by Lavie Tidhar
They don’t remember how long they’ve been this way. They don’t care. The beards on the guys faces get longer and longer. There are two pairs of scissors on the roof, but they’re rarely used. They elevator themselves down only to fetch water or look for more canned foodstuffs, but they try to make those trips as short as possible, get back to the roof, where it’s safe. They feel like they could live like this forever.
But today something is different. Since midnight there’s no playing on the roof, no more music. A wave of nervousness passes through the Rooftop Players, and they sit quietly, separated, wondering what has happened. They think, each of them, they may have seen something strange and wonderful, a woman wreathed in light, passing down below, but it might just be the mushrooms.
Nevertheless, the image lingers, makes them restless. One of them stands up and goes to the elevator, lowering himself from the roof to search for water and food. Then another one goes. And another one.
After some time there’s no one left on the roof. The Rooftop Players walk, each submerged in his or her own thoughts, passing through streets that are no longer empty. Others walk the streets today, emerging from basements and fortified apartment blocks, from petrol stations and bookshops, from hidey-holes and safe houses, women and men, the young and the old, all who still remain. They think not of the war, not of safety or survival. None is aware of the others. Yet they all head in the same direction. All following the path. Her path.
Heading south.
Where the Central Station lies.
THE WAR
7.
In the awful light of the burning helicopter nobody notices the one remaining living paratrooper landing on the roof. He cuts the ropes and his parachute goes free, a huge prayer shawl flying away to the east. He lies on the floor, on his back, breathing heavily, looking up.
There’s a fire truck in the sky, and it’s coming down.
*
Sam fails to believe what he’s seeing. At first he doesn’t believe that the Chief Rabbi’s paratroopers were taken down so easily. Then he can’t accept the helicopter’s destruction. And then, then there’s the fire truck. It’s huge, it’s red, and it’s surrounded by tongues of fire. It simply can’t be. He thinks maybe there are hallucinogens in the air. Maybe he’s tripping. Maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s not even in Tel Aviv, but drugged and locked in a cell by some terrorist organization, and his mind is trying to come to terms with the situation by inventing this elaborate story about a city wiped off the face of Israel. Maybe there was no meeting with the PM, no deal with the Chief Rabbi, no mission, nothing. Maybe he’s old, stuck in a home for the terminally ill, passing his days in happy delirium.
But he’s not happy. He’s not happy, and there’s a huge red flame-throwing fire truck in the sky, coming down, coming down, growing larger in the skies above. It isn’t possible, yet it must be true.
That’s one hell of a report I’ll have to write, he thinks.
The fire truck keeps coming down.
*
Mordechai is struck with awe. As he watches the truck, slowly rotating around its vertical axis and spitting flames in all directions, he thinks of an old film he once watched, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He feels as if he’s starring in the climactic scene of that film, watching an alien spaceship descending, looking for a way of communication. He remembers how it was done in the film — by music — and for a moment regrets his lack of dedication to the piano lessons his mother forced him to take when he was a child. That thought brings him back to the present, and he starts looking for his mother. She stands near the edge of the bay, training her gun on the descending fire truck. Her hand is steady. She doesn’t even blink. He knows better than to try and call her right now. Another film comes, unbidden, into his mind . . .
The Wizard of Oz. Right after Dorothy lands.
The fire truck lands. And Mordechai Abir screams.
Feet sticking out from beneath the great red vehicle . . . for a moment he thinks his mother’s feet are going to curl in on themselves and disappear below the engine, but no: they merely shudder, once, and are still.
*
For a moment, everything is still. Then there’s a sound, a scream of concrete rising from the very heart of the building. Pressure has been mounting and the building isn’t taking it well. The floor hums like an ungrounded electric bass. Then the supporting beams can hold it no more and it falls.
From above, it looks as if the building is being blown up from the inside. As level 7 becomes level 6, then level 5, the surrounding walls fly outwards in a whirlwind of cement and dust. When it stops, half a floor above level 4, there’s a crash that could be heard several kilometres away, were there anyone there to hear it.
The reason for this becomes clear to the survivors of the former 7th level as they get up from the floor — which has strangely survived the fall in one piece — and try to dust themselves. They look at the fire truck, which is still standing there, still burning, and then they notice the rest.
Around the Central Bus Station is a crowd of forty thousand people. Everyone left in Tel Aviv.
They’re quiet.
They’re waiting.
There’s a hiss from the fire truck. From within the flames, the form of a man appears. At first he seems like a mere shadow, but then he grows, fills up, solidifies. In a voice as loud as a foghorn, as dry as forest fire, he clears his throat.
There is a moment of silence. There is a moment in which time changes, when future becomes present, when present becomes past. There is a moment in which everything halts, fragments, reshapes itself into words, a narrative of human time.
Every human moment is a beginning, and an ending.
P A R T F I V E :
T H E L A S T T E S T A M E N T S
I have seen much that was previously hidden.
I have known that which cannot be spoken of, but fuck it, let’s mention it anyway. I’ve come to tell you. Everything.
I have felt the cold winds that lash the body into a thousand fragments of pain. I have dwelt in the dark places, and grappled with the ancient ones, and saw into their minds. And I have learned this:
The universe is a cold, dark place. The universe is a cellar, in which humanity are prisoners. The universe has no meaning beyond being. I have seen it. I have passed through fire and was unharmed. I have passed through pain and was unpained. I have seen the world spread out before me like a thing spoiled — a rotten carcass left in the field of battle for the carrion crows.
I have come to tell you all this.
Blessed are the mean, for they shall be triumphant.
Blessed are the cold at heart, for theirs shall be the softest bed.
Blessed are the bullies, for to them is promised the kingdom of heaven, where the cold uncaring spirits of the mountains dwell, the masters of creation by dint of teeth and talons, of power and aggression.
Blessed are the pimps, for they sell love but are not slaves to it.
Blessed are the sick, for their path shall soon come to an end.
Blessed are the meek, for their bones shall bleach white on the highway of life, rich pickings for the rest of us.
You have waited for me!
And I have come.
Do not rejoice! Do not light a candle under a bushel or on a candle stick. Put it in a petrol station, and watch a multitude of cars blow up. Put it under the feet of men who are not worthy. Tie it to the tails of cats, or foxes, like Samson did.
Think not that I come to destroy the law: for there is no law. I have come to destroy. Yes. If there is anything left to destroy, I shall destroy it.
For I say unto you: do not be righteous pricks.
Drink. Smoke. Fuck. Do unto others what you have always wanted to do. Because up there, there is nothing that cares for you.
You are like ants to the things on the mount. And they, in turn, are gnats to the greater, older ones, those who put out suns and freeze oceans, who hurtle black holes into po
pulated planets. There are many worlds. They all suck.
Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast come out farting. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee. And the same with your left eye. Or your testicles.
For you have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil, but embrace it. And whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, raise your leg to him, and knee him in the balls, and kill his wife and kids, and eat his dog.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. Keep them on your person, and keep a gun, too, and shoot to kill. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
I have seen the darkness. It is great indeed.
Forget God.
If God was a prisoner he’d be someone’s bitch. They’d be building Route Six through his asshole by now. Fuck God. Fuck him up the ass.
Therefore whosoever heareths these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, who built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. So pick up that rock, and smash your neighbour’s head with it.
Let’s rock.
*
The Hebrew Bible says God created the world in six days; on the seventh he rested. Worlds are not as easy to end as to start. Seven is an important number in Hebrew numerology. So is forty. So is thirteen. The world is made of letters, and each of the twenty-two letters in the aleph-bet is also a number: aleph is one, bet is two, yud is ten, lamed is thirty, tav is four hundred. Thus the science of gimatria exists: to discern patterns in the infinite strings of letters, of numbers, that make the world.
What happened, if it happened at all, happened like this:
ALEPH
The silence changed. Before it had been attentive, tense. Now it had a different cadence, a vibrating string of fear, that of uncertainty that would soon turn to rage. It was the silence of forty thousand survivors, a quietude deep like an abyss, into which the Fireman’s words were hurled like rocks, thrown like knives, words to open minds — and break heads.
When the silence broke, it began with a receding, the way the sea draws back from the shore before the arrival of a tidal wave. The silence grew more profound.
Then it ended.
It did so with a scream.
The scream was infectious. The scream was like the blowing of a trumpet, which in the Jewish faith (much tested in the remaining denizens of Tel Aviv) would signal the end of the world. The scream belonged to an amateur filmmaker named Dubi who had somehow managed, so far, to stay alive.
The stone that bashed open his head was stained with his blood, though the head bleeds surprisingly little. The back of Dubi’s head caved in. His scream was cut short.
What happened next was not a war, but a riot. It had no order, which war demands in order to be respectable. No agreements had been signed around a table, there were no arguments about which pen should be used. One man in the crowd did manage to use a pen, but not for writing: with incredible force he did not know he possessed, he penetrated the major artery in the neck of his neighbour, driving the shaft of the pen deep into the flesh, and that time there was a lot of blood. It sprayed the man’s face and hands and blinded him; and a woman behind took the opportunity to turn him around and punch him in the nose, so hard that the nose bones were shoved deep into his brain, killing him instantly.
There were no rules, no commandments to regulate warfare, no Thou Shalt Not Kill. A group mind had taken hold, a snarling, vicious, multiheaded beast that tried to stamp the life out of itself. Somewhere above their heads a man’s figure was clapping and laughing and gibbering, singing nonsense words in an unknown tongue.
Then something made him stop. A second silence, coming from the north. A silence that set his teeth on edge, that choked the laughter in his throat, that made his fingers curl into fists. At the edge of the riot, a silence profound spread from a figure one could not see clearly — a woman cast aglow in light.
Where she approached, women and men lowered their hands, let knives and rocks and guns drop to the ground. Where she approached the silence returned, qualitatively different, a silence of calm, a silence of love.
The figure on the roof gibbered, and as it spoke in its unknown tongue, the riot picked up again, but the louder the man spoke, the deeper the approaching silence became. It was not a physical battle but that of sound and unsound, and the man roared, and an old woman’s heart, standing too close to the ruined building of the station, gave way at the sound and stopped, but her sudden silence was incorporated into the approaching one, like the notes of an underwater symphony.
Then the glowing woman came closer still, and they saw that she did not walk on the ground but, like light, like silence, was in the air. She rose the way a snowflake rises, though it had never snowed in Tel Aviv before. And where passed, the sky cleared and the clouds broke, and she rose still until at last she stood on the roof of the station and faced the Fireman.
BET
The Fireman said one word: bitch. He roared, and from his open mouth black flies came swarming out, a streaming cloud of them darting at the girl, threatening to cover her the way they would a corpse. One of the Fireman’s followers had the misfortune of being in their way. He was hidden by the swarm of flies. When they passed all that remained of the man was a skeleton, with only little bits of red, gory flesh still attached. The Fireman licked his lips.
The girl held out her hand. The flies quieted around her. They buzzed drunkenly. They swayed, though there was no breeze. They sighed, and then they flew away, high into the clouds, and disappeared towards the mountain.
The mountain seemed to loom very close, then. There was a sense in the crowd of vast intelligences watching them from afar, of eyes the size of moons studying them, bored and yet anticipatory, and it was very cold, and people wrapped their arms around themselves to stop the sudden chill.
Die, the Fireman said. And a darkness came out of him, the darkness found in an empty tomb, deep underground, that had not been opened in countless years, the dark of the abandoned dead, and he flung it at her, and watched her step back, and smiled, and his teeth were stained red. The darkness met the light and fought it, and for a moment all those on the roof, and those below, could see her as she was: a young girl, and vulnerable, and they drew in their breaths together, and the sound shook in the cold air.
But the girl in turn shook her head, and gained back her step, and when the darkness met her it dissolved, the light winning, and the Fireman howled, a deep guttural sound that was neither human nor animal, but something both more and less than that.
When he spoke again it was in the voice of ancient gods, of Mot and Leviathan and Ba’al, words of binding and of death, and the words travelled and those who heard them cried and one elderly man slit his own throat and slumped in a pool of his own urine and blood. But the girl stood firm.
And she too spoke then, and she said:
*
I have not seen much. But I know this.
All you need is love.
Blessed are the lovers, for they have love, and they love and are given love in return.
Love is all around you. Love and be loved.
Blessed are the parents, for they have their children to love.
Blessed are the shy who finally confess their love.
Blessed are the young, who experience first love, and the old, who experience the last, the lasting love.
Make love, not war.
Walk naked in the rain and sing yourselves, and
celebrate yourselves. Wash shame from your bodies, embrace each other, touch, feel, give and accept each other’s love.
Love makes the world go round.
Love was there when Eve awakened Adam with her mouth. Love was there when they shared forbidden fruit.
But fruit should not be forbidden. Eat fruit. It is good for you.
Neither should love be forbidden. It is in each of us, the lonely and the scared and the ones well-off. Awaken your love. Seek out your lovers.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward right here on earth, if only you find love.
Take the salt of the earth: it’s a fine spice. But if the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? Variety is good. Love is a shelf of spices. There is cumin and paprika and cinnamon and cloves, chili and pepper, and you should use them all. The taste of nipples is the taste of a perfect sunset.
Love is the light of the world. A body that is naked should not be hid. Set it on a hill, rather, and sing out to your lovers to come.
Think not that I am come to destroy. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, there is no more possession. From now on there can be only love, and love is to be shared, not restricted.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Join the mile-high club. Make nookie. It’s the best thing there is.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye but love? And what more do you need?
Therefore I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; think only of your body, and put no clothes on, and feel the love.