“Fucking animal,” she snapped, and the cigarette fell from her mouth, scattering a cascade of glowing embers. “Get away from me.”
The rain hissed behind the shutters, watering the tiny jungle of plants on her crumbling balcony. Clothes, strewn across the wooden floor, exploded from an open suitcase.
“Get away.”
She rose from the bed, throwing his crumpled boxers at him. Hers stayed in place, hugging the buttocks and the triangle of red hair he had seen so many times before the war started in earnest.
She had recently shaved her head, and the pink scratches on her skull reminded him of the tender color of a dog's belly. The bitch had been killed by shrapnel, and the pups had scattered when his boys tried to round them up.
She wrapped herself in a kimono, and he dutifully put the boxers on.
“I said, get away,” she ground the cigarette butt into the copper bowl, already overflowing with ash. “God, I need a joint.”
She rummaged through the vintage sideboard.
The tram rang outside, and he struggled into his jeans.
“Are you going somewhere, Liora?” he nodded at the suitcase.
Her name felt strange in his mouth. Her bony back remained unmoving, and the sickly-sweet smell of weed filled the room. He didn’t dare ask for a puff.
“Getting the fuck out of here,” she snapped, “before the country collapses into a pile of rubble.”
He picked up his sweaty T-shirt.
“Says the person poisoning the cockroaches,” he retorted. “We need to exterminate the terrorists and save the hostages.”
She still didn’t turn around, but in the foggy depths of an antique mirror, her mouth curved into a mocking grimace.
“The hostages are dead,” she replied, “just like children you bombed. Get the fuck away from me, murderer, and never return.”
She shouted something else, but Michael was already running down the echoing stairs of the tall house—white and ornate like a wedding cake—where he had once drunk his cup of happiness before the war.
The cold December rain soaked his T-shirt as Michael bolted toward the approaching tram, carrying the tired evening crowd. The carriage was packed to the brim, but he managed to squeeze into the last empty sliver of space. Two girls smiled at him, and Michael looked the other way, where a wiry, dark-haired guy was scrolling through his phone.
Michael’s hand trembled, searching for his gun. The tank slowed, and Eli shouted something from down below.
“Come again!” Michael yelled, but now he saw the obstacle—the tank had finally stopped at a pile of concrete rubble.
“Hold it,” Michael said. “I'm going out. There must be a way around this piece of shit.”
He vaguely remembered the aviation doing something in this area at night. Coordination between units was sketchy at best. Stepping out of the tank felt like landing on another planet—one they had turned into a wasteland with their own hands. Michael stood on the armor for a moment, surveying the dead ruins where stones mixed with broken furniture and shards of glass. He had no idea what had happened to the people who once lived here. The aviation had dropped leaflets warning them of the raids.
“Cockroaches," he muttered, jumping to the ground. "Not people.”
The pile seemed lifeless, but then Michael noticed something moving among the fallen walls and uprooted pipes. It tried to crawl away, and Michael took his walkie-talkie.
“Go around the pile, boys,” he ordered. “I'll meet you on the other side. Need to check something really quick.”
The engine roared, and the tank crawled slowly, like a sated carnivore. Sand and dust scratched at Michael’s throat, making him cough.
“Are you OK?” an unfamiliar voice said, and Michael jerked. The dark-haired guy looked at him with concern.
“You've been coughing non-stop,” he said. “Wait, I've got a lozenge somewhere.”
He rummaged in his pockets, and Michael mumbled something unintelligible. The tram came to a halt, and he jumped out at his stop, where the boulevard led to the low roar of the winter sea and glittering skyscrapers towered in the gloomy sky. The rain had started again, but he ran to the bright entrance of his parents’ house just in time.
Stepping into the sterile elevator box, Michael suppressed a cough, standing against a mirror, reflecting something glistening on his cheeks.
Inside, the house was hollow, save for the cat, which emerged from the darkness, wrapping its long body around Michael’s legs before following him to his room. It settled on the sofa, casting a dispassionate glance at the old backpack Michael had thrown on the floor. No one was expecting him home—he had been released from the reserves two days earlier than planned.
“Went abroad for a while,” he scribbled on a note for the fridge. “Will call.”
He sent the same message to his thesis supervisor at the university.
Locking the apartment door, Michael left the keys under the flowerpot in the corridor, where his mother had grown the blood-red roses.
The sea promenade was empty, and he made his way to the airport bus stop, battling the sharp wind. The words from the only book he had shoved into his backpack rang in his head, drowning out the voice of the unsettled sea and the rumble of the tank engine.
“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
He bought the ticket online, sitting in the silver bullet of the train, cutting through the empty plains, illuminated only by the plant skeletons glowing on the horizon. The cough returned, and his right hand—the one he used for shooting—started to ache again. The thing he killed at the pile was genderless and ageless—a little scrap of distorted flesh, dying anyway, whimpering and crying until he shot straight into its bloodied semblance of a human face. His crew never knew what happened, and he told nothing to his commanders.
One of the hostages was a toddler, taken with his family from the border settlement, and Michael looked into his eyes, splattered across the posters—"Bring them back”—all the while he was going through the check-in.
The plane was unexpectedly full, but he talked to nobody, sheltering from the world with his book and headphones. On landing, he went to the border control, thinking about the happier times when he went to this city with Liora, who was by now probably flying somewhere over the ocean, cuddled in the coziness of her first-class ticket, bought with the family allowance.
The woman at passport control wore a Muslim head covering, and Michael read fear in her eyes and in the way, she handled his passport.
“When are you flying back?” she asked, and he coughed, hiding his lie.
“In a couple of weeks.”
Outside, the wind slapped his face, and, huddling under the glass cover of the deserted smoking shed, it took him a couple of tries to burn his passport. The plastic ID card snapped in two pieces more easily. Burying everything under the pile of rubbish, he looked around.
“Final exit,” the sign said, and he went there, unable to be anymore.
DoubleSpeak 