Six Views of Jerusalem
1
Navigation is possible by franchise restaurant alone. At the sidewalk bar known for selling pork, the table of Americans orders three club sandwiches, two of ham and cheese, feeds bills into the internet jukebox, dated dance numbers. The game played involves prom themes. Someone scans the English language paper for movie times, flipping past the photos of what happened to the bus. “I feel a real jouissance for the sequel,” says the girl with the nearly linguistic loop and curve of the Ebola virus tattooed on her upper arm. They laugh the way they laugh in their own country, a self-contained chain.
2
The weather mirrors the jihad. On top of everything else, the city has been struck with a tree disease. Bark sloughs off in chunks. Past midnight, walking the still streets of the Russian compound, downhill from the throb of the clubs, you listen to it fall.
Kids creep through the fences of construction sites, establishing punk communes in the pits. Everybody wants to bum a cigarette; everyone has a trinket to sell. “It’s a good watch, no?” asks the blue-haired boy from Pasadena. He’s trying to save up, to surprise his girlfriend with a new piercing. She says she’s fifteen, which means she’s somewhere nearer to twelve, and speaks in a language learned from billboards along the Jersey coast.
Soldiers shoo off feral cats, lecture the gutter punks about the dangers of smoking. One woman, in fatigues, tries to seal the gap in the chain link, but gives up, cursing, sucking a cut finger. While above, on the crane mast, a blank flag flaps in the night wind.
Moonlight and metal clouds. You take a taxi to the British military cemetery, walk uphill from there, back to the dormitories, a slow stroll, listening to the couples that have come to the graveyard for privacy, to the basic menagerie of moans, waves of sound, those rooted in liquid, those rooted in ether, those rooted in flesh.
3
You attempt to memorize the more nuanced rules of soccer and the names of a dozen girls. Some people translate, some keep quiet. The Danish guy with hopes of commando work tells you all languages can be comprehended with a mind open to the play of inflection.
A constellation of sidewalk cafés, patio bars; everyone is always peeling oranges. After a rough time with the Parisian, the Spaniard, and the Brit who lives in Belgium, you put some effort into the plump thing from Oslo, studying the angle of her thigh in relation to your hand, or, when walking, the full Scandinavian circumference of her hips.
She seems happy you’re pretending to be a writer, amused with your pronunciation of the name Knut Hamsun, skeptical of your claim that there is no longer a professional porn industry, it’s all gone amateur, underground. You tell her that nothing fits worse, in verse, than cheap sentimentality, and, as she can only understand a third of your words, she finds you fairly charming — in her terms, sweet.
The bus driver was sweet, too, and the security man outside the grocery store. Certain celebrities share this status, and the cartoon hippos of her home country, always on canoe trips into dangerously inhabited lands.
In the elevator you tell her, “I can’t hug you without getting a hard on, but that doesn’t mean we should fuck.” She smiles and says, “You are a new vocabulary.”
4
Here is a stack of cow heads, from the freshly butchered. They are placed brow down, tongue out, draping.
And here is the man who hoses down the cobbles, his thumb directing the spray, his wrist shivering it back and forth. He curses the cats, spits at them. Their retreat is only temporary, backs arched, bony with thirst.
These are the old stone streets of Sunday School felt boards: Jerusalem, riddled with alleyways, thick with patriarchs, smelling of hot bread, fresh sweets of pistachios and goat cheese, syrupy, laid out on metal trays.
Here is graffiti, the square and the looped. Even the pictograph of the dripping penis has politics behind it. From the international papers, you know some of the mottos. Ten fingers on the trigger. The meaning is the use.
After a wrong turn, past the rack of True Cross splinters and the Pokemon 2000 posters, a black guard turns you away at the entrance to the Temple Mount, its palm trees in sight behind. His is a thankless job, yet he is the nicest man you have met thus far, even offers you a cigarette. “They sell very well,” the guard explains, working a kink out of his neck with his non-rifle hand. “All the kids like the Pokemon. Even teenagers, they like the Pikachu, they like the Squirtle.”
5
In a bombing, to generalize, what hits first is the suddenness, a register of event, even before the nearly silent, breaking-light-bulb sound, before the burn, before the numbing salve of shock.
After that, an awareness of others, of their shock in realizing the cliché, that one fraction of a second previous everything was entirely different. Because it’s less a cliché when trying to stand on shredded limbs, spitting shards of teeth, etc.
Next comes the naked human sound, not yet a wail but a staccato moan, an extension of breathing, breathing in the panicked absence of breath.
You get to the girl from Tennessee as she begins fingering her scalp. You keep her hands in her lap, tell her not to worry about the taste, it’s only her lips, a superficial injury. A trick learned from television: turning to technical jargon in times like these.
You stay with her by the curb, waiting for the medics to finish with those worse off, trying not to look at what they carry away, making sounds, on stretchers, or what they line by the wall, quiet, and cover with plastic bags.
The girl says she can see the finger of Jesus in all this, something about parted clouds, never mind that this is the desert, the sky clean as a razor. Her cell phone burps out part of a hymn. A text message scrolls some piece of Knoxville gospel.
Someone else comes out of the interior, two of them, staggering, supported by each other, both coated in plaster ash. The air is hot, full of charring.
6
Blintzes for breakfast, sometime before dawn. The only other customers are soldiers sharing an absurdly wide dish of ice creams, their rifles modified with large amounts of duct tape. School children’s construction paper well-wishes line the patio: Peace in the Middle East. Good luck on your war. The Norwegian has recently learned the word exhausted, and now she uses it too much, giggling over her sack of hard-bartered amulets and pirate cds. The café guard does baton flips with his metal-sensing wand, waiting for his shift to end.
Expansive in their emptiness, chilled, the streets hold an illusion of dew. One of the more fashionable, glitter-lined boutiques has their manikins arranged in gas masks and snakeskin skirts. Outside the surplus store, an automated knife unfolds its various tools. There is a sale on parachutes.
Back at the campus, morning emerges on sprinkler heads, spinning, a liquid patter. A military blood drive and a balloon sale jostle for space in the student commons. The Norwegian is still exhausted, her teeth chattering. In three languages she threatens to vomit. Later, she will excuse herself, moist and slightly green, during a late morning lecture on security, partition.
Otium
