The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (15 page)

An M-16 has a range of 100 meters, and regular bullets. An M-4 has an aim that magnifies by ten, a range of 250 meters, and green bullets. The green bullets have a mass in them that weighs 0.008 kilos. They go further, more accurately, because they are heavier, so the metal coils inside the M-4 barrel are wrapped tighter to give the bullets more spin, more momentum. The M-4 is the gun that can actually help you if you need to shoot someone and hit them fast. But if you used a regular bullet with it, it wouldn’t make it past 75 meters. It would never hit where you aimed.

We were silent for a while, but finally I couldn’t wait and I could not let them wait any longer for my words, the words I thought were dirty. “Hagar,” I said, “I am actually going to get with Ari.”

“You have been saying that for months,” Amit said. She had her head on Neta’s bare stomach. Neta and Amit had been
best friends before the army, and they were lucky enough to be stationed together. And if they were best friends before, they were now each other’s sister, parent, everything. When we smoked hookah and played truth or dare with Ari and Gil, they didn’t complain when they had to kiss each other. “It’s like I am kissing myself,” Amit said. “It’s kind of a trip!”

“You just wait and see. This time I mean it,” I told them. I opened my mouth to taste the sun. I was frozen from within; I was pretty; the sun didn’t scare me. “He is going to take me in the ranges. In the clinic. On a coffee table.”

“A coffee table?” Neta asked.

“It is this thing they have in America,” I said. “Go with me here.”

“But I heard he was Canadian,” Neta said.

“He is Australian,” Amit said. It was one of the only things I ever heard them disagree on.

“Yep, New Zealand, Australia,” Hagar confirmed.

“Whatever he is, he is mine,” I said.

We had had that exact conversation plenty of times before.

“Listen, girls,” Hagar said.

“Yael.” Hagar said my name. She said it the way I said Avishag’s name on one of those rare moments when I needed her more than she needed me, for just a second.

“Do you think they torture him?” Hagar asked.

For the past five days, since it happened, Hagar had been making us talk about the soldier they took in Gaza. Hagar lived in his school district, and we all knew she knew him, even though she said she didn’t, she was just interested in the topic of torture.

“I don’t know, Hagar,” I said. It was the truth.

“No, they are not torturing him; they give him chocolate
and take him to the park,” Dana said. I smelled the vanilla and sweat on her skin. She was the one who had made me move rooms, but now she resented that the girls in the new caravan accepted me. She loomed above us on the cement. “You girls,” Dana said. “No brains, no worries, huh? He is probably getting the life beat out of him right now.”

We were silent for a second. Then, careful of the needle in her vein, Amit took off her bra. Neta did too. It was what the two did to scare Dana off. Nudity made her uncomfortable. Hagar still didn’t move.

“So first, Ari is going to turn me over,” I began, ignoring Dana. A minute later, she ran off, screaming that we were all disgusting. Somewhere in the midst of my fantasy, we all fell asleep, our IV bags empty. In my sun-hunted dreams, icy from within, I visited Vegas, then Bel Air, then the bridge the
Full House
girls drove on. When I opened my eyes, I was the only one left lying on the cement, and Ari was standing at the gate of the female residency.

He was! I swear.

“I need help,” he said.

Ari had a fear. He was afraid of doing the set of moving targets with his soldiers.

Since I was a weaponry instructor, I was naturally a fan of the moving-targets drill. It sounded bad, but it really wasn’t. The soldiers on the other side of the shooting line would walk around inside a ditch. Their target would be tied to two sticks, so it’d be tall enough for them to hold up without exposing their arms. They’d have goggles and helmets and bulletproof vests. Ari and I would talk on the radio and have a safe word for when he and the soldiers in the ditch could climb out and switch places with the shooting soldiers. The ditch had been
clogged that past year, so this was his first time trying it, but I knew he’d do fine. I believed in that drill, as a weaponry instructor. If you were going to shoot someone, odds are he’d be moving; it was important to practice. But Ari had a point. It was a little crazy, or at least it could have sounded crazy to me if my basic training had not been as a weaponry instructor and I had not been told that as a weaponry instructor I must be a fan of it.

“I just mean, really? With all the money the army spends on Popsicles and lollipops, am I really going to train my soldiers on shooting at moving targets by giving half of them a stick with a cardboard target tied to it and sending them behind the shooting line?” Ari said that day.

So I told him we could practice shooting first, just the two of us.

Practicing just the two of us was a good idea, I thought. Most of the Bedouin foot trackers spoke little Hebrew and had a tendency to get into fights where they tried to bite each other’s ankles off, so it was always good to practice for them.

Ari and I walked on the pebble road leading to the shooting range where the ditch was. During the walk, Ari told me that he had been pulled from his regular unit to make the Bedouin foot trackers into soldiers, and that he believed that was worth immigrating to Israel for. He said that foot trackers walk in front of the force, looking for tracks, and that during wars they go fast, the fastest. He said that these were guys who needed to know how to fight and that if they didn’t, then it was all on him.

“Do you think they can really know what happened in a sand dune just by looking?” I asked him.

That part wasn’t his responsibility, he said. He said that
Bedouin know how to spot tracks from birth. They have elders who serve as professional trainers to sharpen that skill.

“But I believe they are good,” he said. “They say if you stood on a hill tomorrow, two years from now a good foot-tracker would still know you had been there, and when.”

Once we arrived at the range, before he walked behind the shooting line, Ari put his hand on my shoulder. Then he went down the ditch, helmet, goggles, radio, and all. He was holding a target attached to a long stick, and I could only see the target. I looked hard to make sure no part of his body was peeking outside the ditch. I was behind the shooting line.

I shot at his target. And again.

But Ari wasn’t walking fast enough. I went out of position a few times to yell through the radio, “Faster, much faster,” but it didn’t help. The first eight bullets I hit so they made the shape of half a heart in the place where the soldier printed on the cardboard’s heart would have been. Then I thought better of it. I wondered why our targets all had soldiers in green uniforms printed on them, why we were shooting at ourselves this whole time. The next bullet went to the head. The nose. Then one to the right eye. As I did after every bullet, I closed my eyes, emptied my lungs, aligned my aims. When I opened my right eye, the target was gone. Ari had climbed out of the ditch. He was lying on the ground behind it, motionless.

I walked over to him. The walk was heavy on my heart in fear.

He still had his safety goggles and helmet on. When I cast a shadow over his head, he opened his eyes. “You killed me,” he said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “But I could have! Why didn’t you say
something before climbing out?” My heart shouted inside of me.

“You killed me. I was so young. I should have had more sex. I should have gotten that second burger,” he said.

I tried to stay furious at him, but I couldn’t. “I killed you,” I said.

“Come here,” he said. He held his hands up, kept his back stiff.

I sat on his stomach, one leg at each side. His hands grabbed mine. I let my hair fall on his neck.

Hagar would have handled it differently. But I had been a less-than-pretty girl for the nineteen and a half years before that day, and I had been thinking of Ari for the last three months, and somehow I knew that when dreams come true, you have to drive them. Odd, but what I wanted was to talk his brains out. He knew so much, I thought. I wanted to talk about things Hagar said. Ask questions. Know—everything—right then.

“Do you think it had to have been a bunch of dudes who thought up the ALGL?”

“I think Americans thought up the ALGL.”

“Are you American?”

“I am from New Zealand, but I say Australia.”

“Do you think they torture him? The soldier they took in Gaza?”

“No.”

“Are you lying to me because I am a girl?”

“No. He is just a boy from a tank. They know he doesn’t have any intel.”

“Are you lying to me because I am a girl sitting on you?”

“No. Common sense says he is only good for bargain, and in a bargain, the healthier, the better. People don’t just torture people if they don’t have to. This is the real world.”

Ari moved his palms from mine to grab my arms, balance me. We were playing seesaw.

“What was the happiest moment in your life?” he asked. It was a line. I didn’t mind. I leaned deep and kissed him. I wanted to say, “Right now,” but that was easy. I wanted to say, “Right now,” but it wasn’t true.

From the range, Ari took me for a long walk. We ended up in that emergency storage container. The one that had the word “greens” graffitied on its front. It was as wide as my childhood classrooms and tall enough so that even if Ari jumped the highest his long legs could take him, he still wouldn’t reach the ceiling. There were no green bullets inside. There were two tables that I recognized as belonging to the foot-tracker rookies’ caravan classrooms, and on them there were purple sheets and a pillow. In front of them there was an old radio on cement blocks. It was almost a room where you lived, a living room, but it was a container.

We sat on the tables in front of the radio.

“How come there are no bullets here?”

“The supply officers got lazy. They always forget to order new ones for the training rounds, and it takes a few months to get greens, so they just tapped out the emergency supply.”

“What if there is an emergency?”

“What emergency?”

“I don’t know, a war?”

“There isn’t going to be any war,” he said. I believed him. The daylight was fading outside, but inside the greens container, Ari lit four military flashlights covered with red filters.
Lying on the tables covered with his purple sheets, I put my hand on the back of his neck and felt it stiffen. Then we loved each other for a while.

“I bet you bring girls here all the time,” I said after.

“Not really,” he said. “You are the first girl that mattered,” he said. I believed him. I still believe now. Sometimes I believe things I know are not true.

T
HIS IS
true, in every way: he was wrong about the war because then there was one. You can look it up. The second Lebanon war. July 12, 2006. It is true like history; a lot of things that could have not happened, but the truth is they did.

They say in two minutes the ALGL the soldiers took from our base to the border brought down an eleven-story building in that war. It worked just fine even though we didn’t clean it after we used it. It took down a school. Seventy-three people. If you were to look it up, you might even find their names. Also the name of the soldier they took before the war, in Gaza. The one from Hagar’s school.

When I finally had time to look in a mirror again, it was a Saturday two weeks into the war, and I wasn’t beautiful anymore; I was me. I tried to pull my hair up; I pulled it tight until it hurt, but that girl, she was gone. I handed Hagar back the mirror she had given me. We had slept in the ranges, an hour here, an hour there, on the asphalt, for a week, and we were having our first shower in the caravan, our first break from training the reservists. We had run out of green bullets the night before.

Ari had been dead for five days already. He and Gil were
pulled from the base to fight in Lebanon the day the war broke. Our officer told us seven hours after Ari died.

Two weeks into the war, at seven in the morning, the batch of reservists that came that weekend, over a hundred of them, stormed the caravan of the weaponry training officer. We stood by his side as our officer tried to shout over the mob. The reservists came for three days to train in our ranges; there were reservists in ranges all over the country, before they went up to Lebanon. They wore green, they had guns on their backs, but they weren’t soldiers. They had beards, long hair, jobs in factories, jobs elsewhere, mortgages, wives, children.

Reservists, they went fast in that war—not the fastest, but they went fast. They kept on coming to our base and then leaving. “We have been training with regular bullets our whole time here,” one of them shouted. “We are going up tonight. This is insane.”

“I assure you no one is going to send you up to fight without greens,” our officer said. He had fear. “I have people working on opening our emergency greens container as we speak.”

But. There were no green bullets in our base. Only an empty container in which Ari entertained girls. A place where you live, almost, a living room, but it was a container.