Private Novelist (10 page)

“ISN'T IT STRANGE HOW AVNER'S
book resembles our story exactly, although it was written long before?”

It was 8:30 this morning when Zohar turned to me and posed this question, his curly hair disheveled by friction with our irregular nest of cheap, lumpy pillows and his sweet smile framed by a bulwark of ferociously masculine stubble. His appearance was charming in the extreme and I thought of taking off my shirt, but instead I asked him what on earth he was talking about.

“It's just the same. A spy is sent on a stupid mission to a foreign country and brings back a girl.”

I had not been aware that Zohar was a spy.

“Who do you spy for,” I asked him, “Elite?” Elite is Israel's leading chocolate producer. I surmised that Zohar's work had involved monitoring competing products worldwide, and that the “stupidity” of his mission had something to do with the quality of American chocolate.

Refusing to name his employer, Zohar assured me that when the narrative of Shats'
Sailing Toward the Sunset
begins, the Israeli spy has already persuaded the girl from the Shetland
Islands to live with him on a permanent basis. They arrive in Israel ready to settle down in chapter one.

Briefly, I considered starting over, but then I realized that the addition of a lifelong commitment to the story of Yigal and Mary would not alter it in the least. Mary's reluctance to be fully comprehended, Yigal's continuing fantasies about Nofar, his panicked flight, the sublimation of their cognitive dissonance into marathon sexual activity, the rationalization of a mindless Dionysian compulsion as an economic partnership—these are well-known aspects of lifelong commitment, and my treatment of them as aspects of a shallow and probably doomed flirtation does not affect their fundamental nature.

Therefore, on the arrival of Yigal and Mary in New York, I will send them almost immediately to city hall, where they will be married in a ceremony lasting several minutes.

An Israeli marriage was practically impossible. Only religious weddings can be performed there, Mary was not a Jew, and Yigal's low profile did not permit large bribes.

Seal marriage may have played an important role in shaping Mary's conceptions of the institution, but she did not mention to Yigal that her usual routine was to submit for two weeks a year to whoever seemed largest. It was dissatisfaction with the seal system, after all, that had led her to seek a better life on land.

Shats and his wife, Orly, and daughter, Ayelet, visited us last night. We walked on the beach near the Roman city of Apollonia, where Orly spoke of geology, of embryology, and of the aurora borealis—in Hebrew, the “Northern Zohar.” Shats described the brightly glowing lagoons of the Sinai. Later, he told us how some anthropologists had once decided that mankind descended from an “aquatic ape.”

I had heard something to that effect myself. Why else would we be smooth and hairless as eels? Why else would we have breasts at the top instead of at the bottom, if not to keep our children from drowning as we wade in search of marshmallows and cranberries? Our abundance of subcutaneous fat helps insulate us against the chilly waters of the Eocene swamps, while the unique human confusion of the esophagus and trachea, which allows us both to speak and to choke on food, has an important function of some kind—a function of . . .

There was a moment of silence. Shats tried hard but, like me, he could not remember the underwater function of the human larynx. We looked searchingly into each other's eyes, struggling to find there some insight into the trivial, absurd breathing habits of our damp, naked, nonexistent ancestors (biologists had heaped ridicule on the theory), and it was perhaps this tender moment of shared regret, stolen in the aftermath of a dinner party for which I cannot quite claim success (people seemed to be poking at the food as though they thought it was weird), that led Zohar, at approximately 8:40 this morning, to say, “Avner is in love with you!” (He had tried “You are in love with Avner” on several previous occasions to no avail.)

“Give me one piece of evidence,” I demanded.

Zohar was unable to think of any, and I concluded that his claim had the same origin as his occasional declarations that he is moving to the planet Mars to live there with the parakeets Pouf and Poufa—a sort of waking epilepsy, a random firing of disused neurons. On the other hand, his failure to justify the statement may well have originated in a quality Shats and I share—you might guess “discretion” or “asexuality,” but I refer the reader instead to our lovingly maintained sense of
personal innocence and forthrightness. Many less privileged people attempt this feint, but they forget that, unlike Shats and I, they are least innocent when they are most forthright.

It occurs to me that the elephant and the hyrax too have breasts at the top, but instead of hypothesizing that they used to walk upright, I will return to a question posed by Shats himself several chapters ago: “Is mankind descended from the seals?”

The obvious answer is “No,” but his posing of the question reveals an interest in wrongheaded pseudoscience I feel I have unwittingly echoed, to good effect, in several chapters of the present re-creation of his novel. My own interest in quasi-plausible nonsense was fostered early, partly by
Smithsonian
magazine's regular features on, for example, the genetically engineered “rat-cow” and the probable appearance of the natives of Jupiter (dense, amoeboid), but mostly by my uncle Charlie. I recall his explaining to me in 1971 or so why dinosaurs are extinct: Although they had evolved to be birds, they could not overcome their fear of heights. His crowning achievement was the all-encompassing theory that immediately predated his conversion to Presbyterianism:

EVERYTHING IS THE SAME SIZE,

BUT SOME THINGS ARE FARTHER AWAY IN THE FIFTH DIMENSION.

I remember standing on a college playing field and deducing that the world itself, which appears very large, must on this theory be very close to me in the fifth dimension—and it was. My explanation of the phenomenon “horizon” was truly refined, but I've forgotten it now.

Now it is noon, and Zohar has spent the morning catching
up on his reading of this, his second exposure to
Sailing Toward the Sunset.
His criticisms are invaluable:

“Is Yigal very fat?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“Because he can eat half a gallon of chocolate ice cream in a sitting.”

I take a didactic tone. “Zohar, skinny people can eat lots of ice cream if they want. They just don't eat much else that day. It's not like the way you used to eat an ice cream, then lunch, then an ice cream, then another ice cream, then dinner, then ice cream . . .” He grows bored and leaves the room, returning in a moment to ask:

“What is your relation to Yigal?”

“I'm his upstairs neighbor.”

“You didn't have an affair? Did he go to Switzerland before or after I went to Bhutan?”

“I don't know.”

“Then how do you know what his penis looks like?”

The fictional Zohar was too busy to remember that he had left his wife to the tender mercies of an introverted, easily embarrassed professional assassin. Crouched in an ice cave only two hundred yards from their position, he waited for the Bhutanese border police to break camp. Days were wasting, and he knew the llama-trekkers would pass nearby only once. The guards were drunk day and night on hot yak's-milk liquor mixed with honey wine, but they slept standing up, leaning on their rifles. All around, the snow was stained with the blood of the lemmings and chinchillas which were their only food. Zohar's patience was wearing thin. Squatting in a tiny room made entirely of ice, too low for him to stand up and too narrow to lie down, he had whiled away five long days and nights pondering the intricacies of the
Great Fugue,
when suddenly he heard a whistling
ping
. A bullet had struck near the entrance of his hiding place, releasing a shower of ice crystals which stuck to his face, melted, and became uncomfortably wet. Zohar's tolerance was at an end, and he stepped from the cave, raised the GPS in the air, and yelled, “Mossad!” The border guards drew close in curiosity, their rifles raised. “Mossad!” Zohar repeated firmly. “Israel! Mossad!” Comprehension dawned, and the terrified Bhutanese dropped their guns and ran at top speed down the mountain. Correctly, Zohar had guessed that word of the Israeli secret service's recent descent into incompetence and chaos would not have reached the isolated puppet regimes of the Himalayas, but as he crossed the mountain pass he cried bitterly in shame at having drawn the guards' attention to his déclassé Middle Eastern origins. His only comfort was that he would—probably—never see them again. Looking to the sky, he sought in its vast reaches oblivion from the horror of what he had been driven to by excruciating necessity. Then, lowering his eyes to the sunny plain, he saw the line of llamas, their gay Peruvian halter-tassels whipping in the cold breeze. Zohar jogged down the rocky incline, dialing as he went. They turned their heads, smelling salt (his boots were still covered with salt) on the wind, and you can imagine the looks on the faces of the American advertising executives and lawyers, led by a temp administrative assistant in marketing, as Zohar's solitary figure advanced upon them from a near-vertical wall of ice, talking on the phone.

“That's great!” I told him. “Don't let them get away!”

He folded up the phone and introduced himself, and within moments he was allowed to join them. After weeks of walking across a frozen wasteland, Zohar was again walking across a frozen wasteland, but this time with big, hairy, decorated
animals to keep him company. He called me again in a panic when he found out that the llama trek cost $250 per day, since his travel per diem is only $100. I reminded him how cheap the rest of his trip had been.

Yigal and Mary took their time exploring New York. Yigal had an especial interest in the G, L, and 7 trains and related maps in the public library. Mary was eager to spend hours looking carefully at Max Ernst's
Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale,
the quillwork on Native American slippers, and the Paracas Textile. They met every night in Chinatown for dinner. One day they went together to the Cloisters, and another day they walked over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Finally, one morning, Yigal said it was time to catch Metro North to Rye.

They arrived at Rye Playland in separate cabs. Yigal walked slowly from arcade to arcade toward the Derby Racers, waiting until he saw Mary at a distance. Well rehearsed and armed with a pistol, she was to provide cover, but instead she was crying inconsolably not far from a Whack-A-Mole. Yigal ran up and put his arms around her. “My sweet,” he said, kissing her face over and over, “what's wrong?”

“It's a polar bear game,” she sobbed.

He looked up and read the label twice to be sure. “No, sweetheart, these aren't seals. They're moles. Look at their noses.” He turned her again toward the sick, corrupt, and reprehensible game of murder and violence. “They have pointy little noses and big pink paws.”

A child approached, seized the rubber mallet, and put a token in the slot. The moles descended, then emerged briefly and unpredictably, like seals at their breathing holes, but still they could not evade the quick, violent swats of the angry child, whose concentration created an atmosphere of
frightening stillness in the midst of the pounding and beeping of the game. Yigal led Mary away. “They're moles,” he said again.

There was no one in line for the Derby Racers. Yigal and Mary looked on in awe as the empty ride slowed heavily and majestically, like a planet dying on its axis, then presented their tickets and chose horses. As the building gathered speed, both were conscious of steadily increasing ecstasy, of great power, of the strength of art unfettered by commerce, of freedom from the limitations of the body, of the flimsy nature of the ephemeral structure around them, whose readiness for collapse seemed only to increase its splendor, and of its awesome beauty. There were no mirrors, no painted figures—just the race of the horses, their mouths foaming, and wooden railings, and at the center a small man who, Yigal could see, was biting his nails while chewing gum. This, Yigal knew, was the man Rafi wanted.

Mary stayed on her horse for the next round while Yigal made his move.

“Lamerchakim mafligot hasfinot,”
he whispered.

“Rafi can suck my dick,” the man replied. He shook the hair out of his eyes. “I told that motherfucker several times there's nothing left. What does he want, a DNA sample from every man on earth?” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and began digging around in a desk while Yigal fingered the hypodermic in his pocket. “Hang on, let me show you . . .” He took a medallion and a black-and-white photograph from the drawer. “Take a look. This came off the last guy with any connection to the case, and this is a picture of what he looks like dead.”

Yigal looked down with interest. “Wow, you're right. This guy is so clearly dead. I never saw anything so sloppy in my
life. What's this thing again?” He looked more closely at the medallion.

“From the British Museum. Believed lost with the
Dakar,
now commonly known to be in a desk in Rye Playland.”

“Can I have it?”

“Sure. Forwarding address?”

“No, thanks. Wow,” Yigal said. “This is cool.” He stepped back onto the revolving platform and found Mary. “Look, Mary, this is something really old.”

Mary studied it. “It's strange. I know it's supposed to be a wheel, but from certain angles it looks sort of like a skull—what are you going to do with it?”

“It was stolen from the British Museum.”

“Look at the other side—it's a seal and a woman's breasts. You should send it back to the British Museum and get them to say what it is.”