“Oh?”
“Rumor is he’s got a girlfriend in the Hive. An American—Sarah Something. Lives upstairs. One of the bond guys runs the StairMaster with her in the gym, and he saw her coming out of Reingold’s apartment this morning. Now, Reingold can fly his jet-copter into the heliport, take a couple of meetings, and then bang away all night long. How’s that for convenience? Doesn’t even have to leave the building.”
Jordan sat frozen, ostensibly watching headlines tick up the screen.
“And you want to know the kicker?” Fishman continued. “I just talked to a buddy of mine who’s obsessed with that Stack video. Has been playing it again and again, all day long. He has all this fancy equipment, and he says that he’s pretty sure the thing’s a fake. The first part’s okay—that’s Stack riding up the elevator, shaking the woman’s hand—he’s sure of that. But the kiddie porn thing? In the whole sequence with the girl there’s only one shot where you see Stack’s face, and my buddy doesn’t think it’s really him. Says he’s blown it up to the pixel level, and he thinks Stack’s face was cut-and-pasted from the first part, the elevator segment. Something about the angle—looking up when he should be looking out. In any case, he thinks Stack has been framed.”
“Where did the sex part come from, then?” Jordan said, feeling sick.
“My friend thinks it’s from some dime-a-dozen porn flick, the kind piled eight feet deep in Xiangyang Park.”
“And Stack?”
“Stack’s toast. He’ll rot in prison until they finally let him call a lawyer, and even then he won’t be able to do much. It’s not like the folks at the embassy are clamoring to save him, not with that horrific video going around. He’ll get off eventually—if my friend can spot a fraud, the forensic gurus can too—but it won’t be anytime soon. R.I.P., Stack. Meanwhile, I wonder who they’re going to get to run things around here.”
Just then, as Jordan watched, a Whitney Gilman press release blipped onto the screen.
EVERYTHING I’M NOT
BY LAUREN SANDERS
Tel Aviv, Israel
Ten Counting backwards
Middle of summer and Tel Aviv’s wilted to its roots. But a deep chill cuts through Ben-Gurion. Outside the tarmac steams, monstrous 757s nose-to-nose with military planes, security everywhere. Look matronly, I’d been told: Former combat soldiers comprise airport security, and everyone knows the army’s stocked with mama’s boys. I’m wearing a long floral skirt, loose-fitting T-shirt, sensible shoes, purple beret covering my head like a religious woman. The band of my skirt is soaked.
One security officer approaches a man a few people ahead of me, who presents his passport, Israeli, and the back and forth begins. I make out a few words … Nothing … I go to travel … Paris. Closer to the checkpoint, I fear the religious drag might be all wrong; everyone hates the orthodox. I take heavy breaths, heart like full magazine fire, counting backwards … ten exhale, nine exhale, eight, exhale … a technique from my days on ice, those last few minutes before pushing off when you’re led into position based on a coin toss. Random. Waiting for a signal, the gunshot, and it’s do die. Counting was the only way to clear my head. Still is … four, exhale … three, exhale …
A soldier moves into another line full of tourists, careful to keep the nose of his M16 to the left. The IDF has an arms code peppered with words like humanity and dignity. Soldiers respect their rifles. No solace as they advance, and I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and probably for all the wrong reasons: guilt, loyalty … My father says all people are motivated by sex or money. As a teenager, declaring myself the opposition, I’d float examples to ruin his theory, and ask about, say, nuns. “Sex,” he replied. “God is sex.” The president (can’t remember which one): “That’s too easy, Jen. Watch the State of the Union. See the way the idiot smiles, rolls his fist, senators, dignitaries, special guests sitting and standing like puppets, the eyes of the whole world on him up there at the podium, and you know he’s doing it all for the friggin’ lead pipe in his pants.”
My father is crude in a way that can delight as much as disgust. He knows the feeling of hundreds of thousands of eyes on him, the lead pipe. He’s made me what I am today, standing a few travelers from interrogation, limbs on alert, stuffed with enough stolen information to detain me in the Holy Land—and not how I’d like it. I start the count all over again, ten, exhale …
Nine. The conference (five days earlier)
She finds me at the bus depot, grabbing my arm as I’m about to board the shuttle in the thick, dusty parking lot. “What are you thinking?” She pulls me back, lemony rose scent eclipsing burning fuel, vegetable oil, falafel. “You make it so hard to see you with those drab clothes. I have to find you, don’t I?”
She’s got loose brown curls, dark skin, and freckles. Lips like a blow pop. Israeli women might be the sexiest in the world. Utterly brazen and comfortable in their skin.
“You look much better than I thought,” she says, leading me to a creamy white sports car. A little Honda. “You don’t photograph well. And the stories make you so hard and serious. But you’re okay. Ma? … What? What’s the problem?”
I nod. “Nothing, I—”
“Why are you standing there? Open the door.”
“Are you from the conference?”
A quick stare, candied lips cracking slightly. “Get in,” she says.
As a child, I could recite the exact number of city blocks to my father’s office. I knew when the streets got skinnier, the buildings taller, where we’d come upon the World Trade Center. My father hated the towers from the moment they went up, said they blighted the district. His revenge was buying up souvenir T-shirts and dumping them into the river, buying because he would never rob anyone of their livelihood—not if they were making less than he was. Week after sunny week, cotton shirts bobbed around lower Manhattan, from above resembling a wispy cirrus cloud, said my painterly mother, who like all of us mourned when the police caught up with him. That was the first time he made the cover of the New York Post
Wall Street begins with an old church and ends at the river, the New York Stock Exchange its sire. My father liked being near the exchange, though he rarely visited the floor. He’d made a name shoveling his family’s millions into venture capital and private equity, ideas thrilling him more than commodities. The family had traded in dry goods, which seemed as remote as amber waves of grain, you don’t hear much about dry goods anymore. My father claimed his was the tallest building on the street, and maybe that’s why he hated the towers. From his windows, you could see past the Empire State Building, out to the row houses in Queens and Brooklyn, airports and wetlands, industrial New Jersey. “Take a look at my shtetle, Jen,” he said, lifting me up high and despite his tight grip on my hips I felt dizzy, the drop so far and only a thin pane of glass between me and the end. I read somewhere that people who work on high floors in offices are more likely to have affairs. Something about the thin air and subliminal sense of danger keeps them keyed up. Like driving through a city on pins and needles.
“Always there is so much traffic,” Gila says, as we inch along Ha-Yarkon. She’d given me a few hours to relax at the Sheraton, read through the conference literature. The government had invited me to present on international philanthropy. Once I was a competitive speed skater; now I spend my days handing out the family’s money, though many of my father’s assets have been frozen since he disappeared. “The people of Tel Aviv, they like to go out, dress well, eat well … They don’t let much get in the way. The city is full of pride. Always they compare it to New York City—of course, most people who say this have never been to New York City. But they are very cosmopolitan and alive. Makes a lot of traffic.”
“If I were an urban planner,” I offer, for a moment actually considering it, “I’d invent a city without cars.”
“Hold on.” Gila smiles, then turns off the main boulevard, steadying us through venous streets, tourists left lagging beneath the p
alms. For me, Tel Aviv has always conjured Miami Beach with its concrete terraces, salty-dog air, and long, languorous summers, hotels shooting up against blue-green water … and Jews. All the little old ladies who argue with you in supermarkets and eat dinner at 5 o’clock. But a few generations have given the natives their own look, a tougher dark skin, mirrored in the metallic skyscrapers shooting up around the flat white boxes, many of them historic. The city’s also got its own twin towers, though they’re fraternal: one rectangular, one round, and still they smack of tragedy.
We pull up in front of a coastal bar in Yaffa, the old Arab port, now low on Arabs, high on cafés. Inside Gila signals a man in a gauzy black linen suit who kisses the air next to her cheek two times as Israeli men do and bows reverently, then leads the two of us to a secluded outdoor table overlooking the black-and-white waves, tiny lava lamps strung along the patio, chairs like ice cubes. Very chic, Gila says. She orders a clear liquor that clouds when you add water. I wanted a Coke but with the waiter in front of me say Scotch, neat. I am not supposed to drink, a little wine with dinner, but … Gila’s studying the way I lift my glass and swallow, as if she knows.
“You must be tired,” she says. “I hate flying over the Atlantic. Small flights, sure, but anything more than two hours … I try to set my watch two days before to the new time. Sometimes I take a little hashish, a pill. I have a pill if you’d like.”
I say no thanks, order another Scotch. Gila tells me she learned to fly planes in the army, often winged undercover into Lebanon, Syria, Iraq on fact-finding missions. There were no female fighter pilots when she served and she was training in psychological warfare. I ask what’s psychological warfare and she says strategy. You study your enemy, learn his mind, his methods, so you can defeat him. I say dumb American things like “wow.” I ask when she served, trying to guess her age, and she says between the Intifadas… mid-’90s? She’s younger than her talk, younger than me, and though she’s posturing I am enjoying our conversation, the thick winds coming off the sea, slow songs from the ’80s, American. Chic? I ask if she was ever in combat.
She shrugs, “Every day I am in combat.”
“I meant in the army.”
“Ah, you have romantic thoughts about the Israeli army.” She smiles, I believe. Hard to tell with her. “Americans think, Women serve, they let the gay people in, everyone’s on reserve, it’s egalitarian, but it’s really so much macho bullshit.”
“My brother used to say the same.”
“What?”
“He came over here to serve.”
“You have a brother?”
“He’s dead.” I blurt this out so fast I’m stunned. I don’t share personal information easily, if at all. Gila’s face ices over, and that’s exactly why. When you drop bombs, you’ve got to clean up the debris. “It wasn’t here, happened a little later,” I nervously add. She is silent for a long while, then shakes her head. “I had no idea.”
“Well, it’s not something for the bio.”
Staring beyond me, as if she might not have heard me or might have but despises the levity, so damn American, she repeats herself. She had no idea. Around us, others laugh, converse, provoke, and we’re stuck in the silence … until her phone coughs up a symphony.
I jump slightly. “Sorry.”
She purses her lips, raises a forefinger, shakes her head. “No.” All of this one seamless gesture before she fishes the yammering phone from her bag and checks the number, her face a declarative sentence. I feel feverish.
Gila doesn’t take the call but says we must go. She has work still for tomorrow. It’s been a long night, we agree. Then silently leave the café.
* * *
Eight. Why I don’t drink
Late into the night, fueled by Scotch and jetlag, wishing I’d taken her pill, then playing out worst-case scenarios—you betray a lover, cause an accident, someone’s death, your own, why am I doing this?—the way I’d practiced in rehab, when counting wasn’t enough … I Google her. Gila Zyskun is a common name. I find the conference website. She’s on the staff list, no picture. Beyond that, a roulette wheel of possibilities: graphic novelist, advertising executive, espionage consultant, entomologist, rare-glass collector, government bureaucrat, teenage chess champion. I flip on the TV: CNN: I’m old enough to remember the network’s coming of age during the first Gulf War. At twenty-three, I was here with my brother and felt the fear of Scud missiles pointed at damp, wintry Tel Aviv, the smell of gunpowder over the Mediterranean, people trolling the streets in gas masks, the orthodox lobbying for expensive masks to fit their beards inside, the anti-Semitism rabid in this seaside town. Tonight there are hard-luck stories of those displaced by the pullout. I’m captivated. Sleep experts say Thomas Edison revolutionized insomnia when he invented the lightbulb, extending the day into oblivion, to say nothing of TV sets and wireless Internet. I throw open the curtains and stare out at the charcoal waves to remind myself it’s nighttime, a few hours away from the conference, and I am so small.
Seven. Slacking off
Gila Zyskun shows up the next morning at the Sheraton in a tight miniskirt, curls still wet, maroon-tinged sunglasses, balancing coffee in tall paper cups like martini shakers. She’d called from downstairs, said take your bathing suit, we’re going to the beach, be fast. Though my day was slated for panels and prospecting, I’d fallen asleep thinking about her, the way her pinkie nail grazed the rim of her cloudy glass, her tall tales of moonlit reconnaissance—overnment bureaucrat? entomologist?—and while it’s impossible to visit this country without thinking of my brother, our stay at the kibbutz, all the fig trees we’d planted, the hash in Dahab, I wish I’d left him out of it. Loose lips sink ships.
That was a propaganda campaign during the Second World War: how the gossipy women back home could fuck up troop movements over a cup of coffee.
In the lobby, Gila hands me a caffeine cocktail, says she thought it would make me less disoriented. “I’m juiced up already,” I say, but it tastes very good.
“There is never too much coffee. That’s why Israel has so many cafés. We take coffee sitting down; it’s hard to find anywhere with paper cups. Starbucks couldn’t make it.”
“I thought the politics drove them out.”
“Everyone always assumes politics, sometimes it’s just life,” she says. We are walking through the parking lot. It’s already hot and my bones are jumpy, expectant. I see her Honda a few cars off. “It’s my turn now for a question,” she says, as we split, each to our own side. “Why did you stop skating?”
Her lock clicks open like a shot. “Did I tell you that? When—”
“You don’t remember,” she shrugs, pulls open her door, still looking at me over the roof. I remember drinking a few Scotches and telling her my brother was dead. Not much more. “Jetlag is very powerful. Once after a terrible rocky flight I married a man I just met.”
“Married? You don’t seem the type.”
“I’m not.”
She dips beneath the roof, slams the door. Beyond the parking lot, frothy waves tumble into the beach, already too crowded. Years ago I watched a woman dive from the top of this hotel. Saw bodies on the beach hive together, as if in a disaster film—tourists, police, men in fatigues—but it was too late. The Sheraton is a tall building and she’d landed on concrete. People couldn’t fathom it. Even in a land where soldiers caressed their guns in restaurants, poised always to shoot, and Arab children threw rocks at tanks (this was before the era of suicide bombers), nobody wanted to believe a pretty young woman—Dutch, no less—would throw herself from a building. But sometimes everywhere you look is death.
Inside Gila’s car, I let the cool leather vanquish me. We are going to a beautiful place, she tells me. Private, she says knowingly. We can swim, have lunch at the spa, even return for the afternoon sessions. Nothing is too far from anything else.
Israel is paved with primitive two-lane highways. Marc and I hitchhiked everywhere, once he’d had enough of th
e army and quit. He left me frantic messages, begging me to come, just don’t tell the old bastard—my father had arranged the army after the cops seized fifty pounds of mushrooms from Marc’s apartment, Hefty bags full of them. The old bastard was capable of tectonic shifts in time and space, could bend the law with one phone call. He’d been prospecting in Israel since the Six-Day War, helping to modernize the desert ravaged for centuries by explorers and asylum seekers, his belief in the land holy, rehabilitative. The Jews would make a man of my brother. But my father underestimated Marc’s resistance, and though I was about to begin aggressive training for my second Olympics, the one I’d fantasized about every day since flopping Calgary, I left the country to be with my brother. I never qualified.
At the beach, we climb up on big rocks and lay out a few towels. Gila has come prepared. She says I can change into my suit but don’t worry about the top. It’s European style. The water is a shallow green today, like a drained emerald. I don’t want to be topless in front of her, plagued by an atavistic terror of shared hotel suites, locker rooms, shower stalls: You’re afraid to look but more afraid to not-look too hard. But you get good at pretending. We lie next to each other absorbing the day, talking easily.
When she stands and rolls her arms through the holes of her gauzy shirt, I don’t want to go. We have a reservation, she says. A seaweed wrap before lunch.
To be wrapped I must take off all my clothes, hand over my body to the experts. Gila lies next to me, naked, and I’m not-lookin because this is what women do. These thoughts surprise me. Nothing about my life now is closeted. Ours is a concealed terrace, sunny but embedded in a cool granite fortress, a fleet of leafy green plants on the floor. Bodies wrapped, our eyes are covered with plastic goggles and faces rubbed with a sandy cream. Years ago I took a mud bath in the Dead Sea, let the salt hold me up like a million tiny fingers. It’s impossible to drown, Marc said, and I felt light as a souvenir T-shirt in the East River.
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