The Love Machine & Other Contraptions (17 page)

~

The old people who were used to gathering early every morning on the seashore to get some exercise were quite surprised to find that the sea was gone. That did not prevent them—after the necessary time for discussion and the relating of similar incidents from their past, which had never happened—from completing their morning ritual.

~

That non-morning, a writer woke up, rather late, alone in his bed. Gray murky light flooded his one-room apartment, matching the black and white drawing hung on the wall, in which a naked woman was dancing on the seashore at the time of sunrise or sundown, but clashing with the inactive computer screen nearby. The air was moist and cold, as if a serious European storm had passed through the Middle East, smothering the remains of summer beneath a heavy coat of dampness. He wondered where the woman of the night before had gone.

Memory: the moment before he fell asleep, exhausted by the sport that he had demanded and received without argument, it seemed to him that he heard some noise from outside, like a drawing, or suckling. Or squashing. Or was it a dream? Or—what a strange thought, he told himself—maybe he hadn’t fallen asleep at all?

Memory: “We cannot disobey.”

He glanced at his deliberately old-fashioned spring-wound wristwatch, which he used to display how subversive he was. Eleven o’clock. Time for him to get up, to do something. Write something. He had promised to deliver a story to a magazine—on time this time—but it had been quite a long time since he had written anything, and even his publisher would not speak to him anymore. He had some story beginnings, written several months ago and untouched since. He should continue, write. Maybe he would go and have a coffee first.

No, he told himself and got out of bed. Self-discipline. First I’ll write, then the rest. There’s plenty of time. And there’s nothing like that feeling, sitting somewhere when you’re free, with no worries, no stress, knowing that you’ve just finished writing a story. He knew exactly which abandoned beginning he would start working on. He could already see in his mind’s eye the rest of the story. He sat by the computer and pressed the power button.

Nothing happened.

A moment later he was already out, heading downstairs, on his way to the local café.

Outside, just like in his room, everything was gray. The weather was... in fact, it wasn’t. He lifted his head, looking for the sun, but could not find it. Nor were there any clouds in the sky. Only grayness. Some pedestrians around him also looked up, briefly, then remembered some more important business and hurried away. Some of them pulled out mobile phones, glanced at them for some time in confusion or anger, and then returned them to their pockets. Some of them talked quietly to each other, but no one was using a phone.

Memory: “Three warnings.”

The street had a strange quality about it. Not only the gray illumination. A slight slope that wasn’t there yesterday, or the width of the road had changed, or the cracks in the cement. The road signs looked like a forest of sailing ship masts that had been frozen in the middle of a storm, each slanted in a different angle. Even more than usual, that is. Of all the cars parked in the street, not even one was parallel to the sidewalk.

The café was nearly full but strangely quiet. Some customers mumbled, almost whispered to each other. On regular days they had music playing in the place—usually an album by some obscure jazz band of which one of the café owners was a member—but not today. Over the silence of the speakers stood out the absence of the hoarse scream of the espresso machine, which was in the corner, abandoned and quiet. The writer found an empty table and sat down.

“A big café-au-lait,” he said to a passing waitress.

“Nope,” she answered. “Didn’t you notice? Power’s down. Got only black coffee today.”

“What, here too? Did you try to call someone about it?”

“No power all over the city,” the waitress said, probably for the hundredth time that morning. “No phone either.”

“Ah,” the writer said. “So how do you make your coffee?”

“On the stove, y’know. Black.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, please bring me one. Two sugars.”

Strange, he said to himself as the waitress was cleaning his table, I wonder when they’ll get the power back on. What can I do, meanwhile? He had a glimpse of an idea. “Excuse me,” he said to the waitress, “do you happen to have a pen?”

She happened to have one. She also found him some sheets of paper. Two hours later he had already covered four of them with most of the body of a new story. Around him, the owners of numerous mobile phones and portable computers waited in vain for their normal lives to return.

Memory: “Under Tel Aviv.”

~

A devoted bicycle rider worked himself into a fit of rage upon discovering that the bicycle-only trail, which conveniently connected his apartment at the northern part of Ibn Gvirol Street to his workplace at Rabin Square, had jumped in its entirety to the other side of the street. The other side, he remembered, was extremely uncomfortable for riding. When he finally got over his temper and drove on, sticking to his favorite side of the street despite everything, he found out the hard way that it was not his favorite anymore.

~

A lady, in her fifteenth floor apartment in a handsome building in Ramat Aviv, was begging for her life.

“Come back!” she screamed. “Come back, I said!”

Tears covered her face. Her wild, plucked hair showed no sign of the five-hundred-shekel haircut it had received only two days before.

“You’ve got to come back! I can’t live like this anymore!”

The screams went on for hours. Before the screams there had been a short period of quiet desperation, and before that, a long span of confusion. But under it all lay a clear and horrible understanding, which the lady could not come to terms with no matter what. The understanding had been there, in fact, from the moment she had woken up that morning.

“Come back!” she roared and drove her fist at the innocent wall. “C-o-m-e b-a-c-k-!”

The moment she had opened her eyes, she knew that something horrible had happened. The moment she glanced, the way she did every morning, at the screen of her mobile phone, and read the two words which appeared on it.

“C-o-m-e b-a-c-k-!”

Two words: “No reception.”

~

Somewhere on Rothschild Avenue, a young rock band built an improvised stage, then climbed upon it and performed all the songs that its members knew how to play, and then some that they didn’t. Most of the songs had been written by much more famous bands. The players used acoustic instruments only, thus avoiding the need for electric power. People gathered to watch. For many of them this was the first time since the transition that they had seen a machine or instrument actually working. The band received the most enthusiastic applause it had ever heard.

~

As far as the lady on the fifteenth floor was concerned, “no reception” was the most horrible thing in the world. She depended on her mobile phone in the same way that a person depends on his left foot. The phone was a part of her. The lack of reception was a sort of blindness. After several hours without recharging, without power, the phone turned off, was effectively amputated. So was the backup phone. There was nothing now to connect the lady to the outside world. She was the last person on earth. She sat alone in her room.

There was a knock on the door.

~

No radio transmission greeted the drivers of the thousands of cars now stuck in the biggest traffic jam in the history of the city. The Ayalon Lanes were practically blocked, and the gas stations were dead. After several hours of this, a message started trickling all along the lanes, carried in the enraged voices of drivers and passengers, in the sounds of blows on tin and asphalt, in the cries of rage and shame and pity: There’s nowhere to go; all the exists are blocked; There’s no leaving the city.

~

She stood in the middle of her gray-washed living room. There was another knock on the door. She stared at it, her head empty of thoughts. The door handle moved. The door opened.

Enter: the irritating neighbor from the apartment next door. Uncombed, inelegant, disorderly, his face plain, stupid. A weird, silly man. There could never be any common ground between him and her, not at all. Obviously a person lacking appreciation of anything important, no esthetic sense. Playing annoying music at ten in the evening. His unfortunate looks almost returned the lady to the ground of reality.

He said, “Is everything okay?”

“What are you doing here?” the lady asked. “What do you want?”

“I heard someone yelling.”

“No,” the lady said. And then, “Yes. How is that any of your business?”

“I just wanted to see that everything’s all right, that’s all.”

The lady wanted to fling some horrible insult at him, but couldn’t think of anything. Then she said, “Do you know when the phones will come back?”

“No,” the neighbor said. “In fact, I’m not sure that they’ll return at all.”

“What are you talking about?” the lady shouted. “What do you mean, they won’t return? They
will
return! Of course they’ll return! Do you hear me? You will come back! Come back, come back, come back...” and she started to cry.

The neighbor stood there and watched her for a moment, and then came closer, took hold of her shoulders and pushed her gently toward the window. He said, “Did you look outside? Did you see what’s going on out there?”

She looked, and for the first time she also saw.

~

The city lay, alone, on an endless gray plain. There was no sea to the west, there was no land to the north and east and south. The roads coming out of the city faded slowly, as if into a fog. In the bright cloudless grayness, traffic dwindled at last, and the roads were filled with people returning home on foot, abandoning their useless cars. In the sky there was no sign of sun or moon or stars.

~

At the hour in which the sun was supposed to be at its zenith, the moisture that collected on the walls and in the cracks and slits and on the boilers and antennae and doorposts began dripping down, and every window in the city got its own first rain. Some of the residents, those who found that there was no longer water in the taps, started hanging buckets, bags, jerry cans and other containers under the windowsills and eaves.

~

The writer was still at the café when the time which was not an evening arrived. It occurred to him that he could really use something to eat. He tried to draw the attention of a waitress, but she was busy humming a tune. He called her, asked for a menu, and received a wry smile in return. “There’s nothing to eat here,” she said, and continued humming. He rose, thinking of having dinner at home, remembering last night, fluttering over the image of the woman with whom he had spent it, toying with the idea of incorporating her, as a main character, into a short story he would write:

... a mysterious woman from nowhere changes the fate of a lonely Tel Avivian bachelor, carrying him to far-away worlds rich with allegorical meaning, symbolic significance, and maybe some side characters with strange names—or maybe they would remain nameless, to add to the sense of mystery, of dislocation, of alienation—to build the illusion that it’s a fictional story and not a thinly disguised actuality, and the more, the better. He sat down, took a pen and several more sheets of paper, and wrote and wrote and wrote.

~

A teenager, on the erstwhile-seashore, was waiting for sundown. The sand under her feet was damp. Sometimes she thought that she had been waiting for only a few minutes, and at other times she was sure she had spent her whole life there on the sand. Slowly, gradually, the drug’s influence faded, and the world returned to its usual grayness—or, in fact, to a new one. She was sure that it looked like this because of the drop, the fall from being high, the depression that follows the bliss. But the sun did not go and did not come and did not set and did not show.

~

There was some violence, still imperceptible from a distance.

~

The lady, in her high castle, saw all this and started to laugh. A hysterical, screeching, high, thin laugh of desperation. A laugh which brought her to the verge of strangulation. She squirmed, hit at the walls and herself, kicked the table and the sofa. The irritating neighbor just stood and watched and did not try to stop her. He was waiting for her to exhaust herself. Then she reached him, roaring and shouting and dancing in fury, screaming her frustration in his face, hitting him. He grabbed both her hands. For a moment it looked as if he was going to hit her, but no. He made her sit on the sofa, brought her a glass of water, carefully collected the shards after she dropped it, brought her another one, made her drink, made her sit and stop moving, trembling and wide-eyed. She cried and cried and cried.

~

When the few remaining working clocks showed midnight and still no change was to be seen in the gray light, the city started moving, lost its indifference. Crowds of horrified people flooded the streets, running here and there without a clear destination or purpose. Riots erupted. Supermarkets and grocery stores were burglarized, hysterical or greedy looters fought angry store owners and feeble policemen. Gas stations became destinations for pilgrimage. Bicycles were stolen, even more than usual. Street signs and traffic lights were damaged and destroyed, street lights were knocked over, trees were uprooted, shop windows were broken, tires were slashed, stolen and burned. The Disengoff Center tower was dressed in orange flame. The city roared in fear and hit at itself, and would have continued doing so until the light of morning, only there were no mornings anymore.

Some time passed.

Singles, couples, groups, the residents started returning home, sometimes with loot in their hands. Others fell asleep where they were. A few had lost consciousness in fights, accidents or just out of plain fear. Some lost their sanity. Some lost their lives.

The city slowly relaxed. For some time the streets were abandoned, residents peeking out through their windows at the dirty puddles, broken glass, broken furniture, everything quiet and gray, no longer menacing.