by Dara Horn
The evils that befall men are of three kinds, Rambam patiently explained, and Josie read along, wondering into which category her own agony fell.
1. The first kind of evil is that which is caused by the circumstance that man possesses a body, and is subject to genesis and destruction … Aside from the necessary degeneration of the body, you will nevertheless find that evils of this type are rare: there are thousands of men in perfect health, and deformed individuals are a strange and exceptional occurrence, not even one-thousandth of those who are perfectly normal.
This was true, Josie thought—unjust, ungracious, and uncompassionate, turning people into numbers as any scientist would, but still utterly, undeniably true.
2. The second class of evils are those that people cause to each other … These evils are more numerous than those of the first kind, and their causes originate in ourselves. This kind of evil is nevertheless also not widespread. It is rare that a man plans to kill his neighbor or to rob him in the night. Many persons are afflicted with this kind of evil in great wars, but these are not frequent, if the whole inhabited earth is taken into consideration.
This was also true, she knew—even though now the author was being unjust, ungracious, and uncompassionate to her. She appreciated his honesty, and was impressed that he seemed to express no interest in explaining her statistically meaningless place in the universe. The idea that her suffering was demographically insignificant, that it did not reflect poorly on mankind, was a strange and unexpected comfort.
3. The third class of evils are those that everyone causes to himself by his own actions. This is the largest class. It is especially of these evils that all men complain … The soul, when accustomed to superfluous things, acquires a strong habit of desiring things that are not necessary … Men as a rule expose themselves to great dangers, for instance by sea voyages, or the service of kings, and all this for the purpose of obtaining that which is superfluous.
This gave Josie pause. Twenty million dollars’ worth of ransom surely qualified as superfluous. But her entire trip to Egypt had been superfluous too. Sea voyages, she thought, and the service of kings—the arrogance of a different millennium, but still the same. She, it was true, had always thirsted for more. Judith had known her thirst for acclaim, and had goaded her, tested her—for that was what all this was, wasn’t it? A test? For if it wasn’t a test, or a punishment or trial of some kind, then that would mean she was merely a statistical irrelevance—and could that be true? Rambam himself must have been the sort who lived a life of enviable moderation, never tempted to demand more, she thought with petty disdain. But now she had more questions: Was the desire to remember a dead son superfluous? Was the desire to see a living daughter?
It was then that she reached the book’s most puzzling part, its impossible part. Even to think through the concept, she found, was nearly impossible. Yet she read it eagerly, as a riddle that she had no choice but to solve:
The fact that God knows things while they are in a state of possibility, when their existence belongs to the future, does not change the nature of the possible in any way. That nature remains unchanged; and the knowledge of the realization of one of several possibilities does not yet effect that realization…. The fact that laws were given to man, both affirmative and negative, supports the principle that God’s knowledge of future and possible events does not change their character…. According to the teaching of our Torah, God’s knowledge of one of two eventualities does not determine it, however certain that knowledge may be concerning the future occurrence of the one eventuality.
Josie considered this as she lay in her cell, living through the various eventualities that her message had set into motion. If the future was already known by God, then how could alternatives be possible? They weren’t. That much was clear to her, and should have been clear to anyone as obsessed with reason as the author was. Because wouldn’t that imply that some things were unknown to God? That God had chosen to remove himself from human affairs, to limit his own power, just to make room for human freedom? Who needed a God of that sort? Or—and this was the argument that frightened her—was it merely ignorance, the humbling admission of all one could not know, that made human freedom possible?
A footnote on the French side elaborated:
One can imagine people walking through a valley, with an observer perched at the top of a mountain overlooking the valley below. The observer sees where the people are headed, knows when they will turn back due to an obstructed trail, knows which route will lead them to the valley’s end. But the people in the valley, choosing their route without knowing what lies ahead, experience free will. All the possible paths through the valley exist, and the observer above sees where each of them lead. But this does not mean that the people in the valley do not choose their paths. Their ignorance of the eventualities ahead is the source of their free will.
She remembered a conversation she had had with her mother, years ago. The conversation had been about string theory, about the possibility of a universe that existed in a comprehensive predetermined design. “It’s probably good that I stopped being a physicist,” her mother had said.
They were in the emergency room, Josie remembered, as they often were then. Her father, who already spent most nights away from home, had declined to join them. Eleven-year-old Josie, finished with her math homework and immobilized by the oxygen tank that tethered her to the wall, had asked her mother about what she had studied, long ago. She hadn’t known, before then, that her mother had lived another life, that there was a path out of the valley that had long ago been blocked. Many years passed before she understood that she was the one who had blocked it—that it was her birth, fifteen months after Judith’s, that had been the final insurmountable obstacle which made her mother’s career impossible. Her mother explained to her what she once had learned about the woven, singing fabric of the universe. “If I had continued,” her mother said, “I would have reached a point where I would have had to stop believing.”
“Stop believing in God?” Josie had asked.
“No, stop believing in people,” her mother said. “Physicists like to tell you that the data leave no room for a God who controls the universe. That’s absolutely true. But what they don’t like to tell you is that the data also don’t leave any room for people to have free will. I used to like that, then.”
At that moment the nurse came in to check Josie’s oxygen levels, and Josie had forgotten to ask her mother why she had liked it.
Which of the eventualities would come to pass? Would they come to kill her in the morning, after her captor discovered the message she had tried to send, or was there some obscure reason to hope? If the end was already known to God, how could any of it be within her power at all? Was the route through the valley up to her?
When she fell asleep at last, she dreamed of Judith.
In her dungeon she dreamed often of Judith, had dreamed of her many times. In her dreams she imagined alternatives, eventualities that with absolute certainty hadn’t happened—and, with equal certainty, could have. In one dream Josie was playing chess with a nine-year-old Judith again and again, and Judith won every time. In another dream she imagined her mother standing behind Judith at the bathroom mirror, ignoring Josie as she braided Judith’s hair. She dreamed of walking to school with a twelve-year-old Judith, of twelve-year-old Judith teasing her with problems and riddles that she tried to solve but couldn’t, while Judith laughed and laughed. The frustration of it shocked her, yet now it felt familiar: the impotence, the stunting infantilizing rage, like being trapped in a tiny room. In another dream, she saw Judith owning the company, married to Itamar, raising Tali. She saw her husband in bed with her sister, saw her daughter laughing and hugging her sister, while she herself burned in envy. The fire of her fury woke her in the night. She jolted awake to find her mouth pressed against the filthy stone floor—terrified by her own anger, and wanting nothing more than to hold Judith, to tell her that she understood h
er now, to ask for her forgiveness. But all of these dreams were impossible nonsense, Josie knew, like the diagonal of a square being shorter than its sides.
THE DOOR CLANKED OPEN, rousing Josie from a deep and demented sleep. It was the two teenage guards.
Usually only one of them would wake her in the morning, heaving the door open and throwing her food to the floor. Sometimes whoever had thrown the food would talk to her. More often he would laugh at her, or taunt her by placing the food just past where her chain could reach, waiting for her to beg. But this time there were two of them, both smiling as they entered the room and closed the door behind them. Their smiles confused her. She thought of the previous night, of how overjoyed the man had been. She sat up quickly, suddenly expecting them to be bearing good news, happy surprises.
One of them reached into his pocket and withdrew a phone, the same phone she had held in her hand the day before. He turned its screen toward her. She strained at the shackle to see what he was showing her, but she already knew what it was: her message. Had it been sent? She struggled to her feet, pulling the chain tight to see the details. But by the time she stood up, he had already slipped the phone back into his pocket. The two of them watched her now, still smiling. And then they descended.
It was like that: a descent, like a wave crashing on top of her, enveloping her and crushing her in a brutal churn of water and salt and sand. At first she tried to dodge the metal rings they wore as they punched, the boots they kicked with, the steel bars they slammed into her legs, her buttocks, her feet, her knees. But once the wave had crashed over her it quickly became indistinguishable, the pain no longer affecting something as trivial as a body part, but rather all-encompassing, world-consuming. Salt burned her, blinded her. She was inside a molten scream that had replaced the entire world. With her mouth full of boiling lava, she recognized that burning incandescent space. At Tali’s birth her labor had progressed quickly, so quickly that the doctors had not had time to give her the anesthesia she had always planned to have. While it was happening she had imagined that she was being tortured, drilled through with power tools. Now, as the waves of blows crested and fell, she bit her bleeding lips and rallied. She imagined herself giving birth to Tali again, pretended that the pain had a purpose, convinced herself that on the other side of this room of infinitely dense agony there was a narrow door, and if she could only drag her body to that door, her body itself would open and she would give birth on the floor of an ancient forest and see the face of her daughter again. Until she lost consciousness.
They left her alone after that. For hours, for days. For a long time she assumed she had been left to die. When she awoke she groaned for hours, unable to move, unable even to bend her neck to see the ruin of her own body. When she found the strength to move an arm, she pulled at the ends of her hair, which by now had grown down to her waist. She was amazed at how heavy it felt, as though the strands of hair had thickened into coarse brittle ropes. Only when she stretched a clump around to her face did she see that the ends of her hair were saturated with blood. She looked down and saw her blood-soaked clothes stuck to her bruised, razed skin. Her bare feet were lacerated, bulging, unrecognizable, her left ankle so engorged with bruises that the shackle dug into her skin. But to her astonishment, her hands and arms were almost normal—stained red from her hair and clothes, yes, but not broken, not bleeding. Her head, too, seemed barely bruised. Later she would understand that this was intentional, that they had decided in advance which parts of her body were disposable. Now she stared at her beautiful palms, at her reddened hands, as if she had been fingerpainting with her own blood. She looked at her stained pristine hands and imagined that they were Tali’s, that Tali had been painting, that Tali needed a bath. Yes, she thought, tracing her own fingerprints, you need a bath. Don’t worry, I’ll get you cleaned up real soon. Even those red marker stains under your nose. It won’t hurt, I promise.
Trying to sit up took hours, and finally was impossible. After what might have been years, she let herself scream, hoping that the screams would evoke someone’s mercy, or someone’s frustration, or at least a human voice answering hers, if only to tell her to shut up. She kept screaming until she couldn’t scream anymore. Some time later she began hearing screams, and it occurred to her that perhaps she wasn’t alone, that perhaps there were other prisoners around her, somewhere beyond the tomb. It took much longer to realize that she was only hearing her own voice. She had fallen down into the pit.
WHEN SHE AWOKE TO the clank of the lock, she found herself delirious, expecting to see Itamar, Tali, Rambam. Instead, it was Musa’s father.
For a moment Josie was lost, uncertain whether she was dead or alive. Then, in a drumming rush of pain as she tried to rise from the floor, she remembered everything—the message, the beating, the journey to the underworld, the mangled flesh that had replaced her body, the void that had replaced her soul. She remembered these things as though she were traveling through the software, opening doors and wondering what beautiful image might await her behind each one—because when she opened the doors in the software at home, there was never anything but beautiful images, the ugly and unpleasant ones buried beneath a carefully curated past. She crawled through the events of the past days as though burrowing through long dark tunnels. She no longer knew what was real and what was dream.
He stood against the door, his arms folded against his chest. His smile was hard and bare. She wondered what was behind his sunglasses; if perhaps there might be nothing behind them.
“You practiced dying again,” he said.
How had he known, she wondered. For a moment she marveled at his control over her, how nothing at all remained of her own will. He was omnipotent, omniscient, aware of all possible outcomes. Was he what Rambam had meant by the omniscience of God? Then she looked down at her battered legs and understood that he had meant nothing more than the beating, that it was all physical, all past and present in this tiny room, that he had no special power over the fate of her soul. She told herself this. It was astoundingly difficult to believe.
“It is good to practice, because soon we will kill you.”
Good, Josie thought. The thought comforted her. At last.
“But my wife says you must finish the programs first,” he said. “She is the only reason you are not dead yet.”
Programs? The word was uncanny, like something from a dream that had appeared in real life. She tried translating it in her head, wondering if it was a word in Hebrew, Arabic, French. What did it mean?
“She wants the virus done. And she wants—she wants Musa.”
Now Josie remembered. She had invented something, long ago, something that made people think that the past still existed, that it was still part of the world they lived in, that it was something that could be visited, preserved in perpetuity, like the mummified pharaohs in their tombs. But the tombs had been for the underworld. Her swollen eyes glanced at the sarcophagus in the room, in the city built for the dead, and she remembered the ancient ruins she had visited lifetimes ago, before her capture, the pharaohs whose servants had stored everything they would need after their deaths. These people, her customers, her masters—for her customers were her masters, even at home—they were much worse than that. They believed that the dead ought to live in this world, and her work had fed that belief. It had never occurred to her, until now, that the act of reliving the past could consume the future, that regret regularly ate people alive. She had never known how wrong she was, that it was possible for her to be so horribly wrong, that she had always been wrong. Suddenly she knew.
“You will finish the Genizah of Musa,” the man told her. “My wife wants all the pictures in it. And the movies. And she has more things to tell you, things to keep inside the doors. You will put him there. He will live in your program, so we can have him there forever.”
Josie clenched her teeth. She closed her eyes and remembered one of the tombs she had visited with her mustached hosts when she had first
arrived in Egypt, with its painted butlers and bakers marching across the room’s frescoed walls: slaves like her, forced to serve the dead. She thought of the real men and women who corresponded to the paintings and wondered how many times they had been beaten, how many times they had dreamed of the impossible. She looked down at her hands, her stained uninjured hands, the hands her masters had ensured were perfect—so that she could continue to record the mythology of this dead child, so that the mythology could replace this dead child. She felt a rush of air through her chest, stretching her beaten ribs. Suddenly she remembered what she had known thousands of years ago, when she had held the man’s phone in her hand: that she was already free.
“No,” she said.
The man breathed in. Josie looked up at him, and expected him to pounce. Instead he was tilting his head toward her, his eyes still hidden behind his mirrored sunglasses. But his mouth hung open. To her surprise he didn’t speak. And to her shock she heard herself speak again.