by L. L. Fine
A brief silence took over the room. They dipped in each other's eyes, but each of them swam in his own world. For the first time in a long time, Zomy allowed himself to think about the real reason that led him into the little filthy, overcrowded room. He groped for it without a thought, his OWN souvenir, hidden in a golden pendant to hang around his neck.
"Let's have a drink," Lia finally blurted out.
03/27/01 Email
I thought a lot about what you said and maybe you're right. I had Lia on my mind for quite a long time and I'm pretty sure she thinks about me, too. For example, the same night after Bobby died we went to a bar and didn’t talk at all. We just sat there silently and looked at each other.
There were several times I was sure she wanted to tell me something but she never did. Then I took her hand and stroked her fingers, and she let me. I remember I stroked her hand and she started crying, shaking a little. It scared me. I never saw her crying before, and besides, I hate seeing people cry. I’ve had enough crying in my life.
But Lia comes from a different family, she mourns no one, and always seemed so happy. So why was she crying? I don’t know. But at that moment, I knew I could caress every part of her body and she would cooperate. I knew that even then - and that's why I would not do it.
You're right, Doctor Love. I have a little crush on her. But if I want Lia, I need her to come to me out of her own will. I hope you understand me.
This is what I wanted to tell you now.
*
I spent a few days without any signal from Chromosome. These were not short days. The train of thought that he turned on inside me started moving faster and faster, as it took me to places I never thought I would visit again.
Who was he? What did he want from me?
I read the correspondence between us. I must admit the communications deterred me a bit. Although I'm sure, still, someone was joking with me, I couldn't confirm buds of truths in his story. I did a little research myself on the genome. I tried to check with friends, to find out if it was even a little possible to fish out so much personal information about me.
There were more questions than answers.
Days passed, and instead of forgetting the case, let it slip away, I became obsessed. I started infesting more chats. I started to be more daring with my names.
04/1/01 MSN Chat
Chromosome: You're not serious!
Looking for Chromosome: Where did you disappear to?
Chromosome: What is that name? Are you crazy?
Chromosome: Forget it, you don’t want to know.
Looking for Chromosome: It's so that you'll know I'm looking for you.
Chromosome: OK, then. I know.
Looking for Chromosome: So where you been?
Chromosome: Well, forget about it.
Looking for Chromosome: You started to hide information? LOL!
Chromosome: Not hiding. It's just a family matter.
Looking for Chromosome: Passing through the genes, eh?
Chromosome: Sort of. My father's memorial.
Looking for Chromosome: Oh… sorry for your loss.
Chromosome: That’s okay, it was quite a while ago.
Looking for Chromosome: Still…
Chromosome: It's more painful than strange, because I've seen myself in his place.
Looking for Chromosome: ?
Chromosome: He died from cancer, you see. Lung cancer.
Looking for Chromosome: I don’t understand.
Chromosome: I'm going to develop it in a few months.
Looking for Chromosome: What!?!?!??!
Chromosome: What what?
Looking for Chromosome: If I understood correctly, you said once you're going to develop cancer (!) in a few months?
Chromosome: In about 5 months.
Looking for Chromosome: I'll let you tell me the truth. How do you know?
Chromosome: The same way we knew that Bobby would die.
Looking for Chromosome: You didn’t exactly explain it before.
Chromosome: Don’t worry about explanations.
Looking for Chromosome: Do I look worried?
Chromosome: Sure you’re worried, now I've shown you how your life's as open as a whore’s legs.
Looking for Chromosome: At least I won’t die of cancer.
Chromosome: Fuck you.
He disappeared from the conversation.
I didn’t blame him. I hadn't shown appropriate sensitivity. A man returns from his father's memorial... and I go with him to battle like this. Not to the point, rather silly, given what is happening to him - and what he can do to my bank accounts, if he decides to. It’d be a pretty scary fight - you don’t know if he tells the truth, but you do know he can hit you very hard.
Yeah, pretty scary.
But even then, my real concern was that he just cut off contact. Altogether.
Do you understand? I became obsessed. After those days of lack of communication, his story, or the story he invented for me, fascinated me. The man was, in general, fascinating. Any way I look at it. Although the special attention he gave me might make me shiver, it just made me addicted to it.
Suddenly, I was afraid he’d just disappeared, leaving me with a thousand questions, which would never be settled. Or, worse, would begin to be resolved, written somewhere else, by someone else ...
Intolerable, in short.
Luckily, I got an email from him.
04/3/01 Email
I owe you an apology, I was nervous and had no energy for your nonsense. These memorials always make me nervous, not just because it's my father who died, but because it's this situation with the family and everything - I ran away. I don’t know if you can understand.
Who do you think I am? Obviously you have no idea. So I will surprise you. I'm what they call Exrel. Formerly religious. Not just religious with a yarmulke, but a real Haredy, from Bnei Brak. Panevezys Community, if it means something to you.
Surprised, eh?
Obviously it would be. No one who sees me today could imagine that by the age of 18 I was completely in black, with all the costumes and rituals. I was what they call a student prodigy, an Iluy.
Words, words…what do you know about words, you man of words?
I started reading at the age of two. I'm talking about reading, not Learning To Read. At the age of five I had a special teacher for all kinds of wordplay that you'll never be interested in. But they were my whole world. Marked me in the Panevezys Dynasty as 'privileged'. My father showed off like a (modest) peacock, he was the envy of all.
Well, the cancer took care of it pretty well.
Some pray, some cry, but cancer hasn’t stopped.
They took him for all kinds of ‘treatments’, even to those who oppose Panevezys; he did all sorts of voodoo rituals… nothing stopped the disease. That's how I met Rabbi Eligad for the first time, and I felt he penetrated me with his vision, but only for a moment, and then he took time off to take care of my dad. But once in a while he threw me a strange look.
One day, when my dad got back from Rabbi Eligad’s house, he told me that the rabbi asked about me, which is a great honor. But with my father's illness I had completely forgotten until later.
Day after day I sat at my father's bedside, talking to him about what I learned, quibbling with him. He was no longer at the peak, and I knew he was tired, so it wasn’t good for him - but he insisted that I be with him every day, with or without books, and we’d talk about the Talmud, the Mishnah, even the Zohar.
And - try to understand – at that time I was already an expert debater. It was hard to beat me, even if a great rabbi was against me. Sometimes I had to agree with him out of respect. And my father also liked to talk like that, and we quibbled for hours on interpretations and commentaries and a little gossip on the rabbis when no one was around to hear. But it was hard for him, and he was bleeding at times and twice he fell asleep and I was afraid he was dead.
But he didn’t die, he told me that
as long as he knew that I would come to him, he wouldn’t die. And so I came to him every day and he did not die. It wasn't easy, especially when he began to fall apart before my eyes, and the coughing up blood frightened me, but I didn’t dare leave the room and just held his hand and told him to be healthy and by the grace of God the disease would disappear.
Just one day I allowed myself to be late to my father's bedside. I took a turn for half an hour around the streets and took some air. I remember that day because it was winter and the cold wind stung my ears, and I played a bit in the rain and then the sun was bright and there was a rainbow. Such a special day.
When the rain started erasing the rainbow I ran back home, to my father's bed, but the house was full of people, and my mom was crying and my older brothers were sitting on the floor with torn clothes.
That's all for now.
I hope you'll understand my attitude earlier, and once again I apologize.
*
Life without his father was emptier.
Not that Zomy was used to filling his days the same way, every day, at his father's bedside. On the contrary, Zomy hated every minute of seeing his father wither before his eyes to a crumbling skeleton of a man, like a vision of flesh falling from dry bones. Zomy hated the long hours of quibbling, endless talk in the dark, narrow room where he lay. Jail room. Narrow, dark dungeon. Hundreds of scented holy books guarded it. Old, silent books filled the overflowing room, leaving just barely room for his father.
Life without his father was emptier, not of time, but of purpose.
As long as his father was breathing, Zomy had a purpose. Determination filled his days, shaping his dreams at night. He was all-powerful, equipped with divine permission to destroy the cancer that gnawed his father, every fiber of his being devoted to this task.
Every day the determination burned within him, a cocktail of desire that his father fed, a raging fire that left him, at eleven years old, stuck to his mission, day after day. He was going to beat the cancer, no matter what. No matter what.
And he lost.
Day after day he’d endured. Sat two, three, four hours with his thinned-out father, reading passages, valid interpretations, proving to his creator that he was not created for nothing. The child is a prodigy, Father had bothered to say from time to time, when his aching head allowed the effort. The child is a prodigy.
Until that cursed day, when the prodigy could not stand one more second without the fresh air of freedom, and went to look for it in the rainy sidewalks. And the winter was so pleasant to his senses! Rapturous in the sharpening-cold air, in the flow of puddles under his clumsy shoes.
Only a few more minutes, he thought, just a few more breaths of the wet soil's scent, of the urban grass's touch, of the sight of the spectacular rainbow gracing the tops of houses. Only a few minutes of freedom - and then I'll go back, he promised himself.
When he returned there was no place to go back to. His father died, was taken to other provinces. And in his childish mind, prodigious as it was, Zomy knew why. He was a guard asleep at his post, the messenger who neglected his mission. His father died because Zomy was not there on time, was not there for him. Death, that black ambassador of extermination, filtered into the room in his absence, and picked his father.
This was the answer. It was his sin. Until the day he died, years later, Zomy did not know comfort.
In the meantime:
An hour chased the next, minute-to-minute dissolved, and empty, black, rotten emptiness trickled into the prodigy's life. Not because of the long hours of battle that are no more. But because the war itself was no more - the struggle, without which there was no purpose to existence. Without father, what was the point in learning? Without the hope of his life, what was the point in an effort?
The processions of words that Zomy had gulped only a few months before, seemed hollow, bitter suddenly. Quibbling became stale, for what use was his commentary on this verse, or anything else, if it had no purpose?
And faith, yes faith. Vengeful God was his God, vengeful and unforgotten. A God who didn't excuse the little boy who wanted some fresh air. A strict God. An awe-filling god. And Zomy's faith wasn't hurt. On the contrary, faith turned into knowledge, definitely. Yes, God was in heaven. Was also on the earth. Was everywhere. Even in the cancer flattening the body of his father.
And in taking the father, God left him with nothing but air.
Things that form the heart of the child: one small trip, in the streets, became a whole day trip. And from a day, it's easy to move to two days. What is the difference between two days and a week? There is a difference, but not great. Not all at once, not all in slamming the door. There are doors that open slowly, there are freedoms you have to drink from sparingly, a little bit.
The streets of Bnei Brak, their twisted twists turned into his home. Feral cats had been his friends. He loved to rub against them, stroking all the way along, feeling the tail disappearing under his fingers, only to feel a little head popped up again by his wrist, with pat-demands. He stroked again and again.
He waited, waited to see. When would someone, anybody, notice that the little prodigy didn’t appear in classes, didn’t come home on time.
The experiment failed.
The father left, leaving emptiness in everything. The house which once bustled with life, had gone quiet. There was no one to push the prodigy onwards.
"If not my father, who will pull for me?" he muttered to himself, and went back to pet the cats gathered around him, hiding under the grocery store's stairs. Stroked again and again, repeat and comforted.
Occasionally the grocery owner went outside wearing a wig and armed with a wicker broom, banishing the cats in strange sounds: "Kishta, kishta, shunra!" But it didn’t last long. His friends were rushing back and grouping around him, and in his heart he was laughing at the woman, her heavy flesh and breath. Kishta kishta, Lilith.
Not everything was successful in this new lifestyle. The food issue, for example, was somewhat problematic. But Bnei Brak, the poorest city in the country, took care of its poor better than any other city. A few eyebrows were raised when Zomy approached, for the first time, the soup kitchen. After all, a boy his age! But the fourth time it happened, he became part of the scenery, gratefully accept the hot soup, the mashed potatoes, and sometimes the chicken or small charitable gift or another.
After dinner, he would continue to explore his small kingdom on the streets, here looking at the ports, there enjoying the sun jittering in a muddy puddle. Thoughts, buzzing so in previous months, slowly quieted in the din of the street. For a few moments, he could have sworn it, he was touched by happiness, a little touch of gold.
And so little Zomy felt, in that bitter morning. His pocket was full of chicken scraps, saved from the soup kitchen and well wrapped in a plastic bag, which he kept for his cats. They would dearly love to taste them, he knew. His cat kingdom, which began with three adult cats, had become a mini-empire of several dozen velvety fans, waiting for him, regularly, in their hiding place under the stairs grocery store.
Always at the same afternoon hour, he knew, his hideout was filled with small paws, eagerly awaiting his pocket findings. And every time he had a new, surprising surprise for them. Meow, this time he had a fine dish for them, the result of the generosity of the lady cook: chicken necks! Booty for which there was no demand, except by cats. Meow, he rushed to his kingdom.
Intimidating, eerie silence, greeted him. In fact, it was not silence. He could hear in the dark, dragging noises and vomiting. Scratching on exposed concrete, the sound of wheezing.
With a feeling of mounting horror, he pulled out a box of matches, holding one of the few remaining, and lit it.
On the ground, hiding under the stairs in the depths of the grocery store, lay his subjects, whimsical, white foam dripping from their mouths. Their eyes were wide, some dead, some still rolling agony. He held the match, seeing all over the kingdom, witnessing the extent of the killing, the destructio
n. All the cats were there, he knew. The mothers he first met months ago, to the last offspring whom yesterday he held in his hand and gently cleaned inflammation from their eyes.
The match burned his fingers, fell from his hand and was silenced on the sandy ground.
Zomy stifled a scream.
There were footsteps on the stairs, slight shaking of the sloping concrete roof over his head.
"Do you think we should call the city services?"
"Not yet, let the substance work. Call them this afternoon."
"They won’t stink?"
"Don’t worry, the days are cold now. Call the city services in a few hours, it’ll work out. Cats don’t come back."
The stairs trembled beneath the heavy legs of the grocery store owner and her mysterious ally, leaving in their place a different kind of vibration which began in the belly of Zomy, and raided every little organ of his. Like his father, so the cats. Like his father.
Years later, on a casual summer day, the grocery store owner found that all her money had been withdrawn from her bank account, her house had been sold to an international company, and her grocery store owed millions to different suppliers (of which about five hundred thousand shekels was to a particular rat poison manufacturer). As she turned to the police for help, the police computer remembered an urgent detention order against her name for the extreme avoidance of income tax.
4/4/01. MSN chat
Nucleotide: Interesting name you chose this time.
Mr fate: I am trying. And you are...?
Nucleotide: The one from Bnei Brak
Mr fate: Ah. What does your name mean?
Nucleotide: Nucleotide is a small piece of DNA.
Mr fate: Ok...
Mr fate: I must ask you something.
Nucleotide: Ask away.
Mr fate: You really ruined her life like that?
Nucleotide: Yes.
Mr fate: Ok… it's a bit risky to upset you… isn't it?
Nucleotide: LOL!