To all of that, the idea that began to take shape in my mind after I turned off the radio came as a form of relief. What if, I thought, rather than existing in a universal space, each of us is actually born alone into a luminous blankness, and it’s we who snip it into pieces, assembling staircases and gardens and train stations in our own peculiar fashion, until we have pared our space into a world? In other words, what if it’s human perception and creativity that are responsible for creating the multiverse? Or maybe—
What if life, which appears to take place down countless long hallways, in waiting rooms and foreign cities, on terraces, in hospitals and gardens, rented rooms and crowded trains, in truth occurs in only one place, a single location from which one dreams of those other places?
Was it really so far-flung? Just as plants need us to be drawn to their flowers so they can thrive and multiply, might not space also depend on us? We think we’ve conquered it with our houses and roads and cities, but what if we’re the ones who have unwittingly been made subordinate to space, to its elegant design to propagate itself infinitely through the dreams of finite beings? What if it isn’t we who move through space, but space that moves through us, spun on the loom of our minds? And if all of that is so, then where is this place from which we lie and dream? A holding tank in nonspace? Some dimension we’re unconscious of? Or is it somewhere in the one finite world from which billions of worlds have been, and will be, born, a single location different for each of us, equally banal as any other?
In that moment, I knew unequivocally that if I was dreaming my life from anywhere, it was the Tel Aviv Hilton.
To begin with, I was conceived there. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, three years after my parents were married in high winds on the Hilton’s terrace, they were occupying a room on the hotel’s sixteenth floor when the unique conditions that were the prerequisites for my existence suddenly aligned. With only the foggiest sense of the consequences, my mother and father instinctively acted on them. I was born in Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. But less than a year later, swimming upstream, my parents brought me back to the Tel Aviv Hilton, and from then on, almost every year, I’ve returned to that hotel perched on a hill between Hayarkon Street and the Mediterranean Sea. (Every year, that is, if one is operating under the belief that I ever left it at all.) But if the place has a kind of mystical aura for me, it isn’t only because life began for me there, or that later I spent so many vacations at the hotel. It’s also the spine-tingling nature of something that once happened to me there, an experience that only increased my awareness of an opening—a small tear in the fabric of reality.
It occurred in the hotel’s swimming pool when I was seven. I spent a lot of time in that pool, which was set on a large terrace overlooking the sea, and fed by its salt water. The year before, our visit had overlapped with Itzhak Perlman’s, and one morning after breakfast we came out and found him parked by the deep end, throwing a ball to his children, who took turns leaping into the pool, trying to catch it. The sight of the great violinist in his glinting wheelchair, along with a murky awareness that the polio that had crippled him had something to do with swimming pools, terrified me. The next day I refused to go down to the pool altogether, and the day after that we left Israel and flew back to New York. The following year I returned to the hotel with a feeling of unease, but Perlman didn’t reappear. Furthermore, on the first day back my brother and I discovered that the pool was full of money—shekels everywhere, shimmering mutely on the floor of the pool, as if the drain were hooked up to Bank Hapoalim. Whatever lingering fears I had about swimming were shunted aside by the steady flow of cash we could turn up. As in any well-run operation, we soon divided and specialized: my brother, two years older, became the diver, and I, with a smaller lung capacity and keener eyes, became the spotter. At my direction, he would plunge down and grope around at the blurry bottom. If I had been right, as I was about sixty-five percent of the time, he would burst excitedly to the surface, clutching the coin.
One afternoon after a string of false calls I began to feel desperate. The day was wearing on, and our time in the pool was almost up. My brother was wading morosely along the wall of the shallow end. I couldn’t help myself, and from the middle of the pool shouted: “There!” I was lying—I’d seen nothing—but I couldn’t resist the chance to make my brother happy again. He came splashing toward me. “Right there!” I yelled.
He went below. I knew there was nothing at the bottom, and now, treading water at the top, I waited miserably for my brother to find out, too. The crushing guilt I felt in those few moments comes vividly back even more than thirty years later. It was one thing to lie to my parents, but to so blatantly betray my brother was something else again.
As for what happened next, I have no explanation for it. Or none beyond the possibility that the laws we cling to in order to assure ourselves that all is as it seems have occluded a more complex view of the universe, one that forgoes the comfort of squeezing the world to fit the limited reach of our comprehension. Otherwise, how else to explain that when my brother surfaced and uncurled his fingers, lying in his palm was an earring with three diamonds and, beneath them, hanging from a gold loop at the bottom, a ruby heart?
In dripping bathing suits, we followed our mother through the frigid, air-conditioned hallways of the hotel to the H.Stern’s in the lobby. She explained the situation to the balding jeweler, who looked at us dubiously as he pushed a tray lined with blue velvet across the glass countertop. My mother laid the earring down, and the jeweler fit the loupe to his eye. He studied our treasure. When he lifted his head at last, his giant, magnified eye swiveled over us. “Real,” he pronounced. “The gold is eighteen-karat.”
Real. The word catches in the throat and won’t go down. It never occurred to me then that the earring might be fake in the way my mother had suspected it was. And yet only I knew just how unreal it really was, how against the odds was my brother’s discovery of it. How it had materialized in answer to a need. No young child naturally believes that reality is firm. To her its springs are loose; it is open to her special pleading. But slowly she is taught to believe otherwise, and by then I was seven, old enough to have mostly come around to accepting that reality was fixed and utterly indifferent to my longings. Now, at the last minute, a foot was put in the way of a door closing.
Back in New York, my mother had the earring made into a pendant, which she strung for me on a chain to wear around my neck. I wore it for years, and though my mother couldn’t have known it, the necklace served to remind me of some unknown will, of the accordion folds tucked beneath the surface of all that appears to be flat. Only last year, my brother and I learned that it was our father who’d thrown all those coins into the pool—our father, who back then could turn to us with either love or terrifying fury, neither of which we were ever prepared for. I’d thought the necklace lost, but it had turned up when my parents emptied a safe-deposit box where they had stored some of my mother’s jewelry. It was returned to me in a tiny bag, which also contained one of my father’s ubiquitous labels, tapped out long ago on his trusty Brother P-touch: Nicole’s necklace, found in Hilton pool. The necklace provoked some reminiscing, and it was then that my father casually mentioned that it was he who had filled the pool with coins. He was surprised that we’d never guessed. But no, he’d had nothing to do with the earring with the ruby heart.
When the idea came to me of dreaming my life from the Hilton, I was, as I’ve said, in a difficult place in my life and my work. The things I’d allowed myself to believe in—the unassailability of love, the power of narrative, which could carry people through their lives together without divergence, the essential health of domestic life—I no longer believed in. I had lost my way. And so the theory of having always been solidly somewhere, only dreaming of being lost, was especially appealing. I was between books, and knew it could take me years to find my way into a new one. During those exhausting and incoherent periods, I sometimes think I ca
n feel my mind itself disintegrating. My thoughts become agitated and restless, and my imagination darts around, picking things up before judging them useless and dropping them again.
But now something different began to happen. The Hilton became lodged in my mind like a kind of blockage, and for months little else presented itself to me when I sat down to write. Day after day, I dutifully reported to my desk—reported, as it were, to the Tel Aviv Hilton. At first it was interesting: Maybe there was something in it? And then, when there seemed not to be, it became exhausting. Finally, it was only maddening. The hotel wouldn’t go away, but neither could I squeeze anything from it.
And not just any hotel: a massive concrete rectangle on stilts that dominates the Tel Aviv coast, built in the Brutalist style. The long sides of the rectangle are lined with terraces, fourteen rows down and twenty-three across. On the south side the grid is unbroken, but on the north side it’s interrupted two-thirds of the way across by a giant concrete column that appears to have been wedged in as an afterthought to make certain the building could pass muster with even the most extreme Brutalists. The top of this concrete column rises above the roof and is emblazoned on the south side with the Hilton logo. Above it stretches a tall antenna whose tip glows red at night, so that light aircraft headed for Sde Dov airport don’t crash into it. The longer one considers this monstrosity cantilevered out over the shore, the more one begins to sense that some larger purpose is being served that can only be guessed at, geological or mystical—something to do not with us but with far greater entities. When viewed from the south, the hotel stands alone against the blue sky, and encoded in the unrelenting grid there seems to be a message nearly as mysterious as the one we’ve yet to unlock at Stonehenge.
It was to this monolith that I was mentally confined for half a year. What began as a whimsical idea of dreaming all of life from a fixed point now became a disquieting sense of being tethered to that point, shut up inside it, without access to the dream of other spaces. Day in and day out, month after month, the needle of my imagination scratched a deeper groove. I could hardly explain my preoccupation to myself, let alone to anyone else. Slowly, the hotel passed into unrealness. The more I remained stuck on it, locked in a futile attempt to wrestle something from it, the further removed the hotel became from being real, and the more it seemed to be a metaphor to which I couldn’t find the key. The more it seemed to be my mind itself. Desperate for relief, I imagined a flood in which the Hilton would break loose from the shore.
Then one morning in early March my father’s cousin Effie called from Israel. Retired from his work in the Foreign Service, Effie still kept the habit of reading three or four newspapers a day. Occasionally coming across a mention of me, he would phone me up. Now we discussed his wife Naama’s colitis, the results of the recent elections, and whether or not he would get arthroscopic surgery on his knee. When the conversation came around to me, and Effie asked how my work was going, I found myself telling him about my struggle with the Hilton and the way I’d become haunted by it. I don’t often speak about my work while I’m in the middle of it, but over the course of four decades, ever since the hotel opened in 1965 and my grandparents began staying there, Effie had sat with my family in the lobby, by the pool, or in the King Solomon restaurant more times than anyone could remember, and I thought that he of all people might understand the Hilton’s strange grip on me. But he was distracted just then by a call from his granddaughter coming through on his cell phone, and after he’d briefly answered her and switched back to me, the subject shifted to her budding career as a cabaret singer.
Our conversation drew to an end. Effie asked me to send his love to my parents. We were on the verge of hanging up when, as casually as if he’d remembered some bit of family news he’d almost forgotten to mention, he said, “Did you hear that a man fell to his death there last week?”
“Where?”
“You were talking about the Hilton, no?”
I assumed it was a suicide, though in the days that followed, without knowing the first thing about the dead man, not even his name, I came to wonder whether it hadn’t been an accident. Though the long sides of the rectangular building face north and south, the windows and terraces protrude at a diagonal, in a sawtooth pattern, to allow for a better view of the Mediterranean to the west. This makes it possible to take in part of the sea, but when you look out, whether northwest toward the port of Tel Aviv or southwest toward Jaffa, a feeling of irritation arises of not being able to see enough of it—of being kept from seeing it properly. Rare must be the guest who doesn’t curse the hotel’s architects. How many times had I, in frustration, opened the sliding door in my room and stepped out onto the terrace for a better view? But even there the dissatisfaction persists, because it’s still impossible to face the sea and the horizon head-on, as every atom in your body cries out to do. All that’s left is to lean out over the terrace’s railing, craning your head. In this way, desirous of a better view of the waves that brought the cedars from Lebanon and carried Jonah to Tarshish, you could easily go too far—far enough that you might go over.
Effie promised to try to find the clipping, but was dubious about turning it up: Naama always took out the trash on Sunday, and he had read the story at least a week earlier. I could find no mention of the death anywhere in Haaretz or Ynet, or any other English source of Israeli news online. That afternoon I wrote to my friend Matti Friedman, a journalist from Jerusalem via Toronto, asking if he would search the Israeli press for the report of a death at the Hilton. Because of the time difference, I didn’t receive his reply until the following morning. He’d been unable to find anything, he wrote. Was I sure it had been the Hilton?
If I’d already suspected Effie’s reliability, I had my reasons. Throughout my childhood, he’d been the Israeli consul to a series of countries, each smaller than the last—first Costa Rica, then Swaziland, and finally Liechtenstein, after which he had no choice but to retire. He was twelve years older than my father, and rationing during World War II had stunted his growth, leaving him stalled at five foot. When I was a little girl, I’d developed the impression not only that his bodily size was relevant to his diplomatic appointments but that everything about these small nations was scaled down in size like my father’s cousin: the cars, the doors and chairs, the minuscule fruit, and the house slippers ordered in child’s sizes from the factories of larger countries. In other words, Effie seemed to me to live in a slightly fanciful world, an impression that, like so many formed in childhood, never fully left me. If anything, it was only further confirmed when Effie phoned me back a few days later. Having risen at dawn all his life—the night, like everything else, was too large for him—he had no qualms about calling early, but on that day, at seven in the morning, I happened to be already at my desk.
A roar came through the phone, and I couldn’t understand what was being said on the other end.
“What was that?” I interrupted. “I didn’t hear the first part.”
“Fighter jets. Hold a second.” There was a muffled noise of a hand being placed over the phone. Then Effie came back on. “Must be training exercises. Can you hear me now?”
The article hadn’t turned up, Effie said, but something else had, something he thought would be far more interesting to me. He’d received a phone call the day before, he told me. “Out in the blue,” he added. He took a special joy in English idioms but rarely got them right.
“It was Eliezer Friedman. We used to work for Abba Eban together. I left, but Eliezer stayed on when Eban became foreign minister. He became involved in intelligence. Later he went back to university, and became a professor of literature at the university in Tel Aviv. But you know how these things go—he never gave up his ties to the Mossad.”
While Effie spoke, I looked out the window. There’d been a storm all that morning, but the rain had let up and the sky had opened to let down a soft light. I worked on the top floor, in a room that overlooked the roofs of the neighboring house
s. While Effie carried on talking, telling me about how his friend wanted to get in touch, the hatch on the roof across the way suddenly popped open, and my neighbor climbed out onto the wet, silvery skin of his pristine roof. He was wearing a dark suit, as if dressed for his job on Wall Street. Without any signs of caution, this tall, skinny man from the northern flatlands of Holland approached the edge of the roof in polished black dress shoes. With the meticulousness of a surgeon, he pulled on a pair of blue rubber gloves. Then he turned his back to me, reached into his pocket as if to answer a call on a ringing phone, and removed a plastic bag. Standing at the very edge of the slick roof, he peered over. For a moment, it seemed he meant to jump. If he didn’t, surely he would slip in the smooth leather dress shoes. But in the end all that happened was that he kneeled down and began to fish wet leaves out of the gutter. This operation, which seemed full of obscure meaning, took three or four minutes. When he’d finished, he knotted the bag, briskly retreated to the open hatch, lowered himself down backward, and pulled it closed behind him.
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