by Izzy Ezagui
I'm frozen, though. Only half out the tent. He sees, but he hasn't really seen. Sees only my head and left shoulder so far. The ruined rest of me is still cloaked behind the flap. I wish I could hide it from him, from the world—Oh, God. My mother—for just a few days—as if I'll last that long.
“Izzy,” he shouts again, “now!” He has a weird expression on his face. I don't want to see his eyes. I feel like I'm naked behind a shower curtain and he's ordering me to get out with no towel. He wouldn't want to see this kind of naked. Is there something to cover the source of—the place where my—where it should be?
Go ahead and deal with it. My left arm.
“For Fuks's sake, Izzy.” That's a little joke we have. What would the lieutenant do? Whatever it is, you do it for his sake, and you'll be OK. “They're still shelling! We gotta get the hell over to the shelter!”
Shelling? Right. Another mortar. A shockwave. Concussion. It comes in flashes. Nothing like when a Road Runner bomb goes off in Wile E. Coyote's face.
The mortar hits the ground on the other side of our ruined tent. The impact is ridiculous. The ground rumbles and what's left of my body shakes. It's like I'm a hamster in a shoebox—and some kid's rattling the box. Some asshole kid. Kobi ducks, recoils under a whirlwind of dirt and smoke and cinder and shrapnel. This is nothing like the movies. Why am I barely registering the violence? Am I dead yet? Is it shock? “Don't just stare at me like that. Move, goddammit! Izzy, I swear to God—” Kobi's eyes are absolutely frantic. Have I ever seen anyone's eyes so wild?
He's right. We can't stay here. We have to drag all six-plus feet of my busted-up self to the bunker. And surely I'm a few quarts down on my necessary quota of Red.
Coming out now. He's going to see. He's going to be the first one who sees.
Out—
This is him seeing. I watch him see the remains of…It's dangling by a thread of my fatigues. Still attached? No, not really. It's just sitting there inside my sopping sleeve like a—like a—
Oh, Kobi's eyes. He sees, all right. He really does. The eyes serve as proof. They're afraid, even worse than my mother's back when she drove her son home with the residue of Ivory suds in his mouth. Silent that whole drive home, gripping the wheel like a guide wire, agony in her eyes. Damn that Mole for making her watch that humiliation.
Don't say anything, Izzy. What are you going to say? Stay quiet, and let him lead you toward the bunker. Help him drag what remains…You can do that.
Kobi. Can you see? You've never been good at hiding the truth. Tell me, do you grasp how sincerely screwed I am? Be honest, now. I can already tell from your eyes.
HANDCUFFED
1995. I'm totally screwed. School already sucks. The second grade has not been such a swell time. Now my parents have reinvented all our lives, and (as the expression I once heard goes) poop rolls downhill. They're going to put me in a genuinely Jewish joint. I can see my mother at the kitchen table, reviewing forms and applications. From my perch in front of the TV, I can hear her making calls, asking pressing questions. Her upgraded standards will have to be met, or this whole enterprise is insincere.
There are two options under consideration, it seems, and both are a forty-five-minute drive from home. That's—forever. But nothing as trivial as geography will ever stop my mother from meeting a goal. She's willing to spend three hours on the road each day, shuttling me and Jaz to and from our new Orthodox school. She does not consider this a sacrifice, I hear her tell my father late at night when they don't know I'm awake. Just the opposite, she says.
“This is going to happen,” I whisper down to Jaz, who is on the bottom of our bunk bed. “You know her. She'll do whatever she has to for our ‘best interest.’”
“Are you best interested in going to Jew school?” she asks.
Ha. “That's not what it—look, our ‘best interest’ means whatever they say goes, and we just have to do it. And that means there's no way we're getting out of this.”
“Oh. OK.” She smiles. Innocent kid. What do five-year-olds know? She turns over and hugs Teddy—that's her teddy's name. I roll over and stare at the ceiling fan. Jasmine will adjust. She's about twice as smart as her older brother. She'd adjust to life on a Mars colony if she could bring Teddy and maybe a Fisher-Price dollhouse. But I'm completely screwed.
Sure enough, before we ever really understand all the implications of what's about to happen—the extreme revolution of our young lives—our mother drops us off at our new school. The boys and girls are separated, of course, so I'll never see my sister in this building again.
But I find myself thrust onto a planet of little tzadiks, mini rabbis-to-be, classmates with whom I have absolutely nothing in common. Scooby-Who? As far as they're concerned, the last and only Abraham who led his people out of a mess was not named “Lincoln.” There's no way of relating to my fellow students. I'm an alien landed on a bizarre and occasionally hostile Planet of the Hebrews. How can I survive this mystifying landscape?
If it's adapt or die—I'm already dead, ready to be buried.
In addition, I find it's nearly impossible to maintain the few friendships I've accumulated during my previous, albeit short, “social life”—kids back home who I assume think of me as one of them—not one of “them.” How am I supposed to go over to friends’ houses when I can't even think of getting in a car come sunset Friday? When I'm not supposed to partake of those hot dogs with melted cheese? Why would any kid want to come over my place if we can't work together to ensure that Sonic and Tails kick Dr. “Eggman” Robotnik squarely in the butt? What else is there? What's the point of waking up in the morning?
I saw a movie once, one I probably shouldn't have seen. A war movie. Some brave American pilot is forced to eject and para-drop into a demilitarized zone. It's a fierce winter. Dark. He's shivering. He gets separated from his gear. He's got just a few hours to save himself. It's like that. But it's worse—and this is what twists my intestines every morning. Because this enemy—the “Super-Jews”—are proving they can be every bit as cruel as the enemy officers in that movie. There's a line in the children's book, The Velveteen Rabbit: “The wild rabbits have very sharp eyes.” This was never truer than among these kids. As soon as they spot my differences, my vulnerable stuffing, they zero in for the kill. The magical tactic that surfaced on the ball court has no bounce with these players. I could own a moniker like “Fart Boy” all I wanted—they'd find more biting ways to mark my difference.
I soon become the constant butt of their jokes. Here I am, forced to be among them, yet they still think of me as a Muggle, non-“chosen.” No matter where I turn, I'm bound to take a bullet to the frozen ass-cheek, and limp through the rest of the day. Even the teachers get my number pretty quickly. Enough wise cracks, and when you actually do know the answer, the teacher says, “Put that hand down, Izzy. We heard enough from you today.”
Take PE, for example. Every so often, our athletic director, Mr. Martinez, leads a few classes through the gates within the prison-like walls of our school, across the street to Flamingo Park, which seems a world away. And like a prisoner on lockdown, this “rec time,” no matter how fleeting, is the highlight of my week. Dead grass? Diseased, one-legged pigeons? A breeze that reeks of tobacco and stale vomit? Yes, please. The smells of chalk, dusty prayer books, and twenty boys who have barely figured out deodorant, are enough for me to beg for clemency. Or see me hanging from the rafters of my cell by June.
One bright Sunday, my ragtag team of classmates performs a bona fide miracle, beating an older grade in a tight game of touch football. It's a hard-won victory. We fight for every inch of patchy, dry lawn against our meatier counterparts. So this triumph is so sweet, so rare, it's cause for serious fanfare. My heart leaps into my throat like a squirrel up a drainpipe. We're a real team, and with teamwork we beat those bigger, “better” guys.
After the final play, while everyone on our team is cheering and high-fiving each other, and perilously taunting our momentarily sho
cked opponents, I approach our quarterback. His name is Dov. Which means “bear” in Hebrew. He's short and stubby, but also agile and talented at every sport I've ever seen him play. His two front teeth recall Bugs Bunny. Adrenaline's still racing through my veins. “Hey, man,” I say, smiling, lifting my hand for some reciprocated slapping. “You were awesome. That last throw—”
“Forget it,” he says, and instead of high-fiving me, he spits between his two front wood-chippers onto the turf by my Air Jordans. So my hand is frozen in air as he stares me down.
Pull your hand back, for God's sake, Izzy. Why won't it move? I've stopped all breath. Two great blocks and one touchdown, and I still haven't won their approval?
But wait. Maybe he misunderstood me? Maybe Dov's thinking of someone else, maybe mad at someone else for something. “You think I'd touch the likes of you?” he says, looking me right in the eyes still. “You're nothing. Izzy Something? No—he's nothing. You get it?”
Does a Dov shit in the woods?
In Charlotte's Web, one of Jaz's books, some asshole animal tells Wilbur he's “less than nothing,” and Wilbur reasons that there can't be anything that's less than nothing: “Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go…If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something.”
There is something less than nothing, if only in a feeling that overcomes you in the darkness of a stare, in sight of that saliva glistening on the turf. That feeling you get in the un-slapped hand.
Nobody else hears Dov, no one sees me planted on the grass as he darts off with the winning ball into a sea of acolytes and accolades. All around me, everyone else is jubilantly fist-bumping, whooping it up. Even Martinez blows his whistle to commemorate the coup. Just move, Izzy. Damn it, walk off. But I'm still standing there dumbfounded, stung, like he kicked me in the gonads. That would have hurt less.
What would my father say? “This kind of challenge forges character.” Really? This kind of thing feels like crud. It's several seconds before I can muster just a little bit of something. I finally retract my hand. It's a while before I can figure out what to do with it.
PUT DOWN THAT HAND
January 8, 2009. What are they going to do with my mangled forearm? The brain says flex, make a fist, raise it up. But it's unresponsive. Wasn't programmed with Wi-Fi. It's dead. A horror-movie prop. I can't stop staring at it now as Kobi drags me along. It's just so unbelievable. I can run, a little. More of a stumble.
Wait. Shouldn't I be in horrible pain? Did I forget to hurt? Shouldn't I be screaming, maybe? Yeah. I already am. Roaring. Huh. Just noticed that. It's involuntary. A howl born below. From the pit where fear festers, expecting some chance to reveal itself to the world, like a caged demon waiting for you to open up wide.
It's all the times I wished I could scream, all that waiting in the Mole's office, every time Dov and the rest of them dissed me.
It's my father—what they did to him. All the grown-up Dovs of the world. How they fucked him. How they arrested him at the airport, shackled him, threw my father in a cell. In jail. How so many of the people he tried to help along the way turned their backs on him, trying to make a dollar.
It's that time when I was eighteen, drunk, lurching through the streets of Jerusalem at four in the morning, and got ambushed by a bunch of kids. How they promptly beat the crap out of me. It's how I sat there on a curb, suddenly sober, bleeding from my right eye, my mouth. How they laughed and enjoyed their lame handshakes as I whimpered by their feet. A fellow Jew.
It's the evictions, how my parents had to pack our most essential stuff—“We can't take your books to Israel, Izzy, sorry…”—and vacate us by morning. How they tried to make it into a game so my sisters, now three, wouldn't figure out the truth.
It's bashing down the walls of the decrepit apartment in the Wolfson Towers with a sledgehammer every night before the start of basic training, eyes stinging with detritus and paint, just to create a livable space for my parents and siblings. How responsible I had to be. How grateful I was each time Jonny showed up to help.
This is absolutely not my voice, and that's…liberating. Izzy simply isn't home anymore. You can leave a message, but he might not get back to you—not ever. Whatever this is, it will be heard. The sound of a nightmare that's crept into the light of day.
It's all my childhood phantoms back for a visit. It's the gremlins again, at Jordan's house. A sort-of-friend of mine. 1997. My mom and her workout partner go to Gold's Gym and leave me with Jordan at his house. Jordan's two years older, so I try to stay out of the way of whatever he and his buddies get up to. They want to watch Gremlins. Will the little pussy boy wet his pants? No way. But the images gnaw at my bones. I'm afraid the moment the cassette clicks in the VCR. Oh, I'm in it now. It's the way they ignore the old man's warning and allow water to meet the mogwai. How all hell breaks loose. On screen. In my intestines. They're laughing, Jordan and his friends. And it's all I can do to not mess my pants.
It's how that hell follows me home. How it's coiled, biding its time in the pipes under our drains, getting wet. Waiting. How, for a month, I can't sit on the toilet without staring wide-eyed into the bowl, holding my little nut sack in trembling hands. How if I look away, even for a moment, I know gremlin claws are going to yank me by my nuggets, right down into the sewers, where the alligators live. How I don't shower for weeks. How my mom bursts into the bathroom one day because she can't understand why I've been smelling so bad lately, and finds me pressed against the wall opposite the tub, fully dressed, eyes wide, just watching the water run, just waiting for the claws. How she has to make me leave the door open afterward. For months. Those talons.
Nooo, I'm no pussy…
It's how a few years earlier, after I beg Dad to take me to my first Batman movie, the Penguin's cackle invites a million more nightmares. It's Chucky, Spawn, and that horrible freak from Jeepers Creepers—how that thing removes the back of Darry's head. And takes his eyes.
It's the punishment I get after the Mole rats me out to Mom. How she convinced her that I had “too many distractions.” How they take my Warcraft III online expansion set, my books, my GameCube, and throw it all into U-Haul boxes and stack them in the garage. My whole life. How I come home a few days later and see all the boxes are gone. “Goodwill,” my mother says. She's making my favorite, spinach tortillas, and instead of eating, I run upstairs, lock my door, and block it with a dresser. Flop on the bed and scream into the pillow. How I pee in the plastic bucket every good Jew is supposed to use to wash their hands and pray first thing in the morning. How I piss on that. How I fling that piss out the window, miss a day of school, won't leave my room, not for any damn thing. How thirty-six hours later, all my stuff is back. No explanation. The Goodwill logo still gets me sick.
Like the Sbarro sign.
It's the look of that rock tumbling after it crushed my left foot. Twice.
Don't you know who you are, Izzy? Why you're here? You're a soldier. Is it OK with you that someone else is screaming in you now? From you. Using your lungs? Is it all right to just allow this creature to occupy your body, unhinge your jaw, and just bellow? Giving stuff up is not supposed to be easy—nor painless. Didn't you learn anything from your father?
The only thing they can't take from you, Izzy, is what you've already given.
What you did with that rock…
Not now.
Kobi, beside you, is flinching. The sound coming out of you, the scream would break glass if the mortars had left any windows on base intact. Get it together. Take charge of this, Izzy. It's not a sopping monster that got you. Not a gang of street thugs. It's not a clutch of cops surrounding you at JFK. You're not your father. You'll never be that great. Wouldn't have been, even if you had lived to see twenty-one.
It's closing your eyes and praying—truly praying—that no one heard you let one rip. How when you open them, a hundred kids have fanned out, how a gulf has opened
between you and every other human being in the world.
It isn't like that here. You have friends who look out for you. You're not on that gym floor anymore. These streams of liquid dripping down your side aren't from those waterslides outside the JCC.
Yes. It's all clicking into place. The border of Gaza. We're moving. The battlefield. An encampment of Israeli soldiers. A hard target for a mortar attack. Kobi shouting something over the clamor. Kobi nodding, making sure you understand whatever he's saying. You don't understand. Not the words, at least—but you get the idea. You are more than something to Kobi. You're someone worth saving. Your friend is letting go of you now, falling backward, sprinting, stumbling up ahead over his own boots and legs, kicking up a storm of gravel and pebbles in his wake. Kobi's going back for someone else. This is a rescue operation. And others need to be rescued. You're not alone.
You don't need to be some kind of seer to see how this will end. There's not too much to figure out. They've disarmed you. Forcing yourself to look down at this reality again, you realize your scrutiny has stilled the screaming. For a moment, standing outside the flap of the tent, you hear nothing.
So now you die.
Shouldn't there be lights, a tunnel, epiphanies, your grandparents and Uncle Julio on a welcome wagon? No, Izzy, you're not having an out-of-body experience here. You are altogether back in your body. Your spoiled sack of flesh. No tunnel of light. That's obviously not what happens. You just bleed out, pretty quick, and then, as the Frost poem “Out, Out—” you read in sixth grade goes, “Little—less—nothing!” And that's it then. Well, fine.
You start out with nothing, and to nothing you return.
But wait. That can't be true. I started out with a mother. Ma. Sorry. It's OK. A thing worth fighting for, Ma. A just cause. Just…I'm going to fall now, I can feel my knees crumpling. For once, I am not consumed by shame and regret. Just another few seconds now. I feel warmth envelop me like an olive-green sleeping bag. No suffering, Ma. It's all good, I promise.
