Below is the first segment of my short story, ‘The Messiah,’ published originally in ‘Sambatyon, a Journal of Jewish Writing,’ in 2006. The story is in an excerpt from novel, ‘Very Narrow Bridge,’ published in 2011. Enjoy.
The heavy rain, powered by gusty winds, made it very difficult on Gideon Gold to navigate his way to Beach Lane. Not that it would’ve been easy to locate on a normal, sunny day, since it was just an enclave of sorts; stuck, shapeless, between Main Street and the beach. Not far from where, luckily, he found a place to park by the curb.
He stayed in his car, watching hypnotically a narrow strip of gray ocean, thinking – as he was inclined to do whenever he watched the ocean, or at other unscheduled moments in time and place – of his life, and of home, and of the past and of the future. Longing for his apartment by the Mediterranean Sea, in Tel Aviv, where people spoke his language; where he showed some promise as a writer and filmmaker; and where he left so many beginnings unfinished.
He couldn’t comprehend, all of a sudden, what he was doing here in Santa Monica. He felt weakness in his stomach. A familiar feeling of dread, unreasonable dread, engulfed him like the sea. He couldn’t put his thoughts, in Hebrew, into words in English. He had no idea what he was going to say to Sid Landau, if he ever found him, and how he was going to explain to him his involvement in the mysterious disappearance of Raymond De Rosi and his daughter. He was his old self again: the consummate procrastinator. He was in trouble.
But trouble was Gideon’s current territory, his battleground – constantly triggering his memory. And he remembered, while apprehensively considering his next move, that there were certain situations, as a wise Jewish man once observed, when one had to break into the fortified city through the sewer tunnels. King David, he followed this line of thought, took a similar step with the water tunnels when he first captured Jerusalem. That’s how he remembered it, anyhow, from his bible lessons in the kibbutz. And remembering these things – even if their exact meaning was not yet entirely clear to him – helped Gideon and encouraged him to continue. Reenergized, he got out of his car, leaving his hesitations behind.
Ahead of him stretched a narrow-paved path, which led to the “Santa Monica Studios Complex,” and kept going straight in the middle of the lawn, split¬ting in half two rows of small bungalows. On the wall of the first one, being used as a laundry room, Gideon saw an old, over-used public telephone stuck on the wall, surrounded by graffiti. And on the next door, number two, above the mailbox slot, he found the name he was looking for: LANDAU.
He rang the bell once and waited. Then rang a second time and waited even longer. He rang a third time, too, thinking of retreating and trying later, since the rain was still at it, and he was – true to form, as if a Californian by birth – without an umbrella. He already turned to go, cursing to himself, when the door opened suddenly and he found himself facing a pudgy man in his late twenties, standing behind a rusty screen door. He wore shorts and a dirty sleeveless shirt, holding an open, half-full bag of potato chips in his hand. He looked at Gideon with watery eyes and said nothing, chewing a potato chip loudly.
Hillel F. Damron @ hillelbridge.com 