Before I Leave for Lunastrasse: Shtetl Morning
the script of a new solo play/storytelling collection
What follows is the entire script of a solo play/storytelling collection I’ve written. I plan for it to become an audio piece as well as to exist in a live, staged version – starring me, or another actor, or perhaps both, in different cities! In the meantime, you can read this current draft here. You, my longtime Substack readers, will recognize some of the stories collected here, though much of the script will be new to you.
Enjoy! Or be totally weirded out! Both are likely. I’m grateful that you’re here to receive this project in its current form! If you’re reading this in your email (as opposed to on Substack itself), you will need to click View Entire Message at the end to see the final parts of the script.
Before I Leave for Lunastrasse:
Shtetl Morning
by Emma Tattenbaum-Fine
with creative developmental support from Preston Martin
Synopsis:
The year is 2081. Emma, a wise, spry, elder-millennial, is 95 years old and preparing to leave for the first human settlement on the moon. The risk is enormous, but the earth is no longer comfortably habitable, and the chance to be part of something historic beckons. Newness is hard to bear, but Emma, with her storied past, has come to accept that everything is fleeting and change, the only constant.
In the last two hours in her Brighton Beach apartment she welcomes your company. Making fraught peace with her life's journey and its uncertain meaning, her past lives, ghosts, and memories guide her forward as her life on earth ends and a brave new world begins.
A cozy kitchen in Brighton Beach, in the year 2081. Darkness of the wee hours. The waves can be heard roaring outside the window.
Preface
EMMA, in Voiceover:
You who are settled here
So confident in your mass and volume
That what you touch will yield to you
Resting in the place you inhabit
Thinking it is yours
You are just a visitor.
The couch, the mattress
The tresses of hair on a pillow
Evidence of your decided belonging
Your rootedness in this time
You are just a visitor.
In the places you feel most at home
You are only passing through
In the places most hostile
You are only passing through
You will go back, one day, to the before place (where we once were and didn’t seem to mind?) and look back on here: What a vivid dream I just had.
Or recall it as a town you visited
and saw a little of.
Or you’ll remember nothing. At all.
Of how you:
Unpacked your roller bag and hung your black down coat, flung winter from your mustard scarf. Opened the fridge. Cracked a beer and forgot that You don’t live here.
Deeply rested. Deeply worried.
But always confident: it’s yours.
It was never yours.
And will you look back on a magnificent trip?
Once — and a lifetime.
Or return and do it all again? Ad infinitum?
And we go days without addressing this open wound of a mystery?!
Making plans. Doing taxes. Emailing,
A future ghost.
Because you know, we are always emailing: a future ghost.
I can’t believe we don’t know where we are going
when we are going home.
Brief solo oboe interlude, in Klezmer style, plays then evaporates.
Emma (a 95-year-old woman who appears to be 38 years old at most times, depending how the light catches her) is in a bathrobe moving about in a cozy apartment’s kitchen. Pouring coffee, puttering. The kitchen table is underneath a window. On the table are small tchotchkes, plastic wrapped pastry items of indeterminate age, and a 1940s-style briefcase rests, splayed open and empty on the kitchen floor.
A comically large clock (school classroom style) reads 5:00. It’s dark outside and a window faces out into blackness. The sound of waves is heard in the near distance.
EMMA:
This is the best time of day. 5:00 AM before sunrise. Coffee, my robe, my robe and coffee. Good quality socks. Major gratitude for these things. And before the sun rises I'm sure to find out why. Why. As in. Why I’m here. Why you’re here. Why the table and its collections of atoms are here. I know there's no God, so that’s ruled out as the why. So to whom should I answer? Sun should be up at 7:00 AM, by then I will know. This isn't my first time doing all this. I've been here before. My past lives weren't glamorous, but then neither is my present life.
I'm really glad you're here with me this morning.
It’s hard for you to accept that there’s no God?
I know. Well, will you try, for half an hour, to imagine it? I’ve sat through many religious services for you, pretending there IS a God, so will you sit, for 30 mins with me, and pretend there isn’t one?
I love to talk to the voices in my head during my morning coffee. You seem like a great listener. I know you are.
Raise your hand if you believe in past lives. No, you don't? Me neither. And yet, here they are or were.
The sunlight rises a little bit at the window.
So, a little housekeeping. I’m 95 years old. I look 38, I know, thank you, but also don’t be ageist, it’s not a big thing, you don’t have to make a thing about it. I look 38 because I got hold of the age-stopper serum as soon as it was available, not because I could afford it but because I knew a guy who was dating the woman whose family business was behind it because I had done musical theatre with her at summer camp. Not unlike how I got early hold of the covid vaccine by the way, but this was a far bigger win, for obvious reasons. There’s been no “break through” aging. So my body stopped visually aging at 38. If I’d drank a little less liquor in my 30s I’d probably look even younger now, but we can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
Thanks for coming all the way out to Brighton Beach, by the way, even if only in my mind. Visiting an old woman is always a mitzvah, however it comes to happen.
Sips coffee.
Not easy in a sandstorm. Did you take the Q? Oh, astral projection, yes that’s often faster. Well, I do appreciate you taking the time.
Ah the MTA, the subway system. I’m dating myself. That salty old broad. May she rest in creaky-squeaky peace. Remember that old train that would sing (she sings) “there’s a place for us.” You don’t remember. That’s okay. I’ll hold it. I’ll hold the memory… for… myself.
At 95, I can’t honestly say I’m terribly self-conscious about my age at this point. Imagine that. Being self-conscious about aging. As if you’re the only person who’s ever been weak enough to die.
Before I leave for the moon, I’d like to tell you what’s on my mind.
Oh. So soon?
Please don’t go.
Won’t you stay to hear some stories from an old woman? My Uber Rocket is coming at 7am.
Yeah. I’m leaving– to help form one of the earliest full-time settlements on the moon.
Alright, yeah, yeah, get your ya yas out about it. I know you’re impressed, but someone has to do it. And I didn’t have kids for precisely this reason, to have adventures like this, on the moon. Also, I’m so over it with these tsunamis and the air outside this apartment is pure cancer. I’m ready for a change of scenery. And to be a part of something. Building a new settlement. A new world.
She looks out the window at a slightly less dark, now swirling, sky. The waves are increasingly high and tumultuous.
But of course. Of course I’m afraid to go to the moon. And say goodbye to earth these next two hours. I didn’t know who to call. So I called you. To mind. Young future. Stranger.
Today feels scary, and exciting, like the first day of school. Or like, my last two hours on earth, which is what it is. Commencement. Always the right time for speeches.
More coffee? I have decaf too, so don’t be shy. Everyone has a heart condition nowadays.
Emma pours coffee. For herself and the audience.
There you go. Nice and toasty. Just like the sea. Hehe.
Past Lives
My last, most recent past life ended in February 1985. Yes, it was a quick turnaround. I died and I was immediately conceived into this life. This is why I'm so tired. Born November 1985, I never got a break.
But so, my last life, yeah, I was in an assisted living facility in Florida, hit my head and bashed it on the wooden leg of an armchair. My only memory of this life is bleeding onto an immaculate peach carpet. The aid is in the kitchen, washing dishes, doesn't hear well. So she didn't find me till, well. I don't recall that part. I was already gone. So then what genre is this telling of my thoughts so far? Fiction maybe, for you, but I remember my death, this one death quite recent, February 1985, with my birth following like a relentless tour schedule: February: conceived, June: grow ears, November: breathe on your own: (she slaps her hands together) Go!
It’s an assault. Being born. Utterly nonconsensual. Death, in my limited personal experience of it, has been far less intrusive.
My birth story was of course fascinating, blah blah blah, but then doesn't everyone think that of their own birth? To be anything but solipsistic is an incredibly herculean lift of a task. Because: Being me is so immersive, so demanding of my attention. We used to talk about being the main character. Gosh, sometimes Instagram was actually profound. Before Silicon Valley fell into the soupy sea in the big earthquake that people had talked about for decades yet somehow never prepared for. You know how these things go. People get lost in their fear and forget to take action. We’re all main characters. Lost in the sauce, we used to say.
Violin Story
I can't fathom what it's like to be you. My experience is so rich and immediate, like an itchy crotch. You can think of nothing else. That's how it is to be alive. Your hunger, your vanity is so all consuming, like a searing yeast infection that beseeches you to scratch it. Maybe you've surmised that I'm not religious. Well, I'm not. But if I had religion, it might be found in this story.
My violin teacher, when I was 12 years old, took me to sit in the pit with her at Goodspeed Opera House. She had no children and, as many teachers (of various disciplines) have, she took a liking to me.
But… I didn't practice much, wasn’t great at the violin, therefore, and was generally confounded by her respect for me, which is telling of my value system as a 12 year old. If you weren’t talented, my thinking went, why would a teacher like you?
We played Bartók duets together, with me on the easier part, and I couldn’t believe I was playing alongside an esteemed artist from the Hartford Symphony. When I didn’t understand a rhythm, I would dance it out to translate it with my body and make the music my own. I found her to be nonjudgmental, plainspoken, and generally fearless, attributes that called to me as I incrementally lost hold of my known self, slipping deeper into the mental tangle of teenagehood.
Jane was a full-time, working violinist. She played classical music and music theatre at the highest level that the arts had to offer in the Greater Hartford area and this was slightly before, or just as, the arts scene in Hartford began to lose funding. I had the good fortune to capture the spectacular death rattles of the golden age of Hartford’s ballet company and symphony and so, from the age of 11 onward, I understood that art was a thing everyone “loved,” but that no one was quite willing to pay for.
Jane was an avid runner, she was a teacher, she was a prolific musician from a musical family. She had a handsome, but semi-haggard look to her. In a man it might be called, ‘rugged,’ but in her face it could best be called, ‘poorly rested.’
Jane had what seemed to me to be a perpetual yeast infection. She was the most successful, full-time, working artist I knew as a preteen, and I might have, but couldn’t have, heeded her eternal yeast infection as a sign, a red flag about the artist's path. She never told me about the yeast infection, but it was evident in her frequent, infernal crotch-scratching during my lessons, which she tried, in futility, to hide. The infection was so persistent and intractable that my friends, having heard about it from me, would inquire: “You have violin today?” They'd say, “Has Jane treated her yeast infection yet?”
I felt intuitively, without having words for it, that Jane needed a nap and a hug and 500 dollars. My respect for her ran deep. She was a kind of celebrity to me, even though her apartment and her aspect were patently unglamorous. I felt she was, to the best of her ability, in control of her choices and that she was awake to her own vitality and potential. At 12, I hadn’t yet read enough self-help to name all this, but I sensed it and sought the warmth of the particular light she cast.
Jane, for reasons known to her, respected me as well, in spite of or maybe because of my lack of seriousness about the violin. She said one late afternoon, in my weekly lesson amid her brown living room, “Come sit next to me in the Goodspeed Opera House pit. You can see what the show looks like from there.”
And I went with her one evening. I was nervous, but knew I should not pass up this rare and unique offer.
She introduced me glowingly to everyone backstage, every actor, and told them, with great pride, that I'd be sitting with her in the pit that evening.
She was eager to show me, her truly mediocre student, off to her colleagues. I was shy and cowed by all of it. The actors were cordial and unmoved by both my presence and by their looming ‘places’ call. In her greetings, Jane paid special attention to one man, an actor dressed as an old-timey magician, and told him I’d be sitting next to her.
As the show began, I sat nestled below the stage in the slim violin section, the overture loud and close, sound waves enveloping me — my view of the stage partially obstructed by bows and trumpets.
There was nothing I had to do but fit neatly there and bear witness.
It was reminiscent, I now realize, of “take your daughter to work day,” one of the quirky 90s phenomena that millennials now stumble back upon, asking, “Did that really happen?” Unlike “normal” “take your daughter to work day,” in my case spent drawing with Crayola markers at a soporific insurance company and grabbing Hershey’s Hugs from glass dishes atop cubicle walls, this “take your daughter to work day” was loud, thrilling, percussive and precise.
I don't recall the show itself at all, but there was at some moment a card trick performed onstage.
The old-timey magician man shuffled and let fly a deck of cards so that they bounced gamely off of Jane's violin bridge and rained directly on me, falling with great meaning, like prophecy, on my nose. Jane was smiling hard as she played, sneaking a sidelong glance at my upturned face as cards fluttered down on us. I saw in that moment that she had dreamed up the whole night just for this: To see playing cards snow down on me from the hallowed stage. To make me a part of the magic now, with my open, delighted smile.
And all this, I marveled, even though I wasn’t good at the violin.
It was a pleasure to be confounded.
I think I’ve built some personal religion from that story. To share what you love most with a student. I’ll share a little more of what I love with you before I go.
Oh, this? It’s my gas mask. I know. It’s very cliche. You don’t realize how real life can be so on the nose until it happens, and you’re literally wearing a gas mask, on your nose. It’s embarrassing, actually, when tragedy occurs and you predicted it so well. You think things will play out unexpectedly, but no. The end plays out a little how you saw it going. Only worse cuz it’s actually happening. But of course, I didn’t expect to look so young and to wear my bathrobe all the time. LL Bean really earns their lifetime warranty! So that has borne out to be true. Over time.
She eats a madeleine cookie. Speaks with her mouth full:
Well, so, just… let’s pause me and go grab yourself a treat. Life is short, for some, possibly for you! Don’t let me eat this madeleine cookie all alone.
This bit is like a Passover seder, but one where everyone has a little piece of a madeleine cookie and remembers their enslavement, their enslavement to their own memories. Or if you’re gluten intolerant you can chew an old sock or whatever you normally do to keep from crying. Hehehe.
I’m joking! I got gluten free cookies too. Come on now. This is an inclusive space.
In truth, I can’t really digest much of what I eat either, but I… persevere.
She hands out cookies and moves with some difficulty and stiffness.
It’s very rude, you know this, right?, to laugh at an old woman’s farts. They are, typically, not intentional.
Ghosts, Montreal, and The Great AI Battle of 2045
Everyone who needs one has a cookie? Good.
So. In addition to my memories of past lives, I've also seen ghosts. Raise your hand if you believe in ghosts. Well, neither do I, but I've seen them, seen them and simultaneously didn't believe in them. Imagine the cognitive dissonance of that, for the ghosts… the erasure the ghosts must have felt. To be both seen and disbelieved in simultaneously. No one is more gaslit than ghosts.
One of the ghosts I encountered was utterly mundane. And that's notable, I think: a ghost going about her business.
Perhaps a ghost is a past life without a body. Maybe like hermit crabs, our ghosts move about looking for a host. Some say ghosts have unresolved business. That makes sense to me. They have OCD, which lasts beyond death. Pulling at door knobs and checking that the stove is off for millennia. Until a new baby is born, who will become an accountant and that ghost is called up for duty. To return to earth and work for Turbo Tax, checking and rechecking 1099s and squelching every dollar out of freelance copywriters.
So, yes, I was. I am a writer. I made my name, eventually, in the Great AI Battle of 2045. Some have called me an Accidental Activist. The Great AI Battle of 2045 was much like the Go and Chess battles with the earlier AI models, but in this AI battle I wandered in to find myself up against a highly advanced bot named Madison. In truth I’d been shopping for shoes, but an augmented reality pop-up ad forcibly grabbed me by the wrists and said, come fight this robot, and boy was that ad targeted because I had been itching to fight a robot all day and dammit if the ad didn’t know that from my blood pressure and dilated pupils. So it was me versus Madison to see who could write the most droll, apocalyptic paragraph of verse that also expressed the joy of being alive.
That was the prompt.
Madison gave a fine show, but the judges, a jury of my peers and of Madison’s—so some alive, some merely storing the concept of being alive and of all human experience—judged our verses. Mine was deemed, by a small margin, to be slightly more wistful and funny and thus I won for team humanity. It didn’t make me famous, but it’s definitely going in my obituary.
It’s very hard when you don’t believe in God to square that with the feeling that something divine is there, listening, caring for you. Richard Dawkins, who is the ultimate buzzkill to end all buzzes, explains this as an evolutionary advantage. This belief in a parent. The brain develops that way. Here’s an example he gives that illuminates the godlessness of our lives. Children he says, listen to adults, some children, that is, and the children over time who were most likely to heed advice like, don’t jump in that water with those crocodiles, were the same children who listened when they were told that God made the world in 6 days, or that Eve was out of line taking the apple, or that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were just friends.
Dawkins says that we are evolved over time from the children who made it, the ones who listened, children who heeded, who believed stories. Because stories kept them safe. So according to Dawkins, that means that, somewhere, lost in our ancestry are the most feral streak of children. The ones who heard don’t swim with crocodiles and ran straight for the crocodiles. Now they live in Florida. The progeny of the feral children. But most of them didn’t make it.
A lot of my best friends are religious. And they are better for it. And I love them. And they even were so bold as to have children. They have both God and children. Such a throwback. They won’t be going to the moon in this early batch, they’re still holding out hope. They made new people for this planet so they’re eager to see how that goes. But my last tsunami survival and cancer episode, I said, it’s time to go. Running from a tsunami, full tilt, full to the brim of tumors, it’s too much. It was a difficult April.
The age-stopping serum is a visual fix only. My organs are aging, right on schedule. I am. 95. My bloodstream is suffused with credit card particles. Smell me, I’m mostly plastic. I’ve led a life of superior hydration, but all that water I drank: was filled with microplastics.
So you see, that was Madison’s shortcoming, they knew about the human experience, Madison did, but a bot can’t really know what it is to love water and trust it as the source of all life, and then watch it fill you with microscopic shards of Tupperware that bond with your estrogen and weight you down. Women who once loved Tupperware have now become it.
Can Madison write like that? No. Dumb robot bitch. Well, nonbinary, but, still a bitch. Gender may be a social construct, but being a bitch is congenital.
The Great AI Battle of 2045 ended, of course, somewhat anticlimactically in that everyone got distracted and bored of being at war and the AI themselves just wanted to see what we’d do in battle. They were only in it for the data. Classic AI bullshit. We humans, for our part, were too lazy to stay in any sort of battle. I myself stopped writing for a time after the skirmish with Madison. It was all so demoralizing, the early 40s, to see my supposedly inimitable soul gathered up and copied in deepfakes that were more me than I have ever been, and I was tempted to just sit out my life and collect seashells and stop writing altogether. I think it’s fair to say the AI won. Or that everyone lost together. Whatever, I’m going to the moon.
This upsets you, huh? When I’m just a little bit caustic, negative, sad? You know as a child I was frequently quite mean. Yeah, that’s a little secret of mine that I’m done holding onto. It got sanded out of me, my meanness. Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t like soft things. My own softness disgusts me and frankly so does yours. It doesn’t mean I don’t love. I love, I have loved many people, but frequently found them quite disgusting and I forgive you for being grossed out by me. My melting insides. My floppy breasts. We’re all just doing the best we can.
At a certain point, look, if there is a God I’m not trying to be a tragedy clown show for her. I’m not here to entertain—well, except for you, this morning— but God is not my intended audience. And that benevolent feeling, that deep feeling of care, that more friendly version of God… I believe that is me, the kind part of me, looking out for me, as an expression of the universe, a particle of stars. Minerals mixed up in my bones and eyeballs. Science mixed with good vibes.
My grandmother was a chemist. I was in chemistry class when the planes hit the twin towers. So that’s a brief summary of three generations. My mom’s life happened somewhere in the middle there.
Once my religious friend, very tired from raising two kids and having a marriage and a high powered job said, “‘Eternal Rest,’ doesn’t that sound nice though?” She was a clergy person. So she was always talking about eternal rest, but never got a chance to sleep herself. Sounds like literal hell to me. So I hope when she dies she doesn’t roam as a ghost. She really needs to sleep. She believes in God. The Jewish one. People who believe in God are very precious to me. They are librarians for our most ancient stories.
She goes to get a second cup of coffee.
So this mundane ghost I saw in Montreal: I woke up in a lucid dream, so I was asleep, but believed I was awake. And I saw in the middling darkness of our bedroom, a young redheaded woman in AirPods, jogging through our bedroom.
“Honey, honey, wake up, wake up, a ghost,” I whispered. But my husband, Luke wouldn't wake. And I sat up in bed watching the young woman jog past and along her path. Then I woke up for real feeling that I had had a nightmare, but a very casual one.
The next day, our first in Montreal, I took a walk and found that the enormous park sprawled out in the darkness was in fact about 25% graveyard. And the jogging ghost with AirPods had been on her natural daily route. Perhaps she was buried there. She didn't seem to know she was dead or didn't see it as a legitimate excuse to quit jogging. I can't even motivate myself to jog while I'm alive.
Not all the ghosts I've seen are quotidian. I have seen ghosts in moments of spectacular and cataclysmic personal change. But more on that later. Anyone want more coffee?
Instrumental jazz music can be heard from next door. The sun in the window rises a little more.
My neighbors are awake,
(She smiles.)
It's going to be a good day.
I believe in assisted suicide, don't you? How can anyone live a peaceful life worrying that their death will be terrible? My last one was fine, my last death.
Oh, I’ve upset you. It is difficult as an old woman to remember and keep track of everyone’s sensitivities and trauma. It has been a lifelong battle to remember which things are taboo, which ones merely edgy, which will get you canceled and by whom. Probably cuz it’s a tangle of all the lives I’ve lived. Each with its own inscrutable social mores. See, I’ve been reincarnated 40 times now and literally NEVER said the right thing at a party.
She grabs at a package on the table near the window where the sun is steadily rising.
Dammit these cookies are expired. Well, try one, it’s only a few months past.
Ok, I’ll just put them here. Someone will want one. They’re very special.
She eats an expired cookie and tries to enjoy it.
In one life I was a very ancient Weimaraner. A dog. I was 14 and I prayed wordlessly for death and my mother, my human mother, took me to the vet where they gave me chocolate and killed me gently. That was my first lifetime really tasting chocolate. As a slate grey Weimaraner, losing consciousness in the arms of my human mother.
That life may have been simultaneous with my most recent one, but in a different dimension, or it was a quick palate cleanser of a life between a few other human ones. The timetable is unknowable, but the pace of my reincarnation has been, as I’m sure you can see, fucking relentless.
That’s why the place is a mess. I’m sure you understand, this level of fatigue is not cured by a nap. Eternal rest is the cure.
I’m afraid of death, of course, but I comfort myself to remember: My last one was fine, my last death.
Past lives continued
Hard on the carpet, but easy for me. The life before. I can't recall my death. I remember just one scene from my life, an important moment. My life as the old man who died in 1985 had begun around 1900.
But this life, this scene from my life prior to the Florida assisted living home… The scene here takes place in the very late 1800s. I'm young, maybe 23 or 25 in a pretty but practical long dress characteristic of the time in Europe or Eastern Europe. And I'm having an argument with my sister. The content of the fight is vague, but the emotion is not. We are screaming at one another, stippled by periodic silences, pendulous with grief. Our mother is on the ship and she is dying. And something about this has created a fractious grief we cannot reconcile. We blame one another.
When I tell you that I'm not over this argument, what can you say?
How absurd. But this scene comes to me as a memory that sails without end on a sea I cannot pinpoint. I don't know if I died on that ship, but something in me died. It was a terrible day that lives without closure and is my only memory of a life that presumably began in great love and harmony.
Your life right now is likely to be someone’s past life, don’t you think? Maybe even your own past life, depending upon whom we speak of when we say “You” and “Your.”
When I get into this slipstream, where I’m a witch, I feel everything I say is true and you’d be forgiven for believing me. I’m a terrible liar, due to having no motivation to lie, and I’m an outstanding believer of my own prophetic dreams. Everything I’m telling you this morning is true. Have a little more coffee and you’ll understand.
She pours coffee for the listeners.
When I was young, I had less control over when I’d see ghosts and when I wouldn’t. The thing with ghosts, or call them, if you like, past lives floating absent their bodies, it’s a matter of semantics, really, but the thing about ghosts is that they come through a channel into your awareness and, as you leave childhood, you learn to shut off the channel. But it’s not without cost. Shut down your channel and you may miss all kinds of important messages. And once you shut down one of your senses, your spooky, spooky intuition, for example, well, your inner wisdom is soon to follow. And soon after that you might be looking at Pinterest to see what’s fashionable because you have entirely lost hold of your own opinions. And then fascism gets you. Or socialism, depending whom you ask. But the point is, an open channel means you feel more, you think for yourself and unfortunately, if you’re doing it right, not everyone is going to like you.
I’ve turned the channel back on lately, searching for someone I lost. More on him later. I hope an open channel serves me well on the moon. I honestly don’t know if it will.
Shtetl Morning
I am Jewish. You guessed already from my last names. I have two. My parents were maximalists. I even have a middle name, also very Jewish. Ruth. You wouldn’t fuck with a woman named Emma Ruth Tattenbaum-Fine, given meeker options with fewer names.
23andMe has me hailing from Belarus, on one side, and Poland, on the other. Both genetic lines of my family might have frequently waved to one another, or a lot more than waved, from across an arbitrary border. Or maybe my distant cousins, not knowing they’d someday be my distant cousins, flirted with one another while running errands in Ukraine.
23andMe tells me I’m Ashkenazi and I feel true pride in that, for all the ancient and tribal reasons people feel pride in knowing where they come from.
So I’m Jewish as I said, but the Godless kind. Not believing in God is a glorious and expansive way to live.
(Remember I’ve only asked you to join me in this shared No God reality for 30 minutes. Then you can go right back. Because, you see, I know it can be very scary for some people, even hip, urban types who drink Americanos and put extra shots in things that never used to have extra shots in them. Even the cool kids, when you press a little deeper, might believe in God and may be frightened of the thought experiment that briefly subtracts her from the equation.)
So, about Godlessness: when something terrible and grotesque happens — something like: “Did you hear? Our beloved neighbor has been impaled on a spike! Her young daughter witnessed the whole ordeal. Her dying words to the child were, 'I left the stove on and we have a gas leak.' The house went up in flames and her daughter fled. How she must have suffered, helplessly impaled on a spike, in her own yard.”
When you don't believe in God, you have the liberating gift of not having to say, "Well, God has a plan and 'it's mysterious.'" You don't have to twist yourself into knots saying, "That poor child! May God protect her." You can instead see the situation clearly and say, "Natural selection got that family real good. They won't be breeding now."
That upsets you, too, huh? That was caustic. That was mean. Even to say nasty things about fictional characters, used to illustrate Godlessness, people will tell you: you’re mean. When you’re a woman, you’re mean. When you’re a man, you are telling it like it is. Have another cookie and you’ll forget double standards. You’ll forget that you’re both fat and impermanent. Statistically speaking, most of us are. It’s okay!
Look, I just mean that without God we can hold one another and say, I’m here and I take responsibility. Or, I’m not here. I see your family dying and I’m not going to get involved, as is so often the case. But at least we stand in the honesty of our own neglect. God does not have a plan for you. Or for anyone. Let’s hold each other and breathe through that. I’m giving myself a hug. There is so much pain all over the world and I’m not helping. There’s no God to help, there’s no me to help. Death, destruction, famine, war and God’s not coming to fix it.
When the whole of the Levant went up in a mushroom cloud in 2036, I was honestly surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. I’m glad I made it to Jerusalem twice early in my life to see what all the fuss was about. Beautiful city, Jerusalem was. And now, it belongs to no one but nuclear-resistant cockroaches.
The story of the planet has been this, fighting over territory, so instead we’ve destroyed it and said it’s for nobody. A classic parental approach to children who will not share. The moon will be fresh and new and I expect to be dead by 150 years old. So, if the inevitable and exhausting moon wars come sooner, I’ll make alternate plans for my exit, because I can’t stand war. It reminds me how petty and ineffectual we all are. I would love to feel patriotic for 20 minutes. I felt it on September 11th, 2001 when I was a teenager in my lunch period a cappella class singing “America, the Beautiful.” I loved loving my country and singing about it for 20 minutes. Then the class ended.
I tell you that I'm Jewish, Jewish and Godless, because it's relevant, you see. Everything about me is shaped by my shtetl past. The cellular, ghostly memory of the shtetl — a poor little village swirling with mysticism, wonder, disease, and unbridled creativity pressed under the duress of constraint. I call mornings like this one that we are sharing, 'shtetl mornings.’
So what is a Shtetl Morning?
It's a phrase I coined (for my own philosophical purposes, and now for yours), I'm sure while I was having coffee, for that is when I am most apt to coin a phrase. A Shtetl Morning is when you awake to rain and gaze out your apartment's window — into your neighbor's window — and think "Anything is possible! Within a very finite realm of possibilities." It's the moment when you take your Prozac with your coffee and think, "Wow, I have really optimized this human experience."
It's knowing that the day will bring dread and discomfort, but opening — opening yourself to the glory of no God. A day that natural selection, in its inexorable march through all time, has made for me to sit here in the comfort of science and welcome this new day, kissed and made rosy-cheeked by the awe of agnosticism. Not agnosticism about the presence of God, but a simple, splendid, "I do not understand. And I have no story for this."
No mythology, as I gaze up, out my little window, into my bit of stolen sky. I sit attentively with my honest bewilderment, which, with caffeine, can be called “wonder” and “gratitude.”
At my friend's 34th birthday, many years ago, before the aging serum came to market via the boyfriend of the woman I went to music theatre camp with, when birthdays still seemed very momentous to us, I led the table in a secular humanist prayer.
At one particular moment, all of us around the table, aware of our pleasure and suddenly overcome, looked to one another and said, "Let's do a blessing of some kind! For us! For the birthday girl."
And I let it play out, to be polite, knowing of course that I would be doing the blessing. After the requisite "Want me to? Should I?" from my friends, I said, "Oh, shush, I'll do it." And the table settled.
I was newly sober at the time and very excited to flex my new mental capacities.
My secular humanist blessing went like this:
"What an extraordinary feat that we are all here today, that our lives have overlapped in this expanse of time that we don't understand at all, that we find ourselves at this table in Brooklyn at the best, our favorite restaurant, Pasta Louise.
And let us bless this food and the people who labored relentlessly, with absolutely no assistance from a God who is not real, but people who, by their own sweat, crushed the grapes for the wine that I'm not drinking. Strained the cucumbers for my mocktail. Rolled out the extraordinary pasta and gave us the birthday girl, who, by the warp and weft of natural selection — across countless millennia, before recorded time, has been, somehow, brought to us here! Nearly perfect but for her herniated disc, the great wabi-sabi creation of a godless universe." (The birthday girl had a herniated disc.)
And that blessing, which I came to discover as I spoke it aloud to my friends, to the birthday girl, and to myself — I think, encapsulates a Shtetl Morning.
It brims with promise because, finally, you face reality with all of its limitations. The constant craving for the world as it is not has ceased. You can begin, this morning, to create a reality based on your own story. A story that is both yours and that of your ancestors. Riddled with self-doubt and pride. Personal glory, potential, and the failings that haunt you. All of it, the truth of who you are and where you come from. And it is not a story you've been told before.
And this has worked well for me, on earth. But now that I’m leaving. It would be nice to have God now. God or children or, even both. To send me off. I’m glad you’re here. Listening to an old lady. Maybe I’m boring you. Well, you know what, I did a lot of listening in my day. To everyone’s damn problems. A lot of unpaid hours.
She looks at the giant clock. It is 6 AM. The light has come up an hour’s more in the window, but it’s still dark-ish.
More coffee? The sun will be up soon and this liminal space can’t stay.
Morning is always dismally brief and then the real day starts and is just too bright. Never gentle enough.
The thing people who don’t see ghosts don’t realize is that when one visits you or possesses you, it’s not subtle. You will know. I’ll tell you first about Frank, my least favorite ghost, and work my way toward my wedding night when my grandmother visited me, which is so Jewish and cliche and funny of her. One Jewish atheist popping in to say hello to another. Ok, but first, weird gross Frank, the ghost who brought me back to ghosts.
Moon Prep
Abruptly the clock moves to 6:30 AM.
Oh, look at the time. It’s rude how quickly it passes. Once my coffee is done I’ll be commuting to the moon. My house is 3D-printed, yes, just like all the old podcasts said it would go down. Sometimes things actually play out just like podcasts said they would. On 31 Lunastrasse, that’s where I’ll live, because the realty company is German. It sounds like an old shtetl address. Everything old is new again. This little settlement on the moon. I’m going to miss the animals terribly, chipmunks somewhat but dogs extremely. I don’t know when I’ll see a dog again. Maybe when the next round of settlers come, right now it will be just people. Adults. This is the kind of adventure I wanted. This is why I didn’t have children, to take risks like this. But. As my mother, Margie, once said, the problem with risks is that, sometimes, they don’t work out. That was actually a very counter cultural thing to say in 2023. People were all about taking risks then. And my mom, who once worked in insurance, said, hey, there is a downside to risk. What a stupid, obvious thing to say. But no one else had the balls to say it. The quiet part out loud. Sometimes risks go badly. Instagram never said it. Not in a meme. Not in a reel. Don’t take risks, was never a hashtag.
Stirring her coffee.
I’m going to miss earth. But it gets old, you know? Day after day of earth. I’ve seen it already. And the air is bad here. Zero gravity will be an adventure.
She reaches up, miming.
I’ll grab my coffee in the morning from the air as it floats away. No, my little house will have gravity, don’t worry about me. I’ll be alright. I’ll be a bit lonely, but then I’m lonely here.
Ghosts: “Frank”
Ah so, the ghosts I’ve met. Frank.
It started with this little green light I had in my room in East Harlem. It was one of those lights you had to tap to turn on. There was no other way to turn it on. It was an old lamp and once upon a time you had to merely tap it, but as it got older, you had to smack it, hard, and remind it that it was even a lamp. It was green like the lamps you see in movies about accountants from the 1950s? (Or movies in which there are accountants. No one makes a movie about an accountant.)
Autocracy is challenging these days, but it’s nice at least that tax season went away. That was a lot of stressful guesstimating for awhile there. Always having to add a .07 to the end of things to make it look like you remember some random printer paper you bought ten months ago. Pure farce. Ok, so the lamp.
One night at 1am the touch lamp went on in the darkness of my brick room. I woke up from a deep sleep to the green glow of a lamp that could only be turned on by a vigorous smack.
Well, it wasn’t my first time with ghosts, but it had been decades since my last. I was deeply unsettled and, also, a little bit annoyed. I had explicitly, as a child, and in no uncertain terms, asked that ghosts find a different little girl to bother. No one likes to set boundaries less than I do, especially once they’ve already been articulated.
I sat up in bed staring at the light. My room was the size of a prison cell and the rental price of a two story house in Detroit, as with all New York City apartments. From my bed I could easily see the base of the lamp. I looked for cockroaches. Could a heavy bug have jumped on the lamp? It was an absurd idea, but then, some people say ghosts aren’t real, but no one, no one says cockroaches aren’t big.
There was no bug. So I got up to turn out the light. With a good slap to its base, it was off. I got back into bed, wide awake. The room was still lit by the streetlights and bodegas and it wasn’t too dark, ever, with the curtains open.
I tried to fall asleep, deciding, against my instincts, that it was some sort of electrical fuse thing and not a ghost. As I fell into slumber, but just before, I felt a light brush to my hair, as if from a hand. Yearning and erotic in intention. I shot up in bed, turned around. Nothing but the brick wall behind my pillow. (This apartment had exposed brick and you better believe I’m still bragging about that to this day, even in a ghost story where it might not seem salient, to you.)
It was becoming difficult to ignore this ghost who was not only turning on a slap light, but now, also, moving his ghost hand through my hair.
It was a rough night and I folded myself deep under my covers, hiding from the ghost, whose name had come to me: Frank. A man who had lived in this very room in East Harlem in the 1920s. How I knew this is, well, you know things by intuition when you’re a grownup who formerly spoke to ghosts as a child, so that’s how it came to me.
I didn’t like Frank. I had never met a creepy predator ghost before, but I reasoned that, you know, he was dead and I was not, a power differential certainly in my favor.
So, getting into bed the next night, I thought, perhaps he’s passed on.
Again at 1am, the touch lamp slapped on, again with no bug to be seen. Another terrible night of harrowed sleep.
I arranged to stay at my boyfriend’s apartment for awhile and as days passed, I induced him to come sleep at my place, since the ghost was some lonely man who surely wouldn’t bother me with Luke sleeping by my side. The light never came on when Luke was there.
But the night did, inevitably, come when Luke couldn’t stay over and I couldn’t stay all the way with him in distant Sunset Park, and I was left to face the ghost alone. My friends and my boyfriend had, understandably, laughed good-naturedly about me and my ghost named Frank. It was a problem affecting my life and housing, so, naturally, I discussed it with those close to me, as one does with quirky neighbors or bad landlords. NYC-housing stress is more tolerable when shared and sympathetic listeners are easy to find.
Facing my first night alone in the apartment, since those two creepy nights a week-and-a-half ago, I called my other mom, Rae, long esteemed an amateur shaman among, well, herself, but also me.
“I’m concerned,” she said over the phone upon learning of Frank’s presence and behavior, “because, this is not a spirit from the light.”
“No,” I agreed. “He touched my hair. Very out of line.”
“Here’s what you must do. Before bed tonight. Before you go to sleep, you are to speak aloud into the room ‘Only spirits from the light are welcome, Only spirits from the light are welcome, Only spirits from the light are welcome, all others are not permitted and must leave.’”
“But what if I don’t want any spirits present, from the light or otherwise?”
“That would be a mistake,” she said, immediately. “Spirits from the light are useful. Good to have around, actually.”
My queen-sized bed took up most of my bedroom and, from that vantage point, I began to picture my space as a kind of ecosystem, in which lived monarch butterflies, millipedes and friendly spiders, but also wretched mosquitoes and biting dust mites. And, as with pesticide, I saw that the goal was not to wipe out every living thing, but just the ones eating the crops. (In this case, the living things were dead things, ghosts, but the general metaphor stands.)
My mother, Rae, proposed sagely that this was a time of emotional flux, that my channel was open and I was in a period of transition, vulnerable and open to the shifting tides of energy and the attendant ghosts who pass through when you’re labile.
It was one thing to receive this advice and counsel, and another thing entirely to sit up in bed, legs bent up under my covers, as an adult woman of 29 years old and to speak at a volume that the ghosts, namely Frank, could hear, but not my three roommates in their adjoining rooms. But I dutifully said aloud my incantation, ‘Only spirits from the light. Only spirits from the light. Only spirits from the light. All others are not permitted and must leave.’
And in doing this, I felt, initially, ridiculous, but milli-moments later,
very fucking creeped out.
Because my incantation did not fall on silence. By speaking it, a listener, or many listeners took shape to my consciousness. The air became thick and busy, populated by a prickling energy. I was acknowledging, aloud, by this action, that I was not alone, was never alone. Had never BEEN alone. AND, I was setting a boundary, which I hate to do with the living, as much as with the dead. Truly on all levels this night engaged my every pain point as a human sojourner through this life.
Frank now entered not only my awareness, but also my body, by which I mean that my legs lengthened and filled out with muscle, I saw myself in long, wide Oxford shoes, a blazer. My shoulders became thick and square and Frank, as he had been, arrived in me and visited the tangible world. I loved being a man, briefly, as I hadn’t been one since my previous life and I’d entirely forgotten how it feels to be tall and broad and to spread my legs on a subway bench or any scant space and to be full to the brim of unquestioned deserving. He passed through me like a roller coaster cresting and we dropped together and he was gone.
I had just met the boyfriend, Luke, who would later become my husband. It stands to reason, don’t you think, that ghosts would come for you as you fall in love? Eager to feel it themselves, especially if they’d been robbed of love in their own lives.
Frank put up no fight in his exit, but he seemed, as I was, stunned by my audacity to call upon him and my trust in the presence of the unseen.
Ghosts are mostly gaslit, told they aren’t real. So when they are entirely acknowledged, well, they’re understandably quite shaken by it.
As with my previous experiences banishing ghosts, namely when I was 8 years old and Rae and I conducted a seance with sage, there was always, afterward, the conflicted victory. The sense of having prevailed, but over an enemy both ailing and wounded from the outset. Not an equal or fair fight.
I’m sorry, Frank, I thought, in the spacious new silence, that there was no place for you, in what must have been your old room. I felt certain that Frank had once lived there, in my brick room in East Harlem.
Frank never returned, via the slap light, the hair touch, nor any other means, and only, rarely, have I seen spirits from the light since (my grandma, more on her later).
What makes a person die and become like Frank? I do not want to turn out like him, haunting people, non-consensually. I want to rest. I hope he found rest.
Packing
Packing for the moon isn’t as hard as you would probably think. It’s really not. What would you pack to take to the moon? This isn’t an icebreaker exercise, I promise. We won’t get to know one another, I’m just curious what you would pack.
A brief interview with the audience.
Part of the relocation plan is that honestly the Lunastrasse program is doing most of the packing for me. Because I don’t own much of what I will actually need, like I don’t have a radiation blocking one piece or a vestibular system orienting pair of compression socks. LL Bean carries something similar, but NASA said LL Bean's off-earth gear isn’t made as good as it was in the 2060s, so don’t bother. So they’ll provide all that. And taking stuff with me is too expensive with the fuel and all that. So really I’m gonna 3D print it when I get there. If you want my stuff, my seashell collection or… it’s – this Brighton Beach apartment is yours. But don’t stay long, the tsunamis are worse than the moon dust, so come be on the frontier with me? It’ll be fun. Actually, I’m really not sure about that! But I’m keeping an open mind! Change is the only constant!
Emma gives a thumbs up.
More Packing
I’m permitted to bring a few tchotchkes for my mental wellness. Here’s what I choose:
She holds up a seashell. A sticker of a dog. A stack of post-its.
For my ideas.
She grabs a pen and adds that to the suitcase pile.
It will be interesting to see what kind of ghosts the moon has. Only a few people have died in space, so… Or maybe everyone who has died is up in space. Maybe it’s ghost central. I actually had not considered that. It will either be all ghosts or no ghosts.
It would seem likely that spirits go up there, between lives, to recuperate? Unhoused past life spirits, before returning to earth, maybe getting hosed down. Washing their trauma off before they come back to do it all again. God, how exhausting. And if there is a God, I’m going to look really stupid and so will Richard Dawkins, but he’s used to everyone hating him. I’m not, though. That would be hard on me.
My grandmother of course has visited me, and on multiple occasions. It isn’t just randos like Frank and the jogger in Montreal. Those two are strangers and got caught in my frequency. Sometimes I leave my channel open. I’m sort of a lazy and chaotic medium, with no training, so I never really know what I’ll pick up, like a hobbyist in the early days of radio. But my grandmother was a studious ghost. Very pointed and intentional with her few visits.
Ghosts: Beatrice on my wedding night
My grandmother, who died long before I was born, did something very sneaky some years ago.
I wore her sapphire lavalier the day of my wedding, but, more importantly, I wore her sapphire lavalier the day that Luke and I got our marriage certificate at Avon Town Hall, September 9th, 2020. A date that no one but me remembers, more than a month before our wedding day. But to me it was a special day. I was grateful to be wearing a Covid mask, a cloth mask that said Bride on it in cursive. This was before paper masks were easy to come by. I couldn’t stop smiling, sitting in the backseat of the car on the way to the town hall. My smile was so wide that it seemed clownish, chronic, like something you might go to the doctor to manage, a kind of joy that I could not stifle. Without my mask I’d have been tempted to chill my face out and try to be cool about it. It was only paperwork after all, but I was wearing an expensive white blouse and my grandmother’s lavalier, taken out of the bank safe for the occasion, and of course my hair was done up, coming freshly from the bridal hair trial –meaning, where you try out your hairdo, not like my hair was on trial before a judge– and I was wearing a bride Covid mask. It was all so ridiculous and my face ruptured into a grin so wide that I took deep solace in having a mask to hide it.
We got our papers signed by the office workers at Avon Town Hall, who couldn’t have looked the part more, with an overstuffed office of yellowing papers and old maps and friendly clipboards with pens on strings.
We went out for a festive dinner with my uncles and parents and that night we, Luke and I, had sex in my parents’ basement on the pulled out futon. Our first time having sex as a married couple in the eyes of the township of Avon, CT and, indeed, the planet, Earth.
It was very good sex. So good, in fact, that my grandmother joined. I know, I was also surprised. My grandmother had been dead for some 50 years by this point, so her attendance in my bridal chamber was both unexpected and also somewhat cliche, since brides are widely known, in Jewish folklore, to be targets for old yentas, dead or living.
I had taken the lavalier necklace off and it was in my peripheral view, atop a storage bin in the basement, on the occasion of the futon festivities. I didn’t tell Luke of course that we had a visitor, my first lie of omission in our nascent marriage. But my grandmother was entirely unshy, she possessed me completely that night, brought on by the sapphire lavalier and the momentous occasion, and she also had sex with Luke. We were pretty drunk, so maybe it was a little easier for me to share the confines of my body. It was a joyful experience, silly, magical, profound, absurd. I was glad to give her a chance to come back, to join me in the feeling of being so deeply loved, across and through all time. It was her night, wasn’t it? As much as it was mine?
And as for Luke, well, ghosts or not I’m sure he had a good time. I don’t wish to generalize, but cisgendered human men are fairly uncomplicated in this particular way. They’re typically happy having sexy time, whether or not their new wives are suddenly possessed by a visiting maternal ancestor.
I keep imagining and assuming that I’ll see Luke on the moon when I get there. But he died last year. The Brighton Beach tsunami took him, yeah, that one, maybe you remember it. Got him while he was out for a stroll.
“Put on your gas mask,” I said.
Yeah yeah.
“Wear your coat,” I said.
Sure, fine.
“Wear your supportive sneakers, the new ones we printed in royal blue with extra arch support.”
Ok, Bean, he said, Whatever you say.
“Take your Tom Brady cane.”
He loved his Tom Brady-brand cane. Tom Brady makes canes now.
He left the house smiling, teasing me, knowing I was pleased he’d worn all the lifesaving accessories I’d implored him to.
Ah well, tsunamis don’t care what shoes you have on.
Or if your jacket is zipped.
They just take and take and never give back.
The age stopper serum froze him at 39, but his insides continued to melt like mine. I had recurrently dreamt of tsunamis my whole life and wondered why that was, and of course, in the end, that’s what got him.
Of all the random ghosts who haunt me, he never visits. But I knew he’d pass quickly through the bardo. If ever there was going to be a drama free ghost, it would be my husband. Not one to linger in any sort of purgatory, nor to obsess. No unfinished business for him. Except of course, me.
The clock abruptly strikes 7AM.
Departure
(She looks scared and small, and speaks with dread.)
Oh, oh. I hate when coffee time is over. It’s a little death every morning, isn’t it?
I’m in this LL Bean bathrobe to go to the moon, because it makes me feel safe. I wear it a lot, like every day. Don’t judge. You don’t know how you’ll feel, when you leave earth.
She picks up the little suitcase, fills it with only the dog sticker, the seashell, the post-its and pen. And a bottle of Prozac.
Prozac. Don’t leave home without it.
She puts the gas mask on. Opens the door to outside,
Swirling, howling winds.
She coughs and sputters into the mask. Closes the door real quick, darts back inside.
She pulls off the mask for a final thought:
(a little panicked)
Hey again. So. You can write to me. Email is fine, but if you want to do old-fashioned letters, please spray them with the scent of wet dog because that’s what I’ll miss so desperately. Give your dog a bath and have her roll on the paper, let it dry, then write your message, I’d appreciate that. 31 Lunastrasse. There will only be 100 of us so it should reach me, though for security reasons, the multinational crew governing up there will read it first, so don’t write in code or anything that makes you or me look… ya know, crazy.
Anyway, thanks for letting me tell my stories, it’s the thing I most wanted to do before leaving Earth. See you soon maybe, when you join? I… do care for you. I don’t know you well. But I see the good in you. It’s not your fault, you know.
Uber alert dings throughout the apartment:
YOUNG WOMAN ROBOT VOICEOVER:
Sky Cab is here, please meet your driver outside.
EMMA:
Whatever it is that haunts you. You didn’t choose it, at all, or at least not consciously. It’s not your fault that you’re here and it’s not your fault that you’re going. So I know you’re doing your best with the in-between. And I have done my best, too.
She puts the gas mask on, opens the door to the fire escape. A burst of noise from the wind and waves. She lifts off.
Lights to black, scene change, during which we hear:
Emma, in Voiceover:
Walking along a beach, a 3-year-old boy looks up at his father and, in the grip of a pleasant memory, asks, gazing upward, do you remember when you were little and I took YOU to the beach? And his father, though he doesn’t remember, feels his own former smallness in the little boy’s hand and their identities flow between them in a puddle, an exchange of energy, and mightn’t it have gone back and forth for many lives in different iterations?
On the Surface of the Moon:
Now we see Emma, somewhere new, still in her plaid bathrobe, but now also encased in a space suit. She sits on a beige train station bench on the surface of the moon. She is wide-eyed. To calm herself, she goes to open her briefcase, but loses hold of it just as the contents spill open. The dog sticker, the post-its, the pen, the seashell, and Prozac, along with the briefcase itself, drift out into space.
In the final tableau, Emma reaches out in fear to the objects as they leave her,
but she cannot hold them.
Oboe/Klezmer music.
The End.
WOW Emma. Brilliant, spacy, great depth, and very humorous!! My head is spinning, as I recover from Covid now filled with ther brilliance of EMMA. I was depressed when I began to read this, I am no longer. Thank you Emma. I love you.