I had to ask, and the counselors, well, they’d come down with something, hadn’t they, some really nasty, uh, flu?, and the timing wasn’t so good but they’d all gotten pretty sick, so they sort of rested while the kids stayed up late and talked and it was the best night ever.
Dinner provided the first localized site of language exposure since Esther had returned from her trip, and what happened to our bodies would prove to be textbook.
We did not know it yet, but LeBov had already issued guidance that the toxicity was perceptibly worse after you’ve broken exposure from it, the reaction far more visceral. From Esther’s mouth came something that was causing a chemical disruption, like a mist borne on the climate. That’s the only way to explain it, and this was when any notion of a toxicity not connected to Esther’s language seemed instantly absurd. This wasn’t her hair or clothing or rural dander. This was nothing that could be washed off. The evidence was pouring right out of her face and we were bathing in it. There was a soiled quality to her words, something oily that made them, literally, hard to hear.
Later philosophers of the crisis, like Sernier, would mock the poetics of all this. He’d decry the absence of facts, the vague and personalized anecdotes that inevitably pollute the possibility for real understanding. Personal stories, Sernier would say, are the most powerful impediment to any true understanding of this crisis. As soon as we litter our insights with pronouns, they spoil. Ideas and people do not mix.
I would agree with everything Sernier says. But I’ll point out that bugs crawl from his mouth now, and there’s no one left to read what he wrote.
I looked over at Claire, who had been awfully quiet. Usually she stayed quiet on purpose, in retaliation, to allow Esther, as she put it, to discover herself out loud. To Claire, I was the obstacle as we battled for a foothold as parents. She would say that I offered so many listening prompts to Esther, such eager receptivity and sentence finishing, that I obliterated our daughter’s conversational flow and actually caused her reticence. One can be adversarial, apparently, through aggressive attention. My signs of interest, and their vocal accompaniment, claimed Claire, were the problem.
I looked over at Claire after Esther’s monologue, and she had vanished into herself, ghosted out with her long stare. Her hand covered her mouth, seemed to want to disappear inside it. In her eyes I saw nothing. They had gone to glaze.
There’s our answer, I thought.
Welcome to the relapse, I wanted to say, but Claire lurched from her chair, mumbling, “Excuse me,” and Esther and I looked away from each other as we heard confirmation from the bathroom, the sound of someone we loved trying mightily to breathe.
I produced some elementary noise interference with my utensils on the plate, but my food, some kind of porridgy loaf that was supposed to be a risotto, oozing over my plate like the inner mush of an animal, was bringing up my own small swell of nausea.
I cleaved into it, breaking its gluey shell, and a thread of steam released over my face.
Esther broke the silence first, her mother heaving in the background. “Wow,” she said. “Glad to hear you guys are on the mend. I was beginning to worry.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I pushed back from the table.
In the closet I grabbed a towel and went in to help Claire. I dampened the towel in the sink, knelt behind her at the toilet, held back her hair, which felt dry and breakable in my hands, and I brought my body down softly against her, feeling each of her shaking spasms deep inside me.
When Esther approached the bathroom I pushed the door closed, and Claire and I stayed in there until her footsteps retreated.
Even then we waited, catching our breath, which didn’t come back so well. For what felt like hours we sat together on the bathroom floor with the faucet in full thunder, until outside the streetlights sizzled out and we could be sure that Esther had finally gone to her room for the night and closed the door. Only then was it safe to come out.
8
At noon each Thursday, before the illness began to deter our worship, Claire and I collected religious transmissions from the utility hut on the county’s northern back acre.
As Reconstructionist Jews following a program modified by Mordecai Kaplan, indebted to Ira Eisenstein’s idea of private religious observation, an entirely covert method of devotion, Claire and I held synagogue inside a small hut in the woods that received radio transmissions through underground cabling.
The practice derived from Schachter-Shalomi’s notion of basements linked between homes, passageways connecting entire neighborhoods. But our sunken network existed solely as a radio system, feeding Rabbi Burke’s services to his dispersed, silent community. Tunnels throughout the Northeast, stretching as far as Denver, surfacing in hundreds of discrete sites. Mostly holes covered by huts like ours, where two members of the faith—the smallest possible chavurah, highly motivated to worship without the pollutions of comprehension of a community—could privately gather to receive a broadcast.
Our hut stands where Montrier Valley dips below sea level into a bleached, bird-littered marshland, and the soil rests under a rank film of water. If we took a direct path from home we could be listening to Rabbi Burke in under an hour. But monthly we had to change our route to the hut, switch approaches, delay arrival. Sometimes we spent half a day on detours so elaborate that even we became lost on our way to the woods.
Such huts were the common Reconstructionist camouflage of the time, erected over the gash in the ground, huts with gouged-out floors and a fixture called a listener to welcome the transmission cables and convert the signal sent from Buffalo, Chicago, Albany into decipherable speech.
Huts could be anywhere, disguised in the woods, hidden in plain sight. Yards would host these huts. Sometimes a field. Huts were marked with a star that only glowed with soil rubbed on it, affixed with a surveillance camera. To repel the curious, its walls might be armored in dung.
Generations ago, on Long Island and elsewhere, holes like ours were lined with stone, made to pass for wells. Mock pulleys and bucket systems were propped over them, every manner of concealment employed. The holes were guarded by boys, protected by a wolf, filled in with sand, prettied up with gravestones. Tradition tells different stories about how our predecessors channeled the rabbi’s word and none of them much matter. In any case, I don’t care so much for stories.
Our hut was assigned to us early in our marriage by Rabbi Bauman, and it was ours alone. If other Jews gathered there to worship, then we never saw them in that sector of woods. The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything. Bauman was firm on this, said our access would be revoked if we breached. You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise. Children were not allowed access to the hut. Their relation to you alone did not automatically qualify them. They must be approached separately, assigned their own coordinates. Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness. Burke called it a ploy against our own relationship to uncertainty. You can know nothing of another’s worship, even when they try to tell you. To desire that information is to fear a limitation to your own devotion.
There were rules of appearance as well. A hut could not look maintained. We tended the grounds, kept the landscape looking unvisited. In the fall I cleansed the surveillance camera, its lens gummed up by summer, by steaming heat and the moths that melted into slurry against the glass.