The Love Machine & Other Contraptions

by Nir Yaniv

  Ah.

  You are going to buy.

  Very good. Wonderful. I feel you connecting... yes... I feel the thought of purchasing developing within you, edging closer. Yes, ah. The feeling of purchase—there is nothing better than that, don’t you think? The knowledge that something, quite soon, is going to be yours. Ah, oh. Yes, that’s good. You got online, now you choose a product. A toothbrush? Oh, well. Whatever. Oh. Perfect. Yes. You choose the color, the texture, the rigidity of the handle... oh... yes... you... you’re about to pay! With a credit card! Oh! Yes! Yes! Pay! Oh! You are so great! Marvelous! Wonderful! Yes! Pay! More! Input your credit card number! Oh, yes! Yes! Oh! Fantastic! More! Expiry date! Yes! Humongous! Magnificent! I.D. number! More! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! You are so hot, so powerful, wonderful, splendid, you are the king, conqueror, man, My Lord! Yes! Yes! More!

  The deal is—Oh, yeeeeeeeeeesssss!—Done!

  Was it as good for you as it was for me?

  ~

  You understand, of course, that I was faking.

  Contraption: Sun Machine

  The sun machine orbits our planet at roughly the speed of sound. One day it will get tired of this. One day it will slow down. One day it will decide to come down, and then we’re going to have a party.

  Final Moments

  The roses refused to wither. Leah routinely replaced the water in the red plastic pitcher, and the location she chose, in the living room, was properly illuminated without being exposed to direct sunlight, but inside, she knew that this was not enough. Flowers have a certain life expectancy, which cannot be as long as two and a half months. That was the amount of time it had taken her to notice.

  Leah looked at the roses every morning, right after Gideon went out to have his daily walk in the park. They looked just as fresh as they were the day he brought them, which was his and Leah’s tenth anniversary.

  I’m fifty-four, she said to herself, looking around the living room, which was clean and tidy and looked brand new, just like the flowers. I have Gideon, I have a nice home, I have all the time in the world to do whatever I wish. Why am I unsatisfied?

  Their tenth, boring anniversary.

  That’s unfair, she thought. Maybe I’m the one who’s boring, not Gideon. But she knew this was not true. Wealthy, kind, gentle Gideon, who looked good for his age—he had just retired, though he had managed to do that at a slightly younger age than most—Gideon, who may have been a heroic fighter in his youth, if one believed the stories of his friends, but who never knew how to refuse her anything. Gideon, who bought her these too-predictable roses, which had only now surprised her by refusing to wither.

  The only thing withering in this house is me, Leah thought, and sighed. Here, I can’t even find proper imagery. It was so easy, once.

  Once, when she was a young and fashionable poet, a star of those magazines that no one reads and which are famous for it—at least in the right circles—when she was admired, mysterious, unreachable... so much glory, so much excitement, so much fun.

  Oh God, she thought. It’s me who’s the boring one.

  ~

  In the beginning of the third month—spring was already gone, replaced by a suffocating summer, and a yellow haze had emerged from the nearby road; she was forced to close all the windows and run the air conditioner, though it made her feel uneasy—her sleep started to suffer. She tried staying awake later to make herself sleepy, but in vain. She tried reading books, but got bored.

  Desperate, she leafed through some new issues of a poetry magazines she had received for review, assuming they would make her fall asleep as they usually did, but all she gained by that was an annoying headache combined with a slight abhorrence of the horde of wanna-be writers filling their pages, and a hot, scorching hatred of the few good poets in the lot. The roses ignored all of this, and everything else. It occurred to her that maybe her insomnia was connected to the enigma of the roses, that her mind might be trying, unconsciously, to solve this little riddle.

  Gideon didn’t notice a thing, of course. Neither the roses nor the insomnia. Every evening they lay in bed, side by side, reading; at about ten Gideon would get up, go to the bathroom, return, turn to his left, his face away from her, and immediately fall asleep.

  Where are those boys, she thought, the ones who chased me, who serenaded me? She remembered one of them, who had embarked on a hunger strike right in front of the classroom in which she gave her weekly lectures on poetry. Only twenty-one years old, and already lecturing about poetry! Where did all that go? How did that amazing untouchable poet girl become the woman she was now?

  Because, eventually, she was touched. Or rather, over-touched.

  ~

  One night she listened listlessly to Gideon’s steps as he was returning to their bedroom through the living room. He paused for a moment. Maybe something stood in his way. Sometimes he’d stop whatever he was doing to clear a newspaper or a book from his favorite armchair. A tidy man, Gideon. Too tidy.

  Seconds passed, and he still didn’t move. She heard no steps, just the hum of the air conditioner. It had taken her years to get used to that sound. When she was young she couldn’t stand it. Right now that relentless hum was filling her ears, and even it couldn’t stop her from imagining that time had stopped. She’d sooner believe that, than believe Gideon was doing anything out of the ordinary. But even if the hum was not enough to disprove it, her own slow heartbeats were.

  Five beats. Ten.

  She said, “Gideon?”

  “I’m coming,” he answered, through the wall separating the rooms. She thought she heard something strange in his tone. Maybe stress. Maybe just a spasm passing through the vibrating walls of air separating us... no, don’t think in poetry. It’s too horrible.

  Several more heartbeats, then there was the slightest hint of heavy breathing, and then she heard a sound. A crisp, tiny sound of something being broken. Like thin ice over hot glass.

  She stood up.

  “Leah,” Gideon said, but she was already standing in the door to the living room. He stood in its middle, his hand hanging limply over the roses.

  “Gideon?”

  He raised his hand. It took her a moment to notice the change. The red plastic pitcher contained only stalks now, and the table below was filled with broken petals.

  Broken.

  That’s not imagery, she told herself. Someone had told her a long time ago, when she was a child, of an experiment in which some scientists put a frog in a refrigerator, or maybe they dipped it into a vat of some very cold material, much colder than dry ice—she didn’t remember the exact details, nor did she want to—and then took it out and dropped it on the floor. The frozen frog had broken into five pieces... She did not want to remember that story.

  She did not want to have quite a lot of other memories.

  The petals, too, were broken into pieces.

  ~

  She believed him immediately, even before he uttered a single word.

  “I... there’s something I can do. I think I always could, but just recently I discovered that I could.”

  “What have you done, Gideon?” she asked, feeling as if she knew the answer already.

  “Listen to me. I know that it’s not an easy thing to... I know that you won’t believe me.”

  Occasionally, during their ten years of marriage, it had occurred to her that two people who had met at such a mature age couldn’t ever really know each other, unlike young couples who grew old together. But she knew Gideon well enough to know that he had no imagination whatsoever. She knew that whatever he was telling her, in his tedious and vague and boring way, even if it sounded like the most ludicrous fairy tale, must be true. Besides, the proof was on the table in front of her.

  “And the roses stayed young all that time? You didn’t let them grow old?”

  Him, of all the people in the world. Had he indeed stopped time, or even pulled it a bit in the opposite direction? And was it limited to roses?

  “No
, they grew older,” Gideon said. “Every night they withered, and every time I had to come, lay a hand on them and make them young again.”

  So they didn’t remain young, those roses. They grew old. So did we, Gideon, so did we.

  “Oh, Gideon,” she said, and then grew silent.

  How did he discover this ability? she wondered. Did he simply wake up one morning and decide to make time stop? And are there limits to what he can do? And is time—generally, and particularly for Gideon—the cure for everything? And is that a metaphor or something real?

  Only the smoky remains of all these questions drifted through her mind for a tiny, immeasurable period of time. They had flashed like sparks around the bonfire of the big question, the one which had sizzled through her from the moment she heard his explanation, or maybe since the day she had noticed that the roses were refusing to face death. Or maybe, she thought with a kind of illusory hope, since that long lost day, when she was only twenty-two, and she had realized that she had lost both her love and her poetry.

  She said, “Can you make me young, too?”

  ~

  Gideon stands and looks down at Leah, lying on the bed. He doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t know what he wants. Leah doesn’t understand that her question has shown, more than anything else, that she doesn’t want him now. Maybe she never did. Why is he obeying her, then? He’s not a mindless slave. He remembers reading about such men, who become totally enslaved, who can’t live independently, and who are hopelessly self-deprecating. He’s not such a man. He’s independent, adult, he knows what he wants. That is, usually—but not now.

  What is wrong with me? he thinks. He has a reasonable income, not too large but sufficient for all their needs. He put in his time at a large company, then became self-employed, creating his own business, sold it for enough money to allow him to retire. He’s not sixty yet. He has a beautiful, educated woman, who was once a poet, an interesting woman; he thinks that he loves her. Or maybe he’s just gotten used to her. Their ten years together don’t seem to him, now, to be such a long time. He didn’t know her when she was a poet, when she was bold. He was bold too, when he was young, but that was just serving in the army, like everyone else.

  Lying on the bed, she’s watching him. There’s more than a hint of impatience in her gaze. This shouldn’t surprise him, but it does. She waited two days for him to gather his powers. He told her how it became more and more difficult for him to keep the roses young. They broke, he reminded her, that was the final result. She was not deterred, and he shouldn’t have been surprised at that, either. Leah always knew what she wanted. Just like him. Just like his usual self, that is.

  She looks at him in a new way, different. Neither loving, not hating. Her expression seems vaguely familiar, though he’s quite sure that he’s never seen it on her face before. There’s no affection or disgust, revulsion or warmth, calm or anxiety there. Only one thing can be seen in that face now: need. A great, devouring need. And he, Gideon, isn’t the husband, the loved one anymore, nor is he the person with or without whom she’s spent the last ten yours. He’s merely an object now, an instrument, a device. A fountain of youth.

  No, there’s one more thing which can be seen in that face, which looks stranger and more alien with every passing minute: hope.

  He knows that if he manages to do it, he’ll see Leah in a way he’s never seen her before. He admits to himself that he’s a bit curious. Still, he prefers not to do it, that thing which she forces him to—which she makes him—which she leaves him without choice but to—do. No, no, he wants to do it no less than her. Since the moment the thought came into being, both of them knew that they couldn’t avoid it.

  He lays both of his hands over Leah, one on her forehead and the other on her belly. His younger self would have been aroused, looking at her lying there, but for years he’s been indifferent in that regard. Leah doesn’t mind. Or does she?

  She smiles at him, but her expression seems forced. He closes his eyes, then opens them again. He thinks of something. Something that isn’t Leah. Not the bed, not this house, definitely not he himself, Gideon. He has no name, he has no wife, no country. Winter, rain. Gray clouds. A gray empty plain, with no water, no moisture at all, no noise. A gray filling the eyes, clogging the ears, without odor, without taste, without feeling. His eyes may be rolling now, whenever this now is, and a sound of plucking connects his nose to his ears to his throat, a bit like the pressure release which occurs when changing altitude quickly, dropping from a height, like a plane falling suddenly towards the ground and which will manage to avoid collision at the last moment, or won’t. The last moment, a term which is never absolute, can never be, but always relative. Last moment of what, related to what, there’s always something which comes just a moment later. Even when you die, things happen a moment later. Maybe you see and hear and taste gray, like the gray on his tongue and in his nose and throat and stomach, a cloud of uncertainty, irresolution, in-identity.

  Inidentity. Who is the one thinking here? That gray thing of nothingness, of unawareness, of waning, something woolly, maybe like a sweater or a light shirt, the gray doesn’t fade out—it becomes red, burning against the retina, like suffering a blow to the head, and then it vanishes and uncertainly becomes knowing and irresolution becomes identity, and he’s Gideon again.

  ~

  He breathes heavily, suffering as he has never done before. He falls on his knees. His vision is still blurred. He can’t look at the bed and its occupant. He needs time, he needs to wait, he needs to recuperate. He feels as if his stomach and tongue and ears are filled with lumps of gray matter, but he doesn’t know—or remember—what those might mean. He doesn’t remember anything from the moment he entered the room and saw Leah lying on the bed. How much time has passed like this? And how much time has passed for Leah? And in what direction?

  He stands up. It’s a slow process, but at least time runs now in the proper direction and tempo. Or so he hopes. And hopefully it will stay that way. He is afraid to think of the next thing, but he can’t wait anymore, not while in bed—in the place where he just left the woman with whom he shared the last ten years of his life—now lies something which could be anything at all. He had realized the danger before, analyzed it with his brain, but now it hits his heart. His muscles become cramped. She could be a year younger, a year older, but there’s no guarantee that he didn’t send her right back to her adolescence. Her childhood? He may look at the bed and find nothing there, except for some bloody mucus, the remains of life, remains which won’t give a clue as to their origin.

  It could have been—he almost smiles—the perfect murder. No one could ever have guessed.

  He looks down at the bed.

  ~

  There’s a beautiful woman there.

  He had seen pictures of her short glorious period. The hair, the smile, the hermit-like clothing which served only to hint at what was under it, the look, a gaze that still pierces your eyes many years after it was photographed. A look which he has never seen on the face of his wife until earlier today, when he found her waiting for him in their bed, waiting, as she told him, for him to convert an old frog into a younger frog. He realizes now that this was the very same gaze.

  And now there’s a hint of a smile on her lips and her eyelids are closed. Maybe she’s asleep. Even so, without the look, the Leah lying in bed now is far more impressive than the one in the pictures. Gideon feels his heart starting to race, faster and faster. He cannot take his eyes off her. It’s been years since he thought that way about women, about girls, but she...

  His wife?

  He overcomes his excitement, plants his feet in the floor, stands straight, forces his heart to slow down, forces himself to relax. He stands and looks at her. She doesn’t move.

  His hand reaches for her hair. He considers waking her up. The frog, she said, and him in the role of the prince, and he remembers her saying, numerous times, so banal, so banal, so ba
nal, and still return to this legend, again and again and again. His hand almost touches her hair, then changes direction toward her face. The idea of speaking, of waking her up with his voice, doesn’t occur to him. He feels as if his voice could shatter her, and him, like the roses.

  His hand, very lightly, touches her cheek. She opens her eyes.

  The look. The look! As if that old picture is burning, as if a river of molten lava lives inside that body and is glaring at him through those eyes. He almost takes a step back. Almost. And the gaze, he sees now, is still unfocused. She doesn’t see him clearly yet. Who knows what she sees? And then, in one short moment, measurable just like the period of time in which Gideon performed the transition, the rejuvenation, the eyes lose most of their fierceness and focus upon him. It’s as if they’re connected, he thinks, her right eye to my left eye, her left eye to my right eye. He’s a bit embarrassed. What should an old man, nearly sixty years old, do with a wife who’s suddenly twenty? She must be in shock, he realizes. Maybe it’s a painful physical experience. Maybe she’s hurting. Maybe...

  Gideon puts a smile on his face for her, a soft smile, a supporting smile, gentle and full of compassion. He bends over the bed, moving closer to her. Welcome, the smile says. I’m still here, I haven’t changed. I, your Gideon, am ready to do anything for you. And as always, do it gladly, without complaint. I’m yours. Forever.

  She screams.

  ~

  Her eyes are closed. She smells a weak flowery odor. She can’t identify the flower. Weird. She can’t identify herself. There’s a slight hum from above, maybe of an air conditioner. She doesn’t like air conditioners. They make her sick. Everyone who knows her knows that whenever she’s around, the air conditioning must be turned off. Knows her. Knows who? She doesn’t feel sick. A bit dizzy, maybe. It occurs to her that maybe, if she opens her eyes, everything will turn out fine. She thinks about that, or maybe about nothing in particular. Maybe she’s remembering something. The hum continues.