Aaron wakes up late. Last night, when he returned the car to his parents, he tried to leave as soon as he could, before an incident had time to start. That, ironically, started an incident. He got back home, smoked some leftover weed from Ya’akov’s last batch, tried to remind himself that everyone was on edge now, with the war and all, but ended up staying up late contemplating the connection between fear and aggression, and how afraid you have to be before you start celebrating murder.

He decides to take a break from writing for the day and goes to work out instead. The beach sports park is surprisingly empty, and he can’t help but remember it filled to the brim with beefy dudes doing handstands and impressive pull-up variations, good-looking girls playing volleyball in swimsuits. There’s something unnatural about an empty beach when the weather’s so nice—even during Yum Kippur people go to the beach. 

A tent has been set up by the sidewalk to shade a group of police officers. It’s strange for Aaron to feel safer with cops around. The thought that they might open fire on someone trying to murder him is now stronger than the fear they would search him for drugs or just boss him around. Not that it’s that bad, even if it happens—usually all he has to do is speak loud enough for the cops to hear that he doesn’t have an Arabic accent and they leave him alone. 

He goes to the rings and starts his physiotherapy drills—and a scream makes him turn around. A woman—each of her breasts larger than her head, and just as unnatural as the tiny dog she’s holding, lips thicker than her fingers—walks on the concrete walk so quickly she’d be better off running. A man, seemingly homeless, is following her. They appear to be acquainted by the way he offers her a gift: a statuette made of plastic bottles and other trash. 

Aaron turns to do his exercises while looking at them, to see if he should interfere. “I’m running away!” she squeals, but not directly at the homeless man. “I’m running away!” 

The cops in their tents are either too far away to see, or they see and decide not to get out of the shade. 

“Is this how I build muscle mass?” says somebody Aaron didn’t notice before. 

He turns and sees a shirtless man, flabby and sweaty, sitting beside him and addressing him matter-of-factly. Perhaps too matter-of-factly. “What?”

“How do I build muscle mass? I said to myself, if I’m unemployed, I might as well work out three hours a day.”

Aaron considers this for a second. “There’s no reason to work out three-”

“No no no, I’m not going hard: I do a set, rest, do another set, rest, like that. Is that about right?”

“Well, the guiding principle is to do between eight and twenty reps-”

“That’s what I’m doing! Now I can do twelve push-ups, last week I could only do ten, and that was hard too.”

“Ok, so after you keep going and make it to twenty-”

“No, I can’t do twenty push-ups.”

“Sababa, what I’m saying is that if you keep working out, and you do reach twenty push-ups, that means that load has become too light for you, and you need to move on to a harder exc-”

“How long will it take me to reach twenty push-ups? If I work out every day, three hours but not too hard, do a set and then rest, and then another set and then rest—do you think I’ll get to twenty in a month?”

Aaron takes a deep breath. An electric car passes them, its engine sounding like something from an old science fiction movie. He heard it a lot in Vancouver, and he suddenly misses that boring Canadian city and its polite inhabitants. He sighs. “Forget about it. Just work out and it will be fine. No need to complicate everything.”

“That’s exactly what I told my wife. She told me to talk to a trainer and I said there’s no need, you just have to do something. Thank you.”

Aaron finishes his workout, goes back home, showers, heads to the bus station. His nephews, aged seventeen and nineteen, invited him to the neighboring city in which they live, to play chess. He knows they’re going to admonish him for being late, like they always do, but he still arrives at the bus stop twenty minutes later than he planned. He doesn’t know why.

A redheaded girl of about twenty, wearing hikers’ sandals, stares at Aaron’s feet. He looks at his sandals and back up at her. His sandals aren’t really for hiking, but a type with very thin soles that are supposed to simulate walking barefoot. He bought them thinking that they’d strengthen the tendons in his feet or something. She smiles, a half shrug that says “it is what it is” and turns back to the direction their bus will arrive from. Aaron doesn’t know what this expression means, in context. 

A bus arrives, and neither of them boards it, but focusing their attention on the same object starts a conversation between them. She turns to him again, half smiling. “What bus do you need?”

“Forty-eight. Did I miss it? Moovit¹ says I was two minutes late.”

“I’ve been waiting for it for ten minutes, so I don’t think so.”

“Cool, thanks.” He doesn’t really know how to proceed, and she doesn’t either, so they stay silent and watch people get off the bus.

A severely overweight woman of about fifty limps along the asphalt with a small dog under her armpit, towards the front door of the bus. She passes the open rear door, then the open middle door, but before she makes it to the open front door the driver closes all of them and starts to drive away. She slams her open palm against the window; he, of course, only drives away faster. 

She stands in the middle of the street, cursing in what Aaron thinks is possibly Georgian, until another car stops behind her, and the driver honks. She turns, and curses at them too. 

A man approaches the juice stand by the stop, coughing as if he’s trying to set a record for how far he can spread his infested saliva. “Ahalan²,” he says to the vendor.

“How’s it going?” asks the vendor.

“Alright,” he answers, then remembers, shrugs an apology.

The vendor’s a black guy with dreadlocks. The sides of his head are shaved, and he has black tattoos that aren’t quite discernible against his skin. “It is what it is, daddio,”  he answers in an encouraging tone. “No more, no less.”

Aaron suddenly realizes that the redhead was trying to hit on him. 

By the time he brings himself to talk to her, she’s already on her phone. A serious conversation, by the sound of it, her tone neither angry nor stressed, but professional. Something to do with business or military logistics, who needs to go where. The bus arrives and they both get on, and he sits far away from her, to distance himself from the uncertainty of whether or not he should try talking to her. An elderly woman by the door starts yelling, pointing at a couple of nylon bags on the floor. 

“Whose bags are these?” 

“That guy’s, over there,” says another woman, but the old one doesn’t hear.

“This guy over here,” a younger woman says, and Aaron wonders if she repeated so accurately out of obedience or laziness. 

“Then why doesn’t he answer?” the old woman asks the young one, though Aaron isn’t sure how the young one is supposed to know.

The man in question finally notices the activity behind him, or just decides to stop ignoring it. He turns to the elderly woman. “What?”

“Why aren’t you responding?”

“Excuse me? Not responding to what? What do you want from me?”

“I want you to respond.”

“To respond to what, exactly? huh?”

Aaron decides he’ll fly to India after this. Spend the winter there in a horrible yet peaceful loneliness, and only then move to Berlin. 

He spends the afternoon with his nephews, two brilliant and kind-hearted young men whose likenesses Aaron decides not to steal away for this chronicle. Aside from one point that he finds literally remarkable. As good natured as they are, their moods visibly darken during the game, even before Aaron starts wiping their pieces off the board. He expresses bemusement—not because he’s winning (they’re both used to playing on a computer screen, and the unfamiliar, 3D setup makes them miss things they wouldn’t have otherwise), but because their competitiveness is sapping their happiness. 

“It’s a good thing,” they both say. “It drives you to excellence.”

Aaron doesn’t argue. They’re right—but he doesn’t know if this excellence they’re driven to is worth the grim expressions with which they spend this afternoon together. 

Actually, there’s another event that Aaron will later find too important to leave unwritten. 

The elder nephew volunteers at a hospital, where he’s been promoted to the role of a phlebotomist, a blood taker. The entire family is very proud of him. As a child who was shy even before covid, raised in a protective environment, the easy route would have been to start a degree in computer science and spend his life in front of a computer. Instead, he chose a harder route, one that includes pain and blood and working in physical space. “You know,” he says, “this week I took blood from insurgents.”

“You did what?” Aaron is shaken to discover these two elements, one harmful and the other vulnerable, were allowed so close to one another.

“Yeah, they brought some to get treatment with us, and they had to get their blood tested, so I took it from them.”

“Alone?”

“It was just me taking the blood, but there were armed soldiers in the room with me.” 

“What was it like?”

He shrugs. “Fine. I don’t know. Normal.”

Aaron is frustrated with the answer, but he doesn’t ask him to elaborate on how it felt, focusing instead on events that are not up for interpretation. “And did you explain to them what you were doing?”

“No, I forgot all of the Arabic I learned in high school. I told them in Hebrew I was taking blood, and they understood. The word for blood is the same in Hebrew and Arabic.”

NEXT: Volunteers

1. A transportation tracking app. ↩︎
2. Arabic. Hello, greetings. ↩︎