Paint It Black by Janet Fitch Read Free Book Online Page A

stayed in their places, their instruments laid across their laps like infants. Two rabbis came to the podium, a chubby middle-aged one with glasses on his nose, and the other old and jowly in a silver tie. Both wore white shawls with blue stripes and long fringe. She wondered if they came with the cemetery. She doubted they were Meredith’s. The heavy rabbi sang prayers in Hebrew, and people followed from a book in the back of the seats, singing along, rocking forward and back. Sometimes they stood and sometimes they sat, like a concert. She did what the other people did. The jowly old rabbi spoke. His eyebrows were impressive, his voice important in a fake way. “Dearest friends, we are gathered here to bid goodbye to our loved one, Michael Loewy Faraday. A boy of rich promise, a light in the lives of his parents, Meredith Elizabeth Loewy and Calvin Peter Faraday.” She could tell he didn’t know Michael from a hole in the ground, he was just saying what he thought they wanted to hear. She preferred the Hebrew, songs so old they scraped the bottom of your heart like a burned pan.
    “Who can know God’s intentions? Who can know His Mind?” She looked at the coffin, lying there like a giant question mark. Like the monolith in
2001
.
One big fucking question. But at the end of the day, who needed a God who’d let Michael get so lost that he’d do something like this? What was the point of a Devil if there was a God like that? Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world. Or maybe there was just nothing at all. And everybody was sitting around praying to a great big nothing, like people praying to airplanes, thinking they were gods. The world one big cargo cult.
    She was glad when they told everyone to rise for the Mourner’s Kaddish. She read along with the others, following the English phonetics:
Yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’mey raba b’alma dee-v’ra hirutey
. . . It sounded like a made-up language, the kind kids invent and pretend they’re speaking Eskimo. The translation said nothing about death, only God, praising, blessing. Where had God been when Michael was sitting in that room in Twentynine Palms? It reminded her of the Iranian hostages. You ended up taking the side of your captors, it was called the Stockholm syndrome. Well she wasn’t going to fucking praise that kidnapper, that terrorist.
Fuck you, God. Fuck you and your brother too.
    The silent box reproached them all. How could he stand it in there? He was so claustrophobic. The pyre on the Ganges, that’s what he’d wanted. What he had seen at ten, in India with his mother. “The burning releases the soul,” he’d said. “So it can go on into the next life.” They’d been sitting in Echo Park, eating strawberries and watching the Latino men fishing where there were no fish, the flowering lotus five feet tall, safe from thieves because nobody could reach them across the water.
    “Do you really believe in that?” she asked, sucking the strawberry juice off her stained fingers. “Reincarnation?” Shirley K. was always into that. How you were working off your karma and shit.
    He shrugged, watching a yellow swallowtail dip and dive between the pink lotus blooms. “I don’t know. But I like the idea of purification in fire. Public cremation. The bones right there in front of everybody. You see it. It was kind of horrible, really, I had bad dreams about it for years. Not everybody gets burned right, some people are too poor, they don’t buy enough wood. Then they just dump the bones in the river. But if it’s done right? It’s really satisfying. I don’t want to go into the ground.” And all she’d thought was,
He’s been to India.
Only now did it occur to her, what the fuck did Meredith think she was showing him? What kind of a mother took a kid to see dead people getting burned up? Was that her idea of a tourist attraction?
    Josie shifted in the seat. Her body ached. She hadn’t slept more than two hours straight