A guide for the perplexed: a novel Page 6

  “It sounds rather trivial,” Nasreen said.

  “Of course it is,” Josie answered. “That’s why I’m rich.”

  Nasreen did not smile, not even politely. It occurred to Josie that perhaps this sort of joke was less funny in a developing country. “There’s more to it than that, of course,” Josie said, trying to recover. “There’s a social component too. You can choose to share whatever material you want with whomever you want, according to your preferences, or the software can learn those preferences from you. And there’s also an augmented reality feature that compiles older materials and syncs them to wherever you are right now. On a mobile device, you can use it the way you use your eyes, but instead of seeing what’s around you now, you can see what used to be there. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Josie held up her phone, tapped the screen, and then turned it horizontally, facing the buildings behind them. Through the windowframe of the phone’s screen, the city appeared, and then faded slightly. Over the ghosts of the dozen buildings in front of them, several structures appeared on the screen in black-and-white photos, lithographs and drawings, each labeled and dated with links to further information. As she moved the phone, other current buildings came into view, and occasionally another photo or drawing would appear superimposed on it. Most were labeled in Arabic, but five were labeled in English as well: Royal Army Hospital, 1942; Villa of Sheikh Omar al-Hakam, 1857; Temple of Osiris, 4th century BCE; Temple of Apollo, 3rd century BCE; Neve Tzedek Synagogue, 1834. Surprised, Josie tapped the screen on the last link. “The third-largest of sixteen synagogues in Alexandria prior to the Jewish community’s expulsion after the 1952 revolution, Neve Tzedek was first constructed in …” But now Nasreen was leaning in, trying to see the pictures.

  “It’s like the City of the Dead in Cairo,” Nasreen said. Her voice was melodic, unassuming, lovely. She ought to have no trouble meeting men, Josie thought. But was that even how things worked here? Josie guessed that Nasreen was in her late twenties, but she might have been anywhere between twenty and forty. Without the understood reference points of clothing, hair, makeup, posture, slang, inflection, it was impossible to know.

  “You can do this with any city in the world,” Josie heard herself say. “Actually this isn’t a great example, because it’s just pulling in what happens to be available online for this location. In New York or Cairo you’d see much more.”

  “All cities are really cities of the dead,” Nasreen said.

  The poetry of it surprised Josie. She looked around her, at the eyeless beggars and the children eating ice cream, and tried to imagine the Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Osiris. It was ridiculous; even the gods were dead.

  Nasreen interrupted her thoughts. “What did you mean by ‘instincts’?”

  Josie bit her ice cream cone, feeling the crack of cookie and the wet sweet cream between her teeth. Suddenly it felt indulgent, almost obscene, to be enjoying this ice cream under these palm trees, in front of these beggars, on the ruins of the temples of dead gods. She retreated into script. “The software is designed to learn how you think, what your habits are, and even to learn the habits of people around you,” she said. “When you’ve been using it for long enough, it actually predicts your future based on your current trajectory. Let’s say the program notices that your usual habit is to drink one beer a day, for instance, but that lately you’re having two or three. Or that you regularly send messages to men who don’t reply to you three weeks after they first appear in your contact list. It tracks those sorts of things. That way, if you don’t like where you’re headed, you can see the pattern and make changes.”

  As soon as she’d said it, Josie realized that drinking and dating examples were perhaps not the best selling points in a Muslim-majority country. She racked her brain for something more appropriate. But Nasreen sucked the last of the ice cream out of her nibbled cone, and spoke.

  “You have clearly been quite successful,” Nasreen said, her voice level and thoughtful.

  Josie absorbed the compliment, savoring its sweetness. They were standing by the railing at the water’s edge. She looked out at the dark velvet sheath of the Mediterranean, gleaming under orange fluorescent lights. All cities are cities of the dead, she thought, imagining the remains of lost worlds buried beneath the water’s darkness. It ought to have moved her, saddened her. But instead it intrigued her, as though it were a problem to be solved. She clutched her phone in her hand and resisted the impulse to drag its screen across the seascape, searching for dead maritime gods.

  “But your idea is still rather foolish,” Nasreen announced. “Most things that happen cannot be predicted, and are beyond our control.”

  Was it an insult, or just a badly translated thought? Nasreen was watching Josie, fixing her with her eyes to the railing above the sea.

  “Well, of course you can’t predict everything,” Josie faltered. She gripped the iron rail, glancing down into the water below her. A white plastic bag hovered over the face of the water, a windblown ghost. “There are always going to be acts of God, as the insurance companies put it—earthquakes and all that. But even natural disasters are often at least slightly predictable. You’d be surprised.” The wave of data and evidence rose within her, unstoppable, swelling like the black water below. “Before the tsunami in south Asia in 2004, flamingos in coastal areas flew off to forests on higher ground. There were probably similar migrations before the tsunami in Japan. Animals are very sensitive to environmental changes. They can hear sounds we can’t hear, they notice temperature or pressure changes or magnetic fields, that kind of thing. There’s probably a way to track animal behavior so as to evacuate humans prior to natural disasters. That’s a great R & D opportunity, if you ask me.”

  Nasreen clicked her tongue, a dismissive snap. “That isn’t what I mean,” she said. “I mean ordinary events, between people. Those are also beyond our control.”

  “Some, sure,” Josie conceded, to be polite. But there was an edge in Nasreen’s voice.

  “Not some. Nearly all,” Nasreen said. “Perhaps everything.”

  Now Josie snorted, slipping her phone back into her bag. “That’s just something people say when they’ve failed and don’t want to take the blame.”

  She tried to make her voice light, but she had said it. The insult lay like litter on the ancient sea’s edge.

  Nasreen looked back at Josie, her eyes firm, then at the sea. Her nostrils were noble, her profile erect. She spoke, an incantation.

  “There are innumerable ways for a person to be brought under the power of something or someone else.”

  Innumerable. The passive voice. The diction and syntax were oppressive. Was she just making conversation, or was she making a point?

  “You mean like falling in love?” Josie asked. She thought of Itamar, alone with Tali at home. Once your husband has finished with customs, we shall take you both to your hotel, one of the mustached men announced in her head. She imagined Itamar here with her, leaning against the railing beside her, skipping pebbles on the dark water. And Tali among the six-year-olds out after midnight, Itamar showing her how to cast a stone into oblivion.

  “Perhaps that is one way it could happen,” Nasreen said. “But only one of many.”

  Just past the noise of the night, the water was nearly still. Josie heard children shouting behind them as the sea rocked gently, echoing with the hollow bump of boats tethered to the docks. Nasreen leaned against the railing, took the stump of her ice cream cone, and hurled it into the sea. By the time Josie turned around, Nasreen had already found her a taxi back to her hotel.

  “YOSEFI! WHY ARE YOU calling now?” Itamar’s voice blared through Josie’s phone. She had tried and failed to get video feed to come through, cursing third-world bandwidth as ­Ita­mar’s face disappeared. “Isn’t it after midnight there?”

  “It is, but I just got home,” Josie said. She stared uselessly at the blank screen for several seconds before realizing that it wasn’t worth waiti
ng for the image to come back. The hotel air conditioning was making her head hurt. “Everyone here is up all night. It’s too hot during the day.”

  “Did you get my message? Tali has an ear infection again,” he told her, half in Hebrew. “Dr. Boodish says she needs to have tubes put in her ears. I arranged it for the week you get back, but if you don’t like it you can cancel. How’s Egypt? Are you still healthy?”

  His words washed through her brain, their meaning dissolving. She felt her eyes beginning to close. “People here think they won the Yom Kippur War,” Josie said in English. “And they don’t have eyes.”

  She heard a yelp in the background, followed by a thump. “Here, I’ll let Tali talk,” Itamar said. “Tali, Ima batelefon, dabri itah,” she heard him coax. Tali whined in the background. “Lo. Lo ahar kakh. Ein ahar kakh. Akhshav!” Itamar said. His voice was harsher than Josie wanted to hear. “She doesn’t listen to me,” Itamar muttered under his breath. But Tali had already taken the phone.

  “Mommy, you have to come home!” Tali cried. “Abba gave me medicine that tastes like poop!”

  What time was it there? Was it a weekend? Josie had no idea. “Tali, I miss you,” she said. “You have to take the medicine, okay? You have to do what Abba says.” Josie glanced out her window at the carnival scene going on outside—an actual carnival behind the hotel, with rides on the backs of trucks, little children cavorting at one in the morning. Occasionally she heard one scream. She flopped back onto the hotel room bed, a teenage gesture. No one was calling for her.

  Itamar’s voice returned. “She went upstairs. She’s really tired.”

  “That’s okay,” Josie yawned.

  “Your sister wants to hire someone to handle the Canadian market,” Itamar said. It was hard to hear him. Or maybe she just didn’t want to hear anything involving Judith. “You can approve whoever she finds when you come back.”

  “They thought I was a man,” Josie said.

  “You told me that before, metuka. When are you going to get over this jet lag?”

  “It isn’t jet lag. People here really don’t have eyes. It’s like Night of the Living Dead or something. And you never told me that this is where T-shirts go to die.”

  “Yosefi, it’s late there. Go to bed, okay? Your sister and I have everything under control. Sweet dreams,” he said in English. Tali shouted something unintelligible as Josie hung up.

  That night Josie dreamed of arriving at the waterfront restaurant, searching for Nasreen. When she spotted her, she found her seated at a table for four—with Itamar, Tali, and Judith. The four of them were all laughing together, and Josie wondered if they were laughing at her.

  A WEEK LATER, AS the library’s air conditioning made the hair on her arms stand on end, Josie was finishing a reboot of the library’s image archive when Nasreen sat down beside her.

  “I would like to study your program myself, to understand it,” Nasreen said.

  It was a relief to hear Nasreen’s voice. The men who worked at the library barely spoke to Josie, acknowledging her as she demonstrated the software only with noncommittal nods and glances at her breasts.

  “You don’t study this software, actually,” Josie replied. “It studies you. That’s how I designed it. Here, I’ll show you how it works.”

  This was the part that Josie loved: watching the awe on users’ faces as buried aspects of their minds and lives were suddenly, stunningly revealed, in perfect order. It reminded Josie of showing her mother a teacher’s glowing comments on her schoolwork, the gold star next to her name. She still aspired to gold stars. She crouched over the keyboard as Nasreen gently, almost unnoticeably, shrank to the side. Josie was used to that, too.

  “Let’s start with what’s important to you. Family? Work? Personal interests?”

  “Well, first of all things, the will of God,” Nasreen said.

  Josie’s fingers hovered over the keys. She glanced at Nasreen’s half-covered hair, her stylish pants. This was not what she had expected to hear. “I don’t have a category sorter for that,” Josie said.

  “You should,” Nasreen replied.

  Her certainty irked Josie. A familiar feeling tugged at her gut: her father, before he abandoned them all for his newer, purer, more righteous life, arguing with her mother as he edited the kitchen pantry, tossing out whole boxes of cookies and cereal and replacing them with kosher brands. Now he was apparently a diamond dealer, happily supporting his five newer, better children—all sons, she once heard, and surely by now there were flocks of grandchildren—in a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, with a new and improved wife who was only seven years older than Josie. Josie hadn’t heard from him since she was thirteen. Sometimes she wondered whether he ever looked her up online, and if he did, whether he was proud of her, or ashamed of her. Or ashamed of himself.

  “The software only sorts things the user already knows,” Josie said evenly. “We could create a category for ‘religion’ under ‘hobbies and interests’—”

  “Excuse me, are you a Christian?” Nasreen interrupted.

  Josie grimaced. “Sure,” she huffed. She had been advised before arriving, by nearly everyone, to tell people this—just to make things easier, as her friend who had spent the year in Egypt put it. She was surprised by how often it came up, and by how degrading it felt to lie—humiliating, like being a child again. Later it would take her captors less than half an hour to dig her documents out of the pouch under her shirt, notice the half-dozen Israeli stamps in her passport, and declare her an agent of the Mossad.

  “Your Gospels tell you the will of God, don’t they?” Nasreen asked. “Otherwise, what is their purpose?”

  Josie bit her lip. She thought of the Hebrew words on an abstract painting that had hung on the wall in the house where she grew up: What does God require of you? Only to do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. It had remained there after her father left, a rebuke. For a moment Josie entertained, purely as a programmer, the possibility of cataloguing the divine will. She could create three categories, for instance: one for doing justice, one for loving kindness, and a third for walking humbly with one’s God. But the final category would override the prior two, she reasoned, since the very act of cataloguing one’s deeds of justice or kindness would presumably disqualify a person from walking humbly with his God. It was like Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which had unexpectedly captured her data-tracking imagination when she was forced to read it in school. Franklin had carefully documented his successes in pursuing the noblest of eighteenth-century virtues: temperance, industry, frugality, chastity, and of course, humility. That was the point where Franklin lost all credibility, in Josie’s opinion. Ignoring Nasreen’s question, Josie turned to the screen.

  “The program has a setting for open topics, which allows information to be catalogued as it arrives in response to the query you set. You could create an open topic for questions about—about the will of God, for instance.” This was absurd, Josie thought. But then what wasn’t? At least it wasn’t about a cat. “That would be more specific than having it sorted as a hobby, and it would allow the category to be included in other archives in the network.”

  “The will of God is not an open topic,” Nasreen stated.

  Josie glanced again at Nasreen, at her stylish pants. This was not a conversation Josie wanted to have. “Let’s focus on the software,” she said.

  Josie was relieved that Nasreen seemed to get the point. Nasreen gave a curt nod, pursing her lips.

  “The idea isn’t to teach the software about a subject,” Josie continued, and heard the pedantry her sister hated seeping into her own voice. But now she felt Nasreen deserved it. “It’s to teach the software the way you think, or how you would organize something—which in turn will reflect where you’d look to find it.”

  “Could it catalogue my dreams?” Nasreen asked. “I always write down my dreams when I wake up in the morning.”

  This was intriguing. Josie turned to
Nasreen, noticing for the first time that Nasreen’s eyes were green. “Really? What for?”

  “In case there are any messages in them.”

  Josie looked back at the screen. Everything in Egypt was a disappointment. Even Nasreen, who had at first seemed so refreshingly normal, was turning out to be a crank. “Are we talking about, uh, messages from God?” she asked. She tried to suppress the sarcastic edge in her voice, but it sliced through the vowels nonetheless. “Because like I mentioned before, this software—”

  To Josie’s surprise, Nasreen shrugged. “Any sort of messages,” she said. Her voice was lighter than it had been, and Josie heard something in it that she could barely identify at first: friendliness. “During the day we are occupied with things that are not very important. There is a blinding quality to the unimportant during the day, like bright light that doesn’t allow us to see. Nighttime is our only chance to really be alive.”

  Poetry again. In Josie’s mind, the bright refrigerated library around them faded, along with the past seven years, and she was in Ein Gedi at twilight, the oasis by the Dead Sea. Itamar had pulled the car up along the edge of the cliff and the two of them had climbed out, sitting down on a wide flat ledge along the precipice. Far below them, beyond their vision, a waterfall streamed down to the dark green gully at the bottom of the hundred-foot drop, the falling water a gentle, sibilant shhh, rocking the world to sleep. From the edge of the cliff, in the day’s last light, they could see miles of desert beyond the oasis, tan and white and yellow-streaked mountains. The dark mirror of the Dead Sea lay at the mountains’ feet. Stalagmites of salt floated like icebergs on its surface, an illusion of cold. The heat wrapped her bare arms even as the sky darkened. Before the light faded, she saw an ibex on the top of the cliff opposite—like a poem Itamar had once read to her, the animal’s long face a violin, about to sing. Then night fell: a darkness so total that only Itamar’s tongue against her skin reminded her that she was alive, clinging to the rim of the world.