A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  He stayed in Tali’s room for a very long time. Judith thought of following them, but knew that she couldn’t. Instead she went to sit down on her dead sister’s living room couch, next to the framed photograph of Tali on the end table. I invented a goodness medicine, she heard Tali say in her head. I’m going to drink the invisible part, and turn good. Maybe you can have some too!

  Someone must have been moving things around in the house, because when Judith reached the couch, she saw that the picture wasn’t of Tali. It was of Josie at six years old, her beautiful black hair identical to her daughter’s.

  Judith inhaled a long breath of invisible air, a breath that drew in everything she had done in the past weeks and months. As she waited for Itamar to return, she looked at her little sister’s face and saw what now hovered before her: the possibility of redemption.

  “TALI DIDN’T WRITE THAT,” she said when Itamar at last entered the room.

  “I know,” he said, and lowered himself onto the couch beside her. The intimacy of it startled her, frightened her. She still did not know what to expect. “It’s from an overseas number.”

  Judith cleared her throat, deciding what to say. “It’s actually a Cairo number. I remember that area code from when I had to send around her information before her trip.” She avoided using Josie’s name.

  Her stomach swayed as Itamar held up her phone again, wiping the tomato seeds from its sides. He stared at the screen, bit his lip as he read the number again, read the words again. I’m still here. Don’t tell anyone. Come get me. Love, Josie. It was unfair, unreal.

  “It’s impossible,” Itamar declared.

  “Not impossible,” Judith said. “Improbable, maybe, but—”

  “It must be a joke.”

  “Well, if it is, it’s not very funny.”

  “Not a joke,” Itamar corrected himself, irritated. “I mean a trick. A trick, that’s what it is.”

  “How could it be a trick?”

  “Of course it’s a trick. It’s someone who knows about her, knows what happened, but still wants something from us. Probably some bastard who knows the guy who took her and thinks he can still get some money. Maybe he thinks we might pay him for some kind of remains. Or not even that. Maybe it’s just some asshole who thinks he can get something out of us. It could be anyone. Tricks like that happen all the time.”

  “Tricks like that would only make sense before someone’s been dead for four months,” Judith said.

  “A message like that would also only make sense before someone’s been dead for four months,” Itamar answered.

  “Why would she say not to tell anyone?” Judith asked.

  “There is no ‘she’ here,” Itamar muttered, then raised his voice again. “Because that way whoever wrote it can keep getting things out of us, of course.”

  “You can’t tell me that you don’t want this to be real,” she heard herself say.

  There was the slightest hint of a taunt in her voice. The teasing tone had been completely unintentional, unexpected—and one of the few true things she had ever said to him. She immediately regretted it, hoped he hadn’t heard it. But Itamar heard it.

  “Why are you torturing me?” he pleaded. His voice was high, almost childlike. Then his eyes changed, hardening suddenly from begging to glaring. She could feel the energy in his body focusing, tightening, the way it did in bed. “Fine, torture me,” he spat. “I’ve been tortured before. I can take it.” In his familiar pride, she thought she heard her sister. Judith tried to object, to explain. But Itamar held up a hand to silence her, and kept talking.

  “Let’s pretend this is real, just like you say,” he announced. He spoke loudly now, clearly, like a television anchor. “My wife is alive, the Messiah has come, the dead are rising from their graves and sending text messages to the living. Good. I accept. If it’s really her, if it’s really true, then why would she write to you and not to me?”

  “Because I made you change your phone number,” Judith said.

  Itamar was silent. In the void left by his silence, Judith stared into the dark hole of what she had done, and dared.

  “I think we need to go there,” Judith said quietly. “What if she’s still alive and sending this was dangerous for her? What if she needs us?”

  Itamar frowned, pursing his lips. “Don’t be absurd. If that were true she would be dead already, or at least she would be by the time we got there.” He shook his head hard, then harder, as if trying to detach his head from his body. Judith looked down at her feet again, into the depths of the pit. “She is dead already,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m even talking about this. All of this is absurd.”

  “But would it kill us to go there, just to find out?”

  Itamar laughed, a hard cold laugh. “Yes, Judith. Yes, it would. You think I can go there now, with a Hebrew name, with an Israeli passport, to track down some criminal trying to lure me into a trap? Great idea.”

  “Well, then get the CIA involved. Someone needs to look for her.”

  “Stop it, Judith! This is not her. Don’t you understand? It’s not her!”

  “Abba?”

  Tali was standing in the doorway. She had dressed herself in winter pajamas, with a summer nightgown layered on top, because she “couldn’t decide” what to wear—a Tali absurdity, one that Judith didn’t usually allow. The little girl’s lips were trembling.

  Itamar turned and saw her. Judith watched as his eyes softened, as he became someone else. “Go back to bed, metuka,” Itamar said gently.

  “Abba? You said that Mommy was alive.”

  “Go back to bed. You’re having a dream.”

  Tali clung to the doorpost behind her, pressing her body against it as if nailed to it fast. “I wasn’t dreaming,” she said. “I wasn’t even sleeping.”

  “Maybe you were asleep but didn’t know you were asleep.” Itamar smiled at her.

  “I know I wasn’t asleep. I was sitting on the top of the stairs listening to you.”

  Judith swallowed. Itamar turned red.

  “Mommy texted us,” Tali said. “I thought she sent it while she was dead, but now I heard you say she’s alive.”

  “Tali,” Itamar whispered.

  “You said it yourself. You said, ‘My wife is alive.’ That’s Mommy.”

  Judith watched as Itamar rose from the couch. He approached his little girl as though she were a dangerous animal, whom sudden movements might surprise into an attack. “Tali, it isn’t what you think,” he said, bending down in front of her by the doorpost of the room. “I wish it was, but it’s not.” He tried to take her hand, but she clutched the doorpost, unwilling to let go.

  “Who texted us, if it isn’t Mommy?”

  “Probably some mean person who wants to trick us,” Itamar said.

  “Why would a mean person want to trick us?”

  “The same reason a mean person wanted to hurt Mommy,” he said. “No reason. Or because they want to feel important by hurting someone else.”

  “Why would that make them feel important?”

  Itamar paused as Judith cringed. “I am so glad you don’t understand that,” he finally said. He took his daughter in his arms. At last she let go of the doorpost, and clung to her father. “Tali,” he said quietly, “can you please go back to bed?”

  Tali was tired, Judith could see: the deep exhaustion of a child for whom a single day passes like a lifetime. “I don’t want to,” she said.

  “Come with me,” Itamar said to her softly, and took her by the hand. Another lifetime passed as Itamar brought her back to her room. At last he returned to Judith.

  “This is a dream,” he told her as he settled back onto the couch. “That’s all it is. Don’t be fooled by these people.” He put her phone down on the couch beside his leg and slid closer to her, until his knee was touching hers.

  She had steeled herself to face him, but with his touch her resolve gave way in an instant, as if it had never been. Relief blew through Judith’s l
ungs like a gust of wind.

  “You really think so?” she asked. She made her voice timid, childlike. It still burned in her, her eternal envy of the little dark-haired girl.

  “I’m sure of it,” he said, and caressed her knee. “Anyway, there are all kinds of bastards looking to make money off of her. This is nothing new.”

  Judith sighed, astounded by happiness, like a prisoner inexplicably set free. She fell against his chest as he stroked her hair.

  “The most recent nonsense is that someone has been pirating the software overseas,” he was saying. “A guy in sales told me about it today. Apparently it’s available now in the Arab world as a free download. Someone must have hacked it. We never even marketed it to them, did we?”

  Still drinking in fresh air, Judith hesitated. “We did, actually,” she answered. “That’s the whole reason she went to Egypt, remember?”

  Itamar looked at her. In his look she imagined that she saw a rebuke: The whole reason she went to Egypt was because of you. She swallowed as she tried to recover. “But we only sold them the institutional edition,” she said, speaking quickly. “The newer consumer versions aren’t there.”

  “I thought she was working on expanding the overseas consumer market.”

  “In East Asia, yes. Not in—”

  Itamar clicked his tongue. “Thieves. They’re just thieves. They think everything needs to be free, and they don’t even know what that means.”

  “Who’s ‘they’? You mean people in Egypt?”

  “I mean people everywhere. Every idiot with a computer. They think Facebook and Google and all that are free, and they don’t even know all the ways they’re paying for them. Nothing is ever free.”

  Suddenly his eyes narrowed.

  He sat up straight until she shifted, raising her head as he withdrew his embrace. “You knew about this,” he said.

  “What?”

  He straightened further and picked up her phone again. This time he did not stare at it. Instead he began tapping the screen, dragging his finger across the glass, tapping, tapping again. Judith shivered, shaken by a deep awareness that something had gone horrifically wrong. She was about to grab the phone from his hand when he spoke.

  “The date on this message is from almost a month ago,” Itamar said. “When did you see it?”

  Judith shifted on the couch. Twilit nights kaleidoscoped at her feet until she looked down at the floor and saw the pit, her sister deep within it, calling her name. She had run away, then. She was only fourteen, she told herself. But fourteen had been old enough.

  “I don’t know,” she lied. “Earlier.” But she knew it was already too late.

  “Earlier when?”

  Judith did not speak.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She thought of lying more. She had lied to him before, many times—lies of omission, lies of intention, outright lies. It had become normal for her with him, natural even. Plausible lies began to swirl in her head: she had been swamped with messages that day and hadn’t seen it; her phone had been acting up; it had been filtered out as spam; she had seen the unfamiliar number and assumed it was junk. She almost used the most plausible lie of all: I didn’t think it was real. Instead she settled on a lie that had turned out to be the truth.

  “I didn’t think you’d believe it,” she said.

  Itamar breathed. He tapped at the screen again. An otherworldly silence descended upon him, as if he were surrounded by a halo of held breath. Judith watched him as a strange fear overtook her.

  “But you believe it,” he said at last. “You believe it, and still you never told me.”

  “I don’t know if I believe it,” she tried. “I—”

  Itamar’s body began to tremble, a terrifying shudder, like a volcano about to erupt. When he spoke, his intonation was dark and cold. “You believe it. And that is exactly why you never told me.” His lips shook. “You monster.”

  Judith held up her hands, surrendering. “Itamar—”

  He had already risen from the couch, clutching her phone in his tight red fist. “Josie never liked you,” he said. His voice had become unearthly, as though she were hearing frequencies beyond the human range, a physically impossible sound. “I thought she was being silly, or unfair. I never understood why.” His fury rattled within his towering frame, like a wild animal caught in a cage. Tiny drops of white spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. And then he growled: “Get out of my house.”

  It was unfathomable, impossible. Judith choked, strangled. “Itamar—” she began, when she could finally speak. But she could think of nothing more to say. It did not matter. He was screaming now, his body transformed into a column of fire.

  “Get the fuck out of my house,” he roared. “Get away from my daughter. Get out of my house!”

  Judith tried to speak, but Itamar’s fire consumed the room’s air. The house was in flames. She fled for the door. As she ran out and down the house’s front walk, she paused only to pick up the phone that Itamar had thrown after her, grabbing it from the ground after its screen shattered on stone.

  THE NEXT MORNING JUDITH awoke alone in her old apartment. She had fallen asleep long past midnight, collapsing in her clothes. Dawn was glowing outside her window. She wished she could go back to sleep, tried closing her eyes, tried erasing everything. But something kept urging her awake, a subtle shudder in the room. Many moments passed before she realized that her phone was vibrating on the table beside her bed. She groped for it, eager to shut it off. Under the screen’s shattered glass, a message emerged. It was from Itamar.

  At first she was too frightened to read it. Instead she put the phone back down and let fantasies play through her mind. Itamar never woke up before he absolutely had to, she remembered; a message from him at this hour must mean that he had been up all night. She allowed hope to lead her as she picked up the phone once more. But she soon discovered that Itamar was still asleep, because the message was from someone else.

  der judith i mis you plese brig mommy bak love tali

  That day Judith did not go to work. Instead she bought a last-minute ticket to Cairo, and boarded the plane that night.

  9

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE. Not because such things never ­happened—in fact, they happened often, very often. To ordinary people. That such a thing would happen to David was inconceivable. David, Mosheh’s younger brother, was an extraordinary man, the kind of person who lived his life in such an exquisite balance of business and scholarship, commandment and commitment, that the idea that something this horrifying would ever happen to him belonged only in the realm of the impossible. The idea that Mosheh had caused it was more unfathomable still. Yet as of the previous week, or in point of fact, the previous several months, this was reality. The world that God had created had changed colors, buried in thick gray ash. And it was Mosheh’s fault.

  Mosheh ben Maimon contemplated these things as he made his daily trip by mule between the center of Cairo and his home in Fustat, during those ashen months in the year 4931—or as the Muslims called it, 549; or as the Christians called it, 1171. At home it was impossible to think about it. He was confronted from the moment he walked in the door each evening with an endless stream of patients, rich and poor and everything in between, as though every Jew from Ashkelon to Ethiopia had been invited to Mosheh’s home in order to describe his rheumatism in excruciating detail. Often these evening consultations went on for so long that Mosheh had to lie down during them, out of sheer fatigue. After dinner the scholars would arrive, each waiting his turn to expound on (it seemed) whatever aspect of Mosheh’s commentary on the Mishnah currently interested Mosheh the least. They would then inevitably ask for Mosheh’s authoritative opinion, which would necessitate further hours of discussion and disputation when he and they inevitably disagreed. Late at night, he would often devote several hours to working on a new condensation of the Talmud that, he hoped, would make it possible for future scholars to avoid spending their entire l
ives on the Talmud alone. On worse nights, he would spend the time on correspondence with physicians or scholars abroad, preparing himself for whatever demands the vizier might make the following morning. After that, he would at last collapse in his bed, grateful to God that the day had been too grueling for him to ever think of himself. But then, long past midnight, David’s little girl would somehow avoid the sleeping servants and her own sleeping mother and sneak into Mosheh’s chamber, staring at him with her father’s eyes until he awakened in the night. She had had a bad dream, a bad omen, she would explain in a whisper—and in the depths of a dark and silent room, she had mistaken him for her father. He invariably sent her back to bed. Then he would remain awake until dawn, banging his head against the invisible walls of the world. So it was only on his daily journey to and from Cairo that he ever thought about what had happened, or why.

  It had begun—Mosheh remembered again and again and again, in a merciless spiral of memory that burrowed down into the earth—with a breath.

  MOSHEH WAS A PERSONAL physician of al-Qadi al-Fadil, grand vizier of Cairo. Ever since Mosheh’s training at the royal court in Fez, where he had determined the cause of a prince’s death by investigating the appropriate dosages of the Great Theriac antidote, he had never doubted his own ability. And since his arrival in Egypt three years earlier, preceded by piles of laudatory letters from doctors and nobles all over the Maghrib, the grand vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil—a hunchbacked poet-prince who was impressed not only by Mosheh’s scientific mind but also by his unexpected talent for rhymed prose—had never doubted him either.

  But in the months before the calamity, Mosheh had begun to feel inadequate to the task, and he had wondered if al-Fadil sensed it. The vizier had recently hired an additional Jewish doctor, Hibatallah ibn Jumay, who had rapidly risen to stardom in the royal court. Ibn Jumay had achieved this fame by mere luck. The doctor had been attending a noble’s funeral when he noticed that the dead man’s feet, protruding from the funeral cloth on the bier, were standing erect rather than lying flat—indicating that the man was actually alive. The royal court, including al-Fadil, was now convinced that ibn Jumay was gifted with supernatural powers, a messianic soul imbued with the miraculous ability to resurrect the dead. And ibn Jumay had shrewdly never denied that he could work magic. Just seeing the man’s smug face made choleric bile rise in Mosheh’s throat.