by Yuvi Zalkow
I stood there in the bathroom, pantsless, looking at Julia. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. But I still waited—it was easy to make eye contact with her, even though her eyes were searching all over the room for something besides eye contact with me. Pretty soon, she walked away.
I loved doing this cutting ritual and I knew it would be hard to let go of. It was something that was in me to love long before that one little moment when my father hit me with that belt and then bought me a black widow matchbox car to make up for it.
The matchbox car is still with me—in a shoebox in my closet. The two front wheels are missing, and the back wheels are too bent to spin. Sometimes, when I’m looking for something to be sentimental about, I squeeze the cold metal of the little car and think about how many years a man can carry around the things of his past.
#
It was my father who saw it first. He tapped me gently on the shoulder and pointed down by our feet. Almost nibbling at our toes was a rainbow trout. Maybe a foot long, shining from the light of the sun. It was too big and bright for this dull little river. We kept as still as we possibly could. The fish wiggled silently up to us. It inspected my father’s feet and then my feet, and after careful consideration, it made a quick turn upstream.
“There’s been a mayfly hatch,” my father said. He took a deep breath, as if he could smell insect larvae. This was my father’s world. I was just a visitor here, but he was as natural to this river as the water itself.
The fish swam out of sight in less than a second but we stood there quietly for five minutes. Maybe we were expecting the fish to come back to us. Or maybe we were trying to say goodbye.
Chapter Seven
Palindrome
It’s nearly dawn when the phone rings. I grab it and take it out of the bedroom before picking up.
“Hello?” I say.
“It’s Shmen. What’s up?”
Whenever the phone rings at night, I first think that it’s my father, that something has happened to him, or my mother, calling from Israel, that there’s been an emergency with life or death at stake. Even now that they’re dead, the reflex won’t go away.
Shmen double-checks about borrowing some money. I say, “Of course,” and then he tells me his latest palindrome.
When I come back to the bed, Julia asks me who it was.
“Wrong number,” I say.
“Liar,” she says in a groggy whisper muffled by her pillow.
It’s our usual ritual when Shmen calls at night. I lie. She accuses. It shows love, even though I can’t explain to you how.
My ass burns from the cuts I gave myself earlier, followed by all that spanking. And now that insane palindrome of his is chattering in my head. Between the burn and the chattering, I feel terrible. I can’t keep one coherent thought in my head. So now maybe I can finally get some sleep.
I, madam, I made bone of live flesh.
Ah self, evil foe, no bed!
Am I mad?
Am I?
Book 2
EXODUS
Chapter Eight
A Brilliant Novel in the Works
She’s been working more. Her organization is just getting off the ground. She has thirty-seven volunteers in just three months helping thirty-two alcoholics in twenty-nine families of need. She believes that it’s not about alcoholism, it’s about hopelessness. How’s that for an impossible-sounding task: to instill hope. I’d rather try to rip someone’s colon out through their ear. She’s been on the local radio. She even has a catchy mission statement with sincere nouns like “community” and “generosity” in it. And while she generously helps the community, I spend my time thinking thoughts like: She could be humping any member of this generous community while I sit at home like an idiot.
I try to write. I have a novel that is a steaming pile of personal essays with no plot except one about an author who has no idea how to write a novel. And that is how it looks on the very best of days. My editor is frustrated with me as if she expected so much more out of me. And I want to please her. I tell her that I just need to do a little more research.
“Research what?” she asks.
In my research, I’ve found out that two blue Xanax pills take me from dangerously antsy to too antsy. And that three pills take me to very antsy and that four pills take me to a nap. Vicodin shoots me through the whole antsy spectrum and lands me smack in the middle of a brilliant apathy. Followed by a monstrous headache.
In my research, I’ve also found that staring at the baby pictures of Julia does not help my antsiness. It makes me long even more for something that I do not have.
The good news is that Julia’s busyness has replaced any talk of her wanting a baby. Which simplifies my worries and failings to less than forty-five line items.
It’s ten in the morning on a Tuesday, and while I’m sitting at my desk, I hear the lock on the front door clicking. Then there’s the sound of someone breaking into the house. It’s a murderer, I decide. Someone has come to rob my house and kill me. My first thought: poor intruder, they’ll hardly find anything of value in this house. I can’t even sell my own books, so what is the murderer going to do with them?
The murderer is getting closer to me. I hear heels clicking against the hardwood floor. And then the murderer steps into my office.
“Jesus,” the murderer says. “You’ve been in nothing but that same pair of underwear for a week now. This place smells like rotten coffee grinds. I think you’ve gone three steps past stir crazy.”
The murderer is in that beautiful black dress that I bought her a year ago. The one that looks abominably wrinkled in a way that only she could make sexy. I knew it would be great on her before she even tried it on. She’s shaved her legs today. I see the eyeliner. And that long red hair that only gets redder.
“My brother wants to meet you for lunch,” the murderer says. “Get the hell out of this house for a change.”
It’s gotten heartbreaking to see her these days. I fake naps and fake writing just to avoid her. I tell her that it’s the novel that is killing me.
But it’s her.
Or the things I find in her pants.
Our communication skills are at an all-time low. We’ve
created a new language just to avoid talking about what we need to talk about. I’m tempted to tell her about the failed sign language I created as a kid. But that would involve communicating with her.
“You’ve got to get your act together,” she tells me. “Hush, woman!” I say to her. “There’s a brilliant novel in the works!” And then I close the door and call the murderer’s brother.
SIGN LANGUAGES
My fifth grade class at the Hebrew Academy was unusually imbalanced. Out of the thirty students in our grade, there were only two girls. Our whole grade was stunted by the imbalance. No one thought to approach these girls in a “going out with a girl” kind of way even though our counterparts at the nearby public school had moved on to kissing and touching and even a few isolated stories of going all the way.
Recess at our school was kickball and jungle gyms and playing on the swings and capture the flag and hopscotch. It was trading stickers and trading baseball cards. Getting in trouble for picking on the younger kids. Running away from the older kids. But for Ezra and me, it was hiding behind the four biggest pine trees in the back of the field and talking about girls. Both of them. It turned out that Ezra liked Shayna Eisenberg better and I liked Nari Tanaka better.
“I daydream about her all the time,” he said to me. “I think about her naked all the time. I touch her boobs over and over and over and then I take off all her clothes and then we do it. I can’t stop thinking about doing it. I’m dying to do it.”
Ezra was smacking his hand on the bark of the tree as he told this to me and pieces of bark fell to the ground.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said to him, even though I had no idea what he meant. It wasn’t that my daydreams were way different than his
, but they were different. I didn’t dream about doing it. I dreamed that Nari would strip me to my underwear, that she’d tie me up, that she’d throw me face down on the ground and then step on me with her dirty tennis shoes and then sit on me as I lay there helpless and begging for her to stop, with her butt cheeks rubbing on my spine. She’d explain all the ways that I had misbehaved. If I had enough time in my fantasy, perhaps we’d eventually get to the point where she’d put her hand in my underwear, and sometime after that, maybe she’d take off her clothes too, maybe I’d touch her once in a while, and there was an off chance that we might eventually do it. But I rarely got past the excitement of her strength and my shame. So I said to Ezra, “Yeah. I think about doing it all the time too.”
“We’ve got to do something about it,” he said, looking at the bark all over the ground.
With all this excitement about these two girls, Ezra and I did what any two boys would do in a lopsided, Jewish elementary school when they liked two girls. We formed a group of only boys and created a fully formed sign language to discuss these girls behind their backs.
#
Our sign language was a disaster. The only functional part of the language was that holding up one finger in the air represented Shayna, and two fingers meant Nari. But we also had signs for more than a hundred words plus every letter of the alphabet. And as much as we tried to train everyone in the group, it never worked the way we wanted it to. For example, in the middle of class, I’d want to tell Ezra that I could see Nari’s black underwear when I dropped my pencil on the floor and went to pick it up. But he’d never understand what I was trying to say. “What?” he’d whisper. “You ate Nari’s black pencil?” So I’d have to whisper the whole thing to him or write him a note, which were both dangerous propositions. So I’d give up on trying to explain it and would just keep dropping my pencil on the floor—having to enjoy this incommunicable treat alone.
It was only a week or two later while I was running across the field to meet Ezra by the trees when Nari stopped me. “We know your little secret and find it very immature.” She was wearing her Members Only jacket and she pulled her camera out from her pocket and took a picture of me.
“What secret?” I asked. I could think of a million secrets that I didn’t want her to know. And I believed that she knew every one of them.
“Your language,” she said. “It’s very immature.”
The language. Our precious useless language.
“Whatever.” I ran for the pine trees as fast as I could. I didn’t understand what she meant. I didn’t get how our
language was immature. How else would you behave? At the time, I couldn’t think of a single way to act more mature. A month later, she gave me a copy of the picture of my immature face. I had the look of someone watching an alien spaceship land.
When I told Ezra about the news, he said, “I know.” And he wasn’t banging his hand against the tree when he said, “I told Shayna after she let me kiss her.”
“What?” I said. “We swore not to tell anyone. The language was ours!”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But I just didn’t see the point.”
I didn’t speak with him for two weeks. It’s true that I did get over the loss of our whole silly language, and that we went back to being best friends, but it felt awfully important on that first night as my mom kept yelling for me to finally get out of the bathroom and start doing my homework. For Ezra, this language was a little game to play while he thought about a more satisfying way to behave. For me, this was all you could ask for: a broken way to communicate that was virtually unusable and still worth protecting at all costs.
Chapter Nine
Very Nearly Good News
Shmen steps into the restaurant, his smile exaggerated to cover up his limp. He sits down and asks, “How’s it hanging?” I ask him about the limp.
“You’re supposed to say low and lazy,” he tells me. “Or at least you might suggest a hang to the left. Unless you’ve got a center predilection, which suggests either a very small or very durable penis.”
We order two burgers and two bourbons. This restaurant has mediocre food. The service is terrible. The place smells like rotten fries and the carpet is sticky from old beer. It takes forever to get your order, and consider yourself lucky if they get the order right. You walk out of here with a stomachache and smelling like beer-battered halibut—and they don’t even serve fish. We both love coming here for lunch.
After telling him which way I’m hanging, he tells me about the limp. It turns out it’s a new disease related to his old disease. The new disease is something that people often get a few years after being diagnosed with the old disease. At best, it means that he has something like rheumatoid arthritis. At worst, his joints and his spine will fuse together and his bones will eventually shatter.
“Enough about my diseases,” he says. “Tell me about your diseases.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I say.
He sips his bourbon and makes the sound of getting things out between his teeth. “They say physical therapy can help. The doc gave me some steroids which definitely help,” he says. “Especially if I double the dose.”
The scarier the story gets, the bigger he smiles.
“Does Julia know?” I ask. “Does Ally know?”
“Yes,” he says. “She’s worried,” as if I just asked about one person. He sips on his empty glass.
“My novel very nearly has a plot,” I tell him. “I’ve very nearly told Julia about the money I give you. I’ve very nearly stopped dreaming about my father. I’ve very nearly found a way to get out of my book deal. I’ve very nearly figured out how to live my life in my underwear while standing on my desk.” I don’t mention anything about Julia’s thoughts of a baby because I’ve got nothing to very nearly say about it.
“It’s very nearly good news,” he says, and we toast to this nearly good news. But I can’t keep my smile going for long. There’s an image in my head of his spine fused together and I can’t get rid of it.
After some silence and some staring at our empty glasses, Shmen says, “If you need more plot, why don’t you have someone die? They say that death must come before rebirth any how.”
“Who is they?” I ask.
#
We get our burgers and our second drinks and then a woman on her way out the door approaches Shmen.
“Joel?” she says. “I can’t believe it. I was just thinking about you!” The woman is so tall and so skinny and so blonde and has such red lipstick on her lips that for a second I imagine that she’s a cardboard figure of a woman. When Joel sees this woman he stands up and they hug and kiss two or three times and they express how nice it is to see each other and then they say bye but not before she makes Shmen promise to call her soon and then Shmen sits down as if nothing ever happened except that he sits down slowly because of his new disease and as he sits, I hear Shmen’s grunt that is virtually unhearable.
“Do all six-foot-tall blondes do that to you?” I ask.
“That was Jessie,” he says. “We worked at the university library together.”
“Some library,” I say.
He explains to me that last year he had a crush on her. That she had a crush on him. And I suggest that she still has a crush and he enjoys the accusation. And then I ask him what the hell a crush is anyway and he says it’s when you get excited to see someone each day. It’s when you send them too many e-mails and you fantasize about them, sometimes dream of having sex with them.
I don’t say anything in response. I don’t say anything for a good, long time.
“Crushes aren’t bad,” he says. “We didn’t have sex or anything.”
“But it’s like cheating,” I say. “Writing love letters and fantasizing about fucking like that. It’s cheating,” I say.
“No, it isn’t,” he says. “It’s harmless. Pretty soon you forget about the crush anyhow. Maybe you can bring some of that crush energy into the rela
tionship.”
“The fuck you can,” is what I say. And suddenly I can tell from Shmen’s tightened forehead that I don’t look so normal and so I try to breathe normally. I try to stop thinking about the napkin message.
“You should tell Julia,” he says to me.
“What?” I say.
“You should tell Julia about the money.” He finishes his drink. “And you should stop loaning me the money.”
My face probably looks as overcooked as the burgers we both tried to finish.
“I should go,” he says to me. “I’ve got to fail another interview.” He gets himself out the chair. Then this man kisses me on the top of my head. “Take care of yourself, Yuval,” he says. And then my brother-in-law leaves me at the table to pay for our tab. I notice that he not only limps on his way out, but that he can’t turn his head without moving his chest too. Even his charming smile to the hostess is impeded.
It’s been years since anyone has called me by my full Israeli name and it makes me feel like a child to hear it.
SO YOU DON’T WANT TO BE A JEW
There was a period when I rebelled against being Jewish. When I thought I could get out of the organization for good. I told my mom that I wasn’t Jewish. That I thought the Torah was a big bunch of implausible shtuyot. I told her that I could never be a believer and I wanted to be a Buddhist. This is was what I told her on my first visit from college. With her pretty, Israeli accent, she said, “I can’t believe you’d say this to me. What am I to do with this information? Mah la-asot?”
“Nothing,” I told her. “I just wanted to be honest with you.” “What about your heritage?” she asked. “What about your culture?” She was nearly crying and I wished that I hadn’t started the discussion. But once I started, it was tough to stop.
