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

I threw the stub of my final cigarette into the dark, roiling water. Didn’t even hear it going tsssss . Put the Jericho’s muzzle in my mouth and felt the barrel, still warm after the previous shot, pressing against the back of my mouth. It tasted of smoke and gunpowder.

I closed my eyes, because this is what you do when you commit suicide. It’s instinctive, like closing your eyes when you kiss.

“I wouldn’t do it if I werrrre you,” said a voice behind me, emerging between cleft lips. Tony was sitting there on a rock, cross-legged, smiling an asinine smile. “Look at the macro, dude,” he said. “Keep your head down till the wave passes over. This is just a rough patch. Good times will come; it would be a pity to end up like this.” Tony got up, put a hoof against the gun and removed it gently from my mouth.

“Go away, Tony,” I said. “You’re just like them.” I put the muzzle back in my mouth, closed my eyes and put my index finger on the trigger.

Tony reached out with a hoof and removed the gun again. “There are still those who care about you, Ido,” he said. “You won’t have it this easy; I’m not giving up on you.”

With my right hand, I shoved the gun into my mouth. With my left hand I gave Tony the finger. I started increasing the finger’s pressure against the trigger, gradually. “A gentle squeeze of the trigger,” as I’d been taught in firearms lessons in boot camp.

Tony lifted again his hoof towards me, trying to remove the gun. He was quite serious about it, but I had no intention of allowing him to spoil it for me.

Suddenly we were both rolling on the ground, fighting for the gun. Tony was sitting on my chest, and he was not some skinny donkey. It was all I could do just to breathe. “You shall live, Ido; I will not let you ruin everything,” he said, and I heard in his voice an insistent decisiveness I’ve never heard before. “I love you,” he said, grabbing the barrel forcibly with his strong teeth and pulling. My finger was still caught in the trigger guard.

The gun fired, like it had a will of its own. Tony’s head exploded, bursting like a ripe watermelon. Headless, Tony stumbled two more steps to the right, then fell rolling into the sea. My eyes were burning because of the gunpowder, and a thin buzz filled my aching ears. All over my clothes there was a spattering of blood, brains, and bone fragments. The ugly slush pooled up in various depressions on my body and flowed inside my shirt in warm, sticky rivulets. Some of it got in my mouth, and I have to tell you that donkey juice is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted. And it had to be Tony juice, the only ass ever who really cared about me. I threw away the gun with all my strength. It hit the water far away, making a little splash, and sank deep. The headless corpse floated in the water, and black currents swept it rapidly into the sea.

Up in the sky a point of light appeared, growing larger. The UFO came in fast, stopped, and hovered above the body. A hatch opened in its belly, a yellow ray of light emerged, and Tony’s corpse was pulled up slowly, majestically, into the flying bubble. The corpse was sucked inside, the hatch closed fast, and the bubble went blip, blip, whoosh! —and flew away. Quiet reigned. Only the crash of the waves could be heard. The wind carried towards me a smell of burned out brakes.

“Do you want to acquire merit, sir?”

I turned around quickly. The religious fanatic, the one who’d disappeared at Yarkon Park, was standing behind me holding a prayer shawl in one hand and a prayer book in the other. “Will you say Kaddish for him?”

“But he was just a donkey,” I said.

“Let me tell you,” said the fanatic, “that some Jews have the heart of a donkey, and some donkeys have a Jewish heart. He has no speaking relatives—so perhaps you, as his friend, could…. It’s a great mitzvah, you know….”

I couldn’t take any more of this. I lied without hesitation: “I’m a Druze,” I told him. “We can’t say Kaddish.”

I turned my back on him, stripped down to my underwear, threw the rest of my clothes into the sea, and jumped in myself. I scraped my body fiercely and felt the blood and brain fragments wash away in the cold water.

A thunder blasted, and lightning lit up the sea. Heavy rain started falling, and in a minute I could hardly see the figure standing on the breakwater, in black jacket and hat, shaking all over and chanting aloud, in an Ashkenazi accent, “ Isgodol veiskodosh shmei rabo ….”

I swam away, leaving the breakwater behind me. For the first time in weeks I felt a twinge of sadness in my heart. He really cared about me. The jackass.

I came back home. Mor was standing on a chair in the hallway, removing a white sheet from the wall. Beside her there was a heap of folded up sheets, and the yellow-grey flaky walls of our beloved apartment were revealed in all their glory.

“Mor,” I asked, “what are you doing?”

“I figured, if it’s all over, and there’s no more use for these sheets, I may as well take them back home.”

“What do you mean, it’s all over?”

“Why, haven’t you heard? Alllll over,” she said, pulling it out like she was giving birth to it. “He’s a nobody, there’s nothing to him, as everybody knows now.”

I thought she sounded a bit angry, but surely I was wrong, because Mor is one of those people who never get angry.

Mother came out of the kitchen. “I’m leaving, Ido’leh,” she said in a squeaky voice. “I left some good stuff in the fridge for you to eat. How could you get along without my schnitzels?” She gave me a sticky kiss, leaving a wet smudge of lipstick on my cheek, and went out.

Azulay came in from the balcony, carrying under each arm a pot of geraniums, which for some reason spread orchid smell all over the place. He made his way to the door, grunting in my direction, “See ya, Ido.” He turned his back and kept going, heavy and awkward, never waiting for an answer.

The place looked empty as it had not been for a month now, since Max’s accident. They put the TV set back in place, but without the couch it didn’t look the same.

I went into his room. Max was lying on his bed in a torn training suit and a T-shirt, his arms and legs spread out, listening to trance music through earphones, but so loud that I could hear it as well as he did.

“Max,” I said. He didn’t react. “Max!” I shouted again. Max saw me. He got his earphones off at once and tried to escape. Stepping on the strings of his open shoes, stumbling and falling spread-eagle on the floor.

“Don’t beat me up, Ido. I never fucked Osher. I swear on the Bible.”

“I know you didn’t. I knew all along. I thought maybe we could go back to the way things used to be before.”

“Why are you wet, and where are all your clothes?”

“What’s going on? Why did everybody leave?”

“Because of the mess you made,” said Max. He sounded indifferent. “They asked some tough questions, and I no longer had any answers for them. So I told them it’s all over and they may go away. There was some crying and some shouting. A few of them read me the riot act. But generally speaking, I think they’ll get over it. Let it go, I’ve had enough bullshit for one day. I really have no energy to talk about it anymore. Say, is it at all possible that you’ve got some stuff for me to smoke?”

Max was right. It would be stupid to fight when you could smoke some good junk instead. I went into my room to get the stuff, because all I had in my pocket got lost when I tossed my clothes into the sea.

I was thinking about a small gob of quality Moroccan hash stuck underneath the bottom drawer of my cabinet for six months now, waiting for a special occasion.