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  She takes a sandwich wrapped in paper out of her bag. “Want some? I made it this morning. It’s tuna fish.”

  I tell her I’m not hungry and ask if I can tickle her instead.

  She smiles. “Do you think you’ll get fired?” She takes a bite out of her sandwich.

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out after the meeting with Maor tomorrow.”

  “I have a tough time with kids. It’s not that I don’t like them, I just don’t know how to get along with them. Oded hasn’t stopped talking about kids since the day we met, and I just keep trying to buy time.”

  I ask if Oded is her husband, and I point out that she’s always referred to him only as “my husband.”

  “I guess now I feel a little less sure that he’s my husband.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask her.

  All she says is, “It’s complicated.” Then she asks, “Do you think it’ll keep raining for a long time?” I remind her that she promised to tell me why she was going to disappear, and she nods and says she’ll keep her promise but not today. “I hope tomorrow goes well. I hope you don’t get fired,” she says, and a second before she steps out into the rain she gives me a kiss on the cheek and wishes me a good weekend.

  I keep standing in the doorway for a few minutes, thinking about Raviv, about the meeting tomorrow, about Akirov’s husband, Oded, who is now a little less her husband, and about that kiss she gave me. It was a friendly sort of kiss, and it smelled like tuna fish. The rain is coming down harder, and when I get sick of waiting, I walk out into it.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t wake up till four the next day. On days when I don’t have to be at work, I don’t set my alarm clock. On my phone I see a text message from Mom saying it’ll just be the two of us for dinner because my brother is going away for the weekend with a woman he got set up with at work. She puts three exclamation points at the end of the message, like a sixteen-year-old girl. She’s always dreaming about the day when my brother will remarry. Somehow she’s managed to convince herself that all the pissed-off bitterness that Hagai keeps vomiting on us comes from loneliness, and that the minute he finds someone who’s willing to put up with him, he’ll turn into a prince. The good news from my perspective is that I won’t have to see him this evening. Then there’s another blank message from Maor. I try to call him but his phone is off, so I leave a voice mail.

  My mom makes an even more awesome dinner than usual—four courses, and for dessert, a layer cake from a recipe she found online. She’s happy because of Hagai, and her happiness is contagious. I drink a lot of wine and we talk about my dad, about missing him, but it’s still a cheerful sort of conversation. My mom says she’d always hoped to live to see grandchildren, and that even though she’s already been a grandmother for ages, her dream is for me to have a child. She asks how my lawyer girlfriend is, and I say everything’s going great, and that Iris actually likes kids, but she’s a little anxious that she won’t know how to manage them, just like I am. “I’m in no hurry,” Mom says with a smile, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long, I can wait a little longer.”

  It rains all day on Saturday. I huddle under the covers, watching horror flicks and chain-smoking what’s left of the crappy pot Avri sold me a month ago. Maor’s cell phone is still off but he calls in the evening. He says the meeting didn’t go well. “You told Rosner that a kid brought a lighter to school and caused problems, and that was why you didn’t notice Liam was gone—why did you do that? She brought it up at the meeting, and the principal talked to Yuri and started poking around. The kid said the lighter was yours, and Yuri told the principal he was the one who put out the fire. So, bottom line, now you’re a liar.” He pauses, waiting for me to say something in my defense. But I have nothing to say and I can’t be bothered anyway. “Rosner and the principal are both pissed off, and it turns out that Gavri, the redhead kid who was punching Liam, his grandfather’s something senior in the Ministry of Education, so they can’t kick him out of school. Rosner was raring to go, she wants blood. So, long story short, I told them you’re done. Don’t show up at work tomorrow. Call me in early March and I’ll leave you a check at the school office with however much I owe you for February. And dude, next time you lie? Use your brains. So long.” Maor hangs up on me, and I feel pretty fine about that. I didn’t have anything smart to say on the occasion of my termination: it’s not like it was some toast where you have to make a speech and then they give you a watch. Tomorrow I’ll go look for another job. Maybe bartending. Night hours are better for me, and free liquor is just as good as meatballs in tomato sauce. It’s insulting to be fired, there’s no getting around that. To hear someone tell you you’re not good enough is never a good feeling. But doing that work for 2,800 shekels a month wasn’t something I could keep up for much longer anyway. I wonder if any of the kids will miss me when I don’t turn up on Sunday.

  * * *

  —

  At three a.m., Avri texts me: “Awake?” Like I’m his fuck buddy or something. On the phone he tells me his friend just arrived from Amsterdam with some good stuff. “Primo fresh,” he says excitably, “he just shat it out. Should I run you over some?” By four he’s at my place, and I use what’s left from Akirov’s two grand to buy eight grams. Avri tells me it’s called Pineapple Crush, because this stuff is so strong that if you smoke enough of it, you can fall in love with a pineapple. After his passionate speech we smoke a bowl, and I don’t fall in love with anything, but I do fly far, far away in my mind: I think about Raviv, and about that little stinker Liam, and about Liam’s mom in her pink sweats who probably didn’t give birth to him but just shat him out like Avri’s friend shat out the Pineapple Crush for us. Then I think about Raviv some more, growing old and then becoming a baby again like that dwarf jellyfish; but mostly I think about Akirov and Oded, her slightly-less-so husband, and about how she’s pretty much the only ray of light in my life, and now that’s going to disappear, too. I’m so baked that I don’t even notice Avri leaving, and sometime after the garbage truck finishes its round on my block, I fall asleep.

  I get up just in time to shower, roll a joint, and bike to the promenade. The rain and wind have stopped, and there’s finally going to be a real sunset. Akirov’s already waiting on our bench. She finished work early. The first thing she does is ask about Maor and the meeting on Friday, and I tell her I got fired, and that maybe it’s better that way. “Now you’re my only employer,” I say, as I pull a joint out of my Noblesse pack, “and that’s why I’ve decided to take this business a little more seriously from now on. Check out the sunset I arranged for you!” It really is a beautiful one, and Akirov sits there silently, probably trying to come up with something comforting to say. I tell her that not only is there a premium sunset today, but premium pot, too. I tell her about Avri and the Pineapple Crush, but I skip the shitting part. The truth is, I’ve been smoking pot for twenty years and I’ve never had anything this good. After a few tokes you’re absolutely flying.

  We stay on the bench well after the sun has gone down, and I remind her again that she promised to tell me why she was disappearing. She looks at me with her clever green eyes. She’s stoned out of her mind but she’s still scrutinizing me. She smiles sadly and says she’s also leaving her job, and that it’s ending badly for her, too. Her law firm represents a few organized-crime families, and with one of them, it wasn’t just legal advice—the firm was helping them launder money. We’re talking tens of millions, and lots of important people are involved. But she wasn’t. She found out by accident, and like an idiot she went to the police. When she did that, she didn’t realize the extent of it. She thought she’d discovered a onetime transaction, which only one of the partners was involved in. By the time they figured out how serious it was, she couldn’t back out. Now she’s a state witness. She goes to work every day like everything’s normal, eavesdrops and gathers material, and soon, when the whole
thing blows up, she’ll be out of here—they’ll put her in the witness-protection program and give her a new identity overseas. Even she doesn’t know where. “Oded told me yesterday,” she said, attempting to sound calm, “that he’s not coming with me. He’s very close to his family and he’s not up for disappearing.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I say, and I suddenly take her hand. “I’ll come with you, wherever it is. I love surprises.”

  “This shit really is powerful,” she says, laughing.

  “Yeah, but regardless, I’d be happy to come. You’re my only employer here, and when you leave, that’ll be over, too. A new place? A new beginning? I could really get behind that. Just imagine if they put us on a tropical island! Every morning I’ll climb up a tree and crack open a coconut for you.”

  “You’re really into this!” She laughs some more. “It’s too bad we can’t switch.”

  “I don’t want to switch.” I start getting a little choked up now. “I want you.”

  She bites her lower lip and nods. Except it’s not an “I know” nod, but more of an “I want you too” nod. And then comes this long second that the world has cleared away for us so we can kiss. But I’m too worked up to just kiss her. My stoned brain is too busy imagining us together, with different names, in a different place.

  The second is over faster than I thought it would be. She stands up and smiles awkwardly and says she came to say good-bye because the timeline has changed: they’re picking her up at ten tonight, and she has to say good-bye to her husband and her sister, who doesn’t know anything about all this. I stand up, too, still trying to comprehend how I could have let that second evaporate, and she gives me one of those ordinary American-type hugs and says I’m a special person, which is something almost all the girls who wouldn’t sleep with me said.

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” she says while she hails a cab. “Even after it all comes out. Promise? That’ll only get me in trouble. And you.”

  I nod quickly and a minute later she’s gone.

  I bike home, still wicked high, and all the stoplights and the headlights and the cars honking mingle together in my head and it feels like a huge dance floor. The whole city looks happy—too happy. The munchies set in and I stop at the Yemeni falafel guy’s stand on Nordau. Tomorrow Akirov starts her new life in a faraway place, without a husband and with a different name. It sounds like the beginning—or maybe the end—of a fairy tale. I believe she’ll be happy there, wherever it may be, even if it’s without me. Someone else will pick coconuts for her. Or she’ll pick them herself. Wherever they send her, I hope it’s somewhere warm. Every time I passed her a joint and our hands touched, her fingers felt cold.

  EVOLUTION OF A BREAKUP

  At first we were a cell. Then an amoeba, then a fish, and after a very long and frustrating era we became a lizard. That was the era when, as we recall, the earth felt soft and unsteady beneath our feet, so we climbed a tree. Up there in the treetops we felt secure. At some point, we climbed down and started walking upright and speaking, and as soon as we began speaking, we just couldn’t stop. After that, we watched a lot of TV; it was a fantastic era. We always laughed in the wrong places, and people stared and said, “What’s so funny?” And we didn’t even bother answering—that’s how little we cared. We promised ourselves we’d find a job we’d love, and when that didn’t work out we settled for a job we didn’t hate, and we felt lucky, and then unlucky, and then lucky again. And suddenly our parents were dying. Then they died. A second before they departed we held their hands really tight and told them we forgave them for everything. Everything. And our voices broke when we said that, because we weren’t convinced we were telling the truth and were afraid they could sense it. Less than a year after that, our son was born, and he also climbed a tree and felt secure up there, and he came down at some point, too, and went off to college. Then we were left alone and it started getting cold. Not like it was that other time, eons ago, when we hid in burrows and peered out while the dinosaurs froze to death, but still cold. And we went to an acting class because our friends said it would be good for us. They gave us a series of improv exercises, and in the first one we poisoned each other; in the second, we cheated on each other; and in the third, the instructor, who spoke English with a heavy, indistinct accent, said, “Now switch partners.” And within seconds it wasn’t us anymore, it was just me. The new woman who was my partner said, “Let’s do a sketch where you’re a baby and I give birth to you and nurse you and protect you from all evil.” And I said, “Sure, why not?” But by the time she’d finished giving birth to me and nursing me and protecting me from all evil, our time was up and the instructor with the strange accent asked if the exercise had brought back any primeval memories; and I said it hadn’t, because I didn’t want to admit that it had brought back ancient memories, from millions of years ago, from before we even emerged from the water. Afterward, at home, we got into an argument over something really dumb and had the biggest fight we’d ever had since we were created. We yelled and cried and broke things, the kinds of things that if you’d asked us a day earlier we’d have told you were unbreakable. Then we packed up our stuff in a suitcase and shoved whatever didn’t fit in the suitcase into plastic grocery bags, and we dragged all that behind us like homeless people to the apartment where a very wealthy friend of ours lived, and he put a sheet out on his plush sofa for us. The friend told us that it might seem like the end of the world now, but by morning all the rage and hurt feelings would melt away and everything would look different. And we said no, something had been broken, something had been torn apart, something we would never be able to mend or forgive. The friend lit a cigarette and said, “Okay, maybe so. But can I just ask—why are you always talking in the plural?” Instead of answering, I just looked around and realized I was alone—I mean completely alone.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Etgar Keret was born in Ramat Gan and now lives in Tel Aviv. A recipient of the French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, the Charles Bronfman Prize, and the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, he is the author of the memoir The Seven Good Years and story collections including The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. His work has been translated into forty-five languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many other publications, and on This American Life, where he is a regular contributor.

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