by Eshkol Nevo
In the four pictures Ari took in the restaurant, I really do look like someone to worry about. My hair is plastered to my forehead as if I’ve just finished a triathlon. My head is tilted, as if my neck can’t hold it up. And something in my eyes is totally shattered.
I can’t look at those pictures. I saw them only once, after we’d returned from the trip, and I asked Ari to keep them and never show them to anyone. I didn’t have to explain why. He’d been there when everything went out of control.
* * *
—
I said, My head hurts, I’m going to the cabin.
Curly Hair said, Feel better.
Straight Hair said, I told you that stuff was spoiled.
And Ari asked, Should I come with you, bro?
* * *
—
He came, even though I didn’t ask him to, and lay down on his bed.
I said, It’s not passing for me, Ari.
He said there was nothing to worry about. It was because I drank the whole bag without eating first, and that’s probably why the effects were lasting longer. That’s all.
I wanted to believe him. But the fear, which had been on a low flame in the restaurant, turned into real anxiety as the minutes passed. It’ll never go away, I thought. I’ll never be able to have conversations with people. Or continue the trip. They’ll have to fly me home. Hospitalize me in the cuckoo’s nest. They’ll inject me with sedatives that will screw me up even more.
But my greatest fear was sleep, I was afraid to go to sleep. And then wake up and not know whether I was in a dream or in reality. That was my feeling: that falling asleep was an enormous danger.
* * *
—
So I won’t sleep, I decided. A day, two days, a week, however long it took.
But what’ll happen if I fall asleep for even a few seconds without realizing it?
When I open my eyes, how will I know where I am?
* * *
—
Years later, during one of the first interviews I gave, the journalist told me—maybe as a way to create intimacy—that he was bisexual.
That’s great, I said, you can enjoy both worlds.
Enjoy? he grimaced. You don’t understand how disconcerting it is not to be sure about something that should be axiomatic.
That night in the cabin, I wasn’t sure about one of the axioms of our existence: That everything that happens really does happen. And not only in my imagination.
Were the clouds gathering on the cabin ceiling real?
Were crab claws actually emerging from them?
Was the cabin even real?
Did the bed I was lying on exist?
I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see the claws and tried to think about Dikla. About my mom. About my sister. I tried to hold on to them. But picturing them allowed my mind to do weird things to them. Exchange their faces. Connect one’s limbs to the body of the other. Make them shorter. Make them taller. Distort them.
Like an ATM telling you that it’s not working, my long-term memory was saying, to my horror: Don’t trust me now.
My heart was pounding. My awareness of that only made it pound faster. The crab claws were coming for me. They descended and moved slowly closer, threatening to sink into my throat.
The only sure point of reference in all that chaos was Ari.
He was clearly lying on his bed. Two meters from me. Wearing the striped sharwal he’d bought in the Indian market in Otavalo. One arm was tucked under the back of his neck, as usual. He hadn’t taken off his socks. As usual. He clearly smelled like Ari. And his voice, when he spoke to me, sounded like Ari’s voice.
With a heart threatening to explode, I explained to him that I was like a strand of hair. And that he was holding the end of it.
I asked him to stay awake. And every time I called out, Ari! he should reply, Here!
He didn’t laugh at me or hesitate. He just said that if he should happen to fall asleep anyway, I should shout louder or throw a shoe at him.
* * *
—
Shoes were not needed. He stayed awake all night.
I shouted: Ari!
He replied: Here!
I shouted: Ari.
And he replied: That’s me.
* * *
—
My struggle to maintain my sanity—I’m not exaggerating, that’s how I felt that entire night, that I was struggling to maintain my sanity and might lose it if I fell asleep—lasted until the first rays of sun drove the crabs and the clouds from the cabin, and I heard the real, familiar sound of birdsong.
Half an hour later, we got on the first van leaving the farm and drove away from there. I knew that Ari would have been happy to remain, but he didn’t say a word. I mean—if I reproduce the exact dialogue—I said, Listen, I don’t feel it would be a good thing for me to stay in that cabin. And he said, So let’s get the hell out of here.
* * *
—
I remember the trip. The first minutes of the trip. We leaned against our backpacks in the back of the van and didn’t speak. It was weird: Instead of being relieved that my fear of losing my mind had passed, I felt as if I’d been cast out of Eden.
The cities of the gods no longer glittered beyond the clouds. The clouds themselves were just clouds. And everything that had looked so magnificent when I was under the influence of the cactus juice, now looked ordinary. Banal.
The flow of the river seemed much slower. The sunbeams that had filtered through the branches looked dimmer. The birds weren’t singing. Only chirping blandly.
To be accurate, I felt as if I had shifted from a state of overwhelming, boundless awareness to one that was narrow. Limited. Painfully sparse. The world had returned to being merely the world. Nothing more.
I remember thinking: The high point of the trip is behind us. Anything that happens from now on will never match what happened to me yesterday. For better or for worse.
I remember that Ari asked: What’s happening, amigo? And that after that last night, I felt we were close enough for him to understand the abrupt switch from the fear of insanity to the sorrow of constricting rationality. So I explained it to him.
He was silent for a few seconds, then said: Okay, you have two choices. Choice number one—get ahold of more cactus juice. But you should take into account that this time, you might not survive it.
And the second choice?
Write, he said.
* * *
—
How could he have been so sure, I wonder now. How could he have predicted the future that way?
* * *
—
I took my journal out of my backpack and opened it. There were a few phrases I’d written under the influence of the cactus juice, and like most of what is written under the influence of drugs or alcohol, they were worthless. So I turned to a new page and began to write something else. On the top of the page, I wrote “To Dikla” out of habit, but it ended up being a short story. About Curly Hair. Her family in Israel. The broken heart she’d suffered a few weeks before leaving for South America. The son-of-a-bitch musician who broke it. It was all made up, of course. The only thing I knew about her was that she’d always wanted a big brother. And that was my starting point.
I threw all of myself into that story. My eyes never left the pages.
The van kept moving, but I no longer saw the world that had become so faded and flat after the fall.
I saw Curly Hair’s life. It spread out before me in its entirety, an Eden of possibilities.
* * *
—
The van reached its destination that evening. Only then did I return the journal to my backpack. But in many senses, that trip has continued to this day.
* * *
—
And my bond with Ari
has as well.
His condition has deteriorated these last few days. They sent him home because none of the medical treatments helped. Then they hospitalized him again to administer painkillers directly into his vein.
He was groggy most of the time, and only sometimes did he open his eyes for a few seconds and speak. Sometimes he sounded totally lucid, and other times his mind would stumble around like a drunken sailor.
Yesterday, for example—we were alone in his room—he asked me again to help him die. My parents flatly refused to do it, he said. I mean, my mother. All of a sudden, she remembered that her grandfather was a rabbi, can you believe it? And my father doesn’t want to do it without a green light from her. Those two, with that togetherness of theirs. In short, that’s it, there’s no one but you.
I didn’t say anything.
Ari gave me a pleading look.
I had never seen him plead.
I kept silent and he kept looking at me. For long seconds. Or minutes.
Time moves differently in the oncology department.
And then, suddenly, he clutched my hand and said: Thank you.
I wanted to tell him that I’d thought about it, but it was too much for me, I mean, Zorba is right, it’s probably the right thing to do, but still, I’m sorry, I’m not sure I’m capable of it—
But he went on: That night…in Ecuador…if you hadn’t been with me in that cabin, I would have gone crazy.
It’s the other way around, I wanted to correct him.
But his eyes were closing. And there was no point.
I kept holding his hand and looking at the monitor, which showed dot after dot, and I begged the gods, the ones behind the clouds, please, please make him stop hurting.
Then I had an idea.
I went down to the café next door to the hospital. I opened my computer. I foraged around old e-mails and found the list of phone numbers of the members of that workshop, the one the guy who’d written the subversive story about euthanasia had attended. I called him. He answered. How are you, he said, how’s your back? Still hurting? I told him about Ari: I need that kind of angel urgently, like the one in your story. Someone willing to give the injection.
There was a silence. A long one.
A long silence was what I was hoping for.
Finally, he said: This conversation never happened. Text me your friend’s number. Not by WhatsApp. Then immediately delete it. He and I will make all the arrangements. Don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me what’s happening or what’s going to happen. You won’t have any way of knowing exactly when the angel will visit. There’s no way of predicting. It could happen tomorrow or in another month. Depending on the circumstances. In any case, from now on, you’re out of the picture. Is that clear?
Forgive the technical question, but what is your record? What is the largest number of pages you wrote in one sitting?
Sometimes, one exactly right sentence is preferable to dozens of ineffective pages. That, by the way, is why I suffer from poet envy. It’s like the famous bridge scene in Indiana Jones: While I’m scrambling around in the ruins of characters and plot for so many pages, poets, in one good line, fire a shot and hit the bull’s-eye.
Nonetheless—once, on the roof of a hostel in Peru, I wrote for two straight days. Twenty-five pages of a single letter to Dikla. The night before, I’d called her from the pay phone in the local post office. We spoke, and for the first time since I’d left for South America without her, she sounded distant. Trying hard to show an interest she didn’t really feel. Also, the name of a guy from the university, Mickey, came up twice in the conversation, and something about the way she said it…I don’t know. It stressed me out. In those days, there was no texting or WhatsApp you could use to allay your fears. So I told Ari that I needed a little time for myself and wrote Dikla a letter. I told her about the cactus juice and what happened to me when the effects of it didn’t pass. I described how, when the crab claws came down from the ceiling and threatened to close around my neck, I shut my eyes and tried to think of her. Only her. I knew that if I could focus on her hugging me, it would stop the claws, but I couldn’t. Her image faded in my mind every time I tried to stabilize it. And of all the things that happened to me that day and night, that was the most frightening.
Don’t fade away from me, I wrote her. I love you. I’ll propose to you as many times as it takes, with helicopters and billboards and everything, but you should know right now that I want to have children with you.
For many pages, I continued to imagine what our children would look like. Two boys and a girl, of course, I described each one and the relationships between them, and what a happy pandemonium our family meals would be in our home in the Galilee. I described that home. The herb garden. The hammock hung between two grapefruit trees. The small soccer goals. The hanging speakers playing Meir Ariel and Alona Daniel alternately.
* * *
—
We had two girls and a boy. And we didn’t move to the Galilee.
But I was right about one thing: That was the perfect moment to send Dikla a love letter.
* * *
—
Months after I came back to Israel—we were living together by then—she confessed: I was just about to crack. That guy Mickey called and asked me to go with him to the Student Day celebration at the Dead Sea. And I almost said yes. But then an envelope from you arrived. It was so thick. As if you’d sent me dollars. I had to open it.
* * *
—
I wrote another letter to Dikla during these past few months. More accurately, I tried to write. By hand. On the computer. Dozens of drafts. All beginning with “Don’t fade away from me.” And they all faded away. I didn’t know how to continue. I tried switching to poems. To songs. I tried quoting from Agi Mishol and Jacques Brel. But I couldn’t find the passionate, stirring words that could really tip her inner scales in my favor. Maybe because there was too much past between us that didn’t promise her a future. Maybe because I’d become too much of a writer to write something from my heart that would go directly into hers. Or maybe because the real story here is not about a man who has to mollify the wife he’s afraid he’s losing but about a man who understands too late that he has already lost her.
In any case, tomorrow is the bat mitzvah. All the preparations have been made. The album of her photographs is ready. The deejay has been given the official list of the definitely-yes songs and the definitely-no songs. Her dress has been bought. Tried on at home. Removed with bitter weeping. And tried on again. The cake has been ordered and I only need to pick it up from the bakery in the morning. The final visit to the hairdresser is planned for tomorrow at noon, and tomorrow night, the five of us will get into the car and drive to the hall. When it’s over, we’ll drive home, and after the kids have gone to sleep, Dikla will say, I want to talk to you about something.
How do you know when you’ve reached the end of a book?
In my workshop, I teach a lesson called “The Body and Erotica.” First, I ask my students to cover their eyes with a handkerchief, then I spray perfume in the room and ask them to imagine the woman wearing that scent. Then I spray aftershave around the room and ask them to imagine the man wearing that scent. After they remove their blindfolds, they have to write about the man and the woman sitting in a room, longing to touch each other but unable to.
The period of time the students are blindfolded is the only time in the ten meetings of the workshop that the instructor can look at his cell phone unashamedly.
I had intended to check my e-mails to make sure the Stockholm police had received the written testimony I’d sent them about Axel Wolff—and that’s how I found out.
In the middle of a class. His mother had sent me a short text.
You don’t need many words for the really important things.
I love you: three words.
Ari d
ied, funeral tomorrow. Four words. You can’t walk out in the middle of a session and leave an entire class without a teacher. I listened to erotic texts and thought that Ari would have said that the situation was hysterically funny, and I thought, That’s it, I have no one to collect situations for. I wanted to cry, but crying in front of students is like crying in front of children, so I restrained myself until the last student, who’d forgotten her cardigan in the classroom, came back to get it, and then left. I turned off the lights and played a song he was crazy about on my phone (Ari didn’t just like songs, he was crazy about them).
She’s gone on her way. Oh Oh Oh Oh.
She’s gone on her way.
In large planes above the sea.
Where is she headed?
Where is she headed?
Then I locked up, turned on the alarm, and began to wander the streets of Jaffa. I couldn’t go back to my too-new apartment feeling like that. I had to find someone. Something. I stopped at a kiosk. Bought a bottle of Bitter Lemon in Ari’s memory and drank the bitterness down to the last drop. I thought, Maybe the guy behind the counter? We occasionally talked as Hapoel fans. But he was busy with customers who wanted to give him their betting forms for the British horse races, and I didn’t see how I could manage it. I crossed the street. The pitiful homeless guy was in his regular place near the trash cans. When I sometimes offer him leftover refreshments from the workshop, he takes them and says, Bless you. I threw the empty Bitter Lemon bottle into the trash and began walking toward him, really, I wanted to, but his head suddenly dropped to his chest. He’d fallen asleep. And I didn’t have the heart to wake him up. So I continued toward the area of bars. On the way, a charming couple passed me. He looked charming and she looked charming, and the way they walked beside each other—almost, but not really, touching—was charming. Even the way they looked at me seemed to say, “We have enough love. Want some leftovers?” So how could I interrupt them? And on a Thursday, no less. A second before they left for a weekend at a country B and B. I walked faster and went into an unpopular bar where I sometimes drink after the workshop. On Thursdays, in an attempt to attract more customers, the unpopular bar features a deejay, who plays hip-hop classics from the nineties. He plays them so loudly that if you want to order, you have to hold up the menu for Elad, the barman, and point to the drink you want, because there’s no way he can hear you. I pointed to Arak and grapefruit juice, and Elad brought me the tall glass. I took out the straw and drank it down in one swallow, caught his glance, and finally said—quietly, so he wouldn’t hear—My only friend is dead.