by Matthue Roth
Whether it was Mitch or not, I knew that, whoever it was, I needed to kill him. In the moment, I was sure that strangling would be the easiest way. Everybody’s neck was vulnerable. Thumbs on their Adam’s apple, and then you press in all the way.
My thumbs closed around the depression at the center of his neck. As I pressed in, the mask that was his face crumpled away. Then it fell off, and beneath it was my own.
the past tense
of us
The weather got colder. The outside world was turning completely grey. G-d was brewing up something, maybe reacting to my own foul mood, or maybe taking inspiration from it; there would be snowstorms soon.
I was having panic attacks whenever we approached Hebrew School. The car got close and my hands turned cold and clammy, resting in the rubber handle of the car door. The building rose up from the horizon and I got a taste of pre-vomit in my mouth.
Yet so far I had managed to avoid running into Mitch again.
Larissa kept telling me not to think about him. Of course, the act of her telling me involved us actually speaking to each other, an action which was growing increasingly rare. She texted me less often, perhaps aware that every time we spoke it was likely that we’d just talk about, or not talk about, the rape; and I texted her back less, afraid of what I might say to her. She knew how I felt about her. She hadn’t said anything back.
We stood opposite each other in the hallway during that ten-minute break between classes—a break which now felt too short to run away to the Wawa, or the pool, or anywhere. We didn’t even bother trying to have substantial conversations. We stood opposite each other, her pronounced curves putting my wimpish figure to shame. She looked in my eyes. My eyes roamed the hall.
“Stop looking for him,” she said.
“I’m not looking for him. I’m just looking.”
“I’m the important one here, remember? Watch me instead.” The edges of her mouth twitched. My eyes retreated into an underground bunker.
“Okay. Have you seen him?”
“Arty!”
“I was kidding! I’m just looking out for him for—” I realized I was avoiding eye contact with her, gazing instead over her shoulder. “I want to make sure he doesn’t bother you.”
“So, no. I haven’t seen him. And I’ve decided that I’m not going to.” She sounded chipper, spry, almost happy.
“You can just decide things like that?”
“Arty, I’ve been giving this a fair amount of thought. I can. My brain’s been in overtime about it. I’ll ignore him. Even if he’s right in front of me. Even if he accurately predicts the outcomes of horse races. I won’t even write it down. I’m not going to listen to him. He’s out of my life, and I don’t really care. I’ve got too much going on to worry about Mitch Martin.”
“What is going on with you?”
“You know. Just the usual.”
“No, I really don’t know. Larissa, the past few weeks have felt like months.”
“Life is really absorbing. I don’t know how we could afford to talk on the phone as much as we did.”
“Did? Did you just use the past tense?”
“Arty! Don’t be like that, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just, like—”
“Yes?”
“There’s tons of stuff. School. Piano. This place. College visits. My mom is making me start to look at colleges. Each one has a hundred-page prospectus. I have to read it all, and there’s eighteen of them—”
“Eighteen hundred pages? Shirley you can’t be serious—”
“Who’s Shirley?” She grinned, recognizing the joke. That part of us, at least, was unchanged. “Okay, I’m exaggerating. A little. But life has gone seriously wonky. All these things I have to do, and the stuff on the side that I want to do, and I’ve missed you a ton, Art.”
“I missed you too.” Just saying so felt inadequate. I thought maybe we would hug, but in between classes at Hebrew School? Probably not.
“I know.” A quick flash of emotion, and I saw her face close up. She was back to being perky and cheerful and Miss Hebrew School, Larissa, the straight-A student who never skipped class. We were over. For now.
I waited for her to say something to make it better, to tighten the slack between us. I think she could sense it.
“Hey, we have Newspaper next, don’t we? Tell you what. When it’s time to write articles, you write what you’ve been up to, and so will I. We’ll make it like letters to each other, but we’ll do it in the form of editorials or feature stories or something. Then we’ll make sure we get each other during editing time.”
*
It wasn’t that we’d been avoiding each other. We were rarely in the same physical space, so that part was easy. And it wasn’t that we spoke less, since we still spent the same hours on the phone, talking or listening to the same music at the same time or just sharing air.
It was our trust. At one point, we trusted each other with our lives, we could say anything to each other. And now that anything felt like a threat. Like we weren’t allowed to touch or even mention it—not just the rape, but our friendship, each other. We only talked about other things, not ourselves. It was a box that couldn’t be opened, a spell that could never be uttered. As though, if we did, it could be even more dangerous for us than what had already happened.
*
Our Jewish Newspaper class was exactly what it sounded like—every month we produced a newspaper and distributed it to the school. Mostly it covered burning contemporary issues like going to Israel and whether it was okay to date non-Jews and which singers and TV people happened to be Jewish.
Our teacher, Milt Levin, was an old grumbley veteran of the Yiddish press. He was about a million years old and he cursed like a coven of witches. He said he’d been in sixteen wars. When we checked, it was more than both the United States and Israel had been in, added up together, in the past century. But when one of us asked him how—or why—he would fix his unwavering gaze upon us and say, “Let’s just hope you little slackers never have to find out.” He always wore suspenders. His breath smelled like museum.
He hated most of us, but he loved Larissa. He always said she was tough. “Any pretty girl who makes it through high school alive has gotta be a survivor,” he said to her.
“Like Auschwitz?” Mitch used to joke, and poked her in her too-skinny ribs. I should have seen it coming. Milt hated Mitch, too. He used to shoot down Mitch every chance he got. Which was often.
Milt also saw the monthly newspaper project as a waste of energy, and took as much time as possible telling us journalist survival stories. Today he was talking about Bali.
“I thought Bali would be a vacation,” he said. “It was brilliant there. The beaches, the night clubs, the women. One day you will know what I mean. Israelis were everywhere. They had all just finished their mandatory army service, and they were ready to let loose for the first time in three years. They were allowed to be normal people again. They were so young. They didn’t even know how to be alive.”
I looked toward Larissa, tried to link with her gaze. This was the part during the monologue where we’d normally make eye-contact solidarity. Of course we were different. We knew how to be alive.
I reached for her with my eyes. She wasn’t there. Her eyes weren’t. She stared dead down into her notebook. I looked down at my own book. I wished I was drawing. I had a pencil in my hand, but my eyes just swam. There was nothing I wanted to draw. I didn’t even want to draw; I just wanted to do something. Just, anything but thinking.
“The bombs hit down the street from the hotel where I was staying. A car, a suicide bomber—no one knew it back then. All we knew was, the whole street was on fire. Everyone was running away from the club. So that’s where I ran toward.
“They were lucky I was a reporter, not a photographer. I could write later. My first job could be getting people safe.
“From my time in ’Nam I learned how to carry an injured
body without doing further damage. In Abu Ghraib I was taught to set broken bones. Six people under my watch. Four men and two girls. Six people. Four of them made it. I just had to wait until the medics showed.”
Larissa’s hand shot up. “Milt, wasn’t Abu Ghraib a prison, not a war?”
She could call him on that. She was the only one of us who could.
I ripped out a piece of notebook paper and started my article for Larissa. I wrote a public awareness article about anger management, and I talked about the danger of bottling in your feelings. I didn’t give specifics, but I referred to urges that take control of you and make you inhuman, into an animal. Everyone’s a hypocrite, I wrote. She would know what I was talking about.
I tied it into Jewish stuff by talking about what Mrs. Szmerling, our Mysticism teacher, tried to lecture about the other day. She was Hasidic, one of the super-Orthodox Jews who wear hats and wigs, and nobody really understood what she was doing at our school; everyone was either suspicious that she was trying to convert them or thought she just needed money. I liked her, though.
She said that Hasidim believe that everyone has a Good Inclination and an Evil Inclination, sort of like your conscience on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The Evil Inclination is constantly whispering into your ear, sleep late, steal money, hit people you don’t like—those impulses we all feel sometimes and ignore most of the time.
So if the Evil Inclination is so evil, said Mrs. Szmerling, why did G-d create it in the first place? And she answered herself, the way teachers love to do: Because the human mind needs conflict. There will always be battles, people you don’t get along with, ideas to argue against. That’s what the Evil Inclination gives us. It keeps us on our toes, that part of our brain that’s always critical of ourselves, always trying to figure out what we’re up to. Used the right way, she said, the Evil Inclination gives us something to fight against and triumph over.
That’s where I started from, sharing the fable of the Big Bad Inclination. And this old Hasidic belief—I wrote, now, in my article for Larissa—is so ingenious because it works. No matter what you believe, whether you’re a good person or a selfish one, it still holds true. There’s always a voice in your head whispering, like in that kids’ poem:
Listen to the mustn’ts, child
Listen to the don’ts.
Listen to the couldn’ts, the impossibles,
the won’ts.
Why would G-d create the world this way? It was like a mad science experiment, like Mitch playing with the rest of us, giving us free stuff and driving us around and seeing how we’d react. If that was the sort of creator who G-d was supposed to be, I wanted no part of Creation.
And even though I don’t believe in G-d—and this was my big bad conclusion, starting with that bold admission, which I was only just realizing as I wrote it, which I’d never thought I’d be able to think without fearing for my life—even though I didn’t believe in G-d, the Evil Inclination is an incredible invention. Because, no matter who you are or what you believe, that idea forces you to be it more.
Milt finished his story. Half the class looked like deer caught in headlights, confused and traumatized, not really sure what’d just happened to them, still thinking about the graphic details of the bloodshed. The other half just looked like they’d rather be Xboxing. Milt tsked. That half were probably the only ones he noticed.
“You kids,” he said. “You’re so worried about what clothes you can afford to buy or what boy will take your number. It doesn’t matter, none of this. Your problems are little kid problems. No matter what happens, you’re still alive. And that could end—” His arm shot out and his wrist flicked at an inhuman angle and it made a sound, krak, like snapping your fingers but a hundred times louder “—like that.”
He sunk back to the desk. He sat on the edge, deflated.
“Now,” he said. “Go write your articles. Stay in this little world. Hold onto it as long as you can.”
That, I thought grimly, would never happen. I was still stuck in the same little world, no car and no friends and New York so far away, but the rules of this world were different now. And it would never be an innocent world again.
Everyone else was starting to write. I looked down at my paper and remembered with a shock that I’d already finished. I turned to another page and drew in the margins and awaited, anxiously, Larissa’s communiqué.
Ten minutes before the end of the period, Milt called switch and we paired up. Larissa and I sprung for each other immediately. “Here you go,” I said, nervously depositing my entry in front of her, upside down to me, right-side up for her.
She slid her paper across the tectonic break of our joined desks. “ ‘Music Review: Façades I Thought Of’,” I read aloud. “Nice title.”
“Not out loud. Just read it.”
“Okay.”
Music Review: Façades I Thought Of
by Larissa Fleishman
Once upon a time there was a girl named Lore Izza. She made a record and everybody loved it. The fast songs rocked and the slow songs were never too slow. The three singles were so jangly and funny and fun that it made you want to be her best friend and hang out with her constantly, and the sad songs made you wish could comfort her.
Lore Izza wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Laura Isabella Rosencrantz, a real live Jewish princess from the kingdom of Long Island, but the label people changed it. They told her it sounded more like who she should be trying to be. Her first album, Mirrors, came out two years ago, almost to the day.
So what if her lyrics weren’t completely polished, the melody lines simplistic? She was still young, and fresh, and new. She hadn’t lived much, not yet, so there wasn’t much for her to be disgruntled about. Perhaps this album didn’t inspire genuine emotion so much as it did vague feelings of joy and giddiness. But it didn’t need to. The keyboards sounded like your happiest birthday. The drums were so perfect, you couldn’t tell if they were real or fake. You heard stories of boys, and sometimes girls, falling in love with the photo on the cover. Her glass blue eyes.
But that wasn’t love, that was lust. Even if it sounded poetic, it was still only lust. And those songs Lore sung, the ones you think you fell in love with, they weren’t her real songs.
You see, Laura Isabella Rosencrantz was raised in a whitewashed suburb, a place that appeared so clean and perfect that she grew up knowing instinctively how to whitewash herself. She spoke like a runway model being interviewed, even among her friends. She chewed like someone had taught her how. Her grandparents might have run for their lives, been chased across countries and hunted for supper, but she grew up not even having to order her own take-out. And those problems that Lore sang about on the record—or what you thought were her problems, and, at some point, Lore had probably mistaken them for problems too—they weren’t really problems. Not only that, they weren’t really hers.
Mirrors was released two years ago. This week, her new album, Façades I Thought Of, will appear in stores and online. The tracks will confuse anyone who’s heard any of the songs on Mirrors—which, by now, means nearly everyone in a first-world country. It’s loud. It’s angry, and raw, and not very pretty at all. Likewise, the cover—which Ms. Izza has insisted not be Photoshopped or otherwise altered—is of a much less pretty girl, screaming, wide-mouthed, with teeth that aren’t uniformly white and straight.
The lyrics, too, have lost some of their allure. They aren’t wry or mysterious or charming at all. If there’s any way that they may be compared with the lyrics on her first album, it’s that these new songs are less idyllic and less perfect.
But the more this reviewer listens to it, the more less perfect seems like a compliment.
Lore Izza has declared she will not be touring for this album. As a matter of fact, it is widely rumored—and Ms. Izza has said nothing to quell these rumors—that she will leave the country, or otherwise disappear, following its release.
And that doesn’t seem li
ke a purposeful statement against the new album, or its possible reception, at all. In fact, it seems like one more piece of whatever story the album is attempting to tell.
“My life until this point has seemed like a fairy tale,” she said to the music site Pitchfork last month. “Enchanted castles, poison apple and all. And I’m incredibly grateful for that. But the thing about those stories is, it feels like the princesses never actually have a hand in deciding what happens to them—it just happens. And I need to write my own fairy tale for a bit.”
broken
I looked up. “You wrote that all just now? In one sitting?”
Larissa looked uncomfortable. “Yes,” she said. “I mean, it’s all a lie, of course. She doesn’t exist. I didn’t make up that girl or her record until now, until I started writing.”
I flexed my hands apart and together. They were perched on the side of my desk, the side closest to her. Our desks were a lefty and a righty, the two arms set next to each other. I wanted to be touching her arm.
“So what does that mean?” I asked. “Are you going to go away?”
She rubbed her palm with a thumb. “No. Yes. I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t really disappear. I can’t go anywhere. I have school.”
