The Book of Jonah Read Online Free PDF Page B

tomorrow,” he wrote—then added, “baby,” because he didn’t want to worry her (or at least that was why he told himself he did it).
    But after he’d hit send and tossed the phone onto the bed, he did feel better: relieved that at least there’d be some resolution—and proud of himself that he had dealt (or anyway was going to deal) with a difficult situation, rather than be tossed back and forth between guilt and self-indulgence. More: He had done the right thing.
    And then Jonah caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of his closet door. He was naked by now—and for an instant, he saw himself as he would a naked stranger, without the benefit of protective biases, the protective measures he reflexively took. He saw himself with his stomach unflexed, his shoulders slumped, his expression dull—flaccid dick exactly as large as it was. He was confronted with the image of a man closer to full-blown middle age than full-blown youth: He saw flabbiness at the torso, he saw roundness at the thighs and arms, he spotted grayness among the trimmed black hair above his ears. And even more—he saw in the lengths of pink-pale flesh a naked man of jarring vulnerability, of shockingly finite proportions—woefully overmatched for the events of the day, of the life to come. He turned from the mirror uneasily—immediately pulled on the boxers he’d dropped on the floor, flexed his abs and chest, closed the closet door. He picked up his phone, thinking he might call Sylvia—but saw he had an email from Doug Chen, a partner at his firm, requesting a meeting the following day. Jonah had good instincts for these things; he sensed there was something positive in this for him. After he’d replied to the request in the affirmative, he scrolled through some other emails, checked the weather for the following day, checked the Yankees score, added the meeting with Doug Chen to his calendar, added the lunch with Zoey without any attendant emotion, shuffled idly through the phone’s collection of names and numbers and apps and games—tools to reach and decipher and shape the entire world if he wanted. The world was so fucking manageable when you looked at it through an iPhone. He turned off the light in his bedroom and got into bed; he wrote Sylvia a text message: “Hope you get out of there before midnight. Love you”; he set the phone’s alarm for six the next morning, the glow of its screen on his face the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes—
    And Jonah felt much better.
    1. THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD
    By the next morning the rain had stopped, and any sign that such a thing as rain was even possible had vanished. The sky was immaculately clear—a uniform metallic blue, undisturbed by cloud—and down from this sky, and from a sun that looked like a hole burned out of it to reveal inestimable radiance behind, poured the heat of mid-August. It filled the streets and parks, the doorways and alleys; it infused the concrete and asphalt like water soaking into a sponge; it clung to the windowpanes, it hung in the canyon-walled avenues like great heavy curtains through which pitiable pedestrians had to make their way—mouths open, collars open, sweat at minimum dotting their upper lips in tiny beads, in the most severe cases simply pouring down their faces unimpeded. People moved slowly, they didn’t look at one another. If the rain had brought an unusual conviviality to the city, the heat seemed to imprison each New Yorker in his or her own personal lobster pot.
    Jonah, however, awoke in the sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit that his air conditioner made his right. He was apprised of the situation outside by the cheerfully cartoonish sunshine icon on the weather app on his iPhone’s screen—the first thing he looked at when he opened his eyes. Drinking his coffee while standing before the windows of his nineteenth-floor