"Moishe!”
I opened my eyes.
“Mooooiiisheee!”
Who the hell was screaming outside my window? Peeking over at the alarm clock, I discovered that it was 8 a.m, July 23, 2010. A radioactive time. People are still carrying around the baggage of dreams until it slides away around noon or so. You can bet your ass the real dream world has come and gone in the haze of afternoon, and you’ve missed its departure.
Light was peering through the slits in the blinds, though the aura of darkness was preserved, cupping me in its massive canoe hands.
“Moishe! Where are you? Come out!”
“I’m coming. I forgot my Torah!” replied the sought after Moishe.
Jews, I thought, outside my window. They’ve finally come to take me away for being a religious pariah. Moishe is going to slam his Torah in my face and let ol’ big guy up there take care of the rest.
“How could you forget your Torah? Your Torah should be the first thing you touch in the morning! Even before your underpants, Moishe, even before your underpants!”
Even before your morning wood? Even before you grab your dick and jerk the remnants of last night’s dreams out of it? Poor Moishe. I felt for him. Restricted so, by the Jewish Bible, by the hand of God, from furiously masturbating first thing in the morning.
Moishe loudly slammed the door, and ran after his caller, his tzitzis waving behind him and his yarmulke threatening to let loose, as I imagined through the fog that hadn’t yet lifted from my mind. Maybe Moishe is a looker, I pondered. Maybe he’s got broad shoulders and a chiseled face. Maybe he’s a good lay too. A hunky male stripper-type hiding underneath that white button down and the long curly peyos.
Living next door to a synagogue. I’ve always thought that was my punishment for banishing any kind of single faith from my life. It mocks me perpetually, its windows taunt my windows with their higher moral ground. Even their building stands taller. Mine slumps in comparison, its piety left behind somewhere in the dumpster where the cats gnaw at each other in hunger. Am I a Jew? I would say yes, in some respects. In essence. My nervous character, my constant anxiety, and my deep-rooted, inexplicable guilt give me away. I can’t run from it, though I have tried. I am a Jew by personality. Twice removed, a distant cousin.
So I lay deep under my covers, a struggling, faithless Jew. Fighting my own theological fate, fighting against the ebbing of the dream tide. It didn’t take long until I felt fresh enough to stick one foot out into the space around my bed. This foot tested the air. It breathed in the morning. It wiggled and stretched until it was good and ready to call forth the rest of the troops. But the call was interrupted. A tremor entered my foot and reverberated through the rest of my body. More than a tremor. A quake. The earth shuddering. The slats in the blinds quickly turned to a moody graphite color. The darkness drank in the light until it was quenched and the wind took a butter knife and spread the shadow like a smooth paste. I heard metal creaks, jangles, roars. The hiss of tires against brick, vertical impact.
Apocalypse? Moishe?
Heavy clangs, glass breaking. It felt like the Sphinx was moving through the streets of Brooklyn.
Moishe, call off the dogs. I’ll go to synagogue this week, I promise! I’ll commemorate the Shabbas, I’ll have my bat mitzvah! I heard it was never too late. I’ll even marry a Jew if he’s a hunky male stripper-type hiding underneath a white button down and the long curly peyos.
A safari of man-made structures in turmoil. Like God had exhaled the breath of life on all the wrong creations.
I probed my subconscious for fearlessness, but only my bladder responded with a wild shriek of bravado. Fair enough. The world might be coming to an end, but I did not want to be found in a deathly embrace with urine-soaked sheets by the survivors of this scourge.
Rushing to the toilet, I glanced momentarily at each window that flew behind me, but only the darkness seeped through the crochet of lacy curtains. It seemed like once I relieved myself, the chagrin of the world would at once subside. And two long, pleasurable minutes later, I realized that I might as well have been pissing off the moon, for all the good it did.
Pulling up the blinds also did little to answer my question about what exactly the shit was going on. Newspaper segments were ripping past. The sports section. A political piece on the presidential candidates. A slap of parchment against glass squeezed the air out of my lungs into a mousy gasp that left my lips unwillingly. Indeed, I felt its dread. But looking closer, I began to read the paper pinned to the fiberglass.
“Ancient Prophecies and Their Modern Realities,” by Fay K. Stories. A fiction piece. “It seems a Greek philosopher predicted the complete and total destruction of all denominational sects in the year 2010. He was fairly certain that a total eclipse would envelop the earth. He foreshadowed a long period of anarchy and the beginnings of a human transformation into a religion-free society. After his proclamations about the year 2010, the elderly philosopher died in a tragic earthquake, predicted by another seer, living somewhere in Italy at the time.”
Ha Ha. You’re so clever, Fay.
I raised my eyeballs just a fraction of an inch above the paper, distracted by some movement in landscape. Widening my scope of vision, I captured the entire catastrophe in one shot, one flicker of a blink. After that, the lens broke.
The synagogue I’d lived next door to for the majority of my life was blowing over, sideways, like a straw house.
Must be one big, bad, fuck of a wolf.
Gusts of 200 mph picked it apart brick by brick, tore metal out of its infrastructure, and chucked it like trained javelin throwers. It was a sight to behold, a sacrilegious one at best. It pricked the heart and conscience of the most radical atheist. And I was neither a radical nor an atheist. Just an apathetic soul. I bled for the believers. After all, they would accept this as a reverential act of God, who is nothing by way of a humanitarian.
The Beth Ahavat Temple bent unnaturally to the right, heaving like an asthmatic, dropping fiery two by fours of plywood.
Is this what you wanted? Is it? You bad Jewish girl! You didn’t believe and now you never can.
My left foot felt cold and wet. Stunned by the sensation, I looked down and was gripped by a feeling of vertigo, the floor suddenly above me, then to the right of me, and so on. How much more bizarre is this day going to get? It’s only 8 a.m., and I’ve already lost a religion I’ve never espoused; not to mention countless other ones. I hit the ground running, so to speak. At least I was attempting to churn my legs through a sea of fabric. The floor steadied itself underneath me, or maybe the ceiling snatched it and put it back into place.
I looked over to the alarm clock. Noon. Bright sunlight. My hungry dog, sniffing my foot with moist nostrils for any hint of a chicken treat. Back to some shade of normality. I felt done with dreams for quite a while. Moishe could still read his Torah in the solitude of a prayer room, and he could abstain from sexual gratification until his balls turned blue. It seemed all was right again with the world.
