Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “I’m not good at life.”

  “You are when you’re thoughtful.”

  “Is Dad bad at life?”

  “That’s not the conversation we’re having right now.”

  “If he focused, he could beat me.”

  “That might very well be true, but we’ll never know.”

  “What conversation are we having?”

  She took the phone from her pocket. “What is this?”

  “That’s a cellular telephone.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “I’m not allowed to have a smartphone.”

  “Which is why it would upset me if it were yours.”

  “So you don’t need to be upset.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “No idea.”

  “Phones aren’t like dinosaur bones. They don’t just show up.”

  “Dinosaur bones aren’t like that, either.”

  “If I were you, I’d tone down the intelligence.” She turned the phone over. And over. “How do I look through it?”

  “I assume it has a password.”

  “It does.”

  “So you’re out of luck.”

  “I might as well try this2shallpass, right?”

  “I guess.”

  Every adult member of the Bloch family used that ridiculous password for everything—from Amazon to Netflix to home alarm systems to phones.

  “Nope,” she said, showing Sam the screen.

  “Worth a shot.”

  “Should I take it to the store, or something?”

  “They don’t even open the phones of terrorists.”

  “Maybe I’ll try the same password, but with caps.”

  “You could.”

  “How do you capitalize a letter?”

  Sam took the phone. He typed like rain hitting a skylight, but Julia saw only the disfigured thumb, and in slow motion.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Try spelling it out.”

  “What?”

  “T-o-o.”

  “That would be pretty stupid.”

  “It would be brilliant compared with using the same password that’s used for everything.”

  “T-h-i-s-t-o-o-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s…Nope. Sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry.”

  “Try spelling it out and capitalizing the first letter.”

  “Huh?”

  “Capital T, and t-w-o for the numeral.”

  This he typed more slowly, carefully. “Hm.”

  “It’s open?”

  She reached to take the phone, but he held it for just a fraction of a second, enough to create an awkward stutter. Sam looked at his mother. Her enormous, ancient thumb pushed words up the tiny glass mountain. She looked at Sam.

  “What?” he asked.

  “What what?”

  “Why are you looking at me?”

  “Why am I looking at you?”

  “Like that?”

  Jacob couldn’t fall asleep without a podcast. He said the information soothed him, but Julia knew it was the company. She was usually asleep by the time he came to bed—unacknowledged choreography—but every now and then she’d find herself listening alone. One night, her husband snoring beside her, she heard a sleep scientist explain lucid dreaming—a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. The most common technique for bringing on a lucid dream is to get in the habit, in waking life, of looking at texts—a page of a book or magazine, a billboard, a screen—and then looking away, and looking back. In dreams, texts don’t remain constant. If you exercise the habit, it becomes a reflex. And if you exercise the reflex, it slips into dreams. The discontinuity of the text will indicate that you’re dreaming, at which point you will not only be aware, but also in control.

  She looked away from the phone, and looked back.

  “I know you don’t play Other Life. What is it you do?”

  “Huh?”

  “What’s the word for what you do?”

  “Live?” he said, trying to understand the change that was coming over his mother’s face.

  “I mean in Other Life.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You live Other Life?”

  “I don’t usually have to describe what I’m doing there, but sure.”

  “You can live Other Life.”

  “Right.”

  “No, I mean you are allowed to.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I was grounded.”

  “You are,” she said, putting the phone in her pocket. “But you can live that now, if you want.”

  “We can go get the suit.”

  “Another day. There’s time.”

  Sam looked away from his mother, and looked back.

  —

  He’d checked all the devices. He wasn’t angry, he just wanted to say what needed to be said, and then flatten the synagogue to rubble. It didn’t fit, wasn’t home. He’d wired everything double-redundantly, and placed three times as many explosives as were necessary: under each pew, out of sight atop the bookshelf that held the siddurim, buried beneath the hundreds of yarmulkes in their waist-high, octagonal wooden container.

  Samanta removed the Torah from the ark. She chanted some memorized nonsense, undressed the Torah, and spread it out in front of her on the bimah. All of those beautiful pitch-black letters. All of those beautiful minimalist sentences, combining to tell all of those beautiful, endlessly echoing stories that should have been lost to history and still might be. The detonator was inside the Torah pointer. Samanta grasped it, found her place on the scroll, and started to chant.

  > Bar’chu et Adonai Ham’vorach.

  > Say what?

  > I took my little brother to the zoo and these rhinos started fucking and it was insane. He just stood there looking. He didn’t even know it was funny, which was the funniest part.

  > Pay attention!

  > It’s funny when someone doesn’t know it’s funny.

  > How can I miss someone I never met?

  > Baruch Adonai Ham’vorach l’olam va’ed.

  > I will always, always, always take dishonesty over faux honesty.

  > App: Everything you say will one day be used against you.

  > Baruch Atah, Adonai…

  > Got it: We praise You…

  > I’ve been having this weird thing where I can’t remember what people I know look like. Or I convince myself I can’t. I’ll find myself trying to imagine my brother’s face, and can’t. It’s not that I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, or that I wouldn’t recognize him. But when I try to think of him, I can’t.

  > Eloheynu melech ha’olam…

  > Download a program called VeryPDF. It’s pretty straightforward.

  > Eternal God, King of the Universe…

  > Sorry, I was just eating dinner. I’m in Kyoto. The stars have been out for hours.

  > Did anyone see the video of that Jewish reporter getting decapitated?

  > asher bachar banu mikol ha’amim…

  > VeryPDF has a million bugs.

  > You have called us to Your service…

  > My iPhone is making me seasick.

  > v’natan lanu et Torato…

  > You need to lock rotation. Double click on the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar. Swipe right until you get to something that looks like a circular arrow—it enables and disables rotation lock.

  > Could you go blind from staring at a movie of the sun?

  > Does anybody know anything about this new telescope that the Chinese are talking about building? It’s supposed to see twice as far back in time as any telescope has before.

  > Baruch Atah, Adonai…

  > I know I sound like I’m high, but shouldn’t we acknowledge the weirdness of what you just said? It can see twice as far back in time?

  > I could fit every word I’ve ever written in my life onto a thumb drive.

  > Which means?

  > We praise You…

  > Imagine if they put a mas
sive mirror in space, really far away from us. Couldn’t we, by aiming a telescope at it, see ourselves in the past?

  > Meaning?

  > The farther away it was, the deeper into our past we could see: our births, our parents’ first kiss, cavemen.

  > The dinosaurs.

  > My parents never kissed, and fucked exactly once.

  > Life crawling out of the ocean.

  > notein haTorah.

  > And if it were lined up straight, you could look at yourself not being there.

  > Giver of the Torah.

  Samanta looked up.

  What on earth would it take for a fundamentally good human being to be seen? Not noticed, but seen. Not appreciated, not cherished, not even loved. But fully seen.

  She looked out upon the congregation of avatars. They were trustworthy, generous, fundamentally nice unreal people. The most fundamentally nice people she would ever meet were people she would never meet.

  She looked simultaneously at and through the stained-glass Jewish Present.

  Sam had overheard every word from the other side of Rabbi Singer’s door. He knew that his father believed him, and that his mother didn’t. He knew that his mother was trying to do what she thought was best, and that his father was trying to do what he thought was best. But best for whom?

  He’d found the phone a full day before his mother had.

  Many apologies were due, but he didn’t owe any apology to anyone.

  With no throat to clear, Samanta began to speak, to say what needed to be said.

  EPITOME

  The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: “Are we there yet?” Adults: “How did we get here so quickly?”

  Somehow, it was late. Somehow, the hours had gone somewhere. Irv and Deborah had gone home. The boys had eaten an early dinner, taken an early bath. Jacob and Julia had managed to collaborate in avoidance: You walk Argus, while I help Max with his math, while you fold laundry, while I search for the Lego piece on which everything depends, while you pretend to know how to fix a running toilet, and somehow, the day that began as Julia’s to have to herself ended with Jacob ostensibly out at drinks with someone-or-other from HBO and Julia definitively cleaning up the day’s mess. So much mess made by so few people in such little time. She was doing the dishes when Jacob entered the kitchen.

  “That went later than I thought,” he said preemptively. And to further compact his guilt: “Very boring.”

  “You must be drunk.”

  “No.”

  “How do you have drinks for four hours without getting drunk?”

  “Just a drink,” he said, draping his jacket over the counter stool, “not drinks. And only three-and-a-half.”

  “That’s some awfully slow sipping.” Her tone was pointed, but it could have been sharpened by a number of things: her lost day off, the stress from the morning, the bar mitzvah.

  She wiped her brow with the first part of her forearm that wasn’t soapy, and said, “We were supposed to talk to Sam.”

  Good, Jacob thought. Of the conflicts available, this was the least terrifying. He could apologize, make it right, get back to happiness.

  “I know,” he said, tasting the alcohol on his teeth.

  “You say ‘I know,’ and yet it’s night and we’re not talking to him.”

  “I just walked in. I was going to have a glass of water and then go talk to him.”

  “And the plan was to talk to him together.”

  “Well, I can spare you from having to be bad cop.”

  “Spare him from having a bad cop, you mean.”

  “I’ll be both cops.”

  “No, you’ll be a paramedic.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “You’ll apologize for having to correct him in any way, and the two of you will end up laughing, and I’ll be left as the annoying, nitpicking mother again. You get your seven-minute wink, and I get a month of resentment.”

  “None of what you just said is true.”

  “Right.”

  She scrubbed at the charred residue on a burnt pan.

  “Max is asleep?” he asked, aiming his lips at hers and his eyes to the side.

  “It’s ten thirty.”

  “Sam’s in his room?”

  “One drink for four hours?”

  “Three and a half. Someone else showed up halfway through, and it just—”

  “Yes, Sam is up in his emotional bomb shelter.”

  “Playing Other Life?”

  “Living it.”

  They’d grown so afraid of not having the kids to fill the void. Sometimes Julia wondered if she let them stay up only to protect herself against the quiet, if she called Benjy onto her lap to be a human shield.

  “How was Max’s night?”

  “He’s depressed.”

  “Depressed? No he’s not.”

  “You’re right. He must just have mono.”

  “He’s only eleven.”

  “He’s only ten.”

  “Depressed is a strong word.”

  “It does a good job of describing a strong experience.”

  “And Benjy?” Jacob asked while looking through a drawer.

  “Missing something?”

  “What?”

  “You’re searching around.”

  “I’ll go give Benjy a kiss.”

  “You’ll wake him up.”

  “I’ll be a ninja.”

  “It took him an hour to fall asleep.”

  “Literally an hour? Or it felt like an hour?”

  “Literally sixty minutes thinking about death.”

  “He’s an amazing kid.”

  “Because he’s obsessed with dying?”

  “Because he’s sensitive.”

  Jacob looked through the mail while Julia filled the washer: Restoration Hardware’s monthly Yellow Pages of gray furniture, the ACLU’s weekly infringement of privacy, a never-to-be-opened financial appeal from Georgetown Day, a flyer from some broker with orthodontics broadcasting how much he just sold the neighbor’s house for, various paper confirmations of paperless utilities payments, a catalog from a children’s clothing manufacturer whose marketing algorithm wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that toddlerhood is a temporary state.

  Julia held up the phone.

  Jacob held up his body, although everything inside fell—like one of those bottom-weighted inflatable clowns that keep coming back for more punches.

  “Do you know whose this is?”

  “It’s mine,” he said, taking it. “I got a new one.”

  “When?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…people get new phones.”

  She put too much soap in the machine and closed it too firmly.

  “There’s a password on it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your old phone didn’t have a password.”

  “Yes it did.”

  “No it didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because why wouldn’t I?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is there something you need to tell me?”

  Jacob was busted for plagiarism in college. This was before computer programs that could search for it, so getting caught required flamboyant stealing, which his was. But he wasn’t caught; he accidentally confessed. He’d been called into his “American Epic” professor’s office, asked to take a seat, made to ferment in the halitosis while waiting for the professor to finish reading the last three pages of a book and then clumsily shuffle through papers on his desk in search of Jacob’s work.

  “Mr. Bloch.”

  Was that a statement? A confirmation that he had the right guy?

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Bloch”—shaking the pages like a lulav—“where do these ideas come from?”

  But before the professor was given a chance to say, “Because they’re sophisticated far beyond your years,” Jacob said,
“Harold Bloom.”

  Despite his failing grade, and despite the academic probation, he was grateful to have made the blunder—not because honesty was so important to him in this case, but because there was nothing he hated more than exposed guilt. It made a terrified child out of him, and he would do anything to relieve it.

  “New phones ask for a password,” Jacob said. “I think they require one.”

  “That’s a funny way of saying no.”

  “What was the question?”

  “Is there something you need to tell me?”

  “There’s always a lot of things I want to tell you.”

  “I said need.”

  Argus moaned.

  “I don’t understand this conversation,” Jacob said. “And what the hell is that smell?”

  So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?

  And now, their first baby on the brink of manhood, and their last asking questions about death, they found themselves in the kitchen with things finally worth not talking about.

  Julia noticed a small stain on her shirt and starting rubbing at it, despite knowing it was old and permanent.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t bring home the dry cleaning.”

  The only thing she hated more than feeling like she was feeling was sounding like she was sounding. As Irv had told her Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” She hated the person Jacob forced her to sound like: pissy and aggrieved, unfun, the nagging wife she would have killed herself to avoid becoming.

  “I have a bad memory,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I have a bad memory, too, but I don’t forget things.”

  “I’m sorry, OK?”

  “That would be easier to accept without the OK.”

  “You act as if I only ever make mistakes.”

  “Help me out,” she said. “What, in this house, do you do well?”

  “You’re serious?”

  Argus let out a long moan.

  Jacob turned to him and gave a bit of what he wasn’t capable of giving to Julia: “Chill the fuck out!” And then, not appreciating the joke he was making at his own expense: “I never raise my voice.”

  She appreciated it: “Isn’t that right, Argus?”

  “Not at you or the kids.”