The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
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couldn’t find it. He looked all around his room, in his bed, and in the kitchen garbage but could not find the prescription. Had his mother plucked it out of his wallet and flushed it down the toilet? He needed something, but he had nothing he thought could calm him down, so he took a shower.
Beneath the burning-hot water he reconstructed his memory of the only time he’d met Papa Julius. After a horrible fight with the Judge, his mother had packed a suitcase and flown to Florida with Matthew. He remembered thinking she was taking him to Disney World and the Judge would meet them there. Instead, they arrived at his grandfather’s humid apartment, thick with the smell of illness, where he lived alone overlooking a verdant golf course. His mother shook his grandfather’s hand, and Matthew noticed she was trembling as she said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Stone. It’s an honor.”
“Don’t charm me, Abi. You got me.”
Matthew was surprised to discover his grandfather was so frail and so small. His thick hair had gone white, his bare feet were purple, and he wore a pair of striped pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. A blurred tattoo of a pair of dice crept out of the sleeve and onto his forearm. At first Matthew was afraid, seeing this little man walk toward him, cognac glass in hand.
“How ya doin’, kiddo?” Papa Julius said, and splashed the drink in his face. But it was a trick glass, something found at a joke shop, and Papa Julius was laughing as the golden liquid splashed around beneath its clear concave top. “You gotta be quick,” Papa Julius said, shaking Matthew’s hand. “Hey kid, nice to meet you. I’m your grandpa.”
He thought his grandfather looked kind, like someone he’d throw a baseball around with all afternoon.
“Okay Matty, go watch TV in the guest room. I’m going to paint your grandfather.” Stone recalled the disappointment he felt, being sent away so soon after arriving. He just wanted to be near his grandfather, to watch him move, to hear him speak. He sounded like someone out of a movie with that thick Brooklyn accent, like a Bugs Bunny wiseguy. Matthew pretended to go to sleep as he’d been told but instead stayed up listening to his mother and Papa Julius talk, her voice soft and respectful, his good-natured and full of laughter. He listened to the low murmur of their voices until he fell asleep.
Matthew awoke late at night to the sound of Papa Julius coughing in his bedroom, phlegmy coughs rising from somewhere deep inside his small frame—the sounds of the dying. Matthew was afraid something was the matter, but he stayed in his bed until the coughing stopped and then fell back to sleep. He never saw his grandfather again, after that visit. But he did see the painting years later at the Whitney; Papa Julius sat back on a tattered blue couch, arms spread wide on the high back, his wrinkled face worn from a lifetime of violence, his pajama shirt open at the neck. He looked sly, streetwise, as if he were calculating his next move. There was pathos, humanity, even humor in the portrait as he stared down Death, his final adversary. His mother had captured something so elemental in Julius that Matthew had stood before the painting of his grandfather feeling his entire history had been spread across that canvas.
The shower was not the least bit soothing, exhaustion rippling throughout Stone’s entire body. His hands and feet tingled and, no matter how much he scrubbed, his skin still itched all over. He found Pinky in his room, popping security tags off a rack of dresses with a flat-head screwdriver. “Why did you let her in?”
Pinky looked up from his work and said, “She’s your mother.”
“Not anymore. She hasn’t been my mother in a long, long time.”
“Oh, Jesusfuckingchrist, get over it, you crybaby.”
Stone wanted to lunge at Pinky and throttle him right there on his bedroom floor, but he knew he was too weak right now to do any significant damage. “How did she know where to find me?”
“I figured you told her,” Pinky said, lighting a cigarette and offering one to Stone. “And you were sick as shit. Three days.”
“She was here for three days?”
“She was afraid you were going to die. But you rode it out. Now move on. And stay off the fucking opiates. You want to wake up dead?”
It dawned on Stone that Pinky was not his friend at all, but rather his enemy, and he asked him, “Who told you to bring me to the bingo hall?”
“Say what?”
“You heard me. Who told you to bring me to the bingo hall?”
“You are fucking paranoid, you know that?” Pinky’s face showed no recognition he knew what Stone was talking about, and Stone worried he had imagined the whole conversation with Seligman, that his scrambled mind had met with him under the influence of morphine and not as he remembered, in Seligman’s SUV near Atlantic Avenue. But he had seen him; he knew he had seen him.
“Does the name Zalman Seligman mean anything to you?”
“Is that supposed to be a name? Because it doesn’t sound like a name to me.”
“You know who he is,” Stone said. “You are a terrible liar.”
“And you are the worst roommate I’ve ever had. Now, you can either shut up or get the fuck out of my place. I’m letting you stay here out of the goodness of my heart, and you are nothing but a pain in my ass.”
Stone went back to his room, locked the door, and draped himself in his father’s robe. Surrounded by his father’s books, he thought, the flesh dies, but the property lives on. That is our legacy. But this inheritance was not silent like an armchair or sideboard; these books continued to speak, all Stone had to do was listen. He pulled a book out of the pile. A yellowed, torn envelope with Israeli postage, addressed to Walter J. Stone, had been folded as a bookmark. The return address was from Abba Eban at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The envelope was empty.
Stone found a package of his father’s cigarettes, opened the flat cardboard pack, and placed a Nat Sherman between his lips. The smoke curled in the air and danced before him, spinning up into the light and dissipating. He picked up a copy of The Power Elite, written by one of the Judge’s professors at Columbia. It was inscribed in faded blue ink: “To Walter, Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Best of luck.”
The cigarette failed to calm his racing heart—he was still feverish, his nerves vibrating. The whispering got louder, sharper with each book he opened, and, like a lens coming into focus, Stone was viewing his father in a way he never had in life. He picked up Othello and turned to the pages his father had used to humiliate him all those years ago. He read: “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost / my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of / myself, and what remains is bestial.”
His father was speaking to him through his books, and with each word Stone began to understand the enormity of his betrayal. He had been instrumental in destroying his father’s carefully constructed reputation. He was guilty, there was no doubt. Proof of Stone’s disgrace lay before him and condemned him. Stone determined to make good on his sins. He would read all his father’s books, piece him back together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, and solve the mystery of the man he could never please.
Stone read for three days straight, not leaving his room to eat or shower. Reading his father’s books galvanized some triumphal life force within Stone, made him feel a small temporary victory over the ever-lurking Angel of Death. He pissed in the vomit bucket and dumped it out his window when it was full. He slept in twenty-minute snatches, just long enough to jumpstart his brain before returning to the books. Change a couple letters in Stone, he thought, you had alone; change another, you had atone; split that word, you had at one. When he was with the books, he was at one with them—alone, but not alone. His father’s handwritten marginal notes made it easy to focus his attention, the Judge’s script curling out with the same confident tone he had used when he spoke: “This is hypocrisy,” triple underlined; “Check your facts,” written in red; “Smilansky agrees,” appended with a furious