Sirens

There are sirens and there are sirens.

The Yom HaShoah siren sounds at ten in the morning. Two minutes. The country stops — cars pull over, people stand on sidewalks, a cashier freezes mid-transaction. I learned this as an adult immigrant, which means I learned it self-consciously: feet together, hands at my sides, watching other people to make sure I was doing it right. What happens in the body is odd. The sound is piercing, insistent — everything a warning signal should be — and yet the body settles. It goes still. Something that reads as emergency instructs you to become a monument.

The Yom HaZikaron siren works the same way. By now you know what to do with your hands.

And then there is the other kind.

The missile warning siren doesn’t ask you to stop. It asks you to move. You have somewhere between fifteen seconds and ninety, depending on where you are, and the body knows this before the brain has finished processing the sound. The legs make a decision. The chest tightens. You are already in the stairwell, the shelter or the safe room before you’ve thought the word “stairwell,” “shelter,” “safer room.”

Same sound. One siren and the body says: be still, this is important. Another siren and the body says: go, now, you can feel later.

What I keep returning to is the half-second before the brain classifies which one it is. A moment of pure sound, before context arrives. The body lurches toward both responses at once — toward stillness and toward flight, toward grief and toward survival — and then context arrives and sorts it out and you do what you’re supposed to do.

I have stood still for a lot of sirens in this country. I have run for a lot of sirens in this country. What I wasn’t prepared for — what nobody mentions — is how much you carry into that half-second after a while. All the times you ran. All the times you stood still and let yourself feel what the silence after the siren asked you to feel. All of it is there, unresolved, in the moment before you know which this is.

And then you know. And you do the thing.

And somewhere in the back of the body, the other thing waits.