by Yoav Blum
He sat in the usual evening traffic jam and inhaled the air-conditioning with the familiar smell.
On the radio, the broadcaster had stuttered something about “a slight mix-up . . .” and a song started to play.
Michael finished drinking the water and placed the glass in the sink.
They must have thought he was crazy, he thought, and allowed himself to smile. And why shouldn’t they?
What else were people supposed to think when they saw, in the middle of the traffic jam, a tall man in a suit open his car door, step outside, and start to dance and shed tears to the sounds of the radio? What would they know about songs that became emotional Trojan horses? What was the chance of one of them understanding or guessing the look she had in her eyes when she played this song on her stereo and told him, “You’re going to dance with me now, I won’t take no for an answer!”
After all, the only thing they saw was someone standing in the middle of the street, his car almost shaking from the volume of the speakers, and him gyrating like an idiot, simply because that was how he thought you were supposed to dance back then, because it made her laugh. How could they understand?
They didn’t beep their horns, they didn’t open their windows, and they didn’t yell. Or maybe they did, for all he knew. He wasn’t really there. He just danced and danced, and all of those layers that he had wrapped around himself in recent years, all of them cracked and disintegrated and fell off him like a mantle of dried, muddy despair. With eyes closed and hands flapping, he abandoned all orderly thought, and when the song ended and he finished jumping, he got back into the car and closed the door and turned off the radio. And he also closed the gate in his mind that allowed the entry of any idea that started with the words: “But it’s impossible to . . .”
And by the end of the trip, even after his pulse had slowed and he had calmed down, the book in the trunk had become something throbbing and real again. He made a point of not wiping away the tears but instead let them dry on his face and leave their clear salty sediment, like a battle scar, on his cheek, proving that he had participated in a war for his soul and had been victorious in at least one battle.
He slowly went up the stairs and quietly entered the bedroom.
She was lying there, her back turned away from him.
He didn’t want to arrive with expectations.
He wasn’t there to fix her, or to change her, or to liberate her.
He was the one who needed change. He was going to work on himself.
He realized this the moment the song started to play.
He sat down on the bed, his back leaning against the headboard, the book in his hands.
“You’ve never read this?” he remembered asking her.
She shrugged her shoulders then. “Guilty as charged,” she confessed. “I always promised myself I would, I knew that I must, yet somehow, in a sort of strange coincidence, I never happened to get my hands on it.”
“We need to read it someday.”
“We must.” She nodded at the time.
Maybe she was sleeping now, maybe not.
Maybe she would hear, maybe not.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t expect miracles or dramatic changes. He prepared himself to take small steps. He opened the book.
“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin,” he started to read aloud.
He would continue to read, till the end, or until he fell asleep.
He saw that her breathing was changing slightly; he knew she was listening. By the time he had finished reading the book, the first rays of light had entered the room, turning the specks of dust into small, slow-moving stars. And he placed the book next to the bed and allowed himself to sleep for an hour or two. Months later he would remember that at this moment, even though she was fast asleep, and her face was still gray, it was turned toward him.
26
For the first one hundred yards, it was still anger. Then came one hundred yards of fear, and a sense of urgency. Now he was simply hurrying to do the right thing.
Guy sprinted through the streets, his chest rapidly rising and falling, his strides long and fast, his brain calculating routes.
He knew this city, he knew it well. He didn’t need to draw anything on a wall now. He saw in his mind the entire city from above, the way in which the traffic flowed and stopped in complex patterns, the people hurrying in the streets, the way the city breathed. It was as if someone had turned the lens a bit and, lo and behold, everything became sharp and clear.
He had known this city well for a long time. But now he discovered that he could actually do all of the calculations in his head. He didn’t need a notebook, a wall, anything. He could run in the street and know exactly when each of the pedestrians would appear in front of him and where they would go. He could see the route the bus would travel, calculate the chances that it would stop at the bus stops, know its precise cruising speed when it hit Michael’s indecisive body. He was no longer at rank two. He saw this; he saw the picture of the entire city.
And he was part of it, part of the equation.
He had been an observer for too long.
An observer who intervened and navigated, who examined and checked, measured and moved things an inch to the right or half an inch to the left, but always just an observer. A small and disciplined soldier who moved mountains with the power of a pivot point he never set.
Like a mug of coffee that fell from a table, he was just an instrument, not looking to the right or left, because he was afraid to formulate his own opinion. He was afraid of being someone who occasionally slammed on the brakes, pulled over on the side of the road, and wondered: “Perhaps . . . ?”
He would stop the bus. He would make a new coincidence on his own. A better one, a more correct one. He wouldn’t be a butcher, he’d be a surgeon. Because all this time, when he thought he was making coincidences, he was just another link in the chain.
The anger returned and flared in him when he thought again about the disdain in Pierre’s eyes a moment before he boarded the bus. But the little bastard was right. He always chose to be passive. Even when he did the most active things, they weren’t his. His actions filled his surroundings with energy, it’s true, but he was passive.
So now, he was taking action.
And this time he had even less to lose.
This had happened to him once before, just one time.
He remembered. He was an imaginary friend of a desperate prisoner in solitary confinement, narrow and smothering. He had sat next to him in the dark cell, silent most of the time, occasionally humming a song to him. He saw him quietly eating the foul-smelling food, lying in the corner and shivering from the cold, kneeling in his vomit and trying to regain his sanity. But Guy wasn’t allowed to do anything that his imaginer didn’t want. Every once in a while, a mouse would come to the cell, sniff around, and disappear, and Guy felt that the prisoner was ceasing to imagine him and instead turning all of his attention and love to the mouse. Occasionally, a distant car horn could be heard and sometimes even a hoarse birdcall. Each of these things was enough to make his imaginer abandon him and desperately cling to what existed on the outside.
“I think he’s losing it,” he told Cassandra during their last conversation. “I think he’s going to give up.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“He no longer imagines me humming songs. He imagines me only out of habit. He doesn’t really want me to be there. It’s as if I’m there and he only consents to it.”
The next time the prisoner imagined him, Guy found him a moment before his death.
He had cut the cloth that covered the filthy mattress and prepared a strong noose. Guy appeared in front of him and saw him standing on the toilet in the corner, with the rope already tightened around his neck.
“That’s it,” the prisoner said. “I have no more strength. I’m going to her. At least there, with her, I wo
n’t be alone.”
And Guy was supposed to say, “Go in peace, she’s waiting.”
He was supposed to say it.
That’s what the prisoner imagined he would say.
But he said, “No,” and saw the prisoner’s eyes dilate in astonishment.
He only had a few seconds to act before the prisoner decided that he was insane and the fear would erase Guy from his imagination. He jumped and grabbed the noose and pulled it over his imaginer’s head. And a moment before the prisoner’s brain instinctively rejected him and he faded away, he still managed to whisper to him, “There’s still a lot to live for.” And then he vanished.
He didn’t remember a hearing or a reprimand, but he was stripped of existence for years. He didn’t even know exactly how many.
When he returned to his role as an imaginary friend, the boy who had imagined him sitting on the bench near Cassandra had grown up. He never met her again. He didn’t even have time to worry about leaving without telling her in advance. He had almost no time to think about her sitting there with her girl time after time, discovering that he was not coming anymore. He was afraid to think about the possibility that another imaginary friend was there in his place.
It was the only time in his entire existence when he had dared. When he had been active. Was it any surprise that as a coincidence maker, he never chanced to be more than an instrument?
Guy turned quickly to the right.
Here, he was back.
Him. Not his physical representation, not his job description, not his thoughtless actions. Him. He was here again.
He would stop the bus here, just after the next turn, three blocks before the vehicle was supposed to hit Michael. He would disrupt Pierre’s calculated timetable and organize a new coincidence that would restore Alberto to his desired place without unnecessarily killing anyone. He could do it.
In his mind, he saw the place where the bus was supposed to be. It had to travel a slightly longer route than the one Guy ran. Guy knew all of the city’s bus routes by heart, and this bus was on quite a long route.
He burst into the street, suddenly realizing how physically unfit he was—how much this run had caught him unprepared. Here, he leaped in front of the wheels of the bus, which arrived precisely according to plan. Here, he waved his hands and tried to shout “Stop!” and discovered that his breath was so short that the shout went almost unheard.
And here, the bus didn’t slow down, and one look at the driver showed that he wasn’t even looking at the road. The driver had glanced back toward someone who had asked something exactly a second earlier.
And here, the small, short terror that rolled in his guts when Guy recognized this someone. Someone who didn’t look back at the driver, who hadn’t asked in order to receive an answer, but who was looking forward, at Guy, straight into his eyes, while the bus cruised forward and rammed into his body.
27
The flights flashed on the electronic board.
Three of them were scheduled to depart in minutes, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t understand what was written there, and what their destinations were.
Guy sat on a metal bench in the center of the airport. He was sure there were other people there. After all, he heard a commotion and saw figures passing on his right and left. Still, something inside told him that they were just part of the backdrop, and that he was actually alone.
In all the times he had imagined death, he had never seen a dutyfree store, but it turned out that the reality was different.
Opposite him, at the other end of the entrance hall, he saw a line of check-in counters. None of them were manned, except for one. A chubby, balding ground attendant, his head shining a little in the neon lights, sat there, chewing on a pencil, apparently working on a crossword puzzle. Of all the people in motion around him, holding in their hands what he could only describe as the concept of a suitcase, no one approached the check-in counter. The chubby attendant sat there, totally absorbed in solving his crossword puzzle.
Guy examined his own body. No, he didn’t appear to be particularly crushed. He looked quite intact. Apparently his smashed body stayed behind, on the street. Was he supposed to feel so indifferent about this?
And why an airport, for crying out loud?
It was strange; he had always thought that after everything was over, existential questions would be resolved, rather than new questions being set at your doorstep. Life was full of surprises, it turned out. And death too. A small, brown suitcase was lying by his foot. He lifted it and examined its weight, surprised to discover that it wasn’t constant, that it was alternately heavy and light. He placed it on his knees and opened it.
Inside was his life.
Somehow the suitcase contained much more than he thought it could hold. At some point, he discovered that he was rummaging through it with his hand submerged up to his shoulder. There’s a physics problem here, he thought, but actually what difference did it make. . . ? He searched and pulled out objects, letters, pictures, reviewing them quickly.
The face of the first child who imagined him; the taste of his favorite cheesecake; the first time he went to sleep, when he discovered that there was actually such an option; Eric’s short, annoying laugh; the sound that leaves made when they crackled underfoot; the sharp pain when you pulled a muscle; Medium John’s face peering at him from the mirror and changing; Cassandra laughing.
He poked deeper into the suitcase. If his entire life was arranged here, then that moment should be here too. Where was it?
Finally, he found it, in a corner, placed under his first morning run. A circular, shiny memory. He lifted it up to the light and looked through it.
Winter, snow squalling, bitter cold; he stood on the edge of a barren and terrifying cliff, somewhere in a desert of ice. You couldn’t see anything two inches past your nose. His fingertips were losing their sense of feeling, the shoes on his feet were not well insulated. In back of him, he could hear and see the black outline of the wolves growling at the two of them. Cassandra stood a foot or so away from him, but he couldn’t see her clearly. The cliff started to lose its stability and he heard her say, “Okay, I’m ready to go back.”
He imagined her and she imagined him and they were in the park again, and she was saying this sentence.
He turned the memory a bit toward the light in order to feel it completely, clearly.
“So what they say is apparently true. When the right person is beside you, you feel a sense of belonging anywhere.”
He sat there and surveyed the memories that had shaped his life, until he suddenly noticed that something strange was happening around him. When he looked up, he discovered the reason. He was alone. Unequivocal silence filled the empty airport, and the only thing that moved was the head of the ground attendant who sat on the other end. He put back everything he had taken out of the suitcase and closed it. The time had come to find out what was going on here.
“Just a moment,” said the attendant when Guy stood in front of him, the suitcase balanced between his legs.
The attendant continued to chew the pencil until he looked up at Guy.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “What am I supposed to give you? Eight letters. Starts with an e.”
“Excuse me?” asked Guy.
“I’m supposed to give you something.” The attendant scratched his head. “But I’m not good at remembering things before their time comes. The whole business of advanced planning doesn’t work well when you are just an idea. It’s difficult to think beyond ‘now,’ ” he said.
“You’re just a thought?” asked Guy.
“Of course,” said the attendant. “You don’t really think that death is an airport, do you? I’m something you’re creating at the moment.”
“Really,” said Guy, looking at him obliquely.
“Yes, really. All of you give me this look. And each time, I have to explain it again,” the attendant said.
“I’m afraid this i
s the first time I’ve died,” said Guy. “You haven’t explained anything to me yet.”
“No, not to you,” the attendant said. “To everyone who passes through here. And you’re not really dead.”
“No?”
“No. At least until you board the flight. Officially, you’re not dead.”
“Everything in the world has a procedure?” Guy wondered out loud.
“When you say it that way, it sounds like something bad,” said the attendant and added, “ ‘envelope.’ ”
“Excuse me?” asked Guy.
“Eight letters, starts with an e. ‘Envelope.’ I remembered,” said the attendant, and he pulled out a long white envelope. “Apparently, I’m supposed to give this to you now.”
Guy took the envelope from his hand.
“Is this the user’s manual for death, or something like that?” he asked.
“No, no,” the attendant said. “Someone who was here a while ago left this for you.”
Guy tilted his head in surprise. “For me?”
“Yes,” said the attendant, smiling, the pencil still lodged in his mouth. “You can sit here and read it, if you want. And then we’ll take your suitcase and bring you onto the plane.”
“This suitcase . . . ,” said Guy.
“All of your memories,” said the attendant.
“I take them with me?” asked Guy.
“Not exactly,” said the attendant. “You need to leave it with me, of course.”
“And then?”
“And then we’ll lose it.”
“Lose it?”
“Yes.”
“That is, intentionally?”
“Of course not! We lose it by mistake. But this always happens. It’s part of the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing of starting to be alive.”
Guy felt a bit confused.
“I thought you said I’ll be dead when I board the plane.”
“But later you get off the plane,” said the attendant, as if stating the obvious.
“And . . . ?”