It's a Whole Spiel

by It's a Whole Spiel- Love, Latkes

  Later that night, the Friendly’s manager told us we had to order full meals or leave, and then he kicked us out. We hung out in the parking lot, crowded around Brett’s brother’s minivan while he blasted songs out of the rear speakers. Romy sat in the front seat, long legs out the window, bare to her knees, twiddling the dial when she didn’t like what came on. I craned my neck, looking for Alix and trying not to be too obvious. I spotted her in the middle of a crowd, close to Effie, who was stumbling into various members of the crowd, bouncing off their shoulders and sides, pinball-like. He kept reaching his arms out at Alix as he passed, as though he was trying to hold on to her, or maybe just to paw her.

  “Watch out for Effie,” Brett told me. He laid a stiff hand on my shoulder. “I think he’s been drinking. He isn’t acting normal, even for Effie.”

  Brett and I weren’t close. He wasn’t much to reckon with mentally, but he was a solid guy, and I knew he was saying this out of honest concern. Effie, I knew even less about. Had he been drinking? Is this what people were like once they drank? And did that mean that Effie wasn’t always this way, and that his usual shade of weirdness came from somewhere that was completely different?

  “All right.” I nodded, looking back to Effie. Alix was scoffing at him now, pushing him away with the free neighborhood newspaper from the Friendly’s. She could take care of herself.

  “No problem.” Brett eyed me, not convinced that I’d heard.

  “Thanks for the warning, though.” I rolled my shoulders, then set my jaw so that I looked tougher than I actually was.

  I headed for Effie and Alix. Brett was right; Effie was being rougher. He bounced hard on the concrete, letting out war whoops, crashing into Alix with his whole body in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of Things We Should Not Do. She looked seriously pissed off now, so I went up to her and whispered in her ear that I was over this place, that we should leave.

  “Relax,” she whispered back at me. “We can’t yet. Effie’s out of control. We have to put him down.”

  I guess we weren’t whispering softly enough, though, because Effie stopped, directly behind Alix now, and glared at me over her shoulder.

  “One second, man,” I said, extending the camaraderie that he’d shown me earlier that night. “We were just talking.”

  “What’s wrong? Is she your girl or something? You don’t want me messing with that?” He took a step back, flung out his arms as if to welcome the challenge. “Come on, Gellar. Show me what you got. You want to make a big deal out of it?”

  “She’s not my girl,” I muttered into my own shoulder, backing away from him.

  At the same time, Alix was gaping at him, mouth askew, going, “What’s wrong with you, Effie? Are you crazy?”

  He barked a dry laugh. “Come on, Gellar,” he said. “What’s your damage? You afraid to think about my hands all over her body, getting her nice and hot? You think you can take me?”

  In the space of a second, he grabbed something out of his pocket and tossed it to me. I caught it in my hands, hard and black and cold, silver showing.

  It was a knife.

  Everyone shut up. Somebody ran behind a car. Brett let out a high, prepubescent gasp of fear.

  “Come on. You can have first swing,” Effie said, offering his torso to me. “Here—I won’t even block you.”

  He raised his shirt. An antlike trickle of black hair trailed up his stomach from his belly button to the muscly protuberances of his chest.

  I recoiled, tasting bile. I didn’t even know how to say no to this. This was insane. I didn’t know how we had arrived at this level. I didn’t know how Effie had gotten hold of a knife, and now it was glued to my hand, which trembled uncontrollably. My hand felt as though it had been completely detached from my body. I didn’t want to throw the knife down. Then he’d pick it up, and G-d only knew what would happen. Everyone watched me, baited, unsure what was going to happen next.

  “Effie,” said Alix, completely cool. “You are completely insane. I’m out of here.” She turned around and waltzed off down an alley of cars.

  Effie’s eyes never left me. “Come on, Gellar,” he said. “Whatcha gonna do? Should we fight? Do you want to run after her, comfort her, wrap your arms all over her and then try to get her to make out with you? Or do you still think you’re one of the religious kids?”

  For a moment I felt the temptation. I was actually stuck in his world, actually about to argue with him. Then I realized how stupid he was being, and how stupid I was being, and I threw the knife to the ground and ran after her.

  Behind the Friendly’s was a small forest. When we had come here as kids, it felt like the end of the world, like the forest kept going back forever. Turns out it was only three or four trees thick.

  Behind that was a pond. The pond opened up to one side and the other, carving the forest in two. My brain did leapfrogs of geometry, and I realized it was a creek—the same hidden water that flowed through the little gatherings of trees beside the roads, the scant river that ran throughout the neighborhood.

  Alix was at the bank. I lowered myself to the edge of the river, plopping my feet in the mud. She was a few feet over, lying belly-up, staring at the stars.

  “Man, Alix,” I said.

  “Don’t start,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. You’re going to say how everyone else is so basic and they don’t really understand and they’re not worthy and they have no soul. Everyone has a soul, Alex—it’s just that around here, people are a little rough around the edges. They’re up front about what they’re thinking.”

  “They have no class,” I echoed, staring at the horizon of stars.

  “You can put it that way if you want to,” she said. “The fact is, they’re honest. Even Effie Spiegelman. Maybe especially him.”

  “You’re defending him?”

  “No way. There is no defense for what he did. He’s an asshole. But you know that and I know that and everybody else down there knows that, and you know they’d all take care of him if he did anything that was too assholey.”

  “He pulled out a knife!”

  “And if he did anything with it, Challah and Brett and them would be there to take him down. Come on. He’s just a teenager. He’ll grow up.”

  “But we’re teenagers, and we don’t act like that.”

  “Yeah. We’re just a little farther up the evolutionary ladder than Effie. The rest of them, they’re getting there. But we’re all in it. We’re all stuck in this world together.”

  “For now,” I said darkly.

  She sighed. This was the subject that always shut us up, the one thing about me that she could never understand: how I dreamed, harder than anything, of leaving this place.

  “I can’t believe Effie,” I said, lost in my thoughts.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” said Alix. “Not totally, anyway. He was drunk. People turn into different people when they’re drunk. He’ll like you again in the morning.”

  “Yeah, but what about me?” I grumbled, still feeling the heat in my chest.

  “You’ll forgive him,” she said softly, evenly. I didn’t challenge it.

  We were silent. Finally, when she spoke, it was with a jolt of disbelief. “You don’t have a crush on me, do you?”

  “No!” I said fast.

  “Really?” Her eyes narrowed, giving me that Are you sure? look like she did when I got carried away with a story and started lying halfway through.

  “No way,” I said again, quieter this time.

  “I know,” she said, even quieter.

  “Really?” My eyes popped open. “How do you know that?”

  Her eyes were fixed on me now, totally riveted.

  “Because,” she said, staring straight at me. “Because I know that we could.”
r />   “We could what?” My body shot up higher. My eyes grew a little wider.

  “Eat a hamburger. Break Shabbos. Have sex with each other. We can do anything, Alex. But we don’t. We aren’t totally Orthodox yet, but you know in ten years we’re both going to be totally hardcore. We’re going to be living these whole other lives. Having different things be important. We might not even know each other anymore.”

  “We’ll know each other.”

  “How do you know that, though? We could be dead. Or one of us could be.” She licked her lips. “It’s like, the whole secular world is telling us that this moment right now is the important one. And G-d is telling us to wait.”

  “Not just wait,” I said. “G-d is telling us that everything that’s remotely good we should sit out from and pray instead.”

  “Because there are more important things. Because all the usual teenage things aren’t things at all. Eating at Friendly’s and going out on Friday nights, and even hooking up—they’re just illusions. It’s like cocaine; only your nose and your veins don’t get all shrivelly and cracked—your soul does. That’s what we’re waiting for, Alex. We’re waiting for something bigger than these people. We’re waiting for something bigger than our lives.”

  We were both sitting up now, facing each other straight on. And without knowing why, without thinking about anything, really, we launched into a hug. Not a sexual hug, or an I want you hug, or anything that connoted any crush, unspoken or otherwise. Just a hug to let each other know that we were there for each other, that we could lean on each other. Not that there was a place for that in G-d’s law, but maybe, just maybe, there was a place for that in G-d.

  AJSHARA

  BY ADI ALSAID

  For the duration of his flight, Tzvi had respite from his ghosts. He was terrified of how many would be there waiting for him when they landed. A country always in the midst of war, or at least surrounded by the prospect of it.

  But on his flight, there was the calmness of the jet engines humming everyone to sleep. There were dozens of movies at his disposal, a book to read, the flight attendant who had smiled at him a few times, the magic of her eye contact. There were also his friends scattered around the plane. They were loud and disruptive, and Tzvi was thankful for their volume, for the excitement about the trip that they had bubbling within them.

  Back in Mexico City, Tzvi had bid farewell first to his family—Mom had cried while firing off a list of demands about how often to keep in touch—and then to friends who would have normal summers and then go off to college—a surprising amount of tears involved in these goodbyes, both from his longtime crush and, with different people, from Tzvi himself. Finally he said goodbye to the ghosts in his neighborhood. They’d become accustomed to having someone who could talk to them, and in turn he’d grown used to this odd facet of his life. The trauma of his gift had faded partially with time, mostly because he’d become familiar with the ghosts and their stories. Linda, the girl who’d died from leukemia at sixteen. Sergio, who’d been struck by a car. Two men named Josue, who’d each died when their buildings had collapsed in separate earthquakes thirty-two years apart. He rarely saw other ghosts, since, like the living, they didn’t often stray from their neighborhoods and comfort zones. They haunted familiar places. Even these that he knew, he ignored most of the time. Sure, they talked to him, but it was rare that he ever spoke back. He knew where they liked to spend time and avoided those spots, even steered his thoughts away from them whenever he could. Still, he felt he owed them an explanation as to his upcoming absence. They had so little else.

  “An ajshara,” he said.

  The older Josue raised an eyebrow and looked at the younger Josue, who was just as confused. They were over fifty years apart in age at their deaths, and had grown up during vastly different decades, but how they died had brought them close together, or maybe that was death itself. Every time Tzvi saw them, they were roaming the streets, or sitting at Plaza Cibeles, their backs to the fountain, watching the living go about their days.

  “It’s a tradition,” Tzvi explained. “We take a year to travel before going to school. Usually Israel and Europe.”

  The Josues had follow-up questions, but Tzvi didn’t have the heart to continue the conversation past that notice. Every detail he added would have been rubbing salt in their wounds. It was hard to step away from the guilt that he was the only person they could talk to, aside from each other. But it was harder to stay and talk.

  The pilot announced the final approach. Tzvi’s friends, who’d settled into sleep over the last few hours of the flight, now resumed their too-loud chatter. Tzvi glanced out his window as if afraid that the ghosts would be visible from there, but he saw only the dark blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The flight attendant came by, collecting trash, and when she smiled at him again, Tzvi thought that he could be happy staying on the plane forever.

  Wheels touched down in Tel Aviv, and Tzvi allowed himself to be swept up in the energy of the others. They were eighteen and free of their parents for the first time (though still tied to their bank accounts, thank God), a year of travel ahead of them. It promised to be a year of adventure and food, Israeli girls and European girls and South American boys; boys with guitars at hostels and girls dancing carefree at bars and boys with their bodies at beaches. A fantasy in more ways than one, since Tzvi and his friends were all shy and awkward, and their independence wouldn’t magically change them. The boys assumed the girls would have it easier, but the girls were shyer and treated these fantasies as more far-removed than the boys did, so their opportunities advanced more slowly. Regardless, Tzvi was happy to think of them as sudden Casanovas, since it was more fun to think of girls than ghosts. That’s all he wanted from the year, he realized: time without his ghosts.

  The five adrenaline-fueled boys and two equally excited girls took two taxis to the city, checking in to a hostel a ten-minute walk from the beach. They ate shawarma from a small stand, fighting off jet lag by telling each other of all the glee they’d experience in the coming months. They commented on the abundance of beautiful Israeli girls, gorgeous Israeli men. Tzvi ate with his eye on the wrap, not wanting to look around and see the dead.

  He’d noticed them already. Not what he’d apparently been expecting, victims of bombs and violence, all carnage. Here, too, people died of old age. They died of overdoses, died peacefully in their sleep, died happy. The ghosts looked like the living people, just a slight glow to their skin, wearing their deaths on their faces. Not in any obvious way that Tzvi could point at, but obvious enough that he always knew how they had died, even from afar. No matter how hard he tried, he could not hide from that knowledge. At least here he could hide in anonymity. He could pretend to be just like his friends.

  Down the street from the shawarma stand, on the corner of the intersection, Tzvi spotted a dead man in a tank top, his hands in his pockets, a slight smile on his lips, taking in the sun. The man looked Tzvi’s way, and before he could be recognized, Tzvi reached for the bottle of tahini and added another squirt to his shawarma, taking a bite and trying to tune in to what his friends were saying.

  Boys, the beach, girls, the joys ahead.

  Gabriel wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin, which he crumpled up and tossed into a nearby bin. “We’re finally here,” he said to Tzvi. The rest of the group was chatting excitedly, giddy with exhaustion and the change of scenery.

  “Yeah,” Tzvi said, and looked around to take stock of their surroundings, avoiding looking in the direction of the man in the tank top. The sun was glaring, and everyone nearby looked beautiful in their sunglasses, basking in the heat. Could he do this for the whole year? Look to the light?

  “It’s going to be a great year.”

  “You think so?”

  Gabriel laughed boisterously and then smacked Tzvi’s knee, as if the mere possibility of a different outcome was preposte
rous.

  They ended up going to their hostel and lying down, jet lag taking away all their plans and knocking them out until two a.m. At six they finally crawled out of bed and watched the sunrise, ready to explore the city, ready to start the adventure for real. They ate sabich and then shawarma again, dipped into a mall when the heat had them sweating everywhere. They saw girls in military gear and, in their boisterous Spanish, discussed how to start a conversation, but the girls walked by before any of them could act. At night they talked about going to nightclubs but ended up at a dive bar next to the hostel. It was full of travelers like them, and though Tzvi and his friends had all been able to drink as eighteen-year-olds in Mexico, there was something freeing about drinking without their parents anywhere near, something less intimidating about doing it in this friendly, dark place compared to a nightclub with twenty-five-year-olds. Tzvi saw a dead soldier at the end of the bar, playing with a pack of cigarettes. The soldier was in his forties, dead from heart failure, not bullets. He made eye contact with Tzvi and smiled, a look so desperate crossing his face that Tzvi couldn’t bear to maintain eye contact with him. Tzvi ordered another beer and escaped to the patio with Ariela and Daniela, who were talking to two Belgian girls while the others hung around too closely and giggled too obviously.

  Then they all overdid it and puked on the sidewalk on the short traipse back to the hostel, passing out in their clothes and sandals. In the morning they emerged hungover into the blazing humidity, seeking something that would soak up last night’s mistakes. But it was Saturday and everything was closed, so they ended up lying out on the beach on their too-small travel towels, moaning in discomfort and pain.

  All of their mothers called at some point that day, each of the kids taking turns trying to fake pep and cheer while omitting the binge drinking and all the hope for sex and companionship. “Yeah, I’m having fun,” Tzvi said to his mother in Hebrew. A dead girl walked by as he said this, and she glanced down, her jaw dropping slightly when she realized he could see her and he could speak her language. In response, Tzvi rushed off the phone call and then sprinted past her into the water, not ready to return to his ghosts. He was tired of collecting their names in his mind, collecting all the ways in which life could be cut short.