Zion's Fiction Read online

  Before Mrs. Wright got a chance to bawl Stephanie out, her cell phone rang, and she answered it. Her boyfriend is breaking up with her.

  Events speed up to normal. Mrs. Wright is still talking to her boyfriend.

  “No, come on.” She glances at Stephanie in fear, then turns her back to her and lowers her voice. “Let’s talk about this later, but let’s not decide until we talk about this.” And Stephanie felt the pain in Mrs. Wright’s voice.

  “Come on, Steve….” And in Mrs. Wright’s cracked voice, Stephanie recognized her own feelings. Too many of them. Mrs. Wright is like a future Stephanie. It made her want to cry.

  And it disappears.

  I look up at Professor Parks. “Yes!” I whisper at her. “That was it! That was the same emotion! Right there at the end….”

  Professor Parks purses her lips, and—

  Stephanie is home, again. I have time to feel the inner gyro. She’s almost seven. Mom and Dad are—

  “I don’t want a clown!”

  “But clowns are fun and funny and you wanted a birthday just like everyone else,” Dad reasons calmly. Mom and Dad are standing over her, telling her what they have planned for her seventh birthday.

  “I don’t want a clown!” Can’t they understand how sad clowns make me feel? “I don’t want a clown!” They make me cry! Can’t you see? Don’t you believe me? And in frustration, she begins to stomp the ground with her feet and shout, out of control and in tears: “I don’t want a clown! I don’t want a clown! I don’t want a clown!”

  And it’s gone. That was the emotion. It was the precisely the same emotion that came at the end of the last incident. Without Parks I would never have thought to look in places like this, but that’s not why she showed this to me.

  I look into her eyes. I think she’s taking me back in time! I think she’s taking me down to Stephanie’s core!

  And suddenly Stephanie is four years old and she’s at eye-level with Mom’s bed. Mom is lying on the bed. There is sun outside. It’s almost noon. Mom is lying there, on her stomach.

  “Mom, let’s go outside! Let’s do a picnic! Let’s sit in the sun!” And that emotion is here again! She feels pleasure and fun and joy. No, that’s not true. She’s faking it. She wants her mother to feel that.

  Mom lifts herself slightly and gives Stephanie a questioning look, her face mooshy from sleep.

  “Come on!” Stephanie tries to excite Mom. “It’s such a great day!”

  Events zip in fast-forward, at Parks’s behest—

  I see Mom getting up, and setting up a picnic outside.

  Parks slows down events—

  Mom is hugging me. “You are so pretty and lovely. You’re the best and wonderfulest little girl in the world. What would I do without you to keep me sane?”

  And suddenly events zip back, in quick rewind—

  Before the picnic, before Mom got off the bed, before Stephanie woke her up, before Stephanie walked into the room—

  Stephanie stands in front of Mom’s closed bedroom door, about to come in and wake her. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with Mom again. No: Mom is in pain.

  She looks at the door, and chooses to go in.

  Stephanie decides to go in. She shoves everything she feels aside, and puts on her cute face. She opens the door….

  And it’s gone.

  “There were hundreds of these incidents all through her childhood,” Parks says. “Stephanie’s mother was deeply depressed. When she congratulated Stephanie the way she did she made Stephanie responsible for her happiness. Stephanie felt she bore responsibility for her mother’s good mood. And, eventually, for everyone’s good mood.”

  I look at her. “But … that wasn’t it.”

  She smiles. “I know.” She leans closer and her smile grows wider. “That’s the point. Watch.”

  “I don’t want a clown!” They can’t understand how sad clowns make me feel. (The pain hits her. I can distinguish it better the second time around.) “I don’t want a clown!” They make me cry! (Pain!) Can’t you see? (Pain!) Don’t you believe me?

  “I (Pain!) don’t want a clown! I don’t want (Pain!) a clown! I don’t want (Pain!) a clown!”

  And it’s gone.

  “Was that the same thing you felt before?” Parks asks me.

  I crinkle my eyes. “Yes.”

  “Did you see it more clearly now?”

  “Yes.” What does she want from me?

  “Did you see the pain?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you recognize it?”

  “No.”

  “All right.”

  She blinks and—

  “Oh, gawd!” (Stephanie shouts at her mother. We’re back to the day she died, again.) “This isn’t about you! (Pain!) Not everything is about you! (Pain!) This is my (Pain!) pain! Stop making everything (Pain!) about yourself! (Pain!)” And she shouts so loudly that she becomes hoarse, having uttered just those words. And without words, she keeps shouting in her head: This is mine. (Pain!) Mine! (Pain!) Don’t you get (Pain!) that?

  And the scene changes—

  She looks at her body (Pain!) before she dresses for the date with Michael (Pain!), checking for spots (Pain!), blemishes (Pain!), new fat (Pain!), old fat (Pain!), each carries its own series of these pains. Will he notice? (Pain!) Will he still like me? (Pain!)

  “Wait,” I move my hand away.

  She looks at me patiently.

  I recognize the pain. When four-year-old Stephanie opened the door, when she shoved her emotions aside, there was a feeling of loss at losing yourself, at pushing yourself aside. That was the pain that was flooding her all the time now, in her grownup life.

  I look at Parks. I want to ask her to play it again for me. But I don’t need her for this.

  “Oh, gawd!” (Stephanie shouts at her mother. We’re back to the day she died, again.) “This isn’t about you! (Pain!) Not everything is about you! (Pain!) This is my (Pain!) pain! Stop making everything (Pain!) about yourself! (Pain!)” And she shouts so loudly that she becomes hoarse, having uttered just those words. And without words, she keeps shouting in her head: This is mine. (Pain!) Mine! (Pain!) Don’t you get (Pain!) that?

  Stephanie’s pain, her great pain, that great, bottomless depth it had—it dissolves before me now, made of smaller, completely trivial pains.

  I look at Parks, my hand wavering out of her reach. “Wait,” I say. “Wait.”

  Let’s try something else.

  “Stephanie,” her mother says. “How can you react like this when all we’re doing is going to see Grandma?” (Pain!)

  “It’s not Grandma, it’s the fact that it’s Sunday.”

  “But (Pain!) it’s just a few hours.” (Pain!)

  Something sinks inside Stephanie. It’s that sense of feeling the door, replayed. She has to shove herself aside, she has to put herself on hold. She is so helpless. “This is how I feel, Mom.” And she is in greater pain because she knows her mother will never understand. Because inside she knows her mother will need her to put herself aside again.

  It can’t be! Her pain was so important to her! It defined her! It defined her personality! It was there every second of her life!

  No. I run everything I’ve seen of her in my head, and everything is different now.

  Stephanie was wrong.

  Everything she understood was wrong. Everything she felt was wrong. Everything she had felt was so trivial, so ridiculous. It all boiled down to nothing.

  But….

  “Professor Parks …” And she looks at me with patience. “Professor Parks, Stephanie’s pain, the reason I liked it so much … I also have it. I also have that same pain. All the time! Are you saying that everything I have, everything I feel is wrong?”

  Professor Parks looks at me for a second, and then she smiles graciously. “Welcome,” she says, “to the Indianapolis Academy.”

  God.

  “It’s not true!” I scream. I am so weak. “I am not dust! I am not
nothing!”

  Professor Parks doesn’t move.

  That’s it. She’s done with me. She just sits there and looks at my face. Why would she even talk to me? Why would anyone love me?

  But someone does love me. Or at least he did love me. I have to call him. I have to see him. I have to feel his touch again.

  Not even looking at Professor Parks, I run out of her office and into the hall. I run through the corridor as I take out my cell phone and dial his number.

  I press “Send” only once I’m out of the hall, on the grounds, alone.

  It’s ringing.

  “Yeah,” he answers, always sounding the same, always sounding cheerful and carefree.

  “Michael,” my voice breaks. I’m not sure he heard me. “Michael. It’s me.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize the voice.”

  “I, uh, I’m sorry. It’s me, uh, uh, uh, Alexandra. I’m … Stephanie’s friend.”

  And the temperature drops on the other end of the phone.

  “Yeah,” he says, his voice different.

  “I need to meet you. I need to talk with you about something. Now.” He hesitates for a split-second, so I push on. “John’s Café?” Five minutes from the university, where he teaches.

  “I’m giving a lecture in an hour.”

  I can’t tell anything from his voice. Which probably means that he really doesn’t want to do this. I have to see you! “Thirty minutes, then?”

  Slight hesitation. “All right.”

  “Good. Thank you.” And I hang up immediately.

  I am not nothing!

  I see him coming into the café.

  He looks around. I’ve seen you naked, guy. I could pick your body from a police line-up.

  Now he looks for women sitting alone. There’s only me. He’s coming over.

  Suddenly I realize I have nothing to say to him. There is nothing I could say.

  He stops beside me. “Alexandra?”

  Quickly, I remove my gloves underneath the table. I stand up and offer my hand. He takes it.

  And I am inside him. I don’t care what he feels or what he thinks right now. All I care about is finding an image of Stephanie—There!—and replacing me with her image.

  For a second, he’s stunned at seeing Stephanie in front of him. But he doesn’t let go of my hand.

  And I use that to see …

  Stephanie—

  Stephanie!—

  Naked—

  And I see him watch Stephanie take off her clothes for the first time. The way her legs go all the way up, the way there’s a little fat, just as you reach the crotch. He loves that small ring of fat so much, finds the space between that and her panties, that space through which light gets through from behind, so appealing.

  And I feel how badly he was attracted to her then. And I make him feel it again, now, for me, standing in front of him.

  “Hug me, Michael.” I cling to him. “Hug me. Hug me.” And he does. Tightly, so tightly.

  And his cheek touches my forehead.

  I surf to the moment he first saw her, sitting among five other women he didn’t know. And her image practically leapt at him, touched him, showing something in her even from afar that he liked. At first sight.

  I am not as beautiful as she was.

  “Stay,” she says. They’re at his apartment. It’s the middle of the day. He has to go teach.

  “I have to go.” He puts on his pants.

  “Stay,” she purrs, and curls on his bed like a cat. He can see, underneath her playfulness, how desperate she is.

  He puts on his shirt.

  She grabs it, her mood changed, and looks at him. The desperation in her eyes grows. She’s afraid that if he leaves the apartment she’ll never see him again.

  Oh, my god. I remember this moment. I’ve seen it in her head. But I don’t … feel it anymore. I was never as desperate as this.

  I make Michael hug me tighter, and I search for a memory of her later in their relationship, his strongest memory.

  “Yes,” Michael says. They’re in the corridor where she cornered him, outside his apartment.

  Stephanie stands in front of him, and it’s as if everything inside her changes. Something in her eyes changes, something in her cheeks falls, her face freezes, and she collapses into a ball on the floor.

  It’s as if she is dying in front of him.

  She did die that instant. But something in me doesn’t feel for her as much as I used to. I am not as depressed as she was. I am not in the same pain as she was.

  I look up at Michael. I am not in love with him. I am not attracted to him.

  I step back, and it feels like pieces of who I am fall to the floor.

  I am not as beautiful as she was. I am not as desperate as she was. I am not as depressed as she was. I am not in the same pain as she was. I am not in love as she was. I am not attracted to Michael as she was. I am not as crazy as she was.

  I am not Stephanie. And I am not Parks. And I am not Bendis. And I am not my parents.

  I am not dust. I am not nothing.

  And it dawns on me that I am … something.

  I am me, for once. I am different now. I am strong. I am as strong as Parks. I am stronger than Parks, and she knows it. I am aware of my thoughts. I am free. I am without fear. I am ecstatic. I am in love … with no one. I am in need … of no one.

  And I am through with this.

  I let Michael sit, and I walk off. He’ll be confused for a couple of minutes, but he’ll be all right.

  I call a cab.

  When we get there, I see a sign above the gate I failed to see before: “WELCOME TO THE INDIANAPOLIS ACADEMY!”

  That’s right. Because we deal with truth.

  Hunter of Stars

  Nava Semel

  The night all the stars winked out, I was born. This is why nobody in our family paid any attention to what was going on outside, why none of them witnessed this world-changing event. They were all busy waiting outside the delivery room for my first scream, and Mom claimed I wouldn’t stop screaming, as if I’d already known that the world I was coming into had become completely dark.

  Mom and Dad, and Grandpa, and my two spinster aunts, none of them rushed, crazed, into the streets or fields, like all the other people in the world, to see a sky that went completely black all at once; none of them cried out for the stars to come back.

  Except for them, there’s not a single person in the world who can’t remember what they were doing at that terrible moment, which is called in history books the Obscuration of the Minor Lights. Until this very day—ten years have passed since—people are holding massive rites; even a special prayer was devised for the return of the lost lights. I remember nothing of that night, of course, ’cause a tiny little baby can’t tell day from night and knows nothing about stars or heaven. All this I was told by Grandpa, who also found out only the next morning that the world had turned upside down just as they were naming me.

  Neri, that’s what they named me.

  Mom, who breast-fed me with inoculation-enriched milk, said that I wouldn’t stop screaming for days on end.

  The world got used to it. At first people cried, then they didn’t cry so much, and Grandpa says that people get used to bad things just as they get used to good things. In school we were taught that this was an ecological disaster no scientist had anticipated, and unlike those who claim that this was God’s curse, Grandpa says that this was people’s curse. All those toxic gases they were releasing into the atmosphere for centuries had made the air lose its clarity, and now no starlight can penetrate the black tire that surrounds us. And even though all means of transportation are driven by solar energy nowadays, the air is still sick, and the scientists have found no way to repair this heavenly short-circuit.

  My science teacher claims that what happened to our planet was in fact a blessing, because now it is clad with a defensive shield preventing evil aliens from discovering and hurting us. But if earthligh
t can no longer spread out into the distance, I’m afraid that if God should happen to look for us from high above, He won’t know we exist.

  On every birthday, before the annual rite for the return of lost light, I go out on the balcony and whisper to Him, so that no one else can hear: “We are still here. Do not forget us.”

  Even on ordinary days, I keep nagging at Grandpa: “How did the world look with stars?” And he sits down in the special old folks’ armchair, tailor-made for his one-hundred-twenty-two-year-old body, that delivers healing currents, and tells me how when he was a kid he always waited for a shooting star to make a wish. Once he even saw a meteor shower, but I’m not sure he didn’t invent this one.

  Even if these stories are the products of Grandpa’s wild imagination, I envy him ’cause he got to live in a star-spangled world, for now even the moon is rarely seen—a dim patch, you really need to make an effort to see it—and only when it is full.

  Its picture as a thin crescent, rocking in the sky like a hammock—Grandpa calls it “a light banana”—can be seen only in natural history museums or at the planetarium.

  Today is my birthday. On the cake Mom had baked before she left with Dad for the annual rite of prayer, my best friend Sheli arranged candies to look like the constellations Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter, and at the edge of the cake she stuck Polaris, the northern star that used to accompany Grandpa in navigation hikes when he was young, in the army—believe it or not, we used to have a military once—and the northern star always showed him the way.

  Sheli is short for Shalhevet, “flame,” and she knows by heart the entire star chart, which only select astronomers get to see through their most advanced telescopes. I find it sad that most people chose to forget this chart, and for them the stars are like the dinosaurs that got extinct millions of years ago, or like those peoples mentioned in the Bible—the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Amalekites; they, too, ceased to exist a long time ago. For them, that’s how things are, and if the Universe keeps changing anyway, the time has come for the stars to disappear as well. So long as the sun is still there, says Sheli’s mother—and never mind if its light is drab and grayish. What’s important is that its rays are there, and we can go on living.