by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
I found out where her lab was, but I didn’t go. She’d be too busy to do a reading for a silly author, I was sure—excuses were always my strong suit. Perhaps she didn’t even do readings anymore, being a famous and busy doctor. My wish to meet her remained just that—a wish. I still wish for it now, but it is too late. Even picking up the phone is too hard for me now.
There’s a knock on the door—a futile gesture. Weak as I am, the mere thought of saying “come in” makes me feel tired. I hear my thought echoed by the gruff voice of an orderly. There’s some argument about nobody being allowed to see me, but it’s settled quickly.
The door opens gently, and the tapping of low heels approaches my bed. I wait until she gets within my view—no use wasting my strength on turning my head. I wonder who she is and what she wants. I don’t get many visitors—Ray is the only one, in fact. I made sure the press was kept out.
“Hello, Simon,” she says. The voice startles me so that for a moment I forget my weakness and turn my head, and I see her sad smile. “I’m Sedef. You once came to me for a reading.”
As if I could forget. Yet the shock adds to my weakness and I can’t even tell her that. I can’t even smile back at her. I think of that old man that I hit—how silently he fell.
She has aged a lot since last I’d seen her. At last her looks seem to have caught up with her age. She looks rounder, and her hair, black touched with gray, is more orderly now. Perhaps she has a daughter named Pearl who is combing it for her, I muse—creating background details is a hard habit to break. Her clothes are more elegant, and I think the suit suits her—I find the pun amusing.
The joke eases the shock, and at last I manage to straighten my fingers—a feeble gesture of hello. She notices it and smiles. I’m glad now that the blanket is not over my hand, even though my arm feels cold.
She sits by my bed on the chair that up till now has been reserved for Ray, on his infrequent visits. She takes my cold hand in her warm one. It’s a good feeling, to have someone warm touch me. Her smile is warm, too, and there is warmth in her eyes. I find that I’m a little uncomfortable with all that warmth, even though I’ve often wished for more warmth, both for my body and for my heart. I don’t complain, though—I let her keep holding my hand.
“You know,” she says, “I was really insulted when you left me, twenty years ago, and even more when you didn’t come back. I decided to put you out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I met no one like you, with your power to alter the possibilities, and that strange barrier in your past. When I found out who you were, I was even more intrigued. You couldn’t have thought that the other path would have made you more successful. So why were you interested in it?
“I tried quite a few tricks to see your other path. I even researched you and read some of your books to get a better feeling for you. You know, some of them are quite disturbing. I liked the Lilian series, though. It’s more humorous and optimistic. It helped me forget the insult and think that perhaps there was some good in you after all.
“Anyway, I finally discovered that to move through the barrier I first had to move a little farther back in time. I didn’t even know I could do that, before. It then became easier than any other reading. It was as if your other path was the natural one, and I had to get back on it and then continue. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. Still …,” she pauses and smiles, “I guess I must thank you for all that practice. It really helped me understand better what I could do. It helped me help people better. Thank you.” It feels bad to get thanked for being selfish, but her gentle “thank you” warms my heart nonetheless.
“You had a very interesting life in that other possibility. Once I saw all I could see, I continued to follow you, day by day, in that other life. I can’t see the future, you see, even in another possibility, so I spent a little time each day finding out what you were doing. Then you died there, and I thought that if you were still alive here….I guess I’d better start from the beginning.
“Let me tell you the story of a young man,” she says. “He left his home, his parents, his sister, and went to war. It wasn’t easy for him to leave, and worse still was the war itself. Many of his friends died, people he cared a lot for. When it ended, he couldn’t face going home. He felt that it wasn’t right for him to live, with his friends dead. He started taking foolish risks, learning sports like cliff diving and bull fighting. Perhaps he was even disappointed that he was good enough at them to escape dying for years and years.
“It was in his days in Spain that he met a young woman from Turkey. He didn’t want to be her friend, but she always came to see him fight. She saw something special in him. Once, after he was injured pretty badly by the bull, she happened to see him being brought to the hospital where she interned. It wasn’t easy for her to get to see him, as he was quite famous, but she managed to pull a few strings and visit him.” She smiles. “I guess it’s the kind of thing she does.
“He talked to her then. He told her that he was sorry the bull hadn’t killed him. He said that he had friends waiting for him in another world, where life was beautiful and there were no wars.
“Then he talked to her about wars. He talked about them for hours and hours. He would only go to sleep when the doctors made the woman leave his side and would continue talking when she returned. ‘Soldiers are dreamers,’ he said, ‘and when a soldier dies, there is a little less dreamt beauty in the world.’”
I understand now what she had told me about how people react to her readings. That really felt like me, when I was younger and naïve.
“He talked about the dreams of his friends and how these dreams came to an end. And he talked about the dead of the enemy. He described the horrors of the ones unfortunate enough to survive, without parts of their body, or without a place to live or things to eat. When he came to the end of what he had seen with his own eyes, he talked of the wars he had heard about, the horrors he could only imagine.
“Eventually he finished talking and slept for an entire day. When he woke up, he said that perhaps it was good that he hadn’t died. He had a gift for stories before he went to war, he said. Perhaps if he could put all those horrors on paper, to show people what war was like, then he could do some good and make his friends in heaven happy.
“But the woman had a special gift. She had heard his war stories, and she had sensed something, and so she told him no. ‘You are special,’ she said. ‘Whatever you tell becomes more real, more possible. Don’t tell stories of war; tell stories of peace.’
“And he did. He told her stories of ending conflicts, of age-old feuds becoming forgotten through acts of love and kindness; of tyrants falling and of religious tolerance. He told of the Koreas healing back into one country, of Turkey and Greece ending their differences, of peace in the Middle East, of Europe joined. She was his only audience. ‘People don’t want stories of peace,’ he used to say. ‘They want conflict, action.’
“They moved in together, into a small apartment on the outskirts of Madrid. She worked at the hospital while he took care of their children and thought of new stories to tell. She would come home exhausted, and he would read stories to her while she slept. Around them the world blossomed. It took years and years, but they could track the change. Those stories that he typed they kept together with the news clippings from the papers when they became true. They could not be any happier, with each other, with their children, and with the world.
“And then he fell ill. The doctors found lung cancer, too advanced to be cured. They tried, the doctors. He tried. He told stories of doctors finding cures for cancer, and I know that they did, but they were too late to help him. He died in hospital, a few days ago. He did so much good for the world, but he couldn’t do himself a favor and quit smoking, the silly man.” Her voice breaks at the end. She squeezes my hand and falls silent.
It couldn’t have been. She must have gotten it wrong. “I …,” I gasp, “killed … me.”
“Huh, what?” Her thoughts return to
me from elsewhere.
“Ah …” I start to say, but my voice betrays me. I force my head to my right, to the stand where my laptop sits. I’m not sure if I truly thought I’d write any stories here, or whether I just enjoyed the disapproving looks from Ray, who likes to act as if computers are demons taken form.
When it boots, and the word processor opens, she helps guide my feeble hand over the keys, “i killed me,” I write, “time machine.” Could I have helped create one with my stories, in that other reality? Did I really have that much power to change the world?
She thinks for a while, probably trying to decide if my illness had made me delirious.
“Well,” she finally says, “It sounds rather fantastic, but a time machine could explain why the other path felt more natural. It would take something that could really warp reality to change the natural path of someone’s life. But I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘I killed me.’ You mean literally?”
I don’t answer her. I’m too weary to make a sound or even nod.
“Simon, I’m sorry. I’ve tired you with my story. I guess I’ll come back later, after you’ve rested a little.”
She gets ready to let go of my hand, and I force my fingers to tighten around her. I know that there’s no way I can hold on, so I’m grateful that she stops and sits back down.
“Simon,” she says, and I can hear the humor in her voice, can almost see her smile. “It’s about time you didn’t let go so easily.” She pauses, probably smiling again. I open my eyes, and sure enough, there she is, smiling and looking into my eyes. Her smile grows wider. “Good,” she says.
“I know you’re tired, but I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll ask you questions and you can squeeze my hand for the answers. One time for yes, two for no. No, bad idea—wouldn’t want to tire you. Nothing for no, then. I’ll just wait enough to make sure.” She smiles again. “Okay, let’s see if I get this straight: the older you, from the other reality, came back in a time machine to the time you were about to go to war, and you ended up killing him. Is that what happened?”
I hesitate for a second, then squeeze her hand feebly.
“That’s what I thought. Not that it makes any sense. I’m quite sure now that the possibility I followed was your natural path, and you never got near a time machine there. There probably never was one to be near. So it must have been something else. But what? I wish you could tell me more. Maybe after you’ve rested.”
No way. I’m not letting her go. I have to finish this now. There might not be another day. What was the signal for “no”? Nothing—no, that’s no good. I guess I’ll just have to squeeze “yes.”
“Yes? So you want to rest?”
I guess that saying “no” now would be okay.
“No? Or are you just resting? Not a very smart signal scheme I came up with, is it?” She smiles. I smile back, which probably looks grotesque, with half my face paralyzed.
She smiles a big smile back. “Well, if you can smile a big smile like that, I guess you don’t need to rest. So, you want to continue?”
I squeeze “yes.”
“You want the computer?”
No. I just need to think.
“You need some time to think?”
Hey, she didn’t tell me she has ESP too. I smile in my thoughts and squeeze her hand.
I think back to that day, fifty years ago. My memory is as sharp as ever, but emotions still cloud my view. I push past them, try to see the scene as I saw it then: two men stepping out of a strange contraption that hadn’t been there a moment before. One of them old, feeble, and unfamiliar; the other, Ray, old but recognizable. I remember him telling me the other guy was the old me, and I then saw myself in him. I nearly freaked out then.
There’s some detail here, some buried realization that I must uncover. I stop thinking and let the scene take over, as if it were part of a story, as if these were characters of my own creation that I’m trying to get to understand.
Obviously, Ray was the protagonist. He was the one who talked to me, the one who acted. The old me did little. What did Ray want? He asked me not to become that guy. He wanted me to continue writing. He brought that guy to show me what I would become, and then took his body away. Yet Sedef says that I died in hospital. Perhaps he snatched me from there, then returned me back, dead. Did she miss that moment? She probably couldn’t follow every moment of my life—that would have left her no time for her own.
No, that doesn’t make sense. That old me looked old and muddled, but he didn’t look like he was dying. How did he look? I try to picture that guy—his face like mine, but wrinkled, gaunt; his body thin, shriveled. That’s nothing like me, even after the cancer started taking its toll. I might have imagined this to be me, fifty, even twenty years ago, but not now. Could I have aged differently in that other reality? I find it unlikely.
Ray, the bastard! Did he hire an actor to impersonate me?
“Ray!” I cry. It comes out as a croak. I look to my laptop. When she gets it for me, I type, “Can you check him?”
I wait.
“Ray … Bradbury; the writer, right? I remember now. You knew him before you went to war. You don’t meet him again in the other possibility, but I remember that my research of you mentioned him. I guess you’re friends here. Now that I think of it, I saw him interviewed once. He thanked you for putting science fiction in the limelight. That stuck in my mind.”
It was really Ray who deserved the fame. He was the real artist, with his prose that was poetry. I’ve always thought it unfair that it was my straightforward style that won people’s hearts. Ray never agreed with me, of course. “Simple people need a simple style,” he used to say. It was enough for him that they were reading.
“So Ray had something to do with the time machine? And you want me to check his alternate life?”
I squeeze “yes” to both questions.
“I’m not sure I could follow someone else’s life based on your decision. I do have some feeling for him, from that interview and what I saw in your own life….I guess I’ll just have to try.”
I find it funny that she uses the same Rodin posture that she did twenty years ago. She does have nice lips, I notice when her fingers brush them. I wonder if she has anything of mine on her bookshelves now.
I imagine her mind flying from the east coast to the west, finally settling on Ray’s house, dropping down to the mess he calls a basement to see him sitting among his books, writing his next story on his old typewriter.
A touch on my arm wakes me up. “Simon, are you asleep?” I open my eyes, and I see her smile. “Not a very clever question, is it?
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I couldn’t really see Ray. I did find something. It jumped into my mind when I tried to look for Ray in that other possibility. I guess I could see it because it had something to do with you. He wrote a story about you, you see. He even got it published very recently, so I guess we’re lucky that I’m just checking for it now. Wouldn’t have been able to see it before.”
“What … was … it … about?”
“I didn’t see the exact details—just a second, I’ll see what I can get. My God! It was about him taking your old you to the past to convince you not to go to war. Would you believe it? Did he really do that? No, of course not. Oh, I see. It makes perfect sense now!
“Ray is a good writer, right?” I know an understatement when I hear one. “He probably waited for you to come back, all these years. He thought about you, he even got a story published about you. He finally did it—he changed the possibilities; he changed your past! That’s some power.”
The time machine, the encounter—they were part of a story? He probably didn’t even realize what he’s he’d done. I certainly hope this doesn’t mean that book burning will become true one day. But I don’t really care. It all makes sense now—my irrational behavior, the killing—it was just a story. I didn’t kill me! I didn’t kill anybody! It’s like the stone has been raised from over my
grave, and I can breathe again. I smile, and Sedef smiles back at me, her brilliant smile amplifying mine.
Ray didn’t have to make me kill myself. But I guess that’s just the way he is. I smile again, imagining how I’ll give him a piece of my mind in the next life. There must be one—enough people believe in it. I might have to wait for him a few years, though—he doesn’t seem too willing to let go of this life. I, on the other hand, will soon be looking at new vistas. I hope that heaven isn’t based on the most mundane of human dreams.
I look at Sedef one last time. She takes my hand, and I close my eyes, lose all sensation but her warmth. No more pain, no more queasiness. It seems so right to have her by my side as my consciousness slips slowly away. The warmth becomes sunny, and I’m surrounded by light. A tunnel beckons me. Of the world of my life, I carry only one thing with me; one thing, as if sketched by Lewis Carroll—a smile.
In the Mirror
Rotem Baruchin
On Thursday, Mika, who was my cat, mine and Liron’s, got killed. One of us, we didn’t know who, left her carrier open on the way to the vet, and in one moment Mika busted loose, bolted out of the cage and onto the street. She was run over immediately.
When we got home, Liron headed straight to the sink to do the dishes. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, so she got all the nice dishes from the top shelf and scrubbed them. After that, she went on, working through the bottom shelf, even though the bottom shelf dishes were sparkling clean. She emptied the saltshaker and washed it. She cleaned all the spice jars and the egg tray in the fridge. She washed the dishes for two and a half hours, crying the whole time.
Mika was originally Liron’s cat, not mine. When we moved in together, I adopted her, and Liron used to say that “now she has two mommies.” Mika liked scaring us to death by sneaking into bed between us and by licking our toes during breakfast. She loved toppling glasses from the edge of the table. She loved playing with Liron’s chains until they got completely tangled. She loved being petted behind the ears and scratched under the chin. She loved attention of any kind.