As he turned away, facing the wall...Yvonne crawled into his bed. As he began to break, she wrapped her arms around him...holding him close; echoing his body’s foetal shape with her own.
She talked to him, then. In a voice soft and sweet, she talked. He couldn’t see her lips moving from his outlook, but he remembered the words more than he heard them. They drifted up and into his mind, warm and sad and clear.
She told him how, as a girl, her parents had taken her to Switzerland. She told him about cobblestone paths, and castles, and a clock-tower that she’d wanted to get married by. She told him about the town they went to – north and over the border – to see where her family had once lived...before they’d come to Israel after nineteen forty-eight. She told him how they’d been less...less than they’d been before Germany’s war. Like so, so many Jewish families, then. But they didn’t talk about that.
“Sometimes it’s better...to not talk about the bad things.” She’d said to him. “But it’s still important to know them.” He agreed, wordlessly. And he meant it.
She told him how – in Geneva, running along the stone path astride a beautiful, mirror-surfaced lake – she had fallen over in the street and skinned her knee. How her father had said that she was very brave, because she hadn’t cried. How he’d put a plaster on her knee and kissed it better. Dio found that...at that point...he couldn’t help but laugh. The way she was phrasing things...the playful emphasis, and her comical imitation of her father’s gruff, old-world accent: for the first time, he saw what he wish he’d seen from the beginning. Yvonne had a talent for misdirection.
“See, Dio? I was like you, once.” He sniffled slightly, chuckling.
“What: a child?” He felt her shake her head.
“Innocent.” She fell silent. Pressing her lips into his back, she finally whispered against his shirt, warming the skin underneath: “Ani Mitzta’eret”, she said: ‘I’m sorry’.
“What for?” He replied.
“I’m sorry for what you saw. I’m sorry for what I said.” She admitted. “We’re not the same, you and I. We’re nothing alike. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, does it?” He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. He just smiled to himself. They soon fell asleep; awkwardly rolled up in one another in Dio’s bed.
Over the time they’d been there, he and Yvonne had grown extremely close. That had been the first night...but, Dio remembered, after a couple of months had passed, they slept together most nights. It was rare, after a long enough time that they ever didn’t. The bunker got cold at night, after all. Very cold. And when they slept in the same bed, Yvonne rarely cried out in her sleep; though, alone, she rarely didn’t. So...from a practical standpoint, it was smarter. Beyond that, of course...they both knew and openly admitted what it actually was: human comfort. A quiet, gentle, and compassionate form of love.
The two had never been truly intimate, of course. Not in the most common sense of the word, anyway. Both of them seemed content with this. More than content. As far as Dio knew, Yvonne lacked any interest in anything of that sort...and for his part, he doubted that he would have – if she had been interested, and with him – been able to properly reciprocate. He told himself that it was respect; friendship. An almost sibling-like bond that had grown between and around them. It could have been, of course: at a certain level of affection and closeness, it hardly matters how such feelings manifest as they spill out from the heart and mind and into the world. But it wasn’t that.
And deep down, Dio knew that it wasn’t.
Looking back, Dio saw that it was, in reality, something that he’d been fighting against acknowledging for some time. Yvonne had always been kind to him – if distant; if slightly condescending or short with him, occasionally – but...as Yvonne herself had said: She wasn’t like him. And something about the ways in which that was true – and the extent to which it was – frightened him.
Naïve – avoidant – though he knew it was, Dio liked; loved and wanted to preserve...the image of Yvonne that he held in his mind. The one with the weight of those memories he held of her stripped back and away from her.
Somehow, too: he knew that she would want the same.
§§§
Dio looked around; surprised that he could. He was sitting against a tree; a tree scorched on one side by, it appeared, powerful flames...and surrounded by sand and dust and small, wind-etched, sun-bleached rocks. The sky above had a washed out, white-golden quality to it. He knew that sky. That was his sky. That was his sun, bearing down from above.
He frowned. He recognised the place. It was, perhaps, the only place – after that white room – that no power on Earth could have forced him to go back to a second time. And yet...today...it appeared he was going to see both. Slowly, he got to his feet.
“Do you know what your name means?” The voice from the lightless room echoed out. Dio turned, looking behind him. There she stood; just to the side of the tree: a woman. Not old; not young. Somewhere between thirty and forty years old, he estimated...with brown hair that seemed to be having trouble deciding whether it was light or dark. Whatever her age, it was too young for the turn-of-the-twentieth-century blouse and ankle-length skirt that she wore. She was, he thought, pretty...in a particular, librarian-esque sort of way. He found himself wondering what her eyes looked like. It was a strong desire...and he couldn’t quite understand the sudden and pervasive depth of his interest. Perhaps it was simply that they were hidden in plain sight. He couldn’t see them behind the light caught by those thick-rimmed, angled-down glasses. She was hiding behind those glasses, he realised; directed down, as they were, toward a clipboard that she cradled in her arms like a small child.
“My father told me it was Greek for ‘wine’.” Dio replied. She gave a single, brisk nod without looking up.
“How did you come to be a part of The Organisation?”
“Mister Wright brought me in. Found me a place in the Esquiline Division.”
“Do you know what The Organisation is? What it does? What its aims and goals are? Its ultimate purpose in this world?” Dio found the way this woman spoke to be, somehow, deeply disconcerting. There was a formality...a crispness to her questions; a disconnectedness between one thought and the next that made him feel as though what he was saying didn’t matter in the least. Perhaps it didn’t.
“No.”
“Have you ever asked? Inquired? Sought to, through research or investigation, discover?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I owe The Organisation my life.”
“And this is, to you, adequate reason to not question?”
“It’s adequate reason for loyalty...” Dio corrected.
“And this is, to you, the meaning of ‘loyalty’? Unquestioning obedience?” The woman pushed. Dio’s eyes narrowed. He looked deep inside himself. There was only one truthful answer.
“Yes.” He noticed a shallow smile on her face; still angled downward though it was.
“Good. Where are we, Mister Ben-Zeev?”
“I don’t know.” he lied. The thick swathe of road off to the side of where they stood ran off to the horizon on either side of them. He knew that, in one direction – the direction that traffic, on any normal day, would have been moving – the road pushed north into Jerusalem. To the south, followed far enough, it would eventually take a traveller all the way to Hebron. They were on the cusp of the West Bank; surrounded by it on all sides but north.
“Do you know what the ‘Limbic System’ is, Mister Ben-Zeev?”
“No.” He paused. “You can call me Dio, though.” He stepped forward, offering his hand. She jerked back reflexively, as if he’d held out a hissing, venom-spitting cobra. Slowly – cautiously – she reached out...hand trembling and cheeks flushing with pink, and allowed him to slowly clasp her soft palm in his. She looked up at him. Her eyes were...
He blinked. Hard.
“Your eyes are...” They – her eyes – narrowed. Her top lip cur
led upward in an angry, unsurprised sneer.
“Enough.”
“No, I mean...your eyes...they’re...”
“Freakish? Monstrous? Grotesque? Inhuman?” She spat with unprecedented emotion. Dio barely noticed. He was lost in her eyes. From somewhere deep within his mind, he registered an awareness that this woman: she was a woman utterly lost on this world. He could hear it in her voice; what she expected from his reaction. Perhaps he could detect it, emanating in waves that carried faint echoes of what she, herself, felt. He slowly shook his head.
“Wonderful.” And he meant that. As much as he’d ever, ever meant anything in his life...he meant that.
They were purple. Violet, more accurately. Flecks of sparkling silver and implacable steel played around their edges. Bright, startling blue ringed the dark voids on which his world had suddenly come to centre. What – for anyone else – would have been the whites of her eyes, swam with rippling, swirling violet; lighter, as if the peaceful seas ringing a partly-submerged islet. They were like no eyes had ever been: incandescent; glowing...
“Mister Ben-Zeev. Dio. This...” She pulled back, composing herself...angling her face down and obscuring her eyes beneath eyelids, glasses, and the angle of her face. Her cheeks were still flushed with colour as she adjusted her blouse and straightened her skirt. “This is a simulation.” There was a touch of admonition in her voice, as if she were telling off an overly enthusiastic schoolboy. “Social pleasantries are redundant. Your neurology is being mapped as we speak. There is no need to actively engage.”
“But isn’t it nicer?” Dio smiled. “To...‘actively engage’?” He hadn’t meant for it to sound flirtatious. And yet, from the deepening blush in her cheeks, to the way she pulled the clipboard in tighter to her chest and angled her face further downward still, he could tell she’d taken it in that way.
“The...the ‘Limbic System’ is a collection of structures within the Human brain, sitting above the brain stem, to either side of the thalamus and below the cerebrum. Our...‘software’...catalogues the behaviour of the Limbic System and allows us to determine ways in which we can indirectly provoke certain responses. We do this via the light into which we asked you to look. Only a few seconds of real time has passed; you are, in actuality, still in the processing area in Palatine Hill. Do you understand what this means?”
“I...think so?”
“Good.” She gave a single, brisk nod. “So where are we...Dio?”
“I don’t know.” He lied again.
“Stop.” She snapped. “This is a location from your memory; an important location, which has been selected by your brain in response to selective pressure on structures within the Limbic System that enable the interpretation of emotion from, and correlation of emotion with long term memories. It is not possible that this location would be unknown to you. It is not possible, in fact, that this location is not singularly important to where you position yourself, relative to your past. And so, I ask again: where are we?”
“The Derech Hevron Checkpoint.” He murmured, stepping slowly back and away from her. He placed his hand on the bark of the tree, with a hesitant, uncertain kind of affection. It bothered him: how real it felt beneath his fingers. “At least...we’re where it was.” He pointed north. “The new one is the better part of a kilometre in that direction.”
“Why?”
“There’s a SAM-site, there. Right on the outskirts of Jerusalem.” Off her look of confusion, Dio clarified: “A surface-to-air missile battery – state of the art; an Israeli-Chinese hybrid – to intercept rocket attacks. Since the Damascus incidents, there’re three times as many as there used to be. Even around Jerusalem. Especially around Jerusalem.” Dio sighed.
“Why is this significant?”
“Well...it used to be that Jerusalem didn’t need much protecting. There was a line in the sand that we didn’t cross. Neither did the Palestinians. Blood was fine. As much blood as you could spill. An occasional bombing? Yes, but...nowhere important. And that wasn’t nothing, you have to understand: that was something. For countries on the brink: ours; theirs...that was an armistice in and of itself. A kind of respect perhaps? A foundation that might have been built upon? An awareness, at least...that for all our differences, we are one in that thing that we love the most. So there were no rockets, certainly. Never rockets in Jerusalem. But things change. Killing only makes more killing.”
“Why is this place important to you?” She asked. She was letting him talk. He wished she wouldn’t, but – he supposed – it was probably the point.
“Look.” Dio reluctantly turned his attention to the tree. He ran his fingers, again, over the blackened bark. “See how it’s only scorched like that on the one side?” The woman eyes tracing after Dio’s fingers. He glanced at those eyes again – quickly...not wanting her to notice – before continuing: “A rocket attack. Blew the road-block sky high. We didn’t even know that they could do that, y’know? The precision of it. I still remember the days when Hamas were lucky to get a rocket within fifty kilometres of a target. But, like I said, things change.”
“And...?” She prompted.
“And...they brought me here, afterwards...before they took me to Tel Aviv. I didn’t know they knew when we first got here.”
“What happened?”
“They pushed me down on my knees...and they pressed my face against it.” Dio fell to his knees, pushing his cheek up against the burned wood: re-enacting the dark tableau. “They said they’d kill me. They held a gun to my head. They pulled the trigger. Click. Click. Click.” Dio whispered. “You’d think that after hearing that sound a few times...you’d stop expecting the end. You’d know that you weren’t going to be let off so easily. But no.”
“Do you regret your actions, Dio?” He sighed shakily, coming back from the memories.
“I have no right to.” He admitted.
“Explain, please.”
“To regret my actions would be to value twelve lives over one hundred. I can’t do that. I love Israel: I believe...in Israel. But I love and believe in God, also: and it’s not my place to assign value to one Human life over another on His behalf...Jewish or no. I don’t see an Israeli life as worth more than an Arab life – a Palestinian life – and, in my heart, I cannot bring myself to believe that my God would, either.”
“The Jewish conception of ‘God’ – ”
“ – Stop. Please. I know where that train of thought goes. Everything that has ever been written has been, beyond its message, a product of its time, and of the biases implicit in the hearts and minds of those who wrote it. Why would our Book be any different? Because God provided the ideas? Unless He wrote the words – with His own hands – those words are flawed by the folly of men. The onus of interpretation must lie with the individual.”
Dio felt a sudden burst of pain across his entire right side. The world began to darken. He saw the woman’s mouth moving, as though nothing had happened. Dio winced as the pain cascaded through him again. A buzzing, rippling torrent of sound assaulted his ears, forcing him to cover them with his hands.
“Dio!” The buzzing solidified, becoming a voice. “Dio!” Yvonne’s voice. “Dio! Time to go!” It shouted. “Dio!”
§§§
With a surge of colour and light, Dio’s world transitioned back to the white room; now back to its blindingly lit original state. He blearily struggled to focus on Yvonne – standing over him; hand pulled back – ready, presumably, to slap him again if he didn’t come to.
“Eve?” he squinted, shielding his eyes. A halo of light shone out from behind her head, silhouetting her form. She appeared to be at the heart of an eclipse; the dark heart of an angelic visage: but her expression was clouded and grim. “You hit me...” he mused, lethargically raising his hand towards his throbbing cheek. Behind her, he could see the door open with Wright standing there, a bemused, amused look on his face.
“You didn’t have to be so abrupt, Yvonne...” Wright chuckled.
/> “I absolutely, definitely did.” She threw the words back and over her shoulder. Crouching down, she grabbed Dio’s collar, pulling him forward.
“We really, really need to go, Dio. I can’t stay here for another minute.”
“What did you see?” he croaked. “What did she show you?”
“Demons.” The haunted desperation in Yvonne’s eyes had been replaced with a kind of rattled anxiety and miserable comprehension. “Demons and ghosts.” He reached up, sliding his hand around the curve of her cheek, looking into her eyes.
“Me as well.” He whispered. “Me as well. Did you...see her eyes?” Yvonne looked at him like he’d utterly lost his mind.
“No? What does that have to do with anything?” Before he could answer, Smoke joined Wright in the doorway:
“You called.” Dio looked past Yvonne, and back to the two figures. Smoke stood next to Wright; arms folded.
“Yes.” Wright inclined his head, ever so slightly, in her direction. “Would you please escort Yvonne upstairs?”
“Why?” Smoke sneered.
“Just do as your told for once, would you?”
“Fuck y – ” Smoke cut herself off, glancing at Dio and Yvonne, and, presumably, choosing to save whatever issues she and Wright had with one another for another time and place. “Yeah. Whatever.” Yvonne cautiously got to her feet, eyeing the two alias-laden individuals in the doorway. Wright seemed to sense the root of her uncertainty.
“Don’t worry. This isn’t a punishment, Yvonne.” She folded her arms over her chest, unconvinced. “Am I reading this situation incorrectly? You would like to get back above ground, wouldn’t you?”
“More than anything on or...” She coughed. “Under this Earth,” Yvonne nodded. Smoke rolled her eyes.
“So come on, GI-Jew...let’s get you some fresh air.”
Act 2
The Disappearances
§
Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Page 12