There are ten of us here tonight. Ten destroyers. Ten disappointments. Ten hopeless people whose families have been driven beyond their ability to care. There are ten of us, laying in our beds, talking almost like normal people, waiting for the lights to turn off.

When they do, as they do at the same time every night, I can feel the uneasy breathing of those who share my room. I close my eyes and listen to the tortured shifting of legs beneath their sheets as the other residents of the shelter relive their pasts and imagine their tomorrows. I am one of them. Just another useless breath who will be missed by nobody other than these people. We are a community of eyesores and the world would rather look away.

The shelter tries not to make us feel that way. There are prints of trees on the walls, and there are board games and books. There are showers and even a laundry. When we sleep, our bodies and our clothes are clean. The sheets themselves are spotless and the rooms are tastefully decorated with faux wooden floors and white walls and highlights of Aegean blue. The color reminds me of the sea. I love the sea. Sometimes I like to go to the upstairs workshop and just look out the windows, watching the waves roll in one after the other. Those waves tell me that the world won’t end; no matter what I do.

It isn’t just the building, though. They work hard here, to make us feel like we’re valued. The social workers stop by to check in on us and refer us to those they imagine can help. To their credit, they look us in the eye. Most people won’t. The social workers care too. I know they do, and I value it.

But it doesn’t really matter.

They may not see just another drug user when they see us sitting across from them in their tiny offices. They may see us as people, even valuable people. But I know the future they see. I know they can’t help but see us sprawled out on a street corner, eyes dilated, breathing shallow, pulse barely there. They can’t help but see our skin turning blue as a couple of cops stand over us casually wondering whether we’ll die before they bother to call an ambulance.

To their credit, they try to imagine something better for us. But all it is is imagination.

It’s okay. I understand. I’m clean. I have been for almost a year. Nonetheless, I know I am cursed and I know I am a curse. Deep down, anything better than that street corner feels like an almost hopeless aspiration.

At least, it did until today.

About two weeks ago, I lost my Health Insurance card. It costs a lousy 13 shekel to replace it. 3 Euro. 3 Euro I don’t have. And without it I can’t get treatment. Not only to keep me clean, but to keep my seizures at bay. 13 shekel that could push me over the side.

It was 12 days from when I lost the card to when I checked the neighborhood Facebook groups on the computers they have in the workshops. And there it was. Somebody found my card. Somebody bothered to pick it up – in the far less than perfect Florentine neighborhood no less. Somebody cared enough to look for the owner of a card that could be replaced for 13 shekel.

They cared enough to look for me.

I met her. Just an hour ago. The woman who found my card. Her name is Aviya.

She could see what I am. The way that I live. I couldn’t hide it. She knew too much. She offered me food. She offered me money. She wanted to help. But she turned me away when I said that all I wanted was to sit and talk with her and her friends. It was okay, though.

You see, she wasn’t like the social workers. I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t see a man sprawled out in the street, taking his final weak breaths. Suffering the final stages of an unstoppable addiction. No, she saw something else. She truly believed in something else. She believed that I could matter.

It was the first time in a long time that somebody had seen me that way.

The next morning the lights come up in tandem with the electric shutters that lock out the sun. The brightness of South Tel Aviv penetrates the walls of the shelter. I wake up. We all do. There’s no need for us to change our clothes. Like everybody else in the room, I’ve slept in my clothes. Instead, we shuffle upright, open our lockers and retrieve our most valuable possessions. I pull out a wallet occupied by a single ID and a single Health Insurance Card. There is also a plastic bag stuffed with a single change of clothes. Next to it is a disposable plastic water bottle. I don’t quite know why I keep that last one in the locker. Perhaps it is because everything I’ve ever had has been stolen.

A social worker checks in on me at breakfast. She knows there’s something’s different about me. The change in me has brought doubt to her eyes, like I’m a bipolar man on an unnatural high that she knows will bring me terribly low. She asks, point blank, whether I’m using again. Chemical bipolarism. I try to reassure her, but nothing I say can truly dissuade her from the truth she expected.

I leave the shelter just before nine. They keep it closed from 9 till 3. I imagine it is so that they can clean out all of our filth. Any normal day I might look for work, trying my hand at the restaurants and furniture shops that dot the neighborhood. But I know nobody will hire me. Not even to wash dishes. And, somehow, I know I am meant for more and more will come for me.

I cross the street and head for the park overlooking the beach. As people pass by on the promenade, I lay back on the grass and listen to the waves.

I remember going to the beach once. I was a little kid. My father and I took a train up from Milan to Lake Como. Were my parents together then? I don’t know. But my father was there. There are beautiful beaches running alongside Lake Como. But we didn’t visit them. Maybe we didn’t have the time. Or maybe the problem was money. Instead, we visited a little park that overlooked the lake, like the patch of grass I’m laying on. I remember playing in that grass as the waters gently lapped against the shore below us. When I looked back at my father, he was looking at me. And I knew what he was seeing. He was seeing a beautiful future. A bright and promising future.

That was, perhaps, the last time anybody looked at me like that.

He died in Be’er Sheva in 2013. I was 22. I was also a resident of the San Vittore Prison in Milan.

I never lived up to his dreams. I never got to say sorry for failing him. I apologized plenty, as any user would. But I’d never shared the truly penitent sorry of a man who has found a better path.

When I open my eyes I’m back on the beach in Tel Aviv. There’s a woman there, standing over me and looking at the tattooed pattern running down my left arm. It is a South American pattern. She asks me about it, and I tell her I’d done it myself. On the spot, she agrees to hire me – albeit only for a small fee. It is the first work I’ve had in months.

Somebody else has seen something in me.

I can’t wait to tell Aviya.

As the day comes to a close, I head back to the shelter. On a lark, I look up the world’s greatest waves, wondering whether I might visit them – find hope in them. I read about the Tahitian waves at Teahupo’o. They seem a dream too far. But there are other great waves. In Portugal. I can imagine visiting Portugal. I download a little video on my phone. Maybe I’ll become a surfer and see them in person.

The next day, I finally meet her again. She buys us coffees. I tell her I’m sorry, so very sorry, that I can’t afford to buy her a cup of coffee. She smiles, but not with pity. And then we talk. We talk like we’ve known each other forever. Like we’re just catching up on lives that have drifted just a little ways apart. She used to be like me. Living on the street. Not anymore though. She has a business. She has employees. People who were once like me and like her. And she’s lifting them up, one by one. She’s lifting them because she sees something in each and every one of them. Something other than a body on the street.

A cat passes by the cafe. It is a mangy thing. I glance over, but all I can ask myself is whether she sees hope there too. We sit there and we talk about music, about art, about history. I tell her how I crawled my way out of Italy. I tell her how I made aliyah, just hoping to come down to Be’er Sheva and say sorry and goodbye, one last time, to my father. She listens. She hears of my troubles. No, she isn’t hiring.

But that’s okay. Now, I know I’ll find another way.

I show her the video of the wave in Portugal. I tell her my plan, my dream. I’ll become a professional surfer and they’ll pay me to go there.

She laughs, but there’s no malice in her laugh. There is only joy.

That night, I send her a text. I tell her what she means to me. How she’s changed me. I send her a song. A song in which I promise everything, in which I promise to go where she leads. In which I promise more than I can give.

I get on the bus the next day, planning to meet Aviya again. I find a package on the seat next to mine. It’s a gift, something unique, something special. Something far more expensive than I could possibly afford. There’s a card on the package, but no name. No identity.

When I get to her, she’s busy again. She’s working with one of her employees. I take just a moment and show her the package. I ask whether it might be possible to return it, like she returned my card. I want to live up to her example. But no, nobody’s going to search Facebook for a missing gift. Instead, the little package is mine. I’m almost swimming with delight as I hand it to her.

The lyrics of the song run through my head “Aïcha, take it, everything is for you.”

She’s given me hope. I am delighted that I’ve managed to give her something in return.

On the night of October 1st, nine days later, I’m walking alongside the light rail line in Jaffa. It is just after seven in the evening. I hear a burst of muffled shots. I turn and see gunfire erupting within one of the train cars. I hear a baby cry. I see a woman fall. The doors open and the killers, the terrorists, step out.

I think about running, but I know there is no chance of escape.

There’s a bright spurt of fire and then a millisecond later the rounds slam into me. I fall back. The pain is immense. I crash to the street corner. My breath is not shallow, but liquid and ragged. My heart is not slow but pumping furiously.

I imagine the cops urgently calling an ambulance. But it is I who know that it is too late.

I watch the two men run past me. For a second, I wonder if they realize that they wasted a bullet on a man nobody who matters will miss. A man with a dead-end life.

And then I realize that that’s no longer true.

She saw another path. She knows there was more for me than I could imagine for myself.

It is with that thought, that beautiful thought, that I close my eyes for the very last time.

---

The above is a story based as strongly as I could manage on the life of Victor Shimshon Green. He is described in the news simply as “Green, 33, was living in a homeless shelter.” I had the opportunity to attend his funeral on Monday. Just two people who knew him spoke. One was Aviya. Although I don't have the details of their conversations, or all the details of his life, I pray my necessarily incomplete reconstruction has done no dishonor to his memory.

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