Gods Without Men (47 page)

His hand was shaken by smiling uniformed men, who ushered him into some kind of conference room. A long table, plastic-backed chairs, fading public-information posters on the walls and, at the far end, Raj, sitting on Lisa’s lap. As Jaz came into the room, the little boy looked up and smiled. Together they looked like some religious image, Yashoda and Krishna, Madonna and child. Jaz fell on his knees and embraced them both. He felt his son’s hot damp breath on his cheek, smelled his hair, the soft skin of his face. He was real. It was actually happening. He exhaled and the air came out of him in a long stream, like a balloon deflating. Lisa’s hand rubbed a soothing circle on his back as he cried.

Two days later, when they boarded a plane for New York, the other passengers applauded, peering into the aisles to get a glimpse of them. For the next week the storm of publicity was even more intense than when Raj disappeared. The Matharu family was now a great American story of triumph over tragedy. They were inspirational. Everyone wanted to get close to them, to warm their hearts over the sentimental fire. Though they were offered huge amounts of money to tell their
story, they declined every interview. “All I want,” said Lisa to a particularly pushy reporter who’d followed her into the women’s bathroom at JFK, “is for all the people who wrote such lies about us to have the decency to apologize.” Of course none of them did.

For a while, denied access to the central characters, the media made do with the supporting players. They made much out of the young Iraqi girl who’d found Raj. She was interviewed on evening talk shows. Everyone found her delightful. She was generally agreed to be the right kind of immigrant, a credit to America. More than one commentator quoted Emma Lazarus on the poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free; an anonymous benefactor even offered to pay her college tuition. The British rock star Nicky Capaldi made a mumbling appearance on the BBC, sporting a mountain-man beard and singing an incoherent song called “the boy on the burning sands.” He “identified with Raj,” he told the interviewer. “In a lot of ways, the boy on the sands is me.”

After a man claiming to be a film producer called his cell, asking whether he could buy the family’s life rights for a film, Jaz switched off his phone. He no longer felt the need to follow what the world was saying. He wanted to be private again. One by one, their friends phoned to congratulate them. There were some awkward conversations, as people who’d not spoken to them in months, and who’d obviously thought the worst, tried to establish the fiction that they’d been loyal and supportive all along. The only person Jaz was really happy to hear from was Amy. He and Lisa Skyped with her, holding up Raj to the webcam so she could see his face. She cried and reached out toward the screen, as if for a moment she thought she’d be able to touch him.

They didn’t go out much, preferring to stay at home, ordering in food and watching the maple outside the front window shed its leaves. Sometimes they’d take walks in Prospect Park, the three of them hand in hand, bundled up against the wind, sunk in a silence that was both companionable and eerie, as if a spell had been cast and sound had been snatched away. Sometimes Jaz would try to start a conversation, pointing out familiar things as if they were exotic and new, but he kept coming back to the conclusion that there was nothing to talk about, that somehow the months of pain and separation had exhausted words. Frequently
he or Lisa would begin to cry. It would break out without warning. He’d be watching her fold laundry, red-eyed, then turn back to his book, only to find its pages were damp to the touch.

The wider world moved on from their strange little story. There was a presidential election to think about, and their neighbors were imagining change they could believe in, canvassing and putting up posters. For a while, their lives acquired a thin membrane of normality, like a scab. Then another jolt of weirdness tore it back open. Jaz had been watching the financial crisis as if through the wrong end of a telescope; events that a few months previously would have dominated his life—the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the plummeting Dow—seemed to be taking place in an alternate reality, unconnected to his. He didn’t go online to check his own portfolio, though he knew it must be taking a huge hit. Let it all go to hell, he thought. All those giant abstractions, the gambles on thin air. Here were the falling leaves, the smell of his son’s skin. With his severance package, he wouldn’t need to look for work for at least a year—longer if the family lived frugally. He wondered whether the Walter model had predicted the chaos. If Cy and Fenton were still making money in the midst of the carnage, they’d be hailed as heroes. Fenton’s ego would be completely out of control.

It didn’t quite work out like that. A former colleague phoned to tell him that Fenton’s firm had gone under. Upstairs in the spare room, surrounded by boxes of junk to take to the Salvation Army, he listened as the man, who now worked for one of the ratings agencies, told him how things stood. No one from Fenton’s office was answering calls. According to rumor, the Walter fund had been leveraged to an unprecedented degree, borrowing to take long positions on the mortgage market. When the crash came and their line of credit dried up, the business unraveled.

In the following days, Jaz was called by lawyers and administrators, hopeful he’d help them sort out the mess. Politely, he declined to get involved, even when he heard that Cy Bachman had disappeared. The police were interested. He’d taken a case of disks and documents with him. There was some question of criminal prosecution.

A thought occurred to him, which he tried his best to suppress. What
if Walter had precipitated the crash—or, if not precipitated, then nudged it along, influenced it in some way? He dismissed the idea. The problems in the mortgage market were vast, systemic. They had nothing to do with Bachman’s model. But, though he knew it was irrational, the thought kept nagging at him. Had Bachman gone live with his second, high-speed version of Walter? In Bachman’s company, Jaz had glimpsed something mystical and frightening. He remembered Cy’s expression as they peered into the display cases at the Neue Galerie. He’d seemed like a man drunk with his own power. What temptations had Walter put in his path? Why had he chosen to run away?

For a few days, the press took up the story, reporting sightings of the “fugitive financier” in various global business hubs. Then the election took over again, its frenzied culture-war tribalism leaving no room for anything else in the national consciousness. Barack Obama was elected without the Matharu family’s presence—Jaz and Lisa were too nervous to stand in line at the local polling station, not wanting to be recognized and harassed—but they mailed in ballots and gave money and stayed up late to watch the images of celebration. When they switched off the TV and went to bed they could hear car horns and whistles in the street. Jaz went to check on Raj. To his surprise the little boy was awake, and standing up by the window. He ruffled his hair.

“It’s loud, isn’t it?”

Raj looked up at him. “Beep-beep!” he said.

Jaz couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.

“Raj? That’s right! The cars! They go beep-beep!”

He swept his son into his arms and rushed back into the bedroom, gasping and sobbing like someone who’d just been pulled out of a river. It took Lisa several minutes to understand what had happened.

“He spoke! Raj spoke! He could hear all the car horns. He said ‘beep-beep.’ ”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“I knew it! I knew something was changing. The other day—he said something the other day when we were in the park. Some guy was walking this enormous Great Dane and he said ‘doggie.’ It wasn’t very
clear, but I’m sure that’s what he was saying. It wasn’t just humming or babbling.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“You didn’t think I’d want to know?”

“I said I wasn’t sure. And, to be honest, Jaz, I didn’t think you’d believe me. I didn’t want you telling me it wasn’t true. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? It doesn’t matter.”

They went to bed half angry at each other. The next day, as they ate a silent breakfast, Raj pointed at the maple outside the window. “Tree,” he said. And again. “Tree.” That morning he repeated his word dozens of times, making it into a song, rising and falling, stretching the vowel out like a siren. As the days passed he added other words, giving names to things in the kitchen, out on the street.

They took him to see a pediatrician, who confirmed that he’d made an “unusual leap forward.” She encouraged them to hold conversations with him and said she had “high hopes” for the future. It might be that Raj’s condition was less serious than they’d previously thought. If he carried on progressing, they might be able to “revise their expectations upward.” Lisa was so happy that she danced down Park Avenue, twirling and skipping like a musical star. Jaz couldn’t remember the last time she’d looked so beautiful. He clutched Raj’s hand tightly, the sunlight glittering in his watery eyes. It was such a fine day. A beautiful day. They decided to walk for a while before hailing a cab. Somewhere in the Seventies, on a quiet, tree-lined block, they passed a church. Lisa suggested they go in.

“Why?”

“I want to say a prayer.”

He must have looked confused. She laughed.

“We’ve been blessed, Jaz. We ought to recognize it.”

“But—”

“Yes, I
know
it’s a church. But it’s all one, isn’t it? Many routes to the same truth.”

She took Raj’s hand and pushed open the big wooden door. It was a Catholic church, whose altar was dominated by a lurid crucifix on which a milk-white Jesus hung in spasms of eye-rolling agony. Lisa and Raj walked toward it, their footsteps echoing off the marble floor. Jaz hung back by the door, next to a table of flyers advertising canned-food drives and schemes to sponsor African children. Self-consciously he read a poster advertising an organ recital, trying to appear as if he belonged in the space. Lisa seemed to hesitate in front of Jesus, then turned to a smaller altar in a side chapel. She dropped change into a box and chose a slender taper, lighting it from one of a cluster already set before a plaster image of the Virgin Mary. Then she helped Raj kneel down and lowered herself beside him at the rail, clasping her hands together. It was strange to see her like that: fervent, histrionic. He half expected some priest to emerge from a back room and shoo her away—the defiling Jew in the house of Jesus—but nothing of the kind happened. A couple of old ladies appeared, dabbed their fingers in the font, made little genuflecting crosses at the altar, as if someone or something was there to respond.

As the weeks went past, Raj’s development seemed to gather pace. He’d always avoided eye contact, and had disliked touch, wriggling out of cuddles, whining or screaming if he was patted or handled. Now he
often met his father’s gaze, looking back out of some unfathomable depth that Jaz found unnerving. He’d sprawl on the rug in the living room and make up games, lining up his toys in familiar ranks but also talking to them, addressing them by names and designations Jaz strained to catch. There was something unprecedented about this playing, a connection to the world that had never existed for him before.

The police had admitted they were making no progress in identifying Raj’s abductor, and it was obvious that their investigation was winding down. The Marine Corps had reviewed their security footage and found nothing unusual. There were no tire tracks in the vicinity where Raj had been found. It was, one of the detectives remarked, “as if the kid had materialized out of thin air.” Jaz phoned them every week or so, but there was never any news. He got the impression he was making a nuisance of himself. His son was safe—that was miracle enough. He ought to be content, to give thanks, as Lisa did. But there were too many questions to be answered. The little boy happily lining up plastic dinosaurs on the kitchen table had been through something extremely traumatic. Until his father knew what that was, there would be a blank, an unknown on the map of their family.
Here be dragons
.

This was the wheel that kept turning in Jaz’s mind. Raj had come back and Raj had changed. Or, rather, Raj had
come back changed
. There was something different about him. It wasn’t just that he’d begun to speak. Some new spirit was animating him, driving his engagement with the world. Jaz was happy about it. Of course he was—this was better than he’d dared hope for. He just wished he could understand how it had come about. Half jokingly he’d tickle his son, asking him, “What happened to you? Where did you go?” Half jokingly. Only half. The other half was steeled for some terrifying revelation.

What happened to you?

Where did you go?

Are you still my son?

One evening, Lisa asked him if he’d be happy to watch Raj while she went to a meeting.

“What kind of meeting?”

She looked embarrassed, made a vague gesture with her hand.

“It’s sort of like a book group.”

“Sort of like?”

Eventually he wheedled the truth out of her. It was a Jewish studies class. A group met weekly to read religious texts, “from a contemporary women’s perspective.”

“I know what you think,” Lisa told him. “But it’s not like that.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You know exactly what I mean. Anyway, it’s not what you’re thinking. They’re a really interesting bunch. I’ll be back around ten.”

The group became a regular part of Lisa’s life. She started going every Wednesday, cooking food and taking it with her in a covered dish. At home, she started to drop Hebrew and Yiddish words into conversation, particularly while chatting on the phone to her new friends:
schlep, meshuggeneh, goy
. Standing on the stairs, eavesdropping. Was he the goy? The outsider?