“Yeah. I thought of Georgia O’Keeffe.”
“Close. It represents an ox head, but it’s also an ‘aleph,’ the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In their modern equivalents, the letters spell Elohim no matter if you read them right-left, diagonally, or up-down.” She paused expectantly, and when I didn’t jump in, she said, “God, Jason. It’s God, or whatever power you want to call on. And the gems, these are all from the high priest’s breastplate, each letter associated with a specific jewel. The amethyst in the center: Purple is the color of spirituality. Amethyst is the stone of clarity and transformation. Coupled with aleph, it is the power of one, the power of that which is unique and like none other. It’s you, Jason.”
I chewed on that a minute. “What about those things I conjured up in my hands? What were those?” But what she’d said was already triggering associations I’d look up later.
“Dunno. Be interesting if you can conjure them again.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I read a lot. And when you’re in a family as odd as mine…”
“Uh-huh. Tell me something: Your dad being a demon hunter. Is that all hype? Or are we talking like father, like daughter?”
Her emerald eyes sparkled. “I have a very interesting family. Want to meet him?”
“What are you offering?”
“This.” Then she cupped a hand to my cheek, and I felt something almost unbearably sweet, and yet also like pain, loosen in my chest. As if by losing one thing I had gained something much greater, even if I could put no name to it. Not yet anyway.
“A door, Jason,” she said. “All you need is the courage to open it and step through.”
It was going to be complicated.
Later, in my apartment, I Googled: Ummin. Thummin.
Read and Googled some more.
Thought: Hmmmm.
Two days later, on Saturday night:
I watch as Rabbi Dietterich blesses a cup of wine to begin the ritual of Havdalah, marking the end of Shabbat. The word means separation, and he once explained the ceremony as not only signaling the start of a new week but as a literal separation of one state of being from another. The Orthodox believed that all Jews received a second soul for the duration of Shabbat, and so this ritual marked that separation as well.
What is this second soul? Who? Always the same one, or can any restless soul come calling? I don’t know. I suspect it’s complicated.
Someone passes the spice box, and I sniff the heady aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg, of cloves and allspice. The Kabbalists say that the scent might also entice that second soul to linger just a little while longer.
People don’t like to let go, even when they know they have to.
Chanting the blessing, Dietterich lights the long braided candle with its two wicks. The flames leap heavenward. The light is full and rich and makes Sarah’s hair shimmer with sudden startling flashes of ruby and gold. When she looks at me, I see the light reflected there.
“Just as light illuminates the dark, so we see that there is a clear distinction between darkness and light, between confusion and clarity,” Dietterich says. “To linger in the light is to know wisdom. To know wisdom is to banish loneliness and doubt and fear. So we are sad as we take leave of this Shabbat and of this soul, which has blessed us by its touch, yet we take comfort in what we have shared and what lies ahead knowing that what is now will be again.”
As the rabbi douses the flame in a small dish of leftover wine and for some reason I do not understand, I close my eyes. Maybe it is because, for the first time, I do feel something leaving. Something is letting go. It is not quite loss, but it’s that same feeling when Sarah touched my face.
Is it-was it-Adam? Has he always been there and it’s only that I’ve never rediscovered my old friend, there all along, because I haven’t known how to look? How to see?
How many other souls are worth knowing?
“Jason.” I open my eyes, and it’s the man to my left. Saul, I think his name is. He extends the basin of wine. “Your turn.”
“Thank you, Saul.” I dip my finger in the wine, close my eyes once more, and dab a drop to each.
The command of the Lord is clear, enlightening to the eyes.
Psalm 19:9.
We live in hope.
And when I open my eyes and pass the basin, Sarah is there.
The True Secret of Magic, Only $1.98, Write Box 47, Portland, ORE. by Joe Edwards
It used to be more than a grift. She’d never meant this to be a con. Even now, she could sense her grandfather frowning from the spidered darkness of his grave. “My sweet patoot,” he’d say in that gravelly voice that always brought in a few extra dollars from the middle-aged women in the audience. “You can’t never lose track of which part is from the world of light and which part is from the world of shadow.”
“Yes, sir, pappy,” she whispered.
Bringing in money through the mails was a risky proposition even at the best of times. Postal inspectors took a dim view of mail fraud. The murmured cant by candlelight in a sideshow tent became a felony when she wrote it down and put a five-cent stamp on it.
It wasn’t the money that was interesting.
She lived in a little walk-up on the third floor of a decaying Victorian apartment house on Portland ’s east side. Buses and trucks wheezed in the street by day, railroad cars rumbled down the pavemented sidings by night. It was never silent here, always too damp, nothing like the bright fields of home. There was little to do here except listen to the ache of her bones. If it weren’t for the mail, she’d have cracked like an old chamber pot long before.
The mail was interesting, not the money. It brought questions-the same kind of sad and quiet whispers people had come into her tent with during the years before and during the Depression.
Dear sir can you pleese find my dog Freeway?
How will I find love?
Where did Aunt Irma hide the silver?
She didn’t even mind the sirs. A whole generation had grown up since the war not knowing that women had done anything besides wear sunglasses and capri pants while lounging outside their husbands’ Levittown homes. The ones who were old enough to recall the Depression, and women working swing shift at the factories after that, they preferred to forget, to pretend. Now America had that nice Catholic boy as president, who’d fought the Japanese armed only with perfect teeth and a Cape Cod tan. He was every woman’s dream and every man’s envy. Not like the wrinkled old men who reminded everybody of the bad times.
She took the money in, a few dollars some weeks, more others, because without it she would have been living on dog food in someone’s cellar. But the money was nothing more than the river on which the questions flowed.
This past week there had been a postcard from Dallas, Texas. A question, of course-money came in envelopes.
Why must he die? it said on the back. The handwriting was strong, with a thick marker pen, like a man labeling a box. There was no return address, only the postmark.
She turned it over as she had every day since receiving it. Texas Theatre, Oak Cliff, Dallas, the letters on the front proudly proclaimed. The movie house’s marquee advertised Cary Grant in The Grass Is Greener, which made the photo several years old. Somehow she doubted the postcard concerned itself with the passing of an actor.