That was what was happening in his mind, Z knew. With every day of worry and every day of waiting for what-he-did-not-know-and-could-not-fathom, he could see the quality of his thoughts changing, the bad ideas beading up and starting to glisten. He could feel the temperature of his consciousness shift and sensed the first black spots on the surface of his sanity taking hold.
He tries to steer that Jerusalem memory to one of happier times, to warmer days up the mountain at the university, to sitting with Yoel and drinking beers in the empty amphitheater at the back of campus, the two of them silent, marveling at the sandy hills dropping down to the Dead Sea, and staring out over the heights of Moab and right into Jordan. Those peaceful thoughts, even when he reaches them, won’t take hold. Those perfect moments in that perfect place are all, for him, now ruined.
Disconsolate, he trolls further and further back, trying to map every decision from childhood onward that had put him in this mess. How could he have ended up here? How had a little, religious, Jewish-American boy from Long Island become an Israeli operative, living undercover in Paris, and now a traitor to his adopted state? How could he have ended up being so many kinds of people at once?
Z, with a hand over his mouth, pulls at his face, despairing, surprised that he suddenly has an answer. At least, as to how and when it all started. He has found the seed. The instant he’d discovered that inside one, there could as easily be two.
He is maybe eight, maybe nine, walking home from Ace’s candy store in West Hempstead, his sleepy suburb, with a Hershey’s bar in his pocket. And he sees on the street where the anti-Semites live, he sees the big boys out in force, the tough kids, and the mean kids, wearing their denim jackets with patches, and their denim jackets with the sleeves ripped off. And him, in his saddle shoes, and him in his khakis, the line visible on his pant legs where his mother has let down the hems.
It is then that Z discovers in himself a propensity for the life he has ended up living. For he can remember the little-boy judgments he made. He is already too close to turn around without catching their attention, though they do not consciously acknowledge him yet. Confidence, he decides, is his best bet. He will walk a straight line, maybe nod his head when he passes, the safest route. There is only one problem. He recognizes, as if outside of himself, that his whole identity, the only one he’s ever known, is that of a tantalizingly beat-up-able religious Jewish child, with a yarmulke pinned to the very head he’s about to nod.
That, right then, is the first time he does it. With a practiced motion, as if he’s done it a million times before, his arm swings up, and the hand—the hand with which Z now covers his own mouth—slides up across his head, as if smoothing out his hair. In one perfect action, the yarmulke is gone, palmed, and slipped into the pocket, where it’s swapped out for the chocolate. Suddenly, like that, Z is as Gentile as them. He feels it, because he has become it. And they, who would beat him on another day, pay him no mind. For Z is someone else, another child, passing with the candy bar that he’s already unwrapping.
Even this memory, in its sweetness, is too much, considering all its attendant personal pain. Z cannot anymore handle his loneliness, or his isolation, cannot bear the tenor of his thoughts.
It is evening, and morning is infinitely far off, and his lunchtime outing somewhere further. He cannot go on this way, and though he’s previously weighed the risks and found the plus side wanting, he will head out after dusk. He isn’t going far, and he isn’t going for long, and the peril outside his apartment seems better than what he faces inside his mind.
If only Z had known in his perfectly lovely rooms in Paris what he’d come to know in his single cell hidden, he guessed, somewhere in the desert. If he’d had an inkling in that breezy French apartment of what true boredom felt like and true loneliness, and true limbo—what it might actually be like to be locked up, hidden away without hope. If he’d tasted real madness at that point, he’d not have decided that he was so bored and so crazy that, without TV or radio or a suitably advanced French, at the very least, he deserved a taste of the night air and something decent to read.
With the summer sun forever setting, Z dresses in the half-darkness. He pulls on his jeans and peers out both windows, and heads down into his alley of a street.
Z rounds the far corner and walks speedily downhill, past the little movie theater, to the churchyard park. Crossing through, he stops for a moment beneath what is known to be the oldest tree in all of Paris. Some things, he thinks, have survival in them. Some things stand, against all logic and all likelihood.
He stops a second time at the fountain outside the bookstore. He cups his hands beneath the trickle of water. He drinks, and splashes his face, feeling happy to be out in the world.
The crowds across the way still teem in front of Notre-Dame, and the tourists stream through the front door of the shop. Z relaxes just a hair. It would be an impossible place to take a life in any of the standard and messier manners, a difficult place to drag him into a van.
Z circles the ground-floor labyrinth, making a pile under his arm, then climbs upstairs to see what else he might find. It’s here, straight down the narrow hall, that he sees a woman standing on her tiptoes and reaching for some high-shelved volume, her back and beautiful behind turned his way.
He knows immediately who it is, and he knows that he is in love for real.
Of course, he shouldn’t approach. He should take it as an ominous sign. After all, wangled coincidence, contrived serendipity, this is his bread and butter. It is how they do business, in his business.
But, really, how could this woman end up on the second floor of the bookstore, her back to him, and already up on tippy-toes reaching? That would be too good, and too polished, and the fact that he is even considering the machinations of it is only a testament to the rotted-through-with-paranoia workings of his brain. Also, a mitigating factor: seeing the waitress again was all he’d been wishing for and dreaming of, maybe even more often than he fantasized about strolling down a bouncing gangway and stepping across the threshold to a direct, JFK-bound, New York City flight.
When the waitress lowers herself onto the flats of her feet without a book in hand, Z is already over, tapping her on the shoulder.
“Long arms,” he says as she turns. “I have them, if you need.”
“Only browsing,” she says, and, taking in the sizable stack he holds, “I’m not as decisive as you.”
“I read fast,” he says, and, considering the pile himself, standing there awkwardly, “I’m kind of a homebody these days.”
The waitress, plainly feeling his awkwardness, stares down at her shoes.
Raising her eyes, she points toward one of his novels. A big fat copy of Lonesome Dove.
“That’s exactly the sort of book I’ve been meaning to read.”
“This?” he says. “You want to read about cowboys and cattle for eight hundred pages? In English?”