His head swayed, he furrowed his brow, and his face grew stern and focused. He thought about what she had done for him and what she had been to him. “What a piece of shit I am,” he thought, “I can’t even give her one day.” She heard him. “I have to buy time. Just another few minutes and I won’t be able to …” Ora kneeled in front of him and placed her hands on the armrests on either side of him. It was becoming intolerable. He turned his head away. “She’s hysterical,” he thought grumpily, “and there’s something wrong with her mouth.” Ora nodded and her eyes filled with tears. “I wish she would just leave,” Avram thought out loud and squirmed in his seat. “Just go, leave me. What’s she doing here anyway?”
Something prickled on the outskirts of her brain. She demanded to know what he meant when he said in another few minutes he wouldn’t be able to …
He smiled crookedly, his heavy swollen eyelids barely open, exposing red crescents: “I took a pill. A minute from now I’ll be knocked out. It’ll be morning by the time—”
“But you knew I was coming!”
“If you’d come sooner …” His voice was thickening. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”
She hurried into the little bathroom. The bulb over the mirror was burned out. She moved her fingers over the sink as if trying to pull in threads of light from the living room. There was rust on the taps and the drain and around the screws that held the shelves to the pink porcelain tiles. To her surprise there was virtually no medicine on the shelves. Confused, she thought back to the stash of medication he used to keep around. He liked to give her detailed accounts during their rare meetings, before Ofer enlisted: “Numbon, Zodorm, Bondormin, Hypnodorm,” he would mumble, “they give them names that sound like notes on a toy xylophone.” All she could find now were packets of antihistamines, probably for his hay fever, and a few Assivals and Stilnoxes scattered around, but it was mostly natural sleeping aids. That’s good, she thought, he must have cleaned himself up. Finally one good thing. She crammed the tablets into a plastic bag she found in the laundry closet and left the room. But then she went back: on a separate shelf on one side were a large silver earring in the shape of a spur, a bottle of vanilla-scented deodorant, and a hairbrush covered with short, purple hairs.
Seeing the pantry full of cardboard boxes stuffed with empty beer bottles, she assumed he made part of his income by returning bottles for their deposits. When she went back to him, she found him in a deep slumber. His arms and legs were splayed out and his mouth was open. She put her hands on her hips. What now? Only then did she notice large charcoal drawings on the walls around her: godlike figures, or prophets, a woman breast-feeding a crane whose large human eyes had long eyelashes, and babies who looked like floating goats, their fine hair spread like halos around their heads. One of the prophets had Avram’s face. The breast-feeding woman was actually a young girl with sweet, gentle features and a mohawk. Along one whole wall was an improvised desk — a wooden door on sawhorses — covered with heaps of junk of all sizes. There were tools, tubes of glue, nails, screws, rusty cans, ancient faucets, clocks in various stages of disrepair, old keys, and piles of tattered books. She opened an old photo album that was torn and moldy around the edges, and the odor of trash came at her in a wave. It was empty. All it contained were photo corners stuck on the pages, and slanted captions in unfamiliar handwriting: Father and me, Odessa, Winter ’36. Grandma and Mother and Abigail (in utero), 1949. Guess who’s Queen Esther this year?
Avram groaned and opened his eyes and saw her standing there. “You’re here,” he mumbled, and felt her fingernails digging into his forearms. He couldn’t figure out how these things were connected. He shook his head. “Tomorrow, come tomorrow, it’ll be fine.”
She held her face very close to his again. He started sweating. She yelled into his ear, “Don’t run away on me now!” The voice unraveled inside him into empty syllables and sounds. She saw his tongue move around his mouth and leaned over him again. “Come asleep, come unconscious, but come! Don’t leave me on my own with this.”
He gurgled with his mouth open. What about Ilan, he thought, why hadn’t Ilan come with her—
Later, he wasn’t sure if it was a minute or an hour later, he strained to open his eyes again, but she was gone. For a minute he thought she’d left, let him be, and wished he’d asked her to help him get into bed. His back would ache tomorrow. But then, terrifyingly, he heard her moving around in his bedroom. He tried to get up, to get her out of there, but his arms and legs were like water skins. He heard her feeling around the walls for a light switch, but there was no bulb in there. “I forgot to change it,” he mumbled. “I’ll put one in tomorrow.” Then there were footsteps again. She’s coming out, he thought with relief. Then the footsteps stopped and there was a long silence, and he froze in the armchair. He knew what she was looking at. “Get out of there,” he groaned silently. She cleared her dry throat a couple of times, went to switch a light on in the hallway, and walked back to the bedroom, probably to get a better look. If he’d been capable, he would have got up and left the apartment.
“Avram, Avram, Avram,” her voice again and her warm breath on his face. “You can’t stay here alone,” she whispered, and there was something new in her voice, even he could sense it. Not the panic from before, but some knowledge that worried him even more. “We have to run away together, you don’t have a choice, I’m such an idiot, you don’t have a choice.” And he knew she was right, but warm threads were already tying themselves slowly around his ankles, he felt them crawling up, wrapping themselves with maternal devotion around his knees and thighs, enveloping him tightly in a soft cocoon where he could pupate for the night. He hadn’t taken Prodomol for a few years now — Neta forbade it — and the effect was stunning. His legs were already melting away. Soon another exhausting shift of awakeness would be over, and he’d be rid of himself for five or six hours.
“You’re wearing socks and shoes now,” said Ora, straightening up. “Come on, give me your hand and try to stand.”
He breathed slowly, heavily, with his eyes closed and his face strained. If only he could concentrate, if only she would be quiet for a minute. He was almost there, just a matter of seconds, and she must have known that too, because she wouldn’t give in. She was chasing him all the way there — how could she be allowed in there? Calling his name over and over, shaking him, rocking his shoulders, such strength she had, she’d always been strong, thin and strong, she used to beat him at arm wrestling. But he mustn’t think, mustn’t remember, because beyond her shouting he could finally feel the blurry dizziness waiting, and there was an indentation in the shape of his body, as soft as a palm, and a cloud would cover everything.
Ora stood facing the man asleep in the armchair. Three years I haven’t seen him, she thought, and I didn’t even hug him. Sprawled out with his chin pressed to his chest, the patches of stubble protruded around his mouth and made him look like a drunken troll, and it was hard to decide if he was kindly or bitterly cruel. “Look at something weird,” he’d said to her once, standing naked before her, when they were twenty-one. “I’ve just noticed that I have one good eye and one bad eye.”