The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  He thought of the 17,500 hours of his life he’d given to Cunningham Wolf. “Yeah, I can.”

  “What does it matter anyway?” she said. “One less church in the world.”

  Again they were silent. Jonah could hear the tinny, somehow hopeless whirring of the air-conditioning units in all the neighboring rooms, cars rolling by on the surrounding streets, someone watching television in an adjacent room—the sounds of the Aces High at night. “Judith…” he began.

  “Please don’t,” she said. “There’s no great tragedy here. This is just the career I’m choosing.”

  “But what if—”

  “What if what? What if, instead of leaving that day, you’d stayed? And then? You’d have spent ten minutes consoling me and wouldn’t have felt so guilty? Or I’d have changed my flight so we could have gone to my hotel room and spent a night together? I know it’s tempting to think it could all have been different so easily. If I’d gone to a different college, then maybe my parents would have flown out of a different airport. Or I might have gone to college where you went. Then we might have met each other a lot sooner. Two Jews at a good college, who knows? Fine, it might have been different. But it wasn’t.”

  Her voice had remained even, controlled. But in her trench coat she looked to him the way he remembered her looking when he’d last seen her in Amsterdam: thin—insubstantial. He had never known exactly what he would do, was supposed to do, if he found her. He sometimes pictured it being as simple as giving her a hug—the hug he should have given her in Amsterdam: They’d hug, she’d feel better about whatever it was she’d been crying about, and then, well, mission accomplished. He now recognized the naïveté of this—the arrogance of this whole endeavor. Her life, her needs, had all the complexity that his did—that anyone’s did. What did he expect to offer her?

  “It’s all right, Jonah,” she said, as if guessing his thoughts. “I absolve you of everything. And you’ll be fine, too. You’ll get together with some new girl, you’ll be able to figure out a life for yourself that feels meaningful. And a year from now,” she added, smiling crookedly, “I’ll attend the groundbreaking of the Babylon Center.” She lifted her purse up on her shoulder.

  He knew there probably wasn’t anything he could do for her. Most likely, one way or another, he’d misunderstood everything again. But to just give up, to not try at all—would be wrong. “What if it were true?” he said.

  “Please, Jonah…”

  “I mean—what if you could believe it?”

  She was already shaking her head. “You honestly think you can convince me of that? God sent you?”

  “I mean, I know how it sounds, but—hasn’t there ever been a time when you just felt—when you just—knew?”

  She thought abruptly of the creek, the night before she’d gone to college. There had seemed to be so much in the world then—so much more than she could ever feel, touch, know—and she’d wanted to submerge herself in it—drown in it. But it had turned out—there was so much less—

  “Please don’t do this to me, Jonah,” she said. But wasn’t there something here she still wanted? she asked herself. Why else would she have come?

  “All I’m saying is, there’s a reason we’re in this room. Us, and no one else. That has to be proof of something, doesn’t it? Judith,” he said. “Here I am. We could leave—right now. It’s not too late.”

  And all at once some new form of possibility broke across her mind. So much had been lost—so much of the hope, of the promise of the girl in the Polaroid. But what if it could be regained? Or what if it had never been lost at all? Was she not still that girl? She saw an image of the two of them sitting at a kitchen table somewhere, each doing a copy of the Sunday crossword puzzle. Was it possible—that after everything—?

  No, she thought. No. It was too hard. It had been too long. And in the next moment she was angry—furious. Who did he think he was—to do this to her again, with the arrogance of his unearned faith? And her anger resolved into a very clear intention, a familiar need: to prove that she was right—about everything. She would show him exactly what the two of them being in that room amounted to. Revenge, Judith thought.

  She moved over to the switch by the door and turned it on. A single circular fluorescent on the ceiling buzzed to life, cast an unnaturally blank light into every corner of the room. He stood watching her uncertainly from beside the bed. No, she thought, without the beard, he was not bad-looking. They would do what came naturally.

  Now she did take off her coat, dropped it to the floor. Beneath it, she was wearing a knee-length cotton dress, its blue almost neon in the stark light. She took off her high heels, and Jonah watched her shrink three inches in height, one foot at a time. Then she sat down on the bed, tucked her knees to her chest, hugged herself—like une pauvre petite orpheline, she thought. After a moment, he sat down beside her—because, she thought, they were all the same—and this was what was natural. In the sudden illumination, she could see the fine lines at the corners of his brown eyes, the jutting angle at the tip of his nose. “You’ve waited a long time for this,” she said. Then she put her left hand on his neck, pulled his head toward her, and kissed him.

  He kissed her back for a few moments, but as she opened her lips wider he pulled away. “I don’t think this is…” he began.

  “What else could it be?” She pulled his head toward her again, but he moved her hand away.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “You came here to save me. So let me feel you saving me.” She moved in to kiss him again, but he sat back. He searched her face in confusion, but in the fluorescent glow it seemed to be only surface: makeup-tinted skin, sheer black eyes. “Is this really what…”

  “What did you think, that I would leave with you?” she said. “Give up my life, because that’s what God wanted? Don’t be stupid, Jonah. That isn’t the way the world works. The way it works is, we make each other feel good for a couple hours, and then we never see each other again.” She reached down and intertwined her fingers with his, lifted his hand to her face. “That is the only thing you can do for me.” She moved his hand down to her breast. “Wouldn’t you like to fuck me senseless, and then never have to think about me again?” She had expected to be so turned on, doing this—but all she felt was sadness. But then, as she felt his hand gripping her breast—his eyes now pained, angry—there was the arousal. And they began to kiss—frantically, mindlessly, their tongues making riot in each other’s mouths. She shoved the contracts off the side of the bed as they lay down, pushed themselves up with their feet.

  Maybe she had been right all along, Jonah thought—this was the most it was ever going to be. He could do this—and he could go home.

  “I do everything,” Judith said. “You have no idea how sexually adroit I am.”

  “You would use a word like ‘adroit’ at a time like this,” he said with disdain—and admitting this disdain only seemed to turn them both on more. He reached under her dress between her thighs, pulled down her panties.

  She gripped his head again, as if forcing him to stare at her. “It’s not your fault you got stuck with such a conceited, ungrateful bitch. Do you know whose fault it is? Whose plan it was? And don’t you want revenge?”

  “Shut up,” he said—grabbed her hands away by the wrists, pulled her dress down to her waist. She lifted her hips and he pulled the dress down off her legs, yanked apart the clasp of her bra and tossed it away, so she was now completely naked. He stared at her body: her arms thrown back above her head, a line at her throat where the makeup gave way to pale white skin, the deep concave of her belly moving up and down between ribs he could count as she breathed, her skinny legs tapering to her ankles, her body entirely hairless.

  She said, somewhat self-conscious, “I’ve been skipping lunches, I’m not.…” But then she understood his look a little better. She should have kept the lights off, she thought.

  “I really thought—I really thought it would be m
ore…” he said.

  She felt sorry for him again—for both of them—because she realized this had been her last chance at something, too. But she hadn’t been brave enough—or he hadn’t—or they’d fallen one miracle short. It was very sad to her that even now, she was hoping for something miraculous. She ought to know better.

  She touched his face, gently this time. “It’s not our fault. We’re only bodies.” And she began to undress him—taking off his shirt, his pants, his boxer shorts. “We’re only bodies…”

  They started to kiss again, both naked. In a similar moment, with Zoey, his body had betrayed him, or maybe rescued him, but as he moved on top of Judith, he could tell there would be no such divergence this time. And all he did want, was to fuck her senseless—fuck away the entire last few months. Yes, it was hard to let it go, when you’d seen what he’d seen. But it was hard to hold on to it, too.

  “Hey,” she said, just as he was about to start. “You’ll be okay, right?” Her eyes had a tearful look. “I mean, we both will. In the end. Don’t you think?” He saw she had taken handfuls of the bedspread—as though holding on to it—to the room, to this moment—for dear life.

  He stopped. He didn’t know what would become of either of them after they left this room—after they’d consigned whatever this might have been to a brief remembered fuck. He didn’t know if she finally could be called worthy of divine intervention, if she was drowning, or melting, or unalterably vulnerable and naked—whether this was true of him, or of anyone, or of everyone. It was God or it wasn’t. The visions had been real or they hadn’t. But he knew that whatever he did, wherever he went—whether he became a partner in a law firm in San Francisco, or sold malarial drugs in Africa, whether he convinced Zoey or Sylvia to take him back, or got together with someone new, for love or nothing like it—he would never be able to forget the look on her face, or the question she’d just asked. In the end, it wasn’t God or the visions or the Hasid you couldn’t escape. It was yourself.

  But where naked human bodies are concerned, deciding you shouldn’t do something and not doing it are, of course, very different matters. And he wanted her to know he was sure. Well, he thought—it was time to suffer what his faith demanded. He stood, and then went over to the dresser. He opened the top drawer and leaned over so his nose was in the gap between the drawer and the top of the dresser’s frame. “What are you—” she said as he slammed the drawer shut.

  The cracking sound and the caterwaul of pain he let out and the realization of what he had done and the sight of him jerking onto his back as though the force had knocked him over all reached Judith at the same time. She scrambled to the edge of the bed. Blood was gushing from both his nostrils. A feeling of wrenching awareness and terrified awe came over her. She leapt to the dresser and pulled open the drawer—was leaning over when he realized what she intended. He tried to speak but could only spit out a few disordered syllables, grabbed her around the waist and she tumbled over on top of him—and they lay there, naked on the carpet, their legs entangled, both panting.

  And then she began to laugh—her clear, mezzo-soprano laugh. “Okay, I admit it,” she said, laughing harder now. “That was more than I expected.”

  * * *

  They were up all night. It was hard to get the bleeding to stop; they went through most of Jonah’s T-shirts, using them as bandages, Judith made four separate trips to the one working ice machine in the Aces High, on the ground floor on the opposite side of the building. Eventually, though, it slowed to a trickle, finally petered out altogether—and Judith wiped the caked blood off Jonah’s chin and his chest with one of his socks, which she wet in the sink.

  Neither of them had eaten since the afternoon before, but all she found in the kitchenette were cereal and ground coffee. Apparently he didn’t cook much, either. But he insisted that she at least have something, and she indulged him: sat cross-legged at the end of the bed, eating a bowl of dry cereal, while he sat at the pillows, his head tilted back against the wall. She told him about where she’d grown up, about what she’d done after her parents died, about the Colonel, her work in Las Vegas—all the blanks he hadn’t been able to fill in for himself. He told her about his own upbringing, about his law career, his life prior to the visions. There were certain symmetries in their lives, she noted: differences, too, but perhaps more fundamental similarities.

  At last, as a tentative morning light filled the window, Jonah fell asleep. But Judith wasn’t tired at all. As he slept with his head still back, his mouth open, snoring dully—as though he were trying to communicate with a water stain on the ceiling in a sonorous, whalelike drone—she stood up and opened the door to the room, went outside.

  It was a desert morning in November; she wore only one of his last clean T-shirts and a pair of basketball shorts she’d taken from one of his drawers, but she didn’t mind the cold—even took pleasure in the sensation of goose bumps forming on her arms as she stepped from the doorway out onto the concrete of the corridor. She’d left her shoes inside—ones the Colonel had given her on an occasion when he’d elected to give her a gift—but she decided she didn’t care. She liked the sensation of the concrete against her feet, too. Her toes were painted a burgundy color—and as she looked down at them, she had the urge to remove this: remove the matching polish from her fingernails, the makeup from her face, the product and dye from her hair. But it could wait an hour or two.

  In bare feet she padded along the corridor, then down the stairs inside the building and out into the parking lot. The early-morning traffic was still thin—only a few cars and delivery trucks passed by. Soon, though, the commuters would be heading to work; the offices of the Downtown Las Vegas Development Group would begin to fill up. Jerry Steadman would be knocking on her door, wanting to know about the contracts. All of them would want to know. Those hoping for her failure (and that was more or less everyone) would probably take the fact that they hadn’t heard anything yet as a positive omen. Let them have it, she thought: She renounced all rights and privileges to the Colonel, to his works. In light of the last hours, there seemed a fundamental smallness to him now.

  She traced a route around to the back of the Aces High, where she guessed, correctly, she would have a view of the strip. The vacant lot behind the building was littered with broken glass, splinters of concrete—everything sharp or filthy or both. But again, she didn’t care: She walked onto the lot, taking little inhalations of breath with each spike of pain on the soles of her feet—welcoming every prod, every prick.

  The sky had a towering quality in the West that you didn’t find in the Northeast—and its blue was so fine at this hour it was almost indistinguishable from white. Set beneath this sky, the mammoth hotels of the strip looked even quaint—mismatched tchotchkes on a mantel: a black pyramid, a cream cylinder, a green toothpick. From here, all of it conformed to a lovely morning.

  And Judith realized she was smiling.

  Because she found—it was all still here. She could sense, not her parents exactly—but something of the joy of them, what might be called the best of them: their way of seeing the world—the richness they identified in it—the hope they had for it. It was all still here.

  She asked herself: Could it have been God? It seemed a lot to believe—but she could not deny the thrilling strangeness of it all. If nothing else, it had to be called uncanny: everything he had seen, and all he had done on account of it; how he had followed the path of faith and coincidence to find her here—he, someone who had been raised as she had, someone who could speak to her in her own language, as it were. It was the two of them who’d ended up in that room, as he’d said—the two of them and no one else. Yes, it was uncanny—but perhaps it had no more and no less than the uncanniness present in any moment.

  She took another step toward the sky, the horizon. She knew it was a stupid, clichéd thing to feel, but she let herself feel it anyway: She felt free. From the moment she had heard the cracking sound of Jonah’s nose, she felt sh
e had woken up—thrown off the self she had been only the day before: a parody of the person she might have become; a martyr to the injustice of her own life; or nothing at all, really—one more subject of a false king. Somehow, when Jonah had done that, he had proven something to her—something she had stopped believing a long time ago. And now she stood before this morning—liberated.

  But then, she thought, hadn’t she seen herself as liberated at times in working for the Colonel? Had she not merely traded one man and his faith for Jonah, and his?

  It was, she had to admit, a good question—she had always been perspicacious. But it was a question she was not interested in answering. What she wanted was this feeling: this morning, this sky, this faith, this renewal—and she took another step forward, as though to push herself more fully within it. Then she felt a sudden piercing pain as a shard of glass burrowed into her foot.

  She let out a yowl, lifting up the wounded foot. She balanced unsteadily for a few seconds, finally started to hop across the lot to the thin strip of concrete tracing the back of the Aces High—this, of course, sending fresh stabs of pain into the uninjured foot. And as she hopped her way across the lot, she could not help thinking—that this was all so familiar.

  Reaching the building, she sat back against it—lifted the damaged foot over her opposite knee. The arrowhead of glass was embedded just beneath her second toe. She tucked her lips into her mouth and with two fingers slowly drew it out—moaning as it finally came free. Then she held the glass before her eyes: dark green, and with a single drop of her blood at its tip. And Judith began to cry.

  She didn’t cry because of the pain. She cried for all the mistakes she had made, over and over—for the excesses of her zeal, for what she had done to Claudette, for all she had lost and given up and failed to do because of what had happened to her parents—to try to be dead, like them. Eventually her crying subsided—its sound seeming to have sunk into the morning sky.