A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  The shivering silence returned. Josie wiggled through the wall of girls until she stood at the pit’s rim, peering down into the abyss. Far below, a finger of bright red plastic lay lodged in dark dirt.

  “Now you’re on,” the girl proclaimed, her eyes on Josie. “Who’s got the rope?”

  In seconds a bright stripe of fat white twine snaked out of a girl’s pack, across girls’ hands, between girls’ legs, and slithered down into the pit.

  Someone nudged her. She pulled away, until she felt her sister’s warm fingers around her arm. “Just get it, Josie,” Judith urged. “It’s not that far down.”

  Josie looked at Judith. Judith’s eyelids fluttered, and then she pushed Josie to her knees.

  For an instant Josie clutched Judith’s feet. The circle of girls tightened around them. She let go of Judith’s sneakers, and felt the snapback as her sister pulled her feet away, kicking her aside. The casualness of that kick astounded her.

  She glanced at Judith, but Judith had turned away, helping the others guide down the rope. Josie turned and lowered herself until she was sitting with her legs dangling into the abyss. Twenty feet below, the dark mud at the bottom of the pit was filigreed with a layer of trash. Her inhaler winked at her, red plastic glowing in twilight. The woods were darkening as wind breathed through thick leaves. Her hands clutched the edge of the pit as though it were the rim of a giant bowl, earth like thick clay molded between her fingers. She turned around, took hold of the rope, and began to slide.

  She dropped below the surface and flailed her legs until she caught the rope between her knees. The world swung above her head, tree branches kaleidoscoping as she spun, knocking her head on the pit’s wall while suspended between earth and sky. Above her, eleven girls circled the pit, their faces just visible above the edge, a ring of dark hair and grins. And Judith among them, imploring her. She looked down. The inhaler gleamed below, a perfect bottled version of what her father called the immanence of God.

  The skin on her palms screamed and burned as she slipped down and crashed into the mud. Her body rolled on dirt, long black hair streaking dirt on her face and still-unfamiliar bra hooks digging into her spine as her back pressed against the earth. She heard animals scurrying through dead leaves, and laughter from above as she snatched her inhaler off the ground. She turned upward in utter triumph, and grinned at the ink-blue sky above the fractal branches of the trees. And then she heard the whoosh as the rope whizzed upward, the bright white snake retreating up the wall of mud and out of sight.

  A joke, Josie knew. They wanted to enjoy hearing her beg. Thank God Judith was still above, watching her. How much humiliation would be required this time? It was like a game theory calculation. Josie was good at game theory calculations. She sighed, a deliberate theatrical sigh, and began the game.

  “Come on, guys. Give it back.”

  They were still laughing above her. Someone spat, a white liquid hailstone that smacked Josie’s sneaker with startling force.

  “Maybe she can think her way out of that one,” someone said.

  The faces leaned around the edges of the circle, laughter pouring down into the pit. Josie scanned their eyes, steeling herself against them as she searched for Judith. Where was Judith?

  “It’s getting dark,” a girl said. “How about we go back?”

  Now the girl who had thrown the inhaler spoke, a wide grin on her face, perfect teeth paralleling the rim of the pit. “She’s got her glue sniffer,” she diagnosed. “It’s not like she’s gonna die.”

  “Give me the rope,” Josie breathed. It was occurring to her, slowly, like creeping darkness, that this wasn’t a joke, that this was real: the open throat of the earth, and the sky darkening above her. She breathed again, then called louder. “Please, give me the rope.” She could feel the tears, prayed no one could see them. Where was Judith?

  Miraculously, Judith appeared, a face along the edge above. She was running a hand through her hair, blinking. “Judith!” Josie shouted. “Judith, give me the rope!”

  Judith’s face turned, then dipped below the curve of the earth. Girls’ feet and laughter thundered through the woods.

  “JUDITH!” Josie screamed. “JUDITH!”

  But she was alone. With her inhaler.

  TWILIGHT LINGERED BELOW THE forest floor.

  At first Josie tried to climb the walls, while the crickets laughed at her from the shadows. It would be a long time before the girls reached the campsite, Josie knew, and even longer before the counselors noticed she was missing. It was clear to her now that no one would tell them. By then it would be nightfall, and there was no trail. Already the sky above the pit was seeping deep blue ink between the branches overhead.

  She climbed three or four feet up before crashing to the ground, this time bruising her ankle. It was difficult to stand up after that. Instead she crawled around the bottom of the pit, searching among the trash for useful objects. When she found an old tent pin, she tried and failed to use it as a foothold on the wall. She thought of tying her clothing together into a rope and throwing the end to the top, weighed down by a rock. But the rope wouldn’t be long enough, and anything that would hold her weight at the top would be too heavy for her to throw that high. She tried digging out footholds with the tent pin, and managed to make three, but she could no longer put weight on her ankle. When she had exhausted all other options, she started screaming.

  Nothing came of it except another attack, this one terrifying. Her paper bag was in her backpack at the top of the pit. She quickly pulled off a sock and gasped into it between albuterol puffs: she was drowning in air, hooking her inhaler into her mouth like a fish caught on a line. The sides of the pit rose up around her, merciless surfaces of mud and stone. For a long moment oxygen fled her brain, returning in a dizzying rush that flung her to the ground. She lay on her back looking up at the sky, feeling the frantic rise and fall of her chest as breath returned, but unable to fight the sudden fatigue that made the sky fade above her. As she drifted into dream, she saw something extraordinary: instead of dirt, there appeared, on the tall round walls of the pit, hundreds and hundreds of little doors.

  The doors weren’t quite large enough for a person to pass through, even crawling; they were like the doors of kitchen cabinets, and many were even smaller, stacked one above the other until they covered all the walls of the pit. They were made of bark, or clay, some even of acorns or leaves. Josie ­remembered—for one can remember, within delirium and dream—the children’s discovery room at the natural history museum, which she still loved, where there was an entire wall full of drawers and cabinets just like these, each filled with a different treasure: a geode, a starfish, a glass-encased tarantula, a bone. She thought she might be able to climb out of the pit by standing on the doors, once they were opened. Near the bottom were what looked like drawers. She approached the nearest wall and tugged at a pinecone handle. The pinecone nearly came off in her hand, but then the drawer sprang open, bursting out of the wall until it banged against her waist.

  In the drawer, she found Judith.

  Not Judith now, as she had looked in the forest moments before, but Judith years earlier. In the drawer, a deep one, this Judith was perhaps seven years old, wearing her curly hair in two tight pigtails—which were the first things Josie saw of her, since Judith was lying on her stomach on the bottom of the drawer, propped up on her elbows on a sheaf of brown carpeting. In front of her was a yellow and red plastic game with a ticking timer and a tray full of indentations for plastic shapes. Judith was sorting bits of yellow plastic in her pudgy hands before dropping them into their places in the tray. Josie remembered the game, which she hadn’t seen or thought of in seven years. It was called Perfection, and she always won it. The timer’s bell rang, and the tray popped up and scattered plastic pieces across the bottom of the drawer. The Judith in the drawer jumped, alarmed, then scooted back until she was seated on her knees.

  “I can never do it,” Judith said, still laughing.
It was a wonderful laugh, an unselfconscious cackle that Josie remembered from when the two of them used to play together, not so very long ago. Suddenly she understood that she hadn’t heard Judith laugh like that in over a year. The sisters had entered an unmourned passage, the heartbreaking twilight of play. “How come you always win, Josie?” the Judith in the drawer asked.

  Josie waited for Judith to look up at her, but she didn’t. She was speaking to someone else, Josie understood, a Josie tucked into the wall of the drawer. A moment later, the Judith in the drawer lay back down on the drawer’s carpet, reset the game, and lost it again. “I can never do it,” she said again, and laughed again. “How come you always win, Josie?”

  Josie closed the drawer. She was shaking now. She turned to the right, reached higher, and opened one of the cabinet doors.

  Inside it, her father was seated on their living room couch at home, grading a high stack of problem sets on the coffee table in front of him. He had taken off his glasses to twirl them around a finger, his brown eyes squinting at someone across from him. From deep within the cabinet, Josie could smell food burning.

  “Just consider this, Josephine,” her father in the cabinet was saying. “Can God create a stone so large that even God can’t lift it?” He sucked the end of his glasses, tapping a foot against the rug on the bottom of the cabinet. “It seems like a trap, but Rambam says, ‘There are certain objects which the mind can in no way and by no means grasp: the gates of perception are locked against it.’” Her father’s face, for reasons she remembered not understanding, was turning red. Before she knew it, he had said it all again. “Just consider this, Josephine … ‘The gates of perception are locked against it!’”

  Josie closed the door. She turned toward the other side of the pit, and pulled open a smaller drawer. Here she found herself, at the age of three, sprawled on her stomach in the bath. The bathtub filled the entire drawer, and the thirteen-year-old Josie dipped her finger into the water. It was warm, pleasant. She looked down at her own back, at her wet black hair smelling of baby shampoo. The girl in the bathtub drawer was examining a soap bubble. Suddenly Josie remembered that soap bubble, the one in which she had noticed her own reflection and wondered whether, if she popped it, she would disappear. Josie watched as the girl in the bathtub popped the bubble, then watched the very same bubble form again. She closed the drawer.

  Josie looked up toward the upper edge of the pit, and at the hundreds of doors stretching between the floor and freedom, and at the fractal branches beyond. It would occur to her, years later, that there was a pit like this buried inside each ­person—fascinating, painful, and in the end so infinite that it was rendered useless. Why, she wondered? Who cared, in the end? What was the point of it, if you couldn’t use it to climb out?

  The most frustrating thing, Josie saw as she continued pulling doors open, almost manically, was that you never knew if you were going to find something priceless or something worthless, and the proportion of the worthless was overwhelming. Most of the smaller cabinets were filled with math problems in her handwriting, or jelly beans, or children who had bitten her in nursery school, or used condoms she had once found in the backyard. A larger one contained a chipped-toothed boy who had spent all of kindergarten calling her a dog; another held a teacher telling her to shut her mouth. She slammed doors in their faces. Of all of the cabinets and drawers, not one seemed to contain a flare, or a rope.

  Couldn’t they have been sorted? she suddenly thought. What if each door had been labeled, like an old library catalogue—by person, by date, by topic, by possibility? As it was, the drawers and doors circled her like the girls at the top of the pit, laughing at her. She had to escape. She tried mounting a foot on one of the drawer handles near the bottom of the pit, but it snapped off beneath her shoe. She kicked the drawer, enraged, and it bounced open.

  Inside, her mother was seated in the pediatric emergency room, the tubing from Josie’s inhaled drugs running across her lap to the other side of the drawer. Painted cartoon characters smiled on the drawer’s walls. It could have been any one of a dozen emergency room visits. But it had to be the one in the winter of last year, because her mother was holding the nurse’s pager—which, the nurse had complained, had been buzzing without end, making it impossible to respond. During her second inhalation treatment, Josie had fixed it.

  “You’re tough, Josie,” her mother was saying in the drawer.

  I’m not, Josie thought, the same words she had said then.

  “You are,” her mother answered. “The reason these things happen to you is because when they do, you use them to make other things better.”

  Josie pulled at the drawer, but it was a retractable one, and it snapped closed. When she pulled it again, she couldn’t open it. She gave up, turned away, and opened one more door.

  Behind that door, Judith was kneeling, holding out Josie’s inhaler. The bottom of the cabinet was covered with pine ­needles and dead leaves; the walls inside were bark. “Josie, don’t be ridiculous,” the Judith behind the door told her. “You could do all this yourself if you had to.”

  Judith was right. She could. She looked up at the tall fading walls of the pit and saw that it was completely dark, the mud surfaces shrouded in starlight below the inked branches above. If the archive below the forest floor never existed, then someday she would invent it.

  The Judith behind the door was passing her the inhaler. She took it, and put it back in her mouth. As she breathed in, she felt herself being lifted up, waking up, and then saw lights shining in her eyes, people kneeling beside her at the edge of the pit, a paramedic clutching a clear plastic mask over her nose and mouth.

  And beyond them, Judith, holding the rope.

  JUDITH ALWAYS KNEW THAT Josie was brilliant. Every person who ever met her little sister had told her that. As an adult, Josie had become not merely attractive, but magnetic, drawing everything toward herself with an unconscious, irresistible pull: men, money, prizes, praise. But Judith seemed to attract only disappointments. After being fired from four different jobs in less than a year, she had gone to work in Josie’s shining new office as if enslaved, bearing their shared surname like a brand on her back. To everyone at work, she was nothing more than Josie’s sister. To everyone, at least, except for Itamar.

  “Your sister is tough, isn’t she?” Itamar asked.

  They were in the sushi restaurant next door to the office, an excursion that was meant to be nothing more than a bite to eat before Judith went home, and before Itamar continued working. Itamar was always working. Josie had discovered Itamar on a business trip to Israel the previous year, and had imported him to run the company’s operating systems. Itamar was a thin gangly beauty of a man, with nearly perfect English and a resistance to smiling. The first time Judith saw him, at a meeting whose language quickly devolved from English to pseudocode, she noticed how he pressed his lips together as though he were trying not to laugh. She had grinned at him until he suddenly started laughing, and Josie had barked them both out of the room. That evening the restaurant was dim and empty, more intimate than either of them had expected. The hostess seated them at a corner table lit by a paper lantern. Judith could hear the hush of his breath.

  “Tough? Sure,” said Judith—annoyed to hear Josie mentioned, but too enchanted to stay annoyed. His hands were on the table now, long thin fingers like a musician’s. “When we were little, she was always tricking me,” she added.

  “Tricking you how?”

  “Oh, stupid things,” she said, unable to stop smiling. “I would write forged notes from our parents trying to get myself out of homework and tests, and she would sneak them out of my bag and show them to our mother.”

  “Then you were the tricky one,” he said. “She was the informer.”

  “She’s been an informer since birth,” Judith laughed. “Josie was always working in intelligence.”

  She meant it as a joke, but Itamar frowned, distracted. “When I was in the army, I worked
in intelligence,” he said.

  Behind him in the restaurant’s shadows was a lacquered Japanese cabinet, its face formed from an elaborate series of doors. Itamar seemed that way to her too, then, a locked cabinet full of hidden compartments that could be opened only with the right keys. “What did you do?” she asked.

  Itamar snorted. “Americans always think it sounds so important. You know what you do when you’re nineteen years old in army intelligence? A tiny piece of something. That’s it.”

  “What do you mean, a tiny piece of something?”

  “Like you put a certain chip into a certain circuit board, five hundred times. Or you write the same piece of code, with some tiny variation, five hundred times. It’s the most boring thing in the world. You have no idea what you’re even making, because no one ever lets you see all of it. At the beginning you think that someday someone will promote you and tell you what you’ve been making all that time, but in the end it never happens. You just have to believe that you need to do your part exactly right, and accept that you may never know what it means.”

  Judith grinned. “That sounds like my life,” she said.

  Itamar laughed. Before they returned to the office, he kissed her on the lips.

  Three months later, at a party celebrating the five millionth Genizah subscriber, Judith watched as Josie walked in the door—Josie, her long black hair shining down the back of her evening gown, with Itamar at her side, and a diamond ring on her finger.

  “I know it’s sudden,” Josie told Judith a few minutes later, over the blaring of the band. “But Itamar’s father is ill, and we didn’t want to wait long. And getting him a green card would really help the company a lot. And life is short, isn’t it?”

  “At least in this world,” Judith said.