The Wanting
by michael lavigne
I don’t know what it was. It might have been a head, or perhaps a hand or foot, it went by so fast, but following it, as if pulling a wire, came the explosion, and instantaneously the window I was sitting beside shattered. I can remember distinctly the feeling of glass slicing my skin—it was remarkably painless. At the same time, I fell sideways off my chair and landed at the foot of the drafting table, which I suppose is what saved me, for the entire window, the window I loved, the window that gave my studio an enchanting hint of antiquity in this otherwise modern neighborhood and suffused the entire room with light all the seasons of the year, crashed down in a thunder of tinker-bells, but not upon me. The drafting table was my umbrella. When it was finally quiet—and it was a quiet I had never heard before, a quiet that was a chasm between the breath before and the breath after—I looked up and saw a huge spur of glass hanging over the edge of the table, teetering just above my face. In that second, I thought of two things. I thought of God, and I thought of Kristallnacht. Then everything was noise—I couldn’t tell what—screaming? sirens? cries for help?—and an incredible ringing in my ears that I thought might be angels crying, or laughing, or perhaps it was the ringing you hear when you are actually deaf.
Looking up at the overhang of glass, I almost thought I was standing behind a waterfall, and the thunder I was feeling was the water careening down the cliff face. But I understood this was an illusion. I was on the floor and a bomb had just gone off. And the object flying past my window? It probably had been the head of the bomber, winking at me. But I was also aware that Amoz and Tsipa were speaking to me. Their desks were situated far from the window, all the way on the other side of the office, where I had put them. Now they were bending over me, breaking the curtain of water. I could see they were moving their mouths, but I could not hear them, so I smiled up at them and said shalom. But they did not seem to hear me either, and they did not smile back. And that is all I remember of that moment.
I woke up in the ambulance. The paramedic was ultra-orthodox, like the guys who come around afterward and pick up body parts. His name tag read MOISHE. He had a greenish piece of salami stuck between his teeth and a beard that would be hanging down to his navel except that it was stuffed in a paper bonnet. He was wearing a Day-Glo orange security vest, a black scull cap, and eyeglasses that had slipped down onto the tip of his nose. But he seemed to know what he was doing.
“Keep calm,” he said.
“Where am I?”
He looked out the back window. “On Yehudah Street.”
Literalness, I had learned, was often a consequence of studying Talmud. “I mean, what happened?”
He patted my hand. “You were in a terrorist attack. I’m guessing it’s Hamas, but it could be Fatah or Islamic Jihad. I don’t think it was Hezbollah. Yes, most likely Hamas.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “You get a feeling for these things.”
“Am I going to die?”
“It’s possible.” He felt my torso. “But highly unlikely. It looks like you have some superficial cuts.”
I tried getting a glimpse out the window.
“Don’t move! One move and you could push that piece of glass right into your brain. Then you definitely would die.”
“There’s glass sticking out of my head?”
“A very big piece. If it was a mirror, I could do my makeup in it. And frankly I wouldn’t talk so much, there’s also glass jutting out of your cheek. You don’t want to cut your tongue off. But don’t worry. I’m here to save you. That’s my job.”
“You’re a religious man, right?”
“Of course.”
“What does God say about all this?”
“About what?”
“About bombs going off in cafés and architectural offices and innocent people having their heads blown off and me with so much glass in me I could pass for a Tiffany lamp?”
“Not a café. It was the bus stop at the corner under your building. But you knew that from the trajectory of the head I sent as a warning.”
“Yes, I saw it. I ducked.”
“You didn’t duck, you moved five centimeters to the left and raised your right arm ten centimeters from its position above your drafting table, which caused the flying glass to be deflected from your carotid artery and instead cut the nerve in your triceps brachii, which will cause you only minor annoyance for the rest of the year, instead of having killed you instantly.”
Michael Lavigne’s new novel, “The Wanting,” was recently published by Schocken Books. His first novel, “Not Me,” was the recipient of the Sami Rohr Choice Award for emerging Jewish writers, an American Library Association Sophie Brody Honor Book, a Book of the Month Club Alternate, and was translated into three languages. Lavigne has worked extensively in advertising, is a founder of the Tauber Jewish Studies Program of Congregation Emanu-El, and spent three years living and working in Moscow. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Gayle Geary.