The Book of Jonah (21 page)

By the time she had dinner with David and Hannah a few weeks later, this love had taken on the dimensions of near ecstasy. She told them about reading Proust in French, about her brilliant Philosophies of Religion professor. Hannah and David just smiled and nodded at this unusual bout of verbosity from their daughter. This dinner, David told Hannah that night in their hotel room, was the moment when he saw that their daughter really had graduated from high school—from their care.

At the end of the meal, as they were saying good night, Judith began to cry. “What is it, honey?” Hannah asked her. Misunderstanding the tears, she said, “You'll see us again for Parents' Weekend.”

“No, it isn't that, it's just … I just want to thank you for giving me all this,” she told them.

“We didn't give you anything,” David said. “You earned it.”

“No, I know, but…” Judith began, not quite sure how to articulate the nature of the gratitude she felt. She looked at her two parents—and felt she saw them, maybe for the first time, not only as her parents, but as people: a married couple getting toward the end of middle age, visiting their only daughter at college; her father's hair now closer to entirely gray than black, the deepening creases of his face giving him a sort of durable, late-in-life handsomeness; her mother, her hair having a touch of frizziness of its own, dressed with understated elegance in a light dress with a purple shawl wrapped around her shoulders, because it was chilly that evening. They had a long drive ahead of them that night to get to Boston for their flight to California the next morning. They had sacrificed a far easier trip to make time and have dinner with her. “I feel like everything you ever told me was true,” Judith said.

The next day Judith woke up at 7:15
A.M.
—went for a run, then sat at her desk in her dorm room, reviewing her Philosophies of Religion assignment for that day, sipping green tea. Milim's alarm went off at 8:30—the roommates said a brief good morning, and Milim went to the shower around 8:45. A few minutes later Judith went to take a shower herself. When she got back to her room she noticed that Milim wasn't there—but didn't think much of it. She might have heard some shouting in the courtyard outside her window as she got dressed at 9:15. Someone ran by her door as she was putting her books in her bag. She opened the door to go to breakfast just as Milim was coming in—towels wrapped around her chest and hair, her face wet beneath her glasses. “They crashed planes into New York,” Milim said. It was several moments before Judith could decipher the meaning of this.

When she got to the lounge, half the students on her floor had gathered around the television. Many were crying; those from New York came in and out, trying over and over to call cell phones that didn't work. There remained, for Judith, something plausible—comprehensible—about the disaster as it unfolded on television. She had heard of buildings being on fire before. It seemed to her it was really a problem of engineering, of logistics: How do you put out a fire ninety stories up? She imagined that helicopters might be useful. Then, at 9:59
A.M.
, shrieking filling the lounge, filling the courtyard outside, the first tower collapsed.

It had been reported by then that one of the planes had departed from Boston, headed toward Los Angeles. But only when the tower collapsed did Judith walk to her room, and open her email, reread the itinerary her father had emailed her the night before. She saw that her parents had been booked on American Airlines Flight 11. She supposed they'd missed it. She looked at her watch, and saw that she still had a little time before she had to leave for her Philosophies of Religion class. She sat back down and finished going over the assigned reading.

As she walked across campus, the sky was incredibly clear, the campus incredibly bare, empty—the bright green grass and bordering stone buildings as if having been shaken free of people. But Judith was aware of a kind of frenetic movement at the edges of this blankness—as though just beyond her field of vision, people were running this way and that. When she got to the classroom, it was empty, the lights off. She checked her watch. She had arrived a few minutes early, she saw. She looked over the reading again. Finally a campus security guard came in and told her she had to leave: all classes had been canceled, all campus buildings were being closed.

This seemed wholly irrational to Judith—“hysteria unworthy of a school of Yale's caliber” was how she decided she'd phrase it in her letter to the
Yale Daily News
. She'd been thinking about becoming a columnist for the
YDN.
Maybe this letter could be part of her writing sample.

Milim was still in the lounge when Judith returned to her floor. When Milim saw her, she jumped up and ran after her as she went into her room—Judith could not quite close and lock the door in her face.

“Judith!” Milim said to her. “Your email—people are calling.”

“They missed the plane.”

“They missed the plane?” Milim stared at her worriedly—began to shake her head very slowly.

“Of course they missed the plane,” Judith said furiously. She was finding breathing difficult. She had the sensation of falling. Where was God? she asked herself. Where was God? “Of course they missed the plane.… They must have missed the plane.…” She was wheezing—she saw Milim and her bed careen up toward the ceiling—on television, she had seen people jumping—Where was God? She closed her eyes. She felt something constricting in her chest. An EMT was in her room. The phone was ringing. A dean was there. She was in and out, in and out—God—Hannah and David—Mom and Dad—. Where was the world she knew?

*   *   *

As she made her way blankly through the next days, it was remarkable to her that there were things to do. It turned out there was no one else to do them. She had never noticed before how small her family was. She had to return phone calls. She had to talk to lawyers. And all this activity seemed preposterous to her, given that David and Hannah Bulbrook had been murdered where they sat—burned alive in an instant, if they were lucky—or, if they were unlucky, their bodies crushed and compacted by steel, bones and skulls cracked by what was harder than bone or skull. Or else they had fallen. She could not help herself from dwelling on these possibilities—her mind unable to resist the habit of considering all possibilities. And still—there were phone calls to return. According to the email her father had sent, they had not had seats together: Hannah was in 27A, David in 16B. No one could tell her whether they'd changed seats—whether they had been apart, at the end, without even a hand to hold. Yet she was expected to sign her name. She was expected to talk. Some people were deluded enough to believe that talking remained necessary—that it remained worth doing. They sent her cards, they wrote her emails, they came to visit. They seemed to misunderstand, seemed unaware in some way that Hannah and David Bulbrook had been killed against the side of the World Trade Center. How foolish they were—how stupid—and how stupid she had been. How stupid, she thought at the funeral, looking at the pair of coffins before the
bimah—
how stupid, as she listened to the rabbi, and accepted what passed for condolences, and allowed herself to be hugged by all the same people who had hugged her at her graduation party. She watched it all as though from behind the pale mask of her face, and as she said the mourner's
kaddish
at the first
shivah
of her life, she realized now, at last—she had a secret to surpass all others. Her parents had been liars, and she had been a fool.

7.
FOR YOU, LORD, HAVE DONE AS YOU PLEASED

As Jonah was overwhelmed by his vision, the tidal regularity of the city around him was no more disturbed than the ocean by the plight of a single fish. Shifts changed, happy hours began; on Wall Street, the markets closed. Buses made their weary way crosstown, uptown, and downtown, in their Sisyphean redistribution of commuters. Mailmen—with the dignity of the last American Indians—unlocked squat blue mailboxes and dumped the day's contents into white plastic tubs. Tourists finished up at Liberty Island, or Ellis Island, or Ground Zero, and boarded trains to Times Square, because there were shows to see that night. And because it was summer, the Great Lawn in Central Park was dotted with blankets and Frisbees in flight and women sunbathing and softball games being played with a goodwill that was almost indulgent. Among those in the park was Becky, who had taken the day off work to celebrate her engagement—the princess-cut diamond on her finger glittering in the sunlight with sparks of red and purple and blue. She was reading the
New Yorker
in a skirt and a bikini top—more skin than she usually risked, but she was feeling proud and exuberant to be getting married. Meanwhile her fiancé sat at his desk, staring blankly at his computer screen, not really seeing the Excel spreadsheet before him, realizing that the anxiety of the weekend had not been escaped but rather made permanent. Subway turnstiles spun in
click-clack, click-clack;
automatic doors of clothing stores sighed open, sighed shut, offering New York shoppers the full spectrum—in color and cost and fabric, in attention to fashion, in extravagance and utility—of dress. Dolores walked down the sidewalk with a bag from Macy's, full of the three hundred dollars' worth of clothing she had bought on her boss's credit card—since he was too disorganized and generally foolish to check his own receipts. In the office of the mayor, a union official was making mildly veiled threats that sanitation workers might go on strike if their wages were not unfrozen. Philip Orengo, listening to this, was having trouble suppressing a smirk, because he knew that unions existed in name only now. Meanwhile Patrick Hooper was ordering online a five-thousand-dollar Hermès baseball glove, then decided to order two. And Aaron Seyler, in an office on Vesey Street, was on the treadmill, pushing to get his three-mile splits from six minutes down to more like five-fifty. His energy did sometimes flag in the late afternoon, so this was when he tried to get his workouts in. As he ran, his brows were knit, and even he recognized something savage in his focus. Traffic was beginning to accumulate on the FDR, and at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, and on both levels of the George Washington Bridge, and beneath the stately neo-Gothic archways of the Brooklyn Bridge. Taxis converged on JFK and LaGuardia and Midtown. Where Hicks Street ran parallel to the concrete carapace of the BQE, drivers locked their doors as the woman to whom Jonah had given forty dollars—this money now long, long gone—passed by unsteadily on the narrow strip of curb. She stopped every now and then to assess the progress of withdrawal in her body, the attenuation of the chemical warmth—her head tilted and held still, as though she were listening for a distant storm, though the sky overhead was clear, its light a late summer blue-gold that would last for hours, everyone knew: They decided to walk home from work; they made plans to eat dinner outside. Sylvia was feeling pleased, because the meeting of the Chinese investors and the American lessees of the oil field they were buying and the Angolan ministers who governed the country in which it was located had gone well. They had just taken a fifteen-minute break; she could hear the voices of the men in the hallway as she washed her hands in the empty women's bathroom. And Zoey sat in her cubicle, pondering the naked body of the actress Katie Porter, displayed on the computer screen before her. Katie Porter, eighteen—crucially, from a legal perspective, not seventeen—had a cell phone camera in one hand, with the other she held her hair up behind her head, her mouth in a dewy, soft-core porn smile. The website for which Zoey worked had paid a thousand dollars for the image, with the promise of another four thousand if it proved genuine—and it was Zoey's job to study it, and scrutinize it, and determine whether it was real.

As all this occurred, Jonah was hiding in an underground storeroom beneath a restaurant on Lexington Avenue. The space was no more than a hundred feet square, crowded with cardboard boxes of paper products, jars and cans, cases of wine and liquor. The air was stuffy and close; a narrow crack between the metal doors at the top of a steep wooden stairway leading up to the street was the only source of light, but Jonah had his eyes closed anyway, just in case. He'd seen the doors standing open and fled down here: stumbled down the stairs and pulled the doors closed behind him. He had needed to get off the street, to get away from the sight of people. There had been only so much nakedness he'd been able to take.

Now he was hunched against a silver tower of beer kegs, his arms wrapped around his chest. A crescent of sweat was forming from his forehead down his cheeks, but he made no move to wipe it away. “I'm going crazy,” he was saying to himself, over and over. “I'm going crazy.” When he'd first spoken these words, he'd regarded them as an admission, an acceptance of something—a brave concession to the facts. But the longer he stood there repeating them, mantra-like, the more he understood that they actually provided a form of solace—a solace that diminished with every repetition. If he was going crazy, he could assign clinically defined labels to what he was going through, enact medically sanctioned solutions. He could assimilate what was happening to him in a way that would leave the world as he'd always known it intact. The problem was he didn't believe he was going crazy. He hadn't believed it after Becky's party, he didn't believe it now—and he believed it less the more he tried to convince himself he did.

An abrupt buzzing filled the storeroom. Jonah straightened, startled, flattened himself against the beer kegs. Several seconds of silence passed before he realized what he'd just heard was the buzz of a text message being received on his phone. He took the phone from his pocket, lifted it to his face. The text was from Sylvia: “APPROVED for Bond St. Brett says we need to sched signing ASAP. Tomorrow AM? Call me, love.” He stared at the message, trying to gauge his reaction to it. Finally he couldn't, and returned the phone to his pocket.