by Lavie Tidhar
I blinked, and stared at it again. I saw multiple eyes on its sides, blinking in the sunlight, and terrible smoke rising from its rear. It swerved and veered haphazardly along the road. It came closer and closer to me, head first, and then it stopped, and I heard the whoosh of opening doors and a loud, ethereal screech that was a car-horn, and a woman’s voice said, “Get on! Hurry!”
It was a municipal, double-jointed bus.
I N T E R L U D E
There is an old man living in a public library, and he reads a book a day and when he is done he writes in the margins.
He writes: “Today I ate a frog.”
He writes: “Life is a meaningless joy-ride in a stolen car.”
He writes: “I am lonely. I want to die.”
So far he’s worked his way from Aleph to Lamed, and he is halfway through. He knows when he reaches the last book, he will die.
He writes: “The city is a furnace, it tempers people into steel.”
He writes: “I was once a man. Now I am dead, and do not know it yet.”
He writes: “We are all lost.”
It is comfortable in the library, and he is safe there. In the piles of books he has dug a hidden entrance, created a small dark space where he sleeps and where he hides when others come in. He always hides. They use the place for a lavatory. Sometimes . . .
He writes: “Were I a writer I would tell the story of this city, and I would tell the truth.”
He writes: “The truth tastes bitter and furry. The city lies.”
He writes: “Today I ate a rat.”
Sometimes he writes phone numbers that no longer work, for people no longer alive.
He writes: “I once had a daughter. I once had a boy. I was once a grandfather.”
He writes: “I once owned a car. I once owned a house. Once I was with a woman who was not my wife, in Amsterdam.”
He writes: “There are no more secrets. There is no one to keep them from.”
He writes: “Life is lonely. Death is shared by all.”
He writes letters to old friends. He writes letters to the government. He writes letters to the newspapers. He writes: “I ate the body of a badger today. I found it in the Arts Books section.” The book in whose margin this is written is covered in stains, like old dried sick. He writes: “I miss her.”
He writes: “It hurts to pee.”
He writes: “I want to die in Greek Philosophy.”
He writes: “Dying in History would be a lie.”
He writes: “I am very hungry. There are no more rats.”
He coughs a lot, and it splatters the paper. His fingers shake as they turn the pages. He had a name once but he can no longer remember what it was.
MORDECHAI: FIVE
I am not a violent man.
I just have . . . episodes. Sometimes. I’ve had them since I was a kid. Once, when I was about nine years old, we had a rowing lesson at school. When the lesson ended, the teacher let us jump into the calm water and swim a bit around the boat. When it was time to return, I couldn’t climb back on the boat (I was a little heavy at the time). The teacher, who was a somewhat rough man in his forties, shouted, “Jellyfish! There’s a jellyfish right under you! Get out of there!” — and I did. I was so scared of jellyfish back then. I jumped on the boat and almost overturned it and everyone laughed at me and I . . .
I don’t remember exactly what happened then. Mother had to come to the school and I was excused from gym classes after that, and a couple of the kids never came back from the hospital. My mom took care of everything though. She always does.
But she wasn’t here right now, and all I could think about was — slavery? — and I was beginning to feel a little strange . . .
“What?” the man beside me said. “Keep still! Hey, help me hold him!”
After that, everything went kind of grey.
When I returned to my gentle, easy-going self, I was standing up on the road, breathing heavily. When I looked around . . .
The cart was overturned, and a plank of wood that previously belonged in the cart’s side panel was now in my hand. The man with the hearty voice lay on the ground, unmoving, blood trickling from his head where the wood had connected with his skull. Another man’s head was stuck through the wooden floor of the cart, and his body hung limp from his neck. Yet another man lay under one of the cart’s wheels, which had broken free. He moaned softly. The fourth man was nowhere to be seen, though I heard running footsteps in the distance. The kid was lying on his side on the ground, giving me a frightened look. I remembered slapping him so hard that he flew in the air and hit the pavement. The donkey, being the only one untouched, stood quietly and looked at all this with a contemplative eye.
I stood up, went to the moaning man and took the cart’s wheel off him.
“I’ve had enough,” I said. “Enough mysteries, enough unexplained behavior, enough violence. I am a man of science! You will tell me everything that you know, right now, or I will hurt you.”
“You . . .” he moaned, “you won’t get anything out of me. You . . .”
I raised the plank. “I will start by cutting off your penis,” I said. It felt good to say it. I heard an angry scream from behind and turned around just in time to see the kid charging at me, slapped him again, and sent him reeling towards the overturned cart. “Little shit,” I said.
Just then the moaning man grabbed my leg and tried to bring me down. I jumped, stepped on his hand, and then, in a perfect golf movement, hit him between the legs with the plank.
A moment passed in peaceful silence. The man looked at me, then at the plank. I heard the child behind me, cowering under the cart. “The pain should hit about . . . now,” I told the man, and then it did.
By the time he finished screaming, the other two men were showing signs of waking up. I dragged them beside the cart and tied them with the blankets.
“Now,” I said, “you’ll tell me everything. Yes?”
The man I’d sacked sobbed quietly, looking at the ground. There was puke all down his bright Hawaiian shirt.
“Yes?” I said.
“Yes, yes!” the man cried. “I’ll tell you everything. Just don’t . . . I’ll tell you.”
“Good,” I said. “Let’s start with who you people are, and what in God’s name is going on in this city?”
“I told you, we are the Knights Templar, we’re . . .”
“I don’t care what you call yourselves, you idiot. Why did you try to kidnap me?”
“Well, for the war,” he said. He said it as if it were obvious. I said, “What war?”
“The war! The war!”
“You want me to hit you again?”
“We’re going to war,” he said, talking very fast. “Against the Firemen. Well. Against everyone else, too, probably. Everyone needs bodies, man! Grunts! Foot soldiers! I mean, it’s nothing personal! If anyone else saw you walking around they would have grabbed you instead of us! We weren’t really going to sell you!”
“That’s good to know.”
“Probably just tie explosives to your body and send you into the — ”
I stepped on his fingers and he screamed. When he quieted down I said, “What war?”
“The war against the Firemen. Because of — you know — ”
I kicked him in the ribs. “I don’t know who the Firemen are,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“OK, OK! What are you, from outside?”
“Talk, and make it fast.”
“The Firemen,” he said, “Believe in the Holy Fireman.”
Well, that made sense.
“Really, it’s not a joke! Don’t kick me again!”
“I will if you lie to me,” I said.
“Look, everyone knows this! The Firemen say that there’s this . . . thing. This creature who was once a person. But after the . . . the storm-creatures came . . . They say that only the head was left, but this head didn’t die, somehow it was still alive. The Firemen claim that t
hey have a recording of this head, and it describes everything that happened here, and it contains the story of the Fireman who went to heaven. Don’t hit me!”
I hit him anyway.
“I swear this is what they say!” the man said. “Look, why would I make it up?”
Actually, it made perfect sense to me. I was beginning to understand what was happening.
“Why war?” I said.
“Because it’s heresy!” the man said. “A holy Fireman? That’s crazy!”
Ah.
“Also, everyone else is going.”
“I see.”
“A Firemen victory could set us back years!” the man said. He was on a roll now. “The assimilation of humankind!” he said. “It is within our grasp! Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter if we kidnapped you! When this is all over, you, me, everyone is going to join with the creatures on the mount, and we shall be as one, as soon as — ”
“Yes?”
“As soon as everyone believes,” he said. “Or all the non-believers are dead. Whichever comes first.”
That, too, made perfect sense. I was beginning to piece it all together now. “And where is this war taking place?” I said.
“The bus station,” he said. “Can’t you hear it?”
The station. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
As if on cue there was a low, menacing rumble, followed by the sound of an explosion.
“It’s beginning,” said the man, and there was something I couldn’t quite determine in his voice when he continued, “I didn’t think it would be so soon.”
The second explosion, when it came, lit up the entire sky.
I N T E R L U D E
I love to go there. It is a quiet, high place, and no one else has found it. I have a telescope, and I carry it on my back, at night, as I walk through shadows, and come to my place, my safe and secret place, the place of seeing. I watch the skies.
These stars are not our stars. Of that I am certain. Sometimes, after sunset or before dawn, I look and sometimes think I see the old stars still there, still hanging in the skies, but they are pale and insubstantial, superimposed over the ones I had recently come to know. Sometimes I see the old constellations but the new ones call to me, the new ones speak and give themselves new names: The Wasp; the Torch; The Infinite Path; The Child; The Burning Man; The Skull.
The Child and the Burning Man are somehow connected. The stars whisper to me, and tell me many secrets. Sometimes at night I hunt the small creatures that still live here, cut open their bodies, spill their tiny intestines into my palm, and read the future in them. Sometimes I train my telescope on the mount, and watch many things, strange and terrifying and graceful. There is always the sense of age beyond measure, of beings both ancient and terrifying, watchers in the dark, indifferent. We are like dust in their eyes, motes of dust tossed this way and that in the air of a sun-lit room. I know what is coming. Sometimes I walk in the streets of this old-new city and I sing, I cry, I call out to my people, warn them of the coming flood. I am Noah, and they shun me as they did him. I know the truth found in a droplet of water, in a grain of rice. I know the truths the ancient stars whisper from their cold heavens. A child will come who is not a child, and a man who is fire, who is more than and less than a man. The world will shake in their passing and be transformed. I know all. Sometimes I eat the small intestines, licking them off my palm, so sweet and salty, and I crunch their little skulls in my teeth. They are so tasty. I am so hungry. I want to be like a star, and never be hungry again.
SAM: FIVE
There were guns going off everywhere and I thought I saw a thirteen-year-old with an RPG on his shoulder squeeeeezing the trigger and the wall ahead of me disappeared and I ducked. Shrapnel flew overhead. It was chaos. It was Byronic. It was mad and bad and dangerous to know but I had no choice but to get to know it a whole lot better, or die. Or get to know it a whole lot better and then die. It was a war, and I was in the middle of it. Someone had spray painted a message on the outer walls of the station and I saw it as we approached it and it said, Welcom to Hell, and Dganit said, “I hate it when they don’t know how to spell.”
The bus that picked me up was a very strange bus. And Dganit was, if not strange, then at least a very odd woman. And the people she was with were even odder.
“Who is this young man?” a querulous voice said when I boarded the bus. The driver was a woman with her white hair tied in a tight bun on her head, and spectacles that perched precariously on her nose. The speaker was an elderly gentleman in a baby-shit brown suit and a large bulbous nose, and glasses. Everyone on the bus were wearing what appeared to be reading glasses. “Why did you let him on the bus?’
The person who let me on the bus was called Dganit. She wore trainers, and grey slacks and a grey sweater, like the coach at a Chinese circus act, you know the one who stands on the side and shouts at the little girl to do it again after she falls from the swing that sits on the rod that extends from a wheel that rotates above a moving bicycle, that sort of thing. Unlike the rest of them she had on dark shades, and across her chest were two bandoliers. She had an Uzi in her hands and what looked suspiciously like a flamethrower on her back. She also wore a hat made of kitchen foil. And two antennas that extended out from her makeshift hat.
“I have been shown,” she said, “a great Truth.”
I nodded. She turned to the old guy who was complaining and said, in pacifying tones, “Menachem, we cannot abandon a fellow human being in the middle of everything that is going on right now. He’s coming with us.”
“What if he’s a spy?” Menachem said.
“Then we can kill him later.”
Great. The old man looked at me, smiled rather grimly, licked his lips and shuffled off. I wanted to think he had licked his lips out of nervousness, perhaps in fear of me, but I had the awful suspicion it wasn’t fear but anticipation that I saw in his eyes.
“My name,” said the woman in the crazy hat, “is Dganit. I am the last surviving member of the Israeli UFO Research Society, and the first to make contact — to make first contact — with an intelligent alien life form.”
I stared ahead, out of the window. The vortex thing was moving. I looked back at Dganit and swallowed. The only thing I could think of right then that was worse than being killed by one of those things was to be spared by them. Dganit continued, meanwhile. “I have a BA, MA, PhD — ”
“Not presented doesn’t count!” a voice called from the back of the bus. Dganit turned, Uzi raised. The antennas on her head seemed, for just a second, to actually move.
“Who said that?”
Silence.
“Who. Said. That?”
Silence.
Dganit’s head moved, scanning the interior of the bus, where elderly citizens stared out of windows and clutched a variety of weapons. They looked strangely sheepish.
“Gideon, step forward, please,” Dganit said. A man in his sixties dressed in tattered army surplus clothes, the shirt too tight over a large belly, rose from his seat and shuffled forward, avoiding Dganit’s eyes. “It wasn’t me!” he said.
“Get down on your knees.”
“Dganit, please — ”
“What did you call me?”
“Mistress, please!”
“On your knees!”
The man slowly went down on his knees. He was crying quietly.
Dganit pulled out a handgun strapped to her left ankle, and put the muzzle to the man’s head. “Am I, or am I not Supreme Mistress of the Faculty, Grand Professor and Ultimate Head of Departments?” she said.
“Yes!” The man said.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, Mistress!”
“Good. Go back to your seat.”
She turned back to me and flashed me a bright smile. “I might have to kill you, of course,” she said. “But you look like an intelligent young man. We could use you. Are you currently affiliated?”
“Affiliated?” I said. “Like, to who?”
“To whom,” she said. “Well, you could be a member of the Firemen, for one — ”
“Oh, no, not me,” I said.
“He could be a Follower of the Way of Gertrude!” someone called from the back.
“Preposterous,” Dganit said. “The heresy has been extinguished with extreme lack of prejudice. Alongside anyone else on Ibn Gvirol Street.”
“A Templar — ” someone else said.
“One of the scooter clans — ”
“But he doesn’t have a scooter — ”
“Stupid pizza boys — ”
“He could be a Child of Two — ”
“An Orthodox undercover — ?”
“What, you mean without a beard or the black coat — ”
“Well, it’s possible — ”
“Indeed. Occam’s Razor, my friends. We must always adhere to Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is always the correct one — ”
“Even after the event you still talk of Occam’s Razor? And you wonder why you were never promoted?”
“I was never promoted due to jealousy! Envy! How dare you — ”
“Shut up!” It was Dganit. They fell quiet. “You, Adamson, and you, Matilda, go to the boiler and change shifts! Make this bus move!”
“Boiler?” I said. I did notice the rising smoke, but . . . “You’re not running on petrol?”
“Fool,” someone shouted. Dganit chuckled, which was a horrible sound. “Conventional fuel hasn’t lasted five minutes, as you’d have known had you — hmmm . . .” I did not like that sound.
“Out of town?” she said, speaking quietly. “I’ve heard rumours, but . . .” she shook her head. “Later,” she said, still in the same, soft voice. “We shall talk.”
Then — “No,” she said, speaking normally again — which, for her, meant screaming in the voice of a sergeant-major — “the few remaining petrol stations are held by our enemies of the various denominations. No, we had to go green. We had to go back to basics. We had to re-invent.”
