Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Julia put down the knob with a bit too much force and picked up another, a stainless octagon—ridiculously effortful, repulsively masculine.

  “Well, Mark…I don’t know what to say.”

  “Congratulations?”

  “Congratulations?”

  “Sure.”

  “That doesn’t feel right at all.”

  “But it’s my feelings we’re talking about here.”

  “Congratulations? Really?”

  “I’m young. Just barely, but still.”

  “Not just barely.”

  “You’re right. We’re resolutely young. If we were seventy it would be different. Maybe even if we were sixty or fifty. Maybe then I’d say, This is who I am. This is my lot. But I’m forty-four. A huge portion of my life hasn’t happened. And the same is true for Jennifer. We realized we would be happier living other lives. That’s a good thing. Certainly better than pretending, or repressing, or just being so consumed with the responsibility of playing a part that you never question if it’s the part you would choose. I’m still young, Julia, and I want to choose happiness.”

  “Happiness?”

  “Happiness.”

  “Whose happiness?”

  “My happiness. Jennifer’s, too. Our happiness, but separately.”

  “While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.”

  “Well, neither my happiness nor contentment is with her. And her happiness definitely isn’t with me.”

  “Where is it? Under a sofa cushion?”

  “In fact, under her French tutor.”

  “Holy shit,” Julia said, bringing the knob to her forehead harder than she’d intended.

  “I don’t know why you’re having this reaction to good news.”

  “She doesn’t even speak French.”

  “And now we know why.”

  Julia looked for the anorexic clerk. Anything to look away from Mark.

  “And your happiness?” she asked. “What language are you not learning?”

  He laughed. “For now, I’m happy to be alone. I’ve spent my whole life with others—my parents, girlfriends, Jennifer. Maybe I want something different.”

  “Loneliness?”

  “Aloneness isn’t loneliness.”

  “This doorknob is very ugly.”

  “Are you upset?”

  “Too little distress, too much distress, it isn’t rocket science.”

  “That’s why they save rocket scientists for rocket science.”

  “I can’t believe you haven’t even mentioned the kids.”

  “It’s painful.”

  “What this is going to do to them. What seeing them half the time is going to do to you.”

  She pressed into the display case, angled herself a few degrees. No amount of adjusting could make this conversation comfortable, but it would at least deflect the blow. She put down the knob and picked up one whose only honest comparison would be the dildo she was given at her bachelorette party, sixteen years before. It had resembled a penis as little as this knob resembled a knob. Her girlfriends laughed, and she laughed, and four months later she came upon it while searching her closet with the hopes of regifting an unopened matcha whisk, and she found herself bored or hormonal enough to give it a shot. It accomplished nothing. Too dry. Too unwillful. But holding the ridiculous doorknob, then, she could think of nothing else.

  “I lost my interior monologue,” Mark said.

  “Your interior monologue?” Julia asked with a dismissive grin.

  “That’s right.”

  She handed him the knob: “Mark, it’s your interior monologue calling. He was mugged by your id in Nigeria and needs you to wire it two hundred fifty thousand dollars by the end of the day.”

  “Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe I sound selfish—”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “—but I lost what made me me.”

  “You’re an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”

  “The harder you push back,” he said, “the more sure I am that you agree.”

  “Agree? Agree with what? We’re talking about your life.”

  “We’re talking about the endless clenched-jaw worrying about the kids all day, and the endless replaying of unhad fights with your spouse all night. You wouldn’t be a happier, more ambitious and productive architect if you were alone? You wouldn’t be less weary?”

  “What, me weary?”

  “The more you joke, the more sure—”

  “Of course I would.”

  “And vacations? You wouldn’t enjoy them more alone?”

  “Not so loud.”

  “Or someone would hear that you’re human?”

  She ran her thumb over the head of the knob.

  “Of course I’d miss my kids,” she said. “You wouldn’t?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Yes, I’d prefer to have them with me and them on vacation.”

  “Tough sentence to assemble?”

  “I would choose their presence. If it were a choice.”

  “Is it the never sleeping in, the never enjoying a meal, or the hypervigilance at the edge of a beach chair that your back will never touch?”

  “It’s the fulfillment that has no other source. The first thought I have every morning, and the last thought every night, is about my kids.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “It’s my point.”

  “When do you think about yourself?”

  “When I think that one day, a few decades from now, which will feel like a few hours from now, I’ll be facing death all alone, except that I won’t be all alone, because I’ll be surrounded by my family.”

  “Living the wrong life is far worse than dying the wrong death.”

  “No shit! I got the same fortune cookie last night!”

  Mark leaned closer to Julia.

  “Just tell me,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to have your time and mind back? I’m not asking you to speak badly of your husband or kids. Let’s take it for granted that you’ve never cared about anything half as much, and couldn’t care about anything more. I’m not asking for the answer you want to give, or feel you have to. I know this is hard to think about, much less talk about. But honestly: you wouldn’t be happier alone?”

  “You’re assuming happiness is the ultimate ambition.”

  “I’m not. I’m just asking if you would be happier alone.”

  Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d confronted the question, but it was the first time that it had been posed by someone else. It was the first time she didn’t have the ability to evade it. Would she be happier alone? I am a mother, she thought—not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity. She had no lives to compare with her life, no parallel aloneness to measure against her aloneness. She was simply doing what she thought was the right thing to do. Living what she thought was the right life.

  “No,” she said. “I would not be happier alone.”

  He ran his finger around a platonically spherical knob and said, “Then you have it all. Lucky you.”

  “Yes. Lucky me. I do feel lucky.”

  A long few seconds of touching cold metal in silence, and then Mark asked, “So?” and placed the knob back on the counter.

  “What?”

  “So what’s your news?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said you had news.”

  “Oh, right,” she said, shaking her head. “No, it isn’t news.”

  And it wasn’t. She and Jacob had been talking about thinking about looking for a place in the country. Something dinky that could be re-imagined. Not even talking about, really, but allowing the joke to linger for long enough to become unfunny. It wasn’t news. It was process.

  The morning after their night in the Pennsylvania inn, a decade
and a half before, Julia and Jacob went on a hike through a nature preserve. An unusually chatty welcome sign at the entrance explained that the existing paths weren’t original but were “desire lines,” shortcuts people took that trampled the growth and over time appeared deliberate.

  Julia and Jacob’s family life became characterized by process, endless negotiation, tiny adjustments. Maybe we should throw caution to the wind and take off the window screens this year. Maybe fencing is one activity too many for Max, and too conspicuously bourgeois for his parents. Maybe if we replaced the metal spatulas with rubber spatulas, we wouldn’t need to replace all the nonstick pans that are giving us cancer. Maybe we should get a car with a third row of seats. Maybe one of those projection things would be nice. Maybe Sam’s cello teacher was right and he should just be playing songs he loves, even if that means “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae).” Maybe more nature is part of the answer. Maybe having groceries delivered would encourage better cooking, which would relieve the unnecessary but unshakable guilt of having groceries delivered.

  Their family life was the sum of nudges and corrections. Infinite tiny increments. News happens in emergency rooms and lawyers’ offices and, apparently, the Alliance Française. It is to be sought and avoided with everything one has.

  “Let’s look at hardware another day,” Julia said, slipping the knob into her handbag.

  “We’re not going to do the renovation.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No one even lives there anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m sorry, Julia. Of course we’ll pay you for—”

  “No, right. Of course. I’m just a little slow today.”

  “You put in so much work.”

  After a snowfall, there are only desire lines. But it always warms, and even if it takes longer than it should, the snow inevitably melts, revealing what was chosen.

  i don’t care if you cum, but i’ll make you cum anyway

  For their tenth anniversary, they went back to the Pennsylvania inn. They’d stumbled upon it the first time—before GPS, before TripAdvisor, before the rareness of freedom spoiled freedom.

  The anniversary visit involved a week of preparations, which began with the most difficult task of locating the inn. (Somewhere in Amish country, quilts on the bedroom walls, red front door, rough-hewn banisters, wasn’t there a tree-lined drive?) They had to find a night when Irv and Deborah could stay over to watch the kids, when neither Jacob nor Julia had any pressing work obligations, when the boys didn’t have anything—teacher conference, doctor’s visit, performance—that would require parental presence, and when that specific room was available. The first night to thread all the needles in the pincushion was three weeks out. Julia didn’t know if that felt near or far.

  Jacob made the reservation, and Julia made the itinerary. They wouldn’t arrive until sundown, but they would arrive for sundown. The following day, they would have breakfast at the inn (she called ahead to ask about the menu), repeat the first half of their hike through the nature preserve, visit the oldest barn and the third-oldest church in the northeast, check out a few antiques shops—who knows, maybe find something for the collection.

  “Collection?”

  “Things with insides larger than their outsides.”

  “Great.”

  “And then lunch at a small winery I read about on Remodelista. You’ll note I didn’t mention finding a place for tchotchkes to bring home for the boys.”

  “Noted.”

  “And we’ll make it back for a family dinner.”

  “We’ll have time for all of that?”

  “Better to have too many options,” Julia said.

  (They never made it to the antiques shops, because their vacation’s insides were larger than its outsides.)

  As they’d promised themselves, they didn’t write out instructions for Deborah and Irv, didn’t precook dinner or prepack lunches, didn’t tell Sam that he would be the “man of the house” while they were gone. They made clear to everyone that they would not be calling to check in—but that, of course, should any need arise, they’d have their cell phones close and charged the whole time.

  On the drive up, they talked—not about the kids—until they had nothing to say. The quiet wasn’t awkward or threatening, but shared, comfortable, and safe. It was the edge of autumn, as it had been a decade before, and they drove north along a color spectrum—a few miles farther, a few degrees colder, a few shades brighter. A decade of autumn.

  “Mind if I put on a podcast?” Jacob asked, embarrassed by his desire for both distraction and Julia’s permission.

  “That sounds great,” she said, relieving the embarrassment she sensed in him, without knowing its source.

  A few seconds in, Jacob said, “Ah, I’ve heard this one.”

  “So put on another.”

  “No, it’s really great. I want you to hear it.”

  She put her hand on his hand on the gearshift and said, “You’re kind,” and the distance from the expected that’s kind to you’re kind was a kindness.

  The podcast began with a description of the 1863 World Championship of Checkers, at which every game of the forty-game series ended in a draw and twenty-one of the games were identical, move for move.

  “Twenty-one identical games. Every single move.”

  “Incredible.”

  The problem was that checkers has a relatively limited number of possible combinations, and since some moves are definitively better than others, one could know and remember the “ideal” game. The narrator explained that the term book refers to the sum history of all preceding games. A game is “in book” when the configuration of the board has occurred before. A game is “out of book” or “off book” when the configuration is unprecedented. The book for checkers is relatively small. The 1863 championship demonstrated that checkers had been, in essence, perfected, and its book memorized. So there was nothing left besides monotonous repetition, every game a draw.

  Chess, however, is almost infinitely complex. There are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe.

  “Think about that. More than atoms in the universe!”

  “How could they know how many atoms there are in the universe?”

  “Count them, I guess.”

  “Think of how many fingers that would take.”

  “You make me laugh.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “On the inside, I am. Silently.”

  Jacob slid his five fingers between Julia’s.

  The book for chess was created in the sixteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth century it occupied an entire library in the Moscow Chess Club—hundreds of boxes filled with cards documenting every professional chess game ever played. In the 1980s, chess’s book was put online—many mark that as the beginning of the end of the game, even if the end would never be reached. After that, when two players faced each other, they had the ability to search their opponent’s history: how he responded in different situations, his strengths and weaknesses, what he would be likely to do.

  Access to the book has made whole portions of chess games checkers-like—sequences that follow an idealized, memorized pattern—particularly openings. The first sixteen to twenty moves can be hammered out simply by “reciting” the book. Still, in all but the rarest chess games a “novelty” is reached—a configuration of pieces that has never been seen in the history of the universe. In the notation of a chess game, the next move is marked “out of book.” Both sides are now on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by.

  Jacob and Julia arrived at the inn as the sun was dipping below the horizon, as they had a decade before. “Slow down just a bit,” she’d told Jacob when they were about twenty minutes away. He thought she wanted to hear the rest of the podcast, which touched him, but she wanted to give him the same arrival they’d had last time, which would have touched him if he’d known.

  Jacob brought the car almost all the way i
nto the parking space and left it in neutral. He turned off the stereo and looked at Julia, his wife, for a long time. Earth’s rotation brought the sun under the horizon, and the space fully under the car. It was dark: a decade of sunset.

  “Nothing has changed,” Jacob said, running his hand along the dry-stone wall as they walked the mossy path to the entrance. Jacob wondered, as he’d wondered ten years before, how the hell such a wall was made.

  “I remember everything but us,” Julia said with an audible laugh.

  They checked in, but before taking the duffel to the room, went to the fire and eased into the coma-inducing leather armchairs that they hadn’t remembered but then couldn’t stop remembering.

  “What did we drink when we sat here last time?” Jacob asked.

  “I actually remember,” Julia said, “because I was so surprised by your order. Rosé.”

  Jacob let out a hearty laugh and asked, “What’s wrong with rosé?”

  “Nothing,” Julia laughed. “It was just unexpected.”

  They ordered two glasses of rosé.

  They tried to remember everything about the first visit, every smallest detail: what was worn (what clothes, what jewelry), what was said when, what music was playing (if any), what was on the TV over the honesty bar, what complimentary appetizers were offered, what jokes Jacob told to impress her, what jokes Jacob told to deflect a conversation he didn’t want to have, what each had been thinking, who had the courage to nudge the still-new marriage onto the invisible bridge between where they were (which was thrilling, but untrustworthy) and where they wanted to be (which would be thrilling and trustworthy), across a chasm of so much potential hurt.

  They ran their hands along the rough-hewn banister of the stairs to the dining room and had a candlelit dinner, almost all the food sourced from the property.

  “I think it was on that trip that I explained why I don’t fold my glasses before putting them on the bedside table.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  Another glass of rosé.

  “Remember when you came back from the bathroom and it took you like twenty minutes to see the note I’d written in butter on your plate?”

  “ ‘You’re my butter half.’ ”

  “Yeah. I really choked. Sorry about that.”