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  At night in my tent, I get an Instagram from Summer. The picture shows a giant number 10 made out of M&M’s laid out all over her belly. Every Sunday she sends me the number of weeks I have left till discharge, written in something I like: Star Wars figures, gummy bears, those little packets of ketchup. Instead of sleeping, I think about her and about Baker. I try to picture the way each of them would smile if they won, instead of seeing the other one’s face, the one who gets screwed. Ten weeks till I make one person happy. Ten weeks tops, maybe even less.

  TO: Sefi.Moreh

  FROM: Michael.Warshavski

  RE: “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query

  Many people have recommended your escape room and I would like to schedule a visit for my mother and myself this Thursday morning or afternoon. In addition, I would like confirmation that the room is accessible to a disabled woman in a wheelchair, as indicated on your Internet site.

  Thank you,

  Michael Warshavski

  TO: Michael.Warshavski

  FROM: Sefi.Moreh

  RE: RE: “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query

  Dear Mr. Warshavski,

  Thank you for your e-mail. We are happy to hear that previous visitors to our “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” room have recommended it to you. We love our escape room very much and are excited to hear that more and more people share that great love. The room is disabled-accessible, and since it touches on astronomy and physics, the well-known astrophysicist Stephen Hawking visited it during his brief stay in Israel (I am attaching a photo of his visit). Unfortunately, the escape room will be closed this Thursday because of Holocaust Remembrance Day, but we would be happy to welcome you and your mother on any other date.

  Sincerely,

  Sefi Moreh

  Director of the “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” Escape Room

  LADDER

  DIVINE INSIGHT

  A few weeks before Rosh Hashana, Raphael called him in for a talk.

  “So what’s happening, Zvi, is everything okay?”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  “Glad to hear it, because the truth is that lately, I’ve started worrying.”

  “Why? Did I do something wrong?”

  “Heaven forbid, it’s just that recently . . .”

  “Yesterday morning I didn’t rake with everyone, but I had permission.”

  “I know, I know. There are no complaints about your work.”

  “So what are the complaints about? Someone in the flock spoke to you? Amatzia?”

  “No one spoke to me. No one has to speak, they just have to look.”

  “Look at what? Raphael, if you have something to say, just say it.”

  “How’s your Yiddish, Zvi? You understand farpishter punim? It’s the face a person makes when he’s not happy.”

  “So my face is the problem?”

  “Not your face, Zvi, but what’s behind it. All of us here are . . . How can I put it? Content. Not just because we have it good here—you do agree with me, Zvi, that we have it good here?”

  “So?”

  “. . . but also because of the alternative. Any way you look at it, everyone who comes here feels lucky. More than lucky. Blessed, that’s the word. Simply blessed. To be here with us and not with all the losers in . . . you know where.”

  “I know,” Zvi said. “Did you ever hear me complain?”

  “No,” Raphael said, taking a deep breath, “never. But I’ve never heard you laugh, either. I’ve never seen you smile even once since you got here.”

  “Okay,” Zvi said, forcing a smile now. “You want me to smile more?”

  Raphael became serious. “No, I don’t want you to smile. I want you to be happy, all the time, truly happy. God knows that you have a lot to be happy about—”

  “God is dead,” Zvi interrupted him.

  “I know,” Raphael said, and bit his lower lip. “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about Him. But we’re still here, and heaven keeps functioning just as it did before. And you, as someone who once worked as . . . What exactly did you work as, Zvi?”

  “I was a casualty assistance officer.”

  “That’s in the army?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something medical, right? You treated the wounded?”

  “No. My job was to inform families that someone was dead. You know, their husband, a son, a brother.”

  “Terrible. I had no idea there was a job like that.”

  “How could you know, Raphael? Were you ever in the army?”

  “Right. So you used to go to see the families and tell them that their loved ones were dead, and then you went to stand in line at the bank to pay your mortgage, afraid that you would die, too. I’m guessing you were afraid of death, weren’t you?”

  “Afraid? I was terrified.”

  “And now you’re here. An angel with no debts, no lines to wait on, nothing to be afraid of. You should be grateful.”

  “I am grateful.”

  “You should be relieved.”

  “I’m relieved. Not right now, but in principle.”

  “You should be happy.”

  “I’m trying, Raphael, I’m really trying.”

  “So it’s, like, when you get up in the morning, you don’t feel happy?”

  Zvi cleared his throat. “I do, I do . . . But it’s a limp kind of happiness. Like the elastic on underpants that have been washed too many times.”

  “I have to say, Zvi, that I’ve been here quite a long time and I’ve never come across the expression ‘limp happiness.’ The way I see it, happiness can’t be limp.”

  “It can, believe me. Limp and faded and worn out. You know that feeling of wanting something so much that your whole body aches and you know that your chances of getting it are really, really small, and you stand in your living room in your boxers, covered in sweat, and try to imagine that moment when your lips will meet the lips of the girl you’ve always wanted, or your son saying, ‘You’re the best dad in the world,’ or the hospital calling to tell you the biopsy was negative? Did you ever want something that badly, Raphael?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I did. And I miss the feeling. You have no idea how much I miss it.”

  “We don’t force anyone to stay here, Zvi. If you’re not happy, we can easily transfer you.”

  “I don’t want to go to hell, Raphael. You know that.”

  “To the best of my knowledge, those are the only two options, and if you really want to be an angel here, you have to be happy. An angel has to be at peace with himself. Serene, that’s the word I’m looking for. Because even if it’s not written down anywhere, it’s part of the job description. Not that being an angel is a job, it’s more like an essence and . . .”

  “And about that business of raking clouds . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “Are there angels who do something else?”

  “No, but if you’re not interested in raking, that’s something we can definitely . . .”

  “I’m asking because Gabriel once told us that before our matriarch Sarah became pregnant, he went down to see her and . . .”

  “It wasn’t just him, there were two others with him.”

  “And I thought maybe . . . maybe there’s a chance that instead of raking, I could do something like that? You know, visit people. Give them messages. I’ve already told you, I was a casualty assistance officer. I have a lot of experience with interpersonal relations in extreme situations, and I’m sure that meeting people every once in a while would really help me. Not just me, the entire system. In all modesty, I’m really good at it.”

  “We don’t do things like that anymore.”

  “But Gabriel said it wasn’t only with Sarah . . .”

  “True, but since God left
us, we’ve stopped it. It was always divine insight that influenced the decision to go down and establish contact with people. After all, even if that sort of encounter is efficient, it can cause damage, and none of us—neither I nor Gabriel nor Ariel—has the necessary insight to make that kind of decision.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t have the insight? You’re angels!”

  “Ministering angels. Our job was to serve God, not to make decisions.”

  “But you’re all . . .”

  “Pure, not geniuses. But we’re not stupid, either. And if I may ask, why is all of this so important to you? Do you miss the world of the living?”

  “Not the place itself,” Zvi said with a sad smile, “just the people.”

  “I must say”—Raphael gave him a similar smile—“that is something I’ve never heard before. By the way, you know that it’s quite possible they are no longer . . . no longer . . .”

  “No longer what?”

  “That they have been, you know, annihilated, or have annihilated themselves . . .”

  “But I only just got here.”

  “Do you know how long ago you arrived here?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. Time moves in a completely different way here. Angels don’t age, and neither do clouds. I’m glad to hear that time has been passing so quickly for you. That’s a good sign. But who knows how many human years it’s been. One hundred? One thousand? One million? But however long it is, it’s definitely long enough for such an unstable and vulnerable species to destroy itself.”

  “You sound like someone who knows something.”

  “I sound like someone who knows nothing and admits it. From the moment God died, people haven’t been our concern.”

  “Okay. So if I understand right, the options are either raking clouds or hell,” Zvi said.

  “You understand right.”

  “So I’ll go back to raking.”

  SWEAT

  Angels never fail. It’s almost impossible to fail when you’re a pure soul with no desires or needs. But Zvi couldn’t help feeling that he was exactly that: a failed angel. Floating on an ocean of serenity yet missing the pull of the whirlpools and waves. Something was wrong with him, something he couldn’t share with any other soul. The problem was his alone, and if he didn’t find a way to solve it, he’d end up in hell.

  Hell was full of souls who had lived like there was no tomorrow, and only after they died did they realize that they had to pay a price for their sins. He didn’t want to be the first to arrive there as pure as the driven snow just because he couldn’t manage to find himself some happiness even up here in heaven. Zvi knew he had to find a way to stop missing things.

  Angels never dream. The closest thing they have to dreaming is staring into space. And the first thing Zvi had to learn was how to stare into space, not focus on concrete things and avoid the frustrating place where he began to compare his now extinct material life to his present lofty existence. And he also had to smile more. And no fake smiles. Angels aren’t capable of faking. He just had to find a smile inside himself.

  A lot of time had passed since his conversation with Raphael. He couldn’t say exactly how much—there are no clocks in heaven—but it was a lot. And even if his desire to return to the material world hadn’t completely disappeared, at least it didn’t nag at him. Zvi knew he’d never be a perfect angel but he believed that if he kept working on himself, he’d manage to become a standard one, an angel that didn’t worry or bother anyone. And despite all his angelic modesty, he knew that the change was visible. After all, out of the dozens of angels, he was the one Raphael had put in charge of garden tools. That was apparently Raphael’s way of telling Zvi that he could see he was on the right path.

  As the one in charge of garden tools, Zvi had to get to the shed before all the other angels, load the rakes on the shiny wheelbarrow, and wheel it to the section of clouds scheduled to be raked that day. There were other garden tools in the shed: hammers, pruning shears, even a plowshare, but they really only needed rakes. Zvi’s favorite moment of the day was when work ended or, more accurately, the moment right after it. All the other angels relaxed, sinking into the sea of sublime serenity that Zvi never managed to experience completely, while he invested all his energy in collecting the rakes to keep himself from sinking into the familiar melancholy. Working helped, like real medicine. Every time Zvi spotted even a sliver of a thought about his former existence or a shadow of longing in his mind, he hurried to the shed and began to sort and organize the tools.

  On one of his restless nights, Zvi discovered the ladder. It was a weird, incomprehensible ladder, a paradox with rungs: short enough to stand in the small shed and long enough to . . . honestly? There was no way to gauge its length in material measures, but if forced to do so, Zvi had to admit that its length was infinite. He asked Gabriel about that ladder, and with angelic patience and in great detail, Gabriel began to tell him the story of Jacob’s dream, as if Zvi had never read the Bible. When Gabriel saw that Zvi was getting excited about the story, he introduced him to the angel who had fought with Jacob that night, and even asked him to tell Zvi the story from an eyewitness’s vantage point. And the angel did. He told Zvi that it had been the first and last time he went down to the material world and that the hardest thing about it for him had been the way people smelled. Jacob, the angel told Zvi, was very weak physically, at least compared with an angel, but he was supposed to hide that and pretend he was fighting a losing battle to defeat Jacob. Jacob, for his part, struggled and strained and sweated rivers. The smell of Jacob’s perspiration was so strong that it almost made the angel pass out, but he completed his mission and, finally, when he returned to heaven the next morning, the first thing he asked of God, who was still alive then, was to never send him again on other missions that involved material creatures. When the angel finished his story, he raised both hands in the air as if to say, That’s it, this story has no moral, and Gabriel, who was sitting with Zvi and listening, burst out laughing. “It’s true,” he told Zvi, “the smell is what always bothered me, too.”

  THE SMELL OF FRESH LAUNDRY

  That night, curled on a cloud, Zvi dreamed for the first time since arriving in heaven. When Zvi was still a newcomer, Raphael had explained to him that an angel’s staring into space can sometimes turn into a dream, and that the dream never has a story, images, or time, only color. But the dream Zvi had that night was of a different kind. In it, he was raking clouds when his rake suddenly banged into something hard. Zvi dug in the cloud with his hands and found a metal box that had a picture of butter cookies on it. But when Zvi opened it, he found a small man, a mini-man, inside, and instead of speaking, the little man attacked Zvi in a fury. In the dream, the man was so small and unthreatening that Zvi couldn’t understand where he’d found the courage to attack him. At first, Zvi tried to defend himself gently and get the little man off him by holding his shirt carefully with two fingers, but the little man wouldn’t back down: he kicked and bit and spit and cursed, and Zvi realized in the dream that the little man wouldn’t stop until he destroyed him, that this was a fight to the death. Zvi tried to squeeze the little man between his fingers, to crush him, to tear him to pieces—and couldn’t. He didn’t know what that tiny, hairy little man was made of, but it was a substance harder than diamond. When Zvi woke up and found a dewdrop on his forehead, he put it on the tip of his tongue. It was salty.

  Zvi got up and went straight to the shed, picked up the ladder, and dangled it from the edge of the cloud. The ladder had an endless number of rungs, and as he descended from one to the other, he tried to imagine the smells waiting for him below: the smell of sweat, of fresh laundry, of rotting wood; the sweet, scorched smell of cake left in the oven too long; the smell of something.

  TO: Sefi.Moreh

  FROM: Michael.Warshavski

  RE: RE: RE: “Glitch at the Edge of th
e Galaxy” query

  Dear Mr. Sefi Moreh,

  I am aware of the fact that this Thursday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and if you will permit me to say, my search for an activity appropriate to that sad and terrible day is exactly why I wrote to you in the first place. I myself see no reason to close your escape room on the aforementioned day. After all, the escape room deals with heavenly bodies, and they, to the best of my knowledge, did not deviate from their orbits when six million Jews were sent to their deaths.

  Sincerely,

  Michael Warshavski

  TO: Michael.Warshavski

  FROM: Sefi.Moreh

  RE: RE: RE: RE: “Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy” query

  Dear Mr. Warshavski,

  Holocaust Remembrance Day is meant to be a day on which we commune with a terrible, traumatic event unlike any the world, and our people in particular, has ever known, and I personally would feel uncomfortable ignoring it and opening our escape room as if it were a normal day. In my humble opinion, it would be better if we all devoted our time—even for only that one day—to deepening our knowledge of that horrendous period, and postponed all other matters, however fascinating they may be, to a less emotionally charged date.

  Respectfully,

  Sefi Moreh

  YAD VASHEM

  Between the display featuring European Jewry before the rise of Nazism and the one about Kristallnacht, there was a transparent glass partition. This partition had a straightforward symbolic meaning: To the uninitiated, Europe before and after the night of that historic pogrom might have appeared the same, but in truth they were two totally different universes.