Waking Lions

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

did his best

Two patients with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex will never have the courtesy to coordinate their side effects.

Randomness, that seductive little whore, dances among the ward’s beds,

doctors’ lab coats, and tickles the exclamation marks of science until they bow their heads and become rounded into question marks. “So how can we ever know anything at all?!” he once blurted out in the lecture hall. Fifteen years had passed since then, and he still remembered the anger that had risen in him on that sleepy afternoon when he realized that the profession he was training for was no more certain than any other. A student who had fallen asleep beside

Death teaches you everything you need to know.

We have to wait for something to be destroyed in order to understand what had previously functioned properly.

all of life is destined to be annihilated

what else but idiocy would push a medical prodigy into a head-on confrontation with his boss?

Like all fathers, he knew it was inevitable that he was destined to disappoint his son.

left the hospital, they spoke less

shift from wild wolf to domesticated poodle,

And, although Liat always said there was no point in digging around for reasons—that’s what made him happy—Eitan

sliver of life to fight for. Truly.

How did Liat manage to keep this house looking like a display in a furniture shop?

What was the price of a man’s life?

penetrated his muscle. Sirkit muttered something

Yes, he knows that there can be no price on a man’s life. And that’s why he is so grateful

Idiot, didn’t it occur to you that he had a name; did you think that everyone called him “him,” “the Eritrean,” “the illegal immigrant”?

Other scars come with memories, and then it’s not faint and not pleasant, and who wants to touch them at all?

“If it was a girl from the kibbutz who was run over like that, would the investigation be pointless then?”

secret, unrecorded medical treatment

Since he had been coerced into helping his patients, he hated them at least as much as he hated himself.

However much he wanted to feel compassion for them, he couldn’t help recoiling from them.

Perhaps this was how a veterinarian felt.

The ease with which she took possession of him, the undisputed authority she exercised over him,

Thin black faces that all looked the same to Eitan.

She wouldn’t steal the smell of her pussy from him.)

“I just don’t understand how a person can let someone die that way, like a dog.”

existential fears sometimes overcome moral imperatives,

When she sanctified the good in him that way, she also unwittingly condemned the bad.

He lied so that she would never know how far he was from the man she thought he was.

But when he lied, he merely distanced himself further and further away from that man, until in the end, he saw him only as a caricature.

you wash floors in silence. It was only you and the ceramic tiles.

you must have one place that is free of questions and doubts. Otherwise it is really sad.

abandoned garage in the middle

hellholes?

A person dies, but things remain. A chair. Cigarette butts. The memory of a foot. And maybe the song he used to whistle, which she couldn’t remember now.

should have felt something. Kindness. Compassion. The responsibility of one human being for another. Not only toward this man standing here and shaking his hand emotionally while he himself was only waiting for him to

Something that had happened to someone else. But he recalled the details

He remembered all that from a distance, as if it had happened to someone else. But it happened to you. Not to someone else. To you.

The run-over Eritrean stood outside the walls of his consciousness and pounded on the door, screaming to be let in. But inside, only a faint noise could be heard. Like the muted sound he’d made when the SUV had hit him.

instead of nausea, something else rose in him. The beginnings of a terrible anger.

family sitting at the table is actually made up of loose crumbs of moments.

so she can pat the crumbs of those experiences into a single whole, the way she patted the bread crumbs onto the pink, moist meat.

Eitan concluded that he had once again mistaken one for another.

how could she understand that he had confused the anonymous,

live Eritrean with her dead husband?

his built-in aversion to those foreign hands.

yesterday’s nausea and guilt began to subside, replaced by growing anger.

How can you be so pathetic! How can you bear this futile, groveling existence?! Why do you follow me like a pack of puppies?