“That’d be true if Dad were innocent,” Jacob said, refusing to take the bait. “Besides, he doesn’t have a murderous bone in his body and thinks what we’re doing is reprehensible. He doesn’t want any part of it.”
“I’d still like to know how Herr Krause found out about it, Jacob,” Moses said, digging in the box for a doughnut and taking a large bite. It tasted of childhood, of Saturday-morning cartoons, and for a moment, Moses felt wistful when he remembered sitting beside his dad in the red convertible VW Beetle, speeding through the quiet streets of Dallas on their way to the Donut Hut on Saturday mornings. Perhaps this was the fondest memory he had of his dad and he held on to it briefly before releasing it, knowing that if he were going to go through with this, he had to keep such distracting, extraordinarily rare memories at bay. And they were distracting and they were rare and they could never make up for all of the others, which crowded around him and rekindled his bloodthirsty fury.
“You’re going to laugh when I tell you,” Jacob said, also reaching for a doughnut.
“He’s not going to laugh,” Edith told Jacob. “You’re not going to laugh, Mo. I certainly didn’t.”
“That’s because you don’t have the keen sense of humor that Mo and I do,” Jacob said. “You’ve always been too serious, Thistle. Better yet, let me quote from the book of Julian: ‘You need to lighten up, Eddie.’ ”
“Please don’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t ever use that phrase in my company again,” and she took a quick sip of coffee as if to wash down that bitter memory. “And by the way, I do, too, have a sense of humor. Do you think I could actually sit here and talk about any of this if I didn’t?”
“Touché,” Jacob said, as the lights came on in some of the other houses up and down the block and Dietrich shot past them, all the windows down and the radio blasting opera, the windshield wipers going full tilt, though the sky was cloudless. “Teaching him how to drive has definitely been an experience. It’s either going to bring us closer together or completely rip us apart,” he said. “I don’t envy you, Mo. Five boys. Five cars. Five times the worry.”
“They’re all going to take the bus,” he said and part of him meant it. “Which reminds me. How about a fatal car accident? We can get him all liquored up and put him in a car at the top of Mulholland Drive. With all those hairpin twists and curves, I can guarantee you he’d never make it out alive.”
“First of all, the man hasn’t even touched a drop of Manischewitz in years and blesses a cup of grapefruit juice on Shabbat,” Jacob said. “Second of all, whose car, Mo? Yours?”
“Nah, mine has that sensor on the steering wheel that locks the driver out if he’s over the legal limit,” he said. “I don’t know. Why not their minivan?”
“He’s not going to die in a drunk-driving accident,” Edith said, raising her voice. “What if he ends up killing someone else in the process? I vote lethal injection.”
“You don’t even know what’s in that syringe,” Jacob said.
“I have a pretty good idea,” she said.
“Yeah, what if it’s just, like, water?” Moses asked.
“Water? Why would someone fill a syringe with water?” Jacob asked, irritated, and took another doughnut. “That’s pretty lame.”
“Just as lame as telling your boyfriend our plan, I’d say,” he said.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” he whined, which made Moses want to sock him in the mouth. Yet he restrained himself and channeled his aggression, packing it into a pure white snowball of hate, which he lobbed with all of his imagination at the memory of his dad—a much younger Julian Jacobson and a much younger Moses out in the backyard. “I thought he was asleep and that I was just talking to myself—you know I like to hash things out like that—but he wasn’t asleep, he was ‘resting with his eyes shut’—by the way, he’s a terrific faker—and he says he woke up right in the middle of my soliloquy and heard me say it. So you can yell at me all you want, but it wasn’t my fault.”
“No, but it’s certainly proven my point,” Moses said. “He can’t be trusted, and neither can you. It’s not like Pandora knows anything about it.”
“Oh, don’t give me that holier-than-thou shtick,” Jacob said. “You know who you sound like, don’t you? You sound just like—”
“Don’t you say it,” Moses said. “Don’t you dare—”
“Just like Julian Jackoff Jacobson, that’s who,” Jacob said as Moses reached into the backseat and smashed his raspberry-jelly-filled doughnut in his brother’s face. “You stupid motherfucker,” Jacob hollered. “You got raspberry in my eye.”
“Boys! I didn’t come here to watch you two revert back into unruly apes or to point fingers or to harangue Jacob for his truly idiotic faux pas. I came here to discuss murder, so let’s discuss it before I change my mind and stab one of you with the syringe I just happen to have in my purse. Now will one of you please hand me a fucking doughnut?”
So they discussed and they squabbled and they presented arguments for and against hanging him, for and against drowning him, for and against shooting him with his own gun, which he never went anywhere without and was locked up in the glove compartment in the minivan, a loaded Glock .45. Edith felt strongly that they should do it quickly and humanely, however they were going to do it, which of course led her right back to the insulin, and again the brothers rejected the idea wholesale. “Don’t we want him to suffer?” Jacob asked. “Isn’t this the point, that he knows why and who and for what?”
“It’s too bad we can’t just stick him in a cage and shoot him up with tumor cells, though I know it’d take way too long for him to die,” Moses said, recalling all the times he’d gone to work with his dad at the lab, where he kept dozens of adorable albino mice and how many times he’d helped his dad with the chloroform pellets, dropping them through the holes as the mice ran around in circles, their bodies swollen and disfigured from the cancer cells that his dad, who specialized in rare forms of pulmonary disease and their mutability in and effects on the lungs, had injected into them. Which was noble, he understood, yet he couldn’t ever forget the look of pure satisfied glee on his dad’s face when he handed Moses the big yellow bucket and told him to clean up the cages after all the mice were dead. It didn’t take more than twenty minutes for every last mouse to shudder and die, their tiny bodies still warm when he lifted them out by their tails and set them gently in the bucket, all the while reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, over them. He’d hated this business of his dad’s, who went about his own without so much as a blink of an eye, as if he hadn’t just taken fifty lives, torturing them first, their bodies wracked and riddled and bloated, all in the name of science. Moses had hated all of it—the antiseptic, silent halls, the gamy, rotten stench of death that wafted through the lab, and the twitching pink eyes and noses set into the purest white faces Moses had ever seen—imploring him to release them, which he longed to do, though he knew the price he’d pay for it if he did.
“They’re just filthy rodents,” his dad had said on the way home. “They carry pestilence and disease, Mo. They serve a purpose. You can’t feel sorry for them.” And yet Moses had. He’d felt sorry for them, but still sorrier for his dad, who clearly had no idea just how much his killing of the mice had killed off something inside Moses as well. He’d known enough not to expect his dad to philosophize or to impart any sort of wisdom about the meaning of life and death, yet his nonchalance and dispassion had continually astounded and infuriated Moses, who’d often wondered if this was what years of studying lung cancer in albino mice had done to the man, or if the penchant for such a thing had been present in him all along, from the start. It would take Moses years and years before he grasped the true horror of it all. And even then it was Jacob who had to make the connections for him, had to show him the inappropriateness of what his dad had done to him, of using Moses, his own son, to kill the mice. “But that’s not the worst part,” Jacob had said. “The worst part is tha
t he didn’t give you a choice.”
Yes, that was definitely a part of it, Moses thought, as Dietrich zoomed past them again, flashing the headlights. Yet to the eldest Jacobson sibling, the worst part wasn’t that his dad had never given him a choice, but that in killing, in having the capacity to kill, whether he’d liked it or not, he’d seen some latent quality in himself that had allowed him to believe he was more like his father than not. And even that worst part had another aspect to it as well, which Moses still had a hard time accepting, although Jacob had laid the evidence out for him on the phone last month. It was this that Moses clung to, because it made the idea of killing his dad that much less personal and that much more doable. This aspect that took on monstrous proportions as he replayed those moments in the lab when he dropped the pellets into the cages and sensed the pleasure his dad took in watching him do it. This pleasure, Moses realized, came not from seeing his son snuff the life out of the mice but from a different, imagined scene altogether that had to do with his dad’s innermost feelings about his own family, relatives of these trapped, caged mice. On those chilling afternoons, his dad had turned Moses into someone he wasn’t and never wanted to be, an accomplice, but more than that, a psychic stand-in, for he suspected, though could never prove, that murderous fantasies festered inside his dad.
It did not surprise Moses that, of the two, his mom had fallen ill and was finally succumbing to the metaphorical poison, which his dad had laid out for her. It did not surprise him, but it sure as hell pissed him off. “I’ve got it,” he said, lifting the last doughnut out of the box and dividing it into three equal pieces. “It’s going to take all three of us, though.” Then he told them his plan. “Think you guys can find everything you need by tonight?”
“I still say we just burn him alive,” Jacob said.
“Patience, Jacob, patience,” Moses said. “You want to have a little fun with the man first, don’t you?”
“I suppose,” he said, sighing. “Though I wish you or Thistle had spoken to Clarence, too. He always liked you guys, and I got the distinct impression he still hates me for what happened in college. I don’t even want to think about how much he’s really going to hate me when he finds out I murdered one of his prized pet peacocks and didn’t tell him.”
“He only hates you because you broke his heart,” Moses said. “And as far as the peacock goes, leave that to me.”
“I didn’t break his heart, because he doesn’t have one,” Jacob said, laughing. “And I know for a fact he doesn’t, because I saw what he did to Thad Schneider, both alive and after he was dead. You can’t imagine the extent of his depravity.”
Moses didn’t have to, because Jacob had told him, though he clearly didn’t remember having done so. Clarence had taken it upon himself to contact Thad’s parents, acting as the would-be funeral director he would eventually become, telling them he would be honored if they allowed him to arrange their son’s burial because Clarence loved their son and wanted his afterlife to be peaceful, as opposed to the earthly hell it had been, referencing how shitty Thad’s parents had been to their son about the whole homosexuality thing and how if they only hadn’t been so rigid and unfeeling none of this would have happened. Mr. Schneider broke in and said he had it all wrong, that they had actually accepted their son’s homosexual lifestyle, informing Clarence that Thad had actually killed himself because he’d found out Clarence had been sleeping around on him. “It devastated him,” Mr. Schneider said. “You can read his note. In fact, why don’t you come to the house so I can stuff it down your throat?” Then he hung up, leaving a bewildered Clarence to phone Jacob, whose guilt in the whole tragedy had only been more grimly confirmed.
Yes, Jacob had told Moses all about Clarence and Thad and it had shocked and surprised him, but it was Jacob’s heart that had surprised him all the more, for he sensed that Jacob, even after all these years, still harbored feelings for Clarence and wondered what it said about his little brother that he did.
“Depravity comes in many shades,” Edith said, curled up against the door. She roused to life and began to tremble, rolling down the window and leaning her head out. “How can the air not have any air in it?” she asked, dry heaving.
“Depravity is as depravity does,” Moses said, which elicited a slight grin from Jacob and dyspeptic groans from Edith, who finally threw up onto the grass.
“Morning sickness?” Jacob asked, unable to control himself.
“Oh, just let her be,” Moses said. “Thistle, you okay?”
“Will you just look at us? Look at what we’re doing,” she said. “It’s just…I know I said I’d go along with this, because you’re my brothers and I love you, but I’m not sure I can stand the idea of torture.” She wiped her mouth with the napkin Moses handed to her. “Have you even bothered to ask yourselves how you’re going to live with it afterward?”
“And have you even bothered to ask yourself how he’s lived with himself for all these years?” Jacob asked hotly. “He tried to kill you with figs, Thistle, and Mo with a baseball, and me, well, he didn’t try to kill me so much as try to drive me to do it myself. I’d be lying if I said I won’t take great pleasure in seeing him dead, but it seems to me you’ve forgotten that we aren’t doing this for us, we’re doing this for Mom. Remember her? She’s the woman in the wheelchair who needs fucking oxygen tanks to breathe because of him.”
“I see your point,” Edith agreed with resignation, though her voice was shaky. “But maybe…I don’t know. I’m still not convinced that he had anything…Blame is a bad game to play, Jacob. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Thistle, please shut up. I can blame him all I want, especially for not paying more attention to her health,” he said. “I can blame him for not seeing how much she was struggling.”
“Kids, kids, kids!” Moses said. “I think we can all acknowledge that this goes well beyond blame. Thistle, if you want to back out, back out, but then you don’t have the right to tell us how to kill him. Look, I’ll make you a deal—you help us with the festivities this evening and we’ll think about the insulin. Jacob, is this kosher with you?”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter how he dies just as long as he does,” Jacob said. “So, yeah, okay. I’ll think about the insulin, although it’s far too humane for him.”
“Edith?” Moses asked. “What do you say? Do we have a deal?”
His sister glanced at him, then past him to the house, above which the sky lightened, going from the bruised black of night to the dark, chalky blue of dawn. Soon, the inviolate, relentless L.A. sun would be up, shining down upon them all, Pandora and his sons, his mom in her wheelchair, and even upon his dad on what was to be his last day on earth. “Yes, okay,” she said at last, falling back into the seat and shutting her eyes.
“Jacob, get ahold of your German and go fuck on the beach, while I drive Thistle to Claremont to pick up her van,” Moses said. “Let’s rendezvous at Canter’s around ten A.M. They’re one of tonight’s sponsors and made banners I need to pick up.”
“Oh, right, today’s the day. A Very JacobSONS Passover,” Jacob said. “I’m kind of looking forward to getting to the plagues tonight, especially that old standard—the slaying of the firstborn. No offense, Mo.”
“None taken,” he said.
“Hey, exactly what time does the camera crew arrive?” Jacob asked.
“No camera crew this time,” Moses said. “The network’s sending out a technician to install webcams in most of the rooms. Cuts down on overhead and production costs. We’re going live in T minus twelve hours or whenever sundown is, whichever comes first.”
“You know, Mo, sometimes I wonder if Dad didn’t get it right when he said you were a mountain of stupidity,” Jacob said. “You do realize we won’t have a split second of privacy all night, right? How the hell are we going to carry out our coup de grâce if every one of our movements is being tracked?”
“I guess we’ll just have to improvise,” he said. “Life’s an i
mprovisation, Jacob. But you already knew that.”
“Oh, that’s rich. I didn’t sign on for this Passover reunion special when I agreed to come out here,” Jacob said. “And I haven’t said anything because I wanted to support you in your hour of gross and needy self-promotion. I know you’ve had it hard, what with all the shit going down in Hollywood, but guess what? I’m finally saying something.”
“Are you backing out on me? Is that what you’re doing?” Moses asked, feeling the first wave of heat in his face, which often accompanied one of his panic attacks. He started sweating uncontrollably, big, fat drops that poured down his back and sopped the constricting elastic waistband of his boxers. He wanted out—out of the car, out of his clothes, to jump into the nearest pool and sink to the bottom. He felt himself going from zero to sixty. How had he let it all come to this? How had he put such stock in a profession that was failing him as his brother was now failing him? Yes, the rise of anti-Semitism had begun to eat Hollywood from the inside out, and though no one said so, Moses had heard rumors that the Jews who still ran many of the studios were being pressured to cut back on their hiring of Jewish actors—which may have explained his career’s recent nosedive. There was a part of him that found this excuse a little disingenuous and a little too convenient. What if I’m not getting roles anymore because I just suck? Moses thought, then reversed out of this opinion by reminding himself that he did, in fact, not suck, that good, solid roles in good, solid films were pretty rare, even for those with flourishing careers like Gibbs’s. Still, the facts were the facts—Jews in Hollywood were being ousted, or leaving on their own, though nothing was ever said out loud and certainly nothing was on the books, not yet, but that day was coming, he suspected. And then major box-office draws, even the Gibson Goulds of the world, could kiss their successes good-bye.
Thinking about this did nothing to stanch the flow of adrenaline coursing through him. Moses glanced down at his watch, expecting to see the digital red heart pulsing dramatically, but the screen was black, which made everything seem a thousand times worse. He shook his wrist as if this might reactivate the watch, wondering if his wildly beating heart had overloaded it. The little black screen upset him, but not nearly as much as the idea of Jacob backing out. “If you want out, tell me right now, this second, so I can make other arrangements,” he said. He had thought they’d been talking about the special, though all of a sudden he wasn’t sure.
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