“You poor bastard. Why call now? . . . it’s not Hanukkah or Christmas or Rosh Hashanah.” He stopped. “It’s Passover,” he cried. “You’re calling to wish me gut yontif for Passover!”

“Fuck you, Eli.” Hawkins laughed wildly because they would have had the same conversation if he’d talked to Pinchik every week. “I’m calling because I’m in Riverdale.”

“Rose . . .” Pinchik screamed, “Rose! We got extra kugel?”

“Noodle kugel?” Hawkins asked.

“Potato kugel,” Pinchik answered.

“I hate potato kugel,” Hawkins said.

“So do I,” Pinchik said. “You can have my portion.”

Cabala, Kabbalah, Qabalah, the words blurred as Hawkins and Pinchik had another vodka. “They can’t even agree on the spellings,” Hawkins said.

They pushed away the half-­eaten kugel while Hawkins looked in the books. Pinchik drank and waited. Rose and the kids were in another room. Hawkins heard game-show-­type yelling and looked up.

“Hollywood Squares,” Pinchik said.

Cabalism is of interest only to Jews, Hawkins read. It can have no relevance for Gentiles. Then it gave a short definition.

Cabala, it said, is a system of Jewish theosophy, mysticism, thaumaturgy, marked by belief in creation through emanation . . .

Emanation. Hawkins thought of comic-­book rays of light and advertising-­art sunrises.

The definition went on: . . . and a cipher interpretation of scripture.

Cipher as in number. So they believed God was a ray and the Bible was numbers? He asked Pinchik if that could be true, but Pinchik didn’t know either and he was getting drunk. Hawkins went back to the books, but none helped. He did find out that there were two kinds of Cabala: Iyunit, which was theoretical Cabala—the respectable kind; and Ma’asit, which was practical, and not so respectable because it was the practice of magic.

Magic. The word he’d been waiting to see, but as soon as they used the word, they disclaimed it. Cabala was esoteric, but not magic, not practical. But he saw a diagram of a tree, with circles at the ends of the branches to correspond to sections of a man’s body; the circles had names in Hebrew and the tree looked magical, no matter what they said. There were chapters on demons and angels; he remembered the word dybbuk from a play by Paddy Chayefsky; and the word golem because Ableson called Matt Breslow, who was big, slow, and stupid, the golem.

He read on and on. In the end the men who wrote about Cabala sounded as confused as he was. He closed the books, drank down the last of the vodka.

“Nu?” Pinchik said.

Hawkins shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“You won’t tell me what this is all about?”

“I don’t know for sure. . . .” They didn’t say anything for a moment, and then Hawkins asked, “What do you think of Jacob?”

“That’s a hell of a question.”

“Answer it anyway.”