by Ladies
Jonah was to learn that God was not one for a wait-and-see attitude. For really, what was the point of prophesizing something that had already passed? And so Jonah was dogged by the Lord. When he went for a walk, the Earth spoke to him.
“Nineveh,” it hissed.
“Don’t listen to the Earth,” said Vito. “The Earth isn’t your brother.”
But when the Earth did not shut up, Vito told Jonah to take to the water.
“Find a boat and set sail,” said Vito. “You’ve never been anyplace. Adventures on the open water will clear up your skin.”
The idea of letting his brother wander off on his own made his heart sick. Who would stomp on his foot when he spewed gibberish? Jonah was going to float off into the world like a lonely little feather, but Vito had to let him go.
“Let God besmirch the name of someone else,” he thought. “The line between prophet and false prophet is an almost invisible one.”
And so Jonah set out to hide from the Lord. In spite of never having been anywhere all by himself, he did not feel alone since, secretly, he’d always felt like his dead parents were watching him. The feeling was a holdover from childhood when he actually was watched by his mother, who hid behind bushes and wheat piles, spying on him to make sure he was safe. The feeling of being watched was something that stuck with him all his life and since he was the kind of kid—and now the kind of man—that no one really took any notice of, it helped make him feel more like the star of his own life.
As he made his way toward the sea, he imagined his dead mother floating along with the clouds, her heart bursting with worry. It put a spring in his step.
Being alone taught him new things about himself. For one thing, without Vito there to tell him to snap out of it, he was given to much more daydreaming. His mind drifted in new directions. Allowed to flex its muscle, his imagination became fierce and powerful.
If Vito was to be believed—and Jonah trusted he was—he had always been half-crazy. Being half-crazy made him uneasy because he was never sure which was the crazy side and which was the normal. He did not have his brother’s intuition for such things, so when he was uncrazy, saying things like “Fifteen silver shekels for an ox is a bit pricey,” he did it with the same trepidation that he’d say “Quicksand might be a gateway to the center of the Earth—a place where rainbows are kept and if you eat one you might be able to pee in colors.” On the road, Jonah stopped caring which side of him was crazy and which was not and as a result, he felt his craziness blossom, going from being the kind that chews the flesh of the fingertips to being the kind that pounds the chest and summons God.
* * *
After several days of wild imaginings and daydreams on the road, Jonah came to the edge of the water, where he saw a docked ship.
“To where is this ship sailing?” asked Jonah of a nearby sailor. He received no response, which, for Jonah, was par for the course. Buying a chicken at the market was the kind of thing that could often take up an entire afternoon with “Excuse me, sirs” and “I beg your pardons.” So he simply walked on board. “Really,” he thought, “it matters not where it is going, only that it is going.”
On board, no one paid Jonah any mind. He wandered about the deck, touching things with his soft, moist fingers. He looked at the sky and pointed.
“Should the sky be so red this time of year?” he asked a strapping sailor who hauled rope and looked right through him.
Then with a sudden lurch, they were at sea. Through overheard snatches of conversation, Jonah learned that the boat was set for Tarshish.
“Well, then, some shut-eye it is,” he said and leaned back for a snooze.
He felt that talking aloud would cheer his spirit and allow his parents—who he suspected could see and hear him, though not actually read his mind—to know that he was all right. His mother was always one to encourage a good nap and Jonah believed that to indulge in one on board would bring comfort to her.
“Rest, rest,” he imagined her saying from above.
When Jonah woke up, everything was topsy-turvy, the sailors running from stern to bow in the midst of a terrible storm. Jonah watched the action from a crouch, trying to keep out of the way. The sailors had never seen such a storm and so they knew that something was up, that God was trying to tell them something.
“He is trying to kill us—but for a reason,” said one of the sailors.
“Maybe he is trying to kill only one of us,” said another.
And so it was decided that to figure out who God was trying to kill, lots would be drawn. It was while passing around the little colored stones that Jonah was finally noticed.
“You there! From where did you come?”
“I was here since we left,” stammered Jonah. “Remember? I even said hi to you.”
It was no surprise to anyone that the lots pointed to Jonah. He looked from one sailor to the next as though to say, “Lots! The things they say!”
Before he knew it, Jonah was being carried to the side of the ship. Being carried made him feel special, like the birthday boy; but this festive feeling was only to last four seconds. At the ship’s edge, panic set in.
“Wait,” he cried. “Why get hasty? To be certain it’s me God wants off, let’s have a test.”
Being a fair bunch, the sailors dangled Jonah overboard by his robe straps. The moment his toe touched water, the storm abated. As they dipped him in further, the sun popped out, and when they submerged him past his knees, little yellow birds appeared on the deck, chirping and singing. When they hefted him back onto the boat, the whirlwinds raged anew.
At Jonah’s mincing request, the test was performed and reperformed a half dozen times and each time bore the same results.
“Maybe I can keep my feet dangling in the water from off the side,” Jonah offered. “It would appease the irrational forces at play in the universe as well as beat the heat.”
Not wanting to contaminate themselves with their stowaway’s accursedness, they threw him into the water, where Jonah sank beneath the sun-dappled waves right into what appeared to be a large gaping mouth.
When he was a child, in spite of everything, Jonah had this unshakable feeling that things were going to turn out fine. And now he was in a fish. He had always felt like he was being overlooked somehow, like somehow, he didn’t exist—not in the same way that other people did. As a child he had never been chased by a sheepdog. When his friends ran from them, he ran, too, but he knew in his heart that those dogs were not after him, and sometimes they would run right past him.
He worried that if he were a horse fit only for the slaughter that he’d be brought to the slaughterhouse along with all the other old horses and then, at the time of slaughtering, he would be forgotten. One by one, all the horses would be killed and he would stand in line with the rest of them but at a certain point, he would edge backward toward the door. Each passing second, he would expect to feel a tap on the shoulder, someone’s—perhaps, Babylonian—voice saying, “And where do you think you’re going?” but no such voice would come. He’d make it to the door, then past the door, and then, he’d be in the town, a horse half-dead limping through the streets, past the women putting their laundry up and the boys playing ball. He would wind his way through the narrow lanes, completely unnoticed with no place to go. Not dead. Worse than dead.
His secret fear was that he had been born with only half a soul, a condition that caused him to fade in and out of being. Before he was born, when God had been filling his body with a soul, maybe He had decided to try something a little different just to keep things fresh for Himself: half man soul, half moth soul. Or maybe all morning he had been coming close to running out of souls and so He’d decided to skimp a little, pinching off half a soul from the big soul ball and then mixing the rest of it with air. The result: a Jonah soul. A person who was sometimes there and sometimes not. Vito was always there. Underlined. All in caps. Vito would have looked the fish in the face and said, “Oh, no. You’re not swal
lowing me. Keep on swimming, fatso.”
But with him, that fish must have just seen only water. Maybe some kelp, but no human. No soul. Nothing. Just as he’d heard that people who jumped from mountain peaks often died of fright before hitting the ground, he now feared that he might die of embarrassment before being digested.
He wondered if the fish even knew he was in there. Did it matter? He waved his arms over his head. A squeamish guy like him had to be careful, though. Even touching something squishy and gross would be enough to get him goose-pimpled and barfing.
He supposed that if you were the kind of guy to go around cursing the day you were born, this would be the time for all that. His problem was that he did not know which kind of guy he was. He had always looked at his instincts as suspect—untrustworthy— weird. He envied guys who started off their sentences with “I’m the kind of guy who . . .” He was not that kind of guy.
As a young man Jonah would sometimes awake in the middle of the night with this feeling: that he was saddled to himself until death. Unlike every other person in the world, he could not say good-bye to Jonah and walk away. But this was close to that.
In the darkness he assessed the success of his existence: he left behind no belongings, no words to be remembered by, and no children. He had only ever kissed one person—a woman who, despite the forehead-bumping awkwardness of his lovemaking, had been kind enough to tolerate him. Vito had introduced her to him. Her real name was Eunice but Vito called her “the Macaw” because of her rapid kisses, like little pecks. Vito had brought the Macaw and him together—literally. They were at a party and his brother insisted that they sit side by side “just to see how you look together.” Their legs touched. The wine flowed. Jonah put his hand on her hand. She did not shudder. Emboldened, he looked at her. After a while, she looked back. He had nothing to say. “Hi,” he said.
He thought about her in the darkness and masturbated. Her tolerance, so precarious; all evening it felt like she was pulling away. Don’t go, he kept thinking.
In the dark, in his mind, he still could not keep her from leaving. He would come before she could withdraw herself completely. It was a good way to fill his time.
On his third day in the fish Jonah awoke pretending to be oddly invigorated. He looked around with his hands on his hips. He imagined his mother watching him, her heavenly eye peering in from the spurt hole at the top of the fish. Her gaze brought out the best in him. He slapped his hands together like a camp counselor.
“I am good at being in a fish,” he said. “Better than most.” Then he swallowed back the date-sized lump of vomit in his throat.
“Hello! What’s this? Some sort of wild berry?” It was in fact a polyp. “Praise God, who in His infinite kindness brings his loyal Earthlings manna even in the bowels of a fish!” Jonah ate one of the little purple balls, choked back another teardrop of barf, and set out to explore.
“Perhaps I can slide out between the teeth like a thread of celery,” he said aloud. “But even if I could— what then? I would immediately drown! No, I am better off sitting tight.”
His mother had always been a fan of sitting tight. She had spent her whole life sitting tightly and it had served her well. She could take comfort in seeing that, despite being in the belly of a fish, her son had been raised right.
For his father, though, there would be no comfort. Amittai was a man of action—the kind of guy who would have cracked his own arm off and stabbed his way out with the jagged end. Vito and his dead father were birds of a feather. His dead father was probably gnashing his teeth over this one.
“How sad to be dead and forced to watch over this boring little nincompoop,” his father was probably thinking. “I want to go see what Vito’s doing. He’s always up to something good.”
Amittai had died when Jonah was still young. One of Jonah’s only memories of him was from an afternoon long ago when he had suggested Vito and Jonah pluck dandelions in a field near their house to make a bouquet for their mother. But Jonah had been afraid to pull the flowers from the earth. He couldn’t say why, then or now. There was just something about the yanking, the way the flower seemed to resist, the force and decisiveness it took to free it from the ground. It filled him with terror. Every time he tried to pull one out he became weak and nauseous.
“What is wrong with you?” asked Amittai.
Jonah sat in the sea of yellow flowers, unable to answer. He wished he could. He wanted his brain to be different. He wanted his father to leave him be. He wanted to be alone. He looked down and ran the palm of his hand along the tops of the flowers, knowing that his father was up there, looking down at him. He went on moving his hand through the flowers, embarrassed to be alive.
Jonah wrapped his body in seaweed to protect himself from the gastric acids. He made himself a seaweed purse, too, to protect the half-digested herring he’d find.
“When the purse and the body wrap match, it makes the ensemble,” he said.
As hard as he tried to will himself to think otherwise, living in a fish was not a life. The cramped living quarters was one thing, but the lies one had to tell oneself!
He dropped his herring purse and finally gave in to despair. In the darkness, with tiny, pink fists, he gently pounded the great fish’s uterus and wept.
“Anything is better than being in a fish,” sobbed Jonah and with these words there was a tremendous rumbling that made his teeth vibrate. He felt himself being enveloped, squeezed, and then puked onto the land. He lay on the shore watching the fish as it swam off to sea.
“She was much roomier than she looked,” wept Jonah. He wiped the whale mucus and whatnot from his face, rose to his feet, and took a deep breath.
“Which way is Nineveh?” he asked the first person who passed and not only did this person look right at him, he also gave excellent directions.
Outside in the light of day, Jonah realized that the fish’s digestive juices had turned all of his hair white. Jonah thought it made him look like a real prophet.
When he arrived in Nineveh, Jonah made an instant impression. News of his having been swallowed by a great fish preceded him and made everything he said seem imbued with import and pizzazz, and so when Jonah informed them that God was considering wiping them out, they repented. Jonah really got into it all, even chatting up the king.
“A fool says what he knows and a wise man knows what he says,” he told the king. “I stand before you a fool. I can only tell you what I heard. What it means is for a wise man like you to interpret.”
Soon enough, the king was rending his royal vestments and wandering the streets covered in ash. And in this way, Nineveh was spared from destruction.
When Jonah got back from Nineveh he seemed different, and not just because of the white hair. He was now able to speak without gagging on his own words. Jonah answered eloquently when asked about life in the fish, and there were many people asking, for Jonah’s amazing story had begun to spread far and wide. But Vito did not care much for fish stories. He worried that Jonah was now even less normal.
“He probably spent his time at sea reliving the whole penis incident,” he thought.
Sure, it all appeared to be some matter between Jonah and God, or Jonah and the fish, but Vito knew the truth: the prophecies, the fish—all middlemen— a massive metaphor. This was really a matter between Vito and God.
* * *
No matter how much he forced Jonah to scrub, Vito could still smell fish.
“Have you tried scraping with eucalyptus leaves?” asked Vito.
“You’re the only one who smells it,” said Jonah.
“I’m the only one who’s honest with you! Do you think those other people care if you smell like a leviathan’s asshole?”
“Well, I can’t smell it.”
“God in his infinite mercy made it so. He who maketh all made us largely nose-deaf to our own smells. Luckily for thou, the Almighty hath made thee a brother to extract thine head from the specter of thine own ass. All of
human history is divided between those who bury their heads like ostriches and those who seek reality. Praise be the Divine King for having given thee a brother who knowest reality!”
“Who will have him now?” Vito fretted. He watched Jonah as he ate his curds. “A bumbling grandfather type who reeks of sardines. Some catch. If he could just lose that openmouthed hound-dog look of retarded shock and replace it with a furrowed brow of intensity.”
“Just scrunch up your bloody forehead” is what he wanted to say.
Now more than ever, Vito believed his brother needed a woman to help settle him down and so, with renewed determination, he set about arranging dates, dates that he would chaperone. If he could find a woman to touch his brother’s penis, night after night—enough times to blot out his own touch—then maybe his brother would be saved.
The first date he arranged was with the Blow Job Rooster. Vito had named her this because she was always up at sunrise and rather than cockadoodledooing, she greeted the dawn with fellatio. Before you were even awake. Jonah could do worse.
“I shall introduce you to the Blow Job Rooster,” Vito said. He liked saying “Blow Job Rooster,” for otherwise he would have just called her Meryl, which was her name.
Before the date, Vito coached him: “Now, I don’t want you starting off every sentence with ‘The thing about living in a fish,’ because that can become a social crutch.”
Nevertheless, Jonah couldn’t help himself.
“You’d be surprised by how much there was to do in there,” he told Meryl. “Scooping stuff. Pulling goo from your ears. Good hygiene kept my spirits mighty.”