The Interestings A Novel

TWELVE





Jonah Bay, heading home from the Beth Israel Hospital emergency room in a taxi just past dawn with Robert Takahashi beside him, said, “Did you hear what she said? In the restaurant, right after it happened, when she was sort of talking to herself, sort of praying?”

“Yeah.”

“Jules doesn’t pray; she’s always been an atheist. Who would she pray to?”

“No idea,” said Robert. They leaned against each other in weary silence as the streets flew by, the taxi making every green light in the absence of traffic at this unlikely and disconcerting hour.

“Well, apparently it worked for her, whatever she did,” Jonah said.

“Oh, come on, you’re saying that to me? Don’t you know how many ERs I’ve sat in with friends with pneumonia or cytomegalovirus? Their relatives were always praying for them, and it never did a thing. One guy from the gym, all his aunts and great-aunts came—this big, terrific black family from North Carolina—and they formed a prayer circle and said something like, ‘Please, Jesus, protect our boy William; he has so much he still wants to do here on earth,’ and I swear I thought it was going to work that time, but it didn’t. I haven’t seen any miracles. All the stories end the same f*cking way.” Robert looked out the window as the taxi bumped over the pocked streets. “You know, one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to be the one sitting in an ER for me.”

“Don’t say that,” said Jonah. “Your T-cell count is good. You’ve been mostly fine. You had shingles, but almost nothing else.”

“Yeah, that’s true. But it can’t last. It never does.”

“Well, I guess I still have a little of that miraculous-religion thing in me,” Jonah said.

“Oh yeah? I thought the deprogrammer knocked it out of you for good back then.”

“No, I still held on to a tiny little piece. Don’t tell Ethan and Ash. They put so much effort into that.”

They got out of the cab in front of Jonah’s building on Watts Street, which in all kinds of light—dawn, dusk, the alarmingly violet moments before a major snowfall—looked tilted and slightly scorched, but still remained habitable. What had happened to him, and to his mother, leaving him the legal occupant of her loft, still astonished him. But at the time, it was just what had happened; it was just their story. It made very little sense now to think that for nearly three months way back in 1981, Jonah Bay had been a member of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The Moonies were at the time often considered a punch line, occupying the same zeitgeist territory as the Hare Krishnas.

Jonah had been drawn into the church in the way that many people were: accidentally, not even knowing he’d wanted a church. He had had no natural churchiness in him whatsoever. Sometimes in childhood, his mother had taken him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to hear her gospel-singer friends perform. “Just close your eyes and let yourself be transported,” Susannah would say. Jonah responded to the music, but he’d had no use for Jesus, and during the sermons he would refuse to close his eyes, but would instead look at his hands, at his shoes, or often at other boys in the pews.

In college, fiddling in the laboratory for his robotics class on a Saturday night, Jonah breathed in the scent of machine parts and electrical wiring and, especially, underwashed MIT undergraduates, who definitely had their own scent; and it seemed to him that an unspiritual life engineered solely by humans, busy in their fluorescent academic hive, would be perfectly acceptable. He had a brilliant friend in the lab, Avi, who was an Orthodox Jew, and Jonah could never understand what that deep layer of observance gave him. “Your work is scientific,” he’d said to Avi. “How can you believe in the sublime?” “If you have to ask, then I can’t tell you,” Avi said. Was a spiritual life like a special cloak? Jonah had gotten intimations of the sublime in brief bursts: some of the gospel music at that Harlem church had been celestial, and so was a good deal of his mother’s folk music. The song “The Wind Will Carry Us” was exquisite, and Susannah’s younger voice on that record was so achy that maybe it qualified as sublime. What seemed most otherworldly to Jonah Bay was the sensation he’d had as a boy, his brain cells repeatedly messed with by a grown man who had behaved like God.

During those involuntary, never-confessed-to or alluded-to drug trips, Jonah’s body had been alert and taut, his mind running all over, hyperactive and on a mission. The sensation of being overstimulated was so tremendous that he almost couldn’t bear it. He’d felt it again, in a completely different way, the first time he’d ever had sex with a man, at age eighteen at MIT. He’d ejaculated in about twelve seconds, much to his horror, and the other guy, a brain and cognitive sciences major with a boxer’s blunted face, had said it was fine, fine, but it wasn’t. Jonah couldn’t say to him, Look, I get overstimulated really fast, and then ker-splash. It all started when I was secretly fed a lot of acid as an eleven-year-old. Yeah, eleven, isn’t that wild? Now, whenever I get excited, I get afraid that I’m basically about to go crazy. Exciting sex still scares me to death.

But Jonah wouldn’t say any of this, because he’d never told a single person, including his friends from Spirit-in-the-Woods, about what Barry Claimes had done to him. It would have been too mortifying. It had been easy to come out as a gay person to everyone, which Jonah did the week he arrived at MIT and had had sex—real, going-the-distance sex—for the first time. He’d wanted to wait until sex had taken place in order to be sure that he was right about himself. Yes, he was right. When he made the phone calls to tell people, none of those people seemed shocked or particularly surprised—not Ethan, Ash, Jules, or even his mother. But telling them about Barry Claimes was something Jonah couldn’t do, even though he often thought about the folksinger, a man who had been without inspiration, and who had found a source of it in Jonah; a man who had lost his musical cash cow when Jonah made the decision to stop speaking to him at age twelve. But despite Barry Claimes being mostly gone (his visit to Spirit-in-the-Woods in 1974 with Jonah’s mother had been excruciating), the singer had continued to feel like a real presence to Jonah, and never more so than in adolescence, when sexual feelings took hold. Jonah had had feelings for boys long before the era that Barry Claimes was in his life. When Ash became Jonah’s girlfriend, he already mostly understood he was gay, and he often fantasized about boys, but the fantasies were too exciting and he barely knew what to do about them, or even how to think about them, so he hardly articulated them to himself. Ash had understimulated him, which had been a great relief.

Later on, in college, each time that sex with a real, naked, panting man became an actual act looming in front of Jonah like a meal set before him on a table, he grew afraid that he would be overcome and would almost start to hallucinate. Being highly aroused made him feel hopped-up and sick, made him want to turn away and go to sleep for hours. Barry Claimes’s drugs had done this, the stream of hallucinogens slipped to a child by a powerful and opportunistic man.

Jonah had met Robert Takahashi at a dinner party at Jules and Dennis’s apartment in 1986. Robert had long since left the copy store where he used to work, and had gone to law school at Fordham; by 1986 he had begun practicing AIDS-related law. At the dinner he took an immediate interest in Jonah, wanting to hear about his stint in the Moonies, the way everyone did, and about his job designing and perfecting technologies to help disabled people in their daily lives. Jonah described an innovative device, a sort of piece of scaffolding that allowed a paraplegic person to take a shower, wash himself and dry himself, all on his own. These were simple tasks that able-bodied people took for granted, Jonah said at the table, but the disabled had to rely on everyone for everything; they had to give up the idea of modesty. They had to somehow learn not to feel shame about their bodies and their need for help, which was something that Jonah himself was sure he would never have been able to do. “That all sounds great,” Robert said about Jonah’s work, and Jonah explained that, yes, it was fairly intense, but he felt he had to add, “I just never saw myself doing this for a living.” Robert questioned him further on this, but Jonah was vague. “Is it compelling, and does it have meaning?” Robert asked. “Those were the criteria I set for myself when I took my job at Lambda Legal.”

“Yeah, I guess it meets those criteria,” Jonah admitted, though it still surprised him that this was what he did now, and this was who he was. Music was gone completely. He rarely even listened to music anymore. His album collection was in crates, and he’d barely bought cassettes or CDs. His guitar languished in his closet. The work Jonah did at Gage Systems actually could be very absorbing, but he was reluctant to say this to the buff Japanese-American guy who leaned forward in his chair at the dinner party at Jules and Dennis’s apartment, directed toward Jonah like a plant toward sunlight. Jonah was sunlight? Men had been drawn to him frequently over the years, in bars, at parties, on the street, but rarely this cheerfully and directly. Usually, sexual attraction had an air of cloaked menace about it; that was part of the excitement.

Robert Takahashi also talked about himself a little, lightly referring to himself as “a poster child for the AIDS virus,” which made Jonah feel shocked and sorry for him; but everyone else in the room, who already knew about Robert’s recent diagnosis, acted like being positive was no big deal. The two men happened to leave the dinner party at around the same time; or at least, Robert got up to go almost immediately after Jonah said he was leaving. As they walked out of the building, Robert said, “So I’ve been trying to get a handle on you all night.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t tell if you’re flirting with me.”

Jonah said stiffly, “I’m not.”

“Well, okay, fine. But can I ask you something? Are you queer?” It was a genuine, not hostile, question, but somehow Jonah was shocked to hear this word used this way. “Faggot” he’d grown used to hearing spoken by gay men in a friendly context, not to mention “faggotry,” the state of being a faggot, but “queer” hadn’t been said to Jonah before. “Because I don’t want to get myself into one of those situations with a straight guy who’s slumming,” said Robert. “I mean, you definitely give off a queer vibe, but I have been wrong before. Famously wrong.” Robert was smiling at him the whole time, and Jonah thought maybe “queer” was actually an appropriate word here; he did feel so queer when he got excited.

So here was the compact, slender, handsome, and unapologetically queer young Japanese-American lawyer Robert Takahashi out on the street, asking him a startling, exciting question, and Jonah Bay could not bring himself to answer. Instead, he became exceedingly shy. He didn’t say no, and then, curtly, “Well, good night,” and just keep walking. He also didn’t say yes. Instead Jonah went into his default mode, which was pensive, wooden, and taciturn.

“That’s personal,” he said.

“What’s personal?”

“My so-called queerness. Or lack thereof.”

Robert laughed, which sounded like three sequential, appealing hiccups. “I have never heard anyone answer that way.”

“You go around asking people if they’re queer?” said Jonah. “Is it like taking the census?”

“Usually I don’t have to ask,” Robert said, “but you’re a difficult case. A tough nut to crack.” He smirked again, this confident man with a fatal diagnosis.

Jonah apparently could not be figured out by Robert Takahashi. So Robert, trim and sexually appealing in his old black leather jacket, unlocking his lime-green motorbike from where it was chained to a parking meter, said, “Well, I suppose it’ll have to remain a great mystery. Too bad.” Then he hopped on, kicked off, and puttered away as Jonah headed for the subway. All Jonah could think was that he felt terribly disappointed. But moments later there was Robert again, right beside him, and his reappearance felt like an enormous relief, a delight. Robert idled the bike and asked, smiling again, “Have you decided yet?”

Yes, the queerness question had been decided long ago, but Jonah was protective of his own predilections, cupping them and holding them close. He didn’t want to be overwhelmed by sex and lose control. Slim little Robert Takahashi, a gym rat and a quick legal mind, had tested positive for the AIDS virus, and what kind of sex could you possibly have with an infected person? Maybe you could have controlled sex—which was, to Jonah, good sex.

They went to bed together in the loft on a rainy afternoon a week later. Robert had come over, and while Jonah dragged out his records and spent too much time at the record player trying to make a good choice, knowing that most people saw music as crucial to establishing a mood, Robert lay back against the pillows on the bed with his shirt off. Seeing his planar chest was like being allowed entry into a new dimension. Robert was slight and nearly hairless, but he was muscular; he put time into his body, hoping to keep it in as good shape as he could for as long as possible. “Enough music,” said Robert finally as Jonah obsessed. “Just come here.”

Rain pattered the old, loose windows of the loft where Jonah had grown up and still lived, and there was something exquisite about rain accompanying a long, first kiss. Robert Takahashi’s mouth was hot and assertive; they pulled back now and then as if to check in, to make sure the other person was still there, and that they weren’t just two disembodied mouths. But the kissing spoke to the larger question of what was allowed and what wasn’t. “What can we do?” Jonah whispered awkwardly, not at all sure of what was safe and what might one day kill him. Robert Takahashi’s body was in need of being explored, and yet there were parameters in going to bed with a man who had tested positive. You couldn’t just do whatever you desired. You had to pay attention, or else some years from now the nodes in your neck would swell like marbles in a bag because of a bout of sex you’d had long in the past, which might well have been ecstatic then, but which you could barely remember now.

Robert looked at him with focused eyes; how beautiful they were, with their epicanthic folds. Jonah didn’t even remember where he had learned that term—maybe a genetics class at MIT?—but it appeared now, summoned for the first time in his life, as he looked into these dark and marvelous eyes. “We can do a lot,” Robert said. “But carefully.” Those were the words that became Jonah Bay’s password phrase into the kind of sex he liked and could tolerate. A lot, but carefully. Robert ripped open the wrapper of a Trojan with his sharp teeth, and took out a tube of a water-based lubricant called, lasciviously, Loobjob.

“This is really okay?” Jonah asked. “I mean, you’re sure? Have you asked any experts?”

“Well, no,” said Robert, “but I’ve read about it pretty extensively, and I assume you have too. Do you want to talk to an expert?”

“Now?” Jonah laughed.

“Yes. Now. If it’ll make you feel better.”

“It’s a Sunday afternoon. Where are these experts? Aren’t they all at brunch?”

Robert was already on the phone, calling Information and asking for the number of a hotline he knew about. The operator connected him. Lately the hotline had been in constant use, with everyone calling in terror, afraid of what they’d already done, unsure of what they could now do, tortured with knowledge and ignorance, palpating their own necks for swollen glands.

“Hi,” said Robert. “I’m here with a friend, and he has a question for you.” Then Robert thrust the phone at Jonah, who was appalled, and said, “What? Me?” moving away from it. “Yes, you,” said Robert, clearly enjoying himself. Jonah reluctantly took the phone, the cord stretching tight across the bed, bisecting it, keeping the men in separate sections. “Hi,” he mumbled flatly into the receiver.

“Hi, my name’s Chris. How can I help you?”

“I just want to know what’s, you know . . . safe.”

“You’re talking about sexual safety between two partners?” asked Chris. “Two male partners?” Jonah imagined him blond-haired, early twenties, sitting in a shabby office with his Keds up on a cluttered desk.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We can’t say for certain that any sex act carries zero risk, but some acts are clearly safer than others. For instance, oral isn’t risk-free. While we can’t prove anybody’s gotten it this way, we can’t prove they haven’t, either. If you have cuts, sores, or abrasions in your mouth it makes it riskier. Some people choose to pull out before coming. And then there’s mutual masturbation. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, ‘On me, not in me.’”

No, Jonah had never heard the phrase. While Chris was talking, Robert had come forward and begun to kiss Jonah’s neck, which tickled and made Jonah strain away from him; and then Robert put his hand on Jonah’s thigh in a proprietary gesture. “As for intercourse,” Chris went on as if he were a waiter winding up as he described the nightly specials, “without a condom there’s a high risk of transmission if the active partner is infected. And even with a condom, the risk isn’t reduced to zero, given the fact that theoretically it could break. That said, with condom use between two partners, only one of whom tested positive, to my knowledge there haven’t been any reported incidents so far of seroconversion. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been any that haven’t been reported, or that there won’t be any in the future. But it’s important to use latex only, no natural skins, and also to use a water-based lubricant containing the spermicide Nonoxynol-9. Oils and petroleum jelly can weaken the latex and make it prone to breakage.”

Was Chris reading from a script? Was he bored? Excited? Did he suspect that on the other end of the phone line, two men were poised on a bed, waiting to spring into action once one of them received reassurances from a stranger on the telephone? Did Chris know that his name and his voice, so bland and young, were in themselves arousing to these men? “Chris,” whoever he was, was like an epidemiologic porn star.

“So you think it’s okay for my friend and me to try to do some things together?” Jonah asked in a constrained voice.

“I can’t say that. To achieve zero risk, cuddling is a good bet.”

“Cuddling?”

“Tell him you have to go,” whispered Robert.

“I have to go. But thank you.”

“Okay,” said Chris. “Have a good day. Stay dry,” he added, and then he hung up.

“What did he mean, ‘Stay dry’?” said Jonah with alarm.

“What?” said Robert.

“There at the end, he said, ‘Stay dry.’ Was he referring to fluids? Was he giving me his honest opinion, even though he wasn’t supposed to?”

“He meant that it’s raining out.”

“Oh. Oh. Right,” said Jonah.

“You are adorable,” said Robert. “I even like your anxiety.”

“I don’t. I hate it.”

“We don’t have to do anything, today or ever,” said Robert Takahashi, but the idea of this was unacceptable to Jonah Bay, who couldn’t have explained that although he was anxious and afraid, he wanted to partake of encumbered, restrictive sex, the only kind that wouldn’t threaten to bury him in sensation. Maybe he had found a perfect way to manage his problem of overstimulation, yet not deny his essential, exuberant queerness.

Over time, on gray, moody days in the loft or on days that fractured the loft into various columns of sunlight, or at night, in near darkness, he and Robert Takahashi, one pale-skinned, the other a kind of grain color, ripped open Trojan wrappers and slowly f*cked each other. It amazed him the way body parts could fit together with the precision of Lego. Sex with Robert was a tense, highly careful experience that invariably led to great pleasure. Robert appeared to have bought out the entire mid-Atlantic supply of Loobjob, and he stored a couple of tubes in Jonah’s night table drawer, where Susannah used to keep dozens of guitar picks.

As a couple, Jonah and Robert didn’t look into their shared past, which didn’t go far back, nor did they look into the future, where they couldn’t see too far ahead. Robert Takahashi needed to keep his T-cell count up as long as he could. Neither of them wanted to discuss his condition very much, but the fact that Robert would in all likelihood die young could not be ignored. So far, he was mostly asymptomatic, and his T-cell count was good. Later, some friends were put on AZT, a drug that reduced their lives to a round-the-clock frenzy of beeping pill reminders and bouts of diarrhea and other indignities. The same frenzy would likely eventually arrive for Robert; but under the guidance of a somewhat renegade physician, he took bee pollen and wheatgrass shots and vitamin B12 and worked out at the gym for a solid, belligerent hour before work each day, each grunt a battle cry. His job at Lambda Legal was the center of his life. Jonah envied him this; his own job at Gage Systems, as he told people, was fine but left him feeling slightly empty. His design team had recently received a very emotional letter from a man whose upper body had been paralyzed in a car accident long ago, and who was now able to make himself breakfast each morning because of the robotics arm that Jonah’s team had perfected.

Yes, this work had meaning, but Robert’s work seemed to be a calling, which was different. A year or so into their relationship, back in the spring of ’87, Robert had invited Jonah to come down to D.C. with him to take part in an act of civil disobedience in front of the White House. They made posters before they left, and much later, when Jonah thought about that day and that time in life, he remembered the smell of Magic Marker, sharp and strong like a draft of smelling salts held under the nose. Reagan’s actual presence could be felt; though he wasn’t there, Jonah pictured him in a big-shouldered coat, being ushered past the protestors, barely looking at them. Reagan wasn’t even a real person to Jonah, just a feelingless object, and though he’d been reelected in a landslide, he had not been able to bring himself to say “AIDS” for the longest time, had not even seemed able to imagine gay men in their beds or at the funerals of their lovers.

As the crowd at the White House began to chant, and the signs waved and bobbed, the police closed in wearing rubber gloves. Jonah had lain down on the ground, and in the chaos a heel went down on his thigh and he cried out. When he turned to Robert, he saw that he was no longer there. Frantically Jonah called Robert’s name, but there were too many people crushing in and too much movement. He had lost Robert Takahashi, and instead found himself pressed face-to-face against an old muscleman who looked like Popeye. “Robert!” Jonah called again, and then a hand was on his back, and Jonah looked up to see Robert standing directly above him. Robert’s powerhouse arms scooped Jonah up and staggered off with him.

Tonight, after Dennis Boyd had collapsed in the restaurant, Jonah and Robert had sat side by side in the ER waiting room at Beth Israel with Jules, Ethan, and Ash; and the awful, dislocating institutional scene had reminded Jonah of an image of himself and his friends sitting on molded plastic chairs in another brightly lit space. What was that space? At first he couldn’t remember. He thought hard, and there it was: the police station on the Upper West Side in the earliest hours of 1976. Jonah and the others had waited there all night; it was so long ago now that Jonah could barely recall it, and it had all been left unfinished. Cathy Kiplinger had simply been erased from the group of friends, hustled out by adult forces. He’d always liked Cathy; it was true that she was kind of hysterical, but he had also admired how expressive she was. He could never express anything, but she had often cried and yelled and was full of opinions. Also, she had always responded sardonically to Goodman, who needed it. Cathy had seemed brave in her own way, unafraid to make demands, carrying around a woman’s body when in fact at the time she was still pretty much a girl.

What had ever happened to her? Sometimes in the first several years after that night Jonah had wondered, but no one ever had a detailed or reliable answer to give. It was like hearing what had happened to former child stars from TV sitcoms; almost all of them had supposedly died in Vietnam. The reports were not to be trusted. Someone had “seen” Cathy, and had said she was doing okay. First they had seen her in college; then business school. Then, finally, Jonah had no idea where she was. No one had seen her or heard anything about her for years. Jonah occasionally felt a ghastly unease about Cathy Kiplinger, and about his own role in getting Goodman and Cathy a cab that night, when they were so stoned on the hash that Jonah had provided. Over and over his friends had insisted he was absolutely not responsible for anything that had happened. “Jesus, Jonah, do I have to hit you over the head with a frying pan?” Ethan had once said in exasperation, in the first few weeks after that New Year’s Eve. “I don’t know how to convey this to you any better than I already have. You had nothing to do with what happened between them. Nothing. You are innocent. You were not an ‘accessory,’ and you didn’t ‘drug’ anyone, okay?”

Over time Jonah began to believe that Ethan was right. He became preoccupied with other thoughts: fantasies about how certain teenaged boys might looked undressed, and certain men; and thoughts about what he wanted to do with his life now that he’d decided he definitely wasn’t going to be a musician. As the years passed he wondered about Cathy far less often than he used to. He went to college, he graduated, he got sidetracked by the Unification Church briefly, he took a robotics job at Gage Systems, and by 1989, even brash, exciting Goodman Wolf had completely faded—Goodman, who had been as sharply defined and as erotically charged as anyone on earth.

In the ER tonight, Ethan was the one who felt needlessly guilty; he kept pacing and saying to Jules in an agitated voice, “But don’t you get it? I arranged the dinner. I told them what Dennis couldn’t eat, but I should have made double sure.” Jules had told him, “Ethan, stop, it’s not your fault,” and then Ash had gotten upset with Ethan and said to him, “Would you please leave Jules alone about this? She has enough to deal with.” Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you.

Finally a young doctor had come out and said, “I can tell you that Mr. Jacobson-Boyd had a very mild stroke. We do think it was caused by eating something contraindicated by his MAOI.” At dinner Dennis had apparently ingested a food that contained a substantial amount of tyramine, though no one would ever be able to figure out exactly which food it had been. His blood pressure had been “through the roof,” the doctor said. Dennis would recover, but he would need constant monitoring for a while. “We’re taking him off the MAOI immediately,” the doctor said. “There are much better antidepressants now anyway. At the time he was prescribed this one, back in the seventies, no one knew anything. Personally, I’d try him on a tricyclic. What does he need an MAOI for? It’s got so many problems, as you saw tonight. One piece of smoked cheese, and you’re having a hypertensive crisis at age thirty. We’ll keep him here for a few days, and we’ll worry about the depression later. And maybe he won’t even need treatment for that. It’s kind of a wait and see.”

“So he’s not going to die?” Ash said. “He’ll be okay? Jules, did you hear that?”

“Yes, he’ll survive this,” said the doctor. “You got him here in time.”

Jules began to cry in a sharp burst, and Ash did too, and they hugged each other and then Jules composed herself a little and said she had to go call Dennis’s parents in New Jersey. His mother would no doubt be beside herself, his father gruff and monosyllabic. Jules said she also had to go to hospital admissions and give them all the insurance information. There was so much to do; as a social worker she knew how much paperwork there would be. This was just the beginning, she said. But Ethan said to her, “You’re not doing any of that.”

“I’m not?” said Jules.

“No,” Ethan said. “Just go to Dennis now. Seriously. I’ll take care of everything.”

• • •

Jonah had been walking down a side street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one afternoon in June 1981, when a couple of members of the Unification Church came to him with a message. They didn’t say “God is love,” or anything similar. That wouldn’t have worked on Jonah Bay, who was deeply agnostic. Their message, though not stated directly, was that they recognized he was lonely, and they wanted to help him. Somehow, they were able to perceive his loneliness, though he had no idea how. He was leaving Dr. Pasolini’s mechanical engineering lab, where he was working for minimum wage. He’d just graduated from MIT and was living in one of the summer dorms until the fall, not sure what kind of job he would ultimately take or what city he would wind up in. Unlike almost everyone he knew at college, Jonah was not particularly ambitious. When people inquired about his ambitions, he told them that his mother’s non-acquisitive folksinger’s values must have rubbed off on him, because he didn’t feel the need to have his life figured out. But the truth was that he didn’t want to deal with it.

An old purple VW minibus was parked on the sloping street, and a man and woman, a few years older than he was, both dressed in generic leftover hippiewear, were sitting in the open doorway with a big Labrador retriever between them. Jonah smiled politely and the man said to him, “Nice shirt.”

Jonah was wearing a vintage bowling shirt that read Dex on the pocket.

The woman said, “And nice smile too, Dex.”

So Jonah smiled again for them, not bothering to say his name wasn’t Dex. “Thanks,” he said.

“Do you know where we could get some water for Cap’n Crunch?”

“You mean milk,” Jonah said.

They both laughed as if he were deeply witty. “Cap’n Crunch is our dog,” said the woman. “We’ve been in the car a long time, and he’s extremely thirsty. I’m Hannah,” she said. “And this is Joel.”

It was a reasonable act to bring them into the summer dorm with their dog and let them fill the dog’s bowl with genuine MIT tap water. The dorm was quiet, and the dog’s toenails clicked ostentatiously along the floors. The place felt melancholy, with whiteboards left up on some of the students’ doors, their once-relevant erasable-marker messages still visible. “Amy, we are going to see The Howling at 12!!!” Or, “SORRY, DAVE, ALL YOUR DROSOPHILA ARE DEAD AND I KILLED THEM!!!! HAHAHAHA—YOUR EVIL F*ckING LAB PARTNER.” The third floor was echoey, overly warm, but the man and woman looked around approvingly, as though they’d never been in a college dormitory before, and perhaps they hadn’t. Cap’n Crunch scarfed up the water Jonah got him, and looked beseechingly for a refill, his loose drape of lips still dripping.

“Easy there, Crunch,” Joel said, stroking the long black side of his dog. “You don’t want to get bloat.”

“What’s bloat?”

Hannah and Joel explained the sometimes fatal condition that dogs could develop. “I’m thinking about becoming a veterinarian,” Hannah said. “That’s just one of the things we study at the farm.”

“The farm,” Jonah repeated.

“Yes. We live on a farm in Dovecote, Vermont, with a bunch of our friends. We’ve got some animals up there. It’s a pretty amazing setup.” She looked around her. “But it seems like you’ve got a nice setup here yourself.”

“Not exactly,” said Jonah. He opened the door of the room where he was staying, in order to show them the minimalism of his summer living conditions. They took in the narrow iron student bed, the desk with the Tensor lamp, and the pile of books about principles of mechanical engineering and robotic design and vectors. “Vectors!” said Joel, picking up a book. “I have no idea what they are, but I’m sure I wouldn’t understand them.”

Jonah shrugged. “If someone explained them to you, you probably would.”

The couple sat on the bed, the springs straining, and Cap’n Crunch leapt up between them, while Jonah sat in his desk chair. No one else had been to visit his room since he’d been living here this summer. Even at college for the past four years Jonah hadn’t been overly social; he’d gone to parties in large groups of friends, and had had a few sexual encounters, but as far as he could tell he hadn’t made any lifelong friends. His closest friends were still Jules, Ethan, and Ash; they all got together in New York over breaks. For a while in college he’d played guitar and sung vocals for an MIT band called Seymour Glass, and all the musicians were extremely talented. But when they arranged to get together in the music studio senior year to cut a demo tape and “take it around,” Jonah decided he didn’t want to be in the band anymore.

“Why not?” asked the bass player. “You’re so good.”

Jonah had just shrugged. He’d been squeamish about music ever since Barry Claimes. Not squeamish enough to have given up playing a little on his own, but he never tried to write songs. Whenever he picked up his guitar he recalled sitting around making up music for that grotesque man, who had stolen it from him.

As it turned out, Seymour Glass had signed with Atlantic Records right before the school year ended, and the other band members were going off to LA now with a session guitarist in Jonah’s place. Jonah wished them well, and even though it was painful that they might become really successful (as it turned out, they did, getting known as the cool MIT-grad nerd band), he was relieved to have nothing to do with them. He’d abdicated his talent, he knew, which was depressing when he really thought about it, but also a relief. He’d gotten a reputation in college as a shy, attractive, long-haired boy whose mother was “that folksinger,” as people said, though no one expressed real interest anymore in Susannah Bay. She was over. She’d been over for a while. Talking Heads were big when Jonah was in college, along with the B-52s, whose female band members sported retro hairdos. Susannah Bay had never used hair spray in her life, and the women of the B-52s seemed to offend her sensibility, even though the hairdos were clearly meant as a strange and campy aesthetic. Susannah’s long black hair was her “signature” look, journalists had always said, just as “The Wind Will Carry Us” was her “signature” song.

You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression. Quietly, Jonah had done excellent work in mechanical engineering in college, writing a thesis on robotics and graduating with honors. He was adept at this work, and was frequently praised by Dr. Pasolini, who wanted him to meet the people at Gage Systems in New York for possible employment, but Jonah already felt isolated this summer. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, or do, and he wasn’t planning on spending the summer in the loft with his mother, who had grown increasingly discouraged as her career appeared to dry up like an old seedpod. When Jonah had come home for spring break, she had put his B-52s album on full blast and shouted, “Just listen to that! It’s so bizarre! Do you actually like it?” Of course he liked it, and he’d danced to it all night at the post-midterms blowout his suitemate had forced him to attend, his body bumping up against a sophomore with a key ring in his pocket that crunched pleasingly against Jonah’s hip bone, but he’d told his mother he could take it or leave it.

“So explain vectors to us,” said Joel, and for some reason Jonah found himself wanting to comply.

“Well, there’s Euclidean vectors,” he began. “Does that interest you?”

“Absolutely,” said Hannah with an encouraging smile.

“A Euclidean vector is what you need when you want to carry point A to point B. Vector is from the Latin. It actually means ‘carrier.’”

“See, we’re getting an MIT education,” Hannah said to Joel.

“We’ll have to tell everyone at the farm that we went to MIT and had a seminar in vectors,” Joel said. “But they won’t believe us. You’ll have to tell them, Jonah.”

Jonah tensed upon hearing his name spoken. Just a little while ago, they’d been calling him “Dex.” How did they know his name? Oh, of course; there on one of his textbooks from the school year on his desk, across a large piece of masking tape, he had written “JONAH BAY, ’81.”

“Do you have any interest in spending a rural weekend up there?” Hannah asked. “Pitching hay? Explaining vectors to other people? It would use your brain and your body. Plus, the food is super delicious.”

“No, thanks, I don’t think so,” Jonah said.

“Okay, fine; if you can’t you can’t,” said Hannah, and she smiled at him with what appeared to be genuine regret, and maybe it really was. They weren’t pressuring him to go; he felt no pressure whatsoever, merely a desire on their part for him to be with them.

“Well,” said Joel. “We should hit the road. I enjoyed talking to you, Jonah, and I hope the rest of your summer goes really well.” He stood up and motioned toward the dog, who scrambled to its feet.

Jonah thought of how the room was filled with human life and canine life right now, and that when these strangers left they would take all that life with them. He suddenly wanted to stop that from happening. On impulse, he who rarely followed impulses said, “How long is the drive?”

Before he left with them, he grabbed the mushy-wicked Magic Marker from the message board on his door, and quickly wrote in dry, milky gray letters, “GONE TO FARM IN DOVECOTE, VT. WITH PURPLE MINIBUS PEOPLE. BACK MONDAY.” In the unlikely event that they were planning on murdering him, there would be clues.

The farm was enjoyable, if in a slovenly way. Some of the people who lived there seemed to have been slightly damaged by life: they spoke a little too slowly; they appeared to have been burned out or, in one extreme case, had no legs and rode around the bumpy dirt in a little motorized wheelchair. Yet the food was soft and warm, with an emphasis on rice and potatoes and novel grains like spelt and bulgur. Jonah found himself wanting to eat and eat, and a very kind woman kept refilling his plate until he felt that he might turn into a snowman made of mounds of food. Everyone was so incredibly nice to him; it was different from MIT, where people were involved in what they were involved in, and sometimes at dinner it could seem as if the person sitting across from you was in another dimension. Even while they ate, the engineers were engineering, and the mathematicians had set up little invisible blackboards in their brains; and though the conversation was friendly, it could be remote. Also, by senior year everyone was already planning their next moves, as cunning as double agents.

But here on the farm no one seemed to have any ambitions beyond preparing hearty foods in creative ways; discussing an old sheep that had wandered from the meadow; and welcoming their new guest, Jonah, whom they said they felt blessed to know. Toward the end of dinner, when the women spooned a brownish carob agar pudding into flea market cut-glass cups like a pile of giblets, Joel bent his head in prayer, and everyone else did as he did. The prayers were brief, followed by a few unfamiliar songs, one of them in Korean. Looking back at this scene, Jonah appeared so innocent. He was astonished at how he had allowed himself to be led like that old sheep back into the meadow.

Dinner was followed by a visit to a converted barn, where there was more singing and more prayers. Then Tommy, the man with no legs, locomoted himself to the front of the room, and everyone got quiet. “In 1970,” Tommy said, “here was my situation. I got drafted and sent to Vietnam, where within two months my legs were shot off by a bouncing Betty. I managed to get pulled out of the river and sent back to the U.S., but I spent a year in the V.A., and when I got home my wife said, ‘Hell no, bub, I’m not staying married to a f*cking cripple who can’t even walk across the room to fetch me my pack of cigs.’” There was mild sympathetic groaning, but Jonah sat silently, appalled. “I was down on my luck,” Tommy continued. “Became very bitter. My friends all gave up on me, each and every one, and truthfully I don’t blame them. And then one day I was sitting in my pathetic little wheelchair on the street in Hartford, Connecticut, begging for change—that’s what my life had come to—when a van pulled up at the curb. And the loveliest people in the world stepped out. They said to me that I looked like I didn’t have any family to speak of, and I admitted that this was true. And they said we are your family. And this turned out to be true too.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “They recognized that I needed them, and that they needed me. Just the way everyone in this barn is family, and needs one another, because Satan is all around us. As you know, Israel was God’s chosen nation. But it seems that the Jews, falling under the sway of Satan, turned away from Jesus. God did what he could to show them how dangerous their path was,” Tommy went on casually. “For century after century he made them suffer, and finally, to make a point, he took six million of their people and extinguished them in one fell swoop. But it’s been said that the Jews had made a fatal error in leaving Jesus, and that God needed to look elsewhere to find a new Messiah and a new place to establish himself. So where did God turn?”

The question was rhetorical. Tommy pushed a lever on his wheelchair and made it spin in place. “Where he lands, nobody knows!” he called, and then he stopped sharply, facing the room again, and said, “But actually, God did know. Korea was a perfect location. And because it is a peninsula, it resembled the male sexual organ, the organ of power. It proved to be an ideal place for the battle between God and Satan. And Reverend Moon proved to be the ideal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, only without the flaws.”

Jonah would have laughed at this absurd monologue, but he was alone among these strangers, in a barn on a farm far from anyone he knew. No one would look kindly on him if he mocked this Vietnam vet in the wheelchair. Everyone was listening politely, indulging the man, probably because he was so badly disabled. When Tommy was done speaking, there was applause, and more singing. Jonah quickly learned the words, and the tunes were catchy. Then suddenly a couple of guitars appeared, and Hannah handed one to him, shyly saying, “I know you play, Jonah. I saw the guitar in your dorm room.” But the guitar she gave him was the worst instrument he’d ever played in his life, a totally out-of-tune piece of shit that ordinarily would have been thrown away, yet Jonah spent a few hopeless minutes tuning it, then played while the twenty-five or so people who had now gathered around all sang. They complimented his playing, having no idea of his lineage.

By the time he fell asleep in the men’s communal living quarters, a large loftlike space with rows of bedrolls on a floor of cheap carpet, Jonah realized he was content and exhausted. He had traveled a couple of hours to get here, and then he had eaten great quantities of starch. He had sung song after song. He had been passive, and had listened. He had prayed, in a fashion, though he didn’t believe in God. He had played guitar on command. His eyes now flickered and shut, and he slept undisturbed on his back with his hair spread out around him on the pillow. In the morning there was more soft, plentiful food, now served with syrup. Also, more prayers and teachings, and more warmth and love and kindness. Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.

• • •

It did not seem so strange, three weeks later, for Jonah Bay to find himself selling dyed pink and blue flowers out of a plastic bucket on a street corner in nearby Brattleboro, Vermont. Or if it did feel strange, he was defiant in the face of strangeness, and besides, he liked Lisa, the girl he sold flowers with, though “selling” wasn’t the right word, because no one was buying. The people they approached regarded them with annoyance or open hostility. Here, as at earlier points in his life, Jonah felt he knew what he was doing, but he seemed to be watching it all in third person, neither approving nor disapproving, and unable to affect the outcome.

Naturally, his mother was hysterical about his change of plans. He had gone back to Cambridge in the minibus with Hannah and Joel and Cap’n Crunch, in order to pack up his summer dorm room, and from there they had driven down to New York to drop off his worldly belongings, which he would no longer need on the communal farm. All he would need was a pillow, a blanket, and some clothes. In the loft on Watts Street, his mother angrily said she thought he had more of an independent mind than to join what she called “a common cult.” She had one of her musician friends with her that day for moral support, and they both tried to argue with Hannah and Joel, who were expert at not engaging with irate parents. The more Susannah Bay became upset, the more calmly Hannah and Joel talked. At one point, Hannah said to Susannah, “I have to tell you, we may come to this from different angles, but I really admire your music.” When Jonah had casually mentioned to them who his mother was, Hannah had said she really wanted to meet Susannah, which he suspected was part of the reason for the return to the loft.

“Oh,” Susannah said, a little surprised. “Well, thank you.”

“I grew up listening to your songs, Ms. Bay,” said Hannah. “I’ve bought every record you’ve ever made.”

“Even the disco folk one?” Jonah asked, unnecessarily cruel.

His mother quickly said, “That was a mistake, that record. And this, Jonah, this is a mistake too. We all do things we later regret. Come on, you just got a degree from MIT. You’re such a bright person, and you can do anything you want, yet you’re choosing to live on a farm with people you barely know who follow the teachings of a Korean man who says he’s the Messiah?”

“Yes, that about sums it up,” said Jonah, and he grabbed his old blanket and pillow and slung them over his shoulder. He both knew and did not know that what he was choosing to do was radical. He felt grateful to have decisions taken away from him for once, and to know that he would not be overcome with feeling in ways that were always hard for him to manage. He and his new friends and their black dog sauntered out of the loft and got back into the minibus with the shot springs, and headed back to Vermont, reaching the farm by sundown, in time for prayers.

Within three months Jonah had been so absorbed in life there and in the teachings of the church, as conveyed to him by some of the other residents of the farm, that it was as if he had been triple-dipped in a bath of ideology. His mother remained distraught and contacted a few of Jonah’s friends, essentially saying, “Do something.” So in the fall, in consultation with Susannah Bay, Ash and Ethan quietly arranged for a deprogramming of Jonah that would take place in a midtown hotel room in New York City. Ash’s father “knew someone”—of course he did, he knew all kinds of people. The guy had been recommended by a colleague of Gil’s at Drexel, whose daughter Mary Ann became a Hare Krishna, shaved her head, and changed her name to Bhakti, which meant “devotion.” It was set, and Susannah agreed to pay the shockingly high fee.

What they needed to do first was get Jonah away from the farm; that part was apparently often harder than the deprogramming itself. Ethan, Ash, and Jules drove Susannah up to Vermont to see Jonah and have a look around, and then, the following day, to somehow find a way to get him home. The four of them stayed for dinner and spent the night on the farm. Unlike Jonah when he first went there, none of them were interested in learning more about what they’d seen and heard at dinner and in the barn. All they wanted was to take him out of there. “Listen, Jonah,” Ethan said the next morning after breakfast. “I did a little reading before we came up here. I went to the New York Public Library and I asked them for everything on microfiche that I could find. In my opinion, Moon is a megalomaniac.”

“No, Ethan, that’s not true. He’s my spiritual father.”

“He isn’t,” Ethan said.

“I seem to remember something about your father,” said Jonah, using the only retort he could think of, “and your mother, and your pediatrician.”

“Well, at least you remember the conversations we used to have,” said Jules. “That’s good. It’s a start.”

“Apparently Moon’s followers give up their individuality and creativity, which is something we’ve all valued above everything else,” said Ethan. “If the Wunderlichs taught us anything, it was that. Is it that you’re afraid? Is it because it was hard for you to come out as a gay man? No one cares if you’re gay, Jonah; I mean, big deal! Don’t give that up; don’t take it back. Be yourself, fall in love, have sex with guys, do all the things that make you you. Don’t be guided by some rigid external philosophy. Make things. Play your guitar. Build robots. This is all we’ve really got, isn’t it? What else is there but basically building things until the day we die? Come on, Jonah, don’t fall in line. I just can’t understand this; why are you even here?”

“I’ve found my place finally,” Jonah murmured, and then someone called him to tend the hydroponic lettuces. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “And you should all hit the road. You don’t want to run into traffic heading back. Where’s my mother? Someone should tell her it’s time.”

“You’re under the influence, Jonah,” said Ash. “Please don’t say that this is the sum total of who you are.” She came close and took him by both wrists. “Remember when we were involved?” she asked shyly. Then she whispered, “I know it never became anything big. But it was an unspoiled, delicate thing, and I’m glad it happened. You were the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life. I don’t know what happened to make you so vulnerable to this kind of thing. You should be an artist, Jonah.”

“I’m not an artist,” Jonah said flatly. “That didn’t happen.”

“You don’t have to be one,” Jules suddenly put in. “You can be whatever you want. It just doesn’t matter.”

Jonah looked around at all of them. “I needed something, okay?” he said. “I didn’t even know I did, but I did. Ash, you and Ethan have each other. Me, I’m totally on my own.” He was almost in tears as he spoke, confessing his isolation to his oldest friends. “Maybe I needed a deep love that was more powerful than any other kind. Didn’t any of you ever feel you needed that?” he asked them, but he had turned his head now and was looking right at Jules. She was the other unattached one here, the one who seemed to be quietly waiting, standing in the river of her life, the way Jonah had been. Jules looked down at the ground, as if it hurt her to make eye contact with him.

“Sure, sometimes,” Jules said, and it was the strangest thing, but Ethan was now looking at Jules too; he and Jonah were both regarding Jules Jacobson attentively. Ethan, looking at Jules, seemed to have fixed himself upon her the way people fixed themselves upon the Messiah. Jonah could almost see the ragged edges of light that Ethan certainly saw around her—the coronal fringe light that was sometimes created by diligent, applied love.

Ethan loves her, Jonah thought. This was an epiphany, one of many that he’d experienced on the farm. Ethan Figman loves Jules Jacobson even now that he’s bound his life to Ash Wolf, even now that so many years have passed since that first summer. He still loves her, and because I am now a devotee of the Messiah, I can see such powerful and radiant light.

“You love her,” Jonah said to Ethan indiscreetly. He’d seen it, and he felt he had to say it.

“Who, you mean Jules? Yes, of course,” Ethan said in a curt voice. “She’s my old friend.” Everyone looked in all sorts of directions, trying to sever the moment from the meaning that Jonah was giving it. Ethan walked back over to Jonah now and put an arm around his shoulder. “Listen,” he said, “if you let us, we’ll get you some help.”

“What kind of help do you think I need?”

By now, a few residents of the farm had begun paying attention to the agitated scene between Jonah and his visitors. Hannah and Joel came over to intervene, and Tommy hummed up in the wheelchair, his baseball cap backward on his head. “Is there something distressing going on here?” asked Hannah. “Some conflict?”

“No, we’re just talking,” said Ethan.

“Jonah was asked to tend the hydroponic lettuces,” Joel said.

“Seriously, you can go f*ck the hydroponic lettuces, Joel,” Ethan said. “I mean, really, are you going to compare the need for lettuces to be tended with the need for this person, this great friend of ours, to have an actual life out there in the world? Doesn’t everyone deserve a chance to live in the world, instead of hiding away on a farm, selling dyed flowers that no one wants, and that everyone runs away from when they see the dyed-flower bucket coming their way? What is it with you guys and selling flowers? The Hare Krishnas do it too. What, did everyone see My Fair Lady and think, ooh, that looks like a good idea?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Tommy. “But you’re being disrespectful, and it’s time for you to go.” He pressed a button and reared slightly backward in his chair.

Then Susannah Bay, who’d been giving a guitar lesson in the barn to two young women, suddenly appeared with her guitar. “We’re ready to take a little trip to town, Susannah,” Ethan said, his face full of meaning, trying to tell her, we have to move now. To Jonah he said, “I tell you what. Let’s go for a ride. You can show us around the town. Your mom will come too.”

“Oh,” said one of the wide-eyed young women who accompanied her, “Susannah was teaching us ‘Boy Wandering.’ The chords are actually easy. It’s mostly A minor, D minor, E.”

“And she showed us the open D tuning for ‘The Wind Will Carry Us,’” said the other woman.

For someone who had been so upset since her son had moved to the farm, Susannah Bay now appeared calmer, as if what she’d seen here wasn’t nearly as dire as she’d imagined. She’d had a tour of the gardens and the crops and the sheep in the meadow. She’d given an impromptu guitar lesson to people who still knew who she was and still cared about her music. Time stood still here on this commune in Dovecote. Everyone dressed as if they were at a three-day music festival; no one owned more than a few material possessions. The income they’d earned in the past, or that they marginally earned now, went to the church. Susannah Bay found herself and her work cherished here. It had been a surprise, and now she was going to have to give it up?

“We’ve been talking to Susannah,” said the first young woman, “and we’ve asked her a favor.”

“What?” said Ash. “What could you possibly want from Jonah’s mother?”

“Reverend Moon is holding a spiritual gathering this winter in New York City, in Madison Square Garden,” said the woman in a casual, confident voice. “We all just love ‘The Wind Will Carry Us,’ and we wondered if we could possibly get our chorale—a chorus of five hundred of the best voices from around the world—to sing it at that event. With different lyrics, slightly.”

“Different lyrics?” said Jonah. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m not a musician myself,” said the woman, “but I was thinking it could be something like, ‘The Reverend Moon will carry us / Carry us . . . apart.’”

They were all silent, horrified. “Oh yes,” said Ethan finally, in a voice thick with irony and condescension. “That’s exactly what he’ll do. Carry everyone apart.” He and Jules looked at each other and smiled slightly.

“Pardon?” said one of the women.

“Nothing. Look,” said Ethan, “obviously Susannah Bay is not going to allow her lyrics to be messed with. It’s not negotiable.”

But Jonah’s mother appeared contemplative. Was she faking them all out? It was impossible to tell. After a moment she quietly said, “I’d consider it.”

One of the women asked if Susannah would also consider staying on the farm for a few more days to work on the song with them, and on guitar and vocal technique in general. It wasn’t as if she had any pressing engagements, right? To everyone’s bewilderment Susannah agreed that she would stay here until Wednesday, when someone would drive her to Brattleboro to take the bus home. But Jonah, Ash insisted, should come for a ride into town now. If they’d told him they were taking him back to the city, surely he would have bolted. Jonah, Susannah, and a few key residents of the farm walked away to discuss the situation in private.

“I really don’t like the idea of this,” Ethan whispered to Ash and Jules as they stood watching the group of people talk among themselves. “It feels like a hostage exchange.”

“They said it’s just for a few days,” said Ash. “Apparently Jonah’s mom is into the idea of working with them, maybe even letting them use her song, though I honestly have no idea why. It seems like a terrible mistake to me.”

“I think she’s just so grateful that someone’s thinking about her music again,” said Ethan. “It’s one thing to have a voice like hers, but if nobody appreciates it anymore, then it’s depressing. This is probably giving her a big lift. But this way, at least we get Jonah to come with us. We’ll deal with his mother later.”

It occurred to Jonah during all the confusing, complicated negotiations—Why did they want him to go into town with them so badly? Why were they even here, exactly?—that he’d never wanted to run away from home, but instead he’d wanted to have his home, in the person of his mother, run after him. Here she was now, and he was within reach, but she was wavering. He didn’t really mind it, though. She was appreciated here, the way she’d been appreciated in the past, but now in a much smaller and more concentrated form. She was making a decision to go where the audience was.

Jonah agreed to drive into town with his friends. He could get an ice pop at the general store; he hadn’t eaten anything with artificial color or even sugar in it in a very long time, and he still had a taste for such foods. But when Ethan’s father’s beat-up old car sped past “downtown” Dovecote, and Jonah said, “Why aren’t you stopping?” he supposed he’d already known the answer. He scrambled for the door handle, and Ash and Jules put their arms around him in the backseat and hugged him. “It’s okay,” said Ash, and Jules said, “Everything’s going to be fine,” and then Jonah began to cry, because he was confused, and very, very tired, and felt an underground tremor of nameless, swelling emotion that might have been—though he wasn’t sure, and couldn’t admit it—relief. He was desperate to sleep like a newborn baby squished between his old friends in the tiny car; he had barely slept since he’d been living on the farm. Chores started at dawn every day, and prayers lasted until late at night.

In the city, the deprogrammer awaited him in room 1240 of the dreary Wickersham Hotel half a block from Penn Station. His services were needed for three full days and nights; by the end of it all, Jonah was so worn out from the sleep deprivation that was part of the drill, and from being fed very little other than cold Burger King fries as sunrise broke over the city, and from the constant playing of taped negative testimonies from former church members, and from being repeatedly told that everything he’d heard on the farm was untrue, that Ash and Ethan insisted Jonah stay on their couch in the East Village for a few days, and this he did, gratefully.

It was funny, looking back on this so much later, that Ethan and Ash didn’t even have a guest room in their first apartment. The place was ordinary, with an old rag rug that Ash had taken from her childhood home. They were still, in 1981, like everyone else. And in 1981 they were thoroughly entwined, despite the love that Jonah had seen in the air around Jules when Ethan had looked at her. Because of the deprogramming, and the relatively brief period of time he’d been a member of the church, Jonah eventually forgot most of what he’d felt and learned on the farm. The teachings themselves were slowly leached from his consciousness, as if they were the subject matter of a required college course that hadn’t been of great interest. But he never forgot how he’d seen the ongoing love that Ethan still felt for Jules, and that Jules perhaps still felt for Ethan. He never forgot it, but he knew enough never to mention it again.

• • •

As it turned out, Susannah Bay stayed on the farm in Vermont for a few more days after her son left, singing to a circle of delighted, awed listeners. Their awe would not change over time because of fashion. They would not lose interest in Susannah’s talent, which as far as they were concerned was a fixed thing; instead, they just wanted to bask in it. Susannah returned to New York briefly, not by bus as planned, but in the purple minibus, in order to gather a few of her own essential belongings from the loft, which were then transported with her back up to the farm. A few months later, when Reverend Sun Myung Moon gave a speech at the World Mission Center in New York City, Susannah Bay was called onto the stage to sing her signature song with its newly written lyrics. Her voice was as strong and clear as it had been when she was starting out, and some of the listeners cried, thinking of how they used to listen to her when they were younger and how their lives had changed so dramatically since then. Many of them had broken with their parents, and with their soft suburban lives, and had taken up a greater purpose. This singer, so special, so talented, seemed to be singing right to them, and they were grateful.

The following year, Susannah, along with more than four thousand others, was married in a blessing ceremony in Madison Square Garden. The groom, Rick McKenna, twelve years her junior, a professional carpet installer and a member of the Unification Church from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was a stranger to her until the moment they joined hands in front of the Messiah. Directly following the ceremony, Susannah Bay and her husband got into the minibus and headed back up to the farm, where they would live together for the rest of their earthly lives.