You Won’t Believe This

Below is the first segment of a new short story—’You Won’t Believe This’—never before published. As I say at its beginning, I’m telling you this incredible story to: “Test your core belief in the divine, or your firm conviction in reality and reason.” Enjoy the ride.

‘You Won’t Believe This’

But it happened. And I’m going to tell you about it no matter what, just to test your core belief in the divine, or your firm conviction in reality and reason. And at the same time, while keeping my imagination mostly at bay, I’m going to ignite the power of my memory and let it loose. See where it takes me.

To Tel Aviv in the early eighties, as I recall. It was just a regular summer day—hot, humid, and miserable—with no indication of the miracle about to occur. Truth be told: I was ready to kill myself that day. It was only a matter of how soon and how to go about it. What else could go wrong, I kept asking myself as I was walking home from work. My home was a rented two-bedroom apartment with a view of the beach; close enough to smell the foam of the waves and feel the touch of the breeze coming ashore. You should be so lucky. But thinking about it as I was getting closer to home gave me no comfort on that sweltering summer day, when even the sycamore trees along Ben-Gurion Boulevard couldn’t outsmart the sun, and offered little to no escape from the suffocating humidity in the air, and the relentless beating of the late afternoon heat.

Seriously, you have to live in Tel Aviv in August to understand the force this mixture of humidity and heat can generate. But never mind that, it’s not what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to tell you was how much I hated my life that day, and how much I hated the multitude of people walking in the boulevard, talking too loudly and sending my way stinky vapors, so busy with their pathetic daily lives. I hated the cars passing by nonstop, polluting the air with their black fumes and loud honks. Only in Tel Aviv do drivers honk like that, so insanely and so insistently.

Mostly though, I hated my work. The video magazine I’d been working on for the last three months, in my position as the head of Video Production for the Histadrut, the all-powerful Israeli umbrella trade-union, had been canned for good not even an hour earlier by my fat-ass boss. He was a low-grade apparatchik who’d bluntly accused me, at the end of a loud argument in his office, of failing to understand that I was working for a political organization, not an independent production company. (He knew my aspiration, the jerk, I give him that.) As a result, I’d neglected to include—and not for the first time, mind you, it was made clear to me—the mandatory opening interview with the Chairman of the Cultural Division.

“What is it here, Russia?” I’d asked rhetorically, trying to be clever.
All hell had broken loose as result of that remark, and I’d been shown the door in no uncertain terms. Not sure at all, I realized too late, that I would be able to open that door tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Or ever again.

Oh well, add that to your list of pains, a nagging voice whispered in my ear as I was crossing Ben-Yehuda Street.