For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories (23 page)

Inbar tells me Israeli things, shares maxims on fate and luck. “We cannot live in fear,” she says. “Of course you’re terrified, it’s terror after all.” She has nonsensical statistics as well. “Five times more likely to be run over. Ten times more likely to die in a car. But you still cross the street don’t you?”

She rubs my neck. Slips a hand under my shirt and rubs my back.

“Maybe I shouldn’t,” I say. A kiss on my ear. A switch of the channel. “Maybe it’s time the street crossing stopped.”

A biblical Israel, crowded with warriors and prophets, fallen kings and common men conscripted to do God’s will. An American boy’s Israel. A child raised up on causality and symbol.

Holocaust as wrath of God.

Israel the Phoenix rising up from the ashes.

The reporters trot out the odd survivors, the death defiers and nine lived. A girl with a small scratch on her cheek who stood two feet from the bomber, everyone around her dead. An old man with shrapnel buried in the hardcover book he was reading who survived the exact same way when the street blew up fifty years before. A clipping. He searches his wallet for a clipping he always takes with.

They make themselves known after every tragedy. Serial survivors. People who find themselves on exploding buses but never seem to die.

“Augurs,” I say. “Harbingers of doom. They are demons. Dybbuks. We should march to their houses. Drag them to the squares and burn them in front of cheering crowds.”

“You are stupid with nerves,” Inbar says. “They are the
unluckiest lucky people in the world. These are hopeful stories from hopeless times. Without them the grief of this nation would tip it into the sea.”

I’m swollen with heroism. The sad fact of it. Curled up on the bathroom floor woozy with the makings for a bold rescue, overdosed on my own life-or-death acumen. My body exorcises its charger of burning buildings, its icy-waters diver. The unused hero driven out while I wait patiently inside.

The chandelier, like a pendulum; the day, like a pendulum, swings.

Inbar will turn the corner in her apartment and find her American boyfriend pinned to the floor, immobile, sweating a malarial sweat.

She will discover him suffering the bystander’s disease. She’ll want to wrap him in a blanket, put him in a cab, and take him to the hospital where all the uninjured victims, the unhurt, uninvolved victims, trickle in for the empty beds, to be placed on the cots in the halls.

I do not want the hospital. Do not want treatment for having sat down after, for having sipped coffee after, and held on to the owner’s hand.

A call home. Inbar dials the moment she thinks I can pull off a passable calm. My mother’s secretary answers. Rita, who never says more than hello and “I’ll get your mother.” My phone calls precious because of the distance. As if I’m calling from the moon.

Today she is talking. Today Rita has something to share.

“Your mother is in her office crying. She don’t say nothing to you, but that woman is miserable with you out in a war. Think about where you live, child. Think about your mom.”

There is an element of struggle. Sex that night a matter of life and death. There is much scrambling for leverage and footing. Displays of body language that I’ve never known. We cling and dig in, as if striving for permanence, laboring for a union that won’t come undone.

We laugh after. We cackle and roll around, reviewing technique and execution. Hysterical. Absurd. Perfect in its desperation. We make jokes at the expense of ourselves.

“No sex like near-death sex.”

We light up a cigarette, naked, twisted up in the sheets. Again we would not recognize ourselves on TV.

Inbar has gone to work and invited Lynn over to make sure that I stay out of bed, that I go into town for coffee and sit at my café. Same time, same table, same cup, if I can manage it.

Nothing can be allowed to interrupt routine.

“Part of life here,” Lynn says.

This is why Inbar invited her. She respects Lynn as an American with Israeli sensibilities. The hard-news photographer, moving in after every tragedy to shoot up what’s left.

The peeper’s peep, we call her. The voyeur’s eye. Our Lynn, feeding the grumbling image-hungry bellies of America’s commuter trains and breakfast nooks.

“A ghost,” Lynn says. She is gloomy, but with a sportsman’s muted excitement. “Peak invisibility. People moving right through me. I think I even went weightless at some point, pulled off impossible angles. Floated above the pack. My stuff is all over the wire this morning.” She pops the top on a used film canister, tips its contents into her palm. “You’ve got to come out with me one day just for the experience. You can
stand in the middle of a goddamn riot, people going down left and right. Arab kids tossing rocks, Molotov cocktails, Israelis firing back tear gas and rubber bullets. Chaos. And you move, you just slide right through it all like a fucking ghost, snatching up souls, freezing time. A boy in the air, his body arched, his face to the sky. He’s lobbing back a gas canister, the smoke caught in a long snaking trail. Poetry. Yesterday, though. Yesterday was bad.”

“I’m not made for this,” I tell her. “I grew up in the suburbs. I own a hot-air popcorn popper. A selection of Mylec Air-Flo street-hockey sticks.”

“Two of these,” she says, and drops two orange capsules in my tea. “Drink up.” And I do. “Two before I shoot and two right after I dump the film. An image comes back to haunt me, I take another. The trapdoor in my system. If it gets to be too much, I’ll just stay asleep. So to show my utter thankfulness upon waking, I make a pass of the Old City the next day. I stop in every quarter, pray at every place of worship I find. That’s my secret, a flittingness. I favor no gods. Establish again and again my lack of allegiance.

“That’s what keeps me invisible. That’s how I get to walk through the heart of a conflict, to watch everything, to see and see and see, then pack up my images and walk away. In return, nothing. A ghost. Sensed but not seen. That’s the whole trick.

“Staying alive,” she says, “means never blinking and never taking sides.”

“I didn’t look, didn’t want the dreams. I went the long way around so not to see.”

“Unimportant. Not how you see, but the distance that counts. The simple fact of exposure to death. Same principle as radiation or chemotherapy. Exposure to all that death is what keeps you alive.”

“I feel old from this,” I say.

“Good,” she says. “World-weary is good, just what you
should be trying for. Go play the expatriate at your café. Go be the witty war-watching raconteur. Cock an eyebrow and have them spike your coffee. Ignore the weather and put on a big, heavy sweater. Pinch the waitress on her behind.”

I was raised on tradition. Pictures of a hallowed Jerusalem nestled away like Eden. A Jerusalem so precious God spared it when He flooded the world.

I can guide you to the valley where David slew Goliath. Recite by heart the love songs written by Solomon, his son. There have been thirteen sieges and twenty downfalls. And I can lead you through the alleys of the Old City, tell you a story about each one.

This is my knowing. Dusty-book knowing. I thought I’d learned everything about Jerusalem, only to discover my information was very very old.

I move through town, down the street of empty windows and blackened walls. The cobblestones are polished. Even the branches and rooftops have been picked clean. Every spot where a corpse lay is marked by candles. Fifty here, a hundred there. Temporary markers before monuments to come.

I make my way into the café. I nod at the owner, look at all the people out to display for the cameras, for each other, an ability to pass an afternoon at ease.

I sit at my table and order coffee. The waitress goes off to her machine. Cradling my chin, I wrestle images: unhinged mouths and clouds of smoke. Blasts like wild birds.

Today is a day to find religion. To decide that one god is more right than another, to uncover in this sad reality a covenant—some
promise of coming good. There are signs if one looks. If one is willing to turn again to his old knowing, to salt over shoulders, prayers before journeys, wrists bound with holy red thread.

Witchery and superstition.

Comforts.

A boom that pushes air, that bears down and sweeps the room. My hair goes loose at the roots.

The others talk and eat. One lone woman stares off, page of a magazine held midturn.

“Fighter,” the waitress says, watching, smiling, leaning up against the bar.

She’s world-weary. Wise. The air force, obviously. The sound barrier broken.

I want to smile back at her In fact, I want to be her. I concentrate, taking deep breaths, studying her style. Noting: How to lean against a bar all full of knowing. Must master loud noises, sudden moves.

I reach for my coffee and rattle the cup, burn my fingers, pull my hand away.

The terrible shake trapped in my hands. Yesterday’s sounds caught up in my head. I tap an ear, like a swimmer. A minor frequency problem, I’m sure. I’ve picked up on the congenital ringing in Jerusalem’s ears.

The waitress deals with me in a waitress’s way. She serves me a big round-headed muffin, poppy seeds trapped in the glaze. The on-the-house offer, a bartering of sorts. Here’s a little kindness; now don’t lose your mind.

Anchors. Symbols. The owner appears next to me, rubbing my arm. “Round foods are good for mourning,” I say. “They
symbolize eternity and the unbreakable cycles of life.” I point with my free hand. “Cracks in the windows are good too. Each one means another demon has gone.”

He smiles, as if to say, That’s the spirit, and adds one of his own.

“A chip in your mug,” he says. “In my family it means good things to come. And from the looks of my kitchen, this place will soon be overflowing with luck.”

The waitress pushes the muffin toward me, as if I’d forgotten it was served.

But it’s not a day for accepting kindness. Inbar has warned me, Stick with routine. Lynn has warned me, Don’t blink your eyes.

And even this place has its own history of warnings. One set accompanying its every destruction and another tied to each rise. The balance that keeps the land from tipping. The traps that cost paradise and freedom, that turn second sons to firstborn. A litany of unburning bushes and smote rocks.

A legion of covenants sealed by food and by fire. Sacrifice after sacrifice. I free myself from the owner’s hand and run through the biblical models.

Never take a bite out of curiosity.

Never trade your good name out of hunger.

And even if a public bombing strikes you in a private way, hide that from everyone lest you be called out to lead them.