Pressure Chamber, page 30
He feels wonderful.
He hasn’t felt so alive in a long time. He’s fulfilling his destiny. The bruises and abrasions he suffered during the interrogation no longer bother him, and the extra bags of blood for back-up that the police refused to send aren’t a source of concern either. Even his rage towards the Guardian has subsided to a level at which the ways he plans to end her life appear in his thoughts only every now and then and sometimes even include less painful methods.
The time has come.
He goes to the Laundry Room, folds a pile of dry white towels and takes them upstairs to the X-ray Room. Waiting for him there is the stainless-steel trolley, and he places the stack of towels on its surface and wheels it into the Images Room, humming a merry tune to himself.
* * *
The door to the Guardian’s room opens.
He says, “The usual drill.”
Lee is sitting on the floor with the babies and watches him throw the handcuffs onto the bed. She stands up and cuffs herself to the iron frame and watches as he wheels in the trolley. Two of the babies crawl quickly behind her towards the bed. A third remains playing on the blanket, and the fourth approaches him, following his every move with interest.
He places the towels neatly in the cupboard, replaces the full trash bag with a new one and loads a bag of laundry onto the trolley. After pushing the trolley out the door, he returns to pick up the baby who is following him.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s time.”
He leaves the room.
“Time for what?” she shouts in his wake.
He doesn’t respond.
Although she already knows that it’s hopeless, Lee lifts her hand and tugs at the handcuffs, rattling them in frustration.
He returns a moment later and picks up Rami.
“Where are you taking them?”
“To the Temple.”
She remembers the sign she saw in the hallway.
“What’s the Temple?” she asks. “What’s there? What are you going to do to them?”
But he’s already gone.
She stands up, grabs the bed frame with both hands and tries to drag it towards the door. But it’s impossible, the bed’s fixed to the floor. The handcuffs cut into her wrist, dotting the floor with drops of blood.
He returns to collect Shai. He, too, appears relaxed and curious. They aren’t afraid of him. On the contrary, his rare presence adds variety to their very limited world.
“What are you going to do with them?” She speaks firmly but doesn’t yell so as not to frighten the babies.
“Join them together. And you’re going to help me.”
He slams the door, and she sits down on the bed again. Yoavi, who is playing on the floor at her feet, smiles and reaches out to her. She leans over and lifts him with her one free arm. “It’ll be okay, sweetie,” she whispers into his soft hair.
He makes his way to the Temple with Shai in his hands, reciting to himself:
Then she shall remain in the blood of her purification for thirty-three days; she shall not touch any consecrated thing, nor enter the sanctuary until the days of her purification are completed.
After entering the Temple, he undresses the baby and places him in a chair in the hot tub, alongside the two others. Their chairs are tilted at a comfortable angle, allowing their entire bodies apart from their heads to be immersed in the warm water. The lights are dim, soft classical music is coming through the speakers and colorful shapes flicker on the four television screens. He gathers up the babies’ clothes and diapers into a trash bag and places it by the door, then undresses down to his white underpants.
Nor shall he go out of the sanctuary, nor profane the sanctuary of his God; for the consecration of the anointing oil of his God is on him: I am the Lord.
From the metal cabinet against the wall he retrieves a glass bottle filled with a yellowish liquid. He opens the cap and pours the liquid over his head. The oil drips down his body and he puts the bottle down and rubs it over his skin, his hands, face, neck, nape, chest, stomach, back, legs. He uses paper towels to wipe up the drops on the floor, before stuffing them, along with his clothes, into the trash bag. The Star of David and cross on his back glisten under the oil.
He goes back to the cabinet, retrieves two needles and sticks them into his hands. One in the center of his right hand, the other in his left. He pushes them through until their points emerge on the other side.
Pain.
He leaves the room and closes the door, the needles still embedded in his hands.
86.
We’re both jumping from one sofa to another and laughing. It’s night now and we’re in a closed branch of IKEA and it’s all ours. In the game we’re playing, you’re not allowed to touch the floor.
My friend leaps from a double bed and lands in a soft armchair and then we spring back and forth between two children’s beds with colorful bedspreads, jump our way to a large sofa and sit down on it, gasping for breath.
The lights in the store dim gradually and the white fluorescent glow turns into shades of a sunset. There’s a low resonant sound all around us. It reminds me of a place I’ve been to.
Safe and protected.
Makoto is sitting next to me. She turns to me.
“Want to go on a journey?”
“Yes!” I say.
We’re in a dark place. The floor is soft like wet clay. It’s warm, and the mud seeps between my bare toes. There’s a pleasant smell of smoke. I can’t see a thing.
“Are you here?” I call out.
“Yes.” I recognize the voice of Lee Ben-Ami.
“Yes.” Anat Aharon responds next.
“Let’s try to get out.”
There’s a noise above us. A kind of rolling thunder that doesn’t stop.
I stretch my arms out in front of me and feel my way through the darkness, walking slowly until I encounter a soft wall.
“I’ve found something!”
“Me too.”
“Me too.”
The three of us run our hands over the wall and look for something that will help us get out of there. I come across a handle and press down on it. A door opens and light streams in to reveal a large circular room. The wall around it is black and made of soft, thick fibers, and the floor is milky white. The sound of thunder outside is louder now with the door open. We leave the room and find ourselves standing in a warm pool of liquid.
The noise is very loud.
I look up to see a flame as high as a multi-story building. We’re standing on a giant candle. We’ve emerged from its hollow wick into the pool of molten wax around it. The flame is burning high a few yards above our heads and the noise drowns out all the other sounds around us. We’re hot but not too hot.
I watch Anat Aharon form a megaphone with her hands and yell: “This way!” I can barely hear her.
She starts walking towards the rim of the candle, and we follow.
We walk through the pool of wax for a few minutes before it gets shallower and we step out onto a firmer wax surface. We look up at the burning wick. Our legs are covered to above the knees in a layer of warm, white wax, and we stand there and peel it away.
We turn our backs to the flame and look out at the landscape before us, beyond the rim of the candle. We’re above the clouds. The sky is blue, and snowy mountain peaks rise up here and there among the clouds below us. The pillar of fire is at our backs.
Where do I begin?
A picture within
A picture within
A picture
Forever.
“Follow me.” Anat Aharon spreads her arms and dives over the edge.
And we follow.
Daphne’s phone rings. She reaches out and gropes her hand over the bedside table until she finds it.
“Hmmm.”
“Are you awake?” Rotem asks.
“Apparently so.” She twists her neck, turning her head to one side and then the other. “What’s the time?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“What day is it?”
“Saturday.”
“Ah.”
“Updates have come in.”
“On a Saturday morning?” She yawns.
“Yes, listen up, it’s interesting. Remember the printer you looked into? The one they told you was purchased originally for Home Front Command?”
“Initially for the Field Corps Command. And then given to Home Front Command.” She rubs her eyes.
“So last night, one of the police’s email accounts that I follow received a message with a report from the Standards Institute that says the concrete particles you sent them are very similar in composition to a concrete sample from a Home Front Command military bunker. I don’t expect anyone from the police to be reading the report before tomorrow morning.”
That’s it, Daphne is wide awake now. “How close is the match?”
“Almost identical. But they take into account the aging of the concrete in the structure, so it’s a match as far as they’re concerned, and they’ve stopped examining additional samples.”
“Well, that doesn’t really help. Do you know how many Home Front Command bunkers there are? And bomb shelters? And concrete basements? Every army base from Mount Hermon down to Eilat has one. It’ll take us a year just to get authorization to go into those places. I’ll check with Nathan tomorrow morning to see what we can do. Maybe the interior minister can fast-track the permits.”
“Or you could let me finish…” Rotem admonishes her.
“Okay, sorry, go on.”
“I’m on with the lab that’s testing the germ culture you sent them.”
Daphne frowns. “On with the lab?”
“Let’s just say connected to their computer network, and I can see they already have partial results that have yet to be sent to Investigations. They’re probably waiting for the final report before they send anything.”
“And...?”
“And there’s just about every germ and bacterium that exists in the universe more or less. An eight-page PDF file with names such as staphylococcus, cndida albicans, streptococcus, stenotrophomonas maltophilia, MRSA, you name it. A catalog of every bacterium on Earth.”
Daphne sits up. “He works in a hospital.”
“Exactly.”
Daphne stands up and start pacing the room. “In a hospital built with concrete that served the Home Front Command. The same contractor perhaps, the same construction company. I’ll tell Nathan to have a word with Investigations, get them to go through the files of employees at every hospital in the country. HR departments should be able to check out all their male staff members, who was absent from work while he was in custody. We have a picture of him, we have DNA. That’s great!”
“No.”
“What? Why?” Daphne asks.
“There’s no time. We need to act now. Get ready, I’m on my way. We’ll start with Beilinson. We’ll check in the order in which he took them from the four hospitals. My gut tells me he works at one of the hospitals. That’s where he got the idea from.”
“But you aren’t going to find anyone there from Human Resources on a Saturday morning. There are fewer workers on weekends in general.”
“We don’t need them. Things are sometimes simpler than they appear.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the entrance to each of the hospitals, at the guard station, you’re going to flash your police ID and then we’ll ask just one question.”
“What question?”
“Where’s the Home Front Command building?”
“You’re messing with me.” Daphne closes her room door, puts her phone on speaker and keeps talking while getting dressed.
“Every hospital is required to be prepared for an emergency situation. The Home Front Command and Medical Corps are jointly responsible. There are bunkers for treating large numbers of casualties, soldiers from the battlefront or from an aerial assault on the home front. These bunkers are stocked with medical equipment, generators, underground operating rooms, you know, all those optimistic things. Are you getting dressed?”
“Yes, yes.” Daphne puts on her blue police shirt.
“Dress in uniform and get one ready for me too.”
“Five minutes.”
Rotem hangs up. Daphne runs to the bathroom and does a reality check in front of the mirror. She’s awake. She quickly brushes her teeth and washes her face. Back in her room, she pins her metal name tag to her shirt and then prepares a uniform for Rotem.
87.
Lee’s wrist is bleeding, but she can’t bring herself to stop trying, in vain, to pull her hand through the hoop of the handcuff. She already knows how to get out of the room, but that’s no good to her with her wrist shackled to the bed. A fox, she thinks, would have already chewed its leg off.
She puts Yoavi on the floor and he begins to play with his tower of rings, smiling at her and babbling away. They’ve all learned to say “Lee”, or so she thinks. “Dada”, they could already say, without it meaning anything.
She knows he’ll want to eat soon. What’s she going to do?
Her thoughts are interrupted when the door to the room opens, revealing him standing there in just his underwear, anointed from head to toe in oil. She gasps. That’s it. He’s lost his mind completely. How’s she going to save herself? The babies?
“To maintain pure intellect, you need to turn off the body’s sensations. Arms and legs fixed together. Filtered feces. Water at body temperature. Chlorine and iodine in the water to prevent infection. Antibiotics into the bloodstream. From one to the other. Artery to artery. Vein to vein. A closed circuit, like with conjoined twins. One body with three brains. One heart composed of three hearts. Artery to artery. Vein to vein. Like hooking up a battery. Pure intellect. A superior entity. Three who are one. Combined heartbeats for a common bloodstream will also cause brains to vibrate at the same frequency. Brains that will never see the light of day but will create and build an entire world.”
She waits for him to finish his speech. She knows she must continue to cooperate with him.
She makes every effort not to scream and to speak calmly as she says, “It doesn’t make sense. You’ll kill them.”
“I won’t kill them. And you know that too. They have the same blood type. I’ll give them antibiotics to prevent infection. The water will be sterilized regularly. The power of three brains joined to one another. You don’t understand. You couldn’t understand. It came to her in the revelation, and she told me that morning, when she branded me with the sign. The mark. She told me word for word. Maintenance man. Carpenter. Messiah. She saw it when we were still in her womb. Before we were born. Before the sign. She saw them lying in the water, joined to one another for thirteen years. God’s voice told her. God himself. Thirteen years and then it will occur.”
“What will occur?”
“Let them be as a snail which melts away as it goes along, like the miscarriages of a woman which never see the sun.”
She looks at him and tries to diagnose his condition. He’s crazy, that’s for sure, but she wonders if he is experiencing a full psychotic episode now. He spreads his hands wide and she notices the needles through his hands.
“I need you to connect them. Your time has come. The Guardian. The time has come for you to fulfill your purpose.” His voice is the same as always, cold and impassive.
She says, “Okay, I’ll do it. You need to know how to get into a vein, particularly when dealing with such small ones. If you try it yourself, you’ll hurt them.”
He approaches her and opens the handcuffs. The sight of her bleeding wrist makes him smile.
“The agony of redemption, Guardian, the agony of redemption.”
As he turns towards the door, she launches herself at him.
He took the improvised knife from her a long time ago, and the cameras haven’t allowed her to make another one. But concealed in the waistband of her pants is a lid from a tin can. It, too, is a sharp piece of metal that can slash. It, too, is a weapon.
She leaps at him, aiming for his neck. He raises his arm to protect himself, but the piece of metal pierces his flesh with all the strength and rage she can muster.
88.
“There aren’t any bunkers at Mayanei Hayeshua.”
Sammy turns a key in the lock at the center of the door and then a different key in another lock below.
“There are two more big ones near here. One in Ichilov, which is relatively new, and one at Tel HaShomer, and the rest are scattered all over the country.”
1 – 9 – 6 – 8
He taps the numbers into the keypad and the door opens with a buzz.
Daphne says, “And this is manned here 24/7?”
“Negative. Eight to five, including weekends. I get here in the morning, check all the systems to ensure everything’s in working order. Check expiry dates on the kits, turn on a generator, dust. And the rest of the time, which is practically all the time, I read books, play on the computer and sleep. There’s a communications test at ten in the morning and that’s it, no one bothers me for the rest of the day. A dream job. I live really close by too,” he winks. “Come on, I’ll give you a guided tour.”
“Are you the only one with the dream job, or do others have it too?” Daphne asks as they’re going down the stairs.
“Just me.”
Daphne sees Rotem run her hand over the butt of the pistol that’s on her right hip.
“And what if you’re ill?” Daphne keeps questioning him as the three of them ascend the long staircase. Sammy leads the way, Daphne next to him and Rotem a few steps back, her eyes focused on Sammy for any suspicious movement.
“They’ll send someone from Command if it’s for more than a few days. It’s just an emergency bunker, not a Combat Ops Room.”
“And you’re a career soldier?”
“A civilian employee of the military. Up until a few years ago, they used soldiers, but the IDF started outsourcing. Like they did with all the army mess halls. Little by little, everything that doesn’t explode or get fired from a weapon has been shifted out for civilians to deal with.”
