After weeks of staring through books – through the miniature screens of our eyelids upon which the past was continuously projected – we packed our bags and left.
At Ben Gurion Airport, waiting in line to check in, our passports at the ready, Jamie was stopped by a young female security agent and interrogated.
“Where are you flying?”
“Home.”
“And where is home?”
“America.”
She plucked the passport from Jamie’s hand and began flipping pages before asking, “And what was the purpose of your visit?”
“To study at Hebrew University.”
“And what did you study?”
“Jewish education.”
She raised an eyebrow and looked at Jamie. “What month is it?”
“December.”
“What is the Hebrew month?”
Jamie furrowed her brow and glanced at me. “It’s Kislev, right?”
I shrugged.
“Kislev?”
The security agent shook her head. No. Holding the passport, she stopped abruptly and fixated on Jamie’s gloved hand. Jamie was wearing pressure garments on certain areas of her body, tightly fitting nylon which pressed the skin flat to prevent hypertrophic scars – raised, nodular formations that restricted movement and flexibility. I wanted to step in and explain to the security agent that the scar tissue was still forming, that the glove was applying pres sure to the epidermal layer, forcing the scars to form smooth and flat. I wanted to explain that Jamie had to wear them at all hours for a year. That it wasn’t our choice. That she should just let us go, please, let us go and check in and leave.
“I was injured in a terrorist attack,” Jamie said, watching the agent.
“Which one?”
“Hebrew University.”
“Ayzoh mizkeinah,” she said, pulling up the rope, letting us through, victimhood giving us license to leave, justification to want to leave. It was enough.
As we walked to the gate, Jamie turned around. “What did she say?”
“Ayzoh mizkeinah. It means poor thing.”
“I know what it means. I just didn’t hear her.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t like people looking at my hand.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure I can come back.”
I nodded, looking at the Channukiot left over from Hanukah in the window at Duty Free, the lights gone.
“Want some Scotch?” I asked.
She grabbed my hand. We walked onto the plane, silent, feeling abandoned, feeling as though we were abandoning a life we once loved, a life taken away. The terrorists won, I thought. They fucking won.
PART III
Recovery
10
After Jamie’s physical recovery, we left Israel and settled in Washington, D.C. – a new city, a new place in which to start over, to begin this new beginning we’d been granted by chance.
We grabbed a one-bedroom apartment in the neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, where Salvadorian fruit sellers and Mexican CD pushers mixed with not-for-profit ideologues and lawyers at the Justice Department, where the smells of fish and coffee and smoking tortillas mingled with turbulent currents of hip-hop and reggaeton.
We’d chosen to live in the city despite landing teaching jobs at a Jewish high school in suburban Rockville, Maryland. We’d chosen the corner bakery, the walk-in hardware store, and the neighborhood bank over manicured lawns and strip malls disguised as small towns. We’d chosen bustle and distraction over sterility and calm. And despite fleeing Israel with our first child growing in Jamie’s belly – this new life only months away from choking out her first breath – we’d chosen risk along with the rewards. Two months after settling in to our urban apartment, the pop-pop of gunfire echoed one night in the dark, followed by an ambulance siren’s wail. Looking out from our fifth-floor window, we watched the police and television crews gather on Park Avenue at the corner of Mount Pleasant Street. And then the ambulance, lights turned off, left our building’s front stoop with its cargo, rolling away slowly, silently.
Jamie looked over. “Does that mean someone just died?”
“I think so.”
We looked at each other, neither of us capable of speaking, understanding nothing more could be said without saying everything, without asking whether we had made the right decision, without asking whether we could handle the slightest hint of danger given the things we’d fled to arrive at this place. Our new home.
“We should go to bed. I need to go to bed,” she said.
“I know.”
She took the first shift in our one-bedroom apartment’s sole bathroom. As she got ready, I absently launched an online chess game, seeking to bury my head in an abstract haze of strategic calculations and precise movements. While the screen told me that my opponent was an intermediate player from Ireland, I knew better – knew that the adversary I was about to face resided in my mind. I shut my eyes and tried to channel Bobby Fischer, who before the greatest match of his life, said, “I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.” I nodded. You don’t believe in psychology. You believe in distractions, I thought before escaping into the pixelated board where light and dark pieces were pitted opposite each other. I played black – on the defensive from the start – as my opponent probed for vulnerabilities easy to find. I touched the mouse to various pieces, illuminating squares where movement was possible, revealing a pawn blocked, a bishop on the move. I found solace in the knight, in jumping over everything.
“Come to bed,” Jamie said, fatigued and flossing her teeth. She had come out of the bathroom and was standing over my shoulder. “Just close it.”
“But I’ll lose.”
She looked at me sadly and tilted her said as if to say, Please don’t be a fool, before trailing off into the bedroom. I shut down the computer and angled toward the window for one last look into the dark. The television vans with their retractable antennas had left. The gaggle of police cars honking and flashing had left. In their place was something new – a police trailer, long and white with blue lights ignited on its roof, still, unmoving. It was an anti-gang unit.
For the next week, that trailer idled on our block at all hours, the officers always inside, unseen, watching.
Work had brought us to the capital. We’d both been hired by the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School (JDS), the city’s eminent non-denominational Jewish high school, after an unconventional joint interview. Expecting separate chit-chats, we were surprised when the principal and administrators shepherded us into the conference room together, motioned for us to sit around a circular oak table, and commenced with the interview as though we were a tag team. When a question was lobbed before us – “How would you describe your teaching philosophy?” – it was nearly impossible to discern whether it had been directed at anyone in particular or simply thrown up for grabs. Each time I felt the desire to tag Jamie’s hand and exit the ring.
Whether they knew Jamie had been in the Hebrew University bombing was unclear, and we hoped somehow they did not. We had braced ourselves for it to sneak in off handedly during a traditional interview, but in this chaotic, debate-style approach, I could feel it lurking in the opposing team’s playbook, ready for it to be hurled at us while Jamie delivered brutal clotheslines and I took a series of elbows to the face. When the interview was over, Jamie had clearly won on points – they smiled every time she opened her mouth.
Fortunately, I was offered a teaching position as well, most likely to sweeten the deal, my offer little more than her signing bonus. But Jamie decided to decline JDS’s offer, choosing instead to stay at home for the year, waiting for our infant to arrive, waiting to be a mother, to be the caregiver, finally. And so I found myself navigating D.C.’s public transportation system alone on the first day of school.
Standing at the corner of Park and Mount Pleasant, surrounded by historic row houses and bundled against a crisp, early autumn morning, I
waited for the H4 bus to Cleveland Park, where I could catch the Metro to Rockville. It was before dawn. Around me were construction workers, mothers holding infants and high school kids wearing baggy pants, bobbing to their MP3 players. Scanning the group, noticing the dented lunch boxes, the aluminum Thermoses and stylized backpacks, a surprising thought bubbled to the surface: I’m not looking for a bomb. As the H4 approached, I stumbled forward to the door, shoved by the realization that it had been years since I’d boarded a bus without wondering if my flesh would be torn open by a spray of metal. And as we vibrated downhill, crossing through Rock Creek National Park, I looked around me – at the mothers holding their children and the students awkwardly flirting – and was overcome by amazement, thinking, These people aren’t afraid of dying. They aren’t suspicious. For a moment, I remembered what normal life, life removed from a war zone, felt like.
At Cleveland Park, I followed the crowd to the Metro station and caught the Red Line north to Rockville. As we rocketed underground, I realized I had misjudged the commute. I was late. When the train finally reached the suburbs, I hustled to JDS, splitting hedges and hopping guard rails to make up time. When the school finally came into sight, my first class was due to start in only fifteen minutes, and I had to make a choice: cut down a steep hill behind the school, or take the long, winding sidewalk around the sprawling campus to the main entrance: thirty seconds versus three minutes. I took the hill, failing to notice the smooth, slick sheets of moss, wet from the morning, blanketing the slope. I tried to compensate by alternating my steps, digging my heels in as though I were ice climbing, feeling my soles slide and then, suddenly, lose contact with the ground. I stabbed my hands backwards and slid down the hill as though wheels were attached to my palms and feet. When I reached the bottom and stood up, amazed that I had somehow managed to keep the seat of my slacks from hitting the mud, I saw the blood spurting from my right palm.
Cutting through a back door to the school, I found a restroom and grabbed a handful of paper towels, then slid into class as the bell sounded. Everyone looked up. I wrote a name on the board and introduced myself to my first class – an eleventh-grade survey on biblical texts – while squeezing paper towels above my head to staunch the bleeding.
“What happened?” a giggling, Abercrombie-clad girl asked.
“Yeah, you okay?” asked a few others.
“I’m fine. Just a first-day wound.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Oh, just some newfangled hazing ritual rookie teachers must undergo. I’m fortunate Rabbi Sandler called off the pit bull so quickly. You should see the English teachers.”
The teenagers, many of them Ivy-League bound, gazed back at me, eyebrows cocked. They were not impressed.
Despite the inauspicious start, I was complimented early in the year by the school’s administrators for my innovative and effective teaching. I was making things look easy. Take, for example, my toughest assignment: seventh-grade Bible studies. The curriculum entailed a thematic run through the Torah, from God breathing life into Adam’s nostrils in Genesis to Moses’ death upon Mount Nebo in Deuteronomy. Now, most middle-school students are so flummoxed by hormones that they can devolve, without warning, into banana-throwing chimpanzees during even the most engaging of classes. My little chimpanzees were an entirely different sub-species, coming from some of the most prominent Jewish families in the nation’s capital – families who produced exceedingly intelligent and witty children. Among my students were the children of prominent journalists, high-ranking politicians, and ambassadors. These students were capable not only of throwing objects with their hands but with their minds as well. Particularly when they were bored.
My solution was to transform the class into a simulated FBI operation, grouping students by fours and fives into field offices – Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston – with me as the chief stationed in Washington. The text was our playground, and when the monotony of learning became too much to bear, or when the curriculum demanded that I put them through the rigor of learning an interpretive skill, I’d reach into a drawer, don a police cap and pronounce, Get into your FBI agencies as a bunch of twelve-year-olds scurried to their ‘field office.’ Then, sitting quietly, ready for their instructions, they’d eye me intently, ready for the textual mystery that needed to be solved.
Things were going well on the surface, a surface that appeared to most everyone as smooth and placid. But that’s the problem with still bodies of water – you can glance down and, suddenly, see your reflection.
Deep within, things were off. It began with suffocation. During one of my first classes, while my eleventh-graders were busy generating philosophical questions about the Garden of Eden, an internal drawstring was suddenly pulled, and in a beat my lungs constricted. Hands on my chest, I tried to catch myself and started gasping, unable to take in much more than a shallow breath. Silently standing and retreating to a bathroom, I locked the door and gripped the sink, light-headed, leaning into the mirror. In subsequent months, this would become the norm, suffocating while checking my email or walking to class, unable to expand my lungs, unable to breathe deeply enough to feel sustained, to feel safe. Then one evening, while I was at home grading papers, it happened. I heard Jamie say, “You’re not okay.”
“I’m fine,” I responded, mouth open, trying to force the air in, frustrated and amazed by my inability to perform such a routine, automatic function – to take a breath.
“You don’t look it.”
“I just can’t breathe, is all.”
“Is all?”
“Yeah, is all.” I tried forcing a yawn, opening wide and attempting an intake into the back of my throat. After five seconds frozen in that position, a yawn came, and the sensation of oxygen enriching cells tingled my chest. I was ecstatic.
“Just had to yawn. See?”
“Mm-hmm.”
Jamie had been in therapy for over a year, and had made significant steps toward mitigating much of the raw anxiety that she felt after the trauma. This success compelled her to drop subtle hints about my own refusal to seek help – “You’re an idiot, just go.” But I refused, believing that I was fine, thinking, I just can’t breathe, is all. And anyway, I was adjusting to a new city, navigating a new job, and expecting our first child. Symptoms of stress didn’t seem worrisome. These were just jitters. Nothing that wouldn’t dissipate over time.
Such rationalizations were quickly flooded by reality when Jamie started contractions just as Tropical Storm Isabel was forming off the coast. We drove to the hospital, through Isabel’s outer bands of rain and wind, on September 17, a six-foot storm surge building up in the Atlantic and making its way to Chesapeake Bay. It took nearly twenty-four hours for the waves to course through the varicose waterways leading into Washington, and as the waters began to pour into the Potomac River,1 its banks beginning to crest, Jamie began pushing. I held on to her leg as something emerged. The midwife leaned in and pressed a blue bulb syringe into an indistinguishable mass that immediately popped out in response. It was as though a crumpled, rubber mask had been flipped inside out and formed into a face. “That’s my daughter,” I whispered at the moment of recognition, the moment they placed her on Jamie’s chest, the infant’s mouth instinctively suckling as Jamie’s milk flowed and the rain pounded outside. The world had shifted irreversibly; I was a father. A permanent caregiver. And while love came at first sight, so too did its consequences. Jamie was right. I was not okay.
The stress of parenting quickly became intolerable. Caretaking, caring for another – another who needed me for survival, for comfort, for sleep – I couldn’t do it, at least not well, having already done more than I could bear in Israel.
I never yelled. Never hit. Never expressed anything but a gentleness that belied what was actually going on inside me, my lungs tightening even more, my stomach eating itself. But I shook off such symptoms daily, hourly, minute-by-minute, thinking, Calm down. She’s beautiful. You’re in love. Jus
t be okay. But I wasn’t, and so I became obsessed with making things right for my daughter, Noa, with making her okay instead.
And Noa did have a serious problem that needed fixing: sleep. At three months, she wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t stay down for more than thirty minutes at a time, this tiny mess having absorbed everything in the womb, having felt the umbilical cord’s constriction. A PTSD baby, born neurotic, always alert and sensing a coming threat. Noa seemed unable to handle the dark, just like her father, who took it upon himself to “cure” her infant insomnia, to make her relax, as if such a strategy has ever worked: I’ll make her relax.
Jamie should have known that I was the problem. She should have said, “This will pass.” However, suffering herself from a mind-numbing fatigue induced by Noa’s all-night escapades, Jamie agreed that we had to do something.
We first considered sleep consultants, then tranquilizers, before settling on a fascist regimen outlined in a book recommended by mothers online, The No-Cry Sleep Solution. The title appealed. I didn’t like the crying; I liked sleep; and most of all, I liked solutions. The book promised results: a baby who would sleep through the night, a serene baby for the ages. Photographs of sleeping babies punctuated the pages to prove the soundness of its methodologies. And not just any babies, mind you, but the author’s own children, slumped in high chairs at the dinner table or drooling on pillows, eyes closed, page after page. Amazing. We bought it, and I bought into its ninety-five-step plan, tracking sleep patterns on spreadsheets and plotting trends. I kept a pad next to the bed and marked every night-waking precisely, seven, eight times a night. Up at 3:30. Down at 3:48.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 9