But Rabbi, she asked. It was a Zoom “Introduction to Kabbalah” class, and the handsome rabbi with the slight North African accent was reading her question from the Chat. He had to squint to make out the print on his screen. She had written, “In this Kabbalic notion of non-duality, how are we to account for evil and injustice?” (Becca realized she ought to have personalized it. She ought to have said: how can we be One with the evil and the unjust? Or even more specifically, how am I One with Donald J. Trump?) Because the rabbi’s answer was altogether unsatisfactory, though adamant. He said the forces of evil and injustice were distorting reality, failing to see their connection to the Other (not to mention the Divine), and thus were able, in their blindness, to hurt humans, to hurt the planet. Well, ok, that made sense as far as it went, but how was she to imagine Marjorie Taylor Greene as part of the Infinite Light? Energetic stardust like the rest of the Universe? Despite Becca’s dissatisfaction, it was clear that the rabbi felt he had answered her query, and she knew follow-up from her would be a greedy demand on his much-coveted attention.
That was the thing, if you were Becca. You never really bothered anyone. You never asked for help. You never insisted that an argument be absolutely thorough and convincing. You went about your quotidian business, managed on your own, walked the dog, cleaned the cat litter, and at work you didn’t achieve perfection, but you strived for it. This put you head and shoulders above your peers, though no one ever noticed or praised you.
Becca worked as manager of the copy center in a vast Home Depot box store. As you can see from the profound question she asked the rabbi, she was not an intellectual sluggard, but she was happy with the simplicity of her work. There had been a time among the copiers, before she was manager, when the machines scared her with their jams and testy toner tubes, but given patience and experience she’d learned how to tame them and when to give up and call the company technician. So, when the then manager Casey Cooke died suddenly from a heart attack, Becca was promoted without ceremony. The techs liked her because she only called when necessary and she didn’t take her frustration out on them the way most customers did. Nor did she kick the machines.
Becca hadn’t made her parents proud. Her brother was an ENT doctor and her sister was married to a surgeon and had three gorgeous, curly-haired children, all with musical talent. Becca, on the other hand, hadn’t had a date in years, and had dropped out of grad school (civil engineering) ten years earlier because it stressed her out too much. It wasn’t the work, or even the competition. It was more existential than that. At one point, she just stopped seeing the point. So, she’d landed at the copy center as the Xerox Queen. So dubbed by her sister (it wasn’t a compliment).
Kirby was one of the kids who worked under her. With a face full of acne and dyed black bangs that were too long, he was exactly the kind of person she would expect to work in such a job; he’d finished high school but had no further ambitions. Becca could understand this. There was pleasure in creating beautiful copies, neatly stacked, bound with spirals or black plastic spines. Sometimes there was a rush order and customers were grateful that you could save their butts and make them look good to their bosses. But she’d misread Kirby. He didn’t take this kind of pleasure from the work. He was only in it for the paycheck. Which, by the way, was pretty small. Which is why he began to pilfer from the till.
Computers rendered the daily take in every department clarion clear. Becca had to count up the cash in the copy center coffer, and several times over two weeks there was a ten-dollar discrepancy that she simply made up from her own pocket, thinking that was the simplest solution. She told her underlings to be more careful, and that was that. Until it wasn’t.
When there was a twenty-dollar shortfall, and then a fifty dollar one the following week, Becca began to panic. She swallowed the twenty out of pocket, but fifty was a bridge too far. She brought the problem to her supervisor, Dave, an alcoholic with a lame leg and a red-veined nose. Since she’d never made any sort of error or complaint before, he waved it off, telling her he had her back. “Just don’t let it happen again,” he said with a sly grin. She had no idea what the smile meant but it was a little unnerving.
She started to watch the kids at the cash register with a keen sideways eye. That was how she discovered Kirby slipping a twenty into his palm like a card shark. Truth to tell, she’d unconsciously suspected him, perhaps because of his receding chin. She knew better than to dignify such a prejudice in her conscious mind, but she caught him red-handed, so.
Becca invited him out to pizza to have a talk. He was a little nervous, as he’d never been alone with her before. Kirby surmised she was more than a decade older than he (she was actually closer to two), was plain to look at, and he was afraid she was coming onto him—though she didn’t give off any kind of sexy vibe—but plain girls could be like that. They wanted things like other girls but didn’t know how to get them. He’d prepared himself to reject her politely, so he wouldn’t lose his job.
They drove in her Civic (a hand-me-down from her dad) up a steep hill that led out of the industrial area where their Office Depot lived to a gentrifying neighborhood with a hipster pizza parlor. Becca told him he could get any pizza he wanted. He loaded his order with meat. She chose a Margherita. While they sat waiting for their order to come up, he slurped his root beer through a paper straw.
After they’d picked up their steaming pies at the counter and sat back down, Kirby immediately dug in, folding a hot piece dripping with cheese in half before taking a huge bite. If he burned his mouth, he didn’t complain, but chewed with eager determination.
“You probably wonder why I invited you to lunch.” Becca had thought long and hard about how to conduct the conversation. Kirby glanced at her and burped out something that sounded like a yup. “So,” she continued, “There’s been a pattern the last two months of our till being short a couple days a week.”
“Hunh,” he said.
“Yeah. So, I realized someone had to be siphoning off the cash.”
“Well don’t look at me,” he said, keeping his tone even, undefensive. He widened his eyes subtly to look innocent.
“That’s just it, Kirby, I saw you take a twenty.”
“Impossible. I was probably just making change or—”
“Kirby.”
He wiped his face with his napkin. She hadn’t touched her food.
“I saw you put it in your pocket.”
He licked the corners of his lips, nodded a couple times. “So, am I fired?”
“Why did you take the money?”
He shrugged. “Well, mostly I needed it. I also got a tattoo.” He pulled up his shirt sleeve and showed her. It was a dreidel, the traditional Hanukkah top, and below it Hebrew letters that stood for “A big miracle happened here.” This created cognitive dissonance, for sure.
“You’re not Jewish.” It was more a statement of fact than a question. Jewish parents didn’t name their sons Kirby, Jews didn’t look like meth-addled skaters, and generally, with the exception of Becca, Jews didn’t work in copy centers, so her surprise was understandable.
“I am though,” he said. “When I stopped drinking, I celebrated by getting this. Cause that was a miracle for me.” He heaved a huge sigh. “Fuck me. Am I fired?”
“I didn’t say that.” She was still processing the Jewish thing. “Your parents named you Kirby?”
“No. They named me Menachem. No one can pronounce it, so I just use Kirby.”
“They named you Menachem?” She had no problem pronouncing it; she’d had a Bat Mitzvah at her reform synagogue and knew her Hebrew alphabet, but who names a kid Menachem in this day and age?
“We’re Frum.” That meant super-observant, the Orthodox whose women wore wigs and whose men wore big hats and sideburns nearly to their shoulders. “Well, my parents are. Personally, I couldn’t hack that life.”
This was so much for Becca to take in. Kirby/Menachem Jewish? Orthodox Jewish? Wow was all she could think. But she still had to address his theft.
“Listen, I wasn’t necessarily planning on firing you. I’ve paid most of the losses myself – there’s only $50 outstanding. I paid the $20 you took yesterday, and all the other tens and twenties.” He looked down, feeling guilty. It was one thing to rip off a corporation like Home Depot, but a much different thing to steal from an individual human. Becca was a nice boss. Case in point: “If you can promise not to steal again, and I WILL fire you if you do, you can stay on. I’d like you to pay me the $50 from your next paycheck.”
“I’ll pay you back all of it.”
“Well, if you can, that would be great.”
“It might take some time.”
She nodded, searching for any Jewish features on his skinny, pimple ravaged face. Context made it morph, and she started to see in the transfiguration some shared Ukrainian shtetl relative in his cheek bones, his dark eyes.
For his part, Kirby was relieved he wasn’t in terrible trouble, and that he had a chance to atone. Having stopped drinking was one great step toward stopping his enormous self-loathing. Paying back his debt would be another.
The next day, as a sort of thank you, he brought chocolate brownies to share with Becca and the other copy center employee, a Filipina college student named Jhasmine. Becca was a sucker for chocolate and ate two squares with her Starbucks. She thought the sugar rush would do her good, because they had a jillion jobs to juggle, and more coming in every minute. She snuck a third brownie, thinking she would just skip lunch. Who knows why all the orders came at once some days.
It was while she was uploading a particularly long document from a law firm that she started to notice she wasn’t feeling well. Not sick exactly, but a little dizzy. It seemed like time was slowing down. She looked down on her body from above, the way she’d read people did in near-death experiences. She was scaring herself. Was she near death? When she looked up from the computer screen and took in the store around her, the reams of different colored papers, the rows of office supplies, it felt like being on a carousel of color and rectangles. Why was everything packaged as a rectangle? It suddenly seemed like a crucial question. Was she having a stroke? She wiggled the fingers on both hands and scrunched her toes. Her digits seemed fine.
“There’s something wrong with me,” she said to Jhasmine, who was working the cash register. “I think I need to go to the ER.”
Jhasmine was alarmed. “Should I…” Just then Dave the supervisor walked by. “Dave!” Jhasmine hailed him down. “Becca isn’t feeling well.”
“I think I’m having a stroke.” Becca knew that the sooner you addressed a stroke the less damage would be done. She didn’t want to cause a fuss, that wasn’t her way, but she didn’t want permanent damage either.
“Should I call 911?” Jhasmine asked Dave. He was relieved she had a head on her shoulders and told her to go ahead. As she was dialing, Kirby sidled over to see what was up.
“I think I’m having a stroke,” Becca said, wiggling her fingers to test what she was saying. He dipped his head and whispered something to Jhasmine.
“Are you shitting me,” she said, then into the phone, “Never mind.” Jhasmine hung up on 911. To Kirby, she said, “You’re an asshole.” But then she couldn’t help it. She started laughing, and so did Kirby.
Becca, who felt like she was watching a movie from a great distance, was bewildered by this turn of events. Jhasmine leaned into her and whispered so that Dave wouldn’t overhear, “They were pot brownies.” Becca licked her lips, which suddenly reminded her of grapefruit segments, sour and striped with pith.
“What should I do?” asked Becca.
“Relax and enjoy!” said Kirby. That seemed unlikely, as the world was wildly surreal, and not in a fun way.
Dave was leering from across the main aisle like the Cheshire Cat. He’d had a brownie himself, and boy was this a different high than vodka.
“Menachem, Menachem, Menachem,” Becca said.
Jhasmine looked at her like she was crazy, which she kind of was, if only temporarily. Jhasmine herself was on a keto diet and had ignored the brownies when Kirby passed them her way. But not Becca.
And then, before Becca’s eyes, Menachem’s sideburns grew and curled, his backwards baseball cap turned into a yarmulke, and below a style-less and worn black suit jacket that replaced his anime t-shirt, fringes of a prayer shawl peeked out.
“Wow,” said Becca.
Jhasmine took her gently by the arm and led her to one of the copy machines. “Here,” she said. “This will be fun. You can man the Xerox and I’ll watch the desk for you.” Jhasmine got the job set up for her and pressed the Start button. Becca stood there, watching in fascination as the copier made its two sided, collated, stapled documents. She wondered at the magical technology of it and found herself lost in the chucka chucka rhythm of the paper being pulled into place, sent through the ink jets, and turned into tidy packets. She heard it saying, “Wouldn’t you like to? Wouldn’t you like to?” She thought to herself, don’t mind if I do.
Becca felt sad when she glanced up briefly and saw that Kirby was once again attired in skinny jeans and a Supreme hat. Wouldn’t it be nicer if he remained a man of, well, a kid, of God? He probably wouldn’t have stolen from the register. Not that men of God were perfect or anything. Sometimes they were misogynists, or bigots. They could even lie or steal. But then they were only men-of-God-wannabees.
As the job Becca was working on came to an end, Jhasmine, who was running things beautifully while her boss was otherwise disposed, suggested they all go to lunch.
“Who will man the desk?” asked Becca. Jhasmine said they could just leave a sign saying they’d be back in an hour. “Will Dave allow that?” Jhasmine pointed to Dave, who had fallen asleep on one of the more comfortable office chairs marked down for quick sale.
“It’ll be ok,” Jhasmine assured her. “Come on Kirby, let’s go eat.”
They walked across the four-lane street with arms linked, dodging a semi and an SUV, to get to the local Japanese grocery. In the back there were a few tables for eating, where they took their sushi. Becca was full of wonder at the translucence of the thin ginger slivers, the brilliant grassy green of the wasabi, and the coral of the plump ngiri salmon. Again, Jhasmine and Kirby giggled at her, at how high she was, but she was oblivious, because now she was tasting the sweet fish, and it was as if the divine were living in her mouth.
“It tastes like heaven,” Becca told them. Kirby dug into his California rolls with chopsticks, dipping them into the soy sauce and wasabi mixture. Jhasmine, on Keto, ate raw fish without rice. “Doesn’t it?” Becca asked them.
There was something in her face, in the glory in her eyes, that rendered Jhasmine and Kirby serious, so they tasted the food with spiritual curiosity. “It’s good,” they agreed.
Becca looked up at them, really looked. Jhasmine had beautiful honey colored skin and soulful brown eyes. And Menachem, despite the pimply skin which was frankly hard to enjoy, had a fragility to him, similar to her male cat. It made her feel like he was dear like a pet.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” she asked.
The two of them glanced at each other, and then Kirby asked what was so amazing. “How life throws us together and turns us into friends, into each other’s people.”
Jhasmine was thinking that these were not really her people, but she was far too polite to say so. And Kirby didn’t think he had any people. He wasn’t the having people kind of a person. But Becca couldn’t hear their naysaying thoughts, and she was brimming over with an exuberant sort of love. She suddenly thought of her rabbi, and Kabbalah, and the Divine Energy, and wasn’t this it? Wasn’t she swimming in it? And wasn’t she One with Jhasmine and Menachem and the Japanese clerk who sold them the sushi? Yes. Yes. She was. Now she understood. All the molecules and atoms were part and parcel of one huge universe and there were no actual barriers between the bouncing bits of matter it was formed from, animated by God themself.
Becca was brought back from her reverie when Jhasmine, with worry in her voice, urged her to drink some of her tea. Becca obeyed. The hot liquid did seem to bring Becca down to earth a bit, as Jhasmine had hoped. “We need to get back,” said the sober one among them, who was competency on parade. They took their last bites and sips; Kirby chugged his root beer. And then they made their way back across the wide street to the copy center.
Kirby was used to working high, it made it bearable, but Becca was a novice, so Jhasmine continued to run the show for the next couple hours; she set her boss up again with a big repetitive job at one of the copiers, and Becca once again got into the rhythm. This time the machine was saying, “You know it cannot be. You know it cannot be.” But what did a machine know? She didn’t take it to heart.
It was about three o’clock when Becca was finally almost back to normal. She was ridiculously tired and couldn’t wait for the day to be done so she could go home, walk the dog, heat some soup, and fall asleep in front of HGTV, a station she found comforting in its absolute narrative predictability. She was thinking about kitchen islands and the advantages of quartz when her attention was pulled to the cash register, where Kirby was working.
“Oh no,” she thought as she watched him make change for a customer, but then stick a twenty in the back pocket of his jeans. She girded herself with a deep sigh, and then walked over to Kirby.
“Menachem, Menachem, Menachem,” she said, not unkindly. “You’re fired. Please get your things and go.”
“What?” he said, full of hurt indignation.
“I saw you steal from the till again, and I told you, you’d had your last chance.”
“But. C’mon Becca? What about mercy?”
“What about integrity?”
“I thought I was your people.” She could almost hear her cat meowing.
“You are my people. Now get your things and go.”
And thus, she understood the answer to the question she’d asked the rabbi, which he’d not answered, but which was answered now: She was one with Menachem, despite his evil deeds. It was really very simple.
About the Author:
Meg Richman was a painter, then a screenwriter and filmmaker, then a High School English teacher. Now retired, she writes fiction. A film she wrote and directed, Under Heaven, was a jury selection at Sundance, and nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Two short stories have won honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and one is available from Louisiana Literature. She lives in Seattle with a son and a large dog, surrounded by the sounds of bird song and city sirens. Find her at: X: @megrichmansea, Facebook: Meg Richman, and here.
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