Fly Already Page 3
And I say, “Todd, I haven’t seen you in a year. Tell me what’s happening with you, what’s new. Ask me how I’m doing, ask how my kid is.”
“Nothing’s happening with me,” he says impatiently, “and I don’t need to ask about the kid, I already know everything about him. I heard you on the radio a few days ago. All you did in that crappy interview was talk about him. How he said this and how he said that. The interviewer asks you about writing, about life in Israel, about the Iranian threat, and like a Rottweiler’s jaw, you’re locked onto quotes from your kid, as if he’s some kind of Zen genius.”
“He really is very smart,” I say defensively. “He has a unique angle on life. Different from us adults.”
“Good for him,” Todd grumbles. “So, what do you say? Are you writing me the story or not?”
So I’m sitting at the faux-wood plastic desk in the faux-five-star three-star hotel the Israeli consulate has rented for me for two days, trying to write Todd his story. I struggle to find something in my life that’s full of the kind of emotion that will make girls jump into Todd’s bed. I don’t understand, by the way, what Todd’s problem is with finding girls himself. He’s a nice-looking guy and pretty charming, the kind that knocks up a pretty waitress from a small-town diner and then takes off. Maybe that’s his problem: he doesn’t project loyalty. To women, I mean. Romantically speaking. Because when it comes to burning houses or sinking ships, as I’ve already said, you can count on him all the way. So maybe that’s what I should write: a story that will make girls think that Todd will be loyal. That they’ll be able to rely on him. Or the opposite: a story that will make it clear to all the girls who read it that loyalty and dependability are overrated. That you have to go with your heart and not worry about the future. Go with your heart and find yourself pregnant after Todd is long gone, organizing a poetry reading on Mars, sponsored by NASA. And on a live broadcast, five years later, when he dedicates the event to you and Sylvia Plath, you can point to the screen in your living room and say, “You see that man in the space suit, Todd Junior? He’s your dad.”
Maybe I should write a story about that. About a woman who meets someone like Todd, and he’s charming and in favor of eternal, free love and all the other bullshit that men who want to fuck the whole world believe. And he gives her a passionate explanation of evolution, of how women are monogamous because they want a male to protect their offspring, and how men are polygamous because they want to impregnate as many women as possible, and how there’s nothing you can do about it, it’s nature, and it’s stronger than any conservative presidential candidate or Cosmopolitan article called “How to Hold On to Your Husband.”
“You have to live in the moment,” the guy in the story will say, then he’ll sleep with her and break her heart. He’ll never act like some shit she can easily drop. He’ll act like Todd. Which means that even while he fucks up her life, he’ll still be kind and nice and exhaustingly intense, and—yes—poignant too. And that’ll make the whole business of breaking it off with him even harder. But in the end, when it happens, she’ll realize that the relationship was still worth it. And that’s the tricky part: the “It was still worth it” part. Because I can connect to the rest of the scenario like a smartphone to wireless internet, but the “It was still worth it” is more complicated. What could the girl in the story get out of that whole hit-and-run accident with Todd but another sad dent on the bumper of her soul?
“When she woke up in bed, he was already gone,” Todd reads aloud from the page, “but his smell lingered. The smell of a child’s tears when he throws a tantrum in a toy store . . .”
He stops suddenly and looks at me in disappointment. “What is this shit?” he asks. “My sweat doesn’t smell. Fuck, I don’t even sweat. I bought a special deodorant that’s active twenty-four hours a day, and I don’t just spread it on my armpits, but all over my body, and on my hands too, at least twice a day. And the kid . . . that’s one hell of a turnoff, man. A girl who reads a story like this—there’s no way she’ll go with me.”
“Read it to the end,” I tell him. “It’s a good story. When I finished writing it, I cried.”
“Good for you,” Todd said. “Double good for you. You know the last time I cried? When I fell off my mountain bike and split open my head and needed twenty stitches. That’s pain, too, and I didn’t have medical insurance, either, so while they were sewing me up, I couldn’t even yell and feel sorry for myself like everyone else because I had to think about where I’d get the money. That was the last time I cried. And the fact that you cried, it’s touching, really, but it doesn’t help solve my girl problems.”
“All I’m trying to say is that it’s a good story,” I tell him, “and that I’m glad I wrote it.”
“No one asked you to write a good story,” Todd said, getting pissed. “I asked you to write a story that would help me. That would help your friend deal with a real problem. It’s like if I asked you to donate blood to save my life and instead you wrote a good story and cried when you read it at my funeral.”
“You’re not dead,” I say. “You’re not even dying.”
“Yes I am,” Todd screams, “I am. I am dying. I’m alone and for me, alone is like fucking dying. Don’t you see that? I don’t have a blabby kid in kindergarten whose clever remarks I can share with my beautiful wife. I don’t. And this story? I didn’t sleep all night. I just lay in bed and thought: It’s almost here, my writer friend from Israel is about to throw me a lifeline, and I won’t be alone anymore. And while I’m taking comfort in that cheering thought, you’re sitting and writing a beautiful story.”
There’s a short pause, at the end of which I tell Todd that I’m sorry. Short pauses bring that out in me. Todd nods and says that I shouldn’t sweat it. That he got a little too carried away himself. It’s totally his fault. He shouldn’t have asked me to do such a dumb thing to begin with, but he was desperate. “I forgot for a minute that you’re so tight-assed about writing that you need metaphors and insights and all that. In my imagination, it was much simpler, more fun. Not a masterpiece. Something light. Something that begins with ‘My friend Todd asked me to write him a story that’d help him get girls into bed’ and ends with some kind of cool postmodern trick. You know, pointless, but not ordinary pointless. Sexy pointless. Mysterious.”
“I can do that,” I tell him after another short pause. “I can write you one like that, too.”
TABULA RASA
For Ehud
SAD COW
A. had a recurring dream. He dreamed it almost every night, but in the morning, when Goodman or one of the instructors woke him and asked if he remembered what he had dreamed, he was always quick to say no. That wasn’t because the dream was scary or embarrassing, it was just a stupid dream in which he was standing on top of a grassy hill beside an easel, painting the pastoral landscape in watercolors. The landscape in the dream was breathtaking, and since A. had come to the institution as a baby, the grassy hill was probably an imaginary place he had thought up or a real place he had seen in a picture or short film in one of his classes. The only thing that kept the dream from being completely pleasant was a huge cow with human eyes that was always grazing right next to A.’s easel. There was something infuriating about that cow: the spittle dripping from its mouth, the sad look it gave A., and the black spots on its back, which looked less like spots and more like a map of the world. Every time A. had this dream, it aroused the same feelings in him—calm that turned into frustration that turned into anger that quickly turned into compassion. He never touched the cow in the dream—never—but he always wanted to. He remembered himself searching for a stone or some other weapon; he remembered himself wanting to kill the cow, but in the end, he always took pity on it. He never managed to finish the painting he was working on in the dream. He always woke up too soon, panting and sweating, unable to fall asleep again.
He didn’t tell anyone about the dr
eam. He wanted there to be one thing in the world that was his alone. With all those prying instructors around him and all the cameras placed in every corner of the institution, it was almost impossible for an orphan to keep something to himself, and the meadow with the sad cow staring at him was the closest thing to a secret that A. could have. Another reason, just as important, was that he didn’t really like Goodman, and hiding the existence of the strange dream from him seemed to be a small but fitting act of revenge.
GOODMAN
Why, of all the people in the world, did A. hate more than anyone else the man who had helped him the most? Why did A. wish that bad things would happen to the person who had taken him under his wing after his parents had abandoned him and who had devoted his life to helping him and others who suffered the same fate? The answer was easy: If there’s one thing in the world more annoying than being dependent on someone, it’s when that someone constantly reminds you that you are dependent on him. And Goodman was exactly that sort of person: insulting, controlling, patronizing. Every word he said, every gesture he made, carried the clear message—your fate is in my hands, and without me, you all would have died a long time ago.
The orphans in the institution spoke different languages and had little communication with one another, but they shared one essential biographical fact—all of them had been abandoned in the delivery room by their parents when they learned that their newborns had a disease. A genetic disease with a long Latin name. But they all called it “elderness” because it made all the babies born with it age ten times faster than ordinary people. The disease also enabled them to develop and learn much more quickly than ordinary people. As a result, by the age of two, A. had already mastered math, history, and physics at the high school level; knew many classical music pieces by heart; and his paintings and drawings were so adept that, according to Goodman, they could be exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world.
But, as with all diseases, the advantages paled beside the disadvantages. The orphans knew that most of them would not reach the age of ten, that they would die from illnesses related to old age—cancer, stroke, a variety of heart problems—that their biological clocks would persist in ticking at an insane speed until their worn-out hearts ceased to pump. Over the years, the orphans heard their instructors tell them again and again the same sad stories of their infancy, stories related with the same indifferent tone they used when reading them fairy tales before bed: how their mothers knew at the moment of their birth that their terrible death was racing toward them. And so they chose to abandon them. What parent wanted to bond with a newborn that arrived, like a carton of milk, with such a close expiration date?
At holiday meals, after drinking a bit, Goodman liked to tell the orphans how, as a young obstetrician, he first met a mother who had abandoned her elderness-afflicted baby, how he had adopted him, and within three years, had taught him everything that any other child required at least a dozen years to learn. His tone always emotional, Goodman described how that child had developed right before his eyes at an insane speed reminiscent of the way a plant in time-lapse photography grows, sprouting, developing, blossoming, and withering, all in less than a minute. Goodman would talk about how, at the same time and at an equally rapid pace, his plan was developing to help all those abandoned babies left alone to face the enormous challenges their disease posed. The institution that Goodman founded in Switzerland took in all those sick, brilliant, unwanted children and designed an individual curriculum for each one aimed at preparing them as quickly as possible to go out into the world where they could live their terrifyingly brief lives independently. Every time he told his story, Goodman reached the end with tears in his eyes and the orphans would jump to their feet, applauding and cheering, and A. would stand up and applaud, too, but no sound would emerge from his mouth.
In order for the orphans to go out into the world, they were required by Goodman to pass a life-skills exam. Given once a month, the exam was geared to the particular curriculum of each orphan, and those who received a perfect score went on to a personal interview. According to the rumors, Goodman asked especially difficult questions at the interview; attacked, insulted, and sometimes even struck the interviewees. But if you managed to survive, you could walk out of the institution armed with an identity card, a letter of recommendation that detailed your skills, one thousand Swiss francs, and a train ticket to a nearby city.
NADIA
A. wanted more than anything to leave the institution. More than he wanted to kiss a woman, or hear a divine concerto performed by angels, or paint a perfect painting, A. yearned to pass that exam and the interview that followed it and live out his remaining brief life on a grassy hill under blue skies, among normal people, and not only rapidly aging children and their instructors.
A. failed the monthly life-skills exam nineteen times. During that period, he saw many other orphans leave the institution, some younger than he was and some not half as smart or as determined. But he promised N. that he would pass the next exam in April. N. also studied painting, which meant that A. saw her almost every day, but since A.’s first language was German and N.’s was French, communication between them was somewhat limited. This didn’t prevent A. from giving her a small gift every day: an origami seagull he made and painted for her, a real flower he stole from a vase in the dining hall, a drawing of a winged creature that resembled N. soaring above a towering barbed-wire fence.
N. insisted on calling A. by the name she made up for him, Antoine, and he called her Nadia, after a sad, agile Romanian gymnast he had once seen in an old black-and-white film clip. According to the rules of the institution, the orphans were given full names with matching documents only on the day they left the institution. Until then, it was absolutely forbidden to call them by any name or nickname but the identifying letter they were assigned the day they arrived. A. knew that when he and Nadia left the institution, they would receive totally different names and the entire world would call them by those new names, but for him, she would always be Nadia.
THE SECRET DONOR
The agreement between A. and Nadia was simple. It was more a wish than an agreement—they promised each other that they would do everything in their power to pass the exam and the interview, and when they went out into the world, they would live the rest of their lives together.
The institution was funded entirely by donations, and each of the orphans had a personal, secret donor. It was the personal donor who determined the orphan’s identifying letter, his future name, his curriculum, and the destination on the train ticket he would receive the day he left the institution. Since Nadia was a French speaker and A. spoke German, they assumed that their train tickets would send them to different cities in Switzerland where they could speak their languages, so they agreed on a plan: The first to reach the train station would carve the name of the destination city on the northernmost bench found there, and upon reaching that city would go to the main entrance of the central train station at exactly seven every morning until they were reunited. But first of all, they both had to pass the exam. Nadia’s secret donor wanted her to be a doctor, that was absolutely clear from her personal curriculum. She had failed the anatomy section of her last exam, but she promised A. that this time she would come prepared.
The future that A.’s secret donor wished for him was a bit less clear. Along with his art classes, A.’s personal curriculum placed special emphasis on social and verbal skills, and, among other things, he learned to debate and write carefully reasoned essays. Did A.’s donor want him to grow up to be a leading artist in his field? A lawyer? An essayist or critic? Possibly. In any case, he apparently wanted A. to grow the kind of thick, wild beard suitable to a bohemian, because unlike the other orphans, A. had never received shaving gear, and when he once tried to raise the subject with Goodman, Goodman put an end to the matter with a curt suggestion that A. focus on the upcoming exam instead of “wasting time on nonsense.”
For his part, A. believed that the donor wanted him to grow a beard because he himself had one. Once he saw Goodman through the gym window talking with an old man who had a long white beard. A. was running laps around the gym and could clearly see Goodman pointing at him and the old man watching him intently and nodding. What could make that old man invest so much of his money on the education of an abandoned child? Kindness? Generosity? The desire to atone for terrible things he had done in his life? And why had he chosen to support a genetically damaged child and not, say, a child prodigy who, with his help, might develop his extraordinary talents and advance all of mankind? A. wondered if he would do something similar for a sick child if he himself were healthy and rich. Maybe there was an alternative universe in which A. was the one standing next to Goodman and pointing at a child, maybe even at Nadia, describing her development, her hobbies, her chances of passing the exam and living the rest of her life in the wild, unprotected world that surrounded them.
THE APRIL EXAM
The time allotted for the written exam was four hours. A. had finished previous exams at the very last minute, and twice he’d had to hand them in without answering all the questions. But this time, he finished twenty-five minutes before the time was up and put down his pen. The instructor asked him if he wanted to hand in his exam, but A. declined. Too much was at stake. He reread his answers painstakingly, corrected punctuation mistakes, and rewrote words he was afraid he hadn’t written clearly enough. When time was up, he knew that he was handing in a perfect exam. And, sure enough, among the seven orphans who took the April exam, only he and Nadia went on to the interview.