The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (12 page)

The 72 bus driver stops next to an ice cream store just because he can, and he buys his daughter ice cream—peach sorbet, actually—and all the passengers have to wait. A high school boy who sits behind him yells that that is no way to behave, and the bus driver says he can suck his cock, even though his daughter is right there and she is little and that is so wrong to do. I want to say something too because I am worried about being late for my doctor’s appointment, but I don’t say anything because if I were a bus driver I would totally stop for ice cream whenever I wanted, except I would buy apple sorbet and I wouldn’t stop because my kid wanted ice cream, I would stop because I wanted ice cream, sorbet, actually. So I understand the bus driver’s heart. Maybe that counts as thinking about another person, and I want to tell Nadav about this but I can’t, of course, because he is already back at the base, because I am alone. At the clinic the doctor says I have two options, and I am excited because my favorite thing in life is when I get to make a choice, and I didn’t think I had any
choice in the matter; I thought it was just this thing I had to do, like all of regular life, like the army. The doctor says they can suck it out and scrape what’s left, or I can take two pills, and then the fetus would just fall away on its own. I am conflicted. If they suck it out, they’ll do it right away, and I am kind of bored and anxious to know what that would feel like, if I would feel any different or even sad, which is something I haven’t felt in a very long time. But if I take the pill I could just leave right away and go back to the base and then maybe my officer would let me sign only half a vacation day off and then I’d get to save that half day, because the watch girls’ officer is very nice; he is friends with Nadav. Also, it could be interesting to just do my shift and smoke a cigarette in the watch room while a tiny tiny baby is falling out and no one knows it but me. I didn’t even know that pill thing existed! The wonders of science. I like it that both options are interesting. It makes the whole decision thing that much more special. But in the end I decide on the pills just because I miss them. I miss the made-up people on the green monitor.

The magic that happened after I left the camp was a very unusual magic; it was brought upon me by my mother, and it was not the magic you’d expect. You may think by what I will tell you that I was very lucky, but I was not. Some people had to walk out of Darfur into Khartoum, but my group only walked for a few hours, and then our guide transferred us to the truck of a Bedouin. One of the other women had to sit in the front of the truck and pretend to be the Bedouin’s wife, and the rest of us sat at the back between wooden boxes of potatoes and flour. As I watched the Bedouin take the
woman’s hand and help her climb to the front of the truck, that’s when I heard it first, inside the holes of my ears, the two disapproving clicks of someone’s tongue, and it sounded like my mother, I think.
No good, this is no good
, I heard a whisper thumping at the front of my forehead. The woman who climbed to the front looked about eighteen, my age. Her skin was unusually fair, almost like that of the Indian work immigrants. I then realized that no matter what happens, if I live or die, even if I become a queen, my skin will never be as fair as that woman’s. I will never be that beautiful. This broke my heart; it broke it very much. Everything was in vain. I had never thought about anything even remotely resembling that type of concern before, but now it was all that I could think of, my skin. For all the hours and days as the wheels rolled through the sands, I cried so much the others offered me their rations of bread and dry beef. They could not imagine what I had seen that could possibly make me sadder than they were, because they had seen the worst, and this softened the hearts of even the sons who had broken their fathers’ skulls with rocks. Still, I cried because the movement of the wheels offended me. I kept on thinking that it did not matter if or where we’d arrive. My mom and her husband would still be dead, and it would be me who had killed them. Worse than that, I would still be me, and I had nothing anywhere, and I would be nothing anywhere. When we arrived in Egypt, our guide was terrified because they had just busted two trucks bringing in illegals and they didn’t just kill the illegals; they killed the Bedouin guides too. But we were let in without an incident. That’s when it all turned darker, then even more dark.

Four hours after I take the second pill, I think I am going to die, but I know I won’t. My stomach hurts from the outside, like a drummer is hitting it with bare hands. I crumple forward but I crank up my neck, because I know they’ll yell if I take my eyes off the monitor. In the eighteen years I have been alive, there were times I thought I’d die but then I lived and I lived and I lived. When I was first stationed here two months ago and had my first shift in front of the green screen, I made it till the fourth hour, but then I thought I’d for sure die. All around me there were girls staring at their strip of the fence and I could not understand how they did it for twelve hours, and then again, and then another time, and more. I kept on thinking this was my life for the next four months, until I was allowed to do checkpoints and guard towers, until I was “broken into the unit” as Nadav called it, and I couldn’t even figure out how to make it till the next hour. The green pixels swam inside each other. I’d gone cross-eyed. I counted till a thousand in my head, and again and again. Then I decided to die, or at least shoot my foot after the shift so that they’d have to release me from the army. I thought about which foot I should shoot, the right or the left, and that was sort of fun and helped me pass time, and just as I smiled, that’s when I saw them. Between the pixels, static white streaks formed the shapes of people, hundreds of miniature people, my people, the people that don’t exist. This was not the first time I had seen those people, but I hadn’t seen them since six years before, when I was twelve, the last time I had lice. The first time I had lice I was eight, and I thought I would die but I didn’t. I scratched my head with a pencil really hard into my scalp, and when I took the pencil out there was lice with blood on
it. I didn’t think that would kill me. Still, I told my mom, and then with a brush she smeared gasoline all over my hair and made me watch TV with a handkerchief on my head. The lice were escaping my head like from a gas chamber. I could feel them flicking away and see them crawling all over my neck, a stream of tiny legs and round bodies. I didn’t think that would kill me either. It was super cool. But then my mom said we had to get the eggs out too. I had to stand in the shower for hours while she passed a lice comb through my hair. She would also talk to me, and I hated that the most because at the time she was very busy with having three children, teaching high schoolers history, and having no husband, so she figured she would use the time effectively to lecture me about how I never put the dishes in the sink, how I always left my backpack by the front door, how I brought mud into the house, and how all of those things were killing her and that her only hope was that I would grow up to have a daughter who was just like myself, so that I’d finally understand what a shit I was. I wouldn’t have thought any of that would kill me except I hate swear words, I hate them now and I hated them then when I was little, and they made me feel lumps in my throat whenever she would use them, and she used them a lot when she took out the lice eggs. It took her four years to get rid of the lice once and for all, and at the beginning every single time, I had to stand in the bathroom and I thought I was going to die every time she cursed—until I invented them, the people that don’t exist. They were made of the brown dots on the white tiles of the bathroom floor.

I grew up hearing stories about people who were abandoned or raped by their guides and left to die midway, but in Egypt the twenty people in my group were invited to stay for a few days with the Bedouin’s real wife on a vineyard. The wife was very wrinkled but could read and did read from her Quran every night, and I couldn’t read, and then came the thought that I’d never learn how to read, and I thought that even if I did learn how to read I would never be very good at it and I had already missed out on eighteen years, so what was the point? Again I could hear my mother’s disappointed tongue clicks, the
no good, it is no good
whispers. I had never thought thoughts even similar to that in my whole life; these thoughts were in my head but they were not my own. I realized they were magic, and that magic can exist, and that it is evil. The magic just got stronger and stronger. The Bedouin and his wife were very kind to us and most of all to me; they smiled like children in the morning, and the wife even took me on a walk in the vineyard, and then came the thought that I would never be this kind, not to strangers and not to anyone in the world, that my heart was dark like coal, like a witch’s, and wasn’t that a shame and wasn’t there nothing in the world that could make that better? We walked along the vineyard, and for a second, for the first time since I left the camp, everything was a little good, everything was real and without magic. I’d never seen grapes before. I leaned in between the green leaves and stared at one, just one grape. It was perfectly round and green and so peaceful I grew jealous of it. Its skin was smooth and it glowed in the sun so that you could see lines lengthen within, lines of mystery and flesh and dignity. I touched it, gently. And then came the tongue clicks again. The
no good
whisper.
That’s when I knew I was done for, when that thought came; that no matter what happens, no matter what I’d do, it would all be in vain—I could never, ever, even in a million years, become a grape.

I made up the game I play with the people that don’t exist when I was eight and had lice; I used to pretend the people were the dots on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Now I play it with the people I pretend to see between the pixels of the monitor during my entire shift. I don’t even notice the twelve hours pass. When my shift is over, I even miss these people. The game goes like this: I pretend some group of pixels on the monitor is actually a group of people. Sometimes they are in a country. Sometimes they are in space. Other times they are just in a gigantic room. It doesn’t matter. Then I pretend that I am their ruler, and I make a special announcement, that one of them has been found to be very special, the most special person of all. Sometimes that one person is very good at singing, another time that person is the smartest person ever to be born, and one time she is the kindest person in the world. But that person, always a girl, doesn’t know that she is so special. She thinks that she is a nobody. Usually she is just the tiniest pixel, the one at the edge of the screen, and when I tell her what she actually is, let me tell you, she gets so excited she can taste her heart in her mouth. She could never imagine. Then the game starts again with another group of pixels, maybe the pixels below the broken willow tree or the ones at the very bottom. I never get bored of it because I think my memory is so shot by now that soon after one round of the game is over I forget all about the people. I forget real things too, like all the
games I played at school with Yael and my favorite shows and the sound of Dan’s voice and my mother’s birthday and who I am. Nadav says that happens to a lot of watch soldiers, that it’s the job. Nadav thinks that I have gone crazy, that I am too calm, complacent. He asked me what I thought about all the Sudanese that jump across the Egyptian-Israeli border, and I said they only distract me from my games with the made-up people, because if they jump through my part of the fence, I have to report it on the radio, and when they get shot, even if they don’t die, that can be very distracting. Nadav was mad at that response, so I thought maybe I sounded anti-Zionist, so I added, “But of course I also think the Egyptians are animals.” Then Nadav said I was naive. He said that we can’t shoot the Sudanese because that would look bad, but we also don’t want them here because then we would have to give them jobs, and they bring diseases, and they lower the Jewish rates. So we let the Egyptians shoot them instead because the Egyptians don’t care if they look bad because the world already thinks they are bad but forgives them because they are Arabs. I couldn’t quite follow his whole explanation, so I looked into the white of his eyes and imagined a room full of made-up people. That’s when he told me I only think about myself. I couldn’t win. But I didn’t care so much then. Now I wish I did. My stomach is cramping as if it is trying to push itself between my legs, and my eyes twitch so much that all the made-up people are gone and all I can see is a fence through a green monitor and that one broken tree, and I still have eight hours left on my shift. The Sudanese man’s body is still skewered there, right at the edge, smudged on the bends of the monitor.

We walked toward the fence of the Israeli-Egyptian border in a single line and in utter darkness, one hand on another’s shoulder. The guide had left us an hour before and told us to just keep walking straight and pray to God. I didn’t know why I was walking, but I didn’t know what to do if I didn’t walk, so I did. Ahead there was a willow tree; it was broken, but its top half was still green, lying on the ground. The magic thoughts, the
no good
whispers, got worse with every step. I tried to convince my legs to just reach the tree, and then we’ll see. I could never fly like a bird, so what was the point? Step. Tongue clicks.
No good
. I could never be a man, so what was the point? Step. Tongue clicks.
No good at all
. I could never be a child again, so what was the point? Step. Tongue clicks.
No good, no point
. When I reached the broken tree, I told my legs that now they just needed to reach the fence ahead, to just take a few more steps. But it was too late. The
no good
whispers reached all the way to my sandals, and they were stuck in the sand. I stopped. The woman behind me and the man in front of me turned to look at me, but all they could see were my eyes, and we had been told to make no noise because of the watch-towers, so they quickly walked away from me. I could never stop the magic, the thoughts, so
what was the point
, I thought, and that’s when the lights came on from the Egyptian towers, towers we had not seen at all but that were so close I could see the paint peeling through the flashes, the paint peeling and the gunshots and the screams and the fence ahead; we were so close and they were all running, but I stood still until something pushed me from the back, a gunshot, and my head fell and got buried deep in the branches of the broken tree
and then the thoughts and the world grew quiet and cold, but only for one small minute.