Chapter 41: The Pied Piper of Venice on Locksmith Street

At our age, Facebook “message requests” are usually a mix between eighty-year-old American generals stationed in Yemen looking for true love (and a credit card), and childhood friends from the group you haven’t seen since the Six-Day War who suddenly remembered you existed because they sell ketogenic supplements. So, when the blue letter suit icon flashes, my finger is already trained in the official Titanic movement: delete, block, goodbye.

But then he arrived.

No fake profile, no Google landscape photos, no poorly Photoshopped blurry wedding ring. He was real, he was outrageously young, and he looked exactly - but exactly - like the kid from the movie "Death in Venice." Tadzio, the Messenger version. Pale, wild, and elegant beauty at the same time, the kind that doesn't make most women run after him, but for me? For me, he pushed all the right buttons. I'm made of exactly those materials. The materials that ignite with extreme aesthetics, with the promise of something that shouldn't happen. He was the Pied Piper from Hamelin, and I was already looking for my walking shoes.

“Awake?” That word, which is usually sent from some sweaty man at two in the morning and makes me want to send him a recipe for chicken soup, looked on his screen like a line from a poem.

I was going to answer something cynical. Something like "I've been awake for thirty years, honey, what do you want?" But the words remained hanging in the air of the living room.

Suddenly, the neon light in the corner decided to turn down its volume on its own, taking on a warm, smoky amber hue. The smell of my iced coffee was replaced by the sweet, heavy scent of quality tobacco and stardust. The phone screen didn't just light up, it started to breathe. His words weren't written, they were emitted like dry ice vapor.

I looked around. The boundaries of the room began to stretch and swirl, as if someone had dropped a drop of dark blue watercolor into a glass of clear water. My couch was no longer a couch, it felt like wet velvet.

And he wasn't inside the phone anymore.

He stood there, at the edge of my vision, leaning against a doorframe that hadn't been there before. The Pied Piper from Venice. Half smile, half riddle, and his eyes said we weren't going to talk about the weather.

He stood there, handsome enough to warrant a fine, and for one small, miserable moment, I was back to being a real-life scoundrel. My mind, that annoying type that never goes to sleep, immediately began to recalculate. I looked at him and then, in my imagination, I looked at myself from the side. Come on, my inner voice whispered to me, you look more like his mother than his lover. I could have easily offered him a sweater.

But the boy from Venice didn't come for chicken soup.

He took one step forward, and the distance between us shrank to zero without him even moving his feet. Thoughts about age, about the wrinkles in the corner of his eyes, about "what the neighborhood will say," all fell off me like an old, clumsy garment. When his hand, cool and smooth as marble, touched my neck, my cynicism raised a white flag and went to find itself in another room.

The room had long since stopped obeying the laws of Tel Aviv physics. The air had become thick, almost liquid, with the smell of an approaching storm. He didn't speak, because flutists don't need words. His gaze was a command, and my body responded like a musical instrument suddenly remembering why it was created.

My shirt was gone. I don’t remember if he took it off or if it simply evaporated from the scorching heat emanating from his skin. His touch was a crazy contrast: feather-light but with the power of a tide. The swipe of his lips over my pubic bone sent an electric current that made me forget my name, my address, and the fact that I had a meeting at the office tomorrow morning. We were tangled inside each other on the wet velvet of what had once been my couch. It was sexy, unrestrained, sweaty, and full of smoky mystery. The kind of sexual act that feels like an ancient ritual taking place inside a spaceship. Every breath of his sounded like an echo in a cave, every moan of mine became part of the frequency of the room. I felt myself being taken apart into particles, then reassembled, in a much more interesting way.

And when the climax came, it didn't come with fireworks, but with the collapse of the walls.

Literally. The white plaster walls of my living room began to peel and scatter like cigarette ash in the wind. The concrete ceiling opened wide, and suddenly we found ourselves standing, partially clothed, or perhaps just enveloped in that amber light, in the heart of the city.

But this was not a Tel Aviv of traffic jams on the Ayalon Highway and scooters cutting the sidewalk.

The city took on an apocalyptic appearance, hallucinatory and magnificent in its beauty. The sky was a deep eggplant purple, and instead of stars, fading Chinese lanterns floated in it. From a distance, the Azrieli Towers looked like giant icicles slowly melting into the horizon, and the asphalt of the street flowed under our feet like a dark, shiny river of mercury. There was not a single living soul on the streets, except for a pack of white spirit dogs running in exemplary silence among the abandoned cars, which looked as if they had been painted gold.

My piper took my hand. His fingers were intertwined with mine, and he pulled me forward, into the nightly parade of the end of the world. The wind blew warm and caressing, and I followed him, cynical and in love, into the sexiest ruin this city had ever seen.

The sea of Tel Aviv no longer remembered that it was the Mediterranean. When we reached the shore, the water did not splash on the sand, but whispered. It was black and smooth as a lake of ink, reflecting the purple eggplant sky and the melting ice towers of the city. My flute player stepped straight into the water, dragging me after him. I expected the familiar cold, the shivering, but the water was warm like a caressing bath of oils. My dress floated around me like the wings of a night butterfly. He turned to me, the water reaching his perfect young waist, and his Tadzhioian beauty shining in the darkness like a lone streetlight in the fog. His contact with the water became another round of sensory confusion, half swimming, half corrupt dance, as the dark waves enveloped us and obscured the horizon. There was no past, no future, there was only warm wetness and his breath on my skin.

But the Pied Piper has a schedule, and the fantasy doesn't stop at red.[

Before I could figure out how the salt didn't burn my eyes, we found ourselves walking, completely dry (don't ask me how, the laws of physics went haywire), through the alleys of the Jaffa flea market.

The market was empty of people, but completely alive. The vintage and antique shops opened on their own, and the objects began to run the world without us. Armchairs from the 1960s floated a meter above the asphalt, antique lamps turned on and off with a heartbeat, and Persian rugs unfurled themselves like red carpets in Hollywood just for our bare feet to step on. The Pied Piper pulled a necklace of black pearls from some ghostly shelf, put it around my neck, and with one look at him I realized that this apocalypse was actually the best sale in town, and all for free.

Then he grabbed my waist, gave me a kiss that literally gave me wings, and with a gust of wind we soared up. Like a bird's flight.

We flew over crazy Tel Aviv, seeing the amber and purple lights from above, and suddenly we plummeted, like a bomb of sex and aesthetics, directly into... Locksmith Street.

Well, look. You can make a surreal fantasy until tomorrow, but Locksmith Street remains Locksmith Street. Even at the end of the world, character is stronger than anything.

We found ourselves standing in the middle of the street, between an "Express" garage and a second-hand car dealership that had undergone a cosmic upgrade. The noble white dogs that had accompanied us before? Here they had turned into a pack of ginger street cats with one eye, who looked at us with a look of "What do you think you're doing here without permission from the municipality?"

My flute player, with all his noirish, mysterious atmosphere and divine pallor, stood next to a half-broken neon sign for "Moshe Brothers Tire Shop." The neon flickered and buzzed with the annoying noise of a stuck fly. Every time the neon came on, it illuminated his angelic face with the sickly green light of a '94 Subaru station wagon.

“Tadzio,” I whispered to him, trying to restore the smoky atmosphere, “take me out of here.” He opened his young and beautiful mouth to answer me with a profound sentence about the essence of existence, but just then, from within the abandoned apocalyptic garage, a loud echo of a spiritual jackhammer emanated.

The piper tried to make a magnetic, sexy move, but he almost tripped over a black motor oil can.

I watched him, a boy from Venice, trying to maintain the air of a romantic demigod while smelling like a mixture of perfume and brake grease. My cynicism came home with drums and dances. I choked back a laugh. Oh sure, I thought to myself, there is no fantasy in the world, no matter how crazy and sexy my brain can conjure up, that will survive Locksmith Street without getting a quote for a timing belt replacement.

It was impossible to stay on Locksmith Street. The garages and the grease were an insult to the Pied Piper's aesthetics, and I refused to let sweaty reality spoil the end of our world. I grabbed his hand, hard, and in an instant I pulled us out of there.

Locksmith Street collapsed in on itself like a wet cardboard box, and the noise of the jackhammer was swallowed up in a deep, suffocating silence.

We were thrown into a new space. No garages, no cities, no walls, and no sky. Just thick, warm darkness, made of black, endless velvet, as if we had entered the backstage of the universe.

.

Here, the humor expired. The cynicism, which had protected me all my life, dissolved and turned to dust. It was no longer needed.

He turned to me, and this time there was nothing angelic or distant about him. It was a wild, demanding beauty, almost cruel because it was so precise. His body, young and smooth, clung to me with unbridled longing, and the heat emanating from his skin burned away all my last defenses. Our encounter became a stormy, compressed one, wordless but full of broken breaths and a primal, almost violent need to get lost.

His hands moved over me like a storm. They knew exactly where to touch, how to grip, how to stretch the boundaries of pleasure to the limit of what was tolerable. Every kiss of his was like surrender, every touch of his on my flesh felt like the engraving of an indelible memory. We swirled inside each other in the warm darkness, ageless, identityless, two bodies dancing to the notes of an ancient, bewitching melody. Our sweat mixed, our hearts beat to the same mad rhythm, and the desire was so pure, so sensual and total, that it felt like the only real thing that ever existed.

During the hot, electric touch, I felt his body begin to lose its physical volume. His fingers, which were intertwined with mine, became lighter, airier. I looked into his eyes, those mesmerizing Tadzio eyes, and saw them freeze. His warm skin became smooth, cold, and flat.

He didn't disappear in an explosion. He simply retreated, shrank, and faded back into the outline of his own image.

I opened my eyes.

My living room was back to normal. The smell of my cold coffee still lingered in the air, and the walls were solid, made of banal Tel Aviv plaster and plaster. I took a deep breath, trying to regulate my pulse, and the rational part of my brain quickly got to work.

Come on, really, Yael, I whispered to myself with tired cynicism, what a crazy fantasy. You've completely outdone yourself. The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Death in Venice, the end of the world... You were all daydreaming in front of a Facebook profile of a guy you'll never meet in life. It was all in your head.

I turned on my side, reaching for the nightstand to put down the phone and try to fall asleep.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I froze.

On the nightstand, right next to my glass of water, stood a picture. Not a phone screen, not lit pixels, but a real paper picture, printed, set in an old, weathered wooden frame. And from the picture he looked at me. The young guy from Venice. Half smile, half riddle, and his eyes seemed to move in the darkness of the room. His picture. The real one.

My heart skipped a beat, and this time it didn't return to its normal rhythm. This thing woke me up completely, shaking off any chance of sleep, erasing any possibility of explaining this night as if it were just another blog post.

I rolled back onto my back. I stared at the white ceiling, too steady. I had no way of falling asleep. I just lay there, in the smoky darkness of reality, my eyes wide open, my hands still feeling the warmth of his skin, and my mind swimming in a sea of thoughts, with no lifeboat of cynicism to save me from this crazy beauty.

Chapter 41: The Pied Piper of Venice on Locksmith Street