"Close. Those two are each other's best friend." A seedling of pride grows inside her: At least in that realm she'd been successful. Her two sons were soul mates.

"And is that-is that normal?"

"What?"

"For two brothers, at that age ..."

"They were always like that. Almost from the beginning."

"But didn't you say that...Weren't you telling me that Ilan and Ofer-"

"That changed, too. Things kept changing in that period. I just don't know how I'm going to have time to tell you everything."

It's a bit like describing how a river flows, she realizes. Like painting a whirlwind, or flames. It's an occurrence occurrence, she thinks, happily recalling one of his old words: A family is a perpetual occurrence.

And she shows him: Adam at six and a bit, Ofer almost three. Adam lies on the lawn at the house in Tzur Hada.s.sah. His arms are spread-eagled and his eyes are closed. He is dead. Ofer goes in and out of the screen door, and the slamming wakes Ora from a rare afternoon nap. She looks out the window and sees Ofer bringing presents to Adam, sacrificial offerings to bring him back to life. He takes out his stuffed animals, toy cars, a kaleidoscope, board games, and marbles. He piles his favorite books and a few choice videotapes around Adam. He is serious and worried, almost frightened. Again and again he toddles up the four concrete steps into the house and back to Adam to place precious objects around him. Adam does not move. Only when Ofer is inside the house does he raise his head a little and open one eye to examine the latest offering. She hears heavy panting. Ofer pulls out his favorite blanket and places it tenderly on Adam's legs. Then he looks at Adam pleadingly and says something she cannot hear. Adam lies motionless. Ofer makes fists, looks around, and runs back into the house again. Adam wriggles his toes under Ofer's blanket. How cruel he can be, she thinks. Yet his cruelty is so hypnotic that she cannot put an end to Ofer's torture. Outside her closed door she hears sounds of effort and struggle. Something heavy is being dragged. Chairs are pushed aside, and Ofer breathes rhythmically, grunting a little. A moment later his mattress appears at the top of the stairs, towering over his head. Ofer feels for the top step with his foot. Ora freezes, careful not to laugh so as not to frighten him and make him fall. Adam opens a slit in one eye and an admixture of amazement and awe emerges on his face as he watches his little brother carrying almost his own body's weight on his head. Ofer walks down the steps, rocking back and forth under the clumsy mattress. He groans, pants, and propels himself forward with trembling legs. He reaches Adam and collapses beside him on the mattress. Adam props himself up on his elbows and looks at Ofer with deep, grateful, open eyes.

It seemed to Ora, as she watched from the window, that in fact Adam was not being cruel but rather testing Ofer, to find out if he could sustain a far greater mission, which Ora could not identify at the time; she still thought it was merely the usual, sufficiently complicated mission of being Adam's little brother.

"What do you mean?" Avram asks hesitantly.

"Wait, I'll get there."

"So you're not dead anymore?" Ofer asked. "I'm alive," said Adam, and he got up and started to run around the yard with his arms outstretched, declaring that he was alive and kicking. Ofer pranced along behind him, smiling, exhausted.

"Ilan may have betrayed Adam, but Ofer never did," she explains.

Small, thin, and stuttering, enchanting everyone with his gaze, his large blue eyes, his golden hair, his wondrous smile. He had certainly sensed that he could capture hearts effortlessly, simply with his sweetness and the light that shone from his face. And obviously, she thinks, he'd already noticed that every time he went anywhere with Adam, everyone's eyes immediately skipped over his older, restless, slippery, bothersome brother and were drawn to him. "Just think about what a temptation that is for a boy-to rake in the whole pot at his brother's expense. But he never did. Never. Always, in any situation, he chose Adam."

"From his first step," Avram reminds her generously.

"That's right, you remember," she says happily.

"I remember everything." He reaches out to embrace her shoulders. They walk on that way, side by side, his parents.

They are nine and six, one tall and thin, the other still small, walking and talking feverishly, gesticulating, climbing on top of each other's ideas. Weird, complicated conversations about orcs and gnomes, vampires and zombies. "But, Adam," Ofer squeaks, "I don't get it. A wolfman is a boy born from a family of wolves?"

"It could be that way," Adam replies gravely, "but it could be that he's just got lycanthropy."

Ofer is stunned for a moment, then tries out the word and stumbles. Adam explains at length about the disease that turns humans, or quasi-humans, into human-animals. "Say 'lycanthropy,'" Adam says, his voice hardening, and Ofer repeats the word.

Before going to sleep, in the dark, in their beds they talk: "Is the green dragon, who breathes clouds of chlorine gas and whose chances of knowing how to talk are thirty percent, is he more dangerous than the black one, who lives in swamps and salt flats and breathes pure acid?"

Their door is open just a crack, and Ora, with a pile of laundry in her arms, stops to listen.

"Crazy Death is a creature that has completely lost its sanity."

"Really?" Ofer whispers reverentially.

"And listen what else I made up. He can turn into a crazy undead, whose whole purpose is to kill, and anyone who gets killed by him turns into a crazy zombie in one week and walks around with Crazy Death everywhere."

Ofer's voice is hoa.r.s.e: "But are they real?"

"Let me finish! Once a day, all of Crazy Death's crazy zombies unite into a huge ball of death-craziness."

"But it's not real, is it?"

Adam replies sweetly, "I made it up, and that's why it obeys only me."

"So make something up for me, too," Ofer asks urgently. "Make something up against it for me."

"Maybe tomorrow," Adam murmurs.

"Now, now! I won't sleep all night if you don't make up something for me!"

"Tomorrow, tomorrow."

Ora hears the thin wires that twist through both voices and interweave them: wires of fear, of bared cruelty and submissive pleading, the power to save and the refusal to save, which is also, perhaps, the fear of being saved. And all these also come from her, even Adam's cruelty, which angers her, which is so foreign to her, yet at that moment it strangely excites her, animates her wildly and seems to reveal something about herself that she had not dared to know. The two of them, Adam and Ofer, unraveling from the root of her soul in a double reel.

"Good night," Adam says and starts to snore loudly.

Ofer whines, "Adam, don't sleep, don't sleep, I'm scared of Crazy Death! Can I get in your bed?"

Eventually Adam stops snoring and invents a Skort for him, or a Stark, or a hawk-man, and describes his characteristics and heroic properties in detail. As he talks, a new tenderness enters his voice, and with a rustle in her back Ora can feel how much he enjoys b.u.t.tressing Ofer, enveloping him in the protective pillows of his imagination, his one and only source of power. And that padding, the kindness and compa.s.sion and protection that now emanate from Adam, are also a little bit hers, until suddenly, in the midst of Adam's speech, she hears Ofer's soft hums of sleep.

They are constantly scheming. In every corner of the yard and garden they set traps for androids, which Ora usually falls into, and they create fantastical creatures from painted cardboard rolls and thin wooden rods and nails. They build futuristic vehicles out of cardboard boxes and develop satanic weapons meant to annihilate the bad guys, or all of humanity, depending on Adam's mood. In a special lab they grow plastic soldiers inside sealed gla.s.s jars full of water, with faded flower petals floating around. Every soldier in this sad phantom army has a name and a rank, a detailed biography that they can recite by heart, and a deadly mission that he will be required to carry out when the order is given. For days on end they busy themselves building cardboard fortresses for dragons and Ninja Turtles, designing battlefields of dinosaurs, drawing knightly seals in venomous black, yellow, and red. Here too Adam is usually the inventor, the fantasizer, the Dungeon Master, while Ofer is the elf-the enchanted, obedient imp, the implementer. In his slow, deliberate way, he explains to Adam the limitations of feasibility and wisely constructs the solid bricks from which his brother's air castles will be built.

"But it wasn't just that," says Ora, who eavesdropped and looked in on them whenever she could. "Because Ofer learned from from Adam, but he also learned Adam, but he also learned him." him."

"What do you mean?" asks Avram.

"I don't know how to explain it, but I could see it happening." Ora gives an embarra.s.sed laugh. "I could see Ofer realize that he could figure out how Adam's mind worked, how Adam could leap from A to M in one thought, and how he flipped ideas over midway, playing with absurdities and paradoxes. At first Ofer mimicked Adam, simply parroting his brilliant ideas. But then he learned the principle, and when Adam talked about a step walking down a staircase, Ofer would come up with an apartment moving a house, coins buying money, a path going on a hike. Or he would invent a paradox: a king who orders his subjects not to obey him. It was so lovely to see how Adam molded Ofer, but also taught him how to act with someone like him, someone special and sensitive and vulnerable. He gave Ofer the secret key that opened him, and to this day Ofer is the only one who has that key." Her face softens and glows: she doesn't know if there's even any point in telling all this to desolate Avram, or whether he can understand her that far, all the way to that bend in her soul. After all, Avram was an only child, and from a very young age he didn't even have a father. But he had Ilan, she realizes. Ilan was a brother to him. "And you should have heard those two talking. Their endless, hallucinatory conversations. If I happened to be around, I could have-"

But the pair of little faces look up at her gravely, with exactly the same resentment: "Mom, stop it! Go away, you're bothering us!"

The blades of insult and delight dig inside her simultaneously: She's in their way, but they already have an "us." She feels both cut in two and multiplied.

"And there were lots of other things, but there's one thing I really have to tell you, which happened to us with Adam and with Ofer. Just tell me when you get tired."

"Tired?" He laughs. "I've slept enough."

"We had this episode, just before Adam's bar mitzvah, something I still can't really explain."

The dog turns around and grunts, her fur stranding on end. Ora and Avram quickly look back, and Ora has time to think: It's him him, the notebook man, he's chasing me. But a few yards away, near a raspberry bush, stand two heavy, bloated wild boars, watching them with beady eyes. The b.i.t.c.h howls, lowers her body to the ground, and takes a step back, almost touching Ora's leg. The boars sniff and flare their nostrils. For a moment or two there is no movement. A songbird on a nearby tree screeches. Ora feels her body respond to the wildness in the boars. Her skin quivers, and whatever flows through her is sharper and more animalistic than what she had felt when the dogs attacked them. Suddenly the boars take off, grunt angrily, and run away with victorious glee, their thick bodies dancing lightly.

"Did you notice his twitches?" Ilan had asked one night in bed.

"Adam's? With his mouth?" She murmured and nestled her head in the round of his shoulder. (Later, when she fell asleep, Ilan would gently turn her over and snuggle against her back; every night she sleepily returned to the sweet journey, in her father's arms, from the living room couch to her bed.) "And did you see the way he touches his fingertip to the spot between his eyes?"

She opened her eyes. "Now that you mention it."

"Should we ask him? Say something?"

"No, no, let's not. What good would it do?"

"Yeah, it'll pa.s.s. I'm sure it will."

Two days later she noticed that Adam was breathing into his cupped hand every few minutes, like someone smelling his breath. He turned around and let out quick, short exhalations, as though trying to banish an invisible creature. She decided not to tell Ilan, for the time being. Why worry him needlessly? The whole thing would pa.s.s in a few days anyway. But the next day there was more: every time Adam touched an object, he blew on his fingertips, and then on his arms, up to the elbows. He rounded his lips like a fish before he said anything. She started to find his overflowing creativity a little worrying and was reminded of something her mother used to say: There's no end to trouble's ideas. Finally, after he got up from lunch three times with various excuses, sneaked into the bathroom, and came back with wet hands, she phoned Ilan at the office and described the latest symptoms. Ilan listened quietly. "If we make a big deal out of it," he eventually said, "it'll only make it worse. Let's just try to ignore it, and you'll see, he'll calm down." She had known this was what he would say. That was exactly why she had called him.

The next day she found that if Adam happened to touch any part of his body, he quickly blew on it. The new rule, which he apparently had to obey categorically, was rapidly turning him into a tight knot of gestures and counter-gestures, which he tried very hard to hide, but Ora saw. And Ilan saw.

Strange, thinks Avram, why didn't they take him to see someone?

"Maybe we should take him to someone," she told Ilan at night, in bed.

"Who?" Ilan asked tensely.

"I don't know. Someone. A professional, to have a look."

"A psychologist?"

"Maybe. Just to have a glance."

"No, no, it'll only make it worse. It will be like we're telling him he's-"

"What?"

"Not right."

But he isn't, she thought.

"Let's wait a bit. Give him some time."

She tried to nestle into his shoulder, but her head could not find its place. She felt hot and sweaty. There was no peace in her body, or in his. For some reason she remembered something Avram had once said: if you look at someone for a long time, at anyone, you can see the most terrible place they might reach in their lifetime. She didn't sleep that night.

The next weekend they went to the beach at Beit Yannai. From the moment they arrived, Adam was constantly busy cleaning. He washed his hands over and over again and scrubbed his inflatable beach mattress with damp cloths. He even turned it over every few minutes to clean "the bit that touched the sea."

At sunset, Ora and Ilan sat in deck chairs, Ofer played and dug in the sand, and Adam stood waist-high in the water, turning in circles, blowing in every direction, touching every joint and knuckle in his hands and feet. A tall, tan elderly couple walked arm in arm on the beach and stopped to look at Adam. From a distance, with the sunset's blush on his back, he looked enmeshed in a poetic fairy dance, one movement following the other, each born from its predecessor.

"They think it's Tai Chi," Ilan hissed, and Ora whispered that it was starting to drive her mad. He put a hand on her arm. "Wait. He'll get sick of it. How long can he keep this up?"

"Look at how totally indifferent he is to people watching him."

"Yes, that's what worries me a little."

"A little? Adam? In front of everyone?"

She thought about Ilan's father, who during his final days in the hospital had lost all shame and would undress in front of everyone to show yet another place on his body where the growth had spread.

"And look how Ofer keeps peeking at him, all the time," Ilan said.

"Think about what it must do to him, to see Adam like that."

"Has he talked to you about it?"

"Ofer? Nothing. I tried to ask him this morning, when we were alone on the beach. Nothing." She forced a smile. "Well, he's not going to collaborate against Adam."

Adam kissed his fingertips and showered light touches on his waist, thighs, knees, and ankles in the water. He straightened up, spun around in a circle, and blew in all four directions.

"What's going to happen when school starts in September, I want to know."

"Wait. There are almost two months to go. It'll pa.s.s by then."

"And if it doesn't?"

"It will, it will."

"And if it doesn't?"

"How could it not?"

Now she pulls her knees in to her chest, holds her breath, and looks at Avram for a long time. Avram feels that he can't sit still for much longer. Ants are crawling all through his body.

Adam seemed to grow more distant day by day. Bad thoughts congregated, and Ora sensed that they had been lying in wait for some time. During the day they hovered like shadows in her head. At night, she sleepily banished them until she was exhausted, and then they descended. Ilan woke her and caressed her face and held her close to him and told her to breathe with him, slowly, until she calmed down.

"I had a nightmare," she said. Her face was buried in his chest. She would not let him turn on the light, afraid he might read in her eyes what she had seen: Avram walked past her on the street, dressed in white and looking very pale, and when he came close he murmured that she should buy the newspaper today. She tried to stop him, to ask how he was and why he insisted on being estranged from her, but he pulled his arm away from her grip in disgust and left. The newspaper headline said that Avram was planning to go on a hunger strike outside her house until she gave in and delivered one of her sons to him.

Adam needed new gym shoes for the school year, and she kept putting off the shopping expedition. He asked her repeatedly to take him to the mall so he could choose a gift for Ofer, and while only two weeks earlier she would have been filled with excitement by such a request-"And after we finish shopping, can I take you out to a cafe?"-she now avoided him with such feeble excuses that he seemed to understand, and he stopped asking.

Every day brought new symptoms. He quickly pulled his arms away from his shoulders and to the sides before talking. He pulsed his fists open and closed before he said "me." The washing and rinsing became more and more frequent. In the course of a single meal he was capable of getting up to wash his hands and mouth five or ten times.

After a Shabbat spent at home, during which Ilan saw Adam for a whole day, including three meals, he told Ora, "Let's call someone."

As predicted, Adam refused even to hear about it. He hurled himself on the floor and screamed that he wasn't crazy and they should leave him alone. When they tried to persuade him, he locked himself in his room and pounded on the door for a long time.

"We'll wait a bit," said Ilan, as they both tossed and turned in bed. "Let him get used to the idea."

"How long? How long can you wait with this?"

"Let's say, a week?"

"No, that's too long. A day. Maybe two, but no more."

There was something paralyzing about watching Adam in the days that followed. Her child was turning into a process. During the hours she spent at home with him-when she could not find an excuse to go out for some fresh air, to absorb the smooth, harmonious movements of other people like an elixir, and to suck up some bitter jealousy at the sight of Adam's peers having fun on their summer vacations-in those hours with him she witnessed his entire existence being chopped up into separate parts, whose connection was growing more and more tenuous. At times it seemed that the gestures-the "phenomena," as she and Ilan called them-were themselves the tendons and nerves that now sustained the affinity between the parts of the child he used to be.

"It all happened so close," she says, whether to Avram or to herself. "It happened inside our home. You could reach out and touch it, but there was nothing to hold on to. Your hand closed in on emptiness."

"Aha," says Avram faintly.