by Joshua Sobol
Yes, he understands why she gave him her telephone number, and he wants to tell her: Goodbye, it’s been nice to know you, but the Secret Nameless Friend says to him, you can’t do that to her, not now, not like this, not after you got her into trouble with that filthy pimp, who even if he isn’t Adonis deserves to have his nose stuffed and his mouth sprayed with insecticide. And suddenly he feels his fingers moving like snakes’ heads in the air.
Tell me, he asks, does he like to sing?
When he’s driving, she says.
What songs does he like?
All kinds, she says. Cole Porter, Donizetti arias, all kinds.
Where does he live, he asks, and the information flows from her mouth precise as the designation of a target.
16
And that’s where we are now, he hears Moran’s voice, and sees her eyes looking at him, and realizes that all this time he has apparently been staring into her gray-green eyes without taking in a word she said, and he hears himself say ‘Yes’, and Mona says: So what do you say?
What do I say, he says. What do I say.…
He looks from Mona to Golan and from Golan to Yadanuga. They are all waiting for him to speak. He’s their boss, and they’re waiting for him to open his mouth and speak, to say something at last. To settle this idiotic question, which Yadanuga has suddenly decided for some reason to turn into a matter of principle. As if it’s the be-all and end-all. Whether it’s legitimate to involve children and old people in the promotion of the pill for enhancing sex and feeling.
You want to know what I say, he repeats. Stand a big prick under the balcony in Verona, opposite a cunt overflowing with love, and write: ‘Romeo, oh Romeo’ or words to that effect.
There is a moment of silence, as if a siren has gone off and everyone is standing to attention in memory of the fallen in all the wars, or as if someone has pressed the ‘pause’ button on the remote, and just as the siren ends, and the silence is suddenly broken, and life bursts out again full of noise and fury at having been cut off, Mona bursts out first and demands indignantly:
What’s happened to you, tell me, have you gone completely crazy?
What’s the problem? he asks.
What’s the problem? She demands. You ask what the problem is! We’ve wasted two days on arguing, examining every detail, analyzing every tenth of a second in Golan and Moran’s script, and we need a decision, because we can’t drag it out any longer if we don’t want our competitors to finish us off with a knockout in the first round, and I don’t think it has to end like that at all, I think we have an excellent chance of winning the contract, because we’ve got a real ace, yes, I have no hesitation in stating my opinion, and I think it’s time to say openly: Golan and Moran’s script is a sure winner, and Mackie’s proposal is a non-starter.
That’s your opinion, he tries to put down a bridgehead of a couple of words, but she immediately opens the floodgates and a mighty torrent of verbiage floods his little bridgehead and sweeps it away, and the whole torrent begins with one little word:
No, she says, it’s not my opinion, these are the facts, this is the reality. We’ve had a week for brainstorming. And you kept quiet. Ever since you returned from New York, you’ve kept your mouth shut most of the time. If you thought that everything people said was idiotic, that we were going in the wrong direction, you should have said so. I don’t recall hearing you say anything that contributed to the discussion. Not an idea, not a direction, not a concept, you were completely passive. Paralyzed. And now, after everything we’ve been through, after all the arguments and the confrontations and the shouting, you come and dismiss it all as if nobody’s invested hours and days of work here, and you still have the nerve to come up with that imbecilic joke—a prick standing opposite a cunt on the balcony in Verona—
It isn’t a joke, he says.
A bad joke, she snaps.
It isn’t a joke, he insists. It’s exactly what Sol Lewis wants: one image, to convey that his fucking pill simultaneously enlarges the penis, arouses it, and empowers it, and all in thirty seconds, so it seems to me that my suggestion—
Hanina, she cuts him short, pronouncing his name as a kind of reproach concealing a threat, you know that the future of our entire firm depends on winning this contract. And we’re competing with giant advertising agencies in the US, in England, in Japan, in Italy and in Germany. If we’re on the short list of six finalists we’ve got Moran’s brain and Golan’s work to thank for it. This time you didn’t contribute a thing, and if we’d gone with Mackie’s first proposal we would have been out of the running a long time ago. Now we haven’t got any more time to lose. We have to decide between Mackie’s second proposal and the development of Golan and Moran’s idea. Allow me to remind you that this is why we called this meeting, at your initiative. We’ve been arguing all night long, and when the time came to decide, you asked for time out to go up to the roof and think. I was sure you would come down with a decision, and what happened in the end?
I told you what I suggest. I think that.…
We heard, she interrupts him. What’s your opinion of what Moran said?
When? he asks.
A minute ago.
What did she say?
I told you about the ideas that came up here while you were gone, about how to develop our original idea, says Moran.
I think the ideas are excellent, Mona supports her. You don’t agree?
Try to remember something she said, he urges himself and concentrates on Moran’s face and her eyes staring at him in bewilderment, but her face, and her pouting lips, which part now to say something, undergo a rapid transformation before his eyes and turn into the buttocks of the fucking Frenchwoman whose text Melissa read over the telephone, and again the Frenchwoman’s hand slips between her parted thighs, and in a minute he’s going to get a hard-on, and in order to nip this embarrassing and uncontrollable development in the bud he utters the only words that he’s capable of producing at the moment:
A prick with a hard-on under the balcony in Verona, and a cunt overflowing with love, and Romeo—
I don’t believe it, says Mona in despair. I don’t believe it! We’re going to lose the contract because of you! This firm is going down the tubes. And it’s your fault.
Is this what you meant?
The erect lingam, Golan—who all this time had been sitting in silence and playing with the mouse, absorbed in the screen in front of him, as if he wasn’t there at all—has been there all the time. Now he taps the keyboard, presses Enter, and on the giant presentation screen there appears a giant pill in the form of a balcony, under which a mighty black phallus stands upright in all its glory, swollen veins twining round it like wisteria branches on a casuarina trunk, a pair of lovesick eyes gazing from its head, while it smiles lasciviously at a pink vagina crowned with curly chestnut hair, whose dripping lips are parted like the petals of the Venus Slipper orchid. And from the parted lips a balloon emerges with the words: Romeo, oh Romeo.
When did you do it? demands Hanina in astonishment.
While you were arguing, replies Golan indifferently.
But how did you have time? asks Hanina admiringly.
No big deal, says Golan dismissively. I downloaded the penis from the Mapplethorpe site, and the vagina is a water lily I processed with Photoshop.
Amazing, says Hanina.
But Mackie demurs: He was talking about Romeo and Juliet, not Othello.
What’s the difference? asks Golan.
Romeo wasn’t black, explains Mackie.
No problem, Golan dismisses him. He concentrates on the mouse and the keyboard, clicks a few times, brings up a color table, selects a shade and drags it to the black penis, whose perimeter he outlines with a dotted line, after which he selects the shade of the black phallus and does the same thing with the vagina-lily, click-click, and the races switch before their eyes on the presentation screen: a Caucasian penis pink as a boiled ham rises lustfully opposite an African vagina-lily
, dark and desirous as a black iris.
Any other comments? asks Golan.
No, says Hanina, it’s perfect.
Ye-es, Moran agrees thoughtfully, perhaps it is perfect, but it will outrage the feminists, the fundamentalists, and the anti-defamation leagues. And besides, the judges will reject it outright because it’s an outmoded concept which has no chance of being accepted.
Why not? demands Hanina.
What, in one word, characterizes the whole ‘New Age’ scene? asks Moran.
Fundamentalism, he quotes another book he read on the transatlantic flight home from America.
No, says Moran, write it down: mystical shit.
That’s two words.
She ignores his comment, sell people a carrot as a carrot and they won’t buy it. But if you hint to them that the carrot contains a substance that in combination with the oil of pitango seeds brings about a mystical connection to the embryonic experience together with continuous triple orgasms, they’ll buy the carrot, and also search the internet for pitango seed oil. Do you get it? Advertising today has to speak to our generation, and it isn’t simple. Because our generation is very difficult to characterize, it has many faces. We were born with a mouse in our hands. In other words, we roam at our ease, open everything curiously, but we are quickly disappointed, and easily abandon things that disappoint us. We believe only in ourselves, and we like buying things that we ostensibly discover for ourselves, because we’re a very creative generation, we create as easily as we breathe. We are actually multi-cultural, we pick up Spanish from telenovelas, English from the internet, and we feel completely at home with chaos and high-tech and virtual reality. For us complexity is pretension, and our motto is being connected, connect to yourself, connect to your friends, connect to what’s cool, what’s groovy, what’s hot, connect to the latest trend, the post-trend, the post-post, because basically we’re dying to belong, to be part of what’s happening, to land a good job, to earn a fortune, to make your first million before thirty, and we’re optimistic, but also a little hard, tough, maybe even a little crude, we don’t buy a horse without examining its teeth under a microscope, which is a metaphor of course, because we don’t buy horses. We can be very diligent and very precise, you can’t sell us slogans or grand metaphors. We try new brands willingly, even eagerly, but we don’t stick to any brand. We’re interactive, we like to influence, but we’re also selective, and we buy only what we need, and that too with a critical eye. Our motto is simple: ‘It’s cool to be smart’. But we hate smart alecks, we like things that are direct, pure and intimate …
And all this is in your and Golan’s proposal?
More or less, says Moran. If you look carefully, you’ll see that something almost imperceptible changes in the faces of the children after they take the pill. Suddenly the look in their eyes seems to grow older, it becomes wet and eager, and then lustful and passionate, and in the end satisfied and calm, because Golan went to a porno site and selected the look in the eyes of a woman before, during and after orgasm, and put it in the little girl’s eyes after she swallowed the pill, and he did the same with the old grandfather, who takes the pill while he’s looking at the little girl, you can see that suddenly he looks like a twenty-year old in love, and the little girl suddenly looks like a woman of thirty, who knows what it is and who’s just experienced it, and it works instantly on the subconscious of the viewer, because this change in the expression of the eyes during orgasm is something you recognize in a tenth of a second. We did a lot of experiments on our friends to make sure. It arouses the desire in the viewer to imitate them and to take the pill himself. It works like a peepshow. It appeals to you on your most animal level, and the whole thing is conveyed through the eyes alone, without anyone being able to say what did it to him. We tested it with our friends, and none of them could say what did it to him.
What did what to him? Yadanuga attacks from his corner.
I don’t want to tell you, because your attitude is negative in advance, there’s no point.
Tell me, suggests Hanina, my attitude isn’t negative in advance.
When you saw it for the first time, didn’t it turn you on? she asks, and offers him her eyes, and he sees in them the eyes of Melissa offering him her lips, wet, eager and yearning, and he feels his penis swelling, and he admits that yes, it turns him on.
That’s what you want to achieve with your commercial? Mackie attacks her.
Yes, she says simply, a commercial should titillate. Like the beginning of an affair, like a good book that you can’t put down. It should be sexy like an ‘in’ quarter of the city, arouse unsatisfied cravings in you together with a promise of satisfaction—
‘I desire you more acquaintance, but retain it—’ Hanina hears Shakespeare speaking from his throat.
What’s that? asks the startled Moran, and Hanina explains:
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. And Shakespeare translates silently: ‘I want to fuck you, but I’m controlling myself.’
So what are we going to decide? Mona presses them.
17
What are we going to do, asks Hanina, and Melissa stands in front of him dressed in old jeans and a sloppy white T-shirt, holding a wooden spoon and stirring the wine simmering on the electric plate which glows with an infrared light. With her other hand she sprinkles nutmeg into the steaming punch, which gives off intoxicating scents of cloves and cinnamon, and her eyes look straight into his, and she says to him for the first time, with utter simplicity:
You know, my secret nameless friend, I’m gonna miss you.
Speak to her, the scriptwriter urges him, I’ve written you a dialogue with her. Tell her who you are at last. Give her a name to hang onto. Tell her you’re Maoz Tzur, or Giora Bar-Giora. Something heroic. Tell her you don’t know who you are. Maybe you knew once. But that’s not certain either. Maybe you never knew. This silence is becoming intolerable, the novice scriptwriter says nervously, we’re not in a Bergman or Godard movie here. You’re acting in an action movie. Man, make a sound.
Cock-a-doodle-do, says Maoz Tzur.
Make a sound like a bulbul or a crow, pleads Tyrell. Tell her tra-la-la or cra-cra-cra. Tell her you don’t know if you’re a man or an animal. And if it’s an animal, then what kind of animal. A mole or a monkey-bird. Tell her it’s the bird migration season. The time when all winged creatures are commanded to arise and depart the land of their birth and the graves of their forefathers, to forget their friends both dead and alive, and to fly in the direction indicated by the bird compass implanted in their brains or their DNA.
You know, he hears himself declaim the strange text which the scriptwriter puts in his mouth, once people thought that when autumn came in cold climates, birds took off for warmer climes, but today we know that this isn’t true.
So what is the truth? she asks, without wondering why he has suddenly started talking about bird migrations.
The migratory instinct of birds is apparently connected only to direction, he goes on reciting the novice scriptwriter’s tedious text, without understanding why he’s saying what he says.
But how do they know when the cold days are coming? she asks.
Something changes in the sound of their voice, he declaims the next line.
The birds know that autumn’s coming by the sound of their voices?
They’re very sensitive to sound, he says. You know they can hear ultrasonic frequencies?
And vampires? she asks.
It’s well known that vampires transmit sounds on ultrasonic frequencies, and they pick up echoes returned by various objects on their inner sonar. That’s the only thing that enables them to fly between trees in the dark without bumping into the branches.
And before he can shut him up, the novice scriptwriter involves him in a weird discussion of vampires, which the spidery girl embraces with enthusiasm, and into which she draws him too:
Why do humans suffer so much when they fall in love with vampires? she asks.
> Simple, replies the last scion of a vampire dynasty who has just this minute been born. Human beings want to possess the objects of their love. They don’t understand that it’s impossible to possess a vampire.
Because thanks to its sonar system, the vampire will exploit every crack and loophole in order to escape into the dark, she guesses.
Obviously, replies the vampire Sisera, sipping the hot spicy wine offered him by Yael, the wife of a nameless jealous friend, and now imagine what happens when two vampires fall in love with each other, he hears himself repeating the idiotic text, without the faintest idea of what he’s talking about.
Usually it’s a sad story, she muses aloud.
Because if both of them are searching for cracks in the dark, it will all be over very quickly, without any warning signs, he completes her musings.
So why do they start with each other in the first place, she wonders.
Because they get tired of the possessive instincts and emotional blackmail of human beings, he reads the next line of dialogue from the prompter, and thinks that it contains a measure of truth.
And when the female vampire suddenly leaves the male, doesn’t he pursue her? she wants to know.
Never, he states firmly.
‘Never say never’, says her id, quoting the universal id, and now it’s a conversation between id and id, whispers the delighted scriptwriter, and it can go on forever without putting any effort into it at all.
A true vampire never pursues anyone who leaves it, the words slide smoothly out of his mouth. It will never harass anyone who abandons it, or nag it with stupid questions like, what have I done to deserve this.
And he won’t try to look for her in order to find out why she suddenly broke off contact? She isn’t convinced.
Never, he follows the inexperienced scriptwriter. That’s the difference between vampires and human beings: human beings are sure that they deserve to be loved. When love ends, they look for the logic, because they believe in reasons, circumstances, meaning. In any straw they can grasp at. Vampires, on the other hand, know that they don’t deserve anything. They don’t believe in anything. When somebody loves them, they regard it as a miracle. And miracles, as vampires know, suddenly vanish, for no reason, just as life ends.
