It takes me a moment to pick him out in the next photo. He’s swimming in a pool under a waterfall with some others, mouth open, eyes laughing, the shutter snapped just as he was shouting to the person behind the lens. In the third photo he’s crouching on a rock, shirtless, a cigarette cupped in his hand, a girl next to him, her legs outstretched. Now the familiarity of his face, which is also my face, begins to feel even stranger, because this relaxed young man has so little to do with my father, who was disciplined and rigorous even in the pursuit of his pleasures. In the last photo, his arms are thrown out, and he is laughing in a desert that stretches behind him forever. It fills me with longing, as if I, too, had been there long ago, or as if part of me goes on being there, or maybe it’s just the feeling that I would give anything to meet him there, to stand face-to-face with him, a mirror image of the desert stretching behind me forever.

I fall asleep without realizing it, and when I open my eyes again a filmy dawn fills the window, and I have the sense that something has woken me. In the dream I was having, many people were coming and going from a place that was supposedly my father’s apartment, but actually looked more like the train station of a small town. I understood that my father was dying there, in the stationmaster’s office, like Tolstoy. I get up for a glass of water, and in the hall I see that the door of the spare bedroom is slightly ajar. When I push it open, a heavy odor drifts out, the odor of a man’s body abandoned to sleep. I see him sunk into the covers, legs thrown over the edge, arms wrapped around the pillow, breathing evenly. Submerged in sleep, given over entirely to it, as if he no longer had any responsibility left in the world but to sleep like that—to sleep the sleep of the dead. I feel myself growing drowsy just watching him. As if his sleep has cast a spell over me, suddenly my limbs feel heavy and all I want is to collapse back into bed, to burrow down in the blankets and abandon myself to a long and dreamless sleep. I’m so exhausted that if the bed in the small room hadn’t been so narrow I’d have crawled in next to him, curled up, and closed my eyes. I have to fight to pull myself away and back down the hall, and when I get there I fall into bed.

When I finally rouse myself, it’s already noon, and sunlight streams through the slats of the shutters. The long blind sleep has left me agitated and restless. The door of the small bedroom is closed. I walk all the way to the pool on the roof of Dizengoff Center, a large mall with cheap clothing shops and a movie theater. The women with saggy-bottomed bathing suits drift back and forth, and the old man with the gold swimming cap is there again, doing his knee bends in the shallow end. If he slips below the surface and doesn’t come up, the lifeguard will come down and fish him out, but once he leaves and goes home there are no lifeguards. One day he will slip below the surface in his own house, or on the street, the way my father slipped below the surface in a restaurant. Or maybe it isn’t like that at all—maybe the weights that hold life down suddenly lift.