When the nicotine hits and he can speak again, he says, “True madness.” And then he says, “Why in the world do you think there’s a tunnel to Israel?”
“For the next war. The one that will surely come. I know that they’re there. And I know you’re the one who puts them there.”
The man goes to the door. He locks it and leans his back against it.
“Let us pretend,” he says, “that instead of a cigarette, it’s a gun that I dug out of that drawer.” Aiming the cigarette at the mapmaker’s face, he says, “Let’s act as if it’s a nine-millimeter pistol that I am pointing between your eyes.”
“All right,” the mapmaker says.
“Do you feel it?”
The mapmaker responds with a look, not daring to nod.
“Good,” he says. “Now, tell me. Is this some fake, double-cross-type fuckery that you bring us? Because I’ve let you into my home, and told you my business, and am now going to feed you the food I have so passionately prepared.”
The mapmaker, careful not to panic, and also careful not to insult by looking too calm, says, “This is a real and honest request.”
“Because the kind of thing you’re asking touches on some heavy, ordered from the top, paid for by Iran type of shit. These tunnels that don’t exist are as serious as things get.”
“What I ask is personal and private. I’m not trying to sneak out myself, or embark on a suicide mission. I am trying to see the woman I adore.”
“Don’t you know she must be a spy who wants to find the tunnel entrance and maybe kill you inside it?”
The mapmaker says, “I promise she isn’t,” which is far simpler, in the moment, than adding, “not anymore.”
“And you’re not ratting us out like Sheikh Yousef’s boy?” Here he spits on the floor, a curse on that turncoat.
“No,” the mapmaker says.
“To bring a Jew into the tunnels—a woman—it is the worst of their bogeyman fears.”
“Again, I’m not taking her anywhere. She, as much as me, wants to meet. We’d like to have dinner. To be in the same place, to touch.” It is as critical an instant as any he’d faced. How to say it, how to tell him, that she was the one for whom he hadn’t known he was waiting. That providence had made the least likely person the one he couldn’t live without. The mapmaker says, “I am a man trapped. And in love.”
His host, the mapmaker can see, can neither believe what he’s hearing nor what he is considering himself. For he shakes his head, and circles the room, he coughs again, and laughs again, and stops to size up the mapmaker more than once. He puffs at that cigarette and jabs a finger the mapmaker’s way.
“Okay,” he says. “Yes, all right. I’ll do it.”
“Okay? For real?”
He gives another giant, broad-bodied shrug.
“Who can fight love?”
2014, Black Site (near Tel Aviv)
The guard brings the prisoner his favorites, a falafel in a lafa, a bottle of Eagle Malt, and—an American treat—a bag of ice. He is hoping his prisoner will eat. The guard takes a second bottle from his backpack, this one vodka that he’d frozen. It pours like syrup into the paper cups.
While Prisoner Z sets up the board he says, “You’re really spoiling me today. Our best preholiday party yet.”
“There’s something else!” the guard says, excitement in his voice.
Prisoner Z smiles faintly, already knowing. Every gloomy year in that cell, the guard marks one of the three big holidays with a present. The same gift, every time.
The guard pulls it out, wrapped. Prisoner Z says thanks and sets it, in its festive paper, aside.
They play backgammon. They drink until they’re more or less soused. The prisoner acting as close to himself as he has in a while.
As the guard leaves, the prisoner asks, “Is it rude that I didn’t open it? I can open it in front of you if you want.”
“No, no. To open it will make us both shy.”
The guard tosses the trash in the plastic bag he’d brought the lafa in. He stows the vodka and the backgammon board in his knapsack and, reaching over to the peg by the shower, removes Prisoner Z’s worn robe.
“I’ll just take the old one,” he says, standing by the open door.
“Do,” Prisoner Z says. “And enjoy the holiday with your mother. I imagine I’ll be here when you get back.”
“I imagine so,” the guard says, and locks that heavy door behind him.
Feeling too tipsy to drive and with two more hours to his shift, he sits in the dark of the supply closet that has been, for all these years, his office.
He taps at his keyboard and moves around the mouse, choosing which of the pictures to enlarge.
It’s the camera over the entrance that offers the best angle. It’s as if the guard, himself, floats above the prisoner in the cell, staring down.
He watches his friend sitting alone on the bed. The way the prisoner’s shoulders are rolled forward, the guard wonders if the prisoner is quietly crying, or simply considering his toes.
Prisoner Z straightens up then. He reaches over and takes the package, in its jolly wrapping. He undoes the paper carefully, as if he might reuse it for someone else’s gift.
The guard can see that the prisoner is, for once, laughing. It is his annual robe.
Prisoner Z holds it up, a new color. He stands up, puts it on, and, pulling the two lapels closed, he reaches— Prisoner Z reaches down and reaches back, a habit with robes that he’s surprised he has not lost. Or is it that he subconsciously absorbed what he had not before consciously noticed, but—it cannot be.
The belt is on the robe. The belt is still there, hanging through its loops.
Prisoner Z first tries tying it loosely around his waist. He undoes the belt and reties it, more snugly.
He simply cannot imagine that the guard has forgotten.
The guard stays there, in the dark, at his desk and watches Prisoner Z tie and untie, tie and untie. And then slip the sash from its loops.
Prisoner Z holds it there, strung across both palms, its length hanging down on both sides.
The guard watches as the prisoner, his friend, slowly raises his eyes and looks right into the camera above the door. They know each other well.
From the guard’s perspective, it’s as if there’s nothing between them, no screen and no camera, no walls or metal doors, no numbers rolling and rolling in waves of code to build the picture that he sees. For the guard, it is simply and purely the prisoner looking up at him, mournful, staring right into his eyes.
It is a face of confusion, and a face of understanding. What the guard cannot tell is if it’s also a look of thanks.
But this the guard will leave for himself to wonder over. There are some things a friend should not see.
Easy as that, his prisoner steps toward the shower, into the one space to which the camera he monitors is blind. The guard does not change views. Instead, he reaches around to the backs of the displays and clicks them off for the first time in years. So rarely is this done, it is as if the devices themselves have their own capacity for shock. They make a sort of strange, crackling sigh as the electricity empties out.