The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter fifteen

The apartment complex Sam Lev had lived in for the last twelve years belonged to a wealthy co-parishioner named Abe Teitelbaum. Abe and Sam had known each other since their twenties; they were long-time Talmud study partners, which explained how Sam had come to occupy the superintendent’s unit.

God knew he didn’t do any actual superintending. His expertise was limited to a memorized list of phone numbers. Called upon to confront a broken toilet or a faltering A/C, he’d say, “Right away,” depress the hook-switch, and dial the appropriate handyman.

Nonetheless, Abe took pains to frame the arrangement as a job rather than an act of charity, paying Sam a nominal salary and refusing to take rent, claiming that it had been deducted from Sam’s paycheck.

The apartment was tiny, fronted by a stamped concrete patio furnished with a pair of sooty plastic chairs and an equally uninviting bistro table. A terra-cotta planter contained a barren clod of potting soil. Jacob paused amid the splendor to silence the ringer on his phone and withdraw a suede yarmulke from his pocket. The leather was stiff and dry, permanently creased into a taco shell shape from having been folded and crushed at the bottom of a drawer. He tried without success to iron it out against his leg, then pinned it on with clips, conscious of its weight and the jutting peak. In his mind’s eye, he looked like a crested parrot.

Sam was slow in answering his knock. Worried, Jacob knocked again.

“Coming, coming...” The door opened. “Good Shabbos.”

His father wore a baggy gray suit, white shirt, black loafers, and anomalously large red sunglasses. The skinny end of his necktie stuck out below the fat end, and Jacob tamped down the urge to reach out and fix it.

“Sorry I’m late. I got stuck downtown and traffic was horrendous.”

“Not at all. I just got back from shul. Come on in.”

Jacob made his way carefully across the living room. Cardboard boxes stacked two deep and four high housed a motley library, traditional Jewish texts as well as countless works of physics, philosophy, philology, astronomy, and mathematics. There were also a number of books whose unorthodoxy Jacob had only recently come to appreciate: classics of Sufism and Buddhism, Christian mysticism and gnosticism. In third grade he had scandalized his teacher by bringing in a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for show-and-tell, resulting in a conference with Rabbi Buchbinder, the rosh yeshiva.

Eyes that read such nonsense should go blind.

On the car ride home, Jacob had sat curled up in the bucket seat, quaking in anticipation of ghastly consequences. They came to a stoplight and Sam reached over to take his hand.

Not everyone who wears the title of rabbi deserves it.

But he said—

I know what he said. He’s a fool.

At nine, this was a mind-boggling revelation.

The light turned green. Sam eased off the brake.

You can’t be afraid of an idea he said. Follow the argument, wherever it leads.

Another decade passed before Jacob realized that his father had been quoting Socrates.

But the weight of evidence seemed to fall in Buchbinder’s favor, because in the interim, Sam really did start to go blind. It began a few years after the show-and-tell incident: a sludgy spot at the center of his field of vision that gradually crept outward, sucking up shape and color. He saw better in low light, and had taken to wearing sunglasses, indoors and out; he kept the living room curtains drawn and the track lighting dim; he alone could navigate his library, by following the map in his mind; and while his vision appeared to have stabilized, that could always change: the condition was considered chronic and incurable and, best of all, heritable.

Yet more for Jacob to look forward to as he got older.

Insanity?

Blindness?

Why choose... when you can have both?

He said, “Someone walked you home, I hope.”

Sam shrugged.

“You went on your own?”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s not safe.”

“Fine,” Sam said innocently. “I’ll drive.”

“Hilarious. Have Nigel take you.”

“He does enough.”

Jacob placed the bakery bag on the dinner table, which was laid with a white stainproof tablecloth, wine, and two crooked place settings. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffing. His father wasn’t so good at reading the oven knobs.

No burning.

No nothing.

“Abba? Did you put the food in to warm?”

“Of course.”

Jacob lowered the oven door. Foil-wrapped pans sat on cold racks.

“Did you remember to turn the oven on?”

A pause.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Sam said.

They began with Shalom Aleichem, a song welcoming the Sabbath angels. Jacob then fell silent, listening to Sam’s mellow baritone as he intoned Eishet Chayil, the closing section of the book of Proverbs, a hymn to the woman of valor.

It angered and awed Jacob that, after so many years and so much heartbreak, his father was still singing to Bina.

“Your turn,” Sam said. He reached for Jacob’s head but hesitated. “If you want.”

“Go on. I can use all the help I can get.”

As a young boy, he would listen to the parental blessing, mumbled from on high, the words of a marble-mouthed angel. Sometimes Sam would smile and crouch down so that Jacob could place his hands on Sam’s head and reciprocate with a solemn string of nonsense Hebrew. Kama rama lada gada Shabbos amen.

Now they stood with their faces inches apart, close enough for Jacob to smell his father’s Irish Spring, to be momentarily hypnotized by the flicker of his lips. Physically, Jacob favored Bina’s side, her dense, charcoal hair, delicately salted at the temples; her fluid jade eyes, even more unearthly than his; the open, questioning features that, on his face, plucked a maternal chord in women, endearing him to them at a glance, and later becoming a source of ire.

Don’t look at me that way.

What way?

Like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Sam, on the other hand, was angular, whittled, with decisive bone structure and a mildly bulbous forehead — a brain outgrowing its housing. Jacob thought it was good his father had found an outlet in his writing; otherwise the theories and concepts and other bits of nuclear theologic cognition would pile up, pressure mounting, skull swelling and swelling until it ruptured, spraying gray matter and words of Torah over a half-mile radius.

Sam had removed his glasses. The disease had not caused any outward change; as ever, his eyes were a glossy brown, verging on black. They trembled, half closed, as he murmured.

Sam pulled him in and gave him a wet kiss on the forehead. “I love you.”

Twice in one week.

Was he dying?

Jacob filled one of Bina’s ceramic goblets to the brim with red wine, setting it carefully in Sam’s hands. The wine sloshed across Sam’s knuckles as he recited kiddush, dripping onto the white tablecloth and diffusing, a lavender diaspora. They drank, washed their hands with another of Bina’s cups, and sat to break bread: hunks of challah dipped in salt.

Electing to skip the cold soup, they went straight to the main meal. Sam insisted on playing waiter, setting out platters of roast chicken, sweet potato, rice pilaf, cucumber salad.

“What it lacks in temperature, it makes up for in quantity.”

It was indeed a lot of food, and Jacob felt touched. His father didn’t have money to spare. Before his weakening vision had forced him to stop, and he’d taken on his so-called superintendent duties, Sam had scrounged a living doing freelance bookkeeping and tax prep, usually for elderly neighbors and always at a deep discount. His indifference to the material world was, like his continuing devotion to Bina, a source of admiration and frustration for Jacob.

“Everything’s delicious, Abba.”

“Can I get you anything else?”

“You can sit down and eat, please.” Jacob forked a piece of Jerusalem kugel, sweet and peppery and springy to the touch. “So. What’s up?”

Sam shrugged. “The usual. Scribbling.”

“What’re you working on?”

“You really want to know?”

“I’m asking.”

“Maybe you’re just being polite.”

“You say that like there’s something wrong with being polite.”

Sam smiled. “Since you ask, it’s a supercommentary on the Maharal’s Chiddushei Aggados to Sanhedrin, with special attention given to the themes of theodicy and reincarnation.”

“I smell bestseller,” Jacob said.

“Oh, definitely. I’m thinking we get Tom Cruise to play the Maharal.”

Sam was ordained — although he wouldn’t permit anyone to call him rabbi — and not a few of the books piled up around the apartment bore his authorship: lengthy, esoteric tracts written in longhand in composition books. Whenever he completed one, Abe Teitelbaum paid to print a few dozen copies, which Sam then sold.

That was the theory. Invariably, Sam ended up giving the books away to anyone who showed the slightest interest, trying, unsuccessfully, to reimburse Abe out of his own pocket.

As Sam launched into a summary of the latest work, his elegant pianist fingers flying, Jacob fixed on a smile and set his head on auto-nod. He’d heard most of the ideas before, or some version of them. His father considered Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, his cardinal commentator, and had been talking and writing about him as long as Jacob could remember. The guy could do no wrong. The guy had special powers. The guy was the gadol hador — the greatest Torah mind of his generation. He was a lamed-vavnik, one of the thirty-six hidden righteous men who sustained the world. He was Abraham and Einstein and Babe Ruth and the Green Lantern rolled into one, at once mythical and intimate, like some highly exotic fruit hanging off the far end of the family tree; the fourth cousin who never shows up to reunions because he’s building affordable solar-powered housing in Guatemala or pearl diving off Sri Lanka, and whose absence turns him into the sole topic of conversation.

One of the few recollections Jacob had of Bina showing a maternal instinct was when Sam decided to read to him from a book about the Maharal’s creation of the golem of Prague. The cover art featured a monster with glowing, jaundiced eyes, stretching a bearish hand after some hapless, unseen victim. It had scared the bejesus out of Jacob, then four or five. He’d run in his pajamas to Bina, who gathered him up and turned on Sam ferociously.

Read him a normal book, like a normal child.

In hindsight, it did seem a questionable choice for a bedtime story.

A shrill electronic plaint interrupted his thoughts and paused Sam’s monologue. Jacob fumbled out the sat phone. He was sure he’d turned it off. He flicked the ringer switch, but the phone shrieked a second time.

“You should get that,” Sam said.

Jacob flicked the switch back. The goddamned thing kept ringing. “It can wait.”

“It might be important.”

Hot with shame, Jacob tripped through the cardboard maze, stepped out to the patio.

“Hello?”

“Detective Lev? Phil Ludwig.”

“Oh — hi.”

“I’m catching you at a bad time?”

“No, it’s, it’s fine,” Jacob said, eyeing Sam through the ragged lace curtain. His father had laid his cutlery across the edge of his plate and was sitting with his hands crossed on his shallow stomach, gazing placidly into oblivion. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

“Yeah. What can I do for you?”

“I caught a case that relates to one of your old ones, and I wanted to pick your brains.”

“What case would that be?”

“The Night Creeper,” Jacob said.

Ludwig said nothing for a solid ten seconds. When he next spoke, his tone was guarded — close to hostile. “Is that a fact.”

“Seems that way.”

“Relates how?”

“I think I may have your offender,” Jacob said.

Ludwig exhaled. It sounded labored.

“Detective?” Jacob asked.

“One second.”

The phone clattered down, and Jacob heard grunting, like the guy had accidentally swallowed a cigarette butt.

“Detective? You okay?”

Ludwig came back on. “Yeah.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Well — I mean, Christ. I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I was hoping to swing by and talk to you,” Jacob said.

“You have him? I — shit. I thought you were gonna tell me you had another DB.”

“I do,” Jacob said. “Your offender.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ludwig said. “You’re kidding.”

“I wouldn’t kid about that. Tomorrow okay?”

They arranged to meet at eleven a.m. Before they got off, Jacob again asked if Ludwig was feeling well.

“Don’t worry about me. Listen up: you’d better not be yanking my chain here.”

“Hand to God,” Jacob said.

“Cause you are, I’ll break your fucking neck,” Ludwig said.