53 – Brooklin, Maine
Debra Reuben couldn’t picture herself as an international criminal on the scale of Adolph Eichman, Slobodan Milosovic, or Pol Pot, a criminal who would be tried before the World Court, someone hated enough to be the subject of an Islamic death fatwa. In her own mind, despite all she’d been through and all the relative fame she’d earned in the U.S. and in Israel, her self image was frozen somewhere late in her senior year of high school. Levi’s warning to her about not speaking at the Washington rally only added to her personal nightmares.
Debra’s trouble sleeping was compounded by Levi’s absence and his failure to telephone and let her know that he was all right. After two months of chaste distance on the sailboat, Reuben had let her guard gradually fall when it came to her relationship with the Israeli. Maybe she felt more comfortable on shore, off the confining boat, or maybe it was because she was back in her native country where she did not feel like a stranger, a feeling she’d retained throughout her time in Israel despite her rapid rise to a high-level government position. Whatever the reason, she’d finally allowed herself to have feelings for the man who’d shepherded her across the ocean, back to her homeland.
Once she and Levi started living in the house on shore, she’d fallen into the housekeeping role with relish, enjoying preparing lavish dinners for him in the gourmet kitchen, especially after he’d discovered the locked wine cellar in the basement. Levi, in turn, dropped his captain-of-the-vessel role and appeared, to Reuben at least, intimidated by being in the United States, a country he’d heard so much about from hotel guests and was saturated with in books and movies, but had never before visited.
The sexual tension between them that was part of nearly every interaction on the sailboat, where they’d lived in close proximity with so little privacy, diminished once they moved on shore. At times they behaved almost like brother and sister, living together, sharing household chores, sharing an emotional bond, but remaining physically separate.
Other times, especially after they’d shared a bottle or three of wine, they sat on the sofa or the front porch and cuddled, Levi’s arm around her, her head on his shoulder, an occasional kiss on her hair. Sometimes, he found her standing and crying and he’d held her in his arms while her body shook with sobs. They’d rarely talked about why she cried.
As close as they’d become, they’d yet to have sex. Levi tried, Lord knew how he’d tried, sometimes softly, slowly, gently. Other times angrily, frustrated by months of being alone with a woman he found incredibly sexual. Always, Debra pushed him away. It was not that she wasn’t attracted to the Israeli. No, she found herself craving the physical pleasure of intimacy with this man. Her problem was the same problem that dominated all of her waking moments, and many of her sleeping ones.
I’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people, babies, old people, she thought. I don’t deserve pleasure, never, not ever. Sometimes she’d lain awake at night, her hands unconsciously touching her body as the first tingles of pleasure reached her, when the image of an elderly woman’s burned corpse, or a child, body blackened but still hobbling about crying for her mother, would come into her mind. She’d scream and sob. Then lie motionless. If she could do nothing more to punish herself, she could at least deny herself that pleasure.
So she went to Levi for comfort, used him for comfort, but also used him to deny herself pleasure. It was sick, illogical, hurtful to Levi to use him so, she knew. But she herself was sick, was hurt, was illogical.
Just as she had on the boat, Debra dulled her pain with alcohol, sometimes drinking with Levi, matching each of his drinks with two of her own. Sometimes, she drank by herself, finding herself waking on the sofa long after Levi had gone to bed. She had never been a drinker, never thought she’d had a “problem” with drinking. But now the alcohol was the only way to block the image of herself standing trial for murdering babies, burning buildings, killing people she knew to be totally innocent, killed only because of the city in which they’d lived.
Debra realized that she could not continue to rely on alcohol, that she needed professional help. She’d acknowledged that in a conversation with Levi, whose raised eyebrows were answer enough.
“What do you expect to say,” he’d asked. “Doctor, I killed a hundred thousand innocent people and I’m feeling a bit guilty. Do you think more exercise and fresh air might help distract me?”
If for no other reason than that Levi was the only person who knew of her role in the Damascus bombing – but for other reasons much more physical, much more emotional, too – Reuben slowly realized that she wanted more from Levi, much more. If she could not put aside her wholesale guilt, she could at least ease the guilt she felt from having used Levi as she had. She was ready to stop pushing him away, not to serve her own pleasure, she reasoned, but as a kindness to him, she reasoned. She did not necessarily believe this logic, but she was prepared to act on it.
His failure to call since he’d driven off with the young man sent her mind racing with disaster scenarios ranging from a car accident to an FBI raid. What she learned that afternoon did nothing to ease her concerns.
The cottage had a magnificent MacPro G5 quad processor computer with a breathtaking 30-inch Apple monitor, but Brooklin was still out of reach of high-speed Internet access. The computer had a telephone modem, but Levi had warned Reuben against using her credit cards for anything. In fact, all of Reuben’s plastic cards were sealed in a freezer bag that was stashed out of sight. Levi had no credit cards since the banks that issued them no longer existed. They did not know the password for the Internet provider the computer dialed automatically and they could not open a new account without a credit card.
However, WoodenBoat Magazine could not function without instant access to the rest of the world. The magazine paid to have a fiber optic line brought in from nearby Blue Hill. No homes yet tapped into this line, but as a public gesture, the magazine placed an access point at the Brooklin Public Library, a tiny white frame building with four incongruous Grecian columns, across the street from the Brooklin General Store. To sweeten the deal, the magazine donated some of its older computers to the library.
Jo-lene Dodge, Brooklin’s librarian, was rightly proud of her row of three Macintosh computers, all hooked to the Internet, available for use by the town’s citizens, many of whom spent hours and hours at the machines, using the library as a Down East version of an Internet cafe.
Levi and Reuben joined that scene shortly after moving to the house, using the library computers for Internet access. They set up a Gmail email account in a false name to communicate with the Goldberg-Goldhershes. They had nobody else with whom to correspond, at least so far as they told one another.
Debra occasionally ran a Goggle search under her name, without telling Levi, checking that nobody had connected her with Damascus. She found no entry after the Tel Aviv bomb. Once, she’d searched under “Chaim Levi,” but had found only a reference to a beachfront hotel near Tel Aviv with a handsome young sailing instructor.
After Levi drove away with the strange young man, Reuben walked the mile and a half to the library. Always something of a hypochondriac, she’d been feeling an unusual itching in her scalp, despite working her way through the assortment of shampoos and conditioners in the master bathroom shower, and, even more distressing, it seemed that her hair was coming out, not much, but enough for her to notice.
Rather than considering the stress under which she was living, she immediately tied those symptoms to her having lived for two months never more than ten feet from a nuclear bomb, leaking who knew what sort of atomic radiation. She decided it was time to find out. That was the reason for her walk to the library.
She found an available computer at the end of the row of machines. Reuben logged into the Internet and began a Google search. The key words “atomic bomb” and “radiation” returned about a million and a half hits. She casually paged through web sites describing the effects of nuclear radiation, which included hair loss, a fact that set her heart racing. Adding the words “leaks” to her search reduced the number of hits to 350,000 but did not give her any hints about whether handling a bomb itself was dangerous. She tried a new search, using “atomic bomb,” “handle” and “danger.” This returned nearly a million pages. She browsed through the first few screens of results, stopping to examine one that seemed to discuss “handling” bombs themselves. This was a web site answering the question, “How easy is it to make an atom bomb?” The web site seemed to have been removed from the Internet but when she went into the Google cache of the page she found a lengthy discussion about different kinds of bombs and radioactive material.
The most frightening comment on that page was a statement noting that bombs could be built using either enriched uranium, what it called U-235, or plutonium. The web site noted that “plutonium is harder to work with, extremely harmful to humans when inhaled, and tens of thousands of times more radioactive than uranium, presenting a far greater danger to the bomb designers who would have to shape and handle it.”
That statement startled Reuben. She knew little about what she considered to be “her” bomb. Nonetheless, she was possessive about it, after all, she was probably the only person on the planet to have a personal nuclear weapon. Is it a plutonium bomb or a uranium bomb, she wondered. She continued with more and more Google searches trying to find images of bombs so she could find one similar to the bomb in the wine cellar. She searched for web sites discussing how the military moved and shipped nuclear bombs and whether special suits or protective gear were used.
Reuben became obsessed with the search and, as happens when a person gets sucked into the world of online research, she lost track of time. Reuben came out of her cyber reverie only when Jo-lene, the librarian, gently tapped her on the shoulder, saying “Excuse me dear.” She pronounced the word with two syllables, DEE-UH, “We close in five minutes.”
Reuben excused herself and thanked the librarian before leaving to walk home, stopping only at the general store for milk, eggs and whatever fresh fish came in off the boats that day. It was cod and she bought a one-pound slab, a meaty captain’s cut, the choice of locals who knew their cod from generations of chasing them. The girl at the general store called it cod “loin” and told Reuben it made for the best baking.
She prepared the fish that evening covered in Japanese Panko bread crumbs and kept it warm in the oven until just before 10:00 p.m., waiting for Levi to walk in the door. She finally ate it herself, throwing the leftover fish over the porch rail where she was sure some animal would appreciate the best cut of the cod.
She finished the last of the second bottle of Cloudy Bay New Zealand Chardonnay just past midnight. Where could Chaim be, she wondered before nodding out for the night, sufficiently anesthetized that she hoped to escape her nightmares for a few hours.