Wie
lding a dental syringe with a hummingbird beak, Joel poured one mound of G into a mug filled with water. He mixed it with a swizzle stick. Then, carefully lifting the plunger, Joel filled up the whole thing.
‘Voila. Start with this.’
Joel handed the syringe upside down to Barbra. Then he started snorting stray powder and licking it off his upper lip.
‘Go with her, you pussy-whipped mofo,’ Joel said, sniffing.
God, Joel, when are you going to quit? Did his parents not care that he was a veritable drug addict? I did not think you could just quit hard drugs cold turkey. And mofo, to me, was a Sabbatian thing. Like, drugs in the anus would be God’s way of tsimtsumming. Tsimtsum, I’d just read in an article by this Jewish ufo researcher, meant retreating, withdrawing – as in, turning down the volume on your speakers.
You have to tsimtsum to hear God at all, the guy said.
‘Look, dude, if you hurry,’ Joel said, switching the channel to hockey, ‘we’ll all be peaking exactly the same.’
I heard Barbra from the basement bathroom calling my name. I wanted to know her original name.
My mother had said Barbra needed space to be contrary. My mother thought that, for her whole life, Barbra had played by the rules. ‘These rules were bigger than her when she was a girl,’ my mother said. ‘She was transplanted, adopted, forced to adapt. And now she needs to break the rules,’ my mother said. ‘This is instinctual and understandable and normal, okay?’
‘Sounds like a bunch of social work bs,’ my father said.
‘Barbra was not able to finish the army due to trauma, that is explicit, that is written, and you know that,’ my mother said.
Not quite, Mom, I wanted to interject. Barbra’s a refusenik. The first Beta Israel refusenik. I wanted to put those words on a T-shirt. I wanted it to be public. I wanted her to be studied, respected. I wanted Barbra to feel proud of what she’d done.
‘I heard that they put refuseniks in prison,’ I said to her. ‘Did you go to prison?’
‘No, bruh. I came here,’ Barbra offhandedly said.
I found her weirdly gleeful in Joel’s fancy basement powder room. Just like my mother, liquefied glee.
‘It’s good I’m wearing this tonight,’ she said.
Barbra was in a tube dress, all wrinkled, the colour of beet. I sat on the toilet. She got down on her knees. Tsimtsum, I’d learned, was the first contraction of God. A retraction so that the world could come into being. Barbra wiggled up her dress. I gawked at her panties. I thought, anuses contract. There are innumerable pleasurable nerve endings in the bottom, I remember our high school gym sex-ed teacher said.
I want to fuck you, I thought. Just regular fuck.
Our whole class erupted in hysterical laughter. Joel told me our gym teacher was definitely gay.
Barbra handed me the hummingbird syringe.
I wanted to rip down her panties. Touch her wayward clit ring.
God, let’s leave the rich house, I thought. Let the rich sing!
Barbra contorted herself in the space between me and the toilet. She pulled her panties to one side.
‘Do it,’ she said.
I was staring. She wiggled. This was totally real. Stray black hairs. Volume rising. A tightening tsim.
‘Come on,’ she ordered.
‘Nuh-uh.’
‘Do it. I mean it.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.