Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  That was his new elsewhere, where his mind was as they arrived at the parking lot exit. Tamir reached for his wallet, but Irv was the quicker draw.

  “Next time’s on me,” Tamir said.

  “Sure,” Irv said. “Next time we’re exiting National Airport I’ll let you pay for the parking.”

  The gate rose, and for the first time since they’d gotten in the car, Max spoke up: “Turn on the radio, Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “In the guy’s booth.”

  “The cashier?”

  “Yeah. The radio.”

  “No.”

  “Something big happened.”

  “What?”

  “Do I have to do everything?” Tamir asked, turning on the radio.

  Entering in the middle of a report, it was impossible to understand at first what had happened, but it was clear that Max was right about its size. NPR’s back was straight. Reports were coming in from across the Middle East. It was early. Little was known.

  Jacob’s mind raced to its place of comfort: the worst possible scenario. The Israelis had launched an attack on Iran, or the other way around. Or the Egyptians had attacked themselves. A bus had exploded. A plane had been hijacked. Someone had sprayed bullets in a mosque or synagogue, swung a knife in a crowded public space. A nuclear blast had vaporized Tel Aviv. But the thing about the worst possible scenario is that by definition it can’t be anticipated.

  —

  Other Life was happening even when no one was present. Just like Life. Sam was in the Model UN’s General Assembly—at that moment, his mom passed him a note: “I can see over the wall. Can you?”—but the ruins of his first synagogue were shimmering beside the foundation of his second synagogue. Scattered among the rubble were the fragments of his stained-glass Jewish Present, each shard illuminated by destruction.

  REAL REAL

  The Hilton’s International Ballroom was arranged in concentric arcs of tables and chairs to resemble the UN General Assembly. Delegations were dressed in regional garb, and some of the students attempted accents before one of the facilitators called a moratorium on that very bad idea.

  The Saudi delegation’s speech was wrapping up. A young, heavily naturally accented Hispanic girl in a hijab spoke with quivering hands and a weak, trembling voice. Julia hated to see nervous children. She wanted to go to her, give her an inspirational talk—explain that life changes, and what is weak becomes strong, and what is a dream becomes a reality that requires a new dream.

  “And so it is our hope,” the girl said, clearly grateful to be reaching the end, “that the Federated States of Micronesia comes to its senses and behaves judiciously and with speed to turn over the bomb to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is all. Thank you. As-salamu alaykum.”

  There was some light applause, most of it from Julia. At the front of the room, the chairman—a facilitator with a goatee on his face and a Velcro wallet in his back pocket—spoke.

  “Thank you, Saudi Arabia. And now we’ll hear from the Federated States of Micronesia.”

  All attention shifted to the Georgetown Day delegation. Billie rose.

  “Kind of ironic,” she began, asserting her nonchalant dominance by pretending to sort through her papers as she spoke, “for the Saudi delegate to tell us what to do, when it’s illegal for her to swim in her own country. Just saying.”

  Kids laughed. The Saudi delegation shriveled. With affected drama, Billie leveled the pages against the desk and continued.

  “Fellow members of the United Nations, on behalf of the Federated States of Micronesia, I would like to address what has become known as the nuclear crisis. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines crisis as”—she swiped her phone into consciousness and read—“ ‘a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention.’ This is not a crisis. There is nothing difficult or dangerous about our situation. What we have here, in fact, is an opportunity, which Merriam-Webster defines as…just one second…”—the Wi-Fi was crappy, and it took her longer than planned to load the bookmarked page—“Here we go: ‘an amount of time or a situation in which something can be done.’ We didn’t choose our fate, but we don’t intend to shrink from it. For years, for millennia—or for centuries, anyway—the good people of Micronesia accepted things as they were, understanding our diminished existence as our lot, our burden, our fate.”

  Julia and Sam sat at opposite ends of the delegation. As Julia drew a brick wall on a yellow pad, she replayed the morning’s phone call with Jacob: her lot, her burden, her fate. Why did she feel a need to do it right then, like that? Not only had she shot from the hip when she should have spoken from the heart or at least held her tongue, she had risked Max and Irv getting caught in the crossfire. What did they hear and understand? What did Jacob have to explain, and how did he do it? Were any of the three going to mention the call to Tamir and Barak? Was that the whole point? Did she want it all to blow up? Her wall now covered three-quarters of the page. Perhaps a thousand bricks.

  Billie continued: “Things are about to change, fellow delegates. Micronesia is saying enough. Enough being pushed around, enough subservience, enough eating scraps. Fellow delegates, things are about to change, beginning, but most certainly not ending, with the following list of demands…”

  In the remaining space, between the top of the brick wall and the edge of the page, Julia wrote, “I can see over the wall. Can you?” She folded it in half, and folded that in half, and had it passed the length of the delegation. Sam showed no emotion of any kind as he read it. He wrote something on the same page, folded and refolded it, and had it passed back to his mom. She opened it, and at first couldn’t see anything he’d written. Nothing in the space above the wall, where she’d written. She searched the bricks themselves—nothing. She looked to him. He put his open hand in front of him, fingers spread, then flipped it palm-up. She turned over the yellow paper, and Sam had written: “The other side of the wall is no wall.”

  As the rest of the delegation was struggling to catch up with her radical departure from the agreed-upon script, Billie was smashing the rhetorical ceiling: “Micronesia shall, henceforth, have a seat on the UN Security Council; be granted NATO membership—yes, we realize we are in the Pacific—and preferential trading status with EU, NAFTA, UNASUR, AU, and EAEC partners; have an appointed member on the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee—”

  A facilitator ran into the room.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt the proceedings,” he said, “but I have an announcement. There was just a major earthquake in the Middle East.”

  “This is real?” one of the chaperones asked.

  “Real.”

  “How major?”

  “They’re calling it historic.”

  “But real like the nuclear crisis? Or real real?”

  Julia’s phone vibrated with a call; it was Deborah. She shuffled to the corner and answered, while the model crisis gave way to the real real one.

  “Deborah?”

  “Hi, Julia.”

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Benjy’s fine.”

  “I got scared when I saw your name come up.”

  “He’s fine. He’s watching a movie.”

  “OK. I got scared.”

  “Julia.” She took a long breath, to extend the period of not-knowing. “Something horrible has happened, Julia.”

  “Benjy?”

  “Benjy is absolutely fine.”

  “You’re a mother. You would tell me.”

  “Of course I would. He’s fine, Julia. He’s happy.”

  “Let me speak with him.”

  “This isn’t about Benjy.”

  “Oh my God, did something happen to Jacob and Max?”

  “No. They’re fine.”

  “Do you promise me?”

  “You need to go home.”

  VEY IZ MIR

  Little was known, which ma
de what little was known terrifying. An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 had struck at 6:23 in the evening, its epicenter deep under the Dead Sea, just outside the Israeli settlement of Kalya. Electricity was out in virtually all of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It seemed that the most badly damaged areas were Salt and Amman in Jordan, as well as the West Bank city of Jericho, whose walls crumbled thirty-four hundred years before, many archaeologists have argued, not from Joshua’s trumpeting but from a massive earthquake.

  First accounts were coming in from the Old City of Jerusalem: the Crusader-era Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional burial place of Jesus and the holiest site in Christianity, which was badly damaged in a 1927 earthquake, had partially collapsed with an unknown number of tourists and clergymen inside. Synagogues and yeshivas, monasteries, mosques and madrassas, were in ruins. There was no news about the Temple Mount, either because there was no news or because those bearing it withheld it.

  A civil engineer was being interviewed on NPR. The host, a sultry-voiced, probably short-and-bald Jew named Robert Siegel, began:

  SIEGEL: We apologize, in advance, for the audio quality of this interview. Normally, when phone lines are down, we use cell phones. But cell service has been disabled as well, so Mr. Horowitz is speaking to us by satellite phone. Mr. Horowitz, are you there?

  HOROWITZ: Yes, hello. I am here.

  SIEGEL: Can you give us your professional assessment of what’s going on right now?

  HOROWITZ: My professional assessment, yes, but I can also tell you as a human being standing here that Israel has endured a cataclysmic earthquake. Everywhere you look there is destruction.

  SIEGEL: You are safe, though?

  HOROWITZ: Safe is a relative term. My family is alive, and as you can hear, so am I. Some are safer. Some are less safe.

  Why the fuck can’t Israelis just answer questions? Jacob wondered. Even then, in the midst of cataclysm—the word itself sounded like classic Israeli hyperbole—the Israeli couldn’t just give a straightforward, un-Israeli response.

  SIEGEL: Mr. Horowitz, you are an engineer for Israeli civil services, is that correct?

  HOROWITZ: An engineer, an adviser on government projects, an academic…

  SIEGEL: As an engineer, what can you tell us about the potential effects of an earthquake of this magnitude?

  HOROWITZ: It is not good.

  SIEGEL: Could you elaborate?

  HOROWITZ: Of the six hundred fifty thousand structures in Israel, fewer than half are equipped to deal with such an event.

  SIEGEL: Are we going to see skyscrapers topple?

  HOROWITZ: Of course not, Robert Siegel. They have been engineered to withstand even more than this. It’s the buildings between three and eight stories I’m most worried about. Many will survive, but few will be habitable. You have to realize that Israel didn’t have a building code until the late 1970s, and it’s never been enforced.

  SIEGEL: Why is that?

  HOROWITZ: We’ve had other things on our minds.

  SIEGEL: The conflict.

  HOROWITZ: Conflict? We should have been so lucky to have only one conflict. Most buildings are made of concrete—very rigid, unforgiving engineering. Buildings like Israelis, you might say. It’s served a booming population well, but couldn’t be worse-suited to the current situation.

  SIEGEL: What about the West Bank?

  HOROWITZ: What about it?

  SIEGEL: How will its structures respond to such an earthquake?

  HOROWITZ: You’d have to ask a Palestinian civil engineer.

  SIEGEL: Well, we’ll certainly try to—

  HOROWITZ: But since you’re asking me, I have to imagine it has been completely destroyed.

  SIEGEL: I’m sorry, what has?

  HOROWITZ: The West Bank.

  SIEGEL: Destroyed?

  HOROWITZ: All of the structures. Everything. There’s going to be a lot of fatality.

  SIEGEL: In the thousands?

  HOROWITZ: I’m afraid that as I speak these words, tens of thousands are already dead.

  SIEGEL: And I am sure you want to get to your family, but before letting you go, could you offer some possibilities for how this will play out?

  HOROWITZ: What time frame are you asking about? Hours? Weeks? A generation?

  SIEGEL: Let’s start with hours.

  HOROWITZ: The next few hours will be pivotal for Israel. It’s all about prioritizing now. Electricity is out countrywide, and will likely remain out, even in the major cities, for several days. As you can imagine, military needs will be the first priority.

  SIEGEL: I’m surprised to hear you say that.

  HOROWITZ: You are Jewish?

  SIEGEL: I’m not sure why that’s relevant, but yes, I am.

  HOROWITZ: I’m surprised that a fellow Jew would be surprised. But then, only an American Jew would question why being Jewish is relevant.

  SIEGEL: You’re concerned for Israel’s safety?

  HOROWITZ: You aren’t?

  SIEGEL: Mr. Horowitz—

  HOROWITZ: Israel’s tactical superiority is technological, and that has been greatly diminished by the quake. The destruction will cause desperation and unrest. And this will develop—either organically or deliberately—into violence. If it hasn’t already happened, we’re soon to see masses of people flooding the borders into Israel—from the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. I don’t have to tell you that Syria already has a refugee problem.

  SIEGEL: Why would they come to Israel, a country most in the Arab world view as a mortal enemy?

  HOROWITZ: Because their mortal enemy has first-rate medical care. Their mortal enemy has food and water. And Israel is going to be presented with a choice: let them in, or don’t. Letting them in will require sharing limited and precious resourses. For others to live, Israelis will have to die. But not letting them in will involve bullets. And of course Israel’s neighbors will have a choice, too: take care of their citizens, or take advantage of Israel’s sudden vulnerability.

  SIEGEL: Let’s hope the shared tragedy brings the region together.

  HOROWITZ: Yes, but let’s not be naïve while we hope.

  SIEGEL: And what about the long term? You mentioned the generational view?

  HOROWITZ: Of course, no one can know what will happen, but what Israel is facing here is something far more threatening than ’67, or ’73, or even Iran’s nuclear threat. There is the immediate crisis of needing to secure the country, rescue citizens, get food and medical care to those who need it, repair the electricity, gas, water, and other utilities quickly and safely. Then there is also the work of rebuilding the country. This will be a generational challenge. And finally, and perhaps most daunting, will be the work of keeping Jews here.

  SIEGEL: Meaning?

  HOROWITZ: A young, ambitious, idealistic Israeli has many reasons to leave Israel. You have an expression, “The straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  SIEGEL: Yes.

  HOROWITZ: Thousands of buildings have fallen on the back.

  JACOB: Vey iz mir.

  Jacob hadn’t meant to say anything, and he certainly hadn’t meant to say vey iz mir. But then, no one ever means to say vey iz mir.

  “This is bad,” Irv said, shaking his head. “Really, really bad in about a million ways.”

  Jacob’s mind teleported to apocalyptic tableaux: the ceiling collapsed onto the trundle in Tamir’s old bedroom; women in wigs trapped under slabs of Jerusalem stone, the ruins of the ruins of Masada. He imagined the marble bench in Blumenberg Park, now shattered stone. It must be a catastrophe, he thought, but he meant it in two entirely different ways: that it certainly had to be, and that he wanted it to be. He couldn’t acknowledge the second meaning, but he couldn’t deny it.

  Tamir said, “It’s not good. But it’s not so bad.”

  “Do you want to call home?”

  “You heard him. The lines are knocked out. And my voice won’t help anyone.”

  “Are you sure?”

 
; “They’re fine. Absolutely. We live in a new construction. Like he said, it’s engineered for this kind of thing—better than any of your skyscrapers, believe me. The building has a backup generator—two, I think—and in the bomb shelter there’s enough food for months. The shelter is nicer than that apartment you had in Foggy Bottom. Remember that?”

  Jacob remembered the apartment; he had lived there for five years. But even more clearly he remembered the bomb shelter in Tamir’s childhood home, despite having been inside it for less than five minutes. It was the last day of that first trip to Israel. Deborah and Tamir’s mother, Adina, were on a walk to the market, hoping to find some delicacies to bring back for Isaac. Over coffee, with what almost looked like a grin, Irv asked Shlomo if the house had a shelter.

  “Of course,” Shlomo said, “it’s the law.”

  “Underneath the house?”

  “Of course.”

  The second of course made clear what should have been clear to Irv with it’s the law: Shlomo wanted his shelter underground when there was bombing, and underground when there wasn’t. But Irv pushed: “Would you show it to us? I’d like Jacob to see.” The I’d like Jacob to see made clear what should have been clear to Shlomo with Underneath the house?: Irv wasn’t going to let it go.