I switch off the lamp, close the door gently behind me, go down the hall to the spare bedroom, and climb into the narrow bed. For a while it seems that sleep will never come, until I open my eyes and it’s morning, and I hear the sound of the bath running. But it isn’t the bath; it’s the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the wall from the apartment above. Perhaps soon there will be another leak, and then the stranger will have to wake up and deal with it. I get out of bed and go to look for him in my father’s bedroom. The door is open and the bed is empty, the sheets unmade. Entering the living room, I almost trip over him. He’s curled up on the floor, legs pulled into his stomach, hands tucked between his knees, sleeping like a baby. Very gently, I prod him with my foot, but he carries on serenely, untouched in his vast sleep. How long can this go on? I wonder. Soon winter will come, the sea will darken, and the rain will fall, leaving puddles in the broken asphalt. But even as I think this, I know in my heart that it will go on a very long time. That I will get used to stepping over the stranger on my way to the kitchen because that is the way one lives, casually stepping over such things until they are no longer a burden to us, and it is possible to forget them altogether.
End Days
On the third day of the fires, after they jumped the borders and entered the city, the rabbi called to find out if her parents’ judgment of divorce had arrived. The telephone woke Noa. It was barely past seven, but the rabbi had probably been awake since dawn, his world a more ancient place. She put him on hold while she got up and searched through the stacks of mail that had piled up since Leonard and Monica left. Under the bills and advertisements, she found the thick brown envelope from the California State Supreme Court.
“Hello?” she said into the phone. “It’s here.”
Her finger must have slipped, because now the rabbi’s voice flooded forth on speakerphone, magnified and amplified, with instructions on how to deliver him a copy, so that the get—the Jewish divorce agreement—could be finalized and officially registered. She copied down the address. The rabbi was leading a trip to Poland, flying tomorrow with a group of thirty-five. Before he departed for the camps and ghettos, he wanted to get this squared away. “That everything should be in order,” he told her. And so the paperwork in Noa’s hand was needed immediately. Today if possible; tomorrow morning at the latest. The rabbi made no mention of the fires. They had nothing to do with him, burning now and here.
Come summer, Noa’s family, too, had always gone back in time. Back three thousand years, to the Iron Age and its successive disasters. Leonard liked to say that they were profiting from other people’s tragedies. Her father never failed to deliver this line every June, when the new team assembled for his welcoming remarks, so that she came to associate the arrival of summer—of stifling heat, of heaped-up time—with the coopting of a distant suffering. Archaeology, Leonard liked to say, is the reverse of building up: as the work descends, it undoes and destroys. And though Noa always looked for a tinge of regret in his voice, she never found it. Once, when she was ten, she had been present at a discussion between him and his second-in-command, an archaeologist named Yuval, who had a three-legged dog. Yuval was agonizing over a small intact wall that he didn’t want to destroy. “You think you’ll ever remember this wall?” her father demanded. Yuval rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his dirt-caked hand. “Knock it down,” her father ordered, and trudged off into the shattering sunlight.