The Wanting Read Online Free Page A

shelter was vaporized. There remained only a few stems of twisted aluminum poking up from the ground. On one of these, a life-size poster of Rita on the cover of her new album doggedly hung on, flapping in the wind, her face dripping with blood.
    This particular detail I know because it was described to me by several bystanders, mostly people who were in the coffee shop across the square, a coffee shop I myself frequented most days of the week. Everyone knows me there, and everyone found it necessary to tell me the same story. I wondered if they had all seen it or if they had merely heard it from one another. It didn’t really matter. I asked my friend Lonya—who now calls himself Ari—who happened to be coming to see me that day and had just turned the corner onto my street when the bomb exploded. He could not remember the poster.
    “I just hit the ground,” he said. “When I looked up there was blood everywhere.” Which is also what everyone says.
    Lonya, too, had the ringing in his ears. “It sounds like fleas,” he complained. “Like a million fucking fleas, all day, all night. Sometimes I want to blow my own head off.”
    All this I found sad, fascinating, disturbing, and meaningless.
    •    •    •
    But back to the hospital. They finally let me go, and I arrived home at about two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Shabbat. Shana’s mother, Daphne, picked me up. Shana was Anyusha’s best friend. They all came up to the room, the girls carrying balloons in the shape of hearts and Daphne with a basket of food cradled in her arms. We ate a little lunch, and then the two girls ran around tossing all my things in a bag. They found this highly amusing. I pulled the curtains around the bed so I could change into the clothes Daphne had picked out for me, and I emerged feeling much more myself—a man with a pair of pants. Then I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and foolishly took a moment to actually examine myself in the mirror. What I saw was something more like the invisible man, a creature of science fiction, its face entombed in bandages. The question was, What lay beneath these bandages?
    Daphne and her daughter lived only a few doors down from me. Our town was situated just north of Tel Aviv—not Herzliya, not Ra’anana, but nice. The apartments in our small complex surrounded a garden, so it was almost like we all lived in one great big house, although, come to think of it, I had no idea who most of my neighbors were. I might recognize their faces when I passed them, might say good morning or good evening, but I didn’t know their names, their stories. I knew Daphne mostly because of Anyusha, and her story was this in a nutshell: Daphne was divorced. Her husband had remained in the army and over time had changed, at least according to her. “He became hard,” she once told me. She repeated the word “hard” with a distant, almost mystical, look, as if she could see the heart inside him calcifying before her eyes. “He spent a lot of time in Gaza,” she explained.
    Daphne was an artist, but she made her living doing computer graphics. At night, though, she toiled over her watercolors. To describe her, I would say: average height, average build, just an average girl. Her bland, ocher hair was neat and short. Her lips were the color of mouse, always in need of lipstick. But the maintrouble was her eyes. A very deep, almost tarry brown, that always, and quite improbably given her circumstances, radiated hope.
    “Here,” she said, as we gathered my things and made our way down the hospital corridor, “hold on to me. You probably can’t even see with all that stuff on your face.”
    She led me to the car, guided me into the seat on the passenger side. I was actually surprised that I needed the help. More shaky than I’d thought. She reached over and fastened my seat belt.
    When we were on the road, I couldn’t help myself. “Can we pass by?” I asked.
    “There’s nothing to