The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (12 page)

There’s no telling why the three of them called it snooker when the game is actually called pool. But after all it isn’t the name that counts, it’s the pastime. And this way they could meet every day by the billiard table at the café, set up some kind of mini-tournament and feel like they were doing something. Most of the time, they were pretty evenly matched, because the only one who had a little experience, on account of growing up in the projects, had no coordination. The second guy may have had coordination, he just wasn’t really motivated. And the third one, who was motivated as hell, never had an angle. Which meant that every time it was his turn, his shot was so impossible that he didn’t stand a chance, even in theory.

Pool is a game for two, so that one of them would always have to sit it out, drinking coffee and talking on his cell phone. The one who’d grown up in the projects would call his girlfriend and talk baby talk to her, rubbing his finger around the plastic part you speak into as if he was stroking her lips. It’s amazing how people can sound like retards when they’re talking to their girlfriend, especially if they really love her a lot. Because when you’re just fucking someone you make a point of keeping your cool, but when you’re really in love—it can sound pretty repulsive. Speaking of fucking, the other guy, the one with the good coordination, he never took a latté, just a short and mean espresso, and meanwhile he’d be trying to navigate between all the calls from girls he’d come on to in the past week, putting one on hold, talking to another and so on. And he put so much effort into making sure none of the relationships he was juggling got too serious, that none of them ever did. Which sometimes from a distance seemed kind of sad.

And the third guy, the motivated one, was the only one who didn’t order anything, and hardly ever used his phone, that’s how immersed he was in the game. Once he even tried to make a rule that whenever they played, they would switch off their phones, but the others refused, which was sort of frustrating, because they were so busy yammering they never really paid attention to the game. Sitting on the side, instead of drinking and talking, he spent most of his time hating himself for losing the previous round. And somehow, it was always the same story, that when it came time for the critical shot, he didn’t have an angle. The truth is that he didn’t often sit it out, because he was so into it that whenever he had a miss, he’d start to cheat. And the others would almost always let him get away with it, because when you drag it out with the same girlfriend for three years, or when there are four chicks that you’re feeling bad about, all at the same time, then losing a game of snooker starts to seem like small change. So that on paper, everything should just have kept going. Except that the motivated guy knew in his heart that if he wanted to win, he’d have to keep cheating, and that he was cheating his best buddies. And it bothered him, because deep down inside he was a very honest guy. And he was so set on finding a different solution that he’d stay behind every day after his buddies left, and practice, trying to figure out what he was doing wrong. From the side, it looked sort of pathetic: a bald thirty-two-year-old kid racking up the balls, shooting with the tip of the cue, and cursing himself almost voicelessly every time he missed.

It went on that way for many days till the waitress who worked there decided to help him out. She taught him one simple trick: always, a tenth of a second before he shoots, he should stop thinking about the shot, and think about something else instead, something nice. To his surprise, this trick almost always worked, and suddenly he became so good that his friends didn’t want to play with him anymore. They both said that was why, but the truth was there were other reasons. The guy from the projects was about to become a father, and he was busy all the time with ultrasounds and mortgages and all kinds of Lamaze courses. And the other guy had so many girls and bad scenes on his mind that he couldn’t concentrate long enough to hold the cue straight. So the only thing left for the motivated guy to do was to play against the waitress. And even though she’d beat him all the time, he didn’t really care anymore. This waitress was called Karen, and she had one ironclad rule—not to date customers, but because the motivated guy never ordered anything, she didn’t really consider him a customer, so at least in theory he stood a chance.

At age thirty-one, Himme found that almost all the dreams the people closest to him ever had for him were coming true:

He’d succeeded no less than everyone had expected him to, but he remained modest, which made his father proud. Not to mention the fact that he had married just the way his parents and his wife had always dreamed he would. He even had his health, except for that minor business with the hemorrhoids. And yet, Himme wasn’t happy—which often made him feel frustrated. His mother, after all, ever since he was a little boy, had always wanted him to be happy.

Something Exciting

If Himme could have wished for anything, what would he have wished for?

Quiet? Quiet is serenity, it’s a bubble bath, it’s grass growing, it’s what happens in your refrigerator after you close the door and the little light goes out. In short, quiet is nothingness. And we’ll have more than enough of that nothingness eventually, definitely, once we die. For now, Himme felt, what was needed here was something entirely different. Something, never mind what it was called as long as it tugged at his heart, like a whale song. Something strong, something tough and dangerous, but something that would end in success. Something that would fill his soul to the brim, causing it to overflow, yet could be contained. Something exciting, but really exciting, like love, or a mission, or an idea that would take the world light-years forward. Something like that was just what he needed. At least one, preferably two, urgently. Because the guy’s dying here in the meantime. And the situation, despite his apparent nonchalance, was really and truly serious. “I heard Suzanne Vega’s coming to town,” his wife said, without looking up from the paper. “How about it?” “Why not?” he said, and wiped the sweat from his face, trying not to let her see how agitated he was. “Her first record I really liked,” she said. “The second one not as much, and the third I haven’t heard, but everyone says it’s lousy. And they say she’s got a book out that you can only order online. We could get tickets. Yael too. I’m sure she’d love to come.”

Yael was a good friend of his wife’s. Not very pretty, not terribly interesting. But with a very smooth complexion and the enticing smell of an easy lay. Once, before he got married, he’d fantasize about that kind of girl, half jerking off, half praying for one to show up. Actually, completely jerking off and completely praying. Not that it did him much good. And today, married and faithful, it really didn’t matter anymore.

“Whatever you want, honey,” he said, stressing the
you
almost abjectly.

The tickets were expensive, and the show kind of dull, but moving too. She looked sad when she sang, and it really tugged at Himme’s heart. At one point he imagined himself going up on stage and kissing her. An electrifying kiss that would make her his, right then and there. Then she gave an encore. But even though they gave her a standing ovation, she didn’t come out for another number. She went back to America. Maybe suicide, he thought to himself that same night as he tried to maneuver without spilling the drinks he’d gotten for his wife and Yael. Yeah, maybe suicide.

A Broken Heart

He actually had a relationship once with someone who’d committed suicide. Not emotional, physical. It happened in the army. He was serving in general-staff headquarters at the time, and he’d been brought up on charges of being seen with his boots unpolished. And just when he was walking past the tall staff headquarters building, someone dropped to the ground next to him, splattered. A girl-soldier, they said, with a broken heart, a corporal, Liat Something. Later he remembered hearing a kind of scream above him as she was falling. But he hadn’t looked up. The sound didn’t even register.

He reached the hearing all covered in her blood. They let him off. Liat Atlas. That was her name. They even called on him later, to testify at the military police investigation. It couldn’t go on this way, that much he knew. Maybe he needed therapy.

Lots of Patience

Himme’s therapist was hairy.

Himme’s therapist took tons of money.

Himme’s therapist said it takes lots and lots of patience.

Most of the time he just listened.

When he did say something, it was usually something dumb, or an annoying question.

It takes lots and lots of patience.

Once he told his therapist: “Enough about me—let’s talk about you.” And Himme’s therapist gave him the tired smile of someone who’d heard that crack more than once, but under the smile it was also obvious that he didn’t have much to tell. From the look of it, the only thing working in the therapist’s favor was the exhausting allure of mystery. Mystery. Like between a guy and a girl on their first date, that uncertainty, will he try to kiss her, will she agree, and if she does, what will her body look like naked? Mystery was the only card his therapist had up his sleeve, and he wasn’t about to give it up so easily.

At that session, neither of them said anything for fifty minutes. Himme spent those fifty minutes thinking about what if his therapist had been a beautiful, voluptuous woman and Himme got up out of his chair and kissed her long, smooth neck. How would she react? A slap? Maybe a half-surprised moan? Except that his therapist wasn’t a beautiful, voluptuous woman. “It takes lots of patience,” he told Himme at the end of that session, as he filled in the invoice, “lots of patience.” And they both opened their datebooks and made believe they were really going to meet again.

Science Fiction

Once he read an interview with a marriage counselor, who said that in order to rekindle their relationship a couple should clean the bathtub together in the nude, or buy special underwear made of sugar and lick it off each other until it dissolved. Himme and his wife never did things like the complicated ideas he read about in the paper, but still it was obvious that after a very tired half-year they were suddenly onto something. Like in those futuristic movies, where they always have those weapons that track a person’s frequency, and the person starts resonating until the special effects come on and everything explodes somehow, he and his wife succeeded in finding some secret frequency in each other too. “Why don’t we go abroad,” his wife purred after one of the times when he came. “We’ve never fucked abroad.” “We fucked in Sinai,” he said. “Sinai doesn’t count. It’s Egypt,” she said, drawing close to him, and kissed him on the eyes. “Let’s go somewhere overseas. Let’s go to Greece.”

Here

In the end, they didn’t go to Greece. They tried, but it didn’t work out—and it was because of her. His job had a special offer on an Internet linkup, and he tried for hours to log on. When he succeeded, he spent most of his time looking for the names of people he’d known, from work and from life. Once, on the Web site of some Dutch anarchist DJs, he found the name of his upstairs neighbor, or maybe it was a different Stanislav Hershko. His own name he couldn’t find anywhere, but he discovered soon enough how to outsmart the system, and slip it into some sites, and ever since then he’d visited so many of them, that on his most recent search for his name he’d received seventy hits. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he thought, but he also knew that as long as he wasn’t able to figure out where
here
was, he didn’t stand a chance.

Completely Alone

One night he had a dream that was almost prophetic. In the dream, he was in a faraway country, sitting naked on the sidewalk. In his dream, he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there. He looked down at his feet to see if there was any money on the ground. If there had been any, even a single coin, he could have thought he was a beggar. Except that there was nothing. Which made Himme think that maybe in the dream he was an unsuccessful beggar or maybe even a street performer. Strange, whenever he dreamed, the thing that interested him most was his profession. Even in his most abstract dreams, the kind where you lose all your teeth, or where you’re drowning, his first thought was always: “Am I a drowning captain? A naval officer on a missile ship? Maybe a fisherman?” And as he was being swooped up into the whirlpool of his dream, he’d keep struggling, trying to reconstruct, by the items of clothing, what his elusive profession might be. Except that in this dream, where he’d been sitting completely naked on the sidewalk, it was obvious that his profession was not the issue. The fact that he was naked was no big deal either. The point about this dream was somewhere altogether different, somewhere that couldn’t be referred to by name. The man who was him in the dream was feeling things that couldn’t even be put into words, and the real Himme, the one who’d been a visitor in the dream and had only been thinking about professions, was kind of embarrassed that he couldn’t be more like him. Strange, Himme thought, to be jealous of your own self in your own dream. And for what? For being naked? For sitting on the sidewalk? For being completely alone?

Other Thoughts

In the end she left him. It was odd. He’d been having thoughts for such a long time that if she’d only known about them, she’d have been sobbing her heart out, or slapping him, or both, and all that time, while he was looking at her to see if she could tell, Himme’s wife was having thoughts of her own. From where he was sitting, they
looked
totally innocent: thoughts about cakes and desserts, vacations, a spa, her mother’s health. But in the end, it turned out that she’d been having other thoughts too, thoughts that made her leave him. Never mind leave. Divorce him. If they’d had a kid, they’d probably have figured out a solution or at least they’d have kept trying, for the kid’s sake. But this way, without a kid, there wasn’t even anyone to make the effort for.

Nissim

In the evening, two days after Himme’s wife left, there was a hesitant knock at the door. Nonchalantly Himme went to see who it was, trying not to show any happiness or hope as he opened the door without checking through the peephole first. Standing in the doorway were Nissim Roman and his little daughter, Fortuna, their arms full of dairy products. “Our fridge broke down all of a sudden,” Nissim Roman said shyly. “It’s a crappy fridge. When the repairman comes in the morning, I’ll give him hell. And I thought that maybe in the meantime, if there’s room, we could keep a few things in yours.” When Himme opened his fridge for them, Nissim tried not to show how sorry he felt for him. “Lots of room,” he said, giving Himme an embarrassed smile, and Fortuna arranged the dairy products on one of the empty shelves in neat little stacks. “We’ll take them tomorrow,” Nissim promised, “bright and early,” and he and Fortuna went home, leaving Himme alone with himself.

All night long, Himme couldn’t fall asleep. And whenever he did, he dreamed how he was stealing into the fridge and drinking the buttermilk that belonged to Nissim Roman and his sad-eyed daughter, and he’d wake up alarmed. There was something scary about his craving for that buttermilk. Something very scary. The next morning, the little girl came and took everything. Only then did Himme manage to fall asleep. Five minutes later his father phoned, and woke him up.

The Old Guard

If there was one thing that Himme’s dad was really good at it was writing eulogies. He had that special knack for pinpointing in the dead the qualities that would make us miss them. When he was young, Himme’s dad hadn’t had many opportunities to exercise this extraordinary talent of his. But now that he and his friends had passed seventy, he had his hands full. “Velvaleh died yesterday,” he told Himme on the phone. “Your mother hated him, you know, and it’s her canasta night besides, so she’s not coming. Could you come to the funeral with me by any chance?” Which is how Himme found himself at the cemetery in ninety-degree heat at the open grave of another one of the people his father used to call the Old Guard, listening to an insecure, awkward rabbi produce all sorts of weird mumblings and waiting patiently for his father to inspire him and the others, the way he always did, with a sense of loss and sorrow. Except that in the case of Velvaleh, Himme was sad to begin with, so it was a slam dunk. Himme tried to recall Velvaleh’s facial features, which he’d known since childhood, but he didn’t do very well. What he did remember, down to the last detail, was his amazing ability to look like just about every other person you’ve ever known. Every time Himme met him in the street, he’d be sure it was Pinchas, one of his dad’s other friends, or Mr. Pliskin, who used to own a grocery store on Bialik Street, or any number of other people. Even Himme’s dad would always get mixed up. Everyone did. Women who wanted to flatter Velvaleh would tell him he reminded them of some movie star, and the truth was that—whatever star you picked—he did remind you of him, kind of. Beside the open grave Himme’s dad said that Velvaleh had grown so used to being mistaken for other people, that when he heard someone call out a name in the street, any name, he’d always turn around, because he knew they were really calling him. “Once, when we were sitting at Café Aviv,” Himme’s dad eulogized, eyes moist, “Velvaleh asked me if I thought all those people made the same mistake in the other direction too, and called out ‘Velvaleh! Velvaleh!’ in the street when they saw somebody else.”

A House without Roaches

Nissim Roman and his little daughter were standing there, in the backyard of his building, staring, transfixed, at a man in a T-shirt that read “The Eichmann of Roaches.” It had a picture underneath of a giant roach floundering, on its back. The exterminator was trying to lift the drain cover and went on telling the Romans how the chief entomologist of the Ministry of Health had once told him there was no such thing as a house without roaches. The roaches are always there, but because they only come out in the dark you don’t notice them living right next to you. And by the time you notice them, even if it’s just one or two, it means you’ve got lots more where those came from. And sure enough, right under the cover, there were like a million roaches scurrying in all directions. “Yikes!” little Fortuna shrieked, and ran away, and Nissim Roman scrambled after her in his flip-flops. The only ones left in the yard now were the exterminator, a terrified swarm of roaches in their death throes, and Himme, sweating away in the drab suit his dad had insisted on lending him. The exterminator stopped spraying the sewer for a moment and pointed at Himme’s head. “From one funeral to the next, eh?” That’s when Himme realized he was still wearing the cardboard yarmulke they gave him at the cemetery.