by Lavie Tidhar
Love will keep us together.
A multiple orgasm is the Kingdom of God.
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: a rock of solid love. 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 love.
Let’s get it on.
GIMMEL
For Sam, love came as a surprise. As a growing boy, he had the tendency to fall quickly, disastrously — but mercifully briefly — in love with every suitable female to cross his way. These included, but were not limited to: his English-language teacher Miss Helen, who came from England; his classmates Shiri, Renana, Galit, Adi, Tali, Vered, and the twins Miri and Liri; his sister’s friends Liora, Talia and Keren; his friend Shai’s mother, Mrs. Tamir; a girl he once saw on a bus as she looked out of the window of another bus going in the opposite direction; the girl selling tickets at the cinema; several well-known Hollywood actresses; the women in his father’s hidden stash of Playboy magazines; the guide in the youth movement; her sister; Mrs. Nevoh from across the road; and others.
As a professional agent operating in the world of shadows, as it were, Sam had thought himself long immune to love. He abandoned his youthful enthusiasms gratefully. There was no place for love, he felt, in the world of covert operations.
That love would find him again, not unlike a heat-seeking missile used to assassinate a Hezbollah commander on top of the now-not-so-high Tel Aviv Central Bus Station in the midst of war and disaster, was a shock.
It also came as something of a shock to the other forty thousand people down below who, moments earlier, were trying to kill each other with all their hearts. Now it was as if a love-bomb had been dropped amidst unsuspecting spectators. They embraced each other, touched, kissed, fondled, and forgot everything but the universal need to be held, loved. From the crushed remains of the station’s underground levels, people now crawled out to the light of day — to the light of her — blinking, bloody, looking up. The throng took them in, hugged them, drowned them with love.
Love is not entirely unlike worship. For Sam, on the roof of the world, with the mountain rising above, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, the most amazing, and the most precious. He would, he knew, do anything for her. She was everything that was good in the world, everything that was worth preserving. Where she came from, or why, were questions that did not cross his mind. What her aspirations and goals were, what foods she liked or disliked, her habits before going to sleep or after getting up — there were not things that concerned him. His love, therefore, was the closest one can come to the ideal form of love, which is platonic. Love, when realized, is tempered, like steel is tempered in the fierce fires of the furnace. Small things, charming before, can seem unbearably irritating. Little gestures, a tone of voice, the wrong comment at the wrong moment — love is tempered, forged, tested in these laboratories of life. But for Sam, love was an absolute. He would have killed for her and not thought anything of it. His devotion, his loyalty, previously reserved for his country, were transferred entirely to her. She was everything.
The Fireman took a step back and stared at the girl, unmoving, his lips moving silently though no words came. The girl was radiant, a being of pure light, dispelling darkness. Below, women copulated with men, men with men, women with women, people daisy-chaining around the entire circumference of the station. Above, one single movement drew Sam’s attention.
A yeshiva boy, with gun.
DALET
The last remaining paratrooper, black hat, black shoes, black trousers, black beard, pale skin and an Uzi submachine gun. Shouting Shema Yisrael! as he brought the Uzi up and around in a fluid motion and his finger closed on the trigger and the first spray of bullets spat out, Kill the whore of Babylon, Kill the Jezebel, Kill the woman before she could speak again —
The girl turned, looked, but what expression was on her face it was hard to tell —
The Fireman, too, turning to look, his mouth opening — to laugh? To shout? As the crowd below gasped, collectively, and looked up —
And Sam, in a final act of childhood infatuation, jumped. His body arced through the air. The bullets seemed to sound one by one, a pfpf-pf-pf like the moving of a slow train, the bullets meant for the girl slamming into the soft tissues that are, that were Sam’s body, a phhhtchoo, phhht-choo as they were absorbed into his belly. His body flew through the air, slammed into the yeshiva boy and knocked the gun from his hands, there on the edges of the sunken roof, and his last thought was of flying, his last action one of selfless love, for country or woman or an ideal, he would never now know as they rolled, and thoughts fled and were gone —
And the crowd screamed, that multi-headed, unthinking beast, as two figures, rolling as if in a slow dance, tumbled from the roof of the station and fell down to earth.
HEH
The man may have saved you , the Fireman said, but he cannot save you again. He took a step forward, and another, and the darkness gathered around him, and the girl turned, and she shook her head and for a moment looked infinitely sad, and she spoke one word, and nothing else: Come.
The Fireman came at her, crossing the roof, and each beat of his feet on the concrete shook the entire structure, and the darkness grew around him and everyone who felt its touch was sickened and afraid.
The girl did not move. Patiently she waited, the light around her pulsing like a heart. She extended her hand forward, palm up, and made a motion with her fingers: Come.
The Fireman roared and black flames erupted from his fingertips. The Fireman ran and the night ran with him. He charged at the girl: she stood her ground and waited.
Below, the crowd, too, waited.
As the Earth rotates so it is plunged into both darkness and light. The two are linked, replacing each other over and over. It is what day is: the twin periods of lightness and night. The girl opened her arms to the Fireman. Light waited for dark, for on their own they are incomplete, not a lie but, nevertheless, an untruth. And so she opened her arms and love met hatred and light met dark and the too-muchness of each was eased.
They held each other, and from the high peaks of the mount the winds blew cold, perhaps angry, perhaps amused. They held each other and it was a battle such as is drawn every day since the first apes began to stand. It was like a sexual act, which is a battle and is passion — which is haste and love and fear of extinction. In the cold wind of the mount the two figures reduced, the light and the dark chasing each other, and down below the minds of the crowd were, for the first time, freed, returned to them as they were, as a flux, and people stared at each other and didn’t know where they were. High on the roof of the station the two figures were reduced, diminished, at last joined.
And the single figure on the rooftop raised its head to the mount and laughed, and it was the sound of friends sharing a joke, the sound of old couples who still find each other’s stories fresh, the sound of children in the playground hearing, for the first time, a punch-line that had been told and retold for countless years but was, to them, entirely new.
VAV
For Mordechai Abir, Historian of the Occult, this was the first day of the rest of his life. He wondered when he last slept. The part of him that liked to impose order on what is essentially random and messy and unpleasant — on history and life — was making mental lists. Below: something like Nero’s Rome. Above: something like a World War Two picture. Something else: this figure that seemed to be staring at him, a slight smile curving on its face, not male, not female, something more and less than human, and below, nearly forty thousand heads looked up, and everyone left on the roof looked straight at the figure there, which was once a fireman and a girl and was now — both? neither? — seemed to be looking at each of them in turn, and then it raised an arm, and it pointed.
Thunder, appropriately, sounded. A complicated pattern of lightning etched an inscription in the ski
es. Then the clouds fled, and day, a bright light in a deep blue sky, emerged, hurting Mordechai’s eyes. He blinked and felt tears. When he could see again he saw the mount, rising there, but the air was warmer now, the cold touch of the high winds receding. Sunlight stroked his face. The figure on the roof said, It is time for us to go. Will you follow?
There was a deep, profound silence: the kind that is found in an abyss, the kind found far below the ocean waves. Then whispers. Then, non-verbal communication: heads nodded. Eyes blinked. There were no smiles, perhaps, but something stranger on those battle-scarred faces. Something akin to hope.
Yet the figure still seemed to stare directly at Mordechai. Will you come? it seemed to whisper to him.
Come where? he said — whispered — or perhaps he was not speaking at all, not with his voice.
You’ll have to go there to find out.
Mordechai, clutching the documents in his hand, his precious cargo that he had won, his newly gained life’s work, did not know what to say.
My scribe, the figure said, sounding amused. Will you remain behind like Moses, to tell the story, or will you act, and see its end?
The choice was his. He made it. The figure nodded. Then it fell to earth.
ZAYIN
It landed amidst the crowd, and the people parted before it. The few survivors on the roof followed it, falling down, a rain of people, and were not hurt. The figure gestured again — there, there. Beyond, the mountain itself seemed to part, reveal a path, a way ahead.
Will you follow? the figure said. There was a lightness in its voice, a laughter, and an easing. Not waiting for a reply, it walked ahead.
On top of the roof the historian watched, holding in his hands what, he decided, would become the first part of his magnum opus: He would call it The Tel Aviv Dossier. He watched the figure walk, past ruined buildings, fallen cables, silenced cars: and in its wake a multitude came, the people of Israel going across the urban desert, towards . . .
He watched them, one by one, until they disappeared in the distance. Then, taking a deep breath, he went to find the staircase that would lead him down into the empty city.
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R S
LAVIE TIDHAR
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the linked-story collection HebrewPunk (2007) and the novellas An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2009), and Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (2010). He also edited the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults (2008) and The First Apex Book of World SF (2009).
He can be found online at http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk
NIR YANIV
Nir Yaniv is a writer and musician living in Tel Aviv. His first short story collection, Ktov Ke’shed Mishachat (Write Like a Devil), was published in Israel in 2007. His stories also appeared in translation in Weird Tales and other magazines. He founded and edited Israel’s first online genre magazine, and in 2007 became editor of the print magazine Chalomot Be’aspamia.
His web site is http://www.nyfiction.org