Bloom stands outside Abdo’s bakery.
Windows are smashed. Spray paint on the steel curtain and the walls. Writing in Arabic he doesn’t understand, but the graffiti is clear: A dog-man on his knees, licking another man’s huge, lollipop-size dick. Another dog-man bowing on his knees before a Star of David.
Bloom is dressed in civilian clothes. He carries a WD-40 can, a rag, a steel brush, a bucket with soap and, water.
He works the steel curtain, wipes it clean. He works the wall.
Both man-dogs are gone when Abdo shows up. Bloom is whistling. He’s working on Mr. Lollipop Dick. Half the lollipop is gone.
Abdo stares, hands on hips.
Bloom says, “I always clean up my mess.”
“This is not your mess,” says Abdo.
“I’m cleaning it up anyway.”
They work hard. Abdo’s employees join them. By day’s end the wall and curtain are clean. They carried away the smashed glass. They put the upturned counter and register right.
Abdo goes inside; he checks the ovens. No damage there.
“Go, friend,” says Abdo. “Go, now. We’ll do the rest.”
They shake hands. They embrace Arab style: left, right, left.
Bloom leaves.
He walks.
He breathes in the night air, a mixture of sweet acacia, lavender, and leaded fuel.
“Bloom,” she says in the dark, from around a corner.
“Major Or,” says Bloom.
“Walk with me,” she says.
“Yes, ha-mefakedet,” he says.
They walk the streets in silence. She’s also in civvies. Blue jeans, a yellow blouse, a green sweater around her neck. Her hair is loose for a change. No jewelry, except for a copper bracelet.
She leads, he follows.
They go into a bar.
Whiskey neat for her. Tuborg beer for him.
Bloom sips. Bloom waits.
“Ian.”
“Major,” says Bloom.
“Stop it,” she says.
“I’m under orders from my base mefakedet to address said base mefakedet as Major Or or ha-mefakedet,” he says.
“Stop. It. Now.”
“Okay,” he says.
“I watched you today,” she says.
“I saw you.”
“I green-lighted your request for leave. You traded two off-duty days for today. Add to those the time you spent locked up and the disciplinary action coming your way because of the fight, it adds up to almost two weeks with no rest. I was curious, but I shrugged it off as you needing to let off some steam after your time in the tank, so I green-lighted it.”
Bloom says nothing, keeps sipping his beer.
“Then the guys on patrol report, ‘Corporal Bloom was seen at the Baghdadi bakery, washing away the paint on the curtain. Could lead to further disturbance. Please advise on cautionary action.’”
“There was no further disturbance,” he says.
“No thanks to you. I dispatched two patrol squads to the area. They’re good at dissuading the regular Joes.”
“I saw them. I also saw you. First in uniform, then in civvies. Why’d you come out? The regular Joes were taken care of, so why’d you come out?”
“I wanted to be certain.”
“Certain of what?”
“I wanted to know, to see if you’d changed. If the guy cleaning those walls was the Ian I met at the kibbutz, or Bloom, the soldier in this secret unit.”
“And?”
“And I still don’t know. Who was that? Who are you?”
“A bit of both, I guess. I’m not really sure, and I can’t say more than that. I’m sorry.”
“Why are you here, Ian?” she says.
“I can’t tell you that either. You know how it works. You read my orders and mission brief, but other than that, I can’t tell you.”
“No. That’s not what I meant. Here in Israel. Why are you here? Why did you join Tzahal? Why’d you extend your tour, volunteer for this secret unit, whatever it is? Sign up for three more years?”
“Oh. That.”
“I’ve read your file. Well, the unclassified parts of your file. Rich American brat. Heir to a billion-dollar fortune. One day you upped and left the States. You put your stock in a trust your mom’s relatives have been fighting over ever since and you came here. Why? I remember what you told me about your dad, and I saw how you spent the day fixing the baker’s store with him. It doesn’t add up. I don’t get it. I don’t get you.”
Bloom stares at his beer bottle.
Ian Bloom thinks. He feels the Breguet’s crack lines under his fingertips. He feels the asimon against his skin. He closes his eyes and sees it all again, the horror movie looping in his brain most nights before he sleeps.
Ian Bloom decides.
He tells her. He tells it all.
The night was black, starless, clouded. The road covered in melted snow. A few puddles of ice.
Bloom kept pushing.
The red Bugatti Chiron Sport kept on climbing up Old Dominion’s Lookout Pointe.
One twenty.
The wheel vibrated.
Gaius screamed. Gaius laughed. Gaius pulled at the vodka bottle.
One forty-five.
The wheel grumbled. The Bugatti shook in protest.
Gaius screamed. Gaius laughed. Gaius opened the window. He pulled his head, his torso out the window. The howling night pushed at him. He howled and pushed back. A tree branch hit him in the face, gnashed his right cheek. Gaius closed the window. Another vodka swig.
“I told you to stay inside,” said Bloom. “Now you’ve fucked up your face. Mom is going to kill me.”
“If she’s not too stoned to notice,” said Gaius.
“True.”
Bloom kept pushing.
One hundred sixty miles per hour.
The Bugatti roared. It flew.
He laughed.
He roared, “Yeah, motherfucker.”
Gaius screamed, “Yeah, motherfucker.”
The Bugatti sped. The Bugatti flew.
He kept pushing.
One seventy.
The Bugatti hit an ice puddle. The Bugatti slipped. It spun. It went off the road. It blew the barrier like paper. It toppled. The airbags popped. It smashed sideways into a tree. The tree smashed right back through Gaius’s window.
It all stopped.
Hello, darkness, my old friend.
Goooooood mooooornnnniiiing, Vieeeeetnaaaaammmm.
Fireworks inside his head.
Flashing lights all over the place.
Red, blue. Some yellow too.
The cops showed up. Ditto the paramedics.
They broke his door open.
The paramedic said, “Can you hear me, son?”
His throat was dry.
Bloom nodded.
The paramedic asked again.
“I can hear you,” he rasped. “I can hear you right as rain.”
The paramedic flashed a light in his eyes.
“Can you wiggle your toes, son?”
He wiggled them.
He nodded.
“Move your fingers?”
He raised his hands. He wiggled his fingers.
A few cuts, he saw.
Glass from Gaius’s window was everywhere.
His Breguet Tourbillon’s sapphire-crystal face was cracked.
His brother Gaius had a tree branch through his throat, his hands wrapped around the branch, his eyes open, frightened, dead.
Bloom cried. Bloom wailed.
He walked away from the car.
Bloom stumbled. His knees weak. He fell on them. He put his face between his hands. He threw up. He cried harder.
The paramedic was all over him. Wrapped him in a shock blanket. Oxygen mask on his face.
“We’ve got you, son. We’ve got you.”
The paramedic walked him to an ambulance. A pair of orderlies put what used to be Gaius on a gurney, the sawed-off tree branch next to him. They covered his brother’s face with a yellow plastic blanket, but it was no use. His dead, frightened eyes were seared in Bloom’s mind.
He sat inside his ambulance’s back door, his feet dangling from it, at least a foot from the ground.
He still had the oxygen mask on his face. An orderly was taking his blood pressure. Another with a clipboard in her hands was asking him questions he didn’t even hear. Flashing lights all over the place.
“What?” he asked.
“Are you hurt anywhere, sir?” said Clipboard Orderly.
“I don’t think so.”
The paramedic was back. Next to him were two guys in gray. It took him a second to make them out as highway patrol cops.
“. . . is riding with you to Old Dominion Health, you hear. Soon’s the docs clear it, she’s gonna take your statement. Is there anyone you’d like us to call? Your parents?”
“Call Paine,” he said. “Call Lucian Paine. He’ll know what to do.”
His lawyer’s name was an ice-cold water bucket on everyone.
“Lucian Paine?” the patrolman said. “The weird guy who lives in a beach shack?”
“Yeah. That’s the one,” said Bloom. “He’ll know what to do.”
Lucian Paine handled it. He handled it, all right. He always did.
Bloom looked around.
A shack on the beach. Hammock on the terrace outside, swayed by the ocean breeze. Another hammock inside. A desk with an internet router and some power jacks. Two lounge chairs. A wet bar. A jukebox full of old rockabilly vinyl albums. A pinball machine against a wall, next to a surfboard. Big-ass espresso machine. A full Partagas humidor.
Paine’s place is not what you’d expect, he thought. Nothing about Paine was. A member of the Paine clan, the closest thing to royalty in America, and certainly in Old Dominion, they had a piece of most business in the city, legal or otherwise. He was estranged from the family patriarch, and most everyone else. Left behind a substantial law practice some years ago. Beach bum par excellence. Nephew of mom’s current husband, Gaius’s cousin, Bloom’s best friend.
Lucian Paine. Lucian, the man, lay on one of the lounge chairs, Fat Tire beer in hand.
Bloom lay on the other. Ditto the beer.
Elvis on the jukebox was rocking full swing, Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly on deck.
“The vultures are pissed at me,” said Lucian.
“At you?” Bloom asked. “If anything, they’re pissed at me.”
“Oh, they are. Not only did you kill your stepbrother—”
“Brother. Gaius was my brother, no matter who our parents were.”
“I’m sorry. Brother,” said Lucian. “Not only did you kill your brother, Gaius, in that car crash, but you had the bad manners of not dying too. If you’d croaked, or at least gotten hurt so bad you’d be a veggie in a wheelchair or a drool in the loon house, problem solved. No more Ian. Mommy dearest gets your stock, so the vultures get it by proxy.”
Lucian took a pull from his beer.
“But you didn’t croak, and you’re no veggie. Only a few scratches on your hand and a busted Breguet you still wear for reasons I neither understand nor care to.”
Bloom looked at the cracked watch on his wrist.
Bloom said, “It’s not busted. The crystal’s cracked, that’s all. It’s still running. It’ll keep on running long after you and I are gone.”
He drank from his beer.
He said, “They want me gone so bad, don’t they?”
Lucian said, “They do. If you were standing between me and seven billion dollars, I’d want you gone too, and I like you. Them? Yeah. They want you gone. The money, more than Gaius’s death, is what gets their goat. That’s why they’re pissed at me now.”
Lucian continued, “If I’d let you rot in jail, you’d be as good as gone as far as they’re concerned. They’d go to court. ‘He’s unfit,’ they’d say. ‘Give us the stock,’ they’d say. Well, no. Duane Ferris would say it for them, which is worse, because Duane is a crack at lawyering and he’d get them the stock while you spend the next twenty to life counting bird shit drops on the exercise yard.”
“Yeah. I can see why they’re pissed at you,” Bloom said. “They’re gonna be more pissed after this.”
“They are,” said Lucian.
“Don’t they have enough money already?” Bloom says.
“Brother, no one ever has enough money.”
“Is this bulletproof? Is there anything they can do about this?”
“They’ll try,” said Lucian, sipping from his beer. “Let the motherfuckers try.”
He felt the crack lines under his fingertips. He smiled.
He said, “Let the motherfuckers try.”
“Are you sure about this?” asked Lucian.
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’ve been sure for a while now.”
Bloom wound the watch on his wrist, passed a hand over its cracked face, felt the crack lines under his fingertips.
He recalled. He remembered.
His feet dangling from the ambulance.
They dragged Gaius’s body, and the tree branch that killed him, under a sheet.
They took Bloom.
Hospital first.
They ran the tests. Every. Fucking. Test.
Blood tests: no alcohol, no drugs, no meds, no disease. Nothing. Gaius had been drinking, but not Bloom.
MRI: no breaks, no punctures, no swelling, no internal bleeding. Nothing.
CAT scan: brain, okay.
The handcuffs came on.
He could walk, but they wheelchaired him from room to room, from test to test, from the hospital bed to the patrol car outside.
“Jailhouse Rock” all the way.
They booked him.
They caged him.
They released him.
It took less than an hour. Lucian had already been there. Lucian had left. Lucian’s note:
Sit tight.
He sat tight.
He lay tight on the cot.
He put his hands under the paper-thin pillow, and there it was.
“An old copy of this book, The Catcher in the Rye. Ever read it? No? It’s about this sixteen-year-old, his name’s Holden Caulfield. He was expelled from a posh prep school and spends some lonely time in New York. It used to be a big read in school when I was a kid,” Bloom says to Orit.
He wanted to kill some time, sitting tight, waiting.
He read.
It was an old paperback edition. Loose front cover, picture fading. Dog-eared pages. Creased, bent every which way. Grease-stained.
He found an annotation on the upper margin, page thirteen.
Steady, son. Hold steady, now. It’s time to stop.
The handwriting was like his father’s.
He leafed through the book. There were more annotations.
Be a giver, not a taker.
The prodigal son who wasted all the portion entrusted to him by his father.
Carpe diem.
Is it worth it?
Your life matters to me, make it matter to you.
Fear is a thief.
Rise. Beat the darkness within.
I love you.
All in the same cursive, neat, well-spaced letters in blue ink.
On the last page, this:
I belong to Kyle White
and a phone number.
When he got out, he called the number. Unassigned.
He asked Lucian to find out about Kyle White.
The report came back a week later.
They had picked up Kyle White for loitering and trespass. Father unknown. Mother doing hard time in Colorado. In and out of foster homes since he was six. Stellar school records.
Kyle White was dead. He hung himself in that cell. No known relatives or next of kin. He was nineteen.
“Here I was, everything going for me and, like White, I was busy killing myself, only I didn’t know it. I was pissing my life away,” he says.
And then there was the first message:
Steady, son. Hold steady, now. It’s time to stop.
His father said that when he stopped the chemo.
He said it again when Ian was crying by his bed, the night before he died.
He said it many times.
“So I stopped. I was done wasting my life. I’d make it count,” says Bloom.
“Here? Playing soldier in Israel?” says Orit.
“It’s as good a place as any. Better than most. I love my country. I could’ve joined the US Armed Forces, but America doesn’t need me. It has over three hundred million people and faces no existential military threat. Israel has less than ten and is surrounded by enemy countries hell-bent on its destruction. The US has strategic depth. Its closest adversaries must cross either the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean, the world’s best natural barriers. Israel has no strategic depth, and no natural barriers against its enemies. Israel can’t afford to lose any of its wars. My dad was a Zionist. So was I, during my teens. Despite its many faults, Israel is the Jewish homeland, and I’m a Jew. If my life should count for something, it should be here, doing this.”
She kissed him.
A long, hungry, savage kiss—like those she used to give him a lifetime ago.
His hands running down her back.
Their knees touching together.
Her long, strong fingers on his face, running through his hair, caressing his neck. They stop at the asimon hanging from the leather cord.
She started it, she broke it off.
“Still not lonely enough to call?”
“It’s not because I’m not lonely. I’m lonely every day. It’s because I’m not brave enough.”
“Complete your mission. Leave my base. We’ll see what happens next.”