Crime Scene
A new chapter...
For the last few months, I’ve been tweaking and editing the first half of my novel Two Pigeons Radiance. I’m now plowing ahead with writing the second half… To celebrate, I’m posting a new chapter I finished a few weeks ago.
—Yasha
PS: There have been a lot of new subscribers recently. So if you’re new to the novel…you can start here: Entry #1: The Job. I’ll start posting some new material or excerpts again as I go along…
Crime Scene
I was in the passenger seat of a jeep as it climbed up a dirt road. Boris was behind the wheel, a gun strapped to his right hip. We were in the hills above the resort, making our way to the spot where the sacrifice supposedly took place. The fires that had wiped out all the forests in California before the war were still visible — there were charred stumps and trunks everywhere. But the forest was returning.
The windows were closed shut, and we were wearing breathers. I had a terrible headache from the bevs and the drugs from last night. But spiritually, I felt great…better than I could remember. When I had woken up, Masha was gone, but there was a note on the table. She left me her phone number. “I enjoyed being with you. Call me sometime.” Now, as I bumped along the dirt road into the hills, I had that satisfied inner warmth. A very primal feeling now that I think of it…a feeling of contentment, a sense that everything is right in the world, and that the future isn’t so bad. I have this feeling after I have sex with someone new…a primal squirt of serotonin. Funny how the feeling is still there even if the sex is depressing and barely sex at all. I guess in the end, it’s about the intimate contact, not the quality.
I was only half-listening to Boris talking, his voice in my earpiece. But he was going on and on about his son and his wife and his quest to get them recognized as officially Jewish before his kid had his bar mitzvah. The fact that rabbi Moishe had been at his resort with Misha had set him off on this rant. As Boris explained, he had known rabbi Moishe and had asked him to officiate his son’s bar mitzvah…his transition into adulthood. But Moishe wouldn’t do it. Boris’s wife Larissa had been born in Ukraine to a family with Christian peasant roots. She wasn’t Jewish and so his son Joshua wasn’t Jewish, either. By rabbinical law, Jewish identity flowed through the mother so rabbi Moishe said the kid couldn’t do the ritual without going through a formal conversion process — a process that could take a year or more. Boris argued with Moishe, telling him that Larissa was essentially culturally Jewish. “She was partially raised by her parents’ friends who were Jewish. So she’s been celebrating all the holidays, doing Shabbat, not eating pork, all that shit since she was a kid. She identifies as Jewish. She is Jewish in her lived experience, dude! I told him that. I even offered to make a big donation to his shul. But…but dude, he wouldn’t budge…that asshole,” Boris said, gesticulating wildly as he drove. No! That Moishe demanded the strictest application of Jewish law to my son and wife but look at rabbi Moishe now! You see him on those videos? He’s walking with his head uncovered, no kippah…and doing some pagan shit up here in the hills! He abandoned his faith!”