Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “I couldn’t sleep that night. I felt so guilty about having pulled him so hard that last time, making him choke. And that expanded to guilt about all of the things I’d ever tried to teach him: to heel, offer his paw on command, even to come back. If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t try to teach him anything.”

  An hour passed, and then another.

  They played a game of Hangman, and then another thousand. Max’s phrases were always inspired, but it was hard to say by what: NIGHT BEFORE NIGHTTIME; ASTHMA THROUGH BINOCULARS; BLOWING A KISS TO AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS.

  “That’s what you call a group of ravens,” he said after Jacob had solved it with only a head, torso, and left arm.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “A lamentation of swans. A glittering of hummingbirds. A radiance of cardinals.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I like knowing things.”

  “Me, too.”

  “A minyan of Jews.”

  “Excellent.”

  “An argument of Blochs.”

  “A universe of Max.”

  They played a word game called Ghost, in which they took turns adding letters to a growing fragment, trying not to be the one to complete a word, while having a word in mind that the fragment could spell.

  “A.”

  “A-B.”

  “A-B-S.”

  “A-B-S-O.”

  “A-B-S-O-R.”

  “Shit.”

  “Absorb.”

  “Yeah. I was thinking absolve.”

  They played Twenty Questions, Two Truths and a Lie, and Fortunately Unfortunately. Each wished there were a TV to lighten their load.

  “Let’s go look at him,” Max said, as casually as if he’d been suggesting they dig into the dried mango they’d brought along.

  “Great-Grandpa?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s there.”

  “But why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not isn’t an answer.”

  “Neither is why.”

  Why not? It wasn’t prohibited. It wasn’t disrespectful. It wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, disgusting.

  “I took a philosophy class in college. I can’t remember what it was called, and can’t even remember the professor, but I do remember learning that some prohibitions aren’t ethically grounded, but rather because certain things are not to be done. One could reach for all sorts of reasons that it isn’t right to eat the bodies of humans who died of natural causes, but at the end of the day, it’s just not something we do.”

  “I didn’t say eat him.”

  “No, I know. I’m just making a point.”

  “Who would want to eat a human?”

  “It would almost certainly smell and taste good. But we don’t do it, because it’s not to be done.”

  “Who decides?”

  “Excellent question. Sometimes the not to be done is universal, sometimes it’s particular to a culture, or even to a family.”

  “Like how we eat shrimp, but don’t eat pork.”

  “We don’t eat shrimp as a practice. We on occasion eat some shrimp. But yes, like that.”

  “Except this isn’t like that.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Looking at Great-Grandpa.”

  He was right; it wasn’t.

  Max went on: “We’re here to be with him, right? So why wouldn’t we be with him? What’s the point of coming all the way here, and spending all this time, just to be in a different room? We might as well have sat at home with popcorn and a streaming video of his body.”

  Jacob was afraid. It was a very simple explanation, even if the explanation for that explanation was harder to come by. What was there to be afraid of? The proximity to death? Not exactly. The proximity to imperfection? The embodied proof of reality, in its grotesque honesty? The proximity to life.

  Max said, “See you on the other side,” and entered the room.

  Jacob remembered the night, decades before, when he and Tamir had snuck into the National Zoo.

  “You OK?” he called to Max.

  “Freaky,” Max said.

  “I told you.”

  “That’s not what you told me.”

  “How does he look?”

  “Come see for yourself.”

  “I’m comfortable where I am.”

  “He looks like he does on Skype, but farther away.”

  “He looks OK?”

  “I probably wouldn’t put it like that.”

  How did he look? Would the body have looked different if he’d died differently?

  Isaac had been the embodiment of Jacob’s history; his people’s psychological pantry, the shelves collapsed; his heritage of incomprehensible strength and incomprehensible weakness. But now he was only a body. The embodiment of Jacob’s history was only a body.

  They used to take baths together when Jacob slept over as a child, and the long hairs of Isaac’s arms, chest, and legs would float on the surface like pond vegetation.

  Jacob remembered watching his grandfather fall asleep under the barber’s cape, how his head slumped forward, how the straight razor mowed a path from the back of his hairline to the limits of the barber’s reach.

  Jacob remembered being invited to pull at the loose skin of his grandfather’s elbow until it stretched to a web large enough to hold a baseball.

  He remembered the smell after his grandfather used the bathroom: it didn’t disgust him, it terrified him. He was mortally afraid of it.

  He remembered how his grandfather wore his belt just below the nipples, and his socks just above the knees; and how his fingernails were as thick as quarters, and his eyelids as thin as tinfoil; and how between claps he turned his palms skyward, as if repeatedly opening and shutting an invisible book, as if unable not to give the book a chance, and unable not to reject it, and unable not to give it another chance.

  Once, he fell asleep in the middle of a game of Uno, his mouth half full of black bread. Jacob might have been Benjy’s age. He carefully replaced his grandfather’s mediocre hand with all Wild Draw Fours, but when he shook his grandfather awake and they resumed the game, Isaac showed no wonder at his cards, and on his next turn drew from the stack.

  “You don’t have anything?” Jacob asked.

  Isaac shook his head and said, “Nothing.”

  He remembered watching his grandfather change into a bathing suit wherever happened to be convenient, with no regard for his own privacy or Jacob’s mortification: beside the parked car, in the middle of a men’s room, even on the beach. Did he not know? Did he not care? Once, at the public pool they sometimes went to on Sunday mornings, his grandfather undressed poolside. Jacob could feel the glances of strangers rubbing together inside him, building and tending to a fire of rage: at the strangers for their judgment, at his grandfather for his lack of dignity, at himself for his humiliation.

  The lifeguard came over and said, “There’s a changing room behind the vending machines.”

  “OK,” his grandfather said, as if he’d been told there was a Home Depot just off the Beltway.

  “You can’t change here.”

  “Why not?”

  Jacob spent decades thinking about that Why not? Why not, because the changing room was over there, and here was right here? Why not, because why are we even talking about this? Why not, because if you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you would also lose your ability to comprehend embarrassment? Why not, because a body is only a body?

  A body is only a body. But before he was a body, he was an embodiment. And that, at least for Jacob, was why not: his grandfather’s body couldn’t be only a body.

  For how long could this continue?

  Irv argued that they should just buy a plot in Judean Gardens, as close to the rest of the family as possible, and get on with death already. Jacob insisted they wait until things cleared up in Israel and then fulfill Isaac’s unambiguous wish for his eternal rest
ing place.

  “And what if that takes a couple of months?”

  “Then we’ll owe the funeral home that much more rent.”

  “And if things never clear up?”

  “Then we’ll remember how lucky we were to have this as the biggest of our problems.”

  WHAT DO THE CHILDREN KNOW?

  Julia wanted to rehearse the conversation with the kids. Jacob could have argued that it was unnecessary right then, as they weren’t going to have the actual conversation until after the bar mitzvah and burial dust had cleared. But he agreed, hoping that Julia’s ears would hear what her mouth said. And more, he interpreted her desire to rehearse as a desire to role-play—an acknowledgment that she wasn’t sure. Just as she interpreted his willingness to rehearse as a sign that he was, in fact, ready to move forward with the end.

  “ ‘We need to talk about something’?” Julia suggested.

  Jacob considered that for a moment, and countered: “ ‘We need to have a family conversation’?”

  “Why is that better?”

  “It reaffirms that we’re a family.”

  “But we don’t have family conversations. It’ll tip them off that something’s wrong.”

  “Something is wrong.”

  “The entire point we’re trying to convey with this conversation is that nothing is wrong. Something is different.”

  “Not even Benjy will buy that.”

  “But I don’t even have money—” Benjy said.

  “Benjy?”

  “—to buy something.”

  “What’s going on, love?”

  “What would you wish?”

  “What’s that, baby?”

  “In school, Mr. Schneiderman asked us what we would wish, and he took our wishes to the Wailing Wall, because he was going to Israel for vacation. I think I made the wrong wish.”

  “What did you wish for?” Jacob asked.

  “I can’t tell you or it won’t come true.”

  “What do you think you should have wished for?”

  “I can’t tell you, in case I change my wish.”

  “If sharing them means they can’t come true, why are you asking us to tell you our wishes?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, then turned and walked out of the living room.

  They waited until they heard his footsteps vanishing up the staircase before continuing.

  “And anyway,” Julia said, in a quieter voice than before, “we want to make them feel safe, and then build to the change.”

  “ ‘Can you guys come into the living room for a minute?’ Like that?”

  “Not the kitchen?”

  “I think here.”

  “And then what,” Julia said, “we tell them to sit down?”

  “Yeah, that’s going to be a tip-off, too.”

  “We could just wait until we’re all in the car at some point.”

  “That could work.”

  “But then we can’t face them.”

  “Except in the rearview mirror.”

  “An unfortunate symbol.”

  That made Jacob laugh. She was trying to be funny. There was a kindness in her effort. If this were real, Julia would never make a joke.

  “During dinner?” Julia suggested.

  “That would first require explaining why we’re eating dinner together.”

  “We eat dinner together all the time.”

  “We briefly assemble at the table occasionally.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Max asked, tumbling into the room exactly like Kramer, despite never having seen Seinfeld.

  Julia gave Jacob a look he’d seen a million times in a million contexts: What do the children know? What did Sam know when, two years ago, he walked into the room while they were having sex—missionary and under a sheet and without filthy talk, thank goodness. When Max picked up the phone while Jacob was angrily interrogating Julia’s gynecologist about the benignness of a benign lump—what did he hear? When Benjy walked into their kitchen blow-up and said, “Epitome”—what did he know?

  “We were just talking about dinner,” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You heard?”

  “I thought you were calling us for dinner.”

  “It’s only four thirty.”

  “I thought—”

  “You’re hungry?”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “What’s that have to do with your hunger?” Jacob asked.

  “Just wondering.”

  “Lasagna and some veggie or another,” Julia said.

  “Plain lasagna?”

  “Spinach.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Well, you have an hour to work up an appetite for spinach lasagna.”

  “I think Argus needs a walk.”

  “I just gave him a walk,” Jacob said.

  “Did he poo?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “You would remember if he’d pooed,” Max said. “He needs to poo. He’s doing that thing where he licks at the beginning of a poo that needs to come out.”

  “Why are you telling us this, instead of just walking him?”

  “Because I’m working on my speech for Great-Grandpa’s funeral, and I need to concentrate.”

  “You’re giving a speech?” Jacob asked.

  “You aren’t?”

  Julia was touched by Max’s charmingly narcissistic initiative. Jacob was ashamed by his own narcissistic thoughtlessness.

  “I’ll say a few words. Or actually, Grandpa will probably speak on our behalf.”

  “Grandpa doesn’t speak on my behalf,” Max said.

  “Work on your speech,” Julia said. “Dad will walk Argus.”

  “I did walk Argus.”

  “Until he poos.”

  Max went to the kitchen and came out with a box of unhealthy organic cereal, which he took back to his room.

  Julia called up: “Cereal should be in your mouth or in the box. Nowhere else.”

  Max called down: “I can’t swallow it?”

  “Maybe it’s a mistake to talk to all of them at once,” Jacob said, careful with his volume. “Maybe we should talk to Sam first.”

  “I suppose I could see the—”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  Jacob gestured at the TV that was now always on. There were images from a soccer stadium in Jerusalem, a stadium in which Jacob and Tamir had seen a game more than two decades before. There were a dozen bulldozers. It wasn’t clear what they were doing, or why Israel would allow such images to be broadcast, and that not-knowing was terrifying. Could they be preparing a military site? Digging a mass grave?

  The news that reached America was scattershot, unreliable, and alarmist. The Blochs did what they did best: balanced overreaction with repression. If in their hearts they believed they were safe, they overworried, talked and talked, whipped themselves, and one another, into foams of anguish. From the comfort of the living room, they followed the unfolding news like a sporting event, and at times caught themselves rooting for drama. There were even small, shameful disappointments when estimates of destruction were revised downward, or when what appeared to be an act of aggression turned out to be only an accident. It was a game whose unreal danger was to be talked up and savored, so long as the outcome was fixed. But if there was an inkling of any real danger, if the shit started to thicken—as it was soon to do—they dug until the blades of their shovels threw sparks: It’ll be fine, it’s nothing.

  Tamir was largely absent. He spent part of every day trying to find a way home, but never with any success. If he talked with Rivka or Noam, he did so privately and didn’t share anything. And to Jacob’s amazement, he still wanted to sightsee, schlepping an unenthusiastic Barak from monument to monument, museum to museum, Cheesecake Factory to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. It was so easy for Jacob to see in Tamir what he couldn’t see in himself: a refusal to acknowledge reality. He sightsaw so he wouldn’t have to look.


  The scene at the stadium was replaced with the face of Adia, the young Palestinian girl whose entire family had been killed in the earthquake and who was found wandering the streets by an American photojournalist. The story touched the world, and kept touching it. Maybe it was as simple as her beautiful face. Maybe it was how they held hands. It was a feel-good piece amid the tragedy, but it was a tragedy, Jacob thought, or at least inauspicious, that the good feeling was between a Palestinian and an American. At some point, Max started sleeping with a newspaper photo of Adia under his pillow. When her orphanage collapsed and she went missing, Max went missing, too. Everyone knew where he was—it was only his voice, gaze, and teeth that were hidden—but no one knew how to find him.

  “Hello?” Julia asked, shaking her hand in front of Jacob’s face.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been watching while we’ve been talking?”

  “Out of the corner of my eye.”

  “I realize the Middle East is collapsing, and that the entire world will get sucked into the vortex, but this is actually more important right now.”

  She got up and turned off the TV. Jacob thought he heard it sigh in relief.

  “Go walk Argus, then let’s finish this.”

  “He’ll go to the door and whine when he really needs it.”

  “Why make him really need it?”

  “When it’s time, I mean.”

  “You think we should talk to Sam first? Before the others?”

  “Or Sam and Max. Just in case one of them starts crying. Benjy is going to follow their lead, so we should give them a chance to digest and gather themselves.”

  “Or just let them all cry together,” Julia said.

  “Maybe just Sam first. He’s probably going to have the strongest reaction—whatever that reaction will be—but he’s also the most able to process it.”

  Julia touched one of the art books on the coffee table.

  “What if I cry?” she asked.

  The question embodied Jacob, made him want to touch her—grasp her shoulder, press his palm to her cheek, feel the ridges and valleys of their fingerprints align—but he didn’t know if that was acceptable anymore. Her stillness throughout the conversation didn’t feel standoffish, but it did create a space around her. What if she cried? Of course she would cry. They would all cry. They’d wail. It would be horrible. The kids’ lives would be ruined. Tens of thousands of people would die. Israel would be destroyed. He wanted all of that, not because he craved horror, but because imagining the worst kept him safe from it—focusing on doomsday allowed for the day to day.