The Book of Jonah

by Joshua Max Feldman

  Judith took the time to look around again—sensed there was a right answer to this question, didn’t want to get it wrong. The olive trees were hung with round wicker lanterns; in a corner behind the Colonel was a four-foot-high statue of a Buddha—smiling serenely, hands folded—done in artfully weathered gold paint.

  “I wouldn’t say garish,” she answered. “Though it certainly isn’t my sort of place.”

  She had intended to continue, but he released a howitzer blast of laughter. “Of course it’s not your ‘sort of place.’ Your ‘sort of place’ is a small dark room in a library somewhere. That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point, then?” she answered sharply. She realized he’d already succeeded in wounding her pride—and she had been so determined not to let this interaction go as their first one had. But she would find he had this way, too: of defining interactions—people, even—around his purposes.

  “The point,” he answered, leaning back in his chair, assuming an overtly professorial pose, “is that this place and your gallery are two different versions of the same thing. Twenty-thousand-dollar paintings, or two grand a year for the privilege of sitting up here and drinking an eighteen-dollar cocktail. Different packaging for different customers, but the same product, for the same reason.”

  His assistant returned with his coffee. “Should I have them get the car, Colonel?” she asked as she placed the cup and saucer on the table, giving Judith a thinly disguised look of disdain.

  “Go down and have them wait,” he answered. “I need to have a chat with her.” Judith watched his assistant absorb this like a physical blow—though of course she didn’t protest—and she walked away.

  The Colonel studied Judith’s face in a more leisurely way now, as though he was examining singly her lips, cheeks, forehead, nose. Staring firmly back at his eyes didn’t lessen the discomfort of this: It was as if their lightening color—the dark blue of their outer rings sliding progressively through lighter shades to something almost white around his pupils—gave them a disorienting concave depth.

  Finally he released her from this tyranny of his two eyes—took a sip of his coffee, lifted a briefcase from beside his chair, and took out a plain manila folder. He opened it and made a show of examining its contents. “Judith Klein Bulbrook,” he began. “Born June 8th, 1983. Ages five to eighteen, attended Gustav Girls’ Academy. Graduated class valedictorian, plus a whole list of other things besides. Went to college at Yale, graduated from there summa cum laude”—he mangled the pronunciation— “and wrote a thesis titled ‘Sacred Architectural Motifs and the Modern Artistic Mind,’ which I’ll bet is just as much of a page-turner as it sounds. Parents, David Bulbrook and Hannah Klein Bulbrook, both PhDs of English literature at Evans College, both killed on 9/11. Sincere condolences, by the way,” he muttered, his eyes on the folder. (These were the only times he ever appeared uncomfortable: when he had to show, or dissemble, anything like pity.) “Dropped out of a PhD program at Princeton,” he resumed, “moved to Los Angeles six weeks later. Registered Democrat since April 2001, but at least you’ve never voted. No medical history of interest besides some work on your nose at a French hospital”—he glanced up at her— “non-cosmetic, from the looks of it.” He flipped a page. “Most of your credit-card charges are for groceries and delivery food, and you’re fairly well set for money, although I’d advise you not to keep $876,342.39 in a single Citibank checking account that only accrues .05 percent annually. But then, it’s obvious the nuances of personal finance are lost on you, considering you’ve spent close to eighty thousand dollars to rent a one-bedroom off Highland Avenue. What else…” He flipped another page. “You have an aunt who works at a Bikram yoga studio in Denver, but there’s no reason to think you knew that, since you two haven’t spoken in years. You have a cousin in Europe you email with sometimes, but that’s the only family there is to speak of. No close friends, no one you call regularly. Recently unemployed”—here he smirked— “but that’s hardly your fault. Prior to that a consistent employment history, though no one you worked with had much to say about you personally, good or bad. Sex here and there, but only sex, and only here and there.” He closed the folder, dropped it on the table. “So it would seem to me your life consists of dinners alone in a shitty apartment, a job you just lost that was the only reason you had for getting up in the morning, sex let’s say six times a year, and if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, there’d be one or zero people at your funeral, depending on whether your aunt could get time off from the yoga studio. That about the size of it?”

  She had found it riveting to hear herself explained to herself in this way. Her eyes had fallen to the folder where he’d dropped it on the table. Her entire life had fit in that folder. It was another moment before she looked up at him and answered, “Yes, that’s the size of it.”

  “Shows what a degree from Yale is worth,” he snickered.

  She didn’t know whether she’d been able to resist his gaze before, but she felt herself yielding to it in some new way now. “I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do,” she told him.

  He nodded his shaved head, as though acknowledging something to himself in this. Then he folded his hands over his sizable stomach, and told her, “Here are some things about me. My father worked at the Denton poultry slaughterhouse in West Texas. He was drunk, and then he was dead before I was eight. My mother was born again and tried to make a living as a Christian music singer. I spent my childhood in the back of a Chrysler Sedan, driving to revivals and church picnics, anywhere we could eat for free. When I was twelve I went to live with my uncle in California, who owned a two-hundred-person bingo parlor. And despite the heartbreaking tragedy and crippling poverty of my upbringing, I somehow managed to get into the gaming business myself. When the state of Mississippi in its wisdom legalized gambling in Tunica County in 1990, I had ground broken before the Vegas casinos could even find it on a map. Gambling revenue in Tunica went from ten million dollars a year when I started to a billion a year today. That’s profit even someone with your limited understanding of finance can appreciate. Today I own the tallest building on the Las Vegas strip by about twenty floors, plus nineteen other casinos from New Orleans to Michigan. I have five private residences, my own jet, a horse that’s going to run in the Kentucky Derby, and a hundred-foot yacht. I’m a proud George W. Bush Pioneer twice over, I’ve slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, and I sit on so many boards and panels and industry associations that even Shelly Adelson has to kiss my ass at parties. And again, I miraculously accomplished all this without the benefit of even a single semester at Yale.

  “So pop quiz, Miss Summa-Whatever-It-Was, Miss Daughter-of-Two-PhDs who grew up to hand people a piece of paper in an art gallery. Which of us knows more about life. You or me?” When she didn’t answer right away, he grinned with satisfaction. “Exactly. And now if you listen closely, I’ll explain something to you.” This injunction was unnecessary: Judith was listening closely.

  “Every person lives by an idea,” he declared. “And I’ll prove it to you.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, produced a checkbook and a pen. With a few strokes, he wrote out a check—held it up. “This is a check for two million dollars, made out to Judith Klein Bulbrook. Do you see this?” She did: In handwriting she recognized from the back of the card he had sent was her name, and beneath it the words “Two million dollars and 00/100,” signed by Colonel Harold Ferguson. She had to admit, it was a compelling sight—a check with her name on it, for that amount of money. “I’m just going to assume you understand by now that I’m honest. I’m going to assume you understand that if I gave you this check, you could go down to your local Citibank and deposit two million dollars in that dusty checking account of yours. You understand that, don’t you?” She nodded. “Good. I’ll give you this check if you crawl under the table and suck my dick. Don’t worry, no one will stop you. The owner wants to build one of these in my casino on the strip. I’ll pay you two million dollars
to see that overeducated head of yours bobbing up and down in my lap while I sit here. What do you say?”

  Judith’s face darkened. “No,” she said.

  He let out his burst of laughter—slapped the table in a sort of angry delight and ripped the check neatly in two. “Exactly. Exactly! Because you live by an idea. And your idea is that you’re sad. You’re so, so sad that you believe money doesn’t matter to you. $876,000 or $2,876,000, it’s all the same because your parents died.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Well, guess what? Fuck your parents. Fuck David, and fuck his wife Hannah.” She actually felt herself begin to tremble as he said these things; the immediacy, the physicality of her response was shocking to her. “Like I told you, I’m honest,” he said—not as apology, of course, but as explanation. “And I am going to tell you what every other person in this room and in that city down there is thinking. They don’t give a fuck about David and Hannah, either. Two strangers who died almost a decade ago? They don’t care. You know what they care about? Eighteen-dollar cocktails. Twenty-thousand-dollar paintings. Getting a blowjob, or a promotion, or another gram or second or inch of whatever it is they’ve decided they can’t live without. Because that is how the world works.” She noticed that redness had appeared at the crown of his head. “All your Ivy League friends and your art-gallery pals would like you to think there’s so much more to it than that, but in fact it’s all very simple. This world spins based on one principle and one principle only: Accrual. Getting More, having More. That is what makes the world go round.” The redness had now spread down to his forehead. “Forget your paintings of nothing, forget the sadness you think you owe to your dead parents. It’s all bullshit. Let me tell you something: Your boss fired you like that.” He snapped his fingers—loud, cracking. “He didn’t ask a question, I didn’t even have to insist. How many people in your life do you think wouldn’t fuck you over for a couple hundred thousand dollars? You think that aunt wouldn’t? Or that cousin in Europe? How much do they really care that your parents died? Do you actually believe they matter to anyone anymore but you?” The redness had spread to his face—darkened his nose across the gaping nostrils. “Not many people have the courage to live by my idea. They’d rather tell themselves fairy tales: God’s grace, universal brotherhood, human kindness. I bet your parents were big believers in human kindness, right up until the moment the five most devout people they ever had the bad luck to come across crashed their plane into a building. I think that tells you everything you need to know about God’s grace right there. In the end, my idea is the only one that matters. The only one that counts. And you want to know how I know?” He placed a single finger on the table—the coffee cup rattled in its saucer. “Me, sitting here. I am here because I’m not afraid of how the world works. I made myself how the world works.”

  He leaned back in his chair, folded his hands across his stomach again. The redness of his face slowly receded. Then his eyes went back to work on her face. “I admire you for having the courage to live by your own idea,” he continued. “It’s the wrong one, of course, but either way it takes courage. And you don’t come across many truly courageous people.” And now she felt herself blush again—deeply, uninhibitedly—because to be called courageous by him struck her as the answer to a problem she had had with herself her entire life. “And I know what a person with the strength to devote themselves fully to an idea can accomplish, provided it’s the right idea. Provided it’s my idea. Provided,” he said, “you’re interested.”

  A glint near the pale rings of his pupils suggested to her that he knew she was interested—was more than interested: enthralled. But it seemed necessary—to him, to her—that she say it. Her eyes fell on the Buddha statue behind him: the calm, pupilless eyes, the drapery, the serene indifferent smile. She looked back at the Colonel. “Yes, I’m interested.”

  He opened his briefcase again and took out a single laminated page, placed it on the table between them—did this almost gently. Evidently, there were some things that commanded his reverence. On the page was a digital rendering of a tower: widest at its base, rising in stacks of tapering circular floors, each floor lined with arched black windows, the cream-colored façade toward the bottom deepening into blood red at the top, suggesting a gathering momentum in its ascent. Around this tower were clustered several smaller buildings—a concert hall, a shopping center, a sports arena, she would learn. Directly in front of the tower was a lake, dotted with tiny sailboats. “This is the Babylon Center,” he told her. “Twenty million square feet of gaming, entertainment, retail, and residence. It’s going to be the largest development in Las Vegas history, a city within the city: my city. Right now downtown Las Vegas is nothing but pawnshops, meth dens, vacant lots, and city land they don’t even know how to get rid of. I’m going to turn all that into this.” He tapped the page. “Everyone else in my industry is running for the hills—or to Macau. I’m not. I’m staying. I’m building. People don’t seem to realize we’re running out of America. There isn’t much of it left. And the time to get the remainder is when you can buy it for thirty cents on the dollar.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she breathed quietly—not at any one aspect of what she’d seen or heard, but rather at all of it: at the scale of this ex nihilo creation.

  “What I am offering you is an opportunity,” he told her. “You can go on nursing your secret sadness until you end up as an old woman buying a week’s worth of cat food at the grocery store because you don’t like leaving the house. Or you can help build a city.”

  She was hardly unwilling—but a practical problem presented itself to her. “But I don’t know anything about … the gambling industry. What would I do for you?”

  “First of all, it’s the gaming industry,” he corrected her roughly. “Gambling is something the Mafia runs and you can get your thumbs broken doing it. Gaming is fun for the whole family. And in the future, you never have to tell me any of the long list of things you know nothing about. I’m well aware. For starters,” he continued, “you’ll buy art for my casinos. I may actually be able to get some return on your $150,000 degree, believe it or not. If nothing else, there are dealers who’ll be impressed by the sound of the word ‘Yale.’ After that,” he said with a loose shrug, “we’ll see. Not everyone has the stomach for Las Vegas real estate. But I have a feeling you just might.” Already he was artful in pulling the threads of her emotions—yanking her with an insult, drawing her back with a compliment—playing herself against herself. And already, too, she was aware he was doing it—but found she didn’t have it in her to resist. “To begin with, I’m going to move you out of your one-bedroom off Highland and into one of my properties in Las Vegas. I’ll have one of my personal shoppers work with you to create a look that won’t remind people of an Oreo cookie. If you’re going to represent me, you need to look expensive. I’ll also set you up with a financial planner to do something real with your parents’ money. I’ll even pay you a salary. But what I’m really giving you is an education. Not the one you got from your history of modern whateverthefuck professor, or from your parents. A real education. Think of it as enlightenment.”

  He picked up the paper, returned it to his briefcase; he stood up—she did, too. He surveyed her again, with a certain finality now: standing in the rooftop garden, wearing the butterfly necklace he’d given her, having agreed to go to Las Vegas and enter his employ. “Not many people would have turned down the deal I offered you,” he told her—and his smile spread across his face. “Even a lot of men would have at least tried to negotiate a little. Maybe you think that proves something. But someday you’re going to suck my dick for free. Because that’s just the way the world works. And when that happens, I’m going to remind you of this conversation.” He extended his hand, she shook it; he seemed to make a point of surrounding hers completely with his own. “I’m glad to have you,” he told her. She was blushing again when he let go. He picked up his briefcase and left.

  She stayed in the garden for
a long time—felt the need to pay for an eighteen-dollar cocktail. She sat at the table until the sun began to dip behind the rarefied real estate of the Hollywood Hills, and watched the light of the sunset on the Buddha’s face—sparkling orange and red withdrawing down the profile before shadow. Then she stood up and left. She had not been able to resolve a question she had posed to herself—couldn’t resolve it then, or any of the other times it came to her mind over the following months: not as she watched her belongings packed once again into cardboard boxes, this time by movers he’d hired, for her relocation to Las Vegas; not as she flew on his private jet to Berlin, or to Hong Kong, or to Art Basel in Switzerland, to purchase art for him; not as she sat in the waiting room before the surgery on her nose—which she was made to understand was a condition of her employment—or as she was wheeled around in the salon chair to see her new hair in the mirror. She didn’t know the answer on the night they slept together for the first time, and when she awoke to see him standing naked before the full-length mirror, staring at himself with an almost savage rigor. And she didn’t know when she flew back from Amsterdam, and landed in McCarran Airport, felt the blast of dry, desert air as she came outside, and got into the car that was waiting for her—the Polaroid left crumpled in the pocket of the seat in front of her on the airplane.

  In none of these moments, or in all the time she worked for the Colonel, was Judith ever certain whether what she had consented to was more like captivity, or liberation.

  2. JONAH UPON THE DRY LAND

  Ash-colored mountains, stark and jagged and still, stood in the far distance before a cloudless sky of dilute blue. From these mountains, unfurling like a carpet or seeking the foreground like ocean to shore, were miles and miles of uncultivated valley, murky yellow-green in color—interrupted at some unremarkable point by the farthest sloped, cracked curb, the final chain-link fence that represented the outer edge of the exploded sprawl of Las Vegas across the desert. And several miles of asphalt and strip mall and tract of identical ranch-style house and body shop and windowless strip club and billboard (gun show, restaurant, divorce attorney) inward from this was the corner on which Jonah found himself—standing beside a telephone pole to which was taped a handwritten sign on yellow paper, with a phone number and the words, WE BUY HOUSES! CASH!