Transgression Read online

  Rivka hesitated. She hadn’t gone out with any of the guys on the dig, although several had asked. She hadn’t come here to meet guys, despite what her mother thought. A young woman only goes to Israel to meet men or to meet God, am I right? And you already know God, so you’re looking for a man. What’s to be ashamed of that?

  Nothing, of course, except that it was wrong—a hundred and eighty degrees wrong, to be exact—on both counts. One reason Rivka had wanted to leave Berkeley for the summer was to get away from Stefan. After she tried telling him nicely that they weren’t a good match, he had spent most of the spring semester stalking her.

  The other reason she had wanted out of Berkeley was to take a break from God. Or rather, a break from fighting his battles.

  Ever since she had been a teenager growing up in a Messianic synagogue in San Diego, Rivka had been taking her lumps for God. Somehow, she had never been able to walk away from an argument. Four years of debates in high school, another four as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, and three more in graduate school at Berkeley.

  In the last six months, she had lost her fire. She had heard all the easy answers to all the easy questions once too often. She was tired of giving easy answers, tired of too many battles with too many pseudointellectuals, of always being on the defensive. Tired of her own questions.

  If God was in control of the universe, then why was her life so out of control? And why had he up and abandoned her for the last six months?

  When her father had offered to pay for her summer in Israel, Rivka jumped at the chance, even though she knew there would be strings attached. Her plan was to work hard, play hard, and take a time-out. A time-out from God.

  Or maybe she was giving him the time-out. A time-out for bad behavior. Whatever.

  Just for this one summer, she wouldn’t tell anyone that she was a Messianic Jew. Why bring it up, when it would only lead to an argument? Why not let somebody else be Supreme Defender of the Faith and First Tiger for a while? Let someone else take the heat. God could get along without her help for a few months, couldn’t he?

  So far, it was working—sort of. She had actually gone a whole month without alienating anybody. Nobody had called her a liar, a fool, or a phony since she had set foot in Israel.

  Which made her feel like a liar, a fool, and a phony.

  It also made her feel hungry for God. Not hungry for talk about God, but hungry for…

  “Hey, little sister, which planet are you on?” Dov asked. “Hallo, Rivka?” He rapped twice on her skull.

  “Sorry,” Rivka said. “I was just…thinking.”

  “Okay, fine,” Dov said. “So think. You have plenty of time to think, yes? You don’t have to decide right away.”

  Rivka smiled. Of all the guys on this dig, Dov had to be the safest imaginable. Like an older brother. And it would be wonderful to see Jerusalem again, to really take some time, to try to imagine the city two thousand years ago, when Yeshua walked those streets, climbed the steps to the Temple Mount, lit a fire in men’s hearts—a fire that had gone cold among her own people but had found a home among Gentiles. She wanted fire in her heart again. Real fire. Wanted it bad.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  Dov’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “So tell me. What kind of woman would your cousin Ari be interested in?”

  Dov shrugged elaborately. “She has to be Jewish, or my mother will kill me, yes? And she should be pretty, of course. Maybe blond? And tall. Ari is a hundred and ninety centimeters.”

  About six foot three, Rivka calculated. She thought for a moment. “Do you know Jessica Weinberg?”

  “Who Weinberg?” Dov asked.

  “Jessica. She works in Luke Morgan’s area. I think she’s what you’re looking for. Blond. Jewish American Princess. Adventurous. She’s studying at Brown University. And she’s a lot taller than I am—maybe five foot eight.”

  “How much is that in centimeters?” Dov asked.

  “A hundred and seventy-three,” Rivka said.

  “You’re very quick with the numbers, my friend.”

  “My father’s an applied mathematician,” Rivka said. Then she clapped her hand to her forehead. “Oops! I just remembered something. Jessica doesn’t speak any Hebrew—well, hardly any.”

  “No problem!” Dov spread his hands wide. “Ari speaks very excellent English. He studied at Princeton and MIT.”

  “Good.” Rivka knelt down in the dirt and picked up her trowel. “I’ll talk to Jessica at lunchtime. Meanwhile, we have a masterpiece to uncover.”

  “Very good!” Dov plopped onto his knees beside her. “But le’at, le’at!” he said. Slowly, slowly.

  Chapter 2

  Ari

  ARI’S CELL PHONE BUZZED WHILE he was crossing King George Avenue. He pulled it out of his pocket as he reached the sidewalk. “Shalom, Ari speaking.”

  “Shalom, Ari!” said Dov. “The ladies are waiting.”

  “I’m just turning onto Ben Yehuda Street now,” Ari said. “Where are you?”

  “Go toward the Hotel Kikar Tzion,” Dov said. “We’re in a little café out on the sidewalk. You can’t miss us.”

  Ari snorted. “Which means I will, certainly. Remember the first time you told me we couldn’t miss?”

  “And how could I forget, when you keep reminding me?” Dov asked. “Ah, the waiter is here already. Hurry, Ari.”

  “Shalom.” Ari snapped his phone shut and jammed it into his pocket. It was half an hour after sundown. Shabbat was over, and the streets had magically filled with people—tourists, students, families, couples. The night air was cool, with just a hint of a breeze. A good night to be alive.

  Except that his meddling Imma had pestered Dov’s meddling Imma into setting him up with this blind-date foolishness. Ari sighed. Part of him felt offended by it all.

  And part of him felt grateful. After all, you didn’t meet many women in the halls of a physics department, and Dov had assured him that both of the “ladies” he was meeting tonight were friendly and attractive. Ari only hoped he would make it through the evening without doing anything ridiculous. He hadn’t had much of a social life for years—not since his undergraduate days at Hebrew University.

  It was his own fault, he knew. He feared too much that he would do something wrong, so he usually wound up doing nothing at all. A man almost thirty-two ought to have a wife, or at least a girlfriend. But how did you do that? What was the magic trick? His Imma said he was too passive, and she was probably right, and it made him furious, but what could he do? Was it his fault he got all the introversion genes?

  After a couple of blocks, a bookstore across the street caught Ari’s eye. As he came closer, he wondered if he might have time to glance in the window. This section of Ben Yehuda Street was a pedestrian mall. Ari crossed the street.

  “Ho, Ari!” shouted Dov from somewhere very close.

  Ari spun around.

  Dov sat grinning at him from a table fifteen meters away. “Ari, I bet the ladies dessert that you would walk past without seeing us!”

  Ari shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “You’re a scoundrel, parking yourself just across from a bookstore. The ladies should refuse to pay.”

  Dov and his friends sat at a round glass table on the sidewalk. Ari studied them as he strode up to his chair. The tall one—that would be Jessica—was very pretty. Blue eyes and blond hair and the deep tan that Americans seemed to think so desirable. The other one was petite, with braided dark hair and glittering black eyes and honey-colored skin. She looked like a sabra, a native Israeli.

  “Sit, my friend!” Dov said. “Jessica, Rivka, this is my cousin, Ari Kazan. He is a very great physicist, although he is too modest to admit it.”

  Ari sat down, his ears burning.

  “Kazan,” Jessica said. “I’ve been wondering all week if you’re related to the director.”

  Ari was used to this question. “Regrettably, no.” He shrugged his
right shoulder. “Mr. Kazan was born Kazanjoglu, in Istanbul. Whereas my great-grandfather was a Kazan from Kiev.”

  Jessica looked a trifle disappointed. Then her face brightened. “Dov was just telling us about your adventure in the Arab Quarter.”

  Ari took a sip of water. “Which adventure was that?”

  “The time you saved my life, you meshuggener!” Dov said.

  “Ah, well this story gets better every time I hear it,” Ari said. He shrugged at the two women. “Really, nothing much happened.”

  Rivka leaned forward. “Did you really wade all the way through Hezekiah’s Tunnel?”

  Ari nodded. “All the way to the Pool of Siloam.”

  “Ooooh!” Jessica squealed. “That sounds like fun!”

  Fun? Ari hadn’t thought of it as fun. He had simply wanted to see the tunnel. To be Israeli was to be an amateur archaeologist. Hezekiah’s Tunnel was one of the most ancient unquestionably authentic sites in Jerusalem, a connection to ancestors dead for the last twenty-seven centuries.

  “The fun came at the end, mostly,” Dov said. “When we reached the Pool of Siloam, a crowd of Palestinians was there. One of them spoke to us in Arabic, and I, being a great meshuggener in those days, answered in Hebrew. Five or six of them tried to drown me.”

  “Then what happened?” Jessica asked in a breathy voice.

  Dov grinned broadly. “Ari broke some noses most magnificently.”

  Ari felt his stomach tighten. He remembered the cold fear in his heart, the sight of Dov’s twisted face underwater, the pain in his jaw where one of the Arabs had slugged him. Bloody faces, eyes filled with rage, angry shouts. He had been a fool to go on that expedition with Dov, and a bigger fool to get into a fight. Sometimes you had to fight, but it was never a good thing. Even if you won.

  “We escaped only because Ari could throw stones better than the Arabs.” Dov threw an imaginary missile at a phantom Arab. “He never misses.”

  Ari cleared his throat, embarrassed. That was an exaggeration. And anyway, throwing stones was not a talent a physicist needed.

  “Shall we order?” Rivka said.

  Ari picked up his menu, grateful for the diversion. “So tell me about your recent discoveries, my archaeologists.”

  “Rivka found a mosaic this week!” said Jessica. “It’s absolutely incredible…at least what she’s uncovered so far.”

  “The find of the season, possibly,” Dov said. “As beautiful as the one that was stolen from Beth Shean!”

  Ari looked at Rivka. “You’d better watch this cousin of mine, or he’ll be claiming credit for it himself.”

  “He was there when I hit it with my pick,” Rivka said. “He deserves half the credit.”

  Ari felt a little twinge of surprise. Sharing credit—that was a refreshing attitude to see in an academic.

  The waiter arrived and took their orders. The three archaeologists began an animated discussion of mosaics, and how important it was to preserve them, and the dangers of theft, and how each one brought new surprises to the art historians. Ari contributed to this conversation mostly by asking questions. He could learn more by listening than by talking. And besides, he felt just a bit tongue-tied. Jessica looked very pretty, much more so than any girl he had ever gone out with before.

  Finally, halfway through their frozen yogurts, a grin spread across Dov’s face. He leaned forward. “Ari, you must tell the ladies about your latest theory, yes?”

  Ari shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to bore them.”

  “Try us,” Rivka said.

  “What kind of physicist are you, exactly?” Jessica asked.

  “He’s building a time machine!” Dov said.

  “A what?” Jessica asked, with a giggle that made it clear she thought Dov was teasing her.

  Ari winced. “Not exactly,” he said. “I’m a theorist. They don’t let me handle experimental apparatus for fear I’ll break something.”

  The women laughed.

  “So your colleague is building the time machine,” Dov said. “But he’s using your theory, correct?”

  “Not even a theory,” Ari said. “Just a non-simply connected solution to Einstein’s equations. And you should call it a closed timelike loop, not a time machine, please.” He cautiously looked at the women. Jessica was staring at him, her mouth half open, a look of awe in her eyes. Ari hated it when people looked at him like that, as if he were a space alien.

  Rivka’s eyes glittered with interest. “My father made me read a book last spring vacation when I went to visit him. Hyperspace by Michio Kaku. Do you know of him?”

  Ari relaxed. “Oh, Michio’s book! Very well written, but no mathematics. Did you like it?”

  “Yes, it was awesome,” Rivka said. “But you’re wrong. There was a bit of math. He kept putting in matrix diagrams without explaining what they meant. For example, on page 102, where he started talking about Kaluza-Klein theory.”

  Ari stared at her. “You remember the page number?”

  Rivka blushed. “Yes…I have a fairly good memory.”

  An understatement. “And did you understand the model?”

  “Not really,” Rivka said. “I followed the main point, that the universe is supposed to have ten dimensions, or twenty-six, or whatever, but I didn’t see what those matrices were all about.”

  “I can explain.” Ari pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and began scribbling on his napkin.

  “Tell us about the time machine,” Jessica said.

  “It probably won’t work,” Ari said. “It’s based on a little model I cooked up, which nobody took seriously. We have a saying in physics: A theorist writes a paper, and nobody believes it—except he himself. An experimentalist writes a paper, and everybody believes it—except he himself.”

  “That American friend of yours believes in your theory,” Dov said. “The one with the very strange name.”

  “Damien West,” Ari said. “He’s an experimentalist from Northwestern University. I don’t quite understand why he has so much faith in my model. Dr. West is a bit odd, as are all physicists, but he is a very fine pulsed-power experimentalist.”

  “And he’s building a time machine?” Jessica asked.

  “A closed timelike loop,” Ari said. “He thinks he is building one. As I said, it probably won’t work, and he’ll go home at the end of the summer.”

  “But what if it does work?” Dov said. “Then you will very certainly get the Nobel prize, yes?”

  “We might have a problem in proving it works,” Ari said.

  “Won’t it be obvious?” Rivka asked. “Just take the Nobel committee on a guided tour of the twenty-fifth century. Wouldn’t that do it?”

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Ari said. “Now you’ve been misled by Michio’s book. To go forward in time is a hugely expensive project. You need near-light-speed rockets and other technology we don’t have.”

  “So what are you going to try?” Rivka asked. “To go backward in time? I thought the book said that was impossible.”

  “It probably is,” Ari said. “But I worked out a model last year, really very simple. It’s based on the Casimir effect in a strong oscillating electric field. You create a resonant shell of so-called ‘negative-energy matter,’ and it forms a condensate of quantum-mechanically created wormholes as a macroscopic object. 2 The very strange thing is that it allows you to go backward in time, but not forward. There might be some dangers in going through the device. Also, it would have some stability problems.”

  “What kind of problems?” Rivka asked.

  “If you passed through the device and it then collapsed, you couldn’t return.”

  “No problem,” Dov said. “Make two! Then you’ll have a down escalator and an up escalator, yes?”

  Ari shook his head. “That won’t work. The zero-point fluctuations in a volume the size of the earth are only enough to make one wormhole. If my calculations are correct, you can’t make two.”

  “So you might send the Nobel c
ommittee back a hundred years, but they might regrettably not return to give you your prize,” Dov said.

  “And what if they accidentally killed Mr. Nobel before he set up his prize?” Jessica giggled. “Wouldn’t that be funny?”

  “That can’t happen,” Ari said. “You can’t change the past.”

  “How do you know?” Jessica asked. “In every time-travel novel I’ve ever read, you can change the past. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be much to the plot, right?”

  Ari drummed his fingers on the table. He found most science fiction boring or silly. “God is not a novelist,” he said shortly. “You can prove mathematically that the past cannot be changed—not even with a closed timelike loop.”

  Jessica looked annoyed.

  Ari wished he hadn’t said anything. Wasn’t he here to have a good time? Why did he always have to talk about physics? It only ended with people getting angry at him for spoiling their delusions.

  “Look!” Rivka pointed down Ben Yehuda Street. “They’re going to do some folk dancing. Let’s pay our bill and go watch.”

  Five minutes later, they joined in the applause as the first dance came to an end. The lead musician, a short, bearded bear of a man with a guitar that looked much too big for him, stepped forward. “Who wants to join in?” he shouted in Hebrew.

  Rivka stepped forward immediately and joined the women in the center circle. Dov poked Ari. “Let’s go! You are coming, Jessica?”

  “Can you teach me, Ari?” Jessica asked.

  The last thing Ari wanted was to make a fool of himself trying to dance. He shook his head. “I don’t know how.”

  Dov took Jessica’s hand. “I’ll show you,” he said. “It’s not so hard.”

  Ari folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a lamppost. Why couldn’t he be more like Dov?

  The musicians started playing a slow, traditional folk song, Oseh Shalom Bimromav. Ari doubted that Dov had ever danced this song before, but after a few missteps, he picked up the simple rhythm, moving fluidly to the music, if not gracefully. Jessica looked to be hopeless. When the others turned right, she turned left. She watched Dov, trying to imitate his movements, but she kept getting her feet tangled.