Servant of the Bones

As the Rebbe cursed me, I deliberately called on Marduk in Chaldean. I wanted the Rebbe to hear the pagan tongue. Anger burnt me up as it has so often done. I knew my god wouldn't help me. Some parting of the ways had occurred with me and my god. Must I now recall everything? Must I know the story from the start?

Well, if I sought to put it together, to understand it, to know who

I had been and how I'd been made the Servant of the Bones, there should be but one reason: so that I might die.

Really, really die.

Not just retreat into blackness again, to be called forth into anodier lurid drama, and surely not to be trapped, earthbound, with the lost souls who murmured and stammered and screeched as they clung to mortality. But to die. To be given at last what had somehow been denied me years ago by a trick I couldn't recall.

"Azriel, I warn you." Who had spoken those words then, thousands of years ago? A phantom? Who was the man I saw dimly at the richly carved table who cried and cried? Who was the King? There had been a great king. . . .

But my anger and my rage had weakened me so that I was shocked and dispersed by the Rebbe. My mind was blown apart as surely as my form. My capacity to reason was shattered, and I rose into the night formless, aimless, drifting once more among the electric voices, tumbling as it were above the magnet that holds us all-the spinning world.

But I never let go. I never really let go.

As I came to myself, as I gathered strength again, as I set my eyes upon a destination, I thought of all these various aspects of my situation-that I very well might be utterly Masterless, that I wouldn't fail Esther, that I was stronger than I'd ever been-and I was determined to fight harder this time to be free of either of these two men-the Rebbe or his grandson Gregory-I was determined that if I could not die, I would gain life apart from them.

Who knows what nourishes a spirit, in the flesh or out of it?

Men and women in this time, who would have laughed at our old customs, believed in absolutely preposterous explanations of things- take, for example, how a hailstone comes to form, from a speck of dust in the upper atmosphere, falling, then rising, gathering ice to itself, falling again, then rising again, and becoming larger and larger, till some perfect moment is reached at which the hailstone breaks the circuit and falls to earth and then, after all of that, all of that wondrous process, melts to nothing. Dust to dust.

Someday these people-these clever minds of today-will know all about spirits. They will know as they knew about genes and neutrinos and other things they cannot see. Doctors at the bedside will see the spirit rise, the tzelem, as I saw it rise from Esther. It will not take a sorcerer to drive a spirit heavenward. There will be men clever enough to exterminate or extinguish even something like me.

Note this, Jonathan.

Scientists of your time have isolated the gene for a fruit fly that is eyeless. And when they take his genes and inject them into other fruit flies-God have mercy on his tiny creatures-do you know that these fruit flies produce eyes all over their bodies? Eyes on their elbows? And on their wings?

Doesn't that make you love scientists? Don't you feel tenderness towards them and respect for them?

Believe you me, coming back to myself the following night, taking form again, diaphanous but optimistic and hatefully calm, I did not think to seek the help of scientists any more than sorcerers to effect my final death. No. I was done with all practitioners of the unseen; I was done with everything except justice for a girl I'd never known. And I would find a way to die, even if it meant I had to remember everything, every painful moment of what I'd suffered when death should have come to me, when death should have been granted, when the Ladder to Heaven might have fallen down, or at least the Gates of Hell swung wide.

Stay alive long enough to understand!

It was exciting! It was perhaps the only truly exciting thing that I could at that moment imagine or recall.

On the sidewalk, the next night, in Brooklyn, I took form whole and swift as if some modern man had flicked a light switch. Invisible to mortal eyes, but in the very shape that would soon enough become solid.

I wanted it this way. But still, to come forth on my own? I couldn't quite trust it. But tonight I would make strides in my search for the truth.

Brooklyn again, the house of the Rebbe and his family, and Gregory's car sliding to the curb.

Invisible, I drifted close to Gregory, fairly wrapping myself around him, though never touching him really, escorting him back the alleyway, almost touching his fingers as he unlocked the gate.

When the door opened, I entered with him, beside him, buoyant and fearless, breathing in the smell of his skin, inspecting him as never before.

I think I was luxuriating for a moment in the invisibility, which in general I hate, and came close to see how very well groomed and strong this man was, and that he had the glow of a king. His black eyes were uncommonly bright in his face, unencumbered by fleshly wrinkles that suggest weariness or an attitude, and his mouth in particular was very beautiful, more beautiful than I had realized. He wore fine clothes as before, the simple garments of this era, a long coat of soft fleecy wool, fine linen beneath it, and around his neck, the same scarf.

I went to the far left corner of the room, a much better place than I had occupied the night before, this time quite far to the left of both men and the dingy lamps beside and above them, and the small circle of intimacy which they so unwillingly shared.

Indeed I could see the old man's profile as I saw Gregory's, the two facing each other, and the casket gleaming on the desk, the desk this time which had been stripped of all its sacred books and would no doubt be purified after by a thousand words and gestures and candles, but what was that to me?

I was making the air move. The old man would know it within seconds. I had to be still and resist the lure of my growing strength. Remain diaphanous, quick to move, rather than to be scattered, willing to pass through the wall intact, rather than frightened once more or hurt into disintegration as I had been the night before.

I was near the wall that was closest to the street outside, against a wooden door that appeared unused, its brass handle covered with dust, and I could see my own shape, my folded arms, my shoes. I called the duplicates of Gregory's clothes to form themselves easily around me, in so far as I knew the details.

The Rebbe rested on his elbows, staring at the casket before him, and the black chains looked ugly against the plated gold.

I felt nothing in me that he was so near to the bones. I felt nothing that either man spoke of them, or moved about them, or stared at the casket which held them, and this I noted.