by Yael Hedaya
“That totality: I used to want it so badly. Not just to be with someone but to simply be someone else, who would also be me,” she said.
And he said, looking at her with a love that was, at that moment, more complete than anything she had ever written, simpler than any phrase he had ever used in his books, “Then it’s not someone else.”
“Who isn’t?” She looked at him with those sad eyes, which were new to him then and fascinating.
“That someone. If it’s you, it’s not different.”
“No, I suppose not.” Then she burst out laughing. “We sound like the commercial for that yuppie American perfume, do you know the one I mean?” He said he thought he did, but he didn’t, and she looked at the sky and quoted a few lines sardonically: “‘Am I touching you, or are you touching me? Am I you, you me? How will we know who is who?’” She whispered the name of the perfume in his ear, her lips cold and wet from the beer, and he laughed and said yes, that was it. But he wondered if he was that someone she had once written about, the someone from the commercial, the someone she no longer believed in.
Now he tried to remember how her lips looked, as if he hadn’t seen her for years. Their image appeared instantly, a human file called up on the screen, and flickered on the windshield, standing between him and the luxury car. He saw them move in conversation, open and close as they ate, drank, kissed, remained silent; then he imagined her eyes and saw them closing and opening, blinking, smiling at him, angry at him, huge and half open when she came, like her lips. He summoned up feature after feature and projected them on the windshield, stuck in a traffic jam that, from one moment to the next, seemed more and more infinite. When did that Palestinian taxi wind its way into his lane? He looked for the luxury car, which had disappeared, and now he saw her hands, small, indelicate, unbeautiful, miming. They joined the eyes and lips in their various actions, all of which, he suddenly realized, were connected to him. He tried to imagine her sitting on her own, smoking by the vending machine, thinking about her father, imagining his death, and could not. Then he thought of himself hugging her and saw each separate quality of the embrace—the intensity, the temperature, the dim fullness of her limbs as they were gathered up in his—and he was filled with longing.
But it was not only her he longed for, he missed his mother. The bag on the seat next to him filled him with compassion and fear, because he knew the day was not far off when he would try to reconstruct the flavor of his mother’s cooking in his mouth and would fail, and other flavors would come instead, the flavor of missed opportunities, for example. What did he know about her, this woman who had had a life before him, while he had had none before her? What did he know about this old lady, who had probably given the kitchen a cursory cleaning after he’d left and then gone to rest in her room or back to sorting her mysterious papers until she too had remembered the bird? He stared at the green Palestinian license plate, which looked as beat-up as the orange taxi, and his head began concocting political slogans to amuse himself: Stuck together forever, he thought, and crawled so close to the taxi that his bumper was almost touching it. “Up each other’s ass,” he said out loud, and almost extricated himself from the sadness that had descended upon him, but then he saw his mother leaning down to take the dustpan out of the cabinet beneath the sink, retrieving the broom from behind the fridge, going out into the yard in her robe and slippers to clear away the little corpse, and the sadness became panic, and he knew that anything his mother did in his imagination would now appear to be her last act in life.
A little before four, he was encouraged to see the sign for Ganot interchange. This was the point where traffic usually eased up or became less claustrophobic. Then, finally, there was a report of a disabled vehicle in the left lane, but it was unclear if the vehicle was the cause of the jam or its result. In any case, he was hopeful that soon he would see the big sign, WELCOME TO AYALON HIGHWAY, that he loved and hated so much, because when the highway was wide open it made him feel as if he were in America, and when it wasn’t it reminded him he had nowhere to run to. “Strange Days” came on the radio, and he was happy that his favorite song, his sex song, would accompany him through the moments of deliverance, when he would finally be able to put his foot on the gas. But Jim Morrison’s voice, with the special effect that had been added to it, a kind of dim metallic quality of someone singing from inside a can, suddenly made him fearful, as if Morrison had recorded the song after he was dead. The cars seemed to be crawling along even more slowly. He went underneath a cement bridge, and he remembered a bridge that had collapsed a few years ago, killing three people. He put his face to the windshield and looked up, searching for cracks in the structure, then looked left and right at the complacent drivers on either side and wondered how many victims the disaster would claim: who was likely to survive and who, like him, was stuck directly underneath. He drummed nervously on the steering wheel and stayed close to the Palestinian taxi in front, which, like him, still remained faithful to the middle lane.
When he passed under the bridge he considered switching lanes. Perhaps a change of scenery would help, he told himself. It was four-twenty, and he knew there was no way he would be home before five. Now he wished he’d left Dana a message before leaving. She had probably been home for ages and may have even called his mother about him, and now his mother would be worried. On the other hand, maybe instead of going home Dana had gone off to wander the streets, at odds with herself and with him. What did he even know about her? She must have an entire secret life, as he had had when he was her age, and still did, and always would. And how lonely that life was, he thought. He was filled with sympathy, not for himself—he was an old fox by now, who knew how to steal into the chicken coop he himself had fenced off and get away unscathed—but for his daughter, for whom everything was just coming into being. How many scratches would she get? How many injuries would she suffer as she crawled under the fence? If only he could guide her: You can get in this way, not that way; there’s food over here, over there there’s a trap; here you’ll find love, don’t look over there.
On a sudden impulse, he decided to move to the left lane, which looked as if it was starting to pick up speed. He put his turn signal on and waited for a driver to let him in. He thought about the three of them, about his daughter and his mother and Shira, and wanted to save them but did not know from what. He counted twenty-three cars, twenty-three drivers who ignored him, defending their territory, until he heard a friendly little honk, looked in the mirror, and saw a woman driving a little Subaru Justy like his on his left, gesturing to him, and he waved a thank-you and quickly merged. Curious to know who the woman was, he strained to catch sight of her face in the rearview mirror, but he couldn’t see her clearly. She looked younger, in her thirties, a normal woman in a normal car. Then he noticed that she kept turning her head to the right and her lips were talking or singing, and every so often she leaned so far over that her head disappeared from his field of vision and then reappeared; now he could clearly see that she was making faces, and when her hand joined in the pantomime act, opening and closing like a beak, her fingers moving opposite some invisible entity, he realized there was a baby next to her. He kept looking at her in the mirror as he moved slowly with the traffic, looking ahead every so often so as not to hit the car in front of him, and all the time he had a big grin on his face, as if he were the baby she was trying to amuse. He wasn’t even angry when someone cut in front of him and charged down the lane, which had suddenly cleared without warning. The cars in the lanes to his right also began to move quickly.
The traffic jam is over, he thought, cleared in one second of inattention. Soon he’d get off at La Guardia; he hoped the woman would too, because she seemed like a fairy godmother who had lifted the curse from the road. But the Subaru driver was so busy with her baby she didn’t even glance at him when he moved to the right. She kept on driving and he got off at his exit, which was completely clear, as if he were the only person using it, and
when he stopped at the light, the five o’clock news came on the radio, announced by a series of beeps that penetrated the car like a distant alarm clock ringing into a dream, and he remembered driving with Dana, when she was a baby.
She would sit next to him in a huge car seat with teddy bears and bunnies on it. She always looked so small in that seat, a tiny copilot, the padded straps hiding her shoulders, her bare feet turned in different directions. She would fall asleep with her chin on her chest, and he would look at her and his heart would flutter: here he was driving her now, here he was driving her into his life. Once, when she was three months old, he looked at her and saw she was awake, looking at the window, and he wondered what she could see from her position, facing backward. He tried to catch the images out of the corner of his eye but could not, until he realized it was not images that she saw but pure motion, something basic and fascinating that no longer existed for him. Her face seemed distant, almost old and private; she seemed thoughtful in a way he never imagined a baby could be, and he was alarmed by the idea that she might be sad. Even though he knew it was his own perception that was painting her look with sadness, his own loneliness extracting calmness from her eyes and replacing it with shreds of contemplation, and although he knew he was not watching a sad baby or a happy one, or a tranquil or troubled one, but a person with a life of her own, a three-month-old life, compact and secretive and denying interpretation, he could not restrain himself and his lips let out a whistle. For a moment, her little body in the huge seat was shocked, and he thought she was going to cry. He reached out and tickled her under her chin, and she looked at him and smiled, and her face glowed.
( 28 )
As if someone had been following her around with a huge eraser, the entire day disappeared, the hours distilled into single, horrifyingly clear moments, as cold as her father’s hand, which, alone among all his limbs, was still large and manly. She held it to her lips, tasted his skin, and thought, I am going to see my father die. She felt neither sadness nor fear, only anticipation. She leaned over him, caressed his cheek, and felt her straight back, her tense shoulders springy, her neck and head stiff, as if she were a scarecrow banishing birds of prey from his bed, and she imagined that the room was also anticipatory, emptying its air out and waiting to absorb her father like a substance, a spray released from its container. What, then, would she find in the emptiness left behind his consciousness? Could it be replaced by her own consciousness, snapping into place like a cube? And what was her father’s final thought and what was its precise timing? Was it the thought that passed through his mind a second before he sank into a coma, or one that would fly like a lost ball between the walls of the empty room, which only this morning had been filled with the furnishings of his consciousness, when he took his final breath?
His skin tone had changed. His face and arms had taken on the color of ash or clouds. She didn’t know if it was still raining outside—it seemed quiet and full of expectation behind the closed window blind, a gray she had never seen before, anywhere, not even in her dreams, which always included strange color combinations that could not be reconstructed in the morning, only feared and missed. So this is what death looks like, she thought, and heard herself say silently, So this is what death looks like. She wondered where that place was inside her that always knew how to phrase things. So this is his color, she thought, and her hand reached out to touch the fingers of her father’s right hand, which suddenly trembled and danced on the sheet as if a train had passed beneath his bed, and then they stopped—like the rumble of an engine, she thought, after the ignition key has been turned off—and she didn’t know if the trembling was a delayed response to what she had whispered in his ear just after the doctor had left, the statement, a shiver of words, that she loved him.
She put her face to his, trying to pick up hidden motion behind the oxygen mask, which no longer alternated between clouding over and clearing up but had also taken on a grayish tone, as if coated on the inside by a murky layer of used breaths. Leaning one hand on the plastic chair and the other on the bed, her breath caressing the mask from the outside, she suddenly felt the familiar pain of a metallic pinch in her right hand and realized she was still gripping her keys. She sat down on the chair and fanned them out on her lap: the house key and the mailbox key; the car keys, bigger and more impressive than the others, hanging on a separate ring; the key for the apartment on Borochov, which she had forgotten to return; the key to the deadbolt lock on her father’s apartment door; and the small simple key to his mailbox, which looked like hers.
Once, when she was five or six, he had rushed to make it across the pedestrian crossing before the light changed and pulled her behind him, grasping her hand firmly, and when they got to the other side, she burst into tears. He looked down at her, surprised, and asked what happened, and she jerked her hand away from his and showed it to him, palm down. He asked again, “But what happened?” She pointed to the red grooves his keys had made in her flesh, and wailed, “It hurts!”
“But what hurts?” he asked, smiling awkwardly at the passersby who stopped near them. She pointed accusingly at the bunch of keys in his hand—“That!”—and her crying got louder, as if the confession had only added to her sorrows. “The keys?” he asked, and looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. “These?” He dangled them in front of her and she knew she had lost him; he would disappear and leave her standing alone on Allenby, rubbing her hand, surrounded by strangers, regretful.
He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her eyes. Then he took hold of her hand, which was still held out in the air, demanding justice, took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, put them on, and examined her closely. Then he closed her hand into a fist, finger by finger, and hit himself on the cheek with her fist, waiting for her to laugh—“Here. Now Daddy hurts too”—and said they would go to a café and have some ice cream. “You too?” she asked, because she had never seen him eat sweet things. “Me too. Would you like that?” She dried her eyes and through her post-crying hiccups, murmured yes, and the knowledge that her father liked ice cream was so sensational that she forgot her pain and insult. He put the keys in his other hand and took hold of hers, which now felt very light and free, and orphaned.
She put her keys in her bag, got up, and went to the window but didn’t have the courage to open it or draw the curtain, because she was afraid that the outside, which over the last few hours had been moved far away, like a violent protester who might endanger them, would infiltrate the room—the outside that she missed, knowing that when she met it again, when she went out into the night or the morning, into the air that smelled of rain or of whatever had erased it, she would be a person who had no parents. She tiptoed back to the chair, sat down carefully, and then noticed the catheter bag lying on the floor at the foot of the bed, with its tube visible under the sheet. It was empty, unnecessary, she thought, like the IV and the feeding tube—so he won’t inhale the contents of his gut into his lungs, the nurse had told her when she asked why he needed it—even the oxygen mask looked ridiculous now. She wanted to get up and pull these rubber toys off, one by one, but when she looked down again she saw the bag start to fill with fluid, also of a dreamlike color, something reddish and rusty and thick that did not look like urine but like the fluid from a machine. She watched the bag and thought about that dog, not the puppy they almost adopted on the beach but the one they found one summer evening, when she was ten, with the other kids on the block, lying on his side beneath a shrub in the building’s backyard, panting—the dog she preferred not to think of, because he was always there, shuddering in her imagination.
The children surrounded him, arguing among themselves over whether he was dangerous, what breed he was, and how old he was, until her father, who had stood on the balcony watching them play, noticed the commotion and came down. “He has rabies,” he determined, and told them to move away, and the kids dispersed begrudgingly, protesting that Shira was allowed to stay.
“She’s not allowed either,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder, and at that moment her mother came back from the pool, and her father asked her to go upstairs and call the municipality and tell them to come urgently to remove the lethal danger. Her mother said they should call a private vet: Dudi, her friend’s son, who was doing veterinary studies. A private vet might try to help the dog—Dudi wouldn’t even take money for it—but the municipality would kill him on the spot.
“Yes, Dad.” Shira held his hand and swung it. “Please! Let’s call Dudi.”
But her father said, “Are you mad? Can’t you see he’s rabid?”
The city vet arrived, pushed past the neighborhood children who had disobeyed her father and come back out, and said it wasn’t rabies but distemper. He said it wasn’t dangerous but there was nothing to be done, it was a fatal disease; the dog was two or three months old at most and would have to be put to sleep. Her father looked pleased, as if he had been proven both wrong and right, and the vet went to his car and came back with a syringe and two glass vials, one of which contained a small amount of white powder and the other some clear liquid. Riveted, her father and the kids had watched as he emptied the powder into the liquid and shook the vial, jabbed its lid with the syringe, and siphoned in the magical substance that would help the dog sleep, as he explained what he was doing to the two children from next door. Shira looked at her mother, silently pleading for her to do something, and her mother wrapped her arms around her and crossed them over her chest, and she could feel her damp swimsuit under her dress pressing up against her back, and smelled the beloved scent of chlorine mixed with coconut oil.