Jerusalem Beach

by Iddo Gefen

  I started to understand how hard it was for her without the sun. Sometimes Ayala would slink into the living room and sit beneath one of the large holes, trying to catch the few rays that had managed to filter through the layers of dust, only to creep back into the bedroom even more frustrated.

  “Fuck this. When will it end? It has to end already,” she’d grumble to herself, stomping her feet on the floor. She’d get annoyed with me as well. All I had to do was snore or open a bag of crackers and she’d start yelling that I was unbearable, that I wouldn’t let her breathe. She paced the room for hours, spitting out incoherent sentences.

  Eventually the storm died down and the sun lit up the planet and house once more. It took us a good few hours to clear out all the sand. Once we were done cleaning in silence, we both knew we had to restore the previous order. I went back to the couch and Ayala went outside, leaving the door open.

  9.

  I CAN’T SAY exactly when I stumbled upon the pond, but it was without a doubt the most special spot on her planet. I marched all the way back to the house just to let her have it.

  “How could you not tell me about the pond?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she replied, barely looking at me. At first I thought she was joking, but soon came to realize she truly didn’t know. Eventually I persuaded her to come see. After walking a kilometer and a half in utter silence, we arrived at the shaded area, to a spot the sun couldn’t reach. “I’ve never been here before,” she said. The air was cool. The pond was hiding in the darkest spot—a reservoir of clear turquoise water that had pooled into a small crater, a few meters below the surface. We sat on the rim of the crater and gazed down at the water.

  “It makes no sense,” she said, studying her reflection in the water. I admitted I didn’t understand it either. That maybe some frozen asteroid had once struck the planet. “And somehow, because of the atmosphere, the water …”

  Before I could finish my sentence, she pushed me in.

  My fear of crashing into the rocks was overtaken by the warm lull of the water. I held my breath for as long as possible before coming up for air, then sat on a large rock in the middle of the pond, my lower body still submerged. My clothes were completely drenched.

  “I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t toxic,” she said, and smiled.

  “Isn’t this when you’re supposed to dive in?” I asked her.

  “You’ve seen too many movies, hon,” she said, dipping her toes in the water. We were silent again, but it was a different kind of silence. Like when we had first met, and we each withdrew into ourselves. I tried guessing how much I’d already missed of my first year of studies, wondering whether there was even a chance of catching the tail end of the first semester.

  “That’s what I don’t get about you,” she said and paused as if contemplating her words. “You live your life as if you have no choice in the matter.”

  “But you’re exactly the same,” I replied.

  She glanced at me before turning back to the water, brushing a hesitant hand through her hair. Then she got up and slowly made her way up the rocks, slipping back into the kingdom of the sun. I stayed in the pond for a while before climbing out of the crater, lying in the shade, and gazing at the purple sky.

  * * *

  On my way back to the apartment I saw her sitting on her favorite dune, staring at the sun with unshielded eyes. I stood beside her. She kept staring.

  “So you were actually sent here?”

  She nodded, then admitted that for the longest time she had tried getting her act together, but nothing worked. Tried all kinds of treatments that didn’t help. “The only thing that helped a little was being in the sun.” She said that whenever she called her parents on the phone, she could hear in their trembling voices how they were still hoping she’d tell them everything had worked out. “That all this craziness, it was just a phase,” she said. “Like it is for you.”

  And then it dawned on me. “Wait, what phone?”

  10.

  THE ORANGE PAY phone was nestled not far from the cactuses. She had installed it there the very first day she arrived on the planet. I didn’t ask why she hadn’t told me about it. I don’t think she would have answered anyway. I went there and called my parents, explaining that I had gotten stuck on the planet closest to the sun. They didn’t sound especially concerned, said it had only been three weeks since I had last called. That school had started only a day ago.

  Three days later they landed next to the bus stop, informing me there was one angry grandma waiting for me at home. I wanted to say goodbye to Ayala, but when I went back to the apartment to get my things, she wasn’t there.

  * * *

  As we whizzed past Venus, I told my parents I was going to study psychological engineering. That I was going to make shitloads of money and finally start living. My mom said it was a terrific idea. Then she turned on the radio, saying there was a program about healthy cooking that she loved. I leaned my head against the window and tried to fall asleep, ignoring Ayala’s voice telling me to stop kidding myself.

  Debby’s Dream House

  1.

  I FOUND THE job through a newspaper ad. I didn’t even know there were people who built dreams. I was sure they were just created by themselves or something.

  The first question Bruno asked me was if I was an artist or advertiser.

  I said I wasn’t.

  “Very good. They’re the worst. They think they’re producing movies for the Cannes Film Festival,” he said. “They work on a dream for two months and end up sticking a giraffe on a car roof in the middle of the desert.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, so I nodded. Bruno said I got the job, and then announced that it was a shitty one. You work all night, bring your own food, and there were no holiday gift cards.

  “Still interested?”

  “What does it pay?”

  “Fifty an hour. Seventy-five for overtime.”

  “I’m in.”

  Bruno shook my hand and made me sign an NDA. He asked if I was married. I told him Debby and I were going to tie the knot someday. He said congratulations, then warned me that even if I was taken prisoner and tortured, I couldn’t tell her about my job. “Make up a cover story or something. I don’t need people knowing who I am and start asking for a special dream for their wedding anniversary.”

  We left his office and went to the operations room. A small room; three screens set side by side. Looked a little like the control room of a shopping mall security guard.

  “Every screen is a customer’s dream. We pull twelve-hour shifts, 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., five nights a week.”

  He said that for now all I had to do was monitor the screens and call him if one of them became snowy.

  After one shift I realized it was the easiest job I’ve ever had. That the only challenge it posed was keeping myself awake. I invented all sorts of games to pass the time. I tried to find out things about the customers’ lives through the images that appeared on the screens. For instance, there was this one guy who had to be some kind of technician, because electronic devices appeared in all of his dreams, or this mother who dreamed only about her daughter. There was probably some story there. It was nice, looking at the screens, but what really kept me awake was thinking about Debby. About the breakfast I’d make her when I got home, or how I’d hug that big body of hers before she woke up.

  Debby kept asking about my job, but I couldn’t tell her anything.

  “At least make something up, so I’ll have something to imagine,” she said, but I explained I didn’t know how to lie. She smiled and stopped asking questions.

  * * *

  The lab was just a small room with a fax machine, a desk, and what looked like a big washing machine. Bruno explained that the daily customer reports were faxed in every evening at seven. Each report contained basic information about every customer, and a detailed description of his day. After reading the report, you’
d come up with the idea for the dream, and then draw or write it down on a piece of paper. He said he kept everything in the big pile on his desk, and would choose a random page each morning.

  “Aren’t we supposed to build a new dream every day?”

  “It’s been years since anyone in the industry did that. Usually I recycle something from ’85 or ’91. They barely remember anything anyway.”

  Then Bruno showed me how to feed the page into the “washing machine,” which was actually a big metal contraption that manufactures the dream. The paper spins inside the machine for two hours before spitting out the dream onto a little black disk. After a month, the work became more interesting, once Bruno started teaching me how dreams were built. He advised me not to put my heart into it since the business wouldn’t be around much longer. It was a matter of a few years until the global dream companies took over the market. He said you couldn’t compete with a Chinese factory that had thousands of workers and software that produces dreams in HD. I asked him how he even got customers, since people didn’t know who produced their dreams.

  “Most of the transactions are through the HMOs, but there are also a few labor unions that do it. Believe me, this whole industry’s basically like the Wild West.”

  2.

  RITA’S WAS THE first dream I’d ever built. She had just started working at a new law firm, liked classical music and evening jogs at the park near her house. According to her report, she had spent the entire day in the office and got into a fender bender on her way home. At home, she watched the news and fell asleep on the couch. That was it. I jotted down a few ideas on the page and came up with a pretty strange dream. I had her jogging in the hallway of her office; then a car crashed into the wall and a news anchor stepped out of it. Bruno said it was one of the lamest dreams he ever saw. That the whole bit with the car crashing into the wall was preposterous even for a dream. I asked him if he was going to scrap it for a new dream, but he sighed, switched on the washing machine, and said, “Fat chance.” A week later he used the same dream again.

  * * *

  I continued to build dreams even though I wasn’t good at it. For every dream I got a thirty-shekel bonus, and Bruno was just happy he could go home an hour early. He asked me why I insisted on working so hard, and I told him that I needed the money to buy my Debby a house. That it was Debby’s dream, that ever since she was a little girl, all she wanted was a place where she could scribble on the walls without looking over her shoulder. Bruno said she must be something special if I was willing to work so hard for her, and I told him he had no idea. It was around that time that Debby started interning for some interior designer, said he was a true artist and that she was learning a lot from him. I was happy for her, even though it was hard, barely seeing each other. She finished work every day at seven in the evening, so I only got to see her for an hour in the morning. I didn’t bring it up, since it wasn’t easy for her either. The problem was that even with us both working, we still weren’t making ends meet. To have enough for a down payment on a mortgage, we would have to keep working like that for another decade.

  I asked Bruno if there wasn’t a way to move up.

  “Nightmares are a hundred shekels a pop, but don’t go there. You’re a sensitive guy, it’ll mess with your head.”

  I told him to give me a chance, that I really needed the money. He hesitated but eventually agreed, giving me a report for the guy who always dreamed about electronic devices. He was thirty-four years old, a bachelor, and like I suspected, worked as a repairman at a small electronics shop. Two days ago he had fixed eleven devices, gotten off work at seven, and gone home for a shower.

  I asked Bruno whether nightmares required a special technique.

  “There isn’t a technique, as such,” he said, and admitted that even he found them difficult to build. He said he had once read a book that recommended going all out with the daemons and monsters routine, since it’s had a good track record for thousands of years and was practically bulletproof. Or to try different Freudian theories, to choose something symbolic and work that angle. Bruno said that in either case it didn’t always work, so I should just do what I felt like.

  I didn’t know how to produce monsters and didn’t really understand enough about psychology. The only thing I could tell from all those hours monitoring his screen was that the electronics guy found it difficult communicating with people. So I built a pretty lame nightmare in which he’s just walking down the street and everyone around him is speaking in a foreign language. And he tells them he can’t understand, but no one answers him. Bruno said he didn’t see what was scary about that nightmare, but he certainly wasn’t going to pay me another hundred to build a new one.

  * * *

  The next day, after I punched in, Bruno told me he had just read the guy’s latest report. It stated that he couldn’t stop thinking about my nightmare after he woke up, he was so upset he barely left the house. Bruno gave me a pat on the back and said that good nightmares were great for business. That the Ministry of Health loved them, they were sure they helped people work through their issues, or something like that. He said that each dream manufacturer was required to deliver three quarterly nightmares per customer, so as far as he was concerned I could build nothing but nightmares. I asked him if he didn’t think it was a bit much, since he himself had said that it messes with your head.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said, and added that he had only been trying to scare me because he didn’t believe I would be good at it. I thought he might be lying, but I didn’t ask more questions because I wanted the money.

  * * *

  That’s how I got to building nightmares on a daily basis, and Bruno admitted that even he couldn’t understand why they were so effective. I told him that while with dreams you had to be creative and craft elaborate fantasies for people, nightmares were a whole different ball game. Nightmares had to be simple, because what really scares people are the most basic things in life: that they won’t have enough money to pay their bills, or that their wives will leave them. Those kinds of things.

  “As long as the Ministry of Health keeps recommending us,” he said. He told me he had already gotten phone calls from a few HMOs, referring several new clients that needed effective nightmares to work through their issues.

  “One of them is even named Debby. Funny, huh?”

  “Yup,” I replied. I didn’t tell him it was my Debby. That I had asked her HMO to transfer her to us. I figured that since we saw so little of each other, at least I’d get to read her daily reports and see her dreams every night. Bruno got a new screen for her. She was beautiful on it. I made sure to produce fresh dreams for her every day, mostly involving new homes. Some had large backyards and others swimming pools, and even a big Jacuzzi she could stretch out in. One morning when I came home from work, she told me she had had a really nice dream, but couldn’t remember what it was about. It made me happy.

  * * *

  Toward the end of the quarter, Bruno told me not to put off Debby’s nightmares any longer. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but a small one would be better than letting Bruno build her a big, scary one. I tried thinking about her phobias, like cockroaches and flying, tried doodling a few options, but I soon stopped. I felt physically ill at the thought of doing something bad to my Debby. Hurting her like that. So instead, I just built her another nice dream, that we were living together in the highest penthouse in the city, taking in the view every evening, and were really happy.

  The next day was a Friday, and that night I looked up at the ceiling and told Debby I was on the verge of going crazy. She asked why. I wanted to tell her that dealing with her nightmares was agonizing. That it wasn’t so much the nightmares themselves as the realization of how much damage I could cause her if I only chose to. But I didn’t say a word. Not only because I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, but because I didn’t want her to be afraid of me. I thought it might be a good idea to quit my job. To tell Brun
o I couldn’t take it, and that I wasn’t going to deal with anyone’s nightmares anymore.

  * * *

  But Debby wanted a house, so I stayed.

  3.

  AS TIME PASSED I had more and more nightmares of my own, at least twice a week. But they didn’t really work on me, because I already knew every trick in the book. I’d find myself getting bored by some man pointing a gun at me, and count the minutes until I woke up. Building all those nightmares had left me immune to my own, and that’s exactly what troubled me. I had been sure that dealing with such dark material damaged the soul, but other than my fear of hurting Debby, it didn’t seem to do anything. On the contrary, every time I met someone, I custom made them a nightmare in my mind. I’d buy milk at the supermarket and ask myself what would scare the cashier. Bruno observed I was enjoying it all just a little too much. Said that a few customer reports had mentioned sleeping pills, and he asked me to go easier on the clients. I said sure, but in truth I couldn’t help myself. I was feeding off all those fears, and I didn’t know how to rein them in.

  * * *

  The greatest source of comfort in those days were Debby’s dreams. I could spend three hours building us a living room. I read her reports over and over again, thinking about what she was going through. The name of that designer she was working for started appearing more frequently. It was just the two of them at the office, and they had several meetings a day. It made me jealous. I asked her about him, and she said he was a nice guy. I told her the truth, that I was scared she’d leave me, and she hugged me tightly and said she’d never leave. Debby wanted us to talk more in the morning, but all I wanted was for us to lie together in bed with her arms around me.