One evening, the original tenant notifies Aaron that new roommates are going to arrive at the apartment, refugees from the Otef¹. The following morning Aaron helps them carry their suitcases from their car to his room, which he vacated for them the night before. He takes the less pleasant room that the former roommate cleared out, which contains only a mattress on the floor and empty closets. He shows them the television and living room and study. 

The new roommates define themselves as digital nomads. That means they work from home, but sometimes their home is in India and sometimes in Brazil, so they’re pretty confident they can open up their laptops and carry on with their lives, here. 

They weren’t given a command to evacuate, and in that sense they are not refugees, but there’s not a single civilian in their hometown, a town currently inhabited solely by soldiers. No one left to work the convenience store, nobody to bring food. On some Whatsapp group there are  pictures of soldiers in full gear sleeping on their porch. 

After getting not-officially-evacuated, they spent two weeks in some friends’ apartment in Givatayim, two couples in a space suitable for one, until they started to feel the friendship crumble with proximity. 

The nomad is a small dude, with a tidy beard and a hairstyle hinting at a mohawk, and his shirts are from the same brand Aaron likes to wear—drawings of Buddha, Chakra schematics, variations on the Hindu god Ganesh. There’s something relaxed and cool about him, but Aaron feels like a lot of him is hidden, intentionally. The nomadess is a blonde Russian, younger than him, graceful, taking great care for everything to be as pleasant as possible. From the moment she arrives at the house she starts cleaning it, while her partner spends his free moments on his phone, playing war games. Every time she talks on the phone for work (graphic design, a business she’s struggling to get off the ground), there’s something in her tone that suggests that she’s fighting for her life with each disagreement. 

“Say,” the nomad asks. “Is it sababa if I smoke weed here?”

“From what I understand,” Aaron answers, “in this apartment it’s basically a civic duty.”

The nomads are very nice. They share with him their marijuana and homemade vegan food, but they also dominate (by asking nicely, and Aaron obliges them) the nice study where he used to sit with his computer, and then the living room where they binge-watch Game of Thrones every night. Aaron wants to stand up for himself, to tell them he also wants to use the TV every once in a while, but he lets it go. Their friends died, Aaron tells himself. As sad as it is to see a kindergarten closed, can you imagine how much sadder it is to see an entire town closed? Let them watch Game of Thrones in peace. 

He lies down on the mattress on the floor of his room and watches anime on his laptop’s small screen. He sets his headphones to maximum noise reduction, so when they knock on his door, they have to do it really loud for him to hear. 

“Come,” the nomadess says after he permits her to open the door. “There’s an alarm.”

He takes off his headphones and hears that she’s right, and they all gather into the study, which is also the shelter, and Aaron explains to them that there’s no chance the cat will get in with all of them, and it’s better to leave her alone. 

They close the door, listen as the siren, and to the series of explosions that comes afterwards. 

“I’m used to the Otef,” says the nomad. “There you have fifteen seconds to run for shelter. Even here, with her telling me every day that it’s ninety seconds until impact it’s ninety seconds until impact it’s ninety seconds until impact I still drop everything and run. Yesterday I get to the building’s shelter first and everyone is walking calmly looking at their phones and I’m the only one there with shampoo in my hair covered in towels I don’t even know who used last; I just took whatever was hanging on the bathroom door.”

“Don’t worry,” the nomadess says. “We’ll get used to this, too.”

He shakes his head, a small and masculine gesture, expressing that she doesn’t have a clue. “It’s instinct already. It’s something that’s not going to change without shrooms.” Aaron makes a prediction to himself, that very moment —by the seventh of October, 2024, Israel will be known in the world as a pioneer in the field of psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy. 

Enough time passes that they feel comfortable leaving their iron shelter and the roommates spread around the living room again. Aaron gets himself a glass of water and lingers to watch a second-season Game of Thrones scene with them—the one where Theon Greyjoy looks at two children who were put to death by fire. At his command, perhaps? Aaron doesn’t remember. “Say,” he asks them. “Why is Theon so shocked here?”

“Why? Because he’s a faggot, my brother,” the nomad says, and chuckles. Suddenly he turns and looks at Aaron, a look of confused worry in his eyes.

For a moment, Aaron realizes, they both managed to forget.

NEXT: Rest???

1. The Gaza envelope (Hebrew: Otef Aza) encompasses the populated areas in the Southern District of Israel that are within 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) of the Gaza Strip border and are therefore within range of mortar shells launched from the Gaza Strip. [From Wikipedia] ↩︎