A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  “Can you—can you take Tali home from school tomorrow afternoon?” he asked.

  “With pleasure,” Judith said. She meant it.

  TALI WAS AS BEAUTIFUL as she was strange, an alien girl dropped from the far reaches of outer space onto a new and terrifying planet. People would claim that this was because she had lost her mother, the poor thing: her mother’s newsworthy demise had earned her a permanent pass on life. But the truth was that she had been strange long before Josie left for Egypt. Tali didn’t have friends in school, but this did not seem to bother her. Her world was populated by a series of imaginary friends whose presence in her life was vivid enough that her parents at first thought they were her real classmates, even though she had given them names like Svorgolet and Blangey. For weeks her parents believed that these were the names of Indian children in their daughter’s class. Nor was Tali’s oddity confined to imaginary friends. Each day brought a different madness. Once for an entire month she declared that she was a gavial—a thin-snouted South Asian crocodilian, as she pedantically explained—and attempted to bite anyone who dared to suggest that she was actually a girl. She dressed her toy dinosaurs in sexy Barbie clothes. Of course, she dressed herself exclusively in orange. She sniffed markers, imagining that they smelled like their colors even when they didn’t, and walked around all day with her nostrils dyed dark green and blue. All of this had been adorable and endearing in preschool and even in kindergarten, but none of it was even slightly acceptable in first grade. At the urging of the kindergarten teacher she had once been examined by a neurologist, who tested her for various disorders before deciding that Tali was simply weird. What was perhaps even stranger was that despite her parents’ illustrious careers, Tali did not seem to be particularly smart. She could not read more than a few short words, could not write more than her name, could not retell a story she had just been told, could not count past thirty-nine, confused cause and effect. Worst of all, she seemed completely uninterested in listening to anything the teacher said at school, or in learning anything new. School testing revealed no developmental delays; it was concluded that Tali was simply not very bright—or, at best, perhaps her lack of engagement was due entirely to her own choice. Her parents pretended these things did not matter to them, but they did. The first-grade teacher hated her. It was not surprising that Joy preferred to park her in front of the TV.

  Judith arrived early at the school to meet Tali, asking parents and babysitters where the first-graders would be dismissed. At the appropriate door, women gathered in clumps, staring into their phones, stamping their feet against the cold. Since moving back to Massachusetts to be closer to her demented mother—a move she resented so deeply that she had rejoiced when Josie moved her fledgling company to Cambridge for the same reason—Judith had viewed these half-­working mothers with a deep, delicious envy, which she disguised as contempt. But now Judith qualified as one of them, at least for the afternoon. She moved closer to two women who weren’t looking at their phones, hoping to insert herself into their conversation. She knew how to insert herself, she thought.

  “At first I had no idea what he had in his mouth,” the woman in high-heeled boots was saying. “Later when I called poison control, they told me that if you’re going to eat feces, you should eat the feces of a herbivore, because at least it doesn’t have any parasites.”

  For reasons Judith could not understand, this made the second woman laugh. Judith failed to come up with anything to add. Fortunately the school doors surged open at that moment like a breaking dam, releasing scores of children onto the sidewalk. It didn’t take long to find Tali. The girl barreled toward Judith, her nose glowing with bright green and purple streaks. She had been smelling markers again.

  “JOOO-dith!” Tali cried. “I remembered you were coming to get me today. I thought I would forget, but I remembered!” Her breath hung in a mist in front of her little face. She beamed, as if she had just won a prize.

  “Yes, here I am,” Judith said. She inhaled cold air, invigorated. She could not remember the last time someone had been so happy to see her. Her mother, now in assisted living, was convinced that she was Josie. When Judith visited, her mother confided in this imagined Josie, complimenting Josie’s genius and devotion while Judith cut up her pills. When Judith once dared to tell her that Josie had been murdered, her mother had laughed. “That is so unlike you,” she said.

  Judith was afraid that Tali’s smile might vanish, but she was armed. She had brought Tali a new toy, a craft project in a box, and wanted to present it right away. “Here I am,” she reaffirmed. “And I have something for you—”

  But Tali had her own material to share. “You have to see what’s inside my backpack!”

  The little girl threw her bag down on the sidewalk beside a heap of old snow. Children and adults were still crowding the entrance. To make room, Judith shuffled into the snow pile by the school’s brick wall. The sound of cracking ice beneath her feet comforted her.

  “I invented a goodness medicine,” Tali was saying.

  “A what?”

  “A goodness medicine,” Tali repeated, with genuine impatience. Her long black hair, unbrushed, was draped over her face like a theater curtain as she crouched beside her bright pink backpack. Her hair was a tapestry of clumps and knots. Presumably Joy was the one who usually brushed it, or Josie; Itamar had surely never spent a fraction of a second thinking about his little girl’s hair. Judith reached over to rake away the knots, then thought better of it. A bodily memory shuddered through her: Josie at five years old, fresh from the bath, and their mother gently, carefully, lovingly combing Josie’s long black hair.

  “Abba said I was being bad and not listening,” Tali said when she raised her head again. Judith had once found it unnatural, pretentious even, that Tali used the Hebrew abba instead of daddy, but now she was grateful. It felt less possessive, less real. Abba said I was being bad. Like an imaginary friend. She thought to look for the bruise, but the girl was bundled, mummified in orange vinyl. “I invented this medicine to make me better,” Tali continued. “When I drink the medicine, it makes me really really good! Wanna see?”

  “Uh, sure,” Judith replied.

  Tali pulled a paper cup out of her backpack. Inside it was an acorn, a crumpled tissue, and a penny. Judith looked into the cup and wondered, as she had often wondered since Josie had been taken, if she were dreaming all of this, or, if she were awake, if she had crossed into some sort of parallel world whose rules she didn’t understand. Josie would have grasped the rules immediately, interpreted the dream. For Josie everything was always clear. Even the publicized version of her death made sense: she was a martyr for the grand cause of information technology, for the high holy values of knowledge and cultural exchange. Despite the deep illogic within this story’s veins, it worked. Josie herself would have liked it. As for Judith, she was up to her knees in dirty snow, staring into a paper cup stuffed with trash.

  “See the goodness medicine?” Tali asked. “I made it myself. And now I get to drink it.” She raised the cup to her lips.

  “Whoa, don’t actually swallow that stuff,” Judith said, and made a grab for the cup.

  Tali snatched the cup away from Judith’s hand. She flattened her mouth into a deprecating frown and pointed into the cup, looking straight at Judith. “You are so silly, Judith! This stuff is NOT the medicine.”

  Judith glanced at the other children. Their parents and babysitters were talking on cell phones, dragging them by their hands as the children called to each other, laughing. Judith’s stomach hurt. It really was a parallel world, she understood. These other women managed by ignoring it. For the first time, she doubted she could do this. I don’t know what I was thinking, she heard Itamar say. “You just told me it was medicine,” she said weakly.

  “No, no, no! The medicine is INVISIBLE!” Tali screeched. “The acorn and the tissue and the penny are the stuff that MAKES the medicine. They are ingredients.” Her voice was shrill now, pedan
tic, as though she were the adult and Judith the child. The little girl’s tone rattled around in Judith’s head. Suddenly she was seven years old again, assigned to walk her younger sister home: bracing herself against a lecture about how the earth formed, about how germs died, about how feeble her own mind was and always would be.

  “Because an acorn and a tissue and a penny all together doesn’t make sense at all,” Tali pointed out, with an irrepressible delight in the rightness of her logic. “Listen, here’s a joke I just thought of now! What’s the same about an acorn, a tissue, and a penny?”

  Judith tried to think of a correct answer. This, she recognized, was part of the slow slide into madness. “None of them know how to ride bicycles,” she said. It was a joke her father once liked to make. She still loved her father, despite having heard barely a word from him in twenty years. She looked him up online on occasion, even sent him messages sometimes. Josie never forgave her for that.

  Tali wouldn’t either, it seemed. “Wrong!” she shouted. “Try again: what’s the same about an acorn, a tissue, and a penny?”

  Judith suppressed a sigh. “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “NOTHING!” Tali announced, jubilant. “See? The ingredients don’t make sense! Only the INVISIBLE part makes sense!” She let out a loud, cackling laugh.

  Like a mad scientist, Judith thought. Or just a miniature of her mother.

  “Now I’m going to drink the invisible part, and turn good. Wanna watch?”

  “Okay,” Judith mumbled. She was compliant now, cowed. Her feet sank deeper into the snow.

  Tali mimed drinking from the cup, then looked up at Judith. Her expression was suddenly fixed in an odd smile, like a doll’s. “Hello, Judith, you are my new mommy,” she recited in a monotone. “I will listen to you forever. Wherever you go, I will go. Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God.”

  One of the books on Tali’s shelf at home was a comic book of children’s Bible stories. Tali was obsessed with it, Judith later learned, and had convinced her babysitter Joy to read it to her multiple times a day. Joy, a devout Filipina Catholic, had happily complied. “See how the medicine works?” Tali asked. “Do you like it?”

  Judith breathed in, a long, slow breath. She was deep in the pile of snow now, sunken down to the dead frozen leaves from the previous season, before Josie left for Egypt, when none of this would have been possible. Beneath her feet were a season’s worth of days, lived and bloomed and thrived and blazed with color before falling, floating down, finished, in a heap at her feet. Somewhere underneath the snow and leaves there was a deep pit, with another girl abandoned in it. Judith kicked at the snow until she couldn’t see the bottom anymore.

  “I love it,” she said.

  Tali looked up at her, and her eyes were full of an unbridled and unexpected joy. This, Judith understood, was what that parallel world of children was like: the surprises were often happy ones. Maybe it wasn’t frightening at all, Judith considered. Maybe her deep terror was merely a side effect of wonder.

  “Maybe you can have some too!” Tali exclaimed.

  Judith smiled. “What would it do to me?” she asked.

  “It would turn you into Mommy!”

  The sky spun over Judith’s head. She sank down, squatting in the snow. “That’s something I’ve been looking for my entire life,” she said.

  Tali considered her, squinting one eye: skeptical, like her father. Judith noticed now that she had blue marker streaks on the backs of her little hands, as though she had tried to trace her own veins. “Really?” she asked.

  The question was real. And Judith was ready. “Yes,” she said.

  Tali smiled, a slow, proud smile, as though all were once again right with the world, and all because of her. She tugged Judith’s sleeve until Judith leaned in to listen. “Don’t tell Abba,” she stage-whispered in Judith’s face. Her dark eyes were wide, urgent. “If we don’t tell him, then maybe he’ll think you’re Mommy too! And then it will really work! But you have to promise not to tell him. Okay?”

  Nothing about this was okay. But Judith reverted, backing into a child’s aptitude for happiness. “I won’t,” Judith said. “I promise.”

  “Here it is,” Tali intoned. Her voice was deep and grave. She held the cup out to Judith, an offering to a foreign god. “Don’t forget, only drink the invisible part.”

  “How could I forget?” Judith asked. She lifted the cup to her lips and drank.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, EARLY on a Sunday morning, Itamar summoned Judith to the house, his voice on the phone rich with reluctance. He had to go into the office for a bit to deal with a hardware problem, and could she possibly stop by to stay with Tali?

  Judith came over immediately, and stayed in the house until a flustered Itamar returned home, just before noon. She and Tali had been building a forest out of blocks, in which unlucky princess figurines were meeting their demise at the hands of meat-eating theropods. But then Tali had abruptly lost interest, complaining that she was tired. Judith laid her down on the couch in the living room and noticed something familiar in the little black-haired body, in the way that little body shivered. When her father returned, she told him.

  “I was about to call you,” she said. “Tali is breathing really fast.”

  Itamar hung up his coat and came into the living room, glancing at Tali on the couch. “Little kids always breathe fast,” he said. He bent down and kissed the top of Tali’s head. “Hello, hamuda,” he said to her. Tali didn’t acknowledge him. He stepped away, patting his thigh, the pocket with his phone in it.

  “Little kids don’t breathe that fast,” Judith said, pointing at Tali. “That’s forty-five breaths per minute. That’s not okay.”

  “Mmm,” Itamar replied noncommittally.

  Judith looked at the small body on the couch. Tali had rolled over now, turning away from them. “You need to take her to the doctor,” Judith said softly. “I think the pediatrician has weekend hours, but they probably close early. You should take her right away if you don’t want to get stuck going to the emergency room.”

  “That seems unnecessary,” Itamar huffed. “She looks fine to me, just tired. And how would you know how fast she’s supposed to breathe? Maybe that’s just the way she breathes.”

  Judith dug her fingernails into her palms. “I spent years doing this with Josie,” she said, her voice calm and controlled. She knew the name would wound him. Itamar trembled, though he tried to hide it, running a hand through his hair. “At this age they’re supposed to breathe at twenty-five breaths per minute when they’re resting, or even less than that,” Judith continued. “Not forty-five. She needs an inhaler. Do you have one in the house? Josie outgrew all that years ago, but I’d bet she’d still have kept an expired one—”

  Itamar blew a puff of contempt. “Tali doesn’t have asthma. She has a cold. You just don’t know what it’s like with kids. You have no idea how often kids get sick. Shtuyot.” Nonsense: the worst non-obscene Israeli insult, after the word for sucker. “It’s nothing. You don’t know.”

  “I know,” Judith breathed.

  Itamar stepped back to the couch where Tali was lying on her stomach, her head turned away from the rest of the room. He sat beside her and ran his fingers through her hair. Judith saw how hard he was trying, how desperate he had become. “You’re okay, aren’t you, metuka?” Itamar asked.

  Tali turned briefly to face him. Her eyes gleamed like round wet glass. “Don’t wanna talk,” she groaned, and turned away.

  “She’s tired,” Itamar said. “Of course she’s tired. And okay, yes, she’s probably coming down with something.” His desperation was naked now, shameful. “I’ll give her some aspirin.”

  “You have to take her to the doctor,” Judith seethed.

  Itamar looked at his watch. There was an unbearable tension in the way he turned his wrist. The wrist itself was virile, dark hair accenting the strong ropes of veins beneath the skin. “I have a conference call in three minut
es.”

  “Today is Sunday,” Judith said. She laced her voice with acid.

  Itamar noticed, though he pretended not to. “The call is with a vendor in Tel Aviv. It’s a weekday for them there. They’re staying late for me to call in.”

  “Fine, then I’m taking her.”

  Something shook through Itamar’s body, a live wire of rage. “She’s my daughter, Judith. My daughter, and no one else’s!” His voice cracked. He tried to hide it, rubbing his hands along his own arms, lowering his voice. “If someone takes her to the doctor, it’s me.”

  “Abba,” Tali whispered. Judith was sure he would sit down beside her again, but he didn’t.

  “Then take her now,” Judith said.

  “I’ll take her, once I finish this call. Nothing’s going to happen to her in the next twenty minutes.” Itamar left the room. His body was still shaking, but he walked with his back erect, an affront.

  Judith whispered to Tali. “We’re going now. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Tali said. She coughed, and then vomited.

  When the doctor saw Tali, he put her in an ambulance. The hospital didn’t discharge her for another three days.

  “I WISH I KNEW how to thank you,” Itamar said.

  He had brought Tali home from the pediatric ward late that afternoon. Judith had explained to him how to use the nebulizer machine that had come home with her. Judith also administered the medication at home for the first time, propping Tali on her bed and fixing the mask over her face and reading picture books aloud to her as the machine grumbled, spewing compressed air through a tube and forcing it through a plastic vial of albuterol aimed at Tali’s nose and mouth. Then Judith and Itamar both put an exhausted Tali to bed. As Itamar hugged her, Judith sat on the bed beside him, her arm around both Tali and her father. They became one body, a circle enclosed around their little girl. The naturalness of it shocked Judith. Itamar too, it seemed. Judith felt his arm tremble. She left the room quickly and hurried downstairs. When he came down to say goodbye to her, she was already wearing her winter coat, standing by the front door of the house. He came down the stairs hanging his head, until he was standing before her.