29
Time’s Arrow–Every Second Counts. But when I returned to work it just somehow didn’t any more. Jimmy called me into his office for a welcome-back pep-talk. ‘How you doing, CrocAttack?’ ‘OK.’ ‘You look tired.’ ‘Yes, a little…it’s OK.’ A silence. ‘So! Back with us again!’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Good. Get back into things at your own pace, but not a too-slow pace, if you know what I mean.’ ‘Yeah. How was the Brussels trip?’ ‘It didn’t work out in the end. They put us back to next week when we were already in the departure lounge. Time-wasters. But you’ll be joining us, right?’
‘Sure I will,’ I said, disappointed. There didn’t seem to be much more to say, so I got up to go.
‘Oh, and, uh, by the way, Croc…’ I looked back at Jimmy, who was blinking and running his hand over his lustrous head. ‘You will be happy to know that I contributed my part in removing the…problem that…uh…’ He blinked again. As I said, Jimmy had started out in the Time Management Unit of the air force. He’d helped coordinate the bombing of the nuclear plant in Iraq and various air force raids on Lebanon, and he was still occasionally called up for one-day reserve duty. Then the day after, you’d read in the paper that the air force had carried out a targeted assassination. I think he was trying to tell me that he was on duty when they assassinated that guy in Ramallah, the commander of the terrorist group. But Hamas said that the Café Europa bombing had been carried out in revenge for the assassination. So thanks, Jimmy, for your contribution.
Work was no different from the rest of the country in that I was the object of plenty of attention. There were 463 emails in my inbox to deal with or delete, long chats in the corridors, longer phone calls, endless retellings of my synopsis of what had happened. I told Jimmy I was willing to go to Brussels only if I could be back home by Wednesday. We went to Belgium, then to France, with the desperate Yoash, but the nights in Europe were no better than those in Israel. I did my best to work. I wrote a presentation about an accelerating world, about pre-worn jeans and superfast toasters and about fast talk, blah blah blah. (People generally talk at 150 words per minute but the human ear can decipher 600 wpm. All Time’s Arrow’s answering messages run at around 450 wpm, which people like–they hate slow and option-infested messages.) I used to make a presentation in an hour; two tops. Now it took me a day and a half–including seven cigarette breaks, three cold-water face-washes, an hour’s rest with closed eyes on the sofa in the fun room and quite a lot of directionless wandering between rooms. Bar sent me some new numerologies: Croc = attack yesterday. Croc = sole explosion in mall. And the one he shouldn’t have sent me: Croc = huge attack coming.
One day Jimmy phoned me from the meeting room. ‘Come over here a moment, Croc,’ he boomed, his voice simultaneously audible in receiver and corridor, ‘I want you to meet Roy.’ When I entered, Jimmy gestured towards a guy wearing a skirt: ‘Roy Abramov, a young talented designer, the new star from Bezalel College of Design. He did the poster for Israel’s Jubilee, if you remember.’ I didn’t. ‘Roy, this is Croc, from Sales. Croc…Attack!’ He shot the word ‘attack’ out explosively, as he’d already done a couple of times since I’d come back. No one had ever been scared, or laughed. To be fair to Jimmy, you had to say he was persistent. Also present were a couple of guys from Marketing, Noga and Jeremiah (or ‘The Prophet Jeremiah’ to me).
‘So we’ve been thinking about a new company logo. Roy, show the Croc the options.’ The stare I gave Jimmy slipped over his oiled head like water: I hated these balls-aching marketing discussions. There was this one time when the telecoms giant Bezeq had asked us to come up with a number for their new directory enquiries service. The number was supposed to somehow get across the message that the new service would be quicker and cheaper than the old 144. ‘Let’s do 77–half the time, half the money,’ said Jimmy. ‘Brilliant,’ said the product manager from Bezeq, and everyone agreed. But then someone pointed out that 77 was not half of 144. ‘Half of 144 is 73.5.’ Foreheads were wrinkled, biros were chewed, low whistles were whistled. A problem. 735 now became the leading contender, but it somehow just didn’t sound right. Jimmy called Talia Tenne to canvass opinion. Talia said, ‘Tell me, are you all out of your minds? Half of 144 is 72!’ Eventually they decided on 122. The service still isn’t operational.
The designer had a number of mock-ups of our new logo. ‘The arrow is movement, movement of time, the arrow of time,’ he said, glancing at Jimmy, who nodded with satisfaction. ‘The circle,’ which he made with his hands, ‘is like harnessing the arrow, it is the company, the organisation, the order behind things. We have a conflict here, going forward…’ ‘Running forward!’ thundered Jimmy. ‘OK…running forward, together with order, discipline, responsibility. The circle is also identified with a clock, of course…That’s the basic principle. You can play variations on the arrows, the colours, the shapes and the directions.’
For this they pay thousands of dollars. For some star from Bezalel to waft in in a skirt and state the blindingly obvious. ‘I want the logo to be a globally identifiable design meme,’ said Jimmy, ‘like the Nike Swoosh, like Intel, Microsoft, Apple.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Every human being on Earth is a sales target for them. We’re not like that.’
‘We’re the twenty-first-century Fed-Ex,’ Jimmy intoned.
‘The arrow turns left,’ said The Prophet Jeremiah. ‘We might have a problem with the political connotations.’
‘Well, it can always turn right,’ said the designer, demonstrating. Noga pounced on a design with an arrow pointing upwards, but it was green on a red background.
‘No. Too like the Delek logo…’
‘If anything, the Palestinian flag.’
‘So, blue and white?’
‘Don’t want to be identified with Israel too much.’
‘Red and blue?’
‘Not too American?’
‘Red and white?’
‘God, no, Hapoel Tel Aviv.’
‘Red is hot,’ said Roy. ‘And green is young. Maybe stay with it after all?’ His eyebrows went up and stayed up throughout the ensuing silence.
‘Maybe we’ll call Talia Tenne,’ Jimmy said.
But Time’s Arrow had bigger problems. The situation was to blame, and the business plan, and the management method, and the unplanned investments, and the Indians in the call centres. When problems start, it’s easy to find reasons. We weren’t selling the product to enough customers, and those who were buying weren’t paying enough. When the representative of the Venture Capital Fund told us in a meeting that the Fund believed in the company, and would back it whatever happened, we knew for sure that the shit had hit the fan and the investors were losing patience.
The first round of dismissals came about two months after I returned. Jimmy called me into his office and stared at the sea through the window. ‘You’re staying, Croc, but I’ll be frank. Since the attacks, your productivity has gone down the drain, your motivation is on the rocks. Every second doesn’t count for you any more: you arrive later and leave earlier, and what you do in between…it’s not the Croc I used to know three, four months ago, or even two years ago. But…’ He turned from the window and sat down. ‘I understand. You’ve been through a very difficult experience. Plus there’s this fame stuff. Time’s Arrow can’t afford newspaper headlines saying that the CrocAttack was fired. But I’m asking you: pull yourself together, because nothing is safe any more.’ You don’t say, I thought. ‘For a start,’ he said, flapping a bitter hand at the view of the glittering Mediterranean, the beaches, the city, the three helicopters heading low above the shoreline, south towards Gaza, ‘say goodbye to all of this, because we’re moving to Rosh Haayin.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t tell anyone yet.’
Ron and Ronen were stunned. Three minutes later Talia Tenne burst through the cloudy glass door and asked with shining eyes whether the rumour was true. ‘We don’t know anything about rumours,’ said Ronen. She looked at him furiously, sat on an empty chair between the three of us, and stared us out using her pretty eyes until we cracked. ‘I’ll kill you if it leaves this room,’ I said. ‘Obviously.’ She smiled her sweetest smile. Ten minutes later Bar sent the numerologies: ‘Rosh Haayin = bad for Time’s Arrow’ or ‘Rosh Haayin = international future for Time’s Arrow’, whatever we chose.
Jimmy was right. I wasn’t doing my job very well. I couldn’t care about another sales presentation, another meeting summary, another two-day trip to Europe with non-stop work on the plane: flying, landing, taxi, identical hotel room, identical meeting room, identical dinner, identical porn, identical breakfast. Since the euro had come in I couldn’t tell the difference between the countries: everybody spoke English with the same accent. After sleepless nights, it was a real effort to clear the fog and think logically. My work hours were still long but I worked much less. I frittered away time in the smoking corner, I fell asleep on the sofa, I found myself on Ynet, porn sites, gunning down Danish drug dealers on gaming sites, I spent a third of my day making coffee on the espresso machine or compulsively scoffing pretzels and biscuits while chatting to whoever was in the kitchen. I wasn’t really interested in the Austrian telecoms company that wanted to improve its directory enquiries service, or in saving half a second per call in Spain or in real-time solutions, server efficiency, long, wide and flat databases, probability-based algorithms, voice recognition upgrades, interfacing, sockets, schmockets, websphere voice response, killer apps, blah blah blah blah blahhhh. Time’s Arrow continued to streak into the future, but I wasn’t on it any more.
We moved to a modern building in the business park in Rosh Haayin, an ugly little town twenty kilometres east of Tel Aviv. Duchi and I bought a clapped-out Peugeot 206 for twenty thousand shekels–Duchi continued driving the Time’s Arrow Polo and I drove the Peugeot though she was only driving to Ramat Gan and I had to get to Rosh Haayin. She was a lawyer halfway through a lucrative trial and I was just a failing salesman in a start-up company. I drove every morning (‘against the traffic, against the traffic!’ crowed Jimmy with such delight that he almost sold us on the virtues of not working in the centre of Tel Aviv) to our offices on the second floor of a three-storey building populated by start-up companies in various degrees of trouble.
Lunch consisted of hummus, stuffed vegetables or pasta served ‘à la mode Rosh Haayin’, which, Talia Tenne assured us, would one day soon be nationally renowned. Instead of espresso bars and sushi, street food, beans and rice and stews from Shabazi and Shimson Absolino’s; instead of the Mediterranean, the arid hills of Samaria. The guards at the entrance to the Dizengoff Centre were replaced by a razor-wire fence and the quasi-military park security; the sounds of the city with the calls of the muezzin, or, in the evenings, shooting from the direction of the territories. A single melancholy table-football table replaced the fun room and our designer kitchen became a nook with a microwave, a fridge and a kettle. Economy waffles stood in for organic brownies from the bakery. Cheap veneered MDF replaced clouded-glass doors and silvery steel tables. Colour disappeared from the walls and from people’s faces. Ronen and others left. Eight workers were dismissed, including Shoko from IT Support and Noga from Marketing.
The last time I’d thought about Giora had been beside Shuli’s bed, when his father had asked again what he’d been doing in Tel Aviv on the morning of his death. The PalmPilot, which I’d been going to start solving this mystery with, had perished in Café Europa. If the Palm doesn’t exist, I thought, neither does Giora: there was nothing to be done. But when I tried to connect my computer to the network in Rosh Haayin there was a problem with Outlook. I reinstalled the program, and when I did that, it asked which user I would like to choose. Two options: Croc or Guetta.
And then it hit me–the day after the first attack, before heading out to Jerusalem, I’d synchronised Giora’s Palm to my computer. The aluminium and silicon bowels of my computer contained all the details of his life.
Croc or Guetta?
I sat in front of the screen with my mouse in my hand, and thought about the options. Choose my name and continue with my life or choose Guetta, the stranger with honey-coloured hair and mirrored shades who, by exchanging a couple of words with me, had sent me to Jerusalem, to Shaar Hagai and Café Europa, to a funeral, to the bedside of a girl I was half in love with. Deep inside, I felt that somehow this was a sign that Shuli would wake from her coma. Didn’t this little coincidence compel me to try to find the answer for her as a present on her return to life? That was why–along with nosiness, voyeurism, a sense of adventure, and other reasons which all helped to obscure the fact that perhaps it really didn’t matter any more–I chose Guetta. Click. There he was.