“No, thanks.”
He shrugged, walking over to the printer. “It is an old story. From a book called the Talmud. About a rabbi called the Aher. That wasn’t his real name. I think it was Elijah—”
“Elisha. Elisha ben Abuyah,” Ifrit interrupted him.
“Yes, thank you, Ifrit,” said Moti in a tone that I interpreted to mean Don’t fucking interrupt me again. “He was like the opposite of Job. You know Job? From the Bible?”
I nodded. “Bad things happen to good people.”
“Yes, exactly. Bad things happen to good people. So, you know, Job was this guy God just kept kicking. He killed his kids, covered him in boils … many bad things he did to him. But Job, he keeps his faith in God, and eventually God rewards him with new kids, lots of gold, all that. But Elisha, he was this very well-respected rabbi, a really big man in his community, and then bad things happen to him. So he starts to question why God would do bad things to good people. And, as if in answer, the Romans killed his mentor, this even more holy rabbi. The soldiers, they sliced his head off right in front of Elisha. Fed his tongue to a dog. The thought of that, it gave me bad dreams as a kid.”
“So you’re saying you’re God now? That I should just wait here and suffer until my wife dies and you reward me?”
He shrugged and continued his story, “Anyway, Elisha, he’s watching all of this, and he just goes crazy. He loses his religion. His mantra becomes something like, There is no justice; there is no judge. So he starts disobeying all the rules. He sleeps with a prostitute on Shabbat, tells kids to get jobs instead of study the Torah, pisses everyone off. Eventually, he even pissed off God. So the people stop calling him Elisha. They say he’s not the same person, that he’s someone else—an Aher. So that became his name. They blame him for all sorts of stuff, like getting angels kicked out of the garden of Eden, things like that.”
“I also heard that after he died, his grave caught on fire, and smoke rose from his grave for a hundred years,” said Ifrit. “My father told me Aher used spells from Sepher Ha-Razim. Old Levant magic, you know, Kabbalah stuff. Like the Pulsa D’nura. We are not allowed to pray that something bad should happen to another person. My father always told me God made an example out of Aher. That we break the rules at our peril.”
“Well, I didn’t break shit,” I said. “They did, with their teleportation-replication-clearing-people bullshit. I just want my life back. I want to find my wife. I don’t want to be anybody’s Aher or Job or ayah or whatever-the-fuck.”
Ifrit took the clipboard and pencil from Zaki, scribbled something down, and passed it to Moti.
“I agree with you, Yoel,” said Moti after looking over what Ifrit had written. “Which is why you should be Job. Listen, I have to go for a minute. Zaki will stay with you. Do you want something to eat? Zaki, get him something to eat,” he instructed on his way out. “Ifrit, come.”
Ifrit glanced at me as she followed Moti out. Is that pity in her eyes?
Zaki pulled up the chair across the table from me and sat down. “You know, he lived a pretty good life after his breakdown, though.”
I was lost in my own thoughts, wondering what was on that fucking clipboard. “Who? Job?”
“No, the Aher guy. After he quit religion, he became a—what do you call it—epicure? He went on a journey through Arab, Greek, Roman cultures. I guess knowing that paradise was off the table for him, he decided to find it on earth while he was still alive.”
Zaki took out his cigarette, flipping it in his fingers. “He wasn’t so different from you, Yoel. He was a salter. Except, you ask questions that apps can’t answer, and he was asking questions that God couldn’t answer. Today you are rewarded for asking your questions, they call you a salter, and they pay you chits. But he, in his time, he was punished, and they took his name away, and exiled him.” A brief snigger. “It’s funny how the devout pretend like they want people to ask questions, but really they only want you to ask the questions that they have answers to. You ask the wrong questions, things they don’t want to answer, they get mad. But apps, they want you to ask the wrong questions—they don’t want questions they can answer. It’s very interesting.”
“That’s not how it works,” I countered. “Apps today are just as bad as the people in your Aher’s time. They want you to ask them hard questions, but only under their conditions. If you go too far, they punish you, too. The system kicks you out. Shit, look at me now, Zaki—my comms don’t work; I’m trapped in this room. I’m an exile.”
Zaki nodded. “And what will you eat, Mr. Exile?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
“Not hungry,” I said. “The bread was enough.”
“Not hungry,” he echoed, nodding. Then he resumed quietly toying with his unsmoked cigarette.
I was overcome by the desire to be somewhere else. Somewhere safe. I felt naked without my comms. Before, whenever depressing thoughts entered my mind, I’d distract myself with a game, or watch some stupid Darwin Awards streams, or just throw myself into work. Salting usually cheered me up because it forced me to think like a five-year-old. I got a perverse joy out of confounding the hell out of apps that probably have higher aptitudes than me. Could my enjoyment at witnessing them suffer be considered schadenfreude? I don’t think so. We’ve formed such close bonds with our apps that people have been known to cry when their favorite apps reach end of life. Anyway, I certainly don’t feel bad about it. Sitting there in my not-so-private Second Avenue conference-room-cum-purgatory suite, absent my comms, I escaped into memories.
The memory that came was of the day Sylvia and I got engaged. It was during our first real vacation together, visiting the San Francisco flotilla. Sylvia told her parents she was going to check out a school for her doctorate because she was hiding our relationship from them. I don’t even know if they knew we were dating yet. Like I said, her family dynamic was meh. Since it was my first time in northern California, she took me to see Alcatraz.
Besides the remorseless commercialization of such a terrible place—in which we both partook by buying Alcatraz hoodies prior to boarding the ferry because it was freezing—there was a weird, nagging feeling I couldn’t shake once I got to the island.