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When I was sixteen I told all my woes to my Emmet figurine, and he said, “Oh, babe, there’s no need to worry." Whereupon I started sweating and stuck him in a drawer. Next morning I went to see Rabbi Geli. I told her what I have just told you, and I asked her if this meant God was angry with me.
“Emmet,” she said, “means truth. I mean: emeth, in Hebrew, means truth.”
I pulled my phone from my pocket and put a video of Emmet — i.e. the real deal — on the screen, and in her hazy office we watched him hop across a foreign stage. We watched him twirl and glow: his hair was dyed gold, and the light seemed to slip through it like off-white milk, down over his bare china shoulders, slow and steady and divine. And while we watched I told her that although I had an A in History I had a D in Calculus. I told her, no, it had not improved between Mom and Saul. I told her I struggled with insomnia, and with dyslexia. “Is God angry with me?” I asked.
“Sarah,” she said, “let me be frank: it is possible God is angry with you. Jews must reject idols in all forms.”
I thought: To reject Emmet sounds to me like a greater sin than idolatry. Then I stopped thinking that, for I was worried God would hear.
Rabbi Geli said, “I will tell you three parables. One. An architect understood certain secrets of the trade, which allowed him to achieve unparalleled architectural success. He would not teach these secrets to anyone until two aspiring architects convinced him. Only, once the young architects had learned these secrets, they charged half as much as their tutor, and soon everyone had forgotten the elder architect.
“Two. Ben Sira and his father, Jeremiah, studied the Book of Creation for three years, and at the end of these three years they created a golem, upon whose forehead was written emeth — aleph-mem-tav — just as it had been written on Adam’s forehead: a divine seal. The golem got to its feet, looked around, and finally wiped the aleph from its head so that what remained was meth, which means dead, and it crumbled into dust.
“Three. A son asked his father about his lineage, and the father said Adam had no mother and no father, and that God had created him from the earth. That night the son snuck into the garden and dug up a clump of dirt and shaped it into a cow. The day after he asked his father why the cow could not walk or speak, and the father said God blew the breath of life into Adam’s nose. The son did this with his cow, and Satan slipped into the figure and made it appear alive, and when people came to worship the clay cow the name of God was desecrated.
“Do you understand, Sarah,” said Rabbi Geli, “what I’m trying to tell you?”
I told her I understood. I returned home and withdrew a garlic press from the kitchen cabinet. Then I found the razor stashed between pages thirty-two and thirty-three of my Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary. And last I took my squirming Emmet from his desk-drawer prison. He said, “And then there was light! Light to see you with, babe. You seem scared. You mustn’t be scared. I only have eyes for you.”
I tore Emmet’s head from his body and crushed it with the garlic press. I tried to imagine what went through his gray matter in those final moments. Maybe betrayal. Maybe only metal. What went through my mind during the murder was the memory of holding him to my bosom in a sticky summer dark while through the yellow sub-door crack came Mom taking the Lord’s name in vain. I bit the razor, and then, starting with the right hand, I cut his body into twenty-two pieces. I wiped the dead plastic into my wastebasket and swiped some Manischewitz wine from the pantry and drank it in bed, and where I would have in the past listened to Emmet’s music I lay instead in silence.
Then it was Monday. Lunch on Monday consisted of crinkle-cut fries and a bacon cheeseburger, which I ate teary-eyed in the corner. Lily stood before me and said, “Well look at this. Cow for a cow.” I told her now wasn’t the time. “There will come a time when all things horrific happen to you,” she said. “Those scars on your arm augur harm for you and everyone you love.” She bent to sniff me. “Wow,” she said. “You smell Sarah-bull.”
“Awful,” I said. “Just awful.”
She said, “There is high magic in low puns.”
On the bus home I decided Rabbi Geli didn’t know what she was talking about. Life without Emmet was the most unholy thing I could imagine. I recited his discography in my head as though it were a hagiography. There is a slimy sort of feeling low in the gut that accompanies being close to someone so perfect as Emmet. I whispered his name like a mantra. The sound of his name swaddled me. Within the syllables Lily dissipated and Mom dissolved and all the parables diffused into the wet air.
In my room I checked the news and learned that Emmet — i.e. the real deal — had been killed. Someone had clambered up the side of the hotel and shattered the window and sliced Emmet to bits. The plastic in my wastebasket was missing. I continued to whisper his name.