City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  She’s a failure. That’s how it feels. Tonight, she’ll send the magazine a story she’s not proud of. She doesn’t know how to write a story worth selling, or sell a story worth writing. She passes a butcher, blood on a linoleum floor; she passes two cell phone kiosks next to each other. It came together for the last big piece: the body smuggled out of the hospital, the screaming women, the contextualizing interview with the Palestinian professor, Samar Farha. Vera has emailed the professor a few times in hopes she might do a quick interview about the Girl and the Soldier. No response yet. Now, as the day softens into evening and Vera faces the mortification of asking strangers about the image (The Image), she decides to call the professor again. Why not?

  Two rings, three, four. The call goes to voice mail.

  “Marhaba,” Vera says in the recording, then switches to German: “This is Vera Baldauf, the journalist from Der Spiegel who interviewed you around Easter.” She stops at a corner under a sign for an Arab bank. “I’m not sure if you saw my emails”—pauses as she moves out of the way of a business man who needs to use the machine. Vera hates leaving voice mails—“but I’d be grateful for your insights on the Girl and the Soldier.” She recites her number twice, then hangs up.

  What now?

  She thinks for a shameful instant about texting a photo of the Stars & Bucks sign to Amir. But she can’t; she knows she can’t. So what now?

  She goes back to Jerusalem via the Qalandiya Checkpoint, one that monitors the flow of workers, students, and families into East Jerusalem. She’s always wanted to write about Qalandiya, but what is there to say that hasn’t been said already? It is a horribly articulate place, a place that tells bodies that they are worthless, helpless. This message is conveyed in the narrow metal cages you funnel through single file, in the awkward turnstiles, in the waiting for the man ahead of you to take off his belt at the metal detector, and the bored-looking soldier watching the man, an older man, whose hands struggle with his belt buckle. Every second is the second before some horrible act of violence.

  Or anyway, that’s how it is when you get off the bus. Today, Vera doesn’t have the energy to go through the checkpoint the way that a Palestinian has to. Once she promised herself that she would never take any of the privileges afforded to a white foreigner. But today, and not for the first time, she stays on the bus when the soldiers make their sweep, while those with Palestinian identification cards—hawiyya, she’s heard them called—line up to funnel into the cages, to go through on foot so they can put all of their belongings through a metal detector, step through a scanner, bring their papers up to a bulletproof window, and wait, wait, wait. Vera accepts that she is an exception. She and a handful of white tourists stay on the bus as it winds past the Palestinians who are penned up, waiting to get through. She takes out her phone. She texts Rachel.

  Vera refills her wineglass, or really, the water glass she’s using for wine. The night is already soft around the edges. Rachel is making compulsive lists: pros and cons for getting married. The cons are mostly questions. “Maybe I’m just scared of uncertainty,” Rachel considers. The pros seem to boil down to this: How can you go back when you’ve come so far?

  At some point, Vera begins drifting toward sleep, her head in Rachel’s lap. When she blinks, she can see Rachel’s face scrunched in concentration, typing, typing, typing on Vera’s phone. Messaging with Nimrod, maybe. Or someone else. Talking to Amir. No, shut up.

  “I love you,” Rachel says, talking to Vera but engrossed in Vera’s phone. The room is dark. The air conditioner is blasting, and the down comforter crinkles when Vera rolls to one side.

  “I love you,” Rachel says again.

  This is too much, Vera thinks as she swirls in and out of focus. This is too much. Why does too much feel so good?

  She wakes up into the night, the room dark. Rachel is intoning. “You know he wasn’t my first. My fiancé. He wasn’t my first.”

  They lie side by side now. Vera tries not to move, tries not to show that she is awake.

  Rachel continues, about the boy at the party. He pushed her up against the wall when she said, No, no more. She said, No more. “I said no,” Rachel says. “I said no.”

  Stop, thinks Vera. This is too much, this is too familiar, this is too close. But she stays silent and Rachel keeps going. “He pressed his fingers inside me, this boy, he pressed his fingers inside me and said, ‘Doesn’t feel like a no.’” He didn’t stop. He didn’t stop. Vera hates how well she understands what it means to have a night inside you that never ends, that is always happening to you.

  Rachel is sniffling snottily.

  Don’t, Vera cautions herself, but she rolls toward Rachel. She holds her—damp heat coming off Rachel’s oversized T-shirt, her full cockeyed breasts. “You poor baby,” Vera whispers into her soft hair. “You poor baby.” That is what she says. Here’s what she’s thinking, to Rachel, to herself: You cunt, you cunt, you crybaby cunt.

  Amir has found a way to reach Vera, and it’s oddly quaint: email.

  Email from Amir Oved, waiting in her inbox, next to rejected pitches about refugee camps and e-invitations to weddings. She filed her story this morning, a few hours late, yes, but not too late. The professor never got back to her, but perhaps that’s for the best—it might look unprofessional for Vera to use the same expert for all her articles. No word from her editor yet. But here is an email from Amir. An actual email. Turns out he uses a Yahoo account. The message: Come over.

  She knows she shouldn’t, but she writes back, I’m in Tel Aviv.

  Refresh, refresh. New message.

  So ill cum to you.

  Vera responds immediately. No. Send. Then, Leave me alone.

  She waits. She missed this. The terror of waiting. She missed this. Fuck, she missed this.

  His response: I don’t think that’s what you want.

  Her body betrays her. When he talks to her like this, she becomes some tropical flower unfurling. She can feel the heat and warmth in her blooming, her clit swelling. Why is it this she likes best? The moments when he overpowers her? Do I, wonders Vera, seek after the violation of my own boundaries? And does that mean, the logic continues, that I hate myself?

  She writes to Amir: So then what do I want?

  She can’t even wait for an answer. She’s too hot, too turned on. She rolls over onto her stomach to touch herself this way, likes how her face mashes into the pillow. He’s here, she tells herself, he’s here and he’s too big for the room. He’s filling the doorway. He’s on top of her. With her free hand, she slips two fingers into her mouth, lets herself imagine they are his. It’s something he used to do, and she remembers that he was, actually, fairly gentle in the way he pressed his fingers into her mouth. Part of her always wished he would go too far, gag his fingers down, down her throat, down, his hand disappearing into her, his arm, until he himself slid completely inside her. Come inside me and replace me. It’s late and she’s hot under the covers. Her roommate isn’t home, but even as Vera gets close she doesn’t let herself cry out. It’s an old habit dating back to her first furious rubbings as a child, so young she couldn’t name what she was doing, only knew it was forbidden, her own body forbidden to her. Amir understood this without needing it explained. An idiot, yes, but someone who understood by instinct how Vera fought against her own pleasure. When she kicked, he held her legs down; when she tried to shove her orgasm back into whatever vessel it sprang from, that’s when he gave her his fingers, as you would to a teething child. Alone in her dark room, her horrible room, the muscles of Vera’s stomach shudder. When she does come, it’s a wounded sound smothered by her pillow.

  Lying on her back, breath still heavy, she opens her email up again. Refresh, refresh. He hasn’t responded.

  Down at the Gaza border fence, nine teenagers are shot in one day. The boys are unarmed but for rocks. Vera isn’t there. She’s afraid to go down to the border fence, afraid to get permission from the Israelis to enter the dark prison of Gaza.
Afraid they wouldn’t let her back in. But she reads about the deaths through Mo’s Facebook feed. He shares a post made by a teenager in Gaza.

  “If I die at that fence tomorrow,” the boy wrote, “I leave all my possessions to my friends, except my middle finger, which I leave to the Arab leaders of the world for abandoning us to the Jews.”

  Rachel is frantic, jerky in her movements, as she goes through Vera’s shirts. “Which one,” she says, her eyes bulging.

  “It’s really up to you,” Vera says, not looking up from her computer.

  They’re in Vera’s room. It’s the first time Rachel has ever come to visit Vera in Tel Aviv. She showed up with barely any notice maybe two hours ago, possibly drunk already, pajamas and a toothbrush in her handbag, saying that she’d made a decision: she was going to end the engagement. Really, really. Vera handed over her phone the way you give a kid a video game to shut them up.

  After, like, forty minutes, maybe less, Rachel spoke up. “Nimrod wants to meet.” She was in Vera’s bed; Vera was at her desk reviewing her editor’s proposed changes. The headline Vera had suggested was “This Is What Hope Obscures.” Her editor nixed that: Too oblique. The headline he’s going with: “Palestinians Aren’t Impressed with That Girl and Soldier Photo You Keep Seeing—Here’s Why,” because God forbid there be an ounce of dignity in this fucking enterprise.

  “Sorry, who wants to meet?” Vera asked.

  “Nimrod, the guy I’ve been talking to.”

  “Yeah, well,” Vera said, looking up from her computer, “I’m not really up for it.”

  “No, I mean with me.”

  “What do you mean, with you?”

  “I told him I wasn’t you, I mean, that I was using your profile to meet guys.” Rachel was fidgeting with Vera’s phone.

  “Are you for real?” Vera asked. Rachel didn’t answer, which meant yes. Vera stood and crossed the small room to her bed. She reached out an expectant hand. “Give me my phone,” she said.

  Rachel pouted, handed back Vera’s phone.

  Vera clutched the phone protectively. “Rachel,” she said, still standing over the bed, “what do you want?”

  “I need this,” Rachel said, eyeing Vera’s phone.

  Vera knew she was supposed to say, Okay, but don’t do it this way, don’t go out into the night and meet a strange man, at least, not until you set things right with your fiancé. But instead she said, “Okay, does he have your phone number?”

  “Oh, right,” Rachel said, “right. Can you write that?”

  When Vera opened the app, she glanced at the revelation, the exclamation points and ellipses. She scrolled up and saw the back-and-forth between Rachel and Nimrod stretching back over a week. Did you miss me, baby? All of it coming out of her face, attributed to her face, her photograph, her name: Vera, 26.

  “What’s your number?” Vera asked. Rachel recited her phone number and Vera typed it in. She hesitated. Here was when she was supposed to ask Rachel if she was sure, really sure, that she wanted this, and did she want it with Nimrod, 34.

  “Are you doing it?” Rachel asked, reaching for Vera’s phone. “Let me do it.”

  “I did it,” Vera said, and she sent Rachel’s number to the man. Three seconds later, Rachel’s own phone buzzed.

  “He wrote, ‘Hey, catfisher,’” giggled Rachel, joyous, enflamed.

  For the next half hour or so Rachel lay on her belly, texting from her own phone, feet rubbing against each other sensually. Vera thought maybe it would end there—Rachel sated by texting. But all at once she jumped up and began racing around the room trying to figure out what to wear.

  Now Rachel is pulling one of Vera’s fitted black tops over her head, a little chubby in her bra. “How does it look?” She turns to Vera.

  “Cute,” Vera says. She’s reading over the final version of the article one last time before sending it back to her editor. Soon Rachel will be out of Vera’s apartment. Please leave, Vera thinks. Leave me alone. She asks, “Where are you meeting?”

  “In the market. That’s close, right?”

  “Yeah, but take a taxi,” Vera says. “Which bar?”

  “Actually, his place. He’s going to make me crêpes.”

  Jesus Christ, Vera thinks. She asks, “Crêpes?”

  “Yeah, he swears he makes amazing crêpes,” Rachel says, looking through Vera’s shoes now. They are the same size. “He had the special pan thing.”

  You stupid girl, Vera thinks. You doomed girl.

  “Can I wear these?” Rachel pulls out a pair of glittery faux-leather boots that Vera hates.

  “Yeah,” Vera says. If Rachel ends up in a freezer, no great loss on the boots.

  Ten minutes later, Rachel is hugging Vera, her rich-girl hair soft on Vera’s face. This is it. This is the end, even if she doesn’t know it yet. When Rachel comes back tomorrow morning—somehow Vera knows it will be morning by the time the girl comes back—when she comes back in the gray-blue morning, having taken a taxi, she’ll try to tell Vera about what happened. He really made me a Nutella crêpe. We drank wine and then . . . But Vera won’t let her. She’ll insist that she has work, too much work, that Rachel has to go, that they’ll talk later. She’ll hug Rachel. She’ll say, “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay.” That’s the last thing she’ll ever say to her face-to-face. Vera learned from the best how to ignore someone who is trying to reach you. Already, she knows how she’ll tell this story, the one about the desperately sad religious teenager. Two girls, different in every way but alike in their loneliness. A friendship premised on the continual violation of boundaries, until it reached its inevitable, horrible end: Vera implicated in an act of infidelity, Vera bound to Rachel, who wore Vera’s clothes as she set out to meet a stranger, to break a promise. She’ll say that Rachel was like a drowning person, someone who pulls down anyone stupid enough to get near. This is the end. The end of a friendship that was, for a horrible month, something like a marriage. These are the last seconds of Rachel, before she becomes nothing but a story Vera tells. This is the last of a girl who has become, for Vera, the embodiment of something she hates in herself. I’m sorry, Vera thinks but will never, ever say, not to Rachel, not to herself. These are Rachel’s footsteps, the clip of ugly faux-leather boots fading down the stairwell and into the night.

  Vera’s Room

  Vera doesn’t let herself think about the night back in college, but sometimes it tugs at her. She doesn’t remember how she got into the room, but she remembers waking up in it and he was inside her. He was on top of her, over her, face-to-face as she woke up in a room of neutral tones, a symmetrical room. There was a word forming inside her. She could not let that word form inside her. She woke up in a room with generic landscapes on the walls, how many hours had she been here, she woke up with a man inside her, pumping inside her, and she did something she didn’t know she could do, which was that she stepped out of herself and projected a series of contingencies, and in one, this is a story she has to tell about herself, and in another, she changes the story, forces it into a different shape. She woke up with a man inside her in a strange room, a hotel room, she would eventually figure out when she stuffed her bra into her purse and ran, split-lipped, down and down and down the stairwell, into the cold day, onto the commuter bus, where government workers looked at her and away, her eye makeup smudged and her face bleeding where, she knew without remembering, he must have bitten her. At the bar, someone had handed her a drink. And then? And then she came to with a man inside her in a strange room, Yeah, he was saying, Yeah, yeah. Her body was jerking, the way it would if you were dragging it along the ground. But she was in a strange room, neutral tones of a business hotel, scratchy sand-colored blanket. Yeah, he said, his face floating blurry above her. She had to make a decision. The decision was this: Do I tell myself what is happening to myself? If yes, then this becomes part of her, what’s happening becomes part of her. If no, if it’s a story she edits, that she presses into a place it’s not supposed to fi
t, then she might not want to die after, and yes, the story might leak out, and yes, she might bite her cuticles till they bleed, she might drink until she gets sick, yes, she might develop a cruel edge, yes, yes, there might be consequences, but they are ones that, she thinks, she hopes, she can live with. In the room, under the man, she wrestled the moment into a new shape, one she thought would save her. She wrestled the horrible word out of her mind. Her lip was bleeding. It was years ago now, but it is still happening. Her lip is still bleeding. She is telling herself that this is not rape, that she is not being raped. She kissed him. She kisses him. She kisses the man on top of her.

  Noor’s Way

  After the cut, there is an interval of time—no longer than a sharp inhale—before the blood comes. Inside that interval, Noor watches as the small slash she made across her own thigh opens like a mouth. Always a shock to see her pale, fibrous insides. Looking exposed—surprised, even. No red yet. The blood comes soon. But first this suspended moment when the cut is open like a zipper and each time—each time—Noor feels it might be reversible. Once the blood comes, the cut will be a fact. But now—on her bedroom floor sitting up against the door with her carefully curated kit of tools beside her—before the blood dots and pools in the cut Noor made on herself, on her own body, she feels it might be reversible, that this time she might undo the horrible thing she can’t—can’t—seem to stop doing to herself. The new wound might zip right back up. A moment—suspended.

  Since Hussein returned, she’s been cutting herself more often. The man who came back both is and is not her big brother. Something washed away, something else hardened. He coughs like an old man now. In the middle of a sentence, he’ll begin coughing, hand to his chest. He says it’s because of how he was interrogated—the cold room where they kept him. He looks off to the side when he speaks to you, like he’s talking to someone else or to a different version of you that is standing just to the left.