by Lavie Tidhar
“And I’m out of here,” I said. “Have a nice life, as short as it may turn out to be.”
I made to climb back into the Hawk when the guy, Daniel, said, “Wait!”
“What do you want?”
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s a party,” I said, patiently, like talking to a three-year-old. “It’s a big, honest-to-God, city-wide festival. You know. Like they had when we were kids.”
Then I noticed the woman was pointing the camera at me. I was on film! For real! I said, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and then there was a buzz of static, despite the radio unit being turned off, and I said, “Shut up! Shut up already!” and there was a buzzing sound again like someone had just upset a nest of really grumpy bees, and I screamed.
“Are you all right?” Naked Guy, too close, hand on my shoulder. He had a limp dick. It was probably still wet. “Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?” and then he gave me that look again and said, “You can talk to them?” and he took a step back. Which was good, because I would have punched him otherwise. “Who, man?” I said. “There’s nobody here but us chickens.”
“What?”
“It’s a joke. It’s — never mind.” Suddenly I felt confused. Static, waves, giant waves, coming nearer, about to crash — I had to get out of there. Go high. I wanted very badly to get to that mountain.
I got back in the Hawk. I slammed the door. I switched on the siren, and the sound was very soothing. I leaned out of the window. Two naked people, staring up at me, one of them holding a camera. “You’ll be glad to know,” I told them, “that I’ve decided not to kill you.” I grinned reassuringly and gave them a thumbs-up. I hit the gas, turned right to Frishman Street, which was now more like the Frishman Mountain Road. It went up, not straight to the top of the mountain but close enough. The mountain rose before me. I wondered who those people were. I wondered why I didn’t kill them. But it was nice being sociable for a while.
The road was littered with the burnt remains of army uniforms, along with the remains of their occupants, but they weren’t a problem, I just drove over them. The road was also littered with bombed and broken tanks, and that did slow me down. Still, I was close. I switched off the siren. There was static in the silence.
I thought I was beginning to understand what it was saying.
THE BOOK OF DANIEL, PART III
The word in Daniel’s mind was dybbuk. It came unbidden. It was something the rabbis in the yeshiva spoke about, sometimes. It was an evil spirit that possessed men. That man in the fire truck, with the bug-crazy eyes and the golem-carved grin that said here was one Rabbi Lowe’s Monster who wouldn’t shut down voluntarily. Or something to that effect. That was a man possessed. Daniel wanted to stay as far away from that guy as possible.
“This is amazing,” Hagar said. She pointed the camera at the fire truck as it travelled slowly up Frishman — literally up. “I am going to follow him.”
“You’re what?” Daniel saw the rear of the truck find a bump in the road — someone’s head. The truck travelled over it, squishing it. Daniel felt sick.
“Daniel!” She gave him a quick kiss, still aiming the camera. “I’m a filmmaker. And this — this horrible tragedy, this unprecedented disaster, this heartbreaking loss of human life, the selfless sacrifices and acts of unbearable human courage in the face of adversity, this tragic — ”
“You already mentioned tragedy once,” Daniel said. Hagar sounded like a recital of every Remembrance Day and Holocaust Day speech he’d ever sat through, from kindergarten up. After a while, you got to know the words. Only the order in which they were placed changed.
“Did I? Look up there, Daniel. Look at it!”
He did. Now that they were outside, there was no avoiding it. The mountain dominated the city.
In the place where the Dizengoff Center — with its elderly armed security guards, its tired sweet shops, its dark cinemas and pretentious mall restaurants and its obligatory McDonald’s and two hole-in-the-wall book and magazine shops with their three-for-two bargain tables that never changed — in their place rose a mountain, its peak invisible behind clouds. It gave a sense of enormity, which must have been, Daniel thought, some distortion in the way light passed through the air (he was never much on physics, and the Torah was easier), making it appear larger than it was, than it must have been. Yet he could not shake the feeling that there, before him, was a mountain rising to great heights. He swore he saw ice and snow up there. And beyond, the sense of other, even taller peaks: an entire hidden geography, waiting as if it had been there all along . . .
“You can’t go there!” he said.
“Can’t?”
Too late, Daniel realized he may have made a mistake.
“I can’t?”
“I didn’t — ”
“You think just because we fucked it gives you the right to tell me what to do?”
He cringed. “I didn’t mean . . .” he said, and stopped, at a loss.
This was beyond his scope of experience. “What I mean,” he said, trying again, but got no further.
“What did you mean, Daniel?”
She looked at him. She was almost his height. He thought she had beautiful eyes, though they looked as cold and as distant as the heights of the mountain at just that moment. And so he did what men had done since the dawn of time in such circumstances. “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.
Some of the tension seemed to leave Hagar. “It’s all right,” she said.
“Just worried,” Daniel said. He went to her and clumsily hugged her. She leaned against him. Her cheek against his naked skin, her breath tickling the hairs on his chest.
“You don’t have to come,” she said.
“What? I’m not leaving you — are you really going to follow that crazy bastard?”
“Isn’t he fascinating?”
It was certainly not the word he would have used to describe the former member of the Tel Aviv Municipal Fire Department. “Hagar, I don’t think we should follow him. I think . . . I don’t think he’s quite himself.”
“I know,” she said, surprising him. “You felt it, huh? I have to tell you something, Daniel” — and she nuzzled close to him, began kissing his neck and he felt himself stirring back to life — “I haven’t been feeling myself lately, either.”
NAAMA — PODCAST II (DIGITAL AUDIO)
My voice sounds weird. I feel nothing below my neck, but there must be something there, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to talk, having no lungs. Otherwise, come to think of it, I’d be dead. Or am I dead already? Does it matter? Maybe it’s a hallucination — they put something in my food. In my drink, some gas in the air conditioning, some . . .
No. I must be logical about this. I shall describe now what I’m seeing, in the hope that the MP3 recorder is still working — I can’t turn it off anyway, under current conditions.
So:
My head is stuck on the pavement and all I see around me is junk and broken cars and broken trees and broken corpses and a little grey dog playing with it all. There’s something strange about my point of view — my head is on the ground, everything around me looks huge, but the street itself looks wrong. It looks . . . diagonal. The part of it that I see seems to be much lower than the point in which my head rests. That’s illogical — no such places in Tel Aviv. Is this a trick of perspective? Anyway, this could hardly be a drug-induced hallucination, as there’s nothing in my life experience to invoke it. I’m not a horror buff; I don’t like disaster movies; it just doesn’t fit. If it was some drug, I’d probably be fighting a computer come alive.
Or, I must admit, making love to it.
Note to self: Delete previous passage.
Oh, what’s the point?
Another reality check: I’ll try to call the dog, see whether it responds to my voice.
Hey, dog! Hey, doggie! Hey! Stop playing wi
th that corpse and come here! Come!
Hey doggie doggie doggie!
HEY DOGGIE! HEY HEY!
It heard me!
It’s coming around now. It’s sniffing the ground, I could almost say suspiciously, but it’s slowly getting over here. Come doggie! Come here! Come! Come! Good dog! Good! Goo — Ow!
It just licked me. Fuy! Hey, stop it! Leave me! Maybe this wasn’t such a good . . . aw! Stop! Leave me alone! Don’t push me! Help! Help! Aw! Oooh . . .
Rolling . . . I’m rolling down the street, I’m . . . ohmygodwhat . . .?!
Aaaah!
THE FIREMAN’S GOSPEL, PART VI (ELI — APOCRYPHAL?)
It was love at first sight. The moment the disembodied head flew into my cabin, it fell in love with me. Don’t ask me how. Or why.
As for my part, I was innocently driving like crazy up the Frishman recently designated mountain-road, obeying all the rules of traffic I found applicable — i.e., put the pedal to the metal and close your eyes when you feel like it — when I noticed something rolling towards me at tremendous speed. All sorts of stuff was coming down the mountain now — cars and bicycles, twigs, stones, television sets, air conditioning units — but that was slow, and this was going as fast as a car. At first I thought it was a basketball that got kicked around by the turmoil, and was ready to pay it the same attention I’d paid to everything else, when it suddenly collided with a piece of debris in the street, jumped in the air like a crazy jack-inthe-box, and was put on a direct collision course with the Hawk. It was then that I noticed it had hair. A disembodied head!
I did the only reasonable thing I could do: I said, “Yeah!” and pressed harder on the gas, thinking of squishing the thing like a bug — on the windshield, if I got lucky, on the radiator grill of the Hawk otherwise.
It only partially worked. I managed to hit it with the windshield, but that didn’t get quite the results I expected. There was a wet sound, which I did expect, but then it was followed by a sizzling sound and the smell of burning, and smoke inside the cabin, and I hadn’t quite anticipated that.
The smoke didn’t take long to clear out of the cabin. This was in part because most of the right half of the windshield had completely melted. Then I glanced to my right and saw it: the head of a fat woman, brown hair, puffy cheeks, stuck on the passenger seat near me, with something tied around its neck. The mouth was opened in an unnatural way, as if its owner was greatly surprised by dying, which is kind of stupid. The eyes, brown eyes, were open too. It almost looked as if there was still some life in there, as if the eyes were actually looking at me, not just open in a glaze of death. The overall impression wasn’t too good, really. One couldn’t have failed to notice that this person hadn’t been any beauty queen while being alive. Just what I needed: the head of an ugly, dead, fat bitch.
To put it nicely.
Also, the head was emitting an annoying buzzing sound. Was that a smile on the thin lips of the soon-to-be-skull? Or maybe all skulls smile, even if they’ve still got flesh on them? And how the hell did it pass through the windshield, melting it in the process? And come to think of it — who gave a shit?
Then I had an idea. I knew what I was going to do. It was just the thing to get me into the right mood.
“Bitch,” I said, “you’re going to be my basketball!”
I could’ve sworn the thing blushed.
And then it said, “Hi.”
“Oh, come on!” I said. “First God talks to me through the radio, now this? I mean, honestly!”
“I . . .” the thing said. “I’m, hey . . .”
“If you also claim to be God, I’ll be extremely pissed,” I said.
“There must be a logical explanation for this,” the head said, “but I am — and please do not take this personally — madly in love with you.”
Like I never heard that one before.
The situation presented a unique opportunity. It could not be said I was entirely averse to female company.
“Will you give me a blowjob?” I said. I was being polite, in asking.
It occurred to me it was a pity the conversation was in Hebrew though. If it was in English, I could’ve asked it to give me head. Ha ha. Oh well.
“I can’t move,” the thing sighed, “nor have I ever given a ‘blowjob,’ but I’d do so gladly if I could, I assure you.”
I admit I didn’t expect that, but I recovered quickly and played along. “I could grab you, you know, and . . .”
“Oh, please do!”
This was a bit too much.
“Tell me,” the thing wheezed. “Is my head all that’s left of me?”
“No,” I said.
“No?” Sudden hope — eyes opening wide, nostrils widening.
“No,” I said. “There’s also something tied around your neck.”
I gave the head one of my nicest smiles, and moved my hand to grab the something, which looked vaguely like some kind of digital music player. On the way there my hand reached the space in which, this morning, this ex-woman’s chest was supposed to be. Then I felt it: something a bit like an electric shock of current just strong enough to make my muscles jump, but warmer, glowing, and with a taste of wind. I looked into the deep brown eyes, and it was all there — the whole world, answers to everything, whatever questions I’d never thought of asking and never dreamt of having answered for me. More importantly — understanding. Togetherness. Union. A kindred spirit. I knew now that this was no coincidence: The head and the Hawk and I were climbing steadily towards something, and it was something wonderful.
Then the Hawk jolted, crashing over a sofa lying in the street, and my hand jerked away, I was quite shocked at what I’d just felt. Crap. Bloody head!
“So,” I said. “You know your way in love.”
“I . . . I never . . . I never made love.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised.”
“Will you . . .”
“Look, this is ridiculous,” I said. “I must tell you that I preferred God on the radio. It was easier with him.” This was not the entire truth, but hey, all’s fair in love and war.
“I know you felt it too,” the head said. “Some connection, something deeper than just two people meeting by mere chance. There’s a reason we’ve met, I know it.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“You love me. I can see it in your face.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, and with my right hand, careful not to go where I’d gone before, I grabbed the head by the hair and turned it over, so that it was looking into the seat cover.
“Mur muff muffyinf iff,” it said.
“What did you say?” I moved it a bit to the left.
“You’re just denying it. You’re . . .” I moved it back, pushed it harder into the seat.
“Yuff wiff unfefsanf! I fonf finf!”
I noticed the head’s voice, muffled as it was, was not lower in volume at all, despite my best efforts, and this discovery was soon followed by another — the voice was now being emitted from the back of the torn neck.
“That’s actually a neat trick,” I said.
“Muff!”
The Hawk, exploiting the opportunity given to it by the fact that I was concentrating on conversation instead of driving, gently crashed into an overturned, parked van.
“Oh, okay,” I turned the head. “Just be quiet about that love thing. You and me . . . whatever love you’re feeling, it’s not going to work. Trust me on this one.” I put the Hawk in reverse, turned the wheel a little to the left, and started forward again.
“I have all the time in the world,” said the head. “I can wait.”
“For what?”
“For you, silly.”
“Stop,” I said. “Just . . . stop.”
Unattractive brown eyes regarded me and fluttered their eyelashes. It was a little creepy.
“There must be a logical explanation to it,” the head said. “I know it. I can feel it.”
“You can feel that there’s a logical explanation?”
“I know it sounds illogical,” the head said apologetically, “but it’s true. And, given enough time, I shall find the solution. With your help, my love, with your . . .”
“There’ll be no time, and no love, and nothing besides it. Look around you. Oh, well, I’ll help you look around.” I grabbed the head by its hair, turned it left and right. “Look. Do you recognize this?”
“I . . . I think it’s Dizengoff Street.”
“Exactly. We’re now in the Frishman-Dizengoff junction. Do you notice something interesting about Dizengoff? The way that its left side is so much higher than its right?”
“I . . .”
“There’s a mountain. And I’m going to turn left now and go up it. That’s all.”
“And you will take me with you. Together, by the power of our love, we’ll . . .”
“Are you listening to yourself, you brainless head? What power? What love? There’s nothing. No God in the radio, no love in the air. It’s all very simple — I’m a fireman and you’re a head. It could never work between us.”
“Are you dumping me?” the head said.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. Then I lifted it by the hair, put my hand out of the open window, and relaxed my fingers.
The head bounced away.
It was quite satisfying.
NAAMA — PODCAST III (DIGITAL AUDIO)
Love!
I’ve never felt it before, but I knew it the moment I set foot . . . I set my head . . . I landed inside the truck with the man inside it. And what a man! He is everything I have dreamt of, ever, and I . . .
In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever dreamt of a man in my life. I remember my dreams quite vividly, and I’m quite sure that men, in this context, never appeared in them. But this man!
What am I thinking? What happened? I’m not used to . . . I’m not supposed to . . . my God, what a feeling! How did it happen? I remember myself rolling, then flying in the air, then going through something, like glass, but somehow in gaseous form, landing on something soft, then there was a man, and then there was a glow. My mind was like a neon bulb, bathing in short pulses on a low frequency, humming along the 50 hertz of the power supply. Shining, lighting-up, glowing. It took me some time to understand that this was love, but no time at all to know who it was I was loving. He was like . . .
