Then Maury pulled himself together and held up a manila envelope. “I’ve got the tests right here,” he said. The Maury Show is very supportive with the paternity-test thing, and I was looking forward to the results. Maury tore the envelope open and pulled out the lab report.
At that point, Mickey stood up and said, “I don’t think we need to hear this.” She gestured with one hand, and an opening appeared in the floor of the stage right in front of us. It looked like it led into a cave, and it sure was dark down there.
Then people started coming out of it, people with tall hats and clothing that looked like it was made from dead oak leaves. They were carrying bittersweet vines and two babies, neither of whom looked to me like a bear cub, though I’ve been told that, to the audience, they both looked like bear cubs.
The people in hats danced with Mickey and Maury and Andrea’s mother, and they handed the babies about while they danced. Maury danced, but Andrea and I did not dance. We watched, slightly paralyzed, while Mickey and Andrea’s mother entangled themselves in the bittersweet, and then entangled Maury. Then they all danced down into the trapdoor with the babies, even Maury.
But Maury looked a little worried, just a tiny bit. As he descended down into the floor, he looked right at the cameraman and said, “Keep it rolling, Anthony.” He disappeared into the cave, wrapped in bittersweet. Maury was a pro, I thought, and I respected that.
Andrea and I were left sitting on the sound stage, looking at the audience. I’m sure you’ve seen the clip on YouTube.
Chop Wood, Carry Water
They say you can’t remember before you were born, but I remember. I was cold, cold and damp and clammy. I wanted nothing. I did not know hunger, thirst, or desire. I lived in the dark, and I didn’t have a thought in my head. I was free.
Then, of course, things changed. I awoke from a dreamless sleep to the dreadful noise of three black-clad men bowing and chanting psalms, to the stench of burning metal and baking clay, and to a pall of steam hanging over it all on the muddy bank of the Vltava. I was torn from my bed. I was granted this half-life and became subject to the will of the Rabbi.
The Rabbi was not a bad man: things could have been much worse. He was a compassionate and contemplative human being, interested in dispelling those mysteries that are man’s to dispel. Moral issues were important to him, and he seemed to consider worthy even the life in golems.
But I lost, in that instant of formation, my merciful shapelessness, my oneness with the universe. Yet I did not gain the one thing that would have, I am told, been recompense for those losses.
I must tell you now that, in my opinion, souls are overrated. Compared to the deep, volitionless comfort that comes from being truly a part of the earth, humans and their souls never know a day of rest. They hunger, they thirst, they long for one another in ways that I am not equipped to understand. They lack deep peace, and a soul seems poor compensation for this absence.
Every day, the Rabbi would ask me to do certain simple tasks, and each day, I would do them to the best of my ability. I would chop wood and carry water. As the Rabbi told me, these tasks were much revered by religious people, even in other lands, and I should not feel ashamed to do them. Indeed, I was pleased to have simple tasks, and could do them without stopping, until the Rabbi told me to do something else.
I knew that I could also be called upon, at any moment, to defend the community against outsiders who would wish to harm it. Thus far, I had done that only one time and in a minor way, and after that the outsiders had left us alone. The Rabbi wondered whether they were in fear of me, or whether they were simply planning something extraordinary. This uncertainty gave a special urgency to my distress on the day my strength disappeared.
My first task on the day in question was to serve the dead. Very near to where the Rabbi lives, there was — there still is — a small cemetery, the only cemetery, aside from the one where the plague victims were placed, in which Jews were allowed to be buried. It was not so much a problem as it might seem that the cemetery was overcrowded: the bones were stacked many layers deep: graves were piled upon graves, gravestones upon gravestones, jutting out like loose teeth. The effect was one of deathly chaos.
The Rabbi was in charge of the cemetery, and it had been one of my tasks since my creation to carry new gravestones to the graves. My strength enabled me to pick up a stack of stones, five or six at a time, and place them at the gravesites. And yet, this time, when I approached them, I found I did not have the strength to pick them up. I took them one by one from the stonecutter’s room to the edge of the graveyard, but still I could not carry them out to the graves. I simply didn’t have enough strength.
Since my strength was the only purpose of my vitality — I have no soul, after all, and thus have no reason for my existence except to serve — I thought that its failure in this instance might be cause for concern by the Rabbi. It might cause him to unmake me, and I could go without protest back to my ideal existence as a cold and unthinking component of the living planet upon which the warmer, more volatile beings scurry about.
Right now, the scent of those small white flowers outside by the iron gate is driving me a little crazy. Their perfume fills this storeroom. There is nothing I want to do with these flowers. I cannot eat them, and indeed, have no desire to do so. I cannot impregnate them, I cannot hold a conversation with them, and I could not even were I able to fuck and talk. They no doubt have their own vegetable goals and interests, but such things have nothing to do with me. So why are they trying so hard to hold my attention?
To continue: my first thought was that I must find the Rabbi and indicate to him that I was useless for the purpose of carrying gravestones. I hoped that he would see that this meant my usefulness was finished, and I must be returned to the soil.
The Rabbi, I feared, was entranced by the implications of my existence, and would be reluctant to bring it to an end. He breathed life into me, just as, as he saw it, his maker breathed life into him. In the view of his people, and perhaps in his own eyes, this made the Rabbi more like his maker than he was like other men. This, he said, was the sin of Lucifer, and he feared it. He thought too much, the Rabbi. And yet, that was one of his most worthy traits.
It is not clear to me whether I am a man or something less than a man. It is not even clear to me whether I am a Jew. Although I am dependent on the Shem — the sacred name, which the Rabbi places in my mouth to animate me — I am not otherwise a religious person, and I do not lay Tefillin or study Torah. But I think that it is not necessary for me to be religious in order for me to be a Jew, nor, if I were not, would it make me a Jew to be religious.
The scholars debated whether I could be called upon to make a minyan, and have not, even now, made a clear decision, so I was never asked to perform this mitzvah, this duty. But the Rabbi allowed me to rest on the Sabbath, as a Jew would. It is not clear to me, though, whether he thought I was a Jew, as he had me rest by removing the Shem from my mouth, as if I would not otherwise refrain from labor. This took the power to do so or not away from me, as if I were again a piece of clay. I asked him about this, and he said, “Animals have the same rights as humans do. Even animals rest on the Sabbath. You who have something of the animal and something of the man, as well as something of the earth, should rest as well.”