Bed-Stuy Is Burning

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  For Alex

  Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

  But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

  —GENESIS 11:4–7

  Part 1: Rosh Hashanah

  Chapter 1

  Things were good. As good as they’d been in years. Maybe ever. IPhone in hand, Aaron lay in bed and focused the baby monitor app’s display in on Simon’s little chest rising and falling. Then out, in order to see Simon’s hands and feet. They were fiery white blobs against the flat-white crib mattress sheet. The infrared light shone from his son’s skin in the next room over. It shone from his baby’s face, fingers, and toes. Aaron focused the display in, and the light shone from Simon’s nose and cheeks.

  “What?”

  “What?” Aaron said.

  “You were laughing,” Amelia said.

  “Was I?”

  He tried to direct his thoughts away from Simon, though not toward the next day’s numbers at work.

  Amelia read People magazine in bed next to him. On the back of the folded-over page: “Hot MOMMAS! Celebrities are showing off their BABY BUMPS this summer!”

  The featured Hot Momma wore pink bikini bottoms and a humongous floppy hat that hid her face. She cradled her pregnant belly with one arm and covered her bare breasts with her other, the hand of which held a giant untouched cupcake. “These Hot Mommas Are Eating for Two!” read the caption below. Except the Hot Momma hadn’t been eating at all. Aaron could see her collarbone and shoulders jutting out of her taut skin. She was suffering, the Hot Momma, and it needed to stop. Someone had to save her. The Hot Momma looked malnourished, starving, obscenely pregnant, and forced to pose with a monstrous strawberry cupcake.

  Aaron shook off the thought. He was trying to shake off thoughts like these lately. Thoughts that brought attention to imaginary injustices. Maybe the Hot Momma was blessed with a high metabolism. Which was part of what made her so hot. She was a movie star, Aaron remembered. Maybe she’d devour that cupcake and ten dozen more.

  Aaron tried to relax. He was lucky to live on this block—the nicest block in Bed-Stuy—and lucky to be sharing a life with Amelia and Simon, who breathed steadily on the video feed in Aaron’s hand. He was lucky to have a baby who looked just like him. Everybody said it. Well, we know whose baby this is! Both Aaron and Simon had hardly any neck and tiny ears. Aaron had never been proud of his tiny ears before. They both had little bug noses, too. Amelia said their noses were cute on both of them.

  Aaron thought it might be slightly narcissistic to enjoy looking at his boy as much as he did. Before he went to sleep, he pretended to be working on his phone sometimes. But he was gazing at Simon—even though at night the infrared light meant all he could see were gray patches and blindingly white ones. He watched the bright packet that was his son’s chest rise and fall. He thought about how funny it was that this little baby was going to grow up with him as a father, with Amelia as a mother. With these neighbors as neighbors. That this life would be this baby’s life. That this baby’s father was an investment manager and this baby’s mother profiled celebrities for glossy magazines. Aaron reminded himself to breathe. To slow down his breath. Nobody felt relaxed on Sunday evenings.

  Chapter 2

  You up?” Amelia asked. It was two, three, four in the morning. She wrenched her neck to see the clock: 4:05 according to its spectral red light. Simon was whimpering still—again. It meant he was alive, at least. SIDS was mysterious enough to claim sleeping children in the night, their whimpers signs of life.

  “Mm,” Aaron said.

  “I want to sleep,” she said. “But I can’t.” Lying in bed was the only time Amelia didn’t feel as though she was about to fall asleep. She didn’t sleep anymore, nor was she ever fully awake.

  “I know,” he said. “Just try. Rest at least. Resting is something.”

  “Everything is something,” she said.

  “Resting is a particular kind of something,” he whispered. “A good kind.”

  Her body was moving through interstellar depths. Everything around her—stars, planets, galaxies—was something. She was something, and Aaron was something, and little Simon was something. And when they all died, they’d still be something—only something different. Death was something. Everything was something. Even the darkness through which she floated was something.

  “Dark matter,” she murmured.

  “What?” Aaron asked.

  She’d been sleeping, or not-quite-sleeping. “Simon! Is Simon okay?” she said.

  “You’re confused. Rest. Try to rest.”

  “ ‘The only important thing is rest,’ ” she said. She was quoting Aaron quoting his mother.

  He rolled toward her and put a hand on her thigh.

  “Hot momma,” he said.

  She rolled away.

  Chapter 3

  A few years back, Aaron was still a rabbi, but he already disbelieved. Belief had never been at the core of his rabbinical path. Aaron had wanted to help people through their problems. He had wanted to lead the community. He had wanted to give speeches. He enjoyed analyzing literature, and in this case the Bible would do. Additionally, he was someone people liked talking to. He was reliable. He was a good listener, and he made people feel heard. He was young and bright, and people were proud of him—even people who’d just met him—and he’d spend hours, days if necessary, at temple, their homes or hospitals, sitting with them and listening. He had a way of sitting and listening where he tried to anticipate what someone was going to say next and ask it as a question, like, “And you must have been furious?” so they said, “Yes, exactly!” which made them feel very close to Aaron. It wasn’t a pretend feeling. It was real. Kindness, intelligence, sympathy—these were the most important attributes a rabbi could have, Aaron thought.

  The problem was that unless you’re a psychologist, too, it turns out that the only way you’re going to truly help someone as a rabbi is through God. Sure, you can tell them that what mitigates the death of their son is that he’ll live on in their memory. But how does that make things better?

  In fact, it makes things worse. All that meant, really, was: Don’t suffer, because you can spend the rest of your life in pain over your son’s sudden death. And when she asked how God could allow such a thing to happen, the only tolerable answer was that God didn’t exist. What could another answer be? That God was testing her? How, by murdering her son? That it all fit into a larger plan? How is that helpful? That God was punishing her? That could only lead to more pain. The truth—that life is unfair (or, better yet, a-fair? non-fair?) and she must do her best not to allow her suffering to define her—this had nothing to do with religion at all. This was, as he’d understood it in his undergraduate philosophy class, existentialism. What he believed was that there was no greater meaning, so mankind was responsible for creating his own meaning
. But in the position he often found himself—counseling someone in the face of tragedy, telling a woman that it was her responsibility to create meaning from that tragedy—it seemed cruel. This was a moment when God should step in. But God never stepped in. And Aaron didn’t know how to. Aaron profoundly felt the lack of a higher power in his inability to ease his congregants’ pain. All Aaron had was himself, and that wasn’t enough. Aaron began to suffer. He stopped sleeping. He began to feel his congregants’ pain as his own.

  An itch, a tickle—frustration that grew into impotent ache. His inability to help gnawed at him. It was shameful. People came to Aaron with pain—real pain that caused real tears and ruined lives—and he met them with platitudes.

  It will pass.

  I know it hurts.

  You’re not to blame.

  He met them with nothing. Even if he wanted to believe in God, even if he did believe in God, Aaron’s inability to channel God into lasting comfort for members of his congregation or—especially—for himself was more than shameful. It was intolerable. God hadn’t been able to save Aaron’s great-grandparents. God hadn’t been able to save Aaron’s mother. And God wasn’t doing much of a job with Aaron. The whole enterprise was an intolerable shame. He stopped being able to bear it.

  The reason God never stepped in was because Aaron hadn’t been good enough to bring him in. Once Aaron had realized this, he put the realization away. But he couldn’t keep it away, and it constantly returned to persecute him.

  Even if Aaron could have proven that the sacrifice of that woman’s son had been somehow worth it because of what would happen afterward in her life, his unique position as a rabbi in the century after the Holocaust of the Jews made that answer, rational or not, insulting to all those who were murdered and all those who’d lost so many of their loved ones, like Aaron’s now-deceased grandmother.

  It was all so agonizing and mixed up in Aaron’s mind.

  That Aaron’s great-grandparents—all eight—were taken in the Holocaust had once been another reason Aaron had believed he should be a rabbi. In addition to the fact that being a rabbi seemed to match his interests and that, more than anything else, he wanted for himself the particular kind of respect given to kind, hardworking, capable leaders in the community, he felt he owed it to the history of his family to become entrenched in the religion he doubted. If Adolf Hitler and hordes of Germans murdered so many of my family members because they were a certain thing, I should become that thing even more. That was what he believed, and, more than believed, that was what he felt down to the core of his being: that he should live his life in a way to redress the horrors that had come before him. And when Aaron graduated at the top of his rabbinical class having already been awarded a prestigious internship, which quickly became a permanent position, at Rohr Shalom, the Upper East Side’s most prominent synagogue, he saw his grandmother’s beaming eighty-year-old face—her cane propped against her chair—and knew he’d done right.

  • • •

  That was only six years ago.

  His grandmother had since passed away. She died happy because of him. His mother had since passed away. She died in pain from cancer and the chemotherapy and radiation. Aaron lost his congregation to the extent they were ever his, and now he could no longer open a Gideons’ Bible in a motel room without feeling disappointment and shame.

  The story, more or less:

  It was a sure thing. A tip, in passing, from an agent—the father of a boy studying for his bar mitzvah, of all people. A college quarterback was hurt, and the backup didn’t know the system. Aaron was going to repay the money to the synagogue. He just needed it over the weekend. He needed it to win one bet. Then he’d pay it back, settle his own debts, and stop the craziness. At this point, Aaron owed a hundred thousand dollars, and his own bank account was empty. His savings were gone. The bookie wouldn’t take another bet from him on spec once he owed that much. Aaron needed this bet to settle his accounts. His bookie had been threatening to show up at the synagogue to collect. Aaron didn’t believe that he would cut him off like that and lose the cash flow, but there was always a chance.

  It had started a year or two earlier. Aaron had gone on a few all-night benders to see if drinking could make his work any easier, but it had only made him feel worse. Like he was getting further from God. Like he was somehow conclusively demonstrating God didn’t exist. He was drunk online one night when he clicked on an ad for online poker, and everything changed. He felt good for the first time in years. He felt great. He felt like the first time he’d realized a girl was interested in him. Chance. Risk. And something he could control with a previously untapped inner strength. He won a few dollars that night. And then he gave himself over to a higher power he did believe in. Math. Skill. But mostly sheer luck. He couldn’t sleep. But not because of pain or empathy or philosophical uncertainty. Because of excitement. He’d get home at 4 p.m. or 9 p.m. depending on what service he led and go right to the computer, fall asleep at four, five in the morning, and wake up excited to get right back on.

  Then Saratoga in the summers. Belmont in the fall. Trips to AC and Mohegan Sun. A bookie in New York. Football season was the best. The worst. Every week betting on the spread. Money lines. Over/unders. Knockout pools. Three-team teasers. He was good at it. It made his professional life tolerable. When he was lying to his congregation or unable to help folks in pain, he thought about the rush to come that evening. In the beginning he won more than he lost. Which, in retrospect, was lucky and disastrous. It was what he imagined God was supposed to feel like—when God answered your prayers. The only time he caught himself praying was at the end of a close game. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  So with an empty bank account and inside information, a hundred thousand dollars in debt to a gangster who was going to ruin Aaron’s career, he took a risk. He grabbed money where he had access to it. All four rabbis had the synagogue debit card. He put on a suit and his kippah, and at the Citibank around the corner, he transferred fifty thousand dollars into cash. Forty-eight hours later, he had tripled his money. It was the best night of his life. He’d spent it sober, alone, in shorts and a T-shirt watching TV on his couch. The next morning, he paid his debt to the bookie. Returned to the Citibank. Transferred the funds back where they belonged. And first thing Monday morning, the senior rabbi called him into his office and fired him.

  The senior rabbi received alerts every time anyone touched the account.

  Aaron didn’t admit wrongdoing. “The temple funds were never in any danger,” he said.

  “Wait a minute. You took that money out of the account to gamble?” the senior rabbi asked. “I had no idea.”

  “It was a sure thing,” Aaron said.

  The two men stared at each other. Aaron fought a longing to be hugged. The senior rabbi told him to vacate the premises.

  • • •

  The first therapist Aaron saw afterward asked him if maybe he was punishing himself—if he’d known he’d get caught because of course there’d be a paper trail. Aaron believed now, lying in bed on a Sunday night six years later, the same thing he responded to the therapist then, which was that he honestly didn’t think so. He’d needed the money. He’d withdrawn cash a few times from the synagogue’s account and it had never been an issue. As much as five grand once, for the annual singles mixer. He had no reason to believe the senior rabbi had been alerted then.

  He could have taken a leave of absence and traveled, he told the therapist, eventually ending his relationship with his synagogue in a much less painful way. He sincerely didn’t believe he’d wanted to get caught.

  This was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. This was Aaron’s, to use a Christian concept, original sin. Without it, he’d still be a rabbi. Happy or suffering, he had no idea. But he’d still be comforting families when they needed it most. Or he could have retired. Written books or articles. Continued to gamble or stopped. Worked on Wall Street. But not this. It was the worst thing he’d e
ver done.

  Thirty-one years old with no job, no savings, and shame—the polar opposite of the self-satisfaction he’d spent his entire life up to that point accruing. He’d had to stay in New York City because he couldn’t leave his father alone with his arthritis, severe sciatica, and isolation, so Aaron found a job at an investment firm. He told the HR representative that he had had a crisis of faith and needed a career change. She asked surprisingly few questions. Between his analytical, moral background and his mind newly trained in running numbers, Aaron did well with his clients and took on new ones quickly. He met Amelia. They made Simon.

  • • •

  This was the story Aaron told himself most nights before he fell asleep. Or this was the story that prevented him from falling asleep. It was time to sleep. Amelia was asleep with her bedside lamp on and an open People magazine between them. Simon would be up in two or three hours. Aaron had work in the morning. Before long, Antoinette would be ringing at the door.

  Chapter 4

  Love you,” Aaron said. It was two minutes or maybe ten minutes later. Four fifteen.

  “You, too,” Amelia said.

  Aaron liked to touch Amelia’s shoulders, and she liked to be touched there. He loved her, her skin.

  “Mmm,” she purred.

  That’s nice, he thought.

  Mmm, she thought.

  He crept his hand down her lower back.

  “I’m so tired,” she heard herself say in the voice of the most tired person in the history of the world. She sounded to herself as though she was suffering—as though she was very, very ill, and very brave to be speaking at all, through the pain. Cholera, typhoid fever. She was a pioneer woman crossing the plains in a covered wagon and she was dying. Who would take care of her seven children? Simon, Simon, Simon, Simon, Simon, Simon, and Simon. Aaron might be a respected money manager, but he couldn’t take care of—