Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

It’s impossible to explain what happens to you when an angel penetrates you.

It’s not physical—you wish it was, for then at least you would be left with something of your own. No, your body remains untouched, unfelt, unnoticed, even pure, while the angel penetrates the only place that really matters. You feel it swelling and widening and expanding within you, and then you’re gone.

Superficially, you’re still there, imprisoned in your corporeal body, but it is your mind that has been defiled, and your self isn’t there anymore, and the person you were will never be anymore. And when the angel departs it leaves a hole in you, an empty space, a place that it occupied and that you can never, ever fill again. All of us, all of the people who will visit the machine next week, have such an empty space in the place where we used to have souls.

Know All Tuesday, twice blessed, I walk slowly on my quest, my mind deliberately at rest. Every step gets me closer to the address I was given, an abandoned warehouse in the old industrial zone. I wonder who, of all the people around me, I will meet there, if any, and then silence the thought. The sun shines, it’s a nice day, and those, if I manage it, are going to be my only thoughts till I arrive.

“What are you going to do?” I shouted. “How exactly are you going to fight…?”

Gabi reached out and covered my mouth with his hand, then hugged me. “I fight no one,” he whispered, “but there are more people like us. And, you don’t understand this yet, but there’s something unique about us.”

I pushed him away. “I feel this uniqueness all the time,” I said. “I’m not impressed by it.”

“Oh, it’s not only what you feel. We have other qualities. I… I don’t fully understand it myself, but there’s someone who does. We call him the Know All.”

“And that person, did he explain to you everything about those ‘qualities’ of ours?”

“Not in any words that you or I can understand. But that doesn’t matter. He’s building a machine that will set us free. In several days there’ll be a meeting, and you’ll be able to listen to him for yourself.”

I didn’t answer. It sounded too ludicrous. Some mad scientist builds a silly contraption from springs and coils in his basement laboratory, and a bunch of retards dance around him, hoping for salvation. How pathetic.

I agreed to go anyway. Never underestimate the power of hope, ludicrous as it may be.

We saw from afar the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire. When we arrived at the street, it was already clean. Not much was left of the machine or the Know All, or of the building in which they had once resided. Gabi was desperate to get closer, to look for remains, but I held him back and forcibly dragged him away.

That night we almost committed the deadly sin. We felt suicidal. It was Gabi who saved us, at the last moment.

“No,” he said. “This can’t be the end. The Know All was smart enough to know that this could happen to him.”

I wanted to say that it didn’t sound very smart, losing your life like that, but the sarcasm got stuck in my throat.

“Get up,” Gabi said. “Get dressed. We’re going out.”

We went to a place I didn’t know, a safe house in which, so Gabi said, some of the Atheists’ meetings and some of the Know All’s famous speeches had taken place. One small room, without a bed, without chairs, just one desk, and on it a stack of papers, and on the top one a title: “The Tower of Babylon.”

And under it—diagrams, drawings, descriptions.

“I knew it,” Gabi said. “I knew it.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked. “What’s this about the Tower of Babylon?”

“I don’t know. Let’s take it home and figure it out there.”

And the whole Earth was of one language, and of one speech, in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar .

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth .

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do .

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech .

So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off building the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth .

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You didn’t know the Know All,” Gabi said.

“He never said anything directly. Always clues or parts, or both. I think I know what he wanted to say here. Think of it, Raphi. Read it again. To scatter. To scatter !”

“But even if you somehow manage to build the machine, you’ll get just what he got.”

“Not necessarily. The Know All had a problem—he knew. We, on the other hand, don’t know. This may have been his intention from the start.”

“He killed himself deliberately?”

“I think,” Gabi said, “that he died for the sake of the machine.”

Then came the days in which each of the Atheists received a packet of pages, diagrams, drawings, descriptions.

Each of them built or found, or found someone else to build or find, the part, the component, the ingredient that was described and diagrammed in his or her own packet. No one had any idea about the function of any one part, much less the whole, and those who could make an educated guess tried to avoid thinking about it, or asked for someone else to take on the chore.

And I, while they were slowly bringing this enormous task to completion in this or that abandoned warehouse, lay days and nights in bed contemplating a sin that would destroy me without pain. And Gabi wasn’t there to stop me, for he was the one who had the hardest task of all—that of putting all of those parts together.

Who knows what I’d have done to myself if it hadn’t occurred to me that giving in to the machine was a sufficient sin in itself?

And curiosity, of course. Even for someone like me, who has already paid a considerable mental sum for it.

And then there was a note in my mailbox: “Come.”

And on Tuesday, twice blessed, walk slowly on my quest, my mind deliberately at rest, I’m getting closer, closer, closer to the nest.

The door is unlocked, and I step inside. There are no windows in the warehouse, but it’s not dark. The walls glow. I don’t understand how or why.

In one corner, darkness. A big gray plastic egg, wires and tubes protruding out of its top. It hums, or maybe I’m just imagining this. I go there and sit under it, on the floor, and pull the egg over my head.

Darkness. I sit there for quite a long time. No sound is heard, no indication is given, no activity is visible. Maybe there is none, and I’m sitting inside a piece of dead junk, waiting in vain for salvation or a quick death. I don’t move. Maybe I even fall asleep, there in the quiet and darkness.

Minutes pass, or maybe hours, or maybe days. Nothing happens.

I remove the machine from my head and stand up. The light is blinding. The walls are ablaze with light. I see, now, that they are mirrors. And in those mirrors I see my face, and I say to myself, I know that face. Where do I know it from? Small, delicate, drawn in thin, sharp lines. Not the face I was born with, but that which has been mine since… since…