He saw black nettles, poppies, za’atar bushes, flashes of fire on the hills, and the outline of the mountain range that surrounds Mexico City, looming behind rows of crumbling stone houses and billboards along the road from the airport to Polanco. Stars littered the sky: not this sky, which disappeared behind the clouds, but a different one, perhaps the sky in Pokhara on his post-army trip. He was supposed to hike to Annapurna Base Camp, a beginners’ trek by all accounts, on the morning of the fourth anniversary of his mother’s death, but he woke before dawn, packed his gear, and left while everyone else was asleep. He sometimes still saw that sky when he awoke in the morning and wished he’d stayed and done the trek. In his stories about Nepal—he had.
He was standing on a rooftop and the cloud cover looked very close; if he jumped high enough, he would disappear into it. He put his hands on the railing and felt dizzied by the vast distance between him and the black Lego brick of a road down below. He took a step back and stood between Carlos and the young girl with glasses, whose name he had learned was Elizabeth. She was the daughter of religious fanatics and hadn’t talked to her mother for eight years, although her father sometimes called. She ran a club night called “The Past Is Yet to Come” and was writing her dissertation in political philosophy at the Ibero-American University. Carlos had told him there had recently been several murders in her small hometown, and he’d gone there to write a report for a human rights organization. Carlos was also a writer, translator and poet, of course. He told Yonatan about the murders over breakfast at a cantina in Narvarte on his first morning in Mexico City, while groups of men sat in stony silence at the other tables: a gang had killed every man with the last name ‘Garza’ and buried them near the Texas border.
Yonatan put his arms out and held their hands. All three of them were sweating, which he found charming, and they swung their arms lazily. He felt protected between them, and loved. He marveled again at Carlos’s good looks, his black hair falling on his forehead, a gray spark dancing in his slightly slanted green eyes, beneath thin brows, and smooth, tanned skin.
He looked at Elizabeth. He did not recall such a sharp chin, at odds with the cheeks in her dimples and her light brown eyes, first sincere and then bemused or perhaps skeptical. All the days he’d spent wanting to see her seemed clear now, not because of what he’d told her about his best friend who’d died, but thanks to the memory of her hands on his face when he’d rested his head on her lap that night, the imprint of her touch as she’d stroked him tenderly, as if she’d taken ownership of his body, perhaps his mind, whispering that he would get through that night and other nights. He’d believed her then, but now he wondered if some of her gestures had been ironic. For months the crater under his feet had been widening, cracking open right in front of him or to one side, and he’d had to maneuver his way in a cautious dance, sometimes avoiding all movement. At times it seemed he was frozen in place and the chasm was dancing around him. He knew that if he told Shira the truth it would scare her, destabilizing their lives even further. And even if he was wrong and she could help him, it was best not to confirm her fear that he would not survive the loss of Yoel—that even if he did, he would be a different man, not the father Itamar knew, the man he’d sworn to be out of a sense of duty even before the love. How could he reassure her when he didn’t really know himself? He’d had a dream, here in Mexico, that he was late to pick up Itamar from daycare, but when he got there the entire building had vanished, as if he’d arrived into a faraway time, and the words Yoel had said to him in that dream kept screeching through his mind: “Maybe all this isn’t really for us.”
They sat on the top floor of a dark bar where a few dusty mattresses were laid out, drinking mezcal. He drank more and more and complained that it wasn’t having any effect, or not enough. They stepped out into the night. It was raining and Elizabeth’s glasses got wet. He wiped them with his sleeve and then took his coat off and held it over her head. They wandered around La Condesa, through narrow, dark alleyways and bright bustling streets. He was tired and thirsty, which reminded him that he was some years older than they were.
They stood on the gray concrete floor of a small outdoor club, and he bought beers for Elizabeth and Carlos and they all leaned on the wet wall. A few young men and women in shorts danced between the puddles. Carlos wandered away and came back with a bottle of water, which he passed around, and they all took swigs. “This is crazy shit, you’ll see,” Carlos said.
They took Carlos’s car to the hotel, walked past the doormen and the reception clerks, and stood by the swimming pool kicking at the water. Then they lay down on the wet lawn and counted rainbows and their faces were wet from the light rain. Elizabeth said she’d read Shalamov’s “The Snake Charmer,” on Yonatan’s recommendation: “It’s a nice story, but that’s about it.” “You can’t do anything with Shalamov’s writing—it doesn’t lead anywhere,” Carlos opined, echoing Yonatan, who’d quoted Primo Levi when he’d been asked to recommend a book during the last event of the festival. There was a silence, and Yonatan said, “I’ve come to understand this here: every time you put pen to paper with a picture that has been attacking your consciousness for years—a memory, a fantasy, whatever—you kill it slightly. You kill its wildness and beauty, the potential it had before you wrote it. After that, it will never strike your mind with the same force again. Maybe that’s why the pictures you aren’t willing to lose—you do not write. And when you’re not willing to lose anything, you don’t write anything.”
Then they were in his room, dancing to YouTube clips, and he crushed white rocks into lines on the glass table and told Carlos they might be too thick and Carlos laughed and said, “This time it’s on you.”
He saw a bamboo hut whose roof branched around pale red clouds, and behind it loomed a tower made of rough Jerusalem stone, and on the shelves seen from its windows there were black pieces of record albums, sharp and narrow as knives, and faded newspapers, and notes in his father’s handwriting, and a space heater, and behind the tower there was nothing—the world ended. A chill ran down his spine. He fluttered in terror, the coke wasn’t strong enough, it would all end, they would leave, he would be alone on the roof, were they even in the hotel anymore? But a new flood of warmth spread through his body. He sat down on the floor. Each movement seemed to happen twice, first in his mind and then in reality, as if he were watching his body from outside and then returning to it.
Elizabeth sat down and leaned on him. He put his arms around her, tightened them against her body and leaned his cheek on her shoulder. Her skin was warm, he lit a cigarette and they smoked together. He thought of those mornings in the hotel when he’d checked his cell phone as soon as he woke up: nothing had happened, no tempest. What news was he waiting to hear?
He saw a forest, and Burman hanging on Michael’s stout body, and there was writing on his naked back in an old video-game font: “Sources report that his colleagues at the Holon Municipality knew him by his name, A. Burman, but in the firms where he advanced his private and allegedly illegal affairs, he went by ‘Y. Man.’” The forest widened and he saw Salman observing them from between the trees. Salman seemed to be looking straight at him, and he wanted to hide from his gaze. Words flickered over Salman’s body: “The effects of wastewater usage on the spread of bacteria-resistant antibiotics in water and soil. Ph.D. candidate Eyal Salman. Advisor: Dr. Azriel Sorokin.” Searching for ‘Hila Baron’ on Google and Facebook gave multiple results, there were too many Hila Barons in the world.
The magazine publisher’s black Chevrolet was waiting outside the hotel. The door was so heavy that he had trouble opening it, and there were bulletproof windows. He’d been in such cars here before. He sat down on the leather seat. He took a swig from the bottle of whiskey on the bar in front of him, and looked at the cloudy night sky: he didn’t know where they were going and didn’t ask. That morning the publisher had left him a message at the hotel: “I got what you asked for.” Suspecting another prank—like when he’d made Yonatan wait for the girl in glasses until one a.m.—he was in no hurry to answer. He called back in the evening, after waking up on the lawn outside his room, blinded by the garden lights, with his heart pounding. He couldn’t remember having gone out there at all. His last memory was of lying in bed watching a movie about two planes that crashed on the runway at the tiny airport in Tenerife, in 1977, the greatest aviation disaster in history.
He hurried to his room and washed blades of grass off his face and neck, took a Klonopin, and looked in the mirror: his forehead was the color of the grass and there were thick red lines snaking around the whites of his eyes. He lay down, stood up, sat on the couch, dialed Shira’s number but changed his mind, called his father and hung up. He’d stopped calling Yoel long ago. In the past two years he’d frequently dialed his number distractedly—he could recite all Yoel’s phone numbers from age eight—and stopped midway, until he finally broke the habit.
He had trouble breathing and he touched his chest as if to wake it up. Unable to be alone for a moment longer, he burst out of the room, charged down the hallway and sat in the well-lit lobby near a group of German tourists listening to a tour guide describe the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, where they were going the next day. “I’ve been there, it’s boring as hell. Even Frankfurt’s more interesting,” he whispered in English to an older couple sitting next to him.
He went back to his room and phoned the publisher, who told him he would be picked up in three hours and taken to the best mezcal bar in town, “where you will find your young lady with glasses, and another surprise…”
“It’ll be nice to see you again,” he told the publisher.
“Unfortunately we shall not meet. I’m very busy, and I only meet truly great writers twice.”
He laughed, feeling for the first time that he liked the publisher, who also gave a little purr of laughter and hung up. He felt calmer, knowing that his loneliness would soon be tempered and he would be with people, and would touch them.
He saw Itamar running around the apartment with a ball. A breeze mussed his hair, and his thin arms looked too scrawny. Itamar kicked the ball to him, he kicked it back, and they ran together, yelling and laughing, toward the glass balcony door. Itamar touched the glass and turned to him with a victorious grin: “Again!” He looked around: Elizabeth and Carlos were leaning over him watching the video clip on his phone. The boy was very pretty, they said, very cute. Elizabeth wondered if he shouldn’t go home to his boy: how long had he been here—two weeks? Twelve days, he corrected her; two weeks sounded excessive, almost cruel. “How come you didn’t tell me you were still here?” Carlos said, putting his hand on Yonatan’s shoulder, “I told you that you always have a friend in Mexico City.” He said they would not see each other again after tonight.
Carlos put one foot up on the rooftop railing and said: “Did you notice that every drunken story by a Mexican writer ends with them going home and finding their girlfriend or boyfriend screwing their best friend?” A picture glimmered in Yonatan’s mind: he comes home one day, shortly after moving in with Shira, and finds Shira and Yoel sitting beside each other on the couch, talking, looking at old photo albums, with beer bottles in their hands and a full ashtray between them. There was nothing unusual about the scene, yet it aroused in him a peculiar feeling—a shameful one, perhaps. He could not put his finger on it, but in the first look they gave him, before the welcoming smile and Yoel’s shout of happiness, he imagined he saw a shadow, as if they were displeased with his return.
Then the three of them sat there and Yoel interrogated Shira about her trip to South America after her military service, and every time she mentioned a place he asked her to describe it in detail. Then Yoel said, in a low voice, that he hadn’t gone anywhere after the army. “And your boyfriend”—he jerked a finger at Yonatan—“took a failed trip to the Far East, came home shamefaced after ten days in Nepal, and didn’t call anyone so that people would think he was skipping over mountaintops.” He explained that they’d gone to London together, but that was somewhere you could go even when you were a hundred years old.
Out of nowhere, Yoel suggested the four of them—Yonatan and Shira, with Yoel and his girlfriend Anat—go traveling around the US that summer, Kerouac-style. But as the hours went by the trip shrunk down to Europe, then Greece, then the Sinai Desert, and finally Yoel admitted that he and Anat weren’t exactly together, they were considering their future, and that kind of trip might send the wrong message. Shira looked at Yoel in surprise and asked why he hadn’t told them before. Yoel snorted, as did Yonatan, because they often made plans only for Yoel to back out when he remembered some detail about his work or his girlfriend or his parents. Every time it happened, he assumed that Yoel was excited about the plans, before doubts began to gnaw at him and he changed his mind.
For a while they said nothing, until Yoel asked how come they’d moved in together only a few months after they’d met. Shira laughed and said they’d moved in together because it was the most natural thing to do at the time, and that if things didn’t work out they would stop living together. Yoel seemed unsatisfied with the casual answer, but he said the two of them were clearly meant for each other. When they said goodbye, Yonatan remembered something Tali had told him recently: Yoel thought that Yonatan needed a sense of home because his family had fallen apart after his mother’s death, and that was why he’d hardly been alone since moving to Tel Aviv. The difference between them, Yoel had told Tali, was that Yonatan didn’t always assume there was something better out there, and that he recognized that there were certain things he needed, and certain other things he was afraid of, and he made his choices accordingly. Tali had then told Yonatan that the problem with Yoel was that there was nothing he really needed.
Elizabeth kissed him on the lips and moved away.
He sees a downpour, and horses galloping over grass and mud, and he sees Yoel and himself sitting on chairs at the William Hill betting shop near the Baker Street tube. The counter is strewn with crumpled papers, red pens and cigarette butts, and when the horses near the finish line Yoel and Yonatan stand up with their arms around each other and yell, and everyone stares, and when their horse wins—like Rock’n’roll Boy, at 12/1—they tumble out into the street, sweaty and wild-haired, dancing and singing and waving their ten-pound notes, united by wild, unrestrained joy.
He sees a small kiddie pool full of thick cement, which a giant spoon is stirring. Every so often, images flicker inside the cement. On a snowy boulevard, a young man puts his arms around a bearded man with a muddy face and they fall to the snow. He sees fields and green lawns under a blue sky, where he and Shira walk on the grass with happy faces. I remember that dream, he wanted to tell Elizabeth and Carlos; he’d dreamt it shortly after meeting Shira. He sees a boy standing in the street, surrounded by people talking to him as he strokes the plank of wood sticking out of his throat and his gray eyes scan the crowd with an amused look. He sees HaHalutz Street in the evening, with a gang of kids jumping on a brawny boy who looks like Michael but with purple hair, and himself wearing a surfer shirt, hanging on Michael’s back hitting his head over and over again with a water gun. He sees a park, stone paths, trees, a utility pole, clumps of brownish-yellow dust swirling in the air, and people walk past him and Yoel as if they weren’t there, and beyond the houses a ball of sun floats into the park and stops right above him, and the whole world turns golden and his eyes sting and he cannot see anything.
He saw rays of light around the bleached mountain tops in the distance. Elizabeth and Carlos were lolling on the floor, leaning against the wall and staring into space. They weren’t talking. For the first time he noticed that the roof smelled of rotting plants. He moved closer to them and knew they would leave in a few minutes—when it wears off you say goodbye, that’s the rule. He had an urge to tell them a memory he’d never shared with anyone or dared to write. The intensity of emotion it aroused in him had always frightened him, and he knew that if he waited one more minute, the influence of everything he’d swallowed and snorted tonight would dissipate and he wouldn’t have the courage to do it.
He sat close to them, his knee touching Carlos’s, and linked his fingers with Elizabeth’s. He told them that his mother was lying dead in her hospital room, and he was in the hallway with his father, who had already said goodbye to her body. He stood motionless, and finally dared to cross the threshold into the room, but he stopped at the edge, far from the bed. His brother was sitting there next to his ex-wife, and a sheet covered his mother’s body up to her smooth, peaceful-looking face. She was still wearing the blue headscarf. He said his brother’s name in a trembling voice, unsure exactly what he wanted, perhaps to sit next to him. His brother looked up at the ceiling and whispered something to his ex. Yonatan turned and left the room and stood outside, leaned on the wall, and knew that no matter how many years passed, even if he wanted to one day in the future, he would never forgive Shaul. And that every time he saw him, that picture would flicker in his memory. Through his tears—while some people recited the dawn prayers in the oncology ward at 4:30 a.m., and Ratzon and Yaara and Avigail’s father whispered with his dad, and his aunt stood talking to him though he could not hear a word she said, and his mother’s friend knelt on the floor with her face to the wall—he dimly saw Yoel at the end of the corridor. He hurried toward him, unable to bear the time until he could be close to him, and only when he was right there and could sense his body heat did he imagine that he did have a family after all.