by Izzy Ezagui
More morphine. Mmm. What's it like to be absent a soul? I'm not sure I mind the lack. Just because I can't connect with my deepest self, the place where the fear is, the pain, the dark abyss, doesn't mean I'm a bad person. Don't I possess morals? Didn't I just fight and sacrifice for something I believed in? Shouldn't I feel proud to stand up for all the soulful people out there who need defending? That has to be worth something. I might not be Zvika Greengold—who is? But I have so far kept my vow.
Maybe it's the drugs. Maybe it's the fact that I'm not crying that's sent all the pain inside, bundled it up in a concentrated ball of agony and self-recrimination, all targeted at this asshole in his darkest hour. I feel I can travel outside myself. I've already gone. I'm whispering to the injured trooper, right in his ear. I tell him to shut his frickin’ pickle-hole—and he won't.
I look at his face. I see myself. Lying there, moaning, so sorry for himself, so pained. Exhausted.
Why can't we sleep?
Phantom is wide-awake, grinning like the Joker. Why so serious?
ARM-WRESTLING WITH GOD
Hours pass. The steady blip of my heart monitor punctuates the pitch-black, and the constant buzz in my ears. How long has it been? Maybe two days since they took my arm, and the fumes exuding from my charred flesh show no sign of dissipating. Red has stopped leaking from the bandage. I can't say the same for yellow. Somehow yellow's so much more unsettling.
A blur of more visitors hovers just over the veil of my awareness. The closet across from me is brimming. Multiple DVD players. Game Boys. Laptop computers. Cartons upon cartons of cigarettes—I'll send them to the platoon. All this candy, too. And I'll be damned—Starburst. You're welcome, Amir.
Phantom is going to kill me.
The simplest way I can describe the genesis of this seemingly extraneous pain is by dissecting what happens when you stick your hand beneath a scalding tap.
So what goes down? Your nervous system amps to high alert, sending distress signals to your limb, which instantly warns your brain that, Uh-oh, our fragile body is in harm's way. Retract that hand!
Simple enough.
But what happens when the stressor is far graver than hot water? When a part of that nervous system literally explodes, and the resulting twisted wiring leads to a perpetual cycle of warning. Some amputees suffer a lifetime of real pain in a place on their body that no longer exists on this astral plane. Remember—“pain” has no substance or form. It's only an electrochemical signal process.
Retract that hand!
“What hand, Phantom? What fucking hand?”
The morphine barely takes the edge off anymore, and despite the darkness, pain is casting deep shadows on everything. I'm trying hard to see past the hurt, but my vision's gone opaque—that's probably the drugs. I keep my thumb cemented to the morphine regulator, which turns into a struggle of wakefulness over pain. When I drift off, though I still can't sleep, I lose my grip on the button. When I lose my grip, the pain returns. If I could just get my hands on some Scotch tape, I'd secure the damn button in place.
It's hand, not hands, you cripple. That's PF talking. And you'll never be able to tie anything in place again—even your own shoes. And you'll probably never wrap a piece of tape for the rest of your miserable life. And that's when it hits me. The pain sharpens the dark horizon of my thoughts.
Wrapping.
Tefillin.
The memory's as fresh as my wound. We all wrapped tefillin. “Oh my God.”
“What's wrong?” It's Rabbi's voice from the dark behind his curtain. It muddles my thoughts like a stone hitting the silt at the bottom of a pond.
“Can you remember what we did, Lior? You know, what we were doing right before—?”
“Yeah, we wrapped tefillin. Of course I remember—it was my idea!” He spent precious minutes circling the tent—right before it began raining death on us—so that we could each attach his personal straps using our dominant arms before entering Gaza.
One small black leather box containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah goes on the upper arm, with its strap wrapped around the hand and arm, then through the fingers in a particular way. You place the other box against the upper forehead. “Don't you find it strange,” I ask Rabbi, “that right after we prayed, we got slammed by a goddamn rocket?”
No answer. I can almost hear him thinking.
Across from me, the trooper weighs in with another long moan.
“OK, so maybe it's kinda strange,” he admits, hesitantly.
“Kind of?” I feel a rage growing, something I am powerless to control. “Seriously, Rabbi. Listen. Five months I don't touch tefillin, not once since the end of Basic.” My jaw is grinding, half from the pain and half from being stoned. I attempt to unclench it. “Then the day I do—the same hour, I get…I…” I'm shaking my head from side to side. The morphine makes a rainbow in front of my eyes, then all those colors bleed into red. Something inside me has been stirred awake. It's the dark and snarling tornado again, and it threatens to tear me open at the seams, and snap up everything around me.
“Oh, Izzy, I—”
“—Five months for me, maybe,” I mutter, my jaw locked firmly in place still, “but for some of the others? Lior—they haven't put tefillin on once since turning thirteen. Except for right before the freaking sky caved in on us.”
Tears fill the corners of my eyes, on the brink of rolling down the bridge of my nose. I will not let them fall. I'd hate myself for crying. Maybe I'll get back to that in a couple of months.
It's silent for a long time while I await an answer. Finally, Rabbi says, “Here's the thing, Izzy: We don't always know why these things happen.”
I can barely hear him over the typhoon inside me. I can tell my blood pressure is rising, not only from some beeping machine to which an umbilical cord attaches me. But I receive that interesting bit of data via the blood, which flows in the direction of my freshly-sealed wound. It throbs right there like some barometer of my emotions. Each brutal thump threatening to rip open the seams of my stitching, both physical and psychic. “Five months,” I repeat, though I can't pry open my teeth to say it. My teeth are the gates holding back—everything.
“It's good you wrapped, Izzy. But it wasn't the tefillin—”
“Oh, yeah? Well, God sure picked a hell of time to tear us a new one.” Now I really do give God the finger, which feels weird, coming as it does from my right hand.
“You're forgetting something over there. Maybe putting on tefillin was the one reason we wound up in the hospital now instead of getting shipped home to our parents in boxes. What do you think of that?”
Phantom is nodding in consideration of this prospect.
This conversation is over. Rabbi Lior and I lay in silence. For the next hour, I cannot decipher ass from elbow of my disturbing revelation. I assume my faithful friend has fallen asleep and not died. I almost drift away, too.
How do you reason with the blindly faithful? Was it necessary for me to be so black-and-white, denouncing and renouncing God with dramatic finality, to my friend a few feet away in a parallel bed behind an infectious curtain? Did I need to take a steaming dump on his beliefs to solidify mine? He's neither dead nor asleep over there. I picture his grimace as he tries to find a comfortable position. Let Lior lie there, his soul content with his interpretation of the bloodshed and the murder of my arm. How does that harm me? Why should it offend? I can tell by his breathing that he's plunging back into the vegetative state. So I'm left alone in my sulking. Not alone—I don't have God, but I do have Fuckface still, hand in the air, head-banging to Korn. My friend the ad hoc rabbi left us here, alone to brood, so let the brooding begin. Let the freak off the leash.
Seriously? God spared us because we prayed? I should throw this cup over the curtain and whack Rabbi in the teeth. Did GOD do that, Lior? Why didn't He spare you a Jell-O concussion?
Why did his kind words and thoughtful actions rub me so wrong? The tips of my ove
rsized ears begin to burn. I feel nuclear fusion in the back of my throat. My religious friend—for whom I have deep respect and love—has somehow with his words unlatched a Pandora's box. But a kind of reverse Pandora's box, one ravenously waiting to be filled since my soul's departure. It sits, gaping, inside me, between me and Rabbi. No hope for a soul.
A fiery blast is breathing into me from somewhere, spilling into my skull and my chest, and pushing up against the backs of my eye sockets. It feels like a mob of mind-gnomes banging their pitchforks and torches against the portals through which I view the world, trying to escape and burn it all down.
Phantom is tanning his face on the flames, a sun reflector held up under his chin.
Have I always been such a pessimist? A cynic? Some kind of loner? Maybe. One thing a devastating injury affords you is a lengthy hospital stay. Time—which, of course, you never asked for but you're stuck with now—to get to know yourself. To entertain those gnomes inside you. To go spelunking in all the empty parts of you where some stray shards of life, brutalized and deformed, yet lurk on the former playground of your soul.
This self-knowledge comes in pugilistic punches in the ring down there, and any one of the monsters can knock you on your ass when startled. Any dragon hiding in your darkest caverns can spring forth, fire and fangs.
Did some old, bearded man on a throne in the sky really keep us alive because we performed an ancient rite, a holy ritual? What if that is the only reason we're alive? Rabbi's right on one count, at least. It could have been so much worse. God's grace? Fate? Random happenstance? Was it meant to be?
It can't be. That timeworn tale smells worse than my charred upper body.
What if my doubt is an even bigger middle finger to the Higher Mind that thought enough of me to save me?
I click the bye-bye button.
Please. Knock me out. Stop this spinning. If I lost both arms, would Rabbi say, “It could've been worse. You've still got your legs”? If I were plopped in this bed a paraplegic, would he counter with, “It could've been worse—all your faculties are still intact”? If I were just a head on a pillow, would he say, “At least you're not blind”? Infuriating faith.
Can't it always be worse? Aren't we always “lucky to be alive”? If that's the best proof of heaven, I'm betting all on black. “Have faith.” “Good will come of this.” “It was meant to happen this way.” “You are not alone.” All these banalities delivered by visitors with sincerity, humility, generosity of spirit, bounced off me as the mortar did not. Masses of sheep-people. Sheeple, I kept thinking, even as I smiled and thanked them for coming. Easy to do when your insides are a wormhole leading nowhere.
My thoughts are fruitful now in the night. They fulfill God's “ancient prophecy” for the Jews, by going forth and multiplying with dizzying alacrity. I'm struck by how powerful other people's faith can be. And how I'm obviously missing the conduit to access it.
I can hear Rabbi's slow breaths. He's out. Could it be his faith and not the opioid drip that comforts him? I can't deny that believing it's all in God's hands would lift a heavy burden from my now-uneven shoulders. All I need to do is whisper sweet nothings to myself, to “have faith.” I can almost taste the immediate relief these comforting clichés would bring, like sweet tea and honey. Believing I am not alone would offer powerful support. But what about being honest with myself? I know just giving in to belief could give meaning to all my suffering—but how will I know if I'm deluding myself, violating whatever individuality made me, me?
And there it is, shimmering like one of those orbs of light from a fantasy book I read as a ten-year-old. I can't know—because none of us ever really knows. Not for certain. The best we can do is…have faith.
Truth is, I always found the concept of faith most beautiful when it stems below the roots of our challenges, when belief comes before the onset of our personal struggle—strong and steady regardless of the hand we're dealt. That's what Rabbi's faith was like. He believed in the same loving God while he was praying before the explosion as he did right after it maimed his leg.
My mother's, too. Her faith did more than just keep her from falling apart after the loss of both of her parents and her brother. Her belief in a higher power made her stronger, more sensitive, more compassionate to those around her. She even prayed for the drunk who slammed into her parents. She dived into faith's warm embrace heart-first. Her faith was not the basis for a wrestling match. Nor was it a crutch. But it saved her from suffering much greater miseries.
Halfway through this long, dark night of the soul, and I'm almost at the point where I'm ready to give in, let the light wash over me. I remember how comforting it used to be when I was a boy, like a favorite sweatshirt, to think of that old, white beard in heaven looking out for me. Though my heart now tells me, “No dice.” That if I choose to put the shattered pieces of my body and my life into the hands of some omnipresent entity that I can neither see nor even sense, I'd be doing so for all the wrong reasons. I'd be grasping for security during a moment of weakness.
I trained to become a warrior. I cannot allow the weak tendencies of my past to overawe that soldier's bearing. Not long ago, I promised myself I would no longer be a victim. If I choose the easy way out now, I'll be a victim my entire life.
All of this consideration occurs not at the level of my brain, which is befuddled with morphine, gnomes, and that storm. But in that place deeper inside, that well, that cave I always felt was empty, graced with only the whistling wind and a steady drip-drip from stalactites. Nothing but the remainder of me down there, naked and alone. My body relaxes as I decide with finality that there might be a God, but I can never know for sure, and if I can't be positive, I won't use this agnostic “belief” in God as a buttress against uncertainty.
A soldier shuffles by. I can see one leg, two crutches, underneath my curtain.
It's not an easy thing to take on such weight. The burden comes crashing down on my lopsided shoulders. I no longer contemplate the possibility of some all-powerful source of strength to which or to whom I can turn in an emergency. My father could fall off of scaffolding and survive. Get arrested and survive. A rocket could pierce a tent and nearly kill me, but I'd survive. My mother's heart could suffer a crack and still remain intact, like the Liberty Bell.
So I find in the dwindling hours of my long, dark night of the soul that my choice occasions a stunning upside. Inner strength fills the void. A new backbone brought on by the despondency of being cornered and alone. I can do this. I can take this one solo. Let Lior rest in his faith. Let the trooper wail in his hopelessness. I'm a fighter. And my kind doesn't get to fear gremlins nipping at their nuts or nozzle while they sit on the pot.
Not that I still don't harbor doubts. I just need to lie to myself, over and over, “Izzy, you can succeed; you can matter; you can make something of yourself.” If I lie to myself enough, something positive might accidently happen.
BROWBEATING THEOLOGY
January 9–10, 2009. Dawn's breaking, I think. It seems I had less to fear than I'd predicted. Yes, I discovered no deep shaft inside me filled with faith. But neither did I find there any horned demons I couldn't leash. Instead, I heard only the echo of my own questions. And I knew that it was asking not for answers from on high. But from inside. From me. I, Izzy.
My mother is standing over me now. And is that my father? They're on either side of me. I check and, yes, this is a hospital bed—not a coffin or a cold, steel table at the morgue. The closet across from me is so packed now, stuff's spilling out on the floor—mostly treasures of the culinary realm.
What does it all mean, what happened to me?
Maybe there's no meaning. Maybe there is no bigger picture. Maybe there's just me, at the wrong place, at the wrong time. A big-ass mortar, and, tick, tick—boom.
No, there is no reason I can prove. There is no longer an arm. That is the only truth.
So, if there is no meaning, no reason, if none of this happened as part of some ult
imate plan, then aren't I left to find significance on my own? That's what would happen in all my old books. A boy becomes a man not by going off to war, but by what he does with himself there. What he does when he gets back home.
But many of the soldiers around me were hit during battle inside Gaza, some at extremely close proximity to the enemy—seeing the enemy, fighting the enemy. And me? Where did I get hurt? What did I see? Who was I fighting? Nowhere. Nothing. Nobody. I was sitting in my tent, debating whether or not to call Mommy. OK, so my war's not yet begun. This is my war. The enemy just fired its first, best shot. Now what will I do?
The presence of my parents reminds me that I don't want to live in a soulless reality. Such a reality sounds like a construct that doesn't allow for any sort of cosmic justice. There's karma down here, granted. But I do find it comforting to believe that the good folk will be rewarded in some afterlife, with front-row seats to a heavenly concert of epic proportions. And that the bad folk need to suffer through an eternal loop of Rebecca Black. Now that's justice.
Wait—is my father wearing a Hawaiian shirt? How did he even get here? Isn't he supposed to be in—?
It must be the drugs. I remember the most frightening nightmare I've ever had. It wasn't conventionally scary. No mental institutions with long, eerie hallways and flickering lights. No little dead girls with knotted hair and dirty hospital gowns, mouths wide-open, no girls climbing out of haunted wells or television sets. The most dire dream I've ever experienced felt all too real. And it actually changed my behavior dramatically in the waking world.