36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [76]
“It is toasty warm. I could have used such a defense against the elements back in frore February.”
Cass had a bad moment as the image came unbidden to him of Jonas Elijah Klapper clambering over the snowdrifts of Plotnik Quad dressed like a Valdener.
“Please be so good as to pull over at the earliest convenience.”
The Charlton Full Service Rest Stop was coming up, and Cass pulled off the turnpike and into the parking lot and turned off the ignition.
“In the zippered pocket at the side of my satchel you will find a large blue plastic bag. Please take it out and place this within it, and then carefully deposit it on the backseat. I know I needn’t tell you, Reb Chaim, that this shtreimel, which is Russian sable and made out of thirteen tails, represents an expenditure in the thousands.”
There was an answer to two of Cass’s questions, and to one that he hadn’t thought to ask.
“As long as we have stopped,” said Professor Klapper, when Cass got back behind the steering wheel, “I would like to use the facilities. I don’t know why they have chosen to make it such a trek to get from the parking lot to the rest stop. Please drive up to the building and wait for me in front.”
A young woman who was heading inside held the door open for the sad-eyed fat man in the splendid black robe and boots. Even though he waddled, you could see he had a great deal of dignity, and she thought he must be a religious dignitary, maybe a Greek Orthodox priest or a Wiccan. He passed through without acknowledgment.
As soon as Jonas Elijah Klapper disappeared into the building, Cass let the laughter that had been pushing up through his trachea come gushing out, gaining a new understanding of the cliché “to laugh so hard it hurts.”
When Roz’s laughter had finally expended itself, he found that he urgently needed to use the facilities himself, but he was nervous about leaving the car. It would be a disaster if Professor Klapper came out and the Lincoln Continental was nowhere in sight. Could Cass leave it illegally parked here and just dash in? But he’d have to leave it unlocked so that Klapper could climb in and wait, and he’d just been informed that the thirteen tails of Russian sable curled up in the blue plastic bag on the backseat represented an expenditure in the thousands. He compromised and left the locked car parked right in front, so Professor Klapper would see it when he got out.
By the time the professor exited, carrying a cone with a double twist of vanilla and chocolate ice cream-there was a Baskin-Robbins in the plaza-Cass was sitting in the car, fully composed. He popped out and held the cone for Professor Klapper while he settled himself into the car, struggled with the buckle, and then reached out his hand for the ice cream. He tiled several paper napkins across the expanse of his lap and tucked one into the collar of his kaputa and proceeded to lick.
They spoke little on the way. Cass had gone from resisting the awful attack of laughter-a sort of Zen laughter demanding to be laughed even if Cass didn’t want to laugh it-to being overcome by a despondency that was like feeling sick before any of the symptoms had appeared.
He thought a lot about Gideon. He thought about that first night at The View from Nowhere, when Gideon had told him to go back to pre-med. How would Gideon react if he were to see Jonas Elijah Klapper now? Would it matter as little to him as the remarks of a random philosophy student in The View from Nowhere? “Wovon man nicht knows the first fucking thing, darüber muss man schweigen?” That was pretty powerful stuff, and it hadn’t shaken Gideon in the least. Gideon was brilliant, and he had seen fit to study with Jonas Elijah Klapper for the past twelve and a half years, and he was as convinced as the rest of them that Klapper was on the verge of a breakthrough of epochal proportions. Who was Cass to challenge that view? Was he so influenced by the sight of Klapper looking ridiculous-but why more ridiculous than the Valdeners themselves? why more ridiculous than the Rebbe?-that he was ready to throw up his hands and agree with Roz?
That had been Roz’s laughter, not his own. He loved Roz, but that didn’t mean he had to adopt her cynical view of Professor Jonas Elijah Klapper. Gideon and the rest of the seminar would only have been awed by Jonas’s capacity for throwing himself so completely into another Weltanschauung, appropriating it so that he could understand it as those within could not hope to, reading it as he read the great poets, so that they yielded their innards to him far more torrentially than the poets themselves could have experienced, so that he might crisscross all the vast reaches of human conception and see its arteries coursing with the ichor of psychopoiesis.
And if he’d charged the car service and the leather boots and kaputa and Russian sable shtreimel to his discretionary funds, so what? This was research as legitimate as any, a measure of the creative limits to which a master like Jonas Elijah Klapper would travel, as daring an experimenter as any particle physicist with an accelerator-no, more daring, because it was his own soul that he offered up in the spirit of empiricism.
