by Yuvi Zalkow
In fact, it’s the same way a seventeen-year-old might get a monstrous erection in class. And it hurts bouncing against the horse. And it feels good too. And as I begin to start the process of thinking unsexy thoughts, something awfully childish happens: I come in my pants.
And as I come, the horse starts walking faster. He even starts galloping. So I hang on tighter. And as I hang on tighter, he starts galloping faster. And so I hang on tighter. My pants are all wet and sticky and I’m still tingling. And then this dying horse raises his front legs off the ground, so I close my eyes tight. And that’s when I fall off.
#
When I open my eyes, my head hurts and it’s hard to breathe and Ally is on her knees right next to me. She grabs my cold hands with her warm hands and she looks so gorgeously sad. I can tell how wet my pants are and I wonder if Ally has noticed. I see Fatty Lumpkin in the background. He neighs. He says to me, You’ll need to do more than that to impress me.
I try to take a couple of deep breaths, though it hurts. There is something remarkable about the air out here.
With her little frown, I can tell how much Ally regrets this whole situation. She will soon tell me she’s sorry. She will soon tell me she’s never seen Fatty do that. She will soon recommend I get my head checked out.
But I’m perfectly fine. I want to tell her it’s okay. I want to tell her she was perfectly right to bring me out here. I feel better than I’ve felt in three months.
MEN ARE FROM MARS, JULEFS ARE FROM URANUS
(CONCLUSION)
Just then, the monkey sits more erect. He makes a gesture as if he smells something bad. He takes a few more sniffs. The air is still wrong. “This can’t be,” the monkey says with a surprise our hero has never seen in a JuLef before.
Even though the JuLefs can perform actions just by thought, even though the JuLefs can perform in a fraction of a second what would take us humans years to perform, even though this JuLef creature could simply destroy our hero the second he realizes our hero’s change in heart, the JuLef leaps for our hero in the same clumsy way that an Earth mammal leaps for another Earth mammal when feeling threatened.
When the monkey clutches onto our hero, our hero still has the wherewithal to say, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” and he feels a childlike pleasure in getting to say such a line from such a film. And then, our hero lets out a stream of hot, caffeine-induced urine from his penis, setting off the explosive device which blows up our hero, the JuLef, and the entire planet of Uranus.
The plan, strangely enough, is executed exactly how the Earth leaders had planned it.
In real life, our hero doesn’t get the opportunity to save the solar system. He walks home from the coffee shop with a horrible burning in his chest. But even though his wife is all but finished with him, he is somehow glad that he still loves his wife. He even considers writing a story about his wife and her beautiful giggle. For a moment, he is glad to be able to have such emotions even though on some days it feels like he carries the burden of his whole species in his chest. The book isn’t closed for our hero. And even though he doesn’t know how to save his own marriage, he believes it is this tremendous emotion inside of him that allows our science fiction hero to save the solar system—other than poor Uranus.
Before our science fiction hero disintegrates at the center of a four-hundred-gigaton explosion, his last thought is this: I wish I had opened even one of those stamp books before it was too late.
Chapter Eighteen
Purple Monkey Dishwasher
When I get the call at four in the morning, I think: Dad. I think: Mom. But because they’re dead, I think: Julia. But since I haven’t seen or heard from her in three months, I pick up the phone and say, “Ally?”
“Shmuvi,” Ally says in a voice that is too quiet and too awake.
There’s a split second when I think about how she held my hand after I fell off the horse. I imagine her concern for me. I imagine how much she wanted me to touch her fat horse’s belly. I think about that hat she might one day knit me.
And then I think about the actual reason she might be calling me at this hour. So I jump out of bed. “What’s wrong?”
I’m holding my car keys before I even have my pants on. And when she tells me that Shmen is in the hospital, I don’t ask what for.
#
4:22 am
I get up to the fifth floor waiting room and Ally and Maddy are sleeping on one of the couches. They look so cute and comfortable. I want to squeeze in next to them. I want to cuddle. I don’t want to think about all the things that I think about: the real worries and the fake worries and the worry that I don’t even know the difference. But when I sit on the couch next to them, it is more complicated to get comfortable than I expected. Even so, I give myself thirty seconds before waking them up.
“How is he?” I ask. And I get two answers that make no sense:
Maddy says, “Purple monkey dishwasher.”
Ally says, “Hemophagocytic syndrome.”
I’ve always worried about Shmen, but it always felt like an unrealized weight, something that maybe could happen, but not something that I expected to really happen.
“It’s bad?” I ask, guessing from the number of syllables in the syndrome.
“He’s pretty sick. Do you want to see him?”
“No.” And then I head toward Shmen’s room.
#
5:22 am
It turns out that Shmen isn’t in good shape. He’s running a fever. There are problems with his liver and his lymph nodes. His immune system isn’t right. He has inexplicable inflammation in his knees, his neck. He can’t see out of one eye, and his anus is nearly swollen shut. He’s on some strong drugs and there are at least two things dripping into his veins. His lips look dry, and his eyes look wet, and I ask him what the hell is going on.
“I’m feeling kind of horny,” he says to me.
“Shmen,” I say. “It’s Yuvi. How are you doing?”
“Shmuvi, it’s you,” he says. “I’m feeling kind of horny.”
“That’s good,” I say. “What else is going on?”
“Well,” he says. “It looks like my bike racing career is out the window.”
He’s mumbling the whole time and I don’t have much hope of entering into his world at the moment. Even so, I can’t help but try to fake some sanity.
“Your bike career was never in the window,” I say. “I’ve never seen you on a bicycle in my life.”
“You’ve always been such a pessimist, Yuvi. Have some hope.” He takes a deep breath. “Now let me practice my moves.”
And then he falls back asleep.
#
6:33 am
The doctor says Shmen needs to stop drinking in order to survive this condition. He needs to get physical therapy. He needs to see a nutritionist. Before the doctor leaves, he tells us, “Joel is still young and strong but he needs to take care of himself better.”
Ally’s tears are quiet. Maddy’s tears are not.
I stand there and try to memorize everything the doctor has said.
The last thing the doctor says is, “I’m dying for some Fritos before my next surgery.”
#
7:04 am
It’s just me in the room when Shmen wakes up.
“Shmuvi,” he says. “I feel like hell.”
“You look pretty bad,” I say. I can tell the world is blurry by
the way he looks at things for too long.
“You don’t look so good yourself,” Shmen says. He reaches
out his hand and I grab it. His hand is cold, too cold for someone who is supposedly running a fever, and so I hold it tight, trying to warm him up. It’s sunny outside and the hospital window is huge and I notice Shmen staring up at the sky while his stomach grumbles. He stares in a blank kind of
way as if his dream is taking place up in the sky.
“Is it too bright?” I ask.
“Purple monkey dishwash
er.”
#
7:14 am
There is a noise in the hallway. I hear someone calling out Shmen’s full name and this voice is awfully familiar but I’m not thinking too clearly. Even so, I let go of Shmen’s hand.
And then Julia is standing in the doorway and I suddenly wonder why she hasn’t gotten here earlier. She looks at us both like we’ve been naughty. But the kind of naughty that can be reconciled.
“My baby brother!” she says. She’s been crying the whole way to the hospital.
“Save me, Julia,” Shmen says. “They’ve got me on three kinds of steroids.”
Julia hugs him for a good long time, her arms tight around his body and her face smashed deep into his hospital pillow.
We are on the sixth floor of this hospital building, but looking out the window, it feels like we’re not high enough. I can still hear the street noise, people yelling and laughing and cars honking.
When the hug is over, Shmen looks my way and says, “I told you I’d find a way to get you two together.”
MY AH-VAH-TEE-ACH FEVER
It happened in my aunt and uncle’s sixth-floor apartment in Beer-Sheva. My mom would take me to visit her three sisters in Israel during summer vacations, and this was my favorite of her sisters. This was the one who played with me on the floor like she wasn’t an adult. The one who had a missing front tooth that made her smile so nice to be around. The one who always wanted a child but never got one.
Earlier that day, I was sticking my head out the window just like any boy would do with a sixth-floor window. There was a man on the street yelling “Ah-Vah-Tee-Ach!” over and over again. The echo of his yell made it feel like the whole Israeli sky was yelling this word. My mom wasn’t around, so I asked my aunt what the word meant.
She said, “It is, how you say—” But she didn’t know the word in English. And so she started using hand gestures, making a big round ball shape in front of her stomach.
A belly? A baby? A bomb?
“No,” she said. “I don’t know how you say it.” And so she took me out of the apartment and down the street to see the man who was selling watermelons. The man’s skin was the darkest dark brown I’d ever seen and the watermelon was the reddest dark red on the inside. We carried the biggest one back to the room and then dug in. She asked me not to eat so much, but she also enjoyed how excited I was. And, as if the watermelon was the cause of it all, I got a fever of a 102 when I finished with that thing. I got so dizzy she had to carry me to the guest bedroom, where I passed out for who knows how many hours.
The air was warm and dry in the Negev desert and it was common after a nap—even when you weren’t sick—to wake up with a dry and dusty throat. But that wasn’t what bothered me.
When I woke up, everything felt normal except there was a feeling worse than any feeling I’d ever felt. As an adult, I’ve tried to describe it to a million therapists in a million ways using a million desperate hand gestures. And I always get that same look when I’m done trying to talk about how it felt. So now I know: trying to talk about how it felt is nothing better than stupid. And here is how it felt:
It was like you had just peed in your bed. But I hadn’t peed in the bed. It was like peeing but worse. That your pee had permanently stained the bed. And that it burned through the mattress and stained the floor. Permanently. And it made a smell that would never go away. Everyone in the building smelled that smell of rotten apple juice. And your parents hated you for destroying their furniture. And you would never be able to sleep again. And you would be followed by your parents everywhere you went. And they would be saying, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” And it would never stop.
None of this happened. I don’t think anyone I’ve loved has ever said the word “hate” to me in the real world. It was all inside of me. But I yelled louder than anyone in that apartment complex had ever yelled.
One way to determine the seriousness of your condition is by the number of neighbors that ask what the hell is going on in there. For me: six.
My mother and my aunt ran into the room when they heard me yelling. I was sitting up in the bed and squeezing the pillow. I yelled many things, but one thing I remember yelling without even really understanding what it meant was: “Ain lee tikvah.”
“What is hopeless?” my mom said.
And my aunt said, “Mah karah? Mah karah?”
It was impossible for me to believe that they didn’t understand the obvious tragedy here, so I ran out of the bedroom while squeezing that sweaty pillow. I ran into the room where they kept the piano and fell to the floor, smacking my hands on the floor while saying, “Never, never, never, never.”
My aunt wouldn’t enter the room. She was standing back in the hallway and I saw that look in her eyes even though I don’t know how I could have seen her. One part of her was telling her to help this terrified boy, and another part was telling her to clear the blast zone. And my mother wasn’t far behind either. She stayed at the corner, telling me it was okay from so far away. But my banging on the floor was all there was in my world, the chords reverberateing inside the piano.
I threw the pillow across the room and went over to grab it again. And then I threw it again. And grabbed it again. The pillow cover fell off the pillow but I kept throwing that dirty pillow back and forth. With my mother nearly stepping forward from the corner of the room, but not quite. And I don’t think I wanted comfort at that point anyhow. It was the kind of feeling you feel when it’s too late for comfort.
Slowly, during this ritual throwing and retrieving, I did calm. Without any explanation, the trauma downgraded to terror, then to fear, then to dread, and then it was just a headache and damp clothes against my clammy skin. All it took was time.
Within a few minutes, I had lost the feeling completely. And I only remembered bits and pieces of what had just happened. My mother was now hugging me tightly and calming me using all the Hebrew, English, Ladino, and Yiddish in her power.
I had no proof about what had happened, other than an overly dirty pillow. But I still have a touch of terror from that Negev afternoon twenty-whatever years ago.
#
Later that night, when my mother tucked me into bed, she said, “You had some kind of meshugas in you!” She smiled, but it was more of an exhausted smile than a good one.
“Mommy,” I said. “You know that thing that happened to me today?”
She didn’t nod yes, but she didn’t need to.
“What if it comes back?” I asked.
“Chas vi-cha-leela,” my mother said, which means something like God forbid.
After a few minutes more of sitting next to me on the bed, my mother kissed me goodnight and left me to sleep with a brand new pillow and a brand new pillow cover. And that night, I dreamed prettier dreams, with no urine stains in sight.
But before she left, I did say one last thing, which she pretended not to hear:
“I kind of miss that feeling.”
Chapter Nineteen
Simple Swollen Anus
Shmen gives Julia an update about his situation. And Shmen has it pretty well together and speaks clearly and tells her everything. Except he doesn’t tell her how he’s horny. And Julia takes a deep breath and sits next to him and holds his hand just like I was holding his hand a moment before. She says “I’m with you” a couple times. And after a minute she looks at me as if she had forgotten I was in the room.
“You’re looking well,” I say to her in my best formal, detached, robotic, unsuggestive, strong, confident, goyishe voice.
“So are you,” she says to me in a better detached voice. “Thank you,” I say, and I lift a pretend hat off my head. Shmen seems like he is going to space out again, but he
doesn’t, he just waits and lets the awkwardness sit around for a while, and just before it kills all of us, he says in a violent whisper, “Jesus Christ! Would you guys shut the fuck up and get back together and start fucking each other and have a goddamn
kid already!”
We’re all silent for a while. I try to remember what it was that caused our marriage to get so mixed up and I can’t exactly remember it or understand it. For a moment, I wonder if there is no problem at all. Maybe we got stuck worrying about a nonexistent problem. Maybe she could come home with me right now, after Shmen gets better. I wonder why it took Julia so long to get over here. The only explanation I can come up with is that Julia didn’t get here earlier because she wasn’t at her apartment all night.
“It’s not that simple,” I say to Shmen.
“It’s not,” she says.
It’s a nice feeling to be on the same side as Julia, as we try to persuade Shmen that our relationship is a mess.
“Yes it is that goddamn simple,” Shmen says. “At least your anus isn’t swollen and you don’t need steroids and you have a working digestive system.”
He has a point. My intestines are a lot more capable than his. I have no answer for him. And Julia doesn’t either. And Julia looks at me and I see that same sweetness inside of her like in the olden days, even if she keeps her protected expression on at the same time, and I hope she sees something decent inside of me too. But there’s nothing to say. It’s the wrong time to say anything. Right now, it’s about Shmen, and we shouldn’t et Shmen trick us into worrying about ourselves.
But I get stuck worrying about ourselves. And so I kiss Shmen on the forehead and tell him that I’m off to get a cup of coffee.
#
Shmen does start improving as the day progresses. The steroids bring down the swelling all over his body. And it’s pretty thrilling to see him coming back from the dead. He complains as they take him off the painkillers, but you can tell that he’s glad to have his normal sense of the world back, even if he does try once or twice to get a few prescriptions he doesn’t really need. I take that as a sign that he’s becoming himself again.
