by Yuvi Zalkow
She loved you. You loved her. There was a lot of love in the air. And when she told you her God was loving while your God was vengeful, you agreed with her. “I’m sorry,” you said in apology of your avenging Lord. And when she read you Matthew 21:17, you said, “Wow,” in appreciation of her sweet-hearted Lord. And as you watched those warm lips speak those warm words, you imagined that they weren’t just the words of God, but the Lips of God that you were watching. And wanting.
You asked those precious Lips to repeat the words. You asked her to press those moist lips against your neck as she told you the words again and again.
When she said that you two were destined to have four children and that you two would teach these children to love Jesus, you said that was fine. And it did seem fine. She was lovely and sweet and you didn’t exactly have any kind of belief system in place. She had apparently done her homework, so why not go with her plan?
It could have gone that way. It could have been just fine. Except for that one time, at that restaurant, when there was some disagreement about the bill, and you two were apparently overcharged by the waitress. Your beautiful Baptist whispered to you, “That woman nearly Jewed me out of fifteen bucks.”
You always loved verbifying nouns, but you’d never heard this one before. And even though you were not sure if you were or you were not a Jew, it didn’t really matter.
Your response was just as idiotic as her statement. “Jew this!” you said, and you walked right out on her. You walked right out on those cheekbones and those lips, as if they had never spoken the words of God.
Chapter Twenty-three
Israelis Are from Atlanta, Palestinians Are from Cleveland
Part 2
“Israel!” you say. “I’m from Israel!” And it’s such a relief to admit this to your Palestinian friend. You think to tell your damn editor that sometimes an italicized back story is just what you need to push you to the next level.
At first glance, it’s an expressionless face that he’s got. But you look through that expressionlessness to find the expression. You know there is something there. But you still turn up nothing. He knows how to guard his expression better than you know how to pry. So you tighten your abdominal muscles, just in case.
“I don’t like what Israel is doing with the settlements,” he says. It is like he is complaining there are no more paper towels in the bathroom. You can tell that what he is not telling you is far bigger than the little he is.
“Yes,” you say, “it’s a mistake,” as if to explain that you are not in charge of the paper towels in the bathroom.
You feel some relief in not taking responsibility for the policies of a whole country—you’ve got enough shame when dealing with the policies of just one short, balding, Jewish man. To be honest, you are too distant from the problems in the Middle East to speak properly about them. But you were born there. Your mother was born there. And there’s a monologue running in your head that won’t shut up: It’s messy. There is survival. One little country. Two little countries. So much hate. There is terrorism. The real terror and the terror of terror. There are policies and there is posturing. There is propaganda. There is history. So much history. A history in which everyone has been unfairly wronged, depending on where you mark the starting point. My people have died, your people have died, there is blood and broken bones and prayers and whispers and cries and bombs and bibles and betrayals and blasphemy and the smell of a camel shitting in the desert. It’s messy, you want to tell this man who undoubtedly knows better than you. But it’s too messy to even know how to open your mouth.
You start to feel dizzy.
You can feel your heartbeat at your temples.
And suddenly, through all this mess, you notice that your brown friend has a gorgeous brown nose. It’s crooked, just barely, like maybe it was broken a long time ago. And you wonder who he is waiting for in this waiting room. You smile, relieved when you realize that you don’t have to talk about the Middle East right now. You don’t have to say everything all at once. And besides, this is the wrong novel for that kind of problem. It is too big for this novel.
As you get lost in all your thoughts, you see your Palestinian friend looking down at the hospital’s dirty floor. He has perhaps been thinking the same things as you, has perhaps come to the same conclusion as you, will perhaps save this subject for later.
“Mine is dying,” he eventually says to the floor. “How is yours?” His eyes are unwaveringly brown.
“What?” you ask.
“It’s my father. Prostate cancer. What about you?”
“Oh,” you say. “It’s my brother-in-law. And he’s just getting a tube with a camera up his asshole.”
Your friend laughs. He laughs loudly in an octave too high for someone with such thick stubble. He laughs like it has been a long time since he has laughed. Then he wipes his mouth from all the laughter. And he doesn’t know how to proceed.
You say, “My father had prostate cancer too.”
“Did he die?”
“Yes,” you say. And you watch his face turn into something that is far from controlled. The sadness in his eyes makes you realize that he is as close to his father as you were to yours. And so you explain a little more. “But he didn’t die from the cancer. He did well without the prostate.”
Your friend kicks his shoe into the floor a few times. “With my father,” he says, “it is in the bones.”
“I’m sorry,” you say, knowing that when it is in the bones, the war has basically been lost.
There is a long silence. A piece on the danger of bedbugs plays on the television news and it makes you itch inside of yourself.
“Tell me about your father,” you say to your friend, trying to ignore the picture on the television about how to inspect your mattress for bugs.
Your friend gladly tells you about his father. This is a man who has been a mercenary, a pawn shop owner, a poet, a clown, a lion tamer, a mystic, a journalist, a therapist, a peace activist, a comedian, and a cancer patient. Your friend is a wonderful storyteller and, after he finishes, you wish he could tell you more.
“In his day,” your friend says, “my father was a real mensch,” and you realize that that is exactly what you wanted to say, except you didn’t because you were ashamed not to know the Arabic equivalent.
You exchange numbers. You find out that his name is Yousef. His business card says that he’s a journalist, just like his father. You give him your business card, which says, “writer, neurotic jew.” You tell him that you’re not sure about the writer and the Jew part, but the rest is all true.
“No,” he says. “You are a writer and you are a Jew,” and you’re not sure whether he means that in a good way or a bad way or some other kind of way.
“We should do coffee,” he offers.
“I’d like that,” you say. And whether or not you two will ever meet again, you are confident there is sincerity in this moment.
You hope the very best for his father’s prostate, and he hopes the best for your brother-in-law’s anus.
His hand is warm and big and strong and you shake it a little too long and with that warm feeling still inside of you, you go to find your dear brother-in-law, whose rectum should now be camera-free.
Chapter Twenty-four
Off the Tracks
“Your novel has gone off the tracks,” Shmen says. He mumbles this to me.
It’s been a half hour and he is just coming off the sedative. He has dropped his hospital robe on the floor and even though he hasn’t put on his pants or his shirt, he is fixated on getting his socks on, and insisting on standing up without help while doing it.
“What do you mean?” I say. “Why don’t your socks match?”
I catch him when he loses his balance and he just keeps at it like it’s part of his putting-on-clothes plan.
“Dark blue is close enough to black,” he says. “Be careful of saying too much in that book of yours.”
“How is y
our anus?” I ask him.
“It aches,” he says. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before opening them again. “Let’s go.”
I hate to be the one to spoil the pantsless party, but I say, “Don’t you think you need pants first?”
Even though that first sock takes forever, things move pretty quickly after that. Pretty soon he has all his clothes on and his eyes actually seem to focus on real things around him.
“Should I call a cab?” I say.
He nudges me out of the room. “No, let’s walk. I have some ideas about your book.”
“What did the doc say?” I ask. “Are you getting better?”
“Yes,” he says. “Better. But too much scar tissue. They want to perform surgery to cut some of it away.”
As we make our way out of the hospital, Shmen explains to me what they want to do. The problem is that the scar tissue from his many surgeries can cause infection and even close off the anus. The shit needs a clear path. I think to say, “That’s just like my novel,” but I stop myself. And I state my real concern: “Doesn’t another surgery just create more scar tissue?”
“Of course,” he says to me.
#
It’s awfully sunny and there is a breeze and we’re both glad to be out of the hospital. I want to ask him more about what the doctor said. I want to know more about this surgery. I want to ask him about Ally. I wonder how many hats she can knit in a year. And I want to ask about Maddy. She had a piano recital Shmen missed because of this procedure, and Shmen nearly canceled the procedure because of it. I want to tell Shmen about the charming Palestinian man I just met in the waiting room. I want to suggest we could all meet for coffee. But instead, Shmen insists on talking about my broken novel.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I haven’t even shown you my novel. How do you know it is off the tracks?”
“It’s in your eyes,” he says. “You give away everything. Your novel needs something else. You need to take it further. Have some testicles for God’s sake.”
“Oh,” I say. I have trouble knowing whether his insights are brilliant, or whether they are a side effect of the anesthesia.
“Another thing,” he says. “You told me that you were writing about me getting a colonoscopy, but that’s impossible without me even having a colon to oscopize!”
“Oh,” I say. I had forgotten that I told him so much about my novel. But he’s right just the same.
“You can call it a scope of some kind, but without a colon, they aren’t going to get much further than my J Pouch without some real damage to my small intestine.”
“Oh,” I say.
He looks at me for a little too long. It reminds me of how my first therapist looked at me on my first visit. As if she were digging deeper into my heart with each breath.
“You know,” Shmen finally says. “You look different.” He takes a deep breath. “What happened to you?”
“I’m going to need to think about all this,” I say. “Maybe we can talk about something else.”
I put my hand in my pocket and hold onto Yousef’s business card. I wonder if we’ll really catch up again someday.
A Jew and a Palestinian walk into a bar…
“Okay,” he says. “But remember that it can sometimes get worse before it gets better.”
“What does that even mean?” I say.
“Nothing…yet.”
We come around to the block where the pianos attacked us, but all the crushed pianos are suspiciously gone—not even one piano key on the ground. I look around, expecting to see a sad grandmother or a camera crew or a crime scene with piano-shaped chalk drawings on the ground, but there’s nothing, no proof it ever happened.
After a long period of silence, Shmen says in a whisper, “Did you think about your father while you were in the hospital?”
I don’t say a word.
He puts his arm around my shoulder. “It’s okay,” this man with no colon and a sore anus says to me, “you’re just having a rough day.”
SKETCH OF A PROSTATE
It was two in the morning and I was staying at my folks’ place when my father called from his hospital room. My mother and I each picked up different telephones at the same time to hear my seventy-five-year-old father cry out, “I farted!”
Although my family is not shy when it comes to the various forms of potty talk, this announcement was more serious than usual. My father was in the hospital after his prostatectomy, in pain, waiting for his digestive tract to restart after the shock it had experienced from having a nearby organ removed. I empathized with his traumatized organs, but I couldn’t bear to watch how my father squeezed his eyes shut and made fists while waiting for the pain to go away. The nurse finally convinced me at midnight that there was nothing to be done, that he would get through this period, that it wasn’t so risky even if it looked bad, and that I should go home and get some sleep.
I was thirty years old and still living in Atlanta, my hometown— my parents were in the suburbs (near all the best hospitals) and I lived in town (near all the best bars), except around the time of my father’s surgery, when I stayed in my childhood bedroom with the Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd posters still on the wall. But now they were next to piles of my father’s surplus of chemistry books—after a fifty-year career as a chemistry professor. At night, I thumbed through his pile of books. The books were in order of when he used them, from what I could tell.
On the day he told me he had cancer, I was over at their place doing a load of laundry. I was walking through the living room when I saw him quietly sitting on the couch with a three-olive martini and a big smile. He spoke about the cancer as if he were talking about candy.
“You’re fucking with me.”
His smile was too large and too genuine for any kind of joke.
#
When my father had heart surgery, twenty years prior, I was at sleep-away camp. They didn’t tell me about the event until after it had happened. I pretended to be upset they didn’t tell me in advance, upset they didn’t pull me out of camp, worried about my poor father. But I was secretly glad to have missed the show. After all, I got a chance to make out with a girl for the first time at that camp. It would have been somewhere between boring as hell and terrifying to be in that hospital eating stale tacos from the cafeteria while they cracked open my father’s ribs and re-plumbed his heart with veins from his legs. But as it happened, with my parents not telling me about it in advance, they relieved me from having to confront this truth. And besides, I’d never again get a chance to kiss a girl with a glass eye and the most beautiful fake green iris.
#
My father sipped his martini nice and slow. Like he had all the time in the world, like he was proud of himself for getting cancer, like he had gotten the Nobel Prize in chemistry. I stepped over my dirty laundry and sat on the coffee table, facing my father.
“When did you find out? How big is it? What are they going to do?” I wanted to know numbers and stats.
“Today,” he said slowly. “They told me in the morning.”
“My God,” I said. “How bad is it?”
“It’s bad,” he said. “It’s the fastest kind.”
So much pride about his precious uncontrollable cell growth.
“But,” my father continued, “they’ve found it early. So they’re going to rip out my prostate while they can.” He made a clawing gesture.
What I did at that moment was get on the floor and begin folding my clothes. I folded my dirty underwear while my father spoke with fascination about the procedure.
“Aren’t you scared?” I asked without looking at him, speaking more to my dirty underwear.
I could hear my father chewing an olive, as if my question were meant for another man, but he wasn’t scared at all. In fact, he took it as great news. At least now he knew why he was pissing in his pants at night, why it hurt to piss during the day, why he ached so badly in his gut. He said that after the heart surgery he fe
lt like he was living on borrowed time. He had recently been feeling like his time had come.
“Time has come?” I yelled at him. “What kind of attitude is that?”
“Yuvi,” he said in the sweetest possible way, “calm yourself. This thing is inside of me. Not you.”
#
The night before the surgery, he walked into my room while I was trying to write a story about him. I had gotten past the point of resenting my father for any mistakes he made as I was growing up. But I hadn’t yet filled that resentment with something else. So I sat there alone with no idea what I wanted to say.
“What are you writing?” my father said.
“Oh,” I said. “Nothing.” I instinctively covered my page with my hand, as if there were something bad on the page. As if there were anything at all on the page.
“It gets easier,” he said.
“The writing?” I said.
“ No.”
“Life?” I tried. I don’t know if I was serious or joking.
“Not that either,” he said. “Life just gets worse.” My father stared at his fingers as he spoke to me. He looked at the front and then the back of his fingers like he was unfamiliar with them. I pictured this as a habit of someone getting old, something that only a baby or an old man would take the time to pay attention to. “You’ll learn to handle things better,” my father said to me. “Even the messy stuff you’ll appreciate.”
He laughed for a while, I don’t know exactly why, and I think I even laughed too. “Well, I’m glad we had this awkward little talk,” he said, and he patted me on the shoulder and walked out of the room.
