Misha Firer : Power of Desperation

Rabbi Isaac Kleinman of Or HaTikva Synagogue in Berkeley, California said to Mark, "Meaning of
life? Here it is in layman language. God was supposed to create this world in ten days. That was the
plan anyways. After six days He took a day off and called in sick and never got back to work. So our
mission in life is to keep things moving, changing, influencing, improving where we can until the day
the Messiah comes to finish up the job of Creation."

1.

In the section "my aim in life" of her
CouchSurfing.com profile Melinda typed:
My aim in life is to fight hypocrisy.
Melinda looked to her right and to her left and
opened another window to check Sara's email.
Unfortunately there were no new messages. Then
she logged into Sarah's Facebook account.
Melinda often read emails in Sarah's Facebook. It
was Sarah's indiscreet desperation to get laid that
gave Melinda's the greatest thrill of all. She liked to
read emails that Sarah had sent to single guys in
Europe, Israel, North America. "Come and wwoof on
the farm upon a mountain slope in beautiful
Switzerland, and as a bonus have sex with me." That
was Sarah's sales pitch.

American girls have no pride, Melinda mused for a zillionth time. So far – and it had been five months
now -- Sarah hadn't gotten any "yes" answers. And as long as there were no "yes" answers, Melinda
continued to enjoy reading the correspondence between female sexual frustration and male indifference.

Photo by Aleathia Drehmer

Melinda's husband Karl got off the phone feeling distraught. It was his boss Johannes,

the school master of the school for the super-privileged kids, where Karl taught physics.

Johannes had spent two hours going over the same thing, namely that Karl wasn't in

charge of the school and that he simply couldn't create his own rules. These were the children

of multinationals' CEOs and the CEOs wrote the rules for the school.

Johannes didn't want to fire Karl, because if he fired Karl, Karl would take him to court

and would eventually win around five hundred franks and waste much of his valuable time in the

process. So Johannes was trying to talk sense into Karl's thick head, which was a tough call,

since Karl was practically begging to be fired in order to look like a martyr.

Karl was exhausted after the phone conversation. He was endlessly fighting the forces of

conventionality, idiocy and unfairness. There was a better way, but the people in charge would

never choose it.

Karl sat on the chair and wondered what Sarah, their nineteen-year-old au-pair was

doing right now. She'd been traveling around Italy for the past two weeks, looking for her eleven-

times-removed relatives. She would be back in one week.

Such a long wait.

"…and we had the rule you see Mark that we speak only in German but Sarah spoke English to

Jason the wwoofer before you and to us too although she speaks good German it's so rude this

imperialism of the English language and she forgot about everything when she was around Jason

and she was around him all the time and she wanted to show us Desperate Housewives like it was

the most sophisticated thing but it's so stupid you see Mark I wish many times she wouldn't say a

word keep her mouth shut because all she says is stupid things you see Mark and she stuffs her

mouth three meals a day is not enough for her she also has to eat in between meals she makes

mac'n'cheese the only dish she knows how to cook disgusting American food she buys avocadoes

and tortillas because she has to have her little piece of California she looks down on our peasant

food but every time she goes to a restaurant she gets a stomach ache maybe it's because our

food is so much healthier and when Jason was here she totally lost it you see Mark I came home

and saw foam coming out of the washing machine because she put too much powder and forgot

about it because of Jason and we couldn't get to know him because she monopolized him you see

Mark I don't want the same happen to you she wouldn't leave Jason for a second and we lived in

two camps there was Jason and Sarah and there was Karl and I and it was like having four children

in the house and I couldn't sleep and my tomatoes died because I was so stressed out and every

night Jason would sneak into her room to have sex and at one point he switched sides and turned

against her you see Mark because she has no pride this Sarah and Jason took our side I like

Jason although he's American he wants to live in Europe he's already gotten a Swiss passport

because his grandfather is Swiss and Sarah's so helpless I have to repeat everything three times

to her and she's inconsiderate thinks only of herself and wants to be the center of attention it's

because she's an only child like she thinks she's so important but she's so boring and conventional

she can meet guys only through Internet she doesn't go out and meet guys in town she used to go

out when she first came but then you see Mark the local guys figured out she's so boring and she

doesn't know how to talk to guys they wouldn't want to meet her again and she spends all the time

with her laptop which she treats like it was her baby always holding it close to her chest and once

she sent an email to an Israeli guy and begged him to come and wwoof here but I guess he didn't

like her picture because he never wrote back to her and when her mother calls her she speaks to

me like I was her servant and Sarah had problems with her au-pair visa and we helped her and the

condition is she has to stay with us and she did some CouchSurfing and it is such an American

thing you go sleep on other people's couches and it's a pretext to meet other people because

young people these days they don't meet each other they are so lonely and girls don't know how to

talk to guys they have to use Internet to connect to each other Sarah's so conventional and I

thought I was getting conventional with age but she's something else she wants to serve man she

wants to get married she has all these idiotic ideas about perfect husband and she keeps talking

about her Norwegian boyfriend Uffe who is her boyfriend only in her imagination and who wouldn't

want to sleep with her and how she's been chasing after him for four years but he still wouldn't

sleep with her American girls have no pride Sarah's so bourgeois she doesn't clean her room

because at home Hispanic maid does it for her and she keeps bragging that she goes to Berkeley

University this year and what a prestigious university it is and I told her that she wouldn't have been

accepted into any of the German universities because she's not intelligent enough and that they

would kick her out of Berkeley within a month and when she's so superficial like all other Americans

she was looking for her European ancestry on Google you see Mark and she couldn't find and was

disappointed it's skin-deep and anyways why is it so important to find seven times removed cousins

and when I told her that the town where her grandgrandparents are from is part of Poland now she

was so upset because you see Poles are Eastern European and not good enough for her and

when she comes back from Italy she will attack you she wants to sleep with everybody it's because

of lack of communication Americans are so horny because they have no social lives and sex is

their compensation so when she's here beware she will be all over you because you lived in

California for three years and so she will know how to handle you but don't sleep with her all right

Mark please because this will be the end of our special friendship and if you do it have sex with

Sarah I will have no choice but to kick you out of my house…"

Mark had been wwoofing for seven months around Europe before he

wound up in Lichtensteig, Switzerland. Wwoof was a program of volunteer work on

organic farms in exchange for food and accommodation. Mark hadn't shaved and

hadn't gotten a haircut in half a year. He wore old clothes and his only pair of

shoes had holes in them.

Mark was happy.

He was nobody, wandering through nowhere; no one cared about him and

he paid the world back with the same currency. This lifestyle suited Mark fine as

he was an orphan without a country. His two most indispensable survival skills

were good English and two hands to do physical labor.

When Mark stayed longer than two weeks on the same farm, the hosts

usually paid for his train or bus ride to the next farm. For weeks he wouldn't spend

a single Euro, which was a great arrangement since he was totally broke.

The work usually lasted five hours a day and the rest of the time Mark was

left to his own devices, the time that he spent chatting with the people on the

farm, reading paperback novels, biking around, sunbathing on the grass and

dreaming away.

Mark was sure he could spend years in this fashion, roaming around the

world, working on farms, meeting people, hanging out.

He didn't have home after all.

5.

Karl had a dream.
In the dream he wasn't what he was.
He wasn't bold. He wasn't forty years old. He wasn't humorless. He wasn't a school teacher. He wasn't
married. He wasn't father of two little children.
The truthfulness of a dream is measured by the single criterion of when it comes true. Karl's dream came
true in his night dream. The power of negation was the one must-have requirement and it did the magic trick.
In the dream, Karl invited Sarah to go skiing and she accepted the invitation. They spent the day on the
slopes: skiing down and taking ski-lifts back to the summit. They took many pictures of each other. They
hugged and kissed. They rolled around in the snow. They had a dinner in a restaurant. When they got to
Lichteinsteig, they made out on the bench. There was nobody at home so they were free to make love for as
long as they wanted. And they wanted to make love over and over again.
In the early hour of the morning, Karl lay next to very naked Sarah, casually repeating "I love you",
something, which he had known but wouldn't confess even to himself in his waking life.
"Will you elope with me if I ask you to?" Karl asked.
Sarah said, "And what about all the stuff I got? I'm tied up to it. And anyways, don't you think it's a bit
impractical?"
Karl had an urgent wish, quite impractical as it was, to get Sarah pregnant. There was nothing strange about
this wish. The only problem with it was that the wish contained no negation and the positive canceled out the
previously granted negative.
Therefore the second wish demarcated the end of the dream.
Karl was already waking up.
He opened up his eyes to see Melinda, his wife of fourteen years.

6.

Mark had told Melinda the following story.

"When I stayed at the previous farm, I told the hostess that I'm Jewish. And so about two days later she
decided to verify if it's true what they say that Jews love money a bit too dearly. She put frank bills all over the
house: on the stairs, on the tables, even in the toilet and waited. Eventually, frustrated that none was being
taken she collected some of them in an envelope; it was to pay for the crate of milk. She invited me to come
along with her.
"We drove to another farm where she was supposed to buy milk and she started looking for the envelope
with the money. It was nowhere to be found. We looked everywhere in the car but wouldn't find it. It was then
when she got suspicious that I was stealing money from her after all.
She was sulky on the way home. She wouldn't accuse me directly but chastised me that now she couldn't buy
things in the store. When we got back home she rushed to the house ahead of me. There on the kitchen
table was the envelope with the money.
"She was relieved and maybe felt somewhat guilty because she wouldn't check my honesty again after that."
Melinda couldn't believe this had really happened. But then it sort of made sense to her: Swiss people are
backward, unlike her people, Bavarians. Yet, just to be on the safe side, she asked Mark, if it was true what
he'd told her.
"No," Mark said. "The story is a complete fabrication."
When Melinda explained to Sarah the reason for kicking Mark out of the house she referred to that
fabricated story, which ostensibly had hurt her feelings.

7.

At 11.06 am on April 11, 2004 Mark was sitting with Rebecca in her banged-up Dodge on an intersection of
7th Street and Franklin Avenue in downtown Lafayette, California, waiting for the light to turn green. Mark
and Rebecca were passing a half-finished joint to each other while listening to Ludacris on the stereo.
A teenage girl was crossing the street. She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at the young couple
sitting inside an old car with flaking blue paint, sharing a joint and listening to hip-hop music.
I want to be in the place of that girl with long black hair and olive skin, who's sitting behind the wheel.
Sarah looked at the girl with long black hair and olive skin's boyfriend, whom she would meet and have sex
with four years later half way across the world in Switzerland.
I want to be with him right now.
Mesmerized by what she saw, Sarah wouldn't stop repeating to herself on the way home: They are so cool. If
only I could be that girl.

8.

"I wasn't exactly the most popular girl at school. I spent four years chasing after Uffe the Norwegian boy and
he wouldn't sleep with me. Oof. Do you know Craigslist.com? Of course you do, you lived in Bay Area. So if
not for Craigslist.com I would still be a virgin. I placed an ad and met with four guys. They were all older and
disgusting-looking. I dated one of them for four months anyways. And then here in Switzerland I talked
Melinda into joining the wwoof list. This is how I arranged sex for myself this year. And so there was Jason.
Oof. I hate him. He slept with me and after two nights told me that I'm boring in bed, but he went on having
sex with me all the same. Oof. And Melinda always yells at me and I'm so afraid of her. My mother had told
me not to go and work for the Germans, said they like to yell. But I thought, what do know, mom, you crazy
Jew. I cry every day because Melinda makes me feel so miserable. Oof. And after Jason left, Melinda told me
that I wasn't allowed to have sex with anybody in her house. And then you came along and oh you're so bad.
You were either desperate or I'm attractive after all. But I don't think I'm attractive so you must have been
desperate. Oof. Would you shave if I asked you to -- your bristle tickles my skin?"

9.

As Mark was lying awake next to sleeping Sarah, feeling her hot, steady breath on his face, her little body
curled up he had a fierce attack of envy.
Suddenly Mark, all free and independent, was lusting for her conformist, settled life, just the way it was,
preserved within the secure bubble of her hundreds of pounds of Earthly possessions, her credit cards, her
Facebook "friends", her digital picture archive, her Desperate Housewives CDs, her cheap romantic novels,
her life exactly the way it would unfold in the subsequent few decades, with a special emphasis on the next
three years.
At the very least Mark wanted to be by her side as she would fumble through her UC Berkeley experience:
her dull undergrad lessons, her homework she would struggle with in "rabbit hole", nickname of her future
university dorm's tiny concrete-and-glass accommodation she would share with three roommates, her
presumptuous sonority parties, her sexual escapades, doomed from the start, weekend visits to her parents,
her meals in Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, French, Italian restaurants, her tests, her conversations, her
hopes, her tears, her smiles.
No matter how unexciting and predictable her life would be, and unexciting and predictable it would most
certainly be, Mark wanted to be part of it. He had a million promises and pledges molding into right shape in
his mind, of how he would contribute to the protected life of hers, how he would enrich it with his wit, his
energy, his experience, his love.
His thrust was ardent and enthusiastic. He was thinking children, family. He was thinking loyalty to one
woman, to the adopted nation, adopted state, adopted town. He would dutifully watch football with his
American buddies and Desperate Housewives in the house with his hopefully not desperate, but yes wife.
All Mark needed to make this come true was to ask Sarah to take him home with her. A desperate move, no
doubt, yet once Sarah saw the providential context of this decision she would be helpless to change the
course of the inevitable. He just had to break through her practicality and her illusion of Uffe the
Unconquerable Viking, and she would see the Light.

10.

Mark was postponing ejaculation to spend more time in Sarah, just like he had been postponing going to bed
to spend more time with her for three consequent evenings.
Melinda was slowly descending the stairs that were going squeak- squeak-squeak. She halted to stop the
squeaking, trying to decipher the tell-tale sounds of love-making. As if by merely hearing the sounds of it,
she would somehow automatically participate in the act itself.
Mark is rising up the steep stairs of a windowless tower, his pace quickening.
"It's so good. Yes. It feels so good," Sarah whispers.
Mark sees an image of Sarah, her little happy smile, sitting on the train with her skis across her lap. Sarah
messing up her mac-and-cheese in odd imitation of Susan's gag in Desperate Housewives. Sarah lifting up
little Praznik and pressing him to her chest. "Isn't he so cute?"
Mark reaches the top of the tower and steps into the wide open space. There are waves splashing
underneath. Then the skies darken.
My weakness, your strength. I want you to get pregnant.
Words glow and sear through the darkness. Mark has never been so sure in his life. In the darkness of bliss,
which name is oblivion, he focuses his will on making this happen, getting Sarah pregnant by a single act of
love-making. It is the only chance that Mark is given by jealous God. Against all odds: despite Sarah's birth
control pills, the bad timing of the month, Murphy's Law, despite the fact that God always had His way and
Mark's had always been left in the dust.
The floor squeaking in Sarah's room intensified. Melinda walked on woolen legs below, kept of walking
towards the toilet, which she didn't need to use, the floorboards squeaking, goddamn them, her own heart
pounding. No, I don't want to be there. No, this is so untrue. I don't want to be there, in the room, in Sarah's
place.
(On a Bavarian farm a seventeen year old Melinda and Ernst are lying naked in the hay. Melinda's mother
walks in with hoe in her hands. She screams; her face is a mask of horror, and then blind rage. Melinda
thinks that her mother will kill her would be lover with the hoe. On the impulse she covers him up with her
body.
Her Catholic mother won't kill him. She will excommunicate him. Melinda will have to wait for years for her first
sex. She tried oh how she tried to break through the wall of guilt she dropped Catholicism but Catholicism
wouldn't drop her she met guys she met hundreds of guys and she slept and she slept and she slept with
only one of them her husband --Karl)
Mark's sweaty body rises up.
Jewish boy or a girl. Sarah would make such a great mother. She loves children. My child too. My Jewish
child. We can be together, the two parents.
Mark begins to come when the toilet door bangs down below.
Sarah groans and pulls him tight. Mark convulses, tiptoeing, walking, jogging, rushing in.
Pregnant. Child. Pregnant with a Jewish child. And my life of wandering would make a full circle and I would
be free to go home, to a new home, after all these long fruitless years of emptiness. I will go to California and
stay there for the rest of my life.
(I come….
…and I come…
…and I come….)

And when it's over, he just lies there on top of Sarah.
(happy empty now happy empty now happy empty now happy empty)
now.

the moment arrives when he learns the truth, which is created by the sheer power of negation:
there will be no child.

*

…it's time to pray.