Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Jacob closed himself in the bathroom, but he didn’t pee, and he didn’t pretend the fight hadn’t happened. He took his phone from his pocket. The home screen was a photo taken on Max’s sixth birthday. He and Julia had given Max a suitcase filled with costumes. A clown costume. A fireman costume. An Indian. A bellboy. A sheriff. The first one he tried on, commemorated digitally, was the soldier costume. Jacob flushed nothing down the toilet, went into his phone’s settings, and replaced the photo with one of the stock generic images: a treeless leaf.

  He went back to the kitchen and took his seat across from Tamir. He’d decided to try the joke about the difference between a Subaru and an erection, but before he could get the first word out, Tamir said, “I don’t know where Noam is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was home for a few days. We exchanged some e-mails, and talked. But he was deployed this afternoon. Rivka doesn’t know to where. And I haven’t heard anything. He tried calling, but I stupidly didn’t have my phone on. What kind of father am I?”

  “Oh, Tamir. I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine what you’re feeling.”

  “You can.”

  “Noam will be OK.”

  “You can promise me that?”

  Jacob scratched at no itch on his arm and said, “I wish I could.”

  “I believed a lot of what I said. But a lot of it I didn’t believe. Or I’m not sure I believe.”

  “I also said some things I didn’t believe. It happens.”

  “Why can’t he send even a one-sentence e-mail? Two letters: O-K.”

  Jacob said, “I don’t know where Julia is,” trying to meet Tamir’s realness with his own. “She’s not on a work trip.”

  “No?”

  “No. And I’m scared.”

  “Then we can talk.”

  “What have we been doing?”

  “Making sounds.”

  “It’s all my fault. Julia. The family. I acted as if my home were dispensable.”

  “Slow down. Tell me what—”

  “She found a phone,” Jacob said, as if that statement needed something to interrupt in order to be spoken. “A secret phone of mine.”

  “Shit. Why did you have a secret phone?”

  “It was really stupid.”

  “You had an affair?”

  “I don’t even know what that word means.”

  “You would know if it were Julia having an affair.” Which released the emergency brake of Jacob’s mind: Was she having sex with Mark at that moment? Was he fucking her while they talked about her? Tamir asked, “Did you fuck her?”

  Jacob paused, as if he needed to consider the question, as if he didn’t even know what the word fuck meant.

  “I did.”

  “More than once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not in the house.”

  “No,” Jacob said, as if offended by the suggestion. “In hotels. Once in the office. It was just permission to acknowledge our unhappiness. Julia was probably even grateful that it happened.”

  “Everyone is so grateful for the permission that no one wants.”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s the same conversation we were just having. The same.”

  “I thought it was revealed to be bullshit?”

  “Some, yes, but not this part: you can’t say, ‘This is who I am.’ You can’t say, ‘I’m a married man. I have three great kids, a nice house, a good job. I don’t have everything I want, I’m not as respected as I might wish, I’m not as rich or loved or fucked as I might wish, but this is who I am, and choose to be, and admit to being.’ You can’t say that. But neither can you admit to needing more, to wanting more. Forget about other people, you can’t even admit your unhappiness to yourself.”

  “I’m unhappy. If that’s what you need to hear me say, there it is. I want more.”

  “That’s just making sounds.”

  “What isn’t making sounds?”

  “Going to Israel. To live.”

  “OK, now you’re kidding.”

  “I’m saying what you already know.”

  “That if I moved to Israel my marriage would improve?”

  “That if you were capable of standing up and saying, ‘This is who I am,’ you’d at least be living your own life. Even if who you are is ugly to others. Even if who you are is ugly to you.”

  “I’m not living my own life?”

  “No.”

  “Whose life am I living?”

  “Maybe your grandfather’s idea of your life. Or your father’s. Or your own idea. Maybe no life at all.”

  Jacob suspected he should take offense, and he had the instinct to strike back at Tamir, but he also felt humbled, and grateful.

  “It was a long day,” he said, “and I don’t know that either of us is saying what he means anymore. I like having you here. It reminds me of when we were kids. Let’s cut our losses.”

  Tamir took the last third of his beer down in one gulp. He placed the bottle back on the table, more gently than Jacob had seen him do anything, and said, “When do we stop cutting our losses?”

  “You and I?”

  “Sure.”

  “As opposed to what? Losing it all?”

  “Or reclaiming what’s ours.”

  “Yours and mine?”

  “Sure.”

  He finished Jacob’s unfinished beer and tossed the two empty bottles in the garbage.

  “We recycle,” Jacob said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You have enough towels upstairs?”

  “What do you think I do with towels?”

  “Just trying to be a good host.”

  “Always trying to be something.”

  “Yes. I’m always trying to be something. That says something good about me.”

  “OK.”

  “And you’re always trying to be something, too. And so is Barak. And Julia and Sam and Max and Benjy. Everybody.”

  “What am I trying to be?”

  Jacob paused for a beat, careful.

  “You’re trying to be bigger than you actually are.”

  Tamir’s smile revealed the force of the blow.

  “Ah.”

  “Everybody is trying to be something.”

  “Your grandfather isn’t.”

  What was that? A stupid joke? Some kind of lazy stab at wisdom?

  “He stopped trying,” Jacob said, “and it killed him.”

  “You’re wrong. He’s the only one of us who actually succeeded.”

  “At what?”

  “At becoming something.”

  “Dead?”

  “Real.”

  Jacob almost said, Now you’ve lost me.

  He almost said, I’m heading up.

  He almost said, I don’t agree with anything you’ve said, but I understand you.

  The night could end, the conversation could close, what was shared could be processed, digested, and expelled, save for the nutrients.

  But instead, Jacob asked, “You want another beer? Or is that just going to get us drunk and fat?”

  “I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Tamir said. “Including drunkenness and fatness.”

  “And baldness.”

  “No, you’re taking care of that for both of us.”

  “You know,” Jacob said, “I have a bag of pot upstairs. Somewhere. It’s probably as old as Max, but pot never goes bad, does it?”

  “Not any more than kids do,” Tamir said.

  “Shit.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen? We don’t get high?”

  IN THE HINGE

  It took Julia three hours to walk to Mark’s apartment. Jacob texted and called and texted and called, but she didn’t text or call ahead to see if Mark was there. Her finger was releasing the buzzer to his apartment as it was pressing it—the circuit completed for a startling instant, like a bird hitting a window.

  “Hello?”

  She stood motionless and silent. Could
the microphone detect her breathing? Was Mark listening to her exhalations, four floors above?

  “I can see you, Julia. There’s a little camera just above the buzzers.”

  “It’s Julia,” Julia said, as if she could snip out those last couple of seconds and respond to “Hello?” like a normal human being.

  “Yes, I’m looking at you.”

  “This is an unpleasant feeling.”

  “So get out of the frame and come on up.”

  The door opened itself.

  And then the elevator doors opened for her, and then opened for her again.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” Mark said, ushering her in.

  “I wasn’t expecting me, either.”

  Reflexively, she scanned the apartment. Everything was new and new-looking: phony moldings, floors glossy enough for bowling, fat plastic dimmer slides.

  “As you can see,” Mark said, “it’s a work in progress.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “A lot of furniture is arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow it will look completely different.”

  “Well, then I’m glad I got to see the before.”

  “And it’s temporary. I needed a place, and this…was a place.”

  “Do you think I’m judging you?”

  “No, but I think you’re judging my apartment.”

  She looked at Mark, the efforts he made: he worked out, used hair product, bought clothes that someone—in a magazine or store—told him were cool. She looked around the apartment: how high were the ceilings, how tall the windows, how glossy the appliances.

  “Where do you eat?”

  “Out, usually. Always.”

  “Where do you open mail?”

  “That sofa is where I do everything.”

  “You sleep on it?”

  “Everything but sleep.”

  Everything but sleep: it was unbearably suggestive. Or so Julia felt. But everything felt unbearably suggestive to her right then, because she was unbearably exposed. Before the skin regrew and healed, some of the inside of Sam’s hand was on the outside, and infection was a constant concern. Childishly, Julia didn’t want to blame her child’s hand for its vulnerability, and so saw him as having stayed the same and the world as having become more threatening. They went straight from the hospital to ice cream. “Every topping?” the server asked. As her hand pressed on the door—the first door she’d opened since the heavy one shut—Julia noticed the back of the OPEN sign. “Look,” she said, finding, in the joke, another reason to hate herself, “the world is closed.”

  “No,” Sam said. “Close. Like near.”

  Another reason to hate herself.

  There were so many things she could have said to Mark. There was so much available small talk. It was at sleepaway camp that she learned how to make a bed with hospital corners. It was at the hospital that she learned how to press tightly folded words between massive seconds. But she didn’t want things to be tidy or concealed right then. But she didn’t want things to be as disheveled and exposed as they felt.

  What did she want?

  “What do I want?” she asked, quiet as a spacewalk.

  She wanted some of her insides on the outside, but which insides and how much?

  “What?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know why I’m asking you.”

  “I didn’t hear what you asked,” he said, closing the distance between them, perhaps to hear better.

  She’d tried everything: juice cleanses, poetry binges, knitting, writing letters by hand to people she’d let go of, moments of the unmediated honesty they’d promised each other in Pennsylvania sixteen years before. She’d tried meditating half a dozen times, but always felt lost when guided to “remember” her body. She knew what was meant, but was incapable, or unwilling.

  She took a step toward Mark, closing the distance, perhaps so that all she couldn’t say could be better heard.

  But now, and without trying, she remembered her body. She remembered her breasts, which hadn’t been seen by another man, not sexually, since she was young. She remembered their heaviness, that they were the slowly descending weights powering her biological clock. They had appeared too early, but grew too slowly, and were referred to by the only college boyfriend whose birthday she still remembered as “Platonic.” They became so sensitive when she had her period that she held them as she walked around the house. Years after it was turned off for the last time, she still occasionally heard the asthmatic Medela breast pump struggling not to die. She had grown to know her breasts more intimately as there was more to fear, but she looked away when, each of the last three years, they were pressed between mammogram plates—each time the tech made the unsolicited promise that the machine delivered less radiation than she would be exposed to on a transatlantic flight. When Jacob took her to Paris for her forty-first birthday, she imagined the kids searching the sky for her plane, her breasts glowing like poisoned beacons for them.

  What did she want?

  She wanted everything on the outside.

  She wanted something impossible, whose fulfillment would destroy her.

  And then she understood Jacob. She had believed him when he said his words were only words, but she never understood him. Now she understood: he needed to stick his hand in the hinge. But he didn’t want to close the door on himself.

  “I need to go home,” she said.

  She needed something impossible, whose fulfillment would save her.

  “That’s what you came here to tell me?”

  She nodded.

  He stood straight, now taller than he had been. “I get it that you’re on some sort of journey,” he said. “Nobody gets that better than I do. And I’m really glad to have served as a rest stop where you could stretch your legs, get some gas, and pee.”

  “Please don’t be mad,” she said, almost like a girl.

  Her skin was burning with fear—of his anger, of deserving it, of being, finally, justly punished for her badness. She could be forgiven for allowing her children to be hurt, but there is no punishment great enough for hurting one’s children knowingly. She was going to destroy her family—on purpose, and not because there were no alternatives. She was going to choose not to have a choice.

  “I hope I facilitated a lot of growth,” Mark went on, now making no effort to contain his hurt. “I do. I hope you learned something with me that you can apply later with someone else. But if I can offer a little free advice?”

  “I just need to go home,” she said, terrified of what he would say next, that by some magical justice it would kill her children.

  “You’re not the problem, Julia. Your life is the problem.”

  Kindness was worse than what she’d been most afraid of.

  He opened the door. “And I say this wishing only for peace for both of us: know that next time I see your face on the screen, I’m not even going to watch you wait.”

  “I need to go home,” she said.

  “Good luck with that,” he said.

  She left.

  She took a cab to a hotel whose renovation she’d nearly been hired to oversee.

  There was a cartoonishly large, unnaturally symmetrical floral arrangement centered under ten thousand chandelier crystals.

  And a bellhop said something into a palmed microphone whose cord ran up his sleeve and down his side to a transmitter clipped to his belt—there had to be a better way to communicate.

  And the desk clerk, who could almost have been Sam in fifteen years, but with a perfect left hand, asked, “How many keys will you be needing?”

  She thought of saying, “All of them.” She thought of saying, “None.”

  WHO’S IN THE UNOCCUPIED ROOM?

  By the time Jacob came back downstairs with the pot, Tamir had already turned an apple into a pipe, seemingly without tools.

  “Impressive,” Jacob said.

  “I am an impressive person.”

  “Well, you can certainly turn a piece of fruit into drug parapher
nalia.”

  “Still smells like pot,” Tamir said, opening the innermost bag. “That’s a good sign.”

  They cracked some windows and smoked in a silence broken only by Jacob’s humiliating coughing. They sat back. They waited.

  Somehow the station had changed to ESPN. Had the television achieved sentience and will? There was a documentary about the 1988 trade that sent Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the L.A. Kings—the effects it had on Gretzky, Edmonton, L.A., the sport of hockey, planet Earth, and the universe. What at any other time would have compelled Jacob to either smash his TV or blind himself was suddenly the happiest reprieve. Had Tamir put it on?

  They lost track of how much time passed—it could have been forty-five seconds or forty-five minutes. It mattered as little to them as it did to Isaac.

  “I feel good,” Jacob said, leaning as he’d been told to do at the Passover seders of his childhood, as befits a free man.

  “I feel very good,” Tamir said.

  “Just basically, fundamentally…good.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “But the thing is, my life isn’t good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, you know? Yeah, yours isn’t, either?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Childhood is good,” Jacob said, “the rest is pushing things around. If you’re lucky, you give a shit about the things. But it’s different only by degrees.”

  “But those degrees matter.”

  “Do they?”

  “If one thing matters, everything matters.”

  “That is a seriously good impersonation of wisdom.”

  “Lo mein matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets matter. The Boss matters.”

  “The Boss?”

  “Springsteen. A heated toilet seat matters. The small things: changing a lightbulb, losing to your child at basketball, driving nowhere. There’s your Great Flatness. And I could go on.”

  “Better still, do you think you could go back to the beginning and do that, exactly that, again, and I’ll record it?”

  “Chinese food matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets—”

  “I’m high.”

  “I’m looking at the chandelier from above.”