The evening ends early. Already recognizing that the nomads have great potential, Aaron curls up on the swing-sofa outside and records his musings about their first day together. He begins to suspect that treating everything like a story is his way of not actually being there. 

After he’s done talking, he checks what his phone has to say. Sometimes it feels like his phone is a single entity with a devastating case of split personality. Its voices switch between combat soldiers joking about not coming back home because they’ll stay in Gaza and settle there (“We’ll call the new settlement Kibutz Nova,” Shimshon announces. “Only it won’t be considered a settlement at that point.”) to Canadians politely inquiring about his mental health (“How are you? With… you know, everything? I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.”) Family members sending pictures of their kids making funny faces in the saferoom, forwarded messages giving him permission to fall apart, an interpretation to the weekly Torah Portion.

Suddenly he’s sick of running away. He decides to swan dive into the horror, to see what’s actually going on—so he goes on Facebook, which he’s avoided until now. 

Each and every post on his feed is a call to share someone’s pain. People write what happened to them, or what they heard happened to others that they know. The stories are all horrible, but there’s a sort of distance in writing, and he can handle it. 

What he can’t handle is the pictures. Pictures of people looking like they are about to embark on a partying weekend they waited a long time for, and under the pictures the date and a description of the way they died. Or, worse yet, a noting of the simple fact that they are still captives.

He regrets his courage and decides to retreat. Watch a movie, maybe, one of the ones he loved as a child but could still be regarded as a work of art. Jackie Chan is a true artist: maybe Aaron should see Rush Hour again? He used to love that movie, as a kid. He takes his laptop to bed, turns on the AC, curls under the blanket, and finds the right torrent.

He starts watching, and quickly realizes the movie will bring no solace. When the villain Sang kidnaps the consul’s daughter, Su Yung, Jackie Chan’s character is of course very upset, but very quickly returns to normal. He fools around with Chris Tucker’s character, sings with him (“War”, of course. What else?) and learns how to dance like a black man. 

How the hell can he dance when Su Yang is alone in the darkness, and Sang, who’s already proven to have no moral standards, is holding her? How can Jackie Chan smile, and not worry every single moment about what is happening to her right now, and what Sang is doing to her? 

Aaron, disappointed by the distraction the small screen failed to provide, checks if there’s any consolation in the even smaller screen. 

Avraham, a fighter pilot whose absence from Aaron’s life since the war started doesn’t require an explanation, sends, in his own way, a sign that he is alive and well. “The situation in Palestine,” he reports. “Israeli getting out of hand.”

NEXT: Know-It-Alls