There Is No Other by Jonathan Papernick

Author:Jonathan Papernick [Papernick, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55096-161-4
Publisher: Exile Editions
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The afternoon sun shone brightly through the high prisms of Temple Beth Elohim, aiming its bright yellow light directly on the sheet-draped pulpit. Jimmy had been first in line by virtue of his discovery and he listened in silence as a Boston Globe reporter interviewed the woman in line behind him. There were hundreds upon hundreds of pilgrims behind her.

“I came down from Marblehead to see the Blessed Mother and to pray to her to heal my son who has leukemia.”

“It’s an image on the wood face of a pulpit. Do you think it will work?” the reporter asked.

“Of course it will. The Madonna has revealed herself. This is the gift from God that I have been praying for.”

The synagogue doors opened not a moment after 2:00 p.m. and the crowds swept past the bored security guards, whose earpieces were jammed so deep into their ears they might have been listening to an out-of-town baseball game. Jimmy felt breathless entering the sanctuary again. The sun blazed down like a spotlight, and his heart beat with anticipation for the sheet to be removed. Hirsch, the regular maintenance man, had returned from New York and was standing on the dais. He rolled his eyes and said, in an ironic tone, "Enjoy,” then yanked the sheet off in a spray of dust motes that swarmed momentarily in the white light.

“It’s her,” the woman beside Jimmy called. “It’s the Virgin Mary.” She dropped to her knees and made the sign of the cross with her trembling hand.

The image was clear before Jimmy, the sun’s rays seeming to penetrate deep into the wood, illuminating its golden grain from the inside. He saw how the darker grain jutted up and rounded at the top and sunk down and rounded again. He saw the impossible intricacy of its design and followed the contours with his eyes, and then he touched the image with his fingertips. It was cool to the touch, much like a high-school desktop or the lid of a coffin. The woman beside Jimmy muttered in Latin as tears poured down her face, and a man laid a bouquet of flowers at the foot of the pulpit.

Jimmy was overwhelmed by an incredible sadness as the crowd reverentially passed by and touched the wood, each person offering up a short prayer before moving on. He was overcome by sadness because he knew now that this was not a miracle, but a random image more closely signifying the years the old oak had been alive rather than anything of metaphysical significance. Yes, one could see a person clutching a baby if one chose to, but Jimmy also saw a baseball mitt, a leaning cactus and a somewhat deformed phallus in the jagged grain of the wood where the Madonna had seemingly revealed herself.

The image reminded him of the inkblot tests that the doctors at Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany had forced him to analyze before shipping him back home.

He had been mistaken.

Nobody else seemed to notice. The

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