The word in Daniel’s mind was dybbuk. It came unbidden. It was something the rabbis in the yeshiva spoke about, sometimes. It was an evil spirit that possessed men. That man in the fire truck, with the bug-crazy eyes and the golem-carved grin that said here was one Rabbi Lowe’s Monster who wouldn’t shut down voluntarily. Or something to that effect. That was a man possessed. Daniel wanted to stay as far away from that guy as possible.
“This is amazing,” Hagar said. She pointed the camera at the fire truck as it travelled slowly up Frishman — literally up. “I am going to follow him.”
“You’re what?” Daniel saw the rear of the truck find a bump in the road — someone’s head. The truck travelled over it, squishing it. Daniel felt sick.
“Daniel!” She gave him a quick kiss, still aiming the camera. “I’m a filmmaker. And this — this horrible tragedy, this unprecedented disaster, this heartbreaking loss of human life, the selfless sacrifices and acts of unbearable human courage in the face of adversity, this tragic — ”
“You already mentioned tragedy once,” Daniel said. Hagar sounded like a recital of every Remembrance Day and Holocaust Day speech he’d ever sat through, from kindergarten up. After a while, you got to know the words. Only the order in which they were placed changed.
“Did I? Look up there, Daniel. Look at it!”
He did. Now that they were outside, there was no avoiding it. The mountain dominated the city.
In the place where the Dizengoff Center — with its elderly armed security guards, its tired sweet shops, its dark cinemas and pretentious mall restaurants and its obligatory McDonald’s and two hole-in-the-wall book and magazine shops with their three-for-two bargain tables that never changed — in their place rose a mountain, its peak invisible behind clouds. It gave a sense of enormity, which must have been, Daniel thought, some distortion in the way light passed through the air (he was never much on physics, and the Torah was easier), making it appear larger than it was, than it must have been. Yet he could not shake the feeling that there, before him, was a mountain rising to great heights. He swore he saw ice and snow up there. And beyond, the sense of other, even taller peaks: an entire hidden geography, waiting as if it had been there all along . . .
“You can’t go there!” he said.
“Can’t?”
Too late, Daniel realized he may have made a mistake.
“I can’t?”
“I didn’t — ”
“You think just because we fucked it gives you the right to tell me what to do?”
He cringed. “I didn’t mean . . .” he said, and stopped, at a loss.
This was beyond his scope of experience. “What I mean,” he said, trying again, but got no further.
“What did you mean, Daniel?”
She looked at him. She was almost his height. He thought she had beautiful eyes, though they looked as cold and as distant as the heights of the mountain at just that moment. And so he did what men had done since the dawn of time in such circumstances. “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.
Some of the tension seemed to leave Hagar. “It’s all right,” she said.
“Just worried,” Daniel said. He went to her and clumsily hugged her. She leaned against him. Her cheek against his naked skin, her breath tickling the hairs on his chest.
“You don’t have to come,” she said.
“What? I’m not leaving you — are you really going to follow that crazy bastard?”
“Isn’t he fascinating?”
It was certainly not the word he would have used to describe the former member of the Tel Aviv Municipal Fire Department. “Hagar, I don’t think we should follow him. I think . . . I don’t think he’s quite himself.”
“I know,” she said, surprising him. “You felt it, huh? I have to tell you something, Daniel” — and she nuzzled close to him, began kissing his neck and he felt himself stirring back to life — “I haven’t been feeling myself lately, either.”