The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  * * *

  There was still time for Elizabeth, but she would have no more of it. She drowned in the stormy waters of her own grief, on the night of December 12, 2008, alone at age fifty-four.

  LOS ANGELES

  Friday, July 19, 2013

  __________________

  “I’m going to be frank with you—je vais te dire franchement,” Angela told Leon. “You’re out of your depth with this one and don’t know it. Any one of these people, from the Riffraff to Luci to Raphael’s Son himself, is a world-class villain. They could kill circles around you and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it.”

  They were sitting outside her favorite hangout in Beverly Hills, a chocolate and espresso shop on the corner of Camden and Brighton where she had stopped at least once a day for the past ten years. Angela liked the coffee here, and she also liked watching the other customers. The William Morris Endeavor talent agency directly across the street employed dozens of young, great-looking, well-dressed interns who spent most of their time walking the agents’ dogs or picking up their dry cleaning. Above William Morris Endeavor was a gym where middle-aged men and women spent four hours a day taking classes with names like “Pump N Grind” and “Core N More,” then walked over to the coffee bar for a decaf, nonfat cup of foam with a drop of espresso in it. Among the regulars was an Iranian man, well into his fifties, who wore shiny silver leggings and neon orange shoes he thought would make him look younger to the girls, an Austrian psychiatrist who pretended he was Jewish so as not to frighten away potential West Side clients, an Israeli woman who pretended she was English in hopes of impressing a rich old American into marrying her, and an Englishman who pretended he was a duke of one thing or another and went around in a rented Bentley in hopes of finding a rich woman to pay his bills; for a while, he was engaged to an Afghan woman who—he found out just before the wedding—pretended she was descended from royalty and went around in a rented Carrera GT in hopes of finding a rich man to pay her bills.

  Leon had Facebook messaged Angela that morning to ask for a meeting. Now, he was staring at her from the other side of a tiny aluminum table surrounded by people and dogs and baby carriages. Although she tried to contain her volume, she could be heard thirty feet away.

  From behind the espresso bar a tall woman with major tattoos and a streak of bright blue hair muttered, “You sound like you need a double.”

  Angela got up and picked the drink off the counter. “Anyway,” she said as she lowered herself into the chair again, “I appreciate the chance to visit, but I don’t know that I can be of any help to you.”

  * * *

  On the sidewalk next to them Kareem Islam, the elder statesman of Beverly Hills panhandlers, was yelling at a man who had refused to give him money. Kareem and his wife had just celebrated their thirtieth anniversary of “working” (the term they used when speaking to the police) in the city. From the beginning, they each had their designated turf: she, on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and he on Beverly Drive outside Nate ’n Al’s deli. Together, they made a decent living—enough to maintain a small apartment in the Pico-Robertson area among all the Orthodox Jews. They also maintained a checking and a savings account, and, Angela had learned from the public defender who had of late been representing Mr. Islam, a number of credit cards. Forever polite, upbeat, and eager to engage in endless intellectual conversation (hence the name given to him by an old Nate ’n Al’s regular), Kareem had become rude and aggressive over the past year—a result, he confessed, of “business pressures” having to do with a shrunken revenue stream during the recession. To remedy the slump in earnings, he had abandoned his piece of real estate on the east side of Beverly Drive, and relocated outside the parking lot next to the Williams-Sonoma store. When that didn’t help, he had started walking his wheelchair (he took it around so he’d always have a place to sit) onto neighboring streets. Now he was off his own turf and not getting the kind of respect he was accustomed to, so he started “to lose it” several times a day.

  The object of his outrage that day was tall and heavy, and about to walk into the sandwich shop next door to the coffee bar when he declined to, as Kareem liked to put it, “help me have a better day.” Retaliating, Kareem had parked his wheelchair at the entrance to the sandwich shop and was screaming that the man was “too fat and stupid to be eating them mozzarelli-and-tamater-whole-wheat-spinach-my-balls wraps, you can pay eight bucks for a sandwich you don’t need but you can’t give me a buck to buy a coffee, you fat fuck!”

  Angela shook her head. Any minute now, she knew, two cruisers would be pulling up outside the café to take Mr. Islam to the station and book him for creating a public nuisance. His wife too had been picked up a few times in the past year for being overly aggressive with her “supporters.” When ordered by a judge to move her place of business to another part of the city, the wife had explained that her current location was most convenient because “my husband and I bank there.”

  * * *

  Leon waited till Angela had had enough of the sidewalk spectacle. “Did you know Raphael’s Son has a child?”

  __________________

  The rabbi brought the boy—all 4'5" of him in that big yellow T-shirt he wore every day and that he refused to part with at night, clung to as if it were a layer of skin or an extra limb, which, given his story, should not have shocked anyone—and even Angela, who had never been at a loss for words, didn’t know what to say to him. He was a beautiful child—those golden-red loops of hair, the long, curved eyelashes that cast a shadow over his cheekbones, the white skin and red lips—but there was also an eeriness about him, a sense that he was not quite real, that he was a boy in a painting somewhere with a cold climate and an artist who longed for sunlight. His name was Jonah, and he might as well have been thrown overboard into a storm and washed ashore on Mulholland Drive in LA.

  It was Friday afternoon, right before sundown, and the first thing the rabbi said to Angela was that they were going to have to spend the night, because it had taken him five hours in traffic to get to her from Riverside and now it was almost Shabbat, he couldn’t drive till after dark Saturday night, and it was very nice where she lived and all, up on top of this mountain, except he hadn’t seen a motel or even a gas station within an hour’s walking distance so would she mind very much if they camped—he had brought their sleeping bags—on her floor? There was also a change of clothes, and a blue pillow the boy liked to sleep on.

  She let them stay, even though she realized the rabbi had planned it this way. It was his idea that they should meet at her house, and that it should be on a Friday; all she had wanted was to see the boy for herself. She would have driven out to them, would have preferred it that way, but the rabbi was insistent, which made her think there was more to this story than Leon knew or was able to relate.

  The rabbi offered to go pick up some food in the Valley, he wasn’t kosher, he said, and neither was the boy, so any old place would do, but he was especially fond of Persian food, you know, the white rice with sour cherries and lamb, for example, and was there a restaurant nearby that delivered?

  While they waited for the food, the boy sat hunched on the sofa in his yellow T-shirt, leafing through a National Geographic with pictures of elephants because Angela didn’t have a TV or any children’s books. The rabbi used the occasion to tell Angela “more about myself, my name is Cornelius Cohen, I was born and raised near Watts Towers right here in LA, no, I’m not of Ethiopian descent, my birth parents weren’t Jewish, they were plain old black folk from Africa, and no, I wasn’t adopted by a Jewish family, I grew up in foster care, got into trouble, and ended up at this place called Beit T’shuvah, down on Venice near Robertson, it’s a Jewish rehab, not Orthodox, no, not at all, the head rabbi is an ex-con, in fact, but they saved my life, I have a rabbinic degree but no congregation, I play in a hip-hop group and work for the state taking care of kids who’ve been abandoned like I was, Cohen is what I chose for m
yself.”

  * * *

  At ten o’clock, they were still waiting for the food, the driver having been hopelessly lost somewhere on Mulholland Drive—a twenty-one-mile-long, two-lane highway with hardly any streetlights and dozens of narrow side streets with no signs. One of them was even called No Name Alley, and more than a handful were not paved because that’s how the owners wanted it—secluded and difficult to find—why the movie stars and music moguls and porn kings made their homes here. Faye Dunaway had grown old along these cliffs; Warren Beatty had finally married, and Bruce Willis had licked his wounds when his own marriage broke up. This was where Roman Polanski raped a thirteen-year-old girl, and he did it in Jack Nicholson’s house, so who could blame the poor Iranian driver from the Persian restaurant for getting lost here in his rattling old Camaro, trying to read a map in the dark with his scratched-up driving glasses?

  In the end, Angela defrosted some Trader Joe’s dumplings in the microwave and put them on a plate on the kitchen counter. The boy had fallen asleep on the couch with a half-eaten sandwich on the end table, his head resting on the blue pillow that he clutched with both arms, and the rest of him barely visible under the down comforter Angela had taken from her own bed.

  As soon as the meal was over, Cornelius Cohen asked if Angela might prepare some coffee, “unless you have that good Persian tea they brew with cardamom seeds and, I understand lately, rose petals.”

  It amazed Angela that she was so unresisting to the rabbi taking such liberties. It was as if she thought she could avert the impact of some ghastly blow by letting someone else take charge.

  They sat at the long wooden table that Angela’s handyman, Señor Manuel, had built as what turned out to be—his marriage be damned—an expression of his yearning for her. He was a Mexican guy with too many missing teeth and an affinity for fabric starch and cologne. You could smell him driving down Angela’s street from the top of Mulholland, and you could hear the crinkling of his overly starched white painter’s pants and white cotton T-shirt from the driveway. He walked with a cowboy’s gait and spoke in lyrical sentences that were wasted on Angela because she had no time for or appreciation of his “feminine side,” she spoke only functional Spanish and he didn’t know a word of English, all she wanted was to have a room painted or a dripping faucet replaced, and here was Señor Manuel admiring the sunrise from the terrace or gazing at the lights on Ventura Boulevard late at night, lamenting the intolerance of the wife who kept throwing him out of the house every time she caught him with another woman, bringing Angela roses and refusing to accept payment for his work if only she would let him take her to a nice dinner.

  * * *

  The rabbi was an employee of Jewish Family Services in Riverside, the county adjacent to San Bernardino where Jonah’s mother had lived and died. He had been Jonah’s caseworker since 2008, but he had only approached Raphael’s Son twice—the time he mistook Eddy for his boss and the second time, last April, when he thought he’d try again and see if the father was more willing to care for his own. The rabbi didn’t believe in forcing children onto parents who wanted no part of them, and this one—Raphael’s Son—certainly wanted none of this boy, said he didn’t even think Jonah was his, refused to come down and see him, let alone look at a picture. He went crazy when he found out that Eddy Arax had gone to visit the boy in 2008, and then he really blew up when he learned the mother had been dead for five years already, what was that half-faced Armenian doing with the $2,000 of so-called child support every month? Donating it? Was it his to donate? It’s not like he paid taxes and could use the deduction!

  The rabbi thought it best not to mention that they had only ever seen $1,000 at a time from Eddy.

  “Whatever he did with the rest I figure is not our business, but now look!” He motioned toward the sliding glass doors of the living room. “Look at him now and tell me he’s not something special.”

  * * *

  Jonah stood in the middle of the room with his eyes still closed and the blue pillow tucked under his right arm, a silver pin of light glowing, fluorescent, in the center of his stomach beneath the big yellow T-shirt.

  “He’s always been like this,” the rabbi said softly. “I believe it’s the divine in him—God’s light shining through His best creatures.”

  Slowly, as Angela gaped at him, the space around Jonah fell away, the world getting darker and more empty until it was just him—a small, incandescent miracle—and the setting realization, for Angela, of what this meant.

  __________________

  They walked Jonah to the couch and helped him lie down, then stood around and watched the light glint with his every breath. The deeper they sailed into the night, the brighter the light became and the greater the possibility appeared to Angela that it was indeed true—what no one had contemplated for a hundred years—Raphael’s Son being just that. The inconceivable may be real, the pretense fact.

  Slowly, she saw fireflies and moths and other night creatures appear in the garden—small, solitary glints at first, and then, suddenly, flurries of them like flashing bulbs the size of a pinhead—flapping their wings against the glass of the closed door, and soon so many of them had gathered that the garden was lit up.

  A few minutes before dawn Jonah woke up and came to the window, put his little face with those large caramel eyes to the glass as if to soak in the warmth generated by the incandescence outside, and when he saw Angela, awed and immobile, trying to get the measure of him and what he meant, he smiled at her as if in prayer—believe in me—and turned halfway to open the door, letting thousands of insects swarm the room just as they were about to turn pale in the first light.

  That was at five in the morning. An hour later, the room was awash in color, all the walls and the ceiling, the tops of the cabinets and every empty space now dyed in startling hues, a technicolor chimera that felt strangely, quietly alive. In the yard, the July sky was clear as glass, the air warm even for Los Angeles in summer. Angela got up from her chair and walked toward the sliding glass door. The sound of her steps on the Spanish tile floor struck against the silence in the room, shaking a crack open somewhere in the world, because the next thing they all saw was the rush of color that peeled off the walls and the furnishings and gathered into a cloud above Jonah, hovering like a prayer, then glided in a wave like the giant wings of a manta ray, in a choreographed flight that darkened the doorway, then the terrace. Against the bleached floor of the deck, the early-morning light swept across like watercolor off a page, staining it forever in their memories.

  For the next hour or so the cloud drifted west, toward the ocean. On the ground, people stopped and stared at it, took pictures with their cell phones and called television stations to report the sighting, and reporters and entomologists speculated about its nature and origin, while in Angela’s living room on Mulholland Drive, little Jonah with the electric heart dreamed of flickering ghosts.

  __________________

  They sat on the terrace, Angela and the rabbi, till the sun cast shadows and Jonah woke up and came to the window, barefoot and holding his pillow, and waved at them with those little hands. Then the rabbi announced they were going out for breakfast. “It shouldn’t be so difficult to find my way down to Ventura in daylight, we’ll find a McDonald’s and bring you something,” he told Angela. She barely glanced up when they left.

  So Jonah had a translucent heart, she thought. So what? There are nearly seven thousand rare diseases in the world, some affecting as few as two people, and there are thousands of other “syndromes” that have not been named. Within small, historically isolated communities, many a strange and inexplicable condition has passed through generations without drawing special notice. The fact that every case of luminescence known to Iranian Jews had so far appeared in the Soleyman clan was not proof that it did not occur in other families, either in Iran or in other parts of the world.

  It’s like that other illness, HIBM, that for so long was thought to strike only Irania
n Jews. Then an Indian girl was diagnosed, and a Japanese woman, and a Korean, Chinese, Palestinian . . .

  And who was to say that Jenna Rose’s claim of Raphael’s Son’s paternity had been true?

  Then again, what were the chances?

  * * *

  “I’d say infinitesimally small,” Leon said when Angela asked him on the phone. It was barely nine in the morning, and already his voice was grainy and drained.

  “Just looking at the kid . . .” he paused. “I thought all that stuff about your father’s family was bullshit until I saw the boy.”

  It always shocked Angela that Iranians she had met only casually or not at all, even ones born in the United States, knew so much about her family history.

  “Whatever,” she snapped, mostly because she resented Leon’s allusion to her past. “What’s it to me anyway?”

  He must have thought that was an especially asinine question because he said nothing in response. That irritated Angela even more.

  If Jonah was proof of Raphael’s Son’s legitimacy, what of Izikiel and Aaron, and their rejection of him? What of Raphael’s Wife who had told the truth and been denied and derided for decades? What of Elizabeth who had perpetuated the wrong?

  What of Angela who had taken to the worldwide web with her own perceived truth?

  Here was a truth: for fifty years, Raphael’s Son had tried to shed the indignity of being a bastard among a people who defined themselves and each other almost entirely by name and lineage, and for fifty years the Soleyman family had denied him this singular rite of passage. In return, he had caused unspeakable pain for Angela’s parents, and later wreaked havoc on many an innocent life. But the more injury he brought, and the more millions he stole, the farther he found himself from catching that brass ring. Even after he established himself in the United States, after he moved to Holmby Hills and threw his money around, the Iranians who knew about his past looked down on him; and his white neighbors, who disliked him merely for being Iranian, whispered to each other that he should not have been allowed to move into the area.