Quarter to Three
The new normal | Fiction | Fresh Soup
There’s this guy who lives on my block, he’s nice but a little odd. He talks to himself and sometimes to me. When things are bad he talks to himself very loudly, actual yelling matches. And someone always ends up calling the police. A little over a year ago, he had a really bad fight with himself and the police insisted on taking him away, and then he disappeared. A few months ago, my local barista told me the guy was hospitalized, and that a woman who works at the hospital is a regular at the coffee shop and she said he was doing much better. I ran into him this morning, on the corner of Dizengoff Street, and he told me he was on his way to buy a pack of cigarettes. He said he was going through a rough patch but he was going to be fine now. At least until three o’clock. I was about to ask what would happen at three o’clock, but an air-raid siren interrupted our conversation. I hurried away to the neighborhood bomb shelter, while he went on to the convenience store. I could see him as I walked away, surrounded by terrified people scurrying for shelter. From a distance, he looked like the sanest person on the street, by far.
When the pill stops working, things happen: whole years can fly past me in seconds, or the opposite—a single moment can last forever. Once I kissed a woman at a pedestrian crossing and the kiss felt so long that by the time our tongues disengaged I’d grown a beard and she a belly, and when the light turned green we both crossed and I never saw her again. People on the sidewalk next to me and on the one opposite me wait for the green light, and we stand together like a group of normal people. I’m on a pill but they, if I understand correctly, were just born that way: normal. I like waiting with normal people at a pedestrian crossing for the light to change. It makes me feel as though life has rules that bind us together. Waiting together for the light to change is a bit like holding hands on a first date, or eating off the same plate, or spooning in bed. It’s a moment of intimacy, of closeness, of harmony, a moment that’s supposed to go on and on, like lovemaking, until the light changes. Except that today it doesn’t, because all of a sudden, out of nowhere, which is also everywhere, comes the ear-piercing blare of a siren and in a split second the people around me stop being normal. They shout at each other, break into a cold sweat and check their phones, run across the street in a panic. The red man in the light doesn’t move, and I stand there with him, keeping him company. It’s not three yet. The pill is still working even if the world isn’t.
This reminds me of: what it is like to finally stop taking SSRIs (particularly the grim realisation that, without noticing it, you may have spent much of the past five years sedated); being in Tel Aviv during the 2014 war; the way Americans (even left-wing Americans) know how to treat homeless people like they're a different species, or an invisible super hero, or air.
This gave me chills. A small, pedestrian (no pun intended) moment that is not a normal moment at all.