by Izzy Ezagui
“Izzy! Izzy! Can you hear me? You gotta come with me.”
Fuks. Lumbering giant, crystalline eyes. OK, Fuks. Coming. Just about to die first.
“Izzy,” he says again forcefully, grabbing my good elbow and insisting I meet his gaze. “Man, it's really time to go.”
We're walking. For Fuks's sake. All the red on my uniform's starting to chill. What happened to that warmth? “I need to call my mother. Where's my phone?”
“Izzy, just walk. Just keep up with me. You're not calling anyone, not right now.”
“My phone,” I say again.
He stops for a short second. I stop. “NOW,” he enunciates. “Just walk. We're going to the bomb shelter. It's not your phone we need to find.”
That's right.
The shelter. The shelter's as good a place to call it quits as any other. Through the gaping entrance I see strewn all over the floor gloves and shredded uniforms, bandages covered in the red, little bits of concrete shaken loose by the blast. More drifting down. I don't go inside. Not yet.
Fuks has left me alone a moment to tend to another one of our wounded.
CANVAS FOR ONE-ARMED MAN
Is this really happening to you right now? You're outside the shelter's entrance. You're all alone. Keep moving. Go inside. No, you should raise both your arms the way a human raises arms. Yes, like that, from the shoulders. Do it with supporting muscle, bone, and tendon. But why perform this action? Some symbol of triumph?
Before you can figure that out, your right arm goes up. But the weight of the remainder of your left arm leaves it swinging, spraying red. Your uniform sleeve surrenders to the burden, the threads of cloth beginning to shred apart. You can tell that no longer does the worn, olive-green material fasten an arm to its man. Yet you try again to swing your left arm up, and off it goes. Your hand, wrist, and forearm has taken flight. It's soaring skyward with all the confidence of Superman's fist, attached to its Kryptonian wrist. It's almost amusing, watching it go. Almost “ha-ha” hilarious. You can't help grinning stupidly now. Is that drool down your chin? So be it. At long last, some part of you has found the guts to aim for the sun, to reach for greatness, a goal beyond your grasp. Everything's going to be OK. The rest of this body will follow. The only place to go from here is up.
For a split second, gravity slumbers, and you can sense it, how your feet are milliseconds from leaving their prison ground, how your whole body's about to take flight. But then the arm stops reaching. It's like one of those blooper reels of impotent rockets—failure to launch. You watch the thing begin its descent. But the sun in your eyes has blinded you, blocks you from seeing where that piece of your puzzle lands. Maybe, just maybe, you heard the soft thump of its landing.
You grow woozy. This has turned out to be a terrible idea. Life is flinging out of the wound in impossible arcs now, painting the side of a tent, the gravel, in Red Modern Art, drowning weeds and clods of dirt and rubble for meters all around you, and still soaring up into the steel sky. But the sky says no thanks, wants no part in this nonsense. The sky discarded your arm, and now it rejects all the Red from inside you, sends it raining back down like some Biblical plague. There's a circle of it and you're swaying alone in the center, untouchable, an endless perimeter between your closest counterpart and you.
So tired. Barely standing. Just want to rest, just a few minutes.
Damn it.
Damn it all.
January 8, 2009. Fuks returns, sees all the blood around, and yanks me past the threshold of the shelter. Doesn't seem to notice my arm's taken wing. Within the debris-strewn structure is Amir. I can tell he's just come inside, too, with another wounded soldier. Both he and Fuks have been out there in harm's way, collecting the men of the Second Platoon. Now Amir is standing on a concrete block, trying to get reception on the radio. Fuks is growling orders. During training, I got used to seeing Fuks smile, his eyes dancing as he did paperwork, his phone playing muffled pop songs from inside his shirt pocket. I'm used to commanders calmly, almost mechanically, giving orders. But right here, Fuks is an unblinking machine who doesn't seem to run out of battery. He's wearing a face I don't recognize.
Amir drops the radio, comes over as soon as he sees me. “Why are you moving like my grandma?” he says, spitting detritus.
I look down at my wound. He does, too, and his mouth opens again despite the ambient dust. I see Amir charging outside. I just know he's going to search for the rest of me, even if that means losing part of him.
The entire bunker's smaller than a two-car garage, and packed with thirty soldiers or more, some injured. Help those guys. A sea of olive green parts to let me through. They all see. It's still total disarray out there, but in the bunker now all is still. All is quiet on this front. “For God's sake, help him down!” someone shouts; “Here! Over here!” another soldier yells, and instantly, commotion re-erupts. Much scurrying, a kind of controlled, chaotic collaboration ensues, a form of swarm intelligence. Fellow soldiers go after my blood-soaked uniform. Bare hands tear through the rugged canvas. I'm on my back now. Fuks must have lost his knife in the melee. He's on his knees, digging his face right into the thread above my wound like some vampire—what's he doing? He starts shredding thick fabric with his teeth and then his hands. I remember. During training, they taught us to strip an injured soldier of all his clothing, to search for occult damage. You never know what else is under the uniform. When he lifts his head, his cheek is covered in the Red. My eyes drift as he roughly sponges his forehead with his sleeve, spreading the Red further.
I look past him. The floor of the shelter really is a sight. I see a spool of gauze roll by, a capsized boot, a bloody belt. My mother would have a panic attack if she came home to such a clutter.
Under any other circumstances, she'd be ordering her little soldier to sweep the floor clean.
A GRAND, SWEEPING GESTURE
Any given Tuesday, 1992. I'm helping my mother sweep the floor while my father's at work. It's raining outside. The floor in our Brooklyn apartment is hardwood. My father built this whole apartment building with his bare hands. Amazing. I picture him laying every one of the exposed bricks and concrete blocks the way I do with Lego pieces.
This morning before he left, I heard him tell my mother I was “sharp.” What's that?
Now she smiles at me from the stove, where's she's making lentil soup for lunch. She says, “Such a big boy!” I am. Four, actually. I see myself in the reflection of the stove window beside her—still surprising to see my hair cut so short in the Upsherinish ceremony. My father told me getting my hair cut wouldn't hurt, and it didn't.
My mother turns back to her cooking.
The broom's so heavy. It's easier to pick up the stuff with my hands. The next time she turns toward me, she sees my squirrel cheeks. She rushes over and pulls me hard. I have to spit out the stuff—a dead potato chip, a watch battery, and two matching screws from who knows what. “Izzy—that's bad. You can hurt yourself,” she scolds. “You have to be careful, OK?”
I can shelter my mother in 2009. No bomb will drop on her Jerusalem home, the same way no bomb could drop on me. This lie—that's the perfect shelter. I need my phone right now so I can lie to my mother, to tell her nothing bad has happened. Some kids are sharp, it's true, and some soldiers. But I'm the kid who sucks on screws. And stale chips. And mortar shells.
I came here to be—what? A hero? What's a hero anyway? The one who suffers the blow on behalf of his brethren, or the medic who scrambles from the wounded to the dead, and back again? Is he a hero under the tombstone or still only charging overland toward danger? Can you, so young, even remotely consider yourself brave, devoted, willing to give up everything for your beliefs, when there are so many men among the reservists who risk leaving their children fatherless? How do they endure that possibility? How does Chen the medic deal with all the Red, all the screaming? He's only twenty, like me, drafted a month after I volunteered. Chen, the medic who tends to curse at the wind and the san
d, now tries to tie a tourniquet above the space once occupied by my left elbow. “It's too slick,” he says. “Kus emek! It won't hold.”
The steady outpouring of Red keeps the area too slippery for any bandage to stay in place. With help, Chen tries again. Another medic attempts to stanch the bleeding with a second tourniquet, higher up. More crying out. “Gonna dope him,” someone says, and then that someone stabs a morphine pen through my thigh flesh and an all-over warmth washes through me. A breath. In and out. How long have I been holding my breath? Now here's a third medic. He sees, quickly, serenely, then leans down and tickles my bare chest with something cold. With difficulty, I raise up just enough to see he's written out the time with a Sharpie: 13:10.
Time of death?
Makes sense. The world slows again. How long can 13:10 last? “My phone.” But no one listens. Maybe I'm mumbling. “My phone. Please.” But no one's dashing out toward the tent to retrieve my old Sony Ericsson while mortars are still pummeling the base. “You don't need your phone,” Chen whispers. He's staring straight ahead at nothing. At the concrete wall of the bunker. At Gaza, two kilometers beyond it.
I see colors. And I'm floating, the way your body stays bobbing in the salty Dead Sea. Dark purple, green, a sunset lavender. Now I'm sinking, slowly drifting down under the concrete foundation, through the soil, down, down into black.
My phone.
Love you, Ma.
I'm calling to say I…
HANDS OFF THE MERCH
January 8, 2009. “What am I doing here!?” I don't mean in the ambulance—I know why I'm in the ambulance. I mean what the hell am I doing in Israel? “I'm fucking American!”
The two female medics—Blue and Curls—flicker in and out of focus above me. They glance at each other, and although I can't get a bead on their faces, I can tell by their body language that they're confused. Did I say that out loud? Did I slur? Do they even speak English? Yes—they've been talking to me the whole time, I remember now. What have they been saying?
I hear my bones crunching. No. It takes me a moment to recognize that it's the sound of the water bottle I've been clutching in my right hand, crushing with every flex and contraction. Thank God I didn't accept Blue's offer to hold my hand for the ride. I would've broken her fingers. “So, where are you from?” Curls asks, a blatant attempt to keep me talking. Didn't I just yell that? Curls is different from the other one somehow. They're in their late teens, but something about this one seems more…mature. Her voice comes without any panic or pressure. I listen to her easy talking. She tells me matter-of-factly everything she's doing. I feel her practiced movements on me. This is not her first time knee-deep inside someone else.
Curls keeps up an easy banter with Blue. To me they're all about encouraging, explaining. It doesn't matter what they're saying—it's the shape and tone of their words, how they surround me. They build a wall around me, a force field. Like all those I watched go up in the dozens of sci-fi films my father took me to (then promptly starting snoring); I had to keep elbowing his copious belly. Shields up. Armor against the hysteria sneaking through the cracks. My sight and hearing are fading in and out, but still, the words of Curls soothe me. I watch them roll off her tongue, hear them uttered in perfect, unaccented English.
When I close my eyes I can tell I'm smiling, slightly.
Meds.
And blood loss.
I remember now that one of them asked me if I've gotten morphine. I have, in the bunker, but I must have said no when she asked. I'm back in Miami. Lying by the pool, the sound of a volleyball taking a beating in the distance. My body's still dripping from my last cannonball.
Dripping. I open my eyes. That's my Red pattering on the deck. “Give him a bump,” Curls tells Blue. “OK, little prick.”
Well, excuse me! It's cold without clothes on and…
Mmm. The pain's still there, but way down, way under all the morphine, deep, deep, deep. Something inside me scrambles to get out from under, like a hermit crab below meters of sand. “Hang in there, Izzy,” says Curls, and for just a moment I can feel her hand pressed on my chest, her fingers lightly spreading underneath my time of death.
I can't even tell if my eyes are open. A vague image dawns through the dark, of a half-naked soldier smeared in Red, sprawled on a gurney in his underwear. Over this soldier, a poised young medic with red hair and bright-blue eyes. In the jump seat, another medic, curly hair, taps a syringe. The soldier's on a slight angle across his stretcher, writhing a little, and shaking his head from side to side, slowly.
How am I seeing all this from the ceiling?
Blue leans over the soldier. I want to see the girl's face. I float down toward the pair. Open my eyes. Now I'm looking up. I try to fix my eyes on hers. I can't. I try to bring her other features into focus. It's no use—it's all a blur, as though space itself is rushing around us so fast it's smearing. As in, “Punch it, Chewie!” Light speed.
“It's OK,” says Curls. “That's the morphine talking. We've got you.”
At which Blue leans down again, leans over me, to get something, fix something, move something. Her shoulder, her clavicle, her neck so close, and there, I can focus. There's a pendant there, stuck to her skin with sweat, in the hollow of her collarbone. What is it? I can't make it out. A thin, gold chain bunched up there. A hazel tan that's stretched across that elegant bone I see inside the half-open lapel of her olive-green fatigues. A fleck, two flecks, a spatter of blood on the collar—more modern art. A little something of me I've left with her, too.
There's a bright light over Blue's head, and the light, dappling through her hair, lands on my face. I feel her hand slide underneath me. She has to move me just a bit, to shift my frame on the gurney. For a second or two, I realize, I'm literally in her arms. How many like me have died this way? And this is what I say. I say, “What's your name? Do you know how beautiful you are? You don't belong here. Not like this, not with a nerd from Florida dying in your grasp. You and your friends should be flirting with jocks, sprawled out on the grass at Bar-Ilan University, sun streaming, nose-deep in trig or history or Amos Oz.”
But God knows what it sounds like. Not human speech.
“It's OK,” she says. She thinks I'm moaning. I am.
I can't make out her face because of the eclipse. But now I think maybe I see her lips arching upward, unexpectedly. From where I lie, her smile's upside down. “Well?” she urges. “You never told me where. San Francisco? New Jersey?”
I'm preparing to respond. I will concentrate completely on the words, the syllables—My. Am. Ee.—and we'll be talking. But suddenly I feel the gurney shift an inch or two up toward the cabin, then the ambulance stops short. Blue and Curls hop out. When the back doors open the whole bay fills with the unmistakable whomp-whomp of rotors. “Your ride's here,” Curls says, and I want to smile. I want to thank her.
They pop some unseen lock somewhere and slide me out.
I feel a hand lift off my chest. Good-bye, Curls. Good-bye, Blue.
A hot blast of air punches me, sucks whatever breath I have left from my lungs, and gets my heart galloping again. The chopper crew clambers hastily around me. The two crews commiserate. Blue gives the guys my vitals. I remember then I'm still grasping the water bottle in my right hand, but the moment I recognize its heft there, I feel it roll out and onto the ground.
Nothing soft about the touch of the chopper crew. But no less reassuring. Two fierce-looking operatives wearing thin, black combat vests carry my stretcher to an idling Blackhawk. They shove me inside. It's gutted in there, clear of seats and all other unnecessary impediments to airlifting wounded soldiers. I count three of my platoon mates, variously laid out across the deck inside. If I look as bad as they do, I'm screwed.
First, Roj'e—our platoon's light machine gunner—is gashed across both his knees. One arm is better than two legs, right? Or…? Roj'e likes to kick the ball around. I hope those days aren't over now.
Then I see Elgozi, another private, h
is head resting in Roj'e's lap. It's hard to turn my face far enough to get a good look at him. But I catch a glimpse of a stomach wound. He's barely breathing. In contrast to Roj'e, whose rib cage is rising and falling dramatically, his mouth twitching beneath a dusty five o'clock shadow. I wish I could grow a beard. On Elgozi's face I can see nothing of his usual buoyant personality. “Stay with me, Elgozi, you're gonna be fine,” I hear Roj'e shouting down at him over the wash of the propellers. Isn't he going to be fine? The wound doesn't look deadly—it's maybe the size of a quarter. So why did the medics Sharpie the words “critically wounded” on Elgozi's chest? I look down at my own chest, where I'm shocked to find the words “moderately wounded.” Is it better to be comforted, or to be told the truth?
The whine of the props or the engine or something pitches higher—we're about to take off. I see another one of my squad mates, Lior—“Rabbi”—slumped in another corner, his femur shattered. His eyes are shut tight but his lips are moving just perceptibly. He's either praying, hiding from the pain, or both. It hasn't struck me yet to pray.
We lift off so quickly my stomach remains grounded with the water bottle. I've seen these guys work before. The elite Unit 669, heliborne rescue and evacuation squad of the IDF. They sometimes have to slash through enemy lines to get to their patients, plus they're primo combat medics. You couldn't possibly be in better hands.
Hands…
I start to shiver. Shock and wind and loss of blood—it all leads to the cliché dying man's lament from every war movie ever made: “So…cooold.” And the spasms occasioned by the faintest pang beneath my shoulder. “You get morphine?” shouts the guy standing sentry above me.
“No,” I tell him, and within moments another dose of warm relief dives into me, all the way through me. But this high is interrupted very soon by more incessant shivering. My whole body quakes. “F-f-freezing!” My teeth are clacking into each other, audible even over the din of the flight. “Kar li,” I sputter. In one swoop, the flight medic covers my feet with a blanket—a tender mercy.