“How did you find them?”
“The Blanks came to me,” Saul said, lying back on his own deck chair. “I found the first one in Philadelphia in a bookstore on a side street, all by itself. I had to have it. I knew it was special, somehow, even though it was just a notebook, at first glance. The old man who sold it to me saw it that way. Then I started a bookstore of my own in Boston. One day, by chance, I saw what it could do when I put it into the hands of a man and his life spilled out into his brain and mine. The true story, past and future, as ugly and great as usually is the case. He bought it and I let him because I realized I had to sell it to him. I had handed over my first Blank, and watched it walk out of the store.”
“The next day, I found four more where that one had been shelved. I have never been short of them. Do you see? I think they are drawn to some and when they find a home, they are free to keep coming.”
“Come on,” Frannie said. “Do you think in the night four books just appeared out of thin air?”
“I actually think they flew in like birds, but who knows? I’ve never seen it happen.” He leaned on one arm. “I keep them, I sell them. I am a keeper of the Blanks. And I have one question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you want to be one too?”
She didn’t hesitate, not that she was constitutionally capable of that. “Oh, yes.”
“Good,” Saul said, and he leaned back to glance up at the Riviera’s plain white exterior and up, as though he could cast his glance like a stone over the hotel and across the road to the Café. “Because this place is special, Frannie. They’re coming fast, now. As though they know they have found a special home, more than any place I’ve ever had. When we opened two months ago I had five.”
“How many are there now?”
“At last count? Sixty.”
Frannie started. “But why—why Café Monstro?”
“I know!” Saul laughed. “I should be insulted by that question, but it’s a damn good one. Why does this place with its bonkers art and its folk music become a beacon for Blanks while my old place, a family place, not so much. But there it is.”
“There it is,” Frannie repeated. “Uncle Saul, I knew when I saw that place that I needed to be a part of it.”
“Then take my hand and shake on it, niece,” Saul said. “And we will change lives.”
Chapter 21
Frannie was a runaway, now. Not from home—she still went there at the end of the day, still saw her parents and told them bowdlerized stories of the denizens of Cafe Monstro—but from the life that she had known before. She threw herself bodily at two waves, the Blanks and the surf, and slipped right in.
Saul arrived one morning with a stack of books and told Frannie he was going to stack them all on the table in the little rat hole apartment above the Café. “You can go there and learn them. If there’s not a customer bell ringing, if those beaded curtains aren’t chattering, that’s your place.”
“You want me to study.”
Saul shook his head. “I don’t want you to study. You don’t study the Blanks, because there’s nothing in ‘em. And anyway, you don’t need to study. You need to learn. The stuff you need to learn is in books, the Torah, the Mishnah, some of the Talmud.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. How’s your Hebrew?”
Frannie waggled her hand. “Saturdays.”
“I trust you. But I’m not finished. Don’t worry, I’ll divide this stuff up for you.” He brought out a sheet of paper and Frannie saw that he’d divided it up into a grid for days of the week and hours of the day.
“Oh my God, you’re a maniac.”
“Look here. You got your usual studies and then you need the Zohar, the Sefer Yetzirah, the Shoshan Yesod ha-‘Olam.”
“What’s all that?”
He scratched his head. “Books to understand the Teachings of the Ari, to grasp what is needed to repair the broken world.”
“Ohhh,” she said. “Magic.”
“Sometimes, but that’s a tough word, magic. Sometimes you mustn’t think of it that easy way. It’s the received truth. The wisdom to reach beyond the Assiyah, the physical world, and begin to work with the Atzlut, the world of spirit.”
“Is this something I need to talk to a rabbi about?”
Saul looked down and pursed his lips. “Some of them don’t like young people… look, follow your Chochmah, your intuitive self on that. But I promise you as your Uncle, I won’t steer you wrong. And Frannie, you need this stuff.”
“Five days a week above your Café?”
“Well, six, but who’s counting. But you need it because they’re coming faster now.”
“The Blanks.”
“The Blanks. And so the people. And so the others.”
“Like the ghost? She wasn’t after the Blanks, she was after Hooky.”
“Trust me: you need to get ready.” He clapped his hands. “So. Two days a week on the Torah, three days a week on the Kabbalah, one day on toykhekhe, the curses.”
“Curses?”
“You never know.”
“And what language are they in?”
“It doesn’t matter. You could use Latin. You got Latin?”
“No.”
“Yiddish is just as good, but ya gotta learn it and feel it.”
Frannie put up her hand and turned, walking up the stairs not far from the beaded curtain. She stepped through the door at the top. Inside she saw a small, dingy living room with a threadbare rug and an open window. She could hear the ocean outside. Sure enough it was just big enough for a desk and some chairs, and on the desk were notebooks and the small library that Saul had collected. “Oh, Uncle,” she said as he came up the stairs. “Saul, this is nebekh nuts.” She picked up a scroll. “This isn’t even a book.”
He sighed, his hands in his pockets.
“You really learned this?” she asked.
“Learning. Still.”
“And this is what it is to do… what we do with the Blanks.”
“What we do for them.” Saul said. “And God forbid the wrong guy gets to do the wrong thing with them.”
“You’re gonna make me a freak.”
“Gam zu l’tovah,” he said. “It’s all for the best.”
There were more Blanks appearing over the next month, and more stories coming to find them, sometimes three in a week, as though a secret call had gone out, a psychic sign had been put up that said Open for Business and people were responding without knowing what brought them past the statue of Kronos.
Frannie observed that no one in Los Angeles seemed to be from there. Some visitors came from across the desert looking for whatever was here. They caught a whisper that brought them up the coast to Laguna and Cafe Monstro, now just three months old.
Before work every day, the sea called to her. Frannie took to the waves exactly as Betty had predicted. She learned to read the surf, to close her eyes and hear the scrape of the board on the water and the whoosh when she shot the curl.