The Book of Jonah: A Novel

by Feldman, Joshua Max

  “In the last night, my friend, I tell you who go,” Simon said as he swept. At the Aces High, someone was always either coming or going—and Simon, despite having limited English and working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, somehow kept up with all the building gossip. “In the last night,” he continued, “Martha, children…” And he paused his sweeping long enough to make a gesture of his palm parallel to the ground, slowly rising—which suggested Martha and her kids had floated off into space—but Jonah got the point. Martha had crammed herself and her four children into a one-bedroom unit; Jonah had once given her some predictably useless legal advice regarding unpaid child support. “Left things, all things, in dumper,” Simon went on. “Clothes, papers, fan.” Simon spun his index finger, as though to show Jonah how a fan operated. “Still work!” he said brightly.

  “I guess there’s always a silver lining,” Jonah muttered. Simon seemed immune to the assorted miseries of the Aces High. But then, from what Jonah had heard about Simon’s childhood, they had very different standards for what constituted misery. Still, thinking of Martha and her four overweight, sullen children, all piled onto a bus headed somewhere with whatever of their things they could carry, did nothing to dispel the hopeless feeling he’d been wrestling with since his visit to the Greater Love Hath No Man Church. “That’s probably clean enough,” he said to Simon, opening his door as the sweeping went on.

  “Tomorrow you find your woman, my friend,” Simon said. “Or sooner!” he added.

  “Right, count on it,” Jonah said, and went inside and closed the door.

  His room consisted of a double bed with a dark-brown comforter, a dresser with a television chained to it, a closet-sized kitchenette equipped with a sink, a three-foot refrigerator and an electric burner, a marigold-tiled bathroom with a curtainless shower, a card table and chair by the window—and that was about it. He tossed his wallet and keys onto the dresser beside the Bible he’d been trying to read; it had proved slow going—he’d gotten bogged down in Leviticus.

  He could hear a man shouting in the adjacent room. The walls were thin enough that if he’d listened he could have made out every word this man said—but he had heard it all before by now. The man had been kicked out of his house by his pregnant wife, who suspected he was cheating. He spent at least a few hours a day on the phone with her, trying to shout his way back home. Despite his at times vicious, at times sobbing denials, he really was cheating: Jonah had met his redheaded, spray-tanned mistress smoking cigarettes in the outdoor corridor a few times. She was a baccarat dealer at the Golden Nugget, was actually pretty friendly—though from what he heard through the walls, he knew she was capable of viciousness, too.

  “Is it my fault I’m fucking in love with you, bitch?” the man shouted.

  Jonah opened one of the heavy dresser drawers, took his laptop out from under a pile of his T-shirts. It was a meaningless precaution; if someone broke into the room, they’d obviously search the drawers. But it was better than just leaving it out. Sometimes when people happened to see inside the room, their eyes lingered on it.

  He sat down with the laptop at the card table, checked his email. He’d put ads in the newspaper, had posted them on Craigslist, seeking information about a Judy or Judith in Las Vegas. All this had gotten him was forty emails a day from prostitutes and phishers, claiming to be her or know her.

  He had new emails from both his parents, continuing with their advice war as to what he should do with his life now that he’d told them he wasn’t on a sabbatical but rather had “quit” corporate law. His mother thought he should take up a craft of some sort, something that would let him work with his hands—printmaking was her latest suggestion; his father thought he should go back to corporate law. Philip Orengo had written, as well, updating him on the New York gossip: Patrick Hooper had a twenty-three-year-old girlfriend who was “not even wholly unattractive”; Philip himself was considering a run for city council the following fall. And naturally, all this seemed at least a world or two away from the Aces High in central Las Vegas.

  He clicked over to the list of churches he kept. He actually had only about a dozen left—couldn’t tell whether he found this alarming, or a relief. Either way, he didn’t know what he would do when he got to the end of this list. He’d thought about going through every real estate company in the city—calling each of them up, asking to speak to Judy. And when that failed? he asked himself. He knew he couldn’t stay in Las Vegas forever—whether he found Judith or not. He just had no idea what he should do next. It wouldn’t be printmaking or corporate law, though. In the heady days just before he’d left Amsterdam, he’d toyed with the idea of becoming a human-rights attorney—but that seemed an especially bleak prospect, as he sat there. But didn’t whatever he did after this have to depend on what happened here, in the end? How could he know what came next until he found Judith—or didn’t?

  He clicked back to his email. Nothing worth reading had appeared in his inbox in the last ninety seconds. He was about to close the computer, when he did get a new message—from Becky, he saw. He hesitated a moment—then opened it.

  Dear Jonah

  First of all I got all your emails. And Aimee talked to her sister about that girl, but she said she hasn’t heard from her in years. If you do track her down she wants her email. So that’s that. The real reason I’m writing is to let you know that Danny & I broke up. I still think you’re an asshole for everything you did, but I guess I see the whole thing a little differently now. Maybe someday we can talk about it. But not now. Anyway. I thought you should know.

  Becky

  Jonah reread this email several times—but each time he read it, he only grew more perplexed. Did this mean he’d been right to tell her about Danny? Or did their breakup have nothing to do with him? And what was the “whole thing” she saw differently? And why did she think he should know? He was turning all this over in his head when he heard a knock on the door. He figured it was Simon; as he stood up and opened it, his eyes were still on the computer. Only when he didn’t hear Simon greet him did he turn and look—and see in his doorway a tall, skinny woman with short blond hair in a belted trench coat.

  And Jonah told Judith the whole story.

  * * *

  Jonah paced back and forth across the room as he spoke, Judith sat at the card table by the window, only listening, not asking questions—and by the time he’d finished, the last of the dusk through the window had faded from the room, and all the surfaces—bed, dresser, table, carpet—looked as though they had been splashed with shadow. He sat down heavily on the bed when he was finished—nose aching from talking so much, wishing he hadn’t mustered the will to quit smoking after all.

  For a few moments, Judith studied him: slouched forward, his elbows on his knees, hands dangling before him, the bed bent almost to a V with his weight. The beard was gone, which contributed to a generally more conventional appearance, though it also made the crookedness of his nose more noticeable. She looked over at the dresser with the television shackled to it, a Bible lying beside this, the ribbon tucked among the first quarter of its pages. Someone in the next room started shouting. She stood up, moved closer to the wall to listen. “You think this is a fucking game?” she heard a man hollering. “You think this is a game? This is my fucking life!”

  “Why do you live here?” she asked Jonah.

  “It’s close to a lot of buses,” he muttered. But he knew there was some evasion in this—and there was no point in holding anything back now. “There’s less bullshit here than in a lot of places in Las Vegas.”

  “Do you consider yourself an ascetic?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you consider yourself someone who renounces—”

  “Yeah, I know what the word ‘ascetic’ means,” he said with annoyance, carefully rubbing his face at the sides of his nose. “And no, I don’t consider myself one.”

  Judith smiled a bit in response. She had been so nervous coming h
ere—nervous enough that, standing outside his door, she’d considered not even knocking. But she felt almost giddy now—triumphant: because it had all turned out to be so ridiculous. Who would have guessed he was the sort of person who could hold such notions—prophetic visions, divinely inspired missions? From the looks of it, not even him.

  And observing her persistent smirk, Jonah said, “You don’t believe it, do you?”

  “I understand you believe it. But as for myself, no,” she said simply. “I don’t.” She now picked up her purse from the floor. “Well, thank you for satisfying my curiosity.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, getting to his feet. “You’re leaving?”

  “Why would I stay?”

  “Because I…” But it was as though in telling his story he’d lost track of precisely what it was he wanted from her. “But—at least tell me how you found me.”

  “I didn’t follow a pillar of fire through the desert, if that’s what you were thinking.” His face was increasingly anxious—she knew this had been needlessly cruel, even if there had been some satisfaction in it. She reached into her purse, took out the page of the sermon with his name and address written on it, handed it to him.

  “I was there this morning, though,” he said as he studied it. “This was that church off Foremaster.”

  “The Greater Love Hath No Man Church, yes, that’s right.”

  “But he told me he didn’t know anything about you.”

  “It would seem he lied.” And for some reason, she found satisfaction in saying this, too. She moved again toward the door.

  “Wait—wait!” he said, growing desperate. He’d known it was possible she’d be skeptical when she heard his story—but of all the scenarios he’d gone over in his mind, he’d never imagined this: that she would appear so wholly indifferent, so dismissive of what he’d told her. “Look, you can’t just walk out of here,” he insisted.

  “No?” she asked, standing at the door, her purse hanging from her hands. “Why can’t I?”

  “Because you have to let me—I mean, you were obviously really upset that day. You have to let me—make things right.”

  She paused. She had been prepared to leave him to his little corner of oddness, but now she felt an impulse to explain certain things to him. He wasn’t crazy, only wildly self-deluding. And she ought to cure him of those delusions—as recompense, she thought. “Despite what you may think, I wasn’t put on this earth to vindicate what you perceive as your spiritual journey,” she told him.

  He watched her composed, neatly made up face uneasily. “That’s not what I’m saying.…”

  “But the fact remains, you need me far more than I need you. After all, if I don’t play along, then what was the point of all the time you’ve spent looking for me? What was the point of anything you’ve been through? The truth is you might have fixed on anyone, identified some urgent reason for finding that person, placed her in the role of Lois Lane to your Superman. It only happened to be me, and for no better reason than because you say you remembered seeing my photograph once.”

  “When I left you were sobbing,” he said defensively.

  “Well, that—may be so,” she answered, tripping only briefly—unnoticeably, really, she told herself—at the memory of being alone on that bench. “But even you have to acknowledge that what you’re implying lacks anything like logic, or fairness, or justice. Why would God send you after me, and not after one of the millions of people on the planet who might actually want or need your help? Does crying make me more deserving of divine intervention than someone sick, or someone starving? You must see that the whole idea is simply absurd.”

  “Okay, I get that it seems crazy, I know that better than anyone. But…” But he realized that even now he didn’t know how to describe his faith—knew this wasn’t solely a problem of articulation, either. And he could not deny—she made a strong case.

  “I don’t doubt you’ve felt guilty for what you did,” she continued. “But don’t mistake your guilt for more than it is. Despite your purported visions, there’s nothing I want or need from you, Jonah. And if you ever thought differently—you were mistaken,” she concluded with a shrug.

  He opened his mouth to respond—then didn’t. She watched his eyes darting back and forth to look at hers. She felt sorry for him now. Even the pastor had made a better showing, and he had wanted to surrender. The Colonel had been right about her, she thought. He had been right about all of it. “They’re all just stories, Jonah,” she told him. “They’re just stories we tell ourselves from the things that happen to us. We’re the ones who give the events meaning or moral, who conclude that they unfold the only way they could unfold, as opposed to how they happen to unfold. And we’re the ones who imagine that at the center of them is us, on our little journey, and that it’s God’s hand on the quill pen. But the fact is, if you’d done what any reasonable person would have, and started taking pills when you had your visions, so-called, you’d probably be living with one of those girls right now, and be at work at your law firm, and feel perfectly content that everything was going exactly according to plan.”

  The only light in the room now came from the dull glow through the window of the streetlamp in the Aces High parking lot. Jonah sat back down on the shadowed bed. He knew he ought to argue with her—but much of what she’d said had occurred to him at times, too. And to have finally found her—the central figure in so much of what he had come to believe—only to have her pick those beliefs apart, bit by bit, made her assertions very difficult to dismiss. It was true: There was no logic, no discernible fairness to what he’d described. It wasn’t based on anything like logic or fairness. Maybe then, she was right—it wasn’t based on anything at all.

  And yet—and yet—

  But why was his faith never more than an “And yet”—no more powerful than a caveat, a footnote, a suspicion? Why, when he tried to take hold of it, did it feel no more certain than grasping an icicle?

  “I’m afraid I left your coat in the Amsterdam airport,” she said. Watching him sitting silently on the bed, his face toward the floor, looking so thoroughly confounded, she’d felt she should offer some consolation—hadn’t come up with anything better. “Perhaps you can claim it from their lost-and-found. There were only some … cigarette butts in the pockets.”

  “Why were you crying that day?” he asked after another moment.

  She hesitated—but why shouldn’t she tell him? Hadn’t she promised herself she would never cry in that way—for those reasons—again? “I was thinking about my parents,” she answered, very evenly, very cleanly—the way she’d practiced in the mirror before telling the pastor. “They were killed on 9/11.” And she continued, in just the way she’d practiced, “But that was a long time ago. In any case, I was upset that day. That’s to be expected from time to time. And I do—appreciate all you did to make amends for—departing so abruptly. But of course, you weren’t responsible for—me. Regardless, I am glad we got the opportunity to resolve things. I wish you all the best. So, goodbye.” She didn’t move—as though in this unexpected stream of words, she’d forgotten what it was she was actually saying. “Goodbye,” she repeated, reminding herself. She saw him studying her quizzically. “Oh, I suppose that fits your purposes very nicely, does it?” she said sharply. “The poor little orphan, and your divinely ordained mission to console me.”

  “It’s just you didn’t mention it.”

  “Didn’t mention what?”

  “We talked about 9/11, and you didn’t mention it.”

  “Did we?” she said quickly. “I don’t remember that.” It was a stupid lie, a pointless lie—and, she recognized immediately, one that announced itself as false even as it left her mouth.

  For a while neither spoke—they eyed one another with differing forms of suspicion. Jonah remembered what he’d concluded about her in Amsterdam: that she was wearing a costume. And here she was, with the same polished face and hair, the same purse, the same trench
coat—which, he now noticed, she hadn’t removed.

  “Why are you working in real estate out here?” he asked her. “Why are you buying churches so a casino can secretly—”

  “And why shouldn’t I be doing that?” she interrupted. “Because I went to Jewish summer camp?”

  “Because it’s a fucked-up thing to do!”

  She scoffed. “Would I be better off getting myself fired and going to look for a stranger because God said so?”

  He stood up from the bed. “What point are you trying to make with all this?” he asked, waving his hand at her. “You know as well as I do all of this is bullshit.”

  She forced out a bitter chuckle. “Is that right? Then why don’t you enlighten me as to how I might live a more authentic life.”

  “For starters, don’t defraud some dilapidated Las Vegas church!” he shouted.

  She reached into her purse and pulled out the plastic folder—threw it onto the bed. The contracts spilled out across the comforter. “You see? It’s done. He signed. The Greater Love Hath No Man Church now belongs to Colonel Harold Ferguson. Thanks to me.” Jonah looked at the stapled sheaves of paper—the pages askew, bunched into waves against the pillows, every inch covered in typed words. “Are you satisfied?” she asked. “Will you leave me alone now?”

  In the vague light, he could see the fixity of her face as she stared at the contracts—her one fist clenched around the handle of her purse. “You came to see me,” he said quietly.

  She couldn’t deny it—but she didn’t know why she had anymore: some indulgence, of old, vestigial instincts. She knew she ought to leave at last, but there was something dismaying in seeing the contracts scattered across the bed this way; she found she didn’t have the energy to gather them back into their plastic folder. “It’s something to be a part of,” she told him. “A way to be exceptional. And I always imagined I’d accomplish something—exceptional. Can you understand that?”