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

A week before, I’d stopped washing my clothes. When I got tired of any of them, I would throw the dirty ones on the floor and choose some other dirty clothes instead. The clothes that used to be on the floor were no longer there. I opened my closet and found them, washed and ironed, neatly folded up, lying in heaps, arranged by type and color. Even the condom I’d thrown under the bed, the last time I was with Osher, had disappeared. Motherfuckers. It had some sentimental value for me.

I didn’t have to look far for the culprits responsible for my disaster: Azulay and Mor were on their knees, rubber gloves covering their hands, carefully and thoroughly cleaning the panels with toothbrushes that they dipped every once in a while in a bucket full of soapsuds.

Mor, still on her knees, straightened up. “Hi there,” she said, taking off a glove and gracefully wiping sweat off her brow. “Sorry to have invaded your room like that, without permission,” she went on, “but Max said it will be an excellent exercise for us in personal development and ego attenuation. And when Max says something, you know….” She shrugged, smiling. Azulay, ignoring me completely, kept scrubbing energetically. His trousers were pulled down, revealing the crack of his red, sweaty arse.

“ Get—out! ” I said quietly, emphatically stretching out these words, because this had for some reason a calming effect on me. “ Get—out—now! ” I told them. Azulay quickly wiped off leftover water, and Mor removed the remainder with a damp rag. They got out in haste, and I realized my hands were trembling. I felt I had to leave this room, this apartment, at once, get some fresh air.

At first, nobody took their little cult seriously. After all, in Tel Aviv that autumn you could just throw a casual stone and hit two gurus and a prophet. Nobody took anybody seriously in Tel Aviv that autumn.

It turned out, however, that there was life outside Tel Aviv, too. I went out of the apartment, and my long legs took me north—deep in thought, barely noticing time. Reaching the entrance of Yarkon Park, I saw a lot of people there, a lot even for a Friday afternoon. Oh well, I said, it must be Town Hall having another one of their silly festivals: “Food in the City,” “Jazz in the Park,” or something else to offer an excuse for clean, happy, well-off young people to go out with their fashionable, high-bosomed girlfriends.

But it turned out to be something completely different. Neither “Food in the City” nor “Jazz in the Park.” It was the landing of a UFO from outer space. I managed to see it after pushing through a multitude of people, knocking down a trembling old lady and landing, unintentionally, a terrible elbow blow on a patrol cop who blocked my view. It was a kind of silvery bubble standing on thin legs and spoiling City Hall’s lawn.

The patrol cop’s name was Nissim. He wasn’t mad about the elbow blow. He just put a hand to his eye, where the flesh around it was swelling up quickly and getting an alarming blue color. “A historical event,” he said to me. “A historical event, I’m telling you”—and I realized, by the very fact that he didn’t drag me to his precinct to beat the shit out of me, that he must be right.

Around the UFO there were some SWAT types with their Kevlar vests and short-stocked rifles, the ones with the telescope sights; there’s no knowing how they thought they could use those against a silver-colored bubble. Apart from them were parked three Merkava Mark III tanks and one Chabad Mitzvah tank, illegally parked, and blatantly so, beyond the police cordon. Only God knows how those crazy religious fanatics managed to work the system and get this close to the UFO.

Everybody around was really devastated by the fact that the bubble showed no sign of life. Especially the reporters. There were about one hundred TV crews over there who, having nothing better to do, kept interviewing each other and pushing everywhere with their minicams, their gigantic microphones, and their lights, knocking down trembling grandmas and unintentionally elbowing patrol cops.

“What is it? Why don’t they say something? If they came from that far away, they must know real important stuff,” said Nissim, rubbing his shoulder that got bruised by a cameraman wearing a Sky News badge who’d crashed into him with his camera while trying to move over from nowhere to nowhere and then added insult to injury with a thick Brit accent: “You bloody idiot, don’t you have eyes?”

“Why is he talking to me like this, what did I ever do to him?” said Nissim to me, and I realized I chanced upon the geekiest cop in the Yarkon District and told him he should arrest that impudent cameraman. I kept trying to get Nissim mad at the Sky cameraman, in vain. He seemed far more interested in the aliens than in the cameraman, who stood near us, sunburned, shooting his reporter, who was chattering in English, accented so heavily I couldn’t understand one word of it.

Everybody around us in the crowd started talking excitedly and pointing their fingers: a small hatch opened up in the silvery bubble, and the cameramen became ecstatic. Something that looked like an old gramophone loudspeaker came out very slowly. Everybody was completely silent until it was completely out, except for those ecstatic cameramen who were climbing on top of each other, trying to get a better angle. “Pheeew,” said Nissim, “it’s going to speak. Must have something important to say.”

But the speaker remained silent.

Then it said, “Shalom.”

The Chabad fanatics went crazy. They grabbed each other’s shoulders, formed a circle, and started singing, “ Hevenu shalom aleichem .” Very quickly they switched to sing “Messiah—Messiah—Messiah,” until the crowd broke through the cordon and forcibly shut them up, because people wanted to hear what the UFO had to say.

And the UFO did have something to say: “Bring Maxim Kornfein of 28 Ahad HaAm Street. We have an important message for him.”

Two white cars with blue lights on top went out, their sirens blaring. And I thought that with all those drugs screwing with my brain, I didn’t hear very well what they were saying. What did they need Max for?

The squad cars were back in fifteen minutes; they must have been driving like crazy. The back car’s window was open, and I could see the head of Tony, Ahmed the alte zachen’s donkey, looking out. He saw me in the crowd and winked at me.

Max came out of the car. He looked very impressive, so tall and wearing a white robe. He got on Tony’s back, and then he looked even more tall and impressive. They moved together, trotting in a noble sort of way toward the silvery bubble. When they were real close, the bubble started vibrating and twisting, like the surface of a pool when you throw in a stone. Then the bubble puckered out a pair of lips and— schluk —swallowed up both Tony and Max. The Sky News cameraman swooned ecstatic.

And then nothing happened. For the longest time, maybe twenty minutes. The Chabad fanatics put on their phylacteries and started shaking and quaking. Nissim gave me a friendly elbow in the ribs and smirked: “Look, they’re trying to listen in on the ship’s communications network.” I lit up a joint and offered Nissim a drag. Nissim looked fearfully left and right and then took it. He handed me back the joint and said, “just that you know, I’m not really a patrol cop. I’m with the patrol’s computer unit, but I came here anyway, because this is a historical moment.”

Finally, the ship’s surface started twisting a little, made waves, and the lips puckered up again and spat out Max, still on Tony’s back. The lips pulled back again. The waves grew stronger, the UFO bubble went blip, blip, blip—zabababam! and disappeared abruptly, leaving no trace except for a sharp smell of burning brakes, four little circles of yellow dead grass, and one of the Chabad fanatics, who disappeared leaving no trace.