The Empire of the Dead by Tracy Daugherty Page B

What had been the point of telling her this? Honestly. Was he suggesting they go skating sometime, like a pair of young lovers? No. No point, really.
    The things that struck him that day at the rink were so private, so completely beyond sharing, and so fleetingly insignificant,
awareness
might as well take a hike, he thought.
    It was ridiculous.
He
was ridiculous.
    How could he tell Kate—and why should he—he had stood there, that afternoon, recalling the frozen lake in Dante’s
Inferno
, one of his favorite books in college? Satan brooding in the center of the earth. Then he’d noted the joke (were the center’s architects and designers in on it?): Prometheus, the bringer of fire, guarded the ice. Then his mind swelled with jigsaw scenes from silly old television shows—visual bric-a-brac as tangled as the ice tubes, electric wires, and water mains invisible beneath the street. Only later did he realize he’d thought of these shows because RCA, Rockefeller Center’s old tenant, had churned them out from its studios here when he was nine or ten years old. Somehow, deep in his brain, he had made a connection … just as, moments later, he underwent an auditory hallucination—chopper blades. Vietnam. Cambodia. And why? Because General Electric, maker of napalm—the bringer of fire—also lived in the Rock.
    TV. College. A well-edited war. O, what a mix of miracles was a man!
    A young girl, leaving the restaurant, said to her friends, “I hear they’re tearing down Coney Island. Let’s go out there and get high.”
    Glancing at Kate across the table, Bern considered communication—even
failed
communication—a minor amazement. “More wine, sir?” asked a passing waiter.
    â€œYes, please,” Bern said. Accidentally, Kate dropped a clam shell on the floor.
    â€œSo,” said Bern. He cleared his throat. “Have you written many new pieces?”
    He’d looked for her byline whenever he came across a copy of
Theatre News
.
    â€œA few. The usual. You know.”
    â€œSeen some good shows?”
    â€œNothing to shout about.”
    She was watching him like an animal eyeing a snake, Bern thought.
    â€œIs this what you did, growing up?” she asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œQuestioning everything. Like, Talmudic study.”
    â€œYou feel I’m interrogating you?”
    â€œA little bit. Yes.”
    Bern was about to ask why she’d wanted to meet tonight, but she pressed him. “What
was
it like for you, growing up Jewish?”
    â€œOh, I don’t know.”
    â€œReally. I’m curious. We nun-beaten micks don’t get outside our circle much.” She laughed, and seemed to relax for the first time. “Your education … did you read the Bible a lot? Or the Torah—what’s it called?”
    He fingered the stem of his glass. He would have to slow down if she continued to stall. Don’t push, he thought. Give her some slack. “Well. The most intense reading I ever did—religious reading—wasin a study group when I was a teenager,” he said slowly, drawing out the words. Filling the social space. “We read the Five Books of Moses with our rabbi.” He took a sip of wine. “He was very good, insisted we pay attention to the literary qualities. Characterization. Narrative arc. Metaphors, repeated images. He steered a course between the way most lay people read sacred texts—looking for heroes, inspiration, that sort of thing—and the Midrash, the laws and meanings rabbinical students are supposed to take from it. We saw Abraham and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, David, all the rest, just as people. Flawed, ordinary people who—granted—did extraordinary things sometimes.”
    Kate nodded thoughtfully.
    â€œWe refused to draw morals from the stories. We tried to live them, walk with these folks, find parallels with our own lives. It was a very