The Book of Jonah (35 page)

He didn't plan on remaining here forever, of course. He figured that at some point he would return to America, start up again with his career, with dating, with all of it. But really, these plans were no more specific than those he'd had for what he'd do today when he'd gone to bed the night before. He sometimes imagined building a new life for himself in San Francisco—that city had a reputation for gentleness, too. There was no rush to decide anything, however. Every two weeks his checking account was fattened with another direct deposit from Cunningham Wolf. He could live in Amsterdam for a year off what he made in a month—easily—and that didn't even take into account his savings. He was single, he was unemployed—he owed nothing to anyone. He was allowed to get high in Amsterdam for as long as he wanted. As Max himself had said: Who did it hurt?

He threw out the croissant bag and empty cup in a wastebasket on the corner (every day the same wastebasket) and from Lindengracht headed east, into the Canal Ring—the quartet of canals radiating from the teardrop-shaped center of the city. It had gotten colder; a mistiness filled the air. He pulled the collar of his coat closed tighter around his throat.

Walking south down Herengracht, he arrived at a coffeeshop called Amnesia. It occupied the ground floor of a narrow building on the corner of the block—its door and the frames of its windows painted black, the windows themselves and a sign above the entrance etched with the coffeeshop's name in stately gold lettering. It had the look of a place that in New York would have been in the West Village, sold bespoke shoes, and Jonah had always appreciated the sophisticated restraint of this exterior—in marked contrast to the façades of so many other coffeeshops, seeking to lure in tourists with neon and cartoon animal logos.

He was reaching for the door when a group of people came out. He recognized them as being among a loose collection of expats Max had introduced him to; they often came by the houseboat for afternoons of bong hits, chess, and alt hip-hop. It was a sociable, easygoing crew—about what Jonah would have expected of people who had made getting high every day the practice not of weeks, but of years. And as they greeted him with an assortment of nonchalant heys and pats on the shoulder, Jonah found he was enormously glad to run into this group of his fellow travelers.

“Why are you out in this shit weather?” asked one, named Rafik, scowling up at the misty sky. He was Turkish, about Jonah's age, his head shaved and a Rastafied lion tattooed on the back of his neck.

“I was just going in to buy a gram of something, then go to smoke in the botanical gardens,” Jonah answered.

Rafik let out a dubious chortle. “In the rain, man?” Somehow it hadn't occurred to Jonah that this would, in fact, be a terrible day to visit the botanical gardens.

“I think there'll be greenhouses and shit,” he mumbled.

They were joined by another member of the group, named Geoff—British, an aspiring filmmaker, with a mop of curly brown hair that in appearance shaved even another year or two off his twenty-odd age. “Max was here before,” Geoff told Jonah. “Had a girl with him, too. Wasn't half bad.”

“Only an American girl would go to Amsterdam and hook up with the first other American she meets,” Rafik snorted. He had varied—and, to Jonah's mind, not altogether consistent—complaints about America. He'd described his background to Jonah once: had left Turkey for Sweden with his brother when he was a teenager, bounced around Oslo, Copenhagen, London, briefly held some regional position in the German Green Party—at some point had made his way to Amsterdam. “American girls only ever look at white guys, anyway,” he added.

“Yeah, but I'm fuckin' white, too,” Geoff responded, and he and Rafik laughed.

Cigarettes were being passed around. Jonah was glad for the excuse (sociability) to have another. “Forget about the fucking gardens, though,” Rafik said. He gestured with his cigarette to where a few others were standing nearer the canal. “Paul got some coke. A lot of coke. Good coke.” Paul, an American who had only recently started coming by the houseboat, presently stood—hovered—near the edge of the cluster of people Rafik had indicated, wearing a grease-stained sweatshirt and torn cargo pants. He was spindly, fidgety, and had an unswerving puppylike friendliness—but was maybe a bit too friendly, a bit too puppylike in demeanor; he lacked the patina of cool the others had. And, it occurred to Jonah, he was almost always broke.

“I'm glad we ran into you, matter of fact, Jonah,” Geoff now said, in a not quite offhand way. “What did you think of the new draft of
The Quest
I dropped off?”

The Quest
was the movie Geoff had (ostensibly) come to Amsterdam to make; Jonah had already acquiesced to reading two different versions of the hundred-seventy-five-page script, knew there was a third waiting for him somewhere on the houseboat. The movie told (in great detail) the story of a young British man's road trip across Europe, and his search for love, or nirvana, or something; there was a lot of sex, and a lot of descriptions of sunsets. The others in the group showed a lot of enthusiasm for the project—had all been promised roles on set when the time came to make it—but Jonah couldn't help feeling skeptical about
The Quest
's prospects. From what he could tell, the script was never finished, and only the actresses had been cast.

“I actually didn't get to it yet, I've been…” Jonah began—but could hardly claim to have been busy.

“Right, right, when you get the time,” Geoff said, nodding sharply with each monosyllabic word. Jonah had observed that Geoff had the fragile ego of a much more accomplished artist.

“So how'd Paul get good coke?” Jonah asked, trying to change the subject.

“Sold his bicycle,” Rafik snickered.

Paul, as if sensing that they were talking about him, left those by the canal and walked up to the three of them. As he raised his hand in greeting, he dropped the cigarette he'd been holding. Rafik snickered again. Paul smiled sheepishly, glancing into each of their faces in turn, reached down to retrieve it.

“We were just talking about how we're going to party tonight, brother,” Geoff said.

Paul broke into a wide smile. “They told you, Jonah?” Paul asked. Jonah nodded. “We're going to go over to Marcus's and just do the coke I got for, like, three hours. You're gonna come, right?”

Jonah had done coke a couple of times during his summer associateships, when it had appeared at parties. He'd liked it well enough—though its brain-buzzy, hyperenergized high held absolutely no attraction for him now. But more than that, as he looked at Paul's eager smile—something troubled him about the whole situation. “You should just make sure you save some for yourself, since you paid for it,” was what he came out with.

They were not a group prone to awkward silences—but Jonah had evidently managed to create one with this comment. Rafik folded his arms, scowling; Geoff eyed him with undisguised hostility. For his part, Paul looked almost hurt. “Why would I want to do that?” he said to Jonah. “These are my friends.”

“Yeah, of course, no, I only meant…”

He was rescued from having to finish this sentence when one of the group by the canal called, “Hey, shut up you guys, listen.” A woman had spoken; she had pasty skin, long, unwashed blond hair, wore an oversize Melvins T-shirt. “Listen, listen,” she urged. Watching her gaze down the canal with a stoner's airy fixation, stalks of greasy hair falling across her face, Jonah couldn't help thinking that there could not be a woman more different from Sylvia—that she was almost a parody of Sylvia. But why the hell was he thinking about Sylvia? he asked himself. From somewhere, Jonah heard faintly a synthesized beat, melodic piano, a rhythmic male voice.

“American corporate rap,” Rafik announced.

“Tupac got shot, how could he be corporate?” another in the group answered, and they all laughed.

“No, shut up, shut up, I love this song,” the Sylvia doppelgänger said. She closed her eyes, smiling placidly, tilted her cheek toward the canal—where on the opposite side, Jonah now recognized, the music was being played from a radio strapped to the back of a bicycle. The rider had stopped for something, but now he got back on, and began to pedal leisurely again. The blond woman kept pace with the rider, with the music—started to dance in a slow circle, her eyes still closed. The others laughed some more at this, and a few started dancing, too—Paul jumping around the street rather in the manner of a bee's waggle dance—while others began to sing the chorus.

And watching them all singing and dancing their way down the canal, Jonah suddenly wondered: Who are these people? A Turkish leftist Rastafarian bully; a would-be filmmaker endlessly tweaking the dialogue of his mammoth movie script; and Paul, a very kind person who in his kindness had just sold his only possession of value for a night's worth of coke. It was as though they had all washed up on the shore of the city, on the banks of the canal—refugees—castaways. And no, no movie or anything else tangible would likely come from their time here. But what did they care? This smidge of Amsterdam—circumscribed by this street, this afternoon, this fun—was enough. And Jonah felt jealous, watching them dance.

Soon the bicyclist headed down a side street, and the group rounded a corner in the opposite direction and was out of sight. Jonah stood looking down Herengracht for another moment. Then he turned toward the door of the coffeeshop.

And then he saw him!—the Hasid!—standing on the deck of a passing canal boat—tapping his nose, wagging his finger. Jonah took a lurching step forward. But no, it wasn't—no, of course it wasn't. It was just a man dressed in a dark overcoat, smoking a cigarette as the canal boat disappeared beneath a bridge.

As always in these moments, Jonah first looked around in embarrassment to see if anyone had noticed his distress. But even as he did, he understood that the only person there to comprehend the embarrassment of it, and the perturbation, and the fear, and the pall of futility it seemed to leave hanging in the air like the present mist—was him.

No, there hadn't been any visions in Amsterdam. But the day after he'd had the dream—sometimes, if he was honest, even several days after—he might catch sight of the Hasid: spot the devilish grin among the crowd waiting for a tram, or see him in the window of a distant Dutch row house, holding up a matzo ball—teasingly, tauntingly. He always vanished in an instant, almost in the moment of apprehension turned out to be someone else. Yet this never stopped Jonah from reflexively believing in the next sighting—or from feeling inexplicable instants of surprise when the Hasid turned out not to have been there once again.

He grabbed in his pocket for a cigarette, realized he already had one between his fingers. He took a drag until he began to cough—shallow, rasping. He didn't know when he'd developed a smoker's cough.

There were moments in Amsterdam—when he would unthinkingly lift two euro coins from his pocket, identifying them by weight, not finding in them anything unfamiliar, exotic; when he would be on his second joint of the night in the back of a coffeeshop, and a Bob Marley song would come on, and meet his high at just the right point—and in such moments Jonah could believe he occupied his life as fully, as naturally, as any of those he'd just watched dancing along the canal. He could believe he had gotten far away from everything he'd sought to escape.

But then he'd see the Hasid again; he'd notice a clock and subtract six hours and imagine what was happening right then, in New York. And in these moments—which had the force of unlooked-for clarity—he would apprehend himself as having established nothing, escaped nothing, having merely hidden in the midst of it—and in a hiding place so fragile, so tenuous, so alien to himself, that it was only a matter of time before it collapsed around him. He didn't know what this collapse would look like: further visions, deeper visions; or a giving over to the churn of emotions that had accompanied losing Sylvia, losing Zoey, losing his career, the whole catastrophe. Whatever it might be, though, it felt suddenly, ominously imminent as he stood there on the damp street.

How would this end? he asked himself.

There was really only one thing to do, though, when these moods came over him—only one way he'd found to steady his nerves, regain what passed for his peace of mind: get high. He had been on his way to do this anyway, of course—but you could grow weary of your own pleasures, he'd learned. He still liked smoking pot, in a straightforward way. But getting high defensively, needing to do it in order to feel better—at some point, it became pretty depressing. But then, for better or worse, getting high would help mute these feelings, too. After a couple of hits, he'd be able to convince himself that the Hasid was just a typical, tolerable symptom of ordinary bad dreams—something that could happen to anyone. He'd reaffirm that he liked being here, that it made sense. And in the end, he would still go to the botanical gardens.

He had his hand on the door of the coffeeshop when he realized for the second time he'd forgotten about the cigarette he was smoking. Coffeeshops didn't allow cigarettes—a rule the logic of which he could appreciate, but which in practice struck him as utterly absurd. He took a last few impatient puffs, and fat, cold raindrops began to fall on the cobbles at his feet, into the canal, down his nose. He lifted his arm to toss the cigarette away—was seized by the same ingrained reluctance as earlier. He let out an audible, frustrated growl—at, he supposed, the inescapability of being himself. The rain started to fall faster. He saw that a few doors down was the recessed entrance to a hotel, and he ran over to take cover.

As he huddled into the alcove of the hotel's doorway, the rain began to come down so heavily the water looked as if it formed a great unbroken stream from sky to street. Its spray still dampened his coat and face; he pressed himself more closely against the wall. Someone hurried into the alcove and stood by the glass of the hotel's windows a few feet away from him: a woman, tall, with short blond hair, wearing a belted trench coat and carrying a blue purse that he recognized (from being dragged into Saks on umpteen Sundays) as being very expensive. She brushed some of the water from the top of this purse with the back of her hand, then opened it, took out a slender guidebook—its title,
Amsterdam's Museums and Galleries
, written in English. She opened the guidebook to an illustrated map of the city's larger streets, scrutinized it for several moments, then lifted her eyes, her brows knit ruminatively—as though trying to decipher something in the wall of rain before her.