Somewhere Else

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He stood with a canvas knapsack and a scrap of airmail paper in his hands, peering into the gummy glare over the directions for Rachel's kibbutz. Hungover, inconsolable, he kicked up a spray of dust and tiny ash colored pebbles by the road overlooking the rippling blind valley, as field trucks and pickups carried off the dizzying midday reflections, winding their way down the sloping orchards and burst buttons of the northern Galilee fields. He'd come here to escape. Escape into dreamlike weeks of hurling ripe melon onto the flatbed wagons; escape into the soft damp mornings on hazy biblical hills amidst the first call of the muezzin. He saw himself suddenly happy again, stupid, free. Only two or three months ago, he'd almost been married: Bonnie Holly-Lars, a fiery alcoholic Political Science major: an aristocratic, cunning, willowy (fragrant never brushed hair, sleepy dull emerald eyes, slight limp to her right – skiing, never healed) young widow. He’d been once again on-campus, the aimless and cheap south Jersey campus, this time posing as a part-time not-quite grad student, setting his sights on nothing more academic than watching Tom Baker Dr. Who repeats, a nightly concentration bordering on maniacal. His unsent letters revealing a strictly blank idealism, a path heading into the quiet stress of the perverse. It was enough, enough to simply like the way they would get drunk together in the oneroom efficiency across from Burger King; enough to watch her storming down the cracked, squeaky stairs, drunk, mumbling, waving her Southern Comfort like a scepter, descending like a twilight. Though the rut that was his life seemed resolute, interminable, nervously there swayed in his gut a restlessness, a remembered need shake off, if only in appearance, the ice of routine. Need for change, any change, prevented him from fully riding along with Bonnie towards her authentic quest for alcoholism. That she was moderately young for the crusade did not surprise him – that she denied its hold, widely, did: "I mean, look,” he would plead, unsuccessfully, “all we ever do is ... drink. I've never spent twenty-four hours sober with you." She would respond with deadly silence, a sullen lock of her light auburn eyebrows, a reproachful glare at him through the black reflection of the moist window panes. The proposal was like everything else in their short magpie life together – drunken, desperate, plucked out of sheer senseless thin air. A night of video renting (she would disdainfully refuse to return the tapes), cigarette strolling, lingering by the bare bone futon, naked, sweaty, plastered, seemingly happy. "What if … we get married?" he asked, stretching his arms behind her head. "Why not?" Bonnie joined in, her eyebrows pitching, her toes digging into him, wiggling. And it was done. Guided by hands they trusted belonged to Fate, Destiny, or perhaps some Act of God. She was happy. He could see that. Bonnie smiling more than she ever normally did. For at least a week the idea seemed to pull them up; she even started inspecting classes again. He meanwhile decided to attack one of his abandoned novellas (a multi-perspective present tense "work" that had fifty pages of notes, thirteen coffee stains, and two pages of manuscript). Their days seemed poignant, aligned, fixed on something. Bonnie would later tell her friends it was tequila. Tequila and an endless, trashed night, a

night of tremendous margarita pounding which produced the real future in store for them. And he remembered little of it. His memory could only hit upon the pointless punctuation, concomitant backgrounds: peeled Two Fingers labels, indecipherable beach scenes on the maragarita mix. These props bore no significance yet refused to be brushed away; they replaced the substantive psycho-wrestling with inscrutable still lifes. He could not recall the outraged, slurred shouts, shoves, the clenched fists, the sarcastic recriminations – but he could bring back to life with uncanny accuracy the pieta repose of a cardboard slice of Dominos Pizza tilted on the stereo receiver; could summon the accusing, alien buzz of the Whirlpool freezer after she'd banged the door for the last time. And of course he remembered the handbag. She'd departed without it. Would he drive it over to her, would she come back for it? It stayed. Stayed precisely where she'd miserably thrown it and didn't budge for several days of plodding horror until he couldn't stand it and drove it to her screen door and dropped it against the metal and rushed in the spitting rain, delirious, as if handling radium. No one observed him but her senile cat; he snuck away, ashamed. Once its tattered threads were out of sight, it was over.

He now spent his last morning staring at the Jezreel valley as if seeing it for the first time. The other volunteers knew he was leaving soon, but he didn't want to talk about it. He went to breakfast that morning but without wearing his blue work clothes, and when the volunteers came back from the fields, their knees and hands covered in wet soil, it made him feel empty inside and a little lost. He caught the next bus and finally, miraculously arrived: here at once he suddenly found himself at Rachel's commune, armed with a toothache, some pain killers (which felt nice after a few beers), a paperback, and some swim gear. He and Rachel changed for the pool in the darkened room of her cottage, shutters drawn and the floor swept clean, and he liked it in there, so cool and unfamiliar and graced with a working refrigerator, an indoor shower. He couldn't wait to draw from the lemon vodka bottles standing proud on the small table by the entrance. They packed their cigarettes, paperbacks, and some towels into her knapsack, and made their way down the winding narrow footpath to the pool. Rachel was a good swimmer, her effortless strokes slicing cleanly through the chlorineheavy water, and she looked very beautiful, an amber string bikini against her honey-dark skin. He didn't bother to try some laps; instead he kicked his legs lazily, arms extended on the pool's powder blue rim, and watched her come up for short gulps of air, her legs producing a clever splash. It was a fine time to be by the pool, the air warm and weightless, the late day sun softened by the cover of pines and some eucalyptus, and there were not so many people, only a few children performing cannonballs with mindless, unblemished glee, a pair of young men absorbed in their backgammon set unveiled upon the damp sharp grass. Their towels were placed side by side on the yellowing lawn, and they lay on their stomachs feeling very refreshed, a paperback open before each, a ticklish breeze so warm it could have issued from a hair dryer easing the water off their backs in an instant. He closed his eyes and buried his face into the wet soft towel, a little water in his ears. They left the pool at twilight, the footpath now cast in muted half-tones, a bluish shadow over everything; and though the sky was coursing from cobalt blue to brilliant violet their bodies retained the last golden rays of the sun, their shoulders very warm and their step almost a little

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heavier, as if this lingering glow weighed down upon them, slowed them. She stopped to make him see a kitten, its black hairs standing in all direction, minuscule tail crooked and comical, hiding beneath an azalea and curling into a ball in the undergrowth. He stared at the young kitten's eyes, a liquid yellow, and then he looked up again at her: Her eyes emitted a radiant beam of tenderness, a look he would never forget; she seemed lost in her gaze, removed from the moment and sent out into one only she had access to, could return from at will. He offered her a cigarette and she came back to him, looking into his face as he cupped his lighter to her cigarette end, looking for something she would never fully describe, not even to herself. The cigarettes tasted exquisitely good and they stared into the quickening shadows untouched by any distractions – the world appeared renewed in an unspeakable sharpness, stillness. He traced the outline of her shoulders, his fingers skimming her warm skin as they reached the door to the hut and she searched the bag for her key. As he was moving his hand right to left, describing invisible rivers around the silk of her wet fragrant hair, she found the key and found his eyes. She kissed him on his lips, both mouths faintly tasting a little of chlorine. Into the darkened cool room they entered, dropping the bag, removing their clothes. At last it was the hour neither knew what to do with: their last time together before a ride came and drove him back to get his things. He had to catch a bus to Afula tomorrow, and from there one to Tel Aviv; a night in Gordon's youth hostel and then the morning flight from Ben Gurion. He drank sweet orange soda mixed with vodka, and sat cross-legged on her bed looking with utter disinterest at some color tourist trade book on the Old City. He held the orange drink against his cheek, then suddenly stared at it furiously, as if it was staring back at him. He put it down on the floor and called her name. She emerged from the bathroom and sat on a chair by the table, an unlit cigarette in her fingers. He sat down beside her, their knees touching, and he took from her writing tablet some paper. Together they exchanged the new air-mail landscapes, the American zip codes and the English house names. Each held now the portent of a very near future: tissue thin envelopes and foreign stamps. On the steps outside they waited. A full moon kept time on the horizon, and they could do nothing but sit alongside one another and hold hands. He wanted to visit in his mind the memories of these last three nights, yet he refused: to do so would be to admit that they were memories, fixed, finished. But at this moment she was beside him; he held her, as long as he could.

He walked aimlessly along the walkway by the sea, the sky very sharp and black and the beach lit in spots by strong yellow lights. He could see the shore-break suck up the sand and spin long foamy lines that spread themselves out to nothing. Someone was still folding deck chairs even though it was nearing eleven o'clock, and there were even some bathers in the surf, their hollers and splashes mixing with the low rumble of the Mediterranean; in the distance a radio station jingle for "Sprite" soda. He bought a pack of Israeli cigarettes in an empty bar by the fronts of the luxury hotels, and continued up into the darkness that lay due north where the asphalt ended and a sea wall separated the tiny white sands from the highway. He wasn't really looking for anything, just a place to sit down perhaps and slow everything down. He had tried earlier to stop it: nursing a beer on the roof of the hostel. A Philippino kid, a short somewhat plump young man still retaining the same expression on his face of anxious disgust and cynical curiosity, had recognized him. The late afternoon light dazzled the white walls;

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a video recorder played a movie with David Bowie as a vampire. He'd forgotten the kid's name, but it didn't matter. "Where were you?" the kid asked, frowning, "Nazareth or something?" "Just outside of Nazareth," he said. "Kibbutz must've sucked." "No, actually it was .... You should try it. How long are you gonna work here?" "I'm doing this and some construction till next weekend," the young man said, distractedly, wiping his pale arm across his brow. "You're crazy, man. I would never work on a kibbutz. No money." The Philippino carried his crate of empty green and brown bottles of Goldstar back through the low entrance (a protective cushion placed between the door jam to prevent serious head injury) and down the steep slippery stairs. It was nice to stand on the roof and watch the sun over the ocean. Stand still. Back home he'd only see the sun rise over the sea, and sunsets fall on a placid saltmarsh bay. It felt unspeakably good to be able to swim to the sun, especially late in the day as it bore down on the azimuth and spread upon the green and blue water its burst of red. When he'd first arrived here in Tel Aviv it amused him to try and conjure the score of history, imagine Romans coming in from the waves and crouching upon these soft sands, Greek fishing boats, Egyptian dhows. The new owners played handball by the edge of the shore where the sand was hard and the air slightly cooler. He suddenly remembered his first day in the sun here, reading a paperback and marvelling at the olive-skin of a young girl behind him, trying to understand the antique languages, actually fearing the sun. Now he too was dark-skinned, the Hebrew and Arabic no longer exotic, and the sun, the looming, inescapable sun strangely familiar, almost kind. He turned his wrist and held his watch up to the silver haze scattered from a distant street lamp. The night was passing incredibly slowly – still there wasn't enough time, and he wished he could slip out of its hold entirely. The first departure had been his, it threw him where he wanted it to: out of one world and into another, unknown but somehow intimate. But this second departure was not his, and he fought against it. It threw him back into a world that had not changed, into a known but alien world, a place where he seemed to inevitably lose himself; the void of one's homecoming. He was spinning in between the two worlds now, neither here nor there, and all he could do was point his tiny cigarette cinder into the pitch summer sky, scratch his knees, and walk haltingly into the hours that would not end, and could never save him.

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