Tzipora had met Mike on a scout camp. He had some kind of muscular dystrophy and didn’t go to school. He had an education terminal in his house. He was well-read and had a strong fatalistic outlook on the world, and Tzipora would come by to sneak him beers and talk about things.
Mike would likely die much younger, as his muscles wasted. And even then, he had advantages over others. The relationship between normality and otherness — between life and death; comfort and agony; prosperity and poverty — seemed very close and arbitrary.
Tzipora felt she was close to that edge, despite her good health. She could not understand the dualistic nature of suffering. And she liked Mike. So she would smuggle him things and they’d talk about the future and the news and the goodness and madness of it all.