a ghost, while I wander around the orbit of my memory.
Now I am a machine.
I feel—I feel I am—like a machine.
And I’ve been feeling like this ever since The Incident, since a few days ago when they put me in a machine to try to find out what was going wrong with my machinery.
And, when I came out, everything had changed.
People were screaming and running in the streets.
Buildings were coming down.
Everyone was looking up at the sky or taking pictures of the sky with their little phones.
And there I was, I who’ve not yet gotten used to the fact that phones have won the streets and that people go around by themselves but talking to someone far away, like sane lunatics, plugged into a world where technology has been miniaturizing knowledge into something increasingly small and simultaneously more inclusive and more exclusive. Multiple functions in devices that fit in the palm of your hand. Devices impossible for me. For someone who grew up convinced that computers would be as big as buildings and only operated by wise grownups and not, like it is now, by children who barely know how to talk and who carry them around in their pockets and use them to travel far away, with faraway eyes, with the minute but all-powerful power of their fingers.
Now I’m armored (though stories where computers or robots suddenly humanize have become almost a subgenre in the genre) and I make myself impenetrable and logical and unfeeling.
Or at least that’s what I strive for.
It’s the only way, I think, that I’ll be able to report what happened with any kind of objective indifference, before it’s too late and the hour of my mind is going arrives . . .
To try to separate myself as much as possible from my species: transient and fragile beings and, unlike what we know about other animals, oh so variable and unstable. Men, happy and sad and foolish and wise and yet, maybe for that reason, without the ability to arrive at the collective agreements and accords that other living organisms enjoy. Men who decide to smile or commit suicide, all together, perfectly interconnected, beyond any doubt and men for whom nothing could matter less than the hypothetical existence of an authority embodied in a god who has fled the scene or in an advanced intellect with a more-than-a-little disturbing sense of humor.
I refer here to a scientific god.
A god who sucked down the half-toxic half-ecstatic air of the synagogue for which not even the greatest interstellar traveler was prepared.
A god my father ended up believing in and the god who ended him and everything he’d theretofore believed in.
A god who silenced the Hebrew in my father’s voice, sounding oh so like the guttural, sinuous languages of Martians and Venusians in those early and exceedingly cheap science fiction movies.
A god who destroyed my father with his faith and his love for the expansive wave of an all-powerful memory.
A memory that grew and devoured everything until that memory was all that was left.
The memory of a woman who was his wife and who, for a short time, was my mother.
I don’t remember my mother.
My mother—known as “Fair Sarah”—died during the great influenza epidemic, when I was less than a year old. I got sick too. And against all prognoses, condemned by the doctors, I survived, and no one dared call it miracle: there had been so many victims that my modest resistance was more an unrepeatable statistical anomaly than a singular divine gesture.
My name was Isaac, which means laughter in ancient Hebrew; but I wouldn’t say I laughed a lot as a child; there weren’t many things to laugh about in my childhood.
And I can’t remember what my father was like before my mother’s death either. But I do remember how he was after she died. And how my mother seemed to have replaced his shadow, sewing herself to his heels and accompanying my father, Rabbi Solomon Goldman, at all times, everywhere.
I remember my father crying, reading right to left, looking for explanations in the paper and ink voices of ancient prophets. Words filling his throat that only housed pained groans, hushed screams: the sound of one catastrophe produced by the echo of another catastrophe.
Hear it now as I still hear it.
My father chasing an explanation for the end of his world in the forms of the world’s beginning.
Before long, my father begins to detest the false comfort of other religions (the multitude of Eastern gods and Western saints and that oh so sci-fi notion of Paradise, that other utopian “planet” that comes after this planet, I think now) and to rage in front of churches fuller all the time with the Great Depression. Dumps run by fake-orgasmic priests swearing, with a regularity beyond irritating, to have been “touched by God,” as if God were some kind of specially endowed, all-powerful playboy. And so, all of sudden, everyone is claiming they’ve witnessed something or someone and my father ceaselessly condemns this socialization of miracles. Visions like a plague, for someone who thinks that miracles shouldn’t be massive and popular, but individual and occasional and capable of carefully selecting the site and eyes and body where they come to rest.
That clamor of lies and the incontrovertible truth of the Jehovah’s absence. It’s then that he reads what the Spanish cabalist Abraham Abulafia wrote about something called Tikkun Ra, or “the reappearance of the world,” and disclaimer: I’m not entirely sure about the meaning of this term or of the other cabalistic ideas I refer to here. I cite things from memory that I don’t remember precisely but won’t ever be able to forget.
I remember perfectly, yes, my father studying those symbols. The furious intensity of my father staring at a book. The energy that seemed to enter through his eyes and shake his entire figure, which a pulp illustrator of the day would’ve drawn as a mad scientist with sparks and lightning bolts emanating from his burning brain.
I remember my father telling me what the books told him.
I remember my father explaining to me that the mystics believed that in the beginning, the Divine Light of God, keeper of all things good, was preserved inside one or multiple sacred vessels. But, as the glimmers and cracks of evil had also already appeared in the world, the vessels couldn’t contain that splendor and they shattered. And the beneficent Divine Light broke into countless fragments that fell like crystal rain across the world. And, as they spread, swept by the winds and the slow but inexorable inertia of the planet’s rotations, those divine fragments changed sign and transformed into all the horrible and monstrous things that have happened ever since. Diseases and wars and cataclysms. The mystics, my father tells me, maintain that the task of mankind is to reunite all those malignant fragments by doing good deeds. Transforming them back into benevolent material and reassembling them, like restoring a broken statue to its original whole. The perfect good. The indivisible splendor of the creator.
Tikkun Ra, thought my father.
And it’s then, I believe, that my father decided that I’d be one of those small, lost pieces: something evil only in appearance (because he was unable to avoid associating my arrival with my mother’s departure), but in whose fate and origin lived, barely hidden for those who knew how to look, part of the original and absolute root of the best and first good news.
My
