And he replied: That’s me.
—
My struggle to maintain my sanity—I’m not exaggerating, that’s how I felt that entire night, that I was struggling to maintain my sanity and might lose it if I fell asleep—lasted until the first rays of sun drove the crabs and the clouds from the cabin, and I heard the real, familiar sound of birdsong.
Half an hour later, we got on the first van leaving the farm and drove away from there. I knew that Ari would have been happy to remain, but he didn’t say a word. I mean—if I reproduce the exact dialogue—I said, Listen, I don’t feel it would be a good thing for me to stay in that cabin. And he said, So let’s get the hell out of here.
—
I remember the trip. The first minutes of the trip. We leaned against our backpacks in the back of the van and didn’t speak. It was weird: Instead of being relieved that my fear of losing my mind had passed, I felt as if I’d been cast out of Eden.
The cities of the gods no longer glittered beyond the clouds. The clouds themselves were just clouds. And everything that had looked so magnificent when I was under the influence of the cactus juice, now looked ordinary. Banal.
The flow of the river seemed much slower. The sunbeams that had filtered through the branches looked dimmer. The birds weren’t singing. Only chirping blandly.
To be accurate, I felt as if I had shifted from a state of overwhelming, boundless awareness to one that was narrow. Limited. Painfully sparse. The world had returned to being merely the world. Nothing more.
I remember thinking: The high point of the trip is behind us. Anything that happens from now on will never match what happened to me yesterday. For better or for worse.
I remember that Ari asked: What’s happening, amigo? And that after that last night, I felt we were close enough for him to understand the abrupt switch from the fear of insanity to the sorrow of constricting rationality. So I explained it to him.
He was silent for a few seconds, then said: Okay, you have two choices. Choice number one—get ahold of more cactus juice. But you should take into account that this time, you might not survive it.
And the second choice?
Write, he said.
—
How could he have been so sure, I wonder now. How could he have predicted the future that way?
—
I took my journal out of my backpack and opened it. There were a few phrases I’d written under the influence of the cactus juice, and like most of what is written under the influence of drugs or alcohol, they were worthless. So I turned to a new page and began to write something else. On the top of the page, I wrote “To Dikla” out of habit, but it ended up being a short story. About Curly Hair. Her family in Israel. The broken heart she’d suffered a few weeks before leaving for South America. The son-of-a-bitch musician who broke it. It was all made up, of course. The only thing I knew about her was that she’d always wanted a big brother. And that was my starting point.
I threw all of myself into that story. My eyes never left the pages.
The van kept moving, but I no longer saw the world that had become so faded and flat after the fall.
I saw Curly Hair’s life. It spread out before me in its entirety, an Eden of possibilities.
—
The van reached its destination that evening. Only then did I return the journal to my backpack. But in many senses, that trip has continued to this day.
—
And my bond with Ari has as well.
His condition has deteriorated these last few days. They sent him home because none of the medical treatments helped. Then they hospitalized him again to administer painkillers directly into his vein.
He was groggy most of the time, and only sometimes did he open his eyes for a few seconds and speak. Sometimes he sounded totally lucid, and other times his mind would stumble around like a drunken sailor.
Yesterday, for example—we were alone in his room—he asked me again to help him die. My parents flatly refused to do it, he said. I mean, my mother. All of a sudden, she remembered that her grandfather was a rabbi, can you believe it? And my father doesn’t want to do it without a green light from her. Those two, with that togetherness of theirs. In short, that’s it, there’s no one but you.
I didn’t say anything.
Ari gave me a pleading look.
I had never seen him plead.
I kept silent and he kept looking at me. For long seconds. Or minutes.
Time moves differently in the oncology department.
And then, suddenly, he clutched my hand and said: Thank you.
I wanted to tell him that I’d thought about it, but it was too much for me, I mean, Zorba is right, it’s probably the right thing to do, but still, I’m sorry, I’m not sure I’m capable of it—
But he went on: That night…in Ecuador…if you hadn’t been with me in that cabin, I would have gone crazy.
It’s the other way around, I wanted to correct him.
But his eyes were closing. And there was no point.
I kept holding his hand and looking at the monitor, which showed dot after dot, and I begged the gods, the ones behind the clouds, please, please make him stop hurting.
Then I had an idea.
I went down to the café next door to the hospital. I opened my computer. I foraged around old e-mails and found the list of phone numbers of the members of that workshop, the one the guy who’d written the subversive story about euthanasia had attended. I called him. He answered. How are you, he said, how’s your back? Still hurting? I told him about Ari: I need that kind of angel urgently, like the one in your story. Someone willing to give the injection.
There was
