Also by Ben Nadler
Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side 1981–1991
(nonfiction monograph, Microcosm Publishing, 2014)
Harvitz, As To War
(novel, Iron Diesel Press, 2011)
Copyright © 2015 by Ben Nadler
First edition
Part of Chapter 2 was originally published as a short story, under the title “Krabov,” in the digital literary magazine Mandala Journal, a publication of the Institute for African American Studies, University of Georgia, in 2012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Fig Tree Books LLC, Bedford, New York
Jacket design by Strick&Williams
Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request
ISBN number 978-1-941493-09-0
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Newt Johnson.
Contents
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book 2: Knickerbocker Avenue
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Book 3: The Binding of Isaac
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Acknowledgements
IT CAME TO PASS that four sages entered Pardes, encountering the divine. Ben Azzai died. Ben Zoma went insane. Akiva emerged with perfect faith. Elisha ben Abuyah “tore out the roots” of the orchard, and emerged with perfect doubt. From that point forward, Elisha’s name was blotted out; the rabbis referred to him only as Aher, “the other.”
The story, just a few lines long, appears in both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, but I read it in a photocopied packet of Aggadot and post-rabbinic tales in a Jewish literature class in college. I had taken acid the night before, and when I came to class that morning I was in the posttrip void where colors and logic don’t work quite the right way, and you can’t sleep no matter how tired you are. I ran my fingers over the lines of the story. The Xerox toner felt thick on the paper.
The story opened up something inside of me. Piety didn’t really interest me, but I was fascinated by the path shared by these four sages. They had entered the heavenly garden of Pardes, achieving the highest of mystical experiences. Most intriguing was Aher, who found his own individual truth, which led him away from the bonds of his society.
I had been taking hallucinogens regularly and recreationally for five years, since I was sixteen, but once I read the Pardes tale during my junior year, hallucinogens took on a ritual importance. They were a way to shake the dust off the world around me, to make the hidden signs on my path glow. My consumption increased dramatically. My mind felt like a local train that had switched to the express track and was picking up speed.
The class soon moved on toward modernism without me. We had briefly discussed Moshe Luzzatto, who heard the voice of a divine messenger in eighteenth-century Italy. I devoted myself to reading his guide, Mesillat Yesharim, hoping that if I listened hard enough, and behaved rigorously enough, I could hear the same type of revelation. Despite my lack of piety, I tried to heed Luzzatto’s words as best I could, and follow “the path of the upright.” I started wearing a kippah, partly out of observance, because one had to live a righteous life before he could receive revelation, and partly because I saw myself as a character in a story and the kippah as part of my costume.
In the university library, I read books by other seekers and tried to find myself in their texts. I learned from Kafka—who learned from the Belzer Hasidim—that everyone had their own door to pass through. It wasn’t always an angel or divine messenger who called your name. In Safed, Israel, a rabbi received a letter from Rebbe Nachman—two centuries after the rebbe’s death. Then there was Philip K. Dick, who was struck with gnosis in the form of a pink laser beam. In VALIS, his sci-fi novel–cum–spiritual memoir, Dick’s alter ego learned to thread together hidden narratives from symbols in the everyday world around him. I too believed that messages were waiting for me somewhere. I simply had to find them.
After Oberlin expelled me in the fall of 2004, I went to live with my mother and stepfather in New Mexico. We agreed that I needed to sober up and get healthier—I’d pretty much stopped eating or otherwise caring for myself at school—before I tried to find a job or, my mother emphasized hopefully, reapply to college. I was all for getting sober and healthy; drugs had taken me as far as they were going to, and my brain felt exhausted and bruised.
In the beginning, my mother tried to get me to talk to her. We would go to brunch or a museum while my stepfather was busy with work, and she suggested on several occasions that I attend counseling. Mostly, though, I just spent time alone, walking