Ruthi hovers over the General’s bed, pressing and pressing the call button and crying out, her voice rolling down the hall.
One of the useless schoolboy doctors is on night shift. He comes groggy from his cot, fast-walking down the corridor because doctors do not run. A pair of staff nurses trail him, and when they enter, Ruthi points to the General and says, “Look!”
The night nurse is up now, holding her cell phone in her hand, ready to summon the sons back to the room.
While Ruthi points, demanding of the physician that he do whatever it takes, all in attendance now look at her like she’s a madwoman. The doctor, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand, says, “There is no change.”
“He is dying,” Ruthi says. “It is happening now.”
She can tell from how they gawk at her. “How embarrassing,” “How pitiful” is what they all think.
As that baby doctor opens his mouth to placate Ruthi, to tell her to calm herself down, it is not the General but all his machines that suddenly wake up.
There are bells and whistles. There is a gaudy show of flashing numbers and spiking line, like a jackpot struck. The room awash with all that terrible information.
In the split second where thoughts turn to deed, all look to Ruthi.
Somehow, she’d caught it.
This woman. Astounding. How could she know?
2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)
It’s always worse after the weekends, with Prisoner Z acting hurt and abandoned, and the guard, feeling high-spirited and refreshed after some time at home, returning to face his prisoner and be reminded of how trapped they both are.
And now, it’s all that much harder.
The guard sets up the backgammon board on Prisoner Z’s bed, and Prisoner Z, starting right in on him, says, “You’re acting weird again. And don’t tell me you’re not. It’s been a solid week straight.”
“You’re projecting,” the guard says. “Because this place has made you insane, and you try and put it on me.”
Prisoner Z tilts his head and gives the guard his best stink-eyed look. He’s not buying it. He shrugs and goes over to his shelf. He pulls the letter he’s written the General from where it juts out of the pile of magazines.
He hands it to the guard, who puts it straight into his bag and, without looking up, shakes a die, tossing it to see who rolls first.
The guard throws a five, and Prisoner Z throws a six. But Prisoner Z, on the edge of the bed, sits still.
The guard, staring at the board so that he doesn’t have to look at Prisoner Z, holds out until he’s fully frustrated and then says, almost yelling, “There’s only one move to make. It’s a standard opening. I’ve seen you make it thousands of times.”
“Do you know how many times I’ve made it, exactly?”
“Please don’t freak me out with your crazy math,” the guard says, looking up. “Please, don’t tell me you remember exactly how many times you’ve had a six-five.”
“Nope, I don’t,” Prisoner Z says. “But I can tell you that the score is now 21,797 to 24,446. You’re making great strides. I have less than a three-thousand-game lead.”
Prisoner Z presses his eyes closed and, opening them, says, “If we play like seven and a quarter games a day, you could catch up in a year. But you’d have to win them all.”
“It’s terrifying when you do that.”
“All I’m saying is, it would be great to be tied again. I love it when we’re even.”
“It’s your obsession with being even that put you in here in the first place. Nothing is even. The world, that way, is not fair.”
Prisoner Z does not like this at all. Not the answer, and not the peculiar mode in which the guard is talking.
“You’re being philosophical,” Prisoner Z says. “Or your dum-dum’s version of it. And you can’t tell me I’m making it up. You only reflect in here when things are dire.”
Prisoner Z is stunned at the response he receives. He was poking about but did not expect to strike a chord.
The guard’s color drains, and Prisoner Z thinks, if someone walked in on them, they’d have trouble guessing who had last seen the light of day.
He reaches into his bag and takes out Prisoner Z’s letter. He places it on the board, between them.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” the guard says. “There has been a development.”
“In my case? With this extraordinary miscarriage of justice?”
“Sort of,” the guard says. “It’s about the General.”
“Did he finally answer one of my letters? Is that why you’re giving this one back?”
“He’s dead,” the guard says. “He died.”
“Who died?” Prisoner Z says, his tone completely flat.
“The General.”
“That would be something,” Prisoner Z says, and he closes those eyes again, trying to picture it.
“It is something. It’s happened.”
“Then tell me which of his endless enemies finally put a bullet in his big fat head? Was the assassin domestic or imported? Arab or Jew? I really can’t guess.”
“Not killed, just dead,” the guard says. “I’m not kidding. He passed away Sunday.”
Prisoner Z is staring at the guard, blank.
“This one?”
“The one before. It’s taken me a few days to get the courage up.”
This, it is a lot to process for Prisoner Z. It sounds like the guard is saying that the General, the one who locked him up and erased him, the only one who could bring him back into being and free him, is no longer.
“I don’t believe you,” Prisoner Z says, not wanting to believe.
The guard stays silent, which is its own sort of reply.
“Then what did he die of, if he’s dead and no one killed him?”
“Technically?”
“Why ‘technically’?”
“He died of complications of a stroke.”
“He had a stroke? How do you not tell me that the only one who knows I’m here had a stroke?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Well, when did he have it?”
“Earlier.”
“What are you saying? Was it in the papers? Did regular people know? Or is this something your mother told you during pillow talk?”
“Fuck you,” the guard says. “And, yes, the stroke was in the papers.”
“Fuck,” Prisoner Z says. “Fuck, fuck.” Then, with his eyes full of water, and looking right at the guard, intimate, “When?”
“When was the article?”
“The stroke. When did he have the stroke?”
Here the guard gets up and, in a very Prisoner Z–like way, paces nervously in the cell. When the guard stops, he has his eyes down to the floor and scratches at a spot that isn’t there with his toe.
Prisoner Z has never seen anything like this from him before. A completely new action he’s never cataloged in all these years.
Again, Prisoner Z asks, “When did he have this stroke?”
The guard steels himself. He looks into the prisoner’s eyes with real love. He’d honestly just been trying to protect him.
“In 2005. Late December, I’d guess. Really, the big one, it was 2006. It sort of all happened right before and right after Sylvester.”
“What?”
“Eight years ago. The big one, right after the New Year.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“I mean, you’re kidding me,” Prisoner Z says. “You have to be kidding.”
“He’s been in a coma.”