But of all the literatures of the occult, Simon’s favorites were the legendary tales of the Kabbalah.  Many nights, after the last drunk, rebellious children of the building’s psychiatrists and brokers had at last staggered home, when the night grew entirely silent except for the wind of a few passing taxicabs, Simon would pore over the mysticism of the Jews.  Not for him the Zohar’s abstruse speculations into the mystery of the Divine form, however: Simon had no time for philosophizing.  Nor was he interested in the poetic visualizations of the supernal palaces, glittering in literary gild, or the yogic postures of the ecstatics.  No, what Simon delighted in the most, during the long, quiet hours as the lone night watchman, were the legendary tales of the mystics themselves.  Allusive stories of Talmudic masters causing trees to ignite as they expounded mystical secrets; secret tales, cloaked in danger, of medieval rabbis creating men from dust, only to have them run amok, foreshadowing the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Frankenstein; or rapturous legends of prophets gone mad, speaking in tongues of their all-consuming love of God.  It was this body of literature, the quasi-hagiographic, furtively-told stories of the Kabbalists, that occupied Simon’s time when he read them, and his mind when he did not.
 
     Much of Simon’s interest in the Jewish occult may be attributed, as one might suppose, to his own ambivalent heritage, and to the hidden world of Judaism that had always seemed just close enough, and yet just forbidden enough, to tantalize.  As his unusual name suggests, Simon Ben Ezra was the son of a mixed marriage between a secular-Israeli father and a Kansas WASP mother.  Their disparate ethnic origins notwithstanding, Simon’s parents were united by the cultural bonds of being, first and foremost, Beautiful People.  Hippies, the squares called them; Rainbow children, they called themselves.  They were consumers of organic honey and brewers of bitter beer; they wore Birkenstocks when they weren’t barefoot, hemp when they weren’t nude.  Simon’s parents smoked pot right in front of him, right as he was growing up in the never-quite-tidy, never-quite-paid-for rowhouses of Canadian cities and, later, the countryside of Ulster County, New York – they smoked in public, too, which embarrassed the young boy to no end.  Baseball games, Parent-Teacher conferences, funerals – no place seemed inappropriate enough to stop the senior Ben-Ezras from taking a toke.  Simon grew up in constant fear of being discovered, as if one of his less-open-minded school friends might be a narc in disguise, and as if the sins of the father and mother would be the sins of the son: he lived in constant dread of embarrassment.
 Simon’s parents had met on the Peace Corps, and fell in love amid the squalor of rural Guatemala; they courted in El Peten, while ostensibly digging wells.  After their tour of duty was over, they lived together, in Canada, for many years, Simon’s father dodging the Israeli draft and Simon’s mother dodging her parents.  They decided to marry when the unplanned pregnancy became known – an old fashioned gesture, certainly, but one necessary to appease the distant families whose financial support would be, no doubt, called upon.  The wedding was a ceremony that made the adolescent Simon cringe whenever he saw the photographs of his naked parents standing on the beach -- his father, Simon thought in horror, ever so slightly aroused.

     ‘Shimon’ had been a family name in the Ben-Ezra clan for generations (two generations, Simon later learned, but apparently enough to be a tradition) and while Simon’s father was not a family man, he had a father himself, then only recently in the grave, who had borne the name.  And a great uncle before that, an old namesake who died young.   Simon’s mother had been adamant that her son would not have a name as Israeli as ‘Shimon,’ would not be ghettoized, locked into a nationalistic and religious tribe that thought itself to be God’s chosen people.  So it was anglicized, into a form that American teachers and bank tellers could pronounce.

     Because Simon’s mother was not Jewish, he was excluded from all but Reform Jewish community groups and rituals, since most Jews would not accept him as one of their own.  Yet there was no home among the Reform for Simon, already a budding romantic at age ten.  Simon found their Judaism cold, and dry, and ignorant.  No one knew what they were rejecting, what all the fuss and magical words and funny hats were really about -- no one knew what any of the words even meant.  And so from an early age, Simon admired from afar the “real” Jews, the ones with the black beards and black hats and wives in black scarves.  The ones who spoke their hidden language, and prayed with intense faith and never ate in restaurants.  They were the ones who knew, who held the keys to spiritual enlightenment.  
 Simon’s mother ridiculed the boy’s attraction to such backward-seeming superstition, but to the boy, these mysterious men (and invisible women) held answers, keys, powers.  And yet such Jews would never admit Simon to the inner circle of their faith, if they knew his secret -- and, Simon felt in his bones, they did know.  Simon imagined that they could tell right away that he was not one of them, that they could see through his underwear to his young, uncircumcised penis – his “perfect, natural self,” as his mother explained when the other kids teased him for having a funny looking prick.  They knew, Simon thought, and so he in turn would never know.

     As a teenager, Simon eventually grew out of his obsession with a community of believers who would not have him.  Given the world in which is parents lived, it was easy to find alternatives.  Zen meditation, strict veganism, existential philosophy, crystal healing – Simon had done them all, and before the age most kids are allowed to drink.  He read Kahlil Gibran at puberty, Sartre and D.T. Suzuki at sixteen.  And so by the time he had finished college at one of the ‘alternative’ liberal-arts schools that dot the Northeast, Simon had burned out.  Too many drugs, too many spiritual journeys, too many seductions of first-year wiccan girls with psychedelic art and references to Lao Tzu.  It was all too obvious.  
 So Simon cut his hair, quit looking for Asgard and Shangri-La.  When he moved to New York, he left behind the friends he’d made in college, let their emails go unanswered and their calls unreturned.  They all seemed too obvious, too readily available – too transparent, when the truth, Simon new, still remained concealed.  As there was no pressure from his family to enter a profession, Simon drifted from job to job, working on a small organic farm in Queens, then at a construction site in the Bronx, then pasting up flyers all around the city for left-wing political candidates.  For a few months, he tended bar at a dive in Washington Heights called the ‘Marlin.’  Gradually, though, Simon grew tired of the camaraderie of these supposedly working class environments; he found it too easy, a simple affectation that felt, at bottom, inauthentic.  People bored him; soon he stopped going out altogether, and looked for any job that would just leave him alone.  Though young, he found work as a doorman, and later, as a security guard, and then eventually a well-paying position at 250 Central Park, on the blessedly quiet night shift.  It was all he wanted.  Though Simon still told his parents that he was an ‘aspiring writer,’ who was ‘working on a novel,’ in reality he hadn’t written a word in many months.  He was a night watchman now – that was what he was.  And for now at least, it suited him.

     But Simon never lost his curiosity, his zeal to learn more and penetrate deeper into the occult secrets of seekers across the generations.  At night, he read.  He loved the deathly, cottony silence in the air, with only the slightest, murmuring hum of the city’s perpetual drone in the background.  No distractions.  And the hours came alive in the legends of the ancient rabbis.

     Simon had already absorbed all of the easily-obtained tales of the Kabbalists and Hasidim -- the miracle-working Baal Shem Tov, the cave-dwelling Shimon Bar Yohai, even relatively obscure rabbis such as Honi the Circle Maker, who was said to have brought rain by drawing a circle and standing inside it.  That reservoir had long since been drained.  So Simon had begun the tedious business of learning Hebrew, in order that he might be able to read the many volumes of untranslated tales of the Jewish mystics.  It was slow going.  Simon memorized the new letters, the dotted vowels and new sounds, but languages were difficult for him, and because of his parents’ insistence on not coercing religion, he had never attended Hebrew school as a child.  This could take years, Simon often thought in despair.
 
     As a result, Simon had taken to frequenting out-of-the-way used bookstores on the weekends, rifling through acres of UFO literature and worn copies of The Road Less Traveled to find a temporary fix – a rare edition of Secrets of the Gematria, say, or The Alphabet of Ben Sira.  Anything old to the world and new to Simon, anything that could tide him over until his language skills would allow the harder stuff.  Simon had become an expert hunter of words.  The right kind of store, Simon knew, would be perched on the edge of what used to be a Jewish neighborhood, so that there would be just enough old, dying-out Jews to have these books, but not the kind of dying Jews that would pass such books on as heirlooms.  The best prey were, he imagined, lonely men, or women, who didn’t have anyone to give the book to, what with the son who never cared about such things and the granddaughter with the nosering.  Old people who needed the three bucks – or their sons, who needed the burden lifted and the old books out of the way.  And so Simon, like the trickster-patriarch Jacob, received the birthright intended for the oblivious sons of all these old Jews.

     The Maharal of Prague, the famous Rabbi Loew, was Simon’s favorite Kabbalistic hero.  A genius, a scholar – and also the master of the most notorious Golem in all the Kabbalah, the one that, they said, still lived in the attic of the old Prague shul, waiting to be reanimated by a spell.  The Maharal’s mystical speculations were legendarily complex, and his reputation as a master of the magical Kabbalah was unimpeachable.  But there was something, in the huge reservoir of stories told of the mystical Czech, that seemed to suggest to Simon that he was not entirely of this world; there always seemed to be something the stories weren’t telling.  What was it?  The mystery was unbearable.  So it was with tremendous joy that, one late autumn Sunday, Simon found a rare collection of tales of the Maharal, translated into English and printed onto what were now yellow, thin pages between navy leather bindings.  There were familiar stories told in new ways, and new stories that Simon had never encountered before.  A find!

     Simon could hardly wait for his next night shift to begin.  He allowed himself small peeks into the stories – a Rabbi Loew had delved too deep here, a warm glow of the shabbos candles there.  But he waited for the time he loved to read, denying his desire until the familiar silences hung over the building’s deserted lobby.  And then he read.  The stories did not disappoint: they were bursting with delights, some of tales Simon had never heard before, some of familiar legends told in new, fresh ways.  In one, Rabbi Loew used his Golem to defend the shul from rampaging enemies, terrifying them with the strength of the artificial man.  In another, he trounced a local bishop at a disputation, proving beyond a doubt that Jesus could not have been virgin-born and that the Messiah had not yet arrived.  Throughout, Rabbi Loew’s mastery of the secret arts defeated the brutishness of the enemy.  The man who had compiled these tales was unknown to Simon, but it was clear enough what was his purpose: to win in literature the battles the Jews could not win in life.

     Simon’s favorite story was The Golem’s Golems, which told of the time the Maharal’s Golem attempted to create a Golem for itself – a Golem’s Golem.  Unlike The Bride of Frankenstein, the motives in this tale are less amatory than practical: the Golem has grown tired of all the work; he needs a help-meet.  And so, having secretly read the books of Rabbi Loew, he takes matters into his own hands.  But things go disastrously wrong.  Instead of animating a lump of clay, the Golem mistakenly enchants one of the Maharal’s chairs, which begins to speak in a human voice and comically complain that it has been woken up from a deep slumber, and could someone please tell the Rabbi to get up once in a while, walk around, go outside.  And, while you’re at it, the table continues, could you please push me away from this particular table, who I have for so long despised?

     Amazed, the Golem next animates the table, and of course the table argues bitterly against that obstreperous and stuck-up little chair – who did he think he was, after all?  A fight ensues, and so the Golem quickly animates the shtender, which has been holding one of Rabbi Loew’s heaviest books of sacred lore, to mediate.  But the shtender has his own complaints – why did you animate me?  What do I know?  I’m just a shtender!  I don’t want to know from your troubles!  I ache from all of Rabbi Loew’s heavy books!  The Golem is soon overwhelmed, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but without the human judgment even to know that things are going wrong: he, after all, is an automaton too.  Finally, the Maharal himself appears just in time to save his home (and furniture) from ruin, and to de-activate all of the Golems the Golem had inadvertently created.

     Simon loved the trove of stories, and began to think afresh about the central, mystical idea that lay beneath them all: that through the proper manipulations of letters, life could be created, that humans could imitate God even in the act of creating life itself.  To make a Golem was, for the Kabbalists, a kind of baccalaureate exam; if you could do that, it showed you knew your stuff.  The better Kabbalists eschewed performing these sorts of tricks in public, but it is said that in private, they all had Golems of their own.

     Simon didn’t know his stuff.  Despite all his work, it still took him a second look to tell a dalet from a resh, and he could barely pronounce the words in his exercise books – books written for children.  But Simon came to realize, as he pored over the mystical tales of the Maharal for subtle clues and veiled references to secret doctrines, that these tales were more than just stories:  Simon realized that, in his heart, in a place not scoured by the force of reason and a zone immune from doubt, he believed them.  He felt it, intuitively, deep inside himself, even despite every scientific bone in his body crying out in objection: this was real.  The Golem, the man-made man, was too developed and complex an idea to be invented out of whole cloth – unless the Kabbalah was nothing but a pile of lies, there had to be something real there, something that spoke of a fundamental reality.  Not the fairy-tale exaggerations and smoke and mirrors, of course, but some kind of kernel, deep inside, that contained a kind of truth.

     What’s more, the myth of the Golem was more common than most people supposed.  Most readers of Kabbalah couldn’t have known how many other cultures had similar myths – but Simon knew.  For once, Simon knew.  But what was the secret?  How did they all do it?  Simon redoubled his efforts to learn Hebrew, and unlock the keys of the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation that, it was said, could provide the recipe for creating new life.  His knowledge of Hebrew rapidly improved, as he slept less and less, and read more.  Yet he had no teacher, and even if he could read the Hebrew newspapers fluently, he would still be at a hopeless remove from the ability to manipulate the universe.

     It was The Golem’s Golems that led to his breakthrough.  If one could unintentionally create a Golem, Simon reasoned in the lobby at about 3:15 one morning – not in the farcical way the Maharal’s Golem did, but, in some unknown way that the author of the story dares not say aloud – if one could do this, then the preparation of the clay, the molding of it, even the selection clay itself as opposed to a table or a chair – none of this mattered.  There must be Golems all around us, latent, waiting to be born out of furniture, papers, even food.  After all, what had the Maharal’s Golem done but simply activate or animate the consciousness of the objects around him already?  He didn’t make the shtender; the shtender was made by an artisan who shaped the wood, and shaped its consciousness as well.  So everything created, by man or God, must likewise have a soul latent within it.  All of it was alive.  And if the Maharal’s chair could become enchanted, if it, too had a soul, waiting to be expressed, why not Simon’s reading-table as well?

     And more: do we really suppose, Simon wondered, his mind racing, that the Kabbalists possessed power that the Sioux or Sikhs did not?  Surely this was not the case – Simon was far too enlightened a thinker to believe that only the Jews knew the secrets of creation.  No, what the Kabbalists must have done was tap into some cosmic force is available to everyone.  There must be other channels as well.  Of course, the Kabbalists this pantheistic reality -- that every object breathes a sort of life -- in the tale of the Golem, whereas other cultures spoke in different signs and symbols.  But these were mere details; the point was that everything, everywhere, had a soul of its own hiding within – silent, but not dead.
 Simon thought more through the night, recording his theories and observations in a tattered red spiral notebook.   We suppose the Golems around us are so strange, Simon wrote, but what is the human soul but a phenomenon of the brain?  And what is the brain but an arrangement of proteins and cells?  We are matter too.  There are Golems all around us, all the time – every device that we create, every bit of furniture we carve from trees – all of these objects are Golems, only latent ones. With the right magical formulae or Divine names, they might become enchanted -- but this enchantment is really nothing more than the awakening of what is already present in the thing itself!  This raised desk behind which I sit, Simon thought, has a consciousness.  It, too is a Golem.  This red carpet, these dusted and gleaming doors.  What are they saying?

     Simon paused, and listened, but heard nothing.  At first Simon thought this was because he lacked the tools of the Kabbalistic wisdom, but if he was serious that all world traditions approached the same reality, why only those tools?  Why not the silent meditation of the Vipassana Buddhists?  Or the slow-motion swaying of the Sufis?  It was impossible to imagine that only one portal opened onto the infinite.  And so night after night Simon listened, focusing on his breathing, quieting his mind, trying to half-imagine, half-perceive what the objects around him were saying.  
 After six straight nights of meditation and concentration to the point of exhaustion, he listened with all his soul, bared to the consciousnesses around him, and he heard.  We’re all here to help, they seemed to say.  Just put us to use.

     Of course!  The one thing Golems hate is disuse: once created, they want to serve.  It is, after all, their only reason for being – that is why the notion of a Golem creating a Golem to do his chores is such high comedy.  Golems want to help.  And are all of our modern conveniences any different?  Telephones, toothbrushes, back-supports, they all want to be used.  Just put us to use.  Every human being has a purpose for living, Simon had long known – even if we don’t know what that purpose is, we are part of the chain of being, and we want to reproduce ourselves, and we want to be.  Why suppose these artificial lives were any different?  They too want to be!  To sing the song of themselves – only their song is to function.  The pen cried out to spill its ink in letters or art.  The waste-paper basket cheerfully straightened up to accept bank receipts and banana peels.  Use us! they all said.  We’re here to help.

     Simon was elated.  All of these wonderful objects, all created to make our lives happier – it was a joy!  Calendars, soap, sidewalk pavement – all holy!  Simon woke as the sun was setting and greeted his alarm clock like an old friend.  The clock welcomed him into the world of magic, the bedspread kept him warm, the hairbrush got him neat and ready for work.  His frying pan gleefully heated an egg for him; the spoon happy to be of service.  All the things around him were engineered for human convenience, and he felt their joy at being of use.  Simon spent many days dancing in the ecstasy of objects.  Other people seemed oblivious, let their things rot or threw them away too early, but Simon was aware of the secret life of things; he felt the exciting reality of their sentience.  All around him, Simon felt the presence of a hundred thousand Golems, not yet granted the magical power of speech, but alive, alive nonetheless, in a way that none of the sophisticates with their briefcases could understand.  The briefcases were more fulfilled, always, than the men who swung them from tired arms.

     Soon, Simon began to hear the Golems even without concentrating – he would be stopped on the street by a shout from a newspaper-box or lamppost.  Hello, brother!  See these papers I’ve got inside?  Want a copy?  And sometimes Simon would talk back, if he thought no one was looking.  His hushed world now became filled with the conversations of things.
 But gradually, what Simon heard began to disturb him.  He heard plastic cups silently cry when they were thrown away after only one use.  Six months I’ve waited, and now two seconds pass, and it is over, and I have an eternity to linger on!  He heard luggage complain when Mrs. Weinberg on the second floor blamed her suitcase for not rolling properly.  I’m just here to help, you; and it was your fault the way you pulled me; why do you punch me when I was only trying to help?  All around him, objects carefully created to serve – and mistreated by their ignorant human owners, who discarded them at the first sign of the slightest flaw.  It was a travesty – no, a tragedy!  Every thing he saw was created for the facility and convenience of human beings, but we thoughtlessly replaced them, threw them away, cursed at them on the slightest provocation.  It was an outrage!

     The precious silence of Simon’s long nights was ruined.  Now it was a din of appliances, papers, envelopes, all in agony!  The crying was becoming unbearable.  For every magazine joyful to be read, there were dozens recycled without ever being opened.  For every bit of food that brought joy to a hungry boy or girl, there were pounds of waste thrown into heaps, fruit rotting at Korean grocery stores, spoiled fish that never had the chance to make it to the table.  All around him, he realized, there was far more suffering than joy.

     Simon was distraught.  What was to be done?  Surrounded by inanimate companions who, like himself really, were part of the furniture of the social world, Simon began avoiding other people more and more, enraged by their ignorance, furious at their waste.  He grew alternately enraptured and afflicted by the Golems in his apartment, on the street, at work.  He longed to be sure that when he spoke to the Golems, they understood.  And as he turned inward, Simon wanted to know their lives were not all subjects of his imagination, to charm a Golem into full actualization.  But even despite all his progress, Simon could barely read a sentence, let alone combine letters into magical formulae that would enable his outwardly silent friends to speak.  Simon couldn’t wait; he began speaking with them more and more.  Hesitantly at first, and in secret, but eventually without compunctions and in public.  What is it you want? Simon asked.  I’m sorry that they threw you away, but I have no room in my apartment for you.  The dump won’t be so bad.  Maybe a homeless man will adopt you!  Where is it that you would like to sleep tonight?
 
     Some of the tenants complained that the night watchman was muttering to his notebook.  They said he talked to the light bulbs.  Rumors were aroused, and Simon knew of them.  But to Simon, these voices were no more significant than the souls in the books and the bulbs – and more obnoxious, to be sure.  The notebook, who wished he could have hosted better prose than Simon’s ambling notes, but who respected him nonetheless, and who had a special fondness for the green pen – how Simon preferred its company to that of O’Neill, the day watchman, or Sarzotti, the endocrinologist.  Once, Sipes in 2E called downstairs to complain that someone seemed to be having an argument at two in the morning, and could Simon please tell them to cut out all the racket?  Don’t worry, Simon whispered to the umbrella stand, we’ll settle this tomorrow.

     Finally, after a series of stern warnings from the superintendent failed to quell the night man’s predilection for talking to the furniture, Simon lost his job at the building, a dismissal he scarcely seemed to notice amid the din of a delivery of happy, fresh groceries.  Then, having forgotten for the third month in a row to pay his rent on time, Simon lost his own apartment as well, so he went to live at his parents’ house outside of Woodstock, New York.  It didn’t matter – there were plenty of Golems there too.  Simon’s few friends had been worried for him anyway; he seemed increasingly distracted and nervous.  Maybe the time in the country would do him good.

     Simon worried too – but his concern grew out of knowledge, not of ignorance, and was not so limited as that of his acquaintances.  Simon worried for the innocent dozens of eggs that never get taken out of their containers and are thrown away when their expiration dates come and go.  He mourned paper and plastic bags, created, used once – so brief their intercourse with humanity! – and thrown away to rot for years.  He shuddered to think of the dump at Fresh Kills, filled with cries of suffering and woe and disuse.  If he could only master the formulae to awaken the souls of all of our underappreciated, taken-for-granted fellow travelers!  If he could enchant the sleeping Golems, give them the power of speech and movement -- then he could ease their pain, salve their loneliness.  And he would make us see -- see all our created objects for the sentient souls they were.  And we would treat them less lightly.

     So, while his mother cooked him dinners and his father tried not to disapprove too loudly, Simon agonized over what to do.  He didn’t know any Kabbalists.  Where could he turn?  Were their shamans in Woodstock who could communicate with the bricks?  Was there any way out of this intense, swirling, churning misery – this industrial-scale carnage of which Simon had only recently become aware?
 And then, one cold March afternoon, Simon realized: He was here not to liberate the silent Golems, but to console them.  Why else had he been granted enough knowledge to understand their predicament, but not enough to rescue them from it?  Everything in the world has a purpose: Unless the Master of the Universe was entirely capricious, Simon, too, must have a role – a use.  Surely, then, his knowledge of a hundred thousand imprisoned Golems, coupled with his inability to affect their plight, was the key to his destiny!  Simon felt like a fool, as though he had been standing just outside the window of Kabbalah, nose pressed up against the glass, like the ancient Rabbi Akiva at the academy of the rabbis, when really what he should do was abandon that world, that culture of sorcery and magic, and minister to the forlorn.  This, clearly, he now understood, this was his dharma, his calling, the mission he was on Earth to accomplish – to console the exiled Golems of a million manufacturers, to sympathize with cars and books and blenders, to convey to them the solidarity of knowing that, yes, they don’t understand – but I do.  I, Simon Ben-Ezra, know of your hidden vitality, I sense your pain, I share your dread of onrushing oblivion.  And I will comfort you, and hoard you, and keep you company, and bring you together with others.  I will bring you in wherever I find you, and give you a home with me, instead of in the garbage or the street.  I will ignore their protestations, their human objections, as they try to keep me from you, try to make me throw you away and ignore you as they do.  And what does it matter, Simon thought as he was led off at last, and taken to a place where he could not gather in the garbage and refuse that he seemed unable to let alone.  Everywhere there are warm places to rest, and a thousand sleeping Golems to fill any void.