The first siren went off and sucked the air out our lungs before we had a chance to order the bill. I had been in the middle of asking a question. There were beers, glasses of wine, half-eaten salads with bulgur wheat and cranberries. Grandpa Bob had taken a cab from his retirement home in Hertzliyah to meet us at a café, a small booth with outdoor seating beside a parking lot. When the first siren went off, he was telling a story about my grandma’s battle with leukemia in 1982. She experienced a small death before the final, irreversible one. She had slipped away, her heart coming to a full stop, and then filling back with life. In that brief slice of death, she said she floated out of her body and rose to a corner of the ceiling like a helium balloon. She could see and hear everything clearly—her own frail body, the doctors and nurses, the monotonous beep signaling her flatlining heart. It felt good up there, she said.
___
Sirens signal the end of reality, and the beginning of unreality. Nothing you see is believable. You beg yourself to wake up. Everyone around you is an absurd, badly portrayed character in your nightmare. So are you. You are certainly running like dream-you, which is to say, entirely not fast enough.
___
You should not hide under a car in case of a rocket barrage. I tried to squeeze myself under the hood of a blue Peugeot. The asphalt was still hot from the day. Grease dripped on my arm from the underbelly of the car. I wore a brand-new pair of black pants, which I haven’t worn since. Then Grandpa, who was flat on the ground beside me, announced he had to pee, right now. My brother kept his cool and escorted him to the stall in the tiny café. The rest of us held our heads between our arms and screamed. Fuck, we’re gonna die, I heard someone say. Even as you think your life is about to end, you can’t help but look up at the shower of lights overhead. Like fireworks, except without color. Missiles emit a whistling tone, which feels like a cliché invented by cartoons. Sometimes life does not imitate anything but itself, and you can’t outrun it. Then silence. Sirens are better than no sirens because they mean you still have time.
___
When you run so fast you start breathing daggers. When you run so fast you fear your sandals might get caught in a loose brick on the sidewalk, which might, on any other day, mean a bruised knee. Today might mean death. When you run so fast you squeeze your purse under your armpit, so you don’t lose your car keys. You don’t expect to think of such trivial things, but you do. How else will you ever get home?
___
Your dog’s unused poop bags are flying in the wind, as your brother-in-law runs, the old mutt cradled in his arms. You lost the plastic dispenser cap a couple of weeks ago, but it was never a problem until now. Finally, an apartment building with an underground stairwell. Will you shit yourself, or will you throw up—this is the question. The dog cries every time a rocket lands, like he does when he’s hungry or thirsty or wants to play. But you get used to the little earthquakes. They signal the end of something—the barrage, the round, or just the life of one poor rocket.
___
You don’t think of the person on the other side of the rocket, except after it lands. Then you hate them. They hate you too, for good reason. What is it they say about war? They say so many things. War is a game. War is an art. War is a crime, a trap, a failure of the imagination. A lie believed only by its perpetrators. War is a boy in Gaza. Sweatpants full of burn marks from the rockets that failed to ascend. A fresh haircut, a dusty pair of Reeboks. Trembling, scorched palms. Nails clipped and cleaned—his mother will have seen to that. His mother. You try to think of anyone but her, but it’s too late.
___
Sirens are deafening, by design. Stop talking, they say. Run, they say, and we listen. Sirens are a privilege. Sirens measure culpability. Sirens reverberate through the land, carrying all the things we can never outrun. Grandpa Bob never finished his story, and I never asked my question about how my grandma returned to her body. Or why. The conversation was doubly haunted—once by my grandma, once by the sirens.
