Listen!

             Mark's daughter bursts out the door to catch the bus for summer day camp. She throws her arms around her father's neck as she runs by, nearly knocking him over. Mark watches her round the corner, waves from the front porch at the chimera of her vanishing image, then takes a deep breath and sits down on the top step. Where does the time go? He closes his eyes and begins to take in the sounds of the new day.

            A voice drifts out from the TV in the kitchen, joins the morning chorus: birds chittering and crying, the hiss of automobile tires on the already hot asphalt, the drone of a distant jet.

            A politician has been trapped in a pit--some third party candidate running for president. He fell into a hidden shaft while campaigning at a construction site. The rescue team has been drilling all night, and a microphone lowered into the hole has picked up a heartbeat; there's been no sign of movement since before midnight.

            Sparrows begin to congregate on the branch of a maple in front of  Mark's house. His father's in the hospital. Nothing serious. Just some tests and an adjustment on his pacemaker. Mark prefers to hold the morning for himself, but he's told his father he'd drop by on the way to work. He, at least, believes in keeping the promises he's made.

            He opens his fingers, and for a moment it's all light and motion, no sound. Mark stares at the pavement, hardly moving. The congregation of sparrows swoops down and lands right at his feet. They're doing acrobatics, leaping into flight to catch flies in midair. The ones doing the catching must be the parent birds--every time one lands with a fat fly in its beak, it's greeted by three or four fledglings, each almost as big as an adult, each one doing a little dance, wings half spread umbrella‑like, and chee chee cheeing  until it gets a fly of its own.

            On the radio, they're trying to make voice contact with the fallen candidate. From the shaft come the sounds of a heart beating, and trickles of falling dirt, like static.

             Mark listens.

         

            His neighbor, David passes by on his way to shul and the sparrows take off in a bunch like they're connected by strings. Dave stops and asks Mark if he'd like to walk with him. He'd planned to go to the office late anyway, why not?

              Mark isn't religious, but he likes going to the synagogue on weekdays with Dave. Back in college he'd taken an interest in mysticism. He read Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boeme, the Bhagavad‑Gita and the Dhammapada. For a while he fell in with the Lubavitchers but soon grew disillusioned, turned off by their politics and their certitude. And yet, the idea of studying the ancient texts, of learning Hebrew, the Aramaic of the Talmud--held a certain fascination for him. The layout of the pages in the traditional volumes, the illustrated cover plates, the architectural gateways and arches, the promise of hidden gardens beyond; the grave and authoritative blocks of print that centered each page, set within a labyrinth of commentary, beckoned like a latticed balustrade around a shuttered window. The sages twined their questions over the margins, prying open the secrets of the text, shooting out a tendril to pluck a phrase here, a word there; a single letter in the darshan's hands could strike a spark like flint on glass, to light new meaning in the text, or ignite and turn to ash an older one. In his own mind, he reinvented the sages. Before his eyes, they shattered the Biblical stories as one shatters a mirror, then gathering the remnants, the gleaming splinters, arranged them in shifting mosaics, kaleidoscopes of words, letters that sounded one off the other like wind chimes, cantilations in the holy of holies of the imagination.

            This was beyond his father's comprehension.. He remembers going to a synagogue once when he was a boy‑‑a cousin's Bar Mitzvah, one of those occasions even his father could find no way out of. They sat there--his father like a mountain beside him, smoldering, flashing lightning rays of contempt. When they opened the curtains of the arc, Mark asked what they kept behind those great, carved doors.  "God!"  His father bellowed, loud enough to be heard across the room. Loud enough for heads to turn. "God!"

            But when the doors were opened, there were only rows of Torah scrolls--clothed in purple velvet embroidered with gold and silver thread, adorned with elaborate silver crowns, latticed, filigreed--and when a man, the tassels of his black and white prayer shawl swaying as he leaned over, gently lifted lift one of the scrolls from the arc, he set ringing a dozen tiny silver bells that hung from the crown. They echoed from the dark behind the curtain, a language in search of words. When the scroll was opened the reader leaned over the bimah with his yad--an ivory pointer tipped with a carved human hand--recited the blessings over the Torah and began to chant. Words! Words that were at once song and speech, indecipherable, inexhaustible as wind. Words, incomprehensible, whose meaning and power seemed, to the young Mark, to lie beyond language. Words, the hazen bent into music as a blacksmith bends iron to his will, as a goldsmith beats gold into grape clusters, date palms, pomegranates; he chanted, and the air was filled with silver--the burnished jewels of intelligible emotion.

            It was an uneasy courtship, this halfway return, religion without belief. When he was in college, at the height of his enthusiasm, he had accepted an invitation to a wedding in Crown Heights. The reception was in a school gymnasium, a room where even a whisper would have been magnified by its echoes to a roar--and no one in the place was whispering. In the corner, a band was playing: key board, electric guitar, an amplified violin. Drums rattled like machine gun fire. Bomb shells of "Romania! Romania! burst against the walls.

            Men he'd never seen came up to welcome him--it might as well have been in mime. Mark watched their mouths move, as though they were apparitions, hallucinate figments. He nodded and answered whatever came into his head; it made no difference, since no one could hear what anyone said. Words cracked apart in this place, shattered, blurred into a general tyranny of noise.

            Across from the band was a long table against the curtain that divided the men from the women; it groaned with golden hallah rolls, plates of herring and pickled onion, whitefish salad. There were heaps of gefilte fish stacked on beds of iceberg lettuce, mounds of fiery horseradish. Plastic containers of generic brand colas and orange soda shared the table with bottles of Canadian whiskey, slivovitz, vodka. Anyone who wanted to walk in, it seemed,  was free to help themselves, and soon the nearby homeless were eating and stuffing shabby coat pockets with cake and olives, potato chips and bread. The table was stripped bare, replenished, and emptied again.

            Hasidim drank vodka like water. They linked elbow to elbow in spinning pairs, danced in circles that opened and closed on themselves, danced in long, undulating lines. They danced for hours. They drank. They sang. Two men, surrounded by a gang of shouting children, danced on stilts, their long coats sweeping clouds of dust from the floor. They doused their hats with lighter fluid and lit them, then danced under columns of smoke and flame. The children were everywhere at once--eating, running, shouting. Crescendos of Mazel Tov V'Simon Tov ricocheted from wall to wall. He felt like he'd been dropped through a hole in time. This is America, he thought?

            And there were the women. While the men celebrated, the women danced too, but on the far side of the mehitza--a faded yellow curtain stretched between metal poles--they danced alone. They danced with one another.  Mark caught glimpses of them lifting the bride aloft on a chair. They circled her round, waved lace handkerchiefs, paper napkins snatched from the tables. They feigned bull fights; pointing finger-horns from their brows, swirling their long skirts like capes--thrust and parry: thinly veiled erotic portents of the night to come.

            Later, long before the celebration was over, he'd pushed his way to the door, out on the street--fumbled for his keys. A huge black man in a green, plastic rain coat watched him from the steps of a church. In the distance, the towers of Manhattan under a sky laced with con trails illuminated by a gibbous moon. Mark drove home alone, in silence. No one noticed his going.

            It was the women who haunted him. In the weeks following the wedding they came to him in dreams, like images in a silent film, turning and turning the bride high above them on an ivory thrown, while from the wings came the sounds of children, lost, twittering like birds, crying out like animals in a night forest.

             Mark had begun to keep a private journal--a diary where he recorded the day and the month of both the secular and Jewish calendars, but in Mark's diary, Rabbi Ishmael sat with William Blake in Blake's garden, discussing the thirteen laws by which the Torah may be interpreted. 

                                                                             

             Walking with Dave, he hears the cicadas sing. Their raucous buzzing fills the air. A single insect will begin in a near-by tree, followed by a more distant answer. The note, once struck, rises quickly in pitch and resonance until it seems that all the trees and all their leaves are trembling in its dry vibrato. There is a rapid decrescendo, then quiet ... until the next voice begins.

            A hushed murmur fills the shul. A few men are binding their arms in the black straps of their tifillin, while others have already begun reciting the morning blessings. Outside, the cicadas keep up the buzz of their summer calls and starlings are cackling under the window. The verses from Shemot on the bronze laver are recited, and those from B'Midbar on the daily offering by fire, and on through Rabbi Ishmael's rules; then the congregation falls silent, anticipating the first saying of Kaddish.

            From the back of the room the voices of children.

            Children?

            Dave, standing next to Mark, anticipates his question, whispers--"their father, last week."

            The deeper of the two voices strains at the words, it is a voice stretched between adolescence and childhood, between the voice of a man and that of a child, between the pride of obligation performed, and plain, naked anguish. The younger voice is hardly a voice at all--it makes a sound such as the stars might make if you could hear them, pulsing, rhythmic, high and pure as a wedding glass when you rub your wet finger over the rim. Everyone stands motionless; everyone listens.

 

         

            On the way to the office Mark gets stuck in traffic. The street is being torn up. A huge, gaping hole opens, shored with pilings and wood planks. Clattering yellow machines climb in and out of the pit, rolling up ramps of earth, dumping clotted loads of rock and clay into waiting trucks. At the edges of the wound, men in yellow hard hats lean on jackhammers and peel the skin of pavement further back, widening the incision. Severed cables and pipes are sticking out of the dirt like arteries. Fat, black hoses pump water and mud from the hole and the water runs down the street and the street turns red from the clay in the water.

            Mark turns on the news. A man is describing a funeral in Israel for three soldiers killed in Gaza. The broadcast is interrupted by an announcement that the rescue team is now parallel with the trapped candidate. His wife tells the world she has placed her faith in God; her husband's message is too important to let him die, she says. "He was chosen for this. God won't let this happen."  The station returns to the regular broadcast--the last loop of the Gaza story. In the background, a mother is wailing--ululating--in front of the ruins of her house, destroyed in retaliation by an IDF bulldozer.

            A woman in a reflective, orange vest directs traffic. She waves her bare, sun burned arms for cars to pass, letting them through one by one. She uses the kind of whistle traffic cops used to have, the kind you had when you were a kid, with the flat mouth piece and the round belly and slot with a little ball inside that goes crazy when you blow it. She holds it to her mouth and the vibrato of the whistle joins in a chorus with the mourner in Israel, the rumbling trucks, clanking of steel, the jarring staccato of a jackhammer. It is as though the very earth were howling in pain; Mark squeezes his eyes shut tightly enough to see red mandalas flash under the lids. He thinks of his father. The car rattles from the jackhammer as he waits his turn to be waved through. Mark rolls the windows up, but it is no use. Over the roar of the construction, a wife prays for her husband to be pulled from the earth, a mother wails as they lower her dead son into its maw. There is nothing left to do, but listen.

 

         

            As soon as Mark walks into the room, he knows it was a mistake to come. His father is switching the stations on the TV. He settles on the hospital medical channel. There's a chart of the human head, a voice is explaining how important it is for children to have regular eye exams. They show pictures of a three year old boy who, through a routine eye exam, was found to have a brain tumor. They had to take his eye out to get at the tumor, but he will live.

    His father loses interest and pretty soon Mark notices that he's looking at him. Staring at his arm.

            "Still wasting your time with that crap, I see," he blurts out, in his thick Israeli accent.

            "What's that?"  Mark's face grows warm, flushed.

            "What's that? What's that? That's what," says his father, nodding at Mark's arm--at the faint red marks left by the straps of the tifillin. His father's left eyebrow begins to tremble, his voice takes on a guttural quaver, like a muffled jackhammer.

            "Its not that I give a goddamn," his father says, looking back at the TV, which has a color cross-section of this tumor they cut out. "It's your life. Go ahead, be a fanatic! As if the world doesn't have enough with them. What's it to me?"      

            "If you don't care, why bring it up?",  Mark asks, noticing how much smaller his father looks, propped up in the hospital bed.

            "Well?" his father says, clearing his throat, rumbling like an old truck, like the tanks he repaired in his army days. His voice belies the gaunt body that owns it.

            "Pop, what are you shouting about? What's eating you?"

            "So I am shouting. What of it! Am I shouting at you? No! I don't hear right. I have to hear myself, don't I? So what's your problem? Did I call you names? No! Did I insult you? No! You're worse than your mother! You're are your mother all over again, that's what you are."

            Mark's father is a tall man, big bones and wide shoulders. When he's dressed,  Mark thinks, you don't notice how much weight he's lost.

            "Let's not start, okay? I have to go to work. I come in here. We don't say two words to one another. But you pick a fight. You're getting upset over nothing." 

            "Upset? Who's upset? Who's arguing? What's to argue about? Being a fanatic? You think there's an argument for being a fanatic?"

            They both look up at the heart beat on the oscilloscope over his bed--which, to Mark's amazement--and in contrast to his own heart, which is pounding furiously, does not seem to have changed since he walked in the room. Maybe it's the pacemaker, he thinks.

            His father switches to a network station. There is a diagram of the pit. An arrow points to a drawing of a man crouched under a beam. The beam looks like it is resting at an angle on his shoulders. Another diagram, this one shows the rescue shaft too. It is on the wrong side. The beam that holds the candidate safe from the rubble above, blocks the way of the rescuers. They will have to fill the first shaft and dig another on the opposite side. The candidate's wife expresses her confidence in the engineers. She does not mention God.

            Mark's father grows silent, watches intently. This is a good time to make his escape, he thinks, and makes for the door. He hears his father's voice from the hall: "Wait! Hold on! I'm sorry! I shouldn't raise my voice, I know it. Come back, we should talk! A father should have the pleasure of talking over such things with his own son."

            "I'll call tonight," he answers.

            "I'm an old man, come back here! For once before I'm dead and buried in the earth--like this poor schmuck! We should talk! I mean it!"

            Mark heads for the elevator. "I'll tell you what," his father is saying--"Call me tonight, like you say. You hear? And we'll talk. I promise. Like you've asked me a hundred times!"

            "Thank God," he thinks, as the doors close. Mark slumps against the wall of the elevator, feels its descent in the pit of his stomach, his father's voice still ringing in his ears.

 

         

            Tamara has a guest for dinner. She and Gina sit across from him--chattering away. Like sparrows, he thinks.

            Rona tells him what a hard time she's had finding a new secretary, reminds him of an appointment tomorrow with the dentist. Mark's mind is elsewhere. He eats, pushes the peas onto his fork with his knife, doesn't say anything until Rona asks him how his father is doing.

            "I told him I'd call," he says. "I almost forgot."

             Mark goes to the phone, rubbing his forehead, rubbing his fingers through what's left of his hair. He dials, and gets

the number wrong the first time. A woman's voice asks, an accent he can't identify: "Who? Who do you want? Who? Why do you bothering me?"

            He dials again. Listens to the phone ring.

            Once, twice--five times.

            "Rona, where the hell is he? Do you think something's wrong?"

            RING.

            "Yeah, what?

            "Pop?"

            "Who's there?"

            "Me, Pop, it's me. You don't even know my voice?"  Pause. Mark hears a TV.

            "Oh, yeah, Mark! Hey, Mark, I tell ya what--I'm watching 'Wheel of Fortune'."

            "How ya doing?"

            "Fine. I'm doing fine. I said I'm watching TV. Call me in the morning, okay?"

            Click.

             Mark stands with the receiver to his ear until the dial tone returns...

 

 

         

            After dinner, Mark takes his journal outside and sits down on the front steps. He remembers the last time he saw Avram, his childhood friend, before Avram moved to Israel. It was a Shabbos, not long after Mark's graduation. He--Avram, wore the black suit then even in the summer. It was hot. Miserably hot. A thick, dirty heat. Avram--who he knew as Arnold from his school days, now had a beard that reached past his second shirt button; he had climbed the stairs to Mark's apartment to learn with him the laws and mysteries of Torah. When he reached the top, he was steaming, seething in his own vapors.

            Mark had been getting ready to move out of his apartment. He offered Avram a glass of water.

            They stood there among piles of cardboard boxes and plastic milk crates filled with books, Mark in running shorts and tee shirt, barefoot, and Avram--Avram in his black coat, water glass in one hand, and in the other, nervously tapping it against his thigh, his hat.

            "Are you going to take off your coat?"

Avram shrugged, shook his head, "no", started to say something about coved Shabbos, the honor of the Sabbath, but couldn't seem to find the words and let his thoughts trail off in mid-sentence.

            "Arnie..." he said. "I mean, Avi? Can I ask you something?"

            Avram shrugged, as though to say, "sure, why not?"

            Now it was Mark who felt awkward, self-conscious. "Avi," he said, searching for the words--for how to frame a question that a moment ago had seemed perfectly clear. "Avi, look at yourself. It's like, I don't know. Don't you just wonder sometimes what happened? Do you ever do that? Do you ever look in a mirror and wonder who you are?

            "Happened? Avram flushed, went a little pale at the temples. But then, suddenly--almost before the word fell from his mouth, he relaxed, his shoulders, the muscles in his face eased; he'd heard this one before, and now, on familiar ground, he began to rally himself for the defense. But as he took a breath to speak, Mark cut him off.

            "Avi?"  he said. "I know this sounds stupid, but...are you happy?"

            "What? Am I what?"

            "Aren't there times when you feel--you know? A little strange?

            "Strange? How do you mean, strange?"

            "Sometimes I remember when we were kids. And, I mean, don't you feel that too?

            "Feel what?

            "Like you've turned into something you're not? I mean, do you really feel at home?

            This is not what Avram had expected. "Do I feel at home?" he said, as though he didn't understand the words.

            Avram fidgeted, and for a moment, Mark felt hopeful. But Avram was only working his way back to sure ground.

            "It's the Red Queen," Mark said.

            "What?"

            "You're like a mirror. "Everything in reverse."           

            Avram began to tap his hat against his leg again.

            "Don't you ever listen? 

            "To what?"  Avram asked, baffled.

            "I don't know. To nothing at all. Avram stared at him. As though he weren't speaking English.

            "You know, it's probably not such a good time, is it?"

            "For what?"

            "Today--to learn, I mean. Mark gestured at the half filled boxes around the room. "Things are such a mess."

            "Avram quickly nodded in agreement. He looked positively relieved. "It's all right!" he said, a little too quickly. "I was going to tell you--invited over to a friend's..."  Again, his voice trailed off before he had finished his thought.

            For a few moments, neither could find anything more to say. They shook hands, said "Gut Shabbos, gut Shabbos."  Avram's face glistened, his beard shone, his brow was beaded, his still owlish eyes beamed with puzzled happiness.

            "Menachem ?" he said, using Mark's Hebrew name. But then, he turned to walk out the door. Mark looked at the black suit coat. It was soaked, all the way through, like he'd been in a shower.  He stood at the top of the stairs for a long time after his friend left, listening to the hiss of tires on the hot asphalt of the street below, how they seemed almost like voices, and then--to the silence beyond: like a wind moving in a great emptiness. He never saw Avram again, as though he had been distilled into the vaporous summer sky.

         

            There is a mocking bird in the maple tree. It imitates first a cardinal, then the red winged black bird--its watery, flute-like trill and whistle. From above come the rasping screes of night hawks. By the pale, lingering glow in the sky, he can just make one of them out as it climbs in ascending spirals, then suddenly folds its wings and drops like a stone, only saving itself from a collision with the roof top by swooping up again at the last second--circling, diving, climbing, circling and diving yet again.

            Tamara and Gina bang happily out the door.

            "Mom says it's okay with her if I sleep at Gina's if it's okay with you? Tamara chirps.

            "Sure," Mark says.

            "And can I have six dollars for camp pictures tomorrow?"

            Mark counts out six ones from his wallet. Tamara's arms flit in excitement. "My little sparrow," he says.

            She bends down to give him a kiss on the cheek.

            "A peck from your sparrow!" she says, then runs off down the street toward Gina's house. "Love you, Daddy!" she calls back, and is gone.

            The TV is on in the house. A second shaft is almost complete. No sounds are coming from the pit now, but it may be a failing in the microphone. The candidate's wife, who's been standing on the scene more than thirty hours, has been sedated and taken to a hospital. Mark thinks of Arnold, wonders what has become of him.

            A cricket crawls across the walk, disappears into a crack. There is a chill in the air. Soon it will be autumn. The crickets will crawl out on the walk at night and die of the cold.  Mark hears him singing, this one cricket, right next to where he sits. Then he begins to hear the other crickets, further off, echoing and joining the song of the first. The rhythm of their singing rises and falls, rolls out in a great wave across the lawn, past the tree where the mocking bird sings, gathering strength as it moves, making the leaves of the trees quiver in passing, gathering everything, everything to itself, the whole day and its sounds, from the cries of the sparrows in the morning to the hum of the night hawk's plunge, putting them all to rest, all out of mind; folding them back into the holy ark of evening. Mark closes his eyes in anticipation.

            The sounds of night are everywhere.

            Listen!