The Book of Jonah (34 page)

“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?”

Max opened his mouth to answer—then made a show of changing his mind about whatever he was going to say. “Nothing. Of course nothing. Have it your way, Rabbi,” he said. “Smoke your weed, stroll among your exotic trees. Who did it ever hurt, right? As for myself, I'm going to get ready to introduce a young lady from California to dear, dirty Amsterdam.” He casually dropped what remained of the joint into the canal, then pulled open the door at the bow to the stairs beneath, walked down into the houseboat.

Jonah remained on the deck, pulled uneasily at one of the buttons of his coat. He took out and lit another cigarette—for warmth this time, he told himself. The problem was that you could never precisely trace the trajectory of Max's innuendo, his irony. This was intentional, of course—tactical: He didn't want you to know what the fuck he was getting at. And this inevitably left you feeling exposed—even if you had no cause to.

Besides, Jonah thought further, there was a quite obvious reason he might be feeling anxious, beyond anything Max had said, beyond even having woken up from the dream: He hadn't gotten high yet today. Smoking as regularly as he did now, sobriety inevitably became a little uncomfortable—its perceptions a bit too aggressive, too sharp-edged. He wasn't proud of this, but at least there was a simple solution. Within a ten-minute walk of where he stood there were a dozen coffeeshops, each with its own menu of among the best strains of marijuana on the planet. He didn't intend to spend the majority of his waking hours stoned for the rest of his life—but for as long as he was doing that, he was in the right place.

So, he thought, weed, but breakfast first—a good way to start any day, and indeed, the way he started nearly every day.

He buttoned his coat, then walked down the houseboat's gangway and onto the cobbled street running beside the canal. The streets of this neighborhood were always quiet, but were especially so at this hour of the afternoon, in this weather. Only occasionally did people ride by him on bicycles; other than an elderly woman carrying bags of groceries over a half-moon bridge up the canal, he didn't see anyone out walking. He could hear birds chirping—still a pleasantly unusual sound to him after so many years of living in Midtown Manhattan—the distant low of a canal boat's air horn.

At Lindengracht, he turned and came to the little red-awninged bakery he preferred, went inside and ordered from the apple-cheeked, middle-aged woman behind the counter. He'd come in enough times that she recognized him—always smiled with nebulous sympathy when he tried to order his coffee and croissant in Dutch. He was aware his accent was terrible, and this handful of words represented pretty much all of the language he knew, but even so—it still felt like an accomplishment when she handed him the steaming paper cup, the bag with the warm pastry inside. He took these back onto the street, and ate, as he always did, leaning against a lamppost overlooking the water.

This experience of Amsterdam was far different from his previous visit, backpacking through Europe after his junior year of college. Then he and his friends had spent their time getting drunk and high in the noisy coffeeshops around the train station, wandering the Rijksmuseum while tripping on mushrooms, gawking and laughing at the prostitutes in the red-lighted windows in the Red Light District. He'd imagined finding that sort of drug-fueled oblivion when he decided to come here. Instead, he'd found a much more pacific existence: living on the couch in the back of the houseboat, getting high alone as often as with anyone else, and spending his days in pursuit of whatever he identified as his whim—which typically meant spending his days not doing much of anything at all: sitting in Vondelpark and listening to Toots and the Maytals, working on the KenKen in the
International Herald Tribune
, or, as today, visiting the botanical gardens. It was still drug-fueled oblivion, only in a much more tranquil key. And—dreams and Max's soliloquies notwithstanding—he believed this version of Amsterdam had turned out to be just the refuge he'd needed after the disasters of New York.

It wasn't only refuge from the visions he felt he'd found here, either. It was refuge from the whole of his New York life. Indeed, from the perspective of munching a croissant at some indeterminate hour of the afternoon—watching, as he did now, a pair of ducks paddling up the canal—that life seemed ludicrous to him: getting up in the dark to work an eighteen-hour day at Cunningham Wolf; going to sleep on the floor in front of his desk, waking up three hours later to do it all again; meeting Zoey for an hour in her apartment, showering, taking a cab to be on time for dinner with Sylvia that night. It had even occurred to him that the visions had simply been his overburdened brain's way of crying uncle. The fact was, since he'd come to Amsterdam, there hadn't been any visions. He didn't think there would be any, either. The weed, he sensed, had a suppressive effect here, but even more than that, the atmosphere of Amsterdam didn't seem conducive to them—to the sort of pitiless exposure that characterized them. Everything here felt less urgent, less consequential: the canals, the cobblestones, the long northern twilights, the uniform flower boxes beneath every window. He perceived a kind of gentleness, a safety to the city, even on the rare occasion when he wasn't stoned. Amsterdam's very location reinforced this idea for him—tucked, as it were, in an upper corner of Europe.