The girls changed and gossiped.
The cardboard sign in the supply caravan read: IF YOU WILL IT, WE DON’T HAVE ANY OF IT. It was a joke, and Lea laughed.
They were on an abandoned base built in 2012 for the purpose of training firefighters, who arrived from different cities for one month every year, how to prepare for a fire like the one that had happened in the Carmel forest in 2011.
The base was yellow, oversized, American.
SHAI WAS talking on his cell phone, but when he saw Yael, he hung up. He walked on the sand toward her, and Lea and Avishag froze. Yael trod lightly.
Shai put both hands on her hip bones.
“I waited for you, and now I am leaving tomorrow with my soldiers,” Shai said. He and Yael had met at a Jerusalem gay pride parade a few months after she got out of the army; he was signed on for five more years, which suggested forever. They were waiting in line for colored ice, and their sweat mixed when a float with transgendered people dressed as flamingos pushed everyone closer together. They had known each other briefly before; he was her officer toward the end of her service.
Now Lea and Avishag watched Yael and crossed their arms. Even Avishag was interested. They waited to see what Yael would do; it seemed to Yael that other people were always waiting to see what she would do. As if she knew.
“Show me where and how you are taking them,” Yael said. Then she kissed him. She never liked kissing. Sticking her tongue inside another person’s mouth. It seemed like a poor survival tactic. She tasted the bread he had recently swallowed.
“What have you all been up to?” Shai asked after, instead.
Lea was married to the guy who had started the WDJ sandwich chain stores. She was living in Tel Aviv and smoking her days away in cafés, writing porn books about Nazis fucking the life out of Jews in showers and seven-year-old girls losing their virginity via incest and double penetration. She used a pseudonym and was well received globally. Avishag had left her mother in Jerusalem and was living with her uncle in a small development town in the Negev desert, working as the youth organizer of the local Ethiopian scouts’ troop and integrating horse-riding lessons into their curriculum. On the side she drew fan-fiction comic books based on Emily the Strange called Emily the Sad. Emily the Sad was always losing her keys or missing her bus, but nobody helped her and then she would sit on a bucket in a poppy field and cry. Avishag scanned the images and e-mailed them only to Yael, but Yael never opened the attachments after the first one, the one where Emily forgets how to add and cannot figure out if she has enough money to buy a hairbrush. Yael was busy doing the world at the time, an idea she had promised to herself the day she quit her airport job with seven thousand shekels saved up, translating works she found in China, Romania, Zimbabwe, India, and putting them up online for free. And she wrote music. In all languages. Songs she put on the Internet and that people loved, though they never knew were hers.
“Geez, Yael,” Shai said, after all the highly small talk. He himself had nothing to tell. “Is there anything you don’t do?” he asked.
“Nope,” Lea said, and she tapped Yael on the back. Yael felt her nails on her skin like moans. “Our little Yael is quite the renaissance-cunt-woman.”
“All right,” Yael said.
“Lea, please. We are in a war,” Avishag said.
“I asked for the plan for tomorrow,” Yael said. And she looked at Shai. Her stare was like a fisherman’s string. She would not let him go.
SHAI EMPTIED the war room so the two of them could talk. The room was covered with maps on the wall, cereal on the floor, and rainbow hair ties and radios all over the desks.
Yael asked Shai not to go.
This was after he showed her the sketches of the school they were taking down, the location of each sniper, every window.
“You’ll die. We cannot enter Syria by land,” Yael said.
“I have to go,” Shai said. “I am an officer.”
“I’ll do whatever,” Yael said. She scratched his nose and got down, like a cat, on her knees. The floor was covered in dust and cereal; dead cells she could feel through her pant legs.
“Yael. You are paranoid.”
“I’d walk around the base, the world, forever, on all fours, with your dick in my mouth.”
“Marry me?” Shai asked. He looked down at her. He was joking, but they both knew that jokes are what’s most precise when death feels intimate.
“I need to travel. But maybe one day.”
“One day is not enough. Whatever is whatever.” Yael knew better than to say no, so she said die and gave up. In truth she knew there was no real solution in her words. Not for Shai. On her way back to the caravan, grasshoppers were catching their reflections in the gasoline pools that had formed from all the weapon cleanings, and plunging into them.
SHE ENTERED the caravan smiling. She figured she had to. The lights were off again.
“You are home!” Avishag said. She was braiding her thin hair after a shower, wearing a summer pajama set decorated with pies.
“Let’s play story,” Lea said. She pulled a soul candle from her bottomless pocket and lit it.
The girls got out their pens and paper and each of them wrote a sentence. It was a game they had not played since they were in seventh grade. Their enhanced version of Exquisite Corpse. Lea got to see Yael’s sentences but not Avishag’s. She continued the sentence she saw. Yael’s continued Avishag’s; she never saw Lea’s.
The stories they wrote were mainly about dead dogs making love in a place almost like Antarctica, modified song lyrics from American Idol, and stepmothers so fat they emptied the kibbutz pools they jumped into headfirst. The three pages went on in a circle, each girl folding the sentence she saw and leaving hers to be seen by the girl on her right, like a fan of the words that were in all of them, drowned in ink.
They did not set up a clock. They whispered across the beds the night before that they would wake up by themselves. “Natural awakening”—it was an army phrase no one used anymore, meant for those rare clockless dawns when you have nothing to wake up for in the morning.
THE BOYS were away, in a rolling bus or in another land, when the girls woke; only the younger girls were left. It was past noon already by the time the women felt that urge to step out and roam the base.
The hotter clique of younger girls were covering each other in ice and sunbathing naked by the flag. There was no one left to train in the base, no shooting range or open gate to watch on a monitor. One of the girls, a gorgeous one with a thin plume of blonde hair covering her neck, was jumping between the girls who were splayed on the floor. “Bim bam bap, I ate a rat,” she sang as she jumped, and the girls had to roll over and increase the space between them, because she kept on succeeding to jump into the spaces no matter how far apart they got. “We are a rare breed, an odd bleed,” the girl’s chant rattled on as the three women walked away.
“So are we going to raid the guys’ caravans or what?” Lea asked. “You know you always wanted to.”
Lea stopped walking and approached Yael. She kissed Yael on the forehead. There was something softer about her. Her lips were shaky on Yael’s skin. Perhaps it was the baby inside her, but Yael thought it was the mere unruffledness of aging.
They walked through the base and encountered the less popular younger girls in their red and leopard-print bathing suits. They were holding hands in a circle so firmly that their knuckles turned white. It pleased Avishag that the girls were playing a game she knew. A birthday game. The special girl of the day got to stand inside the circle and be the cat. Outside stood the girl who was the designated mouse. The goal was for the circle of girls to never let the cat break free of the circle. The girls were chanting an ancient army girls’ song: “What a mess, what a mess. Whores get screwed for money; we do it for free.”
“It’s nostalgia day,” a tall redhead, the mouse outside the circle, said to Avishag. She looked right through Avishag. “So you can join us, even though you are
old. Later we can play teachers and schoolgirls, and you’d get to beat us with the L-beat laser-calibration sticks.”
“That’s thirty-four hundred shekels for each stick. You must be joking. Who here is a weaponry instructor?” Yael asked. Since she had first seen the young girls, she had been looking for her younger self. The shortest girl, the thin one. But she was nowhere to be found. The girls’ bodies all reminded her of Amazons.
“There is no use for them no more,” said a girl with dark circles around her eyes that were large enough to penetrate her cheeks. She was a weaponry instructor, and it showed. “The boys are entering Syria by foot. We are all kaput now. I wonder what will happen!”
“Ignore, ignore,” Lea said, and brushed an imaginary spider off her shoulder. “I never liked children. Let’s go to the boys’ castle and have some grown-up fun.”
The three could hear that the cat girl broke free as they approached the boys’ caravan area. She broke the circle with the groan of a muffled robot. None of the women looked back to see her catch the mouse.
THE BOYS’ caravan area was structurally identical to the one Avishag had slept in during her service days near Egypt. The rooms looked as if the boys had been asked to leave in the middle of dinner. The dark mud of a coffee cistern was spilled on a mattress. Yellow underwear stained brown was left on a threshold. Uniforms, razors, pretzels, even money, were scattered on the floors.
Yael heard a voice talking. It was the voice of a woman, but it sounded more like that metallic groan of the cat girl breaking free. The boys must have left a TV on, she thought. At the end of the long two rows of caravans, the “recreation room” stood open. She had always hated it, that because there were more boys in every training base, they were the only ones who got to have recreation at night. The girls could watch TV if they walked in accompanied during the day, but she was always guarding or training during the day. Unless you were fucking someone important, it was “No TV for you after supper, young lady!”
Lea was stuck inside one of the caravans. Avishag and Yael stood outside and watched her sniff mattresses and crusty socks.
“Is this the type of thing that gets you off nowadays?” Yael asked. “I thought you were a married lady.”
“Oh dear,” Avishag said. She rarely spoke for Lea, but obscenity made her eyes buzz.
“Kinda. It kinda gets me off,” Lea shouted, still sniffing. “But really I am trying to detect Russian sweat.… Wait!” Lea looked under a field bed with a mattress covered in hot red sheets she had just breathed in. “Got it!”
She found three bottles that were part of a four-pack of peach schnapps, bound together by white plastic. Avishag hoped the Russian boy had not taken the fourth bottle with him to Syria. Russian boys tended to handle the automatic weapons.
“He must be a homo. What kind of guy drinks this shit? It’s our favorite, Yael! This is too good to be true.”
THE GIRLS stretched themselves out on the velvety broken sofas in the recreation room. Yael took a long swig and felt the ticking of her body slowing down. Lea was already a quarter of the way through her own bottle. Yael did not understand what the TV was showing. It was a video game, set up so that the player was the eyes. A woman with a machine’s voice was reciting insults: “The results of the test from the previous level of the game conclude that you are a terrible human being. We weren’t even testing for that,” the voice said. The setting seemed like some kind of deranged physics lab. Cement and orange lava. Robots were shooting and speaking with the voices of children: “Where did you go? I don’t hate you.”
Yael passed Avishag the bottle. “I can’t,” Avishag said. “The medicine.”
“Oh yeah, the super cool medicine,” Lea said, and pinched Avishag on the cheek. “Tell me, little Avi, does Dr. Zhivago-bumble-bee up your dosage before or after he fucks you?”
Right as she said it Lea regretted it. Avishag looked down at one of her fingernails as if it were a war room monitor. Lea, oddly, was nicer drunk than sober, and she wondered if the cruelty bleeding into her words was the baby’s way of telling her he did not very much care for peach schnapps.
“I have a woman doctor,” Avishag said. Even though it was Yael who had left the country, it was Avishag and Lea who had met the least since their huge blowout after Avishag told Lea she’d been taking antidepressants. They had become friends again after the army, when Avishag needed Lea, with Lea eagerly telling Avishag exactly what to do to cure her sadness. Lea was disappointed in the end that Avishag found a solution that had nothing to do with her.
Yael thought she needed to say something but then realized that she always thought she needed to say something. So she didn’t. She looked around the room, under empty pizza boxes and porn magazines, and found the computer game box. The game was called Human Engineering INC 2. She read the back:
This game is a series of mathematic riddles that must be solved or death and excruciating pain will occur. The player, Many, is following the orders of a Cyber Intellectual named GOD-DOS (Genome Organizing Detailer and Domain Operating System) to complete tests in the Human Engineering INC Enrichment Center, with the promise of receiving frozen pizza if testing is finalized and the subject is still alive and retains his taste buds and face.
The automated woman’s voice was speaking in loops, invisible. Yael closed her eyes and listened. “The Enrichment Center regrets to inform you that the next challenge is impossible. Do not try to solve it” and “Honestly, this part of the game was an error. If we were you, we would just kill ourselves already. Just what, as it says here in your subject 3288 file, your birth mother wanted to do when she gave you up for adoption by putting you in the Dumpster, the night after a sausage festival.”
Yael pressed a button on the joystick, and then she pressed all of them. Lea was drinking more quickly. Avishag was staring. Yael liked it that she had something to do in that awkward moment. Finally, the player on the screen jumped above the lava. The woman’s voice was heard louder: “Great Job! You stayed hopeful and dedicated to your goals in an environment of oppression and negativity. You should really become an activist and free some slaves.”
The next phase of the game was conducted in an incineration chamber for badly wired battle androids. They slid across a manufacturing line into the flames, mumbling like toddlers: “I am badly wired. I only take up space. Thank you for ending me and helping the Enrichment Center thrive!” Except for one android, who quietly repeated: “I’m Ok wired. I am different,” until he burned. Yael wondered about the face of the American man who had written the script for the game. Then she wondered about those who played it. About all of those who had seen that chamber.
“Listen, girls,” she said into the sun that penetrated the recreation room. “Listen girls”—that phrase again, just like all the times she had used it growing up.
“Oh, no,” Lea said. “It’s always a bad sign when she says that.”
Avishag liked it that Lea was finally speaking again. She smiled, showing her teeth.
“They are going to kill us all. The boys. This is the game they play,” Yael said. Then she pointed at the screen.
“Oh no, Avishag!” Lea yelled. “Yael thinks she is Jonah the prophet again!” She was talking about Yael as if she weren’t in the room.
Avishag laughed. She took Yael’s face in her hands. “Yael. You are not Jonah. We went over this in fourth grade. Then again in seventh.”
Yael felt as though she could breathe in Avishag’s voice. She had been missing the sound of that voice, the actual voice, with its dash of unmedicated cynicism. “I know I am not Jonah, duh,” Yael said. In that second, everything started making itself a little good again.
“You are no Joan of Arc either,” Lea said.
“Most certainly you are no Maid of Lorraine. I saw those e-mails you sent from Paris. What was it? Four guys in one weekend?” Avishag said, and then the three started laughing in such unison, had there been anyone near enough to hear them he would have thought a
tractor must have caught the hiccups somewhere.
Lea was the first to stop laughing. “But really, if we forget about Yael reenvisioning a better production scheme for Bruce Willis’s Armageddon, what I wanted to say is that Avishag, I am sorry. It is none of my business, your medicine.”
Avishag took the bottle from Lea’s hands. She poured the liquid into her mouth, paused, swallowed. Then she laughed. A laugh that dropped and rose like a yo-yo. This was the way she did it. This was how she started to cry.
“You are right, Lea. They wanted me to go to the army, so I go to the army. Then I am having all these thoughts and the thoughts are interrupting everybody, so they want me to take medicine. Then one of the scouts’ moms finds out I take medicine, and now they want me fired. I’m going to have to move back in with my mother, who is still living with her mother. You can’t win with these people.”
No one in the world had heard Avishag talk for this long since the tear-gas commander. She spoke like she was opening a can with her teeth.
“Who are ‘these people’?” Yael asked.
“Everyone who is not me,” Avishag said.
Lea gently patted Avishag’s knee. It occurred to Yael that she was the only one who hadn’t changed, that the other two had but she felt like she was still she.
“It’s not just you,” Lea said. “I can’t win with these people either. Ron’s sandwich shops are doing amazing. But we still can’t find a place big enough to raise kids in Tel Aviv. There is so much demand—there is simply nothing available.”
They both looked at Yael. At first she thought they were looking for guidance, but then she saw an embarrassed pinch at the side of Lea’s mouth. They were looking at Yael as if she were an outsider.
“Don’t look at me like that. It is not better out there in the world. Everywhere you go, it’s just trains that never show up, noise complaints. Police cars sticking out of the sidewalk into major roads so that they force you to walk in the middle of traffic. It’s like they want you to get run over.”
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