Assaf Gavron - Almost Dead

I was parched when I arrived, and there, in Murair of all places, I finally satisfied my thirst, drinking water and tea with my father and Aunt Lily. And there was my dear little sister Lulu, with her smile and the stories she’d saved up to tell her older brother — but only when we were alone, near the big cave at the edge of the village, on the ledge of the cliff that fell to the valley below. By the time Lulu and I returned from our walk, Bilahl had already been arrested.

Time’s Arrow— Every Second Counts . But when I returned to work it just somehow didn’t any more. Jimmy called me into his office for a welcome-back pep-talk. ‘How you doing, CrocAttack?’ ‘OK.’ ‘You look tired.’ ‘Yes, a little…it’s OK.’ A silence. ‘So! Back with us again!’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Good. Get back into things at your own pace, but not a too-slow pace, if you know what I mean.’ ‘Yeah. How was the Brussels trip?’ ‘It didn’t work out in the end. They put us back to next week when we were already in the departure lounge. Time-wasters. But you’ll be joining us, right?’

‘Sure I will,’ I said, disappointed. There didn’t seem to be much more to say, so I got up to go.

‘Oh, and, uh, by the way, Croc…’ I looked back at Jimmy, who was blinking and running his hand over his lustrous head. ‘You will be happy to know that I contributed my part in removing the…problem that…uh…’ He blinked again. As I said, Jimmy had started out in the Time Management Unit of the air force. He’d helped coordinate the bombing of the nuclear plant in Iraq and various air force raids on Lebanon, and he was still occasionally called up for one-day reserve duty. Then the day after, you’d read in the paper that the air force had carried out a targeted assassination. I think he was trying to tell me that he was on duty when they assassinated that guy in Ramallah, the commander of the terrorist group. But Hamas said that the Café Europa bombing had been carried out in revenge for the assassination. So thanks, Jimmy, for your contribution.

Work was no different from the rest of the country in that I was the object of plenty of attention. There were 463 emails in my inbox to deal with or delete, long chats in the corridors, longer phone calls, endless retellings of my synopsis of what had happened. I told Jimmy I was willing to go to Brussels only if I could be back home by Wednesday. We went to Belgium, then to France, with the desperate Yoash, but the nights in Europe were no better than those in Israel. I did my best to work. I wrote a presentation about an accelerating world, about pre-worn jeans and superfast toasters and about fast talk, blah blah blah. (People generally talk at 150 words per minute but the human ear can decipher 600 wpm. All Time’s Arrow’s answering messages run at around 450 wpm, which people like — they hate slow and option-infested messages.) I used to make a presentation in an hour; two tops. Now it took me a day and a half — including seven cigarette breaks, three cold-water face-washes, an hour’s rest with closed eyes on the sofa in the fun room and quite a lot of directionless wandering between rooms. Bar sent me some new numerologies: Croc = attack yesterday. Croc = sole explosion in mall. And the one he shouldn’t have sent me: Croc = huge attack coming.

One day Jimmy phoned me from the meeting room. ‘Come over here a moment, Croc,’ he boomed, his voice simultaneously audible in receiver and corridor, ‘I want you to meet Roy.’ When I entered, Jimmy gestured towards a guy wearing a skirt: ‘Roy Abramov, a young talented designer, the new star from Bezalel College of Design. He did the poster for Israel’s Jubilee, if you remember.’ I didn’t. ‘Roy, this is Croc, from Sales. Croc…Attack!’ He shot the word ‘attack’ out explosively, as he’d already done a couple of times since I’d come back. No one had ever been scared, or laughed. To be fair to Jimmy, you had to say he was persistent. Also present were a couple of guys from Marketing, Noga and Jeremiah (or ‘The Prophet Jeremiah’ to me).

‘So we’ve been thinking about a new company logo. Roy, show the Croc the options.’ The stare I gave Jimmy slipped over his oiled head like water: I hated these balls-aching marketing discussions. There was this one time when the telecoms giant Bezeq had asked us to come up with a number for their new directory enquiries service. The number was supposed to somehow get across the message that the new service would be quicker and cheaper than the old 144. ‘Let’s do 77–half the time, half the money,’ said Jimmy. ‘Brilliant,’ said the product manager from Bezeq, and everyone agreed. But then someone pointed out that 77 was not half of 144. ‘Half of 144 is 73.5.’ Foreheads were wrinkled, biros were chewed, low whistles were whistled. A problem. 735 now became the leading contender, but it somehow just didn’t sound right. Jimmy called Talia Tenne to canvass opinion. Talia said, ‘Tell me, are you all out of your minds? Half of 144 is 72!’ Eventually they decided on 122. The service still isn’t operational.

The designer had a number of mock-ups of our new logo. ‘The arrow is movement, movement of time, the arrow of time,’ he said, glancing at Jimmy, who nodded with satisfaction. ‘The circle,’ which he made with his hands, ‘is like harnessing the arrow, it is the company, the organisation, the order behind things. We have a conflict here, going forward…’ ‘ Running forward!’ thundered Jimmy. ‘OK…running forward, together with order, discipline, responsibility. The circle is also identified with a clock, of course…That’s the basic principle. You can play variations on the arrows, the colours, the shapes and the directions.’

For this they pay thousands of dollars. For some star from Bezalel to waft in in a skirt and state the blindingly obvious. ‘I want the logo to be a globally identifiable design meme,’ said Jimmy, ‘like the Nike Swoosh, like Intel, Microsoft, Apple.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Every human being on Earth is a sales target for them. We’re not like that.’

‘We’re the twenty-first-century Fed-Ex,’ Jimmy intoned.

‘The arrow turns left,’ said The Prophet Jeremiah. ‘We might have a problem with the political connotations.’

‘Well, it can always turn right,’ said the designer, demonstrating. Noga pounced on a design with an arrow pointing upwards, but it was green on a red background.

‘No. Too like the Delek logo…’

‘If anything, the Palestinian flag.’

‘So, blue and white?’

‘Don’t want to be identified with Israel too much.’

‘Red and blue?’

‘Not too American?’

‘Red and white?’

‘God, no, Hapoel Tel Aviv.’

‘Red is hot,’ said Roy. ‘And green is young. Maybe stay with it after all?’ His eyebrows went up and stayed up throughout the ensuing silence.

‘Maybe we’ll call Talia Tenne,’ Jimmy said.

But Time’s Arrow had bigger problems. The situation was to blame, and the business plan, and the management method, and the unplanned investments, and the Indians in the call centres. When problems start, it’s easy to find reasons. We weren’t selling the product to enough customers, and those who were buying weren’t paying enough. When the representative of the Venture Capital Fund told us in a meeting that the Fund believed in the company, and would back it whatever happened, we knew for sure that the shit had hit the fan and the investors were losing patience.

The first round of dismissals came about two months after I returned. Jimmy called me into his office and stared at the sea through the window. ‘You’re staying, Croc, but I’ll be frank. Since the attacks, your productivity has gone down the drain, your motivation is on the rocks. Every second doesn’t count for you any more: you arrive later and leave earlier, and what you do in between…it’s not the Croc I used to know three, four months ago, or even two years ago. But…’ He turned from the window and sat down. ‘I understand. You’ve been through a very difficult experience. Plus there’s this fame stuff. Time’s Arrow can’t afford newspaper headlines saying that the CrocAttack was fired. But I’m asking you: pull yourself together, because nothing is safe any more.’ You don’t say, I thought. ‘For a start,’ he said, flapping a bitter hand at the view of the glittering Mediterranean, the beaches, the city, the three helicopters heading low above the shoreline, south towards Gaza, ‘say goodbye to all of this, because we’re moving to Rosh Haayin.’