by Yoav Blum
It was because of her.
All he had done was go out on his usual nightly walk. After an entire day of sitting in the office, his joints needed some movement. Accounting was not a profession with loads of physical activity. He liked to take care of himself—five kilometers of rapid walking had become his routine.
At first, he saw her from afar, coming out of a building, her shoulders a bit slouched. Nothing that should attract special attention. He walked faster, and the distance between him and her lean, seemingly fragile back grew smaller. Behind the corner of the building, she turned to the right. And as he passed by her, he glanced to the side and saw her collapse in tears and sit on the ground, devastated.
It wasn’t the first time Eddie Levy had seen a young woman cry. After all, during the course of evolution, women had developed into creatures that cried quite often. But something at that moment, something in the way her entire body tried to escape through her eyes, resonated with some forgotten truth inside him and made him slow down.
For a moment, he thought, really thought seriously, about approaching her and asking whether she was okay.
But he immediately came to his senses and continued walking, quickly distancing himself, still hearing her sobs, shocked by the way this melodramatic scene made him feel as if someone had ripped his heart from its place and then put it back, but upside down.
For several weeks now he hadn’t felt “right.” He couldn’t put his finger on anything specific, but occasionally the type of thought he’d once believed he had managed to eradicate would infiltrate his defenses. And now this.
Eddie tried to explain away the palpitations and the internal burning behind his eyes in terms of his knowledge regarding causes and effects in the human body. You’re not tense, he said to himself. You’re simply flooded with too much cortisol. Just like there is no such thing as “fun”—only dopamine. Every emotion has a chemical name and component.
He looked at the long bookcase in front of him.
Rows and rows of books on every possible scientific subject in the world. Cosmology, physics, biology, neurology. You’re supposed to be my anchor. You’re supposed to spare me this nonsense.
Just several days ago, his bookcase had to be defended against someone who got stuck with a flat tire across the street and asked to call a tow truck. The person didn’t have a cell phone, claiming he hated such devices. Could he please? It would just take a minute.
Eddie cursed silently for the thousandth time the fact that he lived on the first floor. Yes, sure, why not. The telephone is over there.
At one point, just before this character left—he was a skinny man, almost transparent, with the eyes of a child who had been bullied at school—he surveyed these shelves and asked why there was no prose or poetry. Eddie told him he had no need for them. What interested him was the truth about the world.
This man, who claimed he was a “poet,” started to say all sorts of ridiculous things about love and culture and the way in which we “discover truths about ourselves” not only through science. Eddie didn’t even let him finish. He threw the plain facts at him like a pail of cold water.
After sufficient study, the world was exposed in its full technical complexity and emotional sterility, he said. It was impossible to ignore this. For the sake of the truth, the precious and unequivocal truth, one needed to relinquish a few saccharine points of view. People loved their children, for example, because in the course of evolution, over years of fine-tuning, it was found that the trait of love for progeny was beneficial for the existence of the species. Big eyes, small faces—this was all part of the blind planning that was designed to arouse in us a feeling of protection. Brilliant? Perhaps. Exciting? Not really. Love was sexual attraction in disguise; religion was an invention designed to console humanity, which felt threatened by nature; fear was a survival mechanism; greed was a social convention without which the human race would succumb to existential passivity; the search for meaning was the price of selfconsciousness and was doomed to fail. Systems upon systems. Those which caused us to digest food and turn it into waste, and those that caused us (he pointed to his visitor) to define ourselves as a “poet” and think that it made a difference.
Once you got used to it, it was more practical. You couldn’t be hurt by the amygdala gland problems of another person, or be devastated when you were ignored by someone who was simply not attracted to your pheromones. And the main thing was that you couldn’t fail in a life that had no meaning. Essentially, we’re trying to survive because we’re trying to survive. All the rest was mental decoration and self-persuasion. The poet—as a matter of fact, Eddie didn’t even catch his name—gave him a strange look and went out to the car to wait for the tow truck.
But all these books didn’t protect him now. For a moment, he wanted to assault the shelves in a fit of anger and fling the books to the floor, in a way that would cause them maximum pain. He wanted to take out all of the frustration generated by brokenhearted young women who spewed a radioactive cloud of compassion, put breaches in the walls of worldviews, and exacerbated a loneliness no one understood. He wanted to throw them onto the floor and stand among all the dead pages like the captain of a sinking ship.
But he wouldn’t do that, of course. He wasn’t like that.
He went to the kitchen, closed the door behind him, and sat by the small table.
An old red towel, a jar with a bit of coffee, a white page, and a blue pen waited for him. At the top of the white page was a shopping list in his neat handwriting, a catalogue of the things he needed to purchase on his weekly walk to the supermarket.
People were clouds of numbers, nothing more. Height, age, blood pressure, reaction speed, pulse, number of cells. Everything could be measured, everything. Behind every poignant melody was mathematics; behind every breathtaking leap by an acrobat was physics; behind every heartbreak was chemistry. The notion that her sadness was somehow reverberating through him now, in some strange, immeasurable cosmic way—indeed, this was completely wacky.
He took the pen in hand and started to draw small squares in the corner, like a small child trying to keep himself from being disruptive in class. But this didn’t help when a half hour later he found himself sitting by the kitchen table, staring in shock at the white sheet.
Ten lines were written on the page before him.
Three clean, official-looking lines in the top-right corner listed sugar, paper towels, and laundry detergent. And another seven lines in the opposite corner—crooked and brisk, full of erasures and corrections—attempted to sculpt something with words that had no parallel beyond raw emotion.
Oh my gosh, he thought.
I’ve written a poem.
Eddie grabbed the sheet of paper, quickly crumpled it into a small, tight ball, and tossed it into the trash bin.
He had no recollection of the previous moments. It was as if someone else had taken control of his body, thought things that were no longer his, felt things that he no longer felt, and wrote this damn poem, which he didn’t even understand or want to understand.
He had no need for this artistic weakness. He had only scorn for it, and always had. He was unwilling to bring this thing into his life just because a fragile woman on a street corner had unsettled him.
He decided to go to sleep and wake up like new tomorrow. This nonsense would sink back into his subconscious, and he would awaken to the world as the person he chose to be.
He lay in bed, angry at himself, and one stray thought suddenly made it clear what had bothered him so much. And he couldn’t avoid facing it.
This feeling. Inside. Like something he had created, out of nothing. Not like the rest of his life, which he felt was a combination of the same basic materials over and over, the same things repeating themselves, just in a different order. It was as if this simply emerged from within himself. A new, fresh, unfamiliar answer.
Enough with this nonsense, he told himself. There’s no soul. There’s nothing beyond the
sophistication of the organism.
Nothing? Then what was this?
Thousands of fragments of his old self were horrified and rushed to close the crack before something happened.
This must not happen.
Because if it happened, he would look at his life and consider it a mistake. He would look back, panic-stricken, at every choice he had ever made. His worldview was so clear—a crack or question mark in it would make it all an atrocious waste of time. Years of missed opportunities. It would be better to simply continue on. Don’t change now, buddy! Don’t change!
People only changed because of a crisis, not from growth. If you changed, it meant you were in a crisis. You must not fall into a crisis.
But inside, under all of the anxious fragments of science running around, his soul was screaming hysterically in the streets. He already knew that he did not know. That he was caught in that chicken-and-egg question that no one could solve: Did the worldview shape the personality, or vice versa? He knew that he could dismiss it all as a complex self-illusion if he wanted to, but that he could also surrender and accept that he had within himself, perhaps, just maybe, something more than a system of causes and effects. And, even worse, he realized that he could never take the razor of truth and cut reality in order to reveal the answer. For the first time in his life, in real fear that somehow was able to transform into great joy, he came to terms with the thought that however much he tried, he didn’t really look at reality with elegance and objectivity, from the outside, but always from the inside. Deep, deep inside.
From between the slits of the blinds, Eddie Levy saw the moon. He could now jump back and forth between two ways of looking at it. One way saw a big rock orbiting in space, wrapped in the crushed glass of unfortunate asteroids, and the other saw it as the backdrop for your sweetheart to place her head on your shoulder and close her eyes.
He got out of bed and went to the kitchen.
There are some surrenders that fill you with sweetness. Or perhaps he’d simply lost his mind. Well, so what? That’s the way it was.
He pulled the crumpled page from the trash bin, unraveled it, and made an effort to make it into a sheet of paper again. He didn’t even glance at the poem he wrote earlier but turned the paper over and started to write his second poem. And the page embraced the ink, and another path opened before him in the forest.
11
Guy arrived at the street corner five minutes before the hour specified in yesterday’s envelope. It was relatively early in the morning and the traffic was only starting to awaken and show signs that it intended, again, to block the city from one end to the other, if only to demonstrate that it could. On the other side of the street, a bleary-eyed saleswoman arranged a display window. She tried desperately to hang a sign reading low: low: prices! with a giant red arrow in the background. Not far from her, at the intersection, there was a policeman who had to direct traffic due to a malfunctioning stoplight. Slowly but surely, the street filled with people, cars, noise, and one concerned coincidence maker.
He tried to understand what exactly was supposed to happen, but that strange sentence about the kick in the head didn’t seem related to any sort of possible instruction. The street around him continued to go about its daily routine while he stood waiting for some sign or hint to arrive in—let’s see, how much time remained? Two more minutes.
The get-together yesterday with Emily had ended in sharp silence. He didn’t say the sentences that passed through his mind; she didn’t answer them with sentences of her own. After she left he just went into the shower for an hour, his mind empty but pounding. I wish I could love you, but I can’t. This seat is taken.
He’d known it would come at some point. During the course, they had started to dance this complex dance in which she sent hints, as if unintentionally, and he dodged them like small bullets of caring, in order to be able to maintain what they had. She just has to meet other men, he would say to himself. She only knows me and Eric. As soon as new people come into her life, she’ll move on. Just keep it up.
Because that’s the way it was: There were women who could only be good friends, right? You’ll never fall in love with them, because they lacked the presence that resonated in your heart and they didn’t linger with you after they left. It was true that Emily was the closest thing to someone who was able to read his thoughts. She made him laugh, supported him when he had to learn hundreds of lists of possible incidents and responses during the course, and she listened to him when he needed to spill his heart out after an attempt at coincidence making went terribly awry because he had failed to correctly calculate the who-knows-what. Okay, so what? It wasn’t she that he dreamed of at night. She didn’t overwhelm him or make him tremble. She didn’t interrupt his thoughts every moment. He didn’t soar with her.
And deep inside, another small voice added another small point to the list: she wasn’t Cassandra.
This status quo was preferable; he was used to it. He realized he was acting like a neurotic tragic hero, but certain things were impossible to explain. And one of them was that he simply knew it wouldn’t happen again. That wasn’t so terrible. So why was it so hard for someone else to accept?
Leave me alone, he thought.
And what now?
What would happen the next time they met?
How would they be able to preserve the thin shroud of what was once friendship?
Eric would notice, of course. He noticed everything. And he’ll make a feast out of this. Everything was so simple till now. Why did she have to complicate this so much?
Okay, enough. Concentrate. A half a minute before the meeting. What was he supposed to do?
Okay, okay. Let’s get back to the basics.
Sometimes he had to remind himself that ultimately there were several very simple things that one needed to know about reality in order to be a coincidence maker. All the rest were details. Look at the broad picture and search for the contexts that no one else sees. Try to move one step ahead of reality and guess what it planned to do a moment before it happened.
The General associated a particular picture with every rule he taught them, an image that was etched in their minds when he explained the rule to them. Somehow, this worked. Guy’s mind was full of gorillas rolling barrels from the tops of cliffs, dwarfs in nightgowns tying bundles of ferns, headless acrobats stretching across a trapeze made of chocolate, and, of course, billiard balls. The General really liked to illustrate things with balls.
There weren’t many courses whose first lesson took place in a dimly lit snooker club. But with the General, he later realized, the lesson couldn’t have taken place anywhere else.
The small club the General chose was relatively empty that night. Two young men played at a table in the corner, alternating from a position of intense concentration, their bodies taut over the table, to an indifferent and carefree position, a cold bottle of beer dangling at an angle between their fingers, their eyes watching the arrangement of balls on the green felt table.
A couple sat at the bar in a quiet meeting that included more silence and stares than words of real weight. They were counting on a place teeming with people where they could blend in and do little more than be together, to remember anew, after all this time, how it felt “to go out.” Now, they were forced to try to really interact—conversation, content, nuances of facial expressions, the whole deal. And in the corner, the next-to-last cigarette in the pack in his hand, with a blank expression and four days and three hours of whiskers on his face, sat the guy who always sat in the corner and smoked, since he had nowhere else to go. His small eyes didn’t gaze anywhere in particular, and the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette rested on his thigh, just as apathetic as his eyes, though his fingernails were a bit gnawed.
The General arranged nine balls in a diamond shape and set them up in their place on the table. He reached out his hand without bothering to look up. “Stick,” he said.
Eric hurried to hand him the
cue and the General took it, his halffocused, half-amused eyes directed at the balls. He walked around the table and placed the cue ball in the appropriate spot. In a smooth and natural movement, he bent over and aimed the stick for a few seconds. “So let’s begin. The four ball in the far-right pocket,” he said and hit the white ball strongly, scattering the colored billiard balls in all directions, like a flock of frightened birds. Some caromed off the side of the table. The purple ball, the four, rolled slowly until it dropped softly into the pocket to the far right of them.
The General stood upright and looked at the three of them standing around the table.
“Okay,” he said, “you think you know what I’m going to talk about. You’re sure that I intend to explain action and reaction, to mention Newton’s laws and the Lorenz attractor and Littlewood’s Law and ways to calculate the result, and to use this billiard table as a metaphor. But metaphors are crap. You can never really find two things that serve as a true metaphor for each other. If two things can serve as a perfect metaphor for each other, they’re apparently exactly the same thing. The universe doesn’t suffer waste.”
He moved to his right along the table and stood next to Guy. “If you’ll allow me, junior,” he said, raising a brow. Guy moved quickly. The General placed his cue and took aim. “Always,” he said, “there is always something in a metaphor that is inconsistent with the original idea, or vice versa. So yes, it’s possible to use billiard balls that strike one another as a metaphor for events that affect each other, but there are a few basic things that are different. Guy, what’s going to happen now?”
Guy shook himself a bit. “What?”
“Good morning,” the General said. “Nice to see you’re with us. Before you brush your teeth and drink your first coffee of the morning—what’s going to happen now?”