The Smart Money Like everyone else in America, Ediss Rosenzweig had spent the last two days riveted by news footage of a ten-foot, four-hundred-pound clay monster rampaging through a plaza in Wagner, Kentucky, slaughtering gun-toting, torch-wielding white nationalists--a declaration of war or an act of self-defense, depending on which network you watched. Unlike everyone else in America, Ediss knew exactly what she was seeing. She was a Distinguished Professor of Eden Studies at Brown University, and the figure of the golem was central to her field of inquiry. Not the dreary protector--figure of Ashkenazi folklore--Ediss had little patience for that stuff; it all smelled like fur and schmaltz to her--but the golem of the Book of Genesis. The conventional wisdom was that this golem, this unfinished thing, as the word "golem" was usually translated, had turned into Adam the moment God blew the Breath of Life into his lungs. But as Ediss had argued in her briefly celebrated exegesis of the text, the transformation was not automatic. It was earned. Adam had to claim his humanity.
Invent it. Mold himself into a finished thing. Eve too. She was a part of Adam until she wasn''t--half a golem from the moment God created her from Adam''s penis bone, which was Ediss''s favorite lost fact of Genesis. It wasn''t a rib; if it had been, man would be one rib short. Genesis offers explanations for all the biological phenomena of the universe if one knows how to read it, and here the book is explaining why man does not have a baculum as one might expect, like monkeys and dolphins and bears. This loss is the price Golem Adam pays to gain the equal partner he craves, after God offers him the companionship of various and sundry beasts and Golem Adam rejects them--to God''s consternation, since He cannot fathom why a master-pet relationship should strike his own pet as unfulfilling. Abraham''s self-circumcision may be the founding covenant of Judaism, but it is a pale farce in comparison to the dick sacrifice endured by the first man.
Of course, first man is just as farcical. The Garden of Eden was a petri dish, a stage set. Outside, in the real world, evolution had been unfurling, unfettered, for billions of years. God had orchestrated the Big Bang six Epochs earlier ("day" being perhaps the most unsatisfactory translation in a book replete with them), cleaved the physical universe away from His energetic totality and in so doing sustained unto Himself the unhealing wound of absence that was creation''s toll. By the time God embarked upon the experiment that was Eden, the planet was already teeming with godless, natural-born humans hunting and gathering and f***ing and dying. They had evolved from the single-celled organisms God created during the Fifth Epoch and set in the primordial ocean He wrought in the Third. Adam alone was sculpted from mud--a perfect human with none of the glitchiness of evolution, a crash test dummy, a test subject God used to prove to Himself what He already knew: that He could not compel man to obey. That as soon as humans outnumbered Him, they would form bonds that would leave God out, and He could no more control the exuberant, flowering proliferation of society than He could that of evolution--not even here, in this bespoke greenhouse of sadness.
What Ediss had sought to illuminate in her monograph--which had been published by a respected academic press exactly thirty-four years ago, in the summer of 1988, and achieved its primary purpose of helping her secure tenure the following spring--was that the Book of Genesis was a horror movie. The victim was God and the monster was man. At every turn, the creation defied the creator, turned His worst nightmares vivid and real. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Life and Death was just the beginning--at least that was within the design parameters of the experiment. It was clothing that sealed the deal, made God want to throw up in the mouth He did not have. Adam and Eve looked at the leaves of a fig tree, conceived of a way to use them that was completely different from what God had intended, and then brought the thing they imagined into existence. They recognized a problem and they solved it. By themselves.
Together. Even a split-in-half, evolution-exempt golem in a perfect garden had demonstrated the ability to think for itself, to rebel against its creator, to discover intimacies and pleasures God could never know, then reunite its divided parts in a conspiracy to deceive Him. So what did the Almighty do? He threatened them with a world where childbirth was painful and death swift, where food could only be coaxed forth from the ground by the sweat of one''s brow and beasts ran fierce and wild--in other words, the world as it already existed, the world humankind was out there managing just fine because evolution had endowed it with everything it needed to survive. And when Adam and Eve did not capitulate, did not beg for a do-over, did not sunder themselves from each other in a mad yearning to return to God? He stripped away their fig leaves and clothed them in garments of skin to disguise their mudden golemhood and broke the meniscus of Eden and expelled them from its womb. And that is when the golem vanished, and Adam and Eve were truly born. Or so Ediss Rosenzweig had argued in The Golem of Eden, which had been out of print since 1991 but could be purchased for as little as thirty-five cents on eBay. A nice thing about Rhode Island was that it was affordable, and a nice thing about being sixty-seven years old was that you had been around since things were practically free. Ediss had bought this beach house in Narragansett as an associate professor, for Christ''s sake.
Three bedrooms, right on the water, plus the decrepit barn they''d turned into Lenora''s pottery studio. Nowadays, Ediss''s younger colleagues could barely afford to buy cars, and here she was commuting between a condo in downtown Providence and a waterfront estate like some dowager queen. It was completely unfair. Her heart broke for anybody pursuing a PhD in the humanities these days. The clay deliveries had kept coming for two years after Lenora died. Kept coming. That was one way of saying Ediss hadn''t been able to bring herself to figure out where they were coming from and call and cancel. Which meant that every time she arrived at the beach house she had to brace herself, because if she found a pallet of clay waiting for her dead wife she would burst into tears.
And then one blustery November evening: a pallet and dry eyes. Part of her had wanted to cry over not crying. The next morning she called the clay company and canceled. It turned out she had known how all along. So here she was with two hundred pounds of clay and--probably? possibly?--enough Jewish knowledge to make that mean something. People on social media, including a couple of radical-left female rabbis Ediss respected, were speculating that the golem they had all seen on television shishkabobbing antisemites with their own rifles was not only real--which was far from an accepted fact, because nowadays there was no such thing as an accepted fact--but a creature with some sort of ancestral memory. This was beyond the scope of Ediss''s monograph, though not beyond her area of expertise. At various low points over the years she had been tempted to write a kind of sequel, in which she might try to advance the story of the golem by solving the following equation: God makes The Golem and The Golem turns into man.
Man makes The Golem and The Golem turns into ___? Or maybe it was: The Golem defies God and becomes man. Man defies God and becomes . The Golem? The Golem defies man and becomes ____? Then Ediss would remember that she already had tenure, or that the Celtics were on TV in half an hour, and cast aside the idea. But if these rabbis were right, this golem was a repository of Jewish history such as the world had never seen. A walking holy book. A being who could open his mouth and change everything. And everything needed changing. He hadn''t been seen since the Save Our History''s Future rally, much to the consternation of the frenzied media, which continued to debate his provenance, whereabouts, allegiance, and authenticity as they replayed the same snippets of shaky cellphone footage on an endless shuffle.
They were obsessed with where he was hiding, but Ediss figured the smart money said he''d been unmade: the aleph on his forehead erased, reducing the word truth to the word death and the golem to an insensate mound of clay. And if he''d been unmade, he was ripe for remaking. Ediss poured herself a glass of mint iced tea and walked across the wide expanse of browning summer lawn toward the pottery studio, thinking about quantum entanglement. A game she and Lenora had liked to play was called Get Stoned and Explain Scientific Concepts Neither of Us Understands. Sometimes it was hilarious, sometimes profound. One August afternoon just like this, during the gorgeous, achingly bittersweet lacuna between the first round of chemo and the second, they''d sat out by the picnic table with rosé and manchego and shared a joint and Ediss had said, Okay, quantum entanglement, go. Imagine that you''re one subatomic particle and I''m another, Lenora said, swinging her leg around so she could straddle the bench and looking right at Ediss. I''m all the way on one side of the universe, and you''re all the way on the other.
But way back at the beginning of time, we were a pair.