Seated inside the airy temple in Los Angeles for his bar mitzvah, his family and friends smiled through tears as the rabbi reached into the open Ark and handed him the Torah scroll containing the Five Books of Moses.
It was one of the older Torahs, weighing almost fifty pounds, and he struggled to carry it in his slender, trembling hands. It felt like a boulder. He was thirteen and considered a man now according to Jewish tradition. But he was still a year away from his growth spurt, and his tired arms weren't strong enough to carry it.
As he tried to balance the Torah, it began to tip. There were gasps from the adults and a snicker or two from the children. Oh, no! The Holy Law! He tried to right it but overcompensated. I can't hold it! It's slipping!Like a dream he watched it fall from his hands, just beyond his fingertips, until it hit the platform with a crash and split open.
Deker woke from his childhood memory into the searing light of day. He felt the hot desert wind blow and heard the rustling of leaves. The scent of flowers was sweet, but it couldn't mask something foul in the air.
He blinked his eyes open and tried to move but couldn't. His legs and arms seemed locked. Then he realized he was naked and wrapped around the golden bark of a seven-meter-tall acacia tree. His right leg was bent around the front of the tree and locked inside his bent left leg, which in turn was locked behind the trunk under the entire weight of his own body. They were using the "grapevine" method to secure him as a prisoner. Very old-school, but effective.
He was in some kind of grove of acacia trees, gnarly and black against the sky, their green and yellow leaves blowing like ash in the air.
Pain shot up his spine from the cramping in both his legs. How long have I been left like this?He dug his fingers into the tree trunk and tried to pull himself up. His skin scraped against the bark and he moved up only enough for his head to scratch the sharp thorns of the lower branches. He had an overwhelming desire to throw himself backward to relieve the unbearable pain. But somehow his body sensed that such an action would kill him.
He lifted his head and scanned the grove. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. He couldn't make out the strange black limbs of the golden trees. Then he realized they were rotting human limbs, blackened by the sun. The ash in the air was but flecks of charred flesh carried in the wind.
Horrified, he looked up into the branches above him and saw a half-rotten, sunken face staring at him with pecked-out eyes.
Unable to tear his eyes away, he stared back for a moment, a moan unable to take form at the back of his parched throat. All around him were thousands of corpses strung up in the trees, slits of sunlight shining through their perforated torsos, their mouths open in twisted screams.
He looked away and his throat began to convulse to vomit. But nothing came out. Once, twice, his wrung-out body seemed to constrict from the inside out like a dry, twisted rag around the tree.
This was some kind of mass grave, a grove of the dead. Except the genocidal maniacs who had done this hadn't bothered to bury the bodies, preferring to string them up instead as a warning to somebody.
Suddenly, several shadows blocked the light and he heard a voice in garbled Hebrew say something like "Clean him up."
A thin hyssop branch with narrow blue leaves was waved in front of his face and he felt the cool sprinkle of some kind of aromatic water.
The drops of water on his dry tongue only awakened his senses, and he could taste a fleck of ash.
He tried to spit it out but could manage only a dry groan as several shadows lifted him up and dragged him away from the tree and propped him up against a low stone wall, where his weak legs could barely keep him upright.
In the distance Mount Nebo lifted into the sky under the blazing sun. He blinked. By all appearances he was still somewhere in Jordan. But something didn't feel right, and it wasn't just his personal predicament. Something greater had shifted around him, and the jarring sense of reality shook him to his core.
His nightmare, he realized, had only just begun.