Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “Eat tons of shit?”

  “Shitty food.”

  “Would it be OK if I just watched this?”

  “But I’m having an awesome idea.”

  “Are you?”

  “Aren’t I?”

  “I have soccer, and cello, and bar mitzvah lessons, assuming that’s still on, God forbid.”

  “I can get you out of that.”

  “My life?”

  “I’m afraid I can only bring you into that.”

  “And they’re playing in L.A.”

  “Right,” Jacob said, and quieter, “I should have realized that.”

  That quietness made Sam wonder if maybe he’d hurt his father. He experienced a tremor of a feeling that, despite knowing it was utterly foolish, he would grow to experience more often and more strongly in the coming year: that maybe everything was at least a little bit his fault.

  “Finish the chess game?”

  “Nah.”

  “You’re OK with money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this thing at Hebrew school. It obviously isn’t because of Grandpa, right?”

  “Not unless he’s also the grandfather of whoever did it.”

  “That’s what I thought. Anyway—”

  “Dad, Billie’s black, so how could I be a racist?”

  “Billie?”

  “The girl I’m in love with.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “She’s the girl I’m in love with.”

  “OK. And you said Billie? But a girl, right?”

  “Yes. And she’s black. So how could I be racist?”

  “I’m not sure that logic quite works.”

  “It does.”

  “You know who points out that some of his best friends are black? Someone who isn’t comfortable with black people.”

  “None of my best friends are black.”

  “And for whatever it’s worth, I’m pretty sure African American is the preferred nomenclature.”

  “Nomenclature?”

  “Terminology.”

  “Shouldn’t the guy who’s in love with a black girl be the one establishing the nomenclature?”

  “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle African American?”

  “Pot?”

  “I’m joking around. It’s an interesting name, that’s all. Not a judgment. You know you were named for a great-great-uncle who perished in Birkenau. With Jews there always has to be some significance attached.”

  “Some suffering, you mean.”

  “Gentiles pick names that sound nice. Or they just make them up.”

  “Billie was named after Billie Holiday.”

  “So she’s the exception that proves the rule.”

  “Who are you named after?” Sam asked, his interest a small concession in response to the guilt of having forced his dad’s voice into quiet sadness.

  “A distant relative named Yakov. Supposedly an amazing, larger-than-life guy. Story goes he crushed a Cossack’s head in his hand.”

  “Cool.”

  “I’m obviously not strong like that.”

  “We don’t even know any Cossacks.”

  “And at most, I’m the size of life.”

  One of their stomachs grumbled, but neither knew whose.

  “Well, bottom line, I think it’s awesome that you have a girlfriend.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Nomenclature strikes twice. I think it’s awesome that you’re in love.”

  “I’m not in love. I love her.”

  “Whatever’s going on, this obviously stays between us. You can count on me.”

  “I’ve already talked to Mom about it.”

  “Really? When?”

  “I don’t know. Couple of weeks ago?”

  “This is old news?”

  “It’s all relative.”

  Jacob stared at Sam’s screen. Was this what drew Sam to it? Not the ability to be elsewhere, but to be nowhere?

  “What did you tell her?” Jacob asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your mother?”

  “You mean Mom?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, as in you don’t feel like talking about it with me right now?”

  “As in that.”

  “It’s strange, because she’s convinced you wrote those words.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “OK. I’m becoming annoying. I’ll go.”

  “I didn’t say you were annoying.”

  Jacob moved to the door to leave, but paused. “Wanna hear a joke?”

  “No.”

  “It’s dirty.”

  “Then definitely no.”

  “What’s the difference between a Subaru and an erection?”

  “No means no.”

  “Seriously. What’s the difference?”

  “Seriously, not interested.”

  Jacob leaned forward and whispered, “I don’t have a Subaru.”

  Despite himself, Sam released a huge laugh, the kind involving snorting and saliva. Jacob laughed, not at his own joke but at his son’s laughter. They laughed together, vigorously, hysterically.

  Sam struggled, without success, to regain his composure, and said, “The funny thing…the really funny thing…is…you do have a Subaru.”

  And then they laughed more, and Jacob spit a little, and teared up, and remembered how horrible it was to be Sam’s age, how painful and unfair.

  “It’s true,” Jacob said. “I totally have a Subaru. I should have said Toyota. What was I thinking?”

  “What were you thinking?”

  What was he thinking?

  They calmed down.

  Jacob gave the sleeves of his shirt another roll—a bit tight, but he wanted them over the elbow.

  “Mom feels that you need to apologize.”

  “Do you?”

  In his pocket, he closed his hand around nothing, around a knife, and said, “I do.”

  The one and phony.

  “OK, then,” Sam said.

  “It won’t be that bad.”

  “Yes it will.”

  “Yeah,” Jacob said, kissing Sam on the top of his head—the last kiss-able place. “It’s gonna suck.”

  At the threshold, Jacob turned.

  “How’s it going in Other Life?”

  “Eh.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “Building a new synagogue.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Because I destroyed the old synagogue.”

  “Destroyed? Like with a wrecking ball?”

  “Like that.”

  “So now you’re going to build one for yourself?”

  “I built the old one, too.”

  “Mom would love that,” Jacob said, understanding the brilliance and beauty of what Sam never shared. “And she would probably have a million ideas.”

  “Please don’t mention it to her.”

  That gave Jacob a spike of pleasure that he didn’t want. He nodded and said, “Of course,” then shook his head and said, “I would never.”

  “OK,” Sam said, “so, unless there’s something else?”

  “And the old synagogue? Why did you build it?”

  “So I could blow it up.”

  “Blow it up? You know, if I were a different dad, and you were a different kid, I’d probably feel obligated to report you to the FBI.”

  “But if you were a different dad, and I were a different kid, I wouldn’t have needed to blow up a virtual synagogue.”

  “Touché,” Jacob said. “But isn’t it possible that you weren’t building it to destroy? Or at least not only to destroy?”

  “No, that isn’t possible.”

  “Like, maybe you were trying to get something exactly right, and when it wasn’t, you needed to destr
oy it?”

  “Nobody believes me.”

  “I do. I believe that you want things to be right.”

  “You just don’t get it,” Sam said, because there was no way he was going to concede any understanding to his father. But his father got it. Sam hadn’t built the synagogue to destroy it. He wasn’t one of those Tibetan sand-mandala whatevers he’d been forced to hear about during a drive—five silent guys working for thousands of hours on an arts and crafts project whose function was to be functionless. (“And I used to think Nazis were the opposite of Jews,” his dad had said, disconnecting his phone from the car stereo.) No, he built the synagogue with the hope of feeling, finally, comfortable somewhere. It wasn’t simply that he could create it to his own esoteric specifications; he could be there without being there. Not unlike masturbating. But as with masturbating, if it wasn’t exactly right, it was completely and irretrievably wrong. Sometimes, at the worst possible moment, his drunken id would suddenly veer, and in his mental headlights would be Rabbi Singer, or Seal (the singer), or his mom. And there was never any coming back from that. With the synagogue, too, the slightest imperfection—an infinitesimally asymmetrical rotunda, stairs with risers too high for short kids, an upside-down Jewish star—and it all had to go. He wasn’t being impulsive. He was being careful. Couldn’t he simply have fixed what wasn’t right? No. Because he would always know that it had been wrong: “That’s the star that once hung upside down.” To another person, the correction would have made it more perfect than if it had been right the first time. Sam was not another person. Neither was Samanta.

  Jacob sat on Sam’s bed and said, “When I was young, maybe in high school, I used to like to write out the lyrics of all of my favorite songs. I don’t know why. I guess it gave me that feeling of things being in the right place. Anyway, this was long before the Internet. So I’d sit with my boom box—”

  “Your boom box?”

  “A tape player with speakers.”

  “I was being dismissive.”

  “All right…well…I’d sit with my boom box and play a second or two of a song, then write down what I’d heard, then rewind and play it again to make sure I’d gotten it right, then let it play again, and write down a bit more, then rewind for the parts I didn’t quite hear, or wasn’t sure I’d heard, then write them down. Rewinding a tape is really imprecise, so I’d inevitably go back too far, or not far enough. It was incredibly laborious. But I loved it. I loved how careful it felt. I loved the feeling of getting it right. I spent who knows how many thousands of hours doing that. Sometimes a lyric would really stump me, especially when grunge and hip-hop came along. And I wouldn’t accept guessing, because that would undermine the entire point of writing the lyrics out—to get it right. Sometimes I’d have to listen to the same little bit over and over and over, dozens of times, hundreds. I would literally wear through that part of the tape, so that when I listened to the song later, the part I most wanted to get right wasn’t there anymore. I remember a phrase in ‘All Apologies’—you know that song, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nirvana? Great, great, great song. Anyway, Kurt Cobain’s marbles seemed to have migrated to his mouth, and there was one phrase I had a particularly hard time making out. My best guess, after hundreds of listenings, was ‘I can see from shame.’ I didn’t realize I was wrong until many years later, when I sang it, at the top of my lungs, like an idiot, with Mom. Not long after we got married.”

  “She pointed out that you were wrong?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s so Mom.”

  “I was grateful.”

  “But you were singing.”

  “Singing wrongly.”

  “Still. She should have let it go.”

  “No, she did the right thing.”

  “So what was the real lyric?”

  “Fasten your seat belt. It was: ‘aqua seafoam shame.’ ”

  “No way.”

  “Right?”

  “What’s that even supposed to mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. That was my mistake. I thought it had to mean something.”

  II

  LEARNING IMPERMANENCE

  ANTIETAM

  Neither Jacob nor Julia knew what, exactly, was happening in those first two weeks after Julia discovered the phone: what had been agreed to, implied, broached hypothetically, asked for. Neither knew what was real. It felt like there were so many emotional land mines; they moved through the hours and rooms on their hearts’ tiptoes, with large earphones connected to sensitive metal detectors that could pick up traces of buried feeling—if at the expense of blocking out the rest of life.

  At a breakfast that might, to a television audience, have seemed in every way happy, Julia said into the fridge, “We’re always running out of milk,” and through his earphones Jacob heard “You have never taken good enough care of us,” but he didn’t hear Max say, “Don’t come to the talent show tomorrow.”

  And the next day, at Max’s school, forced to share the small space of the elevator alone together, Jacob said, “The Door Close button isn’t even attached to anything. Purely psychological.” Through her earphones, Julia heard “Let’s get this over with.” But she didn’t hear herself say, “I thought everything was purely psychological.” Which, through Jacob’s earphones, sounded like “All of those years of therapy and no one knows less about happiness.” And he didn’t hear himself say, “There’s pure, and there’s pure.” A probably content parent in a probably unbroken family entered and asked Jacob if he meant to be pressing Door Open.

  All that tiptoeing, all that precious overinterpreting and evading, and it wasn’t a minefield at all. It was a Civil War battlefield. Jacob had taken Sam to Antietam, just as Irv had taken Jacob. And he had given a similar speech about what a privilege it is to be American. Sam found a half-buried bullet. The weapons in Jacob and Julia’s earth were as harmless as that—artifacts of old battles, safe to be examined, explored, even valued. If they’d known not to fear them.

  The domestic rituals were sufficiently ingrained as to make avoidance fairly easy and inconspicuous. She showered, he got breakfast going. She served breakfast, he showered. He supervised teeth brushing, she laid clothes out on beds, he confirmed the contents of the backpacks, she checked the weather and responded to it with appropriate outer clothing, he got Ed the Hyena going (warmed in the six months of too cold, cooled in the six months of too hot), she brought the boys out and stepped into Newark to look for cars coming down the hill, he reversed.

  They found two seats near the front of the auditorium, but after depositing his bag, Jacob said, “I’ll go grab us some coffees.” Which he did. And then waited at the school entrance with them until three minutes of curtain. Halfway through a girl’s talentless rendition of “Let It Go,” Jacob whispered, “I wish she would,” into Julia’s ear. No response. A group of boys reenacted a scene from Avatar. What was probably a girl used different kinds of pasta to explain how the euro works. Neither Jacob nor Julia wanted to admit to not knowing what Max was going to do. Neither could bear the shame of having been too preoccupied with personal hurt to be present for their child. And neither could bear the shame of the other having been a better parent. Each privately guessed that Max would perform the card trick that the magician had taught him after Julia’s fortieth. Two girls did that cup thing while singing “When I’m Gone,” and Jacob whispered, “So go already.”

  “What?”

  “No. Her. The singer.”

  “Be nice.”

  For the finale, the drama and music teachers teamed up for a sanitized version of the opener from The Book of Mormon—living out their dreams while reconfirming why they were dreams. Lots of applause, a brief thank-you from the principal, and the kids filed out and back to class.

  Jacob and Julia walked back to their cars in silence. And the talent show wasn’t mentioned at home that night. Had Max chickened out? Did he consider himself talentless? Was his abstentio
n an act of aggression or a call for help? If they’d brought any of these questions to him, he would have pointed out that he told them not to go.

  Three nights later, when Jacob came to bed, after having waited the requisite hour, Julia was still reading, so he said, “Oh, I forgot something,” and headed back down to not read the paper while not watching another episode of Homeland and regretting, as he often did, that Mandy Patinkin wasn’t ten years older—he’d have made a great Irv.

  Two days after that, Julia walked into the pantry, where Jacob was checking to see if a few hundred billion atoms had spontaneously organized themselves into an unhealthy snack in the ten minutes since he last checked. She walked back out. (Unlike Jacob, she never gave an ostensible explanation for moving away from him, she never “forgot something.”) The pantry wasn’t among the unofficially claimed spaces—as the TV room was Jacob’s, and the small sitting room was Julia’s—but it was too small to be shared.

  On the tenth day, Jacob opened the bathroom door to see Julia drying off after a bath. She covered herself. He had seen her come out of hundreds of baths, seen three children come out of her body. He had watched her dress and undress thousands and thousands of times, and twice at the inn in Pennsylvania. They’d made love in every position, offering every view of every body part. “Sorry,” he said, not knowing what the word referred to, only that his foot had half depressed a mine’s trigger.

  Or stumbled upon an artifact of old battle, which might have been safe to examine, explore, even value.

  What if, instead of apologizing and turning, he’d asked her if the need to conceal herself was new, or old with a new justification?

  When Robert E. Lee’s defensive line at Petersburg had been broken and the evacuation of Richmond was imminent, Jefferson Davis ordered the Confederate treasury be moved. It went by train, and then wagon, under many eyes and between many hands. The Union pressed forward, the Confederacy crumbled, and the whereabouts of the five tons of gold bars remain a mystery, although they are assumed buried.

  What if, instead of apologizing and turning, he’d gone to her, touched her, shown her not only that he still wanted to make love to her, but that he was still capable of risking rejection?

  On Jacob’s first visit to Israel, his cousin Shlomo took the family to the Dome of the Rock, which at the time could be entered by non-Muslims. Jacob was as deeply moved by the devotion of the men on the prayer rugs as he was by the Jews below. He was more moved, because the devotion was less self-conscious: at the Wailing Wall the men merely bobbed; here they wailed. Shlomo explained that they were standing atop a cave carved into the Foundation Stone. And in the floor of that cave was a slight depression, thought to be above another cave, often referred to as the Well of Souls. It was there that Abraham answered God’s call, and prepared to sacrifice his beloved son; there that Muhammad ascended to heaven; there that the Ark of the Covenant was buried, full of broken and whole tablets. According to the Talmud, the stone marks the center of the world, serving as a cover for the abyss in which the waters from the Flood still rage.