The day was over. Stars lanced the sky as I walked back up Mill Place to the dark house after Yom Kippur. I entered but did not initiate the lights, though the hallachic indicator on the house’s main panel blinked green for normal time. From the refrigerator I extracted a prepared K-meal, but quickly returned it to its place. Instead I took out the jug of yogurt, poured some in a bowl, and devoured it – the thick cream satisfying my body’s need but producing no discernible feeling of joy. In this fashion I broke my fast. I write this as if my walking, my entering, my approaching and my devouring were actions in the normal sense. I write as if I initiated these actions from within my own body. I must now attempt to reconcile myself to my new condition. I do not expect this to be easy.

Forgive me son, for this yontif just passed has become impossible to reconstruct. Let us begin with this morning and take everything in sequence. If the word sequence retains any meaning.

I awoke surprised and blinking, my mouth dry like a chalk mine. I uttered blessings. “You have restored my soul within me.” As the words passed my lips I became aware that something was – for lack of a better word –  misconfigured. It was as if some core part of me had come loose and was now freely bouncing and rolling around my psyche like metallic part dislodged within the belly of a machine. Perhaps I should have returned to sleep at this point. Perhaps I should have slept for an hour more and awoken a second time. Perhaps everything would have been okay then. 

Instead, I arose, washed, dressed and found myself facing the kittel which I’d removed from its plastic covering the night before and hung on the back of the closet door. Years ago this closet had been Riki’s writing chamber, though she’d usually referred to it as her shafke – her little cupboard. She’d decorated the little space with all manner of clippings and images by and of her favorite poets, and none more than William Wordsworth, who she admired (disproportionately, I always thought.) His portrait had once hung here, prominent and troubling, the angular English head supported by a large hand. It was a very goyish shafke — a very English shafke. I preserved it, just as she had left it, moving not a scrap of paper until after her yartzeit.

Jonathan you already know this, but our house Yiddish was the language of jokes, of irony, of childrearing and speaking to the elderly. English, by contrast, was for poetry, love and grocery shopping. Hebrew was like the good china — reserved for prayer and study alone. I say this as if it will be news to you Jonathan, but it occurs to me that I’ve never explained this to your clearly before. Does it please you to learn all of the little adult rules of your childhood home?

The kittel radiated harshly, repelling the human eye. I thought of the Lurianic masters and their description of God’s gleaming garments – the same ones worn by Adam and Eve in the garden before the days of good and evil in the human world. The thought of such blinding brightness made me queasy. I burped. Was that the meaning of this day? That we should all wear the costume that recalls humanity before the world was born, or else looks over the prow of time to the days long after we are dead and the Moshiach has come? The loose part inside of me shifted and rattled like an angry marble at this thought. If I really wanted to die then surely I should don the kittel at once! But I could not bear its overwhelming whiteness, and so, after extracting my usual black overcoat from its peg, I closed the door to the little closet. May I one day merit forgiveness.

***

Outside, the tropical storm had passed away north before dawn and left in its wake a troubled sky of bluster and sun and racing strips of cloud. In these days of autumn cyclones, the storms formed an interminable parade, queueing one after the other after the other out over the Atlantic. Between the spirals of cloud yawned gaps of sun and wind, in which the world was granted a few days or a week in which to remember how a New York October was meant to feel. I walked swiftly into the brisk morning, another figure in a coat leaning into the breeze as I approached the Flatbush Avenue shul.

Prayer had already started when I arrived. The inside of the building was a churning, murmuring mass of white. I shuffled down the same aisle, said the same few hellos in solemn hushed tones, and shook the same two hands as I had the evening before. I wrapped talis and settled into the correct motions and words. But as I began to pray I was all at once beset by an alarming feeling which only now, sitting here in this wordless house do I perceive in any kind of objective way.

This is what happened.

All at once, I became aware that I could see myself from outside of myself – or more precisely from above myself. Indeed my “self” suddenly hovered over the prayer service at an altitude only slightly below the stained-glass ceiling – a distance of some forty or fifty feet above the floor. Below, my body continued to move and function as any observer would expect. I could for instance observe its bowing motions as oseh shalom was chanted – the stepping back, stepping forward bowing first left, then right, then straight ahead. What’s more, the part of me that I’d felt rattling around inside, the loose marble in the machine, was precisely the part of me that now seemed to float up here near the ceiling. It is plain to me later, sitting again here in this chair, writing on this pad of paper in the squinting dark, that I had entered what a psychiatrist might refer to as a fugue state – a kind of dissociative reverie or trance. Something within me had split, or cleaved. I had split. I had cleaved. I was not me – I was we.

You must forgive me Jonathan, for at this point that my recollections become scrambled and incomplete like so much corrupted data on an old magnetic disc. For while I could perhaps manage to recount each of my body’s motions as prayer progressed (we stood, we sat, we beat our chests, we touched the Torah in our midst, we sat once more, we chanted) I began to lose track of my own sequence of time. Or at least I became more intimately aware of the part of me that floated aloft than I was of my own body, and it seemed as if time passed differently up there than it did down in the crowd. I could force myself (I did this languidly, without any sense of pressure) to access the sensations of my body. The fatigue of my legs, the feeling of the machzor’s cover on my hands, the smell of pressed clothing and bodies around me. But this required positive attention. And there were gaps, Jonathan, long gaps in time. Or perhaps it is that I recall all that took place – prayers, feelings, motions, desires, regrets  – but I cannot properly conjure these memories in in any sort of concrete or sequenced way. They are un-memories, Jonathan. They are the kind of memory recalled (or so I read) by those who pass through one of the new timegates. But this much I did perceive: the little loose part of me that had until a moment before rattled around within my person, was no longer trapped or confined, but rather hovered above and away from my body. Let us call this floating part of me “soul“. Unless you have another suggestion Jonathan. I’m sure you would have another, better, suggestion.

Suddenly the Haftorah. “Your idols shall not avail you, even when you cry out. They shall be borne off by the wind.” Then skip to one of the day’s several iterations of Vidui, with its wailing and banging of breasts. Skip again to musaf, and after that minchah. Jonah made his annual appearance, flitting from stormy boat to fishbelly to gourd vine in record, disjointed time. Something had come undone. Something needed mending. I tried going for a walk, but as I circled the shul’s block before Neliah, my soul still trailed me, aloft and apart, but marvelously tethered to my body below like a weightless dog, or a security drone, or a child’s balloon.

It is a marvel that I did not panic in the face of this dissociation, which did not abate or change at all as I rounded the corner onto the avenue once more and approached the shul entrance. With some effort I observed the faces of the others crowding around the door. No one looked at me askance — it was clear that they could observe nothing out of the ordinary with me. Was I dying? Was I losing my sanity? I casually entertained both possibilities for a while, but neither left much of a mark. Perhaps I found myself suspended in his way so as to protect my body – to watch over myself like a hovering bird. Was I up here to prevent my own death? To observe it? The answers to these large questions did not seem to matter much. There are so many ways to die, I thought, my soul’s mind worrying through the Unetaneh Tokef, handling and examining its list of terrible fates like a series of interesting pebbles, each distinct from all others, but still readily identifiable as a pebble, as a death.

Thirst, earthquake, wild beast. What did it even matter?  If a wild beast rushed into the shul and dragged my body out from under me, scattering Shel, Harry and the whole congregation in the process, would my floating soul have even objected? Would it have been surprised? Perhaps it would have smiled to itself as I skidded along behind the animal as it dragged my by my left leg, out down the avenue on the sidewalk and up the secret alley that concealed at its end a secret lair. Perhaps I would have floated above, peaceful and disinterested, as my own body was consumed. What did my soul care for blood or bone or flesh? What heed did my soul pay any of my startled friends and neighbors running up and down the thuroughfare in their kittels in search of my dead body? 

Surely there were drugs that produced effects like this. Ketamine for instance.

Have you tried Ketamine in your life Jonathan? O that you were here for me to ask you. I would not judge or reprove you for your answer — I seek only information.

These were the absurd notions which occupied my soul as I re-entered shul. Such was my spiritual state. Nelia flashed by in a timeskip. The shofar blew its long final blast and the arc slammed closed. There was no suspense or finality in these events, no release of tension. My soul did not descend. A gnaw of doubt entered for a brief second and then shuffled away like a bored museum patron.  Was this fugue to be permanent?  Would I need to accustom myself to this hovering — to this waiting at my own doorstep like a keyless child?

I did not stay for ma’ariv. As I made to leave, Harry invited me to join his family’s break-the-fast, but I declined and shuffled out the door into the dusk. I slid back down the avenue – still aloft – and turned left into Mill Place. The beast had not appeared. And then — all at once, and precisely at the moment I unlocked and entered the silent house — everything suddenly reverted. My soul descended back into my body and locked into place with an unfelt click. There was no relief. There was no flood of regret. In fact I felt nothing at all. I picked this pen and paper and I began to write.

That is what happened.

***

Who by water and who by fire. Who by sword and who by beast. We write and chant these words Jonathan, but we know nothing of what they mean. They are not questions for they admit no question mark. What are they then — a litany? An incomplete inventory? Is there such a thing as a fatal fugue? And what of those fates that we call worse than death? Paralysis. Coma. Torture. The fate of the fate of the Dybbuk. Perhaps I am now an un-person. A not-even-dead. I, the lone resident of this un-house. What fate could be worse than that? Speak to me my son, from across space and time. I will wait twenty-four light-minutes for my question and your reply to make their way to Mars and back. I will wait patiently for your reply.

What happens at the hour of our birth? Do we break into parts? Are we assembled from various components by God and only then plunged into the world? (I cannot remember the Talmudic answers to these questions at present. This is another sign that all is not right with me.) And to ask the same question in another way – what happens at the hour of death? Are we re-assembled? Or do we fall back into our constituent parts once more? And how are we supposed to know the difference between all of these states of being to begin with? 

Trailing clouds of Glory do we come, from God who is our home. 

Thus wrote Wordsworth, pinned in Rikki’s hand to the wall of the shafke. And next to this, she’d pinned another, longer except from another of his poems:

But now there opened on me other thoughts 
Of change, congratulation or regret,  
A pensive feeling! It spread far and wide; 
The trees, the mountains shared it, and the brooks, 
The stars of Heaven, now seen in their old haunts– 
White Sirius glittering o’er the southern crags, 
Orion with his belt, and those fair Seven, 
Acquaintances of every little child, 
And Jupiter, my own beloved star! 

I sit in the dark. With my left hand I feel the arm of the chair. The same arm that Riki’s so often grasped, rested upon, stroked, tapped, worried, mended with her own left hand. As long as I sit here, my soul is within me. As long as I sit here and never get up. Maybe if I remain here long enough, she will come back for me. Right here in this chair. Maybe I’ll drift gently off to sleep now, as I feel I might, and maybe I’ll wake when I feel her dear prim weight in my undeserving lap. I said Kaddish for her today. My yogurt-tinged lips know that I did, though my soul forgets.

But at least my soul has returned to the house of my body — and my body to the silence of this house. Let me count my blessings on my hand — one, two, three. On the other hand let me now find pain — for once again I am aware of my wounds. It seems important that I could not feel their ache — nor did I consider them even once during my fugue. My two wounds are like a binary system. Rikki. Jonathan. My heart, my side, my wife, my son. Add me and we make three — one, two, three. Sometimes when it is clear and the heavens align, I walk outside at night and find the rust-glow of Mars above the city’s light. And when I can, I find Jupiter too — Riki’s favorite, the one that Wordsworth knew. If I join them one day in the great sky — when I join them — three stars will shine and the universe will rest.

May I one day merit such forgiveness.