Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  He used his dry fist, his fist lubricated with: honey, or shampoo, or Vaseline, or shaving cream, or rice pudding, or toothpaste (only once), or the remnants of the tube of A&D that his parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw away, despite being able to throw away everything that actually mattered. He made an artificial vagina out of a toilet paper roll, covering one end with Saran wrap (held down with rubber bands), filling the tube with maple syrup, then covering the other end with Saran wrap (and more rubber bands) and giving it a slit. He fucked pillows, blankets, swimming pool vacuums, stuffed animals. He jerked off to the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and the backpage ads in the City Paper, and JCPenney bra advertisements in Parade magazine, and basically anything that could, with the far reaches of his all-powerful and highly motivated imagination, be construed to be an asshole, vagina, nipple, or mouth (in that order). Of course, he had unlimited access to more free porn than could be watched over the course of the lifetimes of every citizen of China, but even an anus-crazed twelve-year-old appreciates the correlation between the mental work required and the magnitude of the nut, hence his ultimate fantasy of intercepting some Arab virgin on her way to get fucked by an actual martyr, tucking his head under her burka, and, in that deep-space, sensory-deprived blackness, licking orbits around Heranus. Would anyone ever believe that this had nothing to do with religion, or ethnicity, or even taboo?

  He tied rubber bands around his wrist—rubber bands being to masturbation what flour is to baking—to make his fingers go numb so he would no longer recognize them as his own. It worked terrifically well, and he almost lost his hand. He angled mirrors in such a way as to see his asshole without the rest of his body, and was able to convince himself that it was the asshole of a woman who wanted him in her asshole. He masturbated with his dominant and his recessive hand—his intact and his mangled hand—and rubbed Indian burns into his shaft with both hands at once. For several months he favored what he called—called to no one, of course—the “Roger Ebert grip”: a half twist of the wrist, so that the thumb was pointing down. (For reasons he didn’t understand, and felt no need to understand, this also gave the impression of his hand being someone else’s hand.) He closed his eyes and held his breath until he started to black out. He fucked the soles of his feet like some kind of horndog maharishi. If he were actually trying to detach his penis from his body, he couldn’t have squeezed or pulled it any harder, and it’s a miracle he never actually hurt himself, although even when he was pleasuring himself, he felt that, in some deep and irreparable way, he was hurting himself, that it had to be so, and that that was another elemental bit of knowledge with which he was born.

  He masturbated in Amtrak bathrooms, plane bathrooms, the bathrooms of his school and Hebrew school, bookstore bathrooms, Gap and Zara and H&M bathrooms, restaurant bathrooms, the bathrooms of every house he’d been in since gaining the ability to come into a toilet. If it flushed, he fucked it.

  How many times did he try to suck his own dick? (Like Tantalus, as he reached, so did the fruit pull away.) He tried to fuck his own asshole, but that required pushing his boner in the direction it most didn’t want to go, like a drawbridge being forced to touch the water. He was able to rub his scrotum around his asshole, but that only made him melancholy.

  He once stumbled upon a sufficiently compelling argument, in an analingus community, for sticking his finger into his butt while jerking off. Once he’d trained his sphincter to stop reflexively impersonating a Chinese finger trap, it felt pretty good, if pretty strange. It felt like being a bowl whose rim was being wiped clean of cookie batter by the finger of someone—namely: him—who couldn’t wait. He was, indeed, able to find his prostate, and as promised, he saw through walls when he came. But there was nothing to see except the next crappy room. It was the removal of his finger that ruined everything. First of all, immediately after coming, everything that seemed not only good but logical, necessary, and inevitable before coming instantly seems inexplicable, deranged, and repugnant. It’s possible to play down, or even deny, almost anything you just said or did, but a finger in one’s butthole cannot be played down or denied. It can only be left there or removed. And it cannot be left there.

  Sam never felt comfortable in his body—not in clothing that never fit, not when performing his ridiculous impression of a nonspastic walker—except when masturbating. When masturbating, he both owned and existed in his body. He was effortless, a natural, himself.

  > It’s ME.

  > That doesn’t help. And stop abusing caps.

  > it’s me.

  > Billie?

  > Billie?

  > Max?

  > No.

  > Great-Grandpa?

  > NOAM.

  > Stop shouting.

  > noam. your cousin.

  > My Israeli cousin Noam?

  > No, your Swedish cousin Noam.

  > Funny.

  > And Israeli.

  > Your dad and little brother are here.

  > I know. My dad sent me an e-mail from the cemetery.

  > That’s weird. He said he couldn’t contact you guys.

  > He probably meant by phone. We e-mail all the time.

  > We’re sitting shiva at my grandfather’s house.

  > Yes, I know that, too. He e-mailed me a picture of the salmon.

  > Why?

  > Because it was there. And because the world lacks reality for him until he photographs it with his phone.

  > You speak English better than me.

  > “Better than I do.”

  > Right.

  > Anyway, I wanted to tell you whatever is the genuine version of “I am sorry for your loss.”

  > I don’t believe in genuine versions.

  > I wish you less sadness. How about that?

  > How did you find me?

  > The same way you would have found me if you were looking. Not hard.

  > I didn’t know you were in Other Life.

  > I used to spend most of every day here. But I’ve never been in this grove before.

  > I’ve never been in this grove before, either.

  > Do you like it when people unnecessarily repeat bits of speech? Like you just did? You could have said, “Me, neither,” but you took what I said and made it your own. I said, “I’ve never been in this grove before,” and you said, “I’ve never been in this grove before, either.”

  > I do like it when people unnecessarily repeat bits of speech.

  > If I used emoticons, I would have used one here.

  > I’m glad you don’t.

  > There isn’t time for Other Life in the army.

  > Too much real life?

  > I don’t believe in real life.

  > ;)

  > I really let myself go. Look at my nails.

  > Look at you? Look at me! I still have placenta on my face.

  > ???

  > My dad committed avataricide.

  > Why?

  > He accidentally sniffed a Bouquet of Fatality.

  > Why?

  > Because he wears his sphincter like a necklace, and it choked blood flow to his brain. Anyway, I’m in the process of rebuilding myself, and I’m not exactly satisfied with my progress.

  > You look…old.

  > Yeah. I kinda became my great-grandfather.

  > Why?

  > Same reason I will in real life, I guess? I mean, this life.

  > Do you need some resilience fruit?

  > A few hundred thousand wouldn’t hurt.

  > I can give you mine.

  > I was kidding.

  > I wasn’t.

  > Why would you do that?

  > Because you need them and I don’t. Do you want 250,000?

  > 250,000!

  > Stop shouting.

  > That must have taken you a year.

  > Or three.

  > I can’t accept that.

  > Sure you can. A bar mitzvah present.

  > I don’t even kn
ow if I’m having one.

  > A bar mitzvah isn’t something you have. It’s something you become.

  > I don’t even know if I’m becoming one.

  > Do babies know they’re born?

  > They cry.

  > So cry.

  > Where are you?

  > At home for another couple of hours.

  > I thought you were somewhere dangerous.

  > You’ve met my mother.

  > Your dad said you were in the West Bank.

  > I was. But I came back the day before the earthquake.

  > Shit, I can’t believe we’ve talked for this long and I haven’t yet asked how you’re doing. I suck. I’m sorry.

  > It’s OK. Remember, I found you.

  > I suck.

  > I’m safe. We’re all safe.

  > What would have happened if you’d still been in the West Bank?

  > I really don’t know.

  > Guess.

  > Why?

  > Because I’m curious.

  > Well, if we’d been stuck there during the earthquake, I suppose we would have had to create a temporary base of some kind and wait to be rescued.

  > What kind of base?

  > Whatever kind we could put together. Maybe occupy a building.

  > Surrounded by people who want to kill you?

  > What else is new?

  > They would have lobbed shit at you?

  > Shit?

  > Grenades or whatever.

  > There is no “grenades or whatever.” Weapons are precise.

  > Right.

  > Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they would have been preoccupied with their own problems.

  > It wouldn’t have been good.

  > There is no scenario in which it would have been good.

  > What scenario would have been worst?

  Like his dad, Sam was drawn to worst-case scenarios. It was obvious why they thrilled him, but hard to explain the comfort they offered. Perhaps they mapped a distance from his own safe life. Or perhaps coming to terms with the most horrible outcomes allowed for a kind of mental preparation and resignation. Maybe they were just more sharp objects—like the videos he hated and needed—to allow his insides out.

  When he was in sixth grade, his Hebrew school class was made to watch a documentary about the concentration camps. It was never clear to him if this was because his teacher was lazy (an acceptable way to get rid of a couple of hours), or unable or unwilling to teach the material, or felt the impossibility of teaching it in any way other than simply showing it. Even at the time, Sam felt that he was too young to be seeing such a thing.

  They sat at chipboard desks for righties, and the teacher—whose name they will all be able to remember for the rest of their lives—muttered a few unmemorable words of context and inspiration and disclaimer, and pressed Play. They watched lines of naked women, many pressing children to their chests. They were crying—the mothers and the children—but why were they only crying? Why were they so orderly? So good? Why didn’t the mothers run? Why didn’t they try to save their children’s lives? Why didn’t they protect their children? Better to get shot running away than simply walk to one’s death. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance.

  The still-children watched from their desks; they saw men digging their own mass graves and then kneeling in them, their fingers interlaced behind their heads. Why did they dig their own graves? If you’re going to be killed anyway, why help with the killing? For the few extra moments of life? That might make sense. But how did they maintain that composure? Because they thought it might buy them a few extra moments of life? Maybe. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance, but a moment of life is an eternity. Be a good Jewish boy and dig a good Jewish grave and kneel like a mensch and, as Sam’s nursery school teacher, Judy Shore, used to say, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”

  They saw grainy montages of humans who had become science experiments—dead twins, Sam could not not remember, still clutching each other on a table. Did they cling like that in life? He could not not wonder.

  They saw images from the liberated camps: piles of hundreds or thousands of skeletal bodies, knees and elbows bending the wrong way, arms and legs at wrong angles, eyes so deeply sunken they could not be seen. Hills of bodies. Bulldozers testing a child’s belief that a dead body doesn’t feel anything.

  What was he left with? The knowledge that Germans were—are—evil, evil, evil, not only capable of ripping children from their mothers and then ripping their small bodies apart, but eager to; that had non-Germans not intervened, the Germans would have murdered every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the planet; and that of course his grandfather was absolutely right, even if he sounded insane, when he said a Jewish person should never buy a German product of any kind or size, never put money into a German pocket, never visit Germany, never not cringe at the sound of that vile language of savages, never have any more interaction than what simply could not be avoided with any German of any age. Inscribe that on the doorpost of your house and on your gate.

  Or he was left with the knowledge that everything that has happened once can happen again, is likely to happen again, must happen again, will.

  Or the knowledge that his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between his life and their deaths.

  Or no knowledge, but a feeling. What feeling? What was that feeling?

  Sam didn’t mention to his parents what he’d seen. Didn’t seek explanation, or comfort. And he was given plenty of guidance—almost all of it unintentional and extremely subtle—never to ask about it, never even to acknowledge it. So it was never mentioned, always never talked about, the perpetual topic of nonconversation. Everywhere you looked, there it wasn’t.

  His dad was obsessed with displays of optimism, and the imagined accumulation of property, and joke-making; his mom, with physical contact before saying goodbye, and fish oil, and outer garments, and “the right thing to do”; Max, with extreme empathy and self-imposed alienation; Benjy, with metaphysics and basic safety. And he, Sam, was always longing. What was that feeling? It had something to do with loneliness (his own and others’), something with suffering (his own and others’), something with shame (his own and others’), something with fear (his own and others’). But also something with stubborn belief, and stubborn dignity, and stubborn joy. And yet it wasn’t really any of those things, or the sum of them. It was the feeling of being Jewish. But what was that feeling?

  THERE ARE THINGS THAT ARE HARD TO SAY TODAY

  Israel continued to describe the situation as manageable, but it also continued to close off its airspace, which left tens of thousands of Israelis stranded on vacation and prevented Jews who wanted to help from coming. Tamir tried hitching a ride on a Red Cross cargo plane, tried getting special clearance through the military attaché at the embassy, looked into chaperoning a shipment of construction equipment. But there was no way home. He might have been the only person grateful to be at the funeral—it gave him a few hours to rest in peace.

  Sam wore his ill-fitting bar mitzvah suit to the cemetery. Wearing it was the only thing he hated more than the process of getting it: the torture chamber of mirrors, his mother’s unhelpful help, the functionally pedophiliac survivor tailor who not once, not twice, but three times groped at Sam’s crotch with his Parkinsonian fingers and said, “Plenty of room.”

  Tamir and Barak wore slacks with short-sleeve button-up shirts—their uniform for every occasion, whether it was going to synagogue, the grocery store, a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball game, or the funeral of the family patriarch. They viewed any kind of formality—in dress, in speech, in affect—as some kind of gross infringement on a God-given right to at all times be oneself. Jacob found it obnoxious, and enviable.

  Jacob wore a black suit with a box of Altoids in the pocke
t: artifacts of a time when he cared enough about how his breath smelled to attempt to echo it off his palm for sniffs.

  Julia wore a vintage A.P.C. dress she’d found on Etsy for the equivalent of nothing. It wasn’t exactly funeral attire, but she never had occasion to wear it, and she wanted to wear it, and since the neutering of the bar mitzvah, a funeral was as glamorous an occasion as she was going to get.

  “You look beautiful, Julia,” she said to Jacob, hating herself for saying it.

  “Very beautiful,” Jacob said, hating her for saying it, but also surprised that his assessment of her beauty continued to matter to her.

  “The impact is lessened by it having been prompted.”

  “It’s a funeral, Julia. And thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For saying I look handsome.”

  Irv wore the same suit he’d been wearing since the Six-Day War.

  Isaac wore the shroud in which he had been married, the shroud he’d worn once a year on the Day of Atonement, the chest of which he’d beaten with his fist: For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance on the lips…For the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly…For the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart…The shroud had no pockets, as the dead are required to be buried without any encumbrances.

  A small—in number and physical stature—army from Adas Israel had passed through the grief like a breeze: they brought stools, covered the mirrors, took care of the platters, and sent Jacob an un-itemized bill that he was unable to question without requiring Jewish seppuku. There would be a small service, followed by burial at Judean Gardens, followed by a small kiddush at Irv and Deborah’s, followed by eternity.

  —

  All the local cousins were at the funeral, and a few older, zanier Jews came in from New York, Philly, and Chicago. Jacob had met these people throughout his life, but only at rites of passage—bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals. He didn’t know their names, but their faces evoked a kind of Pavlovian existentialism: if you’re here, if I see you, something significant must be happening.