by Nir Hezroni
Carmit wrote Keiko in English characters alongside the drawing.
“That’s how it’s written in English. When a child is born in Japan his parents choose the kanji characters that will make up his name. Ko is written with the kanji for girl, and mi means beauty, so they are common endings for girls’ names. Japanese has 50,000 kanji characters. You don’t have to know them all these days. If you know around 2,000, you can get by in Japan. The kids at elementary school learn about 1,000 characters. It’s easier than it looks. Keiko can mean ‘a lucky and blessed girl’ or ‘an appreciative and respectful girl’ or ‘a sunshine girl’ or ‘a katsura tree girl’ or ‘girl of the square diamond’ or ‘girl with the open eyes that herald the springtime’ or simply ‘happy girl.’ But I don’t have the kanji, so I don’t know the meaning of her name. I haven’t seen it. I’ve only heard her speak it to me. But she doesn’t look like a happy child, so I think we can rule out that option.”
Carmit took a pen out her bag and jotted down seven symbols alongside the drawing of the girl.
“One of these is her name,” she said. “A person’s name means a lot. Much more than you yourself usually know. Your name influences the course of your life.”
Carmit looked at the sheet of paper on the table. She ran her finger over the hair of the sketched figure, caressing it.
“I was fluent in Japanese after dreaming about her for the first time. I understood it in the dream and it remained with me after I woke up. I don’t understand how it happened.”
“Don’t you use protective glasses?”
“What do you think? Of course I use them. I have no idea how it happened. It affected me somehow. I don’t know why.”
Elliot finished his croissant. “I think you need to stop the work you’re doing. It’s all well and good as long as the effect remains just a dream; you can live with that. But the Japanese stayed with you. It’s affecting you, changing you. Go get another degree or open a flower shop. What do you need this for? You’ve already got more money than you could ever spend.”
She’d thought about it often. She doesn’t do it for the money, she does it for the adrenaline rush. And because it’s hers. It’s her technique and no one’s going to take it from her.
“You are messing with people who don’t like leaving evidence behind and you are one hell of an evidence. I don’t want to see you hurt. I promised myself I won’t let you make the same mistakes I did when I left The Organization.”
“You’re sweet.”
“How are things with him?”
“With whom?”
“With Guy.”
“Okay, I guess. I mean, fine. Actually good. Why?” she was caught off guard. Elliot has the tendency to catch her like this.
“Just wondering.”
“Elliot, one day you’ll have to accept I’m a family girl now.”
“It’s hard for me to think of you this way.”
“Believe me, I’ve changed.”
“Sure.” Elliot almost started laughing. “All you need is a little push. Like that film with the perfect wife, you know, when she cuts carrots in the kitchen and then realizes that she was a government assassin in her past life and throws the knife into the kitchen cabinet and says to her husband and daughter ‘chefs do that.’”
“She had amnesia. I don’t. I know exactly who I am.”
“I should have waited for you. I ditched first and left you there with all these sharks.” All these years after he left The Organization and he still feels the largest mistake was not taking her with him at that time. He had to disappear fast and he didn’t want them to think she had anything to do with this so he didn’t tell her a thing. He just vanished and left her alone. What a mistake. He loved her then. He still does. He placed his hand on hers. Her hand was warm. She did not pull back.
“You had to. I did the same two years later. If you asked me then to come with you I would have said no. It took me some time to understand I needed to run away, too.”
“I’ll never let anything bad happen to you. Carmit, you have to stop. It’s not worth it. you are hurting yourself. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. This transformation process links you to your targets in a way you’ll be able to understand only years from now. Get out of that business.”
“Eventually I will, but not just yet. Elliot, what happened today? You’re gloomier than ever and too nostalgic.”
“I’m worried. You know Japanese now, you can draw, the dreams are intensifying, it is happening to you much faster than what I have experienced.”
“You got over it.”
“Took me years after I quit.”
They sat drinking their coffees in silence and then got up, put on their coats, and went outside.
Elliot kissed Carmit on the cheek. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
Carmit slung her backpack over her shoulder. She smiled at Elliot, pressed her hand to her lips, and blew him a kiss. Then she headed off in the direction of the Underground.
Elliot looked around him trying to identify anything unusual and smiled to himself. He’d left The Organization years ago and was still acting paranoid. They entrenched it into him.
NIGHT. AUGUST 1997
The whole world stops one day and only I keep moving.
I walk through the quiet streets and look at all the people who are frozen in place. Some are hurrying to work with bags in their hands and some are sitting in their cars or at cafés.
I take a seat at a café next to a woman who’s looking out through the large glass window at the frozen street.
I sip her coffee.
It’s sweet.
Not good.
I move among the tables and sip from all the cups of coffee until I find one without sugar. I take the cup of coffee and sit down in front of the woman again. She’s looking outside with a worried expression. Maybe she’s waiting for someone who hasn’t shown up.
It’s morning, and the sun, too, remains fixed in place, an ongoing morning that could stretch over several days or even a lifetime.
I place my hand on the forehead of the woman sitting in front of me. It’s cold.
It’s 1:30. I get up quietly, taking care not to wake Ronen, my roommate, who’s sleeping in the adjacent room.
I make sure the apartment door is locked and that no one has touched the drinks and food in the fridge.
Ronen serves at the Kirya army base and I’m serving in the Decoding Unit of the Military Intelligence’s Computer Division. “Who has a background and experience in computer programming?” they asked at the Induction Center on the day I enlisted.
I raised my hand.
They sent me off to do a series of professional tests and I completed them quickly. It was material I was familiar with. I had all the tests printed out at home from a server I hacked into on the Internet.
I also completed all the personality tests and provided all the answers that were expected of me. I really wanted to get into the Decoding Unit. It involves a lot of mathematical work.
The unit has bases throughout the country and some have ammunition depots. That’s important. I need ammunition to defend myself.
NIGHT. JANUARY 1998
I’m on my way home from the base. The sky is pitch-black. I can’t see the moon or the stars. The road is dark, no street lamps. My car lights are the only ones on the road.
The air is cold.
My car is traveling fast.
I see something flash past me and immediately hear a boom. The car makes a clunking sound and the steering wheel pulls to the right. I pull over to the side of the road.
I get out and see that the front right tire is flat and the bumper has buckled. The right side of the car is smeared with blood.
I notice a pile of rags on the road some 30 meters away. It’s moving.
Slowly I approach the writhing clump on the road. I may have hit someone.
I lean over the pile of fabric.
It’s wrapped around a large rat, the
size of a man. It’s injured. It looks up at me with bloodshot eyes and bares its teeth.
I wake at 1:30 and walk around the apartment. Ronen’s gone down south to visit his parents. The apartment’s empty.
No one has touched anything in the fridge.
I’ve been in Decoding Unit for a year now. It’s my job to go to all the unit’s bases and install relay systems that send input back to headquarters for deciphering.
I use some of my visits to bases in the north to accumulate supplies. I already have 8 full magazines, 10 blocks of plastic explosives, 2 fragmentation grenades, 20 detonators, and 50 meters of ignition fuse wire in my room.
Every Sunday night I log into the Adjutant Corps’ database computer using a system admin account I cracked and check my personal file. If they’ve written anything wrong, I jot down a reminder to myself to amend it before my discharge—like, for example, to change “introverted and asocial” to “professional and diligent.”
December 4th 2016
Avner glanced at the round clock hanging on the kitchen wall and saw that another half hour had gone by. It was a little after midnight. He placed the notebook on the kitchen table, stood up, and stretched.
He went up to the bedroom. Efrat was fast asleep already. The midnight news was on the television, an anchor was reviewing the stock market’s performance for the day.
Avner turned off the TV and covered Efrat with a blanket. A light breeze was coming in through the open window. Avner closed it completely. Tomorrow would be a rainy day.
With a worn black bag in his hand he returned to the kitchen. He withdrew his laptop, placed it on the kitchen table, plugged it in, and turned it on.
- Fingerprint reader
- User Name
- Password
- Key Phrase
He opened a new Word document and wrote:
10483–Additional Conclusions in Light of New Information
1. We obviously made some serious errors. 10483 was recruited despite the fact that he was clearly suffering from paranoia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. He successfully kept this hidden from us during the recruitment stage but the notebook that has now come to light clearly indicates his condition.
2. We’ve been relying on the army’s findings and information systems. We need to rethink this.
3. The army needs to be made aware of some of this material so that it can fix its procedures.
Avner opened one of the kitchen drawers and found a packet of Turkish coffee. He filled the electric kettle and turned it on. While waiting for the water to boil, he added two heaping teaspoons of coffee to a glass cup. He had a long night ahead of him.
The water in the kettle boiled and Avner filled his glass and stirred it well. He returned to the kitchen table, moved his computer to the side and proceeded to examine the several sheets of paper that had been inserted between the pages of the notebook. They were A4 sheets of paper, without lines, and bore the same tight handwriting that appeared in the rest of the notebook.
There were sketches of some building with bars, something that looked like the façade of a building with several floors, a bridge, something that appeared to be a network of pipes, a drawing of a round container with rods inside it, a number of hand-drawn maps, and various math and physics formulas that Avner didn’t understand. He placed all the drawings in a single pile and put them aside. He’d go through them later. He returned to the rest of the sheets of paper. Some looked like revision notes in preparation for various kinds of psychometric exams. There were examples from Rorschach tests with various interpretations, tests that involved images with stories written alongside them, geometric shapes from Bender-Gestalt tests, explanations about the MMPI-2 test, analyses of the Myers-Briggs tests, and summaries of sentence-completion and shape-completion tests. Some of the pages showed drawings of various trees with a psychological profile for each tree image.
There was also an army release document with references that brought a smile to Avner’s face. The password to access the Adjutant Corps computer had certainly proved its worth.
Attached to the flattering Army release document was a summons from The Organization to admission tests along with a photocopy of a complete classification booklet in the same neat handwriting—and with them, one of The Organization’s standard employment contracts. The Civilian Profession section read: “10483 has agreed to biology, chemistry, and mathematics studies at the expense of The Organization and employment in a pharmaceuticals firm (or a company that provides customer service in the field) that includes travel to Europe and North America.”
A few more stapled pages contained summaries from one of The Organization’s basic courses. There were a number of polygraph test printouts with some of the graphs colored with a yellow marker. Avner assumed they were from the polygraph training section of the basic agents’ course.
There were undergraduate diplomas in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and computer science, and an approval for a full scholarship toward a master’s degree.
A small envelope was taped to one of the pages. Avner opened it. Inside was a flash drive bearing a small sticker with the word, SLOWPOKE, written on it in black ink. He had no idea what the writing meant and he refrained for the time being from checking its contents on the laptop. He first wanted to finish reading through the notebook. He’d get to it afterward.
Avner typed some more:
4. Today, in the age of the Internet, one can very easily study all the psychological and personality tests and provide the optimal answers that the examiners expect. We need to significantly reduce their weight in the recruitment process and rely more on personal interviews, group behavior, (unmediated) observation, and stress-simulation exercises.
That psycho fooled us all, Avner thought to himself. He mouthed the word, SLOWPOKE. He seemed to recall encountering the term at some point in the past, and then it struck him—the Bernoulli Project. A chill went down his spine.
MORNING. MAY 2000
I’m sitting in Ullman hall and listening to another lecture in discrete algorithmic geometry. The material is easy to grasp and I use the time to connect to the building’s wireless network from my computer and hack into the other students’ laptops.
If I find any interesting pictures, I download them to my laptop.
On one of the laptops I find a rental contract for an apartment and a username and password to access an account at Bank Leumi. I copy them, too. I may need them one day.
I thought the studies at the Technion would move at a quicker pace, but I was wrong. Everyone is still slower than me. Most of the lectures bore me.
I no longer live with Ronen in Tel Aviv. I live in Haifa in a ground-floor rental with a roommate, Sigal. Every night I check to make sure no one is poisoning our food and drink in the fridge, and sometimes I go into her room while she’s sleeping to check that she’s still breathing.
Our kitchen and living room window face a garden, where Sigal is growing herbs and marijuana.
NIGHT. MARCH 2001
In the analytical introduction to theoretical geometry you’re also taught to calculate the areas and volumes of circular forms. Most of the formulas include a multiple of pi, which is rounded off to 3.14. The moment I begin calculating pi in my head I break away from the lesson and go back to the apartment and mentally run through the sequence of numbers. Pi is the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. I lie on my bed and calculate pi.
Meanwhile, a large black ant crawls out from under the bed. It’s the size of a pack of cigarettes.
3-point-1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5. I’ve been on the bed calculating pi for a few hours by now. Starting afresh every time I reach a few hundred digits. The ants continue to emerge from under the bed and are walking slowly around the room. A week ago I dropped a box of Moxypen Forte tablets under the bed and left it there. The ants gnawed through the packaging and ate the antibiotics. It caused them to grow.
8-9-7-9-3-2-3-8-4-6. Sigal comes into my room.
She asks if I’ve seen her sneakers. I motion with my hand to indicate I haven’t. 2-6-4-3-3. She returns to her room.
A thin man with razor-cut spiky hair and black eyes is standing next to my bed. “Do you know what a mouse and an elephant have in common?” he asks.
I signal with my hand that I don’t. I can’t speak. I continue my calculations. 8-3-2-7-9. The giant ants are emerging from under the bed. A convoy is heading for the kitchen. If Sigal sees them she’ll scream.
“The thing they have in common,” says the man next to the bed, “is that their teeth never stop growing. That’s why an elephant has to chew all the time and a mouse has to gnaw all the time. That’s how they grind down their teeth. If they stopped, their teeth would grow too large, their mouths wouldn’t close properly, and they’d eventually starve to death.”
5-0-2-8-8. One of the ants is gnawing at one of the wooden legs of my desk chair. A noise is coming from the kitchen. I shouldn’t have left the antibiotics under the bed. 4-1-9-7-1. “You’re the same,” the man says. “You gnaw away at things, too. You have to gnaw. You gnaw on numbers.”
6-9-3-9-9. I continue to gnaw away at the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. The man beside the bed leaves the room and shuts the door on one of the ants, slicing it in two. Music is coming from Sigal’s room. 3-7-5-1-0. One of the ants has crawled up onto my bed. I can see it moving toward me under the blanket.
I wake at 1:30.
There’s a jar of sodium that I took from the chemistry lab on the small bedside table. The gray lump of sodium with its plasticine-like texture is immersed in oil. If you take a small piece and drop it into water, the lump ignites in white flame and bounces off the surface of the water leaving white puffs of smoke in its wake.
I take the jar of sodium and go to the bathroom. I fill the bath with cold water, take my clothes off, enter the bath, and sit in the water. I take a few lumps out of the jar and place them in the water around me and they ignite and dance around me in the water. Whenever one of them reaches too close to me I push it away with my hand feeling the sting of fire when I do that.