7 Million Pounds of Nova
The clock radio went off at 5:00 am, as always. Mikey, swaddled in blankets, rolled over to smack the snooze button. At 5:09, it went off again, blaring an ad for Safavieh Fine Rugs. Mikey snoozed it again. At 5:18, Mikey opened his eyelids, propped himself up on one arm and leaned over to kiss Karen’s forehead. She stirred and smiled with the corners of her lips before burying her face in the pillow. Mikey shuffled into the bathroom and flipped the lightswitch. He leaned over the toilet, bracing against the wall, and fired a lurching ribbon of piss into the bowl. It was the color of dijon mustard. He made a mental note to drink more water. He jostled his member three times like a business handshake to shake out the dredges. Mikey recalled when his prostate was not his enemy, when Coco did not need a ramp to get in and out of the Mercedes.
Mikey slipped out of his clothes and left them in a puddle on the floor. He twisted the shower knob to scalding. He felt the blistering water with the back of his hand, pulled the rod on the faucet, and stepped in. He washed his trim body and thinning black hair, skipping over his economy-sized bottles of For Men soap and For Men shampoo in favor of Karen’s, which smelled like fruit and spring. He turned off the water and stabbed blindly at the towel rack. He had forgotten a towel. Dripping and nude, Mikey scampered toward the sink and pulled one from the cabinet below. He brushed his teeth and checked in on the crow’s feet forming beside his eyes. Mikey pulled on a white Izod polo shirt and jeans with black sneakers over white ribbed socks, then sauntered downstairs.
Coco was pawing at the door and whimpering. How selfish Mikey was to think himself the only one in the house with pee problems this morning. While Coco marked her territory on the modest front lawn, Mikey poured a cup of coffee into a Snoopy mug. After letting it cool to the temperature of his shower, he took four gulps. This was his favorite mug. Why do we have favorite mugs? Probably for the same reason we have favorite foods and first kisses and why his mother chewed toothpicks after meals. Our mouths can be very particular. He whistled for Coco to come back inside. He drained his coffee, then grabbed the Mercedes keys from the table and walked out the door.
Mikey stared at the asphalt driveway, wet from last night’s rain, as he walked the short distance from the house to the car.
“Mikey Luo?”
Mikey jumped and looked over his shoulder.
“Mikey Luo? Of Third Avenue Appetizing?”
Mikey landed on a man standing where the driveway met the road, no taller than him, in a white shirt, black coat, black satin yarmulke, payes, and skeletal frameless eyeglasses.
“My name is Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz. I have very exciting news for you.”
“Wha?” Mikey answered groggily.
“Mikey, today is the most important day of your life,” Rabbi Pinchas announced with glee.
“I don’t have time for the most important day of my life. I have to open the store.”
“You have been selected to cater the Messiah’s bris,” Rabbi Pinchas declared.
“Wha?”
“Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Back inside the house, Mikey and Pinchas sat on either side of the granite kitchen table. Mikey had a million questions. First of all, how did they know it was the Messiah? Well, the prophets had only been partially correct. The savior was not announced by angels and did not ride into Jerusalem on a white horse, looking like a gawdy sculpture built by some junta in a banana republic plaza. Instead, he entered Jerusalem announced by heart monitors and erupting from his mother’s womb. The child beamed white hot; everyone who saw him knew instantly who he was. The prophets had gotten his arrival correct in spirit, but it’s clear now that they were fudging the details. (In fact, some debt of gratitude is owed to the Tibetan Buddhists, who have searched for the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation amongst young boys for millenia.) However, perhaps it was good that in this instance the soothsayers sayed sooth incorrectly, or every baby born in Palestine for the last few millenia would have to have been screened for Messianic properties.
The arrival of the Messiah laid it painfully bare how balkanized the Jews of the world had become in their diaspora. Rabbis from Tel Aviv, New York, Paris, Marrakesh, Sydney, Addis Ababa, Boca Raton, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, and everywhere else descended on the Temple Mount to work out the nitty gritty of Messianic times: which prayers to recite, when to recite them, and grander theological inquiries as to who this precious baby was and how to thank God for him. Negotiations were poised to last an eternity. But the rabbis’ congregants quickly proved disinterested and impatient. Everyone wanted to know how they would celebrate the baby’s bris, and more importantly, who would cater it.
First, the rabbis returned to the Scripture. Reading of great feasts, with pilgrims descending on the Temple laden with sacrificial goats and bales of grain and baskets of plump pomegranates and sweet dates, they got it into their heads that the Messiah’s bris should be potluck. Imagining a gigantic spread of store-bought rotisserie chickens, reheated matzo ball soup, and white paper boxes of stale cookies, the people revolted. No catering? Who ever heard of such a thing? Of course, the guests would bring some food if you wanted, maybe a dessert or something. But it had to be catered.
“Which is where you come in, Mikey,” Rabbi Pinchas continued. “3rd Avenue Appetizing has been selected to provide food for the reception of the Messiah’s bris in Jerusalem.”
“Jerusalem? Like Israel?” Mikey prodded.
“No, the other Jerusalem,” Pinchas answered, sneering.
“Well, what are the details?”
“It’s on Thursday, five days from now.”
“Normally, we ask for catering orders at least two weeks in advance.”
Pinchas made a face.
“How many people?” Mikey asked.
“4 to 10 million.”
Mikey choked on his coffee, feeling Pinchas’s eyes move through him.
“Please, Mikey,” Pinchas said. “We can’t use a Jewish caterer, or every other one we didn’t use would have a conniption.” Mikey stared back at him.
Pinchas inhaled sharply. “We’ll pay you ten million dollars.”
Five minutes later, Mikey and Pinchas sped down the Whitestone Expressway in Mikey’s Mercedes. Mikey dug his fingernails into the brown leather of the steering wheel. Pinchas fiddled with the direction knob on the air vent.
“We’ve taken care of tables and chairs and silverware. Don’t worry about that,” Pinchas started in. “Five container ships are bringing them from all over the world.”
Mikey stared out at the gray roadway ahead.
“We assumed the fish would have to be refrigerated, so we’ve arranged for a fleet of cargo planes to carry the food,” Pinchas kept going. “As for the humans, every El-Al plane will be doing nonstop laps to get pilgrims to the bris in time. You can’t even begin to imagine the logistics involved here. Just think about the napkins. We need 50 million napkins!”
Mikey imagined a team of bulldozers moving through Brazil, clearing acres of ancient forest to provide that much wood pulp so the Messiah’s acolytes could wipe lite cream cheese from their chins. A bit sentimentally, he imagined monkeys and birds returning to the site of their old nests and finding a charred field. Then he imagined the damage a catered brunch for 10 million would do to the world’s fish stock. It would be a miracle if the Atlantic sturgeon survived this week. This baby boy was certainly not saving the world for them. Mikey changed lanes so another commuter could merge onto the highway.
Pinchas was still talking. “Moses and the Israelites had manna when they were in the desert. They didn’t have to worry about feeding everybody. But who are we to complain? The Messiah is here. Such a matanah, a gift, to be alive in times like this. We weren’t even sure if we should circumcise him. All the Torah says is he has to be descended from David and anointed with oil, so we did that right away. But who wants to snip the Messiah’s shmekel? What if you slip?” He laughed to himself.
Mikey looked through the bumper of the white Lexus ahead of him. He had not even told Karen yet. What would he say to her on the phone? “Hi, honey. Yes, I’m having a good day. Listen, remember that thing we saw on the news about how the Jewish Messiah arrived? Well, I’m catering his bris, so I won’t be home for about a week, maybe ten days, but the whole world will enjoy endless peace and joy and they’re going to pay me well. Speak to you soon!”
He began calculating the quantities. 7 million pounds of nova, 1 million pounds of matjes herring, 2 million gallons of cream cheese. Estimation was the most important thing in his business. He recalled when Iris Bromstein, a fickle but loyal customer, contracted him to cater her grandson Kyle’s bris. She told him food for fifty, so Mikey provided for seventy. But then, a number of distant relatives and plus-ones arrived unexpectedly, all with an appetite. When Iris finally got to the buffet on her grandson’s big day, eating last as manners prescribe a host to do, she found the buffet plundered. Though it was no fault of Mikey’s that the food ran out, he heard her diatribe against 3rd Avenue Appetizing and her jeremiad on the sorry state of catering. Only when he offered to do Kyle’s bar mitzvah at a discount, did he stop her from soiling his name in every synagogue and JCC on the Eastern seaboard.
And if Mikey’s reputation were at stake over Kyle Bromstein’s circumcision, imagine the consequences for Baby Messiah’s. Pinchas told him to expect 4 to 10 million hungry worshippers. But he knew you always use the high estimate and add a little. So that meant food for 12 million.
The car pulled up alongside the store. Opposite side parking was in effect so he got a spot right in front. Thank God. Pinchas had finally stopped chattering and Mikey opened his mouth for the first time since they had left Queens.
“Here we are.”
Mikey and Pinchas stepped through the glass front door of 3rd Avenue Appetizing. A jangling bell announced their arrival. Chinese New Year decorations hung over the cash register. The walls were plastered floor to ceiling with photos of customers. Most were fading to yellow and peeling at the corners. There was an old couple both in beige trenchcoats, a young ballerina, Derek Jeter crouching next to a screaming baby in a stroller, Regis Philbin picking poppy seeds out of his teeth, Mikey with Mayor Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion, catering his daughter’s wedding, Mikey with a whole smoked salmon on page B7 of the Wall Street Journal.
The refrigerator case spanned the length of the narrow store. Under thirty feet of LED lights rested an aquarium’s worth of North Atlantic sea life, fileted, smoked, brined, drowned in cream and adorned with onions, flanked by tins of their roe. In thirty minutes, a van would arrive with dozens of steaming bagels, spangled with poppy or sesame or everything. Mikey found the idea of an everything bagel funny. In fact, he had written a free verse poem about them, which he planned to use as the epigraph for his memoirs:
My Favorite Kind of Bagel
by Mikey Luo
My favorite kind of bagel
is the everything bagel.
The everything bagel
has everything on it.
It has poppy seeds,
sesame seeds, caraway seeds,
garlic flakes, and pretzel salt on it.
It has naps on the sofa in
the afternoon sun
and the first light
of dawn on it.
It has joy and sadness,
life and death,
war and peace on it.
It has green grass
and clear skies on it.
Yes, my favorite kind of bagel
has everything on it.
It was hot in Jerusalem on the day of the bris. Mikey was jet lagged and impossibly tired, but happy. The past five days had been brutal. Mikey’s phone rang constantly with calls from suppliers, falling through on this or charging more for that, or from the logistics coordinator (Pinchas’s friend Mordechai, who ran a shipping business) when a dump truck full of bagels keeled over on the FDR. He became like a general on the battlefield of the prep kitchen, calling out his orders: Slice! Stir! Garnish!
3rd Avenue Appetizing became a who’s who of nobility at the intersection of Judaism, civics, and cuisine. There had been the visits from the mayor, the governor, and the Secretaries of Agriculture and Commerce. The Rebbe had visited, a hunched over geezer with Metamucil in his beard, muttering to himself about kashrut. By Monday, the door was swarmed with reporters. Every tourist in the city came to gawk, attracted as they are to crowds in Manhattan like moths to a flood light. Soon, the protesters arrived. Greenpeace came to call Mikey out for buying tuna caught with dolphin-unsafe nets. Amnesty International had gripes with the use of slave labor on fishing junks. The Wildlife Federation took issue with the harvesting of sexually immature sturgeon. By Tuesday, Eli Zabar had been caught with a computer full of bomb schematics and a garage full of fertilizer, and Mikey was under 24/7 protection from the NYPD. Sleeping thirty minutes a day in his office chair, worry always woke him up. He had not spoken to Karen in days.
Mikey wore a navy suit for the big day. His underwear got sticky and bunched up in the Levant sun. The City of David was humming with eleven million Jews. Mikey had estimated perfectly. A Semitic ant farm whirled around him, with Hebrews of every stripe bursting spontaneously into exultant prayer and spirited horas. Shofars and klezmer bands echoed through the limestone labyrinths of the city. The snipping was performed at the base of the Kotel, with Mikey’s mile-long buffet table stretched across the opposite side of the Jewish Quarter.
Mikey and Pinchas watched the circumcision on a Jumbotron display amidst the throng of pilgrims. Mikey had heard about many brises over the refrigerator counter at the store, but always in terms obliquely tangential to the foreskin itself. He had never actually seen the process. It was underwhelming: the father, twitchy and ashen, held the Messiah in his arms. The mohel held a rag soaked in red wine over the baby’s face to anesthetize him, then a few quick cuts and the boy had consecrated his covenant with God. The entire city erupted in song. After a few more prayers, the Chief Rabbi led a hamotzi and invited the crowd to the catered reception. Everyone had already started walking.
Mikey’s serving table was immediately swarmed. Behind every wave of hungry acolytes came another phalanx. The buffet was under siege. The flow of people never stopped. Pressure built quickly. Mikey and Pinchas, at the farthest end of the square, felt it first. Too many bodies in one place and they start to move like a fluid. The boundary between one Jew and another disappeared. The mass of individuals became a viscous ooze. Mikey was pressed up against the wall, his face in Pinchas’s armpit, his feet off the ground. The squeeze tightened. Mikey did not have enough air to scream. His chest no longer had room to expand. He felt fire in his face and black ice in his lungs. The throng became even tighter, impossibly tight, and Mikey felt his bottom left rib shatter and puncture an artery like a thumbnail piercing the peel of a juicy clementine.
The final death toll of the Messianic Stampede was 17,421, by far the largest human crush in modern history.
