“To stir your rage I would tell you to remember that you’re black when you do it, and for Rachel to think about being a woman and all that drek. And I would tell myself to think about the camp and my mother, my father, my sister, the whole list. But I know that won’t work. So, for all of us, scratch out the aleph, and while you’re doing it, tremble with the certainty that if you don’t stop that thing . . . if your fear of death and wanting to live aren’t as big as their hate . . . it’s going to kill you.”

Garfield looked at the clock. “We should rehearse,” he said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s a complicated ritual,” Garfield said gently. “We must do it right.”

The rehearsal turned into a kind of mad party. Rachel tried to join in, but she couldn’t. Little Tepel brought three bottles of brandy and they all drank and wound up laughing like fools. They made a large diagram of the five-­pointed star and practiced saying their names—Michael (Rachel), Gabriel (Garfield), and Raphael (Hawkins)—and lopping off a letter after each circle. Tepel sat at the table bent over with laughter. They were in Garfield’s kitchen. The window was supposed to be Ain Soph Aur, spirit, and the golem was represented by the refrigerator.

When they finished the circles, and Garfield taught them the incantation from Genesis backwards, Haw­kins choked with laughing, and she ran across the room to pound him on the back. Then, with the two old men watching, she leaned down and kissed his cheek and the sides of his mouth. Garfield blushed and said to Hawkins, “You have to bathe.”

Hawkins and Rachel stared at him, and Tepel nodded.

“I mean submerge yourself,” Garfield said. “A ritual bath. Like a baptism. The bath itself is called a mikveh, and women usually go. But so do men who have to be purified.”