Somewhere Over the Sun

Epstein had decided long ago that he was to become a great writer.

To do this, he knew he would have to patience. Expertise did not spring into shape, it eroded. It was hiding somewhere inside you and was slowly revealed. Time had to do its thing. Little particles had to wear away the layers. But instead of wind and dust and rain, Epstein’s genius would be eroded into shape by these three things:

•  Other people’s stories
•  An everyday dedication to his craft     
•  Living his life

Those were bullets and not numbers because all three were equally crucial, balls that had to be juggled. They had the same weight, the same shape, and Epstein would have to learn how to balance all three, giving them each an equal opportunity to chip away at his inexperience and uncover however many masterpieces were waiting within him.

This might some day be a short story or something more, but for now I wanted to share it. Because I like it. Yeah.

This story is not done at all, but I wanted to share it with you guys. Enjoy!

I first noticed the splotch on my skin when washing my hands and no matter how hard I scrubbed, it didn’t go away, as if I were being punished. It didn’t seem fair that I’d be punished for having good hygiene. Even then it looked like one of those things you should go to the doctor for, but I waited a few days anyway. I’m not sure if hoping a skin splotch will go away on its own makes me an optimist or afraid or just completely ignorant of the behavior of skin splotches.

 I didn’t shake anyone’s hand for those few days. I waved instead. And every time I did, the splotch stared back at me, reminding me that it was there. I tried to imagine what its name could be. Hopefully nothing with “noma” in it, because all the cancer splotches have that. It could have been an Itis, but it didn’t look like an Itis. It looked more like a Harold, like a wise, older uncle that spoke in a very deep voice. I could imagine it saying wise, old things to me, like, “The word ‘cerulean’ comes from the Latin word, caeruleus meaning dark blue or blue-green and was used by Roman authors to describe the sky and the Mediterranean.”

In the doctor’s office, I waited on a plastic seat that was almost the exact same color and texture of the splotch. At first I covered my hand with the other one so that no one could see it, but then I realized I was at a dermatologist’s office, and everyone here had a splotch or a rash or a mole that they weren’t particularly fond of, and if I covered mine up then I was pretending that I wasn’t exactly like them. They might have started to wonder what I was even doing sitting in the waiting room. Unless they were less judgmental than I am and just assumed that, even if there was nothing wrong with me that they could see, I might be much sicker or have some horribly ugly thing growing somewhere beneath my dress. Knowing that the other people in the waiting room were so nice they wouldn’t judge me, I uncovered the splotch. I felt like I was one of them, even though I was secretly judging them, wondering which among them had nomas and which had itises. It was these thoughts, these invasive thoughts I had about other people that I kept hidden away somewhere beneath my dress.

When the doctor was ready to see me, he wasn’t in the room they took me to, which meant he wasn’t ready to see me at all. He needed another ten minutes, which made me wonder if doctors are really shy, and they need all that time mentally preparing to talk to their patients because it’s actually quite hard for them and they’d rather just talk to organs and bones. When he came in, I thought that he also looked like a Harold, that him and my splotch should meet and have a conversation made up entirely of wise, old things said in deep voices. Then I realized the whole reason I was there was so the two of them could meet and I felt proud for playing matchmaker.

“Let’s have a look,” Dr. Harold said, and he took my hand in his, just like that. You spend so much time just trying to think of ways to get someone to take your hand, the feeling actually going past your fingers down to your wrist and elbow, who have no idea what’s happening to them, and then you walk into a doctor’s office and he takes your hand, just like that. And then you start to think that this was the entire reason you walked into the doctor’s office, for him to hold your hand. You start to wonder why there aren’t professional hand holders. You try to imagine the people sitting in the waiting rooms at the office of the professional hand holder and you wonder if it’d be easy to tell exactly where their illness was growing.

“Ah, yes,” he said, and let go of my hand, just like that. “I’ve been seeing a lot of this lately.”

He walked over to his desk and sat down in his leather chair and started writing in his prescription pad.

“Is it serious?”

“No. Well, yes.”

“Yes? I didn’t want to hear that word today.”

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing that can’t be taken care of.”

“I get confused by double negatives. Am I not going to not die?”

He scribbled away a little longer, which made me think he was trying on purpose to make his handwriting illegible. “I can’t read this, what does it say?”

“It’s a prescription to meet two new people a week.”

“That’s a strange name for cancer medicine.”

“You don’t have cancer.”

“Then why are you prescribing me cancer medicine?”

“Helen,” he said, which made me think back to how he’d grabbed my hand. “You have a very common skin condition called loneliness. It can become chronic, but it’s fairly easy to control.”

“Loneliness?”

“Yes.”

“Did I catch it from someone?”

“No, it’s not contagious. Quite the opposite actually.”

“Am I going to die?”

“No. It might feel that way, but that’s just a pseudo-symptom. You’re quite alright.”

I stared at Harold the doctor, then at Harold the splotch. I passed the fingers from my other hand over the splotch and wondered where it had come from, this condition, what had caused it to take hold of my skin.

This was it: the greatest moment of their lives. Adi and Shay, ages 11 and 13, respectively, had procured a BB gun.

Shay had a friend who had a friend whose parents were okay with toy guns, and by keeping themselves away from candy for a couple of weeks, they had saved enough lunch money and now here it was, black and silver plastic and a thermos full of bright yellow ammunition. They had no hiding place for it yet, but that could wait until tonight, until after it had been properly used.

They both thought about it at the same exact moment, but Shay said it first, and so he would get the credit, once the blame had subsided, “The roof!”

The roof was glorious. Large and flat, open space with a great view of the city, plenty of surfaces to place toy figurines on, other buildings reasonably close by. Guns, even harmless ones, were strictly forbidden at the Alsaid household. Mom had been in the Israeli army, and so all violence was banned from the beginning, even harmless representations of it.

Shay and Adi were fantastic marksmen. Fantastic. The Mossad agents were probably on their way to recruit them. Adi shot a tic-tac from twenty feet away, true story. The BB and the tic-tac both disappeared. That’s Mossad shit right there.

Target practice lasted about 15 minutes before it was no longer exciting. There was no pain inflicted (tiny, non-harming amounts of pain, Ima). So they looked to the building across the street. A beautiful balcony, four stories below them. Tile floors, an enclosed garden, wooden deck chairs that might have been hand-crafted. But no one in them. No fun shooting at leaves, especially with no snails on them. Targets.

They took a lap around the roof, which, by itself was taboo enough to make the afternoon exciting, but they had a BB gun, so exciting enough wasn’t enough.

Ah, the adjacent building.  A story taller, and lots of open windows. Someone’s mother doing dishes on the sixth floor: too risky. A half-full glass resting on a ledge on 7: behind a protective window , barely cracked open. A challenged. Physics would never allow the shot to be successfully pulled off, but neither of them had yet taken a physics cours, so it wasn’t going to keep them from trying. A limited amount of BB’s made them look for something else.

Oh my god, what was this? Right across, on 9, a perfect shot, a kid maybe Adi’s age trying to sneak some freshly baked cookies that were cooling on the counter, tin foil shining bright beneath them. “He’s gonna get hurt anyway,” Shay said, putting the Replica Berretta X-4 Series (no orange tip!) in his younger brother’s hands. He crouched behind the waist-high wall meant to keep people from falling to their deaths and to hide boys from being spotted by enemies.

Adi crouched too, but he placed the gun in both hands on the concrete and steadied his arms, making himself only slightly more visible (in their minds, all that could be seen by the enemy were two sets of eyes and a gun, maybe a finger or two, nothing at all). The cookies looked chocolate chip, melty, and was it really necessary to say delicious?

What else was there to do with a trigger but squeeze it?

Adi wanted to look just long enough to see the reaction. He wasn’t expecting an award for marksmanship from the Mossad, necessarily, just a chance to see the fruits of his labor.

“They might have seen me.”

“They?”

“There may have been a parent in the vicinity.”

Solution: leave the roof, pretend violence had never happened. But they matched a description. Adi may have pulled the trigger, but they had both fired the bullet, and both were severely punished, although years later they wouldn’t be able to recall what the punishment had been. Regardless of Shay’s vehement claims of being an innocent bystander, he got punished too. It was unfair. What else were they supposed to do with a BB gun?

West Texas goes on forever.

Desert and trees, farms, plateaus, ugly little gas stations, rolling green pastures, it was hard to tell just what the geography was like, they’d been in the car that long. Time was measured in miles, in playlists, in podcasts of This American Life.

“I don’t know why Israel and Palestine are so caught up in that little bit of land. All that sand,” he looked down at the gauges to check the gas tank, “I don’t know why they don’t come here. It’s empty. All these farms. I’m sure their quality of life would improve.” A storm was rolling in from the south, and they were both certain that they’d drive right through it, right past it, they’d still be driving when the next storm came through. “Would anyone mind?”

She was craving a cigarette. Her feet were up on the dashboard, the air from the vents climbing down her legs, giving her a cool reprieve from the heat of the chair, the heat of West Texas. The taste of him still lingered on her lips from a few hours back, when the privacy of a swarm of eighteen-wheelers had sent her wordlessly to his lap. Nestled between his abs and the steering wheel, she’d had the urge to nap.

“Lightning,” he said, looking at the horizon to his right. He’d said it calmly, as if the word was completely disconnected from the electricity of what it described. He imagined himself, briefly, as an airline pilot on a transatlantic flight, or something longer. West Texas was as big as the sky. He looked at the smudge her toes had left on the windshield and knew they would be there for a very long time.