Four times Joseph dials. Four times Joseph hangs up. Rabbis scare him the way God scares him, even though Rachel always insisted that God didn’t exist. Joseph believes that certain men can see things he wishes they didn’t. He feels this in his more pathetic moments: that God or something is watching him fail, over and over again. 

He closes his eyes. When the migraines come on he can see things – a chaotic, turbulent universe of swarming, unsettled colour. He waits like this for a few minutes, until the Vicodin does its work, its long tentacles enveloping him. It is both insulating and emboldening. He dials and this time he doesn’t hang up.

“Hello?”

“Rabbi Kugelmass? Joseph Grabinsky.”

The rabbi sounds surprised. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Joseph drops the phone base. For a moment he hopes he’s lost the connection. He bends over and picks up the ancient contraption. No, the line hasn’t died. 

“She’s dead.”

“Excuse me?”

“Rachel. She died of heart failure last night.”

“Joseph. I’m so sorry.”

He doesn’t tell the rabbi that three days ago Rachel asked him to bring her medication, an unusual request. She was tired and complained of chest pain. Two days later he found her dead in her living room. Now he is in his mother’s kitchen trying to make arrangements for a funeral he isn’t sure she’d even want. 

“Don’t worry, Joe. We’ll give her a good funeral,” the rabbi says. “Will you speak?”

“I don’t do public speaking,” Joseph says. The words feel sheepish and lame. He adjusts the phone in his hand. “Noam Chomsky wants to say a few words.” Chomsky had called that morning. He’d seen the photograph and article in the New York Times.

Rabbi Kugelmass makes a strange sucking noise.

“Chomsky,” he says as though Chomsky were an exotic drink. “Really? You want Chomsky to give the eulogy?”

“They were friends.” Chomsky used to crash on their couch, back in the day.

“How about we keep politics out of the funeral home?”

Joseph laughs. For a moment he regrets the phone call. He’s calling the rabbi out of custom and respect, which is another way of saying “habit”. Rachel would probably have wanted something eccentric for her funeral, her ashes scattered in the Seychelles while a mariachi band played and everyone danced. She loved mariachi music and she loved a good time. But Joseph isn’t one for grand gestures. And besides, Rachel hadn’t left a will. Joseph is left to interpret what she wanted. He’d been doing that his whole life.

“The problem with religion,” Rachel used to say, “is a lack of humour. God is funny, Joseph.”

“I thought you said God was dead.”

She’d ignore him. “Hypocrisy. Stuffy rabbis yakking about what is right one moment while they screw the shiksa down the street on Yom Kippur the next. At least admit the contradiction. Embrace it. When I die, Joseph, I want you to write on my grave: ‘Here lies a contradiction.’”

“Rabbi, you hate her politics, I hate her politics. But if we’re going to give Rachel Grabinsky a proper burial, we have to be honest: keeping politics out of the funeral home isn’t going to happen.”

“Fine. But no Chomsky.”

“Can you say something?”

“I’m a rabbi. It’s my job to say something. Your mom was an important woman. Someone close to her ought to speak. Just not Chomsky.”

Joseph can hear the rabbi’s kids running in the background. They sound like a pack of hyenas high on speed.

“Your mother and I didn’t see eye to eye. But I’m prepared to let go. That’s what death is. Letting go.” The rabbi is referring to a public argument they had two years ago. Rachel wrote a scathing editorial entitled, “Dear Palestinians: It’s Not Your Fault the Holocaust happened.” Rabbi Kugelmass’ irate response was printed below hers. The newspaper went full hog: half-page photographs of both of them, snarling at each other like Vegas prizefighters. Rachel loved every minute of it.

“Your mother deserves a funeral. A Jewish funeral,” says the rabbi. He makes that strange sucking noise again. Joseph wonders if it’s candy or false teeth. “You’re her only kid. You knew her better than anyone,” the rabbi adds. “Consider it a mitzvah.”

Joseph hangs up the phone. He feels the tension in his head build so he pops another Vike. Then he pours himself a glass of Lagavulin 16 year – a bottle he stashed in Rachel’s liquor cabinet for nights he dropped by. It tastes good and warm and he savours its comfort. So he pours himself another. Maybe the rabbi is right. He should make a speech. Joseph unsheathes the Mont Blanc fountain pen his boss gave him last spring as a gift. He puts pen to paper, but he doesn’t know where to begin. He pours himself one last drink and passes out in his chair.

 

He wakes to the sound of his phone ringing.

“Where the hell are you?”

It’s Tamar.

Fortunately, he’d fallen asleep in his suit. A slug of mouthwash, a spritz of Hermes, his chestnut Tom Ford sunglasses and two Ativan. Fifty milligrams later, Joseph is racing across the city in a taxi. Fifteen minutes later he’s at the funeral home. It’s packed with professors from the department, political people from Rachel’s stints doing policy work, and a wide assortment of friends who always seemed to be from other countries.

Chomsky shakes Joseph’s hand and says, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Chomsky looks deflated wearing a kipah. There are bags under his bespectacled eyes, marks left from excessive hours of reading. The white yarmulke on his head reminds Joseph of a sailboat out of wind. The Ativan starts to kick in. He flows towards people he pretends to know. Somehow he’ll make it through this. All he needs is to give a eulogy, something he has never done. He is totally unprepared. 

There are celebrity left journalists like Robert Fisk and Naomi Klein, big name academics whose names were never important enough for Joseph to remember. Senile Aunt Gertie is here. She and Rachel hadn’t spoken in twenty years. Gertie plays with her dentures until they leave her mouth and fall onto the lush blue carpet of the funeral home. Her husband, the ever-devoted Louis, bends down, brushes them off and returns them to her hand.  

“You knew her better than anyone,” the rabbi had said. On the one hand it was true. As an only child raised by a single mother, Joseph had known Rachel behind the scenes. Nobody else had access to her over the years – except Tamar. But what did his mother reveal? She could talk about post-communist regime change, solidarity and non-violent revolution until the cows came home. But talk about herself? What she felt? Just because a person constantly yaks doesn’t mean you know them. 

The New York Times obit described Rachel as “the bastard love-child of Mother Theresa and Slavoj Žižek.” There was no lack of hubris surrounding Rachel Grabinsky. She was certainly prolific. She always had a pen in one hand and another clipped to the front pocket of her grey button-down shirt (she insisted on wearing monochrome, as though her life were a grainy art film). When she wasn’t writing articles or preparing lectures. She was reading, always reading. The house was a museum of her books.

But it also housed her mystery. Joseph remembered the first time he realized his mother wasn’t his mother. At least not whom she said she was. He must’ve been eight. He was in her bedroom playing with her jewelry. She had clip-on earrings she bought in a market in Istanbul. They were made of a silver filigree that Joseph liked to run his fingers along. Sometimes he’d put them on and pretend he was from another place, another time. In his childhood mind he was a pharaoh, a Mayan prince.

Something impelled him to dig deeper. After he removed the jewelry, he noticed the bottom of the box was false. It had a small hole for your finger. Joseph pulled out the thin wooden slat. A man’s watch; a rusted razor; a pair of blue cufflinks framed in gold.

“Joseph,” says the rabbi, putting his hand on Joseph’s elbow. “We’re ready.”

 

He leans into the podium. He reaches for a glass of water, takes a sip and breathes. He can see a stain on the carpet where Gertie’s dentures landed. 

“I’m not a writer. I’m not the one with ten books to my name. I’m not known for connecting the dots of the twentieth century. That’s Rachel, my mother.” Joseph clears his throat. He always wanted to call her “Mom,” but it was always Rachel. “She would weave history, politics and pop culture over morning coffee. Half asleep, she would construct an argument as simple and obvious as a Fox News analysis, insightful as a Wittgenstein aphorism. Rachel read me Wittgenstein aphorisms when I was six.” A few people laugh. Many nod their heads, a symphony of support. “Everyone admired Rachel. Students, peers, even a few rabbis.” A light chuckle spreads through the audience.

Joseph eases into it. The Dexedrine keeps him focused; the Ativan lets him flow. For a moment he feels like he’s riding a wave, and he can see it, the pull of the waters beneath him, the push from the waters ahead. 

“I can’t give you the whole picture. Like you, I only have bits and pieces. So I’d like to share a memory.”

He sees Tamar at the back. She nods, encouraging him to continue.

“I was five years old and it was a Friday night. Rachel was an atheist, but she liked her Shabbat dinners. A leftover from her childhood in Vilnius.” He takes a sip of water. “The kitchen was full of intellectuals, academics and journalists. These were gods with enormous egos and huge ideas, people capable of making and changing the world. Or at least people who thought they could.” A few people laugh. “There was plenty of booze. I was serving hors d’oeuvres on a round, silver tray – I liked to play the waiter at her parties. Rachel turned down the music, gathered everyone in a semi-circle in her living room and started to speak.”

Joseph does his best Rachel: thick Eastern European accent and the swallowing of all consonants. 

“And now I’d like to present tonight’s lesson in social justice. My son, Joseph Grabinsky.”

The funeral crowd chuckles warmly. Joseph leans into the microphone. He likes when people listen. 

“Rachel hoisted me onto the mantlepiece and whispered, ‘Now Joseph, do it just like we practiced.’ My tiny legs dangled. We’d practiced that afternoon. I was supposed to jump and she was going to catch me. But in the rehearsal I hadn’t imagined so many people watching. ‘I don’t want to jump,” I said. I may as well have been sitting on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge, or on top of Mount Everest. Rachel said, ‘Joseph, darling, Mommy loves you. Don’t you love Mommy?’

“Her eyes were hard. I didn’t want to jump. But I wanted her love. So I pushed myself off the ledge. Rachel stepped back and I crumpled to the floor.

“‘You see my dear?’ she announced triumphantly. ‘You see what the world is like? Assholes and liars. Cry your eyes out, Joseph Grabinsky. The world is kind to no one.”

The funeral home is dead silent. A few people clear their throats. Joseph wants to say something more – a real clincher to end the speech on a high note full of admiration and affection, the way a loving son should – but when he opens his mouth nothing comes out. Then he does something he hasn’t done in the longest time: he starts to cry. Rabbi Kugelmass approaches the podium. But before he can do anything Joseph sprints down the aisle, catching his right foot on the thick blue rug. Everyone gasps. When he recovers, he dashes out the back door and into the parking lot. The miles of traffic on Wilson Avenue confuse him. The Vicodin, the Dexedrine, the Ativan and the whisky: everything has bloated his head. It’s all coming out. Every memory, every thought, every piece, everything. The mother he thought he knew. The mother he longed to know.