Even I knew this was a questionable device when it came to repairing a transmission from a Jewish feed. It may as well have been a tiny fire in the woods. Perhaps the console radiated heat, and that’s why the scientists were drawn so closely to it. They had private reasons for misleading the LeBovs. Surely they knew this piece of tech was a dead end. They knew but were not saying.
Such a phrase might serve as a new motto for our times.
At the feet of the Jewish scientists coiled the bright orange cable, snaking out of sight down the hole. They’d coated it in one of those reception-enhancing jellies. A liquid antenna ointment, rubbed onto the cable, rendering it so sensitive that it quivered in the dirt.
If you listened so intently into nothing, using gear like this, you might hear anything you desired. It made you think we were still being sickened from some language we didn’t even know was out there. Inaudible, sub-whispered, mouthed by an enemy from so far away, it could not even be measured. Still it pulsed some toxin on us that made us all crawl on our bellies and choke.
I did not count the scientists, but I could guess there were nine summoned here by LeBov. Nine Jews divining at the quiet hole, to which I’d be the tenth, which would suddenly create the quorum that would ignite the wall of listeners.
Speaking of which, the occasional bird landed on a listener and pecked at it desperately, drilling into the sweet, brown core. No one seemed to mind the vandalism of these birds. Perhaps their work was intentional. Perhaps this was a necessary priming of the listeners. Before they could work in tandem they needed to be mercilessly gouged by a bird’s beak.
Beneath the pegboard, there were skins shed by the larger listeners, collecting like shriveled faces in a trough. Next to the trough was a rumpled sack that looked to be filled with cream.
When I looked at the wall of listeners, for the first time I understood why a listener was once referred to as a Moses Mouth. Some names are so accurate they are unbearable.
A technician, stationed to monitor the doings of the Jews, gnawed at a sandwich through the tiny opening in his foam mask.
Nobody minded me as I circled the work site collecting what I could carry.
I received blank looks from the Jews. I’m sure I stared back at them the same way. My bruised face may have troubled them. Maybe they’d not even been alerted to my arrival. It looked like they’d not been alerted about anything for a long time.
Here we finally were in the community of Jews none of us had ever wanted. We were machines of indifference with a faintly human appearance. Stonewallers and deadpanners. Unimpressed, even when you pressed on us. Failures in one way or another.
Perhaps that’s why we’d all embraced our private style of worship out in secluded huts in the suburban forest. When we came together we felt too much like nothing.
I would not learn what blackmail had driven my forest colleagues into this room. Did LeBov vomit in the bushes for each of these men, months ago in different neighborhoods, laying his trap, or was that a piece of mirroring customized for me alone?
How do you even know that I’m the real LeBov?
As forest Jews, were we supposed to love one another because we drank from the same orange cable, shared the same shade of doubt about the same unknowable deity? I most certainly could not think of the reason. Because love one another we couldn’t. It was just a more territorial form of self-loathing to revile people too much like ourselves.
These were men too much like me. If they had a complaint, a disturbance, some kind of undoused anger scorching their interior, one would need a long knife to release it. What’s the name of the surgical technique required to draw forth a man’s hidden material? Who is it that forges and sells those tools?
We should have all lined up for a leeching procedure, and they could have bottled our private liquid after sucking it free of our concealing shells.
Far above the work site, birds rode thermals inside the Jew hole space of Forsythe. The most gorgeous birds I’ve ever seen.
When the air grew too crowded with them, a lone bird would plummet, returning to a glass tank in an unlit sector of the Jew hole space. A nude old man sat here, quietly addressing a microphone. When I came closer, to assess his work, I heard a singing voice I knew too well. One I’d never forget.
The old man sang with Rabbi Burke’s voice. A perfect imitation. Songs not so beautiful, a warm-up to the sermon to come. No one else could sing in a key that old, on the melodic side of awkward. This was a voice that came from only one man’s body in this world. Birds entered his glass tank and careened inside his sounds, as if they could replenish themselves on music. Then they squirmed out through the glass aperture and shot back into the sky.
There was a broadcast bulb above the man’s glass tank—the kind you once saw at radio stations—and it glowed white. He was singing live, over the airwaves, to whatever world remained.
I stroked the man’s hair and he looked up at me with a face I’d always wanted to see. I did not care if his words were from decades ago or today. I did not care if he spoke a decoy service to deceive people like LeBov, whether his sermons were real or fake, because what was the distinction again? It didn’t matter to me. He was still mine. And now they’d gotten to him, too, reduced him to a crooning role in this underground work site. Or else he’d always been here, had never left, and it took me this long to find him.
He rested his head against me and I held him close.
So it’s you, I didn’t need to say.
To which the rabbi offered no answer but a smile so peaceful it was unbearable.
He resumed singing, and the birds circled, waiting their turn in his tank of sounds.
If I were anyone at all, I would have taken the rabbi with me. But I wasn’t. It turned out that I was no one, out only for myself, what little of it that remained for saving.
You might protest when I call this man a rabbi. But you didn’t see him, did you? You weren’t there. You didn’t know his voice your whole life the way I did, and if you did, I ask you now to stand down and believe me.
In those final minutes I prowled the work site, hiding my mouth from the scrutiny of those Jews. Were they going to rush me, hold me down, feed me the final wire?
I’d forgotten how to act as if I had an inner life, but it was coming back to me now. The face could be a powerful instrument. I’d make myself look like a creature sent to perform maintenance. Oh, it was the nth fucking Jew hole I’ve had to fix, I tried to suggest, but before I could get to work, before I could let them use my apparently special mouth as a reception ground for some unprecedented message to flow through, I needed to gather some equipment.
All the while I inched closer to the hole.
That’s not what it’s for, I’d once said. You can’t go in there.
Until I died I’d keep thinking of the things I’d gotten wrong. Like this. Worshipping for years and years over a hole that I’d not once thought of entering.
No one seemed inclined to try to stop me, which suggested that no one sane would ever jump into this hole and climb down into nowhere with any hope of surviving.
Exactly my fucking point.
I crept up to it and from the hole a blast of air hit me, foul and cold, like the rank breath of people who’ve been buried alive. For all I knew, people had been, and they were down there waiting for me.
I’m coming, I didn’t say. I’ll be with you soon.