Erent didn’t laugh at them. His listened politely but at the end of Garfield’s story he smiled sadly. “You can’t tell me who ‘built’ it or where it is?”

“Does it matter?”

Erent shook his head. “No. Because even if I believed you, which I don’t, I couldn’t help you. I read about the golem in a fairy tale book and I saw monster movies when I was a kid. That’s all I know about golems.”

“But it was done. . . .”

“Obviously you think so.”

“Then it can be undone!”

Erent stood up. “I’m a serious man,” he said. “I follow Cabala seriously, with the hope of ecstasy”—ecstasy again, Garfield thought—“and of union with the Almighty. I’ve always respected you, Rabbi, and you should respect me.”

“I do. . . .” Garfield stood up, and a few of the people in the restaurant looked at him.

“If you did,” Erent said, “you wouldn’t have brought me all the way from the Bronx to listen to a lot of . . . science fiction.”

Erent left without saying good-­bye, and Garfield’s heart started beating with an odd jumping rhythm that frightened him whenever it happened. He pushed his coffee away. “Next?” he said.

“Sol Weiser, at five . . .”

Garfield looked at the clock.

“It’s only three.”

“Have some coffee.”

“It’ll kill me,” Garfield said.

“Then take a walk. . . .”

Tepel went back to his cubbyhole and Garfield walked east on Forty-­seventh, then up Sixth; at Fifty-­third he saw the Museum of Modern Art banner, and he walked the half-­block slowly, trying to think his heart into a better rhythm. He paid, went into the building, and sat in the gray-­lit rotunda, watching other visitors and thinking how beautiful the young women were now. Young girls passed him, wearing high-­heeled boots, their jeans pulled into their crotches. He grinned at them; little asses, he thought, so tight they looked pinched. The girls walked away from him down the long halls to look at beautifully colored paintings he didn’t understand. His heart beat in better time, and he leaned back on the bench, against the wall, and thought he dozed for a second, because he suddenly sat up, startled, his heart going fast, but evenly, and remembered that in the basement they were supposed to have movies. He walked fast down the stairs and pushed open the door. The room was hushed, like a library. A young man leaned over the desk when he came in.

“Can I help?”

“I don’t know. There was a play called The Golem. Do you remember it?”

The young man shook his head.

“And a movie. I’m sure there was a movie.”

“What’s golem mean?”

Garfield quoted Psalms: “A yet-­unformed thing,” he said.

The boy went to the catalogue and Garfield waited.

“Here it is,” the boy held up a card, “The Golem, French, 1936 . . .”