Aisha adjusted the turban wound tightly to her head, her long hair bound up and dripping rivulets of sweat down the small of her back. She pulled the rough excess of her collar over her face, trying to shield herself from the drifting sand. The fake beard only added to her discomfort.
Sand snuck into the folds and various openings of her drafty garment—little more than a burlap toga, tied at the waist by a rope. It had been a birthday gift from her sister, years ago, back when their parents thought they were merely recreational hookah users and not the biggest marijuana dealers in Dearborn, Michigan. Aisha was happy she wore the thing, actually. She was far from home, in need of a touchstone.
She was six months clean, not that this helped her gain her bearings. It was just after daybreak. Strangers passed her on the streets of Jerusalem. A steady stream of Pesach pilgrims filtered into the city. A merchant towing along a caravan of camels laden with spices, fabrics, and dried figs. A peasant driving a small, curiously stoic flock of sheep—too hardy to die, too lean to ever make a profit. Three women balancing atop their heads baskets of donkey and camel dung to be later used as fuel for fires. Aisha rubbed shoulders with strangers dead two-thousand years in her world: Sadducees, Pharisees, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Arabians, Roman soldiers, tax collectors, merchants, craftsmen, peasants, beggars, slaves. Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were spoken intermittently, mixing in her head and rendering translation difficult.
While pursuing her doctorate in theoretical physics, Aisha had befriended an exiled seminarian—exiled presumably for being too deist and too heterosexual—who tutored her in Greek and was familiar with the colloquial, first-century dialect. In exchange for Ecstasy-fueled, exceedingly non-missionary sex, Aisha had mastered the language from the modern Greek all the way back to Mycenaean, plus a little Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin.
The smell of incense, the sound of trumpets and Psalms, the oxen, sheep, kids, and doves being sold for sacrifice. All carried with them a poignancy she had never felt. The sun danced over the Mount of Olives, brighter than any sun she had ever seen. The Antonia Fortress and Herod’s Temple veiled most of the city in their imposing shadows. Aisha reached down, pulling a weed from the ground outside the abandoned amphitheater. She smelled the weed, inhaling deeply and imagining troupes performing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, or perhaps another even greater Greek tragedian history had forgotten. Two Jewish rabbis cursed at her in Hebrew, remembering the theater’s more sinister raison d’être as a gladiatorial killing field for thousands of pious men.
“Shabot shalom,” she said to them in a plaintive but consciously masculine tone.
Aisha made her way to the western edge of the city, keeping to herself as the day progressed. After the encounter with the rabbis she spoke aloud only once to buy a loaf of bread and some pressed olives. She waited outside Herod’s palace for her cue from the Roman soldier. He was a handsome man, a well-muscled legionnaire in his early twenties with medium-length hair that curled out from under his helmet. His armor comprised overlapping strips of iron that hugged his torso in two halves and fastened on the front and back by a system of brass hooks and leather laces. He carried a shield and a short sword.
Late last night, Aisha had bribed him with several gold pieces and a handjob. She needed the practice. The legionnaire unlocked the palace gate and walked away.
She checked inside her hip pocket for at least the tenth time in as many minutes. Everything was still there: the half-dozen empty vials, the cryoprotectant semen extender, the plastic gloves, the small bottle of mead laced with roofies. A hundred yards down the corridor, He sat in His prison cell…
I stack the pages neatly on my desk. Trimmed down from one hundred and twenty thousand words to an even seventy-five thousand, Sperm Bank Messiah has taken up most of my professional time these last few months. I’m late for my twin boys’ first birthday party today. I assume Beth will understand, just like Beth assumes it’s perfectly normal for a couple married seven years to have sex once every two months.
“Very nice,” I say.
I can hear Lila breathing on the other end of the speakerphone. “You think?” she says.
“Yeah, I do. You have a way with character and setting. I felt like I had a front-row seat to Passover in ancient Jerusalem. Obviously, the handjob scene with Jesus needs some more work.”
“Agreed, but the general setup is better?”
“Yeah, more or less.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m still torn overall on Aisha.”
“But I thought you were into exotic looking women.”
“That’s beside the point,” I say, trying not to smile or picture my stepsister in a peach negligee—failing at both. “Why did you give your protagonist, who’s supposed to be a born-again Christian, an Islamic name?”
“Truthfully?” Lila says.
“No, just make something up. Yes, truthfully.”
“I wanted to piss off all those misogynist fuckers in the Middle East.”
“Okay, I’ll buy that. But you couldn’t come up with a better name than Aisha?”
“What’s wrong with Aisha?”
“It makes me think of little black kids doing the running man in single-strap airbrushed overalls.”
“Come again?”
“You know, Another Bad Creation, aka the boy band ABC? Iesha, you are the girl that I neva had, and I want to get to know you bettah!”
“Still nothing.”
“You disappoint me, Lila.”
“My profuse apologies, but other than my protagonist reminding you of early nineties hip-hop artists, what else don’t you like?”
“Your setting.”
“What’s wrong with Indianapolis? You love Indy.”
“If you want this book to make any kind of commercial or critical splash, at least move Aisha out of the Midwest.”
“Why?”
“Because unless you’re Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides, the Midwest just doesn’t sell. It’s the Saved by the Bell factor.”
“The what?”
“The Saved by the Bell factor. Ever watch those old reruns of Saved by the Bell?”
“Maybe.”
“Come on now, Lila. Either you have or you’re lying to me. It’s fucking Saved by the Bell.”
“Okay, I’ve seen a few episodes.”
“A few episodes?”
“And by that I mean every episode at least four times over. I guess I was just hoping we had reached our nostalgia quota with Another Bad Creation.”
“That’s better,” I say. “You remember the first season?”
“Barely. It’s been a while.”
“The series actually debuted on the Disney Channel in 1988 under a different title, Good Morning, Miss Bliss. The focal point was Miss Bliss as opposed to the students, and the setting was John F. Kennedy Junior High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. After one season, the show was retooled as Saved by the Bell and quietly relocated to Los Angeles and the now-familiar Bayside High School. The acting never got better. The stories never got better. There was always the laugh track and predictable ‘ooos’ and ‘ahhhs’ whenever Zack and Kelly kissed. But that one small tweak to the setting made a horrible show legendary.”
Lila looks unimpressed. “That’s sixty seconds of my life I’m never getting back.”
“What do you mean?”
“I like the Midwest, Hank. It has an everyman quality that readers can relate to—like John Hughes’s Illinois and Judd Apatow’s Michigan.”
“Readers don’t want to relate anymore, they want to escape. Why the hell do you think Freaks and Geeks got cancelled after one season? Not to mention, you have the critics to think about. And there’s only one surefire setting for the preening literati.”
“Cue the New York rant.”
“It’s been that way since Nick Carraway partied with Jay Gatsby in West Egg, and you know it, Lila. You make Aisha a Manhattanite, and critics will eat that shit up.”
“How about Brooklyn?”
“Even better. Hell, go for the jugular and put her in Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, or Dumbo—the more indie you can make the setting the better. And if you’re thinking about working in a Midwest anecdote about basketball, change it to something completely esoteric that nobody west of the Hudson gives a shit about, like cricket or cribbage.”
“What’s cribbage?”
“My point exactly. And if you can get a critic thinking that only he will get your references, that’s a guaranteed rave review.”
“And by rave review you mean three pages of a pseudo-literary celebrity showing off before spending maybe three sentences actually talking about my book?”
I stand, grabbing my sport coat off the back of my chair. I extend my arms through my coat sleeves. “Is there any other kind of rave review?”
“What’s all that jostling going on in the background? You got somewhere to be?”
“It’s the twins’ birthday.”
“Give Burke and Johnny a kiss from their Aunt Lila.”
“Give Chris a kiss from your brother Hank.”
“Behave,” Lila says. “Although Chis and I aren’t really what I’d call ‘a couple’ at the moment.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
“Trouble in paradise, trouble everywhere. I feel like I’ve lost control.”
“I’m guessing a lot of people in New York don’t feel like they have control over much of anything right now.”
I can hear Lila start to tear up. She blows her nose into the phone. “It’s been eight weeks since the Towers fell, Hank. Eight weeks! And you can still smell it on the streets, on your clothes, on your soul. The city is just so…sad.”
“Hang in there, Lila. My recommendation for you and Chris would be not to do anything rash.”
“Are you my editor or my therapist?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Will you let me flirt with you or keep playing that stupid sister card?”
“Go to your boys’ party, Hank.”
The phone line goes dead, and I’m a little sad not to hear Lila’s voice anymore.