepts of kavanah and devekut, intensity and cleaving, techniques that enabled you to swing with a simian grace from limb to limb of the Tree of Life. He was told of the tzimtzum, God’s retreat from His own universe, like a landlord who, disgusted with the tenants who had trashed his premises, rather than evict them, exits slamming the door. The noise of his withdrawal is the big bang, the shevirah, behind which the whole house of cards collapsed, the dust from the rubble rising to heaven where it caused the Lord to sneeze. The shower of sparks that ensued from his divine sternutation lodged in crannies throughout the detritus, and it is our lot, saying endless gezundheits for the gift of God’s luminous snot, to retrieve those sparks from their hidden places. Then fanning them into flames, we make sufficient light by which to begin restoring the fallen world to its former splendor.

“Such is on Earth our task,” said Eliezer, with more than a hint of boredom.

Of course, this world was only one of several alternative worlds, not the least of which was the Yenne Velt, the Other Side, populated by creatures at once more feral and more complex than ourselves. It was a realm that intersected our own, its denizens sometimes invading our very beings in the form of dybbuks, malign spirits that take up residence in the organs and apertures of the living, or ibburs, which inhabited the recently deceased in order to complete the mitzvot they’d left unfinished on earth. There were dizzying categories of demons, including jester demons that played tricks on the soul during its posthumous journey toward Kingdom Come: They turned the laws of reincarnation, the gilgul, helter-skelter, giving false directions to souls already bewildered by the mapless thoroughfares of the afterlife.

“It’s from below that the yetser horeh, the yearning,” revealed Eliezer, suppressing a yawn, “brings about the completion above.”

Listening, the boy understood that all his reading to date had been mere amateur dabbling. He was told of the true significance of Torah, which had spawned the seraphim. It was through Torah that all worlds were sustained, though no one could have beheld the Law if it had not clothed itself in the garments of this world. Those garments were composed of fine-spun Hebrew characters that contained God’s essence, and by shifting the letters anagram-fashion—Bernie pictured swapping sleeves for pantlegs as if to fit impossible beings—you could alter the course of galaxies. When he was fairly bursting from a surfeit of magical wisdom, the rabbi told the boy to be still already.

“Concentrate now on the Hebrew word for ‘I’, ani (),” counseled the old man, explaining that the word should then be reconfigured in the mind to form another word: ayin (), “nothingness.” When he’d meditated on this awhile, Bernie began to grow light-headed and uncrossed his eyes to regain his bearings, only to have the rabbi introduce another exercise. He should focus next on the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, whose characters, once visualized, he should then rearrange. He was given the numerical equivalents of the four possible spellings of the written letters, which comprised the rainbow threads of the garment of Torah with its 231 buttonholes, called, since the destruction of the Temple, the Gates of Tears.

Even as he followed the rabbi’s instructions, Bernie wondered what such arcane practices had in common with his unspoken desires, whose object he could no longer identify. But he could not deny the tingling that had commenced in his brain, which felt as if the lid of his skull had been raised like a convertible’s roof to expose its contents to the elements. Then, as if borne on the warm breeze from an open window that invaded his simmering brain, the visions started to come. He could hear the voice of the rabbi, syntax no longer scrambled; but though he comprehended fully, the boy was uncertain what language the old man spoke: “As the hand before the eye conceals the mountain, so does our little life hide the mysteries of which this world is full.” He heard the riddles the rabbi put to him: What eagle has its nest in maidenhair, where its young are plundered by creatures not yet created and taken to places that don’t exist? Who is the beautiful virgin with two left breasts? And Bernie thought he knew the answers! He saw connections everywhere: how, for instance, the redbreast on the honeysuckle just outside the window had its own appointed star and each star its designated celestial being, who represented the bird according to its rank before the Holy One, blessed be He. He saw how certain stars trailing peacocks’ tails held sway over certain herbs called “delirious elixirs,” not to mention certain bodily discharges and women’s hairstyles; that the diameter of one’s penis and the circumference of one’s third eye were influenced by the phosphorescent trajectories of comets across the firmament. Bernie saw the Throne of Glory, which, though vacant, resembled a giant La-Z-Boy in need of dusting, and the Divine Chariot with its tractor tread; he saw the Shekhinah, the celestial presence in Her female aspect, wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform. When She lifted her kilt, Bernie felt his flesh ignite, his sinews blazing, retinas turning to embers, eyelashes flashing lightning, follicles sprouting flames. He was surrounded by hybrid beings, with cloven hooves and ivory wings, so that he cried out the words of the patriarch Jacob that he had not known he knew: “They compass me about, yea, they compass me about like bees…” When the creatures had finished collectively urinating on the conflagration that was Bernie Karp, they vanished, leaving him a smoldering heap. Then, as his senses began gradually to return to the mundane world, he saw again the old man in an outsize bathrobe watching reruns of The Dating Game.

Rabbi Eliezer cackled and pointed at Bachelor Number Two, a teetotaler, who had just expressed a wish to drink prune juice from the bach-elorette’s shoe.

CAME THE EVENING MEAL when Mr. Karp asked his son if he knew anything about certain books that had been checked out of the library at Congregation Felix Frankfurter. It seemed he had had a phone call from Rabbi Tommy Birnbaum expressing concern about some volumes of “mysticalism” (the rabbi could scarcely contain his distaste at pronouncing the word) that Miss Ribalow had brought to his attention, which had yet to be returned.

“He wanted me to know I should always feel free to talk to him, called me Julius, this Rabbi Whosits who don’t know me from Adam. Then he asks me do I think it’s appropriate that I should send a boy to fetch such books. Son, you got something to say to me?”

There had, of course, been other clues to the effect that all was not as it had been in the Karp household. For one thing, while Bernie continued to clean his plate each night and ask for more, the kid had begun to lose weight, his amorphous body assuming a more recognizably human form. Moreover, his pimples had started to retreat like a defeated army from his forehead and cheeks, leaving behind a pitted visage revealing rudimentary traces of character. But Julius Karp and his wife, otherwise engaged, had never been especially sensitive to changes in their son’s physiognomy. What Mr. Karp was aware of, however, was that certain items of his own sartorial wardrobe—a bathrobe, a shirt, a houndstooth jacket, a pair of Dacron slacks—had gone missing, an absence he attributed to the newly hired schwartze’s presumed kleptomania; and he had duly ordered his wife (who ignored him) to confront Cleopatra, the maid.

“Well, young man,” pressed Mr. Karp, slightly uncomfortable in the role of interrogator, “I’m all ears.” Which he flapped Dumbo fashion to ease the tension. “So what’s the story?”

Bernie assured him there was no story, then muttered some excuse about researching a social studies paper on the Jews.

“Jews?” Mr. Karp made a face as if sampling some foreign dish. Bernie’s school, whose season had recommenced, was in any case largely run by Southern Baptists who gave short shrift to the very idea of Jews, let alone inviting papers on their habits and mores. “Isn’t that an awfully broad topic?”

“Yessir,” said Bernie, which was a bit of a give-away, since nowhere in memory had he ever said “sir” to his father. “But I only have to name the main attractions,” digging himself a deeper hole. To try and climb out of it, he began to cite highlights from the Judaic tradition in both its normative and antinomian aspects, remarking upon the influence of various saints and religious geniuses. In the midst of a discourse that threatened to run away with him, he realized that his parents’ mouths were hanging open in response to their son’s unnatural erudition, so Bernie shut up. Still the jaws of Mr. and Mrs. Karp remained mutually agape, though their eyes had shifted from the boy to the middle distance beyond Bernie’s left shoulder. Bernie swiveled in his seat to follow their gaze, which lit upon Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr himself, standing squarely beneath the dining room’s proscenium arch. He was wearing a felt fedora and a houndstooth jacket several sizes large, a burgundy shirt with a parrot necktie fastened about his wattled throat (visible now beneath his unevenly trimmed beard) in a combination of a Windsor and a Gordian knot.

“I think,” announced the old man, his flesh as translucent as beeswax, marsupial pouches beneath his rheumy eyes, “I will like now to see for mayn self the Golden Land.”

Oscillating between horror and disbelief, Mr. Karp turned again to his son. “You knew all the time he was still around?”

“Uh-huh,” replied Bernie, surprising himself by his utter lack of contrition. “Can I keep him?”

His father exploded: “He’s not a pet!”

Upon which Mrs. Karp, who seldom concerned herself in domestic matters, for once made to advise her husband, “The responsibility might be good for the kid.”

“Who asked you!”

“Touchy, touchy.”

Bernie twisted his head back toward the rabbi in the hope of gaining some show of support, but the old man was already gone. It was three days before he turned up again. In Bernie’s late addenda to the annals of the Boibiczer Prodigy that Grandpa Ruby had detailed in his ledger book, old Eliezer’s absence is referred to as “the three lost days.”