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America? I have a last but not least,
     here it is—what or who is
tender to?”
    It dawned on me my voice was no longer echoing from the hi-fi speakers. Then I noticed the phone had gone dead in my ear.
     On the radio, the host was saying, “If you’ve just joined us, you’re listening to WHIM Elmira, the station where talk is cheap
     and sex is the number-one topic of conversation. Hallo.” He began chatting with a lady barber about something called the G-spot.
    Feeling frustrated, unable to get a grip on this America, I hung up the phone and turned off the radio and switched off the
     overhead light and the desk lamp and wandered over to stare through a pair of French doors opening onto an ice-covered sun
     deck built over a garage. Outside, a brittle stillness had settled over the piece of America the Beautiful I could see. Above
     the sun deck, the branches of a gnarled oak creaked like a ship’s rigging under the weight of the ice. Contemplating the winter
     wonderland, the part of me that is theoretical chaoticist started fashioning questions. Should one take the accumulation of
     ice on branches, like the serial murders, as yet another footprint of chaos? If the weight of the ice caused a branch to snap
     off, should one interpret this pruning of dead wood as a random event or an act of God? Is there such a thing as God? Was
     Eden, as the Rebbe claimed, really a swamp of randomness? If so, was the randomness pure and unadulterated? Or was it garden-variety
     fool’s randomness, and thus nothing more than a footprint of the order we call chaos?
    Assuming both God and pure randomness exist, what is the relationship between the two?
    If God created man, should this be taken as evidence that He loathed man? Or was Creation simply a random event that went
     unnoticed by everyone except man?
    Oy—I heard the Rebbe’s voice in my brain—my head too was spinning from all these questions without answers.
    Feeling drained for the first time since my arrival in America, I turned away from the French doors and made my way to the
     bedroom at the back of the apartment. Kicking off my shoes, sliding fully dressed under the sheets, I quickly sank into a
     fitful sleep. I dreamed the usual dreams: thick-soled, steel-toed shoes kicked at figures on the ground; faceless men began
     to dismantle a piece of furniture; a little boy I did not know cringed in a corner, barely able to breathe. …
    What seemed like minutes later, with the first rays of first light flecking the walls of the room, I was roused by the sound
     of a car pulling slowly into the driveway. A door slammed shut. There were footsteps below in the Rebbe’s apartment, then
     muffled voices, then for a long while absolute silence, then a hoarse cry that broke off abruptly, followed by someone moaning
     “Oy, oy, oy.” Moments later a toilet somewhere downstairs flushed.
    Intrigued, I padded over to the window in my stocking feet in time to see a woman wearing fox climb back into a car. She started
     the motor, let it idle until the engine was turning smoothly, then pulled slowly out of the driveway.
    Smiling to myself, I leaped to a conclusion: marijuana was not the only forbidden fruit the Gnostic chaoticist had an appetite
     for. Again I heard the Rebbe’s voice in my head.
“ ‘Ta’amu ure’u,’ “
it said. “ Taste it and see.’ “

Chapter Two

    Freshly shaven (though not well shaven), a patch of toilet paper clinging to a
coagulated cut on his chin, reeking from a few dabs of duty-free aftershave, Lemuel drifts at midmorning down South Main
     Street, past emergency crews repairing overhead telephone wires, past teenagers chipping away at the ice on the sidewalk,
     into the village of Backwater, population (not counting students) 1,290. With each breath the cold dry air stings his nostrils,
     bringing tears to his eyes. He glances furtively at one sleeve, then the other, looking for evidence of a Russian heart, is
     vaguely disheartened when