"Who are you studying with?" she asks tightly when I turn the page.
"What?" I perk up. "What?"
"Rotem," she says wearily.
I gulp. Consider carefully, decide there's no point. "I took a few classes."
"Did you at least find a good teacher?"
"Yes." I wonder how long she's known, from which moment in the story. "Someone Melanie recommended. He's Japanese."
"The Japanese are a bit dry," she declares, and shuts her eyes. "You told him about me?"
"Yes. A little."
"And what did he say?"
"Nothing. He listened. He heard. He usually doesn't say much."
I can feel her scanning inside my head. My thoughts leap inside and I close the door behind them in a split second. Once, in a nature movie, I saw tiny little fish swarming into a sea anemone to escape a preying fish, and I recognized their movement of evasion and the motion of the anemone itself-a fleshy, complex mind, rushing to hide them. My Japanese yoga teacher had listened to what I told him and said, "The woman you spoke of doesn't work right. She relies on her intuition too much, and she's not at that stage yet." Then, at the end of the class, he came up to me again and said, "That woman, she works like someone who doesn't have a teacher. If she had a teacher he would reprimand her."
"I wanted so badly," she says finally.
"I only took a few classes, it's really not-"
"And are you going to continue?"
"I don't know." And I forced a laugh. "It's easier for me to write it than do it."
"No, no," she sighs, "you should keep doing it, it's good, it will be good for you."
She just lies there. Completely still. Because of her condition she has the strange ability to be present without being. In the space that now opens up between my chair and her bed, I remember the nights when Melanie taught me how to sleep together. I don't know why that comes into my mind. She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can't fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, "Come on, try a little longer." And so for a few bleary-eyed, sleepwalking weeks-and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning-she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement-even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced. Now, when I smile, Nili looks at me, and I can't escape in time.
But as if operating her immediate healing mechanism, she remembers something. "There's something you should add."
"Where?"
"When you say what my face is like, how my jaw drops, you know, when I'm on his back."
"What should I add?"
"Write that when I'm like that, I mean she, then she thinks to herself that that's how she'll look when she dies."
"No, no."
"And then write: And she thinks of how everyone will see then that she really was a complete idiot. Write it. Now."
His ignorance amazes her. When she tells him she lived in India for three years, he asks if it's true that everyone there is black. When they talk about vegetarianism, he suddenly claims, with a strange fervor and a kind of vexation, that elephants are carnivores. "Elephants?" She doesn't know where to start refuting such nonsense, but he refuses to be convinced by all evidence she provides, slams his face closed, and locks himself up to her: that's what he's decided, and that's that. What are they teaching them at that boarding school? she wonders. Then something else happens, something trivial, that depresses her for the rest of the day.
While they're doing breathing exercises, sitting across from one another, she presses three fingers below his navel, in the body's furnace, seemingly searching for something. She doesn't find it, and hes-
itates; a moment later, she intuitively pushes her thumb hard into his navel. "When I press here, exhale and push out at me with your breath."
But he turns pale with the first sign of pressure, depleted. "I think I'm going to pass out."
"Lie down, you're just dizzy," she says as she supports his back and calms him, contemplatively; she is surprised again at how quickly he melts and starts to whine, as if the entire complex, delicate structure that he maintains hidden inside himself collapses in an instant upon contact with danger, with fear. He moans, and she rubs his shoulders distractedly. "Don't tense up, relax, relax. It'll pass." But she senses something else, as if whatever secret he is hiding is there, very close to the surface of his skin, and the slightest touch might tear its outer layer. For the hundredth time she wonders how he came to cut himself like that, on his wrist, and why, what had caused him to go so far. She murmurs, "Don't fight, you're fighting. Just get into it, into this feeling, I'm here, I'm with you, protecting you." A pallor spreads beneath his brown complexion. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead. What's going on here? Nili wonders, tightly pressing a finger beneath his nose. We must have done something bad, or premature. Or maybe I frightened his tender stomach again. She tries to recall what had suddenly caused her to change the three-finger pressing and proceed with such certainty to his navel. His hand flutters like the wing of an injured bird. He keeps trying to remove her hand from his navel, even though it is no longer there. Nili stares at the strange, compulsive motion and feels his panic inflaming itself rapidly, like a little fire. He grunts, starts to choke, and Nili finally breaks free and wakes up, quickly lifting his feet onto a chair. She slaps his cheeks lightly, rubs his temples, calls out his name, shouting, "Kobi, Kobi." That seems to help, the color starts coming back to his face, his breath stabilizes, the muscle spasms let up gradually. She caresses his damp forehead and, vaguely guessing, starts to repeat his name over and over, gently, compassionately, smiling. She can see his eyes flutter every time she calls his name, eagerly pulsat-
ing against his tight eyelids, and she thinks how strange it is that she has hardly called him by his name until now.
When she tries to stand up, he reaches out blindly and feels for her hand, grasping it tightly, signaling for her to continue. She recites his name to him like a mantra, moaning, singing a little tune, but inside her something is already darting around the edges, grumbling and thorny. It's my fault this happened, it's unprofessional, the whole thing is unprofessional. I'm going too fast with him and doing too many experiments and forgetting that he's only a kid. I've really gone too far, seriously. She keeps rubbing his chest, trying not to infect him with her anger at herself or any other random angers, until she notices that his eyes are open with the damp sparkle of a smile: "You know you're talking to yourself the whole time?"
"I am?"
"Yeah, with your lips. You keep doing it."
She kneads his shoulders with threatening force. "Well, just don't tell anyone." But after a moment she can't resist: "So what do you know about me now?"