A Brilliant Novel in the Works (10 page)

Just then, the monkey sits more erect. He makes a gesture
as if he smells something bad. He takes a few more sniffs. The air is still
wrong. “This can’t be,” the monkey says with a surprise our hero has never
seen in a JuLef before.

Even though the JuLefs can perform actions just by thought, even though
the JuLefs can perform in a fraction of a second what would take us humans
years to perform, even though this JuLef creature could simply destroy our
hero the second he realizes our hero’s change in heart, the JuLef leaps for
our hero in the same clumsy way that an Earth mammal leaps for another Earth
mammal when feeling threatened.

When the monkey clutches onto our hero, our hero still has the wherewithal
to say, “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” and he feels
a childlike pleasure in getting to say such a line from such a film. And then,
our hero lets out a stream of hot, caffeine-induced urine from his penis,
setting off the explosive device which blows up our hero, the JuLef, and the
entire planet of Uranus.

The plan, strangely enough, is executed exactly how the Earth leaders
had planned it.

In real life, our hero doesn’t get the opportunity to save the solar
system. He walks home from the coffee shop with a horrible burning in his
chest. But even though his wife is all but finished with him, he is somehow
glad that he still loves his wife. He even considers writing a story about
his wife and her beautiful giggle. For a moment, he is glad to be able to
have such emotions even though on some days it feels like he carries the burden
of his whole species in his chest. The book isn’t closed for our hero. And
even though he doesn’t know how to save his own marriage, he believes it is
this tremendous emotion inside of him that allows our science fiction hero
to save the solar system—other than poor Uranus.

Before our science fiction hero disintegrates at the center of a four-hundred-gigaton
explosion, his last thought is this: I wish I had opened even one of those
stamp books before it was too late
.

When I get the call at four in the morning, I think: Dad. I
think: Mom. But because they’re dead, I think: Julia. But since
I haven’t seen or heard from her in three months, I pick up the
phone and say, “Ally?”

“Shmuvi,” Ally says in a voice that is too quiet and too
awake.

There’s a split second when I think about how she held my
hand after I fell off the horse. I imagine her concern for me.
I imagine how much she wanted me to touch her fat horse’s
belly. I think about that hat she might one day knit me.

And then I think about the actual reason she might be
calling me at this hour. So I jump out of bed. “What’s wrong?”

I’m holding my car keys before I even have my pants on.
And when she tells me that Shmen is in the hospital, I don’t
ask what for.

4:22 am

I get up to the fifth floor waiting room and Ally and Maddy
are sleeping on one of the couches. They look so cute and comfortable. I want
to squeeze in next to them. I want to cuddle. I don’t want to think about
all the things that I think about: the real worries and the fake worries and
the worry that I don’t even know the difference. But when I sit on the couch
next to them, it is more complicated to get comfortable than I expected. Even
so, I give myself thirty seconds before waking them up.

“How is he?” I ask. And I get two answers that make no
sense:

Maddy says, “Purple monkey dishwasher.”

Ally says, “Hemophagocytic syndrome.”

I’ve always worried about Shmen, but it always felt like an
unrealized weight, something that maybe could happen, but
not something that I expected to really happen.

“It’s bad?” I ask, guessing from the number of syllables in
the syndrome.

“He’s pretty sick. Do you want to see him?”

“No.” And then I head toward Shmen’s room.

5:22 am

It turns out that Shmen isn’t in good shape. He’s running a
fever. There are problems with his liver and his lymph nodes. His immune system
isn’t right. He has inexplicable inflammation in his knees, his neck. He can’t
see out of one eye, and his anus is nearly swollen shut. He’s on some strong
drugs and there are at least two things dripping into his veins. His lips
look dry, and his eyes look wet, and I ask him what the hell is going on.

“I’m feeling kind of horny,” he says to me.

“Shmen,” I say. “It’s Yuvi. How are you doing?”

“Shmuvi, it’s you,” he says. “I’m feeling kind of horny.”

“That’s good,” I say. “What else is going on?”

“Well,” he says. “It looks like my bike racing career is out the window.”

He’s mumbling the whole time and I don’t have much hope
of entering into his world at the moment. Even so, I can’t help
but try to fake some sanity.

“Your bike career was never in the window,” I say. “I’ve
never seen you on a bicycle in my life.”

“You’ve always been such a pessimist, Yuvi. Have some
hope.” He takes a deep breath. “Now let me practice my
moves.”

And then he falls back asleep.

6:33 am

The doctor says Shmen needs to stop drinking in order to survive
this condition. He needs to get physical therapy. He needs to see a nutritionist.
Before the doctor leaves, he tells us, “Joel is still young and strong but
he needs to take care of himself better.”

Ally’s tears are quiet. Maddy’s tears are not.

I stand there and try to memorize everything the doctor
has said.

The last thing the doctor says is, “I’m dying for some Fritos
before my next surgery.”

7:04 am

It’s just me in the room when Shmen wakes up.

“Shmuvi,” he says. “I feel like hell.”

“You look pretty bad,” I say. I can tell the world is blurry by

the way he looks at things for too long.

“You don’t look so good yourself,” Shmen says. He reaches

out his hand and I grab it. His hand is cold, too cold for
someone who is supposedly running a fever, and so I hold
it tight, trying to warm him up. It’s sunny outside and the
hospital window is huge and I notice Shmen staring up at the
sky while his stomach grumbles. He stares in a blank kind of

way as if his dream is taking place up in the sky.

“Is it too bright?” I ask.

“Purple monkey dishwasher.”

7:14 am

There is a noise in the hallway. I hear someone calling out
Shmen’s full name and this voice is awfully familiar but I’m not thinking
too clearly. Even so, I let go of Shmen’s hand.

And then Julia is standing in the doorway and I suddenly
wonder why she hasn’t gotten here earlier. She looks at us both
like we’ve been naughty. But the kind of naughty that can be
reconciled.

“My baby brother!” she says. She’s been crying the whole
way to the hospital.

“Save me, Julia,” Shmen says. “They’ve got me on three
kinds of steroids.”

Julia hugs him for a good long time, her arms tight around
his body and her face smashed deep into his hospital pillow.

We are on the sixth floor of this hospital building, but
looking out the window, it feels like we’re not high enough. I
can still hear the street noise, people yelling and laughing and
cars honking.

When the hug is over, Shmen looks my way and says, “I
told you I’d find a way to get you two together.”

It happened in my aunt and uncle’s sixth-floor apartment
in Beer-Sheva. My mom would take me to visit her three sisters in Israel during
summer vacations, and this was my favorite of her sisters. This was the one
who played with me on the floor like she wasn’t an adult. The one who had
a missing front tooth that made her smile so nice to be around. The one who
always wanted a child but never got one.

Earlier that day, I was sticking my head out the window just like any
boy would do with a sixth-floor window. There was a man on the street yelling
“Ah-Vah-Tee-Ach!” over and over again. The echo of his yell made it feel like
the whole Israeli sky was yelling this word. My mom wasn’t around, so I asked
my aunt what the word meant.

She said, “It is, how you say—” But she didn’t know the word in English.
And so she started using hand gestures, making a big round ball shape in front
of her stomach.

A belly? A baby? A bomb?

“No,” she said. “I don’t know how you say it.” And so she took me out
of the apartment and down the street to see the man who was selling watermelons.
The man’s skin was the darkest dark brown I’d ever seen and the watermelon
was the reddest dark red on the inside. We carried the biggest one back to
the room and then dug in. She asked me not to eat so much, but she also enjoyed
how excited I was. And, as if the watermelon was the cause of it all, I got
a fever of a 102 when I finished with that thing. I got so dizzy she had to
carry me to the guest bedroom, where I passed out for who knows how many hours.

The air was warm and dry in the Negev desert and it was common after
a nap—even when you weren’t sick—to wake up with a dry and dusty throat. But
that wasn’t what bothered me.

When I woke up, everything felt normal except there was a feeling worse
than any feeling I’d ever felt. As an adult, I’ve tried to describe it to
a million therapists in a million ways using a million desperate hand gestures.
And I always get that same look when I’m done trying to talk about how it
felt. So now I know: trying to talk about how it felt is nothing better than
stupid. And here is how it felt:

It was like you had just peed in your bed. But I hadn’t peed in the bed.
It was like peeing but worse. That your pee had permanently stained the bed.
And that it burned through the mattress and stained the floor. Permanently.
And it made a smell that would never go away. Everyone in the building smelled
that smell of rotten apple juice. And your parents hated you for destroying
their furniture. And you would never be able to sleep again. And you would
be followed by your parents everywhere you went. And they would be saying,
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” And it would never stop.

None of this happened. I don’t think anyone I’ve loved has ever said
the word “hate” to me in the real world. It was all inside of me. But I yelled
louder than anyone in that apartment complex had ever yelled.

One way to determine the seriousness of your condition is by the number
of neighbors that ask what the hell is going on in there. For me: six.

My mother and my aunt ran into the room when they heard me yelling. I
was sitting up in the bed and squeezing the pillow. I yelled many things,
but one thing I remember yelling without even really understanding what it
meant was: “Ain lee tikvah.”

“What is hopeless?” my mom said.

And my aunt said, “Mah karah? Mah karah?”

It was impossible for me to believe that they didn’t understand the obvious
tragedy here, so I ran out of the bedroom while squeezing that sweaty pillow.
I ran into the room where they kept the piano and fell to the floor, smacking
my hands on the floor while saying, “Never, never, never, never.”

My aunt wouldn’t enter the room. She was standing back in the hallway
and I saw that look in her eyes even though I don’t know how I could have
seen her. One part of her was telling her to help this terrified boy, and
another part was telling her to clear the blast zone. And my mother wasn’t
far behind either. She stayed at the corner, telling me it was okay from so
far away. But my banging on the floor was all there was in my world, the chords
reverberateing inside the piano.

I threw the pillow across the room and went over to grab it again. And
then I threw it again. And grabbed it again. The pillow cover fell off the
pillow but I kept throwing that dirty pillow back and forth. With my mother
nearly stepping forward from the corner of the room, but not quite. And I
don’t think I wanted comfort at that point anyhow. It was the kind of feeling
you feel when it’s too late for comfort.

Slowly, during this ritual throwing and retrieving, I did calm. Without
any explanation, the trauma downgraded to terror, then to fear, then to dread,
and then it was just a headache and damp clothes against my clammy skin. All
it took was time.

Within a few minutes, I had lost the feeling completely. And I only remembered
bits and pieces of what had just happened. My mother was now hugging me tightly
and calming me using all the Hebrew, English, Ladino, and Yiddish in her power.

I had no proof about what had happened, other than an overly dirty pillow.
But I still have a touch of terror from that Negev afternoon twenty-whatever
years ago.

Later that night, when my mother tucked me into bed, she
said, “You had some kind of meshugas in you!” She smiled, but it was more
of an exhausted smile than a good one.

“Mommy,” I said. “You know that thing that happened to me today?”

She didn’t nod yes, but she didn’t need to.

“What if it comes back?” I asked.

“Chas vi-cha-leela,” my mother said, which means something like God forbid.

After a few minutes more of sitting next to me on the bed, my mother
kissed me goodnight and left me to sleep with a brand new pillow and a brand
new pillow cover. And that night, I dreamed prettier dreams, with no urine
stains in sight.

But before she left, I did say one last thing, which she pretended not
to hear:

“I kind of miss that feeling.”