But something about today seemed to cloak everything in radiance. Orthodox Jews tended to talk about such things as if they were moments of vast spiritual enlightenment, though David tended to think the Orthodox Jews were a little on the fruity side of things — always dropping Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Bones like that guy wasn’t a fucking whack job of the first order — so it was a good thing Temple Beth Israel was reform, which meant David just had to know some of that hocus-pocus shit, but didn’t have to talk about it too much and certainly didn’t have to dress in that stupid black getup. Still, his mind felt clear today, and whether it was a religious experience or just the settling of some internal debts didn’t particularly vex David, because the result was the same, chiefly that he knew he needed to get the fuck out of Las Vegas before he killed himself and took twenty or thirty motherfuckers with him in the process.
That his life had become a suffocation of ironies didn’t bother him. No, it was the realization that in just three weeks he’d turn fifty and yet he constantly waited for his front door to be kicked in by U.S. Marshals, that he wasn’t some dumb punk anymore who could just live in blindness while other people controlled his exterior life, and, well, he missed his wife more and more with each passing moment.
The Savone family had been good to him, he couldn’t deny that — they’d set him up in this life when they could have scattered him over the Midwest one tendon at a time, even had Rabbi Kales privately tutor him for two years before he started this long con, first as an assistant at the temple’s Children’s Center (where he actually had responsibilities for the first time in his life), and then, steadily, they pushed him up through the temple’s ranks until, when it became clear that Rabbi Kales’s old age and inability to shut the fuck up had become a liability, he ascended to the top spot.
He had a beautiful home. A beautiful car. If he needed a woman, Bennie took care of that too. The problem was that the world around him was changing: Locally, only Bennie knew he was a fake, all the other players having gone down in a fit of meshugass over at the Wild Horse strip club that left a tourist dead and another one without the ability to speak. Eventually, Bennie would end up getting busted on some RICO shit (or, praise be, Bennie’s wife Rachel would get a fucking slit of conscience and/or retrospect and would roll on that fat fuck) and then one morning David would wake up and the U.S. Marshals would shove a big hook in his mouth and dangle him all over the press, the big fish that got away finally on the line.
And then there was the paralyzing issue of technology: When the Savone family moved him out of Chicago after the fuck-up, he had to leave everything behind, including his wife Jennifer and his infant son William. At first, it was easy to keep them out of his mind — it was either forget them or get the death penalty, which would probably be meted out by about fifteen cops in a very small cell. But as time went on and his life became a mundane series of mornings spent holding babies’ bloody dicks, brunch meetings filled with whiny plasticized rich bitches who couldn’t decide which charity should get the glory of their attention, afternoons spent in pink and yellow polo shirts as he golfed with men who would have fucking spit on him in Chicago, and nights spent alone in his Ethan Allen — showroom living room, flipping channels, jerking off to Cinemax, thinking about disappearing, just getting the fuck out, moving to Mexico, or Canada, or even Los Angeles, he began paving roads toward Jennifer and William.
It was so easy: He just typed their names into Google and came up with William’s MySpace page. William was seventeen now and if his pictures were any judge, was in desperate need of some guidance. Every single photo, his pants were half-way down his ass, he was throwing some fucking gang sign that actually spelled out MOB, and he had a Yankees cap — a fucking Yankees cap! — turned sideways on his head, which made him look like a retard, though not unlike half the kids David saw Saturdays at the temple. He only saw Jennifer in the background of a few shots and it broke his heart to see how old she’d become, how her straight blond hair was now silver, how her body had grown frumpy. Time and pressure had turned her into an old woman while he was busy fucking strippers and running a goddamned Jewish empire in the middle of the desert.
But she was there. He could see her. She existed. He checked the archives of the Tribune and Sun-Times to see if her name had been in any marriage announcements but came up empty. David knew that didn’t mean anything concrete, but he also thought that if she had remarried, William wouldn’t have turned into such a fucking putz.
Over the last several months, he’d started looking at Google satellite photos of his old house (where, according to a simple public record search, Jennifer and William still lived). Though all he could really see was the roof and the general outline of the house, he could make out bits of himself too: the pool, which he’d purchased after he got paid for his first substantial hit (a guy he ran track with in high school — Gil Williams — whose father was a city councilman); the towering blue ash tree in the front yard, where he hung a tire swing for William; the brick driveway, Jennifer’s dream, which he laid brick by brick over the course of a long weekend. Before he understood that the photos were static and not updated regularly, David would return each day to refresh the image, hoping to catch a glimpse of his wife, who he was sure he could recognize even from outer space.
Did she know he was still alive? Did she spend nights searching for him too? Did she know he’d also turned gray, but that he’d stayed in shape all of these years, working out, still hitting the heavy bag at the gym when he could, keeping himself ready, just in case, knowing, waiting, thinking that eventually, if he had to, he could kill someone with his hands again, just like back in the day. Happy with the thought. Thinking, yesterday: You think I’m soft? I could shove that attaché case up your ass, Bennie. And now. Now. When would things ever be tenable if they weren’t now? Life, David realized, had reached a terminal point. Years ago, Rabbi Kales explained to David that when the end of days came, the Jews would be resurrected into a perfect state and the whole of the world would take on the status of Israel, and the Jews, he told him, would live in peace there. What about me? David had asked then, and Rabbi Kales just shook his head and said that he’d likely just rot in the ground, right beside him probably, in light of the experience they were embroiled in. He laughed when he said it, but David was pretty sure he meant it. Well, fuck that, David thought now. It was time to get tenable.
David purchased a small bindle of sweet-smelling incense from a hippie-looking girl with a barbell through her tongue. He’d seen this girl before — maybe fifty times, actually, since he was pretty sure she’d been there every single time he’d visited the farmer’s market — but had never bothered to really notice her apart from the fact that she always stood there placidly, selling fucking incense. What kind of life was that? Selling smell. She smiled sweetly at him and David wondered how much kids today knew about the fucking world, about how things really were, how it wasn’t all just iPods and MySpace and throwing gang signs on the Internet, that there was something permanent about the decisions being made around them. Ramifications. Spiritual and physical. If kids wanted to know what it meant to be tough, they’d take a look at the Torah, see how the Jews rolled, see how revenge and power were really exerted. David liked thinking about the Jews as Chosen People, liked thinking that maybe, after all these years, he’d been chosen too. You wander the desert for forty years — or just fifteen — you begin to change your perspective on things, begin to appreciate what you had before you got lost, begin to see signs, warnings, omens. Not everything is so obvious. Not everything has to be digitized to be real. Sometimes, man, you have to look inside of things.