Full of hate, Heap rose to his full height.
Raised his foot to crush it to pulp.
Brought his foot down.
Missed.
It had dodged and was waiting, several inches to the right.
He tried again, and again it moved, and again, and they engaged in an absurd little wrathful dance, Heap stamping and jerking while the foul creature darted in mocking circles.
At last he came to his senses. He was chasing an insect, and meanwhile the girl who had seen his face was God knows where, saying God knows what to God knows whom.
He had to leave. Now. Never mind his things. Catch a taxi straight to the airport and depart posthaste for jolly old, never to return to this awful place.
He turned and ran and crashed into a wall.
A wall that hadn’t been there before.
A wall of mud.
Broad as an avenue, taller than the synagogue, soaring upward like some manic cancer, climbing, expanding, ballooning, reeking of stagnant waters, rotting fish, mold, oily reeds.
He slipped and fled in the opposite direction, hitting another wall.
And then it surrounded him, the mud, mud walls, a city of mud, a megalopolis, vast and dense and formless. He raised his gaze to an indifferent sky, the stars blotted out by mud. Weeping, he cast his eyes down to the earth, where mud black as dried blood began to creep across his shoes, starting at the toes and inching upward. He screamed. He tried to lift his feet and found his shoes cemented to the stones; tried to kick them off but the mud had reached his ankles and grasped his shins and begun to climb. It was the source of the smell, viscous and putrid. It was an absence of color and an absence of space, an aggressive burning emptiness swallowing him alive.
He screamed and screamed and his voice came back close and wet and dead.
The blackness rose to his knees, grinding his bones in their joints; it moved up his thighs like too-tight stockings rolled incrementally up, and Heap’s bowels opened of their own accord, and he felt his genitals pressed, slowly, back up into his body cavity; he felt his abdomen cinched and his ribs snapped and his windpipe collapsing and his innards forced up into his neck, and he ceased to scream because he could no longer draw breath.
In the wall of mud, two slits yawned, a pair of cherry-red holes at eye level.
Studying him. As he had once studied his own prey.
Heap could not speak, but he could move his lips.
He mouthed, “No.”
The answer came: a weary sigh.
Muddy fingers closed around him and squeezed.
As Heap’s skull popped free of its spinal moorings, millions of neurons made their final salvo, and he experienced several sensations at once.
There was, of course, pain, and beyond that, the agony of insight. His was a death without benefit of ignorance, for he understood that he understood nothing, that his sins had not gone unnoticed, and that something unspeakable waited for him on the other side.
Finally there were the fugitive images that imprinted themselves on his fizzling, fading brain as his gape-mouthed head spun in the air: a night sky flocked with gentle clouds; the saffron glow of the lamps along the riverbank; the door to the synagogue garret, flapping open in the breeze.
Chapter two
LOS ANGELES
SPRING 2012
The brunette puzzled Jacob.
First off, his memory of last night — a stunted memory, admittedly — featured a blonde. Now, in the light of morning, sitting at his kitchenette table, she was clearly dark-haired.
Second, while he could recall some frantic groping in a sticky vinyl booth, he was pretty sure he had gone home alone. And if he hadn’t, he couldn’t remember it, and that was a bad sign, a sign that the time had come to cut back.
Third, she was museum-quality gorgeous. As a rule he gravitated more toward average. It went beyond low standards: all that need and vulnerability and mutual comfort could turn the act more than physical. Two people agreeing to make the world a kinder place.
Looking at her, so far above his pay grade, he decided he could make an exception.
The fourth thing was that she was wearing his tallis.
The fifth thing was that she wasn’t wearing anything else.
He smelled fresh coffee.
He said, “I’m sorry I don’t know your name.”
She placed a hand on her throat. “I’m wounded.”
“Please try to be forgiving. I can’t remember much.”
“There isn’t much to remember. You were absolutely coherent and then you put your head down and it was lights-out.”
“Sounds about right,” he said.
He slid past her to fetch down a pair of handmade mugs, along with a lidded jar.
“Those’re pretty,” she said.
“Thanks. Milk? Sugar?”
“Nothing for me, thanks. You go on ahead.”
He put the jar and one mug back, pouring himself a half cup, sipping it black. “Let’s try this again. I’m Jacob.”
“I know,” she said. The tallis slipped a few inches, exposing smooth shoulder, delicate collarbone, a side swell of breast. She didn’t put it back. “You can call me Mai. With an i.”
“Top of the morning to you, Mai.”
“Likewise, Jacob Lev.”
Jacob eyed the prayer shawl. He hadn’t taken it out in years, let alone put it on. At one point in his life, the idea of covering a nude body with it would have smacked of sacrilege. Now it was just a sheet of wool.
All the same, he found her choice of covering profoundly weird. He kept the tallis in the bottom drawer of his bureau, along with his disused tefillin and a retired corps of sweaters, acquired in Boston and never shown the light of an L.A. day. If she’d wanted to borrow clothes, she would’ve had to dig through a host of better options first.
He said, “Remind me how we got here?”
“In your car.” She pointed to his wallet and keys on the counter. “I drove.”
“Wise,” he said. He finished his coffee, poured another half cup. “Are you a cop?”
“Me? No. Why?”
“Two types of people at 187. Cops and cop groupies.”
“Jacob Lev, your manners.” Her eyes brightened: an iridescent brown, shot through with green. “I’m just a nice young lady who came down for some fun.”
“Down from?”
“Up,” she said. “That’s where you come down from.”
He sat opposite her, careful not to get too close. No telling what this one was about.
“How’d you get me into the car?” he asked.
“Interestingly, you were able to walk on your own and follow my instructions. It was strange. Like having my own personal robot, or an automaton. Is that how you always are?”
“How’s that?”
“Obedient.”
“Not the word that springs to mind.”
“I thought not. I enjoyed it while it lasted, though. A nice change for me. Actually, I had a selfish motivation. I was stranded. My friend — she is a cop groupie — she left with some meathead. In her car. So now I’ve spent three hours chatting you up, I’ve got no ride, the place is closing, and I don’t want to give anyone any ideas. Nor do I relish forking over money for a cab.” Her smile brought her into brilliant focus. “Abracadabra, here I am.”
She’d chatted him up? “Here we are.”
Long languid fingers stroked the soft white wool of the tallis. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I got cold in the middle of the night.”
“You could’ve put on some clothes,” he said, and then he thought: moron, because that was the last thing he wanted her to do.
She rubbed the braided fringes against her cheek. “It feels old,” she said.