Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “You are sitting down,” Max told him.

  “I need to sit on the floor.”

  “Don’t,” Jacob said. “It’s filthy.”

  “Everything is now filthy,” Irv said.

  In silence, they watched dozens of people balancing overstuffed trays weave and dodge and never touch. Presumably, a higher life-form would have its own version of David Attenborough. That “person” could make a great episode of a miniseries about humans featuring such hypnotic observing.

  Max whispered something incomprehensible, to no one.

  Irv rested his head in his hands and said, “If God had wanted us to be uncircumcised, He wouldn’t have invented smegma.”

  “What?” Jacob asked.

  “If God had wanted…”

  “I’m talking to Max.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Max said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jaws is such a terrible movie,” Irv said.

  And then Tamir came back. They’d been too preoccupied by their apocalyptic speculations to notice how long he’d been gone.

  “So here’s the deal,” he said.

  “What deal?”

  “He has problems with urinary retention.”

  “He?”

  “Steve.”

  Irv clapped his cheeks and squealed like it was his first visit to the American Girl flagship store.

  “I can see why you assumed I would know who he is. Very impressive résumé. What can I say? I don’t watch a lot of movies. There’s no money in watching movies. A lot in making them, though. Do you know that he’s worth more than three billion dollars? Billion with a b?”

  “Really?”

  “He had no reason to lie to me.”

  “But why did he have reason to share?”

  “I asked.”

  “How much he’s worth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you probably asked if he’s circumcised, right?”

  “I did.”

  Jacob embraced Tamir. He hadn’t meant to. His arms simply reached for him. It wasn’t that Tamir had gathered the piece of information. It was that he had all the qualities that Jacob lacked and didn’t want but desperately missed: the brashness, the fearlessness where fear was not required, the fearlessness where fear was required, the giving of no shits. “Tamir, you are a beautiful human being.”

  “So…?” Irv begged.

  Tamir turned to Jacob.

  “He knows you, by the way. He didn’t recognize you, but when I mentioned your name, he said he read your first book. He said he considered optioning it, whatever that means.”

  “He did?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “If Spielberg had made a film out of that book, I’d—”

  “Exhume the lede,” Irv said. “Is he short-sleeved?”

  Tamir jiggled his soda cup, freeing the ice cubes from their group hug.

  “Tamir?”

  “We agreed it would be funnier if I didn’t tell you.”

  “We?”

  “Steve and I.”

  Jacob gave him a shove, as spontaneous as the hug.

  “You’re bullshitting.”

  “Israelis never bullshit.”

  “Israelis only bullshit.”

  “We’re mishpuchah,” Irv pleaded.

  “Yes. And if you can’t keep secrets from your family, who can you keep secrets from?”

  “So I emancipate myself from the family. Now tell me.”

  Tamir scraped the remaining lo mein from his bowl and said, “Before I fly back.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll tell you before I go.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Could he be serious?

  “I can.”

  Irv banged the table.

  “I’ll tell Max,” Tamir said. “An early bar mitzvah present. What he chooses to do with the information is his own business.”

  “You know it’s Sam’s bar mitzvah,” Max said. “Not mine.”

  “Of course,” he said with a wink. “This is a very early bar mitzvah present.”

  He put his hands on Max’s shoulders and brought him close. His lips almost touching Max’s ear, he whispered. And Max smiled. He laughed.

  —

  As they walked to the car, Irv kept signaling for Jacob to take one of Tamir’s bags, and Jacob kept signaling that Tamir wouldn’t let him. And Jacob signaled to Max that he should talk to Barak, and Max signaled back that his father should—smoke through a stoma? There they were, four men and one almost-man, and yet they were making silly hand gestures that communicated almost nothing and fooled almost no one.

  “How’s your grandfather?” Tamir asked.

  “Compared to what?”

  “To how he was last time I saw him.”

  “That was a decade ago.”

  “So he’s older, probably.”

  “He’s moving in a couple of days.”

  “Making aliyah?”

  “Yup. To the Jewish Home.”

  “What’s he got left?”

  “Are you asking me how much longer he is expected to live?”

  “You find such complicated ways to say such simple things.”

  “I can only tell you what his doctor told me.”

  “So?”

  “He’s been dead for five years.”

  “A medical miracle.”

  “Among other kinds. I’m sure it would mean the world to him to see you.”

  “Let’s go to your house. We’ll drop off the bags, see Julia—”

  “She won’t be back until the late afternoon.”

  “So we’ll nosh, shoot some baskets. I’d like to see your audiovisual setup.”

  “I don’t think we have one. And he usually goes to sleep very early, like—”

  “You’re our guest,” Irv said to Tamir, patting his back. “We’ll do whatever you’d like.”

  “Of course,” Jacob said, siding with the world in its struggle against his grandfather. “We can always visit later. Or tomorrow.”

  “I brought some halvah for him.”

  “He’s diabetic.”

  “It’s from the souk.”

  “Yeah, his diabetes doesn’t really care about sourcing.”

  Tamir took the halvah from his carry-on bag, opened the wrapping, removed a piece, and tossed it in his mouth.

  “I’ll drive,” Jacob said to Irv as they approached the car.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ll drive.”

  “I thought the highway made you anxious?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jacob said, flashing Tamir a smile of dismissiveness. And then, to Irv, with force: “Give me the keys.”

  In the car, Tamir pressed the sole of his right foot against the windshield, parachuting his scrotum for any infra-red traffic cameras they might pass. He braided his fingers behind his head—more knuckle cracking—nodded, and began: “To tell you the truth, I’m making a lot of money.” Here we go, Jacob thought. Tamir impersonating the bad impersonator of Tamir. “High tech has gone crazy, and I was smart enough—I was brave enough—to get into a lot of things at the right moment. That’s the secret to success: the combination of intelligence and bravery. Because there are a lot of intelligent people in the world, and a lot of brave people in the world, but when you go searching for people who are intelligent and brave, you don’t find yourself surrounded. And I was lucky. Look, Jake—” Why did he think it was OK to capriciously shear Jacob’s name? It was an act of aggression, even if Jacob couldn’t parse it, even if he loved it. “I don’t believe in luck, but only a fool wouldn’t acknowledge the importance of being in the right place at the right time. You make your own luck. That’s what I say.”

  “That’s also what everyone says,” Jacob pointed out.

  “But still, we don’t control everything.”

  “What about Israel?” Irv asked from the backseat.

  “Israel?” Here
we go. “Israel is thriving. Walk down the streets of Tel Aviv one night. There’s more culture per square foot than anywhere in the world. Look at our economy. We’re sixty-eight years old—younger than you, Irv. We have only seven million people, no natural resources, and are engaged in perpetual war. All of that, and we have more companies on the NASDAQ than any country after America. We have more start-ups than China, India, and the U.K., and file more patents than any country in the world—including yours.”

  “Things are going well,” Irv confirmed.

  “Things have never been better anywhere at any time than they are in Israel right now.”

  “The height of the Roman Empire?” Jacob felt a need to ask.

  “Where are they now?”

  “That’s what the Romans asked of the Greeks.”

  “We live in a different apartment than the one you visited. We’re always moving. It’s good business, and it’s good in the general sense, too. We’re in a triplex now—three floors. We have seven bedrooms—”

  “Eight,” Barak corrected.

  “He’s right. It’s eight.” This is performance, Jacob reminded himself, or tried to convince himself, as he felt a jealousy surfacing. It’s a routine. He’s not making you smaller. Tamir continued: “Eight bedrooms, even though we’re only four people now that Noam is in the army. Two bedrooms a person. But I like the space. It’s not that we have so many guests, although we have a lot, but I like to stretch out: a couple of rooms for my business ventures; Rivka is insane about meditating; the kids have air hockey, gaming systems. They have a foosball table from Germany. I have an assistant who has nothing to do with my business ventures but just helps with lifestyle things, and I said, ‘Go find me the best foosball table in the world.’ And she did. She has an amazing body, and she knows how to find anything. It’s quite amazing. You could leave this foosball table in the rain for a year and it would be fine.”

  “I thought it never rains in Israel,” Jacob said.

  “It does,” Tamir said, “but you’re right, the climate is ideal. Anyway, I rest my drinks on it, and do they ever leave a ring? Barak?”

  “No.”

  “So when we were walking through the new apartment—the most recent apartment—I turned to Rivka and said, ‘Eh?’ and she said, ‘What do we need with an apartment this big?’ I told her what I’ll tell you now: The more you buy, the more you have to sell.”

  “You should really write a book,” Jacob said to Tamir, taking a tiny needle from his back and placing it in Tamir’s.

  “So should you,” Irv said, taking that tiny needle from Tamir’s back and placing it in Jacob’s aorta.

  “And I told her something else: it’s always going to be rich people who have money, so you want to have what the rich people will want to have. The more expensive something is, the more expensive it will become.”

  “But that’s just saying that expensive things are expensive,” Jacob pointed out.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well,” Jacob’s better angel ventriloquized, “I’d love to see it someday.”

  “You’d have to come to Israel.”

  With a smile: “The apartment can’t come to me?”

  “It could, but that would be crazy. And anyway, soon enough it will be another apartment.”

  “Well, then I’d love to see that one.”

  “And the bathrooms…The bathrooms would blow your mind. Everything made in Germany.”

  Irv groaned.

  “You can’t find this kind of craftsmanship.”

  “Apparently you can.”

  “Well, you can’t find it in America. My assistant—the personal one, with the body—found me a toilet with a camera that recognizes who is approaching and adjusts to preset settings. Rivka likes a cool seat. I want my ass hairs singed. Yael wants to be practically standing when she shits. Barak faces backwards.”

  “I don’t face backwards,” Barak said, punching his father’s shoulder.

  “You think I’m crazy,” Tamir said. “You’re probably judging me, even laughing at me in your mind, but I’m the one with a toilet that knows his name, and I’m the one with a refrigerator that does the shopping online, and you’re the one driving a Japanese go-kart.”

  Jacob didn’t think Tamir was crazy. He thought his need to exhibit and press the case for his happiness was unconvincing and sad. And sympathetic. That’s where the emotional logic broke down. All that should have led Jacob to dislike Tamir brought him closer—not with envy, but love. He loved Tamir’s brazen weakness. He loved his inability—his unwillingness—to hide his ugliness. Such exposure was what Jacob most wanted, and most withheld from himself.

  “And what about the situation?” Irv asked.

  “What situation?”

  “Safety.”

  “What? Food safety?”

  “The Arabs.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Iran. Syria. Hezbollah. Hamas. The Islamic State. Al-Qaeda.”

  “The Iranians aren’t Arabs. They’re Persian.”

  “I’m sure that helps you sleep at night.”

  “Things could be better, things could be worse. Beyond that, you know what I know.”

  “I only know what’s in the papers,” Irv said.

  “Where do you think I get my news?”

  “So how does it feel over there?” Irv pressed.

  “Would I be happier if Noam were a DJ for the army radio station? Sure. But I feel fine. Barak, you feel fine?”

  “I feel cool.”

  “You think Israel’s going to bomb Iran?”

  “I don’t know,” Tamir said. “What do you think?”

  “Do you think they should?” Jacob asked. He wasn’t immune to the morbid curiosity, the American Jewish bloodlust at arm’s length.

  “Of course they should,” Irv said.

  “If there were a way to bomb Iran without bombing Iran, that would be good. Any other course will be bad.”

  “So what do you think they should do?” Jacob asked.

  “He just told you,” Irv said. “He thinks they should bomb Iran.”

  “I think you should bomb Iran,” Tamir told Irv.

  “America?”

  “That would be good, too. But I meant you specifically. You could use some of those biological weapons you displayed earlier.”

  They all laughed at that, especially Max.

  “Seriously,” Irv pressed, “what do you think should happen?”

  “Seriously, I don’t know.”

  “And you’re OK with that?”

  “Are you?”

  “No, I’m not OK with it. I think we should bomb Iran before it’s too late.”

  To which Tamir said, “And I think we should establish who we is before it’s too late.”

  All Tamir wanted to talk about was money—the average Israeli income, the size of his own easy fortune, the unrivaled quality of life in that fingernail clipping of oppressively hot homeland hemmed in by psychopathic enemies.

  All Irv wanted to talk about was the situation—when was Israel going to make us proud by making itself safe? Was there any inside piece of information to be dangled above friends at the dining room at the American Enterprise Institute, or whose pin might be pulled in his blog and thrown? Wasn’t it high time we—you—did something about this or that?

  All Jacob wanted to talk about was living close to death: Had Tamir killed anyone? Had Noam? Did either have any stories of fellow soldiers torturing or being tortured? What’s the worst thing either ever saw with his own eyes?

  The Jews Jacob grew up with adjusted their aviator glasses with only the muscles in their faces while parsing Fugazi lyrics while pushing in the lighters of their hand-me-down Volvo wagons. The lighter would pop out, they’d push it back in. Nothing was ever lit. They were miserable at sports, but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights, but sought arguments. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, of survivors. They were defined by, and proud of, their flagran
t weakness.

  Yet they were intoxicated by muscle. Not literal muscle—they found that suspicious, foolish, and lame. No, they were driven wild by the muscular application of the Jewish brain: Maccabees rolling under the bellies of armored Greek elephants to stab the soft undersides; Mossad missions whose odds, means, and results verged on magic; computer viruses so preternaturally complicated and smart they couldn’t not leave Jewish fingerprints. You think you can mess with us, world? You think you can push us around? You can. But brain beats muscle as surely as paper beats rock, and we’re gonna learn you; we’re gonna sit at our desks and be the last ones standing.

  As they sought the parking lot exit, like a marble in one of Benjy’s OCD Marble Madness creations, Jacob felt inexplicably peaceful. Despite all that had been spilled, was the cup still half full? Or did a crumb of Wellbutrin just lodge free from between his brain’s teeth, offering a morsel of undigested happiness? The cup was half full enough.

  Despite his endless smart-ass and legitimate and almost-honorable protestations, Sam showed up for his bar mitzvah lessons. And despite being forced to apologize for a noncrime that he didn’t commit, he would show up at the bimah.

  Despite being an insufferable, chauvinistic blowhard, Irv was ever present, and, in his own way, ever loving.

  Despite his long history of false promises, and despite his older son being on duty in the West Bank, Tamir showed up. He brought his boy. They were family, and they were being family.

  But what about Jacob? Was he there? His mind kept leaping to the supermagnet of Mark and Julia, though not in the ways he would have expected. He’d often imagined Julia having sex with other men. It very nearly destroyed him, but thrilled what was spared. He didn’t want such thoughts, but sexual fantasy wants what is not to be had. He’d imagined Mark fucking her after their meeting at the hardware place. But now that something had happened between them—it was entirely possible they’d already fucked—his mind was released. It’s not that the fantasy was suddenly too painful; it suddenly wasn’t painful enough.

  Now, driving a car full of family, his wife in a hotel with a man she’d at least kissed, his fantasy found the bull’s-eye: it was the same car, but different occupants. Julia looks in the rearview mirror and sees Benjy falling asleep in his Benjy way: his body straight, his neck straight, his gaze directly in front of him, his eyes closing so slowly their movement is imperceptible—only by looking away and looking back can you register any change. The physicality of it, the fragility evoked by witnessing such slowness, is perplexing and beautiful. She looks at the road, she looks in the mirror, she looks at the road. Every time she looks at Benjy in the mirror, his eyes have closed another millimeter or two. The process of falling asleep takes ten minutes, the seconds of which have been pulled thin to the translucency of his slowly closing eyelids. And just before his eyes are fully closed, he releases a short puff of breath, as if blowing out his own candle. The rest of the drive is whispering, and each pothole feels like a moon crater, and on the moon is a photograph of a family, left by the Apollo astronaut Charles Duke in 1972. It will remain there, unchanging, for millions of years, outlasting not only the parents and children in the photo, and the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, but human civilization—until the dying sun consumes it. They pull up to the house, cut the engine, unfasten their seat belts, and Mark carries Benjy inside.