At the playground, Eos and I were kicking the ball to each other for some few minutes and then we were playing at the monkey’s bar, seeing who could pull the other person off the bar with our legs, as we were suspending from our hands. Because we were both dressed with short pants on, every time my skin was meeting hers, my penis was getting more and more stiff, to the point where I was very glad it was dark outside because she would have noticed this rising hill in my groin for sure. She was succeeding at pulling me off the monkey’s bar more times than I was, but I was basically letting her because it felt better when her smooth legs were around my hairy ones than the opposite.

And then, just when I thought I felt some sperms coming, everything went black, like in a movie when they want you to think for some few seconds that the hero is dead.

Silence.

Nothing for a long time.

Until now, I have no memory of these moments, except what I guess I reconstructed from what Eos told me later. Apparently, the last time she pulled me from the monkey’s bar, I bumped my head on one of the four iron posts that hold the thing up, and fell unconscious.

When my memory comes back, I am on the cart they put in the belly of the ambulance and I hear Eos’s voice talking, but not to me, rather to who I later figured out was the paramedic. And I asked what had happened, and Eos tried to explain it to me, but I was too much in shock to understand.

And then we were in the ambulance going very fast, but not with the alarm. So I was thinking it couldn’t be the end because basically, if it’s even close to the end, you know they are putting on the alarm.

There are some more missing pieces from these moments, but I do remember Eos saying she was sorry many times and rubbing my hand, which felt very nice. And then I remember thinking about my penis and hoping the sperms hadn’t come out before I had the blackout because if they did, I was certain she and the paramedic man would be able to see some few wet spots down there. When I was in a bed at the hospital, the first thing I made sure to do when I could with no one watching, was reach into my underwears and check up on the situation in there. Luckily, there was no stickiness, which was as a big relief.

After some few tests, they told me and Eos that I’d suffered a minor concussion and that I was going to be okay and would be released as soon as my father could be reached, since he was responsible for me being a minor. Eos had already called him when we were in the ambulance and so it wouldn’t be too long before he arrived to the hospital, which was called Cedars-Sinai and had a very large, white Star of David on the outside.

I asked Eos if she picked this hospital because I was Israeli and she laughed at that one and said no. She said it was one of the largest and most famous hospitals in Los Angeles, where all the Hollywood movie stars had their babies, and it was the closest to Park La Brea.

When my mother was going for chemo, she didn’t complain much to me, but sometimes at night, I’d hear her speaking to my father that some sores were hurting her very much. In Israel, most of the floors in the homes and apartments are covered with balatot, which is Arabic for what I’ve seen in the Home Depots called floor tiles. These tiles are made from stones which are polished, like terrazzo-style, and keep the places cool in the heat. But the sound bounces from them very easily, so even though my mom thought she was speaking with a low voice that her sores hurt her, basically I could hear about it in my bedroom.

Cedars-Sinai had some similar terrazzo tiles in the rooms but all the hallways were covered with some industrial kind of carpet that never looks clean, like patients are going to the bathroom on it very often in some places. I told this to my father when he was taking me and Eos from the room to the elevator and he laughed at that one because he was always appreciating my silly sense of humor.

Eos was acting in front of my father like she was guilty for what happened, and I could tell that she didn’t have her normal personality. She was quiet and basically had this apologetic look on her face like children get when they are up to nothing good. With all the volunteering I was doing in the summer camps back in Israel, I know this look very well, but I never expected Eos would have it.

We sat in the Winnebago, in the very back where there was a booth and a table to eat meals, as my father drove us back to Eos’s apartment. The lights from up in Beverly Hills looked dull against the sky and I thought it must be from all the Chinese particles in the air coming across the ocean. No matter how many times I told Eos to forget the whole incident, she wouldn’t come back to her normal personality and it made me feel strange inside, because there was a lot of silences between us, for once.

Then, I suddenly heard this coming from my mouth, like it wasn’t even me talking: “Tell me something more about the guy.” I don’t know where it came from, but there it was coming out finally, almost like I was trying to take the attention away from her feeling guilty about my concussion.

“The guy?” she said, confused from my abruptness.

Because of the concussion, or maybe the fear of the subject matter, finding the right words was hard for me—really hard, like beating the computer at chess in the highest level. But I somehow managed to explain that I wanted to know more about the guy.

“I don’t know if you’ve experienced a power outage in your time here in Los Angeles yet Fareed,” she said, “but they seem to happen pretty often, and sometimes last for, like, hours, which is just crazy given the size and so-called sophistication of this city. You know what I mean?”

I didn’t know exactly, 100-percent what she meant, because I didn’t get to see the power go down while my dad and I have been driving around the state in the Winnebago, but there once was one in our village, or town, back home, but it only lasted some few minutes only.

“So I met this guy during a real long one. And we were in this windowless room at this party of a friend of a friend of a friend kind of deal. And they didn’t have candles or flashlights or anything. So a bunch of us just sat there in the dark waiting for the power to come back, you know? And in comes this guy and he doesn’t see me at all, ‘cause, y’know, I’m hard to see in the dark—heh heh—and he, like, falls onto me, basically. So we just start talking, you know? And after the awkwardness of it wore away, there was this pretty instantaneous connection. And, of course, there’s, like, nothing physical about it because we can’t really see each other, which is what made it even more attractive. I mean, when you click with someone after only, say, 15 minutes of conversation, and you sort of feel attracted to someone under strange circumstances like that… well, let’s just say it doesn’t happen every day, you know what I’m saying?”

There was some small irony here, because with this one, I certainly knew what she was saying. That was the whole reason why I needed to know everything about this person in the first place!

“So we kept on talking but I had to pee really, really badly and I didn’t want to excuse myself to the bathroom, mainly because I didn’t want to stop talking to him, but also because I thought it might be kind of dangerous to lock myself into a bathroom at some stranger’s place during a power outage. Right? But the pressure of holding it in was just too distracting, so I told him I’d be right back. Of course, as whacked destiny would have it, I wound up running into my friend Rhoda, who I’d gone to the party with, and who was now shrieking that she’d just caught her fiancé upstairs making out with some random, and that the wedding was off. And I was like, are you sure? I mean the lights were out up there too, so how could she be so sure of what she saw? But she couldn’t really hear me. She was just a mess, bawling, and everything. So she grabs me by the arm and suddenly we’re in her car, and then at her apartment in Studio City, and she’s still freaking out because the wedding was in, like, a week, and she wouldn’t stop crying. I mean, it sucked. She’s losing her shit and all I want to do is get back to the party, which I eventually did, I mean, like an hour and a half later. And of course he was gone. And I knew he probably thought I’d blown him off. I don’t know why, I just sensed it. And I was really upset about it and asking other people at the party if they knew where he went. Nobody even knew him, let alone whether he left the party or not. It was just crazy, that whole thing.”

She went on talking. Basically about the guy and how much she thought they had in common and all kind of stuff like this, but it was hard to listen from that point. I was starting to feel fatigued from the Vicodin they’d given me for the pain, and loopsy and dizzy. But I was still comprehending what she was saying the way maybe a baby understands things just from the rises and falls in the voice patterns of his parents. The further I pushed back from the conversation, until all that remained of my side of it was the occasional nod of the head, the more enthusiasm for him she seemed to express—at least that’s the way it felt being as loopsy as I was. And in most ways I was sorry I had even entered onto the subject of this mystery guy and his stupid uncle Saul and the stupid party with the stupid power out. The only blackout I wanted to hear any more about was mine at the monkey’s bar. And part of me wished I’d stayed in the unconscious realm after hitting my head. And part of me wished to go back to the joyous moments where Eos was wrapping her legs around mine not even three hours ago. And another part of me wished my dad would stop the Winnebago and kick Eos out and that we’d get back on the road and just keep on driving—driving, through Chicago and Ohio and all those cities in Pennsylvania, and into New Jersey, but avoiding Lodi—just driving away from all this, over some bridge that crossed the ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and steered us back to Israel where my mom would still be alive and everything would just be like it always was, even with the warring and all the bombs and rockets and the empty pool in our yard that I shouldn’t have been neglecting so much.

Check out previous chapters of Trivial Pursuits {?} right here.