At the station, right across from the opaque and bluish Azrieli Towers, he occupies a free spot on a bench and waits for a bus to carry him home from the tech heartland of Tel Aviv. The muted agitation of war hangs in the air, interspersed throughout the urban mundane where all is dominated by shades of asphalt, brick, and dusted glass, but another layer settles onto the banal characteristics: worn pamphlets litter the ground, torn faces of those lost to the agony of the Strip loom like surveillance, and slogans—meant to invite into the body politic of a nation faced with what they say is an existential crisis—ripple through the air. Behind the station, uncomfortably close, stands a nerve center sending out signals to strike, advance, cleanse. He does not wish to think about the numerically titled Unit or how it employs the fruits of his labor.

These days, the persistent call to arms does not want him; it already knows how grinding teeth broke against will, discharging the recalcitrant and honorless. He keeps a certificate somewhere in his hastily packed belongings—his pride and shame, kept secret from some and quickly revealed to others. Peers always sense his lack of loyalty, but some let it go. On his walks, he’s self-conscious of his looks, oscillating between confidence and worries that his best days are behind him. He tries to carry himself with a boxer’s fluid articulation, though too much energy is devoted to a dignified appearance. He still holds onto the virility of those past, gloved days—still thinks he goes by handsome, though no longer twenty-two-year-old.

A lot goes on in his mind during these brisk walks: Is he keeping his head up? Shoulders square? Do his clothes sit well? Does the subtle, consciously chosen stance he strikes at a stoplight look good? And what of his hair? The brown hair that bothers him so—how beholden it is to genes, first signaling a retreat at the temples in fear of time’s encroachment, then signaling again to abandon post at the crown of the head. This is how physicality takes charge as other matters hang suspended, ready to descend on him at a more introspective moment.

Despite these preoccupations of surface, his eyes and brows never fail him. They stand for something deeper. His instinct is that his whole being is carried in the ocular plane and in the hands that allow him to interface with the world. When he keeps his expression stern and eyes sharp, or alternately, when he decides to ease and allow a softer glow to settle, that’s when he feels adequate and whole. With his blue-black eyes, he feels he could arrest anyone. These days, the Earth’s pull has relinquished his gaze, allowing him to squarely meet the eyes of others. Pierce, seduce, persuade, touch. In turn, they reveal how estranged he is from the pulse of the Hebrew am. His blood’s alignment and polarity are, in any case, wrong, and his given name does little to endow him with the Sabra’s spirit.

What makes awaiting public transit okay is the presence of women who fit his vague tastes. He considers them and passes the time, trying to do so without guilt. And, as if to quench the yawning in him, there sits a fitting girl with a dark brown ponytail; a pair of black, thick-rimmed glasses; and pointed, sanguine nails which drip from her fingertips. The sight is appreciated, and intent stirs against self-restraint. His days here must remain numbered.

Standing against one of the bus stop’s walls, he assumes a relaxed, although purposeful, pose, and cradles his backpack at his chest. His effortful effortlessness. He wants to stand out from the other commuters, since, in many ways, he feels better than them. Does she see it? His flirtatious ego desires an audience. Whenever his attention momentarily shifts due to some movement—from his puppeteering of how he wishes her to feel—he’s flustered with his ridiculous show. He notes disgruntled middle-aged men, older women, and uniformed young soldiers nearby. Their presence threatens to humble him.

With focus regained, he continues to attempt to conjure magnetism and keep the otherwise dull moment at bay. She unties her ponytail, releasing her straight, dark splendor, and stands to wait for what is a very late bus, right at the lip of the curb. Others heading in the same direction come alive with a natural lack of patience. His one-way view of the woman pleases him, even though he’s now out of her line of sight. Luckily, she still sends glances in his direction, and who else puts up a show like his in the vicinity? He decides to entertain the possibility of her looking back at him, and he’s not ashamed of its forced, baseless nature. Out of them all, her figure stands in highlight, this white-blue daughter of Israel. He’ll be thrilled if they end up sharing the journey home. His eyes linger over the faded white protest graffiti on the highway, scorch marks from doused flames, dryly thinking of the fervent turmoil which takes place at regularly scheduled weekends and the calls for political change. Feeling nothing, his eyes return to the girl, silently willing her to look back.

Finally, the arriving green bus glides to a stop beside the curb and accepts into itself the shuffling and listless. He releases the floating idea of her as he resumes mechanical movement, scans a card, and looks for a seat to claim. Unlike the evaporating flight of fancy, her unknown, corporeal form keeps up behind him and gets onto the very same bus—Line 193.

On the bus, he’s used to picking a seat next to a woman, preferably one around his age. That way, the seating arrangement makes more sense—and saves him the discomfort of vying for space with another man. A soldier sitting by the window is the one he joins, although she does nothing to evoke his inclination to romanticize. Perhaps her uniform, distasteful to him, serves as integument against his roving heart. So, he settles into the seat, awash in the homesick pulse of Russian music cooing in his ears—a rather recent reclaiming of the kernel where he feels most at home, doma, in the aftermath of the Israeli in him getting crudely amputated. He faintly hears the PA system droning out a promise of unwavering service, unity and victory, and is reminded of his postponed wish to order earbuds with better noise-cancelling qualities. No new girl to haunt, ghost-grey thoughts made of heavier stuff descend and make their way through the melodies. Has he the right to cloak himself in the firebird’s tricolor, its history? And would the porous Earth take his roots? He muses within the neutral comfort of the English language.

Although dispirited following the day’s work and the previous night’s battle to lose consciousness, today there is a piece of warmth he relies on for consolation. A programmer, one he initially mistook for a fellow Russian, is the one he feels most at ease with at an otherwise sterile workplace. She’s the kind of woman he’d naturally gravitate toward, if not for her being happily married. Today, she gave him a small notebook she picked up on a trip; he asked her to sign it with whatever she liked, making the blank gift intimate and imbued. Her eager glow at the request warmed him, and now he keeps the sweetly marked memento in the belly of his backpack.

“I’ll have to tell you about the trip later, okay? Please come to the office more often!” are the inviting words she left him with.

The station girl’s return to view cuts the current line short. She takes a seat on the right side of the aisle, parallel to him, and the subdued joy of the mild surprise makes him revert into what he hopes is a compelling performance. He straightens out, assumes dignity, and, with his face regaining its liveliness and poise, once again takes the seat of power between eye and brow. As he looks straight down the aisle to the front of the bus, he feels a glint of eyes turn toward him from the area to which he’s now most attuned. He isn’t certain it happened or that it was pointed at him, but he doesn’t let slip the possibility that the unaware actress might be agreeing to participate in play, turning an otherwise somnolent ride home into a short-lived drama of furtive glances and intersecting lines of sight.

By the grace of her closeness, he’s paralyzed by a raw tenderness of the heart: a melting core somewhere within the red confines of his ribcage, turning blood to ichor. When he looks inward, away from the grey-brown of seats, shadows, and strife, a swirl of pink and mauve floods his vision, emanates outwards, and envelopes the crimson-nailed girl. And now, as if in a trance, he attempts to angle his head in a direction oblique to her, gazing at nothing in particular but almost connecting. His senses heightened, he hopes to pick up on mirrored movements from her.

While he sits transfixed, deploying more and more of his heart, grounded thoughts remind him how unlikely she is to be aware of him. She might be thousands of miles away, nowhere near his yearning. A turn at which his heart might flutter could just as easily be absentminded boredom for her—a movement to alleviate some discomfort of the neck. He ensures the uninterrupted ecstasy by subduing realism and the disqualifying fact of his partial death.

He’s too far gone. Suffused with an aura of inexplicable and bottomless longing, gravity begins to pull not downwards, but sideways and to the right. He’s molding himself in her favor—knee now angled rightward, eyes orbiting her perimeter, testing proximity, and scanning for more confirmations, more evidence of mutuality—of at least the universal sort, if not the one based on shared identity, love of country, and blood that ties and drips in unison. With more frequent stops, additional passengers pile on. They’re forced to stand along the aisle due to a lack of available seats, and a middle-aged man now stands between him and the girl, obstructing his anomalous new center of gravity.

He considers his hunger and whether it’s strong enough to delude and orchestrate such a one-sided crescendo of wistful longing. Or is palpable, physical magnetism possible through some alignment in biological code? He recognizes the phenomenon and decides that what is felt by him, must then be equally felt by a her. The invisible string between himself and the nameless girl is already formed, and the presence between them does little to fray it. The obstacle pushes him to test new angles of approach. Instead of caressing the air around her face, he lowers his eyes and anguishes at her slender fingers—the sight instantly multiplying into visions of potential intimacy. As the bus sways, so does the back which takes up most of his view. The motion allows him glimpses of the girl’s profile and so fuels the narrative which will, at most, last another quarter of an hour. The lambent sunset winks into the bus through heads and windows.

A number of stops yet remaining, the obliviously offending man leaves the bus, barking a brusque thank you at the driver, followed by the remaining window-side seatmates. Both he and the girl move to the now-vacant window seats in the near-empty bus, moving those few feet further apart. He mourns the minor loss of proximity. Thankfully, the new angle provides opportunity to sit with the back slightly against the window and more boldly look in her direction. At this late point in the ride, he expects the peak of his likely illusion to be behind him, and a faint trace of resignation appears in him. His face slackens, eyes no longer aglint, and embarrassment creeps up for allowing himself to lose his head in such a desperate manner. And yet, he’s quick to forgive himself, thinking that ultimately, he did no wrong. Expiation is on his mind, although not over this. If anything, he deserves to indulge for a while in such a harmless manner. Everything he does on the way out bears the heft of farewell, a proshay in all its finality.

With the cloying, infatuate fog dissipating and light outside dimming, as if rotting and giving way to the impending darkness, he attempts to get at the mechanism which allowed the episode to occur. Why the weakness? The frenzy of emotion? He’s on a precipice with unreconciled appetites, past misdeeds, Israeli and Palestinian female shapes strewn below. A cast of him is also down there, thrown after the rest, or perhaps rightfully dragged in. Dew, tal, winks over all.

Then, before he has time to flow deeper into the heart’s shadowy chambers, comes the moment to disembark, his final stop being two away. One away. Now. And as he rises from his seat and faces the girl, intending to walk to the door, a final melancholy overflows and he allows himself, not without a hint of urgency, to look those eyes goodbye. See me, he thinks. She’s reclining, eyes partly closed, hair mussed. His sense of time becomes viscous, and, within it, he wonders what to make of her slightly upwards tilted, yielding face. No—it’s not for him. The moment passes. As the PA drones out its pre-recorded message once again, his stiff legs transport him out of the bus, and onto harsh first-to-Zion brick.

High and higher the translucent turns dim darker, then void-black, and so does vision. Now, where-to tests unutterable answers that either tear and loose into the unknown or manacle to fate while the Number indivisible listens to know and cast Fell Shadow this way or that.