by Ladies
Vito asked if he could speak to Jonah outside.
“What’s with you?” he demanded. “You had a life before this. You were only in there three days.”
“Being inside a fish changes people.”
“Do you think you’re the first person to survive being swallowed by a fish?”
Vito knew he probably was, but he desperately wanted his brother to feel just like everyone else—regular folk who’d only known the touch of nonbrothers upon their shame rods.
Back inside, Jonah kept on about life in the fish, Vito kept stomping Jonah’s foot under the table, and Meryl kept wondering why she hadn’t just married the nice lamp salesman from Canaan whose virtues her mother extolled.
After Jonah’s disappointing date, Vito was upset.
“It’s nothing to be proud of. Great fish prey on men like you because you’re easy prey.”
He went through his mental Rolodex: the Rump Roast Royale, Peanut Butter Mouth, Dahlia of the Stupid Comment, Locust-Winged Eyelids. Eventually a bride would be found.
“Everyone knows in principle that you’re always inside God, but it still doesn’t stave off loneliness. Inside a fish you don’t ever feel lonely. You feel complete. Comprehended. Cared for.”
“Okay, that’s fine,” spat Vito. “You were swallowed by a fish. You got a certificate and a handshake from the King of Gath. Get over it.”
“You call it being swallowed by a fish, I call it achieving oneness with God.”
“God thinks you’re an idiot.”
The dates continued, and so, too, did Jonah’s descriptions of life in the fish, descriptions that were sweeping, painterly, magnificent, and utterly untrue.
Jonah did not concoct these stories just to impress. There was more to it than that. He wanted people to think there were happy surprises out there. Not awful surprises. Horrible, monstrous, dark, and terrifying surprises. There was no point in letting people know that there were things in life so horrid that they could fill your nights with terror and your days with running as far from the sea as possible. He would say anything that popped into his head, anything that hid the awful truth, which was that there were fish out there and, if your luck was poor enough, they would swallow you whole and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. Thinking about it was his problem and it didn’t have to be anyone else’s. And so Jonah lied to protect them.
“I made good use of the time, writing a memoir. The book of Jonah. It’s all up here,” he said, tapping his finger to the side of his head.
In truth, he had only written the first line: “Stripped of all the blubber, this is what existence is.” He repeated these words to himself over and over, hoping that new words would come, but none ever did.
Contrary to what Vito might have feared, Jonah and his stories were popular and people were drawn to him and his tales. In this way, Jonah became something not unlike the first astronaut, a lying astronaut with magnificent mistruths about worlds he had never seen.
Still, Vito didn’t like it. All he wanted for his brother was normalcy. As Jonah spun tales, Vito sat drumming his fingers and rolling his eyes.
“I and the fish became one,” said Jonah to a woman named Lily, a.k.a. the Contradictory Redhead. Vito had nicknamed her that after she’d turned down his numerous advances. She was date number fifty-three and Vito was losing hope.
“The fish was the body, but I was the brain,” said Jonah. “When I closed my eyes and concentrated hard enough, I was able to exert control. Blink, I would command. Swim, spurt, do that high-pitched shrieky sound.”
“I can’t take it anymore,” exploded Vito. “Three days. Three lousy days. There’s more to my brother than this! Should he be branded for life? He’s just like everybody else!”
“On the contrary,” said Lily. “I think being swallowed by a fish makes a person pretty special.” Turning to Jonah, she continued: “You have seen something that no one else has ever seen. Describe it for me some more.”
“What more is there to describe?” said Vito. “It was stinky and dark. The end.”
“I guess it was dark,” said Jonah, “but not in a depressing way. It was sort of cozy. And you got used to the smell and the noises after a while. It was like being in the womb. But as a fully conscious adult.”
Lily’s eyes were large and smiley. He had her full attention. Attention was better than tolerance. It was past tolerance. Jonah was somewhere new and bizarre. It appeared Lily actually liked him.
“In the center of the great fish was a giant glowing pearl. It spun slowly and caused the inside of the fish to glow. It was like a temple. I sat cross-legged and watched the pearl as it revealed to me in moving pictures the history of the sea.
“First there were water mites and they became snails and the snails went to war with each other. The snails were fierce warriors. Fierce and cruel. But then came the alligators who ate them all. Then the fish opened her eyes and they were like windows. What beauty! The unbelievable, perfect, horrible, terrifying beauty. We sank to the bottom of the sea and I saw where Moses and the children of Israel marched across the ocean’s floor. I saw their footprints stamped into the mud.”
Lily moved her hand to the top of Jonah’s hand. He tried not to think about it too much because to think about it too much would turn his tongue into a tuna, and he wanted to keep talking. Talking made him feel strong and it kept Lily’s touch from crushing his heart. But still, it threw him off his game enough to actually allow a little truth to seep out.
“Sometimes you resign yourself to a certain fate,” he said, “but then that fate changes. It takes getting used to. I was invisible my whole life until I fell into that fish’s mouth. If it hadn’t have been for dumb luck, I’d still be invisible.”
“I don’t think it was dumb luck,” Lily said. “In the very beginning, when God created the universe, He also created the big fish. He made you invisible to keep you safe, so that one day you could both meet.”
“You might speak the truth,” Jonah lied.
“You were saved, so Nineveh could be saved, and maybe also,” she continued trepidatiously, “so we could now be talking.”
She had failed to tally into her equation Vito, who sat chewing his sleeve pensively.
“Maybe God,” Vito thought, “originally sent down an angel to push my hand toward Jonah’s penis. Or maybe the angel pulled Jonah’s penis toward my hand. Maybe, sometimes, when it is a matter of great historical importance, angels are allowed to step in—to halt a sacrifice, to guide the mouth of a fish, to move a hand toward a penis. Anything is possible in this great circus of a universe.”
Vito listened to Jonah and Lily talk. He was about to interrupt, but decided better of it.
“If the complete fool is prophet,” he thought, “then the kid’s got to be at least half an oracle.”
And then, like his mother, his father, and God in Heaven, he leaned back and watched in silence.
My Troubles
(A Work in Progress, by Joseph of N—)
The thing with pregnant women is that they glow. I know you’ve heard this—how they walk around like uranium buddhas spreading joy and light; but the way my Mary glowed was for real. Mary was like the sunrise, and when she smiled her kind little smile, you had to literally shield your eyes.
Another thing about pregnant women, or at least it’s something I’ve noticed with Mary, is that they’re supremely confident, like their bellies are puffed-out barrel chests and they’re looking for a tussle, but a tussle that will end in bear hugs. Because not only are they confident, but they’re filled with love. Mary sometimes calls me over while I’m sanding a chair or something and just quietly strokes the side of my face.
“You’re okay?” she asks.
“Of course I’m okay,” I say. “I’m the one who should be asking if you’re okay.”
But of course I know what she’s getting at.
“How’s the holy baby?” Ezekiel, my foreman at work, asks me, like, ten times a day,
and I have no choice but to bite it. It’s either that or be out of a job. And that’s the last thing I need right now. On top of everything else, can you imagine me, Mary, and the kid losing the house and having to live in a tree? Living off cranberries and pomegranate seeds like a tree rodent? No, thanks.
Being chosen by the Lord is an honor. I’m not saying it’s not, and objectively speaking, I know it like I know anything else. It’s flattering to think that your girlfriend is good enough for God, and on some days I can convince myself well enough that it is an honor indeed, but if the guys at work don’t act like it’s an honor, and none of your friends or family acts like it’s an honor, then it doesn’t feel so much like an honor. And so you end up just feeling like your garden-variety guy who’s been cheated on. Sure, you’ve been cheated on with the Lord, but still.
I should also say that even getting to the point where I believed Mary was an ulcer wrapped in a hernia. She had never lied to me before and I knew her heart like I knew my own, but when she told me this business about being visited by an angel, I had an honest-to-God conniption. Stomach pains. Fistfuls of chest hair. Rending the clothes from my back—trying to shove our dining table through the front door. You name it.
“Is that the best you can come up with?” I asked. “Don’t you have enough respect for me to create something a little less . . . I don’t know . . . completely insane?”
When I got this way—“up to my tricks” is what she called it—Mary would make herself into a wall. The crazier I got, the wallier she got. Our fights were like a game of handball. I’d throw at her everything I had just to break through, to make an impression, and it would just bounce off. I’d say things I didn’t mean, stupid, wrathful things that even didn’t make sense.
“Sister, thou art the cracked egg that hath hatched a chicken of lies.”
I would wave my unlovableness right up in her face, and she’d stare through it as though in a dream. My dad used to call Mary The Sleepwalker. She acted like she was sleeping while she ate, while she worked, while she was spoken to.
“She’s just sensitive to things we can’t see,” I’d say in her defense.
My dad could never understand what I saw in her; but what my dad never stopped to think about was what exactly Mary saw in me. You see, to most I was a high-strung whiner, but to Mary, all of my whining was a laugh riot.
“What’s up with coconuts? I almost dislocated my shoulder pummeling one of the s.o.b.’s against a rock—and for what? To drink coconut milk? Yech. The least God could have done was fill them with pineapple juice.”
When I complained, Mary would shake her head and laugh like I was the funniest guy in the world. So as whiny and annoying as I’d get, there was always Mary, giggling away like it was all a big act, like underneath it all, there was a nice funny heart that deserved to be loved. On most days her love was enough to make me feel like a pretty big man.
But after a whole night of screaming and crying, I don’t think she was finding me such a laugh-a-minute. I went outside to try and cool off. Sitting on a tree stump, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and there he was: an angel. The whole bit. Wings and everything, just squatting there. Talk about a lack of stagecraft. I almost went back to chewing on my knuckle skin and ignoring him entirely.
“Are you the one . . . with Mary?” I asked, not looking at him.
“No,” he said softly. “I just came here to tell you that what Mary tells you is the truth.”
“This is a lot to digest,” I said. The angel withdrew his hand from my shoulder and left me sitting there outside my house, digesting until morning.
Even after all that, I was still a mess.
“What did the angel look like?” I would ask every so often.
“What difference does that make?” she’d say, laughing.
“I just want to know,” I’d say.
In the early days, I was all about the little details. What was he wearing? What did he say to you? Was he a handsome angel? What do you mean there was a blinding flash of heavenly light? And what about my light? Would you describe my light as heavenly? But after a while I started to feel like a fool. I mean, for God’s sake, being jealous of an angel!
So it was pretty soon afterward that I started to worry. The angels must have seen Mary from Heaven and knew she was the right one for the job, but they probably didn’t get a very good look at me. While they were all lying around on the clouds mooning over Mary, they probably missed her loudmouth boyfriend in the background griping about his stubbed toe. Who was I to be raising an angel baby? What could I teach a baby of any kind? How to hyperventilate when you’re outbid for a carpentry job? How to cry in frustration when your roof caves in? What kid is going to want to hang around with me? All I have to teach him is how to worry. That was an area in which I excelled.
And worry I did—worry that the baby might not even look like people, that he might be born with wings. Or worse, be born with just one wing. The thought of Mary holding a one-winged baby on her lap was enough to get me all weepy and sick to my stomach. If that son of a bitch Ezekiel made even one little crack about my illegitimate one-winged baby, job or no job, I’d strangle him with my bare hands.
Now the very last thing I needed in the midst of all this was to load up the mule and take Mary and myself out of town for a census. The Romans were obsessed with counting things—as though numbers offered you a glimpse at the greater truths in life—and so everyone had to pack up and be counted in their city of birth, which, for Mary and me, was Bethlehem.
What a sight! The two of us hobbling along on a mule. Did you know that a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey? It’s a hybrid. Like, say, the way a Pegasus is a hybrid—the offspring of a horse and, I’m guessing, an eagle. Now can you imagine how that Pegasus’s horse mother’s horse husband felt when that eagle first swooped down with roses and sweet talk? Do you see what I’m getting at here?
When we got to Bethlehem, it was like everyone and their uncle Nimrod was there. Every place in town was booked. On the edge of the city, we found a little dive, and it was there, exhausted after a day of refusals, that I decided that I simply wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Mary saw how I was getting—the stress vein on my forehead two seconds from bursting—and so she kept telling me how everything was going to be okay, but of course, when you’re living half in a dream, frolicking with the angels, you can sleep on a mule, on a daisy—on the head of a pin; me, I deal with cold hard reality, and if I couldn’t even get a lousy bed for us, what kind of a job would I do for Mary and the kid? If those angels up there thought I was good for anything at all, it was maybe at the very least that I was a hustler—that I was the kind of guy who would provide—keep her safe. But it looked like I couldn’t even do that much.
A little bearded man greeted us at the door. Right off the bat, he raised his hand, blocking me. No dice, he said.
“Listen,” I said, putting half my body through the door frame, “you have to have something. Do you know what kind of a journey we had? I have a pregnant woman here.”
I was tempted to tell him a few more things—about the angels and the hybrid on the way—but he just looked over my shoulder at Mary on the mule, her face tilted up at the sky, her eyes unblinking, and he took pity on us. I wasn’t crazy about getting by on pity, but it was getting late.
He handed us a blanket and said we could stay in his stable. A stable. The word was like a gob of spit dripping off my eyelashes. Tears of rage burned my throat. A stable! I’d worked my whole life only to have my wife give birth to an angel baby in a lousy manger.
Inside the stable the animals were completely silent. Not asleep, just quiet. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a room full of silent animals, but it’s eerie and unnatural. I looked at them and they looked back at me, silently judging me.
“You know,” said Mary in the quiet, “I really feel like things are going to be different somehow after this baby is born.”
“T
hat’s the way it goes,” I said, clumping up some hay for us. “My dad used to say that, too. After the kids are born, he’d say, nothing is ever the same again.”
“I just feel,” Mary went on, “that this is a very special kid we’ve got here.”
“All mothers feel that way,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“Looking at you in this stable, I could just punch myself in the face,” I said.
Mary reached out and rubbed my cheek. She did it like she always did. Like an old man. Her hand was warm.
“I’m just so happy you’re here,” she whispered.
“I know,” I said. I wanted to ask if she thought the baby might somehow look like me, just a little bit—to keep things smooth at work—but I figured I’d hold off.
I turned over onto my stomach and Mary started in on the knots in my back. As she rubbed, I complained and told her my worries, and as I complained she laughed and the sound of Mary’s laughter was like angels’ wings clapping. For the first time in a long time, it felt like things were going to be okay.
In about three minutes I’d be asleep, and sometime after that Mary would be, too, her head resting on my back. The thing with me and Mary is that whenever we fall asleep, somehow, in the middle of the night, we end up holding hands. And that night in the stable, when Mary woke in the darkness with a sudden start, like always, our fingers were entwined. And when Mary squeezed my hand, I sprang into action.