by Michael Oren
Advance Praise for
The Night Archer
“Historian and diplomat Michael Oren has at long last returned to fiction with an extraordinary collection of stories that sparkle with wit, intelligence, tenderness, and penetrating honesty. The luminous prose is best savored slowly, but most readers will undoubtedly devour The Night Archer in a single sitting and then eagerly await Oren’s next offering.”
—Daniel Silva, New York Times #1 bestselling author
“That hum you hear when you read Michael Oren’s gorgeous short stories is the song of humanity pushing against all of its innate limitations. Oren delivers a heartfelt and heartbreaking account of who we are as a species—flawed, fearful, and lonely but always open-hearted, always trusting that transcendence is possible, if not imminent. This is what optimism for adults looks like, and this is the book you should read if you need a dose of unfettered hope.”
—Liel Leibovitz, author of A Broken Hallelujah: Rock and Roll, Redemption, and the Life of Leonard Cohen
A WICKED SON BOOK
An Imprint of Post Hill Press
ISBN: 978-1-64293-578-3
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-579-0
The Night Archer:
and Other Stories
© 2020 by Michael Oren
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Cody Corcoran
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
Post Hill Press
New York • Nashville
posthillpress.com
Published in the United States of America
For Leslie
Mentor, muse, beloved
Contents
Introduction
Ruin
Liberation
D
Fossils
Afikomen
Metaxis
Day Eight
The Old Osifegus
Surprise Inspection
The Scar
The Man in the Deerstalker Hat
The Secret of 16/B
Beautiful Bivouac
An Agent of Unit Forty
The House on Kittatinny Lake
The Boys’ Room
Live in Studio
Crime Scene
The Reenactor
Prodigal Son
Good Table
A Cure for Suburban Boredom
Skirmish on Chickamaw Ridge
Penitence
The World of Antonia Flechette
The Curio Cabinet
Nuevo Mundo
Alien Report
The Perfect Couple
Live in Fame, Dive in Flames
Pray, Prey
My Little Whiffle
The Book of Jakiriah
Dead of Old Wounds
Sir Reginald and the Purple Prince
Rosen in Paradise
The Thirty-Year Rule
Personal Assistance
Noah Simkin, Athlete, Scholar, Renaissance Man, Is Dead
Jorge
Aniksht
Primus inter Pares
The Blind Man
What’s a Parent to Do?
Slave to Power
The Widow’s Hero
Made to Order
The Cookie Jar
The Innkeeper’s Daughter
The Betsybob
The Night Archer
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Coming home from school one day when I was twelve, sitting at my desk and pulling out pen and paper, I suddenly discovered freedom. It came in the form of a poem, “Who cries for the soul of the pigeon?” What freedom! But while reveling in it, I also encountered a truth. That poetry was not a ramble of unbridled thoughts, but a vision bound by structure, meter, and rhyme. Real freedom, I internalized even then, was only attainable through limits.
That paradox has generated friction, even conflict, throughout much of recorded history and is still destabilizing today. But controversy cannot detract from the timeless need to counterbalance liberty with law. Overly fettered freedom is tyranny, but untethered freedom is chaos. And as in society, so, too, it is with art. A symphony, a novel, or a sculpture becomes transcendent precisely by remaining within its framework, its tempo, genre, and space.
As a beginning poet, I understood that writing free verse meant first mastering form. Many years would pass, though, before I realized that achieving freedom through confinement was more than just a method. Rather, like monotheism and universal morality, it was an eminently Jewish idea.
It is an idea enshrined in Exodus, the story of the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. No sooner do we escape then we lapse into debauchery and golden calf-building. Not until Moses receives the law on Mount Sinai and imposes it on our people is our freedom fully guaranteed. Consequently, the Jews dedicate an entire holiday to freedom—Passover—but celebrate it with strict ritual and dietary rules. For that reason, the Hebrew language has as many words for freedom (hofesh, herut, dror) as it does for law (hok, din, mishpat). For Jews, mitzvah means both commandment and blessing.
The freedom-limit paradox can be confounding but also intoxicating. A friend who was born Jewish but hated his heritage accompanied me once to synagogue. It was the holiday of Simchat Torah, marking the conclusion of the year-long Torah reading, when Jews dance and sing while embracing the scrolls. My friend was flummoxed. “They’re celebrating a book that tells them all these things they can’t do?” he asked. “I don’t get it.” For days he walked around bewildered, unable to grasp the contradiction. Finally, in desperation, he began to study the Bible and then the Talmud, and eventually became observant.
The paradox was yet another Jewish gift to civilization. It deeply influenced the Founding Fathers who hardwired it into their Constitution and the system of checks and balances. Along with proscribing absolute power and protecting the weak—two more Biblical concepts—it laid the basis of American democracy. But it also informed Zionism. While aspiring to transform the Jews into a “free people in our own land,” as we sing in Israel’s Hatikvah anthem, Zionism also worked to curb that freedom with statutes. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to Israel at the same age that I began to write poetry. I wanted the dizziness of freedom along with its sovereign responsibilities.
In Israel, I indeed found freedom but also accepted limits, paying taxes and obeying the national rules. I continued to write poetry and fiction, and, with increasing frequency, history. Writing history, I found, could be a liberating experience, provided it complied with the standards of accuracy and notation. The best compliment I received for my history books was that they read like novels.
But Israeli life often restrained my freedom. For years, I was a soldier, carrying out orders, unable to do or even dress as I chose. And then I entered government service, first as an ambassador and later as an elected official. I forfeited not only my independence but the right to speak my mind entirely. Israeli law, much like its American counterpart, forbids certain representatives from publishing books while in office. Yet nothing prohibited me from writing, and I did so virtually every morning before work. Much of this collection was written then, as a personal assertion of freedom.
If, as a preteen, poetry was my gateway to expression, now I found the same route through stories. Much like verse, short fiction imposes draconian strictures on the author, necessitating constant discipline. A writer must present fully-drawn characters, a developed plot, a
resolution and meaning—within as little as a single page. But while relentlessly confining, stories afford a vast creative scope. I could be anywhere—on a New England beach, an Asian jungle or a spaceship. I could be a homicide detective or a Holocaust survivor, a conquistador or a hitman, a human or an animal. I could be an adult or a child, woman or man, living today or thousands of years ago. What exhilarating freedom!
But what control. The result is stories which aspire to be both concise and audacious, structured yet wild. They are American in their candor and Israeli in their zeal, yet always, paradoxically, Jewish. They are my way of celebrating the end of slavery but also of accepting the law. They are the way I embrace limitation while dancing and singing unchained.
Michael Oren
Tel Aviv, 2020
Ruin
First off, we don’t boo. We don’t rattle chains or—give me a break—wear sheets. We can’t move things, not books or candlesticks, not even the skateboard that some idiot teenager left at the top of the stairs. All that we can do is watch, silently, powerlessly, at most raising a few cold bumps on your skin. Sorry if this sounds disappointing. We don’t shriek, we don’t whimper. We merely observe and bear witness.
Ghosts, you see, aren’t scary. People are scary. Walter Ackerman, for example. Wally. With his hairy shoulders and rolls of neck, arm, and belly fat. Observe him bouncing up and down on Sylvia Ricco, also known as his sister-in-law, whose butt reminds me of a half-deflated basketball. And not in the dark, either. No, these two ghouls go at it in the early afternoon when the wife and kids are safely out of the house, when no one can hear his snorting or her screeching like a cat becoming roadkill—when every vein and every pimple is hideously displayed, and every wattle highlighted. Frightened by nights of the living dead? Try seeing days of the dead living.
For that’s what Wally and his family are, suburban zombies. Alice, a.k.a. Mrs. Ackerman, with her two-bottle-a-day Chardonnay habit and her bustling schedule of therapists, new age spiritualists, and Corsican golf instructors. The children, Pace and Jason, the first a community college drop-out and tattoo parlor apprentice with a magenta Mohawk and more body piercings than St. Sebastian, and the second, a zitty seventeen-year-old geek more concerned with code than with girls or his own cleanliness. A typically damaged family in a rather undistinguished aluminum-sided house that just happens to be haunted.
How I got here is a mystery. I know nothing of my previous life or lives, no sense of where I came from. Yet clearly there’s forethought involved. I’m culturally appropriate, not haunting some hut in Somalia, God forbid, or an igloo. All I know is my name, Ruin, which I suppose means something, but I’d rather not contemplate it. I’d prefer, in fact, to think that it’s actually Rouen, like that pretty town in France, but that’s just a poltergeist’s quirk.
No, the Ackermans are familiar to me, almost kin, and I can sympathize with Wally’s need to pawn his mother’s jewelry to pay off gambling debts or his deepening flirtation with the mob. I can understand why, when he’s not snorting up or bonking Sylvia, he’s locked in the bathroom weeping and bashing his head against the sink. Life is not what you think, I’d like to whisper to him. And guess what, neither is death.
For the inescapable truth is that there is no truth. At least not as humans perceive it. If one ghost exists, then there must be millions. And not only ghosts but fairies, brownies, genies, and nymphs. Throw in leprechauns, too. If reality is a skein and its fabric gossamer, then all people fret about—mortgages, stature, security, orgasms—is chimerical. If Ruin roams the Ackerman house, then countless other homes are similarly possessed and by ominously-named apparitions.
And so, I filter. Up to the attic where Wally’s degrees—duly framed by his father—are kept in a dust-encrusted locker. Around the garage and the garbage bags in which, under the camouflage of crumbled napkins and soda cans, Alice disposes her bottles. The closets are fun but could be more so if I could access Pace’s stash. I could infiltrate Jason’s computer if I wanted to, tinker with its code—who knows, maybe erase his hard disk. Ruin runs ramshackle everywhere in the Ackerman abode, all except for the basement.
That’s the one place even I’m afraid to visit. With those spooky jars of screws and nails, the rusted toboggans, the soup tureens and bowling trophies shrouded in cobwebs. The basement: home to the sump pump and the boiler, the thermostat and the fuse-box, its ceiling scored with drippy pipes and long-dead electrical wires. You know a place is creepy when it even gives ghosts the creeps. Wally, I notice, also avoids the basement, as if there were too many memories hovering there, and one too many temptations.
I long to tell Walter that all is not lost, that he hasn’t squandered his youthful promise and sold his soul to thugs. Perhaps there’s no cure for the male pattern baldness, I imagine explaining, but you still have your heart and other vital organs, your brain, and the occasional erection. And you’re not devoid of kindness. There’s your support for the local little league, the weekly visits to your mother in the home, though it’s years since she’s recognized you. Redemption is possible, Wally, I want to say, and the chance you have is as least as good as a ghost’s. I yearn to impart these wisdoms because somehow, I know him and feel I can help him exorcize.
But, alas, I’m incapable of a boo and can’t prevent his self-devastation. I cannot deter him from sniffing the last of his blow, from leaving Sylvia’s panties for Alice to find, and from telling his loan shark to fuck off. When he drifts into his children’s empty rooms and wails over their childhood mementos, I’m floating behind him, helpless. I’m fluttering above him still as he opens the basement door and descends the shrieking steps. Into the dark and miasma of moldy wicker and mouse droppings. If sheets were indeed my wardrobe, I’d be shaking them now, and rattling the clunkiest of chains. I’d pull the chair out as he climbed onto its seat and clip the wire looped around his throat.
Howling, I’d pull at his threadbare shirt and shiny trousers, hold him under the armpits as the chair tipped away and he plummeted. His gagging and gurgling would be mine, if only I could possess them. Silently, Walter swings, and powerlessly I witness. The meaning of Ruin is known to me now and the purpose of this particular assignment. More horrific than a thump in the night or a hatchet in the back is the specter of human anguish. Ghosts do not in fact visit households. On the contrary, it’s the living who haunt the dead.
Liberation
Confined by tubes, strapped down and caged to prevent him from falling off, Lev Levitsky lay wheezing. Radar-like, monitors tracked his departure from life. Above the bleeps, though, through strata of consciousness, he could hear his doctors consulting. The issue wasn’t medical, it seemed, but promotional. Never had they treated a man so revered. Not only a literary colossus but a moral giant whose existence justified everyone’s. The pluses for the hospital were obvious.
“We could hold a press conference,” one of the physicians was saying. “Release a statement.”
But a second doctor objected. “No, we’ve got to keep the press away. Some jerk’s liable to get in here with a camera, and nobody should ever see him like this. Least of all them.”
“Them,” Levitsky understood, referred to the patient’s admirers peering through the ward’s porthole window, crowding the hallway and the staircase and spilling outside into the hospital’s parking lot. All they wanted was a final word from him confirming that evil would not, in the end, triumph, and was simply no match for love.
“Ironic, though,” yet another voice—younger, Levitsky judged, a resident’s—remarked. “He looks just like he does in that picture.”
The picture he referred to, a photograph actually, was taken of Levitsky more than seventy years earlier, at the Ohrdruf concentration camp. Though only sixteen at the time, he looked ancient, desiccated, rags scarcely binding his bones. More mummy than man. The hollow eyes, the gaping mouth—a face that witnessed the unwatchable. Yet the expression he brought toward the camera showed more than horror. There was also
gratitude and, beyond that, an indomitable conviction. “There is goodness in the world,” his gaunt, shit-streaked cheeks improbably insisted. “I still believe in people.”
The resident would never know the irony of that image. No one would. Only Levitsky, tied to his bed and only intermittently awake, could confess that he had not been gazing at the photographer at all that day but at the soldier standing behind him. A burly American sergeant, florid-faced beneath his helmet, a Tommy-gun slung on his arm, smiled at the prisoner and pointed at the barbed-wire gates. They parted, revealing pastures and forests, a sapphire sky, and the sun like a diadem. “Hey, buddy, look,” the sergeant called out to Levitsky. “You’re free!”
He stumbled out of those gates and into a world that was anything but dazzling. A mortally wounded world, it oozed with people much like him. Aimless, alone, uncertain of how or why to live. He staggered through the ruins of once-quaint cities, picking up debris that might be sold on quirky post-war markets or odd jobs with the various Occupations. He acquired languages as well, and with an ease that surprised him as much as it did the local editors who began buying his articles.