The Love Machine & Other Contraptions

by Nir Yaniv

  Damp fires raised black and sticky smoke. They began in the south, then, like an ink stain spreading on a white paper on its way to becoming a Rorschach test, north and east. Thousands of people warmed themselves by them. Street bands, street theatres, underground shows, acrobats, dancers, peddlers, beggars, guerilla advertisers, soft drink sellers, cats, dogs, all circled around them, migrated between them. The city slowly turned into a huge amusement park, ornamented with colorful junk and twisted trees.

  Residents died, some of them by violence, some by cold or lack of food. Residents were born, some in the mostly abandoned hospitals, most near the warmth of the fires. Residents suffered from shock, stopped responding, stared endlessly at the new empty sky with opaque eyes, locked themselves in frozen apartments. Residents hid, rebelled, disappeared, split.

  The rest just got used to it.

  ~

  Right beside one of the big fires, standing on a small metal stool, a writer was publishing his new book for the third time this non-evening. It was a collection of short stories about the Tel Aviv that Once Was—the sun, the heat, the sea, rented apartments, clubs, pubs, girls, boys, girls, boys, lots and lots of healthy sex, boisterous and unashamed.

  The audience was quiet, and that was probably the greatest difference between the residents of the city in their current condition and the people they were who-knows-how-long-ago, under the sun. Children, men, women, small babies, all sat on the cracked ground and listened. Except for the occasional sound of wood crackling in the fire, the silence was perfect.

  As he was publishing, it occurred to him that his stories included no shred of the past-city’s shortcomings—the horrible humidity, the poisonous yellow haze that covered it every few summers, the pollution, the traffic jams, the lack of decent parking, the preposterous cost of everything, the dog turds, the indifference of the people. The more he read the more he realized that these stories, as good as he thought they were when he had just finished writing them, were empty of real content, said nothing at all.

  Maybe he needed them as a consolation for something he had lost—though in fact, since the transition of the city, his personal state of things improved considerably. He did not suffer from writer’s block anymore, and he was invited to publish more and more. But, for some reason, only stories like these. When he tried reading aloud some of his other stories, those that took place in strange places, that had imaginary women in them, and bizarre metaphors, and imageries which were not connected to the once-upon-a-time-city, the silence of the crowd became cold and estranged. Nothing was ever said to him, but the feeling was very strong.

  And now the words were flowing easily from his mouth, standard, normal words, familiar on the verge of repulsiveness. Despite that, he felt calm and unhurried. That’s life, said the feeling, and it isn’t bad enough to do anything about it.

  He finished reading a story, smiled mechanically at the audience. There was a bit of clapping. He climbed off the stool and went over to the fire to grab himself a hot potato. From the corner of his eye he noticed several people in the audience who wanted to get over, come and talk to him, compliment him, probably. He preferred to avoid such conversations but never—in this new existence, at least—refused them. Still, they can wait, he thought. I need just a minute alone, so that I don’t come apart at the seams.

  Behind him, without a sound, appeared the woman of his dreams.

  ~

  A lady, in her fifteenth floor apartment in a handsome building in Ramat Aviv, boiled some water over a small fire of wood shavings and small twigs. Dew dripped slowly from the window for a very long time, stubbornly fighting the dust and dirt which had accumulated there during the past not-really-months, but she did not grant any of that even a single glance.

  She hummed to herself, distractedly, a quiet tune. After some time she lifted the pot, carried it through the new opening in the wall that had once separated her apartment from that of the neighbor, put it in the kitchen, then went on to take care of the baby.

  It was a good life. She had overcome many, many problems, and had even found love, and all this without having crossed even once the borders of the fifteenth floor. The world outside may do as it saw fit, riots in the street, throats slit—she had a life of her own. She had even gotten used to the recurring dreams, the small spots of pain, the sight of a small man with a big hat disappearing into a fountain.

  The sound of steps came from outside, followed by the neighbor from the apartment next door. Uncombed, beautiful, majestic, a savior and a father, and in his hand a fresh bundle of twigs that he had brought from the outside world, fifteen floors away. She smiled at him, and they both turned to look at their son. They still could not decide what name to give him.

  “Maybe ‘happiness’,” the father said.

  “That’s a tree-huggers’ name,” the lady said, but with a softness that no one who had ever spoken with her on the phone would have suspected. “There are no such people anymore.”

  “It’s the other way around, we’re all tree-huggers now,” the father said, and glanced meaningfully at the bundle of twigs in the corner.

  “But not like these.”

  “Not like these trees?”

  “Not like these huggers,” she said, and her eyes said, don’t get smart-ass on me, but kindly.

  “Well, have you thought of a good name, then?”

  “No,” the lady said. “But, you know, I think... that is, I’m not even sure that we have to give him a name.”

  “What do you mean?” the father said. “Of course we have to. How can he do without a name?”

  “That was true, once,” the lady said. The word ‘once’ was pronounced in a somewhat different way from its usual sound. A pronunciation which meant not ‘at this or other time in the past’, but rather ‘at that particular time in the past, before we got here.’ A pronunciation which, unknown to the lady, had spread all over the city and was common to every living person in it. “Today, however, I see no reason, no need for a name.”

  “But—” the father said, and then there was a knock on the door.

  Hesitation. Silence. Not fear, but lack of understanding. Who would want to—who could—come here, here of all places, to this home of a lady and a neighbor and a baby, to this improvised flat?

  The door handle moved. The door opened. In the doorframe, they saw the shadow of a peddler and a hat.

  ~

  A teenager, thin as a stake, lay on the sand and waited for the day to start or to end. She wasn’t surprised by the sudden gust of air, or the appearance, out of nowhere, of a weird old man. Far away, the wind whistled in the breakwater that hadn’t broken anything for quite a long time. The girl reached out, gave the old man her hand. He gave her a surprised glance, as if she had gotten the better of him. As if he had planned a whole conversation that would have led to him asking her to give him her hand, and which had been cancelled out by her single movement. He stepped toward her, one step. He smiled. And afterwards they both said many, many words, but not on the sea-less sand. Not there. The sand was left in silence, with no old man, no girl that could have been his daughter. And no one listened anymore to the whistle of the wind in the breakwater.

  ~

  The writer turned around, tossing a hot potato between his hands, and noticed her.

  Noticing and recognizing another person is a long and tedious process. At first the other is just a shape screened on the retina. Then the brain decodes the image and decides that it’s probably a person, and immediately after that—it’s the oldest trick in the book—this person’s gender. Then come some other details, and at last: is that a stranger, a friend, someone you’ve met before? All of this takes place in much less than a second, or much more.

  The writer felt as if he had skipped the whole tedious process. The very moment he noticed the woman standing by him in the firelight, her sandy hair, her black eyes, that certain glance that burned into him, he knew. Immediately, he knew. As if his brain had told hi
s eyes what to see, as if the knowledge was already there inside, waiting for the right moment to float to the surface and reappear.

  The hot potato stayed in his right hand, causing a burn that he never felt.

  Looking at her, he suffered a long and painful recounting of all the unpleasant thoughts that had accumulated in his mind since that last night, since then. Had she really wanted to spend the night with him? Or maybe, since her warning was real, her declaration of having to obey his wishes was also true? But why did she tell him of that, anyway? She had to warn him, she did not have to tell him anything about herself. Did she want that night with him? Did she really want it?

  And if not...

  He said, “I’m sorry.”

  He said, “You see, I didn’t think that you really...”

  He said, “How could I know? What would you do in my place? Who would believe such a story? An under-city...”

  He said, “I know that what I’m saying doesn’t matter. I know that. I don’t know what to do.”

  He said, “It’s just... I don’t know what to say.”

  She said nothing.

  He said, “Say something,” and then it occurred to him that maybe she still had to obey his every whim, so he added, “please.”

  She said, “Come with me.”

  He followed her. He could not disobey.

  ~

  The peddler stepped inside, into the apartment, and stopped. He raised his hat in a mechanical, ungraceful gesture. When he put it back on his head and lowered his hand, his face was revealed. The remains of a trickle of blood were still visible on the edge of his mouth.

  “Honorable lady,” he said.

  “You!” the lady said, in a voice she hadn’t used since the last time the sun shone on her face.

  “Excuse me,” said the neighbor, the father. “Do you know each other?”

  “I... he...” the lady said.

  “Pardon me, sir,” the peddler said, strictly and quietly, “but I need to have a word with your wife.” And he stepped forward, one step.

  “Leave me alone!”

  “I fear that I cannot.”

  “Leave her!”

  The baby started crying. The lady shot a frightened glance at it, and then turned to the peddler again.

  “Sir,” said the peddler to the father, “please stand still.”

  “Leave him alone!” said the lady, who felt something passing between the two men, and turned to her partner. “Do something!”

  But the father did not move.

  “What have you done?” roared the lady. “What have you done to him? Leave him... leave us... leave me alone! Leave!”

  The baby cried and cried and cried.

  “Shhhh,” the peddler said, gently, quietly.

  The baby fell silent. She fell silent.

  “Come,” the peddler said, and took hold of her hand, and she did not resist him, didn’t utter a word of protest or make a sound.

  A murmur of wind passing through a closed window, playing with leaves of a dead tree, scattering the hair of a bald man, whirling the smoke of a long extinguished fire, hurrying the waves of a sea gone dry.

  In a flat, a neighbor and an orphaned child are crying.

  ~

  A day, and under it a vast forest of needle-shaped towers, cylinders, spheres, cells, chains of vertical bubbles floating one above the other, never touching but somehow connected, and here and there, far, far away, people, women, men, children, moving in strange patterns but still those of a city, and everything is green and brown and orange and rich yellow. It seemed to him that he was looking into a living cell through a microscope, just the way he had in elementary school so many years and one non-year ago, but the picture was slowly changing, and suddenly he became aware of the enormous scale of the structures—the things—the bodies—and the forest went up and up, and the sunlight glowed on the...

  Sunlight!

  The forest climbed, up and up, floated toward him, and the writer finally understood that it was he who was moving, descending. And then, far away, he noticed a borderline, the end of the forest, and beyond it—a blue glare; it took just a moment for the image to register, and he knew then that he was looking at the seashore of Tel Aviv. Between the sea and the forest—bright yellow sand, as if nothing had changed, as if in a moment it would be filled with elderly people having their daily exercise and swimmers and parents and children building sand castles.

  A hand touched his hand, waking him from his stupor.

  “That’s our city,” said the woman of his dreams, “Under Tel Aviv, which is now Upper Tel Aviv.”

  “I...” the writer said, “it’s beautiful! It’s wonderful!”

  A big smile lit his face. That was the realization of his best, most misunderstood and unappreciated and rare stories, those which, by their quality, compensated for their lack of quantity. He felt elated. He felt like crying. He felt like flying.

  The woman said, “It’s dying.”

  ~

  A kaleidoscope of sunlight and spray and shadow, and a lady and a peddler appeared on a bright green meadow. Around them, great and mighty towers rose, soft-colored tendrils casting giant shadows, under the bluest of blue skies.

  The lady, silent, did not look at any of that. Her head was lowered, and she was staring at the ground.

  “Look,” the peddler said, and immediately she raised her head. “Look at our fair city in the sunlight.”

  She started noticing some details, stains of murky red upon the green, dry white in the middle of the yellow.

  “Your own sun, the hard, the cruel one, the source of your life, the life of all your people. But not so for us.”

  The lady did not reply. Her mouth was not blocked, and neither was her mind. When the peddler had silenced her, she had simply lost the will to speak.

  “These are our last days,” the peddler said. “You were brought to share our sorrow, maybe to save us.”

  This time he looked directly at her, expecting an answer. When he did not receive any he added, “You may speak.”

  The lady opened her mouth to scream.

  “Quietly,” he added.

  “Please take me back there,” she whispered. “Please. I want to go back home.”

  “That home is ours,” the peddler said. “And yours—here. Just a coincidence, bad luck, doing the deed too hastily, too eagerly...”

  “Please!”

  “You were given three warnings,” he said, “and of those three not one was received. To three children of your city we have revealed ourselves, and with those three we may turn the wheel, return the city, make it real.”

  “What?”

  “Everything will be as it was,” the peddler said, “as if nothing had happened. As if no time has passed since then, since that time and this time.”

  “No!” the lady said, as loudly as she could through the peddler’s ban on her mouth.

  “Please,” the peddler said. “I beg. We beg.” He kneeled before her, lowered his head, silent and sad in his poor clothes. And so they stayed, maybe for seconds, maybe for hours. The sun shone without mercy on him, on his hat, on the grass, on the towers.

  ~

  “We’ve dreamed of the sun,” said the dream woman, “for ages and ages. And now she’s burning us, our city, and we’re helpless.”

  Around them, the forest continued to rise while they sank deeper and deeper into it, and stains of rust appeared on the towers’ trunks, few at first, then more and more, and the tendrils were full of holes, and solid walls became perforated and airy and crisp, and broke.

  “Is there a way to return it?” the writer asked. “That is, make Tel Aviv return to where it was before... that is, where it once was?”

  “Some say,” she answered, “that if the three who were warned, the sons and daughters of the other city, the chosen ones, could be brought here, and convinced to... but that’s just a daydream, a false hope.”

  “Convinced to do what?”

&nbs
p; “To abandon their previous lives.”

  “I thought that in your world we had no choice but to obey you.”

  “Convinced,” she said, “without force, without coercion.”

  “No problem,” the writer said. “I can do that.”

  The woman of his dreams looked at him in a way that made him feel stupid, but not enough to make him regret his words. He added, “Really!”

  He wanted to hold her hand, but something stopped him from doing so. Probably, he thought, there’s still a force applied on me, coercion.

  ~

  The lady was crying quietly, almost pleasantly.

  “I can’t make you do it,” the peddler said. “You can choose it only by your own free will. Without your will we’re lost.”

  “I beg you!”

  “I cannot. Already I do not have the power to return there, to the place where the under-city I loved used to be. And when I die, which will be soon, all the rest will die too, and only you and the two others will remain, and perhaps some hint of our city.”

  Slowly, she stopped crying. She looked at the twisted buildings, plagued with decomposition and mold, at the yellowish haze seeping out of the ground. There was a long, long silence, with only the faintest whisper of sea-wind in the background.

  Time passed. The sun passed the zenith, moving west in a fierce blue sky. The peddler remained on his knees.

  “So my choices are, either I get stuck here without anything and spend my life alone, or I give up the life I’ve had since... since once.”

  The peddler didn’t answer. The lady considered it. She thought of the baby. She thought of its father, the loved one, her beautiful one, the strange one. She told herself that even if the past non-year ceased to exist, she still knew exactly where he lived.

  She lowered her gaze to the peddler. She said, “You made me do it. Now make me free.”

  ~

  The peddler hesitated. Then he said, “You are a free woman.”