Just over a year ago, after the first lockdown, the brilliant choreographer Inbal Pinto and I decided to co-create a Covid fairytale based on a short story I’d written a few weeks earlier. Working with Inbal was a unique and instructive experience for me. As an author, I’m used to focusing on plots, stories and characters, but Inbal was interested in different things. Above all: movement. As a result of our collaboration, I took another look at my stories and was amazed to find that, most of the time, they are completely blind to movement: my protagonists get angry, they love, they lie, and they cry, all of which is expressed in great detail in their dialogue and intricately described emotional states. But there is almost nothing about how these characters move. So I sat down and wrote this story especially for Inbal.
For Inbal
Look at him move. Taking delicate sips from the espresso cup he holds in one hand while texting a thumbs-up with the other, he winks at the tattooed waitress in the chic neighborhood coffee shop to bring him the check. Before she even reaches him, he’s already standing up and pulling out his credit card in one smooth motion, and no sooner has the waitress tentatively reached for the gilded card than he’s already letting go of it so that he can wave to a colleague. The wave begins as a hello, only to swiftly transform into a swipe at a bothersome fly. He wipes off the dead insect with the paper napkin that was placed under the tiny teaspoon next to his double espresso, and as he smears the corpse on the silky paper, he quickly creases it into four equal squares and makes another fold to transform it into a gorgeous origami swan, which he leaves, alongside a generous tip, for the smitten waitress whose gaze will follow him as he glides out of the coffee shop under a leaden cloud that trails him slowly—too slowly for his liking.
Look at him cruising along in his blue Tesla. He sails assuredly between the lanes like an Olympic ice-skater on his way to a gold medal: listening to Spotify, ignoring Waze, sliding the window open and signaling to the woman with tousled hair in the beaten-up Ford behind him to let him merge. And there he is now, honking at an old man in a gray Volvo, popping an antacid, answering a call on speakerphone and, while he picks his nose, reassuring a worried client. Life is constant motion and he, it seems, is living it for the rest of us. He’s already at the office building now, pressing the right button in the right elevator without forgetting to greet the hunched doorman whose name is on the tip of his tongue.
And now we can see him truly floating. He hovers over but does not quite touch the toilet bowl in the faintly dirty bathroom on the executive floor. Efficient as a policeman directing traffic, elated as a conductor on stage, he manages to jerk off with his spit-moistened right hand while his left wipes his ass with scratchy toilet paper. Look at him shutting his eyes and picturing himself screwing the tattooed waitress on the sticky table at the coffee shop, and all this while absorbing a detailed report from the CFO who’s taking a piss in the next stall. Notice how, when he comes, he manages to combine an orgasmic moan with a sigh of disappointment over the company’s sub-par performance last quarter. It was a challenging year, what with the inflationary erosion and an ongoing decline in consumption, but the company is still robust and dynamic, as is he. See how smugly he observes his worried reflection in the mirror, as it washes its hands while berating the CFO.
Now look at him convulse. Fluttering between life and death on the pale blue marble floor of a swanky organic restaurant. Look at him wheeze and drool on himself. His forehead glistens with sweat, his legs jerk, his brain fires thoughts in all directions. It must be his heart, or maybe a stroke, but whatever it is, it feels final. Watch him move his lips without saying a word, staring up with his panic-stricken eyes to look at the sky but instead finding a gorgeously restored vintage ceiling. See how in an instant his whole life runs before his eyes like a slick promotional spot: he morphs from straight-A student to top-ranked soldier to dean’s list undergrad to invincible CEO convulsing through his final moments on a gleaming restaurant floor. Notice how, against the background of the light blue marble, his pale face resembles the ephemeral beauty of a feather-gray cloud on a summer day. Twenty minutes from now, when the paramedic pronounces him dead, we will begin to observe someone else’s movements: a solitary, senile old lady named Alma in the internal medicine ward of a geriatric hospital up north. The truth is, her name is spelled with an h at the end, but, sadly, she’s long past the capacity to point this out. The encounter with her will be at once tremorous and static, and without getting into any spoilers, it will have an ending no less dreadful or surprising than the convulsing CEO’s.
A really powerful story, very wry! Especially loved the "vintage ceiling", not the blue sky. Brilliant!
I felt I was almost running to catch up with this guy... my workout of the day haha