“Oh yes?” Upstage, back to the audience, the dentist is selecting her drill.
“There’s a big center in White Plains.”
“I’ve been there. They have a speakers’ series. Elie Weisel came, and of course I had to hear him.”
Jerry, brightly: “We carried signs.”
Weiskopf spoke as she scanned the monitor and fiddled with some tiny switches. She spoke by rote, with a generic inflection characteristic of tour guides and over-the-hill thespians, the kind of delivery that tells you that you should have gotten your ticket earlier in the run. I wasn’t her first, or even her twenty-first. “By now you have gathered that the earphones are not exactly earphones. They do what was once accomplished by electrode implants and then by scanning tunnels. They create a magnetic field around your brain. The hemoglobin in the veins is more oxygen-rich at the points where there is neuronal activity, and it resonates differently to the field. This resonance can be read to form a picture of exactly where the activity is—well, not a picture, actually, because my computer lacks the memory. So I select the areas I want to look at. But this is just the beginning. This is still the realm of conventional, analytical science. Now comes the leap.” A fifties newsreel. Progress of science. Brass and percussion background, Stravinski maybe.
“Isn’t this fantastic?” Jerry brushed the console with a proprietary glee, until Weiskopf snapped, “Don’t touch those!” Insufficiently motivated, I thought; sometimes reality is less convincing than theater. Quite suddenly angry, she pushed his hand away from a bank of knife-blade switches enameled fire-engine red. “They have to be on all the time! If you interrupt the power, I’ll kill you!”
“Sorry, Doc. I forgot. On all the time. I was just monkeying around.”
“Now, Al,”—with spokesmodel aplomb—“see if you can think about that childhood memory you mentioned. Focus on the image of your friend flying up into the loft, as if by magic. Up, up and away!” And there he was, right before my mind’s eye, Howard Guminiak, levitating.
“Got it,” Weiskopf crowed. “But go on. I didn’t mean to distract you.” On the monitor, the dozen lines of waves were replaced by merely three, enlarged. “Isn’t it ridiculous what the mind will fabricate! Flying! Now concentrate on your little friend’s movement upward, just the movement, nothing else—do you understand?—not your friend himself but only his movement through space, up, up… Got it!” She pounced on the keyboard, making an audible “clack!”
There was a rat gnawing at my heel. I jerked my leg away and looked down. It was gone. It had never been there. I threw off the “earphones” and stood up. My eyes moved over the tables full of junk, their shadows swinging as the light bulbs swung. “It’s a lot of baloney, that’s all. That machine doesn’t do anything.”
Jerry was laughing. He pressed his hands against his hips to keep himself from clapping. “Come on, Al, try to remember that thing you said, the guy flying up. Try to picture it.”
I looked at him. I looked at Weiskopf. They were grinning—one thin line running across both faces. I closed my eyes and concentrated. There was the loft. There was Howard Guminiak standing beside me. Then he was in the loft. But I didn’t know how he got there. The image of his flying was gone! I opened my eyes in shock, and they both burst out laughing.
Weiskopf laid a hand on my shoulder. “You see?” she said. “That’s what my angels are investing in. Very soon we take to the air waves. Wait till we get it on cable. Wait till we bounce signals off a communications satellite and rectify world history cranium by cranium! Let the Zionists try to stop us then.”
“The truth will out, Al,” Jerry said. He turned toward Weiskopf, and she gave him a smile.
“Now,” she said to me, “I wonder if we could talk a little bit about the Jew from Kovno, our mutual friend Goldeh.”
It’s the Buddhist line, of course. They say it at my Zen Center just the way the Dalai Lama says it: “All beings suffer.” Goldeh wouldn’t talk about it till now. Now, in our dumpster, waiting for Weiskopf, Goldeh wants to spill everything before the memory dogs gouge it out of her— that’s what she calls them, Weiskopf’s invisible minions, gnawing at her from inside her skull, more vicious and sharp-toothed than the pit bulls echoing across the square.
“Just before the Germans invaded Lithuania—1941 it was—the good people of Kovno killed my mother and father with three hundred others. Me also the Nazis would have liquidated, just for being an orphan, but some kind Lithuanians lied for me.
“Two months later it came the ‘Great Action’; ten thousand Jews the Nazis slaughtered at the Ninth Fort outside the Kovno Ghetto, ten thousand, but not me. Then, two years after that, October 26, 1943, they called us together two thousand eight hundred, me with the rest, what they sent to Auschwitz to be gassed.
“This I remember, although I was a child. This is hard and true. What you run toward, you don’t know from nothing; it might be a wishful thinking. But the things you run away from it, they are real, and this you can be sure, because you wish they were not. Do you understand me?”
“I understand you, Goldeh.”
“Listen to me and remember, Al. You will make maybe a deposition, if I die from this mishugas. In the trial against the mayor of Kovno, Kazys Matsok, they want I should testify to confirm some diaries what a man buried there. This mayor was a murderer, and now they have found him in Chicago. Remember what I say. He threw my sister into a pit at Ponar, and Al, she never came out again. Many others like her he threw in the earth. I saw.” “I’ll remember, Goldeh.”
Then the voices and the dogs.
“Listen, Lydia,” I said, “I’m not a major scientific mind like you. I have to work for a living. Don’t call me here, okay? I have to tear the heads off some chickens for Goldeh.” I was taking the call by the little employees’ lockers next to the punch clock. Nobody was near, but I felt I had to guard my voice.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right after the rectification. No dreams? No mental confusion?”
“I thought a rat bit me just at the end.”
“That’s interesting. Jerry hallucinated a pit viper at a similar moment. He’d never even heard of them before. Strange, but why not? If an infection like rabies can give you so specific a hallucination as the fear of water, why shouldn’t a neural stimulation…”
“Yeah, well, it was nothing, Doc. I found the conversation about Goldeh more disturbing than the machine, frankly.”
“Goldeh has a problem, Al. Naturally, I’m concerned about her.”
“It’s not her problem, Lydia. It’s your problem. Yours and your high-rolling friends.”
“It’s no problem for my friends, Al. Everything’s covered. The truth is on our side. We just don’t want Goldeh to perjure herself.”
“She’s not a liar.”
“Who’s talking lies? Did your friend fly? Did you he about that? It’s just a confusion, that’s all. Why don’t you put her on? Can you get Goldeh to the phone? I want to talk to her.”
“We’ve got to make lunch here.”
“In a minute I’m going to start thinking you’re one of them.”
“One of who?”
“You know what I mean, Al. Think of your relationship with Goldeh. Think of her son, Sam, your friend. Think of how you used to go over to his house and watch TV. Can you remember that?” There was a blast of noise on the line. A mosquito the size of a hummingbird was sucking blood from my shoulder. I reached to swat it, but it was gone. My shoulder itched like crazy, but there had been no mosquito. Weiskopf had hung up.