Vantablack is “the darkest artificial substance,” the website claimed, absorbing an encouragingly precise 99.965% of visible light. He’d first read about it in National Geographic ten months ago, just as the bar mitzvah lessons were starting. Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical nanotubes grown on a substrate, each nanotube manufactured from pure carbon and each precisely 4,000 times smaller than a human hair. Applied like paint to any object, the vantablack coating absorbs light uniformly from any viewing angle. The object appears to disappear, as though a void had suddenly opened up in its exact shape.

In self-aggrandizing corporate-speak, the manufacturer proclaimed: “It holds the world record as the darkest man-made substance, with unrivalled absorption from ultra-violet that surpasses terahertz spectral range.” The manufacturer promised numerous applications in deep space astronomical imaging, cutting-edge optical systems for industry, “and the fields of art and aesthetics.” The green ‘Buy It Now’ button at the top of the screen beckoned him.

The manufacturer had painted numerous common objects with vantablack. The glossy three-part centerfold in NatGeo showed a piece of aluminum foil with the middle painted a perfect circle of Vantablack. He went online and watched the video a dozen times. The crinkled foil edges winked under the harsh laboratory lighting, but the center was a circular void, as if someone had punched a hole in reality. The void seemed infinite, and though he could fall into it and never reach the bottom.

They painted masks, statues, cars, someone’s hand. One videoshowed two masks cast from bronze. The unpainted face of one bronze mask looked vaguely like Vladimir Lenin. The other was a photo negative void of Lenin. Every few weeks, he would pull the issue from his stock of NatGeos and peruse the article on vantablack again. This stopped when his mother threw the whole stack out during one of her episodes.

He was thrilled and unsettled by the videos. His brother Jack walked past and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Talking to your girlfriend again.”

He closed the laptop.  

“She’s not my girlfriend. And no, I wasn’t even—"

“C’mon,” Jack interrupted, “we have to get going. The cab will be here any minute. We might as well get there early. You know she’s gonna be fuckin’ late pickin’ us up.”

He sighed and went to his room to gather his notebooks for class. The drive was fifteen minutes across town. Soon they were in a stale car driven by a gruff-looking middle-aged white man who looked too much the part of a suburban taxi driver. The taxi drove past the neat 1950s split-level ranch esof his neighborhood down broad commercial streets with bucolic names like Oyster Bay Road and Canterbury Drive.

The taxicab took them north to the older, tonier part of town. The generic shopping centers and shrill neon lights of post-War Long Island gradually yielded to the original and thoroughly restored village with its red brick train station and post office of reassuring vintage, the small shops clustered about them that advertised artisanal and hand-crafted this-and-that. He imagined what it was like 100 years ago, Gatsby’s Gold Coast, summers on the Sound and the girl Jay could never get over. The fallen leaves in their motley colors had already been swept away, leaving the tree lawns and curbs a pallid green and turgid brown.

Turning left onto Split Rock Road, the scene outside thewindow darkened further still as the sun set and the road narrowed. The cabpulled into the entrance to the temple. As they got out, the air snapped at hischeeks and hands. His eyes took in the squat modernist building in plain brownbrick, the bright halo of lights above its name, the winking red taillights ofthe other cars ahead of them. He felt tense and tired.

He had been coming here ever since the middle of third grade,four long years ago. His Jewish education has been an accident, the result of animpulsive comment tossed out by his mother one Sunday afternoon when he waseight and Jack was twelve. He was upstairs with Jack watching TV when he’d overhead them speaking in the kitchen.

“We really ought to do something for them, Walter,” she said, “Jack is almost thirteen!”

“Peggy, there is no way that boy is getting a bar mitzvah.”

“Oy vey, we have to try. What will your father say?”

He and Jack were called downstairs to the kitchen and told they would be going to Hebrew School. They decided upon a conservative temple in more upscale neighboring town of Woodbury, chosen in part to assuage his mother’s lingering insecurity over her treif German blood and whether or not she was Jewish enough, even as she was technically Jewish because she had converted in an Orthodox temple before she married his father. This reykher temple, with its sober-minded Rabbi and focus on liturgical purity (no music, services mostly in Hebrew) would give the boys a proper Jewish education.

She was reassured when the officious Hebrew School administrator requested the conversion paperwork; after all, Jewish bloodlines are matrilineal, “and they have to check those things.” His father grudgingly agreed to send them both, but worried about the school fees. Jack lasted about six weeks before it was mutually agreed upon by the school and his parents that he should terminate his Jewish education.

As he pushed open the car door, his stomach churned. Jack knew that he was to walk straight to the library to wait for him. The other boys had seen Jack earlier in the year and teased him for needing an escort, his creepy older brother, the one who’d been suspended from school three times for fighting and pissing in a garbage can. Jack had played-acted the walk through the front door of the temple for maximum effect the first few times, escorting him to class and loudly exclaiming, “See you soon, honey!” just as they got to the doorway.

He hoped he would see his friend Ezra, the boy who had only joined the class the year before. They felt an immediate kinship. He and Ezra were spurned by the boys who lived in the big houses in Muttontown and Woodbury; boys whose fathers were doctors and lawyers, who pulled up to temple in late-model European sedans, their designer athleisure wear still smelling vaguely from the leather bucket seating, their hair gelled and tousled just-so. Boys who bragged about going to expensive sports camps in the Catskills, whose winter coats still had the ski tags affixed from Hunter/Breckenridge/Aspen; boys who bragged about fingering Segal Tal in the hot tub on Saturday nights while their parents took weekend jaunts to the North Fork.

Their de facto ringleader was a boy named Eric – tall, comely, athletic, soft brown eyes the girls swooned over, wavey brown hair brushed up in a dramatic pompadour that highlighted his (of course) prominent cheekbones. Eric and the boys mostly ignored the meek, quiet boy in the backrow. It helped that he was turning thirteen in a month and hadn’t yet entered puberty. They towered at least six inches over him, these boys with sleeveless sports jerseys and wispy proto-mustaches. His diminutive stature and diffidence gifted him a relative inconspicuousness. They mostly ignored him, too inconsequential with which to engage.

The Jewish History class was taught by Mr. Kravitz, anengineer by day who claimed that the only reason he “made the one-hour schlep”from Forest Hills every week was because he lost a bet. Mr. Kravitz was homelyand forgettable at first glance: tall, portly, mostly bald with wisps of curly,gray hair that clung reluctantly to the side of his head, pursed and dry lipsthat fulminated spittle at particular points of his lectures, thick glassesthat steadily inched their way down his bulbous nose, eczema that speckled hisbullish neck and arms. He always wore the same denim collared shirts inwashed-out blue. He imagined charitably that Kravitz had a closet full of them,and like Einstein, was too engaged in his intellectual life to waste time andresources thinking how he might dress.

Mr. Kravitz’s lack of formal teaching experience and determined repudiation of the curriculum was only surpassed by his staunch ethnic pride and a trenchant wit he believed was unique to the New York Jew, honed by centuries of oppression and a pugnacious deportment fit for surviving the schtetls of Delancey Street. It was a legacy (he reminded them in pleonastic digressions) that stretched from Vaudeville to the Borscht Belt to the next streaming comedy special: Youngman, Benny, Berle, Caesar, Burns, Lewis, Bruce, Brooks, Dangerfield, Allen, Rivers, Seinfeld, Apatow, Stewart, Schumer.

His eisegeses – rapid-fire, prolix, and self-deprecating –were really thinly disguised rants about his personal life interspersed with monologues on the significant intellectual and cultural contribution of Jews to almost every area of thought in the Western Canon, even as the goyim never expressed their proper gratitude.

“Did you know that the best Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers? Would it kill them to thank us, or at least acknowledge it?”

At times, it seemed all schtick, but Kravitz conveyedit with just enough conviction to seem earnest. Kravitz was often late to class,invariably claiming that something had gone wrong with his car. It took him foreverto push the car from Queens, he said, his ex-wife got the wheels in the divorce,or that his mechanic was Jewish, too.

Mr. Kravitz often called on Eric and the other boys becausethey never paid attention. “Eric, if it’s not too much trouble, can you read the next passage? Then you can get back to your texting.”

One time early in the year, Mr. Kravitz asked him to speculate on the cause of so-called Jewish Genius, that preponderance of Jewish Nobel Prize winners, artists and entrepreneurs that Hebrew School teachers and zaydes everywhere bragged about.

“It’s probably a mix of genetics and culture,” he said quietly.

Mr. Kravitz cocked his head. “Go on.”

“Well, there’s some evidence for artificial selection at key points in our history – especially during the Middle Ages – that favored high intelligence. Couple that with always being an outsider, constantly living under the threat of imminent destruction, never taking anything for granted, a restless intellect that questions everything.”

“There’s a thread, isn’t there? The reinvention in everysociety we’ve ever lived in, but there is an immutable core.”

“I don’t know. It seems we keep evolving. Reinvent ourselves, reinvent the world.”

The rest of the class gawked at the two of them. Someone snorted. After that, Eric and the boys started calling him “Kravitz’s bitch.”

After every class, he would linger around Kravitz’s deskwhile the others shuffled out. He had time because his mother was invariably twenty minutes late, and Jack would be distracted by the porn he covertly watched on the library computer.

Kravitz would start by complaining about the drive back to Forest Hills, but he never seemed in any rush to leave. Their conversation flowed freely from music to movies to politics to more obscure topics (mechanical watches, old-school 8-bit video games, anime) that, before he knew Kravitz, he could only discuss with strangers on the internet.

He played the revolutionary to Kravitz’s staunch conservatist. Kravitz claimed to not get any music past 1983, so he emailed him playlists with songs by REM, Jay-Z, Radiohead, St. Vincent. They compared The Velvet Underground and the Strokes, Talking Heads and Arcade Fire.

“You have to check out Vampire Weekend,” he said. The leadsinger is a Jewish guy from New Jersey. He’s my generation’s Paul Simon!”

They agreed that while there were some great modern jazz musicians, they were merely standard-bearers for the immortals of the past: jazz had reached its apogee in the bebop of the 1950s. Later, Kravitz introduced him to Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder.

Kravitz rarely called on him or Ezra while in-class, leaving them in the modest comfort of the shadows. Perhaps Kravitz sensed that this would instigate the other boys. Still, Eric and the boys had inferred that their relationship was special and were eager to use it as a cudgel.

“Kravitz’s bitch, the king of the losers,” Eric said aloud oneday, and the moniker stuck.

This was his last few weeks of class, a realization that filled him with equal parts sadness and relief. No more heady tête-à-têtes with Kravitz. The boys would always be there, orbiting their world of facile wealth far beyond his working-class parents and their modest split-level ranch. But farther still was a tantalizing reality limned by Kravitz, one with a noble history that was his birthright. He was heir to a long line of great intellectuals and artists, a prince hiding in plain sight. He was imbued, however fleetingly, with a sense of wanting to belong.

Class was uneventful, and for the first time in memory, Kravitz had to leave right away for an appointment. He found his brother in the library and they waited twenty minutes for their mother.

In the car, he thought about his impending bar mitzvah. He would miss Kravitz and his silly puns, his labyrinthine brain crammed with agreeably useless facts and ideas gleaned from a thousand books, a mind with which he could debate, challenge, and commiserate. He hoped Kravitz was secretly happy, that his schtick really was the act it seemed, that a life in middle age had the potential to be fulfilling. Kravitz seemed propelled by his own hardened opinions if nothing else, pushing that car of his up and down Queens Boulevard likesome kind of Yiddish Sisyphus. Did Kravitz portend his own future, a middle age inertia careening into fitful old age?

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He got home from Hebrew School that night and turned on thecomputer hoping for an email from Tanya. At that moment, she texted him: “Howdid HS go today? I can’t believe your bar is six weeks away!”

“Good. Kravitz was in rare form tonight. He just ridiculesEric and the boys and they either don’t get it or don’t care.”

“I have got to meet this guy.”

“Yeah, hopefully he shows up.” He hesitated before typing:“Getting nervous.”

“It’s normal to feel stagefright,” she replied. “It’s aperformance. I can help you!”

Tanya was a gifted actor and singer. She was seemingly good at everything, even as she fretted about her familial standing versus that of her brother, who she said was “brilliant” and “clearly my parents’ favorite.” She was too confident and self-aware to fight with Matthew for attention in their house, so she focused her unflagging energies on the outside world. He envisioned her sprinting down the soccer pitch, arms bent behind her like contrails; taking the lead solo in Choir; winning the sixth-grade award for Most Outgoing.

She especially loved acting, and one of his favorite moments with her was when she called him in the spring that year and recited her lines from her school’s upcoming production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. She was always so free to be who she was, without apology or need for self-justification. He would read and re-read her emails, savoring the vicarious sense of freedom.

“Maybe it’s because I’m adopted,” she wrote one time. “Theyalways tell me that they must love me even more. But I don’t really care. It’s funny, you know?”

And she was so quick. In their last exchange, he texted her that he had grown three inches and had acquired a dark tan from the summer.

She texted back: “so now you’re tall and dark to go alongwith the handsome!”

They had met six months before at the bar mitzvah of Eric Ginsberg, a mutual family friend. Tanya’s mother and his father were siblings, but they rarely saw each other or their extended family. He was twelve and a half, Tanya almost twelve. He hadn’t hit puberty late and was only five feet tall. She was barely five feet and “always will be.”

They orbited around each other the whole night. He told her silly jokes and she teased him gently about his height. They danced awkwardly and left the floor when a slow song came on, too self-conscious to hold each other. The bar mitzvah ended too soon; she went back to Maryland, he to Long Island. He had managed to collect her email and phone number.

Three days later, he sent that first text message: “Hi! Remember me? How’s it going? The BM was fun!”

Stupid. Of course she remembered him. Doesn’t BM mean “bowel movement?” He stared down at his phone as the reply bubble instantly sprung to life, dancing agonizingly as she typed a reply. Eons passed in the few moments it took to appear: “Oh, hello! I’m so glad you reached out!” Happy face emoji. Heart emoji.

Over the next few months, across innumerable texts, emails, and call, they became friends. Confidant, muse, lover, he wished. He would conjure stories that he was sure to tell their friends years later, about how they had met at the bar mitzvah and first kindled the romance, became best friends.

That first spark ignited a pilot light that burned across space and time – the vast distance from Maryland to Long Island, the long years of adolescence – until converging by happy accident at the same college campus. He would be out of this house forever, and it wouldn’t matter that his parents barely graduated high school while her parents were doctors. Finally free and mature adults, they would consummate their love and be together.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

His mother had made the initial arrangements for the post-bar mitzvah party. After numerous arguments, they settled on a Greek restaurant in a strip mall on Old Country Road. The invitations went out six weeks before. He knew Tanya wanted to go, but the fractious relationship his mother had with his father’s side of the family made her attendance uncertain.

“Don’t worry,” she texted him after they’d sent the invitations, “I’ll be there!”

“Let’s hope so.” He almost hit send, then deleted what he hadwritten in favor of a simple smiley face.

He thought he knew the prayers, Torah, and haftorah portions well enough. They had finally bought him a suit at JC Penney for 70% off even if it was two sizes too big, but his mother waved her hand dismissively and said she would alter it herself on the old Singer, she couldn’t have her son wearing a schmatte to his bar mitvah.

The kitchen that they had started renovating three years ago was still not finished. The house existed in a constant state of disrepair, punctuated by half-hearted efforts at renovation and inevitably further delayed by poor planning, too little money, and too much indecision. The major project over the last three years had been the renovation of the kitchen. The workers had demolished much of it three years before, leaving intact the gas line hook-up to the ancient Amana oven and moving the refrigerator to the adjacent dining room. He and Jack joked that the kitchen would already be dated when they finally completed it.

His upcoming bar mitzvah forced his mother to move the project forward. The appliances and hardwood floors had only just been installed. The walls had been patched and spackled but remained unpainted forgoing on two years. In the wake of this work, their friends had festooned the walls with graffiti in permanent marker: a dessert island with a stick figure leaning on a single palm tree (“It’s better in the Bahamas”), the hands/head/nose peaking over the wall (“Killroy was here”), games of tic-tac-toe and hangman, a gaggle of signatures and doodles and symbols and dates, the gentle and persistent mocking of a household gradually riven by entropy.

Now he could only wait and hope that the suit would be tailored, that the kitchen would be finished. Tanya would see him again for the first time in almost one year, and in his worst moments he feared that the image he’d cultivated for her over email and text would at last collapse. He was short (puberty still not started) and ill-prepared (nervousness made him forget), lived in a shambolic house with no money, and what would his mother and brother say to embarrass him? Dos epele falt nit vayt fun beymele.

He realized with sudden clarity that he was just going through the motions of this mandatory performance – for her? the Rabbi? his parents? – because his vanity derided him. He had no real choice in the matter. The Hebrew left his lips with no meaning or significance, so it was irrelevant if he flubbed a line; besides, almost no one would notice if he did. This was all for appearances: to make his mother feel like she belonged, to make his grandparents happy, to make his parents feel like machers for once in their lives.

He became careless in his preparation, waiting until the taxi ride over to practice the prayers just before his weekly meeting with the Cantor. Errors crept in, the final portion of haftorah especially halting. The Cantor admonished him to practice more so that the chanting was smooth and error-free.

“You started out so strongly. Are you doing half an hour a day like I asked?

He lied. Toward the end, he made it a game of memorizing the passages at the last possible second before his meetings, sometimes moments before walking into the Cantor’s office. His performance was always passable, especially when compared to the Erics of the class.

He found his D’var Torah sermon more difficult to complete.The weekly Rabbinical exegeses were meant to take that week’s Torah portion andplace it in a meaningful context for the twenty-first century congregant.

Rabbis, using every speck of intellect and creative license vouchsafed by their maker, twisted reason into ever greater contortions transmogrifying Bronze Age fables of staggering violence and simplistic morality into derivative lessons that were nominally applicable to post-modern life. The Rabbinic D’var Torah sermons were at once clever (the moral content) and risible (the often tenuous relevance to the source material). God commands Abraham to murder his son Isaac. A blunt warning that ignorant peasants should fear an omnipotent God becomes a contemporary lesson on faith and self-sacrifice. The moral was imparted.

His D’var Torah was based on T’tzaveh, a part of the book of Exodus 27, a dry recitation of how the priestly vestments were to be created and worn (“You shall make a breastpiece of decision, worked into a design; make it in the style of the ephod: make it of gold, of blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen.”) The unnamed authors provided him no juicy intrigues to work with and failed to move the plot forward. The Rabbi allowed that while the prescriptive content of his Torah portion was dry, he had license to “have a little fun with this one.”

He wrote about the role of clothing in modern society as afunctional tool and (more typically) as a signifier of authority, vocation, status, and wealth. The Rabbi raved. He could make up whatever he wanted and the Rabbi would have been pleased, as he was good at giving the appearance of being engaged with the material.

But what if he blew it all up? What if he picked up the Torah and threw it in a heap on the floor? What if he cursed out the Rabbi? What if he told Tanya he loved her in the middle of the service? At that moment, he felt obliged to continue struggling between two equal and opposite forces: that of chanting dutifully the lines that the role demanded and subverting it and embracing the chaos that could liberate him. The former was safe, the later terrifying yet alluring.

He wished to coat these confounding variables in his life –his mother, the Rabbi, his brother, the Torah – with vantablack, leave a void in reality where they had existed. He could use the scientific method to see how it all played out. He could even coat himself in vantablack and watch silently. Was nothingness really part of an experienced reality? When he brought concrete nothingness into the world – the void in the shape of himself – his conscious understanding of it in relation to being meant that it was still part of the totality of life. He could disappear, but the vantablack would change nothing.

He confided in his brother in the taxicab on the way to thetemple.

“I don’t know. I want to do it. It’s just, I’m not sure Ibelieve what I’m saying. Like I’m going through the motions, just mouthing thewords.”

“So don’t do it. What the fuck do you care?”

“But I like that we have a tradition. Some sense of history. It’sjust denuded of meaning for me because it’s built on a myth. I’m a fraud.” Fear of disappointing them, he thought. The caged bird singing in a fearful trill.

“Nude? You’re readin’ too much of that Star Trek shit again.”

“Sartre,” he rejoined quietly.

“Whatevuh the fuck.”

“Do you think that T—”

He stopped himself before her name left his lips. Jack didn’trealize it.

He pivoted: “Do you think our cousins will come?”

“Who knows? You know the way she is. She’s pissed everyoneoff. I’m not sure Daddy’s even goin’.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

With two weeks to go, his parents were in the kitchen arguingabout the money again. He and Jack sat on the landing listening.

“We’re supposed to give something,” she said.

“Well how much? Peggy, we can’t afford it.”

“Aren’t you supposed to give something with the number eighteen in it?”

Chai, he thought. The letters chet and yud added up toeighteen. Jack looked at him quizzically.

“Why?” Jack hissed.

“It’s Judaic numerology. From the Gematria. It means ‘life.’”

“Why eighteen?” his father said. “What’s so special aboutthat? OK, just give them $18.”

“You can’t just give them $18, Walter,” she replied quietly.

“We can’t afford it. You had to get the kitchen done. That going to cost an arm and a leg.”

“What the fuck do you want from me! So people are supposed to walk in and see we live in a shithole? It already looks like Collyer brothers in here.”

Jack turned to him and smiled, the edge of snark on his lips. He put up his hand.

The whole thing was falling apart. His parents won’t give any money, the kids at the temple will mock him. The rabbi will cancel the whole thing. What will he tell Tanya?

“Peggy, I told you a million fuckin’ times. We can’t afford it.”

“Can’t afford what!” she yelled. “This is happening. We can’t give $18. I spent more than that putting him in taxis last month to get him there!”

Silence. He and Jack glanced at each other. Jack simpered, looking pleased at the enveloping chaos downstairs. He quietly despaired, wracking his brain about how he could get them more money. He knew they had spent a lot of money booking the restaurant already.

“What if we give two chais? $36. That’s reasonable,”she said quietly.

“OK. Fine.”

“But it’s really not very much, is it? The temple will saysomething.”

“$36 is fine, Peggy.”

“It’s embarrassing. What if we give $100?”

“Two fucking chais, Peggy!”

And so the matter was settled.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The next week, Kravitz lingered after class. He walked up to Kravitz’ desk, eager to continue their in-class discussion on the contemporary meaning of Pesach. In a rare display of pedagogical innovation and tacit acknowledgement of the fleeting cultural interests of adolescent boys, Kravitz had attempted to make an analogy between the origin stories of modern superheroes and the teaching and practice of Pesach as a binding element of diaspora Jewish identity.

Eric and the boys tried to usurp the conversation with a point-by-point dissertation on which of the many superheroes would win in a giant battle. It was finally agreed that the ten plagues were “pretty badass,” and that Yahweh would likely defeat anyone in the Marvel or DC Universe with the possible exception of Thor. He stayed silent throughout the discussion.

“Chag Sameach, my boy. I enjoyed the draft of yourD’var. Not an easy portion to work with.”

“Thanks.”

“And don’t listen to those boys.”

He looked away, not wanting to meet Kravitz’s eyes.

“You know you’ll find your people,” Kravitz said quietly. “Itwill take a few years. But college is closer than you realize.”

“Meanwhile, I have an eternity to wade through.” Kravitz smiled.

“They never found them,” he continued. Kravitz looked at him quizzically.

“The Jews in the desert. You’d think a couple million people wandering for forty years would leave an archeological record. Nothing.

“True,” Kravitz returned. “And no contemporaneous record in Egypt of such a large ethnic minority living in bondage for generations. No mention of Joseph, Miriam, Aaron, Moses.”

“It’s a fiction.”

“Likely.”

“Then why go through the act? It’s built on a myth.”

Kravitz paused to collect his thoughts: “You have tounderstand. Your happiness is not always based on what is real. Whatever you are feeling – euphoria, boredom, despair – is a function of what you believe is real.”

“If that’s true, then I admire the Orthodox. The born again. The true believers. To have that much certainty.”

“Yes. For them, God is real because they have no doubt. Good will triumph, justice will prevail. But we don’t have that comfort, do we?”

“If you believe that, then why come here every week?”

Kravitz paused again. “Because it gives me comfort. Happiness has always been challenging for me. At some point, the disappointments weigh heavily. I find comfort in the ritual. The shared history. That those before me also struggled.”

“I just don’t feel like I’m a part of this.”

Kravitz shifted in his chair. “I understand.” he said. “Andit may never make complete sense. But it will all come with time. It’s taken me decades. What about the girl?”

He had casually mentioned Tanya a few times and Kravitz remembered.

“She’s good. Great. She’ll be coming.”

“Your eyes just lit up. Wonderful!”

“She said she would help me with my lines. You know, act themout with conviction. She does a lot of theater.”

“Ah, wonderful. Mazel tov. Cherish that. And know that you are enough for her.”

A shadow darkened the doorway behind him. He knew from the time and Kravitz’s frown that it was Jack. He turned to Kravitz, waved goodbye, and shuffled out.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At night in his bed, he dreams of Kravitz. He is walking on some bucolic New England campus, headed toward a rambling old Victorian building and his first college class. Why is he here? It’s too soon. The door opens to a large lecture hall. Kravitz is at the front, shirt untucked, hurriedly organizing sheafs of yellow lecture notes. He looks up and nods at the boy. He is the same age he is now – almost thirteen – and knows he’s not ready, that they shouldn’t have accepted him. Surely Kravitz will expose this callow imposter. Instead, Kravitz glances at him and nods his head at the open seat in front. Tanya is sitting next to him. She looks embarrassed and pained when their eyes meet. She is exactly as beautiful as he remembers: short, bouncy blonde curls, her aquiline nose and thin, upturned lips, a bright green dress that highlights her slim frame, the modest cleavage of her small, firm breasts. She is also almost thirteen, but her air of confidence grants her acceptance without question. Jack is erasing the Hebrew on the chalk board and drawing genitals. Eric and the boys laugh from the back of the room.

He wakes up and thinks about Tanya in the bright green dress, wanting to hear Kravitz’ lecture, the genitals and the laughter. He is hard, but really has to go to piss. He waits ten minutes for his erection to subside, then runs to the bathroom. He barely catches the school bus.

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Two nights before the bar mitzvah, he wrote Tanya a long, discursive email that meandered through what he perceived to be (in his worst moments) the mundanities of his life: his classes, the World Series prospects for the Yankees, what he might do over winter break, how the bar mitzvah prep was going. He’d hoped that these emails, with their daedal asides and ruminations, kept her interested. He feared that he was straining to sound chatty and relaxed.

He loved science and admitted that to her in several emails. Still, he resisted long disquisitions on quantum theory or genetics. He hewed to more practical subjects, but here, too, he feared the quotidian details of his life were too mundane to hold her interest.

He ended this email with a bit of philosophizing: “It’s a big jump up in seventh grade,” he wrote. “Going from class-to-class now, not just one teacher. bar mitzvah stuff. Sports and clubs after school. You’ve REALLY got to keep up with it all.”

He deleted the paragraph. The tone was too patronizing, the all-caps too admonishing. Still, from what he could infer, she liked reading his emails. He imagined (or perhaps wished) that her home life was as banal and unhappy as his. Unhappy in its own way, but unhappy nonetheless.

“You’re so funny!” she had told him when they had met. “You always have so many interesting things going on it that head of yours.” She said that she enjoyed that about him.

He finished the email, sent it, and waited or her to respond. After a tense hour, he texted her: “Really looking forward to seeing you. Only 48short hours.”

No. He deleted it. Trying too hard.

“Really looking forward to catching up in 48 short hours.”

Better – more nonchalant, more noncommittal. He looked at the sentence again, deleted the word “Really” and “short,” and hit send.

An hour later, he finally got a response via text: “SO SORRY!” Heart emojis, a beseeching face emoji. He opened the full text, and as he read, he could feel himself sinking into the floor, through the house toward the center of the earth. He felt nauseated.

“I’m so sorry. We’re not going. My mom really got into it with your mom. So fucked up. Really pissed about it. Would have been so awesome to see you. Write me later? OK?” Folded hands emoji. Heart emoji. Blowing a kiss emoji.

“Sure, OK,” he replied tepidly.

He ran downstairs and, mittendrinen, into an argument between his parents about the kitchen.

“Peggy, we’ve got to get this kitchen finished. I don’t know how you think we’ll have people over with it looking like this. His bar mitzvahis in three weeks!” his father bellowed. “Just pick a color. Any color, I don’t care at this point.”

He practically screamed at his parents: “Are our cousins going to the bar mitzvah?”

His father glanced at his mother and he knew the answer.

“Why? I don’t understand. Why?”

“Son, listen to me,” his father said, “it’s complicated.”

“How? How is this complicated?”

He fell upon his mother for an answer.

“It just has to be this way,” she said, “they’re choosing not to come.”

He stared mute at her.

“Michele is a fucking bitch,” she spit out, “they’ve never given me any respect.”

“Peggy, please,” his father warned.

“I don’t get it! How do you always do this! How do you push everyone away?” he said.

“You don’t know what it was like. When your father and I were first dating, I would come over the house and they wouldn’t even give me the courtesy of saying hello. Molly and Michele huddling in the kitchen, ignoring the German girl that was dating their son. I felt like such a schmuck.”

“That was like thirty years ago. Grandma Molly is gone. Thisis the only thing I wanted. The only thing that mattered.”

“I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal,” his mothersaid. “Maybe you can see your little girlfriend next summer.”

His love was cute, a trifle, something to be salved with an ice cream cone or a cartoon-covered band-aid. He ran out of the house, slamming the door as hard as he could. It rocked back against its frame, and he though the saw the house shudder and convulse against its foundation.

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You can buy vantablack paint over the internet with just a credit card, the one she leaves in her purse on the living room chair nearest the front door. They’ll sell it to anyone and deliver it next-day. Not the original lab-generated prototype, of course, the one that blocks 99.965% of incoming light, but an aerosol spray version for the mass market that is within3.0% of the prototype specifications.

He starts once they’ve all drifted off to sleep, the way they do every night: his father in the bed upstairs, gnarled toes poking out from the comforter at the foot of the bed, his brother with headphones on in his room, his mother on that ratty burnt sienna couch in the den, the still-warm clothing from the dryer in the basket next to her, snoring lightly as soft rock plays on the cable guide channel that washes blue light over her face.

He begins with the countertop, even horizontal lines of black, focusing to keep his hand steady and level. The subtlest shift of his wrist as it oscillates back and forth leaves an unintentional double-coat in spots, so that the vantablack doesn’t lay down evenly and can potentially reflect back the track lighting above the sink. He wonders as he works if the ancient baked-on enamel Amana oven will eventually accept the layer of vantablack, its skin like a peeled garlic clove, smooth yet porous, gradually succumbing; or will it resist the paint, an oil sludge atop the impenetrable white enamel, waiting to be whisked off by an errant sleeve.

The paint looks so perfectly black as he sprays it on that it fills him with a drowsy satiation, like when he watches Jack tame the grass with the lawnmower, walking back and forth in even arcs. He imagines that with real vantablack he wouldn’t be able to distinguish the faintest outline of the appliances, that everything would be subsumed in perfect nothingness, a hole where the physical object used to be.

The smell is making him light-headed, so he opens the kitchen window to let in the crisp early winter air and grabs the jacket atop the sewing machine in the dining room, the one she just finished tailoring only a few hours before. He can still hear the Singer sewing machine stuttering for that the command of her hands, long and sure along straight hemlines, issuing in staccato bursts along the jacket cuff. She would squint and curse under her breath, stop the machine when she’d finished, and clip the leftover thread with her teeth. There, try it on.

He grabs the jacket and crumples it to his nose as a makeshift mask against the fumes. He notices that she hasn’t finished hemming the pants just yet; that would wait until she got up at 5:00am, just a few short hours from now. He finishes the stove, the jacket sleeve dropping at one point from his fisted nose like a thirsty elephant’s truck, spilling into the coated enamel and creating a long smudge across the surface that he must then recoat. He starts on the walls covered with graffiti. He pauses briefly at the carefully dated pencil markings that tracked how much he and Jack had grown over the last decade. Several hours and four cans later, the graffitied walls and beechwood cabinets are eradicated.

The second law of thermodynamics states that the whole universe will succumb to entropy, steadily winding down into disorder and nothingness. Would it turn to black, this last and final absence of color, with no light to reflect at all? Now he coats the walls with a slow, persistent hand, turning crème fraiche to vantablack.

The antique mantle clock on the shelf is obliterated in fifteen seconds. He knows this because he listens to its insistent tick as he sprays and counts to fifteen before the vantablack consumes it. She bought the clock at one of her antique stores, whole Saturdays spent driving along a chain of shops on the North Shore. Their basement was stacked with antiques that never saw daylight again, his father’s patience and the bank account gradually emptying out. She was always there to rescue them from oblivion, saved by her sense of posterity and unerring eye for neglected treasures. We just need more rooms, a bigger house, wait until the dining room is done. But her plans were never started. The disembodied photo negative of the clock ticks on, unaware it is a ghost.

He regrets not being able to get to the white ceiling, so he starts on the floor. It is easier here, the task aided by gravity and the forgiving arm angle. He covers the hardwood quickly, mesmerized by the vantablack that looks like black blood pooling momentarily where mesquite-colored planks meet before seeping into the tongue-in-groove woodwork forever. She had demanded of his father that they buy the real oakwood flooring, not that composite material that he said cost half as much and “only you will notice.” But she spotted the difference right away at the showroom.

He finally notices that he’s painted himself into a corner ofthe kitchen, the one furthest from the door, the last spent can of vantablack next to him. He folds his legs under him like those Chiangmai Buddhist monks in National Geographic and leans against the wall to sleep. His mother will find him like that two hours later, when the first rays of sunrise enter the kitchen window, four hours before he is to chant Torah. The vantablack greedily drinks the light – the appliances, the furniture, the floor all gone – replaced by a formless void. A few straggling rays of sunlight will highlight the dozing boy against the corner wall, the last and final redoubt against the vantablack.

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