The Interestings

“Yes. We live on a farm in Dovecote, Vermont, with a bunch of our friends. We’ve got some animals up there. It’s a pretty amazing setup.” She looked around her. “But it seems like you’ve got a nice setup here yourself.”

  “Not exactly,” said Jonah. He opened the door of the room where he was staying, in order to show them the minimalism of his summer living conditions. They took in the narrow iron student bed, the desk with the Tensor lamp, and the pile of books about principles of mechanical engineering and robotic design and vectors. “Vectors!” said Joel, picking up a book. “I have no idea what they are, but I’m sure I wouldn’t understand them.”

  Jonah shrugged. “If someone explained them to you, you probably would.”

  The couple sat on the bed, the springs straining, and Cap’n Crunch leapt up between them, while Jonah sat in his desk chair. No one else had been to visit his room since he’d been living here this summer. Even at college for the past four years Jonah hadn’t been overly social; he’d gone to parties in large groups of friends, and had had a few sexual encounters, but as far as he could tell he hadn’t made any lifelong friends. His closest friends were still Jules, Ethan, and Ash; they all got together in New York over breaks. For a while in college he’d played guitar and sung vocals for an MIT band called Seymour Glass, and all the musicians were extremely talented. But when they arranged to get together in the music studio senior year to cut a demo tape and “take it around,” Jonah decided he didn’t want to be in the band anymore.

  “Why not?” asked the bass player. “You’re so good.”

  Jonah had just shrugged. He’d been squeamish about music ever since Barry Claimes. Not squeamish enough to have given up playing a little on his own, but he never tried to write songs. Whenever he picked up his guitar he recalled sitting around making up music for that grotesque man, who had stolen it from him.

  As it turned out, Seymour Glass had signed with Atlantic Records right before the school year ended, and the other band members were going off to LA now with a session guitarist in Jonah’s place. Jonah wished them well, and even though it was painful that they might become really successful (as it turned out, they did, getting known as the cool MIT-grad nerd band), he was relieved to have nothing to do with them. He’d abdicated his talent, he knew, which was depressing when he really thought about it, but also a relief. He’d gotten a reputation in college as a shy, attractive, long-haired boy whose mother was “that folksinger,” as people said, though no one expressed real interest anymore in Susannah Bay. She was over. She’d been over for a while. Talking Heads were big when Jonah was in college, along with the B-52s, whose female band members sported retro hairdos. Susannah Bay had never used hair spray in her life, and the women of the B-52s seemed to offend her sensibility, even though the hairdos were clearly meant as a strange and campy aesthetic. Susannah’s long black hair was her “signature” look, journalists had always said, just as “The Wind Will Carry Us” was her “signature” song.

  You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression. Quietly, Jonah had done excellent work in mechanical engineering in college, writing a thesis on robotics and graduating with honors. He was adept at this work, and was frequently praised by Dr. Pasolini, who wanted him to meet the people at Gage Systems in New York for possible employment, but Jonah already felt isolated this summer. He didn’t know what he wanted to be, or do, and he wasn’t planning on spending the summer in the loft with his mother, who had grown increasingly discouraged as her career appeared to dry up like an old seedpod. When Jonah had come home for spring break, she had put his B-52s album on full blast and shouted, “Just listen to that! It’s so bizarre! Do you actually like it?” Of course he liked it, and he’d danced to it all night at the post-midterms blowout his suitemate had forced him to attend, his body bumping up against a sophomore with a key ring in his pocket that crunched pleasingly against Jonah’s hip bone, but he’d told his mother he could take it or leave it.

  “So explain vectors to us,” said Joel, and for some reason Jonah found himself wanting to comply.

  “Well, there’s Euclidean vectors,” he began. “Does that interest you?”

  “Absolutely,” said Hannah with an encouraging smile.

  “A Euclidean vector is what you need when you want to carry point A to point B. Vector is from the Latin. It actually means ‘carrier.’”

  “See, we’re getting an MIT education,” Hannah said to Joel.

  “We’ll have to tell everyone at the farm that we went to MIT and had a seminar in vectors,” Joel said. “But they won’t believe us. You’ll have to tell them, Jonah.”

  Jonah tensed upon hearing his name spoken. Just a little while ago, they’d been calling him “Dex.” How did they know his name? Oh, of course; there on one of his textbooks from the school year on his desk, across a large piece of masking tape, he had written “JONAH BAY, ’81.”

  “Do you have any interest in spending a rural weekend up there?” Hannah asked. “Pitching hay? Explaining vectors to other people? It would use your brain and your body. Plus, the food is super delicious.”

  “No, thanks, I don’t think so,” Jonah said.

  “Okay, fine; if you can’t you can’t,” said Hannah, and she smiled at him with what appeared to be genuine regret, and maybe it really was. They weren’t pressuring him to go; he felt no pressure whatsoever, merely a desire on their part for him to be with them.

  “Well,” said Joel. “We should hit the road. I enjoyed talking to you, Jonah, and I hope the rest of your summer goes really well.” He stood up and motioned toward the dog, who scrambled to its feet.

  Jonah thought of how the room was filled with human life and canine life right now, and that when these strangers left they would take all that life with them. He suddenly wanted to stop that from happening. On impulse, he who rarely followed impulses said, “How long is the drive?”

  Before he left with them, he grabbed the mushy-wicked Magic Marker from the message board on his door, and quickly wrote in dry, milky gray letters, “GONE TO FARM IN DOVECOTE, VT. WITH PURPLE MINIBUS PEOPLE. BACK MONDAY.” In the unlikely event that they were planning on murdering him, there would be clues.

  The farm was enjoyable, if in a slovenly way. Some of the people who lived there seemed to have been slightly damaged by life: they spoke a little too slowly; they appeared to have been burned out or, in one extreme case, had no legs and rode around the bumpy dirt in a little motorized wheelchair. Yet the food was soft and warm, with an emphasis on rice and potatoes and novel grains like spelt and bulgur. Jonah found himself wanting to eat and eat, and a very kind woman kept refilling his plate until he felt that he might turn into a snowman made of mounds of food. Everyone was so incredibly nice to him; it was different from MIT, where people were involved in what they were involved in, and sometimes at dinner it could seem as if the person sitting across from you was in another dimension. Even while they ate, the engineers were engineering, and the mathematicians had set up little invisible blackboards in their brains; and though the conversation was friendly, it could be remote. Also, by senior year everyone was already planning their next moves, as cunning as double agents.

  But here on the farm no one seemed to have any ambitions beyond preparing hearty foods in creative ways; discussing an old sheep that had wandered from the meadow; and welcoming their new guest, Jonah, whom they said they felt blessed to know. Toward the end of dinner, when the women spooned a brownish carob agar pudding into flea market cut-glass cups like a pile of giblets, Joel bent his head in prayer, and everyone else did as he did. The prayers were brief, followed by a few unfamiliar songs, one of them in Korean. Looking back at this scene, Jonah appeared so innocent. He was astonished at how he had allowed himself to be led like that old sheep back into the meadow.

  Dinner was followed by a visit to a converted barn, where there was more singing and more prayers. Then Tommy, the man with no legs, locomoted himself to the front of the room, and eve
ryone got quiet. “In 1970,” Tommy said, “here was my situation. I got drafted and sent to Vietnam, where within two months my legs were shot off by a bouncing Betty. I managed to get pulled out of the river and sent back to the U.S., but I spent a year in the V.A., and when I got home my wife said, ‘Hell no, bub, I’m not staying married to a fucking cripple who can’t even walk across the room to fetch me my pack of cigs.’” There was mild sympathetic groaning, but Jonah sat silently, appalled. “I was down on my luck,” Tommy continued. “Became very bitter. My friends all gave up on me, each and every one, and truthfully I don’t blame them. And then one day I was sitting in my pathetic little wheelchair on the street in Hartford, Connecticut, begging for change—that’s what my life had come to—when a van pulled up at the curb. And the loveliest people in the world stepped out. They said to me that I looked like I didn’t have any family to speak of, and I admitted that this was true. And they said we are your family. And this turned out to be true too.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “They recognized that I needed them, and that they needed me. Just the way everyone in this barn is family, and needs one another, because Satan is all around us. As you know, Israel was God’s chosen nation. But it seems that the Jews, falling under the sway of Satan, turned away from Jesus. God did what he could to show them how dangerous their path was,” Tommy went on casually. “For century after century he made them suffer, and finally, to make a point, he took six million of their people and extinguished them in one fell swoop. But it’s been said that the Jews had made a fatal error in leaving Jesus, and that God needed to look elsewhere to find a new Messiah and a new place to establish himself. So where did God turn?”

  The question was rhetorical. Tommy pushed a lever on his wheelchair and made it spin in place. “Where he lands, nobody knows!” he called, and then he stopped sharply, facing the room again, and said, “But actually, God did know. Korea was a perfect location. And because it is a peninsula, it resembled the male sexual organ, the organ of power. It proved to be an ideal place for the battle between God and Satan. And Reverend Moon proved to be the ideal reincarnation of Jesus Christ, only without the flaws.”

  Jonah would have laughed at this absurd monologue, but he was alone among these strangers, in a barn on a farm far from anyone he knew. No one would look kindly on him if he mocked this Vietnam vet in the wheelchair. Everyone was listening politely, indulging the man, probably because he was so badly disabled. When Tommy was done speaking, there was applause, and more singing. Jonah quickly learned the words, and the tunes were catchy. Then suddenly a couple of guitars appeared, and Hannah handed one to him, shyly saying, “I know you play, Jonah. I saw the guitar in your dorm room.” But the guitar she gave him was the worst instrument he’d ever played in his life, a totally out-of-tune piece of shit that ordinarily would have been thrown away, yet Jonah spent a few hopeless minutes tuning it, then played while the twenty-five or so people who had now gathered around all sang. They complimented his playing, having no idea of his lineage.

  By the time he fell asleep in the men’s communal living quarters, a large loftlike space with rows of bedrolls on a floor of cheap carpet, Jonah realized he was content and exhausted. He had traveled a couple of hours to get here, and then he had eaten great quantities of starch. He had sung song after song. He had been passive, and had listened. He had prayed, in a fashion, though he didn’t believe in God. He had played guitar on command. His eyes now flickered and shut, and he slept undisturbed on his back with his hair spread out around him on the pillow. In the morning there was more soft, plentiful food, now served with syrup. Also, more prayers and teachings, and more warmth and love and kindness. Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.

  • • •

  It did not seem so strange, three weeks later, for Jonah Bay to find himself selling dyed pink and blue flowers out of a plastic bucket on a street corner in nearby Brattleboro, Vermont. Or if it did feel strange, he was defiant in the face of strangeness, and besides, he liked Lisa, the girl he sold flowers with, though “selling” wasn’t the right word, because no one was buying. The people they approached regarded them with annoyance or open hostility. Here, as at earlier points in his life, Jonah felt he knew what he was doing, but he seemed to be watching it all in third person, neither approving nor disapproving, and unable to affect the outcome.

  Naturally, his mother was hysterical about his change of plans. He had gone back to Cambridge in the minibus with Hannah and Joel and Cap’n Crunch, in order to pack up his summer dorm room, and from there they had driven down to New York to drop off his worldly belongings, which he would no longer need on the communal farm. All he would need was a pillow, a blanket, and some clothes. In the loft on Watts Street, his mother angrily said she thought he had more of an independent mind than to join what she called “a common cult.” She had one of her musician friends with her that day for moral support, and they both tried to argue with Hannah and Joel, who were expert at not engaging with irate parents. The more Susannah Bay became upset, the more calmly Hannah and Joel talked. At one point, Hannah said to Susannah, “I have to tell you, we may come to this from different angles, but I really admire your music.” When Jonah had casually mentioned to them who his mother was, Hannah had said she really wanted to meet Susannah, which he suspected was part of the reason for the return to the loft.

  “Oh,” Susannah said, a little surprised. “Well, thank you.”

  “I grew up listening to your songs, Ms. Bay,” said Hannah. “I’ve bought every record you’ve ever made.”

  “Even the disco folk one?” Jonah asked, unnecessarily cruel.

  His mother quickly said, “That was a mistake, that record. And this, Jonah, this is a mistake too. We all do things we later regret. Come on, you just got a degree from MIT. You’re such a bright person, and you can do anything you want, yet you’re choosing to live on a farm with people you barely know who follow the teachings of a Korean man who says he’s the Messiah?”

  “Yes, that about sums it up,” said Jonah, and he grabbed his old blanket and pillow and slung them over his shoulder. He both knew and did not know that what he was choosing to do was radical. He felt grateful to have decisions taken away from him for once, and to know that he would not be overcome with feeling in ways that were always hard for him to manage. He and his new friends and their black dog sauntered out of the loft and got back into the minibus with the shot springs, and headed back to Vermont, reaching the farm by sundown, in time for prayers.

  Within three months Jonah had been so absorbed in life there and in the teachings of the church, as conveyed to him by some of the other residents of the farm, that it was as if he had been triple-dipped in a bath of ideology. His mother remained distraught and contacted a few of Jonah’s friends, essentially saying, “Do something.” So in the fall, in consultation with Susannah Bay, Ash and Ethan quietly arranged for a deprogramming of Jonah that would take place in a midtown hotel room in New York City. Ash’s father “knew someone”—of course he did, he knew all kinds of people. The guy had been recommended by a colleague of Gil’s at Drexel, whose daughter Mary Ann became a Hare Krishna, shaved her head, and changed her name to Bhakti, which meant “devotion.” It was set, and Susannah agreed to pay the shockingly high fee.

  What they needed to do first was get Jonah away from the farm; that part was apparently often harder than the deprogramming itself. Ethan, Ash, and Jules drove Susannah up to Vermont to see Jonah and have a look around, and then, the following day, to somehow find a way to get him home. The four of them stayed for dinner and spent the night on the farm. Unlike Jonah when he first went there, none of them were interested in learning more about what they’d seen and heard at dinner and in the barn. All they wanted was to take him out of there. “Listen, Jonah,” Ethan said the next mo
rning after breakfast. “I did a little reading before we came up here. I went to the New York Public Library and I asked them for everything on microfiche that I could find. In my opinion, Moon is a megalomaniac.”

  “No, Ethan, that’s not true. He’s my spiritual father.”

  “He isn’t,” Ethan said.

  “I seem to remember something about your father,” said Jonah, using the only retort he could think of, “and your mother, and your pediatrician.”

  “Well, at least you remember the conversations we used to have,” said Jules. “That’s good. It’s a start.”

  “Apparently Moon’s followers give up their individuality and creativity, which is something we’ve all valued above everything else,” said Ethan. “If the Wunderlichs taught us anything, it was that. Is it that you’re afraid? Is it because it was hard for you to come out as a gay man? No one cares if you’re gay, Jonah; I mean, big deal! Don’t give that up; don’t take it back. Be yourself, fall in love, have sex with guys, do all the things that make you you. Don’t be guided by some rigid external philosophy. Make things. Play your guitar. Build robots. This is all we’ve really got, isn’t it? What else is there but basically building things until the day we die? Come on, Jonah, don’t fall in line. I just can’t understand this; why are you even here?”

  “I’ve found my place finally,” Jonah murmured, and then someone called him to tend the hydroponic lettuces. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “And you should all hit the road. You don’t want to run into traffic heading back. Where’s my mother? Someone should tell her it’s time.”

  “You’re under the influence, Jonah,” said Ash. “Please don’t say that this is the sum total of who you are.” She came close and took him by both wrists. “Remember when we were involved?” she asked shyly. Then she whispered, “I know it never became anything big. But it was an unspoiled, delicate thing, and I’m glad it happened. You were the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen in my life. I don’t know what happened to make you so vulnerable to this kind of thing. You should be an artist, Jonah.”