Standing on a small stone, Ilan flattens his palm against the cliff rising above the carriage road. Horizontal striations create roofs and ledges. From the smaller ledges, gnarled, bonsai cypresses sprout. Full trees rise out of the largest. Behind him, sitting on a low stone wall that separates the carriage road from a steep wooded hillside stretching down to the Hudson River's plains, his wife rifles through her pack, a rustling that harmonizes with that of fallen leaves caught in the wind. Once there was a before, he thinks. A before in which this cliff was made of gray rock that hewn to blocks could build the Wailing Wall. Once there was a before; and the words are abstract. He tilts his head as if to examine the eighty-foot climb above. The words are sad in the abstract. The concrete events -- a shooting in Tel Aviv; an escape to New York City; leaving the derech, the path of righteousness -- are, well, concrete. Wailing Wall, he thinks. As at that famous relic, tufts of vegetation fracture the cliff's conglomerate rock. I have a nostalgia for a period in which I had a nostalgia, he mouths. The pain he feels is not for the passion with which he once prayed at the last standing wall of the old temple in Jerusalem, but for the young man walking whole Manhattan neighborhoods in a summer evening, awkward in his new secularism. It's for his wonder at junk stores on Mulberry spiked with memories of the Old City's Shuk, as if lower Manhattan's streets were equal exchange for stone alleyways two millennium old, a few stores selling knockoff watches and cheap baseball hats as colorful as a place where bins of fish heads divided crates of fresh eggs from street cobblers. He looks over at the blue-helmeted woman who's begun scaling Horseman. She moves quickly, placing her hands and feet precisely in seams and on small protrusions. His tilts his head back further still to follow her ever-higher ascent and suddenly he loses his balance, steps backwards to stay standing. He wonders if he isn't maybe too...too sick? Too sick to climb? No. Too something, what something? Scared? Too something, too drawn to the twenty-three-year-old wandering the windswept concrete fissures of lower Manhattan, chilly in his first real suit, desperate for the warmth of a bar, of a strange woman's smile. Too whatever, scared, yes, but off-balance really. Too off-balance to climb the "hard short thing next to Horseman" his wife mentioned over their omelets' darkening remains. Blue-helmet told him its name, Apoplexy. But knowing what to call the collection of minute ledges and tiny cracks that constitute a route up this section of the cliff doesn't make him feel much better about leaving the ground. He craves a cold or the flu, an emergency call from work or a car accident on the S-curves below, a sudden intervention and detention by Homeland Security.
