A Savage Flower
Page 15
Even I, with my body’s molecules utterly different from yours, when I’d been chosen to lead my rescue mission here, on Earth, had to prepare myself for this impossible travel through space. Otherwise the body, even a more advanced one, like my own, wouldn’t withstand the pressure and the swift changes. Our scientists came up with a solution, and we took the risk. We were injected with a special substance, and froze ourselves until the completion of our journey here.
Your body is different. But as you know, our mission is to rescue you. It’s important for us that you be saved from Planet Earth’s terrible fate.
Because your planet has reached the end of its course. You’ve completely ruined it, its air, its water, the land, the vegetation, and it will very soon become annihilated.
Your group has been chosen to escape in time, and we want to preserve you, the planet’s survivors, among us.
Our science is thousands of years ahead of yours. And we have found the compound to suit your human bodies.
You will drink the special substance we’ve prepared for you, become physically paralyzed until the completion of the journey, and resume yourselves upon our blessed ground.
You will love living among us. I can assure you of that with absolute certainty.
Millions of years ago, our people were, most likely, the way you are right now. We were saved from total destruction, because we’d developed our enlightenment at a very early stage.
The conditions on our planet are very similar to yours. But nowadays we are different from you. A totally different state.
Without all of your sicknesses. Without millions dying in the thousands of foolish wars which you keep having here.
I won’t elaborate any further. We have no time. You’ll see for yourselves. Now we must hurry.”
And he pulls out something from the depths of his robe, and waves it around.
A little glass bottle.
There. Like this. This is the substance. Simple, genius.
Jacob feels as though he’d been hit by lightning.
That’s it.
The bottles.
And now he knows for certain. That’s how he’s been discovered.
He had found the bottles three days before, and immediately reported them to Ra’anan. Even sent a couple of samples. To be tested.
Ra’anan found them through all of their previously-agreed indications. Both the bottles and the report.
Because he replied about it with the agreed-upon signal, on the hidden satellite phone. It’s likely that he’s already managed to test them, and report back to Tel Aviv.
It could be, it’s very possible that the management has noticed something. And that’s why they’re suspicious of him.
Perhaps they’ve noticed the two missing bottles which he took.
There were dozens of them placed inside boxes, in orderly rows, in levels separated by cardboard, boxes on top of boxes, a clear orange liquid inside them, tightly sealed by cork stoppers.
Three days ago, he’d taken advantage of a joyful late-night meeting, alcohol-soaked, hosted by David, Dori and a few other senior members, with the district police representatives, at the special meeting room, in the wing in front of the management offices, knowing from experience that this sort of meeting stretches out to a good few hours of partying, including the participation of women, which then leaves the management hallways pretty desolate. And he decided to take action.
Jacob quietly sneaked through the dark corridors to the mapped room, which he hadn’t yet investigated properly.
The room was always locked, and he’d hoped that one of the numerous keys he’d managed to get his hands on would get him inside to find new pieces of information. Everything is so vague here.
At first he was disappointed by what he’d found. Looked like just another ordinary office. A large desk. Chairs. A few shelves. A locked cupboard. And a giant fridge in the corner.
It was the fridge that made him curious. It too was locked. But overcoming the lock was quick and simple.
And then the bottles.
That’s it. There was nothing else there. The entire huge fridge was filled with nothing but little bottles. Inside them was an orange liquid, and they were sealed by cork stoppers. They look like medicine bottles. But why?
There are drugs in the village. Obviously. Jacob knew that. The partiers at the other wing, the officers, the cops, the women and the members of management, were currently, obviously, enjoying their sweet glide.
Only, not this way.
Not in this quantity. And he also wasn’t sure that they were really drugs. They looked weird somehow. Unfamiliar.
There was nothing written on the bottles. Clear glass. He took one little bottle, and put it in his pocket, beneath his robe. They won’t notice one missing. He thought for a while, then took another one. Just to be on the safe side.
Then he locked the fridge, went to the cupboard, and opened its lock just as quickly.
It contained files organized horizontally, empty.
Jacob was about to take something out of the cupboard, when he heard footsteps and voices coming from the corridor.
He immediately turned off the little flashlight, tucked himself behind the desk and waited.
The footsteps and the voices passed by the hidden room, weakening further as they continued down the hallway. Jacob waited for their total disappearance and then quickly got out of there.
They troubled him immensely. These little bottles. Even more than the fact that it was only when he returned to his room, after having urgently passed along his concealed samples, with an encoded message, through the hidden opening, beyond the thorny fence, as was agreed between himself and Ra’anan, that he recalled the fact he hadn’t locked the cupboard door in that secret room of theirs.
And now he’s certain that they know.
David is wrapping up his speech.
He’s pacing and closing in, directing the gleam of his thick lenses straight at him, at Jacob, and dozens of pairs of eyes are now shifting like the hands of time within a stork’s-bill flower, towards him.
Three steps away from him, David halts, focusing his lenses onto Jacob, carefully examining him.
Silently.
The breath of all the dozens of people stops all at once.
And then His Royal Highness suddenly walks away, turning his enormous back to Jacob, and paces back to his seat. He lifts his robe, and fills the cushioned armchair yet again.
He sits there, and suddenly seems to have become emptied.
As though the shouts which had previously erupted out of him, and the detailed speech that followed thereafter, had wrung out all of the valour from his immense body.
Leaving him all liquid and limp.
Now he’s lazily hinting at Professor Doron Sadeh with his eyes, and Doron rises, presses his palms together and lift them up, a sign that the Gathering has ended.
The group disperses.
Jacob gets up to leave too, but Doron Sadeh gestures for him to approach them.
28
The empty hall looks strange. Squashed pillows are scattered around over the mats. The walls are bare and vacant.
Faced with the vast emptiness, His Majesty’s cushioned seat does seem smaller to Jacob, but he still feels that the huge figure is terrorizing. Even in its slightly limp state.
In a room emptied of people.
And he shivers.
David gestures for him to approach, and Jacob walks towards him. He stops right in front of him, and remains silent.
“Your day is nearing too.”
David tells him quietly.
Almost softly. Each word measured, your-day-
is-nearing-too.
Jacob remains silent still. His thoughts are racing through his mind. But he grits his teeth. Stares at David serenely.r />
“Yes. Your day too.”
David repeats those calculated, finely-sliced words.
Silence among them. Dori’s gaze shifts from Jacob to David. Like at a tennis match.
“How long did you think you could go on like this?”
David suddenly booms.
And Jacob remains silent.
“You do realize that we know everything about you. We’ve known all along.”
David smiles at him like a chummy dad.
“But we allowed you to play. It was entertaining. Wasn’t it, Dori?”
“Yes… sure.”
Dori comes to his senses.
“Really entertaining.”
He adds with a bit more confidence.
“But every game has an end!”
David thunders again.
And Jacob realizes with surprise that he had never before seen the Caesar this enraged.
Angry, yes. Sometimes. Raising his voice, definitely. Reprimanding, cautioning, warning, upset, sulking, but never like this.
Now he’s truly enraged. Frothing. Boiling.
And there’s something petrifying about him. Paralyzing. Jacob senses the fear crawling up his own throat, choking him. Even Dori seems to be scared.
David looks like he has lost all restraint, like a horse going wild, foaming at the mouth.
“What did you think! That YOU would win against ME? ME?”
There’s a spark of madness in his eyes.
And then he suddenly goes quiet. His silence is worse than his screams, Jacob thinks to himself.
And what now?
It’s as though the air has vacated the King. The grand head of unkempt hair collapses onto the chest. The eyes momentarily shut behind the glasses.
Has he fainted? Jacob hopes.
But David opens one eye, hinting something to Dori. “Follow me,” Dori commands Jacob.
And they both walk out to the long hallway.
Tel Aviv 2017
29
I haven’t slept during the last few nights.
Sensing something terrible is about to happen. Can’t manage to name it. But my body feels it.
My limbs are dispersed all over the world. Some in Tel Aviv, a few at a place called Cayrona Beach, far away. A village that had once, not long ago, been utterly foreign to me, and is now as common within my lips as Tel Aviv.
What is happening in Cayrona? Any new developments in Cayrona? What about Puerto Viejo?
I have phantom pains. Cayrona is signalling to me with half a heart there, and then the other half in Tel Aviv starts to race at a kind of wild pace, uneven.
Something must be done. Urgently. I can feel it, in both halves of the heart.
But what can we do.
Hila talks to me every day. Jacob reports to them from the village. To Ra’anan, to her and to Ilan.
And here, in Tel Aviv, there are a few others whom Ilan has recruited to aid us. Friends from his past, from nowadays, from the army. From the police.
Not many. Five, maybe six, but good people. They meet up, receive signals which had crossed oceans via Ra’anan’s satellite phone, study maps, read and report back.
Because Ra’anan had travelled there over three weeks ago already, to Cayrona Park. The reserve that surrounds the Existential College Village.
Hundreds of acres of forest and shores, occasionally embellished by a scattering of tiny villages, a few lone circles of huts and sheds made of raw wood.
There’s also a small town there, Cayrona-Puerto Viejo. It too is compiled of wooden homes, as well as one brick house, surrounded by a stone wall, belonging to the district police. A unit or two of police officers who aggressively oversee the law and order at Cayrona District.
Because the law must be abided, of course.
Hila tells me about Ra’anan, who is living there right now, in Puerto Viejo, the district’s town, not far from the Existential College Village at Cayrona Beach, in a shared shed with a few lone backpackers, having come together from all corners of the world.
They took a shining to the place.
They surf, fish, swim, walk around the area. And Ra’anan is mingled amongst them. Dressed, or half-dressed, just like them, exposed to the hot sun and the sudden rains, which gush from above in flowing generosity, without any warning signs, and vanish as quickly as they’d appeared, leaving behind them drenched wooden sheds, and white beaches soon to be dried back up by the sun, to resume their soft white graininess.
Ra’anan walks around there a lot. On his own, Hila tells me.
He tells his fellow backpackers how much he loves it, his walks in the sunshine, and in the shade of the drenched groves, having been provided an especially juicy foliage by the plentiful showers, the trademark of rainforests.
He doesn’t say a word about the Existential College, doesn’t ask, and they don’t ask him. It seems that, over there, at Cayrona-Puerto Viejo, they generally don’t tend to ask many questions.
Lone travellers encase themselves there within their silences, each in their own world.
And I hear from Hila that the Existential College is, of course, a part of Ra’anan’s nightly route.
Every evening.
He calls here on his satellite phone, receives orders, sends messages over there. Reports to Hila, to Ilan.
To the tactical headquarters, as Hila calls them.
There’s a hidden opening at the edge of the village’s fence, concealed within the thorny vegetation, which is Ra’anan’s final destination during his late-night walks.
He stops near it, surveys the area thoroughly, making sure that there is total silence, interrupted only by the crickets’ stridulating and the shrieks of the nocturnal birds, feels around within the thicket, his hand guarded by a heavy gardening glove, and finds the signals. The encoded messages. Signs. Names.
As well as two little bottles. With an orange liquid. Three brief lines of explanations from Ra’anan detailing their origin.
The loot that Jacob had left him during the past few days. Ra’anan checked, took photos, and immediately reported them to Tel Aviv.
These little bottles cause such terror within me that I can sense Hila trying to backtrack from the story she’s just told me about them.
“No. It’s nothing, Mom, forget about it. What can it be. A little bottle. Nothing. Come on, Mom, really. It’s nothing. What’s gotten into you.”
But these little bottles are now anchored within me like heavy rocks over my heart. Over both its halves.
The half at Cayrona beach, and the half in Tel Aviv.
Because I remember. I constantly remember.
From the day that Dana had so suddenly been uprooted from us, to be replanted at Cayrona Beach, I delved into the depths of the silent world of the Gods, those illusionists, who lead away so many to the sounds of their magic flutes.
I began, as though possessed, to investigate in-depth and research further and further.
Because I wanted to know, what is the secret. Where precisely is their magnetizing force hidden, which blinds their worshippers, tearing them as though with pruning shears, cluster by cluster, from the branches of their deeply rooted families, leading them to follow it, bedazzled.
I read and read, researched, checked libraries, listened to lectures, watched videos, delved into articles, rummages through old newspapers, and resurrected countless dreamers and delusional people from all continents.
Tormented by loneliness, seeking asylum from the inadequacy of matter and spirit, from ponderings, from distress, battle-ridden, in search of rest.
They gather up, in large and in small groups, in major cities, in agricultural farms, in villages, on beaches. In forests.
At the head of each group there is always a mentor.
A leader. A God. Master. Guru. Ki
ng. Spiritual-teacher, Caesar. He has many titles.
They all swarm after him, to the sounds of his wonder, enchanted, basking within the blinding illumination which radiates all around him.
Now I also understand how it happens that the smart, educated, yet ever so innocent eternal-searchers, are always the first prey. Like colorful butterflies fluttering, lacking of any suspicions, in the blue springtime air, suddenly caught within a golden net, the honey trap, that their Gods spin for them.
There, within all of the books and old newspapers, I found him too.
Jim Jones.
And now I’m truly terrified.
Jim Jones bursts out during my nightmares. Invades my thoughts and leads them to realms of wild madness, completely and utterly tangible.
He’s the reason I envision Dana staring at her King David with blazing eyes, sitting within a tight cluster of men, women and children, performing along with everyone else, like an automated machine, phase by phase, commands which he spurts at them in a metallic, robot-like voice, and then suddenly this entire group of hers fades away into a void, and is no more.
Disappears.
Just like with Jim Jones, at the Peoples Temple.
Nine hundred and nine dead. I remember the number precisely. The nine too.
Two hundred and seventy-six children. And their parents. Everyone who was there. All of them.
They found them embraced among the forest’s trees, dead. Families upon families.
Not in the Middle Ages. Not during the Crusades. Not a community of extremists, fanatic imbeciles. They didn’t even belong to any recognized faith.
They were simply an invention of one single man. Their glowing Son of the Gods.
At night, in bed, my sleep is banished, and all around me I see the innocents, his congregation. They gather tightly in front of my bed, in a straight line, advance, nearing me, enclosing me, desperate, their eyes hollow, hands reaching out to me pleading for help. And I don’t budge. Paralyzed. Bed-ridden.