Only to be repeated tomorrow and tomorrow after that. You hear a sound and it’s truth turning in its grave. Imagination dies a slower death, by suffocation. You try to put up walls, to cordon off the little plot where you labor as something apart, with a separate climate and different rules. But the habits seep in anyway like poisoned groundwater, and all you were trying to raise there chokes and withers. What I’m trying to say is that it seems to me you can’t have it both ways. So I made a sacrifice, and let go.
The idea I began to entertain during that first session with Dr. Lichtman took hold, so that after seeing her ten or eleven times in almost as many days, and, aided by Xanax, having managed to scale the panic down from a nightmare to a threatening menace, I announced to her that I had decided, in a week’s time, to take a trip. She was surprised, of course, and asked where I was going. A number of possible answers crossed my mind. Places I had, over the years, received invitations from that perhaps could be extended again. Rome. Berlin. Istanbul. But in the end I said what I knew I was going to say all along. Jerusalem. She raised her eyebrows. I’m not going in order to claim back the desk, if that’s what you’re thinking, I said. Then why? she asked, the light through her windows spinning her hair, the rising wave of hair drawn up high above the scalp, into something almost transparent—almost but not quite, so that it seemed like the secret to wellness, however unlikely, could still be hidden there. But my time was up, and I was excused from the need to answer. At the door we shook hands, a gesture that always struck me as strangely out of place, as if, with all one’s organs spread on the table and the allotted time in the operating room almost up, the surgeon were to wrap them each neatly in plastic wrap before putting them back and hurriedly sewing you up again. The following Friday, having given Vlad instructions to look after my apartment while I was away, taken one Xanax to get through security, and another hurtling down the runway, I was aloft on a night flight bound for Ben Gurion airport.
TRUE KINDNESS
I DON’T SUPPORT THE PLAN, I told you. Why? you demanded, with angry little eyes. What will you write? I asked. You told me a convoluted story about four, six, maybe eight people all lying in rooms joined by a system of electrodes and wires to a great white shark. All night the shark floats suspended in an illuminated tank, dreaming the dreams of these people. No, not the dreams, the nightmares, the things too difficult to bear. So they sleep, and through the wires the terrifying things leave them and flood into the awesome fish with scarred skin that can bear all the accumulated misery. After you finished I let a sufficient amount of silence pass before I spoke. Who are these people? I asked. People, you said. I ate a handful of nuts, watching your face. I don’t know where to begin on the problems with this little story, I told you. Problems? you said, your voice rising and cracking. In the wells of your eyes your mother saw the suffering of a child raised by a tyrant, but in the end the fact that you never became a writer had nothing to do with me.
SO WHAT? Where to begin? After everything, after the millions of words, the endless conversations, the relentless goings on about, the phone calls, the explaining, the badgering, the emphasizing, the obfuscating and the clarifying, and then the silence of all these years—where?
It’s almost dawn. From where I sit at the kitchen table I can see the front gate, and any minute now you’ll return from your nocturnal rambling. I’ll see you appear in your old blue windbreaker, the one you dug out of your closet, and you’ll bend over to unhook the rusted latch and let yourself in. You’ll open the door, take off your wet sneakers, ridges of mud on the edges and blades of grass stuck to the soles, and then you’ll come into the kitchen and find me waiting for you.
WHEN YOU and Uri were very young your mother lived in fear of dying and leaving you alone. Alone with me, I pointed out. She would look