The highway is relatively empty, but the few people who use it drive their cars very quickly. Not necessarily dangerously: there is a precision in their speed, and the distance they keep from one another is short but constant, as if they were a group of Italian race car drivers returning from a hike in the mountains. Aaron gets to the city of Rehovot¹ quicker than he ever did in the daytime. 

He parks, takes the stairs to apartment number eight, and knocks. The apartment numbers, for some reason, aren’t organized in an ascending order. He arrives at number seven, glad that he’s only got half a floor left to go, and then discovers that climbing that half floor brings him to apartment five, then six, and only then eight. He knocks.

“Who is it?” Ya’akov asks. “A terrorist?”

“I swear I’m not,” Aaron says, and laughs.

Ya’akov opens the door and hugs Aaron warmly, putting on the expression of someone who really, really missed him. Ya’akov is always pretending. If Aaron didn’t know him well, he might think that Ya’akov didn’t really miss him—but that’s the thing: he’s always pretending to feel what he’s actually feeling. He also has the air of someone pretending to be smart, pulling at his goatee under thin glasses, but he’s one of the cleverest scientists Aaron has ever met. In a degree that most students treat like one big memorization game (generally speaking, professors are practically forbidden from asking anything that would be new and interesting, anything that would demand actual problem solving, lest they bring the ire of the student body upon their heads), Ya’akov was one of the only ones who understood that science is a process made from solving hard riddles, from how a certain protein would fold to how to find the position of a specific gene, and embraced that challenge. He still loves science very deeply. 

Life didn’t help Ya’akov finish his bachelor’s degree. The fact that his house burned down and he moved to Australia to pay back his landlord isn’t even the worst of it. And yet he returned and finished it, found a guide for his master’s, finished a thesis he was actually proud of (and rightfully so, in Aaron’s opinion. The creative solutions Ya’akov found to technical obstacles were on par with the truly heroic tales they were told in Biochemistry B), and continued to a doctorate with a professor Aaron took a course with in his own bachelor’s, the most interesting course in the entire program. 

Ya’akov was near the end of his doctorate when his mother died. A complicated event, two strokes in quick succession. He pushed through the grief, barely sleeping, smoking like Bob Marley, but he finished it, and began preparing for the next project. A project he was really excited about, a subject he talked about with the same zealous fire. 

Then the war started. 

“I feel like Job,” he says as he sits down.

“Really? What do you think about that story?”

“Prozac for the masses. Life is shit? Don’t worry: God loves you and will make things right again. Just God forbid you might suspect that there is no God, or that even if there was one he wouldn’t give a Goddamn shit about you.”

“Yeah, that’s how I used to see it too,” Aaron says and breaks into a lecture, not noticing something’s weighing on Ya’akov’s heart, that there’s something he’s waiting to say. While Ya’akov patiently loads his vaporizer with marijuana buds, Aaron explains how it’s easy to see the story as bullshit, but if we remember that the scientific consensus is that human beings developed intelligence mainly to understand and predict the intentions and actions of other humans, it’s not surprising that in order to make sense of the world, they will make a personality to represent it. “And if God is just a personification of the entire world, what’s the message we get from Job? That if you know the right method to deal with the world, one that’s been passed down to you for generations, you shouldn’t abandon it over some bad luck.”

“I disagree,” Ya’akov says after the first inhale. “As a scientist, if you see that a method stops working, you have to try another one. I know I do, with everything that’s happened.”

“Why? None of this is your fault.”

“No, but lately I’ve been having these rage attacks, and I need to do something about them before they get worse.”

“Rage attacks?” Aaron notices that he is confused, which is an important tool for a scientist. Usually people don’t get rage attacks over a family member dying from natural causes. He listens carefully, waiting for the missing part of the image to appear. 

“Didn’t I tell you about my dad?”

“I don’t think so?” Aaron raises an eyebrow.

“Do you know that my dad has a shop in the old town²?”

“A sex shop, right?”

“Yes, good recall. So before… wow, has it been two weeks? A couple of teenage boys got into his shop, and after he kicked them out, one of the them—” He gestures like he was drawing something from his pocket, and Aaron cuts in, before he has a chance to finish the sentence. The story is already clear to him. The boy will pull out a knife, threaten Ya’akov’s father, and even though no physical harm would come to him there would be a fracture in the feeling of safety that they wouldn’t know how to mend. “Wait—why did he kick them out of the shop?”

Ya’akov looks at him as if he just remembered Aaron’s social disability. “Because it’s a shop for sex toys. The boys were in sixth, maybe seventh grade. They weren’t supposed to be there. So anyway: he clears them out, and then one of the boys pulls out…” Aaron braces for impact. “… pepper spray, and sprays him in the face.”

“What the hell?”

“My dad’s choking, and he manages to lock himself inside of the store and call my sister, and of course she takes a long time because she needs to find someone to watch over her kids, and in the meantime he’s waiting and trying to breathe and he’s all alone in there.”

Aaron has a really hard time listening to that. He knows that fear, that horrible loneliness that comes when someone tries to make you have a really bad time, and succeeds. That feeling when you know that someone wants to make you suffer for no reason. 

“By the time I got there they were in the emergency room. They saw him quickly. He was all swollen up—his neck, his eyes, all red. By the time they were done with him he was back to his normal size.” He takes a long draw off the vaporizer before continuing. If you were looking at him through a pane of glass, without hearing his words, you might have thought everything was fine. He blows white smoke. “After I got him home, I couldn’t go home myself. I drove around in circles and looked for them. I didn’t know anger could be like this. No, not anger: rage. It grabs you by the neck, presses your temples, suffocates you. You feel your body getting tired after each attack. Your body gets ready to kill someone, like in computer games where you have a powerup that boosts attack but lowers your HP.”

“Yeah, that shit shortens your lifespan.”

“That’s exactly how it feels. So I go to the lab, do other people’s work, running protein gels or something, and I’m loading the gel with the pipettor, pouring the protein solution to that hole of two millimeters on seven, exactly ten microliters, each deposit so pretty it’s fun to look at, and I’m nice and focused when suddenly I notice the pipettor’s tip is moving side to side, really violent oscillations, and I’m trying to figure out where the vibrations are coming from, and I suddenly realize it’s my hand. I’m shaking all over. I call my lab buddy and ask him to finish and let it run because I gotta go out for some air. So I made coffee (even though it’s a stimulant), and sat there for an hour after. 

“Not anger: rage. When you’re angry at someone you wanna yell at them. When you rage…  Do you know that phrase, ‘like one forced by a demon’? So like that. Like someone’s holding you and trying to make you commit murder.”

He and Aaron both take a deep breath, let the words cool before they touch them again. 

“I know that it’s not what you wanted, but I’m glad you didn’t find them.” Aaron doesn’t say, Why didn’t you call me? “I would have come with you if you’d called. I would have come with gas masks³ and sticks and we would have done something that we’d truly regret. When you said sixth grade there was a part of my mind that immediately translated that to head height, how difficult it would be to kick. Because those are boys who need to get concussed.”

“I would have been satisfied with a good slap. The kind that’d lift them off the ground. The kind that would’ve killed brain cells before they even hit the floor.”

Aaron is surprised that Ya’akov chooses a slap of all things. If Aaron remembers correctly, Ya’akov’s father gave him a slap like that, when he was eleven. And what did he do to deserve that punishment? Ya’akov, already razor sharp, asked his father if there was a chance that the whole talk of God was a big pile of bullshit.

Something clicks, and Aaron realizes he ignored an important detail – Ya’akov’s father is running a sex shop in the religious part of the town. These boys didn’t come from nowhere: they heard about this merchant of obscenities, this man who makes people think of sex as something that’s fun and reasonable to enjoy. The phrase “as if forced by a demon” comes from the Talmud. Rabbinical students try to learn from their rabbi about each and every facet of his life, because they are not just learning theoretical knowledge but how to live in the world. In that specific page they interview their rabbi’s wife and ask her how their children turned out so beautiful, and she in return, tells them how her husband knows her. “As if bound by a demon,” she answers—meaning as if forced against his will, under threat. “Reveals an inch and covers two”—meaning that her husband hides everything that can be hidden during the act, because the visual joy of sex corrupts. 

What, Aaron asks himself, does a person who was raised on this text, who sanctifies it, think about a sex shop? It’s hard to imagine Ya’akov’s father seems like a good person to them, happy to bring joy and fun into people’s life in the form of silicon toys and sexy lingerie. More likely, he seems like an evil man who intends to corrupt Jewish culture. Someone who deserves to suffer.

“You know,” Ya’akov says, “somebody bought me a ticket to a Rage Room. Have you heard of this thing?”

Aaron has—a cool concept in theory but unsatisfying in practice. A business that ,in return for a surprisingly high sum, provides safety gear, a hammer, and a supply of things to break. “Do you think it’s open now?”

“Probably not, but think how funny it could be to call and say – Listen, my brother, I know you’re closed because of the war and all, but please, this is an emergency. I really need it!” They both laugh, and then to Aaron’s surprise, Ya’akov picks up the phone and calls. When he finally hangs up, there’s a look of real disappointment on his face. 

They play chess, instead, and Ya’akov beats Aaron twice in a row, all the while apologizing and explaining that it’s actually luck that got him the wins. Aaron wants to encourage Ya’akov to play the guitar, so he asks to play himself, and they end up taking turns. While Ya’akov plays a perfect rendition of Megadeth’s “Addicted to Chaos” Aaron wonders about the bubbling fury that echoes in each and every song ever written by the divinely talented Dave Mustain, and how hard his life must have been.

Eventually, Aaron sees how exhausted Ya’akov is, and makes up an excuse to leave, which Ya’akov obviously sees through. They hug, and promise to meet again, and Ya’akov walks Aaron to the door.

Aaron stands on the other side of it, lets out a long sigh, and holds his hand in front of him, and watches as it shakes.

He drives home, taking deep breaths. The radio plays “I’m Loving Angels Instead,” and Aaron sings along. He’ll take the rest of the day easy, try to relax, he thinks. Suddenly the radio goes silent. There’s intro music, like an ‘80s news break. ‘Alert,’ a mechanical voice says on the radio, ‘in the South Tel Aviv area.’ 

Cars around him pull over, and only then does he realize that he’s in South Tel Aviv, and somewhere in the sky there is now a rocket falling towards his general location. He pulls over and gets out, squats while leaning against the wheel. What were the instructions, again? Should he use the car for cover, or distance himself from it? If the rocket lands (unlikely) near him (very unlikely), his chances of getting hit with shrapnel drop by about fifty percent. Or does it mean that if the rocket hits nearby, he’s at a higher risk of catching fire when the car does?

People exit their cars and stand on the sidewalk, by the bridge’s safety railing. Two young women, efficient and calm, lie face down on the sidewalk, their hands covering their heads. A man and a woman, aged about forty or fifty, hug and sit on the ground. The woman cries; the man tries to calm her down. A pair of older men, white haired and thin-skinned, stand by their car and continue, presumably, the same conversation they were having inside. Aaron looks at the sky, curious if he’s going to see an interception. 

When he was twenty-four, he stopped being scared of rockets. He and Ya’akov, at the time students and neighbors, stopped running to the shelter—and by the end of Operation Protective Edge, they were going to the roof to watch rockets explode in the air. It wasn’t really dangerous. The rockets were always intercepted, aside from one that collapsed a house on a couple of people. Or maybe it was two houses?

And the shrapnel—well, there’s supposed to be enough air between the explosion and their soft flesh to slow down to terminal velocity, which isn’t fast enough to hurt a human. Probably. Anyway, it wasn’t really dangerous. It’s not really dangerous now. But with every boom, the woman screams. She shakes with violent tremors, like every explosion is a knife stab aimed only at her that just barely missed. Is the thing that shocks her, every time, the chance that she could die, or the knowledge that someone out there is trying to kill her?

NEXT: Storytellers

1. Hebrew. Literally “streets”. ↩︎
2. The old part of Be’er Sheva. Despite being only a hundred years old, both its architecture and demographic are significantly older and more religious than the newer part, where most students reside. ↩︎
3. State-provided gas masks are pretty easy to find. Not every house has them, but many shelters have them just lying around, left over from wars where they turned out to be unnecessary. ↩︎