The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  It was getting toward the end of November—the strip had begun to put up the holiday decorations. He passed a man in a Santa suit taking pictures with tourists for a dollar each; the trunks of the palm trees on the medians had been wrapped in plastic strings of lights; on the other side of the strip, the fifty-foot video billboard outside Treasure Island announced a $100,000 Christmas Eve free roll in the poker room. But there was (as with most things on the strip, in Jonah’s opinion) a certain unreality to all these seasonal touches. Not least, it was hard to muster much holiday spirit when it was sixty-eight degrees out, the air so dry he woke up most mornings with a bloody nose.

  He thought of the New York holiday rituals that would be starting up then: the string of boozy office parties, the elaborately decorated department-store windows, the lists of gifts clutched in gloved hands. Maybe there was something contrived in these traditions, too, but he felt the holidays always succeeded in infusing the city and its residents with a red-cheeked, seasonal joie de vivre—or as close to joie de vivre as New Yorkers ever got.

  He understood he was homesick. But as he stopped at a traffic light—waited beside a woman pushing a stroller with a baby in it dressed in a 7-7-7 Onesie—it occurred to him he didn’t know which home it was he missed. He didn’t really want to resume his life in New York, as it had been—and knew he couldn’t, even if he had wanted to. He certainly didn’t want to move back to Roxwood, or return to the houseboat to live with Max (who had gone so far as to choke back tears when Jonah left). He still thought fondly of Zoey—but he believed leaving her alone these last few months was maybe the one inarguably correct decision he’d made. As the light changed and he crossed the street—watched the woman push the stroller and the lucky baby clumsily up the curb—he thought what he actually longed for was a life that felt familiar: one that felt natural—normal. Half the time being in Las Vegas seemed absurd to him; crazy, as a matter of fact.

  But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried simpler ways of finding Judith. The day after he met her in Amsterdam, he had returned to Margaretha’s art space, but it was closed, and on the following day a different art show had opened there. He eventually got in touch with the owner of the space, who had an email address for Margaretha, but she hadn’t replied to any of his pleading requests for more information about her cousin. He doubted Margaretha was the sort of person who kept close track of her inbox, and he recognized it was possible that even if she had seen his emails, Judith had asked her not to reply, had told her she wanted nothing more to do with him. As for his other tenuous connection to Judith, Becky still wasn’t talking to him, and Aimee hadn’t responded to the notes he’d sent her via her food blog. He understood that if they took him for a creepy asshole, requesting the contact details of a woman they barely knew probably didn’t help.

  He hadn’t been able to find her on Facebook, or on LinkedIn, or on any of the other sites seemingly every other person on the planet used. A lot of Judiths turned out to have been at Yale in September 2001; even more had gone to Camp Ramah in the previous decade. And the fact was that he might have found her name in his hours of Google searching—might have been staring right at it—but without a picture, how could he know?

  Eventually he’d gone through every reasonable approach he could think of—and at that point, he didn’t see what other choice he had. The one thing he knew about her present life was that she lived in Las Vegas, and she was working for a real estate company that was buying a church. So he’d come here and started making his way through the list of churches in the yellow pages. How long could it take? he remembered thinking. Again, he’d enjoyed a lot of certainty then.

  He walked by an outdoor bar where a man with slicked-back hair and an earring was shouting into a microphone, “We got three-dollar kamikaze shots all day long!” Then Jonah came to another intersection, had to turn the corner to an escalator up to a pedestrian bridge above the street in order to cross. One of the (many) things he’d grown to dislike about the strip was the fact that you couldn’t walk in a straight line from one end to the other: navigating it required passing through a maze of skywalks, escalators, moving sidewalks, so that you might think you were walking along the strip, only to find yourself halfway down a covered bridge to the entrance to Harrah’s—which, of course, was the whole point.

  On the pedestrian bridge, a man in a black bandanna and a tattered motorcycle jacket, his forehead dotted with scabs, eyes squeezed to slits, squatted in the sunlight on a dirty American flag towel beside a cardboard sign that read, PLEASE HELP! VIETNAM US VETTERAN. GOD BLESS USA. Visiting the churches, Jonah encountered people in the extremes of poverty fairly regularly—but seeing it again and again didn’t help him get used to it. In many ways, it had the opposite effect. He doubted very much this man was a Vietnam veteran. Even by the most generous estimate, he would probably have been about twelve when the war ended. But Jonah knew it didn’t really matter. He took a dollar out of his wallet, put it in the crumpled paper cup at his feet. As the man muttered a croaking “Thank you, brother,” Jonah thought abruptly of the woman on the subway he’d given forty dollars to that afternoon with Sylvia. It was hard to believe the forty dollars had done her much good—or that this dollar would do this man much good, either. And there were people like this sitting on every pedestrian bridge on the strip, and many other places besides. He remembered something the pastor had said, which hadn’t made much sense to him at the time: The desert was coming in.

  Jonah had felt moved to volunteer at some of the churches, at other charitable organizations; he gave money whenever someone even hinted that his or her institution was in need of funds. It all seemed, viscerally—the right thing to do. He’d even arranged with one church to provide pro bono legal advice to the local community. Theoretically, this was the most valuable service he had to offer, but it had yielded the least in terms of results. There was simply not much he could do for someone with no picture ID, no birth certificate, no Social Security card, who’d had the car in which he was living unlawfully impounded. Jonah wasn’t trained to help someone in that circumstance. He was trained to help BBEC.

  The frustration of it was that he knew he had, objectively, so much more than so many of the people he encountered here: more money, more education, more familiarity with the law and government and employment and all these other systems. Yet he managed to do so little for any of them—little more than whatever had been achieved by giving this faux veteran a dollar. And, too, how many people had he missed walking by as he’d bent down to put the dollar in the cup? How many of them might have been women, how many with blond hair?

  He rode the escalator down off the footbridge, arrived at the entrance to the Venetian, a Brobdingnagian complex of cream-colored arches and columns in high Renaissance(ish) style, fronted with an outdoor canal of swimming-pool blue, in which costumed boatmen in gondolas sang (real!) opera. To continue around all this would require him to immediately go up another escalator, onto another footbridge. Instead, he decided to go inside the casino. He was feeling hungry—and if nothing else, the strip offered a lot of good places to eat. There was a deli he’d been to once somewhere in the Venetian that could approximate a sandwich he might have gotten in New York.

  He walked under an archway to the double set of doors at the casino’s entrance, their inlaid glass tinted to protect those inside from the light, or the dark, or from whatever was happening outside. For a moment he caught sight of his reflection in this darkened glass—looking maybe a little haggard, a little thin, even, his nose a sort of abstract-art installation in the center of his face. Now it was November—in July he had spent the weekend of the Fourth with Sylvia and Philip Orengo and a few other couples at a house they’d rented in the Hamptons. They’d thrown a catered lobster bake on the beach, and he’d been introduced by Philip to Georgina Bloomberg. He’d gotten drunker than he should have, he and Sylvia had gotten into a searing fight about it the next day, and he recognized he was hardly in a position to compla
in about his quality of life—but even so—Jonah couldn’t help feeling a little—diminished—as he looked at his reflection. He pulled open the doors and went inside.

  He was greeted by a forty-foot Christmas tree arrayed with chubby-cheeked ceramic angels in the style of Raphael, ornamental bulbs of gold and silver; an instrumental “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” was playing. As he rode the escalator behind the tree down to the casino floor, the orchestral music was replaced by the inchoate jingle-jangle of hundreds of slot machines, punctuated by regular, recorded cries of “You win again!” and “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” He instinctively glanced around the alleys formed by the slot machines. He doubted very much Judith was a gambler, though he figured that if she was, she was a slots player. But some mental rejoinder immediately noted she might also be a slots player who was playing that day at one of the twenty other casinos within a mile of where he stood. It isn’t futile, he reminded himself.

  He began walking down the aisles of slot machines: based on television shows, movies, sports; island-themed, fantasy-themed, cartoon-themed; or not themed at all—just machines that let you push a button and maybe win some money. He was already turned around trying to find the deli. The principle of design was the same one that governed the strip: If they could get you lost, they could get you gambling.

  All around him as he walked, all manner of people were sliding money into the slots—the machines banging away happily in reply. There was an obese man with a walker here; a bride in her wedding dress and a groom in his tux there; he saw an Asian woman who was maybe eighteen, nineteen, in a very short cocktail dress, smiling across the casino floor as she sat at a slot machine, not playing. Sometimes someone won; at most they would throw their arms up and cheer for a moment. More often, a person who won just pushed the Bet Max button—the same button they pushed when they lost.

  Eventually, Jonah sat down before a machine topped with a digital screen showing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for no reason in evidence armed with a machine gun, chewing a cigar. He felt exhausted, as though he’d absorbed all the fatigue he’d seen on the pastor’s face. What was he doing here? he asked himself.

  He hadn’t had any visions since he’d left Amsterdam. He hadn’t had any dreams. He hadn’t noticed the Hasid lurking behind an Elvis impersonator or ducking into a buffet. He didn’t feel like he was avoiding any of this, either, as he’d been in Amsterdam. Rather, it seemed that these things just weren’t there for him to see any longer. At first, he’d taken this as confirmation that he was finally on the right track, at last doing what he was supposed to do. But increasingly he suspected the opposite: that if he’d stopped having visions, it meant he’d managed to get it wrong once again. Maybe his visions hadn’t been pointing him toward Judith; maybe they hadn’t been pointing him toward anything at all. He’d even tried praying—but his prayers, which he felt the clumsiness of even as he was saying them, had gone wholly unanswered: as unanswered, as unacknowledged, as the prayers he said before had always been, as he’d once assumed all people’s prayers were.

  Standing beside the empty bench in Amsterdam, he’d been sure. But that moment of knowing had turned out to be so brief—had started to vanish almost as he became aware of it. Soon it was all he could do not to doubt it out of existence. The only thing he still felt truly certain of—as certain as he’d been then—was that Judith had needed him, and he’d let her down.

  But didn’t people let each other down every day?

  As he surveyed the vast sea of slot machines, all the players swimming in it, it seemed obvious: He would never find this woman. She’d said she worked for a shell company—the entire premise of her job was secrecy, deception. Even if he found the right church, its pastor or priest or whatever might not know she was involved in its sale—might not know there was a sale in the works at all. Or even if he had somehow known she was in the Venetian at that precise moment—if the Hasid had appeared, tapped his nose, and given him that assurance—his chances of finding her would have still been almost nil. This hotel had dozens of floors, tens of thousands of square feet of casino, an entire shopping mall attached to it—and the city was full of such places, and full of people like her opening new ones all the time. Why did he assume he would even recognize someone he had known so briefly? Wasn’t it possible he’d passed her a dozen times, and not known it?

  He looked again around the casino floor. He wondered how many of these people he saw playing slots were gambling addicts—how many of them were giving away dollars they desperately needed to eat, to pay a mortgage, to make a child-support payment. And how many of them were gambling the way he had in college—knowing he could only win, not lose in any real way? He didn’t feel any sort of moral superiority over those he saw gambling: He didn’t condemn them, he didn’t pity them for their errors. What he felt was the broad, willy-nilly sympathy he had somehow acquired: for the homeless people lined up for food, for the poker dealers carrying around their seat cushions, for the children he saw being led into bars on the strip—even for the parents who led them there. When he looked around the casino at the Venetian, he saw himself in New York, pushing buttons at Cunningham Wolf—with such ambition!; he saw, too, himself wandering all of Las Vegas, searching for someone he’d met once, for less than an hour. What was the longer shot—being the couple who won the two-million-dollar progressive jackpot on their wedding day, or him finding Judith?

  He put his hand to his face, rubbed his eyes—drew his palm carefully over his nose. “Give up,” he said to himself. “Forget it.” And yet—and yet—

  There was always an “And yet.” He had seen things so real, so vivid—he could not simply walk away from it. He could not simply abandon the hope of it.

  “Can I get you a drink, sir?” A cocktail waitress had approached him. She wore a short gold-and-silver skirt, had a tray of a dozen empty glasses balanced on her palm above her shoulder. And she was pregnant—her stomach roughly the size of an elementary-school-classroom globe.

  “Uh … I’ll just have a coffee or something,” Jonah told her.

  “Coffee, no problem!” she said, decidedly chipper. “Cream and sugar?”

  She was strawberry blond, probably in her later twenties, had a thin, drawn face; her smile seemed to be trying to push all of her other features out of sight. “What are you doing here?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking. She crinkled her nose uncertainly—the smile weakened a little. But he could guess: a stripper, or a hooker, or just someone’s girlfriend, who’d gotten pregnant, and because she couldn’t be a stripper or a hooker or someone’s girlfriend anymore, she’d been set up as a cocktail waitress. It was not an uncommon story.

  “Oh, wait,” she said, now frowning apologetically. “Sir, if you aren’t playing, I can’t…”

  “Forget it, it’s okay…” And then he reached into his wallet and put a five-dollar tip in the cup on her tray. She thanked him profusely and walked off—her stomach protruding at least six inches before her.

  Jonah stood, resumed wandering around the casino—past the slot machines, the craps and roulette tables, the bars, the poker room. He studied as many faces as he could, but after a while he wasn’t looking for Judith anymore—or at least, not only for her—but for something else, and something of himself, of all of them, he was terrified to lose.

  3. JUDITH OF THE MOJAVE

  Judith turned on the video camera in the computer monitor on her desk so she could see the digital image of herself—used this as a mirror as she ran a tube of red lipstick across her lips. She’d considered this a pretty clever trick until she saw someone doing it in a five-year-old movie on television. It was another reminder: she had come late to the working world. She squeezed her lips together, sandwiching them between her teeth; she puckered them out, as if offering herself a kiss. She looked over her face more generally. She’d never thought she looked exactly pretty with the new nose and the rest of it, but she could tell by the reactions of people who had typically ignored her in the
past (older men, the drunker young ones in bars) that she had achieved some other quality of appearance. “Well put together” was perhaps the most apt description for her now.

  There was a knock on her office door. She closed the video display as a man stuck his head in. “Ready to do or die, Judy?” he asked, with a characteristically cloying grin. His name was Jerry Steadman; he was one of the Colonel’s attorneys.

  He came in and swung the door closed behind him. He had a bright red sneer of a mouth, thick cheeks, a half crown of reddish-brown hair. “I tell ya, I cannot get used to the sight of you behind a desk,” he said with a chuckle. His head made a full hundred-eighty-degree turn from the bare wall to the left of her desk over the beige-gray carpet to the bare wall to the right, and he commented, “For a former decorator, you sure haven’t done a lot of decorating.” She might have corrected him that she had not been a decorator, she had been an art buyer—but of course he knew that. “Nobody ever got further hanging paintings for a living, though, that’s for sure,” he added. He approached her desk, handed her a plastic folder, thick with contracts. “Now don’t lose these, honey. More importantly, bring them back signed. Matter of fact, if you can’t, maybe don’t come back at all.”

  Like all the Colonel’s personal attorneys, this man was consistently obnoxious, two-faced, vindictive, sycophantic, petty, mean. She’d mentioned this to the Colonel once, after one of their nights together, asked him how he could trust such people. The Colonel had agreed fully—even enthusiastically—with her assessment, and explained, “It’s never a question of trust with someone who charges by the tenth of the hour. Just keep paying them, they’ll keep fucking whoever you tell them.” Judith also understood that for the Colonel to operate the way he did—for any real estate developer to operate in Las Vegas at scale—he needed lawyers like Jerry Steadman: ones who were not inhibited by legal gray zones—rather, relished them.