Zion's Fiction

by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)

“You didn’t know the Know All,” Gabi said.

  “He never said anything directly. Always clues or parts, or both. I think I know what he wanted to say here. Think of it, Raphi. Read it again. To scatter. To scatter!”

  “But even if you somehow manage to build the machine, you’ll get just what he got.”

  “Not necessarily. The Know All had a problem—he knew. We, on the other hand, don’t know. This may have been his intention from the start.”

  “He killed himself deliberately?”

  “I think,” Gabi said, “that he died for the sake of the machine.”

  Then came the days in which each of the Atheists received a packet of pages, diagrams, drawings, descriptions.

  Each of them built or found, or found someone else to build or find, the part, the component, the ingredient that was described and diagrammed in his or her own packet. No one had any idea about the function of any one part, much less the whole, and those who could make an educated guess tried to avoid thinking about it, or asked for someone else to take on the chore.

  And I, while they were slowly bringing this enormous task to completion in this or that abandoned warehouse, lay days and nights in bed contemplating a sin that would destroy me without pain. And Gabi wasn’t there to stop me, for he was the one who had the hardest task of all—that of putting all of those parts together.

  Who knows what I’d have done to myself if it hadn’t occurred to me that giving in to the machine was a sufficient sin in itself?

  And curiosity, of course. Even for someone like me, who has already paid a considerable mental sum for it.

  And then there was a note in my mailbox: “Come.”

  And on Tuesday, twice blessed, walk slowly on my quest, my mind deliberately at rest, I’m getting closer, closer, closer to the nest.

  The Tower of Babel

  The door is unlocked, and I step inside. There are no windows in the warehouse, but it’s not dark. The walls glow. I don’t understand how or why.

  In one corner, darkness. A big gray plastic egg, wires and tubes protruding out of its top. It hums, or maybe I’m just imagining this. I go there and sit under it, on the floor, and pull the egg over my head.

  Darkness. I sit there for quite a long time. No sound is heard, no indication is given, no activity is visible. Maybe there is none, and I’m sitting inside a piece of dead junk, waiting in vain for salvation or a quick death. I don’t move. Maybe I even fall asleep, there in the quiet and darkness.

  Minutes pass, or maybe hours, or maybe days. Nothing happens.

  I remove the machine from my head and stand up. The light is blinding. The walls are ablaze with light. I see, now, that they are mirrors. And in those mirrors I see my face, and I say to myself, I know that face. Where do I know it from? Small, delicate, drawn in thin, sharp lines. Not the face I was born with, but that which has been mine since … since …

  Since that girl, in the library. Since the angel came and took and went away. Went away in my own body, leaving me alone. Only now can I see that.

  I spread my wings and fly.

  Fly, through the ceiling, through the top floors, through staircases and elevators, through the roof, fly out. And over the roofs around me, dozens of Atheists, glowing, radiating, winged, hovering.

  Down on the street there’s no commotion, no notice. No one sees the angels gathering. Gabi flies over and says, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  I try to hug him, but he moves away.

  “Later,” he says. “We’re flying.” He raises his hand, points at the sky, and smiles.

  “That’s the true meaning of it. The tower of Babel. We go up to the sky.”

  I smile back, but something within me is rotten. This is not the way it should be. And the hole in my head, the place where my mind should have been, is still there, still not filled. Nothing has changed.

  “After me!” Gabi roars, and everyone takes off, a squadron of angels, the soft murmur of wings, the sun shining upon the beautiful, glowing things.

  They rise, higher and higher, further and further from the gray, dirty city under the clear, bright sky, from the filth, from the sin. And from me.

  I land on one of the nearby roofs, sit on the dirty whitewash, lie down, look straight at the sun. Waiting in the light, just like I waited before in the dark.

  The angels, above me, become smaller and smaller, fade out. I notice anger within me, scorching anger, beneath the intolerable calm of the hole in my head. Anger at God, of course, and at the angels, but mostly at Gabi and at myself.

  Why didn’t I join them? Jealousy? Fear? Or maybe I’m just lethargic with the disappointment of still being alive?

  The sun moves in the sky, slowly, as usual, then faster and faster. Something is askew. Something is wrong. And if I want to die, why haven’t I flown with them? And maybe my absence is the small factor that has decided the battle against them.

  The sun moves in a great arc towards the sea, and I get up, stand erect, hover, fly—up and up, higher and higher, and the sun moves lower and lower and already I can’t see the city below me, and the light diminishes.

  Up and up. A glow comes out of the fogginess above me, white lightning, and a great noise rings in my ears, or maybe in my mind, screams over screams, and I think I notice, among them, one particular tormented voice, which may or may not be Gabi’s. I will never know.

  Because at that moment there’s the sound of tearing, and the sky above me opens, and I find myself passing like an arrow through a rain of angels.

  Burning.

  Boiling, bubbling, melting, twisting, shedding skin and innards and bones and feathers.

  Dropping. I slow down, change direction, try to fall with them, hurling like a bullet toward the faraway ground, but they fall even faster. Compared to them I feel like a falling leaf, floating gently down, without hurry.

  I try harder, push down faster, but in vain. The city appears, grows up with terrible speed, but not as terrible as that of the remains of the angels hitting it like bombs, clouds of some and fire of others marking the places where they smash into the ground and the buildings. I don’t bother slowing down.

  I hit a roof and some walls and then the ground, then I realize that I’m going through them all. I feel nothing. I find myself alone on the face of the earth.

  The day before yesterday I tried sleeping with someone, a young guy I met at the park. He melted the moment I laid a hand upon him.

  Yesterday I went to the supermarket, took some meat and squashed a carton of milk into it. The building burned and went up in a flame, and only I was left, alone.

  God has cursed me. I am not alive and I cannot die, and I am not punished for my sins, though others are. And maybe that was, after all, the plan.

  Because tomorrow, just after the sun rises, I will go out and fly up, up, and away, over the clouds, through the great fogginess, straight into the citadel of God, and I shall stand in front of Him, and He shall be punished for His sins, and if not for His—then for mine.

  I have always believed in God. It’s about time that He started believing in me.

  Possibilities

  Eyal Teler

  The memory will haunt me until my death—not long now. Fifty years could not erase the image of that old man, the feeling of my fists meeting his face. I can still see him standing there, taking my blows without protest, then crumpling to the ground. No cry, no blood, just a helpless body. Funny how this is what I remember—killing myself. The rest is too fantastic to contemplate: the time machine, Ray introducing me to myself, asking me not to become that man, not to go to Korea, to war.

  The death—the death is real. Ray might have taken the body back with him, but the memory remains: killing a helpless old man, without reason, in a bout of madness. It is a cancer. Much like the one the doctors diagnosed, it eats me from inside. For many years I had used my writing and my success to block it, but the memory has won—no stories come to me as I’m lying on this hospital bed.


  Thoughts that had played in my mind long ago, before I decided there was nothing but madness in them, are now coming back—questions about the reality of it all. How could Ray get a time machine, in that other reality? Just having me go to war couldn’t change reality so much, could it? It would be hubris to think so. And my actions, my words, that killing—they didn’t make sense.

  Yet it couldn’t have been a hallucination. The only drug in my life had been my cigarettes, and my mind had always been sound enough—even when I suffered from depression. Besides, that time machine left a mark on the asphalt—I checked for it the next day.

  I wish I had had the courage to find out what really happened on that day. I’ve never told anyone about it. Only once, about twenty years ago, did I try, halfheartedly, to find an answer.

  “You must be Simon,” she said. It sounded so conclusive that for a moment I was tempted to turn back from her door. After all, if I could only be Simon, a specific, well-defined Simon, what use was there in seeing her?

  “And you have no choice but to be Sedef, I guess.” I wondered, though. I hadn’t expected a short, round-faced girl, nor that broad smile in response to my dry joke. But her soft voice, with a hint of foreign accent, was as I remembered it from the phone.

  “Come in,” she said, and I followed the path that her hand traced in the air to a brightly lit room with landscapes and a kitten picture on the walls. She motioned me to sit on the beige sofa, but I just stood, feeling as if I had happened to walk onto the set of the wrong movie.

  “What did you expect, candlelight and voodoo accessories?”

  Was I that transparent? What had I expected? An older woman, perhaps, with an air of mystery—a fraud—not someone my wife’s age, about half my fifty years. It was just a silly cliché, of course, and I wouldn’t have dared using it in a story. Funny how easy it was to use it in real life.

  She looked more like a grade-school teacher than a seer, with her open, gentle, not-too-sharp face. Maybe it was fitting, in a way. We were all just gullible kids, those of us who came to her. Sure, Ray said that people swore by her. But then he also said that we should remain kids at heart. He may be my friend and mentor, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.

  How had I managed to convince myself to visit a woman with a power I didn’t believe in? It was probably not too late to fix that mistake. I decided to turn around and leave.

  The sofa was comfortable.

  “So, Sedef, what can you tell me about that power of yours?”

  She smiled. “Is this an interview?”

  “No.” I preferred not to think of it that way. Interviews were intrusive and tiring, and my seeds of dislike for them had long ago grown into resentment. “Just curious. I never met anyone who claimed they had a power to see alternate realities.”

  She giggled. “Will you stop calling it a power? Any more of this and I’ll have to start wearing spandex outfits. I don’t think I have the body for them.” She didn’t. Not that the flowery dress she wore looked that great on her.

  “My talent, or ‘gift,’ if you wish, is the ability to see what might have happened had you made a different decision at some specific point in your life. I can tell you the most likely path that your life would have taken in that case. I don’t really know how I do it, and, no, I can’t really prove it, but people always tell me that it feels right, that they really would have done things that way.” Of course they would, if she was a good enough con.

  “So, tell me what would have happened had I gone to war. I mean, to Korea.”

  “Sorry,” she said, “I need to get more of a feeling for you first. Like, what do you do for a living?”

  I didn’t know whether to feel insulted that she didn’t know me or happy that I didn’t have to deal with yet another mushy encounter.

  “I create dreams.” My futuristic dystopias could perhaps be more correctly classified as nightmares, but it was the more lighthearted contemporary fantasy, the kid stuff, that had made me a household name. The wonders of commercialism. Not that I complained—it had been nice to take those vacations in fantasy lands.

  She gave me a vacant stare.

  I showed her. I liked telling tales. I loved the moment of conception, the minute or two when the idea was born, still ugly and unclean but with its inner beauty already showing. I told her a story set in a world where everyone had her power and knew the results of their choices.

  “Wow!” The look she gave me could only be described as awe. My stomach turned.

  “You liked my story?”

  “What? Oh, it was fine. It’s not that. It’s just that your power of suggestion is so strong! You must be a great author!”

  What a good performance; I nearly fell for it. Obviously she had known all along who I was. Still, I decided to play her little game.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, everyone affects the possibilities, you know. Not just choices affect them, but also wishes and dreams and desires. Authors, they don’t just think of ideas—they develop them, research them, let other people share them. Their words are like magic—they can change the world. Even the impossible can become possible this way. I once went with a friend to a writers’ conference. I could feel the possibilities change all around me. Not a lot, but it was still a little frightening.

  “But you, you just told a story, without thinking about it a lot, without sharing it with lots of people, and I could feel the world changing. I could feel my power … damn!” She laughed. “Now I’m calling it a ‘power’ myself. I could feel it grow a little stronger, like this world was becoming more like the one you told me about. It’s like you’re changing the possibilities directly. I don’t know any famous writers, but I don’t think it’s normal.”

  “I’ll try not to write too many alien invasion stories then.” Yeah, right. Trying to convince me she had a power was one thing. Telling me I had a power was just too much. “So, can you do your reading now?” Better get this charade over with.

  “Yeah, I think I have enough feeling for you now. What war was that?”

  “Korea.”

  “Wow, that’s old! Sorry, didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that most people come to me to validate some recent decision they’ve made, not to ask me about something that happened thirty years ago. Don’t know how easy it’d be. Hell, I was just a little baby in Turkey at the time.” She was older than I had thought. “But I’ll try.”

  Her eyes lost focus and looked up, and her forehead creased, as if she were trying hard to remember something. Then her hand went to her chin, her fingers brushing her lips. She reminded me of a female version of Rodin’s Thinker—but with clothes on, which made it somewhat less interesting.

  I waited. I thought how to spin the tale I had told her into a publishable story. A better point-of-view character and some plot complications suggested themselves—enough material to pursue back home.

  Sedef was still in thought, so I got up, curious to see what titles she had on her bookshelves. She didn’t have anything of mine. Several shelves strained under the weight of reference books—many of them about medicine. The rest were mostly classics and assorted poetry. She seemed to like Frost.

  I glanced at my watch, then looked at her and wished she would stop. She could have at least made the show less boring—she could have mumbled or something.

  “You know …” Her words startled me. I half imagined that she had fallen asleep in that posture. “There’s something very strange here. Some … barrier. I’ve never felt anything like it. I may be able to see through it, but it will take me some time. Could you tell me perhaps why you didn’t go to war? That might help.”

  What could I tell her, that I had murdered myself for no reason, as if I had been possessed? That since that day I’ve kept fearing that I’d kill the people I loved? It had been too much for a boy of nineteen to think about. I was declared unfit for duty, of course, due to my mental state. I shut myself in my room and stopped seeing my
friends. I wrapped myself in my writing and hoped that the stories would help me forget. All I wanted was to forget. Why did I come here to stir up these memories?

  I made a show of glancing at my watch. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot an appointment. I have to go. It’s probably for the best. You’ll be able to look into my other possibility at your leisure, without pressure. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you for your time. Here.” I pushed a hundred into her hand as I picked up my coat and made my way to the door. “I’ll come back another day.”

  I went out quickly, but I think I heard her say: “But I don’t take money….”

  Lying in this hospital room, where day and night fade into a half-waking sameness, the memory makes me long for those days gone by, for the sound of words forming on a page in my typewriter, for conferences, even for signings—yes, I half miss even the company of people, of fans, and of Carolyn, to whose arms and tall, athletic body I returned that day; Carolyn of the intoxicating smell. I had overlooked her indiscretions, as she had for a while overlooked my mistress and true love: my writing. After our divorce the gossip columns told me that she had decided famous actors were easier to deal with than famous authors.

  Those had been busy days—too busy to go back to see Sedef, or so I’d told myself—busy enough to push the memory back into its lair and take the thought of her with it. Once, some ten years ago it was, I think, I saw her on TV, on 60 Minutes. She was a physician. “Miracle doctor” they called her—one whose diagnosis was always on the mark. She had been offered work at ROI, a big research firm. I was tempted to find her again, to have her finish the reading. It didn’t matter if she was a fraud. If she could have come up with some plausible explanation, something to help me close that painful subplot of my life, that would have been enough.

  I laugh inwardly and cough outwardly. It hurts—my punishment for being such a skeptic. I’ve seen and done strange things in my years on Earth, not the least of them killing an older version of myself, and still I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she had told me of a special barrier. She couldn’t have known enough for that to be a trick.