Aaron wakes up in the morning, drinks coffee with Mika and Ya’akov while having a lazy conversation (that he tells them that he’s sure he’ll remember and write down, but forgets it later) and heads out to catch a bus to Tel Aviv.
Waiting at the bus stop in Israel is an active process—it requires finding a shaded spot, because the stop itself is often exposed to the early sun, then from the shaded spot going on period reckons to the road itself to see if the bus is coming. The app is often misleading, and the electronic board by the stop is not very reliable. Not only would the driver not see you if you’re not right at the stop, sometimes they will see you and still keep going. Aaron relearns how much preparedness it demands.
Do you remember the bus we took together on Victoria, how amazed we were when everyone lined up before the bus arrived, how calm everything was?
When the bus arrives at the Hertzel stop, the sweaty crowd squeezes together, each one trying to get through the front door first. The first to get in is a reserve soldier with an assault rifle, ponytail and graying beard. Aaron is too far back at the end of the line to understand what’s happening, but the line isn’t moving forward, and somebody is shouting inside the bus. “I told you this one’s for Tel Aviv, didn’t I? So why did you get on?”
The line moves again, and a moment later the soldier gets off the back exit. “Happy holidays,” he yells over his shoulder, than mumbles “You fucking idiot.” There’s no holiday that day.
Aaron eventually gets into the bus, pays through the app and looks for a place to sit. One place is vacant near a toothless man, who moves his lower jaw to places it should not be, making Aaron uncomfortable. He continues further back. Another chair is free, near a woman yelling on her phone. Someone yelled at her at work, he understands from the audible half of the conversation, and she tried to calm the situation down. “Of course it’s understandable, but enough, I can’t deal with her shit anymore.”
He sits in the back row, in the center, and stretches his legs. The sun is on his back, and the air conditioner doesn’t quite reach him there, but he’s not surprised. If this seat was available, there had to be a reason. He plays chess on his phone, and feels like a king—stuck in the back, vulnerable, dependent on others for protection.
In one of the stops a girl with very curly hair and broad shoulders boards the bus. With charming, boyish clumsiness she waves to and sits by the girl sitting two rows ahead of Aaron. She smiles, but it seems forced.
“What’s up with you?” Asks the one who was already sitting. “You seem… shaken.”
“It’s that obvious? I didn’t want to bring the mood down.”
“Bring it down, good soul. What are friends for.”
“Sure? Because it’s really heavy.”
“A hundred percent.”
“I was just with my sister on the phone.”
“Is she ok?”
“Yeah yeah, she got evacuated with my parents, they’re at my aunts now losing their minds, but they’re fine. I told you that someone that she served with was killed in Gaza village, right?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“So yesterday somebody came to talk to her, that was there when they investigated the scene. Originally they told her the friend that was killed there was sleeping when it happened, that he was killed in his sleep. I knew that it was bullshit right away, but I didn’t say anything. But now she talked to someone who was actually there and survived. And heard everything. He said her friend was fighting until the last second but they caught him, and they didn’t kill him right away, and the girls that were there with him… you know.”
“I know.”
“And it’s breaking me.”
“It’s a thing that breaks. It breaks everyone.”
“I’m sorry I’m dropping this on you.”
“You didn’t drop anything, good soul. It’s falling on all of us.”
They hug for a long moment.
Aaron gets off at a stop a little way from his apartment in Tel Aviv, and as he walks through the warmer, more humid, denser streets, a homeless man makes eye contact with him. Painfully thin, in a clean white t-shirt, he looks straight into Aaron’s eyes with very blue eyes. He’s sitting at the street corner, two steady arms above his head, holding a cardboard sign. “Together we will win,” it says. Aaron breaks eye contact, keeps walking, goes around a corner. He stops, looks through his wallet, finds a ten Shekel1 coin, returns, gives it to the man.
“Thank you very very much,” the homeless man says.
“I wish you’re right,” Aaron says, though he knows their definitions must be different for both ‘win’ and who’s included in the ‘together’.
Half a street later another homeless man. Thinner, with a thin beard, and so very young. He reaches for Aaron with open palms. “Something to eat?”
Aaron shakes his head, a short and decisive movement. He considers saying “I just gave to the other guy” but he knows he wouldn’t have cared, if he were in the homeless guy’s torn shoes. He continues walking, and when he turns back he sees a sanskrit tattoo on the homeless man’s exposed shoulder—the syllable Ohm, the frequency of the universe, the collapse of the illusion of separation between all things. What kind of unity brought him here? He sighs. “What can I get you, my brother?”
“A Warm Meal is fine2.”
“Don’t you want something a little more nutritious?”
“A Warm Meal is fine.”
Aaron buys him two, and a chocolate bar. The Homeless man takes the two Meals, but leaves the bar in Aaron’s hand. “I don’t eat that, you understand. Thank you.”
Aaron doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything anymore. He eats the bar himself.
On Dizengoff boulevard, someone took dozens of teddy bears, man sized, and bound them on the benches. Blindfolded them, cuffed their hands. Hostages. A picture of the hostages that Aaron can’t run away from, even if, you know what, maybe for one moment he wanted to forget, you son of a whore.
Aaron passes by one of the teddy bears and sees a picture of a little girl pinned to its chest. Maybe four years old, maybe less. He tries to ignore it and keep walking. The second teddy he passes by has a picture of a boy, around eight or ten years old, holding a cat, and he’s holding the cat wrong, the arm around the neck, choking it. On the bench, right by the teddy bear, sits a filipino woman with her hair folded into pieces of aluminum foil, probably in the middle of dying or straightening or something of that sort. She smokes a cigarette and looks at her phone, ignoring both the bear and the picture stapled to it.
He keeps walking, trying to understand why it bothers him so much. What else did he expect would happen, other than the levels of insanity going to heights never before seen, and people once again adjusting and acting like that’s normal?
Two women, young mothers in tight yoga clothes pass him by. “Did you see the beach now?”
“Yeah, so empty. It’s so nice.”
“Really. Greece vibes.”
An alarm starts, and everyone runs to the closest shelter. People get out of the nearest cafe to the nearest shelter, wave for him to come with them. He doesn’t really care, but he doesn’t want to argue, so he goes with them. As they wait below ground, a small group of friends, among them a girl in a sundress, flip flops, and M16 assault rifle, calculate exactly how much tip to leave, while their waitress waits beside them. Aaron takes his phone out and sends an update to anyone who asks, that the enemy failed to kill him once again.
He spends the rest of the day in the house. There’s a moth caterpillar infestation in ‘his’ bathroom, and it’s been a couple of days already that every morning he picks up the broom and uses it to drop them off the ceiling, then takes toilet paper and picks them up and throws them in the toilet. A methodical extermination, if ineffective. It really disgusted him in the first couple of days, but now it almost doesn’t bother him. In the evening, before he goes out to work out, he sees the two nomads in the kitchen, closely inspecting a lettuce leaf.
“What’s going on?” Aaron asks.
The nomad hides the leaf from him. “You don’t want to see this. You said you have a phobia from anything that looks like a worm, didn’t you?”
Aaron forgot that he even told them about that, probably on the first day of the caterpillar infestation. The nomad’s empathy moves him, but after a couple of days of dealing with this thing, he feels like he can look straight at the ugliness. “Come on, give me some exposure therapy.”
The nomad hesitates, but finally agrees. The caterpillar is very large and very green, and it stands on dozens of hind legs, looking for where to make his next step. It’s really not that bad. They release him in the backyard together, and Aaron goes to work out.
On the way back, after he’s done, somebody yells something from the corner of the street, and Aaron turns out to see who and hear what. Aaron barely catches a glimpse of the man before he disappears behind the corner. “Don’t turn around, you Hamasnik. Keep walking. We’ll come to your house and fuck you3.”
Aaron wants to see himself as the hero of an action flick that always reacts correctly, but he’s so stunned from the direct violence of the statement that came not only unprovoked but without Aaron even being aware of the other person existing, that he just keeps walking to the entrance to his house, and thus informing the yeller which house he should get to if he does wish to, as he said, fuck Aaron. When he gets inside he makes sure the blinds are locked, and only then goes looking for his beard trimmer.
NEXT: Assassins
Aaron Benelli 
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