Yesteryear Fiction

What You Are I Was
(Part 9 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


I held his coat for him as he squirmed his way under the machine, unconcerned by the dusty, plaster-flecked floor. “It can be unpredictable,” he said, his voice as clear and un-echoed as if he were by my side, though he was up to his waist in oily gears, pipes, and cogs, under a vast and complicated mass of mechanisms and scriptures. The oil and paper smell of the machine filled the room. “Why don’t you give it a turn?” The pipes and gears of the machine reflected his face upwards, bouncing it off each component to a metallic reflection spread across a hundred little surfaces above the spools, like the image in a rain-dimpled pond. He was smiling, the expression fractured and distorted, but still discernible. I wondered if he could see me too, if my reflection was being carried back down that same twisted route.

I hung his coat on the doorknob and turned the crank, the metal warm under my hands. After a moment of clanks and creaks as pistons began to pump and gears to turn, the prayer wheels started to spin. My Predecessor slid out of the machine. There was oil on his face and hands, but no dust on the back of his shirt or pants as he took back his coat. I stopped turning, and the machine kept moving for another moment or two as before, the scrolls turning gently, slower and slower as the gears ground to a stop. When they did, my Predecessor stoked one hand over a piece of the metal frame, as if calming an agitated pet.

“May I ask you a question?” I said.

“If you like,” he said, his hand lingering on the side of the machine. “I can’t promise a decent answer. I’m better at asking questions than answering them, myself.” The reply surprised me. He had asked me so few questions, in all the time I’d known him. I do not know him very well at all, I thought.

“Please don’t be offended,” I said, a worrying introduction, I knew, “but I just wondered,” I floundered for a moment, trying to find a phrasing that did not sound either patronizing or stupid. “Do you really believe in these gods? Or that they can hear when a machine prays to them?”

He put his coat on, removed a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the oil smears from his face. When he lowered the handkerchief, his expression was serious. “I used to do this job myself,” he said, walking up the stairs. “And I find that I’m not as well suited to worship as I might be. But no god, nothing that’s ever been or dreamed of being a god, ought be left without a single child. They might prefer that worshipper to have a true soul, but this arrangement is better than nothing.”

Long training as an academic had taught me to notice when someone had avoided answering a question. “But if no one else is worshipping them,” I said, following him up the stairs, “isn’t it for a reason? What good does any of this do?” And why do I keep sending them prayers, I thought, when I expect and receive nothing from them? Why are the dead gods and my Predecessor the only ones in a month who have heard me speak while I give voice to the prayers of a silent machine? I thought of my dream, and felt a sudden urge to go back down to the cellar, tear out the prayers, and run from the Temple as fast as I could. Or no, I thought, I would take out each scroll, carefully, tenderly, then smash the machine to pieces, and walk away, let the gods and me go our separate ways, and never look for them again. Let someone who cared for them pray, but otherwise leave them in peace while their scrolls, untouched, unread, and unturned, crumbled into the dust on the cellar floor. Forget my unfinished, useless degree, and stop praying for something to pray to. The thought suddenly came to my mind, irrelevant and unexpected, that I could have been living with Lisa right now, instead of that clanking mass of religion and metal.

We reached the ground floor of the old storefront. I could tell it was still raining outside from the tapping sound that barely penetrated the room, though I couldn’t see through the boarded-up windows. I would need to inspect the machine for rust, I reminded myself, if damp seeped into the cellar. “What good?” he repeated. “None at all, to anyone but themselves, I suppose. For now, it is enough that they continue to be reminded that they exist, to hear their own names spoken, even if only on mechanized parchment. There may be a use for them someday, of course. You’re all they have,” he said. “You are God to countless gods, but it’s them you’re doing it for, not you.” He stopped, and shook his head. “You’re obviously a far better person than I,” he added, taking his hat from the stand by the door, and setting his hand on the doorknob. “Until next week,” he said. “You’re doing a most satisfactory job here.”

I almost stopped him before he could go, wanting to ask him why he wouldn’t tell me more, why he stopped being God to gods, what that has made him now, and what it will make me, but I could not believe, after all the unsatisfactory answers he had given me, that asking would do any good. He turned to give me one final nod. I returned it, dipping my head slightly, just enough to see that the beneath the layer of goosebumps that had emerged on my arms when the door opened, the bare skin bore the faintest reflection of my Predecessor standing in the doorway.

He stepped out into the rain. It spotted his hat and his dark coat, and I saw his image in every droplet as it fell. The drops carried the reflection down with them, spilling it onto the pavement as he walked away, the door swinging shut behind him. I caught the door before it could slam, hoping to call him back, but he kept walking, and I could think of nothing to say. In the last glimpse I caught of him, striding across the damp sidewalk, I saw his feet as they crossed the puddles, and I was sure, for a single moment, that he did not break the surface of the water. I never wanted to be God, I thought. I was hoping that someone would be a God for me. I almost spoke the words aloud, but he was gone before I could say anything, and I was left staring out at the street, empty except for the windblown rain. I let the door fall shut and stepped back into the Temple, where beneath my feet hundreds of sleeping, insatiable gods were waiting for me.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 8 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


I was waiting for my Predecessor one Tuesday afternoon, two days after calling him to report that a scroll had been attacked by mice during the night. Since I stopped going in to see my advisor, my Predecessor had become the only person I really spoke with on a regular basis, and I was looking forward to seeing him. I was on the ground floor, where, behind the boarded-up windows of the storefront, I performed all of my duties that did not involve the machine. I had just sat down to burn a stick of incense. It was the kind generally employed to mask the smell of marijuana, but I doubted whomever I was burning it to would mind.

I heard the expected knock at the door, and left the incense smoldering in an ashtray as I got up to answer it. My Predecessor came in with his usual solemn nod, bringing with him the smell of impending rain from outside. By the time he had taken off his fedora and hung it on the hat stand, the scent of rain had been absorbed by the cheap, illicit-smelling smoke and the distant odor of oil and paper. He set a fresh scroll down beside the old cast iron umbrella stand, and sat down in one of two well-worn arm chairs that had been in the corner by an elderly space-heater when I arrived. I could see his reflection in the dull, glazed metal of the heater, and I noticed for the first time that my Predecessor seemed to cast a reflection on nearly every surface, from the scuffed wood of the floor to the smooth-worn cloth of the arm chair opposite him. It must be a shadow, I thought, looking at the outline, vague and textured by the cloth, but I caught the flash of light glinting from where his eyes would be in the shape on the facing chair. He was being reflected, ever so faintly, by the cloth.

“Good to see you, Elder of the Temple of the Childless,” he said, the same greeting he used every time he spoke to me since I took the job. He never called me anything but “Elder” since handing over the duties of the Temple. I sat down, wondering if his image was visible on my own skin. It occurred to me that since he had visited the previous Monday, I had only left the Temple to go to the grocery store, and had exchanged no more than a few words with anyone, unless you counted the silent prayers I sent out to the various gods of the Temple. This was the first real conversation I had had since he last left, and I tried to remember whether I left the Temple at all in the past few days. The routine of working the machine and minding the temple had made the days blur together, but I doubted if I had. He tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair, and smiled a little wistfully as he looked around the room. I wondered, not for the first time, if he missed the days when he was the Elder.

We chatted for a while about our usual topics: the technicalities of the machine, the weather. I’d been having a few problems with the machine, an odd creak here, a stiffness in the gears there, and he advised me on them, rattling off lists of parts and how to manipulate them from the top of his head. “There’s no manual, is there?” I said.

He shook his head, and his indistinct image on the plaster wall did likewise. “If there is, I didn’t get a copy,” he said.

The answer surprised me. I’d always assumed, somehow, that he built the Machine himself. I told him so, and he leaned back in his chair, and smiled broadly, steepling his fingers in front of his face, watching me over his nails. Under the inkstains they were ragged, cracked, and that there was dirt trapped beneath them, though the rest of his appearance was, as usual, impeccably neat. “Not me,” he said. “I’ve never been much for building.”

As we headed down to the cellar to place the new scroll and examine the problems I had reported to him, I realized that I had just missed a perfectly good chance to ask who the original mechanic had been. Weeks ago, I would have been annoyed by that, but somehow it didn’t seem important. “I don’t know why,” I told him on the way down, remembering the real reason I had been looking forward to his visit, “but when I used to stop turning the crank the scrolls would keep going for a few turns. They didn’t today, and I thought there might be something wrong.”

He nodded. His arms were occupied carrying the new scroll, and he used his elbow to nudge open the door at the bottom of the stairs. “I’ll take a look,” he said.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 7 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


It was a few weeks after I made the move to the Temple before I sat down to work on my dissertation. I had used moving, and then my breakup with Lisa, as an excuse to procrastinate, and, like most of my excuses not to work, they both served me well until guilt finally set in. I had a meeting scheduled with my advisor lurking somewhere in the middle of the following week, and I felt that I should at least get something done before I saw him. I knew that some people developed quite close relationships with their advisors; mine kept half a disdainful eye on my lack of progress only so that he could tell me, in detail, why my vague and unfocused topic and I were a drain on faculty resources. He held ABD’s to be the lowest form of academic existence, and clearly regretted ever taking me on as an advisee. All But Dissertation, he was fond of telling me, was another way of saying Almost Bloody Dead, and I got the sense that he couldn’t wait to gloat when I fell into to my inevitable academic demise. He seemed to think I was stalling just to annoy him.

I never tried to explain to him that being a philosophy student made me, in my mind, a philosopher. To me that meant that I ought to be a marginalized societal outcast, ideally of questionable sanity and possibly questionable personal hygiene, whose presence was tolerated only by a group of fanatical disciples, and whose life was a pure and perfect illustration of the ideas he espoused, unsullied by social conventions or hypocrisy. I lacked the charisma or the unique ideas necessary to acquire disciples, and even if I hadn’t, I had yet to find an idea I was sufficiently committed to to add an “ism” to the end of my name and argue it until the day I died. There were too many ideas, and while I could believe momentarily in almost anything I read or heard argued, I had yet to find anything I could believe in permanently. An itinerant philosopher in the truest sense; my mindset moving nomadically across any and all epistemologies. I could no more settle on a philosophy or a god than I could come up with anything interesting to say about my dissertation topic. I doubted my advisor would have understood that, even if I had tried to explain it, and even if he had stopped sneering at me long enough to listen.

I did finally, a few days after Lisa and I had said goodbye, make myself a strong cup of coffee, get out the books and articles I thought I would need, and turn on my laptop. I took a sip of coffee. It was too hot, I decided, and set it resolutely down on the desk. Ten minutes after turning on the computer, I came to the conclusion that my pretense of work would be more convincing if I were to open the document labeled graduatedissertationconfirmationsoffaith.doc. That arduous task completed, I played a game of solitaire, which I lost, and tried my coffee again. Success. It was now cool enough to drink, and I sipped at it leisurely while staring out the window. Three hours later, I had reread half of what there was of the draft, played countless more games of solitaire, and fixed a formatting error in the third paragraph. Satisfied with my work for that day, I shut my laptop and went down to the basement to crank up the machine. There was a discordant creak somewhere in the upper reaches, above the prayer scrolls, and I took an oilcan and a stepladder to see if I could fix it. I didn’t go back to the dissertation for another week, and after that, not for a month. It turned out to be easier to procrastinate in the Temple than anywhere else. After all, I reasoned, how could it be considered lazy to concentrate on my duties as Elder? I began devoting more and more time to the care of the machine, and eventually even my guilt over my dissertation faded to an occasional weak twinge.

I began having dreams, though, from the time I moved in to the Temple; dreams where I watched as a tiny corner came loose on a single scroll of the machine, and the whole thing began to unravel, paper flying out, strips of it tangling and tearing, wrapping around gear shafts and being chewed apart by cogs, the words smeared away by oil and axle grease. I would feel myself become buried in the uncoiling scrolls, not wanting to rip the paper but feeling myself sink deeper and deeper as I struggled weakly for the top. The paper turned to cold, salt water. My lungs began to ache, and water forced its way in, burning my nose and throat. I choked on it, spat it out, gasping for air, but there was nothing to take in but more water. There was no real sense of panic, no fear, just resignation, and I would remember each morning after I had had the dream that I would always try to form a prayer in my mind, just as the water drowned me, but that at that last moment I could not remember what prayer I ought to say, and would wake up whispering sh’ma yisroel, hallowed be Thy name, either the wallpaper goes or I do.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 6 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


My Predecessor hadn’t told me anything of substance since the first time we met. We mainly talked about the workings of the machine, the various obscure and mostly forgotten rituals I performed, and baseball, which he seemed to like and which I knew nothing about. I read the sports page for a month or so to keep up with his conversation, but I forgot to pay for my subscription, and when it ran out I never bothered to renew it. He was a rabid fan of the Baltimore Orioles, though I had yet to deduce what other religion, if any, he adhered to. My roommates and I used to make a game of trying to guess other people’s religion based on clues in everyday interactions and conversation, the more obscure, the better. We would claim to be able to recognize the shoes of a Mormon, the handwriting of an Episcopalian, the coffee-order of a neo-Pagan. Since we rarely sought confirmation of our hypotheses by actually asking the subject of our discussions, we were at least seldom proven wrong.

I had tried a few tricks to see if I could figure out my Predecessor’s faith, not wanting to admit defeat at my own game by asking the question directly. I offered him a beer once, to see if he abstained from alcohol, but he said that he wasn’t thirsty, which was frustratingly distant from the point. I gave him a standing invitation to dinner, and if he ever took me up on it I intended to prepare (or order from a takeout, since my cooking skills were certainly not up to the task) dishes containing shellfish, pork, beef, and some sort of bean, though I had to admit that the idea that he was a practicing Pythagorean was sadly far-fetched.

Unfortunately, he had yet to accept the offer, which left me in the dark as to any dietary restrictions he might have. He didn’t sound very interested when I tried to draw him into a discussion by telling him about my dissertation, but then, if I couldn’t muster up some enthusiasm for the topic, I don’t know why I expected him to. He wore no head-covering, apart from the fedora (I toyed with the idea of a brown, slightly weather-beaten fedora as religious headgear, but Humphrey Bogart imitation is not, to my knowledge, a recognized faith), and did not appear to shun leather shoes. Other than that I had had very few clues. I liked him, but somehow he never really spoke about himself and I found it hard to ask him questions. Once I decided to follow him, at a distance, when he left the Temple, but I lost him trying to get onto the El, when the turnstile I was trying to get through jammed for long enough for me to miss the train he had just boarded. I felt a little foolish about my attempt at detective work after that, and never tried it again. If Humphrey Bogart imitation was a religion, it would seem that I could add it to the list of faiths to which I did not adhere. Eventually I stopped trying to decide what his religion was, and even stopped looking at him directly when we spoke; I found the way he drew the eye disconcerting, and was afraid he would think I was rude for staring.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 5 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


I had just slept at the Temple three nights in a row, when I returned to my apartment to find my last room-mate with his belongings halfway packed. It had been some weeks, I realized, since I had last spent any real time there, so it was only then that I learned that he had finally successfully completed his dissertation defense and was moving on to a job at a university out west. I congratulated him, and helped him move out.

He was the last of three roommates to leave. We had all been philosophy students, and had christened our apartment The Tub, in honor of Diogenes. Once alone, I found I genuinely missed the late-night arguments over the dishes and bathroom-cleaning rotation. I missed those arguments as much as the ones about existentialism. I could actually, if I were so inclined, spend all night working on my thesis without anyone bursting into my room with a bottle of cheap vodka and a compelling argument in favor of psychological egoism, and I wasn’t used to maintaining a work ethic without those interruptions. After a night or two in the empty Tub, I went back to sleeping in the Temple. Both were silent at night, but the silence in the Temple felt more natural; appropriate, not like the silence of a place that had once been filled with people. At least in the Temple I could be sure of visits from my Predecessor; my apartment had become the sort of depressing single-person dwelling that only the tenant and the occasional delivery person ever sees. I would be paying the full rent on a three or four person apartment I rarely visited except to change clothes or pick up my mail; I couldn’t afford it, and it didn’t make sense.

I was told when I began as the Elder that rent-free living was one of the financial perks of the job, and it sounded easier than trying to find a replacement roommate or three. I seemed to have been in grad school for so long that most of the people I had met my first year were gone, and I suppose I stopped making new friends sometime along the way. Living with a stranger sounded a bit too freshman-year to be appealing, and no one could replace the inhabitants of The Tub; you can’t just put an ad in the classifieds seeking people to share a Diogenian dwelling with you. It made sense to take advantage of the free housing at the Temple. Besides, I did like the little, sparsely furnished room on the second floor. It felt like somewhere a philosopher ought to live, more like a hermit’s cave, or like Diogenes’ tub, than anywhere else I’d lived. The radiators barely reached body temperature most of the time, and the water came out of the sinks a sickly brown that reminded me of gas station coffee. It wasn’t so bad, though; as the winter came on it stayed a little warmer than I expected, and I easily got into the habit of wearing layers of socks and sweaters at all times. Without having to pay rent, I soon realized that I was even making just enough money to be able to begin, slowly, to pay off some of my student loans.

There was a tiny grocery store a block away, run by an immigrant family that spoke no English and never smiled when I came in, but they kept me supplied with the dehydrated noodle dishes and cold cereal on which I mostly lived. The only cooking appliances in the Temple were a hotplate, an electric kettle, and a broken toaster, and I’ve never devoted a lot of attention to what I eat anyway; spending more than ten minutes cooking a dinner that would be gone as soon as I ate it always felt like a waste of time. There was also a telephone in the Temple, but it never rang. I used it exclusively for ordering pizza and letting my Predecessor know when a prayer needed to be rewritten. I suppose I was embarrassed to invite anyone I knew to such an odd little dwelling as the Temple of the Childless, where the air was so often tinged with smoke from burnt offerings to Ancient Greek household gods or Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican harvest deities. Even for a philosophy student, it would have seemed eccentric. The idea of people coming in and walking around on the floor above the cellar where the machine sat, prayers cradled at its center, was as upsetting as the idea of my friends learning of the rituals I performed was embarrassing. I spent a few nights a week at Lisa’s, but I tried not to have her over to the Temple if I could help it, and I never invited over anyone from the philosophy program. I was so used to the Temple as a silent, solitary place, my voice, the voice of my Predecessor, and the creaking and clanking of the machine the only sounds that existed there, that I was reluctant to open the doors to the loud, argumentative conversation of a group of philosophy students. When my Predecessor came by, we never debated, the way I always seemed to with my friends from graduate school. We just talked. The first time I spoke to him, I remember thinking that it felt like years since I had last had a conversation that didn’t involve orations.

Lisa made no secret of the fact that she was delighted when I moved out of the Tub. She’d never liked spending the night there. She held a deep, mutual enmity for Nietzsche, (the allergy-inducing cat that moved out with my last roommate, not the philosopher, though she wasn’t really a fan of him either. Said Uberkitty’s tendency to shed, and on one occasion, urinate, on her coat if she failed to hang it up has been interpreted by some scholars, notably Lisa, as a manifestation of his namesake’s misogyny) No matter how many times I vacuumed after the cat was gone her eyes and throat still swelled up if she was in the Tub for longer than five minutes. Lisa spent one night with me in the Temple after I moved in, in my little upstairs room.

I couldn’t sleep the night that she was there. I lay next to her, trying to pretend that the sound of her breathing was soothing, instead of distracting, when I heard a single, prolonged groan of metal from the basement. The building was probably just settling, I told myself, or creaking under the weight of the snow that had collected on the roof, but I couldn’t shake the image of the machine stirring under the floor, reacting to the presence of a visitor. I ended up slipping out of bed and going down to check. The machine was still, shadowed in the light of the dusty bulbs, and even after a thorough inspection I found nothing that looked out of place. I went back to bed, treading cautiously on the creaky stairs, but I spent the rest of the night like a new father, waiting in a fitful, half-awake doze to be called out of bed. Lisa slept soundly, but that was the last night she spent at the Temple. It was drafty, it was in, as she put it, a shady part of town, and the bed was lumpy. A week later, when I turned down her offer to move into her apartment, the relationship was over, abruptly, with less emotion on both sides than I would have expected. No one had ever said that the Elder had to be either solitary or celibate, it felt natural. I never heard the sound that had come from the machine that night again, though I dragged my mattress down to the basement and spent the next few nights sleeping there, just to be sure.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 4 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


The non-machine related rituals I performed in the Temple were usually small sacrifices, fortunately none of the bloody variety. Most often it was a libation of water, oil, or wine, sometimes a burnt bit of food or incense. They were all written out, usually no more than a few per day, in the big spiral-bound calendar that my Predecessor passed on to me when I took the job. I noticed that all the gods seem to be operating on the Gregorian calendar these days, which at least kept the schedule simple to manage. I enjoyed the rituals, even if I didn’t usually know their precise meaning, and sometimes felt a little foolish performing them. Ritual had always appealed to me. It may not have been theologically sensible, but I liked the reinforcement of community and the open, easy demonstration of faith it generally seemed to represent.

Like the rituals, the Elder’s tasks with the machine required little in the way of religious training. It made me wonder why I had been chosen for the job, instead of someone with mechanical experience, since oiling, checking the springs, and occasionally replacing a rusted or fatigued bit of metal wasn’t exactly something I’d studied in divinity school. I learned, though, both on my own and under my Predecessor’s guidance. Once I’d settled in to the job, he came by the Temple about once a week, just to check in, or to bring a replacement prayer for the machine. Every few weeks I would examine each scroll for deterioration, and when I found one that had begun to fade or crumble with age, I would check the number on the spool, inter it in its proper resting place in the vast filing system in the Temple’s far darker and mustier sub-basement, accessible only via a rickety ladder stuck down a defunct elevator shaft, and inform my Predecessor over the telephone that a replacement was required. He would tell me how soon to expect him, and then would infallibly arrive with a new scroll, which, at first under his supervision, then on my own, I would wind around the spool before shoving the cylinder back into place.

He obviously did the writing for those scrolls himself – he always had inkstains on his fingers when he brought a new one – and I offered once to help him with the work, thinking that the meticulous calligraphy he must perform each time he wrote out a new scroll had the potential to be the closest I would ever come to actually putting the seminar I had once taken on sofrut to some sort of practical use. He politely refused my offer, and I did not repeat it. I took his answer as a tactful way of telling me that there were some jobs that the Elder was expected to perform, and others that he was not. I looked over each scroll before I put it in its place. Sometimes I could read them, sometimes not. Sometimes I recognized the names of ancient deities, sometimes there were phrases that echoed or evoked those of the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Popul Vuh, sometimes I did not even recognize the alphabets in which the prayers were written, while other times the words were comprehensible but completely unfamiliar; prayers of religions I had never read about to gods I had never heard of. I studied those as carefully as I could, but with no context or guidance, it was slow going, especially since many of them were completely incomprehensible. It would take centuries to learn all of the prayers, all the more reason, I supposed, for a machine to do the job.

I commuted daily to the Temple, taking the El’s Red Line, then the bus to as close as I could get, then walking about a quarter of a mile through whatever grim weather Chicago had to offer that day. The Temple, for all its peculiarities, made a good place to study and work, and I got into the habit of bringing a few books or papers for when I had finished my tasks. A few times I fell asleep over my studies, and woke up to monastically go about my daily duties again, never once having left the Temple building. It would have been more worrying if I hadn’t done that about once a week at the university library when I was an undergrad, and it slowly became habit.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 3 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


I began settling in to my job in what my Predecessor told me was called the Temple of the Childless. The name was written, not above the door or in the window, but on an unobtrusive bronze plaque set into the back wall of the single ground floor room, the sort of historical markers you usually see on buildings where famous people lived or famous documents were signed, but this plaque didn’t have any of the usual dry information, just the name; The Temple of the Childless. The Temple grounds were a semi-derelict Hyde Park storefront wedged between a hairdresser’s and a pawn shop that seemed to deal mostly in dubiously obtained electronics, with a patch dirty concrete in the back housing a few trash cans and two recycling bins. The cellar was lit by a few bare, low-wattage bulbs that I eventually learned immediately acquired a layer of dust whenever a new set was screwed in, giving the dim light an old, muted quality, like sepia tint.

Besides the machine, the cellar held a few tools, cans of oil, and the furnace, which squatted in the far corner, perpetually turned down as low as possible, so as not to damage the paper scrolls of the prayers. The air in the cellar was dry and cool, but I sometimes felt as though it grew warmer the closer I got to the machine, as if it, and not the tepid furnace were the true source of heat in the building. The floor of the cellar was fringed with piles of white powder at the bottom of a few sections of crumbling plaster. I swept them up occasionally, to keep the dust from gumming up the machine, but I never bothered to re-plaster the walls, instead letting the old, forgotten layer of masonry emerge. Lisa stopped by a few times while I was there, but I never brought her down to the basement. My Predecessor had never precisely said that no one else should see the machine, but I wasn’t sure what the point would be in showing it to her, I was afraid she would think the whole job was ridiculous, and I suppose it would have felt wrong, allowing an uninitiated person to view the inner workings of the Temple. I have to admit that I lied to her about what the place was; I told her I was caretaking while the owner of the storefront sought new tenants. I didn’t want to try to explain a job I didn’t understand myself.


- - -
I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 2 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


Once I had the job, I guess my religion became that of the Temple; of the machine, and I suppose it’s appropriate that I barely understand that religion myself. It’s hard for me to remember how I felt the first time I saw the machine. I’ve spent too much time around it since then, and my later experiences supplanted the original ones, the same way the indifference I eventually felt for Lisa overwrote my affection for her to the point where I can hardly remember what attracted me to her when we were both TAs in that Introduction to Hinduism lecture. It’s like trying to remember a smell, one that you only smelled once, and would know if you smelled again, but can’t describe or recall. All I really remember of my initial impression in the Temple is what the machine looked like. It was enormous; a sprawling mass of old metal pistons, angled out like bended knees, intricate networks of cogs, springs, wheels, pulleys, crankshafts and flywheels, and, at the very center, the prayers. A few turns of the big, brass-handled crank on the side set the complicated machinery into motion, gear teeth clicking together, pistons pumping, shafts turning, transferring the motion inwards, where it spun hundreds of various-sized cylindrical, scroll-covered spools. Each scroll had a single prayer neatly written on the inner sides of the paper, facing back towards the spindle. The intricacy was remarkable, like the inner workings of an old fashioned pocket watch. I could have stared at the spinning prayers for hours. I remember, too, feeling the same sense of missing something I felt inside houses of worship; a strong impression that there was something there beyond my perception or understanding, something obvious to everyone else, but utterly obscure to me.

My Predecessor demonstrated the machine that day. He assured me that the spinning of the prayers was as, or nearly as good as speaking them aloud, though he did not clarify whether he meant as far as he was concerned, or to the relevant gods. The machine creaked and rumbled when he turned the crank, and smelled of parchment and axle grease. I decided that it had been made from an old spinning machine from the heyday of the industrial revolution, with a few parts from old clothes wringers, and what looked like a grain thresher, but having decided that I still didn’t feel I knew anything about it. My Predecessor gestured for me to try, and I cautiously took hold of the crank. The metal was warm from my Predecessor’s touch as I turned the prayers for the first time. The scrolls and gears remained in motion for a few moments after I stopped turning the handle, as some hidden internal spring gave up its tightness. My Predecessor watched and listened to those last movements carefully, and gave a tiny nod of approval. If the sound of the machine had been a song, I thought, he would have been mouthing the words.

He was older than me, I guessed, by a decade or two, but it was hard to tell his age; he might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. He was slim, with dark curly hair, low on his forehead but thinning at the center; a natural tonsure. I was staring at him, I realized, though there was nothing particularly noteworthy about his appearance. He drew the eye like an otherwise unremarkable rock breaking an empty desert landscape, even standing against the intricate chaos of the machine. When he spoke, explaining how often I ought to grease the gearshafts, his soft voice seemed to drown out every other sound in the room, as though the creaking of the machine, the hissing of the furnace, my own breathing, had hushed themselves to whispers so that he could be heard. Even when he did not speak, his breath, his footsteps, the quiet scraping sound of his fingertips brushing the dust off of a metal surface echoed through the cellar. I felt I should say something, to show I’d been paying attention. “Like the ‘khor,” I said finally. I almost winced at how loud my voice was, and tried to lower my volume. “The Tibetan prayer wheel. You spin the wheel to speak the prayer, right?”

“Same idea,” he said, looking up from the machine with a startled-looking smile.

I waited, but he did not elaborate. “Deus en machina?” I said hopefully.

“Not at all,” he replied, and showed me where the oil cans were kept. “That’s really all you need to know,” he said, as he took an oil can and reached with it into a cavity of the machine. He leaned further forwards, clambering most of the way into the machine in order to reach some distant part in need of oil. “You are now the Elder, I am your Predecessor,” he said, apparently ignoring the fact that I was only twenty-seven. Old not to have settled on a career path or belief system, but not old enough to be an elder of anything, I thought. “Do come to me if you have any trouble,” he added from the depths of the machine. “That’s what I’m here for.”

He left me to get settled in without any other discussion. Nothing about who he was, why the job had to be done, or whether, as I half-suspected, the whole thing was an elaborate practical joke, human behavior experiment, or extremely high-concept reality T.V. show. I searched for hidden cameras after he left, but found nothing. A few weeks at the job, and I was convinced that if it was a practical joke, it was being carried to elaborate enough lengths that I might as well see it through.

The duties of the Elder were simple enough, I suppose, and took up, at least when I started, about three or four hours of any given day. That left me with plenty of time to not work on my doctoral dissertation on the idea of faith as a virtue in the Abrahamic religions. The paper was meant to explore the various scriptural, legendary, and folkloric instances in which an individual seeker is given proof of the existence of the almighty, and examine the interplay of those ideas in a faith-based system. What it was actually doing was gathering virtual dust on my hard drive while I read the book of Job, Genesis 22, and assorted scriptural, historical, and contemporary accounts of miracles, occasionally making a note or highlighting something, and dozing off while staring out the window. I had identified the fundamental contradiction; the insistence on blind faith, combined with offers of proof, but so far I had nothing interesting to say about it. Being the Elder gave me a few extremely welcome hours a day when I didn’t have to try to say anything about it all.


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I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.

What You Are I Was
(Part 1 of 9)
By Miriam Rosenberg Rocek


I was in my third year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School when I became the Elder of the Temple of the Childless. The job paid fairly well, at least compared to bussing tables or tutoring high-schoolers about to take the SATs, which was about all that part of a Ph.D. in philosophy really qualified me for. The handwritten flyer on the coffee shop corkboard from which I had learned of the job opening said only “Worshipper sought for paid clergy position. Prior experience helpful, but not required. No atheists need apply.” I was almost sure I wasn’t an atheist. I noticed the flyer while my girlfriend, Lisa and I were checking to see if there were any good concerts that weekend, though I knew already that I would feel guilty going out at all considering how little work on my dissertation I’d done that week. Lisa didn’t notice the flyer, and I didn’t mention it, but while she was trying to remember if the Afro-beat band playing that Saturday at a local bar was the same one we had both liked so much a few months ago, I read the job offer, and tore off one of the neat strips of paper from the bottom of the page, each of which was printed, by hand, with a telephone number. I called the number later that afternoon when I had lost all interest in the chapter I was supposed to be writing on the paradoxes of faith healing. A week later, I began the job, and several months later, I still could not have satisfactorily explained it to anyone.

My Predecessor explained the basics of the job over the phone, and seemed excited when I told him about my philosophical and religious qualifications. He didn’t bother to ask me what my own personal beliefs were, which was just as well. Lisa liked saying that my religion was the worship of the goddess Academia, and that was true, in a way, and that depressed me more than I liked to admit, though I knew she meant it as a joke. She’d come to the whole academic study of religion as a way of better understanding what she’d told me early on were her own deeply-felt beliefs, which was all very well for her, but she couldn’t quite see how someone could come to it looking for something to believe in. I told her I wasn’t looking for something to believe in, just checking to see if there was anything there. She told me that was the same thing, and she was probably right, but admitting to being wrong is a cardinal sin in the worship of the goddess Academia.


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I am a graduate of Northwestern University with a BA in creative writing. Since college I have worked as a nanny, and as a tall ship sailor, helping to sail old-fashioned, traditionally rigged sailing ships from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia. I was born in New Mexico, raised in Delaware, and currently live in New York City.