The Book of Jonah (43 page)

The pastor took off his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief from his pocket. “I'm afraid I can't help you with that,” he repeated. Without the glasses, his face looked weary: There were thick bags beneath his eyes, darker than the tone of his skin. A lot of church leaders looked this way, he'd found. Jonah almost wanted to apologize for not being more receptive to the evangelizing.

“Like I said, I appreciate your taking the time,” was the most he could offer, though. “Can I at least leave my name and contact info, in case…” But “in case” what? In case Judith turned up here wanting to buy a second church, on behalf of whomever she was buying them for? He tried not think of the search as futile, though. Yes, there were a lot of churches in Las Vegas—but she had to have some connection to one of them. “Well, just in case,” he finished.

The pastor returned the glasses to his face. “Certainly,” he said. He took a piece of paper off his desk, glanced at it briefly, then handed it to Jonah. It appeared to be the middle page of a sermon, presumably (hopefully) long since delivered. Jonah wrote his name, his email, where he was staying, on the back. Then he returned the page to the pastor.

“They'll be needing me over at the kitchen,” the pastor said, folding the piece of paper neatly and putting it into the breast pocket of his sweater vest. “I'd be glad to show you out.”

They walked from the closet-cum-office back upstairs, through the white hall of the church. As they passed the stacked chairs in the corner, the pastor said, sounding a bit embarrassed, “We don't have so many folks on Sundays as we did five years ago. Ten years ago we had more than that.”

Stepping over the cinder block in the doorway, they came outside. Jonah blinked against the sunlight. The sun seemed brighter to him in Las Vegas, the desert air more translucent. When his eyes had adjusted, he saw that a line of people had formed along the fence around the church—stretched around the corner to the side of the building, where the entrance to the soup kitchen must have been. They were almost all men, though there were a few women, a variety of races, ages, though most of them were middle-aged or older. There was one man with bulbous red lips and cheeks, his hair sticking up from his head in greasy curves, eyeing Jonah and the pastor suspiciously; another man appeared almost cheerful, wearing a blue-and-orange basketball jersey, a backpack on his shoulders, bouncing spryly from one foot to the other; another wore a corn yellow sweatshirt and jeans, his hands shoved in his pockets, muttering with his eyes closed. Jonah didn't see Judith standing among them—though he hadn't really expected to. He realized, however, that as he'd been searching the line, he'd been looking for something all these people might have in common. But aside from a pervasive dirtiness to their clothing, there wasn't anything—except that they were lined up outside a soup kitchen. “We serve over a hundred a day,” the pastor said, observing Jonah looking down the line. “Though we're only set up for fifty. But nobody gets turned away here.”

“How do you manage that?” Jonah asked.

“Fernanda,” the pastor answered. “Good Christians like her. You know, she lost a boy of her own to the streets. But she makes miracles happen here every day. God works through people, son.”

Jonah was not sure the line before him was really evidence of that. He and the pastor watched as a family joined the end of the line: a man, sharp-eyed and rail-thin; a woman leading one child by the hand, carrying another, dressed only in a shirt and diapers, in the crook of her arm. “You see a lot of the same faces, of course,” the pastor said, in the same self-conscious way he'd explained the stacked chairs inside. “We've had a lot more out here than in the church these last few years. I do my best to give them the spirit. It's hard to preach to a hungry man, though. A hungry man wants food, even if that won't save him in the end.”

“Yeah, but, this is clearly, like, very important work you're doing,” Jonah responded—not entirely sure what the point of this reassurance was.

“A lot of people out here are doing their best for their brothers and sisters,” the pastor answered. “The Salvation Army down the block, the Catholic Charities on Owens…” He pushed his glasses up his nose again. “Twice as many out here, half the number inside on Sundays,” he muttered. The fatigue looked like it had thickened on his face—or maybe it was just more noticeable in the sunlight. He lifted his chin toward the chain of mountains above the flat-roofed, single-story buildings of the neighborhood. “The desert's coming in,” he declared. Then he added, apropos of Jonah didn't know what, “I've been in the church since I was eight years old.” Jonah could only think to nod. “You can at least set my mind at ease by promising me you don't wish any ill will on this woman you're trying to find,” the pastor said, turning to Jonah.

“I'd say ill will is the opposite of what I wish her,” Jonah answered.

“Then I'll pray that you find her. And if it's in God's plans, I'm certain you will.”

Jonah was skeptical, having his own ideas about the predictability of God's intentions. “Well—thanks,” he said.

“God bless you, son,” the pastor told him.

“Right, um, same to you,” Jonah mumbled—still not sure how to reply to these words, though he heard them at every church. He cast a last look at the line of people—which now extended past the front of the church to the boarded-up gas station beside it—finally started down the street, back toward the bus stop where he'd begun.

*   *   *

Jonah rode the bus south, in the direction of Las Vegas Boulevard—the strip. He could measure the bus's progress by the increasing frequency of motels and quickie wedding chapels visible out the window. On the strip he would change buses and, he'd decided, return to the apartment he'd rented. Sometimes he did two churches in one day, but the effect of this was always pretty discouraging—doubly discouraging, as it were.

He got off the bus across from the Wynn, one of the higher-end casinos on the strip—a smooth, fifty-story curve of brown-and-gold glass. This was of a piece with the Las Vegas he had experienced on his previous visit, made with some friends during college: carefully managed glitz, expensive restaurants and nightclubs, the loss of several hundred dollars of his parents' money—lots of alcohol. One early indication of how vastly he'd underestimated how long he'd be in Las Vegas was his decision when he'd first arrived from Amsterdam to stay on the strip, as he had on that earlier vacation. He'd gotten a room at the Mirage, a resort with a muddled desert oasis and Polynesian(ish) theme, only a notch below the Wynn on the luxury scale. It took less than a week of returning there from failed church visits for the casino's affectations of ceaseless revelry to become powerfully depressing. Jonah discovered there were only so many times a day you could walk past an empty bar playing “Don't Stop the Music” before you wanted to bang your head against the nearest wall. The apartment complex where he lived now was pretty depressing at times, too—but at least it offered a reprieve from the willed fairy tale of the strip casinos.

He began walking south, to his next bus stop. He passed the usual assortment of people on the strip: the hatted Latino men slapping together their glossy cards with pictures of glossy hookers; a bachelor party in matching T-shirts, armed with drinks in novelty plastic cups; a clutch of gray-haired tourists, happily gawking left and right; and stony-faced locals just trying to get from point A to point B—the way he used to try to cross Times Square when he lived in New York.

During his first days here, he would attempt to study all the faces he passed, thinking that finding Judith could be as simple as bumping into her again. (He'd had a lot of confidence then—a lot of momentum of faith.) But all this fruitless scrutiny proved dispiriting, exhausting. It was stunning to him, the variety, the combinations he discovered possible, among noses, eyes, hair, teeth, cheeks—each face inscribed with its own ideas, its own story, its own conceptions of itself—and each one wholly, stubbornly: not Judith. And a place like the strip was so densely packed with cars, bars, restaurants, casinos, elevators, escalators, malls, shops, stands, arcades—all of it crawling, teeming with people—that for every face he did see, he sensed he was missing a dozen others: groups disappearing into a food court, the backs of blond heads rising up an escalator, pedestrians on a footbridge too distant to be made out clearly. Worst of all were the false alarms: moments when he would suddenly be convinced he'd found her, feel himself shot through with an adrenal mix of joy and terror—but even by the time he was saying “Judith,” realize it wasn't her. The cascading disappointment of these errors was worse than a dozen unavailing church visits. Finally he'd decided to spare himself this all-too-literal search for a single face in the crowd—though even now, when someone slender and blond approached, he couldn't resist staring with blunt, ephemeral hope.

It was getting toward the end of November—the strip had begun to put up the holiday decorations. He passed a man in a Santa suit taking pictures with tourists for a dollar each; the trunks of the palm trees on the medians had been wrapped in plastic strings of lights; on the other side of the strip, the fifty-foot video billboard outside Treasure Island announced a $100,000 Christmas Eve free roll in the poker room. But there was (as with most things on the strip, in Jonah's opinion) a certain unreality to all these seasonal touches. Not least, it was hard to muster much holiday spirit when it was sixty-eight degrees out, the air so dry he woke up most mornings with a bloody nose.

He thought of the New York holiday rituals that would be starting up then: the string of boozy office parties, the elaborately decorated department-store windows, the lists of gifts clutched in gloved hands. Maybe there was something contrived in these traditions, too, but he felt the holidays always succeeded in infusing the city and its residents with a red-cheeked, seasonal
joie de vivre
—or as close to
joie de vivre
as New Yorkers ever got.

He understood he was homesick. But as he stopped at a traffic light—waited beside a woman pushing a stroller with a baby in it dressed in a 7-7-7 Onesie—it occurred to him he didn't know which home it was he missed. He didn't really want to resume his life in New York, as it had been—and knew he couldn't, even if he had wanted to. He certainly didn't want to move back to Roxwood, or return to the houseboat to live with Max (who had gone so far as to choke back tears when Jonah left). He still thought fondly of Zoey—but he believed leaving her alone these last few months was maybe the one inarguably correct decision he'd made. As the light changed and he crossed the street—watched the woman push the stroller and the lucky baby clumsily up the curb—he thought what he actually longed for was a life that felt familiar: one that felt natural—normal. Half the time being in Las Vegas seemed absurd to him; crazy, as a matter of fact.

But it wasn't as if he hadn't tried simpler ways of finding Judith. The day after he met her in Amsterdam, he had returned to Margaretha's art space, but it was closed, and on the following day a different art show had opened there. He eventually got in touch with the owner of the space, who had an email address for Margaretha, but she hadn't replied to any of his pleading requests for more information about her cousin. He doubted Margaretha was the sort of person who kept close track of her inbox, and he recognized it was possible that even if she had seen his emails, Judith had asked her not to reply, had told her she wanted nothing more to do with him. As for his other tenuous connection to Judith, Becky still wasn't talking to him, and Aimee hadn't responded to the notes he'd sent her via her food blog. He understood that if they took him for a creepy asshole, requesting the contact details of a woman they barely knew probably didn't help.

He hadn't been able to find her on Facebook, or on LinkedIn, or on any of the other sites seemingly every other person on the planet used. A lot of Judiths turned out to have been at Yale in September 2001; even more had gone to Camp Ramah in the previous decade. And the fact was that he might have found her name in his hours of Google searching—might have been staring right at it—but without a picture, how could he know?

Eventually he'd gone through every reasonable approach he could think of—and at that point, he didn't see what other choice he had. The one thing he knew about her present life was that she lived in Las Vegas, and she was working for a real estate company that was buying a church. So he'd come here and started making his way through the list of churches in the yellow pages. How long could it take? he remembered thinking. Again, he'd enjoyed a lot of certainty then.

He walked by an outdoor bar where a man with slicked-back hair and an earring was shouting into a microphone, “We got three-dollar kamikaze shots all day long!” Then Jonah came to another intersection, had to turn the corner to an escalator up to a pedestrian bridge above the street in order to cross. One of the (many) things he'd grown to dislike about the strip was the fact that you couldn't walk in a straight line from one end to the other: navigating it required passing through a maze of skywalks, escalators, moving sidewalks, so that you might think you were walking along the strip, only to find yourself halfway down a covered bridge to the entrance to Harrah's—which, of course, was the whole point.

On the pedestrian bridge, a man in a black bandanna and a tattered motorcycle jacket, his forehead dotted with scabs, eyes squeezed to slits, squatted in the sunlight on a dirty American flag towel beside a cardboard sign that read,
PLEASE HELP! VIETNAM US VETTERAN. GOD BLESS USA.
Visiting the churches, Jonah encountered people in the extremes of poverty fairly regularly—but seeing it again and again didn't help him get used to it. In many ways, it had the opposite effect. He doubted very much this man was a Vietnam veteran. Even by the most generous estimate, he would probably have been about twelve when the war ended. But Jonah knew it didn't really matter. He took a dollar out of his wallet, put it in the crumpled paper cup at his feet. As the man muttered a croaking “Thank you, brother,” Jonah thought abruptly of the woman on the subway he'd given forty dollars to that afternoon with Sylvia. It was hard to believe the forty dollars had done her much good—or that this dollar would do this man much good, either. And there were people like this sitting on every pedestrian bridge on the strip, and many other places besides. He remembered something the pastor had said, which hadn't made much sense to him at the time: The desert was coming in.