“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come down.”
I was looking forward to telling Zach he was in league with Vadis with the surprise drop-bys. But when I walked through a turnstile in the lobby, its metal arms saluting me, I could see that Zach did not need his day made. He was already beaming like an idiot.
“Why do you not have ID?”
“You should never carry ID. The Stasi taught me that.”
“You, personally?”
“First, you walk around with a license, next thing you know, you think it’s normal to be asked for your papers, and next thing you know, you’re spitting in a plastic tube, volunteering your DNA to a government website.”
“It’s too early for this. To what do I owe this corporate sojourn?”
He pulled me onto a concrete bench with him.
“I have a present for you,” he whispered, as if the security guards cared.
He opened the flap of his messenger bag, an off-brand version of the one Amos had. I thought about how much this detail would piss Zach off. Clive having fancy things made Zach feel better about himself, but Amos having fancy things meant that there was a guy out there who had managed to monetize the same personality without the world thinking less of him for it.
“Et voilà,” he said, handing me a piece of paper.
It was a photocopy, grainy in the middle from where the bookbinding had sprung away from the glass. At the top were a series of numbered descriptors: （1） double nave, （2） southern vestibule, （3） sanctuary, （4） main holy hall, （5） western men’s annex, （6） women’s section, （7） women’s entrance hall. Beneath these was a floor plan for Congregation Beth Shalom on the Lower East Side. The stained glass window looked like a camera shutter.
A few months ago, I had a writer pitch me a story on “reincarnated New York spaces,” on the city’s cathedrals-turned-condos. The most famous was the Limelight, which had undergone several heart transplants over the years—from Catholic Church, to Andy Warhol’s playground, to purveyor of cheap gifts, to high-end gym. The writer encouraged me to imagine barbells resting where empty ketamine bottles once rolled, the spirit of tinsel in the sauna. That space in particular would probably turn over yet again, she said, before she pressed “send.” My initial reaction to her pitch went something like: What’s so revolutionary about buildings that have been other buildings? But I wound up assigning the story anyway. Radio New York was in no position to kick hyperlocal clickbait out of bed.
“Where did you get this?”
“Google.”
“Wow.”
“No, not Google,” he said, snatching the paper back, punishment for believing him. “I looked up all shuls below Fourteenth Street, and there were two that had changed hands in the past decade, so then I called up the Department of Buildings to see if either one had applied for construction permits. Then I went to the public domain collections and then the Jewish Museum. They sent me to the Tenement Museum, which keeps records of, like, a ten-block radius. Let me tell you, everyone’s incompetent, no one knows who has what, and those who do know treat you like you’re planning on blowing up whatever you find because why else would you be asking.”
“You do kind of have ‘anarchist face,’” I said, waving around his head. “Also, you need a real job.”
He shrugged.
I looked at the map, turning the paper around to get my bearings. I superimposed the soggy Golconda entrance onto the “main holy hall.” It was like a satellite picture of Earth, factual but devoid of spirit, devoid of the idea that a human gaze would fill the map from the inside out with experience, that it would test the map’s authority against its own. Or like reading a review of a play written by someone who’d seen it with an entirely different cast. The women’s section was now the conference room. The coffee machine was in the men’s annex. The elevator blocked a sanctuary.
“Look,” said Zach, pointing at a series of narrow lines outside the “women’s entrance hall.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a staircase.”
I knew of no such staircase. I knew of the hall and its confounding wallpaper, the bane of housekeepers everywhere. I knew of the visible staircase. I knew of no secondary snack staircase.
“Are you sure this is the right spot? Maybe all shuls have the same layout.”
“You really are a bad Jew. This is it. What do you think?”
He took a half-eaten granola bar from his pocket and started grinning as he masticated the remains.