56 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
oldest of the founders of the Israeli com-
pany, and the most brilliant. Things
were looking good, Cohen told him, he
would send back a positive report. He
expected Gal to be excited by this news,
but the younger man remained reserved
and thoughtful. He had hair the color
of the desert, watery blue eyes, and an
occasional stutter that he mostly man-
aged to suppress but that some part of
Cohen—the part that was
the victim of his own feats
of suppression—inwardly
rooted for, feeling a charge
of joy whenever the conver-
sation came to a sudden halt,
caught in the jaws of the
wild beast that wished to
wrestle the word away from
Gal. Cohen saw in the
younger man something of
the talent he’d once had, but
it was this private, internal conflict that
Gal had no choice but to publicly en-
dure that most warmed Cohen to him.
The bar was on a rooftop, and in the
distance, between the pale-yellow build-
ings, was a slice of the sea. The sun was
going down, and the light grew soft and
resplendent. Gal was expecting his first
child in three months, and Cohen re-
galed him with charming anecdotes
about his own children’s early years, omit-
ting the difficult parts. He was older, he
had already gone much farther down
the road in life, and he felt the urge to
reassure the younger man about the view
from where he was, about the solidity
of early promise. Twisting in his seat, he
waved the waitress down and ordered
another round of drinks. As he raised
his glass, he almost had faith in what he
was peddling, and it was only out of the
corner of his eye that he caught a flash
of the sword that swung above him.
Friday morning Cohen e-mailed his re-
port, and at midday, the city slowing
down for Shabbat, his depression catch-
ing up to him, he nibbled at a golden
hunk of psilocybin he had got from Gal—
been gifted by Gal, as he’d heard the young
people say—and went to walk on the
beach. And there it was, all over again:
the bright, pellucid beauty of the world.
The sun’s warmth on his skin, as if for
the first time. All the anxiety dried up,
replaced by the peace that had presup-
posed everything, which sobriety always
obscured. Hours passed. Cohen, feet in
the shallow water, lost his intimacy with
failure. The red sun began to sink into
the sea. Cohen lost himself, too, in rev-
erie; the exquisite, intricate order of
things, and the things behind things, and
the non-things, the interconnectedness
of it all, the goodness, was so breathtak-
ing that tears filled his eyes. In that vast
order he, too, had a place;
he was woven into it. No, he
was not lost; on the contrary,
he would be shown the way
if he only opened himself to
the signs.
Lying on his back on the
warm sand, swan-diving in-
ward, he didn’t notice when
his bag was lifted by a quick
and graceful man who’d been
watching him from the break
wall. When Cohen at last opened his
eyes, there was only a concave dent in
the sand where the bag had been. Money
gone, keys. His cell phone was in his
pocket, but, after powering it back on,
he could not think of whom to call. In
the cruddy mirror of the bathroom at
Banana Beach, he saw his pale and sweaty
face, his crazed hair. The hair he still had,
because the men in his family never lost
their hair. That much he was keeping.- He let himself into the building with
the code. In the darkened lobby, his
phone screen glowing, he searched for
the e-mail chain that would allow him
to contact Hila, his Airbnb host, for a
spare set of keys. He was drifting down,
languid, exhaustion creeping into his
limbs. Climbing the stairs, he took for-
ever. He thought of knocking on the
pregnant woman’s door, to ask if he could
wait inside until he heard back from
Hila. Would her husband be home? Her
boyfriend, whatever: the father. Cohen
had seen him, too. As young as she, but
lacking her presence and beauty. Soon
to lose his hair, Cohen had noted. He
approached their door, stickered with
millennial crap—music shows, pole
dancing, Japanese anime—and was about
to bring his knuckles down when he
discovered a photo of the couple taped
there in the middle. Cohen studied it,
studied her face softened by pastel des-
ert light, and dropped his fist. Turning,
he caught sight of the metal door to the
mamak, with its signage for three or four
kinds of disaster. He pulled it open and
breezed in. Hard, dusty mats lay rolled
in a corner, as if waiting for him. The
tiny, impeccable justices of the world.
He unrolled one and lay down, and with
a last thought of Nadine’s face—her face
as it had looked reflected in the win-
dow that evening two months earlier,
when he’d come upon her speaking to
her lover on the phone—he drifted off.- Woken, or half woken, by—a scream?
A siren? In his fantasia, Cohen imag-
ined missiles, anti-missiles. He sat up,
rubbing his eyes. Staggering to the door,
he opened it and found her leaning on
the railing, cursing, digging through her
bag. Her gray sweatpants were stained
black in the crotch and down one leg.
He tried to ask if she was all right. Bathed
in vague confusion, he wanted to ask if
what he had heard was a missile, but
reading her face he had the wherewithal
to grasp that it would not be a welcome
question. She had been in bed, she ex-
plained in heavily accented English. And
when she turned she felt something pop
in her pelvis, and the rush of fluid down
her leg. Cohen thought he heard an-
other blast, though it might have been
construction work outside, or a pure
product of his mind, freshly returned
from alternate realities. She exclaimed
in Hebrew, threw up her hands, and
dropped her phone. Cohen watched as
it bounced, as if in slow motion, and the
screen shattered. He rubbed his face,
trying to smear away what was left of
his high. He tried to focus. Tried to re-
member the protocol. To remember what
he had done right, if he had done any-
thing right, when his wife had gone into
labor. Quickly—was it quickly?—he un-
rolled another mat and she eased her-
self down onto her back, the dome of
her belly pulsing, enormous.
He thought the other neighbors
might arrive, but none came. Only the
contractions, like a tsunami. It had hap-
pened like that with Jack, their third
child. They had got into the taxi and
by the time they were pulling up to the
emergency room the baby was crown-
ing. Cohen had barely been able to keep
up with the medics as they swept his
wife away. But the truth was that al-