The Angel of Losses (5 page)

At midnight I turned on the light and opened the book again. As the story went on, his handwriting grew smaller, tighter, darker. There was an urgency in the script, or maybe something else—anger or fear. I thought again of my grandfather at the end of his life. A disordered, angry twin of the man who painted oceans and told tales of a kind magician who never failed. I took a legal pad, determined to expel the words cycloning in my mind and cage them behind a set of ruled lines. The White Rebbe. The Sabbath Light. The Angel of Losses. The River of Stones. The Penitent. The Wanderer.

I copied the sketch from the inside cover of Grandpa’s notebook, its many arms, its meticulous angles, and then I copied it again, seeing this time the subtle swelling and tapering of the lines, the elegance of it, and then copied it again, and copied it a fourth time, because it was really so simple, deceptively simple, fundamental, pure.

It was one o’clock. I called a friend from my old writing group.

“Insomnia,” I said. “Again.”

“Just your luck,” he said. “I’m leaving Brooklyn now. We can meet downtown.”

An hour later I arrived at Warsaw, a Polish dive serving cheap well drinks and pierogies under a canopy of Christmas lights. The tables were filled, chairs crowding the aisle, but I didn’t recognize any of the customers. I took a seat at the bar. The blond bartender was intent on the elderly man beside me. He wore a brown plaid hat, round on top with a stiff bill shading his eyes, a fringe of white curls at the brim. He leaned over his mug of tea, shouting a joke to her in what must have been Polish. She laughed, and he leaned back a bit, content.

I ordered vodka, put the anemic lime on a napkin, and swallowed half of the drink. I was itchy and nervous with fatigue. Next would come the headaches, then the flashes in my peripheral vision, like an alarm heralding collapse. I finished my drink.

“Careful, careful,” the old man said. He had a slight accent. “We must remember our sorrows, not drown them.”

“What did you say?” I asked. He was familiar: the wide mouth, the silver stubble, the bright blue eyes, watery and set deep in his flesh. His voice too—the tenor, the authority.

He removed something from his pocket. A silver thread fell from between his pinched thumb and forefinger. “Here,” he said, and I leaned in to see the pendant tracing watery rings on the bar. It was blue and just the size of a chickpea, but it possessed a disproportionate depth, layers of tinted glass, the surface textured with an opalescent fingerprint.

“For you,” he said, and held it out to me.

“Oh, no thank you,” I said. “I couldn’t.”

“Don’t worry, not to keep,” he said. “To hold for a while.”

I knew him. He had tried to comfort me after Grandpa’s funeral, appearing by my side as I stood alone beside the coffin, suspended above the plot. I was the last mourner, and I knew that once I walked away, the workers waiting under the trees would lower him into the pit, the dirt wet and obscene. Grandpa would be gone forever, and the delicate forces containing my grief would weaken and I would spill across the earth. “Eli had a good life,” the old man had said. “Far better than he could have expected.”

I had been angry at this but unable to protest. I realized how little I knew about Grandpa’s life before us.

“Are you a friend from Brooklyn?” I had asked. The senior center had chartered a van. Sam had been too ill to come, and I didn’t think Grandpa had counted any of the other men as true friends; they were just neighbors who didn’t want their own funerals to be unattended.

“From before,” he answered. “I did him a favor once, when he was a very young man.”

The old man had produced a small, hardback book. The cover was black and pebbled with a silver word impressed on the back, and on the inside, faint Cyrillic handwriting filled the flyleaf. The pages broke in my hands like stale bread. We scattered the shards in the open grave, and something unlocked inside my chest—I hadn’t realized how constricted my breathing had become—and for a moment, I was grateful to him.

I wanted to ask him more: When did they know each other? And where? And what had Grandpa been like? And why are you the first friend from his youth I’ve heard of?

But before I could speak, the old man grabbed my wrist with freezing fingers. “It’s a lie,” he said. “Whatever he told you. Everything he told you. A lie.”

I broke away from him, rejoined the small crowd by the parked cars—a few of my parents’ friends, the small band of old men from Brooklyn—and when I looked again, the old man was gone.

Until now. “Do you remember me?” I asked.

The old man laughed, and my throat tightened. He sounded like Grandpa. He had the same blue eyes. He gestured to the necklace. “Go ahead,” he urged. “It’s good luck.”

I didn’t want to insult him, not before I could learn who he was; or maybe it was just that he sounded so much like my grandfather. I put on the necklace. It was clammy from the messy bar, chill against my chest.

“I remember everything,” the old man said.

Immediately, I thought of
The White Rebbe and the Sabbath Light
. Grandpa had kept the story secret; he’d intended for the notebooks to be destroyed. He wouldn’t want me talking about them. Yet this friend, who sat beside me now, gazing into his empty glass, his mouth moving silently—he had been a secret too. I felt my loyalty to Grandpa’s wishes waver.

“You asked me what Grandpa—Eli—told me. You said it was a lie. Did you mean . . . did you mean the White Rebbe?”

The old man scrutinized me. I held my back straight, my gaze steady. There was no reason to fear him. Maybe I feared what he would say.

“So he
did
tell you.” The corner of his mouth twitched—the beginning of a grin, or a frown, I couldn’t tell. “He said he would take it to his grave.”

A hand fell on my shoulder. My friend, already heading to the door. “Meet me outside.”

I turned back to the old man.

“Go,” he said. “Don’t worry. We have plenty of time.”

I didn’t want to leave him there, give him the chance to disappear again, and with him any answers he had about Grandpa, his story, his secrets. But he was waving his hand toward the door, and his promise felt as solid as the necklace he had given me. I slid off the stool. “Be right back.”

Outside, I gave my friend the last of the money I had scrounged up that morning in exchange for a folded paper bag.

“We’re going to Eighth Street instead,” he said. “You want to come?”

“No. I’m going to finish my drink. And I have work to do tomorrow morning.”

“I haven’t seen you in months. Since you quit the writing group, I think.”

“Well,” I began. “Deadlines.” We were all under tremendous pressure to produce, to overachieve, and we must have all liked it, or we would have dropped out by now. But I wondered if I took it too far. I wanted to decide what the story meant. I wanted to decide what mattered and what didn’t.

But he was already looking beyond me, waving to a man and a woman crossing the street toward us. “Eighth Street!” he shouted. “I just texted you!”

I studied the sidewalk while they exchanged a flurry of names—who was waiting inside, who was still on the train, who was unaccounted for—and decided to have one more round. I glimpsed the old man, still at the bar, as the door began to swing shut.

Before I could follow them inside, the other man spoke. “So, did you read the book?” he asked.

I looked up. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and his lashes were long and black, his eyes bright and gray like tin. “
Juan Espera en Dios,
” I said.

He laughed. “It’s Simon, actually.” He offered me his hand, and I took it. “Nice to meet you. Officially.”

“Are you following me or something?” I asked. The question, I realized, was meant for the old man—his reappearance, coincident with the notebook’s, was uncanny—and only bubbled to the surface now. I voiced it with a shade too much urgency. I was shaken, maybe a little bit scared.

Simon just laughed. He seemed primed not to take me too seriously. Usually that made me crazy, but I appreciated it now. Sometimes I even exhausted myself. I smiled too.

“Three thousand people,” I said. “It makes for a big university but a small town.”

“Yeah, I think maybe we’ve met before. But I decided against mentioning it this morning. You seemed kind of upset.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said. “I just had a rough morning. And I haven’t been sleeping well.”

He shrugged off my apology. “What did you think of the book?” It was a given, in his mind, that I had read it immediately—just as he would do, probably.

“It’s interesting,” I said. “It’s interesting—actually—that you picked it out. It’s similar to another book that just fell into my lap.”

“A book on our mutual acquaintance?” he asked.

“No. Well. No. Not really.” I paused. “No.”

“Hmm,” he said, unfazed by my nonanswer. “The Wandering Jew wanders on. So why do you like him so much?”

I had never thought of it that way—that I didn’t want to deconstruct the Wandering Jew, clinically unpack him like I would a sentence. Neuter him with theory. Maybe I just liked him.

“I like ghost stories,” I answered.

“I never thought of him as a ghost,” Simon said. “Being immortal and all.”

“Death-in-life,” I said. “Life-in-death.”

“Like the Ancient Mariner. ‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’ That won me the oratory award in ninth grade. The girls were very impressed.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s only the most famous line of poetry maybe ever.”

Simon drew his shoulders back and brought his hand to his chest. “ ‘About, about, in reel and rout, the death-fires danced at night,’ ” he said, taking a few steps toward me. “ ‘The water, like a witch’s oils, burnt green, and blue and white.’ ”

He delivered the raging words as quiet facts—fire just a blossom of perfume, the sea just a swirl of paint—as if the right intention could turn a word that destroys into a word that heals.

“All right,” I said. “Maybe a little impressive.”

He was right in front of me now, his eyes on my throat, and I felt my face grow hot. “Is that an evil eye?”

I put my hand on the charm, cradled in the hollow of my collarbone, warm as my skin. “Is it?”

Simon came an inch closer and then stepped back. The cool night rushed in between us. “I thought so,” he said. “But there’s something different about it.”

The old man at the bar gave it to me, I almost blurted out. I could feel the flood of words cresting in my mind. If I began speaking, I wouldn’t be able to stop: That old man knew my grandfather. He knows me. I think he’s following me. Is that crazy? Do I sound crazy?

The door flew open, a few drunk girls exiting, their high-pitched laughter like breaking glass. They stumbled down the street, toward the corner where a hunched figure slowly merged with the shadows as he rounded the corner.

Grandpa’s friend, disappearing again.

“Shit,” I said. “I have to go.”

I ran down the block. The drunk girls had separated to the curb and the wall, but just as I tried to move in between them, they coalesced again, blocking me. How could I have missed the old man’s departure? I had been right by the door the whole time. Though he must have been in his seventies or eighties, when I finally came to the corner, he was already at the end of the block, the city spotlighting his hat, his white hair—even, it seemed, as he turned west out of sight, the strange blue of his eyes.

I rounded the corner. The side street was empty except for the squat, hatted figure, already turning onto the next avenue. His speed was inexplicable. I ran faster, and at the end of the block I was out of breath. I took a few steps past the curb, for a better view up and down the hill, before oncoming traffic forced me back to the sidewalk. He was gone.

“Unbelievable,” I muttered. I couldn’t have seen the color of his eyes from a block away, but I was sure it was him. Positive.

I reached into my shoulder bag and crinkled the paper bag as I watched the traffic stream by and then hush again. Soon it would be closing time; soon it would be morning. Too late for medication. Sleeping through the day would only make it worse. I had come down here so I could sleep, and instead I found myself wide awake in the smoky river of night, headlights fish skipping across its slick surface. I turned slowly in place, and when I stopped I was facing a twenty-four-hour tattoo shop, its borders papered with Chinese characters and retro mermaids. The old man had led me on a nearly identical path to the one Holly and I followed on her nineteenth birthday.

IT WAS HER FIRST SPRING AT COLLEGE IN THE CITY, MY FOURTH.
I put the yakitori, the rounds of illicit drinks at Warsaw, where the waitresses didn’t even pretend to examine the fake IDs, on my flimsy credit card, but my real gift to her was to be her tattoo.

We had decided long ago that we would do it together, our rite of passage, finally adults together in the big city. She had been drawing and discarding sketches for the tattoo all semester, and now she held a sketch of a wavering musical staff with two ascending notes (for her) and two descending notes (for me). Around us, the night hung on taxi lights and street lamps, and clouds of cigarette smoke rose from dive bars to the blackened tenement windows above.

I had just stumbled upon the Wandering Jew, and I was trying to describe my interpretations to Holly: language as the law of society, the reality that transcends it, the inexpressible fundamentals written by our bodies. Theory was killing literature, people said, but it had allowed me to see a whole subterranean world: every text meant something profound, if you would only follow it into the dark.

Maybe if I had connected the story to the White Magician, Holly would have shared my excitement. But we had both observed the injunction against Grandpa’s hero all these years, and my explanation fell flat. She was preoccupied and tipsy, her silence passing for polite attention. She was still reeling from her first serious breakup; she had just met Nathan, though they weren’t dating, and she didn’t yet know she would rearrange her life for him.