The Golems of Gotham by Thane Rosenbaum

Author:Thane Rosenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Each of the Golems was experiencing this new lease on life without giving any thought to the possibility of eviction. They made decisions and acted swiftly, not knowing how long this was going to last. They only knew that Ariel had given them yet another gift, and they were not going to wait around to one day discover their time was up once again. Jerzy returned to his blade days with an audaciousness that made a mockery of safe sex. But the others were equally active.

Lothar’s last job before he retired to Miami Beach had been as a manufacturer of textile equipment in New York. With that particularly unemotional line of work, it is surprising that his real interest was actually in psychotherapy. Not that he had ever pursued formal training in the mental health profession. In fact, given his own exit from this world, it seemed unlikely that he possessed a natural gift for assisting others with their emotional problems. Yet Lothar decided to spend his newly bought time as a Manhattan-based psychotherapist.

His very first patient was an anorexic fashion model with a billboard on Times Square whose self-image had no greater density than an editorial page out of French Vogue. She soon became his most afflicted patient, the one he wanted to rescue the most. The irony of having a Holocaust survivor—a former inmate of a death camp, no less—trying to cure an anorexic was not lost on Lothar. How do you explain to someone who lives in a time of abundance that food was meant to be eaten, that it shouldn’t wind up as a weapon in a fight with oneself? It is absurdly sinful, wasteful, and paradoxically self-indulgent to deprive the body of what it needs to live.

The modern world luxuriates in trendy emotional problems—the convoluted interplay of external excess and internal privation. The underlying pain is real, but the self-help remedy is overtly sabotaging. Only in a land of plenty is it possible, and acceptable, to send messages of distress by way of a hunger strike. The only thing that enters or exits the mouth is the primal scream—and an occasional bulimic barf.

“You choose not to eat, and in doing so, you exert the only power you think you have,” Lothar counseled her calmly, delicately.

His office was on West Eighty-fifth; his manners more Jungian than quintessential Freud. He sat in a sloping black leather recliner— metal frame, postmodern design—a chair with a sofa complex. There was a notepad in his hand, but he hadn’t written anything on it yet. His white beard was rough and tangled, like the growth in an untraveled forest. There were unframed diplomas and medical certificates Scotch-taped to the wall, the parchments curling at each corner. His name was penciled in fancy calligraphy. A vagrant setup perhaps suggesting a new practice, or a mere apprenticeship. At any moment he might get called back to the other side, leaving his needy patients hanging—but hopefully not from a noose.

“It is the only power you think you have, but you are turning it against yourself.

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