But that's enough now-what's the matter with you? It's time to go back. I wash the blood off my legs, stick some bits of toilet paper on them to dry and absorb the blood, clean the floor around me, calculate how many days I need for the sores to heal so Melanie won't find out. Let her find out, for all I care-I haven't done it for almost a year and I don't regret it. This is exactly what I needed now, like a good bout of masturbation. I wash my eyes with cold water and blink excessively, and restore my face, redesign the slightly bitter, hurt expression, so Nili won't be suspicious.
The night before coming here, when I had already been reduced to a state of ashes and dust, after packing and unpacking three times and announcing that that was it, I couldn't go, Melanie sat me down on a chair and started cutting my hair. Once every two months or so, when I quietly fall apart, she does it, and somehow, it's not clear why, it settles me, purifies me. Not the final result, which I don't particularly care about anyway, but just the feeling of her working on my head, tidying it for me, and the sense that for one whole hour that head isn't mine, not my responsibility, not my fault. Now, in the mirror, I try to see myself completely from the outside, and as usual, I decide I don't really like the woman I see. Not that I don't like her exactly, I just feel sorry for her. I know what I would think if I saw her passing on the street or if she squeezed past me on the Tube. "Lady," I would whisper to her, "relax, get the stick out of your ass."
I lean against the mirror and cool my forehead. I breathe warm vapors on the glass and write on it, Melanie. I like writing her name in Hebrew. I don't have many opportunities to do it. I like the way the spelling is similar to the Hebrew for my angel.
"And about that Melanie person," she asks the second I get back from the toilet, "have you written anything yet? Is she already in your stories too?"
I wait for a moment, counting to one million. "Not yet. But I'm gathering material about that Melanie person."
"Sorry."
We sit. Silent. A faint gurgling sound comes from somewhere beneath her. Her fluids are drained by means of a complex plumbing system which I was only just able to prevent her from explaining to me and demonstrating all its mysteries. I scan the walls around us with fascination.
"Were you crying?" she asks.
"A little."
"That's good. You should cry. Afterward too, don't hold it in. But remember always to bathe your eyes with chamomile."
She had never hidden her opinion of Melanie from me. She of all people, who had done everything with everyone and so forth, suddenly, when it came to me, her open-mindedness ran out. With surprising creativity she would pull out arguments and recite them sternly, with an assertion of responsibility I had never known in her: Melanie is an affair with no future and no continuity, meaning, no next generation, and in fact, Melanie is preventing you from finally finding true love, with all the perfection and depth that can exist only between a man and a woman, believe me. And there were all sorts of other dialectics hashed out in the darkest workshops of Rishon LeZion.
I deliberate for a while over whether this is the right time to open a debate. I suspect she has no grasp of where I've been and what I've done during my years in the Diaspora, while I was producing exciting material for my stories-the writings of a whacked-out tourist. I feel like simply telling her, without blaming and without whining, about all the years I lived without love, not for anyone, and how I taught myself to desalinate bodily fluids, and how I trained my blood to flow only through bypasses surrounding the intended areas. And how I looked at couples in love as if they were sick, crazy people, each consuming the other's soul through their lips. And how when I took a bath, I could convince myself to see a halo of bluish rot emanating from my body.
Or I could tell her the story of how I almost adopted a little girl because I thought that at least then I would have a girl with me, a living creature, verifiably alive. That through her I would be able to touch the artery that surely must pass through every human being. I'd already contracted with a lawyer who had deigned to mortgage all my assets in return for turning a blind eye when we came to the "medical history" section, ignoring the telling tremble of my fingers. But at the last moment I gave up, chickened out. And anyway, I knew I was only trying to fake my membership card in the human race. I still carry the picture of a one-year-old Filipina girl in my purse. She's seven and a half now, just this week. I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.
Maybe I'll just give her an abbreviated list of events, crashes, and wallowings; fortunately, I can't remember the details anymore anyway, only the names and the faces, and above all the various backs that were turned on me. And it's also true that sometimes I confuse what happened with what I invented around it later, in stories, in writing, but there's no doubt that I spent three or five years like that, being passed from hand to hand and broken up into small change. I scrubbed the bottom of the barrel really thoroughly, until one day I heard a voice next to me that said, "I think it's enough." And when I resisted and kicked and screamed, she said, "If you needed to prove something to someone, I think you've done that." And with complete serenity she added, "You've proven it so well, in fact, that you've almost refuted your own argument." And I barked, "Go away, get out of here, I'm incurable." She laughed and just hoisted me on her back like a sack, and carried me like a casualty through a few deserts, quietly absorbing the toxins I released, and explained to me the whole time that this was all because I was completely ignorant, I was like a child raised by wolves when it came to living together, living as a couple, and that it would gradually stop hurting me so badly, the kindness.
Then all of a sudden I give up. Regretting the harshness of my heart, I turn to her, extricating myself again from the twist I had unknowingly placed myself in. I put my papers aside and stretch out. Enough, I say to myself, and then to her too. "Enough already." She doesn't ask enough of what. I tell her about Melanie's dad's farm in Wales, with its green pastures where, as I told her family, "they maketh me lie down." And the creek that just runs innocently through the yard, and the sheep, which are the most sheeplike sheep in the world. I explain to her that when the cows sit down, it means it's go-
ing to rain, and if the sky is red like fire at dusk, that means it will rain, and if the sky is bright-it will also rain. From my purse I take out a stone I brought back from there; it is black and white and looks like half an apple, and in its center, like an open eye, is my birthstone. Melanie suggested I take it with me on the trip; I place it next to her on the nightstand. It warms my heart to say her name out loud. I'm less lonely when her name is in my mouth. I tell her how Melanie has already grown used to the way whenever she tells me something special, a story or a childhood memory, I pull out a pen and write it down. She even made up a saying: Telling secrets to a writer is like embracing a pickpocket.
Nili digests. Slowly and strenuously, the words pass through the cords that are gradually stopping up in her brain. But when she finally laughs, she laughs from the bottom of her heart, and a bright spark manages to burst through the haze of her eyes, and instead of being burned, I surprise myself by being flooded with happiness for them both.