The World of the End (45 page)

He looked out without responding, his eyes riveted on the lonesome cluster of clouds that hung in the sky.

*   *   *

Dov didn’t invest much effort in choosing the clothes that would cover the nakedness of the unknown man and hurried back to the house, holding brown corduroy pants and a green T-shirt, both draped over uneven hangers and both having known better days. The male slacker collection was filled out with boxers with small holes in the rear, gray wool socks, and a pair of battered sneakers. The naked man looked at him uncomprehendingly when asked to get dressed, and when he was handed the underwear he didn’t think twice before flicking them on his head.

“Oh shit,” Dov muttered under his mustache, asking the man to accompany him to the bedroom and summoning two other cops, who stopped their giggling as soon as they were chosen as part of the dressing team. For several long minutes, the three panting officers of the law battled the man’s clumsy limbs until they were able to fit the proper arm and leg in the appropriate encasing, and when they led him out of the house, the others present restrained themselves from laughing at the sight of him and exchanged looks of wonder at the thin smile that crossed his lips when he hesitated by the row of hedges and plucked a few stray leaves.

The only one who released a bashfully childish giggle was the small woman in the kitchen, suspected of murder, who listened only half intently when she was read her rights, considering the slew of rights she had denied the woman being carried out on a stretcher, such as the right to see Yonatan one final time or the right to read Rushdie’s next book. She didn’t stop chuckling even once the door of her house was closed behind her and she was led with utmost delicacy to the waiting patrol car, holding her head high in the face of dozens of neighbors’ eyes, who had crowded around the front of her house. People who passed her by, day in day out, and never bothered to find out who she was. She happily parted with the hated street, saying never again to the loathsome route between the two rows of sycamore trees, the identical houses, and the sleepy convenience store.

Looking through the streaked windows of the patrol car, she spied a frustrated old woman in black stomping furiously, and she continued to smile, the mists having parted, the thoughts beaten into obedience; it had been a long time since she’d encountered such fine humor, and in another minute the patrol car would pass by the famous bend in the road, and with a quick head motion she shifted her narrowed eyes toward the front of the health club and saw a blind man working out with fantastic concentration on one of the machines, unaware of the buffoonery of his movements as he bent over onto his stomach and lifted a pair of weights with his ankles, and when he raised his head with extreme exertion and every muscle in his face convulsed in shock, she knew that he saw, and she burst out in unbridled laughter.

“Why are you laughing?” Dov asked, detesting the low and disturbing voice gurgling from her throat.

“Nothing, just thought of someone,” she said, as though desultory, and turned from the window.

35

The Hundredth Dead Woman and the Flickering Man

Marian was sure she was a Charlatan. Even though she didn’t know the term’s current meaning. She had no doubt whatsoever that the battle she’d waged with the murderous nurse had ended in the hospital and that she was hooked up to the machines, much like her love. Marian, confusedly, based her judgment on the familiar tales of many people who, with confident and placid expressions, told of the notorious white hallways and, despite her disdain for clichés, she had to admit that there was a grain of truth to their testimony, even if, as opposed to all their descriptions, the room, and not the hallway, was both vast and obnoxiously full.

Apparently a lot of people get cracked in the head with vases, she thought, grinning timidly and laying a hand on the back of her head, feeling for remnants of the struggle and explaining away her blood-free hands as part of the authenticity of the experience, since surely she wasn’t really in an enormous hall surrounded by tens of thousands of curious nudists thirsting for an explanation, and therefore there was no need to insist on terrestrial details like the gaping wound she must have had in her head. Marian paid no attention to the screen and the beautiful orientation lecturer’s speech that was broadcast on it, preferring to spend the little time she had at her disposal considering her dire condition. Since she’d landed in Israel she had twice been brutally attacked. And if those violent episodes weren’t enough, her new love had suffered a heart attack before revealing himself to her. She was filled with excitement at the prospect that he, too, could be somewhere in the same strange room.

She strained her eyes by the glow of the screen, trying to locate him among the sea of heads. When the light was turned back on and the room was flooded with fluorescent whiteness, she rubbed her eyes at length and quickly got to her feet, looking for him alertly, distractedly fingering the strange device that hung from her neck, careful not to miss a single face, as surreal and asinine as it may look. To her surprise, she spotted Kolanski, the famous Israeli painter, on the far end of the room, jumping up and down like a kid, completely ignoring the leering group around him that called him “crazy,” and plowed toward him, but the stern-faced old man, who continuously leaped and called out “It’s impossible! It’s impossible!” didn’t so much as blink in her direction until she tapped his shoulder.

He spun around and addressed her with typical rudeness. “What do you want?”

“I know you don’t know me but I wanted to congratulate you on the medical miracle.”

Rafael planned on smiling but responded instead with a restrained nod and pointed at his jittery feet. “You see that? You know how many years it’s been since I stood on them?”

“Yes,” she answered winningly, and repeated after a brief pause, “You don’t know me, but…”

“Of course I know you. Your husband’s ridiculous friends asked that I draw a portrait of you, which I obviously refused to do. Kolanski doesn’t do portraits.”

“My husband’s ridiculous friends?” she asked with an innocent smile. “You must be mistaken, Mr. Kolanski. You don’t know me because I only got to know you when you were in the hospital in a coma. Maybe you noticed me on the day they let you go home.”

“Enough with the nonsense. I know exactly who you are. Even though it’s a little funny to see you here after all this time. I thought we were the newly dead and here I am talking to someone who died over a year ago.”

“No, no, no, Rafael, you’ve got this all wrong. I’m just like you, deep in a coma. You had another stroke. I read about it in the paper.”

“And you didn’t read that I didn’t make it through that last stroke?”

“No, not at all, you’re still lying in the hospital bed and sweet Bessie is sitting beside you waiting for you to wake up.”

“Bessie’s probably burying me as we speak, you lovely imbecile. My poor Bessie, what troubles she has waiting for her. But that’s nothing compared to what awaits me when she shows up here one of these days. The flower’s profound optimism beat the thorn’s shallow prickliness. Unlike me, she always believed that death was just a word.”

Marian very nearly took up the chant of the leering group around Kolanski but changed her mind at the sight of the opening doors. Certain she was right, she didn’t join the curious mass as they stormed the doors, waiting listlessly till the last of them left. Rafael was swept away by the mass, carried against his will toward the exit, and despite his forceful cries, the galloping dead did not spring him free, forcing on him an enjoyment he had already managed to forget in his fifty years of crippled existence. Marian, pressing herself against the wall, stifled a laugh as she avoided the flowing mass of people, and even from the far corner in which she hid, she could make out the hotheaded old man raising his legs and kicking away with supreme delight.

Marian chose to revel in the blessed time-out and was the last to leave, a childish wish pulsating inside her that perhaps she will not be thrust back to that violent world too soon, and that she’d get a week or two of reprieve. She turned her head slowly to look at the closing doors before she caught sight of the monstrous vehicles on the far end of the vast lawn, giant streetcars that swallowed up the tens of thousands of people and reversed with terminal velocity until they morphed into black dots and vanished into the horizon.

Marian tried to remember if in the tales of those who came back from the dead, something had been said about multi-wheeled streetcars or the silly electronic toy dangling around her neck or even the chilling voice that was broadcast over a hidden loudspeaker until the doors opened. Her thoughts were disrupted by the sight at the far end of the path, about eight hundred yards away, of a bluish, rather rotund figure that did not take his eyes off her. Without understanding what it was that drew her toward him, she ran in his direction, seized by excitement, and with each stride the spark of recognition intensified and she hastened toward him, eager to ensure that her eyes did not deceive her, because, three hundred yards away, the unassailable figure of Yonatan was turning into an apparition; he extended a hand toward her and smiled happily, she smiled back, incredulous at her good fortune, a match made in heaven, a pair of temporarily dead people in a semi-blind date. One moment he was here and the next he was gone. Marian called his name passionately but was not answered. It seemed as though the fading man one hundred and fifty yards ahead of her was yearning to respond—his lips moved helplessly, his other hand extended as well, and his smile was blurry—when suddenly he lost some of his clarity, like an actor in a color movie who bleeds into black and white and ever so slowly melts away. Marian closed and opened her eyes; his being waxed and waned, and then he was back again, strong and sturdy, moving toward her—and then froze again—and she was not willing to give in, spreading her arms wide to hug him—his overalls vanishing and reappearing—in four steps she and he would be one. And then he expired. Marian hugged air. The flickering man had extinguished. Marian didn’t lose her calm. Over the course of the last minute, he had managed to dissipate and be restored dozens of times, like a light that refuses to die, and she continued watching, fully confident of his reappearance, not relenting even after two uneventful minutes, certain that the invisible man was merely testing her emotional endurance. Forgetting her surroundings entirely, she stood alone, detached, in the heart of a lane devoid of people, until her ear picked up a low and gentle voice on her left.

Marian smiled, turned victoriously toward the voice, and awarded the gnome a withering look. The pale man called her by name again, this time with a stridency that underscored that he would not allow her to ignore him, and she responded, “Leave me alone and stop distracting me, jackass.”

Rather than granting her her wish, he called out sadly, “I’m sorry, Marian, but you could stay here for hours and he still won’t come.”

“Butt out and quit ruining the moment.” She shut her eyes and stamped her foot. “Come on, Yonatan, please, don’t make me get upset.”

“No, love, doesn’t work that way,” the low and congenial voice said, “that moment’s done. It’s over; he woke up. But if you open your eyes and look down, you’ll see he left you a memento.”

Despite herself, she obeyed the strange man and bent down to pick up the portrait of the woman who bore a sickeningly close resemblance to her, aside from the redundant beauty mark and the straight black hair. She shouted, “This woman again? First the little scumbag tried to kill me because of her and now even Yonatan leaves me her portrait? To hell with her!”

Before he had the chance to restrain her, she smashed the portrait against a nearby tree and called out in a threatening voice, “Where is he? Where’s Yonatan?”

“I told you. He’s come out of his coma.”

“I also want to come out of my coma!” she demanded, sprinting toward the doors of the white room, disregarding his calls to halt, fleeing from his wheezing approach. Finding no knob on the doors, she knocked with her feet, kicking and screaming in panic, “Open the doors! Open them! I need to get in! I need to snap out of it! You must help me get back! I’ve heard of people living on in a vegetative state for years and I can’t afford to waste all that time! Yonatan’s awake! I have to wake up, too! I have to meet him! Make me flicker! Make me flicker!”

“It’s impossible, dear,” the man said softly, after finally closing the gap between himself and the sobbing woman. “You’ll never be able to go back there.”

“Why not?”

“Because, as opposed to what you think, you’re not in a coma. You’re well beyond that.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re naked, you’ve got a godget around your neck, and the Announcer called your name. That’s the reason I’m here and that’s also why Yonatan was here.” At the end of a long silence, he smiled and said, “Welcome to the Other World, or, in simpler terms, the world of the dead.”

Marian turned around gradually, her pupils filling her eyes, both hands covering her lips. “What did you say?”

This time he was the astonished one. He recoiled as though he’d received an electric shock, his eyes fixed on the small birthmark on her left breast that had only now been revealed. “Oh my God, it’s so simple! When I got to the Family Tree Administration and they told me who your mother was, I thought it was nothing but a brilliant coincidence, but now … now I understand it all…”

“What are you talking about?”

“The birthmark on your chest … the star…”

“I was supposed to get rid of it a few days ago, but in the end I decided against the surgery.”

“Because it reminded you of the last time, right? When your mother went with you to the clinic, and there you met the only man in the world who has the exact same mark, the man your mother killed in a fit of rage, the Belgian bastard who ruined her life.”

Marian whispered in terror, “How do you know all that? And who the hell are you?”

He hung his head modestly. “I’m the Mad Hop, private investigator by trade, but you can call me Samuel, and I’d be obliged if you’d join me for a fascinating journey.”