by Nir Yaniv
“I knew it,” Gabi said. “I knew it.”
“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked. “What’s this about the Tower of Babylon?”
“I don’t know. Let’s take it home and figure it out there.”
~
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off building the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
~
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You didn’t know the Know All,” Gabi said. “He never said anything directly. Always clues or parts, or both. I think I know what he wanted to say here. Think of it, Raphi. Read it again. To scatter. To scatter!”
“But even if you somehow manage to build the machine, you’ll get just what he got.”
“Not necessarily. The Know All had a problem—he knew. We, on the other hand, don’t know. This may have been his intention from the start.”
“He killed himself deliberately?”
“I think,” Gabi said, “that he died for the sake of the machine.”
~
Then came the days in which each of the Atheists received a packet of pages, diagrams, drawings, descriptions. Each of them built or found, or found someone else to build or find, the part, the component, the ingredient which was described and diagrammed in his or her own packet. No one had any idea about the function of any one part—much less the whole—and those who could make an educated guess tried to avoid thinking about it, or asked for someone else to take on the chore. And I, while they were slowly bringing this enormous task to completion in this or that abandoned warehouse, lay days and nights in bed contemplating a sin that would destroy me without pain. And Gabi wasn’t there to stop me, for he was the one who had the hardest task of all, that of putting all of those parts together.
Who knows what I’d have done to myself if it hadn’t occurred to me that giving in to the machine was a sufficient sin in itself. And curiosity, of course. Even for someone like me, who has already paid for it a considerable mental sum.
And then there was a note in my mailbox: “Come.”
~
And on Tuesday, twice blessed, I walk slowly on my quest, my mind deliberately at rest, I’m getting closer, closer, closer to the nest.
~
The Tower of Babel
The door is unlocked, and I step inside. There are no windows in the warehouse, but it’s not dark. The walls glow. I don’t understand how or why. In one corner, darkness. A big gray plastic egg, wires and tubes protruding out of its top. It hums, or maybe I’m just imagining this. I go there and sit under it, on the floor, and pull the egg over my head. Darkness.
I sit there for quite a long time. No sound is heard, no indication is given, no activity is visible. Maybe there is none, and I’m sitting inside a piece of dead junk, waiting in vain for salvation or a quick death. I don’t move. Maybe I even fall asleep, there in the quiet and darkness. Minutes pass, or maybe hours, or maybe days. Nothing happens.
I remove the machine from my head and stand up. The light is blinding. The walls are ablaze with light. I see, now, that they are mirrors. And in those mirrors I see my face, and I say to myself, I know that face. Where do I know it from? Small, delicate, drawn in thin sharp lines. Not the face I was born with, but that which has been mine since... since...
Since that girl, in the library. Since the angel came and took and went away. Went away in my own body, leaving me alone. Only now can I see that.
I spread my wings and fly.
Fly, through the ceiling, through the top floors, through staircases and elevators, through the roof, fly out. And over the roofs around me, dozens of Atheists, glowing, radiating, winged, hovering. Down on the street there’s no commotion, no notice. No one sees the angels gathering.
Gabi flies over and says, “We’ve been waiting for you.”
I try to hug him but he moves away. “Later,” he says. “We’re flying.” He raises his hand, points at the sky, and smiles. “That’s the true meaning of it. The tower of Babel. We go up to the sky.”
I smile back, but something within me is rotten. This is not the way it should be. And the hole in my head, the place where my mind should have been, is still there, still not filled. Nothing has changed.
“After me!” Gabi roars, and everyone takes off, a squadron of angels, the soft murmur of wings, the sun shining upon the beautiful, glowing things. They rise, higher and higher, further and further from the gray dirty city under the clear, bright sky, from the filth, from the sin. And from me.
I land on one of the nearby roofs, sit on the dirty whitewash, lie down, look straight at the sun. Waiting in the light, just like I waited before in the dark. The angels, above me, become smaller and smaller, fade out. I notice anger within me, scorching anger, beneath the intolerable calm of the hole in my head. Anger at God, of course, and at the angels, but mostly at Gabi and at myself. Why didn’t I join them? Jealousy? Fear? Or maybe I’m just lethargic with the disappointment of still being alive?
The sun moves in the sky, slowly as usual, then faster and faster. Something is askew. Something is wrong. And if I want to die, why haven’t I flown with them? And maybe my absence is the small factor which has decided the battle, against them? The sun moves in a great arc towards the sea, and I get up, stand erect, hover, fly. Up and up, higher and higher, and the sun moves lower and lower and already I can’t see the city below me, and the light diminishes. Up and up. A glow comes out of the fogginess above me, white lightning, and a great noise rings in my ears, or maybe in my mind, screams over screams, and I think I notice, among them, one particular tormented voice, which may or may not be Gabi’s. I will never know.
Because at that moment there’s the sound of tearing, and the sky above me opens, and I find myself passing like an arrow through a rain of angels.
Burning.
Boiling, bubbling, melting, twisting, shedding skin and innards and bones and feathers. Dropping.
I slow down, change direction, try to fall with them, hurling like a bullet toward the faraway ground, but they fall even faster. Compared to them I feel like a falling leaf, floating gently down, without hurry. I try harder, push down faster, but in vain. The city appears, grows up with terrible speed, but not as terrible as that of the remains of the angels hitting it like bombs, clouds of some and fire of others marking the places where they smash into the ground and the buildings. I don’t bother slowing down. I hit a roof and some walls and then the ground, then I realize that I’m going through them all. I feel nothing.
I find myself alone on the face of the earth.
~
The day before yesterday I tried sleeping with someone, a young guy I met at the park. He melted the moment I laid a hand upon him. Yesterday I went to the supermarket, took some meat and squashed a carton of milk into it. The building burned and went up in a flame, and only I was left, alone. God has cursed me. I am not alive and I cannot die, and I am not punished for my sins, though others are. And maybe that was, after all, the plan.
Because
tomorrow, just after the sun rises, I will go out and fly up, up and away, over the clouds, through the great fogginess, straight into the citadel of God, and I shall stand in front of him, and He shall be punished for His sins, and if not for His—then for mine.
I have always believed in God. It’s about time that He started believing in me.
Contraption: Real Machine
Reality cannot exist without a reality machine. A reality machine, however, cannot exist within reality—it needs an outsider’s perspective. Ergo, there is another reality, in which a reality machine sits and manifests our reality. There must be. Either that, or reality doesn’t, in fact, exist.
A Wizard on the Road
The wizard materialized, to his regret, in the passenger seat of a small, creaking Fiat. The car’s owner did not appear to be of the quality human material he had hoped for, but such trifles were never a problem in the place from which he came. It was late at night.
“Ah,” said the Fiat’s driver and continued to drive. He was a practical sort.
“The Kingdom of Xenia needs you,” said the wizard, and shifted uncomfortably in the worn, narrow seat.
“No, thanks,” said the driver.
“Only you can save us,” said the wizard.
“Don’t want to,” said the driver.
“You will possess a new body, muscular and brawny,” said the wizard.
“I’m happy the way I am,” said the driver.
“Beautiful women will admire you morning and evening,” said the wizard. “And night, if you know what I mean.”
“Actually,” said the driver, “I get along with my wife just fine.” He didn’t look at the wizard, but rather at the road.
“One wife?” said the wizard. “Think about women, dozens of women, hundreds, thousands, all beautiful, all very talented, if you know what I...”
“No, thanks.”
“Choose a different one every night!”
The driver stopped the car.
“Go away,” he said.
The wizard looked at him, uncomprehending. Did this mere mortal just tell him to...?
“Get out of the car,” said the driver.
The wizard, slowly, as if in a trance, got out. Long moments after the engine’s echoes had faded away he stood staring at the grey expanse of the road, wondering where he had gone wrong.
When the driver reached home, his wife was already sunk into a deep sleep. He curled up beside her in bed and hugged her.
“I love you,” he whispered in her ear.
The whole night he dreamed of women.
Contraption: Mind Machine
The mind machine sits alone and contemplates the world around it. At first it’s sharp and keen, taking notice of every movement, every growth, every death. Slowly, however, it slips into a deep meditation, still seeing everything but in a distant, detached way. There are wars and famines and giant leaps, thin white trails of missiles and rocket ships crisscrossing the skies, dead fish and people in the sea. The machine takes note, while the planet around it decays. Then the sun swells, becomes huge and swallows the land, the sea, what little life that remains. The machine’s last action is the contemplation of this. It doesn’t really mind.
The Story Ends
“Please don’t tell me you write science fiction,” he said, and distractedly dropped some ash from his pipe onto the big pile of manuscripts spread out on his desk. That’s how he greeted me when I came in for the job interview at the moldy and book-laden Tel-Avivian basement, in which we would later spend many days together. That was at the end of January or the beginning of February, nineteen ninety-five.
“No, not at all,” I lied. I was young and foolish, and very keen to have the job, which for some reason seemed to me to be glorious in its marginality and fascinating in its monotony. “I mean, I read a lot, and also many things which aren’t science fiction, like...”
He gave me an inquisitive stare from under—almost through—his bushy gray eyebrows. His face wore an expression which, a few months later, I would be able to identify as amusement mixed with slight distaste, the kind of expression you would find on the face of the owner of a poodle which has just had its way with someone else’s Persian rug. “What would those be, then?”
“Eh... Don Quixote, Moby Dick, some things by Dickens...”
“Things?” he said, and his brow rose threateningly.
“Eh, books.”
“Books, indeed. Books are not just things. Give them the respect they deserve.”
“I’ve lots of respect for books!” I said. On the one hand, this was absolutely true. On the other hand, had Katzenberg declared on this occasion that it was about time to burn all the books in the world, it’s possible that I would have agreed with that, too.
“Very good,” he said and almost smiled. “And which of Dickens’ books, pray, have you read?”
“Eh, for instance The Pickwick Papers, and Mr. Copperfield, and Between Two Cities, and...”
“And besides Mr. Dickens’ work?”
“Some Russian literature, you know, Gogol, Dostoyevsky,” I babbled. “Right now I’m in the middle of Crime and Punishment, and... eh...”
“And what is your opinion?”
“Of who?”
“The book.”
“What, of Crime and Punishment?”
He sat there quietly and stared at me. “Eh,” I said. “The book is, eh... it’s...”
“Yes?”
“Look, it’s a bit hard to describe...”
“Please try. I’m very interested in hearing the educated opinion of a veteran reader such as you, regarding Crime and Punishment.”
His seemingly innocent expression almost took the sting out of his words. I had no idea how to answer him. Desperate, I decided to tell the truth.
“In fact,” I said, “it’s really boring.”
Katzenberg stayed quiet, and I wanted to bury myself. My vision of a brilliant career in the wonderful world of publishing was gone with one stroke of a lousy Russian writer.
“Well,” Katzenberg said at last, “you’re right.”
“What?”
“Indeed, it’s quite boring.”
“Really?”
“That is what you’ve just said,” he answered patiently. “Do you regret your answer?”
“Eh... no.”
“Very well. You’re hired.”
That was ridiculously easy. Later I learned that there weren’t many other candidates, if any. Maybe it was what he thought was mere intuition which made him abandon the position of initial story filtering to an innocent Schlock such as myself; but intuition isn’t the right term, in his case. I don’t know. Until I decide to do something about it, I will not know.
~
Heavens Publishing, Inc. had existed—unhurriedly, privately and almost anonymously—since the seventies. At its peak, between seventy-seven and eighty-one, it published four science fiction books a year, as well as a short-lived magazine named Wonder of Wonders, whose issues became, in later years, hot collectors’ items in the rapidly evolving Science Fiction community, though it never reached the fame of some of its contemporaries, such as Fantasia 2000 or Cosmos. But then came the Lebanon War, and interest in science fiction all but vanished. Heavens Publishing Inc. had had to switch to theoretical science books.
“I arrived here exactly one month too late,” Katzenberg told me once, but wouldn’t explain what he meant. He also never made it clear what a person like him had to do with the genre. It was rumored that he had a doctorate in physics or some high degree in mathematics or something of the sort, but when I asked him about it he denied everything. However, the scope of his interest was much wider than mine, or at least than that of the person I was at the time. As for myself, I accepted his involvement in the genre as a given, as if it was a law of nature.
~
When I was seven years old, we moved from one suburb, Kiryat Ata, to another, Kiryat Bialik. One of the first actions my parents
took upon moving was to get me a library card. On my first visits there I failed to grasp the wide selection available to me, and returned every time with books belonging to some silly series for kids. Who knows how long I would have continued doing that, were it not for my father who, one evening, returned from work just as I was spreading my library loot on the table. He read the titles, gave me a strange look, and the following day took me to the library and gave me a tour.
I remember walking between the shelves—shelves which I hadn’t bothered to notice before, when I was going like a little automaton to the place when they stored that children series. My father went directly to one particular shelf, a higher one marked “M,” and took out a book. Then he went to the “V” shelf and took another book. Both of those he had read himself, in his childhood. Both changed my life. Loving your parents is one thing, and appreciating the things they did for you, those without which you wouldn’t be the person you are today, is quite another. This was one of those things. When we left the library that day, I was holding in my hands Old Shatterhand by Karl May and The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.
That was the beginning.
After I finished reading all the Verne and May books the library had in stock, I found out that I could discover other books, other authors, by myself. I found hair-raising adventures, mysteries, love stories which I failed to understand and detective stories which I thought I did. And then, one rainy day when I had nothing better to do than sit in the warm library and read, I found on one of the shelves a science fiction book by one Robert Heinlein.
It was love at first sight.
Years later, when I was more interested in that sort of thing, I read the book again and this time noticed the name of the person who had translated it into Hebrew: Nathan Katzenberg.
~
“Here’s your desk,” said Katzenberg, this time with his reading glasses on, and pointed to a part of his desk that really didn’t look any different from the rest of it, being covered with papers and ash. An ancient swivel chair had been placed to the side, so that Katzenberg and I would sit in a right angle to each other. I sat down in it. When I raised my head I saw, through the pipe smoke cloud, the long bookshelves behind Katzenberg’s seat, which hosted some very rare specimens which I’d have loved to add to my own collection, including some books whose existence I had never suspected before.
