They’d been waiting for me on the Kibbutz Galuyot Interchange. It was my first indication of how bad things had turned out in Tel Aviv, of how far civilization can collapse, and how quickly. They had surrounded me before I could pull out the Desert Eagle. Hands frisked me, stripped me quickly and efficiently of everything I had. Then they turned me over and I got my first look at them.
“Who dis bird hia?”
“What colour gang him wearing? Me no know dem.” They spoke a language of their own, a Tel Aviv argot of the sewers. It was a mix of English from bad Hollywood portrayals of Pacific islanders, and net-speak, and the sort of Hebrew teenagers use. There were about ten of them.
They were all mounted on scooters.
The scooters were painted in slashes of red and white. The men sitting on them had similarly painted their faces. The scooters all had 50cc engines. As I watched, two of them ran to the jeep and began emptying its oil tank. “Dis hia, like, million dolla!” one of them said.
“You, me, everyone rich,” the other one agreed. They were very efficient. The oil was transferred into two-litre plastic Coca-Cola bottles, and these in turn were distributed amongst the riders.
I said, “Listen, you’re making a mistake. I’m from outside. I’m here to help you.”
“Outside! He one crazy mathafucker. Outside. Why he go tellem outside for? Making the boys dey are crazy. I think kill him.”
“Kill him!”
“Kill him for sure, or — ”
“Yes?”
“Sell him to the Templars?”
“You fucking crazy, man? They’ll — ”
“Sure, but — ”
I said, “Hey,” and didn’t get any notice. “Hey!”
“What you want, crazy man from outside?”
“Who are you people?” I said. None of them was over twenty-five. Spotty faces. Red and white uniforms. A horrible thought invaded my mind and I said, “You’re delivery boys?”
“Who you go calling that, boy!” someone kicked me in the ribs. “We is de nambawan gang, Ayalon Highway Chapter, the Street Racers Clan. Why you go talk rubbish like dis, you don’t know is dangerous? Close-up you dead, man.”
“Look,” I said. “Can I stand up?”
“Stand up, sit down, soon you dead same-same.”
I stood up. They watched me. I said, “Don’t you people speak normal Hebrew?”
One of them, on the far left, young kid with glasses, raised his hand. “Actually,” he said, “well, of course we can speak the old language, mothafucker. If only to establish a working relationship with the tradespeople.” He smiled at me. “But we choose not to. Do you have a problem with that?”
I said, “No.”
“It really is quite easy to pick up, you know,” he said, smiling. “There’s even an old guy from the university who comes around every once in a while to talk to us. He says he’s a linguist, though I think” — and here he switched to their pidgin again — “he like look of boy hia, name of him SpeederManTwo, he want to take boy hia for ride, you savvy?”
“Fuck you!” a boy on the right said. I guessed he was SpeederManTwo. I wondered what happened to SpeederManOne. “Why you go make talktalk like dis? You want fight?”
And then they all began to chant, their palms landing in rhythm on the scooters’ handles, and they shouted, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”
I stared at them, and beyond the city rose, past the ruined highway, and for the first time I truly saw it, the burned-out, broken shell of a city, spreading out for miles in all directions, like a war zone that had been left to stand with no foreign-aid workers coming, a Kosovo, a Beirut, a Kandahar without CNN or Al Jazeera. And beyond the ruined city: the mountain, rising, dominating the skyline, and the sense of slow, immense things stirring, watching —
“Death race! Death race! Death race!” When I turned back to them they seemed to have forgotten all about me. The boy in the glasses and the other one were facing away from me on their scooters. The others surrounded them in a ring. A tall boy in a goatee was holding my Desert Eagle and pointing it at the sky. “One!” he said. “Two!”
“Tree!” they all shouted together, the boy with the goatee pressed the trigger, and the two scooters shot off along the highway. In a moment the others had revved their own miniature bikes and darted off after them, the whole herd making a sound like a cloud of mosquitoes. I heard shots being fired, coming from their direction and, a little later, saw a cloud of smoke rising far ahead. I wondered who won. They made me think of that book they make you read in high school, the kids who get stranded on an island somewhere, I can’t remember what it was called. It didn’t matter anyway. I think they made a movie out of it. I went back to the ruined jeep. The tires were gone. They must have scattered the road with glass or shrapnel. I picked up my backpack, still at the back of the jeep, and the Uzi, miraculously still there, and stepped off the highway, and into Tel Aviv.
Life is better now that the bosses are dead, and the phones too, and life is simpler, and it’s good to know all the skills you’ve worked so hard to gain on the job are coming in handy.
You may ride in a gang, but you only ride for yourself. That is the cardinal rule. You ride for yourself. That’s what he loves, the power, the control, as he rides the bike down the empty streets and knows people are watching him from their hiding places, watch him in envy because he has fuel, he has the bike, and in this new improved world he is king. You ride for yourself, but at the same time you ride with a gang, your friends, stronger than friends, your brothers, stronger than that — your pack. You hunt together in the quiet streets and if you see a looter come into your territory you ride him down and play with him, make him run, make him fall, and when you’ve had enough you tie his feet to a rope and the rope to the bikes and you all ride off together, carrying the garbage outside the border. You share everything with your gang — fuel, food, women — you sleep together, you eat together, you ride together. A lot of it is like back in the army, during basic training, but there are no bosses here, no commanders, everyone is equal, everyone is solitary king of the roads. You speak the language because it is your language now, it belongs to you, and each bike-klan has its own, and the ordinaries, the victims, the people who used to look down on you and phone for pizza and not tip — they don’t speak it, and when you pass by with the engines roaring they skulk and hide and fear you as you pass.
Life is better now, where everyone but you is dead. Life is simpler now, though you will never get to go on that trip to India with Yair, because he’s dead now too and there’s no way out of the city, and you will never go to the university, because there are no more classes and the university clan, with their unholy engine and their leader who is not quite there, who is not right in the head, who even the bikers fear even if they won’t admit it, the university clan doesn’t do admissions any more. But life is better now, a man’s life, and so you ride: you ride only for yourself.