I was assigned to work with Guy at Bells. We were both freshmen. He was in a prestigious social sciences program that I’d also applied to. I got a 655 on the psychometric exam, which was exactly the cutoff for admission. But a few days later they raised the bar, so I checked the box next to economics, because economics didn’t require a psychometric score. I’d seen Guy before, in Nature Hall A, in Esteban’s Microeconomics 101. He was part of a group of students who all sat together in the same row. They were all in that program, known to foster a sense of community. That’s what the website said. They’d also sit together on the social sciences lawn, talking about ministers whose names I recognized, and about what needed to be done with the new budget and the National Insurance deficit. I sat at the edge of the auditorium and watched them. A few of them raised their hands and asked Esteban questions. From where I was sitting, I could barely make out the graphs on the board. There were graphs about supply and demand, about the poverty line. I saw Guy from above, curly hair tied back in a ponytail. Sometimes he wore it loose. He had a huge tattoo on his muscular arm. Guys with ponytails and tattoos weren’t something you saw in Microeconomics 101. Later Guy told me the tattoo was something they all got together, the whole group. A drawing of a puzzle piece. Last summer, when I was photographing a wedding somewhere, I noticed one of the groom’s friends had a puzzle-piece tattoo. I went up to him on the dance floor and asked if he was a friend of Guy’s. I meant to text Guy that I’d run into one of those friends with the puzzle piece on his arm, but I forgot. I thought maybe I’d come across a few more guys like that over the years, and it would turn into a nice little game where I’d walk up to them and ask, excuse me, are you friends with Guy? I tried to remember which wedding it had been so I could find the photos and look at the puzzle piece again. Maybe I was the second photographer, and when I’m the second photographer I don’t keep the photos. I hand over the memory card and leave.
Not long after Guy and I were put on the same team at Bells, he sent me a voice message. His voice is still there on my phone. He said he was about to text me that we’d been assigned a family, when he saw we’d already been in touch, apparently because I’d come to photograph his unit, or something like that. I sent back a voice message saying I remembered that shoot really well, because it had been the last one I did as a military photographer. He replied that he thought it had been in Hebron, though he wasn’t sure, and said it was kind of funny. He added that the family we’d been assigned lived in Gilo, which was really far. A drag, he said, but oh well. Then he asked if I’d done exercise six in Micro I. I said sort of, and sent him a photo of the exercise from my notebook. He asked if I was at the library. I said yes, and he wrote that he was heading down to take a look, because he didn’t know if he was on the right track.
The last photo I took in the army was during the Knives Intifada. I was sent to photograph the counterterrorism unit training in Hebron. House entries, hostage extractions, things like that. It was the same day there was a stabbing attack at the Cave of the Patriarchs. That evening the soldiers kept their faces covered the whole time, because they were in camouflage. I sat on the floor and waited to get on their transport bus. Suddenly I heard a soldier above me say, hey, soldier, what are you doing here? I looked up and found the barrel of his rifle staring back at me. I flinched, and he said, Just kidding. He laughed and lowered his weapon. I didn’t want to get on the bus to Hebron, but I did. They spent the whole ride laughing, calling each other motherfucker, faggot. The bus drove past the Cave of the Patriarchs, and I tried to imagine where exactly people had been stabbed—out in the plaza, which was now empty and lit by white fluorescent lights, or inside, where it was dark. 
My commander told me this would be the last shoot of my service, and I counted the hours until it would be over. There was going to be a graduation ceremony for the photographers in Tel Aviv the next day, with Hanukkah candles, and my parents were supposed to come. I was afraid I’d be late. I hadn’t told them I was going to Hebron.
I photographed the counterterrorism unit walking through the streets of the Old City of Hebron in a convoy, rifles pointing skyward, passing grocery stores and synagogues and signs in Arabic. Some of the soldiers were dressed as captives and others as terrorists, with green headbands with Arabic writing on them, and I documented them. Like a movie set, we moved together in silence. When I aimed my camera at them, they raised their weapons. It was dark and hard to capture them because they asked me not to use the flash. I don’t like using it anyway. My photos often come out pretty dark, and only afterward do I regret not using artificial lighting.
We made it as far as Beit Guvrin that night. I photographed them camouflaged behind the bushes near Lachish. They had night-vision goggles on even though the sun was already up, because it looked good in photos. I photographed them training to extract hostages from an Egged bus, the same one we’d taken from the base to Hebron. The photos turned out well. That’s what the commander said. One of them even made the cover of the army magazine, Bamahane, which was very exciting. If it hadn’t been my last week in the army, they would have filed a complaint about the soldier who pointed his weapon at me. That’s what the commander said.
That’s how Guy and I found out our freshman year that he was the officer who had coordinated the arrival of a military photographer, and approved my getting on the bus to Hebron. I went through my folders looking for the photos from that last shoot, and suddenly remembered that it actually hadn’t been my last shoot. There had been one more, a final one, photographing a karate competition for elite athletes at the sports club in Yad Eliyahu. I photographed them bowing the traditional bows in white robes on colorful mats, performing their karate, and I clapped every time they finished a sequence. I opened the folder with the counterterrorism unit photos, sifting through the faces until I found one that looked like Guy’s underneath the cover. It was easy to make out, because of his large, gleaming eyes, somewhere between green and brown, with long dark lashes that made them look rimmed in black kohl. I sent him all the photos of him on WhatsApp, face covered and rifle raised. One evening I told him about the soldier who aimed his weapon at me, and he said it couldn’t have been one of his soldiers. No way. I told him they were swearing at each other the whole time, those soldiers of his, and that I hadn’t known soldiers in an elite unit talked like that. I said I’d photographed other units, like the Kfir infantry brigade and even the border police, and I never heard anyone talk that way there. He stayed quiet and nodded, and I went on listing the names of all the IDF units I could remember, the ones I’d photographed and the ones I hadn’t.
A few days later he asked me if I was already at the university. We’d planned to go over the details of the family we’d been matched with. I told him I was just now arriving. It was one thirty in the afternoon. He texted: Well well, look at you. I wrote back that I’d meant to get there earlier but had an alarm clock mishap. He said he wished he had those kinds of mishaps, to which I replied: You just need to manifest them. I have so many voice messages from him.
After that we really did become a good team at Bells, he and I. They put us on the Rephaeli family, who were in debt. Our job was to sit down with the family and go through all their paperwork until we got them to “financial balance.” I only joined Bells because the guy handing out their flyers was tall and lean and very handsome. I walked up to him and asked what the volunteering entailed. Guy and I would travel together all the way to Gilo to see that family, who was religious. The husband was a parking inspector in Jerusalem and told us that he could help us with parking tickets, should the need arise, and winked. The rides to Gilo from the city center felt endless. A bus ran out there once an hour, to the projects near Haganenet Street, where the Rephaelis lived. It was my first winter in Jerusalem, and I sat next to Guy in a big coat that didn’t keep me warm, because I hadn’t yet bought a “good coat,” as they say over there. We joked around the whole way about things I don’t really remember anymore. We spent many hours traveling like that until we made it back to Koresh Street, where he lived, and I would go on to Ben Yehuda, to my apartment. One evening we reached the stop after the last bus back to the city center had already left. I said I’d call a taxi and took out my phone, but then he opened Google Maps and said: It’s only seven kilometers, want to walk? It took us three hours to get to Ben Yehuda Street. I walked slowly and he walked fast, a little awkwardly, on account of his short legs. 
At night, I started imagining him coming over to my apartment on Ben Yehuda street and slipping into bed with me, imagined us having sex and me giving him a kiss while he slept on the pillow next to mine. Even Yael, an acquaintance of both of us from the library, told me she thought we’d make a good-looking couple. I smiled mysteriously, so she’d think there was something between us, and maybe feel a little jealous.
In another text he wrote me he was skipping economics due to “a mild hangover,” so we’d go over Ledger another time and I’d teach him what he’d missed. Ledger was Bells’ software, where all the families’ financial information got uploaded, so you could track their progress toward financial balance. We had a lot of exchanges about possible billing dates on the Rephaelis’ credit card. He kept leaving me voice messages asking if I’d done our econ homework yet, because he wanted me to explain it to him, and I always sent one back saying I hadn’t. 
After a while he told me he’d been on a date, and I asked who it was with. He didn’t say, only where they’d sat. I still liked that everyone in the hallways saw a guy like that, with a tattoo on his arm, hugging me. Especially in front of all the people he used to sit with in the middle row of Nature Hall A in Microeconomics 101. Sometimes he’d sit next to me instead, and I made sure they noticed. Until I dropped economics, because I failed all the exams. I bounced between majors, and Guy came up with a name for my combination: LHLAS—Literature, History, Latin American Studies. He joked about how often I switched programs. We’d come up with a fitting abbreviation every time, and every time it made me laugh. Guy liked Spanish too; he’d traveled in Mexico, helped poor Mexicans build mud houses, and said that if he could, he’d take a course in Latin American Studies too. I told him I wished he’d study Spanish with me. We could do homework together.
By the end of the year we managed to get the Rephaelis to financial balance, which officially made us a Bells success story. We even came to the university’s law school one Friday morning to talk to new volunteers about the process. I walked up to the big board and pointed at tables and graphs from Ledger. Guy and I told them about how we slowly managed to convince the mother to switch to a higher-paying job. Guy said, we found them a different loan. I said, because we contacted someone at the bank. Guy said, we used a new loan to cover their overdraft. I said, we moved money back and forth between their checking account and study fund.
We talked on the phone a lot. At first about the Rephaelis and their journey toward economic balance, and later on about other things too, which I unfortunately no longer remember very well. That date he’d gone on was with Yuval, he eventually told me in one of those calls. A guy from Jerusalem who’d just gotten out of the army after a few years as a career officer. They became a steady couple. Yuval even drove Guy and I to Gilo once. When they said goodbye, they kissed in the front seat, and I felt like a little girl being driven somewhere by her parents, watching them give each other a quick kiss on the mouth and pretending not to look. They came together to a party I photographed in Jerusalem that year—a New Year’s Eve party. I photographed them kissing at midnight. I probably still have those photos on one of my hard drives somewhere.
I often thought about writing Guy, asking how he was. We hadn’t talked much those last years. In one of our exchanges I told him I’d been seeing someone for a few months. He asked what his name was, and I said Daniel. He asked how we’d met, and I told him. He asked me to send a photo, and I did, and wrote that I hadn’t even shown a picture to my parents yet. Shortly after, Guy left Jerusalem, and I didn’t. He started a serious job, and I didn’t. One day I was driving in Tel Aviv and took a sharp left onto Yeshurun Street, on my way to my parents’, and almost ran someone over, and it was him. I got out of the car and hugged him, shaken, because I’d almost killed him. But we both laughed, and said how strange it was that we were bumping into each other there, near my parents’ street in Tel Aviv. Yael, our mutual friend from the library, hired me as her wedding photographer. She asked that I shoot both the small family wedding, and the big one with friends. I asked if Guy would be at the big wedding and she said of course. I hesitated for a long time, but the date was too close to my thesis deadline, so I photographed only the small ceremony and recommended another photographer for the big one. In the end I didn’t submit the thesis, and at the end of September the other photographer posted the wedding album on Facebook. There were very good photos of Guy, in a white shirt, lifting Yael on the dance floor.

When Yael called to say she knew about Guy, I asked her which Guy, and she said she thought I knew, but I didn’t. My mind went to other Guys. Guy the redhead who’d served in the intelligence corps, and another Guy who’d studied with Yael. I didn’t cry. I opened my laptop and hooked up every external hard drive until I found the folder from my last shoot in the army—not including the karate competition—and went through the photos one by one. I saw them, the soldiers from the counterterrorism unit, faces covered, some with rifles raised and green headbands, others dressed as captives with black blindfolds. I also saw Guy’s eyes, peeking out, ringed by long dark lashes. 
I thought I wouldn’t go to his funeral. I already knew that even after funerals I sometimes think I see the dead from a distance, out on the street, standing in line at the cafeteria, looking for parking, disappearing into escalators. In the end I did go. Daniel offered to come with me so I wouldn’t be alone, but I told him there was no need, that it wasn’t worth taking a day off work. I walked there, to Gate 6 at the cemetery, just as it said on the death notice I was forwarded on WhatsApp. I saw the people from Guy’s row in Nature Hall A. They hugged and walked ahead, while I walked alone in the procession behind the military vehicle carrying the coffin. A few female soldiers stood next to me, probably assigned to attend military funerals. I joined them. I heard someone saying that Yuval went from hospital to hospital looking for Guy when he stopped answering his phone. He went through their wedding guest list, circling Guy’s army friends, and began calling them one by one to ask if they knew where Guy was. He enlisted their help in calling hospitals and looking for information. They described the puzzle tattoo on his arm as a distinguishing mark. Half his team was injured that morning. Yuval called the casualty officer and told him that Guy was dead, and the officer panicked that they already knew. A few hours later they received official notice, toward dawn, from what I gathered from the eulogies. That’s how I also learned that Guy was supposed to get married exactly eight days after the funeral. I wasn’t offended that he hadn’t invited me.
Their wedding planner organized the funeral. After the eulogies, everyone sang what was supposed to have been their chuppah entrance song. One of their friends showed up in a blue flight suit, dark sunglasses and a baseball cap that hid his face. He said if Guy had known he came to the funeral like that he’d have called him an idiot. The pilot said that a week earlier they’d thrown a bachelor party for Yuval and Guy. They sat them on two chairs, back to back, and asked Guy what was the thing he did that Yuval found most annoying. The pilot said Guy hadn’t guessed the right answer, but he didn’t say what his guess was. Another friend from the unit said that after target practice during reserve duty, Guy had signed out his weapon for the mission and walked off in that quick, clunky walk of his. The friend called after him from a distance, asking if he remembered he was getting married in a week. Guy called back, Don’t worry.  
I tried to picture their home. A spacious living room with a plush L-shaped couch. Modern floors, none of those speckled tiles you get in old apartments. A coffee maker on the kitchen counter. I imagined lying on the couch, my head on a big corduroy pillow, poking fun at Guy for how he used to talk about all the money he was saving by skimping on taxis.
Guy and Yuval had wanted their guests to receive roses at the end of the wedding. Before I left through Gate 6, I placed a red rose on Guy’s grave, one the planner had handed out to the funeral goers. I couldn’t go home that night. I spent the night at my parents’. I left my old bedroom door open and heard my parents watching Zehu Ze!, my mother laughing out loud. The voices of Guy’s friends eulogizing him kept replaying in my head. I kissed my pillow. I’m not sure why. I saw Guy and Yuval sitting on two chairs, back to back, and the colorful decorations hanging on the wall above their L-shaped couch. I punched the mattress. I heard Guy’s friend calling after him after he’d signed out his weapon. I punched the mattress again and called out to my mother. She came in, nudged my legs aside and sat down by my feet. I heard her voice, reading me a story like when I was little, and Guy beside me, on the seat of the last bus from Gilo, telling me how many stops were left.