Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  When he asked his teacher, though, he got sent to Rabbi Kantrowitz’s office. But Rabbi Kantrowitz agreed it was a very good question, and then took out a big, dusty book called the Talmud and showed the boy where another rabbi from a long time ago named Maimonides, whose name was now on the side of the boy’s school, had written about what the world would be like when the Messiah finally showed up.

  “‘And in that time there will be no hunger or war, no jealousy or rivalry. For the good will be plentiful, and all delicacies available as dust. The occupation of the entire world will be only to know G-d . . . the people Israel will be of great wisdom; they will perceive the esoteric truths and comprehend their Creator’s wisdom as is the capacity of man. As it is written, For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of God, as the waters cover the sea.’”

  This sounded pretty good to the boy. He asked if Rabbi Kantrowitz was the Messiah, and the rabbi said no, the Messiah would be a very, very special person. The boy was about to ask, Could I be the Messiah? when he was shooed off to class.

  The more he thought it, the more he was sure it could be him. He was the best in the whole grade at math, reading, and history. He knew every possible statistic about the Chicago Bulls by heart. He had won a prize for the best essay about what the world of 2010 would be like (undersea villages, connected with tunnels). He was patient with all the other boys, despite them being stupid when it came to subtracting large numbers, and sticking their fingers up their nostrils, and forgetting how to spell pepper or what the capital of France was. There were other things too. The boy had once, when no one else was around, levitated a spoon with his mind. He couldn’t do it again later, when his mother was there, although she said she’d definitely seen it vibrating. The boy could sometimes make his favorite songs come on the radio just by thinking about them. Every day the evidence grew more impressive. He began looking forward to the day when he’d fix all of mankind’s problems.

  But it was hard to know that he was the Messiah and not be able to tell anyone else. The only boy he thought he might be able to trust with his secret identity was Isaac Schechter, who sat up front in all the classes and nearly always got the answers right, except when it came to long division. The boy had wanted to be friends with Isaac for a while, but his father wouldn’t allow the boy to invite Isaac over after school because he said Isaac was a “sissy.” At school, Isaac had speech therapy during normal lunch hour, so the boy couldn’t sit with him, and he already had Zeke as a lab partner. Finally, during swimming at gym class, his prayers were answered (of course), and the boy and Isaac were paired up. God had made it happen.

  For three wonderful weeks, during swim class, he and Isaac covered the same position in water polo games. They changed in the same corner of the locker room. They always compared how pruny their fingers would get in the water. When Isaac got cold, his lips turned a little blue. Isaac didn’t mind sharing his towel if the boys got splashed near the pool. Secretly, the boy splashed his towel on purpose, just so they could share. He didn’t really know why. He just knew that he liked knowing the towel had been on Isaac’s skin just before it was on his.

  The final day of swimming came, and the boy gave Isaac a special signal they’d devised, which meant to dive when the teacher wasn’t looking. Underwater, sound traveled better than in the air, and more important, all the people up on the surface couldn’t hear you.

  “I HAVE TO TELL YOU A SECRET!” the boy shouted.

  Isaac pointed to the top. Both boys went up to the surface and took really deep breaths. Then the boy put his hands onto Isaac’s shoulders, and Isaac put his hands on the boy’s, and they pushed back down under the water. All around them it was blue and still. This was what it would be like in heaven, the boy thought. When God covered the whole world with the sea. Warm water covered him like a blanket. His hair lifted lightly from his scalp. Far away, the other boy’s legs were kicking and swirling up white tornadoes of bubbles. Isaac’s hair was floating like a halo around his head. They were gripping each other’s arms to stop from rising up. Isaac’s dark eyes were searching, and then the boy saw his blue lips open to release a big brilliant bubble. And then they were kissing.

  The boy wasn’t sure if he’d started it or if Isaac had, but he never wanted to stop. He felt dizzy, and the water around him began to burn with an intense white light, and he thought he could hear the voice of God from all around him, calling his name—

  Then in an instant it was all over. Mrs. Cogen, the gym teacher, had pulled them both to the surface. She was very angry. She marched him straight to Rabbi Kantrowitz’s office before he’d even dried off or changed his clothes. There he sat, damp and shivering, in an old cantor’s robe, until she finished telling the rabbi what had happened.

  When Rabbi Kantrowitz took the boy into his office, he asked why the hell he had tried to drown poor Isaac. The boy didn’t realize, and wouldn’t realize until he was older, that neither the rabbi nor Mrs. Cogen knew that they had kissed. The boy explained that he had only been trying to tell Isaac something important. A secret. And the rabbi had demanded to know what it was, so the boy tried to tell him that he wasn’t like the other boys. That he was special. He wanted to cry out, I’m the Messiah! I was sent to unite the tribes of Israel! I am the one who wrestles with the angels. I am the one who will prevail with God. But these things all seemed silly the moment he considered them out loud.

  The rabbi took the boy to an empty classroom and handed him an empty pad of paper. Carefully, he wrote something in Hebrew at the very top of the first page.

  The rabbi said that it meant “I am not special” and that the boy would write it on every line on every page until it was full.

  This took the rest of the afternoon, long past the time when the other boys were sent home. His hands ached and ached. He thought maybe his mother would rescue him from this punishment, but she didn’t come. When he finally finished, his father came to take him home. He didn’t say a single word to the boy. When the boy looked up at his father, he saw that he looked a lot like him—a little large, the same bristly hair, the same big hands.

  He thought about Isaac’s blue lips. His hands still throbbed, but it was his heart that ached worse than anything else. I am not special, it beat. I am not special. I am not special.

  The words were stuck in his mouth like a piece of paper, all wadded up. They were like the first line in a long, long poem that might take a lifetime to finish writing.

  • • •

  Jacob woke up to George’s snoring. Very slowly he came to the conclusion that he and George were lying side by side on the blue pullout couch they’d bought at the Toronto IKEA during their junior year of college, when they’d lived in a row house off campus.

  However, as Jacob slowly recalled, he and George were no longer in college, and they no longer lived on East Street in Ithaca. The blue pullout resided now in his apartment, which meant that he was also in his apartment, which meant that George was in his apartment as well. This would have been bad enough, but then, very slowly, Jacob gathered from the sound of dishes being washed that someone else was there too. A third person. William Cho.

  Jacob’s first instinct was to rise, thunderous from the bed, kicking and swearing until William was halfway back to Queens. But his body was in no condition for thundering. His throat was Death Valley dry, and even trying to form swear words was taxing his bruised brain.

  He remembered that William had still been there at the end of the night, his face sweaty in the flashing red lights of the fire trucks. William had been supporting him and carrying George on his other arm. Jacob could still hear the echo in his ears: water, roaring behind the buildings.

  “Coffee,” Jacob rasped, his vocal cords raw. He tried again, raising his voice above the rushing of the sink. “COFFEE!”

  “Shush,” William said.

  Jacob found it superbly irritating that he actually said the word
instead of making a shushing noise, but then he figured there wasn’t much he wouldn’t find superbly irritating in his current condition.

  William came over with a glass of water.

  “This isn’t coffee,” Jacob croaked.

  “Coffee’s just going to dehydrate you more,” William said. “You should have had water last night when I was trying to make you.”

  Slowly Jacob remembered being in the back of the cab, trying to cool his sweaty cheek against the cold passenger-side window. “Were you in the cab last night?” he finally asked, slowly rising to his feet. Carefully, he crossed the treacherously piled floor to get to William by the sink.

  “You and me and George. Who you’re going to wake up, by the way, if you keep shouting like that. This place has a hell of an echo . . . I’ve never seen ceilings this high. You’ve got more fly space than floor space in here. What is this, like ten by twelve by thirty?”

  “Twenty-eight and a half,” Jacob corrected, and though he knew full well it was a bad idea, he still craned his neck back to look up at the thick oak beams in the ceiling. The act made him so dizzy, he had to sit down on the floor and lean his head against the fridge. The plastic door was wonderfully cold and smooth. He closed his eyes and thought he might just go back to sleep, but then a baby outside began wailing, so close that he could also hear its mother, crying back at the child to “please, for the love of God, stop crying!”

  “Lot of people out there,” William observed, pointing up to the barred windows, which were halfway up the high walls—too far up to see out of, but they could see the people’s shadows drifting like ghosts through the apartment. They could hear little bits and pieces of their voices—muffled and sounding like a confusion of other languages. Their shadows crawled upside down the walls, and somewhere above them, Jacob and William heard the insistent pealing of bells. It was Sunday.

  “You live in the basement of a church,” William stated.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Jacob replied, eyes slitted.

  “When we came in last night, I thought we had to be in the wrong spot. But then your key fit the side door. I couldn’t believe it. Is this even legal?”

  Jacob groaned and moved his mouth fruitlessly. Far too much effort to explain that he was sort of unofficially subletting it from the priest, the brother of a Greek Orthodox guy he’d slept with (off and on) in college who’d hooked him up with the keys when Jacob had announced that after graduation he’d be moving to the big city. What had seemed at first like Divine Providence (avoiding the months of craigslist ads and fleabag brokers that George and Sara and Irene had dealt with that first summer) had quickly become a sort of hell. The place came to feel like the kind of dungeon people got thrown into during the Spanish Inquisition. Jacob felt at times like a boy who’d fallen into a well and decided he might as well decorate.

  Though decorate was a term best used loosely if at all. Jacob chewed his lip and looked around at the disheveled heaps that were his worldly possessions. The blue pullout couch, a flimsy bookshelf, and a desk made of milk cartons and an old door he’d found in the alley. These were the only pieces of furniture he possessed. The walls were bare except for a few rough starts of poems that he’d stapled, in haste and at odd angles, onto the flat surfaces around the desk. On the bookshelf was one framed photograph, of himself in a tuxedo posing alongside George, Sara, and Irene at the prize ceremony for In the Eye of the Shitstorm. The jittery MRI printout that Irene had given him was held to the fridge with a magnet from Szechuan Garden.

  The apartment was boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter. His every noise echoed, making him supremely self-conscious of every movement. He had recurring dreams of being trapped at the bottom of an enormous empty swimming pool, only to wake up and find that in a sense, he was. And yet it was so cheap and peculiar that he couldn’t justify leaving. He’d settled instead on two rules: he’d spend as many nights as possible in other people’s beds, and he’d never allow George or the others to see the place—knowing full well that they’d force him to admit he’d made a terrible mistake.

  Jacob felt an odd pinching in his stomach, distinct from the unease of its still containing half a liquor cabinet’s worth of booze.

  “We’ve got to get George out of here.”

  “Why not let him sleep it off?”

  “George hasn’t ever been here. No one’s ever been here.” He tried to rush back over to the couch and promptly hip-checked the bookshelf, which teetered unsettlingly.

  William shut the water off and shook his hands to dry them off. “You pulled your pants off in front of me the night we met, but no one’s allowed in your apartment?”

  As anxious as Jacob was, he couldn’t deny this. “How’d you even know where I lived?”

  “It’s on your old Blockbuster card. Though I notice you don’t seem to have a television.”

  “It had an abrupt meeting with a thrown remote control during the 2004 Oscars.”

  “Not a fan of The Return of the King?”

  “I was pulling for Seabiscuit. Look, why the hell didn’t you just take us to your place?”

  William’s face reddened a little, and he squinted at the adjacent wall, which was badly cracked through the plaster. “You’d just have made fun of it,” he said at last.

  Jacob snickered happily. “Your page twelve?”

  William almost dropped the cup he’d been washing. “She told you?”

  “No, she told Sara. Who told George, who told me.”

  A flash, like lightning, flickered over William’s face, and Jacob was for the first time frightened of what was about to come forth. But before William could erupt, the entire room was filled with a thundering noise from outside—the sound of a garbage truck hitting the curb, then the lighter sound of the men opening the bins’ heavy iron lids, designed to keep the rats out. Jacob had been so grateful when they’d finally been installed, two years ago, and he’d no longer had to scramble past vermin to get to the door. But as with everything, there were trade-offs. Now the lids clanged loud enough to wake the dead or, failing that, an extremely hung-over astronomer.

  George jolted up, looking around for the noise. “Where—?”

  Jacob watched as his oldest friend made the same mistake of staring up too quickly. He could actually see the blood rushing from his head. George rolled over and planted his face into the soft dark safety of the couch cushions.

  “—the hell are we?” George managed, his eyes darting above the cushions accusingly.

  Jacob sighed and faced the humiliating prospect of surrender. I am not special, he thought. He just liked that they had always thought he was. Even if he’d known, years earlier than the rest of them, that it wasn’t true.

  “My brother’s apartment,” William said quickly. “A friend of our father’s runs this church, and he rents Charles the room under the table.”

  While George took another try at inspecting the ceilings, William wandered casually to the bookshelf and set the photograph of them all at the awards ceremony facedown so it was out of sight.

  Jacob stood still, not really sure what to say.

  “I thought your brother was a doctor,” George said to William. “With kids and stuff.”

  “Let me guess,” William said. “Irene told Sara, who told you, who told Jacob? Yeah, well, he works over at Columbia Presbyterian, so he crashes here between shifts.”

  Jacob was a bit stunned—George seemed to be buying it.

  “Hey! Jacob and I bought this same couch, back in the day.” Smiling like a fool, George eased himself from the bed, stretched like a sandy-furred cat, and released a long sigh. “I am going to go throw up,” he announced as he padded off to the bathroom in his dress socks, undershirt, and a pair of blue boxer shorts with sandwiches on them.

  From the bathroom they could hear the seat of the toilet as George knocked it back ag
ainst the basin, followed by the sound of him emptying his stomach. “You didn’t have to do that,” Jacob said to William, who returned to washing the last of Jacob’s dishes. “Really. You didn’t have to do any of this. You could have left us down there in the Village.”

  “I suppose,” William agreed, cheerful now for some reason. “But then you wouldn’t owe me one, and I couldn’t make you take me to see Irene.”

  William passed him a sudsy beer stein.

  Jacob dried it off. “And here I thought you were just doing all this out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “Hell, Jacob. It’s not like I’m the Messiah or anything.”

  Jacob froze, nearly dropping the stein on the counter. “How’d you—did I, um—did I say something last night?”

  William smiled cryptically. “You were pretty drunk. I doubt it’ll hold up in court.”

  Jacob felt a fury rising, but when he opened his mouth to release it, what came out was a sigh of relief. Hearing it out loud wasn’t as terrible as he’d thought. And who’d believe that he’d confided in William, of all people, if he ever were to repeat it?

  “Well,” Jacob said, “you’re the one who went to Yale.”

  A gruff vibration came from a pile of clothes near the couch. Jacob fished around in George’s discarded pants and thought, for a second, he had found a phone in the back pocket. Only the object he extracted wasn’t a phone at all but a slim silver flask with an engraving on the side: Coriolanus Crew 1967 League Champions. Jacob vaguely recalled being with George when he’d picked it up at the Salvation Army their freshman year. The flask was not quite empty.