The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Lloyd Davis Cooper put his hand on Jonah’s shoulder. “It would be best if you returned our jacket, young man,” he said.

  “No, that isn’t necessary,” Jonah said. He risked a look at his table: Sylvia was gathering her things to leave; Doug Chen went so far as to shake his head perceptibly. Jonah took a wary step back from Lloyd Davis Cooper. “If you just let me—”

  With surprising agility for a man in his late sixties (it was known in the office that he remained an excellent tennis player), Lloyd Davis Cooper lunged forward and grabbed the lapel of the jacket. “Our jacket, young man!” he said, pulling.

  “It isn’t necessary!” Jonah said, pulling back.

  As the tug-of-war continued, from the corner of his eye Jonah saw the Hasid poking his head above the lip of the stage, and then, with one flick of his finger, he rolled a matzo ball underneath Jonah’s foot. Jonah slipped—he tumbled off the stage and crashed to the floor.

  By the time he sat up, the crowd had turned on him fully. Partners started toward him menacingly, made to remove the jacket—and now Scott Baker appeared, smiling amiably as he waved a contract over his head like a pitchfork. Jonah struggled to his feet and ran, the crowd following in hot pursuit.

  As Jonah came out of the hall, he found himself running down a stairway—and this ended in an elevator—which brought him to another stairway—which led to still another elevator—and on and on—and never did Jonah feel himself getting any farther from his pursuers. Finally he entered some sort of lobby—vast and deserted and fronted with glass windows many stories high. He raced to the revolving door at the front of the building and pushed through it.

  Outside, it was nighttime, and Jonah recognized a busy New York street, across from it the edge of Central Park, at this hour dark past the first clusters of trees. The crowd had started to pour into the lobby behind him. Jonah ran for the park—dodging taxis as he crossed the street—leapt over a low stone wall around the park’s edge, and began running blindly over the grass. At last he took refuge behind a tree, panting. For a moment all was quiet. He no longer heard the demands, the complaints, the shouted disappointments of those chasing him. He looked up and saw stars twinkling overhead (the sky in the dream differing in this way from the real, light-polluted sky of New York). Briefly, he felt a sense of escape—an unburdening—a sort of deliverance from—

  Plunk!

  The Hasid had followed him!—found him!—somehow. He took off through the park, running as fast as he could, but the Hasid was just as fast. Jonah ran and ran—desperately, frantically—enduring continual matzo-ball plunks, moaning in his sleep now—the faint buoyancy of the floorboards in the narrow and low-ceilinged houseboat room perceptible as he awoke, gasping for air.

  * * *

  With a wheeze, Jonah jerked up to a seated position, looked around. He took in the foot of the couch where he’d been sleeping, the sheet he’d been sleeping under kicked into a clump at his feet; he took in the thin red curtains, illuminated to a pale pink, over a trio of portholes on the opposite wall. It was several more agitated moments before he could recall where he was, how he had gotten there. He had been in Amsterdam for weeks, and his mind still grasped this fact only imperfectly. Even when he wasn’t jarred awake by the dream of the Hasid, he might open his eyes in the dark and flap his arm out, his hand searching for a nightstand and an iPhone that weren’t there.

  Recollecting now that he was on a houseboat on a canal in Amsterdam—and how this had come to be—he leaned his shoulder back against the couch cushions, caught his breath. Whenever he had the dream, the emotions of it would cling to him upon waking, like cobwebs: the embarrassing joy at being named partner; the anxiety at seeing the Hasid from the stage; the panic and desperation of flight. These dissipated quickly enough, though they gave way to a more durable feeling: bitter vexation that he had had the dream, again. He should have remembered to get high before going to sleep.

  He lifted one leg and then the other over the side of the couch—pushed himself up to his feet. He had slept in his clothes, which was not unusual. He picked up his coat from the floor, climbed the narrow spiral stairway in the corner of the room—the only way in or out—and stepped onto the deck of the houseboat. Newsprint-gray clouds hung low and thick overhead. He could tell it had rained earlier, as the wood of the deck was slick and darkened with moisture. He guessed it was mid-afternoon, though it was hard to be certain from the sunless sky; jet lag he had never overcome and smoking weed five times a day had made his sleep patterns irregular.

  The houseboat was docked (it hadn’t moved in the time Jonah had lived there) on a canal called Brouwersgracht, in a sedate, mostly residential neighborhood northwest of Amsterdam’s center. On both sides of the canal stood three- and four-story houses in distinctive Dutch style: narrow and peak-roofed, with painted, thrown-open shutters, tightly crowded together, like dollhouses lining a shelf. Though it was not yet fall, there was an aqueous chill in the air. Jonah put on his coat, pulled it closed across his chest. He had found this coat at the Albert Cuyp Market one Saturday, among stalls of cheeses, pirated European soccer jerseys, faded enamel cookware. It was a Russian Navy coat, the man selling it had told him in fractured English—was thick, midnight blue, with ten gold-colored buttons across the front, each decorated with a tiny anchor. Jonah hadn’t brought any warm clothes with him from New York—nothing so practical as packing for the weather had been on his mind as he’d dumped armfuls of clothing from his drawers into a suitcase—and though he understood its effect was somewhat to make him look like an extra in a low-budget submarine movie, he’d bought the coat anyway. It evoked for him a hardiness, a military sufficiency, that he liked to think transposed to him whenever he put it on.

  He was bearded now—had stopped shaving when he’d left New York—this beard dark and full and flecked here and there with individual hairs of gray. He was aware that the beard added to the B-movie sub-captain impression, but the mass of facial hair gave him a feeling of sufficiency, too. And anyone who had known him in New York would have immediately noticed that his nose had acquired a curve toward its bottom—as though it were fashioned in the shape of an upside-down question mark. But the only person who knew him prior to his arrival in Amsterdam was Max, and if Max had noticed, he hadn’t mentioned it.

  In one of the pockets of the coat, Jonah found a pack of cigarettes he didn’t remember buying. He hesitated, and then took one out and lit it. He’d been trying to quit, but smoking as much pot as he did usually dulled his self-discipline. Anyway, it was a morning after the dream, a cigarette was forgivable. It would help brush away the cobwebs.

  He smoked the cigarette to the filter, made to flick the butt into the canal. But then he stopped, the butt poised between his thumb and index finger. The old Roxwood guilt around littering he’d acquired as a child had kicked in. He looked into the canal: Its water had a kaleidoscopic quality—might appear brown or green or blue depending on the time of day, the light in the sky; toward noon it acquired a stripe of bright reflected sun down its center, at night presented itself as inky black, edged in plumes of amber street light. He finally put the cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe—looked around with annoyance for somewhere appropriate to dispose of it, then just shoved the butt in his pocket.

  He walked around to the houseboat’s bow—felt fresh annoyance when he saw Max come up the gangway from the street, lean against the railing beside it. Jonah had met Max, the renter of the houseboat, in college. He had a portly build, sandy-blond, unkempt hair, a large and notably expressive mouth, a round-tipped boyish nose; today was dressed in jeans and an unbuttoned yellow cardigan. He spread a rolling paper in the palm of his left hand, with the right began breaking up marijuana buds above it.

  “All the great questions have been answered, Rabbi,” Max said. “And it turns out there were no questions at all. Morality is just selfishness by another name, a trick we play on ourselves to give our genes the best chance of reproduction. Art is sublimated
sexual energy, lust misplaced in clay and sheet music and whatnot. Love is more sexual energy and reproductive advantage-seeking, it’s not even worth discussing. Humanity itself is just an accident, the result of disinterested physical forces operating the only way they could possibly work. And as for God? Well, now that IBM has perfected the art of creating computers whose only function is to demonstrate how dumb we are, we are fast approaching the moment when a robot opens its eyes, hears about God, and bursts out laughing because we’ve held on to a concept that only ever came about because our prehistoric ancestors couldn’t explain thunder.

  “Fortunately, now we can explain everything. How we act is Darwinism, how we think is psychology, reality is all in the mind, which is all chemicals, which is all DNA. And why are we here? Well, there are an infinite number of universes, so we had to be somewhere.”

  As he spoke, Max had started rolling the broken-up weed into a massive joint. “These are wondrous times, Rabbi,” he continued. “By which I mean, they aren’t wondrous at all. All the myths have been dispelled, all the superstitions have been dragged to light, every mystery can be explained right down to the specific gene sequence from whence it came. It’s like at the end of a Scooby-Doo episode when the monster’s mask has been pulled off: It was never really a monster, because there are no monsters, or anything like them. The fear Descartes articulates in his ‘First Meditation,’ that there is some demon god deceiving his reason, has been entirely put to rest because, needless to say, there are no gods of any kind, demonic or otherwise. Scooby and the gang, in the form of rational, materialist thinking, pulled off God’s mask to reveal a mechanism of social control that dovetailed conveniently with a collective fear of death.

  “Naturally, there is some melancholy to our era. Of course we miss Santa Claus. Of course we miss the romance of the uncharted, the unknown, the Loch Ness Monster, transubstantiation, the joy of the laughing Buddha, wishing on a star, and so forth. Remember prime time, Rabbi? Remember when the good shows were on? Now we can TiVo it. And yes, our generation had VCRs, but who could work them? Time is irrelevant now, it’s just another aspect of the physical world that we’ve conquered and put entirely to our own uses, like fire.”

  He licked the joint horizontally, continued. “But even granting the nostalgia for belief, which, I’ll add, we’ll be the last generation to feel, even granting that, Rabbi, we’re better off. We’re better off knowing there’s nothing else out there. Who wants to be forever searching the sky for locusts and frogs? Who wants to check under the bed every night for monsters?

  “And don’t misunderstand me,” he said, waving the finished joint for emphasis. “I freely concede we have no shortage of monsters. I am the first to admit to all of humanity’s barbarism, its innate cruelty, its unquenchable bloodlust. But at least we’ve given the problem the clarity of cliché: The enemy is us, man’s greatest predator is man, the fault not in our stars but in ourselves, and so on. When we consider the cycles of genocide, the torture memos, the suicide bombers, isn’t it better to know that it’s just us? That we’re doing it all ourselves? Not to mention the calamities of the physical world, the tsunamis and famines and African pandemics. Isn’t it preferable to know that it isn’t malevolence we’re facing, but simply indifference? That the volcano wiping out your village has no more malice than gravity?

  “No, what is scary, what is truly terrifying, is to think there could be some higher power that allows it. A higher power that wills it!” He lit the joint, took a long hit—his face was entirely still for several seconds, then he exhaled through his nose. “It’s the ultimate fear, Rabbi. It’s the old Cartesian fear. At the bottom of all of it: God’s winking emoticon.”

  He shook his head hastily, as if shooing the thought away. “Rabbi, your beliefs are like the creepy old uncle at the family reunion everyone wishes would hurry up and die. This notion that there is a God. That under the monster mask is a real monster. That there are vast tracts of existence we have no idea about. It’s frightening, it’s undemocratic, and it’s anti-humanist. Really, it’s offensive. You’re a traitor to your species is the bottom line. To say that there are things we don’t know, when everyone knows we now know everything…” He shook his head again, this time with shame. “Honestly, Rabbi, who do you think you are?”

  “Don’t call me ‘Rabbi,’” Jonah muttered—knowing this injunction would be ignored, just as it always was.

  Jonah often thought that if he’d made one mistake since coming to Amsterdam, it had been telling Max, shortly after his arrival, about the circumstances of his departure from New York. But he had been a wreck during those first days: by turns manic, weepy, enraged, despondent. Finally he had needed someone to talk to, and Max was the only person in the city he knew.

  They hadn’t been friends in college, exactly. There was a consistent slipperiness to Max’s character that Jonah had always found a little off-putting. At Vassar, Max had a reputation for getting into shouting debates with professors in the most banal of courses (Spanish I, Introduction to Structural Engineering); for chanting lustily at campus protests, abruptly joining the counterprotests, then chanting just as lustily for the other side. Since college, Max reported he’d hiked the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal, worked at a start-up in Silicon Valley, most recently won a Fulbright to study Spinoza in Amsterdam, with which he funded his life on the houseboat—none of this suggesting to Jonah that Max had embraced a newfound earnestness in his postgrad existence. Still, they’d had a few long and memorable dorm room conversations in their time, and when Jonah had contacted Max, he’d welcomed him to live in the houseboat’s back room.

  Jonah hadn’t told him all the details of what happened in New York. Even if he’d wanted to describe the specifics of what he’d seen, and all it had led to, he’d been too drunk and high at the time of telling to relate it coherently. But Max had gotten the essentials: visions, voices, Hebrew. He had at least respected Jonah’s request not to tell anyone else, though he had decidedly not respected his request not to bring it up at every turn: calling him “Rabbi,” delivering discursive monologues on religion and Scooby-Doo and whatever else came to his mind, and generally prodding Jonah and pushing his buttons in order to elicit—Jonah was not sure what, exactly. It was possible that Max didn’t know himself.

  In any case, nothing Jonah said in response to the provocations ever satisfied Max, so Jonah had given up trying. “Can I have a hit off that?” he asked, nodding his chin toward the joint.

  Max let out a predictably disappointed sigh and took a hit himself. “Why don’t you just curse God and die, already?”

  “What, and miss these little chats?” Jonah responded.

  Max smiled at this. Then, brightening further, he said, “I had good luck at the Van Gogh Museum this morning, Rabbi. An exercise-science major from California.” Max often trolled Amsterdam’s more popular tourist attractions for American women abroad, frequently with great success. “Really, with these college girls, it’s so easy even you could do it. Just mention you know where the locals smoke and they’re ready to take off their North Face jackets and money belts and go at it right there underneath The Raising of Lazarus.”

  “You should write that up for TripAdvisor.”

  “Why don’t you come with me today, Rabbi?” Max offered. “I’m sure she could produce a friend-for-my-friend from the hostel. We’re eating at De Bolhoed, and then we’re coming back here to get high.” He grinned and said, “Well, Rabbi?”

  Jonah had long observed that Max’s face had an unusual capacity to form two expressions at once: an expression and a comment on that expression—as though the look in his green eyes could effect a footnote to the look on his face. The smile he now gave Jonah was most immediately lascivious, suggestive, but it also managed to be a caricature of such a smile—as if to mock the smiles that men gave each other to indicate their intentions toward women.

  However the smile was meant to be taken, though, the invitation didn’t appeal to Jonah.
He had no interest lately in meeting women, flirting with women—nor even in sex: He found he’d developed a strong aversion to seeing anyone new naked. On the few instances when he had given in and accompanied Max on his rendezvous with tourists, been matched with a friend-for-my-friend, he’d felt uncomfortable the entire time, increasingly dispirited—not least because one of the women inevitably reminded him of Sylvia, or Zoey, or both. “I think I’ll pass,” he said.

  “Better things to do?”

  Jonah shrugged. “I was going to smoke, then maybe check out the botanical gardens.” He hadn’t specifically been thinking of visiting the botanical gardens, but they were on the vague list of potential activities that represented the closest thing in his life to a schedule.

  Max tapped ash from the joint thoughtfully. “Who knew you had an interest in horticulture?”

  “Right, I’d be better off spending my time cruising for girls outside the Heineken Brewery,” Jonah answered, irritated.

  “That would be a good place to do it,” Max mused. He took another hit, then asked abruptly, “Rabbi, do you remember History of Western Philosophy, with Professor Marquez? The week we covered Nietzsche, you were practically delirious with indignation. All that will-to-power stuff, it was like you took it personally. You wouldn’t stand for it. Even Marquez was impressed with your contra Nietzsche diatribes.” In fact, Jonah didn’t remember: didn’t remember any diatribes, barely remembered anything about Nietzsche. “Or do you remember how you used to stand on the bar in the Mug and do Jäger bombs? You used to do Jäger bombs in the Mug with such conviction, Rabbi.”

  Max had assumed an almost wistful look. All Jonah could think to say was, “What the fuck does that have to do with me going to the botanical gardens?”