"My laugh surprises you, Jonathan?" he asked. "I believe laughter is one of the common 
traits of ghosts, spirits, and even powerful spirits like me. Have you been through the 
scholarly accounts? Ghosts are famous for laughing. Saints laugh. Angels laugh. Laughter 
is the sound of Heaven, I think. I believe. I don't know."
  
  "Maybe you feel close to Heaven when you laugh," I said.
  
  "Maybe so," he said. His large cherubic mouth was really beautiful. Had it been small 
it would have given him a baby face. But it wasn't small, and with his thick black 
eyebrows and the large quick eyes, he looked pretty remarkable.
  
  He seemed to be taking my measure again too, as if he had some capacity to read my 
thoughts. "My scholar," he said to me, "I've read all your books. Your students love you, 
don't they? But the old Hasidim are shocked by your biblical studies, I suppose."
  
  "They ignore me. I don't exist for the Hasidim," I said, "but for what it's worth my 
mother was a Hasid, and so maybe I'll have a little understanding of things that will 
help us."
  
  I knew now that I liked him, whatever he had done, liked him for himself in a way-young 
man of twenty, as he said, and though I was still fairly stunned from the fever, from his 
appearance, from his tricks, I was actually getting used to him.
  
  He waited a few minutes, obviously ruminating, then began to talk:
  
  "Babylon," he said. "Babylon! Give the name of any city which echoes as loud and as 
long as Babylon. Not even Rome, I tell you. And in those days there was no Rome. The 
center of the world was Babylon. Babylon had been built by the Gods as their gate. 
Babylon had been the great city of Hammurabi. The ships of Egypt, the Peoples of the Sea, 
the people of Dilmun, came to the docks of Babylon. I was a happy child of Babylon.
  
  "I've seen what stands today, in Iraq, going there myself to see the walls restored by 
the tyrant Saddam Hussein. I've seen the mounds of sand that dot the desert, all of this 
covering old cities and towns that were Assyrian, Babylonian, Judean.
  
  "And I've walked into the museum in Berlin to weep at the sight of what your 
archaeologist, Koldewey, has re-created of the mighty Ishtar Gate and the Processional 
Way.
  
  "Oh, my friend, what it was to walk on that street! What it was to look up at those 
walls of gleaming glazed blue brick, what it was to pass the golden dragons of Marduk.
  
  "But even if you walked the length and breadth of the old Processional Way, you would 
have only a taste of what was Babylon. All our streets were straight, many paved in 
limestone and red breccia. We lived as if in a place made of semiprecious stones. Think 
of an entire city glazed and enameled in the finest colors, think of gardens everywhere.
  
  "The god Marduk built Babylon with his own hands, they told us, and we believed it. 
Early on I fell in with Babylonian ways and you know everybody had a god, a personal god 
he prayed to, and beseeched for this and that, and I chose Marduk. Marduk himself was my 
personal god.
  
  "You can imagine the uproar when I walked in the house with a small pure-gold statue of 
Marduk, talking to it, the way the Babylonians did. But then my father just laughed. 
Typical of my father, my beautiful and innocent father.
  
  "And throwing back his head, my father sang in his beautiful voice, 'Yahweh is your 
God, the God of your Father, your Father's Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.'
  
  "To which one of my somber uncles popped up at once, 'And what is that idol in his 
hands!'
  
  " 'A toy!' said my father. 'Let him play with it. Azriel, when you get sick of all this 
superstitious Babylonian stuff, break the statue. Or sell it. You cannot break our god, 
for our god is not in gold or precious metal. He has no temple. He is above such things.'
  
  "I nodded, went into my room, which was large and full of silken pillows and curtains, 
for reasons I'll get to later, and I lay down and I started just, you know, calling on 
Marduk to be my guardian.
  
  "In this day and age, Americans do it with a guardian angel. I don't know how many 
Babylonians took it all that seriously either, the Babylonian personal god. You know the 
old saying, 'If you plan ahead a god goes with you.' Well, what does that mean?"
  
  "The Babylonians," I said, "they were a practical people rather than superstitious, 
weren't they?"
  
  "Jonathan, they were exactly like Americans today. I have never seen a people so like 
the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians as the Americans of today.
  
  "Commerce was everything, but everybody went about consulting astrologers, talking 
about magic, and trying to drive out evil spirits. People had families, ate, drank, tried 
to achieve success in every way possible, yet carried on all the time about luck. Now 
Americans don't talk about demons, no, but they rattle on about 'negative thinking' and 
'self-destructive ideas' and 'bad self-image.' It was a lot the same, Babylon and 
America, a lot the same.
  
  "I would say that here in America I have found the nearest thing to Babylon in the good 
sense that I have ever found. We were not slaves to our gods! We were not slaves to each 
other.
  
  "What was I saying? Marduk, my personal god. I prayed to him all the time. I made 
offerings, you know, little bits of incense when nobody was watching; I poured out a 
little honey and wine for him in the shrine I made for him in the deep brick wall of my 
bedroom. Nobody paid much attention.
  
  "But then Marduk began to answer me. I'm not sure when Marduk first started answering 
me. I think I was still fairly young. I would say something idly to him, 'Look, my little 
brothers are running rampant and my father just laughs as though he were one of them and