The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  Daniel was puzzled. It seemed she wanted nothing to do with him. Of course, she might have had other reasons for choosing this table: its distance from the buffet, or the fact that it was next to the windows, in a rare patch of Chicago sun.

  He searched his backpack for a book and studied her out of the corner of his eye. She was petite but not thin, with a round face that tapered to a slender, shapely chin. She had elegant, furry brows and chestnut-colored eyes with surprisingly pale lashes. Her skin was olive toned and scattered with freckles. Straight brown hair hung to her collarbones.

  The clock ticked toward three thirty, then four. At four fifteen, he cleared his throat. “What are you studying?”

  The woman had a blue and silver Sony Walkman in her lap. She pulled off her headphones. “What’s that?”

  “I was just wondering what you study.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Art history. Jewish art.”

  “Ah,” said Daniel, raising his eyebrows and smiling in what he hoped was an interested-seeming way, though the subject did not interest him very much.

  “Ah. You disapprove.”

  “Disapprove? God, no.” Daniel flushed. “You’re entitled to study whatever you like.”

  “Thank you,” she said, deadpan.

  Daniel reddened. “I’m sorry. That sounded patronizing. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m Jewish,” he added, in solidarity. The woman looked at the remainder of his sandwich. “Ancestrally.”

  “You’re pardoned, then,” said the woman, but she smiled. “I’m Mira.”

  “Daniel.” Should he shake her hand? He wasn’t usually so awkward around women. He smiled back instead.

  “So,” said Mira. “You’re no longer religious?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  As a kid, Daniel was soothed by the synagogue: the bearded men with their silk shawls and rituals, the honeyed apples and bitter herbs, the praying. He developed a private prayer that he repeated each night with faithful exactitude, as though one botched phrase would cause something terrible to befall him. But terrible things did befall him: the death of his father, then of his brother. Shortly after Simon’s passing, Daniel stopped praying entirely. He was not troubled by his abandonment of religion. After all, there had been no struggle. His belief went willingly, logically, the way the boogeyman disappeared once you looked under the bed. That was the problem with God: he didn’t hold up to a critical analysis. He wouldn’t stand for it. He disappeared.

  “You’re a man of few words,” said Mira.

  Something in her tone made him laugh. “It’s just that—well, talk of religion . . . it can make people uncomfortable. Or defensive.” In case Mira herself was becoming defensive, he added: “I do see a lot of value in religious tradition.”

  Her head was inclined with interest. “Like what?”

  “My father was devout. I respect my father, and so I respect what he believed in.” Daniel paused to collect his thoughts; he had never articulated them before. “In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.”

  Mira’s mouth made a little upside-down semicircle. Soon, that expression would become as familiar to Daniel as her small, cool hands or the mole on her left earlobe.

  “I track pieces of Nazi-stolen art,” she said, after a moment. “And what I’ve noticed is just how far each object travels. Take Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. It was painted in 1880 in Auvers-sur-Oise about a month before Van Gogh committed suicide. The work changed hands four times—from Van Gogh’s brother to his brother’s widow to two independent collectors—before it was acquired by the Städel in Frankfurt. When Nazis plundered the museum in 1937, it was seized by Hermann Göring, who auctioned it off to a German collector. But here’s where things get interesting: that collector sold it to Siegfried Kramarsky, a Jewish banker who fled the Holocaust for New York in 1938. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? That the painting wound up, after all that, in Jewish hands, and directly from a Göring associate?” Mira fingered her headphones. She seemed suddenly shy. “I suppose I think we need God for the same reason we need art.”

  “Because it’s nice to look at?”

  “No.” Mira smiled. “Because it shows us what’s possible.”

  It was exactly the sort of comforting notion Daniel had long ago rejected, but he was drawn to Mira despite it. That weekend, they drank wine and listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland on a boom box Mira wedged in the open window of her third-floor walk-up. When she put her hands in the back pockets of his jeans and pulled him close, Daniel felt such bliss that it almost embarrassed him. He had not realized how lonely he was, or how long he’d been lonely.

  At his wedding, when he looked into the audience and saw only Gertie and Varya, something snapped in his heart like a branch. That Klara and Mira had never met remained one of the biggest regrets of his life. Mira was eminently practical and Klara was certainly not, but they shared an arch sense of humor and an air of playful—sometimes, not so playful—challenge. He didn’t know how much he relied on his sister for this purpose until he met his wife. During the breaking of the glass, he imagined his life until now shattering, too: its ignorance and anguish, its great and petty losses. From the pieces, he would assemble something new with Mira. He looked into her bright, hazel eyes, shimmering beneath a layer of tears, and felt his soul relax as if into a warm bath. So long as he kept looking at her, that feeling of peace pulsed outward, pushing pain to the perimeter of his consciousness.

  Later, lying naked with his bride—Mira snored, her forehead damp on his chest—Daniel began to tremble. He prayed. The words came forth as naturally, as necessarily, as urine. (A terrible analogy, he knew—Mira would have been horrified, had he shared it—and yet it still seemed to him more fitting than the inflated metaphors he’d heard in childhood.) Please, God, he thought. Oh God, may this last.

  In the following weeks, when he remembered the prayer, Daniel felt bashful, but also, somehow, lighter; it was as though he’d cut a lock of hair. He had not thought religion could do this for him. Truthfully, the seeds of his atheism had been sown years before the deaths of Klara and Simon and Saul. It began with the woman on Hester Street. He had felt such shame at his paganism, his desire to know the unknowable, that his shame became repudiation. No one, he vowed, could have such power over him: no person, no deity.

  But perhaps God was nothing like the dreadful, lurid fascination that brought him to the fortune teller, nothing like her preposterous claims. For Saul, God had meant order and tradition, culture and history. Daniel still believed in choice, but perhaps that did not foreclose belief in God. He imagined a new God, one who nudged him when he was going the wrong way but never strong-armed him, one who advised but did not insist—one who guided him, like a father. A Father.

  • • •

  Several years later, when they were married and living in Kingston, New York, he asked Mira if she’d intentionally sat beside him in the dining hall all those years before.

  “Of course,” said Mira. When she laughed, a beam of light from the kitchen window turned her eyes to gold coins. “The cafeteria was empty. Why else would I have picked your table?”

  “I don’t know,” said Daniel, embarrassed for having asked, or for having doubted her. “You might have wanted company. Or sun. It was sunny, I recall.”

  Mira kissed him. He could feel the cool strip of her wedding ring, a gold band that matched his own, on the back of his neck.

  “I knew exactly what I was doing,” she said.

  21.

>   Ten days before Thanksgiving, 2006, Daniel sits in the office of Albany MEPS Commander Colonel Bertram. In his four years with the Military Entrance Processing Station, Daniel has only visited the colonel’s office a handful of times—usually to discuss an unusual case, once to receive a promotion from physician to chief medical officer—and today, he hopes for a raise.

  Colonel Bertram sits in a leather chair behind a glossy, wide desk. He is younger than Daniel, with a clean shell of blond hair, shaved at the sides, and a tight, wiry frame. He looks scarcely older than the eager ROTC graduates who arrive by the carload for assessment.

  “You’ve had a good run,” he says.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’ve had a good run,” he repeats. “You’ve served your country well. But I’m going to be blunt, Major. Some of us think it’s time you took a break.”

  Daniel commissioned after medical school. For the first ten years of his career, he worked at Keller Army Community Hospital in West Point. This was the kind of work he had always imagined doing, high-stakes and unpredictable, but he was depleted by the hours and the relentless suffering. When a job opened up at MEPS, Mira encouraged him to apply. The position wasn’t glamorous, but Daniel came to enjoy its stability, and now he can hardly imagine a return to the hospital—or, worse, a deployment.

  Sometimes, he fears his preference for routine is cowardly. The paradox of his job—confirming that young people are healthy enough to go to war—is not lost on him. On the other hand, he also sees himself as a guardian. It’s his job to act as a sieve, separating those who are ready for war from those who are not. Applicants look at him with anxious hopefulness, as if he can give them permission to live, not license to die. Of course, there are some whose faces show pure terror, and in them Daniel sees the military fathers or dead-end poverty that brought them to the armed forces in the first place. He always asks them if they’re sure they want to go to war. They always say yes.

  “Sir.” For a moment, Daniel’s mind goes dark. “Is this about Douglas?”

  The colonel inclines his head. “Douglas was fit. He should have been cleared.”

  Daniel remembers the boy’s papers: Douglas’s spirometry and peak flow tests were far below normal. “Douglas had asthma.”

  “Douglas is from Detroit.” Colonel Bertram’s smile is gone. “Everyone from Detroit has asthma. You think we should stop letting kids in from Detroit?”

  “Of course not.” For the first time, the gravity of the situation becomes clear to Daniel. He knows that enlistment is down by ten percent. He knows that the military has lowered standards for the mental aptitude exam—they haven’t admitted so many Category IV applicants since the seventies. He’s heard that certain commanding officers have written waivers for misconduct convictions: petty theft, assault, even vehicular manslaughter and homicide.

  “This isn’t just about Douglas,” he says.

  “Major.” Colonel Bertram leans forward, and his commander’s pin—a wreathed star—catches the light. Daniel pictures the colonel hunched over his desk with the pin in his hand, scrubbing it with a cotton ball doused in silver polish. “You’re well-intentioned; we all know that. But you come from a different generation. You’re conservative, and that’s fair: you don’t want to see anyone go down who doesn’t have to. Some of these kids aren’t right, I’ll grant you that. We screen for a reason. But there’s a time to be conservative, Major, and this isn’t it. We need guys, we need numbers, for God and country, and sometimes we get a guy come in here with a bad knee or a little cough, but his heart’s in the right place, he’s good enough—and right now, Dr. Gold, we need heart. We need good enough. We”—the colonel picks up a stack of forms—“need waivers.”

  “I write waivers when they’re merited.”

  “You write waivers when you think they’re merited.”

  “I thought that was my job description.”

  “You work for me. I give you your job description. And I’m sure you don’t want an Article 15 sitting in your file, stinking like shit.”

  “For what?” Daniel’s mouth turns to chalk. “I’ve never gone against the code.”

  An Article 15 would end his career in the military. He’d never get a promotion; he could even be discharged. Regardless, he’d be disgraced. The humiliation would burn him alive.

  But his pride is not the only issue. Mira works at a public university. When Daniel left his job at the hospital, they had more money than they needed, but since then, he and Mira have taken on Gertie’s living expenses. Mira’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, too, and her father with dementia. After her mother died, they moved her father into an assisted living facility whose annual payments have swallowed much of their savings and will continue to do so: her father is sixty-eight and otherwise healthy.

  “For insubordination.” A wedge of egg white quivers below the colonel’s lower lip. He lifts the tinfoil in which his sandwich was wrapped and folds it in half. “For a failure to comply with military standards.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I’m a liar?” asks the colonel, quietly. He still holds the piece of tinfoil, folding it over and over again.

  Daniel knows he’s been given an opportunity to correct himself. But the thought of the Article 15 blazes inside him. He is riled by the threat of it, the injustice.

  “Either that or a sheep,” he says. “Doing whatever leadership tells you.”

  The colonel stops. He puts the piece of foil, now the size of a business card, in his pocket. Then he rises from his chair and leans over the desk toward Daniel, his palms flat.

  “Your duty is suspended. Two weeks.”

  “Who will do my job?”

  “I’ve got three other guys who can do exactly what you do. That’ll be all.”

  Daniel stands. If he salutes, Colonel Bertram will see that his hands are shaking, and so he doesn’t, though he knows this will make his situation much worse.

  “You must think you’re a special fucking snowflake,” the colonel says as Daniel turns toward the door. “A real American hero.”

  • • •

  Daniel walks to the parking lot with his ears ringing. He lets the car warm up and stares at the Leo W. O’Brien Federal Building, a tall glass square that has housed the Albany MEPS since 1974. After a renovation in 1997, Daniel was given an expansive new office on the third floor. Downtown Albany isn’t much to look at, but when Daniel first sat in that office, he was filled with purpose and surety—the sense that his life had been leading up to this moment from the beginning, and that he had arrived here by making a series of smart, strategic choices.

  Daniel reverses out of the parking lot and begins the fifty-minute commute to Kingston. What will he tell Mira? Before today, men sought his counsel, asked for his consent: he was an oracle himself. Now, he’s indistinguishable from any other man, like a priest divested of robes.

  “Bastard,” says Mira, when he slumps into her arms and tells her. “I’ve never liked that guy—Bertram? Bertrand? Bastard.” She rises onto her tiptoes and puts her palms to Daniel’s cheeks. “Where are the ethics? Where are the goddamned ethics?”

  Outside, the garage light illuminates the woods that border their garden. A deer sniffs at sticks beyond the first scrim of trees. The landscape has turned brown so quickly this year.

  “Use it to your advantage,” Mira says. “We’ll spend the next two weeks building your case. In the meantime, you’ll have a break; think about what you’d like to get out of it.”

  Scrolling through Daniel’s mind, as if across a television screen: the list of disqualifying conditions. Ulceration, varices, fistula, achalasia, or other dysmotility disorders. Atresia or severe microtia. Meniere’s syndrome. Dorsiflexion to ten degrees. Absence of great toe(s). On and on—thousands of regulations in all. For women, it’s even more restrictive. Ovarian cysts. Abnormal bleeding. It’s a won
der anyone gets through at all, but then again, it’s also a wonder that most people, despite rising rates of cancer and diabetes and cardiovascular disease, still live to the age of seventy-eight.

  “What are things you’ve been meaning to do?” Mira continues. She’s trying to be strong, for his sake, but her anxiety is obvious: she always tries to keep busy when she’s worried. “You could rebuild the shed. Or get in touch with your family.”

  Many years ago, Mira asked, with characteristic straightforwardness, why Daniel wasn’t closer to his siblings.

  “We’re not not close,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not close,” said Mira.

  “Sometimes we are,” said Daniel, though the truth was muddier. There were times he thought of his siblings and felt love sing from him like a shofar, rich with joy and agony and eternal recognition: those three made from the same star stuff as he, those he’d known from the beginning of the beginning. But when he was with them, the smallest infraction made him irreversibly resentful. Sometimes, it was easier to think of them as characters—straitlaced Varya; Klara, dreamy and heedless—than to confront them in all of their off-putting, fully bloomed adulthood: their morning breath and foolish choices, their lives snaking into unfamiliar underbrush.

  • • •

  That night, he drifts into wooziness, then out again. He is thinking of his siblings and of waves, the process of falling asleep not unlike the ocean lapping shore. During one of their New Jersey vacations, Saul took Daniel’s siblings to a movie, but Daniel wanted to swim. He was seven. He and Gertie brought slotted plastic chairs to the beach, and Gertie read a novel while Daniel pretended to be Don Schollander, who had won four medals in Tokyo the year before. When the tide carried Daniel toward the horizon, he let it, electrified by the growing distance between himself and his mother. By the time he grew tired of treading water, he had drifted fifty yards from shore.

  The ocean sloshed in his nose, in his mouth. His legs were long and useless. He spat and tried to yell, but Gertie couldn’t hear him. Only because a sudden wind blew her sun hat into the sand did she stand and, in retrieving it, see Daniel’s dropping head.