The kid stopped in his tracks, turned, and asked, “My instructor?”
“Yeah sweetie, from the computer course. He said to tell you that the class would be meeting at four o‘clock today.”
For a moment the child’s face remained perfectly still, and only when his mother smiled at him did he enthusiastically return the favor. “Thanks, Mom!”
An hour later, he came down the stairs and, his face alight, said he’d be back in the evening. Tali nodded, kissed his face lightly, and wished him a good time. A minute later, she donned dark sunglasses, put on a wide-brimmed hat, and left the house. Feeling ridiculous as she recalled similar scenes from detective movies, she made sure to stay a safe distance behind her son as he picked up his pace, crossing familiar streets turned ominous. Twenty minutes later, slipping into a speed walk, she was certain he was trotting toward the park, but before entering he turned into a quiet street nearby, slowed to a walk, and knocked on the tall door of a stately home. Tali’s heart thumped in her chest as she ducked behind a parked car.
She tried to see who opened the door but couldn’t make out anything beyond her son, who took a step backwards and gesticulated angrily with his hand. For a short while he was quiet, listening to the person who had opened the door, but then he started to scream, his long hair flailing all over the place, “You can’t do this. You’re my friend!”
At that moment, Tali’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of the tall skinny man with the black glasses who, like a rat, poked his head out of his hole for a brief, brave moment, bowed and gently shook the boy’s shoulders, raising his voice plaintively. “Don’t you see this has nothing to do with you? There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me and my brother. It’s too complicated to explain. But for now I can’t be in touch with you. Try and understand, Tom. You know how much I like playing with you, but this time I have no choice. I’m sorry.”
Tom burst out crying and the man embraced him for a long while, stroking his hair and calming him. Tali’s body started to tremble as she watched this strange man with his hands around her son, but she stayed put until the man had gone back inside the house and her son had turned away from the door with an expression that was hard to mistake. Only when she was sure the coast was clear did she straighten up, stretch, cross the street, take off her shoes, and tiptoe to the front door of the house. She wrote down the resident’s name on the palm of her hand and left at a run, slowing down as she spotted her son’s back farther down the sidewalk. For a second or two, she considered keeping up her undercover routine, but then came to her senses, striding toward her stooped son and placing a hand on his back.
Tom swung around and looked at her in a disbelief that, in an instant, melted into understanding. In a crushed voice he asked, “Mom, what are you doing here?”
Before she could find the right words, his full lips formed a crater of shock. “You followed me, right? You lied to me when you said that…”
“Adam called,” she said, putting a steadying hand on his shaking shoulders.
Tom took a step back. “Did you talk to him?” he asked in a threatening tone.
“No, Tom, I didn’t talk to him. I preferred to ask you.”
“What do you want to ask me?”
She pointed at a nearby café. “Let’s not have this conversation right here.”
The mother and son walked to the café in silence. They sat at a corner table. Tali ordered both of them her son’s favorite, a strawberry banana milkshake. They said nothing until the waitress set their drinks before them. Tali asked if he was hungry and he said no. When she turned away from the table, Tom glared at his mother and said, “I know what you’re trying to do, Mom.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re trying to get on my good side so I’ll tell you about my friend,” he said, taking a smooth pull from his shake.
“Honey,” Tali said, “you apparently have no idea what you’ve done. Tom, for the last fifteen months your father and I thought you were going to an extracurricular computer course. I just found out that that course doesn’t exist.”
“If you’re worried about the money, you can relax,” he said. “I didn’t spend a shekel of it. It’s all in my piggy bank.”
“I don’t care about the money. I want to know how you met this man”—she prayed he didn’t feel the shudder in her leg—“and how, for God’s sake, you weren’t afraid that…”
“That what? That he’d hurt me? Do something bad to me?” He sneered. “I knew that the second you found out I had an adult friend you’d go nuts and start dreaming up all kinds of crazy things.”
Had they been at home, Tali thought, he would have heard her raise her voice for the first time, but as she pondered that notion, he amazed her by voicing genuine disappointment. “You’re just like that friend of yours … what’s her name? The one that fell…”
This time she didn’t hold herself back, rasping, “How dare you mention Marian like that?”
The kid smiled indifferently. “It’s cause of her that I met Adam.”
Tali stared at her son for a long moment before asking in a frail voice, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“If you promise not to be mad, I’ll tell you.”
“If you don’t tell me, I promise to be mad.”
It was obvious he was choosing his words with care, and when he spoke there was a new wrinkle in his brow and a false calm in his voice. “I know you and Dad think I’m a good boy. And you’re right. But even good boys sometimes do bad things. Well, things that aren’t good. Anyway, don’t think I planned this or anything. It was just a really beautiful day and class was super boring. Our history teacher was going over the same stuff for like the millionth time. I put my hand up and asked if this was what people meant when they said that history repeats itself. Everyone laughed but she threw me out of class. While I was walking down the hall, I already knew where I was going to go.”
“Where?”
“To the amusement park. I was dying to go there.”
“Where did you get money for that?”
“Dad gave me my weekly allowance that morning and I borrowed twenty more shekels from Ronny.”
“Ronny went with you?”
“No, I waited for him till recess and asked him if he wanted to come. He said he did but that he was too scared.”
“Of what?”
“He thought someone might see him there and tell his parents. I told him there was no chance, but he still chickened out. Anyway, I went alone. And, ironically, as Dad likes to say, just what he was afraid of happened to me.”
“Oh my God … you met Marian on that dreadful day.”
“Yes,” Tom said, biting his lower lip. “On line I saw a big group of kids go in two minutes before me. I was really happy because I thought an entire class had skipped out of school or something, but then I saw two women walk back from the ticket booth and hand everyone tickets. Like a total moron I stood next to the group of kids and one of the teachers handed me a ticket. I gave it back to her and told her she was wrong. She looked at me and laughed.… Marian heard her laugh and turned toward me. I froze. She was really surprised and asked what I was doing there. When I didn’t answer she got it all by herself. She also laughed and said that next time I cut school I should bring a friend or two along.”
“That’s what Marian said?” Tali asked.
“Yeah. She said those places were unsafe, and then turned around and pointed to a guy sitting by the ice cream stand. It was Adam. He looked like a blind businessman. He had on dark glasses and a suit and carried a briefcase. He kept moving his head from side to side like he was looking for something. She told me to watch out for that guy and that he looked really sketchy, but I wasn’t listening to her.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because Adam bent down and pulled out a new game that I’d never seen.”
“Marian didn’t notice you weren’t paying attention?”
“She lost her con
centration. It was kind of funny.”
“What was funny?”
“She asked me something and then she started to stare at this old beggar under a tree. And the beggar was looking real hard at Adam. I think she felt bad for the beggar because she asked me to wait a second and then she went over to him and asked if he wanted to join her group of consulate kids.”
“What did the beggar do?”
“I think he must have been, like, high or something, because it took him a long time to smile. He was so ugly. His teeth were all black and his beard was really dirty.”
“That’s the beggar who sat next to her when she was on the Ferris wheel and then disappeared! Did you see … what happened…?”
“No, no, I wasn’t there when it happened.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I asked Marian not to tell you guys that she saw me at the amusement park, and she said it would be our little secret.”
“You didn’t tell us that you saw Marian on the day she died because you were scared we’d know you’d cut school…,” Tali said in a low voice, “That’s so remarkably stupid.”
The kid, trying to look away from his mother, examined the coffee rings on the table.
“Well, what are you waiting for,” Tali said, “what happened after that?”
Still focusing on the stains on the table, the child tried to sound cool, but before long he got too excited and his sentences tumbled out. “She took the beggar and the class to the Ferris wheel. And I was looking at Adam, who took out this other game that I had never seen either. I was really curious. Then he opened his bag on the grass and I couldn’t believe it. He had like ten brand new games there that I’d never seen. He pulled them out and started to arrange them. Every couple of minutes he looked up and smiled at me. I smiled back, and then he made a sign for me to come to him. So I walked over. He introduced himself and asked if I like computer games. I said it was the thing I liked most in the world. He asked if I knew the Cryptograph series. I said I didn’t, and then he asked if I wanted to play with him. At first I was thinking about what Marian had said, but then he chuckled and showed me the name of the inventor of the game, and it was him! I thought I was going to pass out. Mom, Adam invents all of these games! That’s his job! I asked him what he was doing at the amusement park, and he said he was looking for guinea pigs for his new game. Eight- to twelve-year-olds who would try it out and tell him what they thought. He said it would help him improve his product. In exchange for helping him, they’d get to take free games home.”
“I don’t know if I can go on listening,” Tali said.
Tom leaned toward her. “Stop it, Mom! I know what you’re thinking, and that’s totally disgusting. All he did was take me back to his house, explain the rules of the game, and watch me play. I was having such a good time I didn’t want to leave, and he said he was also but that I should get going so that my parents wouldn’t worry. He gave me two games, and when I asked if I could come back and visit again, he said that he had no problem with that. By the third time I went over there, I realized that if you or Dad knew I was meeting with Adam, who is like old enough to be my dad, you’d go nuts and start imagining all kinds of crazy stuff. So we thought up the idea of the computer course together and then printed up the application and then, so that it wouldn’t seem weird, I asked Ronny to go along with it and say he was also doing the course.”
Tom sipped his milkshake and looked up at his mom. She sighed heavily. “You’ve been going to Adam’s house for fifteen months every single Wednesday and you’re telling me all you did was sit around and play computer games?”
The kid licked his long-stemmed spoon. “Sometimes we also ate pizza.”
“I imagine he isn’t a married man, this guy?”
“No. He lives with his brother. But I never got to see him because he’s always at work.”
Tali glared at her son. “You realize that I forbid you from ever going near this man again?”
Tom nodded sullenly. “It doesn’t matter. He said he doesn’t want to meet again anyway.”
Just as the waitress came past to ask if she could get them anything else, the two started to sob. The child asked his mother haltingly, “What … are … you … going to do … to me?”
Tali brought her napkin to her face, daubed her tears, and whispered, “The question is not what I’m going to do to you, but what I’m going to do to him.…”
“To who?” the kid asked anxiously.
“To the man who made me lose my faith in the person I cherish most in this world.” Tali put the napkin in the ashtray and signaled for the check.
24
Anntarctica on Fire
“Something’s wrong with Annplugged,” one of the nurses said, huddling with her coworkers, surveying the sudden change in the diminutive woman, who’d tried to cover up the emotional storm she’d weathered with ill-applied cosmetics. The thick makeup theatrically laid over the white face did little to hide the puffy eyes; in fact, it lent her a Gothic quality, as though she’d come to work straight from a Transylvanian ball of horrors. Moreover, the smeared eye shadow, the clumped mascara, and the cementlike layer of concealer made it all too clear that the woman had sobbed for hours and, judging by the state of her concealment efforts, the tears were still flowing when she began to work on her face.
“She looks terrible,” one of the nurses whispered.
“I think she’s sick,” another said.
“She must’ve been through some kind of treatment during this past week,” a third surmised.
“And it failed,” a fourth concluded.
The hospital director’s request that Ann see him in his office lit the other nurses’ eyes. They rejoiced at her return, not least because after years of nothing but boredom from Ann, the crew had grown to resent their distant superior, their imagination whisking them away to the day when she’d fall sick and then, at the mercy of her replacement, wait unknowingly to be disconnected from life support, a termination of her existence between these walls, for beyond them she never dared to live. But that morning the nurses learned that the cheeky little nurse had a life elsewhere, too.
The nurses were not alone. After Ann closed the door to his office, the hospital director looked her over for a long moment before greeting her and apologizing for the chagrin the week of suspension may have caused. She said that the only thing that mattered was that he believed in her innocence. He restated his earlier conviction and offered her a cup of tea, trying to buy enough time to satisfy his curiosity about her strange appearance. She declined his offer with a miserly smile, wished him a good day, and left the office.
Only after the door closed, did he realize that the detail that had caught his eye had nothing to do with the garish carnival from the lips up. It was the way she stood. The stoop in her back, as always, threatened to throw her off balance; her left hand, as always, hung frozen by her side; but her right hand was stuffed into the pocket of her white uniform, furrowing in its depths, unaware of its jarring effects. He’d never seen her walk that way, with one hand in sync and the other hidden from view. Five minutes later, on his way to a class he was teaching at the university, he turned around and saw her speaking with the replacement nurse, leaning over Yonatan’s bed, her right hand still jingling inside the pocket, a separate being from the rest of her body, as though she were operating on two different axes.
Briefed on Yonatan’s situation, she thanked her replacement and addressed the paperwork that had been waiting for the past week. The letters moved in front of her eyes like marching battalions of black bugs, and she found herself doodling on the corners of the pages, wondering who the hell cared about the amount of medicine in the closet when she had the most sensational news ever languishing in her pocket. She ran her fingers over the surface of the photo, barely holding back another stream of tears. She got out of her chair, brought the papers into an orderly stack, and decided to come back to them later on. It was shocking to her that she coul
dn’t handle this simple task. A week ago she could have banged out the forms while discussing the health of one of her patients. Catching yet another glance from one of her colleagues, she summoned the proper tone and gave them all something to do, scattering them across the ward merely to avoid their inquisitive glances. She checked her watch and decided to break for lunch. Instead of eating the usual sandwich, she spent her fifteen minutes staring at the rear parking lot, aware that no one would come bother her in this little nook in the wall.
All night long she’d been running through the paces of her next meeting with the mystery woman, desperately seeking a smooth path over the moat that divided them ever since the miserable end of their otherwise amicable dinner. An apology was mandatory, same for an offering of thanks, perhaps a bit of small talk, a dose or two of compassion for Yonatan, some hope-inducing talk about his chances, then the natural bond and the careful interrogation.
When she got back to Yonatan’s room, Marian was in the midst of another one of her “wall” conversations with the expressionless man. The nurse had no doubt who she was referring to when she lowered her voice and told her virtual lover that “she’s really weird.”
Ann drew in a long breath, felt around in her pockets, and belted out, “Good afternoon, Marian!”
Marian didn’t even bother turning around. “Whatever,” she said, her voice dark and distant.
“Would you like me to leave?” Ann asked.
“I thought you already had,” Marian said, caressing Yonatan’s smooth bald head.
“Actually, before I go”—Ann stopped in front of the door, her eyes locked on the statuesque back—“I wanted to say something.”
“I’m not taking it back!”
“I don’t want you to,” Ann said. “On the contrary, I just want to thank you for the beautiful chain and apologize for last night. I acted like a complete idiot.”
“Well, I can’t argue with that,” Marian said, her voice softening. She turned toward Ann and a giggle sprang from her mouth. “What in God’s name did you do to yourself?”
The World of the End Page 24