It’s hardest at night. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying I miss her most at night—because I don’t miss her, period. But at night, when I’m alone in bed, I do think about her. Not warm, fuzzy thoughts about all the good moments we had. More like a picture of her in panties and a T-shirt, sleeping with her mouth open, breathing heavily, leaving a circle of saliva on the pillow, and of myself watching her. What did I actually feel then when I was watching her? First of all, amazement that I wasn’t turned off, and after that, a sort of affection. Not love. Affection. The kind you feel toward an animal or a baby more than toward a wife. Then I cry. Almost every night. And not out of regret. I have nothing to regret. She’s the one who left. And looking back, our splitting up was good, not just for her, for both of us. And it’s even better that we did it before there were kids in the middle to make everything more complicated. So why do I cry? Because that’s just how it is. When something gets taken away from you, even if it’s shit, it hurts. When a tumor is removed, you’re left with a scar. And the best time to scratch it seems to be at night.
Uzi has a new cell phone, the kind that gets real-time updates from the stock market. When the stocks of his computer company go up, his cell plays “Simply the Best,” and when they go down, it plays “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” He’s been walking around with that cell for a month now, and it makes him laugh every time. “Simply the Best” makes him laugh more than “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” because, after all, it’s easier to laugh when money is pouring down on you than when someone is snatching it out of your wallet. And today, Uzi tells me, is a big day because he’s planning to invest a bundle in NASDAQ options. Those options are called QQQQ, but Uzi thinks it’s funnier to call them “cuckoo.” If the NASDAQ goes up, so do they. And since the NASDAQ, according to Uzi, is going to fly through the ceiling any minute, all we have to do is grab the cuckoo by the tail and fly with it to the sky.
It takes Uzi twenty minutes to explain this, and when he’s finished, he checks his cell-phone display again. When he began his explanation, the cuckoo was 1.3, and now it’s already 1.55. “We suck,” Uzi laments as he chews his almond croissant, spraying crumbs every which way. “Do you realize that in just this last half hour, we could have made more than ten percent on our money?”
“Why do you keep saying
we
?” I ask. “And what money are you talking about? You think I have money to put into this thing?”
“You don’t have to put in a lot,” Uzi says. “If we’d put in five thousand, we’d be five hundred ahead. But we didn’t. You know what? Forget it, why am I making you a part of this? I didn’t. And that’s even though, deep down, I knew for an absolute fact—the way a baby knows that his mother will always love him—that NASDAQ would break 1.5.”
“There are mothers who abandon their babies,” I say.
“Maybe,” Uzi mumbles, “but not the cuckoo’s mother. I’m telling you, I should have put all my money on it, but I decided to wait. And you know why? Because I’m a loser.”
“You’re not …” I try, but Uzi’s too far into it to stop. “Look at me, I’m thirty-five and I don’t even have a million.”
“But just a week ago you told me you invested more than a million in the market,” I say.
“Shekels,” Uzi snorts contemptuously. “What’s a million shekels? I’m talking dollars here.” Uzi swallows the last piece of croissant sadly and washes it down with a swig of Diet Coke. “Look around,” he says. “Pimple-faced kids who served me coffee in Styrofoam cups at start-ups created by me are driving BMWs while I drive a Peugeot 205 like some dental hygienist.”
“Stop whining,” I tell him. “Believe me, a lot of people would kill to trade places with you.”
“A lot of people?” Uzi laughed to himself, half maliciously. “A lot of which people? A lot of the jobless in Sderot? A lot of lepers in India? What’s with you, Dedi? You’ve turned Amish on me now? Looks to me like that divorce fucked you up completely.”
Uzi and I have known each other since we were about three. A lot of time has passed since then, but not a lot has changed. Uzi says that even then I felt sorry for myself all the time. When we were in high school, I fantasized about a girlfriend while Uzi was already trying to make a killing. He started a summer camp for kids. His business plan was simple: the money he got from the parents he split fifty-fifty with the kids, and in return, the kids didn’t snitch on him for not organizing any activities except for tossing a ratty soccer ball on the grass for them to kick around and letting them drink from the water fountain once every two hours. Today Uzi has his own apartment, a wife who was once a secretary in some bubble company he worked for, and a chubby little daughter who looks just like him. “If we get divorced now,” Uzi says, “she gets half. Of everything. And it’s all because I was a pussy before the wedding and didn’t make her sign a prenup.”
I’ve already paid for breakfast and now we’re waiting for the change. “You, on the other hand,” Uzi continues, “came out of your divorce like a champ. She didn’t take a shekel.”
“That’s because there was nothing to take.” I try to put the compliment into perspective.
“For the time being”—Uzi pats me on the back—“for the time being. And now that the whole business between the two of you is signed and sealed, this is the perfect time to strike and be the only winner, like in the one-winner sweepstakes, without partners.”
“Without partners,” I repeat automatically, and swallow the last, sweetest drops of my coffee.
“Without partners,” Uzi repeats, “just me and you. I have a feeling that the cuckoo is going to drop a little again, not really low, to maybe one point three five, and then we buy. We buy the pants off it.” The waitress doesn’t come back with the change. The owner walks over instead. “Excuse me,” he says, “I’m very sorry to bother you, but the hundred-shekel bill you gave the waitress is counterfeit. Look.” He holds the bill up to the light. “It’s not real.” I take the bill and look at the watermark. Instead of a drawing of former president ben Zvi, a scribbled smiley face looks out at me.
“Counterfeit?” Uzi snatches the bill out of my hand. “Let me see,” he says, and tosses the owner a different bill, which he examines against the light too. Meanwhile, I apologize. “I took a taxi here and paid the driver with a two-hundred-shekel bill,” I tell the owner. “He must have palmed the fake bill off on me as change.”
“This bill, it’s so cool,” Uzi says. “Will you sell it to me? For a hundred?”
“What are you so excited about?” I ask Uzi. “It’s counterfeit.”
“That’s why, you idiot,” Uzi says, and takes a bundle of bills out of his wallet. “Noncounterfeits I already have. But counterfeit is classy. I’ll dump it on anyone who gives me shitty service.”
“Okay,” I say, “so take it. A counterfeit hundred as a gift from me.”
Now we’re in Uzi’s car. We just got in. I don’t know why I told him that I cry at night. Uzi is not exactly the person to share stuff like that with. “And it’s not because of her,” I stress. “I don’t want her to come back.”
“Yeah, I know,” Uzi mumbles, “I know her.” His cell phone tells him he’s simply the best, but he doesn’t even glance at the display to see how much the stock went up, he just moves his face right up to mine and stares at me from an inch away like a doctor examining a patient. “You know what you need, and right now?” he says. “An Ethiopian sandwich at Fifty-six Matalon Street.”
“We just ate,” I protest.
“A sandwich isn’t food,” Uzi says, fiddling with the steering-wheel lock, “a sandwich is one Ethiopian chick under you and another one on top of you, pressing her tits into your back. I gotta tell you that when I first heard about it, it didn’t turn me on either, but it really is something.”
“What’s Fifty-six Matalon Street?” I ask. “A whorehouse?”
“Let’s not change the subject,” Uzi says, turning on the ignition, “we’re talking about you now. You haven’t fucked even once since you and Ofra split, right?”
I nod and say, “And I don’t feel like it either.”
“In life”—Uzi releases the hand brake—“you don’t always do what you feel like.”
“If you’re trying to tell me that I cry because I’m not fucking, then you’re wrong,” I object.
“I’m not saying that”—Uzi drums the wheel with his fingers—“I’m saying that you cry because your life is empty. Because it has no meaning. And when you’re empty inside …” He touches himself on the chest slightly to the right of his heart. “If there’s meaning around you, you put some of it inside yourself, and if there isn’t, you shove in a plug. Just for the time being, till the manufacturer sends along the meaning. And in cases like that, an Ethiopian sandwich is a great plug.”
“Take me home,” I say. “My life is pathetic enough without going to whores.” But Uzi isn’t with me anymore. His cell phone is ringing again with an unfamiliar, boring ringtone programmed for incoming calls. It’s someone from the bank. Uzi tells him to buy $20,000 of the QQQQ, which has gone down again. “Ten thousand for me and another ten thousand for a friend.”
I shake my head at him, but Uzi ignores me. And when he hangs up he says, “Get used to it, Dedi, you and me, we’re gonna grab the cuckoo by the tail.”
Through the thin wall I can hear Uzi’s cell sing to him that he’s simply the best and a woman roaring with laughter. There were no Ethiopians at 56 Matalon Street today, so Uzi went into a room with a big-boobed girl who said in English that she was Czech, and I had a bleach blonde, probably Russian. On the other side of the wall, Uzi is laughing out loud now too—I guess a Czech open sandwich isn’t a bad plug either. The blonde’s name is Maria, and she asks me if I want her to help me get undressed. I tell her that won’t be necessary, that I’m there only because of my crazy friend and that as far as I’m concerned, we can just sit there together till Uzi finishes and then leave, without fucking. “No fuck?” Maria tries to understand. “Suck?” On the other side of the wall, Uzi’s cell keeps telling him he’s simply the best. Something good is happening in there. Maria unbuttons my pants and I tell myself that if I ask her to stop, she’ll be insulted. I know that isn’t true, but I make an effort to believe it. Maybe Uzi is right and all I need now is a plug. While she’s doing it, I try to invent a life for her, a happy one that brought her to prostitution out of choice. I once saw a movie like that, about a cheerful, bighearted French whore. Maybe Maria’s that way too, only Russian. When I look down, all I can see is her hair. Every once in a while she raises her head and asks, “Is good?” and I nod in embarrassment. Soon it’ll be over.
During the half hour we spend at 56 Matalon Street, the cuckoo flies right through the ceiling. By the time we’re back on the sunbaked street, it has already reached 1.75, which according to Uzi, gives us 100 percent on our money. And so the cuckoo continues to slice through the blue sky like a kite, with us right behind it, clutching its tail tightly, trying not to fall.
A black man moved into a white neighborhood. He had a black house with a black porch where he used to sit every morning and drink his black coffee, until one black night, his white neighbors came into his house and beat the crap out of him. He lay there curled up like an umbrella handle in a pool of black blood and they kept on beating him, until one of them started yelling that they should stop because if he died on them they might end up in prison.
The black man didn’t die on them. An ambulance came and took him far, far away to an enchanted hospital on the top of an inactive volcano. The hospital was white. Its gates were white, the walls of its rooms were white, and so was the bedding. The black man began to recover. Recover and fall in love. Fall in love with a white nurse in a white uniform who took care of him with great devotion and kindness. She loved him too. And like him, that love of theirs grew stronger with every passing day, grew stronger and learned to get out of bed and crawl. Like a small child. Like a baby. Like a black man who had been badly beaten.
They got married in a yellow church. A yellow priest married them. His yellow parents had come to that country on a yellow ship. They had been beaten up by their white neighbors too. But he didn’t get into all that with the black man. He barely knew him, and anyway, he didn’t want to go there, what with the ceremony and everything. He planned to say that God loves them and wishes them all the best. The yellow man didn’t know that for sure. He’d tried lots of times to convince himself that he did. That he knows that God loves everyone and wishes us all only the best. But that day, when he married that battered black man, not even thirty and already covered with scars and sitting in a wheelchair, it was harder for him to believe. “God loves you both,” he finally said anyway. “God loves you and wishes you all the best,” he said, and was ashamed.
The black man and the white woman lived together happily, until one day, when the woman was walking home from the grocery store, a brown man with a brown knife who was waiting for her in the stairwell told her to give him everything she had. When the black man came home, he found her dead. He didn’t understand why the brown man had stabbed her, because he could have just taken her money and run. The funeral service took place in the yellow priest’s yellow church, and when the black man saw the yellow priest, he grabbed him by his yellow robe and said, “But you told us. You told us that God loves us. If he loves us, why did he do such a terrible thing to us?” The yellow priest had a ready-made answer. An answer they’d taught him in priest school; something about God working in mysterious ways and that now that the woman was dead, she was surely closer to Him. But instead of using that answer, the priest began cursing. He cursed God viciously. Insulting and hurtful curses the likes of which had never been heard in the world before. Curses so insulting and hurtful that even God was offended.
God entered the yellow church on the disabled ramp. He was in a wheelchair too; He had once lost a woman too. He was silvery. Not the cheap, glittery silver of a banker’s BMW, but a muted, matte silver. Once, as He was gliding among the silvery stars with his silvery beloved, a gang of golden gods attacked them. When they were kids, God had once beaten one of them up, a short, skinny golden god who had now grown up and returned with his friends. The golden gods beat Him with golden clubs of sunlight and didn’t stop until they’d broken every bone in His divine body. It took Him years to recuperate. His beloved never did. She remained a vegetable. She could see and hear everything, but she couldn’t say a word. The silvery God decided to create a species in His own image so she could watch it to pass the time. That species really did resemble Him: battered and victimized like Him. And His silvery beloved stared wide-eyed at the members of that species for hours, stared and didn’t even shed a tear.
“What do you think,” the silvery God asked the yellow priest in frustration, “that I created all of you like this because it’s what I wanted? Because I’m some kind of pervert or sadist who enjoys all this suffering? I created you like this because this is what I know. It’s the best I can do.”
The yellow priest fell to his knees and begged His forgiveness. If a stronger God had come to his church, he probably would have carried on cursing him, even if he had to go to hell for it. But seeing the silvery, disabled God made him feel regret and sorrow, and he really did want His forgiveness. The black man didn’t fall to his knees. With the bottom half of his body paralyzed, he couldn’t do things like that anymore. He just sat in his wheelchair and pictured a silvery goddess somewhere in the heavens looking down at him with gaping eyes. That imbued him with a sense of purpose, of hope, even. He couldn’t explain to himself exactly why, but the thought that he was suffering just like a god made him feel blessed.