The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (10 page)

This is a story about people who once lived on the moon. Nowadays, there’s no one up there, but up until just a few years ago, the place was mobbed. The people on the moon thought they were very special, because they could think their thoughts in any shape they wanted. In the shape of a pot, or a table, even in the shape of flared pants. So people on the moon could bring their girlfriend an original present, like an I-love-you thought in the shape of a coffee mug or an I’ll-always-be-true thought in the shape of a vase.

It was very impressive, all those shaped thoughts, except that as time passed, the people on the moon came to a kind of agreement about how every thought should look. A mother-love thought should always be shaped like a curtain, while a father-love thought was shaped like an ashtray, so that it didn’t matter what house you walked into, you could always guess what thoughts in what shape would be waiting there arranged on the tea trolley in the living room.

Of all the people on the moon, there was one who shaped his thoughts differently. He was a young guy, a little strange, and most of the time he was troubled by existential, more or less irritating, questions. The main thought going through his mind was the kind that believes every person has at least one unique thought resembling only itself and him. A thought with color and volume and content which only that person could have.

This guy’s dream was to build a spaceship, sail around space in it, and collect all the unique thoughts. He didn’t go to social events, he hardly went out at all, he spent all his time building the spaceship. He built the engine in the shape of a thought of wonder, and the steering system in the shape of a thought of pure logic, and that was only the beginning. He added lots of other sophisticated thoughts that would help him navigate and survive in outer space, but his neighbors, who watched him while he worked, saw that he was constantly making mistakes. Because only someone who really had no idea could create a thought of curiosity in the shape of an engine, when it was absolutely clear that a thought like that had to look like a microscope. Not to mention that a thought of pure logic, unless you want it to look tacky, has to be shaped like a shelf. They tried to explain but he wouldn’t listen. His desire to find all the true thoughts in the universe went beyond the bounds of good taste, not to mention sanity.

One night, when the guy was sleeping, a few of his neighbors on the moon got together and, because they felt sorry for him, they broke the nearly completed spaceship down into the various thoughts he’d used to make it, and rearranged them. When the young guy got up in the morning, he found shelves, vases, thermoses, and microscopes where his spaceship had been. The whole pile was covered with a thought of sorrow—in the shape of an embroidered tablecloth—about his beloved dog who’d died.

The young guy was not at all happy about the surprise. And instead of saying thank you, he went crazy, started carrying on and breaking things. The people on the moon watched him, stunned. They really did not like that sort of behavior. The moon, as you know, is a planet with very little gravitational force. And the smaller a planet’s gravitational force is, the more dependent it is on discipline and order, because it takes only a little push for objects to lose their equilibrium. And if everyone who felt even slightly bitter started carrying on, it would end in disaster. Finally, when they saw that the guy wasn’t about to calm down, they had no choice but to think of a way to stop him. So they thought one thought of loneliness that was about three-by-three, and put him inside it, a thought the size of a cell with a very low ceiling. And every time he accidentally touched one of the sides, he felt a kind of cold blast that reminded him of his solitude.

It was in that cell that he thought a last thought of despair in the shape of a rope, tied a noose, and hanged himself. The people on the moon were so excited about the idea of a rope of despair with a noose on one end that they immediately thought despair thoughts of their own and wound them around their necks. And that’s how all the people on the moon became extinct, leaving behind only that cell of loneliness. But after a hundred years of space storms, that collapsed too.

When the first spaceship reached the moon, the astronauts couldn’t find anyone around. All they found was a million craters. At first, the astronauts thought those craters were ancient graves of people who had once lived on the moon. Only on closer inspection did they discover that those craters were merely thoughts about nothing.

Of all my friends, my friend Gur has the most theories. And of all his theories, the one that definitely has the best chance of being right is his theory of boredom. According to Gur’s theory of boredom, everything that happens in the world today is because of boredom: love, war, inventions, fake fireplaces—ninety-five percent of all that is pure boredom. He includes in the other five percent, for example, the time two guys beat the shit out of him when they robbed him on the subway in New York two years ago. Not that those two guys weren’t a little bored, but they looked really hungry. He likes to explain this theory of his at the beach, when he’s too tired to play paddleball or go into the water. And I sit and listen for the thousandth time, secretly hoping that this is the day a gorgeous woman will walk up to where we’re sitting. Not that we’d try to hit on her or anything, just so there’d be something to look at.

The last time I heard Gur’s theory was a week ago, when some plainclothes cop caught us on Ben Yehuda Street with a shoebox full of grass. “Most laws come from boredom too,” Gur explained to them in the back of the patrol car, “which is totally cool. It makes things interesting. People who break the law are uptight about getting caught, which helps them pass the time. And the police—the police really have a ball. Because everybody knows that time flies when you’re enforcing the law. That’s why, in principle, I have no problem with your arresting us. There’s just one thing I can’t quite understand: Why the handcuffs?”

“Shut the fuck
up
,” barked the plainclothes cop with the sunglasses who was sitting in back with us. You could tell he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be busting two assclowns for smoking up because they ran out of money for beer, when he could have been hauling in some serial rapist or terrorist, or even just an everyday bank robber.

Gur and I really dug the interrogation. Not only did they have AC, there was this cute lady cop who sat with us for a few hours and even made us some coffee in Styrofoam cups, and Gur explained his theory on the war between the sexes to her and got her to laugh at least twice. In fact, the whole thing was pretty laid-back except for one slightly freaky moment, when a cop who’d seen too many
NYPD Blue
episodes came into the room in the middle and wanted to slap us around. But we played it smart and confessed to everything before he could even get close. Now, when I tell only the interesting parts, it probably sounds as if it all happened very fast, but the truth is that by the time they got done filling out all the forms, it was after dark. Gur called Orit, who’d been his girlfriend for almost eight straight years and only just wised up enough six months ago to leave him and find herself a guy who was more together, and she came right down to the station to post our bail. She came alone, without her boyfriend, pretending to be pissed off that here was Gur, dragging her back into one of his lame situations. But you could tell how happy she was to see him and how much she’d missed him. After she sprang us, Gur wanted to go get some coffee or something with her, but she said she had to run, because she was working the night shift at the Super-Pharm. Maybe another time. And Gur told her that he’d been calling and leaving her messages of love but she never called him back, and if he hadn’t been arrested he never would’ve seen her at all, and she said it would be better if he didn’t call, because nothing good would ever come of their being together, or of him either, as long as he kept hanging out with guys like me and did nothing but eat shwarma, smoke joints, and look at girls. And I didn’t mind when she talked that way about me, because she actually meant it in a kind of friendly way. Besides, it was true. “I really am late,” she said, and got into her Beetle. And as she’d pulled away, she even waved goodbye through the window.

Then we walked all the way home from the police station on Dizengoff Street without talking, which is pretty normal for me but really unusual for Gur. “Tell me,” I said to him when we got to my block. “That boyfriend of Orit’s, you want us to beat the shit out of him?” “Forget it,” Gur mumbled. “He’s all right.” “I know he’s all right,” I told him, “but still, if you want, we can beat the shit out of him.” “No,” Gur said, “but I think I’ll take your bike and ride over to look at Orit for a while at the Super-Pharm.” “Sure,” I said, and gave him the key.

That was one of his regular pastimes, going to look at Orit when she worked nights. And, honestly, if you look at it theoretically, hiding behind a bush for five hours to watch someone ring things up on a cash register and put aspirin and Q-tips in bags really would be something you’d do out of boredom, except somehow, when it came to Orit, those theories of Gur’s never seemed to work.

“There’s nothing like the tits on an eighteen-year-old,” the cabdriver said, and honked at a girl who didn’t know better than to turn around. “Believe me, you sink your teeth into one or two of those a day, your bald spot disappears.” Then he laughed and touched the place on his head where he once had hair. “Don’t get me wrong. Me, I got two kids that age. And if I ever caught my daughter with some old fart my age—I don’t know what I’d do to her. But that’s the way it is, that’s nature, that’s how God created us, right? So tell me, why should I be ashamed? There, just look at that one,” he said, honking at a girl with a Walkman who didn’t stop. “How old would you say she was? Sixteen? And look at that ass. Tell me the truth, wouldn’t you like a piece of that?” He honked another few times before giving up. “Doesn’t hear a thing, that one,” he explained, “because of the tape. I mean come on, after you see one like that, how can you go back to your wife.” “You’re married?” I asked, trying to sound accusing. I wished I hadn’t taken the front seat. “Divorced,” the driver mumbled, and tried to keep a little more of the girl with the Walkman in the rearview mirror. “Believe me, how can you even think about going back to the wife.”

There was a sad song on the radio, and the driver, who was trying to sing along with it, was too happy to stick with the beat. He switched to a different station, where another sad song was waiting. “It’s because of all that shit with the helicopters,” he explained to me, as if I’d just landed from Mars, “those helicopters that crashed in midair. Did you hear about it? They announced it before, on the news.” I nodded. “Now they’re gonna kill our shifts for us. I swear, nothing but bad news and sad songs.” At a pedestrian crossing, he stopped for a tall young girl wearing a back brace. “She’s not bad either, huh?” he said, hesitating a little. “Give her maybe another year or two.” And then he honked at her too, just to be on the safe side. He kept switching radio stations, and stopped on one that was reporting from the site of the crash. “Take me, for example,” he said. “I got a kid in the army now, in a combat unit. Haven’t heard from him in two days. So if I say you gotta put something lighter on the radio when these disasters happen, nobody would say I was wrong, right? What I’m saying is, they’re getting us all worked up for nothing. Think about his mother, my ex. She’s gotta listen to all those songs about soldiers going on about how their buddy died in their arms. What she needs is something to take the edge off. Come on,” he said, suddenly touching my hand, “let’s call her, yank her chain a little.” I didn’t answer. I was taken aback when he touched me.

“Hey, Rona, howya doin’?” he was already yelling into the speaker phone. “Everything OK?” He winked at me and gestured toward a peroxide in a beat-up Subaru Justy standing next to us at the light. “I’m worried about Yossi,” a slightly metallic voice replied from the other end. “He didn’t call.” “How can he call? He’s in the army, in the field. What, you think they got pay phones at the front?” “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I have a bad feeling.” “You’re really something, you and your feelings,” the driver said, winking at me again. “I was just saying to this fare I got how, if I know you, you’re worrying.” “Why? You aren’t worried?” “No,” the driver said, laughing. “And you know why? Because I’m not like you. I listen to what they actually say on the radio, not just those tear-jerkers in the middle. And what they say is that the ones in the helicopters were paratroopers, and our Yossi isn’t a paratrooper, so what’s to worry?” “They said
also
paratroopers,” Rona mumbled. “That doesn’t mean there weren’t others.” Even though the connection was bad, I could hear her crying. “Do me a favor, there’s this hotline for parents. Call them and ask about him. For me.” “Didn’t I just tell you?” the driver insisted. “They said
paratroopers
. I’m not gonna call now like some kind of schmuck.” And when he didn’t get an answer from the other end, he went on: “You wanna look like a retard? So you call.” “OK,” she said, trying to sound tough. “So get off the line.” “Well, listen to you!” the driver said, and hung up. “Now she’ll even spend ten hours trying to get through, anything, just so they check it for her,” he said, and gave a short, empty laugh. “Real stubborn, that one, don’t listen to no one.”

He was looking through the windshield for something to honk at, but the streets were almost deserted. “Believe me,” he said, “an ugly young girl is better than a beautiful old broad, and I’m talking from experience. A young one, even if she’s ugly, her skin’s still tight, her tits stand up, her body has a kinda smell, young. I’m telling you, there are lots of beautiful things in the world, but the body of a seventeen, eighteen-year-old girl…” He tried to hum a different song from the one on the radio, and after two verses, the car phone rang. “That’s her.” He smiled at me and winked again. “Rona, honey,” he said, and moved his face closer to the speaker phone, as if he were a radio broadcaster flirting with his listeners. “How are you?” “Fine,” the woman answered in a happy voice, making an effort to sound formal. “I just called to tell you they said he’s OK.” “Is that what you’re calling for?” The driver laughed. “You dummy, I already told you fifteen minutes ago he was OK, didn’t I?” “You did,” she sighed, “but now I feel better.” “So good for you,” he said, trying to be sarcastic. “OK, I’m going to sleep. I’m dead tired.” “Sweet dreams,” the driver said, putting his finger on the button that disconnects the car phone, “and next time, listen to me, huh?” We were very close to my house now, and pulling into Reiness Street, he saw a thin girl in a miniskirt who turned around, frightened, when he honked. “Get a load of that one,” he said, trying to hide his tears. “Say, wouldn’t you like to stick it to her?”