The Immortalists

  He hadn’t. And now, he never would.

  “Three books are opened in heaven on Rosh Hashanah,” Rabbi Chaim said, on the first night of the High Holy Days. “One for the wicked, one for the virtuous, and one for those in-between. The wicked are inscribed in the book of death, the virtuous in the book of life, but the fate of the in-between is suspended until Yom Kippur—and let’s be honest,” he added, to smiles from the audience, “that’s most of us.”

  Gertie could not smile. She knew she was wicked. All the prayer in the world would make no difference. But she must try, said Rabbi Chaim, when she went to see him privately. His eyes were kindly through his spectacles, his beard bobbing peaceably. She thought of his family—his dutiful wife, who rarely spoke, and his three healthy boys—and for seconds, she had hated him.

  Another sin.

  Rabbi Chaim put a hand on her shoulder. “None of us are free from sin, Gertie. But God turns no one away.”

  Then where was He? Since Saul’s death, Gertie had committed anew to the temple and its promises, she had thrown herself at it like a lover—she had even enrolled in Hebrew lessons. And though she had cried enough tears to fill the Hudson, she felt no forgiveness, no change. God remained as distant as the sun.

  On Yom Kippur, Gertie dreamed of visiting Greece. It was no place she’d ever been, though she had seen photos of it in a magazine at the dentist’s office. In the dream, she stood on a cliff and clutched two ceramic pots, each of which held one set of ashes: those of her husband, and those of her son. From the cliff, Gertie could see the blue-capped churches and white houses that withdrew into the mountain, like a rescinded offer. When she tipped the pots toward the water, she felt dreadful freedom—an unbounded aloneness so dizzying she felt the pull of the water herself.

  When she woke, she was nauseated that she had not buried Simon and Saul according to Jewish custom. Just as bad was the pull of the water, that dark slope of pity.

  Her nightgown was heavy with sweat. She pulled on her pink bathrobe and knelt on the wood floor at the foot of the bed.

  “Oh, Simon. Forgive me,” she whispered. Her knees shook. Outside the window, the sun was just beginning to rise, and she wept for it, for all the suns that Simon, her bright one, would never see. “Forgive me, Simon. It’s my fault, my fault, I know it. Forgive me, my son.”

  There was no relief. There would never be any relief. But the sun, slanting through the bedroom window, was warm on her back. She could hear the taxis honking on Rivington and the bodegas rustling to life.

  She walked unsteadily to the living room, where the children—she would always call them that—had fallen asleep. Klara curled against Varya on the couch. Daniel’s long legs hung over the arm of Saul’s favorite chair. When she returned to the bedroom, she made the bed and whacked Saul’s pillow until it fluffed. She dressed in a dark wool shift and flesh-colored stockings, fit her feet into the black heels she wore to work. She powdered her face and put hot rollers in her hair. By the time she came out again, Varya was making coffee.

  She looked up in surprise. “Mama.”

  “It’s Tuesday,” said Gertie. Her voice was scratchy from disuse. “I need to go to work.”

  The office: clacking of keys, central air. By 1982, Gertie had her own computer, a magical gray behemoth sent to do her bidding.

  “Okay,” said Varya, swallowing. “Good. Let’s get you to work.”

  • • •

  Four months later, in January of 1983, Klara noticed Eddie O’Donoghue in the audience at a club in the Haight. As she was being lifted for the Jaws of Life, his upturned face grew smaller and smaller, and his badge caught the glare of the spotlight. It took a moment for Klara to recognize him as the cop who had once harassed Simon; then her body grew hot. She stumbled when she landed, bowed gracelessly and exited the stage. She was thinking of all the times she’d slipped a hand into a man’s back pocket and grabbed a twenty or two, more if she needed it. Was he tracking her? A vendetta, maybe, after she cursed at him on the station steps?

  No. It didn’t make sense. She was careful when she picked pockets, she had sharp eyes that took everything in. One month later, those eyes spotted Eddie again at a show in North Beach. This time, he wasn’t wearing his uniform, just a white crew neck and Dockers jeans. It took all of Klara’s focus to stay on script during her cup-and-ball routine, to ignore his crossed arms and closed smile, which she saw next at a Valencia Street nightclub. This time, she nearly dropped her steel rings. After the show, she strode toward Eddie, who sat on a round leather stool at the bar.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Wrong?” asked the cop, blinking.

  “Yes, wrong.” Klara sat down on the stool beside him, which wheezed. “This is the third show you’ve come to. So what’s your problem?”

  Eddie frowned. “I saw your brother’s picture in the paper.”

  “Fuck you,” she said, and it felt so good, like alcohol burning out a virus, that she said it again. “Fuck you. You know nothing about my brother.”

  Eddie flinched. He’d aged since she saw him outside the Mission Street police station. There were creases below his eyes and a fuzz of orange hair around his chin. His strawberry blond hair was mussed, as though he’d just woken up.

  “Your brother was young. I was hard on him.” Eddie met her eyes. “I’d like to apologize.”

  Klara stiffened. She wasn’t expecting this. Still, she couldn’t pardon him. She grabbed her duster and her duffel bag and walked out of the bar as quickly as she could without attracting the attention of the manager, a sleaze who never missed the opportunity to pressure her into a nightcap. Outside, it was shockingly cold, and hard-core punk streamed from the doorway of Valencia Tool & Die. Klara’s eyes smarted. It seemed unfathomable that Eddie was alive while Simon was not, and yet he was—alive and presently jogging after her, his eyes sharp with new determination.

  “Klara,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”

  “You’re sorry, I know. Thank you. You’re absolved.”

  “No. Something else. About your show,” said Eddie. “It’s changed me.”

  “It’s changed you.” Klara chortled. “That’s sweet. You like the dress I wear? You like the way my ass looks when I spin?”

  He grimaced. “That’s crass.”

  “It’s honest. Do you really think I don’t know why men come to my shows? You think I don’t know what you get out of it?”

  “No. I don’t think you know.” He was wounded but held her gaze with a stubbornness that surprised her.

  “Okay, then. What do you get out of it?”

  He opened his mouth just as the door to the Die expelled a clot of punks, who paused against the empty storefront to smoke. Their heads were shaved or garishly dyed, and chains hung from their belts. In comparison, Eddie looked painfully conventional, and he paused with discomfort. Years ago, Klara might have felt sympathy for him—for anyone at all—but by now her sympathy had been exhausted. She turned and walked swiftly toward Twentieth Street.

  “When I was a kid,” said Eddie, to her back, “I was a fiend for comic books. The Flash. The Atom. You name it. I’d see the Green Lantern when I looked at the sky. If I passed a fire, I knew it was Johnny Blaze. I thought my wristwatch was Jimmy Olsen’s; hell, I thought I was Jimmy Olsen. ‘Hallucinations,’ my father said. ‘That’s what they are.’ But they weren’t. They were dreams.”

  Klara crossed her arms, hugging her jacket closer, but she stopped walking. She stared straight ahead as Eddie caught up and came around to face her.

  “Of course, I couldn’t say that to my pops,” he said. “We’re talking real old-school Irish Catholic, labor union organizer, member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. ‘Do you hear me? Hallucinations,’ he goes. ‘And I don’t wanna hear you say a word of it again.’ ‘All right,’ I said. And I didn’t. I went to Sacred Heart a
nd I joined the force and I imagined I could still be like those guys. A hero, right? But I wasn’t like those guys. I was a man, or less than—a pig. I hated the kids and the gays and the burnt-out hippies, all the people who hadn’t worked as hard as I had and still had it better than I did. People, I thought, like your brother.”

  She was crying. It took nothing to make her cry. Next month, it would be one year since she lay in bed with Simon and watched him inhale for the last time.

  “I was wrong,” said Eddie. “When I watched you, making a card appear out of nowhere or working those steel rings, I remembered the comics. How it was possible to be more than you were—more than you started out being. I guess one way to put it is you gave me faith. Another is that I figured maybe I’m not too far gone yet.”

  For seconds, Klara could not speak. Finally, unbeknownst to her, she had reminded someone of magic. She had given Eddie faith.

  “You’re not screwing with me, are you?” she asked.

  Eddie smiled, a childlike smile whose guilelessness made her cry harder.

  “Why would I do that?” he said, and leaned forward, keeping his hands in his pockets, to kiss her.

  She stilled at the shock of it. She’d been kissed plenty of times, but only now did she see how intimate the act really was. She had barely spoken to anyone since Simon’s death; usually, it was too painful to even see Robert. Inside her, a flock stirred and flew toward Eddie, desperately. But when he pulled back to smile at her, a smile of delight and good fortune, her desperation turned to revulsion. What would Simon think?

  “No,” she said, quietly. Eddie’s hand appeared behind her neck to draw her closer, because he had not heard her or because he had decided to pretend as much, and she allowed herself to be kissed by him for seconds more. In doing so, she could pretend to be a different kind of person: someone who kissed a man because she liked him, not because it made her forget the hard ledge of rock from which she hung, clawing.

  “No,” she repeated, and when Eddie still did not let go she shoved him in the sternum. He grunted and stumbled backward. A 26 trundled down Valencia, dispelling a haze of exhaust, and Klara started after it. By the time the gas cleared, Eddie stood alone beneath a street lamp, his mouth hanging open, and Klara was gone.

  • • •

  That fall, during the High Holy Days, she returned to New York for the third time. Klara and Varya chopped apples for kugel, Gertie cooking the noodles, while Daniel told stories of life in Chicago. Varya, twenty-seven, had finally moved into her own apartment. She had started graduate school at NYU, where she was studying molecular biology. Her focus was gene expression: she assisted a visiting professor in removing mutated genes from fast-growing organisms—bacteria and yeast, worms and fruit flies—to see if this altered their likelihood of disease. Eventually, she hoped to do the same in humans.

  At night, Klara climbed into bed with Zoya, who had, in her old age, developed a queenly indisposition to walking anywhere. With the cat on her stomach and Varya in the opposite bunk, she asked to hear stories of Varya’s work. It gave Klara hope: the match-strike of genetic expression and the infinite variables that could be used to adjust eye color, predisposition to disease, even death. She had not felt so close to her siblings in years, and everyone, even Gertie, seemed lighter. When Gertie suggested the Golds perform the kaparot before Yom Kippur, in which a live chicken is swung above the head while reciting from the Mahzor—“Children of man who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,” she intoned, “bound in misery and chains of iron”—Klara burst into laughter; the charoset in her mouth splattered Daniel’s shirt.

  “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  “What about the poor chicken?” asked Daniel, flicking Klara’s chewed apple off with two fingers. Gertie’s indignation melted, and suddenly she was snorting, too—a miracle, it seemed to Klara, who had not heard her mother laugh in years.

  Still, Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed: Mastering her first coin trick at eight, pulling quarters from Simon’s ears while he giggled. Nights when they crawled down the fire escape to go dancing in the hot, packed clubs of the Village—nights when she saw him looking at men, when he let her see him looking. The way his eyes shone when she said she’d go to San Francisco, like it was the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Even at the end, when they argued about Adrian, he was her baby brother, her favorite person on earth. Drifting away from her.

  At 72 Clinton, she lay in her old bed and closed her eyes until his presence was tangible. One hundred and thirty-five years ago, the Fox sisters heard rapping noises in their Hydesville bedroom. On a gray, blustery afternoon in September 1983, Simon knocked for Klara. It was more than a creak in the floorboards, more than the whine of a door: a low, sonorous pop that seemed to come from the bowels of 72 Clinton, as if the building were cracking its knuckles.

  Klara’s eyes flew open. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears. “Simon?” she ventured.

  She held her breath. Nothing.

  Klara shook her head. She was getting carried away.

  She had all but forgotten the knock by June 21st, 1986, the fourth anniversary of Simon’s death. She’d spent previous anniversaries in bars, drinking vodka straight until she forgot what day it was, but this year, she forced herself to make coffee, tie her Doc Martens, and walk to the Castro. It was remarkable: many of the gay clubs had closed with the bathhouses, but Purp was still standing. It even looked freshly painted. She wished she could tell Simon, or Robert. Robert had never liked Purp, but Klara knew he would be glad to hear it survived.

  Robert. She used to meet him downtown. In 1985, President Reagan still hadn’t acknowledged AIDS, and two men chained themselves to a building at UN Plaza in protest. Klara and Robert brought food and copies of the Bay Area Reporter to a growing mass of volunteers. If Robert wasn’t too sick, they slept outside. Klara begged a nurse who had cared for Simon to include Robert in the Suramin trial, and he received the last open spot. But the medication made him sick, so sick he couldn’t dance, and he stopped taking it within days. Klara banged on the door of the Eureka Street apartment where Robert now lived alone. “You owe it to Simon,” she shouted. “You can’t quit now.” By August, they weren’t speaking. By October, every patient in the trial was dead.

  When Klara read about it in the paper, it felt like her whole body was on fire, like she could melt through the floor from the burn. She tried to call Robert, but his line had been disconnected. When she got to Academy, Fauzi told her that Robert had moved back to Los Angeles. Just picked up and left. That was seven months ago. She hadn’t been able to find him since.

  She found an orange nasturtium on the ground and hooked it through Purp’s door handle. That night, she made Gertie’s meat loaf, which Simon had loved, and undressed for a bath. Underwater, her hair spread like Medusa’s. She could hear the echo of voices, muffled feet on the stairs. And then: a crack. She recognized it instantly as the noise she’d heard in New York.

  She burst through the surface of the water, wetting the floor.

  “If you’re real,” she said, “if it’s you, do it again.”

  The noise came a second time, like a bat striking a ball.

  “Jesus Christ.” When she began to shake, tears hit the water. “Simon.”

  14.

  June 1988: Raj stands onstage at Teatro ZinZanni as Klara paints her face in the dressing room. It’s the nicest one she’s ever been in, with a gold vanity and a TV screen that shows what’s happening onstage.

  “Life isn’t just about defying death,” Raj says, his voice coming through the speakers on either side of the television. “It’s also about defying yourself, about insisting on transformation. As long as you can transform,
my friends, you cannot die. What does Clark Kent have in common with the chameleon? Right when they’re on the brink of destruction, they change. Where have they gone? Nowhere we can see. The chameleon has become a branch. Clark Kent has become Superman.”

  Klara sees the miniature Raj onscreen spread his arms. She lines her lips with bright red pencil.

  • • •

  Three months later, Klara flies to New York: her visits over the High Holidays have become a tradition. She is dizzy with happiness. Second Sight was a success, and though the collapsed birdcage poked like veins through Klara’s jacket sleeve—they’ll have the seamstress let it out—the audience didn’t seem to notice. Teatro ZinZanni has booked them for ten more shows.

  Klara wants Raj to meet her family, but they can’t afford two tickets to New York. Soon, though, he says, they’ll have the cash to go anywhere. On Rosh Hashanah, Klara pulls Varya into the bunk room. It feels like her body’s all helium, like she could rise to the ceiling if she just took off her shoes.

  She says, “I think we might get married.”

  “You started dating in March,” says Varya. “It’s been six months.”

  “February,” says Klara. “Seven.”

  “But Daniel hasn’t even proposed to Mira.”

  Mira is Daniel’s girlfriend. They met one year ago, when Mira was studying for an art history degree, and she’s already come to meet Varya and Gertie. As soon as Daniel gets a job, he plans to propose with a ruby ring Saul gave Gertie.

  Klara tucks a lock of Varya’s hair behind her ear. “You’re jealous.”

  She’s observing Varya, not accusing her, and it is this—the tenderness in Klara’s voice—that makes Varya wince.

  “Of course not,” she says. “I’m happy for you.”

  Varya must think it’s another one of Klara’s acts, something she’ll quit in a month or two. She doesn’t know they’ve all but done it, that Klara has her dress and Raj has his suit, that they plan to go to City Hall as soon as Klara returns from New York. She certainly doesn’t know about the baby.