I head to the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror, I survey the beard. Something isn’t right. I pinch a strand of hair, and pull.
My eyes widen.
The strand stretches out the distance of my finger.
I let go of the strand. The hair snaps back into place.
A cold feeling blooms in my chest.
I pinch and pull again. I peer into the follicles of my chin. They’re spaced apart, too far apart to make a genuine goatee. It never filled in after all, the hairs just twined together to create the illusion of a luscious beard. But I haven’t grown a beard. I’ve grown a clump.
I open the medicine cabinet. Behind a tube of Voltaren, and a half-full jar of Tiger Balm, lie a pair of scissors. I grab them. With my free hand, I grasp the entire goatee, and pull.
Snip.
Snip.
Snip.
Weeks of work and millennia of heritage tumble down my shirt and onto the white countertop.
When it’s done, I stare into the mirror. My face is bare. It’s the face of a twenty-three-year-old man-child. No job. No money. No way out.
My chin feels cold.
Homicidal Stranger
Larissa Ho
Lon, the psychologist, leads me out of his office and back to my hospital room.
“Don’t forget to fill out the questionnaire, Larissa,” he says in his soft voice.
“Take care.”
“Thanks.”
I share my room with a girl named Fiona. She’s on the bed when I arrive at our room. Her face is haggard, and she stares at the chipped white wall across from her.
“Hey,” she says when I come in. She looks at the questionnaire I have in my hand. “Homework?”
“Mhmm.” I toss the questionnaire at the foot of the bed and I fling myself onto it, face down.
I hear them before I see them pass by the open doorway—four patients who are always together, laughing. I wonder what’s so funny. There’s not much to laugh about in a mental health unit.
“You know the guy in the red shirt?” says Fiona.
“Yeah. The one with the ripped jeans?”
“Exactly. His name is Ahmaad,” she says in a low voice. “He’s suicidal, homicidal, and violent. But you didn’t hear it from me.”
“I see,” I say, though I really don’t. What is the point of telling me how homicidal he is? I know Fiona has good intentions, but she has no idea how much Ahmaad, a guy who probably sees no point in living, scares me. He would most likely not hesitate to slit my throat if I were to step on his toes.
In the group discussions, I watch Ahmaad when he’s not looking. His right leg shakes up and down and up and down and he stares at the rips in his jeans, his head bowed. The other three boys—Evan, Harry, and Oscar—all have their own troubles, too. They are deep in thought all the time. Their faces are blank, like they’re not all there. They’re probably so medicated they don’t even know what they’re thinking half the time. Maybe all the time.
Alistair became a patient at the hospital three days ago. He follows the pack around everywhere. He talks about his grandma, about how she’s sick in a hospital in Milton. He laughs whenever Oscar swears. It sounds forced and unsure.
At lunch, we sit at the long tables in the dining area. Today’s meal is rice and beans, minestrone soup, crackers, and apple juice. I think of my father’s cooking.
The four boys—Ahmaad, Oscar, Evan, and Harry—are late to lunch. They only sit down after everyone else is done. I am still at the table when they arrive.
Just the sight of them makes me feel depressed. Depression is contagious, I’ve found. When one person has it, everyone feels it. I believe that when people are compassionate they can’t help feel depressed when others do.
I like to think I’m compassionate. This is the reason, I tell myself, that I feel so depressed looking at these four boys, especially Ahmaad, whose drooping head can’t raise itself high enough to look anyone in the eye, even his little group of friends.
They sit down a few chairs away from me. They scrape their chairs on the floor and bang their trays on the table.
“I knew it,” says Evan. “I knew it the moment I looked at him…”
“How can you tell someone is gay by looking at them?” says Ahmaad. His fat fingers grab the crackers off Oscar’s tray. “How was I supposed to know he was a faggot?”
I listen to them talk and drink my minestrone soup.
When I finish the soup, I get up, go to the recreation room, pick up the phone that sits on the table for the patients to call and receive calls, and dial my home number.
She picks up on the third ring.
“Mama.”
“Yes? Is everything okay?”
“Yes. Everything’s fine. I just want to come home.”
“I know… But you have to stay. You have to get better.”
“Mhm… Just another day. And then I’m coming home after that, okay?”
“No. You’ll come home when the doctor says you’re ready,” she says. “We need you to follow the doctor’s orders. He knows better than we do what’s best for you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything else?”
I pause. Then I say, “Yeah, can you call the nursing station and tell the nurse there that I want to talk to her? Alone?”
“Why?”
“I just want to talk to her.”
“Okay. I’ll call right now.”
“Thank you. Bye.”
I hang up the phone. I ignore everyone who passes by me as I return to my room. I sit on the bed and draw the blanket around me. This place is so cold.
I hear footsteps.
“Larissa? Are you okay, sweetie?”
It’s Dana, one of four nurses on duty today. I like her. She’s got tall studded black boots on, curly hair piled high like a mountaintop sitting on her head, and long dangly earrings. She sits at the chair beside my bed.
“Hi Dana.”
“Your mom just called and told me you want to talk to me. Is everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“What’s bothering you, hun?”
“I heard Ahmaad, Evan, Harry, and Oscar talking at the dining table.”
Her brow furrows. “Okay…”
“I heard them say they’re having sex with each other in their room at night.”
She looks shocked. “Oh no, dear! They’re not. Trust me, the nurses would know if they were. Don’t worry about that.”
“I know, but they’re telling Alistair that they are.”
She looks puzzled.
“Don’t worry, honey, I promise you that the nurses know exactly what each of you are doing at every hour of the night. We check up on you guys… Sweetie, you have to remember where you are. These people are not the kinds of people you’re used to. But you’re a strong girl and you’ll be fine.”
“I’m not worried about that, exactly,” I say. “It’s just that when they were talking about Alistair, something seemed wrong. I just got this bad feeling…” I clench the blanket around me closer, trying to figure it out.
“What bad feeling, honey? What seemed wrong?”
“They’re ganging up on him...” I think back to what they said and then I start to understand. “Yeah, they’re telling him they’re having an orgy in their room after the lights are out for the night!”
She stares at me, uncomprehending.
“They’re bullying him, Dana!” I say. “They’re teasing him because he’s gay.”
Her face changes.
“Is there anything you can do to stop it?” I ask. “He doesn’t know they’re lying. They’re teasing him by telling him all the stuff they’re doing in their room at night after the lights are out for the night. Is there anything you can do?”
Dana sets her mouth into a line.
“Yes, I’ll take care of this,” she says. “Don’t worry about a thing, sweetheart, and I won’t let them know it was you who told me.”
“Thank y
ou, Dana.”
She gets up. To my surprise, she gives me a kiss on the forehead.
“You’ve done the right thing, Larissa. Now get some rest.”
She leaves. I bury myself deep under the blanket that my aunt brought me from home. I try to fall asleep, but I can’t get those four guys out of my head.
Later that night, I dream that Ahmaad, Oscar, Harry, and Evan sneak out of their room, get past the nursing station and past Fiona’s bed.
They get to me. They try to drag me by my hair out of my bed, pull me up by my arms and pick me up and carry me out to the nursing station. I shriek and call for my father. They set me in front of all the patients, the doctors, the nurses, and my family and friends from school. They stand around looking at me. They whisper, “It’s really too bad. She was just trying to do the right thing.”
Ahmaad takes a knife out of his pocket and stabs me in the chest, over and over again. I look down at my hands, see dark blood, and sink to the floor in a widening pool of it.
When I wake up from my dream, I bite my fingers so I won’t scream.
Minor Benefactors
Luke Sawczak
The first time I come down from the mountain is to make a journey to Bethlehem by bus. I got the idea when I read about King David and realized I hadn’t been anywhere in this holy country. So I leave the residence. I cross through the Student Village, past three shrubby little gardens each with its name on a plaque, the name of some minor benefactor of the Diaspora, mauve hoses snaking through them to keep them alive. I walk through the garbage road to the Arab buses, and sail to Bethlehem. A Palestinian taxi driver and I end up eating knaffa together—hot, sweet dough and melting white cheese.
A few days later is the first time we go to the Old City, a family of roommates minus Lyera. We enter by a gate we did not intend: the Lions’ Gate, beside Temple Mount. I have seen the walls of this place from a distance: massive blocks in massive stacks with battlements to crown them. Where the ground is uneven, beige rock strata jut out to interrupt the wall for a space, rocks covered in golden fur. Seoren says it looks like Disneyland.
On the inside I grant it does. We dodge cars heading through the Lions’ Gate. Seoren reads the Arabic plaque inside the gate: “It’s not the same, guys,” he reports. “It says ‘Warrior Gate’.” The narrow street is walled, and windows stand in the walls. Someone guesses that they’re residences, but no doors are visible.
Seoren and I go in search of the Armenian Quarter. There are big old cobblestones underfoot we keep nearly slipping on. The walls of the buildings grow higher, the alley narrower.
The first door we find is St. Someone’s Greek Catholic recess, but you have to pay to get in, so we move on. The next is a little Greek Orthodox joint built into the wall, the site, says a sign, of Jesus’s imprisonment before Pilate. A tour group bustles past us and in, and a black-frocked priest receives them.
Seoren and I peek in: in the middle, a set of stairs ascending to somewhere flooded with natural light; on its left flank, a set descending to a heavy small door. Over the first set hangs a sign reading NO ENTRANCE, so we go down the stairs on the left, but a priest approaches us from behind to tell us if we are not Greek we cannot enter. We are hustled out the door, and I look over my shoulder to see a boy slipping in behind us, not more than eleven, carrying a bicycle on his shoulders like a cross; he climbs up the middle set of stairs beneath NO ENTRANCE. Seoren directs my attention to a woman sitting on a step smoking.
Eventually we come to some signs marking the Stations of the Cross, so we follow them. “I can’t believe they turned us away,” Seoren says in his Persian accent. “Not Greek? What is this?”
We keep walking. By and by we get lost: the streets make sharp turns and twist into funny little squares and long sets of steps heading up, up, to who knows where. On one of them a car is parked, back tires on one step and front tires on another. The roadway buckles and unbuckles, adopts roofs and disowns them. Finally we start to see manned stalls and tables, most with fridges of Coke and XL Energy Drink.
At one of them a man in Western attire is selling daggers. I pick up a knife-sized box with the Himalayas painted on and something scribbled over in black marker.
“A hundred and twenty shekels,” says the man. A hundred and twenty? That sounds like a lot…
I pick a number: “I wouldn’t pay more than forty for this.”
He hesitates. His eyebrows manoeuver around his face. “How much more than forty you have?”
“Sorry, but not more than forty. Look at the box,” I say. “We can clearly get this anywhere.” That’s probably true.
“More than forty.”
Seoren steps in. “He only brought forty,” he lies. The man looks at Seoren and, only vaguely interested in the dagger, I take the chance to walk away up the long steps. Seoren follows.
My first haggling experience, I think. Maybe next time I should be more conservative. They just won’t sell if you go too low. I pull my map out of my pocket and study the close-up of the Old City. Seoren looks up at a sign in Arabic and tries to figure out where we are. If we can only get to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we might from there find a way to the Armenian Quarter…
“Okay, guys, guys,” says a voice suddenly. The man is running up the steps after us. “You buy for forty or not?”
A few minutes later, Seoren and I meet the rest of our makeshift family by chance at a falafel restaurant. We all sit down to eat, except I’m not hungry. I show them the box. Somehow they’ve seen several corners of the Old City, and they weren’t even trying to get anywhere in particular.
*
The Star of David has to be gold, says my grandma. She could just buy one in Canada, but she wants “the real thing”, made in Jerusalem. I’ve put it off for weeks, but one day after eating hummus in the Jewish Quarter with my Biblical Hebrew class I find myself on Chain Street, the street of jewellers. So I go hunting for the star.
Once again I have to haggle, but this time it won’t be so easy. I’m alone, for one thing. And I have to guess what my grandma likes. I don’t even have a clue how to tell real gold from fake. There’s competition on every side, hungry eyes wanting me to buy their wares: thousands upon thousands of trinkets sit on floors, sit on shelves, hang from ceilings; uncountable rosaries and crosses, bulk candies and Stars of David, kippehs and carven cats, chains of silver and fridges of Coke, twisted plastics and sunglasses, shirts with pro-Israel, anti-Israel Defence Forces slogans, all shining and gleaming and looking to be overpaid for.
I make my way to the shade under the overhang at the top of the street, and on an impulse step inside a shop where a hefty bald jeweller stands behind a counter, chewing a strange fruit, rows of gold objects pinned to the wall behind him. “I’m looking for a gold Star of David,” I say.
“My friend, my friend,” he replies, “I have many Stars of David.” He gestures to one of the rows on the wall. I study it.
“Are they pure gold?” I reluctantly ask.
“Pure gold?” he says. “My friend, my friend, I don’t have gold always!”
I stare at him in bewilderment.
“Okay,” he sighs, “wait here, my friend, I will get some.” First he scribbles his name and address on a business card for me in case I escape, then he huffs out of his store, over to some neighbour, leaving me alone with his strange fruits and fake gold.
He comes back in under a minute. “See?” he says, holding out his hand like an excited child. Inside is a little twisty star, the arms beaten and rough. “Fourteen karats. Five hundred fifty.”
I realize how expensive this is going to be, more than my grandma gave me, and tell him I need to consult with my grandma before I buy anything. He interprets this as haggling. “Five hundred,” he says.
Now that the price is beginning to drop, I am suddenly aware that I didn’t come here intending to buy anything. If I had, I’d have brought more than the four hundred shekels in my wallet. I tell him this. “Four hundred
fifty, for you,” he replies.
“No, no, I only have four hundred! And I need to consult with my grandma first,” I haggle by accident. “Could you show me the way out of the Old City?”
This is the biggest blow of all. “Okay, okay, my friend,” he says quickly, “three hundred eighty, I give it to you now. It’s my first sale of the day, special price.” But since he’s being unhelpful I start walking. “Three hundred fifty!” he calls after me. “Three hundred fifty, my friend!”
I feel a little rush of power when I realize the price was manipulated without my having intended it to: I was just being honest. But even this is too much if I’m not sure my grandma will like it. And besides, how do I know it is gold?
I go down a step, out from under the dark roof overhead into the sunlight, and into the next shop. I ask the young man if he has pure gold, and he says no, but go down a little ways and I will find what I am looking for.
Here’s the shop he must have meant. It has signs all over saying it’s real gold, and inside the wall it’s a much bigger shop, with glass display tables for the jewellery. The man behind the counter has crooked, snaky teeth. He says the government of Israel has authorized him to sell real gold, and I figure, eh, he would’ve been busted by now if he was a crook. So I ask to see a Star of David.
He points to the display table in front of him. I see the very same one the other guy’s shop had. “Normally eight hundred,” he says, lifting it out and setting it on top of the table, “but for you my friend, six hundred, just this once.”
I feel very resolute now, and reach for the only number I know. “No, my absolute limit for this is three hundred fifty. I won’t pay any more than that. I don’t need it right now anyway, so if you don’t want three hundred fifty for it I’ll just go.”
He hesitates. “For five hundred fifty, you get it,” he says. “I tell you what, it’s my first sale of the day, so this is special price, just for you.”
“No, it’s not your first sale,” I rebuke him; “everyone says that. But thanks anyway. Three hundred fifty is all I’ll pay.”
“My friend, I can’t do that. I pay four hundred fifty to get it…”
“That’s ridiculous. Now, three hundred fifty or not?”
He sighs at last and I buy it for three hundred fifty shekels—most of my wallet, and more than my grandma gave me for both charm and chain.