By D. Dina Friedman
There are three of them in black suits, faces freshly scrubbed under their graying beards. No yarmulkes necessary. They’re wearing baseball caps: Miami Marlins. It’s important to patronize the local team, even when they’re losers.
Come with us. They extend their arms, not toward his bed, but out to their sides, as if they’re children about to play airplane. We’re not going far. Only around the corner. To pray at the shul. Daven the afternoon prayers.
I don’t re…re…member!
His tongue stutters on the words, the process of forming them as difficult as making a man out of clay, a woman out of a man’s rib. There’s no shul anymore; it’s a Cuban restaurant now, and besides, he’s not at home. Or is he? He wants to be. But where is his stuff? His record collection? His radios? His Venetian blinds? The window he can see from his bed—not his bed because there’s no gray carpet, only a polished floor—is large with a palm tree, the shade drawn halfway, blocking out the worst of the light.
Like actors in a chorus, the daveners spit their lines in quick succession, no breath between one man speaking and the next.
What? You don’t remember the shul? It’s right around the corner.
What? You haven’t been there?
What? It’s now a restaurant? Truly, you must be hallucinating!
It’s the shul. It’s always been there.
Like God.
A rock.
He could be your rock if you’d let Him.
The man tries to lift himself off the pillow, but his chest is too heavy. I d…d…don’t remember how to p…p…pray … how to d…d…daven.
Silent, the daveners snake their hands around the man’s body. The man can see a hangnail on a wizened thumb, a smudge of ink on the side of a pinky, a sunspot peeking out from under a white sleeve whose rim is dusky yellow and frayed, its threads breaking away from the cloth.
I don’t re…re…member! He lifts his own hands to his face, as if he needs to assure himself his cheeks—clean-shaven—are still there. His arms, like those of the daveners, are also streaked with brown blotches, freckles gone haywire from too much time in the sun.
Davening is breathing.
He feels their hands near his heart, on the once-upon-a-time broad-and-bathing-suit-beautiful torso he used to parade by the shore of the ocean, when, even with hair already softened to gray, he was still handsome enough to pick up women. Now, his chest has sunken, his heart controlled by a ticking machine they put in to make the beat more rhythmic. But what did it matter? He was already dying—each time he heard the crinkle and crunch of the diaper, each time he had to be carried from bed to chair and back to bed, each time he found himself propped in the dining room, all dressed in collared shirt and khakis, as if there were anything to dress for.
One of the daveners picks at a callus on his thumb knuckle, the open blister bleeding into the valleys between the veins, not red but a pus-like yellow. Another is already davening, eyes closed, heart arched toward the heavens. Hear O Israel…
The man remembers those words. From the Sh’ma prayer. Remembers when he was a child, someone telling him it was important to die with the Sh’ma on your lips. The heart monitor beeps, a sound whose pitch he might have known in the once-upon-a-time he could chant prayers without thinking, a time when the sounds of davening soothed his aching, not so much for their promise as for their pattern, a series of words he could listen and plan for. Now, words are puffs of air, too soft to be remembered.
Come with us.
Don’t take me anywhere!
He elbows the davener’s arm away in a hard thrust. He became his own man too long ago—a live-and-let-live kind of man happily burrowing in his own man-cave. A man who didn’t believe in telling people who to sleep with or what to read. A man who didn’t need daveners.
Suddenly, he’s no longer in bed. He’s sitting in a wheelchair, body cinched at the waist. The shade has been lifted. Sun pours through the window between the fronds of a palm tree that bisects the glassy frame. There’s a dark figure at his side. Not a davener. A woman in a mask wearing green pajamas.
Where are you t…t…taking me? I don’t re…re.re…member how to da…da…da…ven! He grips the arms of the chair and tries to catapult forward, land as a flat dead thing on the dull-colored floor. But his muscles are weak, his lurch pathetic.
The woman pats his shoulder, clasps his tremoring hand. I’m taking you to dinner. You remember how to eat? She bobs him down the hall, a lilt of ocean in her accent, until he’s in the swimmy mess of the dining room with its clanking plates and smell of overcooked spinach. He does remember how to eat, a dwindling but remaining pleasure of food leaving its flavor on his tongue before slipping away. Sometimes he feels too tired to go through the whole ordeal, and someone helps him—offering a succession of spoons so all he has to do his open his lips, receive.
That’s all you have to do, one of the daveners whispers, standing beside him in the wheelchair. Open your lips. The words are on your lips.
The davener holds out the spoon. Mashed potatoes with turkey gravy. Soft and warm. The man lets the potatoes slide around his tongue, sucking out as much of the flavor as he can before swallowing, and then … he’s not sure exactly, only that the beach has been blocked by concrete barriers and he can’t get through. There’s a stampede of people. Some kind of protest, perhaps the Don’t Say Gay laws or the book bans, the last pieces of news he remembers. But it’s gotten out of hand and there are police and loud blasts, a whole array like fireworks but nothing sparkly in the air, only smoke and screaming. And through it all, the daveners are trotting behind the crowd, panting like tired horses who should have been done with the racing circuit if their owners hadn’t been too greedy to let them go to pasture. He hears someone shout something about blue and they’re wheeling him away from the mashed potatoes. Then, someone’s punching at his chest, where the potato-gravy mix is oozing, thick and viscous, inching into the raw and empty crannies in his gut. The gravy covers him like a blanket, muffling the daveners and the beeping machine, which has gone syncopated, like jazz, which he once tried to learn, but couldn’t let go of the downbeat.
Just say it: Sh’ma Yisrael…
The davener’s hand is cold, his breath fishy. Once upon a time, when the man was a child, there’d be a fish in the bathtub to make fresh for the holidays. He’d watch the poor creature bumping against the porcelain walls until it was scooped up in a big pot. That’s how he feels right now. Like that fish in the bathtub. At the Passover table, they’ll enjoy him, chopped and smoked, molded into a little ball. Bite-sized.
Just say it.
He could die whether or not he says the magic words. Whether or not there’s anything to hope for on the other side, eternal nothingness, or some Christian notion of Heaven with harps and angels, or maybe Hell for all his womanizing and forsaking of religion. But he doesn’t really think he’ll go to Christian Hell. He’s lived a good life. Whatever rule-breaking he may have engaged in, or dalliances, it was all consensual. No one ever got hurt.
And if he had hurt anyone…
Forgive me! he shouts.
As if they’re on a television gone haywire, the daveners dissolve into a static gray blur, their bodies distorted, though they’re still praying. He can hear the tune, plaintive, crooning, the words, Sh’ma Yisrael, almost on his lips. Maybe just on the edges, mingling with the taste of the gravy and the mashed potatoes. Delicious. Through the window, he can sense the sun shining through the palm tree fronds, brighter than it’s ever been.
D. Dina Friedman has published in many literary journals, including Salamander, Rattle, The Sun, Mass Poetry, Chautauqua Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cold Mountain Review, Lilith, Negative Capability, and Rhino. She has also received six Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net nominations. She is the author of two previous poetry chapbooks, Wolf in the Suitcase and Here in Sanctuary, Whirling. Dina’s fiction includes the short-story collection Immigrants and two YA novels, Escaping Into the Night and Playing Dad’s Song. To learn more about Dina, visit her website at ddinafriedman.com. Subscribe to her blog on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe at ddinafriedman.substack.com.
