Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “I don’t know how I could be any more sorry for what I did,” he said.

  “You could start by telling me you’re sorry.”

  “I’ve apologized many times.”

  “No, many times you’ve told me that you’ve apologized. But you’ve never once apologized to me.”

  “I did that night in the kitchen.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “In bed.”

  “No.”

  “On the phone in the car, when you were at Model UN.”

  “You told me you’d apologized, but you didn’t apologize. I pay attention, Jacob. I remember. Exactly once, since I found the phone, did you say, ‘I’m sorry.’ When I told you your grandfather died. And you weren’t saying it to me. Or to anyone.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter if that’s the case—”

  “It is the case, and it does matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter if that’s the case, because if you don’t remember an apology, I obviously didn’t apologize fully enough. So hear me now: I’m so sorry, Julia. I’m ashamed, and I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not the texts.”

  The night Julia found the phone, she told Jacob, “You seem happy, but you aren’t.” And more: “You find unhappiness so threatening that you would rather go down with the ship than acknowledge a leak.” What if she wouldn’t go down with the ship? Because if it wasn’t the texts, then it was everything. What if, when Jacob closed himself in the unoccupied room, he closed Julia in the unoccupied house? What if the thing he needed to apologize for was everything?

  “Tell me,” he said, “just tell me, why are you going to destroy this family?”

  “Don’t you dare say that.”

  “But it’s true. You’re destroying our family.”

  “I’m not. I’m ending our marriage.”

  He couldn’t believe what she had just dared to say.

  “Ending our marriage will destroy our family.”

  “No. It won’t.”

  “Why? Why are you ending our marriage?”

  “Who have I been having all of those conversations with for the last three weeks?”

  “We were talking.”

  She let that reverberate for a moment, then said, “That’s why.”

  “Because we were talking?”

  “Because you’re always talking, and your words never mean anything. You hid your greatest secret behind a wall, remember that?”

  “No.”

  “Our wedding. I walked seven circles around you, and I surrounded you with love, for years I did, and the wall toppled. I toppled it. But you know what I discovered? Your greatest secret is that you’re wall all the way to the centermost stone. There is nothing there.”

  And now he had no choice: “I’m going to Israel, Julia.”

  And either because of the addition of her name, or a shift in his tone, or more likely because the conversation had reached the point of breakage, the sentence took on a new meaning—one that Julia believed.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said.

  “I have to.”

  “For whom?”

  “Our kids. And their kids.”

  “Our kids don’t have kids.”

  “But they will.”

  “So that’s the trade: lose a father, gain a kid?”

  “You said it yourself, Julia: they’re going to put me behind a computer.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You said they wouldn’t be dumb enough to give me a gun.”

  “No, I didn’t say that, either.”

  Jacob could hear the click of a lamp. A hotel? Mark’s apartment? How could he ask her where she was in a way that didn’t convey judgment or jealousy or imply that he was going to Israel to punish her for having gone to Mark’s?

  More than a thousand “constructed languages” have been invented—by linguists, novelists, hobbyists—each with the dream of correcting the imprecision, inefficiency, and irregularity of natural language. Some constructed languages are based on the musical scale and sung. Some are color-based and silent. The most admired constructed languages were designed to reveal what communication could be, and none of them is in use.

  “If you’re going to do this,” Julia said, “if you’re really going to do this, I need two things from you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’re going to go to Israel—”

  “I am.”

  “—you need to do two things for me.”

  “OK.”

  “Sam needs to have a bar mitzvah. You can’t leave without helping to see that through.”

  “OK. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

  “As in, today?”

  “Wednesday. And we’ll do it here.”

  “Does he even know his whole haftorah yet?”

  “He knows enough. We can invite whatever family can make it, whatever friends Sam wants. The Israelis are here. I can get ninety percent of what we need at Whole Foods. We’ll skip the accoutrements, obviously.”

  “My parents wouldn’t be able to be there.”

  “I’m sorry about that. We could skype with them?”

  “And we need a Torah. That’s not an accoutrement.”

  “Right. Shit. If Rabbi Singer won’t participate—”

  “He won’t.”

  “My dad can call in a favor from that shul in Georgetown. He knows a bunch of people there.”

  “You’ll take care of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. I can get the…And if I…” She trailed off into her interior plans, into that never-resting maternal lobe of her brain, the place that scheduled playdates two weeks out, and was vigilant about the food allergies of the kids’ friends, and always knew everyone’s shoe size, and needed no automated reminder to make appointments for biannual dental checkups, and kept track of the outflow of thank-you notes for birthday presents.

  “What’s the second thing?” Jacob asked.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “You said you needed me to do two things.”

  “You need to put down Argus.”

  “Put him down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s time, and because he’s yours.”

  When Jacob was a boy, he used to stop spinning globes with his finger and imagine what life would be like if he lived in the Netherlands, or Argentina, or China, or Sudan.

  When Jacob was a boy, he imagined that his finger brought the actual Earth to momentary rest. No one really noticed it, just as no one really noticed Earth’s rotation, but the sun stayed where it was in the sky, the ocean went flat, and photos fell from fridges.

  When Julia said those words—Because it’s time, and because he’s yours—her finger held his life in place.

  Because it’s time, and because he’s yours.

  The space where those clauses met was his home.

  But could he live there?

  At the last convention he attended, Jacob met two deaf parents and their eight-year-old deaf son. They’d recently moved to the States from England, the father explained, because the boy had been in a car accident and lost his left hand.

  “I’m sorry,” Jacob signed, making a ring around his heart with his fist.

  The mother touched four fingers to her bottom lip, then straightened her arm, arcing the fingers down—like blowing a kiss without the kiss.

  Jacob asked, “Are there better doctors here?”

  The mother signed, “British Sign Language uses both hands for finger spelling. American uses only one. He would have managed in England, but we want to give him every best chance.”

  The mother and boy went off to the crafts tent while Jacob and the father hung back. They spoke for an hour, in silence, displacing the air between them with the stories of their lives.

  Jacob had read of deaf couples who wanted deaf children. One couple even genetically selected for a deaf child. He found himself thinking about that quite often, the m
oral implications. Once they had shared enough for it not to feel like prying, Jacob asked the man how he felt when he learned that his son was deaf, like him.

  “People would ask me if I was hoping for a boy or a girl,” the father signed. “I told them I just wanted a healthy baby. But I had a very secret preference. Maybe you know that they don’t perform the hearing test until you’re about to leave the hospital?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It works by sending a sound into the ear—if it echoes back, the baby can hear. So they leave as much time as they can for the ear to drain of amniotic fluid.”

  “If the sound doesn’t echo back, the child is deaf?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where does the sound go?”

  “Into the deafness.”

  “So there was a period of not knowing?”

  “A day. For a day, he was neither deaf nor hearing. When the nurse told us that he was deaf, I cried and cried.”

  Jacob once again circled his heart with his fist.

  “No,” the father signed. “A hearing baby would have been a blessing. A deaf baby was a special blessing.”

  “It was your preference?”

  “My very secret preference.”

  “But what about giving him every best chance?”

  “Can I ask if you’re Jewish?” the man signed.

  The question was so unlikely, Jacob wasn’t sure he understood it correctly, but he nodded.

  “We’re Jewish as well.” Jacob felt that old, embarrassing, singularly comforting recognition. “Where are your people from?”

  “Everywhere. But mostly Drohobycz.”

  “We’re landsmen,” the father signed. He actually signed, “We’re from the same place,” but Jacob understood that his hands were speaking Yiddish.

  “It’s harder to be Jewish,” the father signed. “It doesn’t give you every best chance.”

  “It’s different,” Jacob signed.

  The man signed, “I once read a line in a poem: ‘You may find a dead bird; you won’t see a flock of them anywhere.’ ” The sign for flock is two hands moving like a wave away from the torso.

  Jacob returned home from the convention in time for Shabbat dinner. They lit the candles and blessed them. They blessed the wine and drank it. They uncovered the challah, blessed it, tore it, passed it, and ate it. The blessings disappeared into the universe’s deafness, but when Jacob and Julia whispered into their children’s tiny ears, the prayers echoed back. After the meal, Jacob and Julia and Sam and Max and Benjy closed their eyes and moved through their home.

  VI

  THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL

  COME HOME

  In the end, they didn’t need to rush the bar mitzvah—it took Tamir and Jacob eight days to find a way to Israel—but apparently there wasn’t enough time to put Argus down. Jacob spoke with a few compassionate vets, but also watched a few horrible YouTube videos. Even when euthanasia was clearly a “good” thing—a genuinely suffering animal being given a genuinely peaceful end—it was horrible. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t ready. Argus wasn’t ready. They weren’t ready.

  The embassy continued to be unhelpful, and commercial flights to Israel continued to be halted. So they looked into getting press certification, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders, flying to another country and reaching Israel by boat—all nonstarters.

  What changed their situation, and changed everything, was an internationally televised speech by Israel’s prime minister—a speech that he must have known, when writing it, would either be memorized by future Jewish schoolchildren or be etched into memorial walls.

  Looking directly into the camera, and directly into the Jewish souls of all Jews watching, he conveyed the unprecedented threat to Israel’s existence, and asked that Jews between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five “come home.”

  Airspace would be opened to incoming flights, and commercial jumbo jets, emptied of seats to hold more bodies, would be flown continuously from airfields near New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Moscow, and other major Jewish population centers.

  The planes weren’t fueled until just before takeoff, as no one knew, even approximately, how heavy they would be.

  TODAY I AM NOT A MAN

  “We need to have a family conversation,” Sam said. It was the night before his makeshift bar mitzvah. In twelve hours, catered food would begin to arrive. And not long after, the handful of cousins and friends who could make it on such short notice. Then manhood.

  Max and Benjy sat on Sam’s bed, their feet growing toward the floor, and Sam gave his ninety-two pounds to his beloved swivel chair—beloved because the range of motion made him feel capable, and beloved because it had been his dad’s. His desktop flickered with footage of an army moving across the Sinai.

  With parental gentleness, Sam recounted an age-appropriate version of what had happened with their father’s phone, and what he knew—from the snippets Max had overheard in the car, what Billie had witnessed and inferred at Model UN, and his own piecing together—of their mother’s relationship with Mark. (“I don’t get what’s the big deal,” Benjy said. “People kiss people all the time and it’s nice?”) Sam shared what Billie had overheard of their parents’ separation-conversation rehearsal (mortared with the results of Max’s snooping), as well as what Barak had been told of their fathers’ decision to go to Israel. Everyone knew that Jacob was lying when he said Julia had spent the night at a site visit, but they also sensed that he didn’t know where she’d actually been, so no one mentioned it.

  Sam often had fantasies of killing his brothers, but he also had fantasies of saving them. He’d felt the opposing pulls for as long as they’d been his brothers—with the same arms that cradled baby Benjy, he wanted to crush his rib cage—and the intensity of those coexisting impulses defined his brotherly love.

  But not now. Now he only wanted to cradle them. Now he felt no possessiveness, no diminishment at their gain, no scorching, referentless annoyance.

  When Sam reached the climax—“Everything is about to change”—Max started to cry. Reflexively, Sam wanted to say, “It’s funny, it’s funny,” but a yet stronger reflex prevailed, and he said, “I know, I know.” When Max started to cry, Benjy started to cry—like a reservoir that floods into an overflow reservoir, overflowing it. “It sucks,” Sam said. “But it’s all going to be OK. We just can’t let it happen.”

  Through his tears, Benjy said, “I don’t get it. Kissing is nice.”

  “What are we going to do?” Max asked.

  “They keep putting everything off until after my bar mitzvah. They’re going to tell us about their divorce after my bar mitzvah. Dad is going to move out after my bar mitzvah. And now he’s going to go to Israel after my bar mitzvah. So I’m not going to have a bar mitzvah.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Benjy said. “You’re smart.”

  “But they’ll just force you to,” Max said.

  “What are they gonna do? Pinch my nose until I expel my haftorah?”

  “Ground you.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Take away your screen time.”

  “Who cares?”

  “You do.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You could run away?” Benjy suggested.

  “Run away?” his brothers asked at the same time, and Max couldn’t resist calling, “Jinx!”

  “Sam, Sam, Sam,” Benjy said, relieving his brother of his imposed silence.

  “I can’t run away,” Sam said.

  “Just until the war ends,” Max said.

  “I wouldn’t leave you guys.”

  “And I would miss you,” Benjy said.

  When Jacob and Julia had shared the news that Sam and Max were going to get a little brother, Jacob made the mistake of suggesting the boys name him—a sweet idea that if carried out one hundred million times would never once produce an acceptable result. Max quickly settled on Ed the Hyena,
after Scar’s loyal henchman in The Lion King, assuming, presumably, that that’s what his new brother would be: his loyal henchman. Sam wanted to name him Foamy, because it was the third word his finger landed on when he was riffling through the dictionary—he’d promised to commit to the first word, whatever it was, but it was extortion, and the second was ambivalent. The problem wasn’t that the brothers disagreed, but that both were such terrific names—Ed the Hyena and Foamy. Great names that any human would be privileged to have and that would all but guarantee a cool life. They flipped a coin, and then did best out of three, then seven, and Julia, being Julia, gently folded the winning name into an origami bird that she released from an open window, but made the boys T-shirts with iron-on letters that read “Foamy’s Brother,” and, of course, a “Foamy” onesie. There was a photograph of the three of them in their Foamy-wear, asleep in the backseat of the Volvo that was christened Ed the Hyena as an easy-to-give concession to Max.

  Sam patted his knees, beckoning Benjy over, and said, “I’d miss you, too, Foamy.”

  “Who’s Foamy?” Benjy asked, climbing onto his brother.

  “You almost were.”

  Max found all of this too emotional to acknowledge or name. “If you run away, I’m coming, too.”

  “No one is running away,” Sam said.

  “Me, too,” Benjy said.

  “We need to stay,” Sam said.

  “Why?” they asked.

  “Jinx!”

  “Benjy, Benjy, Benjy.”

  Sam could have said, Because you need to be taken care of, and I can’t do that myself. Or, Because it’s only my bar mitzvah, so only I need to run from it. Or, Because life isn’t a Wes Anderson movie. But instead he said, “Because then our house would be completely empty.”

  “It should be,” Max said. “It deserves to be.”