Lea was stuck inside one of the caravans. Avishag and Yael stood outside and watched her sniff mattresses and crusty socks.
“Is this the type of thing that gets you off nowadays?” Yael asked. “I thought you were a married lady.”
“Oh dear,” Avishag said. She rarely spoke for Lea, but obscenity made her eyes buzz.
“Kinda. It kinda gets me off,” Lea shouted, still sniffing. “But really I am trying to detect Russian sweat.… Wait!” Lea looked under a field bed with a mattress covered in hot red sheets she had just breathed in. “Got it!”
She found three bottles that were part of a four-pack of peach schnapps, bound together by white plastic. Avishag hoped the Russian boy had not taken the fourth bottle with him to Syria. Russian boys tended to handle the automatic weapons.
“He must be a homo. What kind of guy drinks this shit? It’s our favorite, Yael! This is too good to be true.”
THE GIRLS stretched themselves out on the velvety broken sofas in the recreation room. Yael took a long swig and felt the ticking of her body slowing down. Lea was already a quarter of the way through her own bottle. Yael did not understand what the TV was showing. It was a video game, set up so that the player was the eyes. A woman with a machine’s voice was reciting insults: “The results of the test from the previous level of the game conclude that you are a terrible human being. We weren’t even testing for that,” the voice said. The setting seemed like some kind of deranged physics lab. Cement and orange lava. Robots were shooting and speaking with the voices of children: “Where did you go? I don’t hate you.”
Yael passed Avishag the bottle. “I can’t,” Avishag said. “The medicine.”
“Oh yeah, the super cool medicine,” Lea said, and pinched Avishag on the cheek. “Tell me, little Avi, does Dr. Zhivago-bumble-bee up your dosage before or after he fucks you?”
Right as she said it Lea regretted it. Avishag looked down at one of her fingernails as if it were a war room monitor. Lea, oddly, was nicer drunk than sober, and she wondered if the cruelty bleeding into her words was the baby’s way of telling her he did not very much care for peach schnapps.
“I have a woman doctor,” Avishag said. Even though it was Yael who had left the country, it was Avishag and Lea who had met the least since their huge blowout after Avishag told Lea she’d been taking antidepressants. They had become friends again after the army, when Avishag needed Lea, with Lea eagerly telling Avishag exactly what to do to cure her sadness. Lea was disappointed in the end that Avishag found a solution that had nothing to do with her.
Yael thought she needed to say something but then realized that she always thought she needed to say something. So she didn’t. She looked around the room, under empty pizza boxes and porn magazines, and found the computer game box. The game was called Human Engineering INC 2. She read the back:
This game is a series of mathematic riddles that must be solved or death and excruciating pain will occur. The player, Many, is following the orders of a Cyber Intellectual named GOD-DOS (Genome Organizing Detailer and Domain Operating System) to complete tests in the Human Engineering INC Enrichment Center, with the promise of receiving frozen pizza if testing is finalized and the subject is still alive and retains his taste buds and face.
The automated woman’s voice was speaking in loops, invisible. Yael closed her eyes and listened. “The Enrichment Center regrets to inform you that the next challenge is impossible. Do not try to solve it” and “Honestly, this part of the game was an error. If we were you, we would just kill ourselves already. Just what, as it says here in your subject 3288 file, your birth mother wanted to do when she gave you up for adoption by putting you in the Dumpster, the night after a sausage festival.”
Yael pressed a button on the joystick, and then she pressed all of them. Lea was drinking more quickly. Avishag was staring. Yael liked it that she had something to do in that awkward moment. Finally, the player on the screen jumped above the lava. The woman’s voice was heard louder: “Great Job! You stayed hopeful and dedicated to your goals in an environment of oppression and negativity. You should really become an activist and free some slaves.”
The next phase of the game was conducted in an incineration chamber for badly wired battle androids. They slid across a manufacturing line into the flames, mumbling like toddlers: “I am badly wired. I only take up space. Thank you for ending me and helping the Enrichment Center thrive!” Except for one android, who quietly repeated: “I’m Ok wired. I am different,” until he burned. Yael wondered about the face of the American man who had written the script for the game. Then she wondered about those who played it. About all of those who had seen that chamber.
“Listen, girls,” she said into the sun that penetrated the recreation room. “Listen girls”—that phrase again, just like all the times she had used it growing up.
“Oh, no,” Lea said. “It’s always a bad sign when she says that.”
Avishag liked it that Lea was finally speaking again. She smiled, showing her teeth.
“They are going to kill us all. The boys. This is the game they play,” Yael said. Then she pointed at the screen.
“Oh no, Avishag!” Lea yelled. “Yael thinks she is Jonah the prophet again!” She was talking about Yael as if she weren’t in the room.
Avishag laughed. She took Yael’s face in her hands. “Yael. You are not Jonah. We went over this in fourth grade. Then again in seventh.”
Yael felt as though she could breathe in Avishag’s voice. She had been missing the sound of that voice, the actual voice, with its dash of unmedicated cynicism. “I know I am not Jonah, duh,” Yael said. In that second, everything started making itself a little good again.
“You are no Joan of Arc either,” Lea said.
“Most certainly you are no Maid of Lorraine. I saw those e-mails you sent from Paris. What was it? Four guys in one weekend?” Avishag said, and then the three started laughing in such unison, had there been anyone near enough to hear them he would have thought a tractor must have caught the hiccups somewhere.
Lea was the first to stop laughing. “But really, if we forget about Yael reenvisioning a better production scheme for Bruce Willis’s Armageddon, what I wanted to say is that Avishag, I am sorry. It is none of my business, your medicine.”
Avishag took the bottle from Lea’s hands. She poured the liquid into her mouth, paused, swallowed. Then she laughed. A laugh that dropped and rose like a yo-yo. This was the way she did it. This was how she started to cry.
“You are right, Lea. They wanted me to go to the army, so I go to the army. Then I am having all these thoughts and the thoughts are interrupting everybody, so they want me to take medicine. Then one of the scouts’ moms finds out I take medicine, and now they want me fired. I’m going to have to move back in with my mother, who is still living with her mother. You can’t win with these people.”
No one in the world had heard Avishag talk for this long since the tear-gas commander. She spoke like she was opening a can with her teeth.
“Who are ‘these people’?” Yael asked.
“Everyone who is not me,” Avishag said.
Lea gently patted Avishag’s knee. It occurred to Yael that she was the only one who hadn’t changed, that the other two had but she felt like she was still she.
“It’s not just you,” Lea said. “I can’t win with these people either. Ron’s sandwich shops are doing amazing. But we still can’t find a place big enough to raise kids in Tel Aviv. There is so much demand—there is simply nothing available.”
They both looked at Yael. At first she thought they were looking for guidance, but then she saw an embarrassed pinch at the side of Lea’s mouth. They were looking at Yael as if she were an outsider.
“Don’t look at me like that. It is not better out there in the world. Everywhere you go, it’s just trains that never show up, noise complaints. Police cars sticking out of the sidewalk into major roads so that they force you to walk in the middle of traffic.
It’s like they want you to get run over.”
The girls looked at her as if she were a wannabe in their clique. Desperation rang false on Yael.
“But. I haven’t been everywhere yet, obvi,” Yael said.
And then they all breathed.
FROM THEN on the days of war were nice to them. They watched Yes satellite TV all day. They all just had regular cable at their parents’ homes and wherever else they lived, so the new channels were a blessing. They watched a Gilmore Girls marathon and a Discovery Channel show about honey badgers. They watched a documentary called My Car Is My Lover, and a Night Court/Who’s the Boss marathon on the oldies channel. In the afternoons Lea and Avishag took the car to get food and alcohol in the nearby Arab town. Lea paid; they got fusion food: fried onions and Muenster cheese and basil on everything that could ever be carved out of bread.
Yael stayed behind when the other two went out to get food. She loved it. It was like babysitting for the richest couple in town after the children had gone to bed. She stretched her legs out and watched fuzzy shows on channel six, the children’s channel. Bully the Snowman and Wonder Shoes and Chiquititas. The songs bounded her, as if their notes were painted in water on the walls. The channel’s theme song between the shows was her favorite. “The channel is my home. This summer the plane is boarding on the children’s channel! Science! Art! Horror stories!” She breathed like she thought nothing of it in those hours. She was the ruler of a domain not her own. The song rang like trumpets when she closed her eyes. “The national channel is the true place! With it I am able, and it is always with me!” If Yael was crying, it was because only then did she start to understand why she thought it was, after all, pretty good to die for her country.
The women were happy in those days.
THE BOYS came back to the base after two weeks. Shai had died. A few others had too. The foot invasion had achieved nothing and the army was taking down Damascus and Aleppo with aerial strikes instead. The younger girls had left the day before, sent back to their original bases. They boarded the bus laughing and pointing their middle fingers at the three women. “Summer vacation is over, grandmas! We are going back to mommy and daddy.” The blonde watch girl giggled at them, slamming her body against the window, looking just as ethereal with her breasts crushed on the glass. Yael thought of Hagar. The reserve officer called her on the phone to chat about the dead they both knew and said that, under the circumstances, the women could go home because the boys were only coming back to wrap up their equipment, and they would have no time to train with the girls or linger in the base. Then the boys would get a week at home.
Yael thought the right thing to do was to wait for the boys until the last bus got them, even though the women had a car. But when the boys arrived they looked through the three of them as if they had been airbrushed out of the base.
Ten guards from an artillery platoon were to guard the base until the firefighters arrived in a month.
It was only when everyone was all packed up and waiting at the gate for the late bus that the boys engaged. They teased Yael. There were twelve boys left, waiting for the last army bus in the sun. The boys said if Yael was going to do just one tiny thing to earn her reserve stipend, that thing would be the fattest guy in the group. That’s Zionism right there.
“I am not going to pity-fuck Baruch,” Yael said. “He is nasty as fuck,” she said. She was sitting on top of the antisniper barricade by the gate of the base. She did not look at Baruch or Oren the officer, the one who had come up with the idea, when she spoke. Her words were mumbled because she had Lea’s bobby pin jabbing out of her red mouth. Lea lay with her head in Yael’s lap. Yael was twisting the sides of Lea’s bangs into tiny braids, as if nothing mattered more than those auburn hairs. Lea’s hair smelled of lavender shampoo. When Yael rubbed her nose, she smelled that the cleanliness of it had stuck to the tips of her fingers.
“Why would you say something like that?” Oren the officer asked. He stood with his arms crossed, turning his gaze from the gate and the road ahead to Yael. “His best friend just died on him, while you were here in the base jerking off.”
“So his best friend died. My boyfriend died. Actually, a few of my boyfriends died. They tend to. Avishag’s brother once died a long time ago. Big deal. He needs to find his balls and move on,” Yael said. She was winking at Lea, rolling her eyes with the teenhood that the young girls infected her with. Avishag held her hands to her ears and closed her eyes.
“Find his balls and move on?” said Yoav. “Shai was not your boyfriend. He said he was not. If he was, you could have made him stay.”
Yoav. The staff sergeant. He joined in the conversation.
AT FIRST Yael thought the boys must be kidding, that they must be just kids. They came with three gurneys and slammed the three girls onto them. They didn’t tie them in for safety or give them helmets. As a weaponry instructor, any deviation from safety protocol disturbed Yael, and her concern grew when the boys jammed the barrels of their guns firmly into her back. She could not see the other two because of the dust clouds that rose from the run up the hill to the flag area, but it was clear to her that had the angle of the jam been different, her spinal cord might have been severed.
The boys let the girls drop like leaflets from the height of their shoulders right by the flag. Then they huddled in a circle, as if the world were their soccer game, and whispered.
“You are going to write, big, with stones, ‘We Are Whores,’ or we’ll … we will torture you,” Yoav said to the girls on the ground after a few minutes. “We will not let you go home.”
Yael rose from the ground and sat on her bottom. She looked up at Yoav. His eyes were red. He’d been smoking weed. She could see that the snot in his nose was black, and she knew he had been too afraid to wash his face and be forced to look in the mirror since he got back. She could not believe he used the word “torture.” It sounded cliché. Like he hadn’t bought the vowels for it.
“We are not writing nothing,” Yael said, low. “Nah, nah, nah. Come on.” The old Rihanna song flew from her mouth. She remembered when Rihanna had overdosed the year before. How she had cried about it while looking at her delayed flight glowing in red in that tiny Romanian airport. “I like it, like it,” she now sang on.
“Listen, girls,” Avishag said. She removed her hands from her eyes. She had been crying for a while; the dry wetness blended with the new.
“You shut up with your baby talk,” Yael said. She hadn’t yelled at Avishag since they were in high school. Maybe that was a problem, Yael thought, and then waited for Lea to talk.
“I am a professional writer and I won’t even write it in stones. Stones are so permanent. And I personally like ‘S&M,’ even on Facebook. I like it, like it,” Lea said. She did not sing the lyrics.
And so the boys did not know what to do. They shrugged at each other, pointed their guns and made the girls go to their caravan, the Negev guns storage container that was already locked. They made the girls crawl on all fours.
“WHAT NOW?” Avishag asked. Night was dropping and all the lights on the base went out, then back on, and again.
“Now we are not scared. There is no fear in the world,” Yael said. There was becoming much more of her with every word. “We have two bottles of sauvignon blanc and tons of pizza crust and pasta left and a whole bottle of Diet Coke, from that time you accidentally bought diet. I brought it here.”
“You brought it here from the boys’ area?” Lea asked.
“I brought it here. I thought it might be wise.”
“So now we wait,” Lea said. “You thought it might be wise …” she said, and shook her head, smirking. It was almost as if she were surprised by something for the first time; at who Yael was, at who she herself was. In her voice Yael heard that Lea got it but was not sure she wanted to.
The girls sat on their mattresses and looked at the door. They did not move. They wanted to remember everything that had happened in the seconds before.
AND SO it began.
The next morning Yoav entered alone and asked for a volunteer, and Yael volunteered by rising and walking and following him.
Avishag cried.
“OMG,” Lea said.
Yael talked through the whole march up to the flag, saying she’d do whatever if he promised not to touch the other two, then giving up hope when she was already naked and saying that she’d do anything and gladly, if he only spared Avishag. She mentioned the dead brother, but in the end it did no good.
The twelve boys and three girls were all active participants. Volunteering proved unproductive.
Nothing that they did was very productive. But they tried. Yael tried talking. She would not shut up. She said she’d been hitchhiking all over Africa; that she probably had exotic diseases and that this was really not a wise move. Lea only spoke on the walk back, saying that this was all rather interesting, that she might write about it or tell her husband about it—they had been meaning to spice up their bedroom routine. She lectured the boys as she was clicking her bra shut, her hands under her uniform shirt. Even Avishag could not be shocked. She kept her eyes closed and whispered apologies for the war, sympathetic chin nods about how difficult it is to be a young man in today’s dating world.
The twelve boys found themselves inside a pickle.
THE GIRLS were fine that first night. Even Avishag was thinking ahead. She spoke as the other two were looking at each other, as if hanging each other and Avishag on the line between their eyes.
“We’ll just have to do a lot of drugs. We’ll travel somewhere and do a lot of drugs and then move on,” Avishag said. She put her head on Yael’s shoulder and Yael did not push her away like she usually did. “Yael, did you do a lot of drugs in India? Which drugs are the most optimal drugs for moving on?” Avishag asked.
“The way you talk sometimes, I swear …” Lea said. “I’ve missed it.”
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 24