The Book of Jonah (33 page)

 

III.
AMSTERDAM, OR THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

 

 

While he lived in Amsterdam, Jonah was plagued by a recurring dream. The dream took place in a banquet hall of fantastic luxury: chandeliers spreading octopus arms dripping with sparkling diadems above a room lined in molded walnut paneling; tables arrayed with gold flatware, china plates, crystal vases capped with roses of pink and red—all of it of a class he would have thought had sunk with the
Titanic,
as it were; waiters in black tie circling with green-glass bottles of champagne or with trays of caviar and lobster tail poised on the pads of five white-gloved fingers. The guests at this banquet were dressed immaculately in tuxedos and evening gowns, and Jonah found himself seated at a table with Doug Chen, and Aja Puvvada, and other Cunningham Wolf partners. Sylvia was sitting beside him, resplendent in a shimmering dress of pale green, smiling with warmth and satisfaction.

At the front of the hall was a stage and dais, and after a time Lloyd Davis Cooper himself appeared: managing partner of Cunningham Wolf for the last two decades, dressed in a white tuxedo and carrying a large and propitiously ribboned envelope. “The time has come to announce our newest partner,” he declared, speaking in the absurdly dignified Boston-gentleman's-club accent familiar to Jonah from the speeches he gave at the firm's annual holiday parties. At his words, the lights dimmed, and spotlights began to wheel across the hall, as though searching for the anointed associate.

At this point, it would occur to Jonah that this was a very unusual way to announce partnership at a law firm. But this thought only sent ripples across the surface of the dream—didn't shatter it—nor did it stop him from feeling a breathless, heart-gripping elation when Lloyd Davis Cooper tore open the envelope and read, “Jonah Jacobstein!” As the spotlights surrounded him and applause filled the hall, tears of happiness would spring to Jonah's eyes—in the dream, and where he slept on the couch in the back of the houseboat.

The partners rose in a standing ovation, Doug Chen nodded in approval. Sylvia beamed, and Jonah kissed her on the lips. Then he stood and walked onto the stage. Lloyd Davis Cooper produced a green jacket and slipped this over Jonah's shoulders. (This latter detail, apparently drawn from watching golf highlights on SportsCenter, was especially baffling to Jonah in his waking life.) He took his place at the dais—triumphant, grateful, ready to thank everyone: his parents, his colleagues, his law school professors, his elementary school teachers, friends, Sylvia, everyone—thank them all so earnestly.

And then he noticed, at the back of the room, a Hasidic Jew, smiling devilishly at him. This man resembled not so much one particular Hasid as he did the idea of any Hasid: He had a Hasid's distinguishing characteristics but in exaggerated, almost caricatured form—like the costume Jonah had worn in eighth grade to play Avram the Bookseller in his junior high school's production of
Fiddler on the Roof.
He was dressed all in black—black overcoat, black hat, oversize black boots—his beard had a sort of gaudy charcoal blueness to it, his
payos
dangled in wild curls. As Jonah met his eyes, the Hasid wagged a finger at him, tapped his nose, wagged his finger again, sharpened his devilish grin. Jonah cleared his throat, returned his attention to the other guests. The spotlights seemed to have brightened; he felt himself getting hot.

“I just want to say…” he began. His eyes darted nervously to the back of the hall—but the Hasid had vanished. Relieved, Jonah continued. “I just want to say, that I've learned if you work hard, if you dedicate yourself to a goal and—”

Plunk!
Something had struck him on the cheek—soft, round, somewhat slimy. He looked around, but saw only the expectant faces of partners. “If you dedicate yourself to a goal and commit yourself to—”

Plunk!
He was struck again! And this time the off-white, grease-dripping sphere bounced from his forehead and onto the dais—and Jonah saw: He had been hit with a matzo ball.

He quickly wiped the grease from his face, glanced anxiously in the direction of his table. Sylvia was frowning; Doug Chen lifted and lowered his hand in disappointment. “What I mean is, becoming a partner was an ambition of mine for a long time, and if you believe you can accomplish—”

Plunk!

This one struck him right on the nose.

He spotted the Hasid ducking behind a table to the right, tittering fiendishly. “Security!” Jonah yelled. “That man is attacking me!”

The crowd started muttering—and Jonah could tell these were the uncomfortable mutters of an audience losing faith in the speaker. Had no one else noticed the Hasid? Had no one else seen the matzo balls? He plunged ahead. “I worked very hard for this!” he declared.

Plunk!

Jonah looked frantically around the room—the Hasid was nowhere to be seen. “Because I…” he resumed, hurriedly wiping his face. He spotted the Hasid doing a leg-kicking Russian folk dance, a bottle balanced on his head. “That man!” Jonah shouted, pointing.

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.