No.
She asked whether I needed a bottle of water and I nodded. She went to the drinks machine in the corner, plugged it in, dropped a coin into it, and came back with a bottle of red wine.
I pulled a chair over from one of the empty rooms, turned it around, and sat down, a leg on either side.
The two guys, Ravit, and the crown of feathers sat in a semicircle in front of me.
I took a long drink of wine.
The first guy looked at his watch and said: You have twenty minutes, tops. We have to wrap up by two.
Two is indoor soccer time, the second guy explained.
Our indoor soccer game is top priority, Ravit explained.
I placed my books on the floor. Arranged them in front of me in chronological order of publication, from right to left, then reconsidered, moved them aside, took another swig of wine, and began to tell them about the book I wrote that was never published. The one I had never told anyone about.
I worked on that book for more than a year, I told them. I had already reached page two hundred on the computer, which is about three hundred pages in a book.
The book was called Accounts, and it was based on the powerful sexual tension between a man and a woman. They live in the same apartment and are very attracted to each other, but for various reasons, they’re forbidden from acting on the attraction. In my original plan, they’re supposed to overcome the prohibition on the last few pages of the book. But after a year’s work, I couldn’t take the sexual tension between the characters anymore. They wanted each other so much, and I had more and more difficulty stopping them, so I decided to do something about it: to write the final scene before the actual end, to free myself and my characters from all that frustration and then put the scene aside until it was time to insert it. And that’s what I did: I wrote fifteen pages of wild sexual abandon, a long, detailed, erotic scene, and really, I had a truly pleasurable week at work, except that the moment I finished, something super-problematic happened: I lost interest in the book. Totally. I tried to force myself to fight it, to shake it off, to keep writing. But the efforts exhausted me so profoundly that once or twice I even nodded off while writing and my face actually fell onto the keyboard. Finally, a month later, I had to concede that the book would not be finished. More than a year of work down the drain.
Did you at least save it? Ravit asked, shaking her feathers.
The truth is that I deleted it. If I had already decided to shelve it, then why not go all the way.
But what was the bug? the first guy wanted to know.
The bug?
What was the real glitch in the book?
Yes, the second guy joined in, like…the way you tell it, it sounds like if you hadn’t written that sex scene in advance, everything would have been fantastic. But that’s crap, bro. It’s like when we tell people the reason the company folded is that the Canadians beat us to it.
And that’s not true?
Of course not, our user interface was complicated and clumsy, and theirs was more user-friendly. That’s why they were able to attract paying customers. And we weren’t. That’s the real story. That’s why eighty people went home.
You should always ask yourself—the first guy clarified—what’s concealed behind the official explanation. I mean, why did you really shelve that book? Otherwise, how will you learn for the next time?
Every crisis is an opportunity, Ravit said. Then she pulled a feather out of her crown and stuck it between her teeth as if it were a knife.
When one door closes, another door opens, the first guy said.
Soccer time! the second guy said.
They stood up and stacked their chairs on the side. I did too.
The first guy put a miniature soccer ball the size of a tennis ball on the floor and signaled the second guy to stand at the other end of the corridor. The game was about to begin, and it seemed as if they were no longer interested in secrets from the writer’s desk.
Ravit walked me to the elevator along the yellow brick road and said, Thanks, the guys received a lot of added value. I haven’t read your books, but now I will totally consider reading them.
The elevator began its slow descent to the lobby. On the twentieth floor, it suddenly stopped.
And a huge crab entered. If a regular seashore crab is a ten-point font, then this one was a seventy-two-point font.
Its red claws spread along the length of the elevator walls and I had a feeling that it was looking at me through its antennae. I glanced in the mirror to keep from creating eye contact between us, God forbid. And for the first time, I began to suspect that I wasn’t real.
The elevator stopped at the eighteenth floor (only later did I figure out what the numbers meant), the crab went on its way in its crablike sideways walk, and Yoram Sirkin, along with a few suits, took its place in the elevator. They spoke English to each other, and one of them, who looked like Ari before his illness and was holding a small hypodermic needle in his hand, kept repeating in the same tone in which Ari after his illness asked me to help him end his suffering: Start-up nation. Start-up nation. Start-up nation.
He said “start-up nation” eight times until the elevator reached the twelfth floor. Each time he said it, he sounded more desperate. And the eighth time it really sounded like a cry of anguish.
They got out at the twelfth floor (the bat mitzvah floor), and Dikla entered, wearing her brown dress.
She came over and gave me a long kiss on the mouth, the way she used to. Then she opened the
