by Zhanna Slor
Someone clears their throat and I turn to follow the noise. It’s the barista, the girl with purple hair and cheek piercings from the alley, who has finished with the customer in front of me. I move forward in line, ordering a large black coffee. I’m so tired I forget to force a smile, watching like a slobbering dog as the young girl pounds her fist over the decanter, allowing a long, hot stream of caffeine to pour into a large paper cup. I should probably explain: Israel has many great attributes, but the ubiquity of Nescafé is not one of them. I have dreams about American coffee more than I dream about my parents.
The barista puts down the cup and then, as I pick it up, her eyes narrow ever so slightly and glaze over. All she sees is the three other people in line she has to serve before she can have a cigarette break, the ones behind me who have spent the last five minutes debating the best places to dumpster-dive (Trader Joe’s in Shorewood! I want to tell them, but decide against it). She is still looking at my hand when I realize what she wants: money.
“Sorry,” I explain with a nervous shake of my head. “Jetlag brain.” I put my giant canvas bag on the floor and open it to find a handful of loose cash my dad must have thrown in there when I wasn’t looking. The barista’s eyes widen before I can get the bag closed. With an apologetic smile, I hand over two one-dollar bills and leave the change, almost half of it, as a tip.
“Have a nice day,” the girl says to my back, as an afterthought, once she’s pocketed my tip. Within minutes, I’m back outside; I don’t know why, except that I don’t particularly like feeling young and self-conscious again, which is the only way I can feel while listening to The Cure. I take the lid off the coffee cup and inhale before whispering “Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, shehakol nih’yeh bid’varo.” The blessing for coffee. As automatic to me now as lighting up a cigarette used to be; perhaps a replacement to it, if I’m being honest. Sometimes the only way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a better one (or a worse one).
I drink the coffee in a matter of minutes; it’s a little burnt but still basically heaven, and by the end, I don’t feel so sad or so cold either. I’m about to go back for a refill when something catches my eye. Not my eye, actually, but my nose. I know that smell.
“Rose?” I ask.
A young woman in bright red cowboy boots stops walking past me and turns, her long, pale face annoyed at first, then morphing into surprise. “Masha?” she asks. “Is that you?” Rose hugs me tight, nearly knocking the air right out of me and replacing it with a cloud of patchouli and sandalwood. For a moment it feels like no time has passed at all since we last spoke; like I’m still in college, living two blocks away, falling for men only after I’d slept with them a few times and they didn’t want me anymore. Chasing annihilation like it was my job. I wonder now why I wanted to disappear so badly when all I had to do was leave. What is so intoxicating about self-destruction? Is it merely the freedom to be able to do it, or is there something else? In Israel, I never have this feeling.
“What are you doing here?” Rose grins, her large hazel eyes sparkling. I smile back, relieved. Rose knows no one well, but she knows everyone just a little bit. Back in the day, we’d go to parties, and in an hour she’d have met everyone there and remembered their names. It could be useful now, as it had been then. “Did someone die?”
“No!” I laugh, before feeling a superstitious chill and getting serious again. I remove a pack of cigarettes from my bag that I’d bought without thinking at duty-free, and give her one. Rose takes the offering, lights it. Her shoulders loosen right away, as if she can only ever be comfortable with a cigarette in her hand.
“But I thought you...” she starts, squeezing my hand now. “Never mind. I guess I thought you were never coming back here.” She sits down, still holding my left hand. “Wow, I can’t believe it’s you. You look so good, girl.”
She, on the other hand, looks like she needs to go back to rehab, but I don’t want to be the one to tell her this. Otherwise she is generally the same, except that her hair is a new shade of pink. She’s wearing shorts with tights underneath and a lacy tank top under a loosely draped Aztec-patterned shawl, a giant chest tattoo of wings still visible beneath. I’d almost forgotten all about that poor decision, and wince as I look at it. Not because she is basically barring herself from ever having a real job—I have no delusions Rose is capable of holding down such a job—but because it’s so poorly done. The wings are flat and mechanical when they should be full of movement and freedom, like an actual bird. Instead, they look like they belong on a flag icon, a call to arms, like all the old hand-drawn posters she used to hang in the house that said “courage” or “resist,” with images of boots with flowers on them.
Maybe it was the linguistics major in me, not enjoying seeing words so out of context, but I always hated those posters. I couldn’t help but wonder: resist what, exactly? Sentences?
“I heard you were in the Middle East,” Rose interjects before I can respond. “What’s up with that?”
“Israel isn’t exactly the Middle East. I mean it is, but—”
“Are you like, really religious now?” she interrupts, smirking.
“No,” I say, quickly, before remembering that isn’t true anymore. “I mean...I don’t know. In Israel, it’s more about the customs—holiday dinners and no phones on Shabbat, stuff like that. It’s kinda nice.” I leave out the part where I go to synagogue with David once a week, and celebrate every holiday with his family, and love Shabbat. I remember myself when I used to live here, and I know Rose would merely use this information against me. Already she lets out a small laugh.
“What about those crazy fanatics with the funny hats?”
“Well...I’m not sure I would really call them fanatics, Rose,” I start, annoyed. In Korean, there is a word—dapjeongneo—for when someone asks you a question and has already decided the answer they want to hear from you and are waiting for you to say it. I know she wants us to make fun of the Hasids. But Rose hasn’t talked to me in five years, years that were intensely transformative for me, so her expectations are going to be very off. “Remember the group of communists you used to hang out with? They seemed like fanatics to me.”
Rose’s shoulders deflate a little. “Wanting everyone to get their fair share is not extreme,” she says flatly.
“Okay...and who decides what’s fair? You?”
“Common sense decides! No one needs a billion dollars. Especially not when there are so many poor people suffering in the world. In this day and age, with how much money America has, we can all afford some more equality.”
“Oh boy. Equality. Now that is a loaded word.” I lean back on the bench and take a long, deep breath. This is not the conversation I want to be having, and yet, I can’t help myself. “If you haven’t noticed, nothing is equal in life, other than in mathematics. That is where the word originated, back in the 1400s. Latin. Identical in amount or portion. Uniform in size or shape.”
“Well, yeah, that’s the problem, don’t you think?”
“No. The problem is that ‘equal’ can’t be applied to people, because people are never identical. Except twins, I guess, but even then, there are studies…” I pause. “It really reminds me of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Do you know it?”
“What?” Rose gasps. She drops her cigarette on the ground and grinds it down with her shoe. “No. You know I never read the Bible.” Rose spits out bible like it’s a dirty word. In Riverwest, it is a dirty word. Here, the only religion is counter-culture—which, if anything, is merely an absence of culture, not a replacement with another. A vacuum that sucks in everything around it.
“Never mind,” I say. I should probably have shut my mouth back when she mentioned crazy people in funny hats. If I start talking religion in Riverwest, I won’t make it through the day. I imagine a crowd of torch-holding anarchists throwing me out onto the Humboldt Avenue bridge, where artsy Riverwest turns into the college-partying East Side.
Even when I lived here, I barely talked to anyone about religion, or politics for that matter. Not because I disagreed, more because I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything—that was the problem. It was what you found at the bottom of the vacuum. Nihilism sucked you in with its ideologies, but it kept you with its existential crisis, its replacement of meaning with parties and the everyday dramas of your neighbors. It’s easy to get lost in these things for years, for decades even. A person could get lost forever, looking for something, when she doesn’t know what it is she’s looking for.
“Um, okay,” Rose starts, as if she is talking to a crazy person. “Have you thought about getting a snake?”
I turn to face her, my face morphed into confusion before I can stop it. “What? Why?”
“Well you need one, like, desperately. Your energy is really dark right now.” She does not explain how a snake could change my energy from dark to light, not that it would make the sentiment more logical in my eyes. She simply scowls at me, then glances down at her wrist, where there is a large tattoo of a bass sticking out from under a thick plastic watch, and abruptly stands up. “Shit. I’m late for band practice,” she says. “I really have to go. We’re playing later at Bremen if you want to check it out! The band is kicking ass lately.”
“Who? The Silver Plague?”
Rose scoffs, as if spitting out a bad egg. “No, The Langston Hughers. The Silver Plague was getting too famous. I had to quit that shit.”
“Why?” I ask, puzzled. I know that famous in Milwaukee only means people in Milwaukee know who you are, not that you’re touring or making money; nevertheless, it only makes her statement more puzzling to me.
“I don’t know,” she says, looking to the sky, her mouth set deep in contemplation before turning up a little at the edges, as if she is proud of the answer she’s come up with. “Maybe I’m scared of success or something. Sellouts are so lame.”
I open my mouth, then close it again.
“Anyway,” says Rose, the smirk from her face gone. “You know I’m not one for deep thoughts. I’ll leave that to people like you.” She starts walking off, but I stand, blocking her exit on the sidewalk.
“Wait.” It suddenly occurs to me why I’m here, and it’s not to convince anyone about the deeper meaning of bible stories or discuss local music. “You ever see my sister around?”
Rose begins adjusting the large plaid knit wrap over her shoulders until it’s essentially covering all of her skin, like a shield. A shield from me. “Uh, yeah, sometimes.”
“Where?” I ask, stiffening.
Rose keeps looking down at the sidewalk, which is covered in cigarette butts and wet coffee sleeves, before stealing a glance in my direction.
“I don’t know, just around.”
“Rose.”
My old friend sighs. A flash of something dark—worried, maybe? Jealous?—passes through her, and I suddenly wonder if my dad isn’t being paranoid at all. “I really don’t remember,” Rose says. She lights another cigarette from a pack in her shawl.
“Are you sure?”
Rose crosses her arms over her chest as if warming herself, but I know it’s an instinctively defensive move. Against me. Probably all that Krav Maga I’d been learning in Israel making its presence known without my realizing it; fighting is all muscle memory, after all. Had I ever been so meek? It’s hard for me to imagine. Still, I sit back down and try to relax my posture as much as I can. I practically slouch right out of my chair.
“You should check out Valhalla,” she finally tells me. “That’s where everyone her age goes.”
I almost laugh. “Valhalla?”
“Plato’s Cave?” she tries, her eyes bright and amused.
I shake my head.
“...The Blue House?”
“Oh. The Blue House,” I say, remembering the blue-and-white duplex across the street from an abandoned basketball court. How could I forget the revolving door of punk houses in Riverwest? I used to spend half my free time at them. They were always changing location or name, but they were all the same: messy, overcrowded duplexes full of cigarette smoke and sticky-beer floors, and way too many people living there than could be legal. Local bands screaming from basements every other night, while bonfires burned high in the yard. The feeling of camaraderie enforced by vast amounts of alcohol and the fact you all lived in the same mile radius. At one point, it was the closest I’d ever come to some sort of religion. Only now that I’ve experienced true religion do I realize how immensely far away it was from one. The connection I’d felt hadn’t been real; I never talked to any of those people again.
“Anything else you can tell me?” I pry. But Rose merely breaks eye contact and hugs me again—a light, casual-type of hug now, one reserved for strangers—then turns on her bright red cowboy-booted heels.
“No, sorry, Mash. Good luck, okay?”
Then she disappears down the street without another word, and I have no choice but to go, too.
MASHA
________________
CHAPTER THREE
At the door of Valhalla, a tattooed, muscular man in plaid boxers squints at me, like I am a too-bright sun. Or like he hasn’t seen the sun in a while, more likely. He lets out a noisy exhale, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth nearly falling to the floor.
“Whoa,” he says, eyebrows thick with confusion. “Masha?”
I’m surprised too, admittedly, but I hide it better. “Hey, Liam. Can I come in?”
Liam steps back, still blinking profusely, and opens the door wider. I follow him inside, while three huge dogs circle and sniff me in a frenzy, then get bored and crash down onto the floor. Liam presses pause on a remote and points at the flat screen, where a bald man is standing out in a desert with no pants on. “Have you seen this show yet?” he asks. “Breaking Bad? It’s the shit.”
“No,” I say, sitting down. “I don’t really watch much TV, to be honest.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Liam says. “Everyone says that, and no one means it. Come on.”
“Believe what you want,” I shrug. I could explain how American TV takes forever to get to Israel, and even when it does you often have to pirate it. Pirating shows may be fine for most people, but when your boyfriend works for the government, you don’t exactly want to do anything illegal, no matter how small. But what would be the point? More importantly, do I really need to defend myself to a guy who still uses blankets as drapes?
Liam shakes his head, then starts packing a bowl into a massive red bong on the table, his long, curly black hair falling around his shoulders. He still doesn’t ask me what I’m doing there. Like it’s perfectly normal for me to show up out of the blue and sit down on his dog-hair infested couch. “Always such a hipster,” he says with a smirk.
“Says the guy growing not one but two kombuchas.” I nod my head in the direction of two large jars filled with a yellowish-green liquid. He turns and looks.
“Those are not mine,” he explains.
“That’s what all the hipsters say,” I joke, letting out an uncomfortable laugh. “Well, that, and that they aren’t hipsters.”
Liam, still busy with the bong, allows himself a little chuckle. “Ha. Very astute, as usual.”
Unaware of how to transition to the subject more naturally, I get to the point. “So, uh…have you seen my sister around, by chance?”
Liam is already taking a hit from the bong, so I have to wait a ridiculously long time for him to inhale and exhale. When he’s finished, instead of answering, he looks up and asks me if I want some. I shake my head no.
“That’s a first,” he snorts. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
I roll my eyes. “Liam. My sister? Have you seen her? I heard she might be here.”
“A lot of people hang out here.” He shrugs and packs down the bowl again with the edge of a lighter. “Who’s your sister?”
“Anna?” I say. I lean forward, sinking further into the co
uch. “Anastasia Gold.”
He stops mid-bong hit, his eyes widening like he’d inhaled too much, before opening his mouth again. Smoke engulfs the already smoky room. “Anna’s your sister?”
“She goes by my mom’s maiden name,” I explain before he can ask. “I honestly don’t know why. She claims it sounds better. Maybe it’s a feminist thing… Anyway, have you seen her?”
He takes a moment to let this sink in, then shrugs. “Not lately.” He tries to sound casual but comes off slightly venomous. “I mean, I don’t really know her, I’ve just seen her at shows.”
“You don’t seem happy about that,” I say, curious.
“Like you’re the paragon of happiness over here,” he snaps, his mood souring. He pushes the bong away and lights a cigarette. Then, he finally looks at me. “What are you doing back, anyway? Aren’t you too good for us common folk?”
“What? No. I’m only trying to find Anna.”
“Well, I don’t know where she is,” he says, annoyed.
“Okay. Fine. If you hear anything...” I begin to stand up, but Liam comes over and stops me by sitting down. He smells like sweat and cigarettes and a hint of whiskey; it takes me a second to realize what the combination is, I’ve grown so accustomed to Israelis’ over-generous use of colognes. In Riverwest, the closest people get to wearing perfume is using soap in the shower.
“So, are you back now, or what?” he asks, a squint in his eye.
“No, no, no. Just visiting.” I move slightly farther down the couch, away from his half-dressed tattooed body and all those familiar pheromones. One of his dogs, a pitch-black lab with streaks of gray near his ears, jumps up onto the couch between us and starts sniffing me curiously. I pet his thick fur, feeling slighter better. I think I remember the dog from when he was a puppy; and he must remember me too, the way he is so happily licking my arm.
