Jerusalem Beach

by Iddo Gefen

  She laughed. “I felt the same way at first,” she admitted. She said she didn’t really know what caused the colors to appear in her sky, but thought it probably had to do with the solar flares. “A little like the northern lights,” she explained. “Only it isn’t cold here, and like a million times more beautiful.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said, just to keep the momentum going. “I bet people would pay big bucks to see something like this. I mean, it could be one hell of a tourist attraction.”

  She considered me for a moment, then turned her gaze back to the sky. She said that on such a hot planet, you couldn’t afford to waste words on chitchat. “Talking just makes you thirsty,” she said. Then she was quiet again for a while, and I, out of sheer awkwardness, tried to be even quieter. We stayed like that, side by side, for some time. At a certain point, she got up, shook off the sand from her clothes, and extended her hand.

  “You coming?” she asked, and I stood up as quickly as possible, without daring to ask where we were going.

  * * *

  On our way to wherever she was taking me on her little planet, she started to drill me. About my trip. About the studies I was trying to avoid. About my parents who didn’t know what to make of me. She asked if I had a girlfriend. At first I said no, but then I told her about Sivan. Either because some part of me still missed my ex, or because I wanted her to know I wasn’t the giant loser she thought I was. I told her we met three years ago. That I was sure we were going to get married at some point, but we ended up splitting six months ago via holographic call. She called me just as I had finished climbing the Olympus Mons on Mars, saying she couldn’t take my roaming and roving anymore, that she was beginning to feel I wasn’t so much trying to find myself as I was running away from her. I tried to tell her that wasn’t it at all, but she didn’t seem interested.

  “So basically, you were too chicken to dump her so you waited for her to do it for you?”

  “What? I just explained that she was the one who left me,” I replied. “I didn’t want to break up.”

  “So why didn’t you go back to Earth?” she asked.

  “Because I’m not done here.”

  “So you dumped her for a few more hikes?” she scoffed. “Because you haven’t yet found the answers you’re looking for?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “It’s okay, it’s not like you owe me any excuses.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked her, making sure she caught the severe tone.

  “No one’s willing to lose the girl he loves for a few shitty answers about life, it’s just not how it works,” she asserted. “It’s simply a matter of priorities. She probably didn’t mean enough to you.”

  “How would you know? You don’t know me at all.”

  “You’re right,” she replied. “But there’s one thing I do know. That you traveled all the way to the center of the solar system for some girl you met at a party, but haven’t bothered to visit your girlfriend even once.” Before I could reply, she quickly announced: “This is what I wanted to show you.”

  We were standing in front of a cluster of large green cactuses. She said she hadn’t planned on growing them. What she had really wanted was mango or pineapple, but the trees couldn’t survive on her planet. Eventually she settled for eleven cactuses, by special order. Two had withered and died, but the rest managed to pull through. She couldn’t stand them at first, but she’d come to love them. A pair of worn-out gray gloves were lying next to one of the cactuses. She picked them up, put them on, and plucked a red prickly pear, splitting it open and offering me a piece.

  “Isn’t it thorny?” I asked.

  “Only on the outside.”

  I warily accepted the piece. It was without a doubt the tastiest thing I had eaten in a long while. I said I was pretty sure it was the first time I’d had a prickly pear.

  “Obviously,” she said, then told me they had stopped growing them on Earth a long time ago. They just didn’t have enough space over there. The only place you could get prickly pears was on the black market in China, and even there they grew them under the ground, which made them completely bland, because it’s the sun that gives them all their flavor. She said a few dozen prickly pears sets her up for a whole year. And people were willing to pay crazy money for them.

  “Every once in a while some realtor shows up wanting to buy the planet,” she said and laughed. “Weird guys in suits. At first I thought you were one of them.” She told me she never actually listened to their pitch, but sometimes sold them a few prickly pears. Even gave them a discount if they promised to bring some to her family.

  “Isn’t your family flipping out about you being here?” I asked.

  “Flipping out? They’re the ones who encouraged me to move here,” she said.

  “What do you mean? Why would they encourage you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Once we were done she grabbed my hand and pulled us toward the nearest dune. I suggested we return to her apartment to get some rest, but she said that where there was no day and no night, time ceased to exist, so the concept of rest made little sense. Careful though I was, I still ended up with tiny thorns in my hands, but I didn’t say anything. We started walking up the closest sandy hill. It was no more than thirty meters high, but scaling it in the insane heat required some real effort. Once we reached the top I collapsed with exhaustion, sure I was about to pass out, but she nimbly sat down beside me, folding her legs to her chest and hugging them. “I see you’re quite the mountaineer,” she said, winking through her sunglasses. I tried coming up with a witty comeback, but I was too busy trying to catch my breath.

  “Right here, this is the closest a person can get to the sun,” she announced. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her pants, fished one out, and held it up. The tip instantly lit up as it exited the atmosphere. She stubbed it out in the sand, saying she didn’t smoke, that it was just a game she liked to play.

  I lay down on the sand and told her about an experiment I had read about in which people were left in a lit room for an entire week. Almost all of them went completely bonkers. That was what scared me most on this planet, and I didn’t get how it hadn’t happened to her yet.

  “Who said it hasn’t?” she asked, and as if to prove her point, lowered her sunglasses and stared directly at the sun. Looked at it without even blinking.

  “What, are you crazy?” I yelled at her and sat up, pressing my shoulder against hers. “You’ll go blind!”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she stated. “I’ve been doing this for three years and nothing’s ever happened to me.” She said it was only blinding for a moment, but then you could see perfectly fine. That only candy-ass scientists too scared to ever look up from their telescopes thought otherwise. “I honestly don’t understand how people can spend an entire lifetime under it without looking at it even once,” she said, and before I knew it, she had plucked the sunglasses off my face. “If you’ve ever wanted to find any meaning in life, this is a good place to start.”

  I couldn’t stop blinking, could barely see a thing.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” she asked. I craned my neck, trying to open my eyes, but the light wouldn’t let me. I barely blinked twice before fixing my gaze back on the slope. She sighed and lay down on the sand, still staring at the sun.

  “Don’t worry, it’s okay. Most people don’t even have the guts to try,” she said, and closed her eyes. “You’ll get there eventually. That is, if you don’t pass out next time we climb the dune.”

  I didn’t have anything witty to say, so I kissed her. She didn’t smile or anything, just said it was a punk move kissing a girl whose name I didn’t know.

  5.

  HER NAME WAS Ayala.

  6.

  HANDS REACHING OUT in the heavy heat. Gentle, tentative groping sticky with sweat and sand. The body operated differently in fifty degrees. Words dissolved, making way for long stretches
of silence, inquisitive gazes, like children exploring their bodies for the first time.

  After an indeterminable period of time, another real estate agent arrived on her planet. He was wearing a dark jacket and black trousers, dripping sweat along the sand. He found me and Ayala sitting by one of the craters and asked if he might steal a few moments of our time. Despite her limited patience, Ayala eventually agreed to listen on the condition that he bought a bag of prickly pears. He paid her and launched into his pitch, telling us this planet was worth a good few million. That it could be sold to a large research facility or to armies that wanted to train their soldiers under extreme conditions. He proceeded to explain that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, that she could take the money and live on an artificial island in Miami, which was exactly the same as here only twenty degrees cooler.

  “So what do you say?” he finally asked, by now almost suffocating from the heat, barely breathing.

  She lowered her sunglasses and gave him a quick once-over. “I’m not selling my planet to someone who’d wear that suit in this heat,” she announced, flicked down her sunglasses and would say no more. He started throwing figures at her, unfathomable amounts of money that kept increasing. Three. Four. Five million dollars. But Ayala didn’t even bother to answer. I looked at him with something of an apology. Eventually he gave up, picked up the bag, and started walking toward his Mercedes spacecraft.

  “Wait,” she called out when he was already a few meters from his vehicle. The guy tossed the bag of prickly pears onto the sand and came running back, asking if she had changed her mind.

  “No, but this one here needs a ride,” she said, pointing at me.

  “Don’t listen to her,” I said. “She’s crazy.”

  The man turned on his heels, and Ayala closed her eyes and smiled.

  7.

  THE SANDSTORM BLEW in a few hours later, maybe even a few days, I’m not sure. All I remember is us sitting in front of each other in the narrow shade of a cactus while she explained her theory about the fourth person. “Think how lonely it is to talk in first person. To admit it over and over again.”

  “Admit what?”

  “That I’m alone.”

  “Of course you’re alone. You’re the only one on this planet.”

  “It’s the other way around. Here I have no one to talk to, so I barely think about it. But back on Earth it drove me crazy. I felt like the whole language thing was keeping me stuck inside myself,” she said, and started piling sand into a small mound.

  “Come on, you’re overreacting. It’s just words. And besides, first-person plural pretty much solves your problem,” I said. “We eat. We sleep. We. See? Not so lonely anymore.”

  “No, dummy. That’s the worst. First-person plural just lumps you in with everyone else, erases you completely. Like it makes no difference whether you’re a realtor or a Holocaust survivor. People get lost in that shit.”

  “You’re the only one who gets lost.”

  “Fine, then I’m the only one,” she snarled. “Then for me second- and third-person are even worse than worst. You say ‘you’ or ‘she’ and you completely take yourself out of the equation, as if you don’t even exist.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re obsessing about it. It’s just semantics.”

  “For you. For me it’s more than that,” she said. “That’s why we need fourth-person.”

  “What’s that? How would you even use fourth-person?”

  “How should I know? I’m not a linguist,” she protested. “I just know that when you use it you don’t feel completely alone or completely lost.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “You know, like when you mix yellow and blue and they still haven’t turned completely into green yet? That’s what I’m talking about.”

  I told her the whole approach sounded a bit childish to me. That no disrespect, but I’m not sure first-person was the reason she felt lost or all alone in the world. That it was more complicated than that. A strong wind blew past us, crumbling the little mound she had built. Ayala got up and strapped on her ski goggles. At first I thought she was just having one of her moments. That I had somehow managed to offend her. But when I noticed she was gazing out at the horizon, I turned around. A wall of blue dust was sweeping up behind us. It was still a few hundred meters away, creeping toward us.

  “What’s that?” I asked Ayala.

  “Come,” she replied. “Now.” She started to bolt.

  “Wait,” I yelled, but she wasn’t listening. When I saw she wouldn’t even look back, I realized she wasn’t fooling around. She started running, and I tried to follow her but couldn’t keep up.

  “Hey, what’s going on? Wait a minute!” I shouted, but she still wouldn’t listen. Then the shade came. A large stain that gradually spread across the desert. The sandstorm bit into the sun, which instantly turned into a faded white dot in the sky. I ran as fast as I could, but all the dust made it hard to breathe. A wave of sand washed over me. I couldn’t see. I had no idea where to turn. She didn’t answer. I cursed myself for getting stuck there, in the middle of a goddamn sandstorm, when I could have been sitting in an air-conditioned college auditorium.

  Her hand emerged from within the dust, pulling me toward her. I followed her, grabbing on for dear life.

  “Careful,” she said as I took another step and almost slipped down the staircase. She slowed down, leading me one stair at a time. “Slowly,” she instructed, and I listened. I heard the door opening and she pushed me in. The door slammed shut behind me, and I kept my eyes closed.

  “It’s okay, hon, you can open your eyes,” she said.

  I waited a few more moments before opening them. The room was awash with a pale light, like the glow of a sunset. Sand was trickling in through the holes in the ceiling, forming small mounds on the floor. Ayala emerged from the bedroom with a few buckets. “Snap out of it already, it happens. Don’t take it so hard.” She handed me a bucket and told me to put it in the middle of the living room.

  “Believe me, you were lucky I brought my ski goggles,” she announced.

  When we were done, I slumped down on the couch. The storm had made the apartment even hotter. There were three large holes in the ceiling above the couch, and the sand pouring through them was piling on top of me. I tried falling asleep but couldn’t.

  “You can come in here,” she shouted from the bedroom. “And bring a glass of cold water.” I quickly followed her orders, pouring water into a glass and placing it on her bedside table. Then I brought another glass for myself and lay down beside her. We stared at the ceiling in silence.

  8.

  THERE WAS ONLY one hole in the bedroom ceiling, which made it the only room in the house that wasn’t sheeted with a thick layer of sand. While Ayala wouldn’t come out of the room at all, I sometimes snuck into the living room for a change of scenery. I’d shift the buckets around, grab a bite to eat, but that’s pretty much it. We spent most of our time in bed, side by side. The air got thicker, the room darker, leaving me and Ayala no choice but to get closer to each other. To burrow into one another until our sweat mingled. I told her I sometimes imagined our bodies as blocks of ice cooling each other off.

  “That’s a lovely way of thinking about it, but the reality of it is still super gross,” she said and laughed. And she was right.

  The crampedness edged out the romance, and neither of us was able to hide the particularities of the body. Wrinkles on her chin and hairs on my cheeks, calluses on the bottoms of her feet, a swollen scar on my back.

  “Well, are you hopping on the next bus?” she’d ask every now and then, and I’d tell her I didn’t know and hugged her tightly, hoping she wouldn’t notice how tired I was getting of living in such a confined space. Of the heat and the sand. But she did.

  * * *

  One night, waking up drenched in sweat, I saw her reading The Catcher in the Rye. I told her I had read it in high school and kind o
f liked it. She stopped reading and looked at me suspiciously.

  “Then what’s the name of the girl who kept all her kings in the back row?” she asked. I had no idea what she was talking about. I told her I couldn’t remember, that I had read it a long time ago. She sighed irritably and said I was just trying to sound smart.

  I told her everything I remembered about Holden, about his journey through New York. She wasn’t the least bit impressed. She snorted, said I probably hadn’t even given any thought to what happened to Holden after the story ended.

  “How am I supposed to know what happened to him?” I mumbled, and before I could say anything else, she cut me off. “He commits suicide,” she said decisively.

  “I don’t think that was in the book,” I replied hesitantly.

  “Of course it wasn’t.” She said that because the author didn’t have the heart to kill him off or admit him to some loony bin for the rest of his life, she was pretty sure that’s what happened. “Someone like Holden doesn’t grow up to be a psychological engineer or something like that,” she teased.

  I told her she could think whatever she liked, but it didn’t make sense to get angry at every person who decided to grow up.

  “It isn’t growing up, it’s giving up on your dreams. It’s becoming a lame first-person plural, like everyone else.”

  “Oh come on, then what’s the alternative?” I barked, sick of her patronizing me. The heat was driving me crazy. “What should I do instead?”

  She fell silent.

  “What, just quit? Go off the radar like you? That’s the solution? Everyone should just find a hole to crawl into?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How could you live here for three years and not know?”

  A slight tremor passed over her lips. She considered me for a few moments before turning her back to me, lying on her side and gazing silently at the wall.