Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “I still think we should call it Dad’s House,” Sam said.

  “But it’s not just my house. It’s our house.”

  “We can’t call it Our House,” Sam said, “because the other house is our house, too.”

  “Clock House?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Pompelmo House?”

  “Anonymous House?”

  “Dusty House?”

  “To be continued,” Julia said as she checked her phone for the time. “I’ve got to get these guys to haircuts.”

  “Right,” Jacob said, knowing the inevitable, and wanting to defer it, if only for another few minutes. “Does anyone want a snack or drink first?”

  “We’re going to be late,” Julia said. And then: “Everybody say ’bye to Argus.”

  “Later, Argus.”

  “Ciao, Argo.”

  “A good goodbye,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s his first night in the new house,” Jacob said.

  “New House?” Sam suggested.

  “Maybe,” Jacob said. “Although it won’t be new for long.”

  “We can change the name at that point,” Sam said.

  “Like the Old-New Synagogue in Prague,” Julia said.

  “Or move,” Benjy said.

  “No more moving,” Jacob said.

  “Gotta go,” Julia said to the kids.

  The kids said good goodbyes to Argus, and then Julia knelt down to be face-to-face with him. “Take care, hairy man.”

  She showed nothing, nothing that anyone but Jacob could see. But he could see. He couldn’t describe the giveaway—her face revealed nothing, her body revealed nothing, and there was nothing in her voice—but she gave it all away. He could only ever manage repression. She was capable of composure. And he was in awe of it. She did it for the kids. She did it for Argus. But how did she do it?

  “OK,” Jacob said.

  “OK,” Julia said.

  “I know what we should do,” Benjy said.

  “We should go,” Julia said.

  “No. We should walk around the house with our eyes closed. Like we used to do on Shabbat.”

  “How about next time you’re here?” Jacob said.

  Sam stepped forward, into the space of his adulthood: “Dad, we can do this for him.”

  And with that, Julia put down her bag. And Jacob took his hands from his pockets. No one watched anyone close their eyes, because that would have betrayed the spirit of the ritual. And no one peeked, because there was an instinct stronger than that instinct.

  It was fun at first; it was funny. The nostalgia was sweet and untinged. The kids bumped into things on purpose, and made boy noises, and laughed a lot. But then, without anyone intending it, or noticing the shift, a silence bloomed. No one stopped talking, but there was no more talking. No one suppressed a laugh, but there was no more laughing. It went on for a long time—it felt like a different amount of time to each—the five of them like ghosts, or explorers, or newborns. No one knew if anyone’s arms were extended for protection. No one knew if anyone crawled, or did leg sweeps for obstacles, or ran a finger against a wall that he kept to his right at all times. Julia’s foot touched the leg of a folding chair. Sam found a light switch, pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, searched for the place between off and on. Max felt a thrill as his hands explored the stovetop. Julia opened her eyes; they were greeted by Jacob’s open eyes.

  “I figured it out,” Benjy said, old enough to know that the world doesn’t disappear when you aren’t looking at it.

  “What did you figure out?” Julia asked from across the room, not betraying him by looking at him.

  “Wailing House.”

  —

  Jacob didn’t need anything when he made his final visit to IKEA. He’d just become so accustomed to IKEA satisfying his needs—hand towels for the top bathroom, a pot of lamb’s ears, freestanding acrylic picture frames—that he came to believe IKEA knew his needs better than he did, in the same way that he scheduled physicals because the doctor knew better than Jacob if Jacob was sick.

  He picked up a bright red step stool, a garlic press, three toilet brushes, a drying rack for laundry, a drying rack for dishes, half a dozen felt storage boxes that would be perfect for some still-unknown purpose, a level (despite never once, in the previous forty-two years, having had need of a level), a doormat, two letter trays, oven mitts, several glass jars with airtight seals for the storage (and attractive display) of things like beans and lentils and split peas and popcorn and quinoa and rice, more hangers, LED light strings to connect the corners of Benjy’s room, pedal bins for each bathroom, a crappy umbrella that wouldn’t survive two storms but would survive one. He was among the textiles, spreading his fingers in a faux sheepskin, when he heard his name.

  “Jacob?”

  He turned to face a quite beautiful woman: warm brown eyes like old leather; a gold locket that drew his gaze to the top of her tight, unmottled cleavage; bracelets halfway down her hands as if she’d once been bigger. What was in that locket? He knew her, or had known her.

  “Maggie,” she said. “Silliman.”

  “Hi, Maggie.”

  She smiled a smile to bring a thousand ships to harbor.

  “Dylan and Sam went to nursery school together. Leah and Melissa’s class.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “It’s been a decade,” she said kindly.

  “No, I remember.”

  “I thought I saw you. Way back in living rooms. But I lost you in the shuffle. And I wasn’t sure. But when I saw you here, I knew.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m so relieved you’re home.”

  “Oh, I don’t live here,” Jacob said, his reflexive flirtatiousness stimulating the thought that maybe she was the one whose husband had an aneurysm in the middle of the school year. “Just purchasing a few things for my actual home.”

  She didn’t laugh. She was visibly moved. Was she the one for whom Julia brought over all those dinners?

  “There was a list of everyone who went.”

  “Went?”

  “To Israel. They hung it outside the sanctuary.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said.

  “I never used to pray. Never. But I started going. A lot of people did. Most mornings the sanctuary was full. Anyway, I looked at it every day.”

  He thought, I can still tell the truth, but only now. After this, an awkward misunderstanding will be a lie that is worse than what it is concealing.

  “I had no idea,” he said.

  And there are smaller lies available (that I was turned back at the airport), and even half-truths (that there was a crisis at home that needed me even more than the crisis abroad).

  “There were two lists, actually: one with the names of those who went to fight, and one with the names of those who died. Everyone on the second list was on the first list, obviously.”

  “Well, it’s really nice to see you again,” Jacob said, hating the truth, hating the lie, and knowing nothing between.

  “They never took them down. Maybe they’re supposed to be some kind of memorial? Or maybe even though the war is over, it somehow isn’t?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In Israel. Were you in logistics? Infantry? I don’t know the terminology.”

  “I was in a tank unit.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Being in a tank must have been terrifying.”

  “Not as terrifying as being outside of one.”

  She didn’t laugh. She brought her fingers to her mouth and said, “You didn’t drive it, did you?”

  “No. That requires a lot of training and experience. I reloaded the ammunition.”

  “Sounds grueling.”

  “I guess it was.”

  “And did you see battle? Is that the right way to put it? Se
e battle?”

  “I don’t know how to put things, either. I was just a body. But yes, I saw battle. I imagine everyone did.”

  The sentence advanced, but his mind stayed back with I was just a body.

  “Did you ever feel that you were in grave danger?”

  “I don’t know that I was feeling much of anything. It might sound clichéd, but there wasn’t time to be afraid.”

  Without looking down, she took the locket between her thumb and forefinger. Her hand knew exactly where it would be.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m asking too much.”

  “No, that’s not it,” he said, seizing her offer of regret as an escape route. “I just have to get out of here in time to pick up Sam.”

  “Is he well?”

  “He’s doing great. Thank you for asking. And—?”

  “Dylan.”

  “Of course.”

  “Dylan is having a hard time.”

  “Oh no. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Maybe,” she began, but then shook the thought away.

  “What?”

  “I was just going to say, maybe if it’s not too much to ask, you could come by sometime.”

  “I’m sure Sam would like that.”

  “No,” she said, a vein in her neck suddenly visible, or suddenly noticed. “You. I meant you.”

  Jacob no longer understood. Could she be as brazen as she sounded? Or was she mistaking him for a parent who was a child psychologist, as he’d mistaken her for the wife of an aneurysm victim? He was attracted to her, he wanted her, but this couldn’t go any further.

  “Sure,” he said. “I could come by.”

  “Maybe if you shared some of your experiences, it would make things less abstract for him. Less scary. I think part of what’s so hard right now is not having any details.”

  “That makes sense.”

  Although it didn’t.

  “It wouldn’t have to take a lot of your time. I’m not asking you to take him on or anything.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it.”

  “You’re a good man,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he said.

  And then, finally, she laughed. “Well, I suppose only you know for sure. But you seem good.”

  Once, Benjy called Jacob back into his room after tuck-in and asked, “Are there things that don’t have names?”

  “Sure,” Jacob said, “lots of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this headboard.”

  “It’s called headboard.”

  “Headboard is what it is. But it doesn’t have its own name.”

  “True.”

  “Good night, love.”

  “Let’s give them names.”

  “That was the first man’s first job, you know.”

  “Huh?”

  “Adam. From Adam and Eve. God told him to name the animals.”

  “We named Argus.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But the first man was a monkey, right? So did he name himself?”

  “Could be.”

  “I want to name everything.”

  “That would be a lot of work.”

  “So?”

  “OK. But starting tomorrow.”

  “OK.”

  Jacob went to the threshold and waited, as he always did, and Benjy called him back, as he always did.

  “Yes?”

  “Are there names that don’t have things?”

  Names like the names on the gravestones in the suicide ghetto. Names like the names on the memorial wall, which Jacob had rearranged into words. Names like the names in his never-to-be-shared show. Jacob had written thousands and thousands of pages about his life, but it wasn’t until that moment, her pulse visible in her neck, his choice finally visible, that he questioned if he was worthy of a word.

  “OK,” she said, and smiled, and nodded, and took a half step away. “Please say hello to Julia for me.”

  “I will,” Jacob said.

  He left the overflowing cartful of things where it was, followed the arrows back through LIVING ROOM, WORK SPACE, KITCHEN, DINING, and BEDROOM to the parking lot. He drove straight to the synagogue. Indeed, the lists were still there. But his name wasn’t among those who had gone. He double- and triple-checked.

  So what had just happened?

  Had she misremembered?

  Or maybe she had seen the Islip photograph in the newspaper and was remembering his image when she thought she was remembering his name?

  Maybe she was giving Jacob the benefit of the doubt?

  Maybe she knew everything and was destroying the life he’d saved?

  With the hand that had cut three umbilical cords, he touched the names of the dead.

  “Only you know for sure,” she had said.

  —

  There were dozens of veterinarians far closer than Gaithersburg, Maryland, that he hadn’t consulted—it felt essential to go to someone they hadn’t seen, for both Argus’s sake and Jacob’s—but he needed to create some distance from home.

  On the way there, he took Argus to a rest-stop McDonald’s. He brought the food to a grassy hill beside the lot, and tried to feed Argus McNuggets, but Argus just turned away. Jacob kept stroking him under the chin, as he liked.

  Life is precious, Jacob thought. It is the most important of all thoughts, and the most obvious, and the most difficult to remember to have. He thought: How different my life would have been if I could have had that thought before I was forced to.

  They drove with the windows halfway down, Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History: Blueprint for Armageddon II” blaring. In the context of an argument Carlin was making about the significance of World War I, he spoke about a concept called the Great Filter—the moment at which a civilization becomes capable of destroying itself. Many mark 1945, and the use of nuclear weapons, as humanity’s Great Filter. Carlin argued it was 1914, with the worldwide proliferation of mechanized warfare. He then digressed a bit, as was his genius, to Fermi’s paradox. During a lunch break at Los Alamos, in 1950, a handful of the world’s greatest physicists were joking about a recent spate of UFO sightings. Taking the matter ironically-seriously, they unfolded a paper napkin and tried to calculate the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere. Assume there are 1024 stars in the observable universe—ten thousand stars for every grain of sand on Earth. Using the most conservative estimates, there are approximately one hundred billion billion Earth-like planets—one hundred for each grain of sand on Earth. If, after billions of years in existence, one percent of those developed life, and one percent of those developed intelligent life, there should be ten million billion intelligent civilizations in the universe—one hundred thousand just in our galaxy. Clearly we are not alone.

  But then Enrico Fermi, the most celebrated and brilliant physicist at the table, spoke for the first time: “So where is everybody?” If they ought to be there, and they aren’t there, why aren’t they there? Clearly we are alone.

  There are many responses to this paradox: that there’s plenty of intelligent life in the universe, just no way of knowing about it because we’re too far from one another for any messages to reach; that humans aren’t listening properly; that other life is too alien to recognize, or to recognize us; that everyone is listening and no one adequately transmitting. Each of these struck Jacob as unbearably poetic: we’re too far for messages to reach; we aren’t listening properly; no one is adequately transmitting. Then Carlin returned to the notion of the Great Filter. At a certain point, every civilization will become capable of destroying itself (on purpose, or by accident), and face a kind of pass/fail test—whether it is possible to have the ability to commit suicide, and not commit suicide.

  When did Isaac reach his Great Filter?

  When did Israel?

  When did Jacob and Julia’s marriage?

  When did Jacob?

  He parked the car and walked Argus to the clinic door. No leash necessary an
ymore. Argus wasn’t going anywhere. And yet Jacob wished he’d had a leash then, so it wouldn’t feel like Argus was unknowingly walking himself to his own end. It would have been horrible to lead him there, but less horrible.

  The place was called Hope Clinic. Somehow Jacob had forgotten that, or never bothered to know it. It reminded him of a Kafka quote: “Oh, there is hope, an infinite amount of hope, just not for us.” Just not for you, Argus.

  They went to the reception desk.

  “This is a checkup?” the secretary asked.

  “Yes,” Jacob responded.

  He just couldn’t. He wasn’t ready. He’d have another chance with the vet.

  Jacob browsed a magazine without focusing his eyes. He remembered the first time one of his kids called him out for looking at his phone instead of at them.

  “That’s my boy,” he said to Argus, scratching under his chin. Had he ever called him his boy before?

  The tech came and led them to an examination room in the back. The vet took forever, and Jacob offered Argus treats from the glass jar on the counter. But Argus just turned away.

  “You’re good,” Jacob told him, trying to be as calming as Max had been. “You’re so good.”

  We live in the world, Jacob thought. That thought always seemed to insert itself, usually in opposition to the word ideally. Ideally, we would make sandwiches at homeless shelters every weekend, and learn instruments late in life, and stop thinking about the middle of life as late in life, and use some mental resource other than Google, and some physical resource other than Amazon, and permanently retire mac and cheese, and give at least a quarter of the time and attention to aging relatives that they deserve, and never put a child in front of a screen. But we live in the world, and in the world there’s soccer practice, and speech therapy, and grocery shopping, and homework, and keeping the house respectably clean, and money, and moods, and fatigue, and also we’re only human, and humans not only need but deserve things like time with a coffee and the paper, and seeing friends, and taking breathers, so as nice as that idea is, there’s just no way we can make it happen. Ought to, but can’t.