Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

JUST THE WAILING

  Judaism gets death right, Jacob thought. It instructs us what to do when we know least well what to do, and feel an overwhelming need to do something. You should sit like this. We will. You should dress like this. We will. You should say these words at these moments, even if you have to read from transliteration. Na-ah-seh.

  Jacob had stopped crying more than an hour ago, but he still had what Benjy called “after-crying breath.” Irv brought him a glass of peach schnapps, said, “I told the rabbi he was welcome to come, but I doubt he’ll come,” and went back to his windowsill citadel.

  The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and “salads”—Jews apply the word salad to anything that can’t be held in one’s hand: cucumber salad, whitefish and tuna and baked salmon salad, lentil salad, pasta salad, quinoa salad. And there was purple soda, and black coffee, and Diet Coke, and black tea, and enough seltzer to float an aircraft carrier, and Kedem grape juice—a liquid more Jewish than Jewish blood. And there were pickles, a few kinds. Capers don’t belong in any food, but the capers that every spoon had tried to avoid had found their way into foods in which they really didn’t belong, like someone’s half-empty half-decaf. And at the center of the table, impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them. It was too much food by a factor of ten. But it had to be.

  Relatives exchanged stories about Isaac while they piled their plates toward the ceiling of the floor above. They laughed about how funny he was (on purpose, and by accident), what an obstinate pain in the ass he could be (on purpose, and by accident). They reflected on what a hero he had been (on purpose, and by accident). There was a bit of crying, there were some awkward silences, there was gratitude for having had an occasion to gather as a family (some of the cousins hadn’t seen each other since Leah’s bat mitzvah, some not since Great-Aunt Doris’s death), and everyone looked at his phone: to check on the war, the score of the game, the weather.

  The kids, having already forgotten about any first-person sadness they might have felt over Isaac’s death, were playing first-person video games in the basement. Max’s pulse doubled as he spectated at an assassination attempt by someone he thought was a second cousin. Sam sat off to the side with his iPad, wandering in a virtual lemon grove. This was how it always went, this vertical segregation. And inevitably, the adults with enough sense to escape the adult world would migrate down. Which is what Jacob did.

  There were at least a dozen cousins—many from Deborah’s side, a few from Julia’s. The younger ones unpacked all the board games, one at a time—not to play them, but to unpack them and commingle the small pieces. Every now and then one would spontaneously freak out. The older cousins were surrounding Barak as he performed virtuosic acts of extreme violence on a TV so large one had to sit against the opposite wall to see its edges.

  Benjy was on his own, stuffing crumpled Monopoly money between the venetian blinds.

  “You’re being very generous with the window,” Jacob said.

  “It’s not real money.”

  “No?”

  “I know you’re joking.”

  “You haven’t seen Mom around, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Hey?”

  “What?”

  “Have you been crying, buddy?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? You look like you have.”

  “Holy shit!” a cousin shouted.

  “Language!” Jacob shouted back.

  “I haven’t,” Benjy said.

  “Are you sad about Great-Grandpa?”

  “Not really.”

  “So what’s upsetting you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Dads know these things.”

  “Then why don’t you know what’s upsetting me?”

  “Dads don’t know everything.”

  “Only God does.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mr. Schneiderman.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My Hebrew school teacher.”

  “Schneiderman. Right.”

  “He said that God knows everything. But that didn’t make sense to me.”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me, either.”

  “But that’s because you don’t believe in God.”

  “I only ever said I was unsure. But if I did believe in God, it still wouldn’t make sense to me.”

  “Right, because if God knows everything, why do we have to write notes to put in the Wall?”

  “That’s a good point.”

  “Mr. Schneiderman said that God knows everything but sometimes forgets. So the notes are to remind him of what’s important.”

  “God forgets? Really?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “It’s weird.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “But that’s because you don’t believe in God.”

  “If I believed in God, he would be a remembering God.”

  “Mine would, too.”

  Despite being as agnostic about God’s existence as he was about the question’s meaning (could any two people really be referring to the same thing when speaking about God?), Jacob wanted Benjy to believe. Or Dr. Silvers did, anyway. For several months, Benjy’s anxiety about death had been slowly and steadily ramping up, and now risked tipping from adorable to problematic. Dr. Silvers said, “He has the rest of his life to form answers to theological questions, but he’ll never get back this time of developing his first relationship to the world. Just make him feel safe.” That struck Jacob as right, even if the thought of evangelizing made him squirm. The next time Benjy raised his fear of death, just when Jacob’s instinct urged him to agree that an eternity of nonexistence was certainly the most horrible of all things to imagine, Jacob remembered Dr. Silvers’s command: Just make him feel safe.

  “Well, you know about heaven, right?” Jacob said, causing a nonexistent angel to lose its wings.

  “I know that you think it isn’t real.”

  “Well, no one knows for sure. I certainly don’t. But you know what heaven is?”

  “Not really.”

  So Jacob gave his most comforting explanation, sparing neither extravagance nor intellectual integrity.

  “And if I wanted to stay up late in heaven?” Benjy asked, now planking on the sofa.

  “As late as you want,” Jacob said, “every single night.”

  “And I could probably eat dessert before dinner.”

  “You wouldn’t have to eat dinner at all.”

  “But then I wouldn’t be healthy.”

  “Health won’t matter.”

  Benjy turned his head to the side: “Birthdays.”

  “What about them?”

  “What are they like?”

  “Well, they’re never-ending, of course.”

  “Wait, it’s always your birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a party and get presents every day?”

  “All day every day.”

  “Wait, do you have to write thank-you notes?”

  “You don’t even have to say thank you.”

  “Wait, does that mean you’re zero, or infinity?”

  “What do you want to be?”

  “Infinity.”

  “Then you’re infinity.”

  “Wait, is it always everyone’s birthday?”

  “Only yours.”

  Benjy rose to his feet, raised his hands above his head, and said, “I want to die right now!”

  Just don’t make him feel too safe.

  In Irv and Deborah’s basement, facing a more nuanced theological question, Jacob again resisted his instinct for
truth in favor of Benjy’s emotional safety: “Maybe God does remember everything but sometimes chooses to forget?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “So that we remember,” Jacob said, pleased with his improvisation. “Like the wishes,” he continued. “If God knew what we wanted, we wouldn’t have to.”

  “And God wants us to know for ourselves.”

  “Could be.”

  “I used to think Great-Grandpa was God,” Benjy said.

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, but he’s dead, so obviously he wasn’t God.”

  “That’s one way to think about it.”

  “I know Mom isn’t God.”

  “How is that?”

  “Because she would never forget about me.”

  “You’re right,” Jacob said, “she wouldn’t.”

  “No matter what.”

  “No matter what.”

  Another round of expletive mutterings from the cousins.

  “Anyway,” Benjy said, “that’s what was making me cry.”

  “Mom?”

  “My note for the Wailing Wall.”

  “Because you were thinking about how God is forgetful?”

  “No,” Benjy said, pointing at the TV, which wasn’t displaying a video game, as Jacob had thought, but the effects of the most recent, and most severe, aftershock, “because the Wall crumbled.”

  “The Wall?”

  They came spilling into the world: every wish tucked into every crevice, but also every wish tucked into every Jew’s heart.

  “No more proof of how great they were,” Benjy said.

  “What?”

  “The thing you told me about the Romans.”

  How much do the children know, and how much do they remember?

  “Jacob!” Irv called from upstairs.

  “The Wailing Wall,” Jacob said, as if by saying its name aloud, it would exist again.

  Jacob could make his children feel safe. But could he keep them safe?

  Benjy shook his head and said, “Now it’s just the Wailing.”

  LOOK! A CRYING HEBREW BABY

  Tamir’s presence had not only made a full reckoning impossible, it required Julia to be a buoyant host. And the death of Jacob’s grandfather required her to at least perform love and care, when all she felt was sadness and doubt. She was good enough to manage her blossoming resentment, good enough, even, to suppress her passive-aggression, but at a certain point, the requirements of being a good person inspire hatred for oneself and others.

  Like any living person, she had fantasies. (Although her immense guilt about being human required a constant reminder—that she was “like any living person.”) The houses she designed were fantasies, but there were others.

  She imagined a week alone in Big Sur. Maybe at the Post Ranch Inn, maybe one of the ocean-facing rooms. Maybe a massage, maybe a facial, maybe a “treatment” that treats nothing. Maybe she’d walk through a redwood tunnel, the growth rings bending around her.

  She imagined having a personal chef. Vegans live longer, and are healthier, and have better skin, and she could do that; it would be easy, if someone shopped, cooked, and cleaned for her.

  She imagined Mark noticing small things about her that she’d never noticed about herself: lovably misused idioms, what her feet do when she flosses, her funny relationship to dessert menus.

  She imagined going for walks without destinations, thinking about things of no logistical importance, like whether Edison bulbs are actually obnoxious.

  She imagined a secret admirer anonymously subscribing her to a magazine.

  She imagined the disappearance of crow’s feet, like the disappearance of crow’s footprints from a dusty road.

  She imagined the disappearance of screens—from her life, from her children’s lives. From the gym, from doctors’ offices and the backs of cabs, hanging behind bars and in the corners of diners, the iWatches of people holding iPads on the Metro.

  She imagined the deaths of her air-filled clients and their dreams of heavier and heavier kitchen appliances.

  She fantasized about the death of the so-called teacher who chuckled at one of Max’s answers four years ago, requiring a month of bedtime talks to reinstill his enjoyment of school.

  Dr. Silvers would have to die at least a couple of times.

  She imagined Jacob’s sudden disappearance—from the house, from existence. She imagined him dropping dead at the gym. Which required imagining him going to the gym. Which required imagining him once again possessing a desire to be attractive in ways other than professional success.

  Of course, she didn’t actually want him to die, no part of her did, not even subconsciously, and when she fantasized about his death, it was always painless. Sometimes he would panic in awareness as he tried to reach through his chest to grab his stammering heart. Sometimes he would think of the children. The end of sometimes: he would be gone forever. And she would be alone, and finally unalone, and people would grieve for her.

  She would cook all the meals (as she already did), do all the cleaning (as she already did), buy the graph paper for Benjy’s solutionless mazes, the teriyaki-roasted seaweed snacks for Max, a cool-but-not-trying-too-hard messenger bag for Sam when the last one she bought for him fell apart. She would dress them in end-of-the-year Zara and Crewcuts sale clothing and get them off to school (as she already did). She would have to support herself (which she couldn’t, with her present lifestyle, but wouldn’t have to, given Jacob’s life insurance policy). Her imagination was strong enough to hurt her. She was weak enough to keep the hurt to herself.

  And then came the most hurtful thought, the thought that can never be touched with even the whorls of the fingers of one’s brain: the deaths of her children. She’d had the most horrible thought many times since she became pregnant with Sam: imagined miscarriages; imagined SIDS; imagined tumbles down stairs, trying to shield his body from the treads as they fell; imagined cancer every time she saw a child with cancer. There was the knowledge that every school bus she ever put one of her children on was going to roll down the side of a hill and into a frozen lake, whose ice would re-form around its silhouette. Every time one of her children was put under general anesthesia, she said goodbye to him as if she were saying goodbye to him. She wasn’t naturally anxious, much less apocalyptic, but Jacob was right when, after Sam’s injury, he said it was too much love for happiness.

  Sam’s injury. It was the place she was unwilling to go, because there was no road back. And yet the trauma center of her brain was always pushing her there. And she was always never fully returning. She’d found peace with why it happened—there was no why—but not how. It was too painful, because whatever the sequence of events, it wasn’t necessary or inevitable. Jacob never asked her if she had been the one to open the door. (It was far too heavy for Sam to have opened himself.) Julia never asked Jacob if he had closed it on Sam’s fingers. (Maybe Sam could have gotten it moving, and inertia would have taken care of the rest?) It was five years ago, and the journey—the century-long morning in the ER, the twice-a-week visits to the plastic surgeon, the year of rehab—brought them closer than they’d ever been. But it also created a black hole of silence, from which everything had to keep a safe distance, into which so much was swallowed, a teaspoon of which weighed more than a million suns consuming a million photos of a million families on a million moons.

  They could talk about how lucky they were (Sam very nearly lost his fingers), but never how unlucky. They could speak in generalities, but never recount the details: Dr. Fred repeatedly sticking needles into Sam’s fingers to test for feeling, while Sam looked into his parents’ eyes and begged, pleaded, for it to stop. When they came home, Jacob put his bloody shirt in a plastic bag and walked it to the garbage can on the corner of Connecticut. Julia put her bloody shirt in an old pillowcase and tucked it halfway into a stack of pants.

  Too much love for happiness, but how much happiness was enough? Would she do it all again? She alw
ays believed that her ability to endure pain was greater than anyone else’s—certainly than her children’s or Jacob’s. A burden would be easiest carried by her, and regardless, it would ultimately be carried by her anyway. Only men can unhave babies. But if she could do it all again?

  She often thought of those retired Japanese engineers who volunteered to go into failing nuclear plants to fix them after the tsunami. They knew they’d be exposed to fatal amounts of radiation, but given that their life expectancies were shorter than the time it would take for the cancer to kill them, they saw no reason not to get the cancer. In the hardware gallery, Mark had said it wasn’t too late in life for happiness. When, in Julia’s life, would it be late enough for honesty?

  —

  It was amazing how little changed as everything changed. The conversation was continually expanding, but it was no longer clear what they were talking about. When Jacob showed her listings for places to which he might move, was it any more real than when he used to show her listings for places to which they might move? When they shared their visions for happy independent lives, was it any less make-believe than when they used to share their visions for living together happily? The rehearsal of how they would tell the kids took on a quality of theater, as if they were trying to get the scene right, rather than get life right. She had the sense that to Jacob it was a kind of game, that he enjoyed it. Or worse, that planning their separation was a new ritual that kept them together.

  Domestic life stagnated. They talked about Jacob starting to sleep elsewhere, but Tamir was in the guest room, Barak was on the sofa, and leaving for a hotel after everyone was asleep and arriving before anyone woke up felt both cruel and profligate. They talked and talked about what kind of schedule was most likely to facilitate good stretches with the kids, and good transitions, and as little missing as possible—but they didn’t take any steps either to repair what was broken or to leave it behind.

  After the funeral…

  After the bar mitzvah…

  After the Israelis leave…

  After the semester ends…

  There was a nonchalance to their desperation, and maybe talking about it was enough for now. It could wait until it couldn’t.