End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  She laid the cards on the couch, facedown, and turned.

  “Hello, Tristan.”

  As slowly as he was walking, Tristan’s halt still seemed abrupt, military. His arm swung up to fill the distance between them, a paperback clutched in his hand.

  “Have you read it?”

  Amalia arched her back and peered down her nose at the book, though she knew already that it was their grandson’s novel. She had finished it yesterday afternoon, and made her peace with it last night. At first, Amalia had been devastated at the man her grandson had become, felt as she read that she was watching him pledge himself to a fate worse, even, than his grandfather’s. Tristan’s crimes were of neglect. He had cast real relationships underfoot in order to cultivate those he invented. Tris had shoveled the lives of two people who loved him as dearly as any on this earth into the furnace to fuel his art. She’d imagined him licking his wounds, growing bitter, weighing out revenge scenarios and comeback plans and deciding that such collateral damage as the loss of a grandparent or two was worth bearing if it meant unassailability, success. She’d almost closed the book.

  But as Amalia had read on, the dread lying in the pit of her stomach dissolved, and she began to experience something entirely different: a soaring wonder shot through with a staggering, soul-deep relief—as if by reading she had unburdened herself—and finally an awed gratitude. He got it, she’d found herself thinking. This book is every true thing I have ever feared to say. She’d been a shitty Pandora, refusing to loose stinging things upon the world, accepting instead the misery that came with keeping the box closed. Tris had flung it open and the hordes had flown out, and now Pandora was free.

  Amalia stared up at her husband, hoping Tristan noticed how untroubled she was by his rage.

  “Of course.”

  The hand that held the galleys dropped to his side. “So you know what he’s done.”

  She sighed at him. “What has he done, Tristan?”

  “He’s run our lives through the goddamned processor, Amalia! Right under our noses, he’s been spying on us.”

  “You’ve never tried to kill yourself, Tristan. You’ve never moved back to the Bronx. You’ve never cheated, to my knowledge.”

  “It’s still me. Anyone would know it. Will know it, I should say. Who the hell is going to tell them what’s real?”

  Amalia leaned against the firm curved back of the sofa. “I don’t understand. You’re angry because he made things up, or because he told the truth?”

  “Both. It’s both at once. Even the things he made up are true.”

  Amalia darted her eyes to Mariko, embarrassed to be having this conversation in front of her. But Mariko was gone, had flitted from the room without attracting so much as an errant glance.

  “It’s flat-out treachery, Amalia.” He sounded helpless, hollow. “He used my life and made me out to be a monster.”

  “Pound Foolish doesn’t have monsters, Tristan. There are elements of you. And me. But Tris’s characters aren’t that simple. If you want my signature on your declaration of war, you can forget it.”

  “Don’t tell me,” he boomed. “I’ve done this my whole life—it’s all I’ve done, as your grandson has been kind enough to point out. I know how writers think. They change the facts but not the people. The people but not the facts. They take things a step further, a step to the left, a step to the right. They do the shit-ass hokeypokey. Especially the hacks.”

  “Like your first novel, about the other families living in your building?”

  Tristan responded with a look no less infuriating for its familiarity, a grimace that meant, Your lack of understanding is so profound that it is painful, tiring, to even speak to you.

  “That book was shit. But it’s completely different. I didn’t know those people. I had a few facts and I made up the rest.”

  “Just like Tris.” Amalia realized she had clenched her jaw, just like her daughter, and relaxed it. “I didn’t sit for any interviews. I never told him what it was like to be married to you. Tris imagined. He invented. And he nailed it. He nailed it and you know it. Some of it is my truth. Some of it is yours. But all of it is his. So goddamn it, Tristan, let him have it. Lord knows, others have done as much for you. Including Tris.”

  Tristan shook his head. “No. This is unforgivable. Our lives are known, Amalia. People will read this book and think I’m a drug addict. That I had an affair with Judy Pendergast, for Christ’s sake. What kind of pseudo-Freudian bullshit is that?”

  “Oh, come on, Tristan. The love scene in the country club bathroom? It’s hilarious. There’s no way that could be you—a hard-on for Judy? That scene proves the book is fiction.”

  “Only to you.” He dropped his copy onto the coffee table and glowered down at it. “You know what our grandson is? He’s a spoiled trust-fund brat with a fucking master’s degree in fiction that we paid for, and nothing to write about except us and our lives. Some progress this family has made.” His eyes met hers and anger blared from them, anger Amalia saw was covering for hurt. But if Tristan wouldn’t own up to that hurt, he’d get no sympathy from her.

  “What gives him the right? What in the hell does he know about anything?”

  “A hell of a lot,” Amalia snapped back. The dull tickle in her throat intensified. She swallowed hard against it, not wanting to cough. “If I had had the courage, I’d have written a book just like his—but instead I’ve got a desk drawer full of poems no one has ever seen.” She waited for a response, but he said nothing, and just like that the secret ceased to be a secret and floated weightlessly away, like a balloon nobody cared about. Amalia watched it drift off, stunned, and then remembered she was furious.

  “Is that the only reason you came down? To talk about the book?”

  “Yes.” His voice stiffened. “To talk about the book.”

  “Well then, I think you’d better go back upstairs.” Amalia leaned forward and picked up her cards. Her husband stood before her, shocked, indignant, and Amalia pretended not to feel his eyes. Finally, he relented, turned, and disappeared.

  By the time Tristan stood at the second-floor landing, with one hand clutching the bannister and the fingertips of the other splayed against the wall for balance, a sense of completion was settling over him. At long last, he was cut off from every other human being in the world. Unanimously betrayed. By his wife. His grandson. His daughter, who’d raised such a child—Tristan knew damn well what her agenda was. By the friends who had failed to provide better counsel, and the friends who’d been heartless enough to die. By the brain lollygagging in his head, the withered muscles of his body.

  One way or another, everyone and everything had spoiled or faded, and now things were simple. He felt unburdened, and realized he had jettisoned two enormous weights he’d always carried: foreboding and hope. Things weren’t going to get any worse or any better. Time had come to a standstill. Tristan could either struggle vainly as the resin encased him and hardened into amber or accept his fate and be still, perhaps spend the remaining time recalling happier occasions.

  Perhaps this was why so many of the aged lost their minds. Capitulating to obsolescence was less painful if you couldn’t tell your dick from a garden hose. But here he was intact, still full of anger at a time when anger was pathetic, useless. In eighty years, he’d neither earned the right to stand above the fray nor forfeited enough to fall below it. He had merely slowed down, and the other members of the pack had smelled his frailty and attacked. Soon they would fight over his bones, his legacy. But not before they’d gathered by his bedside to receive his benedictions.

  Tristan sighed, dropped his hands from the wall and bannister, and considered his options. He could turn right and walk into his study, sit behind his desk and pretend that he might write, flanked by leaning skyscrapers of wasted paper, with a jar of gefilte fish and a plastic fork and a paper plate by his elbow and no horseradish with which to flavor the soggy morsels he’d been masticating mindlessly since youth.
Still Life with Manuscript Pages, Manischewitz Jar, and Bitter Old Fart. Or he could turn left and stumble into bed and give himself over to sleep, wake only to eat and piss and shit, perhaps read something. There was pleasure there. Respite. A life of sleep had tempted him before, but he had always had the fortitude to forgo it. Some men coped with crisis by springing into action, purposeful or purposeless—by grabbing a rifle and marching straight toward the banditos or by grabbing a rake and marching straight into the yard. Others coped by deactivating, shutting down. Or by taking that same rifle and blowing out their brains.

  Tristan had worked through wars, through illnesses, even through the seven days in 1980 that had passed between the removal of the polyps from his lymph nodes and the finding that they were benign. But now the notion of somnolence was too seductive to resist. A long, strong nap. Perhaps he’d wake up refreshed, with some of his rage leached away and his perspective realigned. Or perhaps he’d stir to consciousness groggy and disappointed, wanting only to return to dreams, and turn back over like a speck of flotsam in the ocean and submerge himself in them again.

  Either way was fine. He pulled back the mothball-scented quilt of the guest room bed and lay down on the cool, soft sheets and closed his eyes, and time began to fall away.

  That was what happened when you jettisoned hope and foreboding, he supposed; the hours and the days lost meaning. It was an opaqueness Tristan had always steeled himself against. Compared to most men, he had lived a timeless life, free from schedules and punch cards, and so Tristan had learned to impose such things upon himself. They called it self-discipline, but really it was just a way for him to feel part of the world. He got up when the businessmen rose to remind himself that what he did was work. To subdue any lurking self-indulgence, any fey capitulation to the whimsies of the Muse. Let the other bozos bitch and whine about how they didn’t feel like writing today, how they weren’t inspired. Lawyers probably didn’t feel like lawyering every day, either, but they didn’t stay in bed. Garbagemen manned garbage whether they were in the mood or not. The very act of consuming a mug of coffee at 7:30 A.M. was an affirmation, no less than imbibing a cocktail when the work was done.

  But no more sensory Ping-Pong. No more ritual sharpening and dulling of the wits. Tristan slept. Not with abandon, but with diligence. Straight through the night, the morning, the beginning of the afternoon. When his body forced wakefulness upon him, Tristan dispensed with it as perfunctorily as he could, condescending only to a state of semiconsciousness as he stumbled to and from the bathroom, then returning to the business of slumber.

  His stomach, rumbling, awakened him some hours later. He ignored it, turned onto his other side to fool it into shutting up, and dozed off. The next time he opened his eyes, it was to squint at the pale light behind the gauze curtains and wonder whether it was dawn or twilight. He spent a moment in speculation before deciding that it didn’t matter, shutting his eyes again. He slept and he woke and it was dark and on the nightstand was a turkey sandwich. He ate it, drank the glass of milk beside it, considered getting up. But soon the food, and the promise of more dreams, won out. Tristan didn’t remember his dreams during his brief bouts of consciousness, but he had the sense they were agreeable and mild.

  In the days that followed, Tristan began to regard his new enterprise as elegant. For eighty years, sleep had merely been about refueling, and now at last he was granting this remarkable condition the kind of time and attention it deserved. In his reluctance to wake up, he found himself spending longer and longer each day suspended in a pleasant in-between state, with his eyes closed and his mind channeling both dream and thought. He had limited powers of control, and no desire to expand them. Bodily sensations, words, images, ideas, and essences swirled together, touching and eluding him. Each thing dancing through his brain was a liquid ribbon of color, and where they brushed or caromed off the walls, they left smudges, streaks, splatters.

  Each time Tristan moved out of this limbo and into full awareness, he was left with an internal painting to admire and decode before it fell away. Often, some person he’d known seemed to be the subject. Most memorably, he’d awakened with a strong sense of Albert, a feeling of Albert, an urge to listen to some of Van Horn’s music. But the LPs were downstairs, in the living room, so that was that. He played them in his head instead, all he remembered, until they soothed him back to sleep.

  Sandwiches and soup, water and tea continued to materialize. Only once was he awake when Mari entered with the tray. It was absurdly frightening: the sight of her, the anticipation of even the smallest interaction. Tristan shut his eyes and tried to mimic slumber, but he was too slow and she spoke.

  “You have to get up, Tristan.”

  He regarded her through half-masted eyelids. “No,” Tristan replied, his voice sludgy with disuse and surprisingly fearsome, “I don’t.” Mariko set down the tray and left without another word.

  That, Tristan knew had happened. Whether Linda had banged on his door in a dream or in reality, or both, he couldn’t be sure. In any case, he’d muttered Go away and heaved a box of tissues at the sound, and she’d obeyed. The box was back on the nightstand now, but that didn’t prove anything. No one else had come around, not to his knowledge. Least of all the newest goddamned writer in the family. No fool he. The devious little shit was staying out of range.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  Nina tore down the crisp autumn block, leaves crunching underfoot, arms pumping, cheeks red, ignoring the prurient glances thrown her way by every male over twelve as she passed in her T-shirt and track pants. This was why she never jogged anymore. Her tits jounced all over the fucking place, painfully, no matter what she wore. But she had to do something, and pushing herself to the brink of physical exhaustion was it. A week had passed, and nobody had called. Most likely, Hunter College was trying to figure out what to do with her, just as she was trying to figure out what to do with herself.

  This much was certain: she was fucked. Hunter might or might not make her give the money back—and it was money she didn’t have, so unless they planned to sue for it and garnish her wages, which seemed fairly ridiculous, they could chalk that one up, learn their lesson and make people prove they were what they claimed in the future. They might or might not expel her. Probably they would. She would if she were they. At a bare minimum, they’d put her on disciplinary probation and inform Columbia of what she’d done, and Columbia would revoke her acceptance to its graduate program. One way or another, her student visa was going to expire, rendering her illegal. As early as next week if they expelled her, in May if she were permitted to don a cap and gown.

  That left two options, deportation and marriage. That was one option, really, and one option wasn’t an option, but a necessity. The simplest thing would be to declare her situation openly, tell Tris she could stay in America only if they got engaged. She wouldn’t even have to explain the lie and the scholarship and the consequences she’d brought tumbling down with that bout of truthfulness or moral reckoning or whatever it had been. She could just say she’d changed her mind about grad school and wanted to work instead, pay back her student loans.

  But that was no good. If they were going to do it, they should do it for real. She couldn’t have Tris feeling that he was rescuing her. That would give him too much power.

  And really, Nina didn’t feel as skeptical about marriage as she used to—didn’t see its futility confirmed by the wreckage of her parents’ union or Tris’s grandparents’, didn’t consider it the ludicrous, doomed proposition she once had. Perhaps it was love, or age. More likely, it was the creeping exhaustion that mounted in her with each year of going it alone, in a foreign country, with no asylum and no money and Marcus still treating her like his personal concubine and Miklos bawling out his distant pitch-black woes. Marriage had started to seem like an increasingly nice, calm, sturdy idea as far back as two years ago—and this wasn’t revisionism, Nina told herself, jogging in place as she waited for a red li
ght to turn green. This wasn’t tricking herself into believing what she had to. This was legit.

  It would come as a shock to Tris, because his knee-jerk antipathy toward the institution had stopped her from ever divulging her own evolving opinion of it. That had been a mistake. She’d have to ease him into the idea quickly, convince him that it didn’t mean what he thought it did, wasn’t an agreement to live a boring life, or a finish line that marked the end of everything vital in a relationship. That it wouldn’t turn them into his parents, grandparents, whatever suburban Hubby and Missus archetype he held in his mind. That it would be fun to have a big party, a public celebration of their love. Malik could DJ. It could be a hip-hop wedding. They’d get presents.

  Nina turned onto Dekalb, the half-imagined seasonal aromas of pumpkin and hearth fire sharp in her nostrils, threw on a burst of speed, and crossed the street. Once more around the level rectangular route, three blocks long by five blocks wide, and then she’d go inside and shower and let Tris know she wanted him to marry her. No—she’d use wife as a verb, wife me up, the way he and Malik did. That would be nice and playful, convey the point that it was still her, that wanting to get hitched did not instantly transform her into some gross American sitcom harpie, waving her unadorned ring finger in the air and threatening to walk. The image made Nina think of the new wife her mother had conjured up for Miklos, the trashy, silicone-filled Californian broad. It was amazing how vividly Nina could still see the nonexistent woman in her mind.

  How many hours have I just slept? Tristan wondered as he ruptured the surface of a bowl of minestrone with his spoon. He’d been awake now for an hour, mostly out of the desire to determine whether it was dusk or dawn. A hard urge to put down, that. He stirred only at ambiguous hours, it seemed to him. Or perhaps all light was beginning to take on the same wan hue. It was dusk, he had decided finally, and time he ate something. It had become a ritual of sorts—who knew why?—for Tristan to ignore the food left for him until he’d awakened to its company a second time. The spoon was halfway to his mouth when Linda barged through the door.