The Book of Jonah (22 page)

As he did this, it occurred to him that he had a pocket, and so he was wearing clothing—maybe this meant the vision had ended. He hadn't really considered his own nudity, though, as he'd been witnessing everyone else's. One common feature of what he'd seen today and what he'd seen at Becky's party was how they both seemed to invert his consciousness—making him aware of himself least of all.

Maybe he should talk to a rabbi, he thought. But none of the rabbis he'd encountered in his experiences of institutional Judaism had been very inspiring. And as he imagined Googling “best rabbi NYC,” eventually visiting an office bedecked with menorahs and
mezuzahs
and leather-bound editions of the Talmud and framed Chagall prints, imagined sitting down before the oaken desk of a bearded, yarmulked, amply nosed rabbi, and explaining that he'd been having “y'know, visions”—if he could even get this word out at all—he could not think of a single thing the rabbi might tell him that would give him any comfort, yield any insight. It wasn't like he needed advice on preparing for an adult bar mitzvah.

It was all completely unfair, he thought, as he now leaned his forehead against the cool surface of one of the kegs. He was not a bad person. Sure, he wasn't as good as he might have been, but then again, he was better than a lot of people: just like everyone else, in other words. Why, then, was he the only one who couldn't walk down the street without seeing the population of New York stripped of its clothing?

If there had been a discernible message, some purpose to these visions, he might have borne it all a little better. If he had to be afflicted in this way, was it too much to ask for the rationale? Or, barring that, why couldn't the visions be different? Why couldn't he see, say, harp-toting angels on puffy white clouds, lambs curled up with lions in some Edenic portrait of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens? Hell, he might even have been grateful for that. Who wouldn't want confirmation of a greeting-card afterlife and a smiley-faced higher power? But there was something awful in the scenes that had been put before his eyes. He could not say precisely what was so awful; but whatever it was, it was potent enough that even recollecting the details of what he'd seen in memory—New York reduced to a wasteland, everyone around him naked, equally and unalterably naked—an additional, cold sweat sprang onto his forehead, he had to tug away the knot of his tie and undo the button at his throat ahead of a gasping sensation.

He recalled the Hasid on the subway—his warnings, his story. Jonah was not afraid he was about to be swallowed up by a whale, of course (though he had to admit, his present circumstances resembled that predicament far more than he would have liked). But the whale, as the Hasid himself had explained, was not the point—was only a detail. Jonah sensed that there was something—Biblical—going on. And to find himself caught up in that mind-set, that order, was terrifying. That he didn't know how he recognized this, just that something in these experiences made it unmistakable, only added to the fear—such that the storeroom, as he looked anxiously around it, became eerie, forbidding, the way the inside of closets had looked when he was a child: its unidentifiable, shadowed contents suddenly imbued with sinister, uncanny possibilities.

Instinctively, he grabbed for the box of cigarettes in his pocket—but as he tried to take it out, the box turned sideways, and jerking it free the box slipped from his hand and dropped to the concrete floor. He reached forward to retrieve it, and as he did he knocked his head against the side of a set of shelves stacked with jars of mustard, ketchup, pickles. “Damn it,” he said, and smacked the shelves—triggering another shiver of pain through his palm.

“Damn it!” he repeated, and started to shake the shelves—and as the jars shattered on the floor, he shook the shelves harder. “Damn it, damn it, damn it, fucking damn it!” he shouted, as he knocked over the tower of kegs, tossed boxes in the air, ripped open bags of whatever he found, threw soda can after soda can against the walls.

When he'd finished, he sank to the floor amidst viscous puddles and broken glass, his suit stained in a rainbow of colors—panting, his head hanging limp. “What am I going to do?” he said—quietly, sorrowfully now. “What am I going to do?”

The box of cigarettes was lying at an angle against a dented, fizzing can of Diet Pepsi. He wiped some mayonnaise from his fingers onto his pants, took out a cigarette, and lit it. He tried to concentrate on only the sensations of smoking: the filter between his lips, the warm smoke coming in and out of his mouth. He tried to envision the nicotine—soothing, steadying—being absorbed into his lungs, his bloodstream, coursing through his body. And by the time the cigarette was finished, he did feel buoyed a little. Maybe it would all just go away, he told himself. Maybe it would just stop.

At that moment, the metal doors to the storeroom rattled above him—Jonah raised his head as first one and then the other was lifted away and a tabular slab of light fell over him. He squinted and heard Spanish being spoken. He pulled himself to his feet as a Latino man in a Mets hat, apron, and cargo shorts appeared at the top of the stairs. This man's head made a bewildered semicircle as he took in the mess of the room, the food-splattered man at its center.
“¿Estás bien?”
he said to Jonah.

Jonah tried to construct a response from what he could remember of high school Spanish, realizing he had only a few moments before it was deduced that he was not the victim but rather the perpetrator in this post-food-fight spectacle.
“Necesario … médico … con permiso…”
he said, and then hurried up the steps and pushed past the still-befuddled man.

He had made a half-jogging walk across two avenues before he felt confident he wasn't being followed by the man in the Mets hat. And then he thought to himself, a Mets hat: a Mets hat, and an apron, and cargo shorts. He stopped, looked around: The people passing him on the sidewalk, going in and out of office and apartment buildings—they were all fully clothed. He felt like dropping to the ground and weeping with relief. He couldn't be sure, though, how long this return to normalcy would last, that he would not immediately be confronted with some new form of metaphysical exposure. He started to hurry again along the sidewalk, looking up and down the street for a taxi.

At a streetlight at the end of the block he had to stop. The other pedestrians gathered beside him on the curb gave quizzical looks to his Pollock-splatter clothing. He ignored them, kept his eyes on the street, still watching for an open cab. But as he stood there waiting—watching the cars, glancing at the traffic light—the solidity of these things began to assert itself. The mundaneness of it all—pedestrians clustering at the very edge of the sidewalk as they waited for the light to change; a mammoth red tourist bus now lumbering around a corner as every car around it honked; the green street signs with white letters meeting perpendicular near the top of the pole of the streetlight—the mundaneness was comforting, reassuring. What could interrupt this, alter this? Maybe he'd been crazy after all. Maybe, if he could hold on to the ordinariness, the inertial regularity of everything around him—he would be okay.

He spotted a bar across the street. Anyone would tell him he deserved a drink after what he'd been through, he thought. He crossed the street when the light changed with everyone else, went up the block to the bar. It was one of those faux-Irish places popular in Midtown: named O'Something's, with a neon Guinness sign in the window and a placard out front touting the Yankees–Red Sox game on eight HD flat-screens. It was not the sort of bar he typically went to; with Sylvia it was artisanal cocktail bars, with coworkers it was upscale places with good booze. Today, though, this characterless place, which could have existed anywhere in the city—maybe anywhere in any city—seemed to him exactly where he needed to be: a monument to the fundamental banality of life.

As he was pushing open the door, he noticed a man getting out of a taxi a few feet up the block. This man was heavyset, with a high, mottled forehead, wore a tie and slacks and had a suit jacket hanging over the crook of his arm, a bulging computer bag slung across his chest with a newspaper wedged into one of the outside pockets. There were two large rolling suitcases already beside him on the curb—and, as Jonah watched, he reached back into the open door of the taxi, began trying to yank out an oversize duffel bag. As the man pulled, his jacket fell to the sidewalk, his nostrils and mouth started to work silently. He gripped the handle of the duffel with both hands, yanked again. Beads of sweat sprang up on his forehead; his mouth bent into a pained grimace. “Uhh!” he cried, as the bag still would not come out after another pull.

Jonah stood with his palm holding open the door of the bar as he watched this. At last the bag came free. The man set it beside the others, shaking his head in an exaggeratedly dismissive way—as though to demonstrate his renewed self-mastery to anyone who happened to be watching. He picked his jacket up off the sidewalk and closed the cab door, and then he sniffed loudly—as if drawing a line between himself and all that had just occurred—took the strap of the computer bag off his chest and put his jacket on. As he straightened the jacket over his shoulders, he noticed that Jonah was indeed watching, staring at him from the doorway of the bar. They looked at each other for a few seconds—neither really knowing how to look at the other. The man raised his chin, opened his lips for a moment, like he thought he might recognize Jonah—and then a sort of instinctive hardening came over his features, and he turned back to his bags, slung the computer bag again across his chest, lifted the duffel onto one of the rolling suitcases, its edges drooping over the roller's sides, and began to pull the whole load down the street.

Jonah went into the bar. Inside were the mahogany booths and stools, the digital jukebox playing classic rock, the dartboard and row of taps lining the bar he'd expected. He didn't advance any more than a few steps past the doorway, though. He was thinking about the sound the man had made: the “uhh!” he'd let out. It was a universal cry among New Yorkers—guttural, visceral—you heard it on the subway when someone couldn't get through the crowd before the doors closed; you heard it in line at the grocery store when someone accidentally dropped his wallet on the ground. It was typically the most New Yorkers allowed themselves in terms of acknowledging discomfort, or disappointment, or embarrassment, in a city that so valued acting like you'd done it all, seen it all, conquered it all before. It was the sound of wits' end, of lost cool, of exhausted patience at the thousand tiny trials necessitated by life in New York, or anywhere else. It was, in so many ways, an awful sound.

Jonah turned around and walked out of the bar. He looked out at the city: his home. If this was his home, what did that make the man he had just seen, to him? What was the fellowship that existed between two people in the same home? It had to be fellowship of some kind. Hadn't he been that man—a thousand times?

He knew then what was so awful in his visions, what gave them their power to terrify, to torment—to make his life seem so peculiarly hollow all of a sudden: They were true. That fragility he had seen, the mortality, the vulnerability—they were everywhere. It was no great revelation that everyone was naked beneath their clothes, that the city and everyone in it would someday crumble into dust—except that it was.

He should have helped that man, he thought. If they were alike in—he should have done—

He clenched his teeth, squeezed his fists until his fingernails dug into the skin of his palms—willing this train of thought to come to an end. No, he thought. No, no, no. He was not the kind of person who spontaneously offered to help strangers with their bags. He was not the kind of person who reacted to an “uhh” with anything other than gratitude that he had not been the one who'd made it.

He saw that he was losing—was being robbed of—an essential capacity: the capacity to ignore. It turned out that you had to ignore certain things—a lot of certain things, in fact—just to be able to walk into a bar and get drunk, to say nothing of working 17,500 hours in a law firm. You had to ignore, for one, that you were surrounded at all times by fellow human beings whose lives had the same despairs, both minor and great, the same final brevity as yours, as anyone's. When you lost the anonymity of others—when you could no longer automatically filter out the peopleness of other people—then you couldn't function here. You had no place here. Jonah felt as if he had spent years, maybe his whole life, able to abide—to thrive!—on the finest surface of things, and having been plunged momentarily beneath this surface, he could no longer find it.

And that, he thought, was wrong.

Jonah got angry again—not in the manner of the temper tantrum he'd had in the storeroom; this was a deeper, a self-sustaining, indignant anger. Walking into a bar at any hour of the day to get drunk was the right of every New Yorker. Why was he denied it? Why couldn't he live his life however he wanted—with as much callous disregard for his fellow human beings as he wished?

He felt a wild impulse to demonstrate—to himself, and to whomever (or Whomever) might be watching—that he was the same person he had always been, would always be—for better, for worse. “
Non serviam,
motherfucker,” he muttered under his breath.

*   *   *

Around this time, Zoey was leaving work. She knew she ought not have been, but staring at the digital picture of a naked Katie Porter—studying the individual pixels making up the flawless thighs, and flawless breasts, and flawless hair, and flawless stomach, and flawless on and on and on—had succeeded in depressing her. She'd recognized the image was real more or less from the moment it had appeared on her screen. Part of her job was to judge the authenticity of dozens of such pictures a week. And it was really too bad she had to see this, she'd thought as she examined it. Katie Porter was the celebrity Zoey had pegged herself against in recent months, since, in theory, they had very similar body types. So much for that theory, she'd thought dispiritedly. Everywhere Zoey was too round, or not round enough, or not toned enough, or somewhat disproportioned, Katie Porter presented the Platonic ideal. Zoey had considered whether it would make her feel better if the picture were shared with every pimply teenage boy and creepy middle-aged man on the planet—but it wouldn't, she'd decided. The instinct for revenge was not very strong in her, and more than that, she'd detected in herself an anticipatory sympathy for all the other girls in their cubicles who had a
Glossified
RSS feed and who would study this picture with the same masochistic scrutiny that she had, to the same dismaying effect. So she'd finally closed the picture and written an email to her boss, Anika: “Looks like a fake to me. Disney executives can exhale.” Then she'd left for the day.