The Tel Aviv Dossier

by Lavie Tidhar

  There are screams outside now. Somehow, they sound to him like the cry of Tarzan, a modulating, loud, piercing sound. He clutches his chest. He can’t breathe. Through dimming eyes he sees something impossible — a soldier in the olive-green uniforms of the IDF flying through the air, away from the tank, like Tarzan swinging on the jungle vines, coming straight —

  There is the sound of breaking glass, and a hundred small, sharp pains flower in him but he is strangely calm now, detached and very far away. His last thought is of the Jane he never had.

  THE FIREMAN’S GOSPEL, PART III (ELI — APOCRYPHAL?)

  The architecture of the south part of the city was wild — at least the parts of it I could see, jumping over the tarmac like crazed kids at an unpopular classmate’s birthday party. The fire on the Hawk’s tail was growing larger. It seemed an unnatural sort of fire to me. There wasn’t so much stuff to burn in the Hawk, it being what it is, and the remains of the yacht should have been cinders by now. But that was logic, which seemed, today, to be on the losing side.

  The fire looked wrong, smelled wrong. In fact, it smelled of nothing at all. For a moment I thought that maybe the speed of my driving was pushing the smell away, but I had to slow down several times to cross all sorts of obstacles, and still there was nothing.

  I recognized my surroundings as the area of the old central bus station, but only barely. The place had literally been overturned. The ground was covered with smashed vegetables, fruit, fish, ripped T-shirts, broken plastic jewellery and other sorts of cheap merchandise. There were also other things, which, it took me some time to understand, were probably the remains of people. I drove through it all. The vertical cloud was right above me. The air had a funny colour to it, and it was glinting. From somewhere in front of me, an unnatural woosh-woosh-woosh sound was coming, like the wing-flap of an overfed duck.

  It was, in fact, a chopper.

  It came out of the smoke, rather slowly, not too high above street level. I saw the pilot. He noticed me too. I gave him the thumbs-up, and I think he smiled, though I couldn’t see, really, with his helmet on and all. Then his head turned abruptly, looking at turbulence in the smoke to his right. He tried to turn and pull up — I saw his hands moving in the cockpit — but the chopper responded lazily. The turbulence grew and grew, and there was some kind of metallic screech, and suddenly the chopper was covered in shadows. Then something huge came out of the smoke, almost right above it.

  It was nothing more unnatural than a flying Merkavah Mark IV tank. I served in the artillery corps, before I was thrown out of the army, so I know. That thing’s weight had to be at least sixty tonnes, but it flew gracefully, gun pointing skywards, not hurrying anywhere. Its course was a perfect parabola, which wasn’t disturbed in the slightest by smashing into the chopper, which burned, exploded, melted and turned into shrapnel, all in fast-forward. The tank, taking its time, landed on the ground, breaking the tarmac and making the Hawk dance in its place, then sinking into the ground, only the gun remaining above it like a flagpole.

  What a wonderful sight! Give me some more of these, and I’d be willing to forgive the army for not letting me drive those tanks myself.

  THE YURI ARCHIVES, PART II (AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING)

  The world is not in black-and-white. It’s red. I’m turning around so fast that I can get only vague impressions of what’s going on around me. I see people — I believe some of them are our small production crew — but I can’t tell who’s who. In my hand I still hold the boom, a big microphone attached to a long pole, and I think for a moment that if I was female and just in the right position I could’ve looked as if I’m a witch riding a broom. But I’m not. I’m flying head-down. I guess it looks stupid. The street “above” looks as if it’s about to fall on me, and “below” me there’s a pink-red storm. I look at it, over my upward-pointing legs, and see someone shoot into it at incredible speed. Then I feel a wetness. Something is raining over me. Red. Maybe a bit of green. Lumps of something drop on my legs. I have no idea what those could be. I hope.

  And then I shoot up myself, my brain pressing against the top of my skull, all my blood going there, the buildings “above” me getting smaller and smaller, the sound of the wind becoming a shriek, the red thing above me pulsating, opening, sucking me inside. Then there’s a moment of bright red light, like lightning passing through blood. Then there’s noise. Then there’s pain.

  The ground is shaking, but there is no ground.

  The sea rises over the roofs of the city of my soul, flooding it. And I’m not myself.

  An octopod the size of the solar system, pink and dirty yellow like the moons of Saturn, curls around my left pupil, searing it with ochre fire.

  My stomach is the burying ground of a lost tribe of minute cannibals. I feel their tiny sharp bones, like hollow microscopic steel needles, shaking inside me, trying to crawl out of their graves.

  I cannot be myself. Myself doesn’t think in those terms. Myself isn’t prone to using metaphors.

  I breathe fire. First I inhale it, and it kills everything inside me, billions of sentient microbes the size of elephants, of whose existence I was never aware before, though I suspected all along that there might be something wrong with my lungs.

  Who, me?

  I see a body, convulsing, shaking, turning inside out, in a red haze. It may be myself. I cannot be sure. I cannot see my face.

  Rain clouds are shooting out of my nostrils, emitting short bursts of lightning, smelling of ozone, burning purple holes in the fabric of the universe.

  Myself may have taken a drug, it’s possible. Myself has done so many times before. But this is unlike any drug experience myself has ever had.

  I give birth to a leviathan. The delivery goes very smoothly. The creature flies out of my navel, tiny like a drop of blood, then covers the sky, shadows the ground.

  I exhale. Fire.

  The sea goes dry, becomes a desert covered with half-caked corpses of fish, black, with the occasional glint of silver. All the deepest abysses can now be seen for what they are, dry holes in the crust of the earth, containing nothing, leading nowhere.

  Containing something. Something which dwells underneath the compressed crust of the lowest of the low places of the ocean. Something which lives and dies in darkness, which should never see the light of the sun, or perceive, even, that there is a sun. Something that lives upon the tremors at the core of the earth, taking heat and life from molten rock and magnetic resonance and pressure. Something tiny. A dot, a point, a microscopic entity. Something horribly compressed. Something which, were it ever to reach sea level, will be bigger than all the oceans of the earth combined.

  Something which notices myself.

  The universe explodes.

  VIOLENT CHANGES, A DOCUMENTARY (VIDEO RECORDING, PART II — HAGAR)

  I am hiding in the opening of a shawarma shop opposite Rabin Square. I don’t know how I got here, all I remember is running, running, and now my legs hurt and my stomach hurts and I can barely breathe but I’m alive: I’m still alive, and I can’t say that for other people in Tel Aviv.

  The store is abandoned and there is still the smell of roasting meat inside but everything is thrown around. I managed to lower the metal grate over the entrance and now I’m at the window with the camera peeping out. It’s been very quiet for a while but that didn’t last. The first loud sound I heard — it sounded like back when I was a girl and the first Gulf War was going on and we used to hide in the room with the masking tape on the windows and the wet towel against the gap in the door to stop chemical weapons, and we watched on the television as the missiles were being fired. That’s what it sounds like now. Missiles. Someone is shooting at Tel Aviv again, and I have a strange feeling it’s not the Iraqis.

  The missile attack has been going on for over fifteen minutes. I can hear it, a constant bombardment, the whisper of flight followed by explosions, and I can see buildings coming down in the distance. Sometimes I see people running outs
ide, but they don’t seem to have a purpose, they just run, and some of them don’t make it. Then I hear a new sound, like heavy vehicles moving on the road, and I look through the camera and there’s a convoy of tanks moving down Ibn Gvirol from the direction of the cinematheque. As they come closer I hear a man’s amplified voice saying: “Stay inside! Lock your doors! Do not panic! The army is dealing with the situation!”

  The situation? All of a sudden I get this huge suspicion and I have to take a deep breath. Is the army responsible for what’s going on? Is it some secret weapons programme from the Weizmann Institute that somehow got out of control? Is that what’s really happening?

  The tanks are coming closer. And then, all at once, it becomes very, very quiet. The bombardment seems to have stopped. I don’t see people outside any more. Only the tanks, and more and more of them are coming, and then I see — it’s unbelievable — I see this military jeep going past and two army officers sitting inside it and a third soldier with a machine gun at the back, covering them — the officer in the passenger seat looks high ranking, in fact he looks familiar, I pan the camera on him and get a close-up of his face — it’s the Aluf Pikud Merkaz, the Major General in charge of Israeli Central Command, and I can’t believe it but he’s smiling. He has the driver go straight onto the square itself and there the jeep stops and the Aluf gets out — he’s got a pistol in one hand and he’s smeared his face with battle paint and he’s waving the gun in the air and he seems to be shouting but I can’t pick up any sound. The tanks are going down Ibn Gvirol and down Frishman and down the side streets, spreading everywhere, and they form an enclosure around Rabin Square. Nothing happens for a while but then I notice Yigal Tomerkin’s Holocaust memorial is — I think it’s vibrating. At first it’s hardly noticeable but then I see the whole frame of it, that massive inverted triangle I remember climbing once during a demonstration in the square. The whole thing is shuddering. The Aluf turns to look at it too, and all the tanks rotate their guns and point at it. The Aluf shouts something, it looks like a challenge, and he waves his pistol in the air again. The Tomerkin structure vibrates harder and then it starts to turn, like a Hanukkah spinning top. It turns faster and faster, and then there’s a huge tearing noise and the whole structure lifts in the air, still spinning, and hurtles across the square, above the head of the Aluf Pikud, and into the Tel Aviv municipality office building. All the tanks begin firing simultaneously but there is nothing to fire at. The Holocaust memorial crashes into the municipality building and the whole front caves in, windows explode and rain down glass on the parking lot where Prime Minister Rabin was murdered, and I see the Aluf falling down to the ground and covering his head with his arms and I realize what he’d reminded me of — it was Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now — but he doesn’t now, not any more. The spinning Tomerkin structure gets blasted by the tanks and the council building is collapsing and then —

  Something weird is happening in the distance. At first I don’t notice it because I’m watching what’s happening in the square and it isn’t good. There is a strong, sudden wind and it smells of the sea and then I see one tank, and then another, lifted up and hurtled about, randomly, crashing into buildings or into each other and one flies over the square and I see the Aluf lying on his back and he is beginning to scream and then the tank falls on him. The remaining two soldiers in the jeep try to start it and somehow they succeed, they’re driving through the square while things are flying about them and — they make it — they disappear into a side street and I wish they survive; I wish I was going with them. Then I look up, I think I might be crying, there seems to be a sort of mist and I have to blink a couple of times and — the weird thing — it looks like something is rising in the distance, somewhere near the Dizengoff Center Mall, as if the ground is rising and pushing all the buildings and people and cars and — it looks like a mountain.

  NAAMA — PODCAST I (DIGITAL AUDIO)

  . . . having said that, please remember that object-oriented programming, despite all its obvious advantages, can be very easily abused, and that in some cases it might be smart to consider strict function-oriented design. In my many years as a computer . . . Ahm. Excuse me. Just clearing my throat. Well. As I said, in my many years as a computer programmer I’ve witnessed several such cases, so I assure you, dear listeners, that this can be, in fact, real. Despite the fact that . . . ahm. Excuse me. Leonid, please get out of my room. Later. Not now. I’m busy. No, Leonid, I don’t care that you have a problem. If you were one tenth of the programmer you’re supposed to be you wouldn’t have come into my office for a solution. Go read a manual or something.

  Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.

  So, where was I?

  Yes.

  Such cases, despite being rare, may be worthy of a deeper examination, as they present the limitations of the most common programming practice these days. One such case I encountered while serving as a team leader in Leonid for crying out loud I said do not interrupt! Don’t you have any sense of —

  No, I don’t care if the ground is moving. What ground is moving? Are you playing again with —

  What do you mean “the ground is moving”?

  No there’s no earthquake. Your hysterics are quite unimpressive. Close the door behind you and do not interrupt or by God I’ll have you fired from this company first thing tomorrow morning. Out. Out!

  This Leonid person, unbelievable. I sometimes think he has the hots for me.

  Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.

  So, where was I?

  Yes.

  One such case I encountered while serving as a team leader in the IDF involved the conversion of a real-time test engine for a certain kind of radio transmitter/receiver system to a more . . . what was that noise?

  Leonid?

  What’s that noise?

  Leonid, where are you?

  Where’s everyone?

  Something weird is happening. I shall continue recording, in order to analyze the proceedings later. There are strange noises from the outside. Looking out of the window, I can see all sorts of things in the street, flying.

  This is not possible. People don’t fly. Cars don’t fly. There must be a simple explanation. Occam’s Razor.

  It’s a hologram. Someone is pulling a stunt on me. They put a sound system near my window, and they’re screening images on it somehow. That must be it. I saw that on Mission Impossible once. The TV series, obviously. Not the rubbish movie versions. Forget that. Leonid? Leonid! I’m onto you! Stop this foolishness! It’s not as if we have too much free time on our hands here.

  Maybe it’s not Leonid. He doesn’t have the guts for it. There must be another explanation.

  Ilya?

  No, it can’t be him. He has the guts, but not the technology. Who, then?

  Barak? Rakefet?

  Shai? Asaf? Ronen?

  Is there anyone left in this office?

  Hello?

  Now I feel a sort of earthquake. But it can’t be. It’s impossible. I’m dreaming.

  Note to self: Delete previous passage in editing.

  But if I’m dreaming there’s nothing to delete. Or to edit.

  The walls are gone. The walls are gone!

  I’m in the street. I’m in the air! This can’t be real. The only real thing is the MP3 recorder hung around my neck.

  Reality check: MP3 stands for “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3,” and is thus a part of the ISO/IEC 11172-3 standard. The first MP3 encoder was created by the Fraunhofer Society in 1994. I’m flying! I’m flying!

  My memory seems to be intact. I’m still me. There must be an explanation to all this. I should examine my surroundings.

  All is calm. There’s no wind. I’m floating in the air. Near me there’s a Volkswagen Golf. It’s hovering on its side. There’s a young man inside it. Now he’s flying up through the side window. He’s going up in a cloud of glass shreds and plastic. Above him — above everything, now that I think of it — there�
�s something brown and red. It looks a little like a cloud. Not exactly. The young man is now about twenty metres above me. Thirty metres. Now he’s in the brown-red thing. Now there’s a noise, it seems familiar to me. I can identify almost any noise in the world, if I’m up to it. This sounds just like . . . just like . . . I know! It’s a tricky one, because you can’t usually hear sounds like that. You have to be able to analyze them, like me. It sounds exactly like a food processor without the noise of its electric motor.

  Now there’s a wetness. Something is dripping over me. Some kind of fluid. It’s as if someone is determined that I reach the conclusion that a young man, above me, was processed into shreds and now his blood is falling all over me. This is, of course, quite illogical. There must be another explanation.

  Possible hypothesis: hypnosis?

  Possible hypothesis: hallucination?

  Make a note of that.

  Now I’m starting to move. First I turn around on myself, my legs are getting higher than my head. The MP3 recorder hangs upside-down over my cheek. I hope the recording will turn out OK. Now the whole of me is getting higher. Up and up I go. This means that I’m the next one to be processed. I should be terrified, but this can’t really be real. There must be an underlying logic to what I’m seeing and feeling, which will help me to better understand what this can be.

  Possible hypothesis: perhaps I was drugged. Question mark.

  I’m going up and up. I don’t know how long I can stay conscious, hung in the air upside-down like this. Maybe if I lose consciousness this will end. What is going on here?