The Book of Jonah (13 page)

Now two of the three packs of cigarettes were empty, the third only half full. The neck of the three-hundred-dollar bottle of Scotch poked out from the under the couch at his feet; the Rolling Stones album was beginning to repeat for the fifth time. He didn't want to think he was crazy, of course—but his dissatisfaction with the explanation went beyond that: It was visceral, instinctive. An explanation of insanity felt insufficient to him—in some strange way, too easy. You could, he thought, assert that seeing things was a symptom of madness, just as you could assert that sneezing was a symptom of the flu. But in both cases you had to allow that the symptom—the vision, the sneeze—might actually be attributable to something else.

But, then, what else?

Omitting drugs and stress and insanity—what did that leave?

Abruptly he thought of his conversation with the Hasid in the subway. What if this man had cursed him? Doomed him to repeat the experiences of the biblical prophet he'd been named after? He grabbed his laptop from where it was sitting underneath the coffee table, did some searching, and found the text of the King James Version of Jonah online. What he read wasn't very enlightening, though: There were “mariners” and a place called Joppa and a ship heading to someplace called Tarshish, plus the whale, which didn't actually do much besides provide the setting for a somewhat tedious prayer. Little of the story seemed to correspond to the one he'd been told by the Hasid, let alone what he'd seen. This Jonah had been instructed to “cry against” the city of Nineveh. He hadn't been instructed to do anything, not in any way he could understand, at least. He hardly thought he was in any position to “cry against” New York, either. Crowded subways and inflated cost of living aside, he loved the city enough that it had been heartbreaking for him to see it destroyed. Plus, in the end, Nineveh was specifically not destroyed, which suggested the biblical story had the opposite message of what he'd witnessed.

He slapped the computer shut in frustration. Strictly speaking, he was not even named after the biblical Jonah. He had been named after an uncle on his father's side who'd lived his whole life in Newark and who'd been dead for forty years. The most remarkable thing he'd ever heard said about that Jonah Jacobstein was that he'd invented a prototype for the front-loading washing machine. And as he began to speculate on ways he might lift the Hasid's curse, the whole idea seemed increasingly asinine, sitcom-farcical—utterly incommensurate as a cause with the effects with which he'd been afflicted.

What about the Hebrew, then? Could there be some clue to something there? He picked up the envelope from the floor and smoothed it out on the coffee table, took the pen and tried to re-create the characters he had seen. He made a few curved lines, a squiggle; his knowledge that Hebrew was written right to left only hampered his efforts. And even if he could re-create the words, he'd be no more able to understand them now than he'd been when he'd first seen them. He tossed the pen across the coffee table. He should have paid more attention in Hebrew school, he thought—with more grimness than irony.

But Hebrew school had at the time seemed a form of sanctioned abuse. Every Sunday and every Wednesday after school, he would be driven by his father to the Jewish Community of Roxwood, the local Reconstructionist synagogue. He'd go down into the finished basement, where the four classrooms constituting the religious school were located, and suffer through two hours' worth of Hebrew vocabulary lessons, Israeli history lessons, Torah lessons, prayer lessons. These would be doled out by Jewish studies or Hebrew majors from one of the local colleges, many of whom showed only marginally greater interest in being there than he did. The whole experience was given the particular piquancy of injustice, as well, due to the fact that Jonah's non-Jewish friends didn't have to endure anything like it.

His early experiences of synagogue were similar in that they were characterized chiefly by boredom. Services included interminable stretches of Hebrew, which he, along with 90 percent of the congregation, couldn't understand. Seemingly every other prayer required everyone to Rise, and then thirty seconds later to Be Seated, making escape into daydreaming impossible. On the other hand, the more closely Jonah paid attention to the service, the more repetition he noticed. Even a basic Friday night Shabbat service lasted more than ninety minutes; a Saturday morning Torah service took two and a half hours. And the High Holiday services—attendance at which was categorically unavoidable—took all day. His father never made them stay the entire time, of course—his own participation having more to do with guilt than conviction—but every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Jonah could count on being in synagogue for something like three hours in the evening and then five hours the following day—which, to a ten-year-old accustomed to thirty-minute cartoons and Game Boy, felt as if it stretched toward eternity.

When he got older, Jonah was at least permitted to sit in the balcony with his friends. The rabbi would glare up at them from the pulpit as they laughed at jokes about the cantor or any other congregant they noticed worth lampooning, passed between them copies of
Sports Illustrated
or
Uncanny X-Men
. Those moments of camaraderie and mild defiance were probably his best memories of being in temple
—
though eventually, inevitably, an usher would appear and scold them with the shame of five thousand years of disrespected tradition, and the clutch would be forced into silence or broken up altogether.

Like almost all the Jews in his grade—of his generation—he'd had a bar mitzvah. For six months to the burden of Hebrew school was added the burden of weekly
haftorah
lessons, followed by the abject terror of the moment itself—his hand trembling as he traced the
yad
across the parchment of the Torah. But after his bar mitzvah he was finally allowed to stop going to Hebrew school, and soon after that his parents got divorced. Jonah's compulsory participation in Jewish ritual ended along with his parents' marriage.

Occasionally during college he would go to services, but it was always done from some nebulous feeling of guilt—the same feeling, Jonah imagined, that had prompted his father to force his attendance as a child. By hour two, the guilt was always more than assuaged, and Jonah would find himself eyeing the young women in attendance, identifying something undeniably erotic in their shows of piety: the calm faces, the hair combed to sedate luster. Then he would feel guilty all over again, for entirely new reasons, and soon leave.

After college he basically stopped formally practicing Judaism altogether. Zoey, in the midst of a brief period of Judaic fervor following the death of her grandmother, had insisted one year he go with her to evening Yom Kippur services at a Reform congregation on the Upper West Side (this death and the subsequent necessity of going to
shul
being her excuse for contacting him again after six months). But the lack of Hebrew in the Reform service bothered Jonah for some reason—as if the service didn't count if he could understand it—and Zoey was by turns bored and teary-eyed with grief. They decided it would be more spiritually edifying to spend the following day strolling Central Park in unstructured contemplation—and predictably they ended up fucking.

Jonah's relationship to Judaism was additionally complicated by the fact that, while his father was Jewish, his mother was not, so he was really only half Jewish—or not Jewish at all, as far as the Orthodox were concerned. He'd once mentioned this issue of matrilineal descent to his father on a car ride to Hebrew school, citing it as a rather compelling reason why he shouldn't have to attend. His father only shrugged nonchalantly and and said, “If we'd been in Germany, they would have killed you. That makes you a Jew.”

But none of this—his status as a half-Jew, or a quasi-Jew or whatever he was, or the fact that he found the actual practice of Judaism so tedious—stopped Jonah from identifying himself as Jewish, or from enjoying being Jewish. Passovers and Hanukkahs—holidays celebrated outside of the synagogue—were, he thought, a lot of fun. He liked seeing his father's side of the family: Becky and his other cousins, his grandparents (when they were alive), his aunts and uncles; he liked the food-driven narrative of the Passover celebration, he liked that Hanukkah involved a two-minute menorah lighting followed by an evening of presents, latkes, and dreidel. He definitely enjoyed playing Seven Minutes in Heaven with Lisa Zuckerman at his bar mitzvah reception; it was during B'nai B'rith Youth Organization sleepovers that he'd gotten high for the first time, gotten past second base for the first time. More generally, he liked the community of Judaism: the instant bond he felt toward any -berg, -man, or -stein he encountered, the connection he could claim to Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Sandy Koufax, the Coen brothers, Bob Dylan, and everyone else in the familiar litany of distinguished Jews.

As Jonah sat on his couch, conducting this review of his spiritual biography—now lighting a fresh cigarette with the remnants of the previous one—he thought how somewhere in all these experiences and associations, good and bad, was or ought to have been an experience of the holy, the eternal, the sacred, the Prime Mover—the above, the beyond, the whatever. (The Jewish Community of Roxwood had never been very picky about notions of divinity, it being one of the more liberal institutions in a very liberal town.) But Jonah—now standing, starting to pace his apartment from couch to windows—had never considered himself a spiritual person, and certainly never during any of his mind-numbing hours in synagogue, or while singing
“Dayenu”
at his aunt Sheila's house, or while fumbling to unclip Suzie Meister's bra under the bleachers at a BBYO picnic, had he ever felt anything like the presence of the Lord. When the whole congregation sang the prayers the whole congregation knew, he felt a sense of beauty and community; when he and his father both cried during
Schindler's List,
it was moving and unsettling because it was the only time he'd ever cried with his father; he felt a unique bond with his Jewish friends. There was never in any of that a sense of elevation, however: He never for a moment thought the prayers he joined in saying were actually going anywhere; he never felt himself in contact with something greater, or believed that anyone else was, either.

If he'd thought about it—and he rarely had—he would have allowed the possibility of something Almighty-ish: some sort of vague and unfathomable field of enormous but inscrutable power. He thus understood divinity the way most people understand Wi-Fi. But he certainly didn't believe this meta-field, whatever it might be, had any role in human life. It certainly didn't have any role in his life.

Until now, it seemed.

He stopped pacing. He looked over at the wrinkled envelope on the coffee table, his chicken-scratch attempts at Hebrew visible across a creased corner.

He remembered how, in elementary school, he'd once told a teacher he wanted to be attorney general. He'd had no idea what the attorney general did, of course; he'd only understood it was an important and highly respected position—someone who appeared on TV a lot. He remembered, too, when he was in high school, coming home from a girlfriend's house or a party, how he would sometimes go into the living room of his sleeping house and stand before the floor-to-ceiling windows, with their views of dark Massachusetts hills. He would stand there in the silence, and with a kind of stillness of mind feel as if he were announcing himself to some great mystery—feel, very clearly, that he was only at the start of something vast, and profound.

Jonah had always understood himself, in other words, as having some great destiny. He had always believed in something More: something more for himself, something more attainable. He had never known what this More was—had certainly never thought of it as having any connection to Judaism or to spirituality. But it occurred to him now that it was a notion in which he had always had a certain faith. Even through college and in the years immediately following—when his life had been made up mostly of drinking and getting high and going to Phish shows and reducing as much as possible the impact of the hours he spent at his job as a paralegal—he would see himself as pursuing this Moreness.

Nebulous fourth-grade aspirations notwithstanding, he'd never really wanted to be a lawyer. But he'd understood that law school was always an option for him: a rip cord he could pull that would deliver him into an adult life of remuneration, of parental and societal approval. Eventually he'd decided to pull this cord, and, characteristically, once he'd settled on becoming a lawyer, he dedicated himself to becoming the most skilled, the most successful—the most More—lawyer he could be. Jonah had never lacked for ambition, and it had struck him more than once that what he liked most about his job was that it gave his ambition, his aspirations, such a clearly defined channel. He wondered now, though, if in following this channel he'd lost the essential quality of the More he believed in. Because what was most remarkable about what he'd seen—more remarkable than the clarity, more remarkable than the instant sobriety, more remarkable than the humbling of doubt—was that the vision hadn't surprised him. It was as if he had been waiting to see the total whiteness, his own aged face, the collapse of the Empire State Building—perhaps not waiting to see these specifically, but waiting to see something of that magnitude. It was the lack of surprise, the sense of unconscious expectation realized—like finding yourself there when you wake up in the morning—that finally made every Logical Explanation inadequate. The problem was, he knew the explanation. Somehow, without even knowing it, Jonah had always been a believer.

So, he concluded, he was fucked. He sensed something fundamentally irreconcilable between this vision and his life as he had known it. In the crudest terms: Cunningham Wolf partners didn't have visions. This realization now led to an immediate, panicky mourning for his old life (so much for the blow job in Le Bernardin!) as well as a deep anxiety about what his life would now become. He imagined himself in a hair shirt, shouting at people in Central Park, in and out of Bellevue until he was inevitably loaded up with so many meds that his greatest cognitive exercise would be drooling. At best he would end up like that Hasid: wearing a heavy coat all summer, living in Borough Park, endlessly walking to and from synagogue with his bald wife and nineteen children in tow. Or he would simply become one of those sad, shabby figures on the subway, thumbing through a tattered Bible, making anyone who sat next to him uncomfortable with the murmurs of his praying lips.