Guid­ed Tour

The aliens’ space­ship arrived every Thurs­day. Meron would wait for them next to the ruins of what used to be Ramat Gan City Hall, with a cool­er in tow. They always came in groups of four, or five if you count­ed the hov­er­ing robot who seemed to be their guide. Meron had a reg­u­lar itin­er­ary: first he took them to see the Great Syn­a­gogue that had remained almost intact, then they made their way to Ramat Gan Sta­di­um, which had long ago turned into a swamp, and final­ly he led them to the wreck­age of Ramat Gan The­ater. That was where, a few months after they’d start­ed going out, he and Rona had seen Romeo and Juli­et. Stand­ing by the pile of rub­ble that used to be the the­ater, he told the aliens the sto­ry of the infat­u­at­ed pair who were so des­per­ate­ly in love that they pre­ferred dying togeth­er to liv­ing alone. After his roman­tic mono­logue, Meron would open the cool­er and hand out the ice pops that he and Rona loot­ed from the gro­cery store near Oasis Cin­e­ma, where they’d worked before the dis­as­ter. The aliens would suck the ice pops curi­ous­ly, and since their body tem­per­a­ture was much low­er than the half-melt­ed treats, all it took was one touch of their tongues for them to com­plete­ly freeze back over. 

After the tour, the robot always gave Meron a tiny met­al box con­tain­ing a hand­ful of what Rona had begun call­ing ​“health pearls.” They nev­er fig­ured out why the aliens need­ed the health pearls, but their effect on humans was incred­i­ble: swal­low­ing just a sin­gle pearl would make you feel full, healthy, and not at all depressed for a whole week. It was a win-win: the aliens got a heart­felt, per­son­al­ized tour led by a near-extinct life-form, and Meron and Rona, the last human beings in the uni­verse, got enough health pearls to sur­vive until the next group’s visit. 

Rona nev­er met the aliens. If it were up to her, she would have joined Meron, but he was adamant, and so every time they land­ed, she ducked into the hide­out they’d set up in the pub­lic library’s base­ment. The robot and the tourists were always well behaved, and Meron nev­er felt in any dan­ger, but nev­er­the­less, he thought it would be safer if the aliens believed he was the only per­son left on Earth and did not find out about Rona. When he gave his spiels about the dif­fer­ent sites, he nev­er so much as hint­ed at her exis­tence, except per­haps when he deliv­ered his mono­logue about Romeo and Juli­et and their over­pow­er­ing love. Although he didn’t men­tion her by name, he felt Rona’s pres­ence in every sin­gle word. 

Rona died from a rusty nail. The health pearls that offered pro­tec­tion from so many ills turned out to be pow­er­less against tetanus. And so, after sur­viv­ing a mete­orite fall, two hur­ri­canes, one tsuna­mi, and the most cat­a­stroph­ic series of earth­quakes ever to hit the plan­et, Rona ulti­mate­ly suc­cumbed to a dis­ease for which humans had devel­oped a vac­cine more than a cen­tu­ry ago. 

Meron buried her next to the bench where they’d first kissed, in King David Park. When she got ill, he’d des­per­ate­ly insist­ed that she take all the health pearls they had left, but now, as he slumped on the bench, he wished he’d kept one for him­self. He wasn’t sure exact­ly what he had, but he was burn­ing up with fever and all his mus­cles ached. ​“Maybe this is the end,” he thought as he lay sweat­ing on the bench near the fresh grave, and shut his eyes. Maybe it was like Romeo and Juli­et: if he and Rona couldn’t live togeth­er, at least they would die together. 

When he woke up, Meron saw the robot hov­er­ing above him, and he could feel a small group of aliens look­ing at him from behind. He must have been in such a deep sleep that he hadn’t heard the space­ship land. He was very weak, but he knew that the only way he could sur­vive was to get more health pearls, and the only way he could do that was to give the tour. He got up and made his way heav­i­ly toward the syn­a­gogue. The tour took longer than usu­al, most­ly because Meron had to do every­thing very slow­ly and he passed out twice. When they final­ly reached the the­ater ruins and Meron held out his hand to the robot, instead of plac­ing the cool met­al box in Meron’s palm, the robot emit­ted a dis­sat­is­fied whis­tle. Meron shrugged his shoul­ders uncom­pre­hend­ing­ly and kept his hand out­stretched. The robot respond­ed with anoth­er whis­tle, this time at a fre­quen­cy so high that it hurt Meron’s ears. He knew that as far as the robot was con­cerned, the tour wasn’t over until Meron told the sto­ry of Romeo and Juli­et, the pair so in love that they saw no point in liv­ing with­out each oth­er. He sighed and told the story. 

Only after the space­ship took off did Meron allow him­self to open the met­al box and put a pearl in his mouth. His fever broke almost imme­di­ate­ly, and by the time he got back to King David Park, his aches and pains had van­ished. He looked at the grave. He and Rona had always thought the aliens trav­eled from the oth­er side of the Milky Way because they want­ed to see the Great Syn­a­gogue and enjoy a frozen treat on a stick. But that wasn’t it. They didn’t fly across all those light-years for that. The rea­son they kept com­ing back was to hear Meron stand at the ruins of the the­ater and tell the sto­ry of true love and of a race so rare, so sen­si­tive, so unselfish, that it would not hes­i­tate to choose death over heart­break and loneliness.