The ground was hard, the chilled night air smelling like industrial fuel. The fumes made Noam’s head throb, his eyes bursting with sharp pain every time his brain hammered against his skull. His body was enveloped with aches—sore ribs, a swollen lower lip, a bruised jaw, a stomach so thick with acid it could jump a battery. Though dressed warmly, wrapped in a woolen jacket, he shivered, the shakes sometimes so violent his knees knocked together. He propped himself up, leaning his back against a concrete pillar. Slipping his hands back into his pockets, he rolled himself up into a ball. Both of them awake, both refusing to sleep, fearing that the other might be planning something.

Nothing between them except deadly suspicion.

It was almost three in the morning. The watch Abba had given him for his bar mitzvah worked like a mule. Noam had been so mad at his father, angry that even for an occasion like his bar mitzvah, Abba had been too cheap to buy him the watch he really wanted. Now Noam clung to it as if it were the only tangible link to his past.

He no longer cared about his safety, knowing it was just a matter of time before something irreversible would happen. The only thing that gave him solace was tshuvah—repentance. Since the last ordeal, Noam had been silently praying, begging Hashem’s forgiveness for all the evil he had done. He knew it was too late for him in this lifetime. Even if he should live to be reunited with his family, he couldn’t do anything to undo the terrible, terrible things he had done. Nothing would ever, ever be good for him again. But that was the way it should be. He didn’t deserve goodness.

But he hoped he would show himself to be worthy of Hashem’s forgiveness. If his repentence was sincere, if his confessions to God—vidduy—were complete, maybe he could earn a tiny fraction of salvation in the world to come.

He must suffer. It was the only way to achieve forgiveness.

Pray, he told himself. Try to save your evil, worthless soul. Pray.

Thoughts of his family kept interfering. The only good thing about it was that the images of their faces made him suffer even more. Noam looked up, tears finally flooding his eyes. The sky was moonless, an eerie misty gray lightened by streetlights and clouds. It seemed to beckon him upward, seemed to have visible folded arms just waiting for him to fall asleep. Then they’d part and swoop down, yanking him into an empty void.