The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman

The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman

I.  NEW YORK (FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS
EARLIER)
PROLOGUE. THE SMIDGE
Jonah knew the 59th Street subway station well enough that he did not have
to look up from his iPhone as he made his way among its corridors and
commuters to the track. He felt lucky as he came down the stairs to the
platform to see a train just pulling in—he boarded without breaking his
stride, took a seat by the door of the nearly empty car, went on typing. A
crowd of people flooded in at the next station, but Jonah felt he’d had a
long enough day that he need not give up his seat. But then an older woman
—frumpy, blue-haired, with a grandmotherly sweet face and a tiny bell of a
nose—ended up standing directly before him, and Jonah decided to do the
right thing and he stood.
He was not on the train long, but when he got off he saw that many of
those moving past him on the platform were soaking wet: hair matted to
foreheads, clothes translucent and sagging. They all bore it well, though,
Jonah thought—stoically marched ahead with mouths fixed, eyes straight,
as though they got drenched during every evening commute. Then, as he
came to the stairwell leading up to the street, he found that a group of
twenty, thirty people was standing semicircled around the bottom, not
continuing out. Jonah advanced a few steps. Rain cascaded down onto the
concrete stairs in an unbroken sheet, making the light shining into the
station pale and misty, as if they were all gathered behind a waterfall. Those
in the group shrugged to one another at their predicament—tapped away on
their smartphones or just stared placidly at the rain, seemingly admiring this
temporary transformation of the world outside. Some, having stood there
for a few moments, turned up their collars or held out their umbrellas and
flung themselves up the steps with a sort of reckless bravery. Those coming
into the station—umbrellas bent, hair dripping—looked puzzled at the
gathering below, as though finding a crowd of people in the subway
unmoving, unshoving—even by and large content to be there—made their
surroundings somehow unrecognizable.
Jonah had been running late when he’d left his office, but he knew
QUEST events were always well attended; his absence from tonight’s
cocktail party for another ten or so minutes wouldn’t make much difference.
He had time, in another words, to stand there and wait out the rain, too—
and he found he was glad for this momentary interruption of his day. He
had lived in New York for almost a decade now, and was gratified to find,
once again, that it could still surprise him.
Jonah Daniel Jacobstein was thirty-two; a lawyer; ambitious, unmarried
and dating; never without his iPhone. For all these reasons, his concerns
tended to be immediate, tangible, billable. But every now and then such
moods of appreciation would wash over him. He would glance out the
window of the Q train as it crossed over the Manhattan Bridge and would
take in the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the whole of the
skyline over the river; he would climb into a taxi on a Friday night with
crisp bills from the ATM in his pocket and Sylvia (or Zoey) to meet; he
would be drunk at 4:00 A.M. with a great slice of grease-dripping pizza in
his hand; and he would count himself incredibly lucky—as he did now,
watching the rain in the subway station—to be who he was, when he was,
where he was.

The Book of Jonah by Joshua Max Feldman