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There is a minefield in Golan Heights.

A pack of wolves lives among them, too light to trigger the sensors.

If they leave the minefield, they will be shot.

If the mines are removed, their ecosystem will be destroyed. And they will be shot.

Your paw on my sensor. Lithe, watchful. Just delicate enough to keep yourself alive. As long as you don’t push too hard.

*

Rubicon clings naked to the damp body, his finger wiggling inside a bullet hole. His bony legs kneel on either side, his toes curling, what’s left of them. The sun is starting to creep into the room, hot with the smell of gunpowder. His soles are blinding, two side-view mirrors.

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She doesn’t recognize her own voice. Nine months without anyone to talk to. And when she did, it was in a voice changed by the burning substance. As if her time underground had transformed her into a demon.

Time streams black from her head. Hair shaved at different lengths for topical testing. The caustic wax burning into her skull. Somehow more freakish and dehumanizing than if she was shaved completely. Prickly patches and dark chopped lengths.

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The vitals monitor beeps the countdown of the heart. Lazur sits next to the bed reading an old Lispector paperback of his mother’s, The Passion According to G.H. She was never the type to underline, but her presence is still felt. Paper is delicate and fibrous as any tissue. His mother’s hands dog-eared this page, spilled tea on that corner, and in every place the oil of her fingers lead to permanent near invisible changes.

Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere.

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Rubicon sits on the plastic stool, shower blasting his scarred back. Water spills through the holes of his face, turning him into a fountain in the dark granite cubicle.

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The shadow walks toward him, empty soles silent on the carpet.

Lazur reaches under the pile of clothes he removed from his body earlier, boxer briefs soft on the back of his hand. He pulls out his gun and aims at the shadow and pulls the trigger faster than he intended, still adjusting to his actual body, and he must have missed because the shadow keeps gliding toward him and there’s a crack on the window like the crack on his mind.

Then he sees the hole in the shadow, edges sparking around a coin of night.

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If you ‘act’ the most fatal ‘act’ of your life, the most fatal act of the epoch, you are depriving your life and the epoch of their deadly seriousness. From this consideration springs my first warning advice:
1. By no means should you consent to acting yourself, to become the actor of your life.

— Günther Anders to Claude Eatherly, the pilot of Straight Flush

Lazur stares into those hell blue eyes that reflect him without iridodialysis black or hyphemic red. Pupil, iris, sclera; clean circles of control.

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He made a terrible mistake.

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