THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 55
T
he paradox of personal religion:
God has abandoned me, so I’ll
pray. On my knees. The sky ex-
ploding. And her on her back, gasping
from the pain, making use of all the Ar-
abic curses.
Cohen saw the pregnant woman five
or six times before they ended up to-
gether in the mamak, a room with re-
inforced-concrete walls, a heavy, sealed
window, and a steel vault of a door, that
can protect residents from deadly gas,
earthquakes, or the blast of rockets, one
room on each floor, stacked atop one
another, creating a core of safe rooms
in the building.
She lived across the hall from the
apartment he’d Airbnb’ed. One of those
young Tel Avivian women who looked
like they’d learned krav maga at the breast,
waited enough tables to be able to size
up what you wanted, everything you
wanted, with a glance, and never apolo-
gized. Nose-ringed. Silver-bangled. Car-
rying low, the way his wife had when she
was pregnant with their sons, the younger
of whom was now nearly old enough to
be drafted, but would never be, since he
was not Israeli but American. A boy: the
first time he saw her in the hall, the af-
ternoon he arrived from the airport, he’d
had the urge to offer her this bit of folksy
wisdom that older women had once be-
stowed on his young and pregnant wife,
but she’d passed right by him, used to
the constant stream of Americans strug-
gling with the lockbox of WOW! Super
Nice Apartment in the Heart of TLV.
A boy, he was sure of it. His wife, his
three children—he knew something of
these things. He wanted again to tell
her when he ran into her two days later
at the coffee kiosk around the corner,
there in the tree-lined median of the
boulevard. For a moment, bewitched by
the lack of boundaries that still surprised
him every time he returned to Tel Aviv,
he thought he might sit down across
from her and start a conversation. Maybe
she’d want to go with him to see a psy-
chic in Jaffa? Cohen, who was fifty-two,
didn’t believe, but there were things he
wanted to know. She’d probably have
no interest, knowing the future already,
being the future incarnate, with the vague
superpowers—technologically fostered,
but extending beyond technology’s
scope—that were the birthright of her
generation. He never found out, because,
talking into her cell phone as he stood
debating with his glass of tea, she looked
right through him.- He, too, had been looking right through
things. Off the Percocet and the Prozac
and down to only the occasional Xanax,
he had taken up microdosing psilocybin,
which wasn’t addictive, but he had come
to rely on it to soften things, to soften
him. To help him roll through the days,
to add color and texture. On the flight
to Tel Aviv, where he’d been sent, by the
company that had bought his company,
to do due diligence on the potential ac-
quisition of another company, he’d taken
what he thought was Ambien but turned
out—when the whorls of hair on the
man sitting next to him began to divulge
their cosmic secrets—to be MDMA,
which he’d put in the same pill bottle for
the purpose of camouflage at customs.
Did the man with the universe in his
hair know that he was on a plane? Cohen
felt the nearly irrepressible need to tell
him and tell him.
To Tel Aviv on business, and to give
his wife space, his wife, who, after
twenty-five years, might be leaving him.
Had betrayed him with a cardiac sur-
geon, that much was certain. A man
who cut open bodies and rearranged
the heart as needed, pulled more life
out of the muscle than it had been plan-
ning to give. The richness of it all was
not lost on Cohen. A heart surgeon!
The doctor’s own wife had died, and
after a sufficient period of mourning he
had joined a book club, run under the
auspices of the 92nd Street Y, and there,
where free bagels were served, he’d met
Cohen’s wife. At some point between
the last Philip Roth and the next-to-
last Amos Oz, Nadine had discovered
that the surgeon, despite his loss, could
achieve erection, which Cohen, con-
stricted and suppressed and limp from
pharmaceuticals, could not. Though still
he found—had always found—his wife’s
body to be beautiful. The way she moved
through a room crowded with people
could still arrest him. All that he held
against her was vast, immeasurable. But
now and always and still: her smell.
The space that had unfurled between
Cohen and his wife: half a world. And
between Cohen and his death: less than
half a life. And between Cohen and
Cohen something else had slipped in,
courtesy of the perspective of middle age:
a hand span of ironic distance. From time
to time, with enough psychedelics, he
even managed to see himself from above.- For four days, he had been meeting with
the heads of the small Israeli company
that had developed a facial-recognition
technology that drew on the technology
his previous company had developed be-
fore he and his partner had sold it—
cheaply, at an early stage, to a far larger
company. Cohen had gone to work for
the acquiring company as part of a vest-
ment schedule. In these past years, the
job had become a golden cage. It paid
well, if not extremely well—not the riches
he might pursue if he were daring enough
to try to start another company. But,
more insidiously, it was easy. He didn’t
have to work very hard to be seen as
doing a good job by people who didn’t
really understand what he did. Only
Cohen knew how little effort he was
making. Knew that his imagination was
drying up. That he was coloring inside
the lines, increasingly pragmatic about
what he could do, and less motivated to
think about what he might. Meanwhile,
he’d watched all the bold ideas he’d once
had get taken up by other companies
that were actually able to follow through
on them. Whereas there was very little
tangible evidence that Cohen had
achieved anything significant at the large
company where he now worked, cer-
tainly nothing that he could hang his
hat on outside it. Those within the com-
pany who had been impressed by his
early ideas and looked to him as a sort
of savant were fewer and fewer. Sure, he
had accomplished some small, incremen-
tal things, just enough to keep him from
entirely abandoning hope that his “ef-
forts” might ultimately amount to some-
thing. And this was sufficient to con-
vince him—even as his vague ambitions
were dissolving, and his expectations for
himself eroding, even as time was speed-
ing up—that he might not have it as
good somewhere else, and, in any case,
would have to work too hard to find out.
On Thursday, after a long day of
meetings, Cohen went out to have a
drink with Gal, who at thirty was the