—
It was Zorba who encouraged me to propose to Dikla: The sexual attraction has been so strong, for so many years—he claimed—I never heard a better reason to get married.
He also urged me to leave the world of advertising. Look at the skin of your face, he said. That rash. What does it look like to you? Not like a delayed allergic reaction to the campaign you ran for that nothing, what’s his name?
—
I recently consulted with Zorba again.
We were sitting in the port. Drinking rum.
I gulped it down to get high. He sipped—held the liquid in his mouth to enjoy its taste, and only then let it slide down slowly and warm his insides.
His eyes glowed through his suntan: Disparaging, sad, restless. Ablaze with passion.
I told him what Ari had asked me to do. And I told him that ever since he’d asked me to do it, I’d been spending my nights tossing and turning: On the one hand, I knew that doing what Ari had asked would really be a kindness. On the other hand, every time I tried to imagine the situation, I couldn’t. On the third hand, it was a criminal offense, and even if Ari claimed it was all arranged, no loose ends—
Excuse me, Boss, Zorba growled at me in response, what is all this crap?
But, Zorba—
Why are you thinking so much? He shook his large, heavy head. You keep a scale in your head all day. You weigh things to the last gram. Hey, habibi, fuck the scale.
But—
Pardon me, but I once killed a man. Fifty years back. And I can’t get that bastard’s face out of my mind. A Turkish shell exploded on him. His whole stomach…was spread all over the ground. And he…he pointed to my gun and asked me to help him.
So you simply shot him?
I said it was simple, Boss? You heard me say it was simple?
No.
My heart broke when I pulled the trigger. It split into two parts, my heart.
Okay.
But sometimes you have to do something for someone else. You understand that, Boss?
Yes.
Criminal offense or not, a friend is a friend!
Okay, Zorba, don’t be angry.
Why should I be angry? Zorba said. And sipped some more rum. Then he smiled broadly and said, Otherwise, Boss, how are you?
As I was reading him the definition of dysthymia from my cell phone, he stopped me and said, Enough with all those big words, tell me in words a person can understand!
Okay, so…you know the kind of chills that make your scalp tingle when someone surprises you from behind, covers your eyes with his hands, and asks, “Who am I?”
So?
So dysthymia is the same thing. Only instead of a few seconds, it lasts for a few years. Excited anticipation combined with inevitable disappointment. Usually, people are excited with anticipation when they’re starting out on some kind of mission, but here, you have no desire or ability to carry out a mission, you anticipate nothing, maybe death, maybe your body smells the danger inherent in despair or the potential of jumping off a roof—
Stop, man. Give me some feelings. Not all this bullshit.
Okay. The mornings are usually the hardest. The chills I talked about are absorbed into your scalp and drip down from your neck to your back, and around noon, they solidify into a motherfucking anchor between your shoulders. Then some invisible hand starts to pull at that motherfucking anchor as if it wants to tear it out, but it actually cuts into your flesh and anchors the pain once and for all in your posterior heart—
“Posterior heart”? What is all this crap?
No one talks about it, but we have two hearts, one in the front and another behind it, in our back.
Let’s say that’s true. Go on.
So you go everywhere with that constant pain in your posterior heart, no rest, no moments of relief, not during the day and not at night, not after two glasses of rum and not after ten. After everything you try to do to ease the pain, you check to see if it’s still there, in your posterior heart, and fuck, it’s still there, and that’s what causes the most frightening chills of all, the knowledge that it won’t pass, it will never pass—
It will pass, of course it will—
And the worst thing is that you have no idea what started it all. There are a lot of obvious reasons, but you keep thinking that the real, deep reason, invis—
So go out to play.
What?
Go out to play, like your mother said. I don’t understand how you can whine to me here about pain in your posterior heart and still keep yourself closed up in a room all day.
But—
No buts. You won’t get over this until you go outside into the sun. To people. Fight with them. Hug them. Look them in the eye. Do what the devil shouts at you to do.
But for twenty years, Zorba…for twenty years I’ve been writing instead of living. I’m not sure I still have a devil—
So keep whining. No problem. Just don’t be surprised if your wife really leaves you after the bat mitzvah. Women want men with balls. That’s just how it is. It’s nature.
Wow.
Now take your last drink of rum—and get up. Do you dance?
No.
No! His hands fell in shock. Okay, so I’ll dance, Boss. Get out of the way, so I don’t run you down, eh? He leapt up, broke through the fences, threw off his shoes, his coat, his undershirt, rolled his pants up to his knees, and began to dance, his face still smeared with coal, blacker than black, the whites of his eyes glittering. Totally swept away by the dance, he clapped, skipped, spun in the air and landed on his knees, then skipped and glided in the air as if he’d been shot out of a cannon, then he suddenly leapt in the air again, as if determined to defeat the
