by Izzy Ezagui
The partygoers, all loud and blotto, are growing increasingly impatient, and understandably so. They start to whack the stall harder, to rattle the handle faster. The bass of the megaspeakers—“I Kissed a Girl”—vibrates the beads of piss and puke on the porcelain between Phantom's knees. The more it all thrums, the more I freeze. The more I freeze, the more I lose whatever dexterity I might have had in my fingers. In hindsight, it's a good thing I finished only half a drink before my bladder sent me here. I can't imagine how any level of drunkenness would have contributed to my manual ineptitude.
There's nothing funny about a full-grown man struggling with all his might just to close the top button on his jeans—not even on Purim, while he's dressed like a pirate. My heart is jumping like the subwoofers; my five remaining fingers, turning into sausages. I begin for the first time to dread my future outside the comfort zone of rehab. What kind of life can I look forward to as a useless, clumsy gimp? Back to combat operations? I can't even close my flippin’ fly.
Phantom flushes, yawns, doesn't wash his hand.
Finally, I manage to cinch the button and buckle my belt. I unlatch the door with my sore and cramping arm. My costume's drenched in perspiration, the eye patch swimming in sweat. Club music hits me as I emerge from the restroom: “P-P-P-Poker Face!”
I'm all ready to apologize to the throngs. Then it happens. All their stares of drunken agitation melt away the instant they get a good look at me, what's left. Something overtakes them then, the shame at having hounded a poor cripple. Impatient to piss when this feeble sucker has no arm. Shame and pity. The truth of those eyes detonates inside my chest with the precision of a well-aimed mortar. I want desperately to make a self-deprecating joke—but I come up short. So, bowing my head, I make my way down the hall with all the grim ceremony of a man marching in his own funeral procession. The crowd of mourners—all sexy cops and shirtless lumberjacks, all fairies and also “fairies”—parts for me, just like those kids on the basketball court at the JCC parted for Fart Boy. One vampire with a lisp offers a mumbled apology.
After passing the rows of onlookers, I scramble straight for the exit. My night is over. I jump into the closest taxi without finishing my first drink or sending word to my friends, Minnie-as-Sailor and Annie-as-Tinker Bell. Anything but pity. Anything.
It isn't pity in Lieutenant Fuks's clear, blue eyes the next morning. He'd visited me at Soroka, and a few times now at Sheba, to play poker. Our bond would never be broken after what we'd been through together, timeless like names scrawled in wet cement.
BRIK BY BRIK
Aaron Brik. He who'd quarterbacked my bloody ER encounter when we were students at yeshiva in Tucson starting in 2001.
Brik joins us late, a few months before that spectacular pass that ended in my laceration. We begin as enemies.
He was kicked out of his previous yeshiva, in Brooklyn, for spray-painting a couple of security cameras. When his principal called him into his office to level the accusation, the twelve-year-old denied it. More than denied it. He was utterly appalled at the very idea that anyone, especially an authority figure, a rabbi, no less, could even think him capable of, not to mention willing to, debase himself in such a breach of honesty, integrity, morality; Why, if my father could only—
The principal, without a twitch, swiveled his monitor so it faced the accused. A freeze-frame of Brik's grinning mug, centered on the screen, a can of Krylon ColorMaster Gloss Black clearly gleaming in his hand.
“Umm…I'd like a word with my lawyer.”
What he got was the boot. A few weeks later, they unceremoniously dump him among us twenty-five frontiersmen.
Within days, we're Cain-and-Abel-level foes. I can thank cacti for that. One evening, after we finish our daily twelve-hour dose of nonstop Torah fun, a few of us decide to explore the nearby terrain. The only interesting place to scout is the golf course neighboring our secluded dormitory. So six of us carefully creep over to the weak spot we discovered in the barbed-wire fence, and make our way to the highest of the green knolls on the course, which is closed for the evening.
A bright desert moon obscures most of the stars but gives us great visibility. The grass has been trimmed, and its scent strikes me calm. Once we find a suitable plot of Kentucky blue, we all plop to the ground. We're talking smack about the rabbis, reminiscing about home, and telling stupid jokes:
“Hey, Brik.”
“'Sup?”
“What do you call a kid with no arms, no legs, and an eye patch?”
“Easy. You call him names.”
“So you heard that one. How about this…”
At some point, the distant, spooky sound of baying, as though carried on the clear air from some foggy past, begins to reach us, one by one. We ignore it.
“Guy walks into a zoo,” says Brik. “The only animal in the whole place is a dog.”
“How is that a joke?”
“Because it's a Shih Tzu, man. Get it? A Shit Zoo…”
With time, the noise of howling and barking grows more insistent. I don't know who's first to panic, just that I'm last to react.
It's obvious that someone has let loose a pack of attack dogs to tear us to bits. Coyotes. No—wolves!
No one actually speaks those words, but our eyes evince that's what everyone is thinking. We all take off as one. Running, panting, yarmulkes threatening to fly off in the breeze, aiming headlong for the barbed-wire fence.
Do you know what a jumping cactus is?
Well, if the cactus is the prick of the plant world, the knobby, yellow “jumping cholla” is King Prick. It doesn't actually “jump,” of course, although you'd be forgiven for ascribing to it malicious intent. When you step on the soft, compressible soil in which it typically grows, the cactus leans toward the “compressing entity”—say, a fleeing teenager. Then the spiky cholla segments pop off the main plant and jab into said compressor-kid. This gives the appearance of it biting or “jumping.” Even a subtle shift in the wind—say, caused by a group of terrified teenagers running from an unseen canine enemy—and it'll sway toward you, closer and closer with each passing kid. All the plant requires now is the slightest purchase on a nerdy boy's fragile flesh in which to sink its wicked fangs. Super-sharp needles with microscopic barbs dart deep inside your muscles and tendons—they can even reach bone.
Five boys run past one such plant unscathed. Back and forth it sways. And then I pass. “Ahhh! God! I'm hit!” In the moonlight, I can just make out this alien form hugging my leg, digging into me with its probes. “It's got me, guys! Save yourselves!”
Each foot-pound forward sends the spines burrowing deeper into my thigh. But I'm far too terrified to stop moving. The dogs. Oh, the dogs. I'm holding my breath. By the time I reach the fence, the tines have rendered me immobile. I can't even lift my leg, let alone jump over the wire. Four of my companions have scaled it and continue running for the dorm.
Only Brik stays.
No. Not to help.
He's laughing so hard that he runs out of breath and has to lean down and hold his knees. “You bastard,” I groan, over and over. “You evil bastard.”
The dogs, probably just some neighborhood mutts conversing with the moon and each other, are quiet now. The only sound in the desert night is that dick Brooklynite laughing. Laughing so hard, he's choking.
Yet eight years later, 7,457 miles away, Brik is here with me now. He's spent a week at my bedside, after flying over from the States to be with me. “Perils of the desert,” he says. That must be an expression.
“You were my only peril in Arizona,” I say. “Whenever I get a pang in this leg, I think of you.”
“I've missed you, too. Of course none of the scars or broken bones in your arm are still attached to your body, so I'm assuming at least those don't bug you anymore.”
“Bastard.”
On the last day of his visit, he's wearing an even more mischievous smile than he usually does. “So, I'm joining up, Izzy.”
“The Girl Scouts?”
“No, Ass-wipe. The IDF.”
“I pity the IDF.”
FEAR THE WALKING MEDS
Rabbi Lior brings his Nissan clunker to a stop a short limp from the front gate of the kibbutz Ein HaShlosha, on the border of Khan Yunis, Gaza. My Ground Zero. I roll down the window. It's mid-April 2009, and we're on another unauthorized outing from rehab. All around is the evidence of recent rocket attacks. I can see the place where, a year before the mortar took my arm, Carlos Chavez, an Ecuadorian volunteer, was shot and killed by a Hamas sniper while working on the kibbutz. I stood guard at that gate for hours on end.
I'm not used to it being so warm here. I'm not sure what crops grow in these vast, green fields that surround us, but the sunbaked vegetation puts a pleasant scent in the air, which sedates me.
Rabbi hobbles around sans crutches to open the passenger door for me, but I'd rather not budge. How the hell is he standing on a three-month-old shattered femur? I don't ask him, because I know exactly what he'll say. He puts his hand out to help me up and out. A strange shift in reality has been dawning on me lately. At first I felt luckier than all the leg amputees, because while they were stuck in bed or confined to a wheelchair, I was running around playing Ping-Pong and “diagnosing” my “patients” alongside Dr. Zivner. But over time I came to realize that they would soon resume their normal lives in a way I never could. Counterintuitively, I'd much rather have lost a leg than an arm, because the prostheses for legs are so much better, both functionally and aesthetically. In fact, you wouldn't even know a guy had a missing leg unless he was stripping right there in front of you. I will only ever have the use of one real arm, but most of those guys can walk around on two legs, and some of them can already run again. Many are totally indistinguishable from fully assembled humans. You know, people whose parts aren't sold separately.
I follow Rabbi. Injured and drugged, we're stumbling toward the rickety gate we both called home not so long ago. My flip-flops are slapping against my heels in rhythm with every step. Then, without warning, Rabbi stops his forward hobble, and I smack right into him. “What the hell, man?”
“I, uh…I'm not so sure they're going to let us in.” He motions toward the base. The First Brigade—Golani—took over from our brigade, Kfir, soon after the end of Operation Cast Lead. We see their flag now, a green olive tree on a yellow background, waving in the breeze. I wonder if they'll recognize us as friendlies, or if they'll assume we're just the world's worst thieves.
In Tucson, Brik once told me that convenience-store workers are not allowed to act against shoplifters. “Seriously. It's company policy. You could walk right in and openly take as much candy and soda and crap as you want. Maybe you want a Big Gulp? They won't react.” The two of us sat on a curb outside the local 7-Eleven. Oh, it crossed our thirteen-year-old minds, all right. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Not out of any real moral imperative. Mostly because of my father. I could handle the manager, police, a judge—but the thought of my father's quiet disapproval prevented many a youthful misdemeanor.
Most people probably assume that Israeli security is among the best on planet Earth. And it is. So it would likely come as a surprise that the IDF has major issues related to theft. Unarmed bandits and thieves have infiltrated many military installations, often stripping them clean of valuable non-weapons-grade material. Mostly Bedouins. Some Arabs. Some Israelis. Sometimes both, working together. Hurray…
With my own eyes, I've witnessed theft by the ton. Spent casings from shooting ranges and ammo dumps seem to be the easiest steal—all of that can be sold for scrap. But live submachine-gun ammo, even live tank shells, also disappear in mass quantities. An emboldened bandit will literally steal the engines off an F-16. Almost impossible to believe—but entirely true.
I've got to hand it to these thieves: they've got balls. But most of them are stealing gear we leave outside base. Stealing from inside is an entirely different, far more complicated, story. You might have to cut through wire fencing, evade guard towers, or bust locks. But the main reason robbers succeed is not their guile at burglary—it's that their opponent is so poorly prepared. There are millions of pounds of metal scattered around the Negev desert, with only recruits a few weeks into training responsible for all of it. Which means, essentially, no one's responsible. Ninety percent of them don't yet understand the meaning of “to guard.” In short, it does not mean playing Snake on your iPhone, Oren.
Having said that, these thieves, especially of the Bedouin variety, also seem to have an innate ability to case the surrounding terrain in search of easy entry points—vulnerabilities—and escape routes. They plot. They certainly don't waltz through the front gate while wearing T-shirts that proclaim, “I'm Smiling Because I'm about to Rob Your Sorry Ass Blind.”
Neither Rabbi nor I considered the possibility that a different unit now guarded this territory, that they might not allow random civilians to enter whenever they decided to stroll in. The scope of the guard's rifle glints in the sun. “Damn. You might be right, Lior.” We face the front gate from fifty meters away. The infantryman on duty stares right back at us, unmoving and seemingly unmoved, his brown beret buttressed on his head. “Oh, hell, it won't hurt to try,” I mutter. I take the lead; we begin our short trek to the front gate. I try my level best to project an air of confidence as I trudge forward. Not easy in shorts and flip-flops—especially not while doped up and struggling just to walk a straight line. I nod self-assuredly at the guard as we reach him. And, with a drug-induced sense of authority, I march right past him, Rabbi hobbling at my heels.
The unblinking soldier mumbles something as we go by that, to me, sounds like, “This isn't really happening.”
I interpret that enigmatic phrase the following way (and this is purely speculative, possibly achieved by my abusive absorption of both morphine and comic books):
The guard, let's call him “Shmulik,” has been working double shifts patrolling the border. He's not been sleeping, because he has nightmares. Not his fault. He recently read the Walking Dead series of graphic novels, which his brother sent him from Haifa. Sleep eludes him now, as whenever he closes his eyes, zombies amble by. He sees their knotty grimaces, their lifeless eyes, hanging skin, spilling guts, and so on. Their trawling and ungainly gaits.
He intends to study psychology at Ben-Gurion University, so he knows exactly what's going on here with his “zombiphobia”: The walking dead of his nightmares are stand-ins for the real terror lurking nearby. He's haunted by these zombies because they're far less terrifying than the militants crawling through the intricate network of tunnels he knows very well are underneath him. The scariest Walkers are the ones whose arms or legs have dropped off; they keep plodding anyway, slowly, deliberately—no stopping them…
Coinciding with his reading of The Walking Dead, Shmulik and his entire unit recently sat in the mess hall to hear from their captain all about the events that transpired at Ein HaShlosha a month before Golani took over the base and its border fence from Kfir after Operation Cast Lead. Guard duty was meant to be a welcome change of pace for the exhausted unit, which had spent the entire operation deep inside Gaza.
Golani itself took tremendous losses of their own during Cast Lead. Many soldiers were injured, and some were killed when a tank shell “friendly-” fired from an Israeli armored division collapsed an entire building on top of them—Shmulik knew some of those guys since Basic.
The captain reminded them all that the Haruv Battalion of the Kfir Brigade had been posted on this base before Golani. That unit suffered casualties of their own only a few tents from where Shmulik now straight-laced his boots. The higher-ups decided to use that “damned” tent to store their weapons cache. No one wanted to sleep in the same spot where that one poor bastard got his arm ripped off by a mortar's molten shrapnel.
Walkers don't exist.
They don't.
Rumors began to spread about that one wounded soldier, and the captain declared the
m all true. He was an American kid, and he never lost consciousness. Holding his severed arm up by the fibers of his uniform shirt, he stumbled through the smoke the way one of “them” would. Somebody even saw him raise his arms up afterward, so the limb went flying.
Shmulik donned his vest and adjusted the brown beret this morning, trying to clear his mind of that image. He navigated the new layer of concrete barriers that had been added since the incident. The military always reacts too late.
The sleep-deprived soldier felt lucky. He always managed to land the day shift, giving him the comfort of clear visibility. But this wasn't a mistake—he knew his buddies were bending over backward to make sure he got posted only in daylight. They were worried a night patrol would unhinge him. And just as he was thinking how grateful he was for those friends, for a world where zombies didn't exist, he heard a voice cry out in the distance, “What the hell, man?”
He narrowed his eyes. Two figures. Wobbly legs. Unearthly gait. Foggy eyes. A missing arm. He practically wet his fatigues. The two phantasms shuffled by.
“This isn't really happening,” he said.
Well, it was either that, or the guard just didn't give a damn. If you ask any soldier from a different outfit, they'll tell you those Golani guys are known for that. Many of them are milling about as we stagger past; none seems to find our presence particularly concerning.
We make our way directly to the tent flap where Kobi found me in two pieces, a look of horror in his eyes. I find that my mind's not ready to cope with this place. Why did we come? It seemed a capital idea at the time. I blame the drugs. And maybe Rabbi pushing me for some spiritual “closure.”
I peek inside the tent. Mountains of expensive weaponry, highly organized, filling every inch of space. Someone has done a bang-up job erasing the damage caused by the mortar strike. Who gets tasked with cleaning up the mess that the wounded and dying like me tend to leave behind? Did the chunks of my exploded elbow wind up in a Ziploc bag? Or were they just mopped up and dumped along with the scraps from supper?