Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  And it did change us, of course it did, Jacob thought, grabbing a towel and drying off. Not visibly at first, but over time Jacob was able to pass the dreaded sports bar without hearing “der Jude” in the air and to glance at the sides of buildings without looking for swastikas, although he did find them, but even then he understood that it was just a symbol, a sign of a single rotten soul and not one of another Jewish apocalypse. And Diet changed incrementally as well, shedding some of his renewed nationalism and owning up to his own latent anti-Semitism, which surprised Jacob, not that Diet confessed to it but that he was clearly working it out through Jacob, by loving the thing that scared him.

  It had been many months since they’d begun their experiment, but in recent weeks he’d started to worry that the routine of it all had grown somewhat stale, that in fact their entire sex life had become old hat, and it was his hope they might be able to rekindle it there, in his brother’s home, where it was even more forbidden to do what they were doing. The thought gave him an instant erection, and he beat off before leaving the bathroom.

  No, Jacob wasn’t proud of himself, but it still excited him to think about the other suitcase and what it contained, how imaginative they were going to have to be now that they were surrounded by his family. He’d never be able to explain to anyone just what went on between Diet and him, the reenacting of a moment in time bracketed by the world’s sympathy on the one hand and now the world’s renewed hatred and scorn on the other. The Jews of America had it bad, and it was only getting worse, which was another reason Jacob was not so happy to be back in California. He could not tell his family that he felt unsafe, especially not his dad or brother, who would have dismissed him for being paranoid and silly, reminding him yet again and at every turn how thankful he should be for getting out of that barbaric country, if only for a few days.

  Jacob slid into bed beside a mummified Diet, who slept with the sheets drawn tightly around him. He wore the eye mask and had inverted—inserted—the earplugs, muttering softly in his native tongue as usual, a nocturnal habit Jacob found both charming and frustrating, for he was never able to make out anything Diet said. Jacob, who liked to sleep unfettered, forwent the mask and earplugs, falling asleep the second he shut his eyes.

  His sleep did not last for long, however, because only a couple of hours later Jacob was awakened by a familiar, alarming noise—familiar because it was one of the more frequent soundtracks to his childhood and he would have known it anywhere and alarming because it was close to midnight and his brother lived on a quiet, residential block. After throwing on some clothes, Jacob hurried downstairs and opened the front door to find the source of the noise: his dad, barefoot and dressed in his pajamas, mowing the rest of the yard. This sort of thing had happened a multitude of times during Jacob’s youth, usually whenever his dad was experiencing a period of “heightened agitation and stress,” brought on, naturally, by his “unsupportive, ungrateful wife and children.”

  His dad disappeared around the side of the house. Jacob gave chase, shutting the front door and heading to the wall of glass and through the pneumatic door to meet him. He stood on the patio, watching his dad push the mower in a single straight line, his glazed eyes fastened to a point in the distance. It always amazed him that, out of everything his dad could have chosen to do while he was sleepwalking, he chose to do yard work.

  Jacob approached him tentatively, for he’d discovered that waking his dad when he was like this meant one of two things—he could snap out of it without consequence, disoriented though malleable, as someone hypnotized, or he could turn violent, throwing punches and screaming, as someone possessed. It was a constant toss-up, Jacob had learned, first from Mo, then from Edith after Mo left to pursue his acting in Hollywood, Jacob inheriting the burden from her not long after she left for Harvard. And his mom? She slept through it every time, though somewhere in the back of Jacob’s mind he suspected this might have been her meager attempt at revenge, a passive-aggressive way of being rid of him, of not being responsible for anything that might befall him while sleepwalking. He knew his mother loved his father—she’d let him stay, for fuck’s sake—but that same love had never touched Jacob, who now saw how easy it might be to end their troubles altogether, and an idea bloomed as he moved slowly toward his dad, who let the mower go.

  It died in place, right there where the grass met the curved, pebbled apron of the pool, and as it died, so did the idea, for his dad began turning away from the pool and toward the house, as if being called back to bed. Jacob turned with him, hoping, praying, that a gust of wind might redirect him, might angle the dinghy that was his dad and steer him to his watery end. Well, technically, waterless, thought Jacob, when suddenly his dad was changing course on his own, as if he’d heard Jacob’s thoughts, and he shuffled zombielike toward the pool, raising his arms above his head as if he were already swimming. And for one beautiful second Jacob saw it happen, saw him walk to the edge of the empty pool, put one foot in front of the other, pitch forward, head over heels, and fall flat on his face, breaking bones and cracking his neck. It would have been so easy to hurry the process along with a gentle nudge, even to push him, so that his body was propelled harder and faster into the concrete basin, ensuring his death.

  But Jacob couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, because this wasn’t part of the plan, because then there might be a chance he survived. Lord only knew how insanely lucky the man was—he’d beaten skin cancer and lived through two heart attacks and a raging bout of sepsis. Though it made Jacob sick to his stomach, he took his dad by the arm without waking him and led him back into the house, whispering in his ear, “I could have let you die, but that wouldn’t have been any fun. We have something far more painful in store for you. What? What was that? Oh, you’re sorry for all the times you called me a cocksucker, and you’re sorry for all the times you made my mother cry, and you’re sorry for missing Mo’s first starring role on Broadway because you just had to go fishing, and you’re sorry for breaking up Thistle’s marriage. Well, guess what? Fuck you and fuck your apology.” Jacob opened the door to the guest room, where his mom was asleep, the oxygen mask secured tightly to her face, and helped his dad into bed and drew the covers under his chin.

  He stood above him, thinking back to a moment that he only knew from a photograph—as a two-year-old, he was sitting on his dad’s knee as they watched what was destined to be the final launch of the Challenger space shuttle, which exploded into a fireball seventy-three seconds later. In the photo, he was smiling and tilting his head up to gaze at his dad, who was pointing at the Zenith’s fuzzy green screen and smiling for a different reason altogether.

  There was hope in the picture, so much hope and so much love, that it seemed impossible to Jacob that he’d grown up into the kind of man who would plot his own dad’s death. But there it is, he thought, retreating quietly from the room. So much hope had become so much unendurable, needless pain, years and years of it, that even if Jacob wrote it all down, as he’d tried to do over and over again, he knew that no one would believe him and that his dad had counted on this all along, just as he’d counted on going to his grave as lucky as the day he was born.

  Upstairs, Jacob slid back into bed. His mind whirled and raced with ideas, each of these breaking apart into thousands of thoughts and these thoughts multiplying and dividing exponentially into millions of possibilities with a gazillion different outcomes—everything hinging on the waffling Edith, for he and Mo could not move forward with their plan without her. She would take further convincing, though Jacob was at a loss as to how to move her. She was his older sister, yet in many ways she’d never quite grown up—their dad had seen to that by infantilizing her. Jacob knew he wasn’t supposed to know about all the money Julian had sent her over the years, paying off her sizable student debt, buying her a car when her own finally broke down for good. Jacob didn’t begrudge her any of this blood money. That’s all it was, he understood, though he wasn’t sure she did. Blood money for
all the psychic bloodletting, the battery of subtle and not-so-subtle abuses that rendered her too weak and too timid to step out of their dad’s shadow, where she might have seen him for the monster he was. He felt sorriest for her; if any of them had gotten the rawest deal, it was certainly his trusting-to-a-fault, utterly docile sister, her daddy’s favorite plaything.

  Even to this day, she continued to believe herself to be the daughter of a man who had loved her unconditionally. The truth, Jacob supposed, was just too intolerable to face. The irony, of course, was that she did face it in each of her disastrous romantic interludes—from her obsession with Sheik Cohen to her implosive marriage to Elias Plunkett to this new affair with a Displaced Israeli Male. Leave it to Edith to get involved with one of them during what was turning out to be a terrible time for the Jews in general. Violence against these DIMs was on the rise in Atlanta, which had taken in fifty thousand refugees at last count.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, because of her skewed judgment when it came to all things romantic she was now facing the dissolution of her academic career—this scandal with one of her former students at Emory. The idea that she’d gone that far was alarming enough in itself, but that she wouldn’t take any responsibility for it was plainly pathological and, quite frankly, a sure sign that something inside of her had broken irrevocably. He wanted to help her, yet he’d never been as close to her as he was to Mo, for she had always been her daddy’s eyes and ears, tattling on Jacob for infractions big and small—accusing him of taking a stick of her chewing gum, stealing a quarter from her Golda Meir porcelain bank, or using her curling iron to curl his bangs—things he most certainly did but that she never should have been reporting on, Jacob believing as he did that the bond between siblings was a bond most holy. He never tattled on Edith, and he never quite understood how she could betray him time and again. He hated her blind faith and loyalty, yet couldn’t hold it against her. Her daddy was all she’d ever had. What then could Jacob say, he pondered, to blunt that blind faith, to break that loyal oath she’d kept solemnly since they were little? How was he going to bring her around and convince her that what they were doing was more than justified, it was necessary? Think about Mom and her final few months, he might remind her, think about that, Thistle. And just as Jacob himself was thinking about it, Nieves let out a loud crescendo of barks, then fell silent, only to start up again a couple of minutes later. He reached for the earplugs, but not before he heard what sounded like crying, its origin unclear, and sat up in bed, startled. For a moment, he thought it might be coming from just outside the door.

  When he was a boy, he’d awoken many times to find his poor, unhappy mom in her sheer nightgown sobbing just outside his bedroom and he wondered now if it might not be her again, wanting to slide into bed beside him, sobbing, apologizing for waking him up. “Your father kicked me again in his sleep,” she’d often said, though this explanation never quite accounted for her tears or these visits, during which she’d unleash upon him all of her marital sorrow. She’d hugged him to her and kissed his neck, her warm, full, dangling breasts pressed against him, as if she’d been trying to comfort him and not the other way around. As if he’d been sick and had called out for her in his fevered sleep, except that he hadn’t.

  Jacob got up and tiptoed to the door, opening it and stepping out onto the empty landing. Everything was still and tranquil; the appliances hummed a domestic tune that resonated in the air and filled the house with reason. Returning to the room, he heard the crying again, fainter now, though just as clear, and it seemed to be close, emanating from a point just beyond the windows. If he’d been dreaming, he would have been able to pass like moonlight through the glass. He would have been able to transport himself into the trunk to comfort the peacock, as he’d comforted his mom.

  “I hate to see you in so much pain,” he would have said, just as he’d said to his mom on the nights she came to him. “What can I do to make it better?” He would have been able to hush the bird, as he’d hushed his mom, stroking her hair until she fell asleep in his arms, Jacob never feeling himself as powerful or as strong as he had on those nights she’d visited.

  He wasn’t dreaming, however, he was very much awake, though dead on his feet. He went to the window and parted the curtains, peering down at the car parked in the driveway, already imagining the morning, when he showed up at Clarence’s with the peacock. Yes, that was the only way to deal with the situation. The bird belonged to Clarence, who would give it a proper burial, although he didn’t relish the thought of having to return to the cemetery so soon or of seeing Clarence’s fallen face when he delivered the dead bird back to him. Better perhaps to call the city of Calabasas and have them deal with it, he thought. Until then, Jacob, in his mental exhaustion and emotional fatigue, listened to the bird’s sad, plaintive call, made all that much sadder because this call anticipated a response that would never come.

  Abandoning the window, he returned to bed and inserted the spongy, orange earplugs, though every time he shifted his head, one or the other fell out. He lay like this for hours, suspended between worlds, between wakefulness on the one hand and sleep on the other, understanding that directly beneath him, his mom struggled to breathe and his dad, safely tucked back into bed, slept an unencumbered sleep, refusing the call of the peacock. Jacob found himself praying that Julian might die a natural death that very night and spare them all the trouble of having to kill him.

  He also prayed that coyotes didn’t come sniffing around the trunk, because that’s all he needed—a pack of them howling, snarling, and scaring the neighbors, with whom Mo and Pandora were already having serious tsuris, according to Pandora, who’d asked them nicely and repeatedly to remove a certain prickly pear cactus from their front yard before one of the boys gouged himself.

  An older couple, the neighbors dismissed Pandora and Mo’s requests and continued to hold the boys’ soccer balls and basketballs hostage, going so far as to spear them on the cactus and leave them out like decapitated heads, a warning to all children everywhere in the closed and gated community of Edelweiss Estates. If there was anyone brave enough to broker a deal between them, Jacob knew, it was his sister, Edith, consummate mediator and ethicist extraordinaire, who was set to arrive in the morning. Then the real fun could begin.

  Edith emerged from the crowded, shadowy terminal onto the equally crowded, shadowy breezeway, dragging her broken suitcase behind her and taking her place in line for the airport shuttle. As usual, she’d overpacked, the Samsonite about to explode from the extra dress and heels she’d tossed in at the last minute. Thank heavens for Ephraim, her Israeli neighbor, who’d stayed over again last night and had helped her zip it up, or else she never would have made her flight. She’d also enlisted him to drive her to Hartsfield-Jackson airport, and as Ephraim was out of work and none too keen on looking for more, he didn’t seem to mind doing her the favor. Besides, he said, the drive would give them an extra half hour of canoodling. Did it matter that he was sixteen years her junior and a pothead who was into hip-hop and wore his baggy jeans well below his waist? No, not to Dr. Edith Jacobson Plunkett, who, over the course of the last couple of years, had come to appreciate this newly minted species of DIMs as they were commonly referred to in impolite society. She saw their proliferation throughout the southern United States as an unexpected silver lining to the thundercloud that had been the final annihilation of Israel—a population of swarthy, desperate-to-assimilate Jewish men who, along with the women and children of the former Jewish state (though she had less use for them), had been “transitioned” abroad after Syria, Iran, and Lebanon had invaded, conquered, and carved up Israel. They’d put up a good fight, the Israelis, but they couldn’t make a go of it alone—the four million Israeli refugees America had accepted, the price the country had paid for its shocking and inexcusable neutrality née isolationism.

  The shuttle finally arrived and they all piled in, the driver welcoming each one of them to Los Angeles, pronouncing it t
he way the Spanish settlers had intended, with all of the poetry packed within it, making Edith think of angels, which in turn made her think of Elias Plunkett, her ex-husband of several years. She wasn’t ready to think about him, not yet, and turned her attention to the other passengers, some of their faces familiar because they had been on her flight. She wondered if those she recognized were heading to Pomona College for the conference and if she’d see any of them there, wanting to ask but chastened by her own shyness and fear of strangers. Even a simple ride like this put a fair amount of strain on the hypervigilant forty-year-old divorcée, who shuddered in her seat. Sometimes, it was all just too much. Sometimes, the people’s eyes she met were filled with such accusation that she had no other choice but to turn away from them, which she did now, although she was wearing her big, black designer sunglasses that eclipsed half her face.

  “And what a beautiful face it is,” Ephraim had said last night while lying on top of her and thrusting himself deep inside her pussy. “And what a beautiful pussy it is, too,” he’d said once he was finished and had helped Edith to finish as well. They’d kissed and cuddled, satisfaction glazing them like summer sweat, although the carriage house was cool, with every window thrown open, a light spring rain tapping out sonnets against the tin roof. She was not in love with him and, most likely, he was not in love with her, yet it had been so long since she’d enjoyed a man’s lips and tongue and cock—his anything—that she wasn’t about to dismiss him merely out of some outmoded idea of moral relativism she had about herself. Fuck love, she thought, when Elias Plunkett plunked himself down in her head, brandishing his big light-saber prick at her like the nebbishy, Jedi-obsessed freak he was.