The Luminous Heart of Jonah S.

by Gina B. Nahai

  * * *

  Before Jonah I assumed I was the last of the Soleymans of Tehran. Whatever started three thousand years ago in Iran was going to end with me, here in LA. Every right and wrong, longing and war, buried in a cave with me, the immovable boulder that blocks the opening. That’s why I was eager to set the record straight, get to the facts. That would be my role, the epilogue I would write to the fairy tale of translucent men and disappearing corpses and little girls who carry the sea in their breath and the rain in their tears.

  Now I realize I won’t be the end of it. After me, there’s Nicole and Kayla and after them there’s Jonah and so it goes, each of us casting a line through time that the next one will grab on to, tie into a noose with which to hang himself or others, or use as a lifeline, or both. Which means, you see, that what I do matters much beyond my own lifetime. Because it’s not going to end with me, this story that started when the first flicker glistened, so long ago, inside the first Soleyman child and brought out every lost and lonely ghost, sent fathers to step across the line and take their fallen sons.

  We know this in the East, that children inherit their parents’ sins and sorrows as much as their aabehroo, that there’s no such thing, really, as starting anew, you may not be aware of the past but it knows where to find you. Some of us Iranians might have wanted to forget that once we discovered Los Angeles; I certainly did.

  Note that I say “we,” as in “we Iranians,” which is strange, I know, jarring even to me. Here I am, with barely a memory of the place, having lived in the West the great majority of my life, and still I can’t help thinking of myself as Iranian. My allegiance, it goes without saying, is to the United States, to its flag and its government (but not the bankers and hedge-fund operators and politicians who enable the thieves). So is my gratitude and so, though I hate to use a platitude, is my love.

  And yet.

  * * *

  I’ve thought a great deal about this since I found Jonah—how he and I are products of two very divergent worlds, how I could live in the United States for a hundred more years and still be something other than American. How, despite this difference, he and I are children of the same enchanted castle, cousins by blood, though I traveled by land and he by water. Maybe it was a curse, maybe a blessing, our fathers’ sins or mothers’ innocence; something plucked me from behind the tall brick walls on the Avenue of Tranquility, and Jonah from the sun-beaten desert of Southern California, and brought us together on a no-name street on top of a foggy mountain at the hands of a black rabbi named Cornelius Cohen.

  * * *

  The Ashkenazim complain a lot that Iranians are loathe to “integrate.” They’re wrong about that. I’m as integrated a citizen as you could possibly find, and so are most others. I know the laws of this country, the language, the history, better than a good number of natives, and I vote more often too. It’s true I don’t have many American friends but then I only have one real friend. My funeral, I am certain, will be as American as a Fourth of July barbecue: a handful of mourners who dress well but don’t mourn, and a buffet of cold cuts.

  Maybe I’ll ask to be buried at sea.

  What we’re not very good at—yet—is assimilation. We act American, but we think and feel and maybe even dream in Persian. I’m not sorry about this. We may be codependent, but we also appreciate the value of family; we may spoil our kids, but they’ll never doubt our love for them. We may carry the past around like a tether, but because of that we can see farther, and deeper, into ourselves and others.

  * * *

  What I see, when I look behind me, is Bagh-e Yaas, the garden that looked as if it had been snowed on in summer because of the poet’s jasmine that bloomed on the vines, the house with the high ceilings and bay windows, the color of sunlight in Iran—because it is, truly, different—Manzel’s kindness, her husband’s tears. I remember too the phone ringing in the night, the rainstorm that wouldn’t relent long enough for Elizabeth to bury my father. The morning I woke up to find Noor wasn’t in her bed. The footprints in the snow.

  I remember leaving the house in the dark, the screeching of metal as Elizabeth closed the gates of Bagh-e Yaas behind us, the pictures in her suitcase curling at the edges before they were consumed by fire.

  They say, in LA, that Iranians feel unjustifiably entitled, that their kids are spoiled at home, their men quick to find a loophole, and their women resistant to rules. It’s true for some, just as it is for any crowd. There may be a Paris Hilton or two among the tens of thousands of Iranians in this town and they do stand out, but the rest of us, I want to say for the record, all carry within us a repository of hardship and struggle, of fear and regret and sorrow, that is either inherited or gained firsthand, but that defines us and informs our actions in more ways than is readily discernible.

  It took strength and courage for us to survive in Iran, and later in America, and it’s going to take strength and courage to resolve now the course of our story, to preserve the good and let go of the bad rather than cling to or chuck the whole.

  Because, you see, we can’t chuck the past. That’s another thing I learned when I met Jonah.

  * * *

  I let him stay with me those first few weeks because I was spellbound by the beauty of it—he with the luminous heart, the ghosts and shadows and night creatures that lit up as if in reflection of him, those thousands of butterflies carpeting the walls with impossible colors. Just to look at him sitting on the couch in that T-shirt that’s a second skin to him, a perfect little sun holding a piece of blue sky for shelter, was worth going without sleep for days. But I also let him stay because I understood (yes, I do grasp a subtlety or two every once in a while) that his being here, being at all, is a chance.

  * * *

  I had to let the rabbi stay too, because he couldn’t just leave Jonah with me and take off, though he often failed to show up for two or three nights in a row. The rest of the time he slept on the couch in my living room and helped himself to my Persian rose-water tea. I don’t drink tea anyway; I only bought it because everywhere I go in this town, someone is talking about how we should all drink tea now instead of coffee. So I leave the tea in the kitchen and let the girl at my espresso bar look after my health.

  Because of Jonah, I let the rabbi drink my tea and sleep on my couch, and when he suggested that I take foster-parenting classes—three months’ worth of Saturday mornings—so he’d be able to leave Jonah with me for longer stretches of time, I even did that. I went back to work for the public defender’s office because I realized I’m no authority on truth or lies. I gave up writing the book—Two Continents, One Thief (I still think that’s one hell of a title)—because I can’t imagine doing that to Jonah; I’ll let Leon win my Pulitzer if he ever delivers on the police procedural he’s been threatening to write.

  Jonah doesn’t ask about his father and nor do the girls. They don’t ask how Neda has managed to hold on to the house while the creditors have yet to receive a dime of their money, or why she seems to be thriving a little more every day since last June. She gave it a couple of months, then went out and got a haircut and a new pair of cheekbones. Another month or two, and she bought the fish lips and the boobs, the tummy tuck, the new Cartier white-gold-with-diamond-bezel Ballon Bleu. She signed up for Italian classes at UCLA Extension, art classes by Shaheen in Malibu, and It’s Just Lunch! online. She turned the house over to the bankruptcy trustee, then sent the Riffraff to buy it back in the fire sale the trustee held to “liquidate” Raphael’s Son’s assets. The Riffraff paid cash because, as we all know, they have plenty of it to go around. All the money they were holding on to for Raphael’s Son, that they would have had to return to him out of fear if not loyalty—it’s all theirs now to invest and spend and use to lasso spouses for their not-so-attractive children. I mean, I’m no Marilyn Monroe myself, but among the Riffraff, Hadassah Simcha is considered a beauty and she, no offense to the bird, looks like a woodpecker with freckles.

  I hate people
who’re awful and don’t know it.

  * * *

  So the Riffraff bought the house back for Neda and they must have given her a good amount of money, maybe out of gratitude, more likely to keep her from going to the DA.

  She might not have known anything about Raphael’s Son’s affairs before, but now she has Eddy, the human abacus, with those ledgers only he can make sense of, which means the Riffraff had better part with some portion of other people’s hard-earned dollars.

  For the record, I don’t begrudge Eddy one penny of what he’s earned, in salary or self-served bonus, throughout the term of his enslavement. True, he could have given all $2,000 every month to Jewish Family Services; but he could also have given nothing. The bottom line is, the man played by the rules longer than most of the rest of us would have. He fought in the most useless, meaningless war of all time, and has that face to show for it. He took care of his sick mother for twenty years, and she’s still sick and wheezing and calling for him every five seconds in that cinder box of an apartment they share. He worked for Raphael’s Son for two decades, and was about to hear his own ribs crushed under the wheels of the bus, courtesy of His Sleaziness.

  He did exact the mother of all revenges on his torturer, keeping from him proof that he wasn’t a lie his mother made up, but really, was it the bookkeeper’s responsibility to report to Raphael’s Son what his own child looked like? Suppose Eddy had told him—does anyone believe Jonah would have been better off? That leaves only the matter of what Eddy should do with whatever overseas bank accounts he might know of.

  His choice, however, is not between stealing the money for himself or giving it back to its rightful owners. Not at all. Not if he is to abide by the law of the land. His choice, rather, is between stealing the money for himself or handing it over to the bankruptcy trustee to steal.

  The way it works, by law and with the full backing of the American justice system, is that the court appoints a trustee, and the creditors hope to get back some small part of the debt they’re owed. That hope is a fool’s dream. In the case of Raphael’s Son’s Ponzi scheme, the trustee ended up pocketing, in payment for his “services,” every last dime of Raphael’s Son’s remaining assets. Eighty million dollars is not a lot compared to the half billion lost by creditors, but it’s not exactly pocket change for a hack lawyer with a couple of accountants on his payroll, which is what the trustee is. Then again, why stop at that when you’ve been handed, by a judge who’s probably a crook himself, the gift that keeps on giving? Once he had emptied the “trust,” Mr. Hack Attorney filed three hundred—yes, with two zeros—separate lawsuits against anyone with any perceived or real assets, then quickly settled for whatever sum he could blackmail out of them. Then he went on to pay himself the total amount of the settlements in return for his “services” in filing and settling the lawsuits.

  If Eddy, or Neda, or anyone—even the Riffraff—point to any money anywhere, all that will happen is that the trustee will get richer still.

  That would be unintended consequence #2.

  * * *

  #3 would be Leon finding what he (and I) firmly believe is the answer to Raphael’s Son’s mystery. For three weeks after the conversation with the Altoid Man, Leon pursued the mythical green Impala down every dimly lit alley and abandoned backstreet of Holmby Hills and its surrounding cities. He sent uniformed cops door-to-door throughout the neighborhood. He studied footage from real, functioning security cameras (as opposed to the cheap dummies Raphael’s Son had opted for) outside private homes. He scoured DMV records for every one of Raphael’s Son’s victims and the LLCs and corporations registered in their names, as well as the Riffraff’s, Eddy Arax’s, and even Neda’s. Then he extended his search to the video archives of the Century City building where Raphael’s Son had his office, the rental car company’s records, and the closed-circuit surveillance cameras installed on all the borders of the 5.71 square miles of real estate that was the City of Beverly Hills.

  O’Donnell was fed up. Kevorkian threatened to quit. But Leon couldn’t stop digging.

  He had never had a case in which the victim was more worthy of the fate Raphael’s Son had met, or where the chances of getting the DA to press charges were more slim. Before Jonah showed up, Leon was all but ready to call it a day, let dog eat dog, or at least wait until someone, somewhere, uncovered a body. Before Jonah showed up, Leon could tell fact from fiction, reason from absurdity. But if the most fundamental assumption about Raphael’s Son—that he was not who his mother said—was false, and the most implausible likelihood about Jonah—that he had inherited the luminescence disease from the Soleyman bloodline—was true, how was one to distinguish truth from fabrication? If the most outrageous part of Neda’s story was true—that the body had vanished without a trace within minutes of her discovering it—what was to keep Leon from believing the Altoid Man’s testimony? The woman he had described to Leon sounded like a dead ringer for one of the Simchas. They had motive (Eddy Arax had made sure of that), method (shechita was in their blood), and just the right amount of greed to be willing to kill for money. Yes, many other people besides the Riffraff had motive. Yes, if anyone thought they could kill with impunity, it was Luci and his trail of rotting rodents.

  But there was a certain poetry to both the image and the role of the green Impala that Leon could not help but respond to. He explained to me later that it reminded him of the story his mother used to tell about a boy she had known in her own childhood; he had died in an accident while riding his bike, she said, but he came back as a ghost, night after night to his mother’s house and to the street where he had grown up, pedaling madly in the moonlight as if to tell a story, assert a truth, that had gone unsaid.

  “How can you believe such nonsense?” Leon had asked his mother when she first told him the story. He was eight years old, and already he knew ghosts were not real.

  “Because I’ve closed my eyes and listened,” she had said. “I heard the ring of truth and when I looked again, this time with my heart, I too saw the ghost boy.”

  So Leon took to the phone and checked every car rental agency within a fifty-mile radius of both Los Angeles and Palm Springs. When that proved futile, he made a new round of calls, asking for any vehicle with a body similar enough to the Impala’s. He was hoarse from talking and his neck and shoulder muscles were tight as coils, and still he couldn’t let go of the car. On the afternoon of Labor Day, he had a revelation: The Simchas were tacky and cheap, but they weren’t stupid enough to leave a track as easy to follow as a rental car. If any of them did drive up in a green Impala, it was probably bought, in cash, from one of those secondhand lots that recycle old rentals.

  That night, Leon drove to Palm Springs with a folderful of pictures of various members of the Riffraff Brigade, their spouses and adult children, and a list of used-car dealerships in the entire forty-five-mile stretch of Coachella Valley. Five days later, he landed on a dealer who recognized Hadassah Simcha’s picture.

  * * *

  Needless to say, Hadassah Simcha and her contingent of underdeveloped, unsophisticated, and utterly unlikable relatives did not waste one could-be-spent-pilfering-some-unsuspecting-orphan’s-lunch-money moment fretting over Leon’s discovery of Baby Simcha’s purchase. So what if some used-car shark claimed he had sold a green car to Hadassah? The family had no obligation to disclose their purchases to the police, and anyway, “Go find the thing if you’re so smart, bring it back and put a one-eyed witness on the stand, explain to the jury that the cops have spent two decades claiming the guy is either a liar or a lunatic, probably both but an unreliable character at best, and it only gets worse after that, what with no body and . . .”

  Never mind that. Leon knows who the killer is the same way I do: because only Neda and Eddy could have counted on the body disappearing once it was cut up. Because only they knew that Raphael’s Son was legit. And precisely because of that—because he knows who killed Raphael’s Son and what became of the body—Leon al
so knows that she is going to walk.

  Do you see Leon convincing O’Donnell that the ghost of Raphael Soleyman descended upon Holmby Hills early one Monday morning to whisk away his son’s lifeless and bleeding body? Do you see O’Donnell committing professional suicide by taking the story to the DA and asking him to prosecute, say, Neda?

  And even if he did—if Leon did manage to put Raphael’s Son’s murderer behind bars—given how much he abused her and what a foul person he was, would any of us feel that justice had been done?

  * * *

  The real justice, I propose to you, is what I’ll call unintended consequence #4. You see, even the most unforgiving of Raphael’s Son’s victims, once they had become convinced of the probability that he was dead and gone (as opposed to alive and gone to Mexico), put down their arms, buried their rancor, and managed to see him as the infinitely small and eventually insignificant element he really was within the three-thousand-year history of the Jewish people of Iran. From the time they had walked in chains, slaves to Nebuchadnezzar after the destruction of the First Temple, into Babylon, to the years when they rose, in achievement and success, to seats of power in every continent on earth, long before Raphael’s Son, there had been others who tried to inflict permanent harm upon this small, strangely resilient tribe. They had all failed—some more miserably than others. In barely a tenth of that time, the United States had produced the Oklahoma City bomber, Bernie Madoff, and legions of Wall Street CEOs. They, at least, had done enough harm to become notorious on an international scale; the most Raphael’s Son achieved by way of immortality is to be written up in this blog.

  This—being ultimately inconsequential, irrelevant, and unreckoned with—was the one state of being he had wanted most to escape.

  * * *

  They say, among Iranians, that a girl comes into this world carrying her own luck. That can be a good thing, as in the case of the good-luck women who bring great wealth and many sons to their husbands. Or it can be a problem, if you happen to arrive empty-handed. No one says anything about the luck of a boy because it would be redundant—a boy is luck. This always bothered me and still does, though I have to admit that in Jonah’s case, it’s true: he is a piece of luck.