Kabbalah explains—experienced voluntarily by God. God contracting and compressing himself and renouncing his own infinite essence to allow for the existence of a conceptual place: chalal panui, a space where a world could exist independent of Him. In a way, God made Himself into the perfect reader so that we’d be imperfect yet fertile writers.
Tzimtzum means, I believe, “to conceal Himself from the beings He created, to let them exist as tangible creatures, instead of overwhelming them with His perpetual and infinite presence.” So God limits Himself—puts boundaries on His divinity—withdrawing without disappearing so that there might be something outside of Him. What Solomon Goldman was never able to fully understand was if God’s diminished size implied a relative reduction of His power or, to the contrary, turned it into a far more potent concentrate. If God’s self-limiting weakened Him, then maybe man’s corresponding role was to occupy that chalal panui and attempt to resemble God. Or, perhaps, to the contrary, to commit human errors over and over to emphasize the imperfection resulting from the partial yet decisive withdrawal of the Lord and Master of all things and thereby provoke Him to come back to make order of the chaos. Solomon Goldman didn’t know what to think. Both possibilities seemed logical. That’s the problem with the Kabbalah: unlike other sacred texts, it doesn’t offer answers, just pieces with which to assemble an answer. It’s not a compendium of infallible instructions. In the end, the true manual is mankind, the reader, the interpreter and assembler of all the loose pieces. Man approaches God through reading. And God—this god—is a man with deep faith in mankind. That’s why He’s left them alone and only in certain moments does He reappear, proud, to punish some blunder He deems incomprehensible. Some ignorance unjustifiable in creatures as magnificent as His, in beings artificially designed in His image and semblance. At times, the reason for His presence is easy to comprehend. Floods, commandments, and sharp shadows that cut off the lives of firstborn children and sacrifices that, sometimes, at the last second, are halted or neutralized. Events and marvels woven with the transparent texture of legends or fables.
But Solomon Goldman felt that he was the protagonist of something else, something far more complex. Something only accessed, or suffered, by the enlightened. Because God didn’t halt the rhythm of Fair Sarah’s death. God allowed Fair Sarah to cease existing and allowed him to survive her.
So would his mission be to reunite the pieces of the broken vessel, to reunite the lost exhalations of the Divine Light?, my father wondered. One night, after explaining all of this, he asked me that terrible question, and I really didn’t get it. I didn’t even realize that my father was in trouble, that his was another kind of illness. But I intuited how all of that would seem curiously similar to what I’d read later in science fiction magazines.
Religions are, all of them, early forms of science fiction: sudden flashes, flying, above and below, visitors from galaxies on the other side of infinity, appearing and disappearing. It doesn’t matter which planet: the story is always the same and it’s powered by the volatile fuels of love and death and an inferior faith in something superior: man creates God so that God creates man. And then they discover they cannot deactivate each other and that both, in a way, have turned into each other’s Frankenstein’s monster. Thus, man believes in God so he can do as he pleases in His name and God believes in man so He can blame him for all His mistakes.
At some point (I realize now that I refer to him, indistinctly, as my father or as Solomon Goldman, as if I were trying to divide him in two without having to break him into pieces more dark than light; as if in the one or the other I might find, barely hidden, the explanation for his madness) my father Solomon Goldman begins to talk to me about “aerial beings,” about “stellar powers,” about “portals,” and about “dimensions.” And about how I—having been on the threshold of death without being wounded too deeply, having almost come back from the other side—was the key that’d open the cell where he’d find my mother, Fair Sarah, a prisoner.
And it’s not that I believe him, but some part of me wants to believe him. Some part of me needs to believe him, because his visions are so much brighter and livelier than reality’s faded hue. And because, for the first time, in his delirium, in the magical properties he confers on me, I feel that my father loves me as a son, that he’s proud of me.
So, one night I clearly hear the whirr of a machine outside my window and believe I see them, just landed, with fierce smiles and tracing symbols in the garden soil with swords of light. Timeless angels held aloft by the wind of other “planes of existence,” their wings exuding a strange, immaculate glow. The next morning I wake up possessed by terrified happiness. Thinking I’d come to believe in what my father believed, convinced that from that moment on a new life would begin for me.
A life of true lies.
A false existence where I’d find myself forced to remember everything I said because—if I were to tell someone what I was almost certain I’d seen the night before—I’d be instantly written off as a liar. And liars have the terrible obligation of remembering everything they’ve said. Each and every lie. And that’s how they wind up arriving at that crystalline instant where the lies are enough to completely cover the surface of the planet of their true lives. The lies cover everything like a deadly virus imported from the far reaches of the universe, and for which there’s no cure or comfort. And when there’s nothing left to infect, when everything has been devoured, the lies begin to devour each other.
My lies, I realize, will be very different from the lies of other children. Children who lie to cover up a naughty deed.
I, on the other hand, will lie because, for me, all truth will seem far worse than any falsity.
For me, all truth will be unbearable.
I’m not at home when they come looking for my father and find him and take him away.
When I get home from school, they tell me that Solomon Goldman climbed up on the roof of the synagogue, that he was naked or dressed (there didn’t seem to be an agreement on this particular point) in a strange silver uniform or with his body covered in gold paint.
And that my father howled alchemical formulas and cabalistic prescriptions and desperate curses at the heavens.
And that he waved his arms, over his head, repeating again and again the gesture of someone drawing the blinds or opening the curtains.
Months later, a letter informed me that my father had died when he jumped from a terrace at the Bellevue Hospital Center.
The specialists’ final verdict was of sudden, unpremeditated suicide: they explained that my father was a “model patient,” whatever that means.
Years later, during a book signing at Andromeda Books—a specialty bookstore on Bleecker Street where one of my novels was being launched—a stranger with shrunken pupils approached me. Pupils the size of pills. He told me he’d been institutionalized with my father, but now was “completely cured and probably saner than you.” And he told me—presenting a copy of Remote Universe for me to sign—that my father hadn’t committed suicide, that that was a sham.
He told me that my father “had finally comprehended the secret language of the clouds . . . Clouds, immense and complex like ice cream sundaes in the summer, clouds as powerful as castle armies.”
He told me too that my father had attempted to fly and that, for few meters, he’d succeeded. He told me that he saw it, that he witnessed the deed, but that “the nurses’ cries made him lose focus and the poor and saintly Solomon ended up falling into the void.”
And he concluded: “Believe me: your father, Solomon Goldman, died happy—knowing he was right.”
And
