I bought a rooster.

For several months now I’ve been trying to quit, unsuccessfully.

The symptoms leave no room for doubt; deterioration of vision, wrinkles on the sides of my eyes, extreme mood swings. I’m willing to put up with the weaning interval, the twitching of the finger, the paranoia – maybe something happened?

But the main difficulty was the mornings. When your awakening, perhaps the most sincere moment of the day, when oblivion sprouts into being, when the soul roots itself once again within the same familiar body, and is forced to shrink from a state of infinite spiritual planes, spaceless and timeless, into confinement within the flesh and blood whose boundaries are so clear and their perishment is so certain – when all of that is disturbed ahead of time by this device, the fate of the day is more or less doomed.

You can reduce the dosing, but it’ll still be there, in the background, alerting and encircling you like a blinding field of smoke. A shower sometimes helps.

So I took the van to Grandma’s kibbutz and bought a rooster. A studio apartment facing Allenby st. is most likely not the natural habitat of the winged beast. It was meant to wallow in endless lawns, to peck at grains newly fallen from the trees, to bounce upon hens.

But right now there’s nothing more important than weaning, and when animal rights organizations will come knocking on my door with their angry signs, spilling cat blood on me or whatever, I’ll declare he’s a free-range rooster. For he set me free.

True – he throws dung in the corner of the room about twice a day, in any case it’s better than this device that shits in the corner of my mind every thirty seconds. Everything is really starting to stink over there. It’s amazing how much one bird, meaning poultry, one poultry, is able to improve one’s life quality, provided that it isn’t grilled on some barbecue on Nahalat Binyamin.

Louis – that’s how I decided to name him, for his crest that reminded me of a crown. Louis calls exactly at dawn, he cannot be tuned to a different times and his sound cannot be changed to harp or marimba.

Only Cock-a-doodle-do!.

Since I had to distract myself from not receiving my dose, dawn became a whole universe of productivity. I managed to write three pages, stretch my arms and quadrilateral, fifteen minutes of meditation, some piano and two free-range eggs – all before eight o’clock.

Gradually Louis began to affect the lives of other people as well, without them even knowing he exists. Sometimes I suspect he’s a magic rooster. My neighbors also started waking up at dawn. I imagined that sooner or later I’d have to expect angry door knocks, but none of them had imagined that the building was inhabited by a cock. They googled for an explanation for the phenomenon – “rooster sound city center”. The search engine found nothing. One time, one of the neighbors came up to me and asked me if my alarm clock had the sound of a rooster. I told him that no. I don’t like to lie.

The day Louis ran away off the porch – probably saw one of the ducks that miraculously emerge from time to time at the fountain on Allenby – I was forced to set the device for eight o’clock, just for one day.

Four hundred and eighty-seven days have passed since then.

Four hundred and eighty-seven days of marimba.