Free Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories by Etgar Keret, Nathan Englander, Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston

use the bathroom, and then, after locking the door behind him, he’ll masturbate into the toilet.
    He thinks this will bring him some relief from that sense of loneliness. He’s not sure.
    In Chinese medicine, sperm is considered a form of energy. When you ejaculate it, you are weakened, and that’s why it isn’t recommended. Especially when you’re weak to begin with.
    The father doesn’t know any of that, but he gives up on the idea anyway. Loneliness is hard for him, but he doesn’t feel comfortable leaving his son alone with the Chinese acupuncturist.
    Every day except Saturday, the acupuncturist repeats. He thinks the father wasn’t listening the first time.
    The father pays with new bills. Exactly 450. No change necessary.
    They make an appointment for the next day.
    On the way to the door, the Chinese acupuncturist says in Hebrew, “Be well, you two.”
    The son thinks it’s weird for the acupuncturist to say that. After all, he’s the only one who’s sick.
    The father doesn’t notice it. He’s thinking about something else.
    Wife ; snot ; Be well, you two .
    Be well, you two ; snot ; wife .
    There’s nothing stranger than hearing a Chinese man speak Hebrew.

GRAB THE CUCKOO BY THE TAIL
     
    It’s hardest at night. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying I miss her most at night—because I don’t miss her, period. But at night, when I’m alone in bed, I do think about her. Not warm, fuzzy thoughts about all the good moments we had. More like a picture of her in panties and a T-shirt, sleeping with her mouth open, breathing heavily, leaving a circle of saliva on the pillow, and of myself watching her. What did I actually feel then when I was watching her? First of all, amazement that I wasn’t turned off, and after that, a sort of affection. Not love. Affection. The kind you feel toward an animal or a baby more than toward a wife. Then I cry. Almost every night. And not out of regret. I have nothing to regret. She’s the one who left. And looking back, our splitting up was good, not just for her, for both of us. And it’s even better that we did it before there were kids in the middle to make everything more complicated. So why do I cry? Because that’s just how it is. When something gets taken away from you, even if it’s shit, it hurts. When a tumor is removed, you’re left with a scar. And the best time to scratch it seems to be at night.
    Uzi has a new cell phone, the kind that gets real-time updates from the stock market. When the stocks of his computer company go up, his cell plays “Simply the Best,” and when they go down, it plays “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” He’s been walking around with that cell for a month now, and it makes him laugh every time. “Simply the Best” makes him laugh more than “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” because, after all, it’s easier to laugh when money is pouring down on you than when someone is snatching it out of your wallet. And today, Uzi tells me, is a big day because he’s planning to invest a bundle in NASDAQ options. Those options are called QQQQ, but Uzi thinks it’s funnier to call them “cuckoo.” If the NASDAQ goes up, so do they. And since the NASDAQ, according to Uzi, is going to fly through the ceiling any minute, all we have to do is grab the cuckoo by the tail and fly with it to the sky.
    It takes Uzi twenty minutes to explain this, and when he’s finished, he checks his cell-phone display again. When he began his explanation, the cuckoo was 1.3, and now it’s already 1.55. “We suck,” Uzi laments as he chews his almond croissant, spraying crumbs every which way. “Do you realize that in just this last half hour, we could have made more than ten percent on our money?”
    “Why do you keep saying we ?” I ask. “And what money are you talking about? You think I have money to put into this thing?”
    “You don’t have to put in a lot,” Uzi says. “If we’d put in five thousand, we’d be five hundred