The Cut

By Dario Sulzman

Albee waited by the window, listening for any hint of the low congested rumbling that his father’s van made as it strained up Elm Street toward his mother’s house. It was a gray Ithaca afternoon. His mother’s footsteps paced the kitchen floor. From a radio in the living room, an even-voiced female news anchor asked a correspondent about the Oslo Accords.

“The King of Chaos,” his mother addressed the ceiling. She was a small thin woman with dark hair and sharp eyes. “The King must always keep his subjects in a state of perpetual uncertainty,” she said.

“For Chrissake, Mom, do you have to be so dramatic?”

“Don’t trivialize my emotions. It’s a classic sign of an abusive relationship.”

Albee pulled the strings on his orange hoodie so that it closed around his face. His parents had divorced three years ago. Now he was thirteen and his Bar Mitzvah was fast approaching. Over the last four months he had gained a smattering of hair on his face, chest, and genitals.

“You’re all hunched over. Sit up straight.”

Fingers danced across his back and an electric jolt shot up his spine.

“Jesus, Mom, I hate when you do that!”

His mother was a physical therapist, her hands keyed to his body’s every nerve ending and pressure point. “Please, Albee, don’t punish your body for your father’s neglectfulness.”

“He’s not neglectful. You don’t even know why he’s late.”

“Sure, just like when he left you alone for four hours without saying where he was going and you called me sobbing and hysterical, right?”

Albee’s face grew hot with embarrassment, wanting to stand up for his father and not knowing why. “Levosh helochel,” he murmured to himself. The words, though meaningless, calmed him, as they often did when he felt trapped. The semitic-sounding phrases were what Albee called Yibberish–a cross between Yiddish and jibberish.

From the living room, the female voice asked, “. . . given his strong relationship with Rabin, how does Clinton convince Palestinian leadership that he can represent their interests?”

“He doesn’t care,” Albee’s mother spoke loudly. “He just thinks the Palestinians should accept whatever scraps they’re offered, because they’re weak and Israel’s strong.”

“That isn’t true,” Albee said. He heard the rattle and crash of tools and pipes in the back of his father’s truck as it pulled into the driveway.

“. . . to know that he understands their history of their suffering,” the reporter said.

Albee grabbed his duffel bag. His mother already stood by the front door.

She waited until his father’s boots sounded on the porch steps, then threw the door open and gave a “Heil Hitler” salute. “All the hail the King of Chaos!” she shouted.

Albee’s father stood on the porch, hands covered with orange work gloves. A tattered hemp yarmulka topped his balding head, cobwebs of hair sprouting from his temples. “Don’t be so over-dramatic,” his father said.

“Mom, c’mon stop it.”

His mother ignored him. “Karl, you walk around in a whirlwind of chaos. And whoever tries to get close gets sucked in.”

“Don’t fucking analyze me,” Karl snapped. “I’ve been down on my knees in a ditch for the last four hours, so I don’t want to hear it, okay?”

“C’mon Dad, lets go.” Albee tugged at the sleeve of his father’s greasy blue sweater. He hugged his mother goodbye and moved away quickly before she could put her arms around him.

The next morning, Albee ate breakfast while his father davened, rocking back and forth on his heels, face yellowed by the morning sun. He wore only gray bathing trunks and a white prayer shawl draped across his hairy arms and chest, fingers and wrists tightly wrapped with black leather tefillin. He mumbled Hebrew prayers, barely audible, now falling silent, only his lips moving imperceptibly. Albee slurped his cereal. The square black tefillin box tied to his father’s forehead reminded him of the monster in Frankenstein.

Following the divorce, his dad had decided to become an orthodox Jew. It had happened very quickly, overnight almost. The early signs — declining to get cheese on his burger — were rapidly followed by declarations that he would no longer drive on Saturdays, and that he was getting his kitchen kosher-renovated. It was a strange transformation. His father came home from work with dirt on his face and in his nails. Albee had always imagined the Orthodox as prim and well-kept. His father told him that believing in a higher power gave order to his life.

“Have you been studying for your Bar Mitzvah?” his father asked, when he finished praying.

“Shamoni hachol nebodelech leshoma,” Albee said.

“That is your torah portion?”

“Yeah.”

“What does it mean?”

“Dunno, some shit about washing your vagina after menstruation.” While the previous response had, in fact, been yibberish, Albee’s summary of his torah portion was roughly accurate. Tazriyah Mitzorah was about being clean. It proclaimed strict laws regarding sex following menstruation and how often a woman should bathe during this period. It told the reader how to clean himself after coming into contact with individuals who had leprosy or typhus, how many times a day one should bathe with a boil, for how long one should bathe with a rash. If a red lesion appeared on a bald man’s forehead, he was commanded to tear his garments and call out “unclean! unclean!” as he walked down the streets.

That evening, Albee and his father sat across from each other at Panda Garden. Albee shoveled fried rice and General Tso’s chicken into his mouth while his father drank water from a big plastic cup and sucked on peppermints taken from the cashier’s stand. There were no kosher restaurants in Ithaca, but Albee’s father still had several hundred dollars of unused credit at Panda Garden as partial payment for a job he’d done there prior to becoming Orthodox.

“I have to ask you something.”

Albee stopped his fork.

“Your Bar Mitzvah’s coming up,” his father said. “You’ll be a man under Jewish law.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular mashka bibble.”

“What?”

“A mashka bibble. A shon deps. A clespa fegan.” Albee spoke quickly, a barrier against uneasiness.

“But you’ve never been circumcised,” his father continued. “Jewish men are circumcised.”

“So, I’m not Jewish?”

“No. You’re still Jewish.” Albee’s father cleared his throat. “What I’m saying is that I would like you to be circumcised.” A metal pan clattered dimly from the kitchen in back, its rim dancing against the floor.

“The foreskin…”

“Gone,” his father spoke the word with a flourish, like a salesman trying to promote the effectiveness of a cleaning product used to combat dirt and grime. “A mohel would perform the procedure.” Albee began to laugh. His father’s lips tightened, and Albee fell silent. “This is something I want for my son. As a Jewish man. Maybe I could compensate you in some way,” his father said.

“What does Mom think about this?”

They waited while an older man and middle aged woman walked past their table to the front counter.

“Your mother doesn’t have a say in this. It’s your body.”

They had decided it before he was born, Albee realized. Had they argued about it, like so much else while they were together? Or had it been different then, a harmony and love between them that he had never known, or didn’t remember?

“Why wasn’t I circumcised?”

“You’ll have to ask your mother. She didn’t want it.” A waitress passed their table and his father asked for the check.

Albee looked down, lumpy brown pieces of chicken growing cold on his plate. “You said compensate,” he said. “Is that like bribe?”

The following day in biology class, Albee considered his father’s offer. It was hard not to, if only because Albee already thought about his penis a great deal, particularly when he was at school.

He remained in his seat after class, waiting for the other students to leave.

“Do you have a question, Albee?” Mr. Fleric looked at him curiously from the front of the classroom. Albee shook his head. When the teacher turned, he slipped his hand below his belt, quickly tucking his hard-on into the top of his jeans. Only then did he zip up his backpack and leave the room. Tucking was a risky business. Three months ago, in Drama, he had been caught with his hand down his pants. But what else could he do? School was a minefield of hard-on triggers: girls’ legs, the smell of their hair, the curves of boobs and mouths and cheekbones seen from the side. This time, in biology class, it hadn’t even been a girl that caused it.

Students passed Albee in the hallway, their laughter following him like a pesky ghost.

“Pee-wee Herman!” A voice called out. Albee’s cheeks burned, but he kept walking. After getting caught with his hand down his pants (and because he happened to share the last name of a celebrity caught masturbating in a movie theater) Pee-Wee Herman had become his new nickname.

Albee stopped at his locker. He couldn’t explain exactly why he didn’t have more friends, or why girls weren’t interested in him the way they seemed to be interested in other boys his age, but his exclusion confirmed what he already suspected: that something inside him was missing or had been made wrong.

After school, Albee went to Francis Pandler’s house to play ping-pong in the basement. Francis was his only, and best, friend at school. Albee told him everything.

“How come you’re not circumcised?” Francis asked.

“I don’t really know. He said that my mother didn’t want it.” They had stopped the game, the subject was too complex to discuss while simultaneously playing. “He offered me money. Can you believe that?”

“Geez. So it’s like you get to have two Bar Mitzvahs.”

Albee whacked the ball in Francis’s direction. “Do you think it will help? That’s what I’m asking you.”

“I’ve gotten hardons talking to girls too,” Francis said, retrieving the ball from beneath a couch. “You just forgot to hide it.”

“Yeah, but sometimes it’s not even anything physical. Today in bio I got one just from hearing Fleric talk about how flowers blossom, just hearing that word, blossom, whoop there it goes, like it’s listening to a command or something.”

“We can check on the internet,” Francis said. “Maybe there’s a connection.”

“For real?” Neither of Albee’s parents had the internet. The brand new Mac Performa in Francis’ house was, it seemed to Albee, a sign of health, an indication that the Pandler family was doing what it needed to stay fresh.

Under a page called “Benefits of Circumcision” Albee’s suspicions were confirmed. “Sexual pleasure is not diminished by circumcision,” the article read, “but the slightly reduced glans sensitivity make it easier to control arousal and orgasm.” This was “Reason No. 10.” Reason No. 2 was that circumcised penises were less likely to get infected, and Reason No. 3 that uncircumcised men in Africa had higher rates of contracting HIV/AIDS. The reasons did not seem to be listed in any particular order of importance.

“Tazriyah Mitzorah,” Albee murmured, remembering his torah portion.

“You’ve got to think about girls too,” Francis said, pointing to Reason No. 6 which stated, “Lots of women prefer the appearance of the circumcised penis. Awareness of a good body image is very important in building self-confidence.”

“You don’t wanna gross ‘em out,” Francis said. “Glenn told me that most girls have enough trouble figuring out what to do down there as it is.” Glenn was Francis’ older brother at college. Mrs. Pandler’s footsteps crossed the floor above their heads.

“You thinking about doing it?” Francis asked, once his mother had passed.

“You kidding? You know how bad my mom would flip out?”

Returning to her house the following Sunday, Albee forgot to take his shoes off. He tracked mud across the foyer. His hoodie’s cumbersome bulk overturned the slender coat rack when he tried to hang it up.

“Time to detox from chaos mansion,” his mother said, wiping up his tracks with a rag.

Albee muttered yibberish, but couldn’t disagree with her. Returning to his mother’s, he felt positively unwelcome; not so much by her, but by the house. It actually felt more fragile, the windows more prone to shudders, the walls more easily bruised. He imagined calling out, “Unclean! unclean!” as he walked in the front door.

His only escape was his room, with its door that locked and walls through which he listened for his mother’s fading footsteps down the stairs, the slap of the dead bolt on the front door when she left the house, and, at night, the click of her light switch when she went to bed.

The girl he pictured was pale and blond, riding his cock, and wearing a turquoise bikini. She threw her head back, sometimes leaning forward so that her long hair fell across his face. It was important that he was on his back. Who was she? Albee had no idea. She had appeared spontaneously in those first days, like a kind of guide, patched together by his imagination from Playboy and the Victoria’s Secret catalogue that his mother discarded every month, unread, into the recycling.

His bed sheets lay tangled at his ankles.

“Albee, did you brush your teeth?” The door knob jiggled. He threw the covers over him. “Albee, open this door.”

“I’m changing Ma.”

“So?”

“So, I’m naked.”

“What difference does that make? Albee, I carried you around naked in me for nine months. I raised you not to be ashamed of your body.”

“I’m not ashamed.”

“I want this door opened now. It’s dangerous.” She rattled the knob again. On the back of Albee’s door was the front page of the New York Times from September 14, 1993, showing the famous handshake between Rabin and Arafat with Clinton grinning between them, his arm encircled just behind each man’s back as if bringing the two long-standing enemies together through some invisible force. When Albee opened the door, the poster faced directly into the wall.

He moved quickly past his mother to the bathroom, brushing his teeth hard, so that the mint toothpaste burned in his mouth. His mother stood in the doorway behind him.

“Why are you being so cold to me?” she asked.

“Mom, it’s nothing. I just want my privacy, that’s all.”

“I guess you’re getting to that age.” She covered her face with her hands and began to sob, as though she had realized something terrible.

“It’s okay Mom.” Albee came over and put his arms around his mother. She wasn’t much bigger than him, and this made him feel strong.

But three days later, Albee heard her knock again and this time he ignored her demands to be let in, struggling to keep the girl’s falling blond hair in focus while he continued to jerk off.

His mother pounded on the door with both fists. “I’m going to call the police!” she screamed. “Unless you answer me, I’m calling the police!” She left the hall and Albee heard her speaking loudly into the telephone. “Hello? I need an officer at my house, my son won’t open his door. I’m afraid he’s dying.”

Albee suspected she was speaking to a dial tone, she had done the same thing to his father when his parents were together, but he pulled up his pants and opened the door. “I’m fine Mom. Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t you ever do that again.” His mother walked toward him with such speed that Albee moved his hands to defend himself. “Don’t ever not answer me when I call you. You don’t know what it does to me.”

“Mom, I was just busy, that’s all.”

“That’s what he would do.” She pointed a finger down the hallway. “When I needed him he wasn’t there. I’d wait for a phone call, he’d never call. I won’t be made to feel that way again.”

The next day after school, Albee found a fist-sized hole where the knob on his bedroom door used to be.

At his father’s house, it was easier to adjust. His dad didn’t care what Albee picked up at his mother’s as long as it wasn’t the belief that he, Albee’s father, was a piece of shit. The main problem at his dad’s was really Albee’s problem, because he was thirteen and still be afraid of being alone at night. His father had left without saying where he was going.

Albee walked through the house, turning lights on as he went. He flopped onto the couch in the living room and dialed Francis’ home number.

“What’s up Al?”

Albee tried to think of something to say. He had called Francis simply to hear another human voice, to take time off the clock until his father came back. “I was wondering if you’d thought anymore about the other day,” he said. He heard a rustle, then Francis’s door bang shut through the phone.

“I had been thinking about it, actually,” Francis said.

“Really?” Albee’s hand instinctively moved below his shorts, as though for reassurance.

“Sure. I mean, sorry if that’s weird. I was reading this article in National Geographic, about this tribe in Ethiopia where they do get circumcised, except they do it at, like, your age. It’s like part of what they do to become men. To make them tough. And then they all go out and hunt a buffalo, or something like that, with their penises all sore and shit.”

“No kidding.” Albee heard his father’s truck pull into the driveway. “Hey, I’ve got to go,” he said.

Albee watched his father take off a long gray coat. He had started wearing it the previous winter, not realizing that it was only the Hasidim who dressed that way. He kept wearing it when he went out though–even after he discovered that he didn’t have to–superstitiously, Albee suspected, like a baseball player on a hitting streak who refuses to change his socks. His father bent over, yanking a glossy black dress shoe off his foot.

“God, these things are uncomfortable,” he said. He wiped his face. “I’m always buying things that don’t work or they break easily or don’t fit right. It’s like a conspiracy sometimes.” He flexed his toes on the tiled kitchen floor. “They’re nice though. Some of the men at minyan wanted to know where I got them.”

“That’s where you were?”

“Yeah.”

They moved to the living room. Albee stared at the yellowing calluses on his father’s feet, while his father read the New York Times.

“So have you thought about it?”

“You mean –”

An affirmative grunt came from behind the paper.

“How does it happen?”

“A couple different ways.” Albee’s father cleared his throat and put the paper down. “One way is that they put the foreskin in a clamp.”

“Yuck.” Albee squinted as he tried to picture it.

His father’s eyes brightened. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Let’s go downstairs.”

“We are downstairs.”

“The basement.”

Cobwebs and exposed insulation hung from dark wood joists. Electric wires dangled from holes in the wall. The air was cool and smelled of mildew. Albee’s father leaned over a work table by the far wall, his bare scalp glowing beneath a naked bulb. One arm grasped the table while the other turned the vise’s metal handle, tightening something that Albee couldn’t see. A tumble of plastic bins occupied the floor, overflowing with white PVC fittings, fluffy rolls of pink insulation and piles of broken down cardboard. Perched precariously at the very top, like a throne for some demented lord, was a splintered wooden chair.

Moving closer, Albee saw that his father had been tightening a tube of black steel piping, about a foot in length.

“This will allow me to explain it better,” his father said.

Albee looked at the pipe. “That’s my penis?”

His father gave the vise handle a final twist so it creaked tight. “Your penis,” he said. Albee began to laugh. “This is a serious decision you have to make,” his father said. “If you think it’s a joke, we can go back upstairs. You see this?” he gestured to the damp walls around him. “Your mother is always saying how I’m such a slob, and maybe that’s true. But behind all the mess, I’m a damn good plumber. You ask around town, people will tell you: when they have a problem they know that I will get the job done.” Albee’s father stood upright, his eyes sharp and intent.

“You know there was this one time, you were about five years old, and we were at this toy store. Me, you and your mother. You had wanted this wooden truck that had an arm on the top of its cab with a cherry picker that could swivel and move around. When we said we weren’t buying you anything, you got really upset and ran out of the store with the truck. Just took off when I wasn’t looking, it was very tricky.” They both laughed.

“Anyway, I caught up with you and I was pretty stern. I mean, you were stealing. But your mother wouldn’t have it. ‘You’re scaring him, Karl,’ that’s what she said. At the time I thought that was just how I came off, like some oblivious monster. It wasn’t until after the divorce that I realized that she didn’t know about some things. Outside the toy store that day, my instincts were right, not hers.” Albee’s father stopped speaking. From the back of the basement, the boiler’s hum filled their silence. “You’ve got to make up your own mind,” he said finally.

Several days later, before returning to his mother’s, Albee checked the basement: the pipe remained in the vise, clamped tight.

Albee and his mother sat at the table, lit only by Shabbos candles. Her eyes remained closed after saying the blessing over the candles, as though savoring some invisible energy in the silence that followed. When Albee’s mother and father were together, once a year they lit candles for Hanukkah and said prayers on the first night. Now, both of them lit candles every Friday and said Shabbos prayers. Albee found the phenomenon strange.

His mother served him fish stew. It smelled thick and warm and was his favorite.

“Mom, why wasn’t I circumcised?”

She put the ladle down, squinting at Albee as though his body told her things. “Why? Where is this coming from?”

“I just want to know.”

“It’s coming from somewhere. You wouldn’t have thought about this on your own.”

“I learned about it in Sex Ed. They said it helps prevent infection.” Albee began tilting back in his chair. His mother told him to stop and he did.

“That’s crap,” she said. “That’s just what they tell you because it’s become Westernized.”

“But aren’t you supposed to get it if you’re Jewish?” Albee didn’t know what Westernized meant exactly. It was his mother’s way of saying that something was normal, and therefore suspect.

“According to all the chauvinist pricks who thought up the rules,” his mother said.

“So why wasn’t I circumcised?”

Albee’s mother closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I felt that it was patriarchal ritual designed to sever the natural bond between a child and its mother.” She said the words very clearly, like they had been rehearsed.

“What does that mean?”

“Oh God, Albee, I don’t want to get into this now. It means they wanted to do it so you wouldn’t love me as much.”

“Okay.” Albee could see that his mother had grown frustrated thinking about the past. But he had one final question. “You’re more religious now. Does that change anything?”

His mother looked shocked. “Albee, I would never want that. I don’t follow all of that sexist garbage. I haven’t gone completely off the wall like—” she stopped speaking, her eyes widening. “Oh!” she said. “I know where you’re getting this from! I get it now!” The triumphant smile on her face made Albee want to smile too. But that would reveal everything. “I knew it!” his mother said, as his own smile sheepishly appeared. “Does he want you to get circumcised because of his crazy orthodox bullshit?” She stood up from the table. “Please, Albee, tell me you’re not listening to his garbage.”

He began to tilt back in his chair. “I don’t know Mom. You know, everyone else has it. It might be for the best.” He said it more to see what it felt like rather than because it was something he believed. But his mother grabbed at her hair and began screaming, “No! I forbid you to do it! No!” Her voice startled him and his chair tipped over backwards. She moved over to help him up but he pushed her away.

“You don’t forbid shit!” he said. “It’s my foreskin, and if I want to cut it off I’ll do it, and you can go to hell.” He ran upstairs and pushed his dresser in front of the door so that it covered the hole where the door knob used to be.

The television in the Pandler’s basement showed a split of screen of Bill Clinton, one side with footage of him sitting with Rabin in the Oval Office, while on the other side he embraced Yasser Arafat on a dusty gray runway strip. Albee sat on one side of the couch, fingering the rubber freckles on a red ping-pong paddle. Francis watched the screen, holding the television remote on his knee like a small animal, or a gun. An announcer on CNN said, “. . .delicate balancing act of diplomacy.”

“This is a big decision for you.” Francis said. He muted the television.

“I just want–I don’t know. My Dad says that being orthodox made him feel more in control of his life.” Albee thought about his father’s long, grey Hasid-coat, containing the whirlwind of chaos that his mother said swirled around him.

“It’s about being a man,” Francis said.

“It’s about being a man.” They raised their eyes to the ceiling as footsteps passed above them. Clinton signed a document, holding the pen triumphantly aloft. The camera zoomed out, showing others around Clinton clapping silently.

“So what’s your Dad giving you?”

“Sega Genesis, pretty sweet right?”

“Damn sweet.”

The men stood around Albee and spoke in deep voices. On a small table next to Albee’s bedside lay a gleaming silver knife with a small triangular blade, and a clamp that looked like a device to send out morse code. The room was narrow and smelled like old hair. Albee lay on his back with his pants off, a clean white towel under his balls. His father stood behind him and placed a hand on Albee’s forehead.

“He won’t be cutting off all the foreskin, Albee. He says it’s barely a nick.”

“I want that anesthetic,” Albee said. “I’m not doing this unless I’m high as hell.” He looked around at the men, then down at his penis, small and shriveled against his leg, its foreskin wrinkled at the tip, like his orange hoodie when he pulled the strings.

The mohel, Dr. Steinberg leaned close to Albee’s ear. “It’s actually a sedative.” He spoke in a soft, whispered voice. “The anesthetic is local.” He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and squirted some white cream from a tube labeled “MAXELINE” onto both hands, rubbing them together.

“I’m going to put my hands on your penis now Albee,” he said. “It’ll just be for a second. I need to apply the cream so you won’t feel anything down there.”

The cream’s coldness made Albee gasp. He didn’t know any of the men around him except Rabbi Mishka, the Hasidic rabbi from chabad, who was short, fat and spoke in a booming Eastern-European voice. Five men wore sports jackets and were clean-shaven. Four, including Mishka, were Hasidic and wore long black coats, thick black hats and had dense, clinging beards. They rolled back and forth on the balls of their feet, humming and mumbling to themselves, to each other, to God. The floor boards creaked beneath their shoes. Dr. Steinberg prepared a syringe.

“You think this will make it less sensitive?” Albee said.

“Abselootely!” Rabbi Mishka stepped forward. “Albee, this will help you become a real mensch.”

The syringe slid into Albee’s arm.

“You might not remember this,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Midozolam sometimes causes you to forget.”

Albee thought about this. “I’m going to think I’ve always been circumcised?”

“No, just the procedure I’m talking about.”

Albee felt himself getting heavier. He looked up and saw the Hasidim’s dark clothing, blurred at the edges. Above him, his father began to sing. Albee closed his eyes.

Shema yisroel…adonai eloheynu…adonai ehad. The others sang the same words back, their gravelly voices pushing against each other. Albee’s father began to pray alone.

Baruch atah adonai, eloheynu melech haolam, ashair kiddeshanu b’mitzvot tav, vitzivanu lechaniso bivrito shel Avraham avinu.

“Blessed is he who has commanded us to bring him into the covenant of thy father Abraham.” Rabbi Mishka translated for Albee. His father began another prayer.

Baruch atat adonai, eloheynu melech haolam, shechehiyanu vuki’imanu vehigiyanu, la’azman hazei.

Albee’s eyes snapped open. “We sang that,” he said. “We used to sing that.”

“Albee, shhh.” His father looked around nervously.

“We used to sing that prayer, me, you and Mom,” Albee said. “I remember that. We used to sing it on the first night of Hanukkah.”

“It’s going to be over very soon,” Dr. Steinberg said. “Just relax, Albee.”

“No.” Albee sat up. “I don’t want to do this.”

The men looked at each other. They looked at Albee’s father.

“He’s drugged,” his father said. “I don’t think he knows what he’s saying.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Albee!” his father’s voice grew loud and whiny. “This took a lot of time to set up. These men came here.” He put his hands on Albee’s shoulders, but Albee jerked free and grabbed the small knife off the table next to him.

“Get back!” He jumped off the table.

“Jesus Christ, Albee.” His father took a step forward, but Albee held up the knife and he stopped. Albee whirled around to make sure none of the other men were near him. He looked at his father, who stared at him for a second before putting his hands over his face. In that instant, Albee bolted past his father and into the hallway.

Cold air seared his skin. He ran until there was no more hall, just a wooden door to his right. Looking back he saw the men emerging, first his father, then the others, like gangsters pursuing a robber who had just held up their card game. Albee pushed the door open and locked it from the inside. The floor rocked beneath him, an unsteady pier. The room was empty, save for a dull white cot against one wall. The long rectangular window at the back of the room seemed to expand and shrink when Albee looked at it, like a dilating eye.

“Open the door, Albee.” A hard slap rattled through the room.

Albee tried to hear the men outside. The floor creaked and he imagined that it was the Hasidim, still rocking back and forth on their heels.

“It must be the drugs,” he heard his father say. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“He’s right though,” another said. “The shechehiyanu. You do sing that on the first night of Hanukah.”

“And no other night.” This sounded like Mishka. Albee rocked back and forth on his feet, in rhythm with the floor. The knife looked at him with blank shiny curiosity. I’m ready whenever you are, it seemed to say.

“What are you doing in there, Albee?” Something crashed, followed by “Fuck!” and Albee knew that his father had just tried to ram the door with his shoulder.

Mishka said something about calling the police which triggered an eruption of arguing voices, an angry swarm of hornets trying to get in. Be quiet, Albee thought, but the words lost their shape in his mouth.

“Albee, say something. Let me know that you’re okay.”

“Filei abeinu!”

“What? What did he say?”

“Fileya what?”

“Filei abeinu! Geshema tich m’holam shol hafas!” The yibberish retched from his mouth, some sickness needing to leave.

“Is that Hebrew? I can’t understand it.”

“It’s his yibberish.” Albee heard his father’s sobs. He sat down on the cot. The bed frame groaned and sank low. The knife blade felt cold against his inner thigh, still oily from Steinberg’s cream. He heard a voice recite his mother’s phone number.

By the time she arrived, Albee had wrapped himself in a bed sheet to keep warm. His mother hurled screeching curses outside the door. His father’s defensive growls rumbled the ground. Albee felt a strange excitement, a desire to put his ear to the door, just as he had as a child when his parents were still together.

I’m going to sue you. Get you in–

Try it.

–front of that judge and show him what an asshole you are.

Try it.

Try it, try it. His mother mocked his father’s voice.

“Fackocked shameinis!” Albee flung the knife across the room. “Gefagen ahunt lecol bisorim. Bisorim, bisorim, bisorim!” He shouted because although their fights meant nothing, he had wanted them to mean something, because even when they stopped fighting their voices were still inside him, they would always be inside him.

“Albee,” his mother said. “Please speak to me.”

“He’s not speaking a language, Emily.” His father sounded like a tourist who had received too many wrong directions. “He’s not making any sense.”

“That’s because you don’t know how to listen to him.”

It was useless. Their fights echoed back to the darkness of his birth, to those days when Reagan couldn’t get on television without calling the USSR an evil empire, back to when his parents were children, when fire-hosed bodies tumbled across television screens like bowling pins, and to those demonstrations his parents had told him they had marched in. The roots stretched back to their parents’ childhoods, his grandparents, who grew up with fears and a hardness to survive that they forced onto their children because even though the Depression was long over, all they knew was that bone-deep fear of poverty, which their children, his parents, could never understand — just as a generation of Israelis could never understand the Holocaust as anything other than the result of Jews not fighting back hard enough. How was it, that despite all the suffering that fighting caused, that the solution seemed always to be another argument?

Outside the door, his parents’ clamoring accusations formed a kind of music, harsh and violent, but with a rhythmic soundness only possible from years of practice. An urge to join the struggle crawled across Albee’s tongue. He didn’t want fight, so instead he searched his mind for some thought, some sound, to make the urge go away. And then, surprisingly, it surfaced inside him.

“Lech-l’cha,” he said. It was a real word, he knew that, a Hebrew word whose meaning he did not know or remember. But its sound, round and repeating, seemed right.