by Nir Hezroni
We’re sitting on the sand and looking at the sea. The lights of the city create a yellow-orange-white aura behind us. The beach itself is dark and a cool breeze is blowing in from the sea. The sky is cloudless and dotted with countless tiny stars and a large white full moon. It’s the middle of the month.
“You know,” he says, “after the accident with the bus, I was lying on a stretcher in the ambulance. It was driving fast but I could see everything in slow motion. Someone was sitting next to me and holding my hand and shouting to the driver: ‘No pulse now for two minutes.’ We are all born with two hundred forty million heartbeats and the countdown begins immediately. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Until your time is up. It’s an internal clock that counts the moments of your life from beginning to end.”
“That’s assuming you live to be eighty-four.”
“The ambulance siren sounded as if it was coming from far away. The driver raced over a speed bump, jolting everything inside the ambulance, including the stretcher with my broken body. It hurt. The ambulance made a sharp right turn and a sharp left immediately thereafter and then stopped abruptly. The rear doors opened and I was wheeled down white corridors with fluorescent lights on the ceiling. I heard someone shout: ‘Quickly, to the operating room.’ And we went down another corridor that ended in a set of white doors with round glass windows set in them. The doors opened and they wheeled me in on the stretcher. Everything was hazy. I heard them count: ‘One, two, three.’ And hands gripped me and moved me over to the operating table. I was surrounded by doctors.”
“Were you conscious?”
“Yes. I heard a woman’s voice say: ‘He’s unconscious, applying desflurane mask.’ ‘Respiration rate normalizing, oxygen saturation above ninety.’ ‘He’s under. All yours.’”
“And did you remain awake?”
“Yes. I could feel the doctors performing surgery on me. The anesthetic left my muscles paralyzed and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see much other than blurry images of people standing over me, but I could feel everything—the doctor who was setting the bones of my legs in place, the one who was reconstructing my face, the power drill that was fixing steel plates to the bones of my legs. I experienced degrees of agony I had never felt before, despite the fact that I have a wealth of experience when it comes to pain. If I could have moved a muscle, I would have grabbed one of the scalpels resting on the metal tray near my head and slashed the faces of all those doctors who were butchering me without checking if I was properly anesthetized. The doctor dealing with my eyes was reciting a children’s song while he worked on me, and then he started chatting with the nurse next to him.”
“What did they talk about?”
“He asked her if she was familiar with the definition of anxiety. She said: ‘An intense fear of something specific perhaps?’ And then he said to her: ‘A = Th × Ti.’”
“Which means?”
“Anxiety is the product of thought multiplied by time.”
“And did you remain awake throughout the surgery?”
“No. Shortly afterward I was sucked into a black tunnel, like a movie stunt double with a wire attached to his back who’s tugged backward quickly to simulate being blown backward by a bomb blast. The lights of the operating theater that were shining orange red through my closed eyelids withdrew rapidly and disappeared, and I suddenly found myself in a pitch-black space, a timeless dimension.”
I lean my head against his shoulder and look up at the sky. The moon disappears. I lift my head.
“Did you see that?” I ask.
“What?”
“The moon was up there a second ago and now it’s gone.”
“It must be hidden behind a cloud.”
“But I saw it happen. It was too quick. I saw the moon disappear like a streetlight suddenly going out.” I push my bare feet into the sand. It’s warmer below the surface from the sun it absorbed before night fell a short while ago. I wiggle my toes in the sand and feel its warmth slipping between them.
“There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky; and if there was one, we wouldn’t be seeing all the stars right now. If there was a cloud, it would be hiding them, too.”
“You pay too much attention to detail. Stop being so concerned about what’s happening around us instead of sitting here on the sand and making out with me.”
His eyes are on me now and not on the stars. We kiss.
“Do you know what it means?” I ask.
“What?”
“If the moon vanished like that in a flash, it means we don’t have much time.”
“What do you mean?”
“The moon is responsible for the ocean tides. Its gravitational pull affects them. When it hangs above the center of an ocean, the waters rise up toward it like a huge hill of sorts.”
“I should have paid more attention during physics class. Does this mean there’ll be no more tides?”
“Correct.”
He runs his hand through my hair.
“That’s a shame,” he says, “because change is a good thing. It’s nice when it’s low tide and you can walk arm-in-arm along the seashore looking for shells.”
“We won’t be able to do that any longer.”
“That’s a shame.”
He gets up and brushes the sand off his pants. He still can’t comprehend the significance of what just happened.
“Come,” he says, “we still have time to grab something to eat before the restaurants fill with people and noise.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Sure we do. We can make it. It’s still really early now.”
I look at him.
“Why are you so sad all of a sudden?” he asks.
“We don’t have time because if the moon has disappeared and is no longer drawing up the hill of water from the center of the ocean, then it’s approaching.”
“What’s approaching?”
“A tsunami. Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen before. And there’s no point in trying to make a run for it. The water will surely reach as far as the hills of Jerusalem.”
December 22, 2016
Carmit woke early, remnants of the images in her dream still fading. She got up and stretched. Heavy gray clouds hung over the Herzliya shoreline and she gazed at them through the window of her hotel room. The reflection in the glass appeared unfamiliar and Carmit was startled for a moment when she saw the mop of blonde curls looking back at her. She wasn’t used to her new look. She exhaled onto the cold glass to form a circle of condensation and drew a smiley on it with her finger.
It’s cold outside. She should dress warmly and buy an umbrella, too. She left hers in London. She must have forgotten somehow that Israel, the land of eternal sun, also has a winter in December. She closed the curtains and went out into the hallway. A quick look left and right, nothing suspicious. A look up. The tiny motion sensor she’d dismantled from above the door to her room at the InterContinental in Tel Aviv and fixed to the doorframe here was still there. She got into the elevator and went down to the dining room on the lobby floor.
Soon she’d go to the Organization’s main base. She had yet to decide exactly when and exactly who she was going to speak to, but she decided that it was something she had to do. She’d put a few safeguards in place beforehand, just to make sure they don’t get any ideas in their heads, like trying to make her disappear, for example.
When it came to breakfasts at Israeli hotels, the size and variety on offer always surprised her. Even when she’d lived here, she never understood why someone would want to eat so much so soon after getting up. She served herself a hard-boiled egg and a small portion of Greek salad and went over to one of the small tables at the far end of the dining room. She’d just sat down when a waiter approached and asked if she’d like some tea or coffee. “Earl Grey, please,” Carmit replied and took out her laptop in the meantime. She connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network, logged into her Gmail account, and composed several emails with particularly inc
riminating material that she scheduled to be sent automatically from her account to a number of intelligence agencies in a week’s time. If the Organization decided to hold her somewhere, she’d have a bargaining chip.
She closed the laptop, returned it to her backpack, finished her tea, and got up. She went out to the parking lot, got into the car she’d rented the day before, and started the engine. The car’s temperature gauge showed 11 degrees Celsius outside. Carmit turned on the heat, ran her hands over the two knives in her belt, and drove off in the direction of the base.
She stopped for a moment a few dozen meters from the entrance to the base, her gaze fixed on the big steel gate and the guard post next to it. But before she could muster up the final drops of courage she needed to enter the place that was once her second home, the gate opened and three cars, tires screeching, came flying out one after the other. Carmit spotted a familiar face in one of them. She knew Avner from her training period at the Organization, when she was still a rookie. Without giving it much thought, she waited for the cars to pass her and then did a U-turn and started following them from a safe distance.
The three-car convoy sped along Route 5, turned onto Route 4, and exited at the Bar-Ilan Junction. She followed them to the entrance to Savyon, and then from there to HaHarzit Street. As soon as she saw the cul-de-sac sign at the beginning of the street, she parked her car and allowed the convoy to continue on. She got out of her car, locked it, and continued on foot down the street.
When she caught sight of the three vehicles parked outside the secluded home at the very end of the street, she slowed down and stopped, gazing from afar at the scene unfolding ahead of her and doing stretching exercises as if she had just come to the end of a long walk. She watched as the cars’ occupants left their vehicles and surrounded the house at the end of the street. Nobody opened the door for them from the inside, and one of them climbed through one of windows and opened the door for the rest. Two remained outside and everyone else went in. They all emerged again some fifteen minutes later. A group of men remained standing outside the entrance to the house and someone appeared to be briefing them, and another two individuals had moved away from the house a little and were talking on their cell phones. From where she was standing she could tell almost for sure that one of them was Avner, and that the other was a young woman. They were walking slowly in Carmit’s direction and she finished stretching, turned away so they wouldn’t get too close to her, and pressed herself flat to the ground after the shockwave from two big explosions threw her to the sidewalk.
Carmit jumped quickly to her feet. Luckily she’d managed to break her fall with her hands and not her face. Her palms were grazed, she had minor cuts on her skin, and a ringing in her ears. Apart from that, absolute silence. She turned to look in the direction of the vehicles and the people who had been standing outside the home. They were strewn across the ground.
She hurried toward them, bypassing Avner and the woman lying next to him and going first of all to those who were closer to the house. They were all dead. Severe blast injuries and countless fragments of shrapnel had given them no chance. She left them and went over to the young woman sprawled unconscious on the road and put her ear to her mouth. After confirming that the woman was still breathing, Carmit gently checked her over with her hands. Nothing appeared to be too badly broken, but she may have suffered internal organ damage and there were several bits of shrapnel lodged in her back. She had been standing with her back to the house. The bombs that went off must have been packed with a large quantity of metal fragments. A red stain was spreading rapidly over one of the young woman’s legs. Carmit took one of the knives out of her belt and quickly cut through the entire length of fabric, exposing a thigh wound from which blood was pouring out in spurts. Carmit removed her backpack and placed it on the ground next to her. She took out the laptop charger, disconnected its power cord, wound the cord around the young woman’s thigh twice, close to her groin, and then knotted it. She tightened the improvised tourniquet until the blood stopped flowing from the wound, stood up, and went over to Avner, who was lying unconscious on the road some two meters away. He, too, had suffered blast and shrapnel injuries. More severe, it seemed, than those of the woman she had just treated. A deep tear in his forearm was causing him to lose blood rapidly, too. Carmit reached for her laptop charger again, this time using the cable that ran from the charger to the laptop itself—and she wound the cord around Avner’s forearm, close to the elbow, tightening it until the blood stopped. She left the charger connected to the other end of the cable and stood up. By now two people had emerged from neighboring homes. Both looked like foreign workers employed to do maintenance work at the villas nearby. It would still take a few more minutes for the security forces to show up. Carmit ran into the house at the end of the street and had a quick look around. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary. She picked up the phone and dialed 101.
“Magen David Adom.”
“Come quickly! A terror attack with fatalities at the end of HaHarzit Street in Savyon.”
“Who are you? I nee—”
Carmit hung up the phone and noticed that her backpack was still open. She’d forgotten to close it after taking out the laptop charger. She closed the bag and noticed two holes in the fabric at the back. Carmit opened the bag again to check the state of its contents. Two steel nails were deeply embedded in her copy of Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y. Mr. Y had saved her spine. “Thank you, Ariel Manto,” she said to the book, kissing its scarred back cover.
Carmit closed her backpack and raced back to her car. She got in, started the engine, pulled out of the street, and headed for the exit from Savyon, where she stopped at the side of the road and waited. The first vehicles to fly past were two fire trucks with sirens blaring and lights flashing red. “Not much work for you,” Carmit said to herself. The fire trucks were soon followed by several ambulances and police vehicles of various kinds. Carmit remained in her car and sipped from a small bottle of mineral water she’d left on the front passenger seat. A few minutes later, two wailing ambulances flashed past on their way out of Savyon. She stuck to them and followed them for a few minutes to the Tel Hashomer Hospital. She watched the ambulances offload the wounded before turning around and driving away.
December 24, 2016
The drops fell slowly one after the other in the drip chamber of the IV connected to Rotem’s arm. She was lying in a hospital bed under the influence of a sedative of some kind. She’d regained consciousness for a few minutes after being admitted, and the doctors decided to knock her out again after she tried to get out of her bed and flee the place in her hospital gown. She was lying motionless now, and her visitor was sitting on a chair in front of her and looking through a newspaper. He leaned forward and said something to her but she didn’t respond. When he leaned back again, he felt two metal points pressing lightly against his sides, slightly above his waist.
“Don’t do anything foolish if you’re fond of your kidneys,” Carmit said. “Dialysis is a shitty thing and there’s a long waiting list for transplants.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Grandpa responded. “You’ve picked up a nice British accent, it suits you. You can put the knives away. I have no intention of doing you any harm. In fact, I could use some help.”
Carmit put the knives back in her belt and stepped out from behind the curtain. “I’m surprised you didn’t arrange to have a security detail here. I looked. But maybe that’s because I dispatched the two guys you sent to my hotel room. Did you really think they’d get to me?”
Grandpa looked into Carmit’s brown eyes. “I swear I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “And you really do have to get rid of those curls. Not you at all.”
“Two gentlemen tried to kill me in my room at the InterContinental. You must have heard about it on the news.”
“That was you?”
“Yes.”
“I should have guessed,” Grandpa sai
d with a smile. “No, they weren’t there at my behest. You know we like to play cat and mouse, but I’d never harm you. I have bigger problems right now.”
“I know. But you’ve brought them upon yourselves. That bomb blast in Savyon.”
“It’s way worse. You don’t even know the half of it,” Grandpa sighed.
“It’s your fault. And mine, too. You used me to transform him. To drive him to seek maximum collateral damage. And I helped you do so. I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. But how does it go? Ignorance of the law excuses no man. I’ve been sentenced to live with what I’ve done.”
“Don’t tell me, Carmit, that you’ve developed a conscience all of a sudden.”
“Not all of a sudden. It was a gradual process, following the birth of my children. I’d already made up my mind to sever ties for good, but a series of dreams convinced me that I need to fix a few things before I managed to get a decent night’s sleep like a normal human being. That’s why I’m here. I’m doing some fixing. I’ve come to help that agent on which you performed all those transformations.”
“Help him? Are you fucked in the head?”
“My head is just fine. It’s his head that’s fucked up. You fucked it up. You—”
“Just a moment. That agent was our mistake. We realize that now after reading his notes and seeing—”
“Do you have the notebook?”
“You know about the notebook? How do you know about it?”
“I read parts of it when I performed the transformation on him in Bariloche. I only got through the beginning.”
“And you didn’t tell me about it at the time?”
“I didn’t feel like it. How did you get it?”
“He sent it to us. He wanted us to read everything. I have it all here with me, a scanned PDF file, and I have no problem sending it to you. In fact, I want you to read it. And I want to show you a movie.”