A guide for the perplexed: a novel Read online

  Josie laughed as Itamar kissed her, and then she turned away, her long black hair swinging in Judith’s face.

  One cold morning seven years later, Judith read a message addressed to Josie, forwarded to both Judith and Josie by Josie’s receptionist, from the board of trustees of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt—an institution that Judith seemed to remember learning about in a history class in fifth grade. She wondered if the message was a joke.

  It wasn’t. The library, it seemed, had been rebuilt by Arab philanthropists with grand ambitions. As its website proclaimed, “This library is no ancient dream, but a cutting-edge modern reality.” The message to Josie, obsequiously written, invited her to come to Egypt for three weeks as a visiting consultant, to help develop the digital archiving systems for what the trustees hoped would someday become the world’s largest library, for the second time in two thousand years. It was the sort of invitation Josie would barely have glanced at. But Judith looked at the swirling black arabesques of the library’s logo on the screen and saw what might be possible.

  “This consulting gig in Egypt looks like a great opportunity,” Judith said when Josie walked into the office that morning. “It would be terrific publicity for the company, especially for overseas markets.”

  “You think?” Josie asked. She looked at the screen over Judith’s shoulder, reading as she twirled her hair around her finger.

  “Definitely,” Judith answered. “And I bet it would be really interesting for you to go there. Isn’t Genizah named after some Egyptian thing?”

  “Of course, the Cairo Genizah,” Josie said. “It was a huge stash of medieval manuscripts that were hidden in a room in a synagogue in Egypt. Not just books, but things like business receipts, letters, medical prescriptions, ordinary things like that. And nobody had even looked at them for a thousand years until—”

  Judith was already tired of listening to Josie. “Right, I remember,” she interrupted, though she didn’t. “The point is, you’d have a great time. You could go look in dead people’s filing cabinets or whatever. You love that kind of thing.”

  “That’s true,” Josie said, still twirling her hair. “But I’d be pretty worried about safety, wouldn’t you? I mean, no one really knows what’s going on over there now. After those riots at the embassy last year, and now with the new parliament—”

  “Oh, come on, Josie. You think they’d let anything happen to you? This library is a world-class institution. They have Saudi Arabian billionaires financing the whole thing. They’d be watching you every minute,” Judith said. “And they only need you on site for three weeks. I think you’d get amazing media coverage. Especially because everyone else is too chicken to go.”

  Josie was incapable of resisting fame. “Hmm,” she murmured. “Actually, it would be nice to clear my head for a few weeks.”

  “Wouldn’t it?” Judith prompted.

  “I’ve had a lot to deal with lately, between work and Tali,” Josie mused. “Maybe this would be a chance to take a deep breath.”

  The very existence of Josie’s six-year-old daughter Tali, a black-haired beauty just like Josie, made Judith, still single, sick with envy. Judith’s envy was a physical illness, a nauseous, aching, shivering longing whenever she saw that little girl. “You deserve a deep breath,” Judith said.

  Josie smiled. “Tell them yes,” she said, and whirled away, her black hair flying behind her. When Josie left for Egypt three months later, Judith suddenly found herself, for the first time in years, able to breathe.

  Judith barely thought of Josie after that, until Josie was taken hostage.

  THIS IS WHAT JUDITH would like to forget: a girl in a bathtub, her breath hovering over the face of the water.

  In this memory Judith is four years old, and she is blowing bubbles, enraptured by how the soap-skinned bathwater bulges, by her breath alone, into a primal ooze. She raises her head to take another breath, her eyes level with the rounded end of the bathtub’s faucet. And then she notices her reflection.

  Her face appears on the faucet’s shiny surface, her wide gums and stumpy baby teeth sliding into focus. She moves closer, and her face flattens across chrome, distorted, until she backs away again. Now she can see the whole bathroom reflected in the faucet, curled into a perfect orb like a baby bird enfolded in an egg. In the miniature world contained within the faucet’s circle, she can see her little sister Josie standing on a stepstool by the sink, and her mother brushing Josie’s dark wet hair. If Judith tilts her head, Josie shrinks away, becomes insignificant, while her mother grows larger, her strong hands exaggerated against Josie’s back. And now Judith watches, with absolute reverence, as her mother braids her sister’s hair.

  On the curved surface of the bathtub faucet, Judith sees her mother holding a new striped bathrobe and wrapping it around her sister. Three-year-old Josie’s face is glowing above the bathrobe’s colors, resplendent in the room’s primordial light. Her mother bends down to Josie’s little face. And then Judith hears her mother whisper to her sister, “Josie, I love you best of all.”

  This is the beginning, Judith’s first memory, and nothing else matters. All of the worlds before that moment might as well never have existed.

  2

  FOR YEARS, JOSIE had prepared for this possibility. Someday when I’m in solitary confinement, I’ll have the time to figure that out. She had had this thought when she stopped playing chess, and again when she stopped teaching herself Japanese, and then again when she abandoned the remarkably ill-conceived master’s program in statistics for the spectacularly ill-conceived doctorate in applied math. Later she saw that she wasn’t indecisive, but what compelled her was a discipline that didn’t yet have its own name: the study of patterns, of whether the past could be used to learn anything about the future—about whether patterns existed at all, or whether they existed only in the minds of people who sorted the information to conform to their own beliefs. She had created Genizah in part to test whether such patterns existed.

  Instead she had learned that astonishing numbers of people cared mainly about their cats. And the problems she had long packed away to solve—whether dreams were mental garbage or a window to a world beyond what a waking person could perceive, whether nature or nurture mattered more, whether it was ever possible to throw something away—had all shriveled in her mind. They had seemed like discrete, captivating ideas once, long ago. But now they, along with every other thought or experience she had ever had, had become no more than tiny threads in a vast tapestry of obsession that occupied her entire being: the possibility of escape.

  Her stupidity galled her, the memory of the mistake devouring her insides along with the terrible vomiting of those first few days. She had always taken a private car service from the library to the hotel. But that night she had been working later than usual, with Nasreen. Josie never understood Nasreen’s position at the library. She was clearly several levels down from the men with authority, thin mustached figures with whom Josie had shared sugared tea and stilted conversation. Josie suspected that Nasreen had been given the job as her ­Soviet-style minder mainly because Nasreen had graduated from some sort of elite British school in Alexandria, spoke excellent English, and was a woman. The Egyptians had expected Josie to be a man.

  When she got off the plane in Cairo and saw three men waiting outside of customs, one of whom was holding a sign with the library’s logo on it that read “Mr. Ashkenazi,” it hadn’t even occurred to her that it was anything more than a spelling error. She walked right up to them, couldn’t recall whether handshakes were appropriate, and gave a slight nod instead.

  “Hello, I’m Josie Ashkenazi. It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

  “Good morning, madam. You are Mrs. Ashkenazi?” the ­oldest-looking man said. The younger two looked at each other, bemused.

  Josie smiled, unaccustomed to the “Mrs.”—which didn’t even make sense, since Itamar’s last name was Mizrahi. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Very nice
to meet you,” the old man said. “Once your husband has finished with customs, we shall take you both to your hotel.”

  Josie opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “It’s—it’s just me,” she stammered, suddenly feeling Itamar’s absence beside her. She should have brought him, she realized. But she hadn’t been willing to bring Tali too, and she had felt bad enough abandoning Tali for three weeks. And Itamar had told her that he hated Egypt. “I went there twice with my friends during high school, and both times I got sick,” he had complained. “Both times! Twice I ended up vomiting in a hotel room. Listen, Yosefi, you don’t need me there.” Josie glanced down at her wedding ring and added, “He’s at home.”

  Now the old man stared at her, confused.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “We are here for Mr. Joseph Ashkenazi. The computer executive. He is coming to work at our library. Pardon me, madam, but I believe this is—you are a mistake.”

  You are a mistake. The last time she had heard this about herself was from Judith when she was nine years old, when Judith had hurled it at her along with other insults. Judith claimed to be privy to certain conversations between their parents where they had supposedly discussed how Josie’s conception had been a mistake, that if it hadn’t been for Josie following so closely, fifteen months after Judith’s birth, their mother might actually have finished her doctorate, gotten published, gotten hired, become a professor, lived a dream. Instead there was Josie, the mistake.

  The mistake smiled. “Oh, no, that’s me,” she said, and took out a business card: “Genizah, Inc.” “I’m Josephine Ashkenazi. At your service for all your memory-storage needs.”

  The man took the card in his hand, his fingernails more carefully filed than Josie’s. He held it close to his eyes, then at a distance, as though he couldn’t make out the words. Josie’s stomach sank. Someone had invited her; how could they not know who she was? Were these men just chauffeurs? It didn’t seem so, and at any rate there were too many of them for that. Even if whoever had invited her was waiting in Alexandria, hadn’t at least one of these well-groomed men looked her up? She clutched the plastic handle of her suitcase and watched as all three men edged away from her, backing off ever so slightly, turning their heads and glancing around the terminal, as though she had suddenly begun to smell.

  “Ah,” the man said, raising his glasses as he squinted at the card again. His mustache crinkled as he attempted a smile. Josie wished again that Itamar was with her, that anyone was with her. “Well, then, I believe we will take you to your hotel.” For the rest of the ride, the men were silent. From that moment on she felt as though she were covered in filth.

  During the first few days her hosts tried to awe her with the country’s past. The pyramids and the other postcard sites impressed her, but what astonished her was the dis­array of everything—not just the raging seas of cars and people in the streets, but the actual national treasures, the ancient remains that appeared to have been dumped into museums by earth-moving equipment. It reminded her of Genizah: at first, in beta testing, people had treated what they saved carefully, cataloguing their data like precious stones. But now no one even bothered to look at what they saved. There was no need. In the National Museum of Pharaonic Antiquities, Canopic jars and miniatures of the pharaohs’ lives lay scattered in wide glass cases, sometimes covered in dust. It made sense, in a way, especially since the splendor of the pharaohs now only served to make the contemporary country seem pitiable by comparison. On a hot autumn morning two days after Josie arrived, the city was paralyzed by parades, those who had jobs released for the day, revelry in the streets. One of the mustached men explained to her that it was a national holiday, celebrating Egypt’s victory over Israel in the war of 1973. The fact that Egypt had not actually won the 1973 war seemed in no way to dampen the festivities.

  In between the places her guides brought her, Josie could sense an energy in the city, a live current of excitement just beyond her reach. A friend of hers who had spent a year in Egypt had told her that she needed to go to the concerts, to the bookstalls, to the outdoor fairs—to feel the country’s vitality in the open air at night. But with the mustached men at her side it was impossible, as though an invisible gate stood between her and the people in the crowd. She had been advised by everyone not to go out alone. There was a shiny elite in Cairo: in the packed streets, expensively dressed young men, and even some expensively dressed young women, pushed their way through the crowds with cell phones welded to their hands, their eyes hidden behind sunglasses as they slammed taxi doors. But these seemed to Josie like a thin veneer, lipstick on the city’s aged mouth. Most of the city seemed tired, wasted, reused: the sagging, peeling buildings, the diesel fuel from millions of battered cars, the recycled English-language T-shirts worn by poor men and boys stamped with phrases like “Jeff Lakes Day Camp” and “Lehman Brothers.” Eye disease was so common that there were elderly people wandering the streets with no eyes to speak of, their hands thrust in front of them on canes as they walked like living mummies. Among the sunglasses, the blinded eyes, and the disappointed businessmen who dutifully escorted her from one floating Nile restaurant to another, only ogling men seemed to be looking at Josie, and then only at her breasts. Only later did she understand that she was being watched.

  Alexandria was a slightly cleaner city than Cairo, slightly cooler, and, Josie was lulled into believing, slightly safer. The library itself felt to her like an empty shell, a giant, glassy, bossy modern complex of buildings as impressive as the pyramids and almost as vacant. The vast library didn’t have nearly enough inside it, whether books or computers or, most of all, patrons. And what the library actually had was on the verge of becoming useless by disorganization alone, books lost forever simply by being incorrectly shelved, or software catalogues that rendered materials invisible by classifying them under the least relevant search terms. The extent of the task was debilitating, absurd. She felt abandoned, duped, until she met Nasreen.

  Nasreen was a young woman, stylish but severe, with frame­less glasses, fitted black pants, dark eyelashes, a pinched lower lip that made her look perpetually perplexed, and hair half-covered by a spangled headscarf that might as easily have been for fashion as for faith. The part of her hair that was visible was dyed an unlikely shade of orange. She invited Josie to dinner, and Josie assumed she would follow Nasreen back to her home when the day’s work was done. But Nasreen had other ideas.

  “Let’s meet at half past ten,” Nasreen said. “Nothing decent is open until then.”

  It was true. When Josie arrived at the waterfront restaurant whose address Nasreen had given her, she was amazed by the crowds. The city came alive after dark: by a quarter to midnight, thousands of children and adults were pouring into the streets, having dinner, shopping in stores that were closed during the heat of the day, eating ice cream beside the ink-dark sea. At the busy restaurant Nasreen had chosen, everyone was young and beautiful. Over grilled fish, Nasreen spoke about the library—the idea of reviving Alexandria’s past, the donors from Saudi Arabia and Dubai, the awareness of untapped potential, the possibility of creating the greatest scholarly resource in the Arab world. It was a sales pitch, blather from a brochure. Only afterward, when Nasreen offered to take Josie out for ice cream by the water, did Nasreen ask, “Are you enjoying your stay here?”

  They were walking under a row of palm trees on a promenade along the docks. Even here, among children clutching ice cream cones, the eyeless beggars were out in force. Josie ignored them, following Nasreen’s lead.

  Josie started to nod, but then gave up, sick of the show. “I have a six-year-old daughter at home,” she said. It was an answer to Nasreen’s question. She pulled out her phone, tapped it a few times, and showed a photo to Nasreen. On the screen, Tali was dressed as a fairy, vinyl wings tied to her back, her mouth hanging open. There was pink ice cream on her chin.

  “She is beautiful,” Nasreen said. A platitude. Her tone was controlled, courteous. �
�What is her name?”

  Josie hesitated. It was a Hebrew name; would Nasreen notice? “Tali,” she conceded.

  “A lovely name,” Nasreen said, neutrally, and licked her ice cream cone.

  Nasreen must be single, Josie reasoned, and childless. No mother in the world would have been able to resist the temptation to pull out her own photos. Even a young childless married woman would have expressed some curiosity. And Nasreen was taking Josie out for ice cream, alone, at eleven o’clock at night. But perhaps there was some cultural expectation of escorting guests that Josie simply didn’t appreciate? She wanted to ask Nasreen about her family, but Nasreen’s coolness held her back.

  “I read that your company is very popular in America,” Nasreen said, “not just for libraries and businesses, but for ordinary people.”

  Josie never stopped enjoying other people’s admiration. “You could say that,” she replied, pretending modesty. She couldn’t help smiling.

  But Nasreen did not smile. Her thin eyebrows were drawn together as she glanced at Josie. “I do not understand it. Why would ordinary people need a cataloguing system?”

  Josie laughed. “You underestimate the average American’s capacity for fascination with himself.”

  Nasreen didn’t get the joke. “What do you mean?”

  “You’d be surprised how many people want to keep records of what their cats ate for lunch over the past five years,” Josie said. “The program automatically catalogues the individual’s past, and then everything is stored on the network.”

  “But how could that happen automatically?”

  Josie launched into her own pitch, just as Nasreen had. “Wherever you have a computer—whether it’s a desktop or a tablet or a phone or pretty much any device—you probably have a recording component and a camera component,” she recited. “Our software runs those, either continuously or at the user’s request, then sorts the images and the voices with facial recognition and language processing. It also captures any text content you produce, like messages or tweets or whatever comments you post anywhere, and then archives everything based on your habits—or instincts, if you will.” The term instincts was far from accurate, she knew, but she also knew that consumers seemed to like it. “Then two weeks later, when you want to remember where you put something or what you said to someone or what your cat ate for lunch, you can call up a record of exactly what happened.”