“I’m not sure who you’re talking about,” Yanai eventually said, the very guy who took every opportunity to remind us that he scored a 96 on his Hebrew finals without ever learning the meaning of the expression “to give up.” He shifted the sling of his gun behind his back and took a few steps closer to her. “You’ll have to put out a bit more if you want help. More details, I mean. Name, rank, hobbies.”

She smiled, embarrassed. I was hoping that someone braver than me would tell him to cut the crap, but other than someone’s feeble “Come on, Yanai, stop it,” none of us protested.

“Sit with us for a bit, we’ll sort you out, don’t worry.” Yanai reached out to touch her hair. She jerked her head and took two steps back. Her black bag was pressed up against the fence. Her right sleeve caught on the wire, leaving a small tear. A single drop of blood dripped onto the sand. I think I was the only one who noticed.

“Don’t get your panties all in a bunch, sweetheart,” Yanai called out and drew closer to her, standing right in her face. “I don’t bite.”

Her face turned red. She looked away from him, at us, but we didn’t say a word.

For years I blamed Yanai for everything that happened afterward, his vanity, his inability to restrain himself, the ridiculous thought that it was only a matter of seconds until she fell for his charms. But today I know that it wasn’t Yanai, it was something about the outpost itself.

They say it was a soldier from the November ’02 draft who started the whole thing. That he was the one who carved the question proudly displayed above the broken urinal in the grunts’ latrines: “If a tree falls in Neptune, does it make a sound?”

This heralded other bursts of creativity: “If a soldier shouts ‘No more!!’ in Neptune, is he really shouting?”

“If a soldier goes batshit in Neptune, will he ever see the headshrinker?”

“If Waxman the CO shoots a camel in Neptune, does he finally get to join the recon battalion?”

Slowly but surely these jokes turned into serious philosophical debates that went on for hours. We found ourselves arguing heatedly about whether the “Neptune tree” phenomenon existed only within the confines of the outpost or also along the road that led to the bus station. Whether it had existed here since time immemorial or was born only when the outpost was built. And so, without expecting it, we started to get the creeping feeling that the things that happened in Neptune had eluded the space-time continuum. We had reached an unspoken agreement that it was okay to pull a cat’s tail because they didn’t really exist, or to cheat on your girlfriend, if you could just find someone to do it with.

2.