The story of how Aaron ends up in the apartment where he stays for most of the visit is a complicated one. Some true stories fall into place by themselves and tie their own ribbons; others complicate themselves until no elegance remains.
Shammai eventually comes back from Paris. He tried to stay longer, to avoid the war as well as leave the flat for Aaron, but couldn’t postpone his flight back. He even volunteers to stay with his parents, knowing it would be easier for him than for Aaron. Aaron refuses, though he appreciates the offer so profoundly he can’t express his gratitude in words. They end up spending one night in the apartment together, Shammai in his own bed, and Aaron on the couch.
“Did you make my bed?” Shammai asks after putting his suitcases in his bedroom.
“Yeah. Just thought it was something I could do for you.”
“Thanks,” Shammai says. “But you’re not my mom.”
In the morning, their conversation is hard on Aaron. Shammai, as usual, looks directly at reality and laughs at it. Aaron is still not ready to look, let alone laugh. This conversation is a dance of humor and requests for leniency; apologies and subject changes.
Anyway, here’s the story of the next apartment he finds.
Someone Aaron lived with when he last visited Israel sends him the phone number of her friend, who’s looking for somebody to cat-sit at her place. He contacts the cat’s owner. On the appointed day, he finds the place on Ibn Gabirol street, goes in the crumbling entrance (behind some trash cans), climbs the dusty stairs, and knocks on the door.
When the cat woman opens it, he is assaulted by a pungent smell, by the unreasonable closeness of the walls, the narrowness of the corridor. The apartment must have been tiny before it was subdivided into two smaller units, the motivations behind this design clearly having to do more with financial gain than any desire to create a habitable space for a human being.
She takes him on a very short tour of the apartment, from the musty bedroom, where the cat’s sleeping in the closet, to the tiny living room with an ancient sofa and a dry lump of cat shit on the floor. Before Aaron can ask why the hell the window’s closed, she explains that it’s been stuck for a couple of days. She pulls hard to the right, where it should open, and Aaron stops himself from explaining to her that every person needs to read the Tao Te Ching at least once. He recalls Verse 69 – Rather than advance an inch, it is better to retread a yard. She asks him to try, because he looks strong, and he does the opposite of what she expects: pushes the window to the left. The jamb comes loose with a satisfying click and he opens the window, letting fresh air in (as much as the air on Ibn Gabirol street can be considered fresh).
“So what do you say?” she asks. “Do you wanna stay here?”
He shakes his head in a terse and pointed motion and narrows his eyes a little. A part of him painfully notes that he must look just like his father.
“No?”
Aaron is surprised at how surprised she is. In a true feat of diplomatic patience, he says, “I don’t think it’s a good fit.”
“Really? What am I going to do with him now?” She turns away from him, as if talking to herself. “I can move him to another apartment, but it has another cat in it, and moving is so hard on cats; it’ll really traumatize him. What if he gets depressed again?”
It would be an exaggeration to say that Aaron has been hardened by this war. He hasn’t killed or wounded anybody, hasn’t developed an immunity to the feeling that someone’s trying to kill him. He has, however, become somewhat immune to seeing women cry. He remembers how, as a child, he saw his housekeeper cry when her daughter was diagnosed with bone cancer. He hid upstairs, waiting for her to stop. The uncontrolled sadness horrified him. Not anymore.
When this woman bursts into tears, Aaron tells her the truth, but only the parts she needs to hear. “Listen, I can drop by to feed him and clean the litter box, but I don’t want to live here. I’m also at war; I have my own anxieties. I’m not going to add an external difficulty to breathe to the list.”
“I’m sorry it’s dirty here. The cleaner was supposed to come on Monday, but she canceled because of the war. I asked her to come anyway but she said it’s too dangerous.”
He doesn’t say that he isn’t there to judge her. He’s there to tell her if he’s willing to live there or not, and he’s not.
“You really don’t wanna stay here? Oof, the girl who came in the morning also said it’s not good enough for her.”
And that, Aaron thinks, wasn’t enough of a reason for you to clean the cat shit off the floor?
He leaves the apartment and records the story in a voice message to add into his journal later. As he speaks the words, he hears how cold he’s become. This woman is also riddled with anxiety. She knows she needs to clean the shit off the floor but can’t bring herself to do it. He ends the recording, and sees a message from the German, the one he hasn’t yet decided to eliminate from the story. She left the gross and safe-room-less flat in Florentin after one of the neighboring buildings got hit directly, and now she’s cat-sitting on Bograshov street. He’s welcome to stay with her.
He moves there in the evening. They buy a shawarma in a nearby shop from a polite Arabic clerk and watch Netflix. They get into a truly bitter argument (turns out some women have a really hard time taking “No” for an answer), and in the morning he drives her to the airport. Because most of the four thousand German citizens in Israel wanted to leave at the same time as almost every commercial air-travel provider withdrew their planes from Israel, the German government arranged a couple flights just for German citizens. It wasn’t easy to reserve a spot, and her mother, the German says, stayed up all night on the phone.
When he returns, this apartment that he didn’t pay for, didn’t even ask for, is his. The cat doesn’t look at him, let alone come for pats, but he serves her faithfully, replacing the water and checking that the automatic feeding machine is loaded with dry kibble. When the litter box starts to stink, he realizes he doesn’t know where the clean litter is. He sends a message to the person who’s supposed to live here (he doesn’t even know if it’s the owner or a renter, only that he was at a convention in the US and can’t get a flight back) and asks where the precious crystals are hidden. The original resident explains, and thanks him from the bottom of his heart. He invites Aaron to eat whatever he wants from his fridge, and to play the guitars and piano in the saferoom if he so desires.
Aaron sits with his phone in his hand and cries. Afterward he picks up the guitar and plays a song he wrote a decade before, discovering the words fit his situation more now than they did then. He sharpens the chords, realizes his perception of harmony has become more sensitive, more accurate. He imagines himself recording this song, having it go viral in these hard times. He decides to play and record it ten times and post the best version online. He records it once, but he doesn’t like the way it sounds and gives up.
#
After a relatively peaceful week in the home of a stranger, making sure that the cat gets in and out at the appropriate times, watching Netflix (and discovering that Black Mirror made two episodes based on ideas very similar to those he wrote two short stories about, thus killing their chances), the original resident notifies Aaron that his old roommate is going to arrive and pack the stuff in his room, the one that Aaron left vacant, for the movers to take. Turns out he planned on moving to Netanya before the war started, but because Netanya is, for geographical reasons, one of the safest places in the country, he decided to move there even earlier.
Aaron, just like the cat he was entrusted with, feels a degree of anxiety about having to share the space with someone unfamiliar, an anxiety that reaches a climax when a key twists in the lock, and the door opens.
Here I must remind the reader that this is a memoir—because though it seems hard to believe, the man who walks in is a near double of Aaron. Bald and bearded, fit, with the slow, deliberate speech pattern of a person who thinks way too much.
They shake hands, ask how’s it going. With a directness befitting a close friend, the roommate declares that he wants to order takeout, pack until the food arrives, and then eat together and chat. “Sound good?”
“Yalla.”
“What do you feel like ordering?”
“Look, I’m fine with anything,” Aaron says, and regrets it as soon as a specific craving appears. “But if I’m feeling anything, it’s Mexican.”
“Taqueria?”
“If there was a Mexican place better than Taqueria in this country we’d order from there, but with things being what they are, I don’t think there’s much choice.”
“On point.” The roommate laughs, logs into Wolt, sends Aaron a link to join the order. They both order burrito carnitas.
Aaron offers three times to help him pack and gets three refusals, so he plays chess on his computer. The server pits him against a player from Saudi Arabia, and Aaron defeats him using a gambit called Intercontinental Ballistic Missile1. The Saudi and he congratulate each other on their good games in abbreviated internet talk, and Aaron feels a sliver of hope before noticing that the flag by his name and picture is the Canadian one.
Aaron and the roommate take their food outside and talk about their lives. It’s like they’re different versions of the same person, from different timelines. Aaron elaborates on the events that brought him to this nomadship, and the roommate says that he’s been working in crypto for the last couple of years.
“Can you tell me what, exactly, you do? I know how blockchain works.”
The roommate smiles while peeling the aluminum off his burrito. “So tell me how blockchain works.”
Aaron smiles too. In Canada nobody would ask that for fear of offending you, wounding your pride, or making you feel like they didn’t believe you. He does his best to describe the principles behind the chain of blocks, and in the process discovers that he’s forgotten a crucial part of the mechanism, which the roommate explains concisely. Aaron goes on asking technical questions, and the roommate responds with the kind of clarity that only people who love knowledge more than themselves are capable of.
“Look,” the roommate says. “I’ve had a whole lot of luck. I did a master’s in math because I loved it. Yeah, I wrote it down as a master’s in compsci, chose a subject that might superficially look like the kind you get a job from doing. In conferences I say that my mission is to create a platform where safe cooperation can be established without trust, and that’s true. But I just play with equations all day, and I feel…” He stops for a moment, stares at his half-eaten burrito, and adopts a higher register to express his thoughts clearly – “… an intense aesthetic pleasure. Even if I had money, I’d keep doing the same thing.”
“I feel the same way. I write these stories about the world’s central, timeless problem—how to know when to cooperate and when to follow our own interests, how to navigate systems that are made of people. I think great art really does make the world better. But that’s not the reason I do it. I do it because it’s the most enjoyable thing I’ve found so far.”
The roommate nods and, in the way of people whose communication actually works, doesn’t add anything more. After he finishes his burrito, he rolls an enormous joint. He takes two first puffs before offering it to Aaron, with that specific expression that people make when they offer joints, with smoke still in their lungs. Aaron refuses, sticking to his plan to limit his smoking to once a week.
And thus, the symmetry is broken. The roommate, it seems, can smoke as much as he wants without worrying about consequences. Aaron, on the other hand, knows that if he smoked as much as he wanted, he’d soon dig himself into a hole so deep he might not be able to climb out. He barely did, last time, wasting two weeks of precious Canadian spring in front of the laptop, reading Japanese comics and gaining weight until his ex returned from her trip to the Rockies and guilt tripped him out into sunlight and sobriety. He wonders if he too could have been like the roommate, if his life hadn’t been knocked off course.
They talk about their love for Terry Pratchett and his cheery nihilism (Aaron resonates more with the nihilism than the cheeriness), about the difficulties staying motivated to work out in your thirties (Aaron has an easier time keeping at it, perhaps because he feels like he should always be ready if a fight starts). When the roommate eventually leaves, Aaron thinks that he sees sadness in him. As if glimpsing the shadow version of himself in Aaron darkened his spirits. Aaron’s just glad that a person like the roommate exists.
Goaded by something the roommate said about not taking advantage of the nearby beach when he lived there, Aaron decides to venture out on a walk. It’s a good decision. The beach is beautiful at sunset: the water shimmers like cold-forged steel; toe-high streams of air carry thin sand on a long and narrow plane.
Aaron tries to concentrate on this beauty, to let it seep into him, but he’s distracted. He tries to decide what he’d do if he heard the rocket siren. Run for cover among the hotels on the other side of the road, or dive under the water? If he’s honest, it doesn’t really matter, either way.
Aaron Benelli 
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