“I know you don’t actually need the sense of touch to do what you do,” she said, looking me straight in the eye, “and I’m trusting you won’t try anything. Besides…” She turned her hand palm down, fingers spread outwards. A pebble. “We have rules, right?”
We shook hands. The charms crushed against my skin. They were a nice, cool contrast to the humidity hanging in the room.
“That’s a nice charm.”
“My mom makes me wear it,” she said and shrugged. “You know what moms are like.”
I nodded. “My mom would want me to wear a hazmat suit whenever I go out.”
Sherry grinned and brushed the hair off her face. Too short to tuck around her ears, it bounced right back. She looked at Matthew and asked, “Are you a moody too?”
Matthew looked up from his book and said, “No, an orthopedist. Reed takes people’s pain away, and I make them feel it.”
We both laughed at his stupid joke. Sherry shifted her gaze between the two of us and smiled politely. “I’m a cop.”
My smile froze. “You were at the rally?”
“Every single one in the last two years, since…” she fell silent.
“Since Flint,” I finished the sentence for her. At that rally, a bomb had been tossed into the middle of the crowd, detonated by an unknown pyro. It was the Sons of Simeon’s first murder. Nothing was ever the same again. They saw themselves as the heirs of Simeon Ben Shetach, the Sanhedrin murderer during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus.
“I’m one of those nutcases who volunteer to actually go the rallies instead of staying at the station and getting the reports after the fact.” Sherry bit her bottom lip. “I’m also involved in the surveillance of potential murderers.”
“You’re supposed to tell me not to worry, that this time you’ll get him for sure,” I said, trying not to sound bitter. I didn’t mention that her volunteering didn’t help us. That the police hadn’t managed to prevent a single murder, and that the cops mostly stayed on the sidelines and never made any arrests.
Matthew kicked me. “Be polite.”
“He’s very polite,” Sherry said quietly. “Most people here won’t let me anywhere near them once they find out what I do for a living.”
“We’re nicer than most,” Matthew said, smiling at her.
Before Sherry could answer, Daphne appeared above her, almost tripping over the ottoman. She crouched between us, opened Matthew’s backpack and took out what was left of her sandwich. “I’m taking Oleander back to our place,” she said and winked at me. “Don’t come home too early.”
I was torn between my desire to keep her away from him and the urge to wish her a flaccid night. “Just keep the noise down, OK?”
“Sure thing,” she said, and got up.
Sherry smiled. “It’s good to see that at least for some of us life goes on as usual.”
Crossing his legs, Matthew said, “It’s just a shame those some of us aren’t into me.” He sounded bitter but smiled, and we moved on to small talk, ignoring all the political debates around us, which were simmering to a boil courtesy of the late hour and the alcohol. Forrest launched into a diatribe about how ‘if we don’t help ourselves, no one’s going to help us,’ while Aurora kept countering with ‘armed resistance would just set public opinion against us,’ and the usual ‘we have to understand their motives, we have to find common ground’.
Sherry glanced at me. “You disagree?”
I tried to show as little emotion as possible. “After the votes for Change from Within failed to reach the threshold? To get even one seat? No.”
Sherry held her hand flat, palm facing upward. “We have a chance with the major parties. Flint managed to get into parliament.”
“And got killed. And no one even investigated it seriously. It’s been two years and not a single lead.”
Matthew shifted in his seat. I looked at him and asked, “What?”
“Nothing.” He shook his head.
“I’m not running for parliament.”
“Good,” he said, tightening his lips into a grin. “God forbid you should make a decent salary.”
I tried being annoyed at him, but it was impossible. “Never mind the salary, what would I do with a car?”
Sherry looked at him, then at me, and said, “And a driver.” She smiled, and for a moment she looked pretty.
“We’d never find parking. The poor guy would have to circle the neighborhood all night.”
We got to talking about our apartments, and from there to even more trivial, mundane matters. Sherry had three cats, each of which had run away to a different neighbor during one of the heavy storms last winter, and she told us how she frantically knocked on every door in her apartment building late at night to try bring them home. Matthew asked whether I could have tracked them down by attuning to their feelings, which eventually led to the story of how I caught the mouse that had set up camp in one of our kitchen cupboards last year.
By the end of the evening, when Matthew gave me a ride home, I felt a little less dismal.
2
The following morning I dragged myself to the shower with eyes half closed, trying to remember whether my shift started at eight or nine. Lately I had to pick up more shifts to cover my part of the rent, which the landlord had once again raised after reading some article about the unreliability of people like us.
Oleander came out of the bathroom in a cloud of warm vapors, dressed in the old T-shirt I received at the end of basic training and had loaned Daphne years ago. He had curly light brown hair and bright, smiling eyes. I thought of Ivy and her funny stories about her fights with her younger brother, scuffles that were mostly carried out in reflections so their parents wouldn’t see what they were doing to each other.
I rubbed my eyes and yawned. I had gotten maybe four hours sleep, and even those were muddled by one disjointed nightmare after another. It would be days until the feeling of the knife being pushed in between my shoulder blades faded. At least this time I hadn’t been in the closest circle. Back then it had been weeks of waking up in tears, and no pill could make me lie in bed for more than two hours straight.
“Hey,” Oleander said, his voice pleasant and deep.
“Hey.” My own voice produced its usual morning rasp.
“We didn’t make too much noise last night, did we?” He seemed too wakeful and chipper for seven am.
“I really need the bathroom,” I replied.
Daphne opened the door to her room, dressed in a nightie. Oleander’s feelings for her sizzled up and struck me with such force I could barely keep myself steady.
“Good morning,” Daphne said, smiling. Her passion came flooding into me.
I rubbed my forehead. “Would you please, please stop thinking about sex? Please.”
Daphne feigned an innocent expression. “Who, me? I’m thinking no such thing!”
The next wave made my knees go weak.
I fixed her with a look. “Please, wait half an hour until I’m gone.” My voice, which was supposed to sound leveled and confident, came out a miserable snarl.
“Fine,” she replied with a dramatic eye roll. It was enough to get a small smile out of me. I wondered if she had planned it that way. “And you’re going to want to take an extra shirt today.”
I sighed. “Again?”
“I’ll wait for you,” Oleander said to her before finally stepping away from the bathroom door and disappearing into her room.
I cleared my throat. “Daphne, are you sure about–”
“Haven’t we already discussed this?” she interrupted me, looking somewhere over my shoulder, as she always did when searching for the fastest way to end the argument.
“This is not a good idea. He’s her brother. You know what–”
“He’s a one-night stand. Nothing more.”
“It’s just that… I don’t want this to be another Alder.”
“Neither do I,” she said, flicking the hair from her eyes. “But Oleander
isn’t… it’s not… he’s nice, and thoughtful, and…”
And a damus. “Alder was nice and thoughtful,” I said, trying to keep my tone steady, soothing even. I’m just asking, I told myself. I’m absolutely not going to barge into her room and physically kick Oleander out of my house.
“Oleander isn’t another Alder,” Daphne blurted. “And I’m not the same eighteen year-old girl terrified of her commander. Have a little faith in me.” Before I could answer, she added, “And he’s not Ivy.”
“I just think that…” I said, searching for the right words, “that maybe there’s a better way of coping with what happened than…”
“And I think that maybe instead of burying yourself in work, you should remember we could all die tomorrow, so you better live a little,” she said, her voice slightly deflated.
I was too tired and miserable to produce a supportive and understanding answer. “Unlike you, I’d rather go through life without catching an STD from every man who passes by and having to get monthly antibiotic shots.”
“Of course you won’t catch anything, you’d have to actually do something for that,” she retorted with a smile meant to lighten up the message.
“I do enough.”
“What do you do? Dishes?” she snorted. “That’s one odd fetish.” She arched her eyebrows so ridiculously high, I couldn’t help but smile.
She returned the smile. “Feeling better?”
“How do you do it?”
“Magic,” she said, kissed me on the cheek and went to her room.
I stepped into the bathroom. The showerhead spurted in two opposite directions, neither of them directly above me. I had to hop left and right to get wet. The mold painted a greenish-brown fringe on the shower curtain. We really do have to replace it, I thought, even though it was the first thing we bought for the apartment together. The bloody handprints design gave us a laugh.
I was happy we were out of hot water. The icy drops helped me focus, get my act together. After each murder, Daphne was on the lookout for one-night stands, and I always booked enough double-shifts to exhaust myself to the point of passing out at night. It didn’t work, but it was the only solution I managed to come up with.
Not listening to the news was the one thing we agreed on. Turning a deaf ear to the many pundits, to the hollow speeches broadcast from parliament, to the attempts to rouse our worn-out, divided community with endless debates.
Beneath the water, I closed my eyes and tried to find myself amidst the overwhelming pain.
3
The bus was late, as usual, and almost every seat taken by the time it arrived. The other three people waiting at the station boarded from the front. I could board with them, and no one would notice. This time there weren’t any visible bruises on my face to reveal what I had been up to last night. I could board from the front, and pay with cash instead of using my smart card. I could pretend I was from another city and simply didn’t have a Tel Aviv bus pass. Easy-peasy. As long as an inspector didn’t board, I’d be fine.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I waited until the back door opened, dodging the looks of everyone sitting in that part of the bus. I held my pass against the reader, and it beeped, as usual, arousing murmurs from the rest of the passengers. I fixed my gaze on the floor, proceeded to the section bordered in white and stood by the window. I looked out, ignoring the whispers buzzing around me. The passengers closest to me were radiating palpable aversion. One passenger’s repulsion was so strong he was physically sick. I considered heightening his nausea. I pictured him throwing up on the woman sitting next to him.
Three teenagers huddled in the back seat were talking about the rally. One of them said ‘They took down another one,’ and his friend laughed and told a joke I had heard a million times before.
They were being intentionally loud. I could feel their need for violence, driven by fear and loathing.
The radio was blaring with the regular series of interviews: a man who claimed he had alerted the police before the rally but no one paid him any attention – followed by the police spokesperson’s response that the man was lying; then came the ambulance driver who had evacuated the wounded and complained they weren’t being paid enough to transport ‘those people’; two politicians from rival parties debated who was to blame for this recent murder, and a nurse from Gershom Hospital, to which the wounded had been admitted, harped about the overcrowding and the shortage of skilled nurses.
“Let them die,” one of the teenagers behind me scoffed, and the other two laughed.
I compressed my anger into an explosive force.
“The Sons of Simeon are doing them a favor,” one of them said.
The bus came to halt at the next stop. The rear door opened. A woman in a floral dress boarded; her bus pass beeped, alerting the passengers of another presence similar to my own. The hem of a purple skirt was peeking out from under her dress, revealing her occupation: relieving people of their emotions for a fee.
We exchanged a silent glance.
One of the teenagers laughed. “Look, they can’t even get along with each other.” His words were steeped in panic. The song playing on the radio now over, the host of the morning talk show was interviewing the deputy minister of defense. They talked about the rally, the deputy minister demanding that the prime minister take active measures to ensure public safety from this ‘domestic threat’. She spoke about all the innocent people who could have gotten hurt were a riot to break out due to ‘internal intrigues that have nothing to do with normal, law-abiding citizens.’ She didn’t say a single word about the Sons of Simeon. They didn’t interview one true representative of our community. Not even the chairwoman of The Coalition for Peacebuilding, who was always peddling her tired mantra about peaceful coexistence inspired by the promotion of diversity. No one believed in those slogans any more, not even radio hosts, apparently. At least this time they didn’t interview Linden, the leader of the Sons of Simeon, or Prof. Yeshurun, a splasher and self-proclaimed expert on the community who jumped at any opportunity for self-promotion, even when it came at our expense. The only good thing I could say about him was that at least he was the first to shun the airhead rapist who used his powers to prevent his victims from calling out for help.
Before the transition to the newscast, the host once again played the statement made by Sons of Simeon, claiming responsibility for the bombing. “Another blow has been dealt today in God’s name. Today the Sons of Simeon wiped another medium off the face of the Earth, as our Holy Scripture commands. We have struck at the heart of the depraved city of Tel Aviv, and we shall continue to strike wherever they lurk until every last medium is annihilated.”
I choked back my tears, put in my earphones, and cranked up the music. Outside, people were walking, talking, nodding, stopping to toss a few shekels into the open guitar case of the musician on the street corner. I scrolled down the most recent posts. Someone had started another thread about patriarchy and using our powers, and I immersed myself in typing an appropriate comment, one that would be angry enough to get my message across, but not inflammatory enough to get me blocked again.
The bus stopped.
A man with a thick, carefully styled beard, dressed in a tank top and hiking boots, boarded from the rear door. His pass beeped as he swiped it against the reader. He looked at me and then at the woman standing next to me in the white section, and pressed his thumb to his index finger, making a small circle. Looking for a psychic. The woman gave off a quick surge of fear.
I could have let her treat him. She was going to anyway, once the bus pulled over at her stop. But I couldn’t ignore the tremor that shot through her. I tried to imagine myself doing what she did, day in, day out. Having to touch every person I crossed paths with just to make ends meet, having to feel what they felt, to do for them what they wouldn’t allow themselves to do within the confines of civilized society. I sent her a short protection wave, looked the man straight in the eye and scratched my
temple with my middle finger. Empathy. Daphne would flick her hair back and touch her forehead with her pinky to signal foresight.
The woman exhaled her pent-up breath. The man approached me and extended his hand. I took out my earphones.
“Remember me? We were in elementary school together. Danny, right?” He was engulfed in a cloud of cheap deodorant.
I didn’t have to shake his hand to feel him, nor did I have to ask what he wanted from me. His outstretched hand gestured consent. He was leaking sadness.
I shook his hand. “Reed, actually,” I said, managing to feign a smile.
I took away the top layer. Not a lot, but enough to get him through the day. I saw the relief in his eyes. He exhaled as the pain subsided. I held his hand for another moment, thinking he might be interested in something more than a quick fix. The bus started moving again and the woman in the floral dress lost her balance. He reached out and helped her steady herself, turning his attention entirely away from me.
I shifted my gaze out the window again. I had to scatter the foreign emotions swirling inside me so I wouldn’t absorb them. Usually I’d disperse them among the bus passengers, maybe even toss a few out the window if the bus was at a standstill for long enough. This time I directed all of it at the three teenagers sitting behind me. I made sure the emotions really seeped in. The one who was in the middle of yet another joke fell silent, and the other two stopped giggling. I felt the sadness sink deep inside them. They didn’t and wouldn’t understand where it came from, and I didn’t care. When the bearded man looked the other way, the woman caught my attention and clasped her hands together, a gesture of gratitude and solidarity. I returned the gesture and separated my hands once the man turned his gaze back to us.
By the time the bus reached my stop, one of the three teenagers had managed to overcome the emotions I had planted in him, and started muttering something about how if he ever had a kid ‘like that’ he’d make sure the midwife strangled him at birth. I got off the bus without looking back. I made sure no one was following me. Although it was broad daylight, and there were no telltales of my true nature, one could never be too sure.
The Heart of the Circle Page 2