…for history has yet to start
and there’s no geography
and no other languages.
And even better:
the war
has left its “r” behind
and turned into love,
so the weapons sleep
beneath the dust,
and the planes pass by
without shelling the cities,
and the boats
look like smiles
on the water.
—Dunya Mikhail, “Another Planet”
There were days that out in the middle of nowhere was home.
There were days that being in transit alone, along the winding desert road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, felt most like home.
You were most at home while in motion, your body in stillness carried by motion.
In motion there’s somewhere to go, even if the destination fails you.
In motion you could handle all sorts of silence.
There were days you were always looking up at the sky and wondering if you’d ever be one of the chosen ones to see Pluto or its largest moon, Charon, from Earth. Rarely does one see either. Israel is a small stretch of country. It is hard to take the kind of trips in which size is salvation. Those were the days it was hard to imagine infinity, boundlessness, possibility.
In Tel Aviv, sometimes you took a bus from the open-air terminal of Arlozorov, but that required a bus transfer from the Central Bus Station, an extra trip that was less about being in motion than interruption. Almost always you took the 25 NIS sherut, the shared taxi stuffed with students and tourists and Jerusalem weekenders who, like you, had come to Tel Aviv during the Sabbath, who’d come to escape the sandstone silence of Shabbat in Jerusalem, those like you who preferred the sea and bars and bookstores on Dizengoff, those who liked the orderly up-and-downness of Dizengoff, the more-grid like streets. Things seemed easier in Tel Aviv. Yet you’d argue Jerusalem was special, and Tel Aviv just like any another city by the sea, that’s why you stayed in Jerusalem, that’s why you refused to leave, that’s why you tried to endure its silence on the Sabbath, immerse yourself in the homes of family and friends, that’s why you’d run away to Tel Aviv, because the silence was not the silence it was supposed to be, and you didn’t have the words to explain how the stillness from Friday night to Saturday morning haunted you, filled you with fear, that things were not right at all, that this is not what was meant, and what was meant you’d long forgotten.
And out in the middle of nowhere, going from city to city to sleeping on the shoulder of strangers, unable to sit with legs straight thanks to the piles of suitcases on the floor, so many suitcases in the rear that the driver couldn’t see out the back window, you would look blindly into the night sky for distant Pluto and Charon, but could only marvel at its place hidden among the stars.
Charon, you’d thought then, the furthest place where you’d never doubt its silence, the silence intended for such days as the Sabbath.
* * *
Although they “share a common center of gravity,” Pluto and Charon are two very, very different worlds as discovered by New Horizons spacecraft: while Pluto’s diverse terrain is “icy, mountainous, and new, with plenty of large regions devoid of craters,” with an atmosphere like that of Earth, Charon is a “completely airless world,” one bearing a canyon system longer than a thousand miles that, in some places, is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and reveals “titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past.” It also signals the possibility that “the entire crust of Charon has been split open.” Their origin stories are quite different as well, involving Pluto stealing Charon’s “volatile materials” like methane and nitrogen. Soon there will be higher-resolution images and data transmitted from New Horizons. Mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver anticipates that “Charon’s story will become even more amazing!”
You marvel at the exclamation mark at the end of Weaver’s prediction. You wonder what he believes based on science and what he’s hoping for as a dreamer, as a lover of other worlds, as a lost explorer who listens in on, who searches for, worlds in the heaviest of silence.
* * *
You are reading about broken Charon and thieving Pluto on a double decker bus in Hong Kong, sitting on the second level, in the very front. There are seat belts to strap you in these seats, lest there’s an accident and one would go flying through the large window. You take a time-lapse video of crowds passing and then another. When the bus goes down a particularly sharp hill your stomach flips and churns. Once you wanted to die and be buried in Jerusalem, in a Jewish cemetery, and for this reason you did not tattoo your skin. Now that you’re married, there’s soft talk about buying plots somewhere, sometime, although in your husband’s family in Hong Kong that last ritual is cremation. Halachah, Jewish law, demands that the dead must be buried in the ground, and especially after the Jewish Holocaust, the act of voluntary cremation is certainly controversial and even unforgivable in the eyes of your survivors, and you know that deep down, even when you are that most silent, you do want to burn. You want your body in the mouth of the earth. You want to be spoken after death. Not only in leaves of grass, or passing through earthworms. You want a stone marker. You want to transcend this.
There are truths that come out of you on buses.
You grow tired thinking of the finite, the borders, the restrictions.
You transfer to a streetcar because you don’t want to reach where you are going in Hong Kong. You are on a small island on a planet in a galaxy scattered along the darkness, and you imagine a state of being where you are carried by something much larger and it is almost always in motion, so you almost always are in motion, a motion you can feel, especially in the briefest of pauses.
You imagine peace is a bus that has no destination.
You imagine God is a bus that carries you through place after place, and each never the same, and what you take in—what fully absorbs you—was what was meant by silence. That comprehension is communion. No one asks are we there yet. No one gets closer or counts the years, regrets, legacies. No one is not listening.
May Charon speak one day of what happened before Pluto found its way to it, and took what it did. May we understand what is said.
May Charon’s story never be finished.