Grief Street

talkers I have ever enjoyed hearing.
    “When it really comes down to the barbed wire and you need somebody to fight for you—and believe me, blood will run in the streets one day soon—who do you want on your side? Who can you trust when your back is turned?” Marvil tossed out these rhetorical questions the last time I saw him-He was sitting behind his desk in the study, hands folded in his lap, a half-empty plate of noodles and chicken in tea sauce in front of him. I was finishing off a fortune cookie that advised, a polite boy is a popular boy. Which is exactly what all the nuns at Holy Cross used to tell me as a kid, only none of them were Chinese. “How about you Neil? Could you trust a priest? The president? The mayor with that demented smile of his? A captain of industry?”
    “No.”
    “God help us, though, you could trust a cop.”
    “A certain kind of cop, maybe.”
    Marv lifted a hand and rubbed his beard. It was a short black beard, flecked with the same shade of gray as the bristly, thinning hair on his head. “A certain kind of cop,” he said, reflecting on what I had said by repeating it. “I like that. I don’t suppose you ever heard of Shabbatai Sevi.”
    “Sorry, no.”
    “Don’t be sorry. Not so many Jews ever heard of him
    either.”
    “Who was he?”
    “A mystic during the Ottoman Empire, latter part of the seventeenth century. Shabbatai Sevi was obsessed by a certain Talmudic saying: the mashiah will arrive when all men are holy, or else when all men are sinners. That sounds contradictory, I know, but we’re talking Talmud. By the way, that’s messiah to you.”
    “How did Sevi figure? Good guys or bad guys?”
    “He decided on the preponderance of evidence around him."
    “Meaning, you’re saying he was a bad guy?”
    “More like a pragmatist in a bad mood all the time. A psychopath maybe, which in the rabbinate is entirely possible. But Sevi was not an evil man—well, not exactly. He had a cult, like anybody else who isn’t exactly evil. Hundreds °f thousands of people, actually—a surprising thing, since practically nobody today ever heard of Sevi. Anyway, he married one of his many female admirers, a Christian prostitute. So maybe he wasn’t so crazy? Never mind about his sex life. He taught something he called the Doctrine of Universal Sin.”
    “Which is?”
    “Shabbatai Sevi had a big idea how the world then was eyen more of a godforsaken sinkhole than it is today. He asked himself. So where the hell is God when you need?” Marv laughed. “I’m not saying those were the exact words, but you get the picture.”
    I said I did.
    “Sevi figures the world’s an armpit because God is sick a dog, too weak to do anything about plagues and locusts and raining toads and all the rest of it. God needs a doctor, you see. He’s wounded bad. Hell’s bells—God needs surgery already! So who’s going to be God’s physician?”
    “That I don’t know,” I said. “But it reminds me of a joke.”
    “So knock-knock already.”
    “What’s the difference between a surgeon and God?”
    “What?”
    “God knows he’s not a surgeon.”
    Marv laughed and said, “My brother the cardiologist, I got to tell him that one.” He actually wrote down my joke on a notepad. After which he returned to the matter of Shabbatai Sevi, a psycho-mystic evaporated in time.
    “Who can heal a wounded God?” Marv asked. “Who can heal the world?” Rabbis and Jesuit priests, I have noticed, enjoy telling us things by posing riddles. “A holy man? An army of holy men? But even holy men are mortals, and aren’t mortals weaker than supernatural beings? What is man but a hemophiliac?”
    “You’re saying if God is a patient, he needs a doctor stronger than he is.”
    “But, can there be such a doctor?”
    I said something about this being altogether too Talmudic for an ex-choirboy such as myself.

    “Like I mentioned, though, Sevi had a theory—the Doctrine of Universal Sin.” Marvin picked open his own fortune cookie. He read the slip of paper inside, shrugged, dropped it to his desk for me to see. “Here’s the way he saw it: there is nobody more powerful than God, but there is something equal to His power. What would that be?”
    Anybody who ever crossed the threshold of Holy Cross School knows the answer to that one, especially if they ever sat in Sister Bertice’s classroom. “Evil,” I promptly said. Whichever pole of the hereafter was now her home, I felt the late