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CHAPTER SEVEN

SHANAN, conveniently in those days of the cosseting, was living with his parents. His father, no longer a gambler but industrious since birth, had bought a Shell Gas Station on Route Eleven in North Syracuse, and son Shanan began working at the station to help pay the four pennies he was contributing for his home, and the meals his hard-working mother prepared for him on a daily and nightly basis. Young Bin’s miserly characteristic was not because his father paid him apprentice wages, but due simply to the premise that he was certifiably oblivious toward tangible responsibilities, and he avoided bills as if they were a case of the measles. One had only to understand that Shanan Bin was often manifestly a thoughtless and covetous person.

 

 

ON A SUN-FILLED AFTERNOON, as a man was driving at top speed to his father’s station, a beautifully colored pheasant flew directly into the grille of his automobile and was killed instantly, countless feathers flying randomly past the man’s windows and descending buoyantly, as if they were rainbow-painted mini clouds.

 

     The vehicle came to a decidedly swerving and screeching halt; the murderous transportation shifted and parked in the middle of the road. The driver threw open the door, nearly off its hinges, nearly back in his face, ducked fleet-footed as he jumped from the car, and picked the bird up delicately. Its neck was broken to the point that its head dangled at the end of its lifeless neck—off the edge of the driver’s shaking palm—as if its neck were a loose, wet sock. Shanan laid the dead pheasant carefully onto the front seat of the car. Warm blood was dripping from the victim’s wide-open beak. Warm blood was also dripping from Shanan’s heart, as it was broken with grief for this innocent bird of circumstance.

 

     The gas station was but around the corner, only a quarter-mile north. Shanan zoomed in, exited his automobile, and carried the dead bird into the office. His mustachioed, dark-complexioned, German father, inquisitiveness now budding, was sitting in his Shell uniform, behind the gray-topped steel desk.

 

     Cwethan the son, “Hi, Dad!”

 

     “What do you have in your hand, lunch?”

 

     “No, Pop. I just hit her,” he replied despondently as he set the expired pheasant onto the top of a wide, sunny windowsill. “I got this funny feeling, Pop. If I put this bird in the sun, and maybe say a prayer—” The hose-bell rang. A familiar customer rolled his sedan to the gas pumps. Shanan’s father stepped through the doorway to attend to the man’s requests.

 

     Shanan sensed time was certainly of an essence: All things are possible. And If I’m alive, and if I hold the pheasant close to me…and give her warmth from my body…Jesus….

 

     He removed the bird lovingly from the sill, and sat into the chair at his father’s desk, and, with a squeak of the rusty spring, tilted the seat backward, just enough to cradle the bird and keep an eye on his dad. With tenderness, he covered the wings and the body of the hit-and-not-run victim, with his hands, and held the pheasant close to his stomach. His father returned finally from the pumps and their duties and, “Move.” Shanan deleted his presence cordially from the chair and replaced the dead Pheasant immediately back onto the windowsill.

 

     “You going to eat it now,” his father chuckled, “or save it for supper?”

 

     Shanan freed a smile from the right side of his troubled lips and turned back toward the pheasant— “She blinked!” he screeched.

 

     Standing in awe, he bent hurriedly over the bird, straining to detect other signs of life, if there were signs to be seen. Shanan went altogether bug-eyed, filled with amazement. “She blinked again, Dad! I think.”

 

     “You blinked.”

 

     “Dad, I think I know a blink when I see a blink.” He lifted the pheasant and stepped quickly into the out-of-doors, to hold her in the relativistic radiance of the sunlight. “She blinked again, pop!” he cried at the top of his lungs into the office, heel holding the door ajar.

 

 

A HALF-HOUR OF DEMONSTRATIVE EXERCISE, and this beautifully colored pheasant was now on its living feet, teetering slightly on the windowsill, tail feathers adding in the support. The bird’s eyes, tolerant in their stare, would unremittingly follow Shanan’s every step and every gesture, and she would—no holds barred—allow him to come near and permitted his gentle touch or a gentle petting. He lifted the pheasant and started for the door.

 

     “Now where’re you going?” his father asked.

 

     “She might be able to fly, Pop!”

 

     His father was cool, cool but reticent, during this entire affair, and shook his head composedly, allowing Shanan to attend to his miraculous bird.

 

 

BEHIND THE STATION was a wide-open field, vast, covered with a virtual sea of tall weeds, and every here and beyond—but none taller than a mature camel—a slender tree bravely endured the unpredictable elements of the North.

 

     Shanan walked slowly toward the field, stopping just short of its edge, yet remaining quietly on the pavement. With a smooth lift of his two caring hands, he tossed the recovering pheasant into the air and out toward the waiting field. His sad, little bird gave a couple of desperate flaps of its nearly powerless wings and fluttered perilously back to the hard earth, though evidently unharmed. Shanan retrieved his diving buddy, tidied its feathers, and returned solemnly to the office.

 

 

As they readied for the next daring test flight, a serious half-hour passed, filled with compassionate man-to-bird, nose-to-beak dialogue on how to think positively. “Through the door,” the voice commanded, softly. Shanan’s eyes popped wider, and after reaching for his unflappable feathered friend, he scrambled to the end of the side of the station. On this attempt, contrary to the last, his living bird flew far over the open field and high into the lofty breezes, smaller…smaller, now tiny…now teeny, and soon melted altogether into the azure expanse. You should have seen Shanan’s face. What can I say…his face glowed…. His face glowed as bright as his eyes and smile were wide, and his smile could be seen from either side of eternity. “How great thou art!”

 

 

SHANAN’S FAMILY rarely spoke of these happenings. Shanan was, without a doubt, different, and they generally took him with a grain of salt: a rather large grain of salt. He did, all the same, upset them from time to time when he would be sitting before a roasted chicken at the supper table, and quip: “I seen one of these dead birds fly once.” Of course, Pop would lower his brows, give Shanan a stern look, and softly fire back, half chuckling, “Your bird wasn’t that dead! Now, shut up and eat your supper.”

 

 

A REVELATION OF NATURE

 

WELL, the stealthy Wedding Bell swung its unseen clapper, and voiced its nuptial opinion neighborhood-wide at last for young Shanan. His fiancée, Ethel, was a quiet, petite, but very beautiful young brunette woman of a somewhat country-spun composition. Gerald Hayes, pastor of North-side Methodist Church, had quizzed them for the requisite hour and had prepared them for the gala marriage ceremony to be. In those long lost days, Pastor Hayes’ personal doctrines tended to lean, but lightly, toward reincarnation and, not so strangely, so did Shanan’s, as curiosity and a couple of two-sided questions revealed.

 

 

THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, after a thorough dowsing of rice a-la-dry, as he was getting into his automobile, Shanan blazed a sheepish smile toward his friends and relatives. On to the new hotel by the airport they drove to enjoy their honeymoon; and Ethel was not filled simply with joy as they drove off—Buddy was born eight months after the honeymoon.

 

 

Three lusty days took wing into the Annals of the Unrecorded and, after returning even more enamored, from the hotel, Ethel and Shanan purchased new linen for the double bed in the upstairs dormer in his family’s home. Ah...the life of the pampered.

 

 

ONLY A WEEK HAD PASSED, and as a passing hour donned its death mask and fled dying into the realm of timelessness, Shanan, as he lay catnapping and counting his blessings, was swept into an extremely complex vision.

 

     He was standing before a towering court-styled lectern, behind which sat a judge whose face was stout, clean-shaven, but stern, reflecting the age of a youthful fifty—a very youthful fifty. The judge’s hair was neat and cropped close, and whether he was court-style robed or not, Shanan could not tell. Nevertheless, he listened intently at this man’s unbendable words of decree.

 

     “The verdict is—guilty. Thus, outer darkness for you.

 

     “Go unto your people. You are at liberty for an hour to put your house in order. No guards will accompany you, for nowhere can be found whereat this judgment shall fail in its course. You need not return, for the judgment shall reach out to you and find you, in its perfect time—at the end of your allotted hour.”

 

     Shanan discerned no emotion within himself, neither fear nor calmness of nerves. He departed apathetically but immediately from the colossal, square, burnished structure in which the court was held, and sprinted in slow, slow-motion (six thousand slow, slow-motion seconds crammed into a slow-motion minute), with broad, spanning strides across a uniquely paved walk in a uniquely modern setting and on toward a building of antiquities. In the building, he ran lethargically to and fro and suddenly came to a muted standstill before a lidless and four-inch-thick-walled, leaden four-feet-square—depth, breadth, and height—box elevated upon a three-feet-tall columnar base seven feet in diameter.

 

     As he nimbly hopped weightlessly to the top of the columnar base and to the side of the lead box, a vague feeling of potential security from the ruling of the court filled Shanan’s anxious insides. Without examining the interior of the box, he gripped its leaden edge, hoisted himself over its top, and began a s l o w e d descent into its shallow, gray depths: The lead will protect me, Shanan thought: the judgment will not ge—

 

     Sight...abandoned the eyes, no pain; darkness…shrouded the mind, no light; a distant fading and a sonorant buzzing…echoed briefly between two ears and into reverberating caverns of eternity, and—blackness.

 

 

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

113 Newcastle ROAD

 

LYING NAKED UPON A BASSINET was a baby waking gradually from a nap and peering up into the eyes of someone who seemed affectionate, and someone who was its mother. Laughter appareled the moment of relief. The babe had no authority over the direction of his little squirts, and the face of the affectionate woman was now being patted dry with a towel.

 

     As they were diapering this wide-eyed, baby, Shanan mused in his soul, but not with words: My pee go straight up to nice lady.

 

 

WHEN SHANAN awoke from the vision of the court ruling, he conceded to himself that it had somehow portrayed the past, but more, and far more mystifying, was it somehow portrayed a hidden future—explaining a Judgment Day of sorts: But how come I was a baby?

 

Footnote:

Something prompted an unusual transformation in the man, and from that day forward, at every opportunity, he socialized with individuals or groups of a more intellectual caste than himself. He listened hard to every one of their big, as he referred to them, words or fancy, as he referred to them, phrases, and would lock those scholarly utterances in a mental cage isolated from slang.

 

Knitting itself to this new indulgence was a faculty he soon came to realize as the ability to recall ninety or more percent of the words, sentences, paragraphs, or all three of these areas, from conversations from anywhere out of his past and became quick to remind someone of misdescribing a chat or discussion, or errors of theirs during reminiscences, especially pertaining to business reminiscences.

 

 

YEAR 1964

 

TUNIS, TUNISIA

 

IN THE OFFICE of a small construction company with a huge bank account, eight Arabian men, the majority of them leaning belligerently against or sitting in the bordering furniture of the room, lingered—scowling.

 

     “Arafat, al-Fatah has done nothing in months but join allies to P.L.O. We move by swift powers of Allah or forget your people by sundown.”

 

     “My people?” Yasir growled, “They are our people! Our plans surpass your blind impatience. Al-Fatah now is coveted among all camps inside P.L.O. Before long, we command them all without effort.”

 

———

 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CALIFORNIA

 

NEW YORK WINTER HAD ARRIVED with its earlier Shadows cast by shorter Hours and their snowy and sleety associates, and Shanan had opted for advance retirement from his father’s gas station. Leaving Ethel holding a snow shovel at the front door of their rented house on Fordsworth Street, Shanan drove off to Los Angeles, California, with a running doll he had invented and built. Our modern-day da Vinci had high hopes of submitting it to the prestigious Mattel Toy Company, and high hopes of a fame-decorated fortune that would keep his advance retirement permanent. He had submitted the doll originally to the Topper Toy Company—now defunct (Hand of God)—in Elizabeth, New Jersey; but, after two visits, a series of telephone calls and unkept promises and what appeared suspiciously to Shanan as deliberate lagging on the part of Topper’s executives, Mattel became the next logical prospect.

 

     The eight-and-a-half-inch-tall doll, animated by means of a low-gear eccentric rod-and-shaft assembly, could stride heel and toe quickly (no rollers, wheels, or sliders beneath the feet/shoes), and with absolutely no supporting mechanism; and, whatever it ran into would turn and 'run' in another direction; and, the Bin family had paid for the patent rights (ten claims strong). The patent included a track-running model with a miniature geared motor in its torso. Electrodes in its hands connected to railings allowed the tiny doll to sprint around a track at a remarkable speed. Despite these many and remarkable attributes and additional financial backing (a couple hundred and a car axel-bearings repair) and legal support by newly acquired friends in Los Angeles, Naive-to-Big-Business-Bin’s plans were dashed and trashed by a personal rejection from Jack Ryan himself, Mattel Toy Company’s CEO or the like, who, in his gigantic ballroom, if that was what it was, a humongous fireplace gracing a wall, gently folded his arms, looked down his nose at Shanan, who thought he sensed a tad of jealousness, and said, 'I don't think we're ready for something like this.', and in Jack Ryan’s Belair, California, mansion.

 

     Not long afterward, having mentioned the doll to his Beverly Hills apartment manager, completely surprising her (a sweet, little old lady who, coincidentally, flew to New York 'by personal invitation' occasionally with the toy titan (in his personal jet) of Mattel to catch off-Broadway plays), Shanan listened to these words: “Oh...you're the person with the running doll? Mister Ryan told me privately that if he had accepted the doll, he'd lose his job, and you’d be president of Mattel today. He was so amazed and couldn't stop talking about your running doll, all the way to New York and all the way back to here!”

 

     Until that time, no manufacturer on Earth could boast a doll that could walk upright successfully, let alone—run.

 

 

SAN DIEGO

 

DISCOURAGED TO THE MARROW OF HIS SKINNY BONES, Shanan, thoroughly numbed intellectually by this, as he termed it: deliberate act of behind-their-back people-misuse and corporate greed and injustice, packed his personal belongings, dragged himself glassy-eyed into his vehicle, and nosed it south to the city of San Diego. In tandem with this unexpected disappointment, Shanan was filled with guilt: While in Los Angeles, he had hit a Gardena poker house and had gambled almost dry the generous bankroll of money his Los Angeles backers (a commercial group who had befriended Shanan while in Los Angeles) had fronted him.

 

 

WITH A SMALL AMOUNT CASH, which Shanan had tucked away for emergencies, which was rare (not emergencies, but the tucking away) he rented a room, somewhat spacious, wall-to-wall carpeted, with bed, easy chair, television, and private bath, at the Balboa Park Inn, at Thirty-four-0-two Park Boulevard, very near to the Balboa Park Zoo. Colonel Aldman, a lean-bodied retiree from the military, owned the inn and charged rates that were more than reasonable and, at a mere suggestion, was quick to accommodate with complementary amenities his numerous guests. Moreover, the colonel observably was a trusting soul—“You don’t have to mention this part.” I indeed do, Mister Inventor—and had no idea it was our boy, Shanan, resourcefully uncapping the exposed horizontal glass cola bottles in the outside refreshment machine—“Thanks, O exonerating comrade.” You are quite welcome—and draining their cool tonics into his waiting mug, after midnight. Curiously enough, however, the coin box was always left undamaged and un^.pilfered. “Hey, when you’re broke, honest, and thirsty—And have you ever taken a drink of Southern California tap water…?” Yes, I have, Mister Honest. “Forgive me for asking, already.”

 

     Aside from this standard of the wile and woolly, while in San Diego, Shanan had his first angelic experience. Not a dream, as we would consider a dream to be, but a powerful living vision, “Spiritually extraordinary,” as he would thereafter describe.

 

 

THREE in the hushed San Diego morning, he awoke lying on his side, eyes directed toward the old, wooden door to his modest room. Standing before the door was a tall figure with the soles of its naked feet a full two inches off the beige-carpeted floor. Shanan could not tell whether the manifestation was male or female.

 

     The figure, nonetheless, was clothed in a long, willowy-white garment flowing from its shoulders to just above its ankles; and a fine, translucent white aura nearly three inches wide emanated outward from its entire being, compassing the spiritual individual with a surrounding halo of unworldly but magnificent light. Having fully impressed Shanan’s awareness, the Showing began to drift very slowly across the floor and toward the bed.

 

     A glorious love stuffed Shanan’s room, and an infinite unity with the gross sum of the quiet universe flooded his undivided soul. His spirit was drenched with a profound peace, and no fear whatsoever could be found in his heart.

 

     Shanan raised himself cautiously onto his elbow to greet the visitor; and, as Shanan—now very wide awake—began to open his mouth, the angel vanished swiftly, as if escaping the room, its stately aura a swiftly dissolving impression of twilight, as if given no apparent message for this capricious mortal.

 

     Shanan, utterly dumbfounded, eyes as wide-open as they could stretch themselves, attempting to distinguish dark and elusive forms in his quarters, still resting on his elbow, in union with a sanctified cloud, soared to heights he had not ever reached; and, with this ethereal spirit of holy love now swelling to the burst in his faraway room, he felt embraced by an undefiled joy breezed in from the highest hill of a faraway paradise.

 

     As a man in a light trance, he rose from his bed…, stepped slowly but tranquilly to the wall…, clicked the ON switch to the globeless ceiling light…, and returned to the edge of his bed. He climbed onto the middle of the quilt-covered mattress, positioned himself numb and cross-legged, and consumed with eyes, soul, and flesh his fully illuminated room, his spirit wandering quizzically, searching deep into an abating Garden of Eden.

 

     Shanan sat meditating telescopically stoical and spiritually introspective for two aesthetic hours before finally nestling into his blankets, to finish his night’s sleep.

 

     This was a living encounter unmasking a depth of existence of which he knew nothing, and he fell asleep in a moment, that glorious spirit of love ebbing gradually from the room, and funneling mystically into his peaceful dreams.

 

 

YEARS FOLLOWED YEARS, and rather innovative entrepreneurs purchased the inn, had it remodeled lavishly, and titled eloquently every apartment and room throughout the property. Today, Shanan Bin’s second-story—smoke-free—room contains a split-level floor (somewhat intimating a higher and lower walk) with an elevated and canopied colonial bed, very decoratively furnished, glorifying the entire mood of the abode. The room’s name? —Suite Escape.

 

 

YEAR 1966

 

SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

 

SHANAN had returned home from California five months ago. In Syracuse, he had suffered two occupational setbacks, and he and Ethel were forced to move sadly back in with the family Bin. Within this five months, experience had taught him a great lesson in hypocrisy and rapaciousness manifoldly at his last place of employment. A ball bearing manufacturing plant had hired him as an inspector, and his duty was to reject Vietnam-War-bound helicopter bearings if, through the application of ultraviolet light-sensitive chemicals, he detected cracks along their walls. Many were the bearings returned to the heat-treat division; only once was his speedy termination from the plant. The owner and the employees of the factory were earning their daily bread through the fashionable art of contract, deadline, and piecework. Shanan had informed his supervisor, “I’d quicker starve myself and my family than to ever compromise the lives of our men in Vietnam.” Thus, slipping gracefully into another early retirement—Excuse me: Gainful employment suddenly lay at his feet, or rather was peering down his throat, for he was required to accept an offer from the masculine head of the Bin residence: to return to the ever scrupulous business of gas pumps and oil cans.

 

 

SHANAN’S GRANDMOTHER BIN, a wrinkled, little old woman of a moderately bronzy complexion, five-foot one, roughly ninety-five pounds, gray and velvety hair descending to below her waist, eyes that ever twinkled smilingly, speech accompanied by same, was living with them now, for she was wracked with cancer and had to be assisted through all her daily routines. Her years were eighty-and-four wise-but-fatigued, and Shanan cherished her with all his heart.

 

 

THE ATMOSPHERE was always family among the Bins, the short-lived but long-remembered days were always warm-hearted among the Bins; but at the end of an unusually tedious week, as the Hours of the Night were calling the kindred to their sleeping quarters, young Bins’ grandmother beckoned weakly for him to come near to the side of her bed.

 

     “Shanan,” she sighed, raising her head from the pillow slightly, eyes focusing toward her grandson, “whether you graduated high school or not, doesn’t bother me…doesn’t matter...I still love you. The things in your life...you do,” she sighed again. “God is watching over you.”

 

     “Oh, Grandma, I love you, too.”

 

     She motioned him closer. He bent forward and kissed her on her forehead. “Nighty-night, Grandma.”

 

     She was lying there in excruciating pain, but to what depth, no one really knew. “Pray for me tonight, Shanan….”

 

     “I always do, Grandma, in my Lord’s Prayer. Anything more for you, Grandma, I will.”

 

     “Pray for me to die. You do this for me….”

 

     “Oh, God, Grandma. Please don’t talk that way,” he pleaded, in a genuine but sorrowful tone.

 

     “Please…do this for me, Shan…, I want to die. God hears your prayers. I know he does….”

 

     “But, Grandma, how could I pray for you to die? I love you!

 

     “Shanan...” and she closed her tired eyes, their twinkles soon but a memory.

 

 

AS THE DAYLIGHT HOURS climbed into their chamber of the night, Mr. Grandson climbed sadly into bed. He kissed Ethel and, not wanting to upset her, rolled over, and faced the sunup wall to pray. Mouthing the words beneath his breath, he glided through his Lord’s Prayer, as he had since childhood; but this night, this night Shanan included this precious prayer, slowly:

 

     “Dear Lord and dear God,” Shanan began, “if grandma’s got just a half a smile left to put on anyone’s face…please, God, give her the strength and the health to do it, and without pain. But, oh...my dear God...please...I love my grandmother so…” and he began to weep. “But if every bit of her work is done—Oh…, God, I can’t say it…but please, God..., be so gentle, and do it so peacefully, and without the least bit of agony, and raise her into your arms. I love my gramma; I really do. And please, God...you love her, too...oh, my—oh, Gramma...” he lamented as he cried himself softly into his sleep.

 

 

LATE the next morning, the capacious kitchen was bustling as Shanan descended the rear hallway steps for a warm and home-cooked breakfast. Older sister, Roberta, paying a two-day visit was washing dishes and humming a cheerful tune; Aunt Hilda was on the telephone, chatting with a friend, while mother Bin was busy preparing a hot cup of tea for Grandmother Bin. “She’s stronger today, honey,” Mrs. Bin elated to her son, who was now sitting at the table, fountaining cold milk and dexterously lifting fork and spoon to an unfathomable opening just beneath his nose, and nodding.

 

     Satisfied that his prayer might be yet on hold, he finished the last of his eggless French toast, threw on his cobalt-blue work jacket, kissed his mother and smiling grandmother, “See you when I get home,” and left in haste for his father’s gas station: God is so wonderful…oh, so wonderful….

 

 

’TWAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY. The Sun was displaying her golden splendor pompously; the drifting clouds displayed their whites proudly, swelling robes against the cerulean divide of heaven; and, here below, hardly a breeze stirred a limb-locked leaf. Shanan coasted his car past an exiting customer and pulled onto the wide asphalt lot of the station, parked his green sedan, walked directly to the wide-open door to the office, and entered. Two young neighborhood boys turned toward him as he stepped into the office. This scene bewildered Shanan. “Where’s Pop?”

 

     “Your dad told us you were on your way,” the older of the two boys explained, standing near the open drawer of the cash register, hand extended, depositing a gas payment from the latest customer. “He wanted us to manage the place til you got here. And he wants you to call your house.”

 

     Shanan could not figure the play on this stage: No way Dad ever trusted anyone in his life. He wouldn’t let me work on a customer’s vehicle, unless he was standing over me, inspecting my every move. He let me drive his car but once in my whole life, and now he’s leaving a couple of kids to manage the station—and guard the money? Hah! He reached expeditiously for the pay telephone and dialed very nimbly. A ring, and his mother answered, “Hello?”

 

     “Hi, Mom, it’s me. Dad wanted me to call—”

 

     “He had to come home early, dear.”

 

     “How come?”

 

     “Well...Shan, honey..., the Lord took grandma.”

 

     Shanan began to moan inwardly, as his mother spoke. “She had to go to the bathroom, honey. And your Aunt Hilda was helping her off the couch...and, grandma fell asleep…and in her own daughter’s arms. Is that not a good way...? Your dad is making arrangements, and I’m taking care of the phone calls. He’s going to come out for you in a while. Just be patient…Oh, Lord….”

 

     Before he had replaced the telephone into its cradle, Shanan’s cheeks were shining with wetness, his open mouth curling out ghosts of soundless words. He leaned his dazed head confusedly against the telephone mount, and cried as if he were a baby—his soul, his body, his lungs now draining of life. His spirit, his mind, and every particle of his flesh felt a remorse they had not felt before this day, a day of the first great loss in his life. Bitter grief shrouded his whole reality, and his pain could not be described by all the poets of hell. As he stood shaking and grieving before the wall, his entire youth was dying. Hearing the door groan somberly on its hinges, he turned tearfully, and watched as his father entered the office.

 

     “Come on, honey, I’ll take you home. You don’t mind if I call you honey, do you?”

 

     “No, pop.”

 

     His father handed a five-dollar bill silently to each of the boys who had watched the station, released them from their duties, tacked a full flowery wreath to the outside door, turned the key in the lock, and he and Shanan drove off to their home.

 

 

MENTALLY, Shanan was destitute, begging for clear thoughts, exhilaration destroyed. During the next three weeks, he would suddenly burst into an irrepressible torrent of tears. This could happen anywhere and without provocation: driving his wife to or from the store, in the middle of a moneymaking game of pool, or while pumping gas at his father’s Shell station. In the stillness of each night during this sad period, his grandmother’s absence produced a vacuumed turbulence within a forlorn soul, as that last prayer drifted buoyantly within a troubled mind. The man of many tears would have to struggle constantly against spiritual opponents to fall asleep. Notwithstanding these doleful and depressing items, to mollify his despondency, on warm, sunny afternoons, he would drive to the cemetery and lay himself down upon the cool grass veiling his grandmother’s grave and tumble effortlessly into a dream-filled nap. Regardless of this new and self-liberating practice, grandma—his special friend—was gone.

 

 

YEAR 1969

 

MIDDLE EAST

 

PEACE, THOUGH PRICKLY, had again existed in Israel, but this time for only about two years. Stages were changing, and upsets in daily life, both in homes and politics, were unfolding frightful complications.

 

 

TUNIS, TUNISIA

 

ARAFAT GRINNED at his colleagues. “We have now full control of all Palestinian Liberation Organization groups. We are P.L.O.! Conceivable forms of resistance is stewed with blood of pigs in our cauldrons, and we have now means to interrupt Jew’s peace in Israel—anytime. We find sympathies easily in international broth until in end, Jerusalem is again ours—Israel is again ours.”

 

     “We have done but zilch!” a riled Arab screamed. “Burden them; break their filthy resistance, their Occupation. Palestinian gun, as I speak, is found not in land. Buy our people guns—Create evil in streets those Jew dogs are dying to tasted. Bomb them; roast them!”

 

     Arafat glared at the men—into eye after eye after eye. “Events will take place, my brothers. And do we not now possess…? Impulsive maneuvers are dangerous…for now, at least. Yet, you will witness day, my brothers. I have vowed my tormented soul to destruction of Israel and imminent devour of their land, and will not rest bone until I am contented.”

 

     “What do we do with Jew pig we grabbed at beach?”

 

     “Twist off infidel’s head, and ship him to Jerusalem, U.P.S.: United Palestinian Style—in two boxes,” he laughed.

 

For the king of the north shall return,

and shall set forth a multitude

greater than the former,

and shall certainly come after certain years

with a great army and with much riches

 

 

†