The Book of Jonah (48 page)

For a few moments, Judith studied him: slouched forward, his elbows on his knees, hands dangling before him, the bed bent almost to a V with his weight. The beard was gone, which contributed to a generally more conventional appearance, though it also made the crookedness of his nose more noticeable. She looked over at the dresser with the television shackled to it, a Bible lying beside this, the ribbon tucked among the first quarter of its pages. Someone in the next room started shouting. She stood up, moved closer to the wall to listen. “You think this is a fucking game?” she heard a man hollering. “You think this is a game? This is my fucking life!”

“Why do you live here?” she asked Jonah.

“It's close to a lot of buses,” he muttered. But he knew there was some evasion in this—and there was no point in holding anything back now. “There's less bullshit here than in a lot of places in Las Vegas.”

“Do you consider yourself an ascetic?” she asked.

“What?”

“Do you consider yourself someone who renounces—”

“Yeah, I know what the word ‘ascetic' means,” he said with annoyance, carefully rubbing his face at the sides of his nose. “And no, I don't consider myself one.”

Judith smiled a bit in response. She had been so nervous coming here—nervous enough that, standing outside his door, she'd considered not even knocking. But she felt almost giddy now—triumphant: because it had all turned out to be so ridiculous. Who would have guessed he was the sort of person who could hold such notions—prophetic visions, divinely inspired missions? From the looks of it, not even him.

And observing her persistent smirk, Jonah said, “You don't believe it, do you?”

“I understand you believe it. But as for myself, no,” she said simply. “I don't.” She now picked up her purse from the floor. “Well, thank you for satisfying my curiosity.”

“Wait a minute,” he said, getting to his feet. “You're leaving?”

“Why would I stay?”

“Because I…” But it was as though in telling his story he'd lost track of precisely what it was he wanted from her. “But—at least tell me how you found me.”

“I didn't follow a pillar of fire through the desert, if that's what you were thinking.” His face was increasingly anxious—she knew this had been needlessly cruel, even if there had been some satisfaction in it. She reached into her purse, took out the page of the sermon with his name and address written on it, handed it to him.

“I was there this morning, though,” he said as he studied it. “This was that church off Foremaster.”

“The Greater Love Hath No Man Church, yes, that's right.”

“But he told me he didn't know anything about you.”

“It would seem he lied.” And for some reason, she found satisfaction in saying this, too. She moved again toward the door.

“Wait—wait!” he said, growing desperate. He'd known it was possible she'd be skeptical when she heard his story—but of all the scenarios he'd gone over in his mind, he'd never imagined this: that she would appear so wholly indifferent, so dismissive of what he'd told her. “Look, you can't just walk out of here,” he insisted.

“No?” she asked, standing at the door, her purse hanging from her hands. “Why can't I?”

“Because you have to let me—I mean, you were obviously really upset that day. You have to let me—make things right.”

She paused. She had been prepared to leave him to his little corner of oddness, but now she felt an impulse to explain certain things to him. He wasn't crazy, only wildly self-deluding. And she ought to cure him of those delusions—as recompense, she thought. “Despite what you may think, I wasn't put on this earth to vindicate what you perceive as your spiritual journey,” she told him.

He watched her composed, neatly made up face uneasily. “That's not what I'm saying.…”

“But the fact remains, you need me far more than I need you. After all, if I don't play along, then what was the point of all the time you've spent looking for me? What was the point of anything you've been through? The truth is you might have fixed on anyone, identified some urgent reason for finding that person, placed her in the role of Lois Lane to your Superman. It only happened to be me, and for no better reason than because you say you remembered seeing my photograph once.”

“When I left you were sobbing,” he said defensively.

“Well, that—may be so,” she answered, tripping only briefly—unnoticeably, really, she told herself—at the memory of being alone on that bench. “But even you have to acknowledge that what you're implying lacks anything like logic, or fairness, or justice. Why would God send you after me, and not after one of the millions of people on the planet who might actually want or need your help? Does crying make me more deserving of divine intervention than someone sick, or someone starving? You must see that the whole idea is simply absurd.”

“Okay, I get that it seems crazy, I know that better than anyone. But…” But he realized that even now he didn't know how to describe his faith—knew this wasn't solely a problem of articulation, either. And he could not deny—she made a strong case.

“I don't doubt you've felt guilty for what you did,” she continued. “But don't mistake your guilt for more than it is. Despite your purported visions, there's nothing I want or need from you, Jonah. And if you ever thought differently—you were mistaken,” she concluded with a shrug.

He opened his mouth to respond—then didn't. She watched his eyes darting back and forth to look at hers. She felt sorry for him now. Even the pastor had made a better showing, and he had wanted to surrender. The Colonel had been right about her, she thought. He had been right about all of it. “They're all just stories, Jonah,” she told him. “They're just stories we tell ourselves from the things that happen to us. We're the ones who give the events meaning or moral, who conclude that they unfold the only way they could unfold, as opposed to how they happen to unfold. And we're the ones who imagine that at the center of them is us, on our little journey, and that it's God's hand on the quill pen. But the fact is, if you'd done what any reasonable person would have, and started taking pills when you had your visions, so-called, you'd probably be living with one of those girls right now, and be at work at your law firm, and feel perfectly content that everything was going exactly according to plan.”

The only light in the room now came from the dull glow through the window of the streetlamp in the Aces High parking lot. Jonah sat back down on the shadowed bed. He knew he ought to argue with her—but much of what she'd said had occurred to him at times, too. And to have finally found her—the central figure in so much of what he had come to believe—only to have her pick those beliefs apart, bit by bit, made her assertions very difficult to dismiss. It was true: There was no logic, no discernible fairness to what he'd described. It wasn't based on anything like logic or fairness. Maybe then, she was right—it wasn't based on anything at all.

And yet—and yet—

But why was his faith never more than an “And yet”—no more powerful than a caveat, a footnote, a suspicion? Why, when he tried to take hold of it, did it feel no more certain than grasping an icicle?

“I'm afraid I left your coat in the Amsterdam airport,” she said. Watching him sitting silently on the bed, his face toward the floor, looking so thoroughly confounded, she'd felt she should offer some consolation—hadn't come up with anything better. “Perhaps you can claim it from their lost-and-found. There were only some … cigarette butts in the pockets.”

“Why were you crying that day?” he asked after another moment.

She hesitated—but why shouldn't she tell him? Hadn't she promised herself she would never cry in that way—for those reasons—again? “I was thinking about my parents,” she answered, very evenly, very cleanly—the way she'd practiced in the mirror before telling the pastor. “They were killed on 9/11.” And she continued, in just the way she'd practiced, “But that was a long time ago. In any case, I was upset that day. That's to be expected from time to time. And I do—appreciate all you did to make amends for—departing so abruptly. But of course, you weren't responsible for—me. Regardless, I am glad we got the opportunity to resolve things. I wish you all the best. So, goodbye.” She didn't move—as though in this unexpected stream of words, she'd forgotten what it was she was actually saying. “Goodbye,” she repeated, reminding herself. She saw him studying her quizzically. “Oh, I suppose that fits your purposes very nicely, does it?” she said sharply. “The poor little orphan, and your divinely ordained mission to console me.”

“It's just you didn't mention it.”

“Didn't mention what?”

“We talked about 9/11, and you didn't mention it.”

“Did we?” she said quickly. “I don't remember that.” It was a stupid lie, a pointless lie—and, she recognized immediately, one that announced itself as false even as it left her mouth.

For a while neither spoke—they eyed one another with differing forms of suspicion. Jonah remembered what he'd concluded about her in Amsterdam: that she was wearing a costume. And here she was, with the same polished face and hair, the same purse, the same trench coat—which, he now noticed, she hadn't removed.

“Why are you working in real estate out here?” he asked her. “Why are you buying churches so a casino can secretly—”

“And why shouldn't I be doing that?” she interrupted. “Because I went to Jewish summer camp?”

“Because it's a fucked-up thing to do!”

She scoffed. “Would I be better off getting myself fired and going to look for a stranger because God said so?”

He stood up from the bed. “What point are you trying to make with all this?” he asked, waving his hand at her. “You know as well as I do all of this is bullshit.”

She forced out a bitter chuckle. “Is that right? Then why don't you enlighten me as to how I might live a more authentic life.”

“For starters, don't defraud some dilapidated Las Vegas church!” he shouted.

She reached into her purse and pulled out the plastic folder—threw it onto the bed. The contracts spilled out across the comforter. “You see? It's done. He signed. The Greater Love Hath No Man Church now belongs to Colonel Harold Ferguson. Thanks to me.” Jonah looked at the stapled sheaves of paper—the pages askew, bunched into waves against the pillows, every inch covered in typed words. “Are you satisfied?” she asked. “Will you leave me alone now?”

In the vague light, he could see the fixity of her face as she stared at the contracts—her one fist clenched around the handle of her purse. “You came to see me,” he said quietly.

She couldn't deny it—but she didn't know why she had anymore: some indulgence, of old, vestigial instincts. She knew she ought to leave at last, but there was something dismaying in seeing the contracts scattered across the bed this way; she found she didn't have the energy to gather them back into their plastic folder. “It's something to be a part of,” she told him. “A way to be exceptional. And I always imagined I'd accomplish something—exceptional. Can you understand that?”

He thought of the 17,500 hours of his life he'd given to Cunningham Wolf. “Yeah, I can.”

“What does it matter anyway?” she said. “One less church in the world.”

Again they were silent. Jonah could hear the tinny, somehow hopeless whirring of the air-conditioning units in all the neighboring rooms, cars rolling by on the surrounding streets, someone watching television in an adjacent room—the sounds of the Aces High at night. “Judith…” he began.

“Please don't,” she said. “There's no great tragedy here. This is just the career I'm choosing.”

“But what if—”

“What if what? What if, instead of leaving that day, you'd stayed? And then? You'd have spent ten minutes consoling me and wouldn't have felt so guilty? Or I'd have changed my flight so we could have gone to my hotel room and spent a night together? I know it's tempting to think it could all have been different so easily. If I'd gone to a different college, then maybe my parents would have flown out of a different airport. Or I might have gone to college where you went. Then we might have met each other a lot sooner. Two Jews at a good college, who knows? Fine, it might have been different. But it wasn't.”

Her voice had remained even, controlled. But in her trench coat she looked to him the way he remembered her looking when he'd last seen her in Amsterdam: thin—insubstantial. He had never known exactly what he would do, was supposed to do, if he found her. He sometimes pictured it being as simple as giving her a hug—the hug he should have given her in Amsterdam: They'd hug, she'd feel better about whatever it was she'd been crying about, and then, well, mission accomplished. He now recognized the naïveté of this—the arrogance of this whole endeavor. Her life, her needs, had all the complexity that his did—that anyone's did. What did he expect to offer her?

“It's all right, Jonah,” she said, as if guessing his thoughts. “I absolve you of everything. And you'll be fine, too. You'll get together with some new girl, you'll be able to figure out a life for yourself that feels meaningful. And a year from now,” she added, smiling crookedly, “I'll attend the groundbreaking of the Babylon Center.” She lifted her purse up on her shoulder.

He knew there probably wasn't anything he could do for her. Most likely, one way or another, he'd misunderstood everything again. But to just give up, to not try at all—would be wrong. “What if it were true?” he said.

“Please, Jonah…”

“I mean—what if you could believe it?”

She was already shaking her head. “You honestly think you can convince me of that? God sent you?”