Grossman David - Her Body Knows

He reaches out his hand, helps her stand up, but she sits down again. She collapses, scattering embarrassed smiles, and he stands above her, smiling at her confusion. There is a certain tender, cowlike grace to her slow heaviness right now. She holds her gaze on the two mats, realizes that she and he were sleeping here, side by side. She wonders what he thought when he saw her lying there like that, exposed to him.

"You know what I remembered?" he says, as if answering her thought. "Once, when I was three or four, more than four, at the water park this one time, my dad took me there once, and I got totally freaked out."

"From the water slides?" Nili asks supportively, recalling herself with the girls in that watery hell, guessing what a child like him must have felt there.

"No. All of a sudden I started"-he laughs to himself-"I had this idea: what if everyone in the whole world except me was dolls? Like, not real people."

She laughs. "That's quite an idea. And what did your dad say about that?" (He's talking, a little wheel in her head starts spinning faster than the others. Listen, he's telling you something.)

He gets down on one knee next to her, speaking with a strange, foreign satisfaction that frightens her a little. "My dad, he grabbed hold of me here with his hand"-he grasps the thin skin on the back of his forearm as he speaks-"and pinched me, and twisted his fingers around like this until I cried, and he kept laughing and asking me, Is this real? If this is real, then everything's real!"

As her eyes clear, she sees. A large scythe shape lightens on his dark skin, then disappears. She rubs her face and thinks vaguely, The fact that I slept here, the fact that he saw me asleep, it's as if it opened him up more than anything I've done or said.

"Wanna know the truth?" He smiles to himself. "To this day I sometimes think that, about people. Like dolls. Except now I don't care."

"And what about me," she asks, regretting it immediately, "am I real?"

He looks at her from a few inches away. Unseen fingers move inside her, leaving little indentations at the bottom. Finally, not with any ease, he says, "You are."

Then, with a sudden urge, she grasps his hand above the watch and quickly unfastens the thick leather strap; microscopic quivers of fear and refusal and imploring scurry between their hands, but he doesn't pull his hand away. She takes off the watch and turns his wrist over to see, fearfully, and she sees, and somehow she is not surprised, as if she had known all along.

His lips turn white. His look is wild, warning her not to ask anything. Not to dare. She drops his hand. Thinks dimly, It's still fresh, as if the skin there is still brittle, as if he's just been pinched; this happened not long ago, six months, a year, no more. She takes his hand again and lays it exactly over her left wrist, on the inside, and carefully and gently rubs the soft skin of her hand on his, absorbing into it, massaging and absorbing, absorbing and softening. She thinks, This child has been to hell and back, this child knows the way. She shuts her eyes and sees in front of her, for some reason, the showers at his boarding school, an iron pipe coming from the ceiling, a pink soap dispenser, torn around the edges, and a gray cement floor with thick drops of rust dripping onto it.

"We're getting closer," she says. Or asks-it's hard to tell. "Don't be afraid," I say, compelled to protect her. "I haven't hurt you in there."

"No, it's not that." She looks surprised to discover how poorly I comprehend what is really worrying her now.

I drink some more tea. As I look at her from the side, stealthily, it flashes through my head that she's mature. That's it. That's the change. Perhaps even more than the illness. She is simply a mature person. She is, finally, more mature than I am.

That thought undermines me a little. I sink down for a minute, entangled in myself. Where does this place me now? And it's a little unfair, I think, for it to happen at this point, when there's no time left for me to get used to it and reorganize. How can I relearn, at my age, how to walk, talk, and be?

Suddenly, a memory: When I used to wake up in the mornings, she would already be doing a headstand. Her vest would fall down and cover her face, and her large breasts, which looked so soft, would drop and lengthen toward her neck. I would stand and stare at them as in a continuation of the night's dream-

A sweet drop of memory. Who sent it? And why now?

I serve her the day's last battery of pills. Twenty-one, I count. Almost every pill has a counterpill, intended to cancel out its side effects. "If only," she laughs. "If only it canceled them out, but it doesn't cancel anything. The only thing they're canceling out is me, slowly and thoroughly, but when I die-poof! That'll close down their playground." She whistles her new laugh, delighting in the revenge. Once, she wouldn't even swallow an aspirin, not even when she had a migraine. She would beat any pain she had on her own, through meditation and relaxation.

I give her the pills and glance at the piles in the drawer. There are a few there that I remember from here and there, them and their creative richness of expression: the worms that would crawl deep inside my throat from the Anafranil, or the messed-up feeling in the morning after spending a stormy night with Elavil, and various other episodes. But she doesn't know anything about that chapter of my life, and I am careful, of course, not to demonstrate any knowledge. But my poisoned brain starts investigating the option of whisking away a few of her pills for use in times of trouble, and makes loathsome calculations about the quantities she'll still need and what they'll do with the scandalous leftovers. No matter how hard I try, I can't control these thoughts, and I console myself that this too is one of those survival habits that troubled tourists are apparently unable to be weaned from, but it's clear that I'd never be a good character witness for myself, in all honesty.

"Rotem," she moans softly, "shut the drawer already." She asks me to moisten her lips with a damp cloth. Then she dozes off for a while. Or sinks into her thoughts. I have no way of knowing. She now has long disappearances when she simply is not there. Whisked away. I sit and watch her, and try to recover from the little class reunion I've had here. I see her breaths relaxing, and I breathe along with her, the way she used to relax me when I was little. I try to engrave her on my memory that way, to store up supplies. I know how people get erased from my mind after a while. Even now, a second after we spoke, I can't remember what it's like when her eyes are open and looking at me. And no matter how hard I try, I keep getting pushed out of that look, and that in and of itself is starting to annoy me so much that I almost make the mistake of waking her. But then her breaths do start working on me, and I sit and slowly manage to enjoy the situation, even becoming addicted to some suspicious tranquillity, as if all at once a true calm has prevailed inside. Perhaps it's because when she's sleeping I don't keep feeling as if particles of me are being sucked toward her without any control, and there is a somewhat stolen pleasantness about it, being near her like that, like watching the sun during an eclipse.

I think about what I just read to her, about the doll-people, about the watch she took off his wrist. I turn over my hands and look at the place that should have long ago developed a scar just from the thoughts I've transmitted to it. Nili sighs in her sleep, a thin sigh like a whimper, and I become uncalm again, pins and needles all over my body, and then the whole mess of my thoughts, and I don't seem able to rationally comprehend that in a short while, maybe weeks or days, she will not be. This person will be no more. There will be no such Nili in the world. This entity. My mother. I get up and leave the room, almost running.