by Dara Horn
“Actually it’s just one big computer,” Rocky clarified. “If you want, I can show you how it works.”
“Yes yes yes!” Ezra shouted. “The Amazing Jumping Man says YES!” And then he leaped toward the machines.
Rocky caught him mid-pounce, spinning him in the air until the boy screeched with laughter, not even noticing that his grandfather had parked him safely on the stairs. “The only thing is, you can’t turn it on yourself,” Rocky told him once he stopped giggling. “It gets really hot if it runs more than a few minutes, so we have to be careful. Got that, Amazing Jumping Man?”
“Got it,” Ezra snapped back. He composed his little face into an expression of utter reverence. “Show me!”
“Help us get all these parts inside and then we’ll fire it up,” Rocky said. “There’s a few smaller boxes you can handle. Jump to it, kid.”
Rachel watched as Ezra flew out to the driveway, Meirav and Rocky trailing behind him.
WHEN SHE MET ELAZAR in the tunnel that night, she gathered her anger together and presented it to him, a bouquet of pique. Even the anger was exciting. In the last week she had felt herself becoming younger, the proximity of death bringing a rejuvenating hope. She wanted to seize Elazar and eat him alive.
“Why are you dumping your property on Rocky?” she asked. Even her voice sounded different to her, not bitter but gleeful. “Whatever that thing is, aren’t you going to need it?”
She had been so eager to confront him that she hadn’t noticed how different he looked: lighter somehow, the circles around his eyes diminished. His face gleamed with a genuine joy. “Oh, the mining rig,” he sang. “That wasn’t my property, technically. There’s a whole pool of owners. I just owned the controlling share.”
“You’re all about the controlling share.”
Insults slid off Elazar’s back like rain. “I’ve been so blessed, I just wanted to share the bounty God has given me.”
“I don’t think God gave you a currency-mining server.”
“His mercy endures forever,” Elazar intoned, and shrugged. “I just thought, maybe it’s time to unload things I don’t need. Give them to someone who needs them more.”
Suddenly Rachel understood. A hundred memories ran through her mind from the times she had prepared to burn: cash planted in other people’s drawers, safes unlocked, grown children kissed goodbye in their sleep. “You’re leaving,” she breathed.
Elazar glowed. “Oh no, Rachel. It’s much better than that. I have amazing news. Your granddaughter is going to kill me!”
“What?”
“I signed up for one of the studies her lab is running. Don’t worry, it’s off-site. I won’t ever meet her.”
“What study?”
“Some study of gene therapy and toxicity. They edit your genes or something like that. Does it matter? It’s so dangerous that it’s only for terminal patients.”
“Aren’t you the opposite of a terminal patient?”
Elazar’s eyes sparkled. “Not according to my medical records.” Rachel groaned as Elazar grinned. “I gave them what they wanted and they took me. They said it was extremely high-risk.”
Rachel frowned. “High-risk for her.”
“Yes, I still think that. But you’re already putting her in danger. If she dies, it’s not my fault. And this way, at least I have a chance. Just like you.”
Rachel controlled her flinch. How could she still care what he thought? “You said it was nonsense.”
“Yes, I still think that too. But I decided that I’m willing to try nonsense. If you’re not going to be in this world, I don’t want to be here either.”
A hollowness opened around Rachel. “There’s more to life than me, Elazar.”
“I don’t think so.” Rachel was astonished to see his eyes fill with tears. “Rachel, I want to say goodbye.”
Rachel looked at Elazar as though he were a child, full of quiet pity. “Elazar, please,” she said. “It may not work. And even if it works, it will probably take weeks or months, won’t it?”
Elazar shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t care. I don’t want to see you that way. And I don’t want you to see me that way. Both of us have watched more than enough people die.”
The tunnel was silent. Rachel felt Elazar’s utter terror in her own body, as hundreds of years of hope and fear drained into the ground beneath their feet.
“Let me hold you once more, Rachel,” he pleaded. “Just one more time.”
She said yes.
He took her clothes off slowly, gently peeling away each layer as he revealed her shoulders, her back, her legs, her breasts. She felt the current rush across her feet, a river of sorrow and love and gratitude. She looked at Elazar, forever beautiful and forever hers, and understood in that moment why no one wanted to die. She took him in her arms and kissed him like she was eighteen years old.
He breathed in her bare body in the dim light, running his lips along her neck as he whispered in her ear. “If I could do it all again, Rachel, I would still follow you. Until the end of the world.”
THE LAB AND THE OUTPATIENT center attached to it were just beginning to feel ordinary to Rachel when Hannah began to be thrilled.
“It’s really exciting, Gram,” she gushed as Rachel put on another sacral gown, preparing for yet another nameless scan. Hannah’s voice rasped as though she’d caught a cold, which she probably had. Rachel had noticed that the pretense of purity at the lab and the clinic only went so far. The place festered with hidden corners of dirt, unemptied trash bins, used tissues. “I’ve run a lot of experiments and seen a lot of things. But nothing like this. There’s a lot we still have to analyze, but we’re very excited. Cautiously excited.”
Rachel sat on an exam table beside whatever machine was supposed to probe or inspect her, ready to lay herself down like a sacrificial goat. “I’m excited too,” she said, with an edge in her voice.
It was a test. There was something in Hannah’s demeanor, a hesitation, that made Rachel deeply suspicious. Rachel had begun to contemplate the possibility that she had been betrayed. But now she watched her granddaughter and noticed a heaviness in her movements. The young woman bent over the table, leaning against it as though bearing a pack on her shoulders.
“You look tired,” Rachel said.
Hannah shrugged, and forced a smile. “I’ve been here pretty late most nights, working on this,” she admitted. “It’s exhilarating. And tiring too, I guess.”
Hannah looked more than tired, Rachel thought. She looked older. Maybe even ill. “You’re working too hard,” Rachel said carefully.
“It’s catching up with me, for sure,” Hannah conceded. “I’ll go home early today. I’ve barely seen the kids all week.”
“Good idea,” Rachel said.
Hannah sat down on a stool near the exam table and caught her breath. For a moment Rachel forgot why either of them was here. Hannah seemed to forget too. Rachel’s aggressively perfect granddaughter closed her eyes for an instant longer than a blink, and leaned against the wall behind her.
“Gram, how did you do this for all these years?” she asked.
Rachel glanced around at the room’s whirring machines. “I never did anything like this,” she tried.
“I don’t mean the science. I mean—I mean—just life,” Hannah said. “Working, raising children, building a business, living with everyone, getting through every problem, never a moment alone. I feel like I’m only just beginning, and I’m already exhausted. I can’t even imagine. How did you get through it all, for so many years?”
“By knowing that nothing lasts,” Rachel answered.
Rachel did not know what would happen next. And she finally felt alive.
SOMEONE’S HOUSE MUST BE on fire, Rachel noticed as she turned onto her street. Not because of the fire engines—there weren’t any, and no distant sirens either—but because of the smell. And as she got closer, the smoke. Soon she was in front of her own house, except that it couldn’t be her o
wn house, because this house was on fire. Smoke was streaming out of several of the lower windows. The front doorway had no door, just a gaping open mouth of smoke with a bleeding man lying on the floor within it, a man whose thick squirming body looked strangely familiar. She lunged out of the car and rushed to his side.
“Rocky, what happened?”
“Door fell on my leg,” he grimaced. “I can’t get up.” Rachel knelt down next to Rocky and saw that the blood was mostly from several large gashes in his left hand, which clutched his thigh. Rocky waved his right hand and shouted, “Ezra’s upstairs!”
“WHAT?”
“He was sick at school, so I brought him home! He was playing in the basement and then he went up to nap. He’s sleeping upstairs!”
Rachel peered into the house in horror. The smoke made it hard to see. She yanked her phone out of her pocket and pressed it into his bleeding hand. “Crawl out as far as you can and call 911,” she said. “I’ll get him.”
“Mom, no! You can’t—”
“Rocky, I love you,” she said. “It’s my time.” She bent down and kissed him. He was a baby again, all possibility. “Marry Meirav. Make something magnificent. I’m watching.”
“MOM!” Rocky screamed.
But she was already running inside.
THE STAIRS WERE ON FIRE, at least along one side. Rachel didn’t care. All that mattered was making it up to the little room with the little window, the room where she had once tucked Rocky into bed every night. She reached the upstairs hallway just ahead of the flames, diving to the floor and rolling to put out the sparks that had already touched her clothes. Then she raced for Rocky’s old room, yanked the door open and slammed it behind her.
Ezra was standing in the middle of the room, blinking and coughing, red-faced and bewildered. When he saw her, he grabbed her around the waist and burst into tears.
“I’m sorry, Gram! I did it! I’m sorry!”
“Did what?”
“I turned on the computers! I left them on! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
In another life there would be time to consider this, to back through the multiple curtains of responsibility and blame that covered the void, to imagine that the fire wasn’t simply waiting for her as it always was, as it always had been, as it always would be. But not now. She crouched down and held Ezra’s little face to hers.
“Listen to me, Ezra,” she said. “I need you to remember this for the rest of your life. This is not your fault. It’s my time. Tell your mother that, okay? Your grandfather too. Tell them it’s my time. Promise me.”
“I promise.” The little boy was sobbing.
She glanced behind her and saw the smoke seeping around the edges of the door. She knew how fast the flames would come. She clutched the boy to her chest, kissed his head, inhaled his smell. But she was out of time; already she was inhaling smoke. She cranked open the tiny casement window. There was no way she could squeeze through it. Even Rocky, eight years old when they bought the house, had been too big to fit—which was exactly why this had been his room. But Ezra was so little. And so, so young.
“Now jump out the window. I know you know how.”
Ezra’s wet eyes bulged. “JUMP?”
“I’ll watch you jump. You’re the Amazing Jumping Man.”
He shook his head, still sobbing. She lifted him and perched him on the windowsill, seating him with his legs swinging in the outdoor air.
He twisted his head toward her. “Gram—”
She kissed him again. “I love you, Ezra. Don’t forget. Keep jumping. I’m watching, always. Ready? One, two, three!”
For a five-year-old, the numbers were a magic spell. She watched as his dark curls took flight, heard the crunch of the bushes below, looked out on the front lawn as he scrambled off the bushes and raced toward his crawling bleeding grandfather.
And then she turned to face the flames.
CHAPTER
15
DAYS OF OLD
. . .
Rachel had forgotten how peaceful it was to hold a baby in her arms. She remembered well the agony of days and nights with newborns, the formless chaos and endless demands. But it had been more than half a century since she had had a baby, and she had forgotten the peace.
For years she wondered if Elazar had planned it, if the fire was nothing more than his malevolent plot to save her life. If that was true, he was biding his time. There was no sign of him for so many years that she even thought he might have succeeded in dying. Then, last year, she had seen him—a younger him, a happier him, a him so different from the one she knew that she couldn’t be entirely sure it was him at all—in a news photo: an announcement about a team selected to train for an international mission to Mars. She had mourned and rejoiced, her mourning and joy indistinguishable. His presence was hard to bear. His absence made her love him more.
She had met Nir on her post-army trip, backpacking in Peru. She was amazed by how fresh everything felt in this version, how unexplored. She had thought she had been everywhere, seen everything, and was astonished to discover entire new continents. She had also never tried drugs. She wasn’t surprised that they had no effect on her. What surprised her that warm night at the Incan ruins in Pisac, among the dozen other Israeli tourists who had taken leave of their faculties by the floodlights near the ancient terraces, was a young man with tan skin like hers and thick curly black hair. He wore glasses and a T-shirt whose Spanish words she didn’t understand, and was scratching with a pen inside a little notebook. The pen and the notebook were more than strange: it had been at least five years since she had seen anyone use a pen. It was like watching her father dip his quill into her mother’s ink. She was sitting with her back against a terrace wall outside the national park’s official borders, discovering yet again that the drugs did nothing, when she noticed him watching her.
“You’re not stoned,” he said.
“No,” she answered. “I guess it’s just not for me.”
He nodded. His brown eyes gleamed behind his glasses with a weird childish wonder. “I’m the same,” he said. His voice was too quick, too eager. She liked it. “I know I’m supposed to be smoking my brains out. But I spent the last three years half-asleep. Now I just love being awake. Being alive.”
Something within Rachel quivered to life. She had avoided dating during her army service; the last time she had done this, she had worn dresses, stockings, girdles. She leaned over and touched the young man’s shoulder. “What are you writing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he muttered, and quickly shut the notebook. But she had already seen his sketch of her, crosshatched in deep black ink. She was shocked to see herself so young.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. I am beautiful, she thought, in quiet awe. The world was full of unexpected light.
Nir’s backpack buzzed. He fished out his phone, red-faced and relieved. “Ten new messages in the last three minutes,” he muttered. “And over there it’s not even six in the morning.”
“Crazy girlfriend?” she asked.
He shook his head. “My mother texts me constantly. And my sister. And my four brothers. Even my grandmother texts me. I went halfway around the world and they’re still following me.” He laughed, but Rachel could see the effort he poured into putting the phone down without reading the texts. He tried to distract her. “Enjoying the big trip?”
The question was inane. “Amazing,” she said, like she was supposed to say. There were always things she was supposed to say.
To her surprise Nir smirked, and gestured at the wall behind them. “We’re supposed to be wowed by these ruins,” he said. “But I’m from Jerusalem, and my grandmother is from Aleppo.” Rachel nodded, remembering both. “The guide yesterday told me these terraces are six hundred years old and he thought I’d be impressed.” He paused. It was sweet, his fear of saying the wrong thing. “But maybe you are. You’re American, right?”
“Not really,” she murmured. “Not anymore.”
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“But you must still have family there,” he pushed.
She sighed. “It’s ancient history.”
He laughed. “For an American.”
Rachel was tired of being coy. “Before I left America, my family’s house burned down,” she said.
Nir hesitated, confused. Then his eyes widened. The innocence was captivating. “With—with people inside?”
Rachel wanted to begin anew, without lying. “Yes, with people inside,” she said simply. “That’s why I left. I don’t have a family anymore.”
For a long moment Nir sat still, silent. Then he smiled, and offered her his phone. “Would you like a new one?”
Several years passed, years full of things Rachel had never done before—university courses, exams, laboring in a lab, more exams, medical school, the exhilaration of learning new things, things that mattered, things that made her want to ask more questions and then ask even more—before she finally said yes. Now she nursed their newborn baby on a quiet evening in their tiny apartment, overwhelmed with peace.
Nir had run out to pick up a few necessities, a strange thing that young men now seemed to routinely do for their wives and children, along with dozens of other tasks she had never seen any man do, like vacuuming a rug or emptying a dishwasher, the equivalent of cleaning out ashes from an oven. She marveled at it. Nir had even let her give the baby whatever name she wanted, no matter how weird or unfashionable. “You have too many people to name him for,” he told her. He was right.
She marveled more at the actual baby at her breast. The baby was tiny, a smear of dark fuzzy hair and large brown eyes, and he was terrifyingly familiar. From the moment he was born Rachel felt the jolt of recognition, as though something deep and ancient had risen up from a vein sunken in the earth. It was wondrous, and frightening. As he suckled he steadied her, and her body flowed with milk and peace. But when he slept, his little mouth detached from her, and she succumbed too easily to her fears. She distracted herself by scanning her phone with her free hand, searching.
She searched for Elazar, as she often did, searched and searched but could not find him. Instead she fell back on an old favorite, photos someone had posted years earlier of Rocky and Meirav, hoisted high on raised chairs. When she tired of that she searched for a name she only rarely encountered beyond a few repetitive profile pictures and outdated listings, a troubling void in the virtual universe. But this time something new came up: a photo of a familiar woman leaning casually against an institutional white countertop, a faux-serious pout on her no-longer-young face, followed by a clickbait headline on which Rachel, stroking her baby’s little head, eagerly clicked.