FOUR PREPOSITIONS
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These stories are from About, Above, Around: 50 Prepositions, a collection of short fictions, running from a few hundred to a few thousand words, each of which springs from an English preposition and considers how it might describe the movements of feeling.
ABOVE
When the bald spot formed, he started wearing a yarmulke, exactly the right size. His father, who was dead and who never wore a yarmulke, had had some funny story how he'd discovered his bald spot in a security monitor at the deli or in an elevator with a mirrored ceiling, but he knew of his own from the beginning. He could feel his baldness, the cool when it was cool, the heat when it was hot, the sticky wind the train pulled from the tunnel. His bald spot could sense the shadows of pigeons changing perch. In his city, which had also been his father's city, many men wore yarmulkes, so he fit in fine, another jaywalker transversing the street through where the blue sky between buildings shot down brightest. You didn't need to believe in God to feel better with a cap on. And now, when he didn't have it, he felt a nervous glow in his scalp where it should be. The feeling of eyes on your skin times a thousand. Molecules of brightness and blue that fell upon his scalp from higher than the high-rises—he might measure the height by the tingle on his skull.
And above the blue?
And above that?
And above that?
That was the old game of the fathers. To construct infinity from an itch. Only God could see his own bald spot, and even He never saw it from above.
FROM
His last name, Meyer, had been chosen around 1806 when Napoleon required the Rhenish Jews to register a family name. Meyer was a very common name, an inconspicuous name.
However else they lived, they passed on the inconspicuous name. Landowning and the professions were closed to them, so they sold dry goods. Once in a life, they saw the Rhine. They practiced reading, the same small words, trusting something unexhausted flowed from them. Sometimes they looked at letters, at the shapes of letters, and wondered what else around them might be unraveled too. Soldiers came, named all the streets, and numbered all the buildings, and the store, where they also slept and lived, became 19 Untergasse Street.
It was the local historyman, as Sigi called himself, who told him that his inconspicuous surname was not so old. Tristan had told the inn by email who he was when he made the reservation, the inn had told Sigi, and Sigi, who had made a hobby of local history after retiring from finance, had invited Tristan Meyer and his wife to walk through town with him.
"We are a quiet little winemaking willage," Sigi said, overcompensating for the German V. At 19 Untergasse Street, even the street looked German, even the new asphalt, which was damply bright, a perfect even gray, as if some light lived below. The cobblestones had been ripped out and paved over, but their nerve roots remained. A glass plaque at number 12 bragged it was the residence of the Weinprinzessin of the 2015 Weinfest.
“Back home, in a city close enough to Metropolis, someone was filming a superhero movie downtown. It made traffic.”
Somehow everyone knew who he was. The Weinhotel Weingut Wolf wouldn't let him pay for the room. Frau Wolf gave him one of the porcelain votives she would be selling at the Christmas market. "So angels will always be with you," she said. He decided better not to tell her that, in her parking lot, someone had keyed his rental car.
Sigi invited them to come back for a summer Weinfest, but everything Tristan needed he'd gotten from the bright wet street.
Back home, in a city close enough to Metropolis, someone was filming a superhero movie downtown. It made traffic. Out his office window, he watched American money restoring the old hotel across the street, expecting it would fill with guests from foreign lands. He discovered he liked his name more now. Meyer. It was like being named nothing at all. Yet he knew he had a family. Sometimes a twisting light would dash across the street and ancient joy would make its path through him.
TOWARD
When he was a little Jewish boy, six, seven, in the early 90s, he and his sister took aikido classes at a strip-mall dojo in a sub-affluent corridor of Central Time. He got a yellow belt then quit.
He remembers so little: the bowing, the rough gi crossed and tied over his naked chest, the whapping sound of them rolling across the mat. Mainly he recalls a phrase—extend ki.
Ki received a great deal of definition. He remembers framed calligraphy of its ideogram at the front of the dojo where the redheaded, goateed sensei knelt in his black skirt. Ki was life, was health, was energy, was circulating like air, was in him infinitely but also in the ground from which it could be drawn up into the body as redwoods draw rainwater. Its movements directed strength and facilitated balance (there were many balancing exercises). He remembers a day when the sensei's sensei's sensei visited from Japan and demonstrated that twelve men together couldn't push him over, because of how he extended ki.
But the word extend, so far as he recalls, received less discussion. Did the high sensei anchor himself by extending ki into the ground, did he topple assailants by extending ki in pulses against them, or was it extension along an internal dimension?
He kept the yellow belt and gi hanging in his closet for a couple years. It was the era of the Karate Kid franchise, but he wasn't bullied, certainly never by packs. His grandfather had been held in Buchenwald though, and he had dreams about Nazis, in which, like Indiana Jones, he would annihilate them all with a secret, destined, boxed-up, holy energy. He only needed to look at a Nazi and he could push forth an energy that would agitate the Nazi's atoms till he melted.
He asked his parents; they didn't believe in god. He was more disappointed when his grandfather didn't either. His dad blew on dice. His mom said love you even after he or his sister was out of earshot through the door, as if she were extending a blur of love that would entangle and protect them.
When he was 19 and his sister 21, she was arrested for vandalizing a head shop. She said there was bubonic plague in the bongs. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and medicated. She used to communicate subtly and comically with her eyebrows; now they just hung. She'd completed her training to be an x-ray tech, but she decided she couldn't do x-ray work for health reasons she wouldn't specify. When her roommates kicked her out, he helped her move in with their grandpa. In her room, she had six blocks of quartz she called her owls.
His mother took him to Panera one day. She said, "I'm going to ask you a question that's for you, not me. How much do you love Deedee?"
"I love her," he said.
"I know you do, honey. You've always been a loving brother. The question is how much do you love her. It's a hard question, but you need to start asking it so you know the answer."
“He doesn’t visit often, but he considers himself a good uncle to his nieces: he sent them a Guinness Book of World Records and now they’re obsessed with getting in.”
"She's my sister," he said. "She's family."
"So there's no limit? Infinity? You'll never get tired? When you were babies, I would get so exhausted, but I could always find more when I needed it. I don't feel that way anymore."
He laughed. His coffee was gross. He thought he tasted blood clots in the milk.
"I love you and Deedee enough to lose my retirement but not the house. For instance. I think that's healthy for me now. I think you should be prepared to know how much you're able to give her and what you need to keep for you."
He could see a vein puffing under her eye. He asked her, how do I tell what to keep, but her throat had gone too dry.
But Deedee did fine, did outstanding. She and her wife own a geodesic house in Alameda and run a children's theater playhouse together. He doesn't visit often, but he considers himself a good uncle to his nieces: he sent them a Guinness Book of World Records and now they're obsessed with getting in.
Today, his own daughters are only six months and two and he loves them infinitely. Infinity. If today some Irish Setter snapped at them at the park, he has no doubt he could throw it into orbit. He can see it: a red dog flying backward through the clouds, through cloud after cloud and never coming down.
OUT
The Jews of fourth-period World History glanced at each other.
Yah-Who?
Never heard of him.
"Monotheism," Ms. O'Nicolas continued reading from the textbook, "allowed the Ancient Hebrews to wander because they considered their god Yahweh the god of everyone everywhere."
The fourth-period Jews stuck a finger into the gap between pages and spine. It wasn't even Labor Day. Fertile Crescent to the Holocaust. It was going to be a long year.
Rabbi Bimbski started jumping up and down and covering his ears. "We do not say that name, amigos."
Fucking A, it really was God's name.
Fine, Ms. O'Nicolas. Have it Yahweh.
Bimbski, characteristically, had more to say. He said that in ancient times, on Yom Kippur, after ten days of thorough atonement, the great high muck-a-muck top jedi of all the rabbis, would get togged up in all white and go into the holiest room of the holiest temple in Jerusalem. And in there, there was an even holier room.
"The Holey of Holeys," Armand, the horny one, said.
"For real, for real, exactly," Bimbski said. He knew they were all horny, but this Armand was making a persona of it. "And in there there was a veiled off part. And no one was allowed in there except him, the Kohen Gadol, and only on Yom Kippur, because it was reserved for the Presence of God. But one day a year, he could go in and say, 'Hiya Y—'"
Bimbski smiled and shook his Wooly Willy face. "But if he said the wrong name, the whole room would be consumed in Holy Fire!"
They laughed, but the point was made. Mumsies. Don't risk it, little Jews.
What were they going to do anyway, pray to Yahweh? They didn't pray. Technically, basically everything they were learning in bar and bat mitzvah class was a prayer, but nobody meant it that way. They were doing the bar mitzvah thing so they could get gaming computers and because their older sisters did and because if they didn't, they would just be white.
One of them, as mentioned, was Armand. Around age eleven, he'd taken a good hard look at himself in the mirror and designed a personality, Pepe Le Pew but Jewish. He wore a newsie cap and flowers in his buttonholes. The over-flirters, in Bimbski's experience, were usually gay, but in Armand's case, it could just be his stature (very short) or his nose or his Rs; the kids still called him Almond. Bimbski asked Mrs. Bimbski, you think I should talk to him?
"Is he pinching butts?"
No, no. He gave away button flowers, he talked over Bimbski, he wanted the girls to catch him looking at their boobs.
On the day Rabbi Bimbski asked Armand to stay after Crossing the River class, Ms. O'Nicolas, the World History teacher, had done the same thing. She'd closed the classroom door.
You coming on to me, Miss? he thought—the audience for the thought being Lenny and Dougie who he figured he'd catch up to soon. But when she said, "Sex can be a beautiful thing," he started feeling strange. It was his fault. If he hadn't cooked up his Lothario schtick, Ms. O'Nicolas would never have thought he was the seventh grader likeliest to fulfill whatever sick fantasy this was.
But his body prepared itself. He perceived how easily his virginity could be wriggled out of, how it would slide to the floor like a piece of laundry and die there, decompose quick as soggy flowers. If he were the king of the universe, he would have chosen someplace other than the World History classroom and he would have chosen something other than rape. Nonetheless, he was ready.
But it went in a different direction. Did he know he was making people feel uncomfortable? O'Nicolas said the things he was feeling were beautiful things, beautiful special things that he should be excited to explore, but talking about them so casually, that wasn't good. Mumsies. Better to feel them silently inside.
Rosh Hashanah was Labor Day this year. Then came the ten days of atoning for Yom Kippur. "Rabbi Bimbski," Lenny said that afternoon at Crossing the River
"Armand has a question for you."
Sniggerings. Even the girls knew what it was going to be.
Can we jack it on Yom Kippur?
Bimbski would probably have given them a serious answer. What is Talmud for if not such ponderations? But Armand was still recovering from his earlier humiliation. He said nothing.
Bimbski said, "So you'll wait and ask me after class."
They went, the two of them, into Bimbski's rabbi office. Again the closed door "What was it you wanted to ask me then, my boychikel?"
Ever since Ms. O'Nicolas let him out of the room, his virginity had been all over him. It had climbed back up from the floor and tightened to him. He'd been joking, they were jokes, his taxonomies of nipples, his passing-period serenades, but post O'Nicolas, he felt like his true self, not his aspirational self but his true and holy self, was trapped inside his virgin laundry.
"It's that name," he said.
"Name?" said Bimbski
"You know. God's name. I keep really wanting to say it."
Bimbski laughed. "Have you tried it? Did you go up in flame? You know there's a teaching—" Bimbski stopped himself. "You have it in you for one more teaching?"
The poor kid seemed almost eager.
"As you know, old Hebrew has no vowels, so we don't really know the name, just the consonants. The old Oples-and-Bononos quandary, yes? So, the teaching has it maybe God's name has no vowels, just Y, H, W, H. Or, maybe those are the vowels," and hopping up with fists at his hips, Bimbski did his yoga ujjayi breath, throaty aspirants that were supposed to sound like Ys and Hs. "Could be you've been speaking the forbidden name every second, ever since He breathed a life up your nose."
Bimbski decided he'd save the reproof for next week. The poor little Jew seemed like he'd had a day already. He watched him go out to his dad who was waiting and take off his kashket cap to receive his kiss on the head.
Religion, Bimbski thought to himself. God save us from religion. Being shaken like that, only because you wanted to say hello to Him. Religion will fuck you in the head. He ought to remember that. His job wasn't Talmud, wasn't weddings and deaths. It was to hold people still for a second and repeat basic facts: Life is passing through you very quickly. Enjoy this. It will not always be in you.
Mark Mayer’s first book, Aerialists: Stories (Bloomsbury 2019), won the Michener-Copernicus Prize and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis.