As for Rockland’s difference, so Monica told me in the waiting room, the difference was apparent but “it didn’t matter,” said Monica, “it weighed nothing.” The weightlessness of Rockland’s difference seemed, too, an assault on the rabbi’s post-electrocuted constitution; and I, respecting the rules of recovery, could not pester him with weightlessness. That Rockland, though probably not “of” the rabbi’s seed, was thoroughly the rabbi’s and Carla’s beloved son, weighed everything; the difference, indeed, its weightlessness, I didn’t dare transform into heaviness, by depositing its bulk upon the rabbi’s convalescing brain. So, appeased by the Pacific Ocean, in Santa Cruz, where Atlas rented me a room in a hotel by the beach, I could dream about the weightlessness and not let it turn into my newest burden.

  153.

  In that hotel, in my room overlooking the beach, I regressed: I fell back into the equivocal arms—whether inviting or menacing—of places I’d never seen but that became vivid to me, as if they were the only arms, the only vistas, I’d ever wanted to be held by. All day, and into the evening, I walked along the sea; I watched the tide violently approach my feet; I swam into the pummeling foam, to greet the paroxysm, not to tame it; the sea’s anger was of a size and strength I couldn’t hope to subdue, or even to understand; I felt numbed by the noise the ocean made, crashing its edges down upon my body as I lay in the sand; I gloated over how shivering and alone and endangered my body seemed, as I sat, wearing just a vertically striped black-and-white swimsuit, by the encroaching tide, in the cool early evening; amid the beginnings of rainfall I stayed there, uncomfortable, yet turning that discomfort into a relaxation that was almost a dissolution.

  The full weight of my passivity—what the rabbi had often criticized or praised me for embodying—landed on me, as I sat, shivering, by the sea. If some instinct of self-protection or survival hadn’t jumped up to attack or rescue me, I’d have willingly let the passivity win the day, or the night, and I would have allowed the sea to take me over entirely.

  Was it Rockland who weighed the most upon me? Was it Dito? Was it Monica Prague? Was it the rabbi, who called me every night, and who gave me the good news of his continued recovery from the electrocution? Was it Doc, whose stiff, incoherent, and bootless loyalty to the Zimmermans and the Anti-Pontificators I feared I was priming myself to assume as my own vocation? I was growing into a replica of Doc’s frozen regard for his clan, his ancestors, and the fragments of revolutionary forms that surrounded him in that ambiguous Victorian house, five stories high, or more, or many more, that lay adjacent to a friendship center I’d never properly befriended, and a synagogue I’d never had the faithfulness to attend. If I had capitulated to the rabbi’s long-ago request that I relinquish my irreligiosity and deign to enter the synagogue (just once, on Yom Kippur, I need never return, but give it a try, for the rabbi’s sake), might everything have turned out differently? But what difference of outcome was I seeking, if I decried the particular destiny I was now pursuing, here, by the Pacific?

  154.

  That’s when I found Udi—that very night, in my hotel room, after my evening of passive attendance at the sickbed of the sea, the tide like an electronic recording of the heartbeats and brain-wave patterns of a comatose or dying patient. Before I found Udi, when I had just roused myself from the soporific state provoked in me by the lulling yet aggressive sea, I began ruminating on the rabbi’s reluctance to tell me anything substantive about the crises and tragedies that had formed him. He never told me about Rockland’s difference, until I dragged the evidence out of Monica. He never told me about his ancestors, or much about his parents. He never told me how he made the transition from a bruising life with Carla, and a period of being the father to a sickly infant, to the state of being a widower, without a son, and then, as if overnight, into a sexual virtuoso who caught me in his filigree. Was I glad to have been forced, by the rabbi’s reticence, into foraging for clues from all of his associates and from distant parties, rather than squeezing the information directly from his unyielding mouth? Was the circuitousness of the search, to which his silence had consigned me, a boon? Did I love the circuitousness more than I craved the climax?

  A climax, that night, I achieved with Udi, a young man I found on Grindr. I had not used hookup apps for some time, so sated was I by the rabbi’s intimacy, but now, in a state of near-evaporation from my circling confusions, I sought distraction in the ghostly gallery of torsos and faces and bulges. In that scroll of inaccessible physiques—a mortuary’s yearbook—I found a temporary peace, a sedation, like the ocean’s repetitions and insults, or like the revolving door of Doc’s discourse, his slow, hypnotizing recital of information that never added up to revelation.

  On Grindr, I saw the profile of a man (only a half mile away) whose screen name was U.D. I messaged him, sent pictures. He reciprocated, and within an hour he was in my hotel-room bed.

  His name, he said, was Udi. U.D. sufficed for the purposes of Grindr. Udi had no last name. Curious to pin down destinies and derivations, I asked for his full name, and he said he never uses a last name, he’s a musician and a dancer, a skateboarder and a painter, he doesn’t need a last name, people prefer it when he’s just Udi or U.D.

  He offered me, that night, what I needed. I needed a redhead, because I was steeped in Rockland’s inexpressible difference, a difference that ended up weighing nothing, though it had seemed weighty enough for the rabbi to hide from me its bulk. For another tankard, and yet another, of this heavy or weightless redheadedness, I thirsted. Of the sanguine, Udi gave me an ample allocation, with his cock, and its red hair, and the red hair on his stomach and legs and butt and shoulders, and the curly red hair on his head, lighter red than the hairs on his body, a red so light—so weightless—it floated up to blondness, or the step beyond blond, which might be invisibility.

  To Udi’s redness, his roseate distinction from what I am, from what the rabbi is, and from what, I presume, Carla was— a redness that coral-haired Atlas could boast of, if mere redness was prizeworthy—to Udi’s redness, I turned, and he offered it to me in such profusion that I might profitably have stored up some of the portion and saved it for a future when I might pine for a lifesaving sip of the red oblivion he held so lightly. Udi, I confessed to myself, looked like Ari Aramillo, who did not look like his older brother, Eli Aramillo, who, I now knew, must have been the biological father of Rockland; but I could imagine that, when Eli was younger, he might have looked like his handsome kid brother, and that, even if Eli had never approximated, in his own person, the splendor of the younger Aramillo, it was plausible that a boy-child of Eli’s might resemble Ari more closely than the inseminator himself.

  Udi, in my hotel-room bed, became the temporary answer. Holding him, I clasped Rockland’s difference, about which the rabbi professed to feel no shame, though its oppressive weight drove him to hide the story from me. Letting Udi hold my body, I felt enwrapped by Rockland’s difference, which was, in a sense, the silken sash of the rabbi’s separation from me. For was it not my journey, all along, to erase the schism between us, and to discover, again and again, that the interstice was inexpungible?

  Udi came in my mouth, and I came in his. Thereby, at least for a time, we shouldered the difference between us, and held its viscous weight in easy suspension.

  155.

  Upon my return to my apartment in Hoboken’s enigmatic periphery, I realized that my first concern was Dito.

  Dito, after a period of health, had been subject again to fits of anti-social behavior and to near-naked wanderings in the neighborhood where he and Pablo lived in Baltimore. The rabbi, conferring with Pablo, had decided that it was for the best that Dito be once again removed to the Imperial Plaza Apartments to live for a brief interlude of convalescence under Monica’s care. Monica, too, we could forgive, if she felt, more than the rest of us, the weight of Dito’s care, and harbored a wish that Dito recover quickly enough to give her a period of peace, apart from the perpetual task of ministering to the mental health of the rabbi’s adopted son.

  I had never once visited Dito while he was housed—I was tempted to say incarcerated—in Monica’s demesne. I suspected that Monica, a loyalist to the rabbi and his affiliated causes, considered me an interloper, perhaps a gold digger, and I could not bear to be seen as someone poaching on her terrain, when I was merely taking an avuncular interest in the recovery of the rabbi’s nearest living relation. Monica was not stymied by “relation.” To her, apparently, all affections needed to be earned, and the rabbi had won, in heaps, her affection, not just from the wisdom of his teachings, but from the splendid size of his emotional offerings to Monica, whom he rewarded with praise, and, I imagine, financial compensation, through the unspoken agency of Atlas. I could offer Monica neither praise nor financial reward; but to Dito I could give my curiosity about the workings of the human mind, and the deviations that any nervous spirit underwent in the search for a graspable and not Sisyphean destiny.

  Entering Monica’s house, I could almost reach out and cup my destiny in my palm, so close did the future seem to hang on its branch, as close as the fragrance that enveloped me. Surrounded by an aroma of heliotrope, gardenia, jasmine, rose, or maybe an amalgam of every flower, in her vestibule I hung my raincoat and left my wet shoes and umbrella. The cold rain here in New Jersey, after the relative warmth of Santa Cruz, was yet another disappointment that gathered its noose around my neck, upon my return to this labyrinth of relations to which I’d pledged my troth. It was the desirability of the rabbi’s body, perhaps, that most tightly hugged my throat, with a throttling immediacy, threatening to cut off my supply of air.

  156.

  Monica directed me to the guest room—she called it the library, or the sewing room—where Dito was temporarily domiciled, but she didn’t follow me in.

  “It’s best,” she said, “that you be alone with Dito. He’s more than I can handle, and, frankly, I’m sure he’d like to see the last of me.”

  To the last or to the first, Monica knew how to respond, to lend a hand, or to ignore; I was, perhaps, Monica’s last, and I was grateful that she turned her back to me, and walked away, as I opened the door to Dito’s den, where I saw—crammed into a space the size of a generous walk-in closet—a sewing machine, a wheeled aluminum rack hung with shirts, a desktop computer, a shelf filled with books and vases (more vases than books), a painting of a sailboat (hung on the wall above the bookcase and its overdose of vases), a lyre chair, and a twin-size, narrow bed, pushed against the wall.

  Dito lay on that bed, and I, in deference to him, and not wanting to hover above him as a raven or judge, gazing beakily down at Dito’s distress, sat on the lyre chair, which was of a frailness that could hardly support my body’s weight. I sat gingerly; it would not endear me to the censorious Monica if I were to break her chair, although I, among her associates, would be the person best qualified to repair it.

  A retreat it was, isolated from everyone, I presumed, except Tamara Atkins (Monica’s neighbor and ally), the rabbi (who had the liberty to visit night and day), and her spectral clients (I hypothesized their existence). Based on the evidence of the pressed shirts hung evenly on the wheeled rack, I gathered that Monica—in addition to her multiple duties as the rabbi’s factotum, as the friendship center’s administrative officer, and also as a behind-the-scenes honcho of the synagogue and the Anti-Pontificators—had a minor alterations business on the side. Perhaps she was more than an alterer of garments; perhaps she had sewn these shirts from whole cloth. Mistress of the whole mystery, as well as the whole, or partial, cloth, Monica had certainly proved herself to be, without fully giving me the material to sew a comprehensible garment for myself. Her reportings and confidences, in the waiting room of the hospital, had left me with pieces and oddments, a sleeve, a cuff, a collar, a zipper, a pocket, but nothing as wearable, as presentable, as the complete story.

  For that story, I now turned my eyes to the reclining, disordered Dito, who lay, on top of a bedspread, in his dungarees and a stained, ripped T-shirt with a picture of a skull on its front—a reference to some band I hadn’t heard of, or to a secret society, an organization more macabre, but less revolutionary, than the Anti-Pontificators. I wished, right away, to kiss Dito, and to take off his shirt, not because it was ethically within my rights to establish an independent erotic bond with my lover’s nephew, now his son; but because my repertoire of healing actions and rituals was scanty, and its pièce de résistance was sexual, so that, without playing a physical, often phallic card, I had no other way to advance the game or to aid in someone else’s recovery. Wanting Dito to recover was, within my narrow range of curative devices, tantamount to wanting to make a pass at Dito. A pass I could not, in good conscience, make; nor could I even bring myself to the precipice of wishing to make that ribald proposition to my lover’s son, or nephew, or both; but I was in that deep, I was that dreadfully wading through the muck of the rabbi’s relations, that such a pass, made to Dito, could even threaten to rise to the surface of consciousness, though it rose as a prohibition and not as a possibility.

  Respecting all prohibitions, except where the dissemination and unveiling of family secrets were concerned, I assessed Dito’s present condition as sound enough for me to dare pose to him a single bold question: “Why on earth does Monica Prague keep you here?”

  157.

  “She likes me,” Dito began. “Everyone likes me. Everyone has always liked me. My father liked me. My uncle, the rabbi, liked me, ever since I was a kid. My father was proud of having a rabbi for a younger brother. My father was a metalworker, and then a lawyer, sometimes back and forth, a metalworker and then a lawyer, or a lawyer and then a metalworker. He liked the balance of the two, and the alternation. If he grew tired of law, he turned to metals; when he tired of metals, law always awaited him as the other place to go. We all need a place to hide. And my place is, apparently, the Prague household. That’s what the rabbi thinks, and what Monica thinks. Pablo sometimes disagrees, but mostly he’s content to see me stay with Monica. Pablo says that she has a better grasp of my problems, my difference, as she puts it, to mend me and tuck away from sight my more unsavory aspects, or stuff that she—she is a fussbudget—calls unsavory. Pablo thinks I have potential in the assemblage field, but I’m not sure I’m talented enough to be a true assemblageur. Pablo’s got that gift. He plans to mess up society, tear it into pieces, so tiny they’re unrecognizable, and then he and his fellow assemblageurs are going to sew them together into new structures. Pablo aims to renovate civilization, to save all living things. But I’m too tired for salvation, or any of Pablo’s schemes. He’s just being generous. He doesn’t want me to wither on the vine.”

  I dared, at this moment, to interrupt the stammering recitation, though its sheer outward flood seemed cathartic to Dito: “What vine? On what vine are you, as Pablo put it, in danger of withering?”

  “A vine that’s the opposite of the Anti-Pontificators,” Dito shouted, prematurely triumphant.

  To his exultation, I appended cautiously, “Is Pablo in bed, then, with the Anti-Pontificators, that he wishes you to climb in there beside him?”

  Dito sat up, or tried to sit up, but seemed sapped of vigor. Falling back down again, he said, “Pablo is afraid I don’t have the pluck.”

  “The pluck,” I suggested, “to be an Anti-Pontificator?”

  Dito shook his head in disagreement, scowled, and said, “My father was proud of the rabbi. My father didn’t have the pluck to be a rabbi, though their parents wanted both boys to take up God and make a career of it. I’m glad my father chose metals and law. He was more balanced than the rabbi, who always seemed hell-bent on secret missions, as if he were a detective or a spy on the trail of heroin or nuclear secrets. As if he thought that we had atomic codes in our basement! I’m not sure what odds and ends Dad hid down there, along with his tools and his scraps of metal.”

  I took the path of a further, incendiary surmise: “Were you afraid that your father’s equipment for soldering, shaping, and amalgamating metals would set your house on fire?”

  I’d stumbled on the truth. Dito smiled, with misplaced pride, and said, “He almost set the house on fire when I was a baby. I don’t remember it. But I loved when he’d tell me the story—the time our house almost exploded. I’d brag about it, at school, until the other kids got sick of my boasts, and said, Your father’s a freak.”

  “A freak!” I exclaimed. “Did they go that far? Was that a distance—toward the freakish—you were willing to traverse?”

  Dito solemnly nodded: “Freakish yes, no shame, I was proud of that, too, my father a freak, maybe my mother, too, until her dying day a freak.”

  The mother—a freakish mother, no less—was a new note I was eager to seek a harmony with, so I asked, “And how did your mother, freak or not, die?”

  Dito smiled again, more broadly. I’d hit upon a vein of family lore on which he was overjoyed to expound, however brutal and dark its undertow. “She killed herself, just like the rabbi’s wife. Overdose. Doesn’t everyone?”

  I couldn’t help but agree, so remarkable was the proliferation of overdoses in our midst.

  Dito’s composure, however, in the face of this bleakness—a dreadfulness as intimate to his heart and well-being as the death, by suicide, of a mother—took me aback, and I exclaimed again, in pity, but also with the wish, not unscrupulous, to peer further behind the arras: “What did your father say? What, I mean, did your father propose?” Clearly a suicide was not a melted metal he could mold into a more pleasing shape.