A Night In Israel, Chapter 1

It’s an insufferably sweltering night in Jerusalem, the broken air unit in our share of the Hotel Leonardo a real contributor (that narrow, balding building with permanently fogged windowpanes and exotically graffitied epistyles, the one erected next door to the faded landmark hotel, like an ugly younger sister who stands always to the side of the beautiful girl, a hand on the shoulder and grey, crossed eyes askance at the floor . . . the landmark hotel’s name I registered once, briefly, a name I’d picked up in a short story, I think of Camus, and set aside, now scurried soricine across my tongue, while we, the fifty postgraduate, Chicago-homed Americans lazing aboard Bus Tour Group 747, crossed the suspension bridge and sighted the grand opulence of a place we would not repose this night nor ever, then forgot the pretty image entirely once the autobus moved along, beyond the vestiges of splendor [speaking of Jerusalem] - upon seeing where we would be staying - the Hotel Leonardo erases one’s mind like that).

In the lobby we received roommates, three to a plot, preordained from a folded up list taken from the taskmaster’s pocket, room keys, and instruction. “There is to be none of this, all of that.” A schoolchild again at twenty-three. No bother. The tour guides left to consider the Torah in their flannel pajamas and gauzy bed sheets while the group of tired half-Jews, still strangers despite the transatlantic flight and the endless layover in Frankfurt (of all places), the oily clothes and the bloodshot eyes, descended upon the unsuspecting lobby bartender en masse, where the Israeli man, in the nick of time, began at once to overcharge everybody. Israeli beer – there is nothing to say. We drank and spoke and I didn’t like many of the people. I’ve known them all my life without knowing anyone presently gathered and I didn’t like them then, either. It occurred to me thusly that this would be too long of a trip, that ten days would leave me in shambles, cracks in the frame that guards my tissue paper organs, that I should have talked a friend into coming along, if only for an echo of commiseration. If only, if only. The words spoken were formulaic. I feel like I don’t even have to expand upon what that means. I’ll say this: if I’m ever forced to discuss once again the television shows we watched as children, or the linguistic derivations of soft drink appellations betwixt neighboring cultures, I might start a fire.

Around one in the morning, Jews began to retire for their first night’s rest in The White City, one of the holiest municipalities in all the world. How would we sleep? I think if you’d asked me then, I would answer correctly, “Without grace.”

The boys who’d slumber beside me were all right enough on first glance - dark everywhere but in their pale skin, their curly hairs tangled from the strain of travel, clouded by the shadows of beards that would pursue their faces like kudzu for the rest of their lives. They were tired, like me, and reasonably unsure about the warm hotel room and the startling proximity of our beds. We, like men, set out to move them (the beds) as far apart from the others as we could, but this wasn’t far at all. We showered, separately, under a detachable showerhead that was too small for its sheath, such that it rattled and slipped onto our heads from its own whimsical exertions. So I stood with one arm raised above me, holding up the showerhead, while the other arm roamed for packets of liquid soap and shampoo that I tore open with my teeth and ably dispatched onto my face and eyes and mouth. The showerhead bounced along the bathtub floor, retching, while I clawed at my face. Scraping is a most hygienic sound.

In bed, in the swelter, I’d manage a light doze with the abetment of the pills young Americans stuff into their carry-ons like candies into pillowcases on Halloween; these are brim-stuffed carry-ons, the pills bursting forth into the world upon unzipping, piñata-like. Pillowcases stuffed so tight that they’re piñatas. On the airplane, as a first icebreaker, before names are traded, they barter with each other: Quaaludes for bennies, all that old hat. My family-sized Tylenol p.m. smokestack went unnoticed; it is the candy corn of barbiturates. But in icebreakers, the lonely go out on limbs and are received there, trembling in the wind, and I scored three Ambien and earplugs to boot. That night I would take half of a pill. They are so small, those Ambien are, and I wanted to eat the very bag they came in, but I had already in my mind the notion of ten days and the nights that would follow them.

At four a.m. on the sixth floor of the Hotel Leonrado, I was roused.