Like other people who experience life as a constant struggle for enlightenment, Noah Goldstein thought he hit upon the answer. It came as he was walking down Broadway toward Times Square. God is time. We make our peace with time and we make our peace with the universe. If we can only let instant after instant wash over us without protest, we will align with our true selves and begin to flow in the general direction of things, rather than swimming like fish upstream.
"God is time," said Noah Goldstein draining into Soho like a fig leaf charting its course toward the sea.
When he returned to his Midwood Brooklyn room, he began furiously writing down his thoughts.
Noah Goldstein was indisputably handsome, tall, dark skin, with brown curly hair cropped close around the sides exploding out of the top of his head. In the summer, he wore a t-shirt, shorts and hiking boots. In the winter he wore wool pants, a sweater and the same hiking boots. He took pride in rarely purchasing new clothing. This and other staunch dogmas made long term relationships a rare occurrence in his life, but he had no shortage of one night stands.
His peaks were times of high adventure and danger, when he could be arrested, beat up, or made passionate love to by a total stranger. During his valleys he would retreat to his room and only come out to make trips down to the store. His floor mates, a girl and a boy from Brooklyn College, could here him in his room cursing himself, his family, god, life. Once, after hearing the impact of blows on skin, they called the police. They were mainly tolerant, concerned people and so rather than making a big deal about it, they choose to tolerate Noah, his highs and lows, that he could be the life of the party, that he could shut everything down with a sudden outburst.
Noah Goldstein's parents were dead. They had died one after the other in 2007-08, his father from a heart attack and his mother from a rare form of stomach cancer that took her swiftly. They left him 75,000 dollars and a house in Massachusetts, which he rented out, making him financially independent. Since he had studied history in college, he was otherwise unemployed although not totally without ambition.
In his spare time, he read zoology textbooks: he thought he might like doing something physical, and he had always loved animals, perhaps more than people. He could imagine himself someday working in a Zoo, tending to chimps perhaps. When he was happy, he took long walks through the city and occasionally made short lived friendships in neighborhood hang outs, mainly with outdoor enthusiasts and marijuana types who thought he was one of them.
During his peaks, he was extremely charismatic but simply didn't think straight. During his valleys, he felt mostly hate toward everything and everyone, especially God. But there were moments in between when he understood he had to change, and he drank the dregs of those moments, searching for answers within himself, finding only short term inspirations which, if he was lucky, vanished with the onset of a new emotional state and if he was unlucky continued to prey upon him as new obsessions.
***
He picked up an older woman in a midtown Starbucks. To be precise, she picked him up. He caught her staring at him. He approached her, stood looming over her, said, "Hi." She invited him back to her apartment on the upper east side.
"Oh, I think I like you," she said. "I think I'd like to take you home with me."
Her name was Julia. She was petite with long dark hair, dark skin. The way her jeans hung down over her heals spoke to him of wealth and grace and a state of being fairly distant from his own. Her building had a doorman, a chandelier in the mirror-lined lobby. Her apartment was truly nice, truly comfortable, like a big, expensive goose down pillow. The lap of luxury. The degree of comfort felt alien, strange, as if he had just returned home from a war. He laughed on the inside, feeling indifferent, scornful, aroused.
"We have the same skin," she said. "Are you Jewish?"
He answered her.
"Me too!" she walked to the large steel refrigerator, poured two glasses of white wine. "Ice cube? You know, have you been to Israel? I've always wanted to go!" said Julia, returning with the wine.
He laughed inwardly. It seemed like such a conversation piece, the obvious thing a 42-year-old Jewish woman would say lacking anything else to say. He muttered something, leaned in, kissed her.
"Go slowly!" she said.
In his memories, he remembers himself as a creature with no voice, just someone humping Julia on her upper east side couch. In his memories, he is present at the time without being fully, totally there. He is a ghostly presence throughout his past.
"You're such a tiger!" said Julia.
Tiger, he thought. Something an old Jewish lady says to her young lover.
They lay on the couch in each other's arms. "I think I'm going to like getting to know you. Are you going to like getting to know me?" she asked.
When she was in the bathroom, he fled. He encountered himself floating toward Central Park, overjoyed. It was a pure, chemical joy: a narcotic ecstasy. A moment later as he was crossing Amsterdam Ave, he crashed, realizing what happened, what it meant. It meant something. He treated it like nothing. She wanted it to mean something. She wanted meaning. She wanted to create a story with him, about a woman a little older, but still very youthful and attractive, and her younger wild lover. She didn't seek out men at random: she sought out him. She didn't care about wealth, about money. All she wanted was meaning. He recalled the things she said about things like that never happening to her, about her ordinarily not doing those wild, forbidden things. He recalled sitting there, an empty-headed slightly scornful sex-seeking vessel. That's when, walking down Broadway, the idea came. Time.
***
The problem is man's relationship with time, he wrote. We cannot let ourselves flow smoothly. His yellow curtain ruffled in the breeze. He could see out across his yard into his neighbors yard where a chubby lady in a bikini baked herself brown. "If we can only make peace with time," he wrote. Noah sat, pouring himself out onto one of the note pads he prefered over his laptop which he rarely used. He was sweating in the white t-shirt he bought in a packet of similar t-shirts which he pleanned to wear weak after weak until it became a ripped, tattered rag.
At night, he lay in his bed, remembering Julia's body. He could not seem to make peace with time. The memory of her body interceded. The memory was like a fury preying on him, pushing him toward an abyss. The memory was right there at the cusp of his mind, uncensored, uncut. She offered him her own self-same eden. What led him to treat the situation like that?
He shook himself out of his trance. Time. He wwas not letting time wash over him as he should have. He was swimming against God. He tried to empty his mind. He succeeded. He slept. In the morning, the memory of Julia's body seemed less pressing.
"Time is God and God is time," he announced to his flat mates studying in the living room. They exchanged worried looks. He marched out into the daylight, walking down Cony Island Avenue. He felt that he finally hit upon the proper current; was finally flowing in the proper direction.
Since it was Friday, the Jewish occupants of Midwood were busy shopping for the shabbos. He popped into the grocery store. He wanted bananas. He resolved to only eat bananas this week to see what becomes of him. The store was full of men with beards and hats and women with wigs, dark dresses. Time is god, time is god, time is god, he thought. Only he was not thinking it: he was saying it.
"What's do you mean, time is God?"
"Yes," he smiled, caught in his madness. "Time is God."
"Are you Jewish?"
"Yes."
"Would you like to come to shabbos? Come with me to shabbis! My name is Mordecai Decantalon."
"Decantalon."
"It's Ladino."
"Ladino."
"What's the matter? You only say one word at a time?"
"I'm fucked in the head."
"Come to shabbos with me. Here, come on."
He shopped with Mordecai Decantalon. "Onions, check, bread check, chicken, check," said Mordecai. "I usually don't buy wine. I don't see how alcohol enhances the gathering, but today, here, why don't we get some." He reached for a bottle.
He piled into Mordecai's car, sat in the passenger's seat. Mordecai told him about his life.
"My great grandfather was in the paper business, my grandfather was in the paper business, but my father wanted to work in show business and so moved to Hollywood where, at 40 he realized that he couldn't continue."
"What happened?"
"What do you think? He was living in a little room somewhere, writing screenplays, eating beans every meal. In short he was miserable."
"So, what did he do?"
"He moved to Israel. Went to live on a kibbutz. Met my mother, Sabina, the daughter of German Jews who had fled Germany in the 1930's."
"They got out just in time."
"Yes they did. And so my father decided to move back to New York with Sabina."
"But what did he do?"
"What do you mean, what did he do?"
"I mean, when he came back. Screenplays?"
"He made a life. He started as other men do, with nothing but the love of a good woman, and made a life. He worked in a restaurant for a while. Then, after a few years, he opened Perry's Pizza. Now we have three kosher pizza restaurants and it's the family business."
Noah had truly never conceived of life like this. You start out with the love of a good woman and then make a life. It ran totally counter current to his time theory, or to any of the other theories espoused to him by psychologists and self help books. It was totally backwards from everything he had learned.
"You can do that too, Noah."
"I guess I could."
"Of course you could! How old are you?"
"27."
"My father was 40 when he met my mother. When he was 42, he was a busboy at the Star Of David Cafe. When he was 43 he had me. When he was 44, he opened the first Perry's Pizza."
"How did you survive."
"What do you mean, how did we survive?"
"I mean at first, when you were born."
"My father and mother rented a room, lived cheaply, drank water instead of wine."
Noah laughed.
"Yeah! said Mordecai, not so hard. Life isn't so hard."
They pulled up on front of a nondescript brick house on a quiet street. Mordecai introduced Noah to his family, his wife Sylvia and his daughter Sabina and son Micah. The children came rushing up to him to embrace his legs. The evening seemed so full of quiet, moderated joy. As if a cork had been removed, after he told him about the death of his parents, language came to him in a torrent of child speak.
Then, later as they were walking through the quiet evening with the other promenading families, Mordecai said. "Come back next week and the week after and we'll discuss finding a good woman for you."
"First the woman and then the life?"
"The woman is always first, and then comes life. Without woman, life is impossible. That's how God intended it. We'll discuss it man to man."
Laying in bed at home in his room, the shabbos candles still dancing before his vision, he thought of Julia.
"I think I'm going to like getting to know you," Julia had said.
He wondered if things like that always happened to Julia. He wanted to tell her about the simplicity Mordecai envisioned. He wanted to ask for her forgiveness, and then if she granted it, sit with her at a table by candle light and to tell her all about his time theory.
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