In fact, everything I’ve written since then, eight books, is one very long letter addressed to her.
I never let anyone else get as close to me as she did. Her name alone engulfed me with softness.
I can’t fall asleep without her, wake up without her, fall without her, find my way in the hall of mirrors without her.
In the end, I’ll probably show her this interview too.
—
She called me after I’d been sleeping in the studio for two weeks.
Said the kids missed me.
That she doesn’t know what to tell them.
That she’s sick and tired of having to take care of everything herself.
I said, Does that mean I can come back?
Yes, she replied, but—
I said, I’d like to remind you that all the men in my family die young.
And she didn’t play her part and laugh.
We haven’t slept together since then. After the kids fall asleep, I go to the couch in the living room, and before they wake up, I fold the sheet and blanket, drink a cup of Turkish coffee, and make their sandwiches: cream cheese for Yanai, cream cheese and olives for Noam. I also make a third sandwich, with cream cheese, olives, and cherry tomatoes—for Shira. Then I remember that she doesn’t live at home anymore. So I eat it myself.
—
Yesterday, I asked Dikla if she would mind reading something new I was working on. Of course, I waited for the right moment. I waited for her to come back from her evening run. Ten kilometers. I waited for her to finish showering. Shampoo, conditioner, body lotion. I waited for her to put on the sweat suit she wears at home and the thick woolen socks she bought in London when she was there with that twenty-something guy. I waited for her to brew her homeopathic tea, spread her long legs on the couch and sip it. I waited for her cheeks to redden from the heat of the tea and her eyes to become shiny, as if she were crying.
Then I asked her.
She said she didn’t have time for it. She’s in the middle of another book, a thriller, by that Scandinavian writer, Wolff? You know, the one who looks like a Viking?
I persisted. I asked again.
She shook her head and said that, the Viking aside, it was just too soon for her to read something of mine. That until now, she could always separate the story from the writer, my fantasies from the reality of our life, but she wasn’t sure she could do that now.
A wave of coldness flooded my body. Like the one I’d felt at the edge of the abyss on Death Road in Bolivia.
I went into the kitchen to load the dishwasher and said to myself, It won’t be easy, but that’s my mission: to do everything to make her believe once again that everything except her is and always will be only a story. What kind of music do you listen to?
Damn that song. Even when our love was very much alive, there was something stressful about listening to it on the radio when we were driving together. Even when the drive could end in our turning onto a dirt road to undress each other, right then, because we couldn’t wait—those lyrics sounded like an ominous prophecy that would come true in the end, because even we, whether we wanted to or not, would follow the herd of mumbling souls—
Now, a week after returning home from my exile in the studio, we’re driving to the wedding of one of her employees. And there’s a traffic jam on the highway.
We’ll be late, Dikla thinks.
Of course, I think. It took you so long to get ready.
I’m getting old, it takes time to camouflage it, Dikla thinks.
You just get more attractive with the years, I think.
Colombia, she thinks.
Not a word is spoken.
And then that song that Ariel Horowitz wrote for his wife, Tamar Giladi (how does a woman feel when a man writes a song for her called “Love Is Dead”?)—
And both of us, at the same moment, reach for the dial to change the station. All of your books are written in the same style. Have you ever thought of writing something completely different? Maybe science fiction? Fantasy?
So let’s say I wrote something about a different planet. And let’s say that planet had two suns. And three moons, one of which was the planet’s Siberia, where people were sent for punishment. And let’s say that every new person you met on that new planet wasn’t really new to you, because a few seconds before the encounter, all the intimate information the Web had collected on him was transmitted into your brain. And let’s say there was an underground of people who wanted to disconnect from the Web so they wouldn’t know everything. People who believed that life without secrets was not worth living. And let’s say that the authorities on the planet persecuted those people in the underground. Or the idea of democracy didn’t yet exist, and the council of representatives of various giant Web corporations ran things. And let’s say that the leader of the underground was a woman with a dark secret in her past. Really dark. Which was revealed to every new person who met her. And let’s say she was sick of it, which is why she had the need to conceal, to leave the past behind and turn over a new leaf. And let’s say she knew a hacker named Tristan Carmeli, who fell in love with her despite her dark secret, or maybe because of it. And Tristan Carmeli managed to find a way to hide her and all the underground people somewhere inside the Web. Not outside the Web—because that’s where the authorities would search for them—but inside it. Very deep inside it. Intra-Web. Like an air bubble in bread. And let’s say that Tristan Carmeli lived deep inside that intra-Web hiding place and wrote poems about the world that he and the other
