Free Private Novelist by Nell Zink Page B

she started over. “Silkies are ancient and immortal, right? But seals and people aren’t. And in a sense neither are silkies. You can’t be a seal forever, or a person forever. You’d get bored. I’m only like four years old, as a person I mean, I think.”
    â€œHow can you be ancient and immortal and four years old?”
    â€œI don’t know, people pay attention to stuff like that, seals don’t. Nobody cares. I mean, some seals get older, and some don’t. And some become silkies, and some don’t. I think I seem pretty young. I mean, like the way I can’t defer gratification, and this confused way I talk and stuff. I know I look like twenty-five, but I wasn’t a little tiny seal when I first came out—I was pretty big—”
    â€œWhen was that?”
    â€œIt was in 1990. I had this crush on this totally cute guy who was a ski bum in Taos, so I came out, but it didn’t work out, so I went back in for a while, but now here I am again.”
    â€œYou lived in Taos?”
    She shook her head. “No, no, no—Santa Fe. I think if we’d lived in Taos, it might have worked out. For him, anyway.” She looked sadly out the window at Rabin Square hung with flags, and began to cry. “Where’s Yigal?” she sniffled.
    I had to admit, I had no idea.
    The next day Osnat called to tell us he was in Amsterdam, whoring around on drugs. She and Mary went out to Café Siach to cry together.
    Mary came back angry. “How can she say she loves Yigal, and then say he’s going to get hepatitis and herpes? It’s like she wants him to be punished. I told that bitch Mr. Francis Ford Coppola isn’t going to be needing her services, we’re filming in Salt Lake City.”
    â€œLook what I got,” I said. I sat her down in front of the computer. I had thought to ask for his e-mail address from Osnat, and I already had an answer.
    Dear Nell, don’t mention things like Trident missiles in unencrypted messages. This part is for Mary. My dear Mary, I am still wandering around Switzerland, but you are in my apartment in Tel Aviv. Why? Yigal.
    Mary wrote him some sort of reply.
    I also had a disquieting message from Shats in response to chapter five. There was a low humming sound outside just now, he wrote, like some huge engine in the distance, and what sounded like occasional underground explosions far away. I went to the window and there’s this blazing sunset, the sky was very gray and the sea dark blue gray, and on the horizon bright orange strips of light. A satil —a navy missile boat—was sailing southward along the shore, then changed course and started sailing toward the sunset. It doesn’t make sense—the distance’s too long—but it seems the sounds came from the boat.
    Could it be, I wondered, that the stress of reading Sailing Toward the Sunset has unhinged Shats’ mind as the labor of writing it seems to be unhinging mine? My friend Mary (no relation to the Mary in this novel) remarked that I seem frazzled, and whenever I leave the house I find the outside world fantastically large and three-dimensional compared with the tiny world of the computer screen. And, Shats says, his English is good, but not entirely second nature; I think he put it, To see Hebrew is to read it, but English still requires concentration. In short, it may be that he spends more time reading each chapter than I spend writing it. It is possible.
    I fear I may lose artistic momentum, and even as I do, Zohar’s joyful faith in me as an artist for art’s sake reaches new heights daily. “You are working! You are obsessed!” he cries, taking the opportunity to, for example, eat all the blueberry jam, knowing I may not think of going anywhere near the kitchen for hours.
    I asked him why the outside world seems so lovely now, as though I were naked at midnight on a golf course having eaten a big handful of