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  The tool itself is so outsized that when inserted and thoroughly swallowed up, Larry feels like he’s looking into the woman’s very core. It’s as if, pondering death, he’s now gazing straight back to life’s start, to the place that Larry’s college art history professor—with the lights of the lecture hall off, and a provocation of a Courbet painting projected on a screen—had introduced as The Origin of the World.

  Larry’s eyes again shift to the woman’s to see what she might be thinking herself. All he gets is simulated eye contact and simulated orgasm, as she moans in muted silence, trapped in her digitized, teaser loop. A perpetual, shared moment that was for this woman surely one thing, and for Larry another. Except right then, it isn’t for Larry what it usually would be. He isn’t titillated, only numb, forcing him to reconcile how desensitized he’s become.

  He’d stared at similar scenes with such frequency and regularity that this one just seems prolapsedly, membranously, fistedly mundane. No different than switching on a baseball game after getting home from a doubleheader. It allows Larry to register that this performer, trapped in time, had, at some point, pulled on her clothes and gone home, worn out and exhausted from doing what was nothing more than her terrible job.

  Would his sister pass out if she walked in on Larry and saw such a feed? Would she scratch out her saintly eyes, trying to unsee? Larry is sure that as modern as Dina fancies herself, she doesn’t have the slightest idea of the everyday depravities filling the alternate reality that ate more and more of sad Larry’s time.

  And then it strikes him, a giant truth for Larry to absorb.

  While dutifully enacting the pledge he’d taken before his sister and her two kosher witnesses, while recording remembrances of his father so that a devout yeshiva student might better know the man behind the page, in and out, in and out, that glass dildo dipped.

  That downtrodden woman, a fake smile on her face, had worked her apparatus, as if she’d been turned, for whatever paltry payment, into a human butter churn, God help her. And God help me, Larry thinks. Then—for the first time since he’d left the fold—a personal, heartfelt prayer escapes his lips.

  “God protect my father’s soul.”

  * * *

  —

  Larry eats his Cheerios in the morning while watching the men assemble for prayers. He finishes his breakfast, and then, with a borrowed tallis, and borrowed tefillin, holding a siddur whose pages were worn smooth by another person’s hands, he follows along.

  With one sincere, Larry-generated prayer already loosed, he goes for another. He prays that they might find him a match in Jerusalem—whatever the price.

  After davening, as he’s about to be released from shivah to stroll around the block, Larry excuses himself and hurries straight to his nephew’s room. He takes his filthy, corrupted laptop and checks his mail again.

  And there it is, a letter from the site. It initially appears to be an apology, which nearly stops Larry’s heart. What could anyone be sorry for, but not being able to rescue him from his plight? But, no, the site’s administrator is only sorry that the choices are not greater, though he wants Larry to know, the one student available is a truly special young man, eager to do the job.

  Attached is a picture of the boy with his hand to his forehead, as he stares down at a holy book. Larry can see a wispy black beard, and the side curls tucked behind his ears. There’s just enough of his mouth visible in shadow for Larry to believe he sees a warm smile.

  Larry reads the letter from the student that comes after the administrator’s introduction. It is beautiful, if only two lines. “Dear Sir, I understand the responsibility that comes with the task I’m about to undertake. Know that, as you are his son, so, for the next eleven months, am I. Sincerely, Chemi.”

  There’s a link to click that takes Larry to a rudimentarily animated page displaying a contract, and a pen. Off to the side is a disembodied hand, clasping and unclasping.

  Larry is prompted to sign, and does so. A flashing arrow then has him drag the pen to the hand, which closes around it.

  All Larry’s religious learning comes bubbling to the surface. He understands immediately that the hand is meant to be Chemi’s and the pen his, that this transfer is a digital form of kinyan. It’s a symbolic exchange, to which the Kaddish is attached.

  Larry cries and cries, racking sobs that do not abate for some time. He suddenly feels the true weight of the duty that was, and always had been, his—though he’d just now passed it off to another.

  Having found a way to meet his obligation “halachically,” as the rabbi said, having found a way to do it “right” and “real,” as his father had wanted, Larry wipes his nose and takes out his credit card, entering the numbers. Sealing the deal with Chemi, Larry clicks “purchase” and pays.

  part two

  VI

  Was it a week after the contract ended, was it two, that Larry had received an envelope postmarked from Jerusalem and sent to his apartment in Clinton Hill? He’d torn it open to find a letter, along with a black-and-white photo of a student, who he immediately recognized, though the young man was shot from behind.

  Snapping open the page, the letter was comprised of a single typed line. Oh, that efficient Chemi! It said, only, “It’s been an honor to be your emissary, mourning the dead in your name.”

  Where a piece of correspondence would usually be signed “Sincerely,” or “All Best,” the boy had written “Chayim Aruchim”—Long Life—spelled out in English characters.

  It was not the clipped and economical note but the photograph that had started Larry crying in a way he hadn’t since enrolling with kaddish.com.

  In the picture, Chemi sat alone in a modest study hall poring over a blat of Gemara. There were a couple of long tables, an arched window, and a section of a peeling, domed ceiling that looked no broader than a teacup. And though no fixture was visible hanging from above, a circle of light illuminated the student and his book.

  He remembers admiring how deeply Chemi was embroiled in his learning and—this is the point that matters—he remembers thinking it exactly as he recalls it now: “Look at that boy’s focus!” is what he’d thought. “See how this young man, alone in the beit midrash, struggles to assimilate some Talmudic idea.”

  Back then, Larry had cried for how moving he found the image of study to be, which then had him crying for his father, a year gone from this world.

  As Larry’s crying turned to weeping, he’d understood that he was no longer weeping for any of those things. The tears shed were not over a lost father. The tears he’d spilled were for his lost self.

  That, at least, is what he came to believe in the ensuing weeks, and months, the ensuing years, and—could it be?—the two decades that followed. It is the version of events he held on to after he’d again taken on his Hebrew name, going back to Shaul, before settling on the nickname Shuli (a nod to Chemi, he felt). It was the “lost soul” narrative that Larry had first told himself, before repeating his story of rebirth to countless others.

  “Do you know what is the subconscious?” Shuli might ask his seventh-grade students. “Do you understand the complicated inner workings of the mind?”

  He raises these same questions when he’s brought in to inspire at a kumzitz, or a Shabbaton, or any kind of gathering of the faithful and, even more so, when addressing those who might want to be.

  He performs the story almost weekly at his Friday night table, at the Shabbos dinners, where there is always a guest or two invited for kiruv. Those secular Jews with a budding interest in their own lost traditions, willing to open themselves up to outreach, and the kind of inspired personal myth with which a born-again man like Reb Shuli might regale them.

  “Don’t you think it’s funny,” he says, “that I saw the photo of this student, this Chemi, leaning over a table working on some Talmudic problem, and did not just think
, ‘Oh, look, at that young man studying’? I didn’t just think, ‘The boy sits there, and he thinks.’ What could be a simpler way to put it?” Shuli doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “It wasn’t ‘wondering,’ or ‘sussing out.’ It wasn’t ‘embroiled in’ or ‘reflecting upon’ or ‘pondering’ that came to my addled mind. Of all the possibilities in our rich language, what I thought was, ‘There he sits, assimilating.’ ” Shuli stands and raises a finger up with such emphasis that the Shabbos candles flicker in its wake.

  “Could there be a more perfect choice of words?” Shuli asks. He steps back from the table, as if stepping away from the power of his own story.

  “There I was, alone on my couch, in goyishe Clinton Hill, thinking, ‘Over there in Jerusalem sits Chemi assimilating the Talmud—assimilating information precisely as Hashem, HaKadosh Baruch Hu, intends—and me, what am I doing in my empty life here? What kind of assimilation is mine?’ ”

  * * *

  —

  With that photo before him, Shuli had opened himself up to certain possibilities, ignoring how embarrassing exploring those possibilities would, in practice, be.

  Back at the beginning of his transformation, his sister ended up playing a pivotal role. Without forcing him to acknowledge anything openly, she provided Larry with the cover he desperately craved.

  When visiting his sister’s house in Memphis—far from the prying eyes of his irreligious, heterogeneous Brooklyn gang—Larry could quite naturally play by Dina’s rules.

  During that period of tentative re-exploration, Larry would simply fly down for the weekend and, embodying his usual role of secular, black-sheep uncle, and under the guise of being a good sport, put on a yarmulke when joining the family for meals. And once the yarmulke was on, it was no great leap to leave it on, to maybe borrow a suit jacket from Avi on Shabbos morning, so that he could, while holding hands with a niece or nephew, accompany the family on their walk to shul.

  From there, all unfolded speedily, and with utter ease. And why shouldn’t it have, when he’d rediscovered his one, true self?

  Shuli asks this rhetorically of his dinner guests, as he opens another bottle of wine with a dramatic, cork-pulling, punctuating pop.

  In the end, Larry’s transmogrification back into Shuli couldn’t have been any more ordinary. As his dear, wise father had said; as his too-smart-for-her-own-good, meddling sister had pointed out; as he himself had finally understood: His return and redemption were the most conventional things that could happen to the stray child in any family. What else was Shuli doing but coming home?

  And it was not only home to his sister, and not only home to his faith, but Shuli was returning home-home, to Royal Hills, Brooklyn. He soon traced his way back the three subway stops, toward the stand-alone aluminum-sided houses, toward the worser restaurants, and his fellow Jews.

  Shuli returned to the heart of the community he’d grown up in. He sold his Clinton Hill apartment for about a thousand times what he paid for it, so that he was able to afford a modest house in the neighborhood in which he’d grown up. He’d used the windfall to pay for his own years of study, until he was living on the salary of a seventh-grade Gemara teacher at the very yeshiva where he had gone. When there was a wife, which—after meeting Miri, his bashert—there very soon was, he was able to support her as well when she’d stopped her own high-school teaching to learn all day. It had been important to them both that one of them be able to dedicate their life, full-time, to Torah study. And, as Shuli put it, it was no coin flip to see—between the two—who had a better mind. So Miri learned at the women’s kollel.

  This is the arrangement they continued to balance when the happy couple was blessed first with a girl and then with a boy, two children, born two years in a row.

  With his teaching job and that Clinton Hill Buffer (which is what he and Miri called that ever-dwindling resource) Shuli was able to keep them all fed and clothed, and put the whole family in shiny new shoes every year at the holidays. A gift from God, that extra money. A sign that he’d done what’s right.

  And on a night like this, when his guests do not ask for the takeaway at the end of Reb Shuli’s inspiring story, he offers it himself, with a blushing pride and bearded smile.

  Having refilled all the glasses, Reb Shuli remains on his feet. He nods toward his wife, and then goes over to the side of the table where his children sit across from the guests. He hugs Hayim, his son, age eight, and Nava, his daughter of nine. He then stands behind them, a palm pressed atop each of their heads, fingers waggling, as they laugh—so much different than when he’d laid hands upon them for their weekly blessing, earlier in the night. He looks to his Miri, lovingly, and she, lovingly, looks back. And he says to those welcome guests, “I do not share the story to brag, or show off, or even to make excuses for all the years of lost time. I only share it to say, it’s never too late to live one’s true life.”

  VII

  One’s true life! Could Shuli possibly love his any more? He feels grateful always. Even when marching toward his classroom to deal with a troubled student who—a fifty-fifty chance—awaits. Reb Shuli carries with him the relevant masechta of Gemara in one hand and a barrel-sized mug of coffee in the other. Sipping at it in the hallway, he steels himself with a sigh.

  He attends to this headache of a boy during recess. Shuli would bet it never crosses the boys’ minds that when he takes their playtime away, it’s also his own recess that he’s losing.

  Peering through the wire-mesh window in the door, Reb Shuli is thrilled to see Gavriel already seated, with his small student chair pulled right up to the other side of Shuli’s desk. He wouldn’t have believed it possible, to see a student such as this, not only waiting, but waiting patiently—Gavriel straight-backed and unfidgety.

  He looks the perfect angel.

  In light of this, Shuli alters his body language as he steps into the room. He does not look so stern as he might have, relaxing his shoulders and putting to rest his furry, overgrown eyebrows, which he’d already set in motion, hoping for a sort of punitive, caterpillar-like wave.

  He struggles then to find a replacement expression. How many directions can the mouth tilt, or the forehead wrinkle, to tip off a feeling? In his case, not many. Which reminds Shuli of his dear sister and her signature judgmental look. God had, in these middle-age years, given Shuli his bushy eyebrows. And to Dina, at birth, those rolling eyes.

  “So, nu?” Shuli says, opening with the default rabbinical gambit.

  He places his mug and Talmud in the middle of the desk. He sits and pops the hat from his head, resting it a safe distance from the coffee, crown down.

  Gavriel doesn’t blink, acknowledging nothing. Not his general jokiness and disruptions, nor the faces Reb Shuli can feel burning the back of his neck whenever he turns to write on the board. He doesn’t say a thing about the grave wrong with which he had to know he was about to be charged.

  Matching silence with silence seems the best route. Shuli leans back in his chair while the sounds of the missed recess pour in from the playground.

  The boy looks wronged as he waits his rebbe out.

  Shuli wants to tell Gavriel that he doesn’t know how good he has it. Yeshiva boys today, what consequences do they face? Rob a bank during school hours, and still, you’ll end up across from a teacher like Shuli, talking about the roots of your feelings.

  It’s his father’s story that Shuli wants to share.

  On Shabbos afternoons, when Shuli was little, he would sit on his father’s lap while his father read. Restless, he’d play with his father’s tie and then his father’s face, trying to distract him. Always he’d get to his ears, the left one of which a tiny Reb Shuli would run his fingers across, delighted.

  For this ear was not perfectly smooth, as ears tend to be. There was a sort of jagged indentation, a divot in the curve at the top.
r />   He’d ask his father about it, though he’d heard the story a hundred times. His father would laugh and tell him again. For his father found it as silly in the reciting as Shuli did in the hearing.

  His father would tell him that, back in school, he’d sometimes been a naughty boy himself—even fathers could be. One day, he’d interrupted the class, upsetting his rebbe with some infraction he couldn’t recall, no matter how often Shuli begged his father to try.

  The teacher had explained to his father that, when you steal even one minute of Torah, it is not just your minute lost. It is multiplied by each person present—one minute taken from every student in the room. According to this calculation, Reb Shuli’s father had actually stolen eighteen minutes of Torah learning that would never reach God’s ears.

  And while his father processed this concept, his rebbe had taken up his ruler and, in front of the class, struck his father a blow to the ear so hard that it broke—putting a dent in the cartilage that never went away. Always at that point in the telling, as little Shuli felt that ear with his fingers, his father would feel the spot himself.

  “Do you know what happened?” his father would ask him. “Do you know what happened when I got home?”

  “What?” Shuli would say.

  “I ran to my mother, to tell her how the rabbi had beat me. I ran to show her my broken ear. And do you know what my mother did?”

  “What?” Shuli would ask, already giggling.

  “She said, ‘If he hit you a zetz like that, you must have done something terrible.’ Then she beat me, a second time, for my sins.”

  This they both found fully entertaining, horribly unjust as it was.