Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 74 of a new online serial novel, Outside the Bubble, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
The moderator of the group, a hulking, blond guy, smiled all the time. Martin hated his smile. The guy also walked around among the eight people seated in a row facing him, and he was so close and towering over them that it seemed he would be able to peek into the shirt pockets of those who were wearing shirts with pockets.
Martin had no problem with that, on a personal level; he had no pockets on his shirt. But there was something he didn’t like about this crossing of personal boundaries, and he was pretty sure that Yosef would not have been able to stand it either.
“Hey!” he said, when the moderator, while listening to one of the participants describing with pathos the night he had just experienced, continued walking around the room, passing between Martin and the person to his left. “Hey, it gets crowded here when you pass by! Don’t pass here!”
The moderator—James or Jim; Martin hadn’t caught his name exactly—stopped. “I can avoid passing there if it bothers you,” he said pleasantly. “But you could be more polite.”
“I’m not polite!” Martin stared at his palms. “If you were fighting for your life, you wouldn’t either have time to be polite.”
The person sitting on Martin’s left snickered. “You don’t need time to be polite,” he said, and moved his chair a bit more to the left, as if to expand the space between the chairs. “You just need to behave properly.”
“Well, to do that, you need to plan your responses,” Martin said doggedly, “and I have no time or patience for that.”
Someone at the end of the row fixed him with a stare. Martin stared back defiantly. “You have a problem with something?” he asked.
“No,” the other person said. He was a slim youth wearing a baseball cap, and he continued staring at Martin with those big, wondering eyes. “I have no problem.”
“Then look in a different direction,” Martin growled, and straightened up in his chair. The moderator was still quiet, as if he didn’t remember where he’d paused.
“Okay…” he said after a few seconds. “Who was in the middle of telling me about his night?”
“Me,” said the last person who had spoken. He looked toward Martin hesitantly, as if he was afraid the boy would erupt again. “But I don’t remember where I stopped.”
“So let’s move on to Josef, our new member,” the moderator said, looking at Martin. “Josef, would you like to tell us about your first night here?”
Martin stared at him. Making an assertive impression was sometimes fine, but it would be unwise of him to begin his stay here on a confrontational note. That was not the character he wanted to attribute to the figure he was playing.
“Yes,” he said. “I was tired, and I slept well.”
“I’m happy to hear that.” The blond giant smiled at him. “What else?”
“I had a few vague dreams.” He creased his forehead. “I know that my medications usually suppress dreams, but now, maybe because of all my traveling, I did have some dreams.”
“What did you dream about?”
Martin wrinkled the bridge of his nose in a puzzled expression. “I don’t really remember. Something about my uncle who is here. We were together someplace, not here, and he told me that we’ll leave here together, the two of us, and we’ll be healthy. But I can’t remember where it was and who else was there and what we were doing. Maybe we were on a boat, because I remember the sound of water.”
“Let’s hope for your sake that the dream comes true,” the moderator said.
“But I’m afraid of places with water!” Martin protested.
“Do you know how to swim?”
“Yes.”
“We have a nice pool here, you know, and we sometimes have swim contests.”
“Sure, contests,” someone snapped. “Don’t plant any illusions in his head, Jim, so that he doesn’t think he might win Mike.”
“I don’t win anyone,” Martin protested again. “I don’t go into the water. In the water, there are strange sounds of creatures that run after me.”
“And you can’t win them?” Jim asked.
Martin shrugged. “Maybe you’ll teach me how. I know in my mind that they don’t really exist; everyone always tells me that. I mean, the voices and everything. But I feel them very strongly, and it’s scary. If you can make it that I shouldn’t feel them, it will be great.” He stretched in his chair and folded his arms, as if to say, “I’ve said enough.” The moderator, to his credit, got the message and moved on.
Martin listened attentively to the participants, and tried to figure out what each one’s problem was. Another man seemed to be schizophrenic, and two were anorexics—the thin youth who had been staring at him before, and another one. He couldn’t diagnose any of the others, and they were talking about things he didn’t quite grasp anyway, and in a style that he didn’t understand.
“Did you enjoy the session with us, Josef?” the moderator asked him when the large room had emptied. The anorexic with the baseball cap was still standing at the door, as if lingering intentionally.
“Yes.” Martin nodded. “But I didn’t understand everything. What is the ‘power of pluralistic communication’? And what is the ‘energy of the right nail’?
“The nail energy is just something that the guy who said it made up, poor thing,” Jim said in a low voice, moving his mouth closer to Martin’s ear. “He’s totally incoherent. He was actually a pretty with-it guy, but at one point, something happened to him, and he got schizophrenia. Then, when he developed a fungus on one of his toenails, he began to believe that it was a curse that was cast on him by one of his enemies.” He laughed, and Martin, who wondered if Jim had forgotten that he was speaking to a schizophrenic himself, had a malicious urge to fret aloud that he also suffered from such a fungus and maybe it was also a curse. But he decided not to overdo it.
Instead, he just scowled and said, “I don’t like it when people laugh at schizophrenics, you know? He believes what he’s saying just like you believe”—his eyes roved around the room, until he caught sight of the skinny boy—“that Mike’s hat is gray, and it has orange embroidered words on it saying, ‘From Becky.’”
The boy standing at the door blushed. He took off the hat, crumpled it, and stuck it into his pocket. “Do you have a problem with my cap or something?” he snarled. He seemed ready to pay Martin back for the earlier lashing-out, and strode back into the room, as if he was going to deal Martin a punch or two.
“All right, guys, figure it out,” the moderator said cheerfully as he took a few steps back. “You don’t need my help in this head-to-head, do you?”
Martin assessed the man’s size with a quick glance. “No. If you get involved, we’ll both end up flat as schnitzels.”
Jim chuckled, enjoying the compliment, and turned to go. “Just don’t let Mike’s size mislead you!” he yelled from the door. “He’s really thin, but man, is he strong!”
“The one who wins all the swimming competitions, huh?” Martin replied, and turned to Mike, who was drawing nearer. He had no intention of acquiring enemies on his first day here, and he was going to fix this mistake as quickly as he could. “Hey!” he said. “What are you so riled up about? I just wanted to show Jim how delusions can appear real. I hate it when people scorn me and people like me.”
“And you couldn’t find anything else to prove that to him with, besides for the cap that my sister embroidered with her name?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“As it is, they say I’m too sentimental. And stop looking at me like that, Canadian.”
“Canadian? Who’s Canadian?” Martin automatically lowered his voice.
“You.”
“Don’t you know I come from Israel? My parents are American.”
“Don’t tell me stories; we have family in Canada, and their accent is exactly like yours.”
“Oh, that…” Martin laughed heartily and began walking to the door. He had to end this conversation as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t be friends, but at least Mike wasn’t looking at him so darkly anymore. “We speak mostly Hebrew at home. I spoke English with a friend of mine, and he is Canadian. My mother says that I got his accent.”
“Yeah, sure. Like Perl is your uncle,” Mike whispered.
“What?” Mike stopped and turned around to face him.
“And like you’re a schizophrenic.”
“What?”
“Stop saying, ‘What, what.’ Do I look like an idiot to you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know, you’re saying things that…um… are really not normal.”
“Yes, go and tell it to my phone,” Mike sneered, still in a whisper.
“Your phone?”
“Yes. As Michoel Perl’s only friend, I lend him my phone regularly so he could speak to his niece, Hindddaaa.” With a strange smile, he rolled the letters on his tongue, and Martin didn’t know if it was scorn, or because he was really struggling with the name. Should he simply nod vigorously and say, in as natural a tone as he could muster, “Right, my mother”? Or should he just ignore Mike?
One thing he did know: This Mike was dangerous. Very, very dangerous.
Had his phone recorded Michoel Perl’s conversations? Had he listened to every word Michoel had said to Hinda?
And this was the guy who called himself “Michoel Perl’s only friend”!
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