"You'll die?"
Just like that, suddenly, stupidly, helplessly, with the voice of a three-year-old. It just popped out of my mouth.
The next morning he shows up looking pale and green, and apologizes. "It's my stomach, it really hurts. I didn't sleep all night."
"I knew it."
"What did you know?"
"That you weren't feeling well."
"How did you know?"
"I knew, I just knew." She walks around him worriedly. "At night I felt it too, and now, before you came in, it was really strong."
"But how did you know?" he demands, and she explains distractedly that every time before he comes, she sits quietly for a few min-
utes and tries to feel what he feels. His mouth opens wide, his pain seemingly letting up for a minute. "Even when I'm not here you sit here and think about me?"
"Tell me, do you have a lot of stomachaches?"
"Yeah, sometimes. But yesterday was the worst, I really didn't sleep."
"So do you want to leave it for today?"
"No, I don't know, it really hurts." As he talks, his pain seems to increase, or perhaps the talking incites the pain, and the wretchedness.
"Show me where it hurts." But her hand is already reaching out to touch the exact spot, beneath the rounding of his left ribs, deep inside.
He groans. "How did you know where-" He grabs her wrist hard, his eyes digging wildly into hers, with that hunger of orphans. But with suspicion too. "How did you know?"
"Lie down now. Don't speak." He obeys her and lies down. Every movement hurts him. She kneels by his mat, her buttocks resting on her heels. She passes her right hand over the core of the pain. Starts pulling into herself, drawing from him. A long time goes by. She doesn't move. She plays a quiet, monotonous tune to herself. She asks herself who raised him-certainly not that father of his; maybe some grandmother or an aunt. Or no one. He falls in and out of sleep. His body is limp, his forehead perspires. She wipes the sweat off with her hand and notices that he follows her with his gaze to see if she wipes her hand off on the mat. As he does so, she checks his wristwatch out of the corner of her eye, the one he wears on his right hand and obstinately refuses to take off. Now it's set five hours ahead. Maybe Thailand? Korea? Is New York ahead of us or behind us? He groans weakly. Opens miserable eyes, then falls into a brief slumber. She hears the hum, his two hearts beating, one large one, heavy, and one little one, straggling behind. If only she knew what he was really going through, who was wrestling inside him. She massages him tenderly and wonders if he himself knows; sometimes she thinks he's completely ignorant of everything that goes on inside him, and sometimes she's convinced that he knows very well. At this moment, for instance, even though he is giving himself over to her hands, she guesses that he'll allow her only to help him bear his heavy baggage, just for a few days, on condition that she never try to glimpse inside him even once.
His abdomen rises and falls. His stomach and intestines almost turn over, and sink and create whirlwinds on his velvety, perspiring skin. "Now, slowly, try to breathe into it."
"Into what?" He is alarmed.
"Into your pain." Her voice is soft and sweet, she refuses to get caught up in his alarm, she can't recall seeing such panic in any of the boys she's treated. "Now exhale it into my hands." He holds on to her arm, his head stretches back, and his fingers pinch her skin with a twitch. She steadies her kneeling position again. Her body is uncomfortable, and she soon knows something is wrong. There is some deceit here. The pain has already melted, she is certain, but it seems to be having trouble leaving his body. She touches, presses, and releases, listens with her fingers. Strange-as if it is the body which is now clinging with all its might to the pain, unwilling to give it up. "I'm here," she tells Kobi when she finally understands. "Let it go, you don't need it. I'm staying." And after a moment's hesitation she adds, "And I'll stay."
Over and over, reassuring, promising, repeating with pangs of guilt the promises she must not make. And slowly, like a tight fist painfully opening up, finger by finger, the pain breaks free. She feels the truncated billows absorbed in her palms dissolving. The face on the mat becomes calmer, consoled. She rounds her hands over his stomach, using wide, slow circles, and does this for several minutes, until his head falls to one side and his mouth opens slightly with a slight snore, tranquil.
Two hours later, she wakes up. She sees him sitting in a corner of the room with his knees folded into his chest, looking at her. She gets up slowly, sits, rubs her scalp. "Was I asleep?"
He celebrates his little victory. "When I woke up I saw you sleeping."
She yawns, opening her huge mouth wide, remembering too late to cover it. ("Even Einstein didn't look all that intelligent when he yawned," Rotem once explained to her sweetly.) "Wow, are you crazy? It's already lunchtime! We've missed half a day. Help me up."
He reaches out his hand, helps her stand up, but she sits down again. She collapses, scattering embarrassed smiles, and he stands above her, smiling at her confusion. There is a certain tender, cowlike grace to her slow heaviness right now. She holds her gaze on the two mats, realizes that she and he were sleeping here, side by side. She wonders what he thought when he saw her lying there like that, exposed to him.
"You know what I remembered?" he says, as if answering her thought. "Once, when I was three or four, more than four, at the water park this one time, my dad took me there once, and I got totally freaked out."
"From the water slides?" Nili asks supportively, recalling herself with the girls in that watery hell, guessing what a child like him must have felt there.
"No. All of a sudden I started"-he laughs to himself-"I had this idea: what if everyone in the whole world except me was dolls? Like, not real people."
She laughs. "That's quite an idea. And what did your dad say about that?" (He's talking, a little wheel in her head starts spinning faster than the others. Listen, he's telling you something.)
He gets down on one knee next to her, speaking with a strange, foreign satisfaction that frightens her a little. "My dad, he grabbed hold of me here with his hand"-he grasps the thin skin on the back of his forearm as he speaks-"and pinched me, and twisted his fingers around like this until I cried, and he kept laughing and asking me, Is this real? If this is real, then everything's real!"
As her eyes clear, she sees. A large scythe shape lightens on his dark skin, then disappears. She rubs her face and thinks vaguely, The fact that I slept here, the fact that he saw me asleep, it's as if it opened him up more than anything I've done or said.
"Wanna know the truth?" He smiles to himself. "To this day I sometimes think that, about people. Like dolls. Except now I don't care."
"And what about me," she asks, regretting it immediately, "am I real?"
He looks at her from a few inches away. Unseen fingers move inside her, leaving little indentations at the bottom. Finally, not with any ease, he says, "You are."
Then, with a sudden urge, she grasps his hand above the watch and quickly unfastens the thick leather strap; microscopic quivers of fear and refusal and imploring scurry between their hands, but he doesn't pull his hand away. She takes off the watch and turns his wrist over to see, fearfully, and she sees, and somehow she is not surprised, as if she had known all along.
His lips turn white. His look is wild, warning her not to ask anything. Not to dare. She drops his hand. Thinks dimly, It's still fresh, as if the skin there is still brittle, as if he's just been pinched; this happened not long ago, six months, a year, no more. She takes his hand again and lays it exactly over her left wrist, on the inside, and carefully and gently rubs the soft skin of her hand on his, absorbing into it, massaging and absorbing, absorbing and softening. She thinks, This child has been to hell and back, this child knows the way. She shuts her eyes and sees in front of her, for some reason, the showers at his boarding school, an iron pipe coming from the ceiling, a pink soap dispenser, torn around the edges, and a gray cement floor with thick drops of rust dripping onto it.