The Good Friend

I'm a good friend.

And I have proof of it.
Ultimate proof.
It's like God himself told me I'm a good friend.

And how do I know?
Because Mia Goldfarb chose me as a friend.

And Mia's choices are always right.

Always.

So yes, people think she's a little off in the head.
For instance, the fact that she wants everybody to call her the Stinker.

But I know why, and believe me, it isn't some whim.
She knows exactly what she's doing.

She calls me the Liar, by the way.

That's what I asked everyone to call me, but my request gets less traction.
I figure being that rich helps people want to please her.
Anyway, Mia always chooses right.
Hasn't made one mistake from age thirty to about fifty.

Twenty years of nothing but wins, the Stinker.

But she wasn't always like this.

She used to be just some woman.
Like the rest of us.

There's nothing special about her.
She isn't the smartest person in the world, and that's putting it gently.
She isn't the kindest either.

She has that healthy street-cat logic, sure.
And infinite patience.
Attention to the tiniest details.

And yes, she's a good friend.
We're always here for each other.

Loyalty.
That's what we have in common.
Extreme loyalty.

Mia wants to get into heaven when she dies.

That's her mission.
Mission number one.

Money she already has more of than she can spend.
Good friends, she's got the best in the world.

The most suitable partner, the healthiest and happiest kids.

Dresses the most impressively, furnishes her villas in the most inspiring style.

Every choice she makes works out.

So what's left for a person who has everything?
Only making sure it keeps going after death.

And how does she know there's anything at all once you close your eyes for the last time?

The same way she knows the perfect answer to every question.
She flips her coin.

And I'd say it's a magic coin if I weren't so careful about clichés.

Let's call it exceptional.

Because between us, if a thing like that exists in the world, who knows what else is out there?

She told me about the coin the night she asked me for help.

An unusual kind of help, because she knows I can be counted on.

We were sitting in some bar on Esther HaMalka.
One of those hidden ones, for the top tenth of a percent.

Honestly, the tenth of a percent is beneath it.
It's a bar for the top 0.01 percent.

And then she told me about the coin.

I remember she ordered herself one of those rich-people whiskeys.
Usually she doesn't drink.
I didn't order anything, even though I do.
She even offered to buy me a drink.
They're very expensive there.
I said no.

That was the first time she ever offered to pay for something of mine.
Thinking about it now, also the only time.

We sat for a while and said nothing.
Her whiskey glass sat between us.
All of a sudden it looked so pathetic and lonely to me.
A glass of expensive whiskey sitting between two friends like a lost sock.

It took her a while to get it out.

I gave her time.

And she didn't show me the coin that night.
She isn't crazy.
It doesn't leave the villa in Ein Hod.

It doesn't even leave the safe except when she needs to use it, and then it goes right back.

Four guards on that villa.
24/7.

And when she told me about it, and about what it does, a lot of questions I'd been asking myself about her and her success suddenly got very clear.

Because that success genuinely doesn't make sense.

So she told me that one day, more than thirty years ago, she was walking along Nordau and a car pulled over beside her.
A gray Ferrari.

An older man gets out.
Dressed like a billionaire with amazing style.
Because not every billionaire has style.
Really, not at all.
This one did.
And Mia has taste.

Walks up to her, says good morning, hands her a coin.

Told her the coin has two sides: yes and no.
And that any question she asks it, it'll answer correctly with a flip.

"I already got all my answers," he told her, "and it's time to pass this along."

"So why me?"

"You were here," he answered.
"Good luck."

The billionaire got back into his Ferrari and continued down Nordau toward the sea, and Mia was left standing on the boulevard with a coin in her hand.

Mia says she was very curious, even though she assumed he was messing with her.

What can you do?
When a man with a Ferrari stops in the middle of the road to tell you something, you don't wave it off that fast.
So she figured that even if it was a prank, he probably expected her to test the coin, to try what he'd said.
She was curious to see where it went from there.

And what did she have to lose?
A few motions with her hand?
Some small humiliation with only herself watching?

Between us, she's made rougher motions with that hand, and survived bigger embarrassments than this one.

In a small way.

It was a completely smooth coin, roughly the size of a half shekel.
Matte gray.

One side had a pomegranate in relief, the other a sword.

"Is my name Mia?" she thought, and flipped it.
Pomegranate.

She ran the same question twenty more times.
All pomegranate.

"Is my name Neta?"

Sword.

Mia canceled the meeting she had that morning and went back to her apartment.

She sat there asking the coin questions for hours.
Hundreds of questions.
I already told you she has patience.

And she mostly asked about herself and her own past.
Was my first boyfriend Tal?
Am I a Leo?

She'd run each question a full hour.
Every so often she'd trip it up with one where the answer had to be no.

Half a day of wins.
100% correct.

Only then did she dare ask about the future.

The answers were very encouraging.

The coin showed she'd find the love of her life, that they'd live happy lives, that they'd have successful children, that everyone would be healthy, that they'd be rich.

The hard questions she didn't dare ask.
Not yet.

And because she's a street cat, she went straight for the money.

A short series of questions led her to the winning crypto bet.

Within 48 hours she had a million dollars.

A week after that the money was in a bank, invested in the stocks the coin promised the biggest and fastest returns.
Six months after that she'd solved the money problem for herself and her entire dynasty, five generations out.

Next.

Mia freed herself up to find love.

"Does the perfect man live in Israel?"

"Can I make him fall in love with me?"

"Will he be faithful?"

"Will he be in Tel Aviv tomorrow?"

"The day after?"

Slowly she narrowed down where he was going to be.

Then she kept going and narrowed down what he looked like, so she'd be able to spot him.

It took longer to work out with the coin what to wear, what to say, how to behave.

The plan was simply to show up and conquer him, and everything was ready.

Luckily, she had the sense to ask whether there was a problem with the plan.

The yes sent her into a spiral of frustration, at the end of which she called me.

I don't know if the coin advised her to talk to me.
Maybe she thought of it herself.
Either way, it was lucky.

Because once she told me about the coin, I understood what the problem was and what she had to do.

I advised her right away to build a different sequence of questions.
Shorter and far more efficient for her.

I just showed her that he wouldn't be falling in love with her, he'd be falling in love with whoever the coin told her to be.

And that maybe he was perfect, but she wasn't.
And the only perfect thing about her was this new tool that had come into her possession.

We started checking who the perfect man for her actually was, and got precise with a few more critical questions: "Is he available for love?" "Will he love her for who she is?"

And I'll admit, it took a while to find Mike, her husband.

Almost a full week of work, in fact.

Because the coin's only drawback is that everything with it is linear.
You can't skip ahead the way you can with an open question.

The binary nature of its answers demands endless expeditions of yes and no, and every time you get stuck you have to go back to the beginning.

Anyway, that's how we found Mike, and my help established me as the sole consultant on coin affairs.

Lucky for us, I also managed to help her with the question of questions, the most important question a person can ask.

Understand, everything in her life was perfect.
Everything solved.

But then she reached the crossroads every person who has it too good eventually reaches.
At some point this stops, and what do you do with that?

So she asked the coin if there's life after death.

Pomegranate.

And is there a heaven?

Pomegranate.

And is it the Jewish heaven?

Sword.

The Christian one?

Sword.

Muslim?

Sword.

That's how she went through every religion she knows.
All sword.

And every religion on the internet.
Sword.

So she called me.

And I admit, I worked a little dirty here.
Brute force.

I just ran the alphabet to find the name of the religion whose heaven you can actually reach after death.

It was some strange religion called Agdag, widespread in the Fertile Crescent five thousand years ago.

The problem was that this religion had no mention anywhere online.

So we went to Professor Eliyahu Sofer, the number one expert on ancient religions of the Fertile Crescent.

I say expert, but the truth is he looked more like a man serving a sentence for them.

Thin, yellowish.
Random facial hair, thick glasses.
A man who remembers too many inscriptions carved into stone, and has already watched too many small gods go extinct.

Talks slowly.
Like some echo out of history.
An echo full of self-importance.

Mia was repulsed by him immediately.

Me?
I appreciated the hostility.

One thing led to another and he told us about the religion.
Let's just say the customs there are extremely bizarre.

For instance, they used to call each other by insulting names.
Everyone picked their own name.
Based on whatever they were most ashamed of, their worst trait.
That's how they fought their own egos.
A bad name, according to Agdag, was like an open window.
It lets the stink out before it has time to become a soul.

They also had a thing with smells, and with spit, and with dogs, but maybe we shouldn't dwell on that too much.

One more thing.
Every time they gave charity, or just helped somebody out, they'd ask that person for a slap.
A hard one, not a pat.
A slap that knocks the self-satisfaction out of the deed.
The smell of righteousness.

And it's all there in their scriptures.
Not many people have access.
Professor Sofer saw to that.

Between us, their beliefs go a long way toward explaining why this religion went extinct.
People don't like it that way.
They want to feel good.

And as for heaven, they believed you can only get in if you don't want to.

Fate's little joke.

And you can probably guess how much this frustrated Mia and me.
Probably frustrated the ancient believers too.

It basically bars entry to most of the human population.
Leaves some small opening for atheists, maybe.

So Mia sank into a funk, and I thought about what to do.

In the end I told her we could save ourselves the depression by just taking the risk and asking the coin whether she'd manage to get in.

She didn't dare.
She was scared.

Said it would kill her to know she wouldn't.

Especially in light of the alternative, because the Agdag hell is also a movie you really don't want a ticket to.
There's business with sharp smells, and bitter cold, and all sorts of eternal frustrations and misunderstandings, and shame.

She was very afraid of it.

Me too, honestly.

It's a stressful question.

But in the end I did what a good friend does.

I flipped the coin for her without telling her.

It's not like I broke into her house like a thief or something.
And you couldn't anyway.
There are the guards, and the safe.

I needed her permission, even a vague one.
So I took her out for a cigarette on her balcony.

She understood right away that it was serious.
I told her there was something I wanted to ask the coin, but I didn't want her to hear it.

And she probably figured she could always check up on me afterward with the coin.
Or maybe she was simply too comfortable by then, and too trusting.
Because come on, her street-cat days were long behind her.
Either way, she said no problem, and gave me one of those half-warm, half-wary hugs.
After she opened the safe she waited for me outside the room.
And that, really, was my first time alone with the coin.

I sat across from it a few minutes doing nothing at all.
Barely even breathing.
I don't know.
My brain went smooth.

There were so many possibilities, theoretically, but practically I couldn't come up with a single one.

I just sat there and stared.

In hindsight I'm sorry I didn't ask it anything about myself.
It's stressful, that kind of access to the truth.
And I don't think it would have been a betrayal if I'd gotten a little something out of it for myself.
Not really.
But I froze.

In the end I asked it what I came to ask.

Whether Mia would make it into heaven.

I figured that if the answer was yes, I'd tell her.
She'd be happy and I'd get the credit.
Maybe I'd even ask about myself.

And if it was no, I'd tell her a different story.
That I'd flipped on something else entirely.
Something about love, or some other intimate question.

But here's where the most aggravating thing happened.

Because when I asked, the coin landed on its edge.

I tried a few times, always the same result.
Landing on its edge.
In perfect balance between yes and no, between pomegranate and sword.
Landing with that tidy little click of metal on wood, as if the world were still perfectly comprehensible and binary.
And no matter how high I threw it, or how much spin I tried to put on it with my finger, always the same click, always the same result.
That was the first time I actually saw with my own eyes that something supernatural was going on here.
Until then I'd believed through the results, and suddenly there's a miracle happening right in front of me.
A small one, intimate, but still.
It made me nauseous.

Eventually I'd had enough.
I got the point.
There's free will and everything's open.
So basically we were back at the beginning.

But I didn't really know whether to tell her or not.
An answer like that felt too small for all the drama of the cigarette on the balcony, and going into the room alone with the coin and all that.

But then I remembered there's no need to work so hard.
I flipped on that too.

And that was my mistake.

I mean, I had no way of knowing, but that was the moment the coin was done with us.

It landed without making any sound at all.
There was no click.
I already knew something was wrong.

And when I checked the result, the side facing up was blank.
The reliefs were gone.

The other side was blank too.

My heart started pounding like crazy.
I could actually feel it in my throat, in my cheeks, in my ears.

Because I'd basically destroyed the most incredible tool anyone could imagine, and it was hers.

We were also left without a real answer to the question that troubled her most.
And I'm supposed to be her best friend.

But there was no choice, so when she came back into the room, I got to my feet with awe and reverence to tell her.

She went straight over to check the coin, turned it side to side, tried flipping it a few times.
Patience to the very end.

She asked me what I'd asked.

I told her the truth.

Then she asked me what the second question was.
I told her that too.

She stood there with the coin in her hand for about a minute.
More, even.

Finally she nodded.
"I understand."

Looked at me with a different look.
Twenty years of knowing each other and there are still new looks.
Go figure.

She's looked at me that way now and then ever since.
Less from below, less from above.
From the side.

In the end she said she wanted to be alone now.
Understandable.

I went home, but within an hour she called and said everything was fine.

That she even felt a little relief.
For years she'd thought of it as a tool, and now suddenly she understood it had been a heavy tool.

And that maybe this tool had been holding her by the throat.

I asked her what we do now.
I thought we should wait, maybe it would change.
Nothing to lose, worst case some humiliation from flipping a blank coin and waiting for a miracle.
In a small way.

But she said maybe it was time to pass the coin along.
Maybe it would work for someone else.

And she really did give it away.
To somebody on Nordau.
Some skinny guy sitting on the bench drinking a beer.

Mia felt it brought things full circle.

And we don't know if it worked for him, honestly.

She didn't stay to see.

So it took us a few years to get used to thinking for ourselves.

And we made mistakes.
We hesitated.
There were even crossroads where we decided not to decide.

Looking back, the coin arranged very beautiful lives for us, and also crippled us a little.

The way I see it, that's a small price to pay for all the good, all the perfect choices it made for us.

And as for heaven, I don't know.

It's stressful, I won't lie to you.

On the other hand, it changes what choosing good means.

And both of us, me and Mia, have found ourselves choosing it more and more.

It's even gotten a little addictive.
No pomegranate, no sword.
It's a different vibe, precisely because it's clean.

The bad deeds got a little smaller too.
Like the air went out of them or something.

And maybe that was Agdag's intention all along.
Which is basically God's intention, no?

So I guess that's an optimistic ending to our story.

And maybe it isn't the ending.

We'll die and see.