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

Since that girl, in the library. Since the angel came and took and went away. Went away in my own body, leaving me alone. Only now can I see that.

I spread my wings and fly.

Fly, through the ceiling, through the top floors, through staircases and elevators, through the roof, fly out. And over the roofs around me, dozens of Atheists, glowing, radiating, winged, hovering.

Down on the street there’s no commotion, no notice. No one sees the angels gathering. Gabi flies over and says, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I try to hug him, but he moves away.

“Later,” he says. “We’re flying.” He raises his hand, points at the sky, and smiles.

“That’s the true meaning of it. The tower of Babel. We go up to the sky.”

I smile back, but something within me is rotten. This is not the way it should be. And the hole in my head, the place where my mind should have been, is still there, still not filled. Nothing has changed.

“After me!” Gabi roars, and everyone takes off, a squadron of angels, the soft murmur of wings, the sun shining upon the beautiful, glowing things.

They rise, higher and higher, further and further from the gray, dirty city under the clear, bright sky, from the filth, from the sin. And from me.

I land on one of the nearby roofs, sit on the dirty whitewash, lie down, look straight at the sun. Waiting in the light, just like I waited before in the dark.

The angels, above me, become smaller and smaller, fade out. I notice anger within me, scorching anger, beneath the intolerable calm of the hole in my head. Anger at God, of course, and at the angels, but mostly at Gabi and at myself.

Why didn’t I join them? Jealousy? Fear? Or maybe I’m just lethargic with the disappointment of still being alive?

The sun moves in the sky, slowly, as usual, then faster and faster. Something is askew. Something is wrong. And if I want to die, why haven’t I flown with them? And maybe my absence is the small factor that has decided the battle against them.

The sun moves in a great arc towards the sea, and I get up, stand erect, hover, fly—up and up, higher and higher, and the sun moves lower and lower and already I can’t see the city below me, and the light diminishes.

Up and up. A glow comes out of the fogginess above me, white lightning, and a great noise rings in my ears, or maybe in my mind, screams over screams, and I think I notice, among them, one particular tormented voice, which may or may not be Gabi’s. I will never know.

Because at that moment there’s the sound of tearing, and the sky above me opens, and I find myself passing like an arrow through a rain of angels.

Burning.

Boiling, bubbling, melting, twisting, shedding skin and innards and bones and feathers.

Dropping. I slow down, change direction, try to fall with them, hurling like a bullet toward the faraway ground, but they fall even faster. Compared to them I feel like a falling leaf, floating gently down, without hurry.

I try harder, push down faster, but in vain. The city appears, grows up with terrible speed, but not as terrible as that of the remains of the angels hitting it like bombs, clouds of some and fire of others marking the places where they smash into the ground and the buildings. I don’t bother slowing down.

I hit a roof and some walls and then the ground, then I realize that I’m going through them all. I feel nothing. I find myself alone on the face of the earth.

The day before yesterday I tried sleeping with someone, a young guy I met at the park. He melted the moment I laid a hand upon him.

Yesterday I went to the supermarket, took some meat and squashed a carton of milk into it. The building burned and went up in a flame, and only I was left, alone.

God has cursed me. I am not alive and I cannot die, and I am not punished for my sins, though others are. And maybe that was, after all, the plan.

Because tomorrow, just after the sun rises, I will go out and fly up, up, and away, over the clouds, through the great fogginess, straight into the citadel of God, and I shall stand in front of Him, and He shall be punished for His sins, and if not for His—then for mine.

I have always believed in God. It’s about time that He started believing in me.

The memory will haunt me until my death—not long now. Fifty years could not erase the image of that old man, the feeling of my fists meeting his face. I can still see him standing there, taking my blows without protest, then crumpling to the ground. No cry, no blood, just a helpless body. Funny how this is what I remember—killing myself. The rest is too fantastic to contemplate: the time machine, Ray introducing me to myself, asking me not to become that man, not to go to Korea, to war.

The death—the death is real. Ray might have taken the body back with him, but the memory remains: killing a helpless old man, without reason, in a bout of madness. It is a cancer. Much like the one the doctors diagnosed, it eats me from inside. For many years I had used my writing and my success to block it, but the memory has won—no stories come to me as I’m lying on this hospital bed.

Thoughts that had played in my mind long ago, before I decided there was nothing but madness in them, are now coming back—questions about the reality of it all. How could Ray get a time machine, in that other reality? Just having me go to war couldn’t change reality so much, could it? It would be hubris to think so. And my actions, my words, that killing—they didn’t make sense.

Yet it couldn’t have been a hallucination. The only drug in my life had been my cigarettes, and my mind had always been sound enough—even when I suffered from depression. Besides, that time machine left a mark on the asphalt—I checked for it the next day.

I wish I had had the courage to find out what really happened on that day. I’ve never told anyone about it. Only once, about twenty years ago, did I try, halfheartedly, to find an answer.

“You must be Simon,” she said. It sounded so conclusive that for a moment I was tempted to turn back from her door. After all, if I could only be Simon, a specific, well-defined Simon, what use was there in seeing her?

“And you have no choice but to be Sedef, I guess.” I wondered, though. I hadn’t expected a short, round-faced girl, nor that broad smile in response to my dry joke. But her soft voice, with a hint of foreign accent, was as I remembered it from the phone.

“Come in,” she said, and I followed the path that her hand traced in the air to a brightly lit room with landscapes and a kitten picture on the walls. She motioned me to sit on the beige sofa, but I just stood, feeling as if I had happened to walk onto the set of the wrong movie.

“What did you expect, candlelight and voodoo accessories?”

Was I that transparent? What had I expected? An older woman, perhaps, with an air of mystery—a fraud—not someone my wife’s age, about half my fifty years. It was just a silly cliché, of course, and I wouldn’t have dared using it in a story. Funny how easy it was to use it in real life.

She looked more like a grade-school teacher than a seer, with her open, gentle, not-too-sharp face. Maybe it was fitting, in a way. We were all just gullible kids, those of us who came to her. Sure, Ray said that people swore by her. But then he also said that we should remain kids at heart. He may be my friend and mentor, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.

How had I managed to convince myself to visit a woman with a power I didn’t believe in? It was probably not too late to fix that mistake. I decided to turn around and leave.