Epstein touched his own eye reflexively, got out of bed, and went barefoot to the window. What had he known of relations of grace?
He could have still gone back to Tel Aviv had he wanted. Could have called the taxi back, walked down the still-dark hallway to the waiting car, texting Klausner with the excuse of a forgotten meeting. He could have finalized the details of a donation in memory of his parents to the Weizmann Institute or the Israel Museum, finalized the hotel bill, finalized Moti, who would have come to the lobby with sweat stains under the arms to see him off and receive the usual envelope of cash, could have packed up and gone back to the airport, left the city where he’d been born, and to which he had returned countless times to regain what he could never put his finger on, flown six hundred miles an hour in the opposite direction from Judah Halevi’s heart, and watched the Eastern Seaboard emerge out of the dark and fathomless. And after the pilot, fighting high winds, had brought the plane down askew to the scattered applause of those who found themselves still, surprisingly, alive, he could have sailed through Global Entry, hurtled in a taxi along the Grand Central, empty at four thirty in the morning, glimpsed the Manhattan skyline, and felt the rush of emotion that comes with returning after having been far away, at a place where one’s arrival had felt very nearly final. He could have gone home had he wanted to. But he hadn’t. And now other things would have to happen.
He felt the ballast gone. Everything and everyone that held him to the pattern of himself was gone now. He leaned his forehead against the glass and looked out at the immense realm of the sky, hemmed below by the jagged line of primordial masses. He felt aroused, not only by the view but by his own receptivity. Something had been dislodged, and in the cavity the nerves conducted raw feeling without purpose. He probed tenderly and discovered, as one discovers with all absences, that the emptiness was far larger than what had once filled its place.
Kaddish for Kafka
In the morning everything was calm again, the sky still and cloudless. I’d slept hardly at all, and as always during nights of insomnia, I’d had the feeling that the shore of reason, with its familiar hills and landmarks, was drifting farther and farther away from me, and was touched by the fear that I was in some way willing myself away from it, and had chosen sleeplessness as my method. I sat drinking bitter coffee on my sister’s terrace. The brightness irritated my eyes, but from there I could look out for Friedman, who in my exhaustion I half hoped wouldn’t show up. Sitting in my grandmother’s chair, I thought of how she used to take me to the Dead Sea as a girl. She would pack us a lunch, and we would take the bus from the Central Station out to the desert, and in a couple of hours the two of us would be floating belly-up in the salty, electric blue remainder of an extinct sea, with the ancient mountains of Moab behind us. Floating in a concentration of history reduced by the slow evaporation of time, my grandmother in her white bathing cap decorated with rubber flowers. I imagined Friedman floating there, too, in his darkened glasses, controlling the transmission of national literature while his white hair rippled out on either side like underwater life.
At ten sharp he rattled up in his white Mazda, another symphony pouring through the windows. I lifted myself out of the old chair and tucked Parables and Paradoxes into the plastic bag that held my change of clothes. Hazily, I grabbed my bathing suit and stuffed that in, too. I glanced at the computer left open on the table from my middle-of-the-night e-mail home, then closed the door behind me, locking both upper and lower locks as my sister had instructed me to do whenever leaving the apartment for any length of time. The stairwell was cool and dark going down, and the sudden switch from the brightness made me dizzy, as if the roof over my thoughts had been suddenly raised, letting in a cold rush of space. Just beyond exhaustion there must be something else, just as beyond hunger they say there is an exalted clarity and lightness. But I’d always preferred to read about altered states rather than risk them personally. My mind was too permeable as it was; what few drug trips I’d taken had dipped all too briefly into euphoria before plunging me into panic. I sat down on the steps and put my head between my knees.
A warm wind came in through the open windows of the car as we drove. Friedman had brought me some chocolate rugelach from the bakery, and, feeling better, I ate these, one after another, while his dog rested her head on my shoulder, breathing in my ear. When I’d had dinner with Matti a couple nights earlier and told him about the other Friedman I’d met, who might or might not be former Mossad, Matti had laughed and said that if all the people in Israel who hinted that they worked for the Mossad actually did, then it would be the largest employer in the country. Think of all the banal domestic secrets whose cover-up the Mossad has unknowingly sponsored, he said. The truth is that by then I didn’t really believe I would be called on to write the end of Kafka’s “play.” The idea now seemed so ludicrous that it wasn’t necessary to consider seriously. The dog and the cookies, the crumpled bag of disintegrating paperbacks, the cats, the Mossad, and Friedman, who may only have been looking for a way to entertain himself in his retirement—it all struck me as almost playful. I had also retired, for the time being, from my former purpose. The purpose of writing a novel, I mean, though it is never really a novel that one dreams of writing, but something far more encompassing for which one uses the word novel to mask delusions of grandeur or a hope that lacks clarity. I could no longer write a novel, just as I could no longer bring myself to make plans, because the trouble in my work and my life came down to the same thing: I had become distrustful of all the possible shapes that I might give things. Or I’d lost faith in my instinct to give things shape at all.