“No one here remembers Gemara Yoma?” Shimon stroked his right payot for comfort, as if to calm himself. “If there’s even a question of emergency, of pikuach nefesh, but you still have to ask a rabbi? The Gemara says you’re like a murderer.”
Mordechai nodded along. “Too much piety can cost a life.”
“So you’re calling me a murderer?” Reuven was now only half-smiling.
“Not only that,” Shimon said, “but if I was your rabbi then I’d be a disgrace, too, rules the Gemara.”
Reuven picked at his front incisors, tracing the staggering distance between them. “Why?”
“For letting you even think there’s a havah minah here,” Shimon said. “For letting you delay saving a life by asking stupid questions.”
“Okay, okay, now I got it,” Reuven announced, snapping his fingers. “What if it’s a goy? Goyim can’t keep Shabbos!”
Mordechai snorted. “So? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“So the initial reasoning is out,” Reuven said. “You’re not saving future mitzvoth.”
“Remember Gemara Sanhedrin?” Mordechai rolled his eyes. “If your neighbor’s drowning, you’re obligated to save him.”
“Yeah, but still,” Reuven said, “does that include a goy? You know, necessarily speaking?”
Mordechai shook his head. “You don’t believe that?”
“Well, no,” Reuven conceded.
Shimon went quiet for a moment. “But for the sake of argument . . .”
“Aryeh,” Mordechai said, his voice rising, “Aryeh, talk sense into them, will you? Someone drowns—Jew, Gentile, animal, anyone, anything—you save them, yeah?”
I’d been swinging in silence, mind adrift, until quite suddenly I realized the news I’d been avoiding since February could, at long last, be avoided no longer. “I’m leaving.”
Shimon gave me a look, annoyed I’d interrupted the counterargument he was preparing. “What?”
“I’m leaving,” I repeated. I rooted my feet to the asphalt, taking myself out of motion.
“Shkoyach, you made that clear.” Shimon, dripping with sweat, wiped the back of his hand across his face. “Library?”
“I’m leaving Brooklyn.”
“Leaving Brooklyn?” echoed Reuven.
Shimon frowned. “What does that mean you’re leaving Brooklyn?”
“I’m moving,” I said. “Away.”
“To the city?” Mordechai asked, dark eyes aglow.
“Why davka Manhattan?” Shimon was a skilled Torah student, but his habit of reframing everything as a Talmudic question was grating. “Your father wants you to learn in that yeshiva?”
My hands gripped rusting metal. “Which yeshiva?”
“On the Upper West Side. For kids who aren’t serious about Torah.” After a pause: “You aren’t serious about Torah.”
I allowed myself, briefly, to exit my present conversation, to visualize the school and the streets and the neighborhood and the city around me, to meld the clamor of traffic and children and animals and Gemara and crying and laughing and singing and praying into one simple unit of sound, a single emission, to grasp it and, in the palm of my hand, crush it into silence. I waited, I counted to five, and then I relaxed my fist, permitting all noise to untangle back into clarity. “I’m moving to Florida.”
“Florida?” All three looked flushed with shock. “What’s in Florida?”
Shimon tried coming to a halt, nearly falling out of his swing. “There aren’t yeshivas in Florida.”
“Of course there are,” Reuven said defensively. “My cousin lives there.”
“They have beaches,” Mordechai said quietly. “Beautiful beaches.”
“I’ve never been to the beach,” Shimon said. “My father says beaches aren’t . . . shayich.”
“My father got a job there,” I said, stony-faced.
“But he already has a job.”
I felt, all at once, emotionally bludgeoned. For stability, I envisioned myself as one of Fitzgerald’s characters—neurasthenic, desirous, self-enclosed—for whom unhappiness somehow deepens nobility. The thought was less redemptive than anticipated. “And now he has a new one.”
“Well,” Reuven said, scrunching his face in thought, “when do you leave?”
“August.”
“Wow,” Shimon said plainly. He sucked his breath melodramatically. We stood awkwardly for a bit, nobody saying much, save for Shimon whispering “wow” every so often.
“Will there be girls in your new school?” Reuven finally asked, delicately, shifting uncomfortably on his feet.
I nodded.
Shimon looked fairly appalled. Reuven gave a conflicted smile, unsure how to react. Mordechai, most experienced among us—rumor had it he was secretly dating the daughter of Rabbi Morgan, our seventh-grade rabbi, though I was skeptical about that whole affair—clapped my back.
“You’re lucky, Ari Eden.” His eyes narrowed. “Most of us will never get out of here.”
* * *
MY LAST MONTHS IN BROOKLYN dissolved at a terrific pace. There was a flurry of packing, everything we owned—quite little—stuffed into boxes and trucks. There were solitary walks through my neighborhood. There were things I left behind: torn basketball sneakers I’d worn to death, forgotten birthday letters, discolored Parsha cards I’d won in school raffles. At the end of my days in Brooklyn, I stood in my bare bedroom, staring at my mirror, watching seventeen years fade: the furniture gone, the rooms emptied, everything whitewashed. A general sense of melancholy hit me for the first time since my parents announced the move. Leaving didn’t make me sad; on the contrary, the exhilarating prospect of trading my dreary, uneventful life for something new was, at long last, within reach. What was saddening was the realization that, in time, we stand in emptied houses to learn we’ve never made a mark.
* * *
ON MY FINAL DAY IN Brooklyn, Shimon and I biked to Brooklyn Bridge Park, only a few miles from where we lived. Mostly we rode in silence, stopping occasionally for water or rest. It was late afternoon when we arrived, the sun retreating into the water, the sky a brilliant violet, a trace of summer in the air.
“Well,” Shimon said, drenched helplessly, mopping himself with a towel. “This is it.” He wrapped the towel over his head. “Can I ask a question?”
“Go for it.”
“Are you scared?”
“To leave?” A sailboat moved across the water. The hull seesawed gently with the wind. I felt an inexplicable sense of vicarious seasickness. “No. I want to start over.”
“Know how long we’ve known each other?”
“Since nursery.”
He gave up drying himself. “And you’d say I’m your best friend, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, “I guess I would.”
“I was thinking.”
“Yeah?”
His hands were deep in his payot. “Saying farewell to a sefer is easy.”
“Pardon?”