by Paul Briggs
“You gotta try the gym,” she said. “Leah’s been teaching me Krav Maga. It’s a little like Chinese martial arts, only a…” She looked at Carrie’s face for a second or so. “Aw crap.”
“It’s not that bad.” Carrie escorted her daughter through the hotel room and out onto the balcony. It faced the north, and was shielded from the sun by the bulk of the building. It looked out onto a vista of modern solar panels and ancient red tile, interrupted by tall, cone-like cypresses, all brought to full technicolor glory by the light of the Middle Eastern sun.
Thel sighed. “Okay, what’d I do?”
“Nothing. But I want you to stay away from any more of Bendayan’s events.”
“Mom!”
“It’s just a precaution,” Carrie said. “We all have to be careful who we interact with. Who we let ourselves be seen with. There are people out there who will try to use us for their own purposes. Especially you. You’re young and idealistic and they’ll think they can talk you into things.”
“He’s not like that,” said Thel. “Bendayan, I mean. I’m not saying he’s right, but he’s one of the good guys. It can’t hurt just to listen to him.”
Carrie folded her arms. “Thel,” she said, “sit down. This is going to hurt.” Thel looked mulish, but she sat down.
“You think this Natan Bendayan is a good man, and you know what? You’re right. He is. That’s the problem. He’s a man who wants to make life better for millions—or to save millions from something terrible. But do you know what a man like that sees when he looks at you? He sees a rich, beautiful, coddled teenager who lives in a world full of pain and hasn’t suffered her share of it. Yet.” Carrie put a finger under Thel’s chin and lifted, gently drawing her daughter’s face up to look her in the eye.
“You mean everything to me, but to him you’re just one person. One person who, in the long run, will be okay no matter what happens.”
Thel looked up at her angrily. “Tell the truth, Mom. Are you actually worried about me getting hurt? Or are you just worried that I’m gonna embarrass you?”
Carrie drew herself up to her full height.
“I am worried about you getting hurt,” she said. “And if you’re not worried about you getting hurt, then you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are.” Especially since I just now barely stopped myself from smacking you in the face very hard. And one of these days you’re going to meet somebody a lot less patient than me.
The door opened. Roger and Mama were standing there looking at her, expressions of concern on their faces, not even trying to hide the fact that they’d overheard every single word.
“Yes?”
“I have an idea,” said Mama. “I’ll keep an eye on her while we’re here.”
“So you’re supposed to be my chaperone now?”
“Either me or your father, dear. Take your pick.”
“Fine,” said Thel with an exaggerated sigh.
Roger followed Carrie back into the bedroom. Seeing the look on his face, she raised a hand in a signal for him not to start talking. There will come a time when I’m ready to talk about what she just said. This is not that time.
Even as a little girl, Carrie had always been ambitious—either to be President of the United States or a billionaire. At the very least she’d wanted to exceed her father, in status if not in mass. In fact, it was Papa she credited for this. He’d been an important man in his own right, and his social circle included many rich and powerful people. Through him, she’d learned that those the world called great were not fundamentally different from herself, and there was no reason she couldn’t join them, or surpass them if she had it in her. The road was hard, but it was open and it went to the highest places.
But her ambition came at a cost. While the rest of her lived and loved and cried and regretted, there was always that one part of her brain that was just sitting back and quietly judging the things and people around her, determining if they were to her advantage or not. It had grown stronger as her ambitions had condensed from dreams into plans and conscious choices.
When she’d first looked at Roger—tall, remote Roger with his seeming air of hauteur—most of her had seen him as a challenge. That cold thing inside her had said tall, smart, good-looking, should clean up well. Lots of potential social status. Yes, you can work with this. She told herself that all successful politicians had something like this, but that was no comfort when the calls were coming from inside her head.
Carrie didn’t always obey the cold thing. More than once, it had told her that Mike and Samantha were liabilities and should be cut loose. But even when she didn’t, it usually found a way to rationalize her decisions—not a good look to abandon a brother, even if he is useless.
And sometimes that inner sociopath of hers made her sick to her stomach. Nothing was sacred to it, nothing off-limits. Looking at things like Anchorage and the Northern Monsoon and calculating how they’d play politically was the least of its sins. Her father’s death? This will win you sympathy. George’s injury and death? When you speak to veterans’ groups, tell them of this. Drew’s disfigurement and long, slow recovery? This will come in handy during health care discussions. She didn’t like to think of the cold thing as part of herself, but it was never far away. And even if she could have had it removed or exorcised or something, she wouldn’t—she was afraid she needed it.
The cold thing was very pleased with Thel. She was beautiful, brilliant, highly presentable, and idealistic without being rebellious—perfect First Daughter material. But it didn’t love her, because it didn’t love. Its approval was creepier than all the men on the street who turned to look at Thel like dogs looking at steak. Much, much creepier, because it was coming from a place where nothing like it should even exist.
And the worst part? Thel knew about the cold thing. She knew. The only thing she wasn’t sure of was to what extent her mother was that thing. (“Are you actually worried about me getting hurt? Or are you just worried that I’m gonna embarrass you?”)
And if she knew, it was a safe bet that Roger knew. And her mother. And who else among her family and friends?
As long as you never let the voters find out about me, you’re all right.
* * *
For the purposes of this conversation, Carrie had gotten the hotel to separate a part of the lounge for a half hour. This was not a good time to be overheard.
President Ahmed al-Masir of the Palestinian National Authority gazed out through the screen of Carrie’s tablet. His glasses were thick, and made him look like a white-bearded owl. Two of his Cabinet ministers were visible behind him.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said in lightly accented English. “We’ll have to find another source of funding, less beholden to the Zionist entity.”
It’s called “Israel.” Can you say that? Is-ray-ell. “If you can find someone, go for it,” said Carrie. “But as I see it, you’re in kind of a bad spot. The only people in the world who still have money to spare for you are the Basra Pact, and how long do you think that’s going to last? Their biggest export is oil, and every country on Earth is trying to get off oil.”
“That is not going to happen. Not if Group 77 has anything to say about it.”
“You know something about this group?”
“No. I’ve only seen what they’ve done. Along with everyone else.”
You’re not as good a liar as you think, thought Carrie. The Palestinian Authority couldn’t possibly be involved in Group 77—it was too much of a charity case for that—but somebody in the group had told al-Masir something, possibly to soothe his anxieties over this very subject. The best-informed people Carrie had spoken to claimed that Group 77 was dominated not by oil companies, but by the governments of oil-producing nations. Which made sense. If you ran an oil company, you could diversify, invest in renewables, and sell the oil wells if necessary. If you ran a nation with large oil reserves, on the other hand, you really needed crude to be selling at a decent price.<
br />
“Have you seen what happened in China?” replied Carrie. “They tried buying the whole biofuel industry and shutting it down and the government just took it away from them. Do you think nobody else is going to try that?
“Look, we’re getting off track. The point is that if you want to be able to protect your own people, then somehow or other you’re going to have to work with Terna. You need to give her some kind of guarantee—something enforceable—that if she lets you build shelters, she won’t be sorry later.” Al-Masir didn’t respond. He just looked impatient.
“And you need to do it this year,” said Carrie. “Vague promises of a peace deal five years from now or ten years from now—”
“Do you seriously think the Zionist entity is going to be here ten years from now?”
Carrie just sat there looking at al-Masir. He didn’t sound like someone uttering a party line nobody actually believed. He sounded like somebody stating a well-known fact. As if it were an elephant in the room that everybody had been trying to avoid and it had just become impossible. As if Carrie were the delusional one, thinking the State of Israel was a long-term proposition, and he’d just gotten tired of humoring her on this. And the two ministers were nodding their heads.
“We’re winning the war,” he said, his voice going into Rousing Speech Mode. “You heard what your Congressman Darling said. Even the Americans are tired of their servitude to the Zionists. And every day, more and more Jews are leaving Palestine. One day all the Gharqad trees will be uprooted. I still have the key to my father’s house outside Jaffa, and I will live long enough to use it.”
Carrie had to shut her eyes for a moment to keep herself from rolling them. She didn’t even know what a Gharqad tree was, but it didn’t matter. Yes, a small percentage of Jews are leaving Israel. A much larger percentage are not leaving Israel. And a smaller percentage are still coming to Israel. And the ones who stay—or who actually come here—are by definition more committed to the Zionist project than the ones who abandon said project, and less inclined to negotiate with those who regard said project as illegitimate. Which explains a lot about the direction Israeli politics have been going. That’s half the reason why every attempt to reach a peace settlement fails harder than the last one. The other half is that your side is full of people who’ve broken off diplomatic relations with reality. People like, to pick a name at random, you.
And here’s the thing. The ones who leave—whatever percentage it is—aren’t taking their share of the nation’s arsenal with them. Everything from small arms to nukes is staying behind in the hands of an increasingly radical government. All this was crashingly obvious to Carrie, but she had the feeling that if she tried to explain it, she’d be met with nothing but blank stares. This guy didn’t even grasp that whoever was living in his dad’s old place outside Tel Aviv had probably changed the locks by now.
“Well, then, you’re set,” she said. “The… ‘Zionist entity’ is building some of the best heat shelters I’ve ever seen. Once you’ve got them nicely driven into the sea, you’ll have those shelters all to yourselves.” Then she broke the connection.
Carrie just sat there for a moment, shaking her head. How did you talk to people like that? How did you negotiate? Even if she could wave a magic wand and replace the Terna government with a government headed by, say, Natan Bendayan, that was only half the problem solved. Talking to al-Masir reminded her of the Ghost Dance of the 1890s, which she’d done a paper on back in college: One day the dead will rise, the buffalo will come back, the white people will go away, everything we ever lost will be restored, we’ll be free to live again as we once did…
Carrie had once thought of delusional thinking as the privilege of life’s winners, that losers were forced to face reality. Reading about the Ghost Dance, she’d realized that in the most extreme cases, this no longer held true. Somewhere on some subconscious level, people started to think: If we engage in the clearest, most cold-eyed realism, if we discipline our minds to reject all wishful thinking and accept the situation as it is… we’ll get stomped into the dirt anyway, because we have no power and no way of getting any. If we embrace wishful thinking, at least it’ll make us happy every now and then. There’s nothing left for us in the Desert of the Real.
When she went back to her room, she found two of the bodyguards outside. Roger was inside alone, reading an online glaciology report.
“Where are Mama and Thel?”
“They went to some sort of women’s march,” he said, barely glancing up from the screen. “I didn’t catch the details, but it was your mother’s idea, and Leah and Nahida went with them, so it seemed all right.”
The first thing Carrie did was report back to Sandra Symcox. It was early morning in New York, so Sandy was sitting at her kitchen table. She had a little bowl of what looked like shiny multicolored peas in front of her, and she was eating them with a pair of jade chopsticks which she handled as expertly as Thel. Somehow, she still looked like a student who’d been pulling too many all-nighters.
“Not your fault,” she said. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I had a feeling Terna and al-Masir weren’t going to be reasonable.”
“Don’t judge Terna too harshly,” said Carrie. “If you look at Israel’s history… well, you know…”
“I’ve heard.”
“And don’t get me started on the Palestinians.”
“I’m not judging anybody.” Sandy set her chopsticks down and looked squarely into the camera. “But if we start making exceptions, we’ll never be able to stop.”
Part of Carrie wanted to say no, you don’t understand, this isn’t some Third World country, this is a Western nation stuck in a bad neighborhood, these are good people and we should find a way to help them. It was one thing to give Avner Shapira tough love, but in front of Sandy she just wanted to defend the nation. But… no. Not a good look.
“What are you eating?”
“Spherified fruit juices,” said Sandy. She picked up a couple of orange globules. “Or reverse spherified, I should say—they mix the juice with two percent calcium lactate gluconate, bathe it in water containing sodium alginate and it reacts to… sorry. Chemistry geek. You ask me a question like that and you get way too much information.
“The bottom line is, Israel will get by without us, you did all the right things and we haven’t compromised our principles. So I guess… enjoy the vacation.”
Carrie didn’t believe in jinxes. If she had, she might have blamed Sandy for what happened next.
* * *
Just after five, Carrie got a call. Her phone said “It’s Mama.”
It also made the three sharp chimes that meant emergency.
Carrie’s fingers fumbled a little before they hit the right button.
“Carrie?” came her mother’s voice. “Oh my god I’m so sorry, something terrible’s happened and it’s all my fault.”
“Mama, what happened?” On the screen, Mama was sitting in some sort of cinder-block room. Alone. “And where’s Thel?”
* * *
The rest of the evening was a fog of fear and rage, in which occasional moments stuck in Carrie’s memory like icebergs looming out of the mist.
Moments like sitting in the hospital waiting room listening to her mother’s explanation of what happened. They had taken part in a women’s march in Jerusalem, to protest gender separation in Orthodox neighborhoods. “What I was thinking,” she said, “was that if Thel wants to get involved in a cause, it ought to be a good one. I mean, one that we can all agree on.” Carrie nodded.
“Half of us were dressed well. Better than average. A lot of women were dressed casually, and a few were dressed like prostitutes… I didn’t really approve of that, but I think this was on purpose. A way of saying ‘As different as we look, we’re all on the same side on this and we won’t be divided.’” Carrie nodded again.
“We weren’t even going into the Mea Shearim proper—it was just some streets where a lot of Haredim
had been moving into, where there were suddenly a lot of restrictions… or maybe not restrictions, just social pressure… we were just walking down the street and singing. That’s all.
“There was a crowd of men following us. Haredim. Mostly young. They were getting angrier and angrier. They were shouting at us, we were trying to drown them out with our singing…” She shook her head.
“We should have… I should have listened to the bodyguards. Leah said this place was getting dangerous and we needed to get out of here, Thel said, ‘What about everybody else here?’ and Leah said, ‘I’m not here to protect them, I’m here to protect you.’ She didn’t want to leave, and as for me, all I could think was, ‘This is ridiculous. I’m a Jew. This is Jerusalem. No one can tell me I’m not supposed to be here. Not even another Jew.’ I didn’t…” She shook her head. “I didn’t think they’d hurt us.” Carrie reached over and folded her mother’s hands inside her own.
“I didn’t even see it happen. I just heard something… break. And suddenly Thel was swaying, about to fall down. I caught her, but there was blood coming out from under her hair. A lot of it.
“I heard the gunshot, but I was down on the ground with Thel. I didn’t see what happened. Oh, god… what have I done, Carrie?”
Then there was the moment when she saw it on the news. By then, the media had gotten footage from Thel’s headcams and half a dozen phones. Forcing herself not to look away when the screen showed the incident was the hardest thing Carrie had done in a long time.
The view from the headcams wasn’t much help. Thel could see over the heads of the women around her, giving the cameras a good look at the faces of the men in the crowd. They looked not only furious, but—it was a terrible thing for her to admit to herself—alien. The black hats, and the black coats in hundred-degree weather, might almost have been a uniform.
