Dinner at the Centre of the Earth

by Nathan Englander

  “What’s a few years to try and undo a life sentence that no one has had the dignity to hand down?”

  “Okay,” the guard says.

  “‘Okay’ what?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You will?”

  “Sure. And maybe you can advise me on the best way to go about it. I can’t remember. How did taking an idiotic moral stand work out for you?”

  2002, Paris

  Z sits in his boss’s office across from his boss’s empty chair, while that same boss stands behind him, twisting a plastic rod and pivoting the slats to the venetian blinds closed in front of his glass wall, alerting everyone on the floor to yet another secret-business tête-à-tête.

  If there were an action dumber, and more obvious, than the one Z’s boss was engaged in, and in which he habitually engaged every time they needed to talk discreetly, Z would have liked to hear it.

  The man he works for at the Parisian satellite of their global information technology concern is also his handler at his other job, with its alternate objectives and hole-and-corner realm. Together, they run this covert operation from inside the company, a situation facilitated by a sympathetic Zionistic soul among the higher-ups.

  When his boss takes his seat, Z apologizes for the urgent nature of his request to meet, and the personal nature of the e-mail he sent the night before, but he wanted to loop his boss in just as soon as he himself was aware, and, well, it seems he is going to need an unscheduled leave.

  Z wants to fly to the States to help his mother die or, you know, not die, he says. That is, he very much hopes she’ll not die, but he also guesses she probably will.

  “Riddled through,” is the phrase Z lands on.

  “I am so, so sorry,” his boss says, with blunted affect.

  “It’s important to me—to her—that I be there.”

  “Of course.”

  “I should tell you, I went and bought a ticket, already, this morning.”

  “Yes,” his boss says. “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “We know. It came up. The ticket purchase.”

  “Yes,” Z says. “I’d imagined it would,” Z says, really not having imagined this at all.

  The pretext itself—his mother’s cancer, and his sudden need to race home to attend to her—he thought he’d set up expertly when he’d installed it as a contingency, years before. He had assumed, if he did ever need to employ it, that it wouldn’t have been to extricate himself from a situation involving his genuinely well-meant treason.

  On one of Z’s early trips home to America to legally and preposterously change his name (an easy way to reboot an expat existence), he’d spent a jet-lagged morning in court waiting among a group of crazies who believed themselves to be a Petal or a Poppy, a Sunshine-Daydream or a Batman-James.

  He’d driven back to his house, successful and fully exhausted, to find his dear mother waiting in the kitchen, wanting to know how his meeting had gone.

  Her understanding was that he was visiting on business (which, in some ways, he was), and, as relates to his made-up meeting, he’d said, thank you very much, it had gone just fine.

  He removed his tie, and kissed her on the head, and went to the den. Once he was camped out on the sectional, the remote control in hand, he told her through the doorway, and as nonchalantly as he could, that—and it was very important to his work, she should know—he was entrusting her with a critical e-mail-related task.

  So startling was this that his mother momentarily paused from offering him the fruit he never accepted and with which she continuously, unceasingly, plied him. She sauntered into the space between her son and the TV, with a nice bowl of nectarines, and tried to sound nonchalant herself.

  To be entrusted by her genius of a computer-expert son with any sort of responsibility like that was a highlight of her cyber-life.

  “How can I help?” she’d said, as if it were no big deal at all.

  Z praised her ability to check the weather on weather.com and to print out the digital pictures she received. He let her know he was full of confidence and told her that what he was asking was simple, besides. Simple, but still important.

  He had a new e-mail account, he’d said, and he was listing her address as the default. She was never to write to him there. Never to tell anyone it even existed. But, if she ever did receive an alert about it, all she had to do was let him know.

  It was an assignment that made her nervous just to hear.

  “You can do it!” he’d said to his mother. “You’re a pro.”

  He’d told her, almost as an afterthought, that she wasn’t to waste time calling the number on which they shared their weekly catch-up, as there was a special, emergency number for such an occurrence. A number, like the e-mail address, that she was never, ever to use.

  “Then how do I call you on it, if I’m never supposed to use it?”

  “Except,” he said, once again, “in this special case.”

  He did complicate it one step further. “I know this sounds kooky,” he said. “But I’ll also need you to make that call from somewhere else, when you do.”

  Not wanting to blow her chance at being a support, his mother had readily agreed.

  And look at that? There he was, at news of the university bombing, stepping out of his office, returning to his apartment on Rue Domat, and knocking on a neighbor’s door to tell them his Internet connection was down.

  If he could, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, he’d said in his terrible French.

  Then, in seconds, he’d logged on to that virgin account, changed his password, and logged back out. No e-mail sent, no contact made, an action as clean as clean could be.

  He’d gone back to the apartment, and, from one of his hiding places, produced the never-used SIM that he always kept topped up with credit, and slipped it into the backup handset always kept charged to receive it.

  He’d gone down into his building’s lovely courtyard and waited for it to ring.

  His mother, God bless her, it wasn’t even thirty minutes before she was on the line, and—as he’d instructed—without calling his regular phone.

  “Are you okay, honey?”

  “I’m fine,” he’d said.

  “Someone changed your password. Do you know that? They wrote me, the Internet people, to tell me that someone had changed a password.”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I changed it.”

  “I almost didn’t go on this morning—I do every morning, but today I have things to do. I was about to run out and now I’m so glad I checked. Should I forward the note to you?”

  “No, Mother. Don’t send it. And I’m so glad you checked too. And thanks for remembering to call this number first.”

  “I had it in my address book. I wrote it on the inside cover, ‘Call special phone.’ I tried the Erlbaums, but they weren’t home, so I came to call from the JCC. They’re letting me sit in the director’s office. I said to bill me the long distance, but I bet they won’t. They love me here.”

  “Perfect.”

  “And you’re good? Is Paris hot? It gets so hot there in summer.”

  “It’s cool today.”

  “Good. I worry about the heat. People die there in the summers.”

  “Old people, Mom.”

  “Like me!”

  “Yes, their children are not good Jewish children. They all head off to their summer homes and leave the old grannies to cook.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “It is, Mother. And speaking of?”

  “Speaking of cooking grannies?”

  “Sort of, yes. I need you to call me on my regular number and tell me you’re dying.”

  “What?” his mother said.

  “I need you to make an appointment with your doctor for today. You go in, you get him to send you for a scan. Then call me, even if it’s the middle of my night. I need you to wake me and tell me you have cancer.”

  “Wait, do I have cancer? Do
I? Oh my God! How do you even know?”

  “I don’t, Mother.” Hearing the panic over the line, he’d repeated an emphatic, “You don’t!”

  “But how do you know I don’t? Why even say it, if I’m not sick?”

  “For personal reasons I need you to call me and tell me that you do. It needs to be bad. Tell me that the doctor wants to set you up at Sloan Kettering right away.”

  “What’s happening?” she’d said, her voice shaky and filling Z with an excruciating surge of guilt. “What are you saying? Do I have cancer?”

  “Mother, no. You don’t. But I need you to call and tell me you do.”

  His mother went quiet for some time, and then she’d started to weep.

  “Don’t cry, Mother. You’re fine.”

  “It’s not me,” she’d said. “It’s you. It’s happened. You’ve gone psychotic. I always sensed.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. We’re both fine.”

  “Oh, you’re a bit too old. Trust me, I waited. I thought we were safe by now. But you’ve always shown signs. Oh my, oh my.”

  “I’m not psychotic.”

  “Your grandfather was psychotic.”

  “Wait, what?” Z said, drawn off on a tangent he didn’t expect. Secrets everywhere, he thought. Secrets abound.

  “We never told you.”

  “Which grandpa? Is it Grandpa Mike?”

  “Your father’s father. Zayde Reuben.”

  “How could you not tell me that before?”

  “Because we wanted to avoid this. Your father and I, we thought if we didn’t say, then maybe.”

  “Knowing medical history doesn’t give you psychosis. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that sort of thing skips a generation.”

  She hesitated on her end, and then she said, “Skipped a generation, that’s you.”

  Z thought about it. Yes, on that point, she was right.

  “Well, I’m not psychotic. But I still need you to do this. I can explain when I’m home.”

  “Home Israel? Or home, here? If you’re sick you can come back to your room, it’s just the same as ever. We pray every night for you to get out of that godforsaken country.”

  “France?”

  “Israel.”

  “You sent money to Israel your whole life. You march in the stupid parade. You love Israel.”

  “I do. But not for my son. And France is even worse. Tell me what’s going on! Who are you in trouble with? Tell me, and I’ll do like you say.”

  “I really can’t. And don’t try and guess. But I need you to get an appointment and then a mammogram and then call. And make sure it goes through insurance right away too.”

  “I hate that machine, squishing down.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. But you should get one every year. How long has it been?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’d come up with something else, a better idea, if I thought it was for nothing. A woman your age should get checked.”

  “What if they find it?”

  “Then maybe they can save you, and then you’ll sound more realistic on the phone.”

  “You’re a terrible son.”

  “I know. But if you do it, I really can come home. I can get a place near you and Dad, forever. No more travel, I promise.”

  “If I tell you the cancer thing?”

  “Yes, if you do that all today. If you get in somewhere and call me, and never tell anyone about the talk we’re having now. Just delete the alert, and do like I say. I’ll call and check in on you a bunch of times, okay? Just be yourself. Be your paranoid, negative, hopeless self. Only, add the cancer.”

  “Because you’re in trouble?”

  “Because your son is in some trouble. Yes.”

  It’s this notion of trouble that Z is very much distracted by as his boss says, “I hope you don’t think it crass of us.” And his boss, reading that distraction expertly well, says, “Us, taking advantage of your mother’s illness in this way.”

  “Of course not,” Z says.

  “We must harness what we can, even when it means playing on the emotions of others. It’s the unfortunate nature of our work.”

  “I don’t understand?” Z says, in what might as well be his patented catchphrase.

  “We thought, this trip of yours, charged as it is, is also a perfect way to get you to Tel Aviv under the radar.”

  “Instead of America?”

  “On the way to America. They just want a day of your time, to debrief you about Berlin. We were already talking about how to get you back for a visit without drawing attention, and then this very unfortunate alibi came up, and we thought, yes, why not?”

  “You want me to change my flights? So they can talk to me in Israel?”

  “To debrief you about Berlin, yes. But also, no,” his boss says. “We don’t need you to change your flights. We’ve already taken the liberty.” Here his boss reaches into a desk drawer and presents an itinerary and set of tickets to Z.

  Z reads the schedule, trying to seem absolutely, beyond at ease with the change.

  His boss leans across the desk and points at the paper.

  “That lists it as direct to New York. But the tickets are obviously correct. The Tel Aviv leg is there.”

  It’s so smart, and so simple, Z thinks. He is found out already, and they are asking him to transport himself home for retribution. No muss, no fuss. Easy as pie.

  Z looks to his boss with what must be obvious terror on his face. Revealing, he knows. Still, what can Z do in the moment but forge ahead?

  “It’s a perfect idea,” Z says. “A great way to pop me in and out unnoticed. But the reason I asked to talk, and forgive me for the confusion, was the opposite.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of what you’re proposing,” Z says. “I wanted you to know that after I e-mailed you, and after I booked the ticket that I, of course, knew you’d see—my mother called again. We had a good long talk. And things are different.”

  “She doesn’t have cancer?”

  “No, she still does. Bad cancer. It’s that, with the chemo, and the radiation, the rounds and rounds—it will go on for some time. And she knows how much pressure I’m under at work. That is, at the work she knows as my work.”

  “Okay,” his boss says.

  “So, it’s already urgent, but what she was saying is that it would stay urgent and that I should save up my leave. That it would be better if I came for the Jewish holidays. She is brave, my mother. She said, typical her, that it would give her time to get used to being a sick person. She said, having her son there for Rosh Hashanah, it’s only a few weeks away, and it would give her something to live for.”

  His boss swivels in his chair, considering. His face shows nothing, a picture of restraint.

  “I appreciate your point,” his boss says. “Regardless, why not start an unofficial leave now? Stay close, recharge your batteries, and let me talk to Tel Aviv.”

  2002, Paris

  They sit on the couch in their suite in what is turning into their go-to position, the waitress leaning against its arm on a heap of pillows, her feet in Z’s lap. Z squeezes a foot and lifts it, admiring her ancient pedicure, the paint mostly missing, the polish picked off. He kisses those toes, and he loves those toes.

  “Do you know where you messed up, Jewish boy?” the waitress asks.

  “No,” is Z’s answer. He cannot fathom where, along his pitiable route, that might be.

  “It’s believing a Jewish mother would be able to get you out of a problem this big. If you need the world to spin in the other direction, get an Italian girl to ask her father. That’s when you’ll see what an overprotective Calabrese can do.”

  “Ha!” Z says. “You’re serious?”

  “I am. You should meet my dad. He could help.”

  “Because he’s rich?”

  “No, not because he’s rich. Because of how he’s rich. He owns a small media empire—which is still quite large.”

  Z rubs a fo
ot. He offers nothing in response beyond “So?”

  “You really don’t know anything about our country, do you?”

  Z, apparently, does not.

  “In Italy, if it’s ‘media,’ Berlusconi owns a piece. My father has the prime minister’s ear, and a good amount of his money.”

  “That’s the plan? Your father?”

  The waitress takes her foot back and sits up at Z’s side.

  “Do you have one better than living in this hotel forever?”

  “There are worse ideas,” Z says, of their palatial digs.

  “If you have one better, let’s hear it. Anyway, I still don’t understand why you don’t take a taxi to the airport and just go.”

  Z smiles at her sweetly and pats her leg.

  “I’m starting to hope they catch you,” the waitress says.

  “Sorry,” he says, sincerely not intending to condescend. “I don’t run, because I don’t have diplomatic cover. I’m just someone with a bad passport, who has broken a lot of laws. If Israel tips off France and then denies knowing me, I rot in jail here. If they have me flagged and take ownership, I get deported and sit in prison there. In both cases, I lose. Only, Israel also loses, because I come with a sizable international incident attached. And so we’re in a standoff. Which leaves me stuck here, trying not to give my colleagues the chance to have me slip in the shower or break my neck on the stairs. My only out is to get to America, where, for a bucket of reasons, it becomes worth it for all of us to just walk away. Maybe I look over my shoulder a bit more, but at least at home I fit in and the Israelis stand out. If we’re playing the odds, I still likely win.”

  “But you can’t get there.”

  Z practically hoots at the sad truth of it.

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then it sounds like your best bet is to come to Italy with me. You can throw yourself on my father’s mercy—something he very much enjoys.”

  “Since when are you going to Italy?” Z says, caught off guard yet again, which, occupationally, really shouldn’t happen to him so much.