Disarmed

by Izzy Ezagui

  We bank to the left. To my side, a member of the 669 squad hangs by the open door of the chopper as it whips over a blurred landscape, greens and browns, nothing but a strong grip on a ceiling strap separating him from a one-way trip to the ground.

  At some indiscernible point, the unremitting beat of the rotors sinks into a soothing white noise. It gets inside you. You're gliding incredibly fast, but it feels so smooth, so controlled, like those water bugs in Miami, striding over the surface of puddles after an early evening rainstorm.

  When did we land? It's a grassy clearing, and I can see the sign for Soroka Medical Center. So we're in Be'er Sheva. I still can't focus, though. In fact, it's getting harder with every minute.

  You've lost a lot of blood, Izzy. You're cross-eyed from painkillers. You're in shock.

  “You're gonna be OK, brother,” says one of the heli-medics, shoving my stretcher off to the hospital staff, outside among the multitudes who welcome us.

  “Reporters,” Roj'e shouts to Elgozi as they pull him off right after me. “A mob of them, look, behind the chain-link fence.”

  “Oh, man,” I'm thinking. “If my mother sees this on TV, she'll freaking kill me.”

  For the first time, I manage to sit up on the stretcher. With my five remaining fingers, I trace the length of my body, which seems never-ending, the wound a world away. Lashes of pain strike the back of my skull like whips, but I proceed to my target. It's unbelievable. Right there and no denying it, but unbelievable. I remember, for some reason, some words I had to look up online after having read them somewhere: Cognitive dissonance. This is it.

  I pull the blanket up over my face, trying to ignore the gremlins clawing at my side, twanging through my whole body when they strike a nerve. I try to pull the blanket up over my face, but there's no overlooking the horror of reaching out with two hands for a blanket and coming up half short.

  My arm is gone. It's still warm against my side, but really, it's just gone.

  They roll my gurney across the clearing, nothing but blue sky above, a searing sun. Half an hour ago, I was about to rest my eyes, lie on a cot after that long morning slog, that endless night patrol. And now…This has got to be the mind's own force field, some adaptation or God-given gift (Lior would say): It's a good design that at a certain level, we can't quite wrap our heads around such a calamity, a loss.

  A photographer standing by the sliding glass doors of the ER is trying to pull my blanket down. You've got to be kidding me.

  Yes—he wants to snap the bloodiest shot of the devastation that used to be my arm. Wants a clear look at my tortured expression. I hold the blanket tightly with my right arm. I make a mental note to hate this vulture later, hate the vileness of his act. And to find him, if I ever recover, so I can beat him senseless with my severed appendage. And if I die, I'll stay in limbo so that I can haunt this bastard's nightmares.

  The ER's air-conditioned, so my shivering increases. It's fluorescence, bustling, and a hospital smell like bacteria scented with Febreze. They wheel me past the door that says “Soiled Linens.” Two lefts, a right, two sets of doors. They're whizzing me toward surgery. A plump female, an officer huffing alongside the gurney, asks, “Would you like to speak to your mother?”

  “Yes!”

  “I have her right here, patched through to my cell phone.”

  Now?

  What do I say?

  I remember my earlier conviction that I had moments left to live, my yearning to tell her right away I loved her, to tell her good-bye. Now, surging so strongly through me that it overcomes the abuse of morphine, I have the impulse to assure her I will be all right, I will survive. I just know it's true. I do.

  WHITE KNUCKLES

  January 8, 2009. A knock at the door. She sees them through the peephole. Three men in uniform. She collapses to the tile, sobbing, even though she knows there's been a mistake. Her son is safe, somewhere quiet, the border of Lebanon. They have him washing dishes. He's been complaining about soap-burn for days, washing and washing and doing nothing else. Nearly twenty minutes pass before she can force herself to open the door.

  She just wants to tell them they've made a terrible mistake. Her son is alive.

  They agree. “Yes ma'am, your son is alive.”

  She breathes again. Then the officers try to explain what happened. But they don't speak English. What little Hebrew she's learned evaporates in the panic, gets washed out by the cacophony of her three daughters wailing on the floor. An officer shows her a report on his clipboard. Hebrew gibberish to her. Then she spots the only two words written in English: “Moderate injury.”

  Oh, God.

  It's OK.

  He's alive.

  One of the officers speaks her son's name and offers her his phone. She snatches it. He's alive and he can talk. I overreacted, she realizes. He's barely injured—only moderately wounded. He's going to be fine. “Izzy, my God,” she sobs. “What happened!?”

  She hears him, too, trying to catch his breath. As a child, he formed the bizarre habit of holding his breath. It began at the swimming pool. He spent much of his time at the Bay Club, underwater. He won contests for his underwater endurance. He still has white marks on his front teeth from swimming by the drain with his eyes closed, from bashing his mouth into the side of the pool, down at the bottom where he spent so much time. What was he holding his breath for? Waiting for what big thing to happen?

  She'll know how bad it is as soon as he speaks. Only a mother could understand this.

  “I'm all right, Ma.”

  “Are you really OK?”

  “I got hit.”

  “Where? Are you—tell me!”

  He doesn't respond.

  “Tell me! God, please, just—”

  “My arm.”

  Now she's holding her breath. “How bad?”

  She has to plead with him until, for the first time in weeks, he tells her the truth: “Ma, I'm sorry. I lost it. It's gone.”

  She can't help it—she starts to scream once more, joins her daughters down on the floor, almost drops the phone.

  He's silent on the other end. She can hear him breathing. How much effort it takes to fill his lungs. “Listen, Ma,” he finally speaks. “Listen to my voice. I'm OK. You can hear I'm OK. Right?”

  She's still sobbing. “Yes. You sound OK.”

  “Good, because I need you to relax. You have to be strong for the girls. For Ta. You guys have to be—” He's slurring now. “Ma. I'll see you when I get out.”

  Please, God, let that be true.

  She wants to say something, anything. That she'll always stand in the way of those gremlins climbing up the drainpipes, no matter the form they take. She'll wrestle all his nightmares away, take them on. She won't try anymore to get him out of the house when he's been glued to the Xbox for two straight days. He can play until his thumbs bleed. He can play until he passes out. Will he ever be able to hold a game controller again?

  She can hear people in the background now. She hears someone fumbling with the phone. She hears the click. “I love you,” she says, knowing he doesn't hear her. Knowing he already knows.

  She stands in the kitchen, still holding the phone. She watches the clock on the stove. She won't move until she knows he's under. So much time for the trip down the hall. Maybe an elevator? They transfer him to the operating table. The anesthesiologist arrives. “Here comes the medicine, Turai”—they call him “Private.” “Cold in your nose for a second. Now count down slowly from a hundred.”

  He can do that.

  So can she.

  “Ninety-nine…ninety-eight…nnnnn…”

  SMALL ARMS FIRE

  March 2002. “Just breathe normal. Little pinch,” says the nurse.

  “Now what?” my mother asks over the phone. A not-unexpected sigh accompanies her inquiry, just deep enough for the 2,249 miles that separate us to lose all functional significance: I can hear all the fear, frustration, and love in that exhalation. I escaped the Mole's p
rison to attend Orthodox boarding school in Arizona six months ago, the culmination of our transformation into super-Jews, and not at all meant as a punishment. “Really, Izzy, what's it this time? Please tell me it's not serious.”

  “Define ‘serious.’”

  “Just tell me.”

  Tell her, Izzy. You're thirteen now—these things happen all the time to thirteen-year-olds. “I cut my arm.”

  “You're mumbling.”

  “I cut myself—my arm—playing football.”

  I'd caught a wicked touchdown pass, arm through the window. Only problem: the window was closed.

  And now the nurse is wiping stinging stuff around the wound.

  “Oh, Izzy—Again?”

  “No, Ma. Not again. The last time it was a contusion and a hairline fracture. This one's a laceration. Just a cut.”

  The nurse smiles at my medical vocabulary.

  “How, exactly, did you end up in the emergency room—again—over ‘just a cut’?”

  “Did you know Super Glue was discovered in 1942 in a search for materials to make clear plastic gun sights for World War II?”

  “You're telling me this why?”

  I explain that surgical glue will play a significant role in my treatment. I don't tell her what the nurse who called my mother kindly pointed out: “We don't use this kind of thing on mere paper cuts, young man.”

  The first year of the new millennium is turning into the Year of the Scars. Two neat scars on my left arm already since they installed me at the Yeshiva High School of Tucson, Arizona. Two trips to the emergency room. Two football injuries. Mr. Martinez would be proud.

  No one believed that I fractured my arm the first time around. “You know, Izzy,” Rabbi Z. lectured me in front of the entire class, “lying about a wound is a grave offense. One who isn't in need of a wheelchair shouldn't even sit as a joke.” That was the Torah talking. “Besides, it calls down negative energy.” That was the Arizona talking.

  “But I'm not lying, Rabbi. I'm pretty sure my arm really is messed up.” I tried to jiggle it, and winced. “Yeah. It's broken.”

  Rabbi Z. wouldn't budge on his assessment of my injury, not even a day later, when I returned from the hospital in a cast. That's how long it took—twenty-four hours—before someone believed me and took me for an X-ray. When the rabbi saw the cast, he just harrumphed. “More time for studying,” he said. “Instead of football.”

  Fortunately, trip two didn't require any coaxing. My arm was vomiting blood from a mouth it wasn't meant to have.

  “You need to be more careful, Izzy,” my mother demands. “You have to—hold on.” I can hear a voice in the background. “Your father wants to know if you scored a goal. What's that? Oh, pardon me—a touchdown.”

  “Yep—twenty yards.” (Suck it, Dov.) “And I'll be more careful, Ma. I promise.” Probably shouldn't tell her about the rattlesnake that greeted me in my room one morning last week. It's not for nothing the students all fought over getting the top bunks.

  The nurse raises her eyebrow as only a mother could. It says, “You better keep that promise.” I will. I don't promise anything to my mother that I don't intend to keep. She suffered enough drama during the past few years. It's absolutely imperative to ensure she's got nothing but smooth sailing from this point forward. No sudden shocks. No big losses. No more calls about family from hospitals.

  So much worse than broken arms and gashes is having to sit by idly as your mother keeps hiking down endless corridors of hell. Helpless kid. Mother undeserving of such agony. And now so far away, incapable of keeping a direct eye on you.

  “OK, say good-bye to Mom,” says the nurse. “We've got to glue you back together. How did this happen again?”

  Well, the short answer is Brik. Aaron Brik. My new best friend and former mortal foe. The architect of both the touchdown and the cut.

  But I'm more inclined toward longer answers. And, lately, I've been asking myself this question a lot: How did this happen? How did I wind up in the desert? Playing football under the mountains? Horses neighing in the background? If you're looking to stay calm and cool while you're bleeding all over the only unstained white shirt you own, this kind of thought exercise works well. How far back can you go to trace the circumstances that led you to where you are right now? Thirteen years is a long time.

  It works like this: If the parents of Reina Alegre Baruch—or, as Jaz and I knew her, Ma—hadn't fled from Cuba to Estados Unidos when the nefarious vibes of Communism became impossible to ignore, then I would not have sliced open my arm diving through a closed window for the most dramatic touchdown of my life.

  If their parents, my great-grandparents, hadn't fled to Cuba via Turkey, and if their Sephardic parents—probably from Spain—hadn't had to flee…Well, you get the idea. The history of Judaism is festered with fleeing families. Just when we get comfortable somewhere, our “hosts” call an end to the party and we all have to bounce. This has been going on for more than five thousand years. I know, because now I actually pay attention in History class. It's why I get that Israel is so important. After five millennia, we finally got the keys back to our homeland. This is worth a few crabby neighbors who have the unfortunate tendency of lobbing everything from grenades to “Grad” missiles onto our front lawn.

  Anyway, my maternal grandparents, Isidoro (for whom I'm named) and Susana Baruch, eventually settled in Southern California, leaving behind all of their worldly possessions, along with any vestiges of practicing Judaism. They'd never been particularly religious, but that has never stopped totalitarian regimes from slapping a yellow star on you and marching you off to the showers. It's not that they parted ways with God—I'm not sure they'd ever been acquainted—but Cuba had become yet another risky place for Jews. Castro had flipped the Welcome sign over, and that's all she wrote.

  I never got to ask my maternal grandparents anything about their lives, because they both joined that Guy Upstairs when I was just a kid. But my mother told me some details. They wanted to avoid the terror of, once again, having to flush their soap down the toilet before Castro's henchmen bashed down the door to see if they were “wealthy” enough to afford clean dishes.

  They thought it better to hide their history. Although the Holocaust hadn't touched my family directly, better to stay safe than find yourself suddenly sorry.

  That decision landed my mother in public school in Los Angeles, where her parents had settled after a short stint in New York. My grandparents spoke no English when they arrived, and it's tough to teach old dogs new tricks. They spoke only Spanish at home.

  To no one's surprise, young Reina Baruch excelled in school. Her string of straight As, which she never bragged about, but which my father never failed to bring up, always made me assume someone must have dropped me on my head and knocked loose all that genetic sense. Let's be honest; whatever wisdom I arrived with at birth probably slipped right out of my gigantic ears. But that still wouldn't explain why Jaz and I suffer from the same butt-won't-stay-in-the-chair syndrome. My mother is far too coordinated to have dropped us both.

  A more logical deduction: We take after our father, street smart but not from the Poindexters. More than once it has struck me what a shame it is that, as a species, we can't choose which traits we inherit from which parent. In a heartbeat, I would have swapped my father's inability to study for his capacity to grow a beard and socialize with other humans like a pro. I'm thirteen already—most of my friends have at least some scruff—and instead, I'm left with the mere wisp of a mustache, and I get flustered at the thought of talking to my own shadow. Plus I get no grade higher than a C minus.

  Before I left for Tucson my father badgered me with tales of my mother's success in Jewish school. “Ma chose a religious institution on her own, you know. Her parents were fine with keeping her in public school.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, sulking. “I'm so darn lucky that I have your support. I'll be living on a barn floor crawling with scorpions. You cool with that?�
��

  “Your mother shared a classroom with twenty other girls, Izzy. More fangs and venom there than any pit full of scorpions.”

  My mother did well enough in school to skip a grade. Eventually, she got a full scholarship to UCLA.

  So…I could do this, right? Surely, I'd survive.

  But she also told me her early life was not without its hitches. She hit her first wall in college. Returning to a classroom filled with both women and men was daunting, to say the least. And the necessity of getting up in front of two hundred of her peers every time she wanted to ask the professor a question—that thoroughly unsettled her. She simply chose not to get up.

  She had the knowledge. She had the discipline. The drive. But her early schooling had failed to prepare her for the “real world” of UCLA. So she decided to drop out after only eleven months.

  She wouldn't see another classroom again until a few years down the line. Now fully observant, she came back “home,” ending up in a Jewish day school—this time, as a kindergarten teacher.

  These are the things I'm thinking about while the nurse is literally gluing the skin of my arm back together in a bright, white room with speakers playing a Muzak version of “The Real Slim Shady.”

  “So, as long as the edges of the wound are nice and straight,” she says, breath smelling of peppermint, “and less than, let's see, I think it's five centimeters, you get the glue instead of stitches. Good, right?”

  OK, now it hurts.

  HEAD OVER HEELS

  Here's how it—my existence—happened: Needing a break from the commotion of the Big Apple, my father booked a quick vacation to California. During his stay, he stopped by a Jewish day school to visit the principal, an old classmate. He spotted, he once told me on the way to the Aventura Mall, “this beautiful, exotic, Latin-looking teacher on the playground with her class.” I could see it. “Izzy,” he said, “I haven't been able to get her off my mind since.” Thank God for that.

  “What if I didn't decide to see Yankel that day? What if I got held up at brunch, or traffic on the 405 was backed up, or—?” I never would have come to be. No me. “Izzy, this is the funny way HaShem works sometimes. All the time. Everything for a reason. Everything for some big reason we have no idea how to comprehend. The good things, the bad things, the things we can't figure out. We just have to trust. You'll see. It's impossible to miss the signs if you're looking. Impossible.”