2001.

Because the video rental store where Lou Ella worked featured only films adapted from Broadway musicals (the owner was an eccentric with a private income), there was a very limited clientele. As a result, Lou had a lot of time for reading. Lately, despite the dismay the book had caused Bernie, she kept returning to the less didactic chapters of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr’s autobiography, The Ice Sage. She especially enjoyed the sections describing the rebbe’s serial adventures before he was born as himself. For the infant Eliezer, a prodigy in the womb, had managed to elude the Angel of Forgetfulness, the one responsible for tweaking you under the nose at birth. This is the touch that causes an infant to forget its past lives and any interim time spent in Paradise. By curling his upper lip monkey-fashion over his philtrum as he was yanked from between his mother’s legs, the newborn was able to deflect the angel’s retrograde flick, thereby leaving him with a taste of heaven on his lips all his days. Consequently he remembered the entire genealogy of his previous soul migrations, his gilgulim. He recalled his humble beginnings as a locust that had participated in the ten plagues of Egypt, as a flea in the ear of the Prophet Habakkuk, a bat in the cave wherein Simeon bar Yohai spent thirteen years translating the natural world into holy writ. In his most ignominious embodiment Eliezer was a cat a Cossack hetman had sewn into the belly of a pregnant Jewess whose fetus had been excised. Thanks to an amulet blessed by a lamed vovnik, however, the woman survived and the cat was born as a human child, a pious daughter who eventually married and bore a litter of seven children, all given to burying their feces in sand. There were other human incarnations the rabbi recounted on the way to narrating his own, such as his birth to a poor Jew and his wife in the Transylvanian Alps. The baby was snatched from his cradle by an eagle and dropped over an Arabian desert where he landed in the common kettle of a Bedouin tribe who raised him as their own. But a nameless itch spurred him to wander through several countries, faiths, and lives until his soul was born again into the family of Zephyr Threefoot, a charcoal burner in the Polish village of Boibicz. There the eloi, the prodigy, was from childhood a prey to spontaneous ecstasies. He had always to check clocks to keep himself anchored in time, to wear spectacles in order to see individual persons and objects, since without them he saw everything in its cosmic unity. As a toddler he had on his own initiative slathered pages of Torah with honey and gobbled them up, so that by the time he was old enough for cheder he could regurgitate the entire Pentateuch.

“In those days you could say that me and God were thick as thieves,” the rebbe had written (via the medium of Sanford Grusom’s no-nonsense prose). “Together we performed your standard miracles and exorcisms; we healed lepers, vanquished werewolves, shooed away demons from circumcisions, staged mixers to introduce souls without bodies to bodies without souls—that sort of thing. And always I remained, as they say, a hand’s breadth above the earth.…” Then after a long and auspicious career that had drawn to him a circle of devoted followers, Rabbi ben Zephyr was at his prayers in his customary spot beside Baron Jagiello’s horse pond when a sudden storm came up.

The rebbe made it clear in his memoirs that he had little patience with the yokels who’d carted him about in a casket like a vampire for over a hundred years—since all they’d had to do was melt the ice (and maybe rattle a grager in his ear) to bring him out of his trance. Still, he allowed that his lengthy dormition had been a kind of blessing because he’d reawakened to the world with renewed fervor. In his second coming he felt he had a mandate not so much to lift up lost souls as to restore them to their rightful place on earth. Of course he offered the conventional transcendence to seekers, but only as a preliminary relief, after which they would be better equipped to take advantage of the material world. This was the point where the argument became a bit fuzzy for Lou, twirling a coil of viridian hair around a thrice-pierced ear. She was unsure how the rebbe’s ministry had swerved from the traditional theme of redemption through spiritual discipline to a passionate embrace of the free-market economy—never mind a strain of self-interest the girl had not encountered since she’d first read Ayn Rand. Nevertheless she was a pushover for a good hagiography, especially one written about himself by a living saint.

Which isn’t to suggest that Lou had any inclination to visit his House of Enlightenment. Having a boyfriend with his own saintly proclivities was handful enough for her, thank you very much. Moreover, she was greatly concerned about Bernie these days and felt in large part to blame for his current condition. True, she’d been frustrated at his inability to take her beyond herself, but having used what charms she had at her disposal to reel him back to earth, she now wondered if her efforts might have backfired. Lately he seemed to dwell in a kind of perpetual ekstasis-interruptus—a phrase of her own pleased coinage. Tiresomely he expressed his gratitude for what he regarded as her well-intentioned efforts at seduction, insisting that, had she not drawn him back, he might have crossed over for good. Such a woman was worth more than rubies, he assured her, prompting a dry response from Lou Ella to “that old saw.”

“I guess,” she chided him, not without malice, one evening beneath the Harahan Bridge as they sat watching a late-summer sunset, “I guess you got to be an inept before you can be an adept.” Then she was rendered speechless when Bernie suddenly thrust aside his grandfather’s journal and shouted, “Marry me!” The plea was accompanied by the ticktock of the wipers that he’d accidentally switched on in his attempt to fall to his knees on the floorboard. Wedged awkwardly between the dash and Sue Lily, whom Lou had been bouncing on her lap, he further promised that if she wasn’t ready he would remain in a state of self-imposed groundedness until she was.

Lou closed the jaw of the mouth-breathing baby sister, who seemed not to be growing any older, and returned her to the backseat. “And that’s what passes for being faithful in your pea-brain?” she replied, having finally found her tongue. “Ooie gevalt, I’m faithful by default,” she mocked him, never able to resist a dig at the subject of his chastity. But while she was realist enough to know that a wedding was not in the cards, she nevertheless allowed herself to picture it: the gaunt groom in a tophat like Mottl the Tailor from Fiddler on the Roof (she’d become well acquainted with the video store’s musical archive), the bride in what?—maybe Sally Bowles’s merry widow, fishnet stockings enmeshing the dolphin tattoo on her thigh. The two of them standing beneath an ocelot chupeh with their feet “a hand’s breadth above the earth.” Impatient with herself for succumbing to fantasy, she snarled, “Get up, dude,” and when he had she added almost tenderly, “Bernie Karp, you’re a visitor from outer space, and some day…” She failed to finish the thought.

While she liked to think of herself as a girl of broad experience, Lou sometimes felt that with this strange boy she was in over her head. “I s’pose you think your mad affection for me is flattering,” she said. “It makes me feel like some temptress and all, like I’m Sa-lou -mé.” Lingering accusatorily over the middle syllable.

“Doesn’t it?” Bernie asked artlessly.

She gazed at the mare’s nest of his hair, his increasingly cadaverous body, which he inhabited with ever more authority. “Well,… yeah,” admitted Lou, touching his hollow cheek before giving it a peremptory slap.

Having summoned him as a witness to the quotidian, she fretted over what she had done. Because the more closely he examined life on earth, the more besotted he seemed to become with it, while the more urgently in need of redemption he found it to be—in light of which his newly hatched desire to save some corner of creation seemed all the more futile and picayune. Thus were his emotions dangerously mixed. Meanwhile in the present climate of global mayhem, what with the blood of foreign wars lapping at the nation’s doorstep, it was practically a crime to be in love. Children informed on their parents, parents feared their children, and antichrists were detected in all walks of life. Bernie’s own rebbe, risen like gangbusters from his protracted slumber, was himself in peril of being apprehended for a felon. Recent newspaper editorials tried to link the Prodigy and his followers to subversive activities, even insinuating that the House of Enlightenment was a terrorist cell. This despite a philosophy that seemed to the girl to have less in common with Osama bin Laden than with Norman Vincent Peale. But it troubled her to see Bernie so obviously distraught: Whether or not he had the makings of a saint remained in question, but she didn’t think he was hero material, and heroic measures were what she figured it would take to save Rabbi ben Zephyr. Her only solace was that they still had some chapters ahead of them before finishing Grandpa Ruby’s journal, and she thought she could keep the boy from doing anything stupid until they got to the end. Lou wanted never to get to the end.