Eliza’s table has been replaced by two overstuffed pillows. The dictionary has joined Saul’s other books. Until Eliza smells the dust and paper and crumbling leather again, she doesn’t realize how much she has missed her father’s study. Even as a long-absent sense of well-being overtakes her she has no idea that this feeling is contingent upon the smell, which she associates with Saul’s love.

At first Eliza thinks her father’s ideas are weird.
“Think of your brain as a muscle. A runner does stretches to warm up. Brains need the same courtesy.”

Some days he has Eliza write the alphabet over and over again without looking at the paper, switching the pen between her right and left hands. He tells her not to think about what the letters look like or if she is writing too small or too large. She is only to focus on the motion of her hand, upon the feeling of the letter emerging. Eliza imagines the alphabet climbing inside her arm and taking her hand for a ride until she is no longer aware of her fingers’ movements, only knows what she is writing after she looks at the page.

Sometimes Saul has Eliza visualize the first letter that comes into her head, telling her to make it grow to the size of a tangerine, to a melon, to a small dog, and on and on until the letter is bigger than herself, bigger than the house, stretching majestically toward the sun.

“What is a universe of A like? What’s a universe of Q?” he’ll say, usually not guessing the letter that’s growing inside her head like a time-lapse film of seedling to flower. Occasionally she has trouble breathing, the letter grown so large in her imagination that it takes up all her air.

Sometimes they chant the alphabet together, forward and backward, in unison and independently, until the letters are a continuous ribbon of sound unwinding from Eliza’s tongue. She feels most like her brother then, the ghost of his guitar entering the room. The letters become music, the alphabet their own duet.

“Okay, Elly, I want you to clear your mind.”
This is the hardest part. There is so much going on. The more of her mind Elly makes quiet, the more she finds making noise. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, she repeats as fast as she can, sweeping her other thoughts away. Eliza pictures her brain as a tunnel extending deep into the earth, nothing the water slowly filling it from bottom to top.

Saul can see the change. Elly’s jaw relaxes, her face slackens. Only a few minutes after closing her eyes, she is in what Saul calls the Zone.

“Are you clear?”

Elly nods.

“I want you to open yourself up to a letter.”

Elly has learned that this is something different than thinking of a letter. When she opens herself up, she doesn’t know what the letter will be. Somehow, Saul can tell if she is opening up or thinking. The trick is to think about babies.

Eliza imagines she is floating in a warm space. She is a mere half something waiting to be made whole. Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute. Each letter struggles to be the first. Some letters stumble. Others slow and then stop. What was once the whole alphabet is now only part of the letter spectrum. Elly feels mounting excitement as the remaining letters approach. One pulls away from the others. It comes closer and closer until, finally, it passes into her, filling her with its A-ness or R-ness, K-ness or Y-ness, and now she is a growing thing, the letter present in every fledgling heartbeat, every newborn drop of blood.

This is how she comes to discover that the letters feel different. She’s afraid to tell Saul, uncertain what he’d think to learn that L thickens her skin, that F makes her feel liquid, that Q fills her head with beautiful glass beads until she can only hear them clicking together. Not all the sensations are pleasant. E tenses her muscles as if they are bracing for an attack. K coats her joints in sandpaper.

Saul can tell when a letter has come. Eliza’s face goes from a state of relaxation to intense concentration, as if she is trying to hear a very soft sound.

“Do you have a letter?” he asks loud enough to enter her thoughts without shattering them.
Eliza nods, eyes still closed.

“Good. Now, without deliberately thinking about it, I want you to open yourself up to all the words that contain that letter. Let the words flow through you, like you’re a hollowed-out log being carried by a current.”

This has become Eliza’s favorite part. It took awhile to make her father’s instructions work. At first she was too conscious of trying to pull words from her memory: apple, acorn, around, arrest. The key is to take baby-making to its natural conclusion. Filled with a letter, she imagines growing with it. Pieces of the letter break apart or fuse together to form her eyes, her nose, her hands and feet. The letter bends and flexes, and suddenly a stream of words is passing through her, coming so quickly she barely feels each word before it is replaced by another. Accommodatarantulassoramblastand. A whispering noise, like the rustle of silk. Words she feels in her fingertips as she sees behind her closed eyes. Beneath the words she hears are ones she doesn’t quite catch, words to which she has not been properly introduced but which hover, expectant, on the periphery of consciousness. Next time, she promises, remembering that for every baby there are countless neverborns.

Through it all, Saul watches. Elly’s eyes dance back and forth behind her closed lids. Her fingers flutter and twitch. Inside Saul, dreams once destined to be neverborns begin to grow.

The school year ends. eliza’s final report card overflows onto its back with glowing comments penned in Bergermeyer’s careful hand. Bergermeyer calls Eliza her “little star,” and waxes prosaic over the “lovely surprise she gave us all this year.” Eliza’s spelling A becomes an A+ and is joined by unprecedented A’s in History, Work Habits and Reading, bumping her up to Honor Roll for the first time in her academic career. Saul celebrates by baking a cake whose emergence from the oven only he and Eliza witness, Miriam working late and Aaron gone to an end-of-school pizza and movie with Charlie. If either of them notices that dinners for two have become the norm, they don’t mention it. Eliza is too excited by the idea of spending entire summer days with her father ensconced in words and letters. Saul, for his part, has been waiting for summer’s beginning to progress to the next stage of their studies. It’s time for Eliza to meet Abraham Abulafia.

Once the cake has been sliced, Saul lifts his plate above the table.
“A toast,” he says. “To the end of a wonderful school year and the beginning of a very exciting summer.”

Eliza giggles, lifting her plate so that father and daughter may clink dishes.

After the first slice Eliza expects Saul to tell her she has had enough, but when she looks up from her plate she finds him deep into seconds, eating with the abandon of an unmonitored child at a birthday party. Eliza eats four more slices, each topped with a candy flower of the coveted oneg variety, solely because she can. For fifteen minutes, vigorous chewing and occasional giggles fill the room. When the sounds subside the cake, which had been easily large enough for four, has been reduced to crumbs.

Eliza and Saul stare at the empty plate, amazed. Saul looks up at his daughter with stricken eyes.

“We ate the whole thing,” he whispers.
In the slight crinkles around her father’s eyes, where before Eliza only saw age and authority, she now perceives youth. She can envision softer versions of those same lines in a younger face marveling at a colony of thumbnail-sized baby frogs or the blueness of a swimming pool. Now permanently reflected in her father’s features, Eliza sees the boy he once was, a child whom Eliza considers a friend.

“Aaron will be mad he didn’t get any,” Eliza says.
“Let’s not tell him,” Saul stage whispers. “Or your mom.”

Eliza giggles and nods. “We’ll clean up the evidence.”
“They would never understand, anyway,” Saul says, no longer whispering, looking into Eliza’s eyes.

Eliza knows he’s right.

Eliza has no idea how much of each day is spent in her father’s study. The letters erase time with their presence. She allows her pen to slip from a word’s moorings, exploring every possible combination of its letters, the motion of her hand and the release of ink upon paper clearing her mind until there is nothing else.

Her father calls it permutation and describes it as a way to get to the essence of the letters themselves. Words are barriers, necessary gates beyond which lies the larger letter universe. Most people stop at the arrangement of letters a word presents: EARTH is earth and only earth. But within EARTH, there is RATHE and THRAE. Within EARTH, there is HEART. By departing from a given word order and exploring every possible combination, the true essence of the letters can be reached. E’s true identity can only be known once it has been experienced next to A and R as well as between them. Only by knowing E in all its states can E’s presence be sensed in AERATE as easily as in CABOOSE.

At first Eliza sticks to smaller words. A three-letter word contains only six possible combinations; four letters produce twenty-four. She feels comfortable inside such limits, is less afraid of making mistakes. Initially, permutation is a daunting math problem. A five-letter word with its 120 possibilities seems terrifying, the 720 permutations of a six-letter word impossible. But as the weeks pass, Eliza becomes more confident. The letters’ internal rhythms begin to make themselves known. Eliza’s first five-letter word grants a sense of release absent with shorter words. She learns not to anticipate the letters. Instead she lets the pen in her hand guide her as she submits to the power of the word itself.

Sometimes she stumbles. Deep into five-letter permutations, she can lose her way, suddenly unfixed from the letters and their strange internal rhythms. She becomes fearful of the paper and its nonsensical letter combinations. She and Saul revert to dictionary study then, spelling drills a welcome return to apparent normalcy.

The day Eliza attempts her first six-letter word she knows she is ready. She can feel this certainty in her blood. She picks up the pen and closes her eyes. It is easy to clear her mind now. In a few deep breaths she has washed away the day and all sense of yesterday or tomorrow. She waits for the word to arrive.

MANTLE enters her pen like a gust of wind and her hand begins to dance. The letters fill the page with their lines and curves until her entire body is carried by the steady stream of letters as they come together and break apart, touching and falling away, M making way for A and N, then shifting into a solid crunch of consonants. L, T, M and N attract and repel each other with magnetic intensity as Eliza proceeds from NTLEAM to TLEAMN to LEMANT. She can hear the dissonance and harmony of each combination inside her head. She feels no fatigue. Thirty minutes into the permutation her hand continues its frantic pace, 300 recombinations down and 420 to go, though she isn’t counting. The letters are all she needs to know. MANTLE’s energy wells up from deep inside her, bubbling to the surface.

After little more than an hour, MANTLE is complete, its 720 permutations filling ten sheets of paper which lie scattered about Eliza like shed skin. Saul has been watching, entranced, for the last forty minutes. He doesn’t need to review her work to confirm what she has accomplished.

“You did it,” he says in hushed wonder.

Eliza, exhausted but exhilarated, can only nod.

Saul realizes the time has come to tell his daughter everything.

In 1280 a jewish mystic named abraham abulafia writes a book entitled Chayay Olam HaBah, or Life of the Future World. Before this book, the world of the mystic had been a closed one, the methods by which one communed with the Divine a secret combination of magic words, talismans and Talmudic erudition. Those deemed unworthy of the journey were punished with madness, blindness or death.

Abulafia’s book changes everything. In it, he states that the key to transcendence is language itself. Creation takes place through words, a series of “And God Saids” bringing each new stage of life into being. Language is God’s Divine power made manifest in the world. The foundation of language is letters.

“Letters,” Saul says. “Abulafia believed that, by concentrating on letters, the mind could loose itself from its shackles to commune with a presence greater than itself, what Abraham Abulafia called shefa, the influx. He believed that barriers separated personal existence from the larger stream of life, the Divine Intellect.”

He pauses to look at his daughter, to see how she is taking all this. Eliza is extremely still, completely focused on his face. Tabula rasa, Saul thinks. She is his own blank slate.

“Abulafia was branded a heretic and his books denounced. Neither Future World nor any of his subsequent treatises on practical mysticism was published. But they survived. Handwritten manuscripts were copied and handed down through the ages. His ideas were not only discussed but put into practice. Today, Abulafia is recognized as one of the great Kabbalists.

“The steps that Abulafia outlines, the methods that caused such an uproar, are basically instructions on how to meditate. Abulafia uses language play as a way to clear the mind, to remove oneself from daily concerns and thoughts. The exercises we’ve been doing are Abulafia’s. His methods are primarily a kind of Jewish yoga, a way to relax. For most, what Abulafia describes as shefa, the influx of the Divine, is a historical curiosity to be discussed and interpreted. Because, while anyone can follow Abulafia’s instructions for permutation and chanting, very few can use them to achieve transcendence. I’ve never been able to do it. After years of failure I convinced myself that the transcendent state Abulafia described was the result of an inspired imagination or perhaps a condition made inaccessible by modern times. But when I saw you onstage at the area finals, I realized I was wrong.”

Eliza starts getting a warm feeling in her stomach. It’s a cross between a fluttery excited feeling and a sick feeling. She can tell that whatever comes next is going to be big. Part of her wants to freeze time. She would rather enjoy this vague sense of importance than have it defined. She has a feeling that once her father has said whatever it is he is about to say nothing will be the same.

“I think you have what Abulafia had, Eliza, something he took for granted when he wrote his books. You have the ability to use his exercises as he intended, as a means toward achieving shefa. I’ve seen it. You’re able to go beyond simply clearing your mind. You’re able to remove yourself entirely from daily life to brush against the limitless. It happened with EYRIR at the state bee. It happened today. But these were accidents of latent ability, the merest shadow of shefa. In order to truly reach shefa, you must work even harder. You must explore the letters through Abulafia’s methods. I will prepare you. Spelling is a sign, Elly. When you win the national bee, we’ll know that you are ready to follow in Abulafia’s footsteps. Once you’re able to let the letters guide you through any word you are given, you will be ready to receive shefa.

In the quiet of the room, the sound of Eliza and her father breathing is everything.

“Do you mean,” Eliza whispers, “that I’ll be able to talk to God?”

Saul leans forward until their heads are touching. His words are too fragile to survive anything stronger than a whisper. “It’s impossible to describe. But from what Abulafia wrote, it seems less like talking than a special kind of listening.”

“And you think I could do it?” The question comes out louder than Eliza intended, startling them both.

“In all my life,” Saul says, not whispering now, the power of his voice unmistakable, “you’re the only person I’ve encountered who might have a chance.”