Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “Is it dusty?” Jacob asked.

  “Another person would ask if it was beautiful.”

  “People shouldn’t be allowed to get married until it’s too late to have kids.”

  “Maybe you could get enough signatures to make that happen.”

  “And having a gratifying career is impossible.”

  “For anyone?”

  “For good fathers. But it’s so hard to deviate. All these fucking Jewish nails driven through my palms.”

  “Jewish nails?”

  “Expectations. Prescriptions. Commandments. Wanting to please everyone. And the rest of them.”

  “Them?”

  “Did you ever have to read that poem, or journal entry, or whatever, by the kid who died in Auschwitz? Or maybe Treblinka? Not really the important detail, I just…The one about ‘Next time you throw a ball, throw it for me’?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Consider yourself lucky. Anyway, I might not be getting it exactly right, but the gist is: don’t mourn for me, live for me. I’m about to get gassed, so do me a favor and have fun.”

  “Never heard it.”

  “I must have heard it a thousand times. It was the theme song of my Jewish education, and it ruined everything. Not because every time you throw a ball you’re thinking of the corpse of a kid who should have been you, but because sometimes you just want to veg out in front of shitty TV, and instead you think, ‘I should really go throw a ball.’ ”

  Tamir laughed.

  “It’s funny, except that throwing a ball becomes an attitude toward academic achievement, becomes measuring the distance from perfection in units of failure, becomes going to a college that murdered kid would have killed to go to, becomes studying things you aren’t interested in but are good and worthy and remunerative, becomes getting married Jewishly and having Jewish kids and living Jewishly in some demented effort to redeem the suffering that made your increasingly alienating life possible.”

  “You should smoke a bit more.”

  “The problem is,” Jacob said, taking back the apple, “the fulfillment of the expectations feels amazing, but you only fulfill them once—‘I got an A!’ ‘I’m getting married!’ ‘It’s a boy!’—and then you’re left to experience them. Nobody knows it at the time, and everybody knows it later, but nobody admits it, because it would pull a foundational log from the Jewish tower of Jenga. You trade emotional ambition for companionship, a life of inhabiting a nerve-filled body for companionship, exploration for companionship. There’s a good in commitment, I know. Things have to grow over time, mature, become full. But there’s a price, and just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s endurable. So many blessings, but did anyone ever stop to ask why one would want a blessing?”

  “Blessings are just curses that other people envy.”

  “You should smoke more pot, Tamir. It turns you into fucking Yoda, or at least Deepak Chopra.”

  “Maybe it allows you to listen differently.”

  “You see! That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “You’re becoming funny,” Tamir said, bringing the apple to his mouth.

  “I was always funny.”

  “So maybe I’m the one listening differently.”

  Tamir took another hit.

  “What was Julia’s reaction? To the texts?”

  “Not good. Obviously.”

  “You’ll stay together?”

  “Yeah. Of course. We have the kids. And we’ve had a life together.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I mean, we’ve talked about separating.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Jacob took another hit.

  “Have I ever told you about my TV show?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, I mean my TV show.”

  “I’m high, Jacob. Pretend I’m a six-year-old.”

  “I’ve been writing a show about us.”

  “You and me?”

  “Well, no, not you. Or not yet.”

  “I’d be great in a TV show.”

  “My family.”

  “I’m in your family.”

  “My family here. Isaac. My parents. Julia and the kids.”

  “Who would want to watch that?”

  “Everybody, probably. But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s probably really good, and probably the writing I was born to do, and for the last ten or so years I’ve been pretty singularly devoted to it.”

  “Ten years?”

  “And I’ve never shared it with anyone.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, before Isaac died, it was because I was afraid of betraying him.”

  “With?”

  “With the truth of who we are, and what we’re like.”

  “How would that be a betrayal?”

  “I was listening to the radio the other morning, a science podcast I like. They were interviewing a woman who’d lived in that massive geodesic dome for two years—nothing goes in, nothing goes out. That one. It was pretty interesting.”

  “Let’s listen to it now.”

  “No, I’m just searching for a metaphor.”

  “It would make me so happy to listen to it right now.”

  “I can’t even tell if you’re serious or making fun of me.”

  “Please, Jacob.”

  “I still can’t tell. But anyway, she talked about how living in that closed environment made her aware of the interconnectedness of life: this thing eats this thing, then poops, which feeds this thing, which blah blah blah. Then she went on to talk about something I already knew—not because I’m so fucking smart, but because it’s just one of those things that most people know—that with every inhalation, you are likely breathing in molecules that were breathed out by Pol Pot, or Caesar, or even the dinosaurs. I could be wrong about that dinosaur bit. I’ve found myself really interested in dinosaurs recently. I don’t know why. I spent about thirty years not thinking about them at all, and then suddenly I was interested again. I heard, in another podcast—”

  “You listen to a lot of podcasts.”

  “I know. I really do. It’s embarrassing, right?”

  “You’re asking me if you’re embarrassed?”

  “It’s humiliating.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “What kind of person sneaks off to unoccupied rooms and presses an almost-muted phone to his ear so that he, and only he, will hear a putterer’s exploration of something as irrelevant as echolocation. It’s humiliating. And the humiliation is humiliating.” With his beer bottle, Jacob drew a ring of condensation on the table. “Anyway, this other podcast did this whole thing about how all the dinosaurs—not just most of them, but all of them—were destroyed at once. They roamed the earth for some large number of millions of years, and then, in something like an hour, gone. Why do people always use the word roam when referring to dinosaurs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They do, though. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s weird.”

  “It is.”

  “So weird, right?”

  “The more I think about it, the weirder it becomes.”

  “Jews roamed Europe for thousands of years…”

  “And then, in something like a decade…”

  “But I was saying something else. About the dome woman…dinosaurs…maybe Pol Pot?”

  “Breathing.”

  “Right! With each inhalation we take in molecules yada yada. Anyway, my eyes started to roll, because it just sounded like trite cocktail science shit. But then she went further, to say that our exhalations are just as certainly going to be inhaled by our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.”

  “And future dinosaurs.”

  “And future Pol Pots.”

  They laughed.

  “But it really upset me, for some reason. I didn’t start crying or anything. I didn’t have to pull ove
r. But I did have to turn off the podcast. It suddenly became too much.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “Why do I think at all?”

  “No. Why do you think it upset you to imagine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren breathing your breath?”

  Jacob released a breath that would be inhaled by the last of his line.

  “Try,” Tamir said.

  “I guess”—another breath—“I guess I was raised to understand that I’m not worthy of all that came before me. But no one ever prepared me for the knowledge that I’m not worthy of all that will come after me, either.”

  Tamir lifted the apple from the table, held it so that the chandelier light passed straight through its cored center, and said, “I want to fuck this apple.”

  “What?”

  “But my cock is too big,” he said. And then, trying to push his hairy-knuckled forefinger into it: “I can’t even finger-fuck it.”

  “Put the apple down, Tamir.”

  “It’s the Apple of Truth,” Tamir said, ignoring Jacob. “And I want to fuck it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You want to fuck the Apple of Truth, but your cock is too big?”

  “Yes. That is exactly the predicament.”

  “The present predicament? Or the predicament of life?”

  “Both.”

  “You’re high.”

  “So are you.”

  “The scientist who was talking about the dinosaurs—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That podcast. The scientist said something so beautiful I thought I would die.”

  “Don’t die.”

  “He asked the listener to imagine a bullet being fired through water, and how it would leave a conical wake of emptiness behind it—a hole in the water—before the water had time to come back together. He said that an asteroid would create a similar wake—a rip in the atmosphere—and that a dinosaur looking at the asteroid would see a nighttime hole in a daytime sky. That’s what he would see just before being destroyed.”

  “Maybe it’s not that you wanted to die, but that you became like the dinosaur.”

  “Huh?”

  “It saw something incredibly beautiful before it was destroyed. You heard about it, and thought it was incredibly beautiful, and so assumed you would be destroyed.”

  “They give MacArthurs to all the wrong people.”

  “I lied.”

  “About what?”

  “Most things.”

  “OK?”

  “Rivka and I have been talking about moving.”

  “Really?”

  “Talking.”

  “Moving where?”

  “You’re going to make me say it?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Here.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Just talking. Just thinking about it. I get job offers every now and then, and a month ago I got a really good one, a great one, with a tech firm. Rivka and I were playing make-believe at the dinner table, imagining what it would be like if I took the job, and then the conversation stopped being make-believe.”

  “I thought you were happy there? And all that shit about renting a room in America?”

  “Did you hear anything I said before?”

  “When you were begging me to make aliyah?”

  “So I can make hayila.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Aliyah backward.”

  “You just did that in your head?”

  “While you were talking.”

  “And what, there’s some sort of Bloch-Blumenberg Constant that has to be maintained?”

  “A Jew Constant. Ideally, American Jews and Israeli Jews would just switch places.”

  “Is this what we were talking about the whole time? Your guilt about leaving Israel?”

  “No, we were talking about your guilt about leaving your marriage.”

  “I’m not leaving my marriage,” Jacob said.

  “And I’m not leaving Israel,” Tamir said.

  “All just talk?”

  “Whenever I would turn down an offer of my father’s—for another piece of halvah, an evening walk—he’d say, ‘De zelbe prayz.’ Same price. It was the only time he used Yiddish. He hated Yiddish. But he’d say that. And not only in Yiddish, he’d imitate my grandfather’s voice. It doesn’t cost me anything to talk about leaving Israel. Same price as not talking about it. I can really hear my father imitating my grandfather: de zelbe prayz.”

  Tamir woke up his phone and showed Jacob pictures of Noam: from the hospital, first steps, first day of school, first soccer game, first date, first time in his army uniform. “I’ve been obsessed with these pictures,” Tamir said. “Not with looking at them, but seeing that they’re still there. Sometimes I check under the table. Sometimes I go to the bathroom to do it. Remember going to the supermarket with your kids when they were small? That feeling that the second they were out of your sight, they would disappear forever? It’s like that.”

  All the dinosaurs were wiped out, but some mammals survived. Most of them were burrowers. Underground, they were protected from the heat that consumed every living thing aboveground. Tamir was burying himself in his phone, in the photos of his son.

  “Are we good men?” Tamir asked.

  “What a strange question.”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t think there’s any higher power judging us,” Jacob said.

  “But how should we judge ourselves?”

  “With tears, with silence, with—?”

  “Even my confession was a lie.”

  “I must have given you reasons to lie.”

  “I want to leave. Rivka doesn’t.”

  “You want to leave Israel? Or you want to leave your marriage?”

  “Israel.”

  “Did you have an affair?”

  “No.”

  “Did she?”

  “No.”

  “I’m always tired,” Jacob said. “Always exhausted. I’ve never wondered about it before, but what if this whole time I haven’t been tired at all? What if my tiredness is just a hiding place?”

  “There are worse hiding places.”

  “And what if I decided that I would never be tired again? If I simply refused to be tired. My body could be tired, but not me.”

  “I don’t know, Jacob.”

  “Or what if I can’t get out of my hiding place on my own? If it’s too familiar, too safe? And I need to be smoked out?”

  “I think you’re smoking yourself out right now.”

  “What if I need Julia to smoke me out?”

  Jacob looked at the apple between them. He understood what Tamir meant, about wanting to fuck it. It wasn’t a sexual longing, but an existential one—to enter one’s truth.

  “You know what I’d like to do right now?”

  “What?” Tamir asked.

  “Shave my head.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can see how bald I really am. And so everyone can see.”

  “What if we made some popcorn instead?”

  “It would be awful. But I’m ready for it. But it would be awful. But I’m ready for it.”

  “You keep saying the same thing over and over.”

  “I think I’m falling asleep.”

  “So sleep.”

  “But…”

  “What?”

  “I’ve also been lying.”

  “I know that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. I just don’t know which parts.”

  “I didn’t have an affair.”

  “No?”

  “Or I did, but I didn’t fuck her.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Just a bunch of texts. And not even that many.”

  “Why did you lie about it?”

  “Because I didn’t want to get caught.”

  “To me.”

  “
Oh. I don’t know.”

  “There was a reason.”

  “I’m high.”

  “But it’s the only thing you lied about.”

  “When Julia found my phone and I told her the truth—that nothing actually happened—she believed me.”

  “That’s good.”

  “But it wasn’t that she trusted me. She said she knew I wasn’t capable of it.”

  “And you wanted me to think you were capable of it.”

  “That’s my interpretation of myself, yes.”

  “Even though you aren’t capable of it.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “You asked before, what kind of person sneaks around to listen to science podcasts?”

  “Yes.”

  “The kind of person who uses the same phone to sext a woman he won’t touch.”

  “It was a different phone.”

  “It was the same hand.”

  “So now you’ve shaved my head,” Jacob said, closing his eyes. “Tell me what I can’t see.”

  “You’re balder than I thought, and less bald than you think.”

  Jacob felt the reflexive jerking, the fall down the elevator shaft that marked the onset of sleep. He couldn’t account for the passage of time, or movement between thoughts, or stretches without thought.

  What would happen to the sound of time? If all that he and Julia had rehearsed were performed? If it weren’t the same price to explore an idea? No more candlelit whispering into the boys’ ears. No more dishwashing musings about that afternoon’s birthday party. No more scrape of the rake as the leaves were pulled against the curb so they could be jumped into just one last time. What would he listen for to hear his life? Or would he be deaf to it?

  The next thing he was aware of was a hand, a voice. “There’s news,” Tamir said, shaking Jacob by the forearm.

  “What?”

  “You were asleep.”

  “No. I wasn’t. I was just thinking.”

  “There’s something big on the news.”

  “Gimme a second.”

  Jacob blinked away the glazing, rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, and walked to the sofa.

  Two hours earlier, while Jacob and Tamir were getting stoned, some Israeli extremists entered the Dome of the Rock and set it on fire. The flames caused hardly any damage, the Israelis claimed, but the effort caused more than enough. The television, which had somehow switched from ESPN to CNN, showed images of rage: men—always men—punching the sky, shooting broken rivers of bullets at the sky, trying to kill the sky. Jacob had seen this before, but the images had always come from the vicinity of the quake, primarily Gaza and the West Bank. Now, however, CNN was bouncing from feed to feed, with a seemingly endless supply of fury: a circle of men burning an Israeli flag in Jakarta; men in Khartoum swinging sticks at an effigy of the Israeli prime minister; men in Karachi, and Dhaka, and Riyadh, and Lahore; men with bandanas over their mouths smashing a Jewish storefront in Paris; a man, whose accent was so thick it’s unlikely he knew one hundred words of English, screaming, “Death to Jews!” into a camera in Tehran.