Chapter 31
31
The golem and I walk toward the L stop in silence. I’m grateful to be with someone who won’t push me to talk. Someone who will just stay beside me, no matter what. No one has made me feel this secure in a long, long time.
Maybe the golem is all I need. Maybe we should just go home. Maybe we should never leave the apartment again.
The thoughts whisper their way through my mind with such ferocity, they don’t even feel like my own. I shiver. No. We’re not going home. Not yet. I’m not ready to call it a night. I’m all dressed up, I have a date, I’m buzzed, and I want to keep the buzz going.
The neon lights of a bar on the block before the train station catch my eye. I look up at the golem, who hasn’t had a drop to drink all night. Is it because he was on guard at the rehearsal dinner? Picking up on my tension? Maybe we both need to loosen up.
“You want to have a drink with me?”
The golem shakes his head.
“Not safe,” he says.
“Not safe for me to drink?” I ask. “Or for you to drink?”
At first I think maybe he wants to keep his hands free, like a good bodyguard. Then it occurs to me that maybe he’s trying to stay sober in case the alcohol does to him what it’s been doing to me. I feel a little ashamed, and try to remind myself that he can’t judge me. He’s not even a real person.
Then why did you sleep with him, Eve?
I shove the question from my mind, wanting to dull my thoughts with more liquor but feeling like that option is off the table now.
“Let’s just go home, then,” I mutter.
A train approaches the station as soon as we reach the platform. When we board, the car is packed. It’s ten o’clock on a Friday night, holiday season, relatively mild weather. Everyone is enjoying their evening, laughing as they enter and exit the train. The crowd finally thins by the time we reach Belmont. When we change from the red line to the brown line, we’re the only ones aboard.
But then, at the next stop, someone else gets on the train. A slender white guy in a denim jacket. Short blond hair, no hat.
Nazi , I think. That’s the same fucking Nazi who spit at me earlier this week.
Terror instantly clogs my throat, and beside me, I feel the golem stir. I try not to look at the pinched face of the man in the denim jacket, but my eyes steal his way—and instantly lock with his pale blue ones.
I feel like a deer caught in the headlights, about to be slammed by an oncoming vehicle. Surely he’ll recognize me, the girl he spit on and leered at less than a week ago. I tense, waiting for the wicked smile or wad of spit.
But his eyes are dull, uninterested. There’s not even a glimmer of an acknowledgment of our past interaction. Nothing whatsoever seems reflected in his ice-blue eyes.
He doesn’t recognize me , I realize with a start.
Because the last time he saw me, he didn’t see me as an actual person. He saw me as a woman riding alone on the train with a big Jewish beacon on her chest. An easy target for someone who harbors hatred in his heart for people like me. Jews. Women. But right now, there aren’t such obvious marks of victimhood clinging to me. I’m just another person on the train, wearing a plain black dress, sitting beside a big, hulking man.
Except the big, hulking man isn’t sitting beside me anymore.
“Paul?”
I look up and see that the golem is rapidly closing the distance between himself and the man in the denim jacket. And then, before I even know what’s happening, he’s slamming his powerful fist into the man’s nose.
“What the fuck!”
The guy reels back, stumbling, falling heavily into one of the empty seats lining the train car. The golem advances on him again, fists raised.
“I’ll call the cops!”
At these words, the golem rips the fedora from his head and snarls. His victim stares in terror at the Hebrew letters bearing down on him. There’s blood coming from his nose, a dark scarlet trickle, staining his teeth, running down to his chin. He scuttles backward like a wounded animal, whimpering. The golem takes another step toward him.
I leap to my feet, grabbing him by the elbow and pleading with him to stop.
“You can’t do this,” I say. “You’ll get arrested.”
The train lurches to a stop, the PA system announcing the next stop. The preppy racist vaults to his feet. For half a second I think he’s going to take a swing at the golem, who I’m still restraining. Instead, he gives my protector a look of terrified hatred. Then, clutching his bleeding nose, he bolts from the train.
“Oh shit,” I say, heart thudding and head pounding in a painful preview of the hangover I’ll be experiencing tomorrow morning. “Oh shit. He’s going to call the cops, he’s going to be back here with the police, there might be a camera on the train, oh shit...”
But then the train rumbles forward again. No one else gets on or off it. At the next stop, I tense, certain police are about to board and attempt to handcuff the golem, which won’t go well for them. To my shock and relief, no cops come for us at that stop, either. The only people to board the train are a middle-aged couple, laughing about the holiday improv show they just saw.
We make it all the way to my stop without incident. I hurry us home, up the stairs, into my apartment, locking the door and the dead bolt before finally turning to face the golem. My heart is pounding, my breath coming in rapid gasps. All my more complicated emotions have been burned away, leaving only this fresh shock.
“Why did you do that?” I ask my protector.
“Man was enemy,” said the golem simply. He thudded his chest with his fist. “Keep safe.”
“Oh,” I say, everything within me blooming and unfurling into a garden of blissful relief. It was so straightforward to my protector, so black-and-white. The man was a threat. Paul neutralized the threat. He wasn’t going to wait until I was being harmed; he was going to prevent me from being attacked. He’s not just a reactive protector, but a proactive one. Is there any better way to stay safe?
Grateful and buzzing, hungry for the earthquakes of pleasure this safety could bring, I throw myself at the golem like I’m going to swallow him whole.