Here I Am (10 page)

Sam knew that everything would collapse, he just didn't know exactly how or when. His parents were going to get divorced and ultimately hate each other and spread destruction like that Japanese reactor. That much was clear, if not to them. He tried not to notice their lives, but it was impossible to ignore how often his dad fell asleep in front of the absence of news, how often his mom retreated into pruning the trees of her architectural models, how his dad started serving dessert every night, how his mom told Argus she “needed space” whenever he licked her, how devoted his mom had become to the Travel section, how his dad's search history was all real estate sites, how his mom would put Benjy on her lap whenever his dad was in the room, the violence with which his dad began to hate
spoiled
athletes who
don't even try
, how his mom gave three thousand dollars to the fall NPR drive, how his dad bought a Vespa in retaliation, the end of appetizers in restaurants, the end of the third bedtime story for Benjy, the end of eye contact.

He saw what they either couldn't see or couldn't allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one's parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice. Because he was less stupid than his parents, he knew it would one day be suggested to him that he wouldn't have to choose, even though he would. He knew he would begin to lose the desire or ability to fake it in school, and his grades would roll down an inclined plane according to some formula he was supposed to be proficient with, and the expressions of his parents' love would inflate in response to their sadness
about his sadness, and he would be rewarded for falling apart. His parents' guilt about asking so much of him would get him off the hook for organized sports, and he'd be able to favorably renegotiate his screen time, and dinners would start to look a lot less organic, and soon enough he'd be steering toward the iceberg while his parents played dueling violins at each other.

He loved interesting facts, but was almost always troubled by his strange recurrent thoughts. Like this one: What if he witnessed a miracle? How would he convince anyone that he wasn't joking? If a newborn told him a secret? If a tree walked away? If he met his older self and learned about all the avoidable catastrophic mistakes he would be unable to avoid? He imagined his conversations with his mom, with his dad, with fake friends at school, with real friends in Other Life. Most of them would just laugh. Maybe one or two could be nudged to a gesture of belief. Max would at least want to believe him. Benjy would believe him, but only because he believed everything. Billie? No. Sam would be alone with a miracle.

There was a knock on his door. Not the sanctuary door, but his bedroom door.

“Scram, fucker.”

“Excuse me?” his mom said, opening and entering.

“Sorry,” Sam said, flipping the iPad facedown on his desk. “I thought you were Max.”

“And you think that's a good way to talk to your brother?”

“No.”

“Or to anybody?”

“No.”

“So why?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe take a moment to question yourself.”

He didn't know if the suggestion was rhetorical, but he knew this wasn't the time to take her anything less than literally.

After a moment of questioning himself, the best he could muster was “I guess I'm someone who says things he knows he shouldn't say.”

“I guess so.”

“But I'll get better at that.”

She scanned the room. God, did he hate her little stolen surveys: of his homework, his belongings, his appearance. Her constant judgment carved through him like a river, creating two shores.

“What have you been doing up here?”

“Not e-mailing, or texting, or playing Other Life.”

“OK, but what
have
you been doing?”

“I don't really know.”

“I'm not sure how that could be possible.”

“Isn't this your day off?”

“No, it's not my day
off
. It's my day to get some things done that I've been
putting
off. Like breathing and thinking. But then we had to make an unscheduled visit to Adas Israel this morning, as you might remember, and then I had to meet with a client—”

“Why did you have to?”

“Because it's my job.”

“But why today?”

“I felt that I had to, OK?”

“OK.”

“And then in the car it occurred to me that even though you have almost certainly thwarted it, we should probably continue to act as if your bar mitzvah is going to happen. And among the many, many things that only I would remember to remember is your suit.”

“What suit?”

“Exactly.”

“It's true. I don't have a suit.”

“Obvious once stated, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“I continually find it amazing how many things are like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Why are
you
apologizing?”

“I don't know.”

“So, we need to get you a suit.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“The first three places we go aren't going to have what we need, and should we find something passable, it's not going to fit, and the tailor is going to get it wrong twice.”

“Do I have to be there?”

“Where?”

“The suit place.”

“No, no, of course you don't have to be there. Let's make things easy and build our own 3-D printer out of popsicle sticks and macaroni, and render a perfectly accurate anatomical model of you that I can schlep to the
suit place
alone on my day off.”

“Could we teach it my haftorah?”

“I'm not laughing at your jokes right now.”

“That didn't require saying.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don't have to say you aren't laughing for someone to know you aren't laughing.”

“That didn't require saying, either, Sam.”

“Fine. Sorry.”

“We're going to have to talk when Dad comes home from his meeting, but I need to say something. It is
required
.”

“Fine.”

“Stop saying ‘fine.' ”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying ‘sorry.' ”

“I thought the whole point was that I was supposed to be apologizing?”

“For what you did.”

“But I
didn't—
”

“I'm very disappointed in you.”

“I know.”

“That's it? You don't have anything else to say? Like maybe, ‘I did it and I'm sorry'?”

“I didn't do it.”

She put her hands on her waist, forefingers through belt loops.

“Clean up this mess. It's disgusting.”

“It's my room.”

“But it's our house.”

“I can't move that board. We're only halfway done with the game. Dad said we could finish after I'm not in trouble anymore.”

“You know why you always beat him?”

“Because he lets me win.”

“He hasn't let you win in years.”

“He goes easy.”

“He doesn't. You beat him because it excites him to capture pieces,
but you're always thinking four moves ahead. It makes you good at chess, and it makes you good at life.”

“I'm not good at life.”

“You are when you're thoughtful.”

“Is Dad bad at life?”

“That's not the conversation we're having right now.”

“If he focused, he could beat me.”

“That might very well be true, but we'll never know.”

“What conversation
are
we having?”

She took the phone from her pocket. “What is this?”

“That's a cellular telephone.”

“Is it yours?”

“I'm not allowed to have a smartphone.”

“Which is why it would upset me if it were yours.”

“So you don't need to be upset.”

“Whose is it?”

“No idea.”

“Phones aren't like dinosaur bones. They don't just show up.”

“Dinosaur bones aren't like that, either.”

“If I were you, I'd tone down the intelligence.” She turned the phone over. And over. “How do I look through it?”

“I assume it has a password.”

“It does.”

“So you're out of luck.”

“I might as well try
this2shallpass
, right?”

“I guess.”

Every adult member of the Bloch family used that ridiculous password for everything—from Amazon to Netflix to home alarm systems to phones.

“Nope,” she said, showing Sam the screen.

“Worth a shot.”

“Should I take it to the store, or something?”

“They don't even open the phones of terrorists.”

“Maybe I'll try the same password, but with caps.”

“You could.”

“How do you capitalize a letter?”

Sam took the phone. He typed like rain hitting a skylight, but Julia saw only the disfigured thumb, and in slow motion.

“Nope,” he said.

“Try spelling it out.”

“What?”

“T-o-o.”

“That would be pretty stupid.”

“It would be brilliant compared with using the same password that's used for everything.”

“T-h-i-s-t-o-o-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s
…Nope. Sorry. I mean, I'm not sorry.”

“Try spelling it out and capitalizing the first letter.”

“Huh?”

“Capital
T
, and
t-w-o
for the numeral.”

This he typed more slowly, carefully. “Hm.”

“It's open?”

She reached to take the phone, but he held it for just a fraction of a second, enough to create an awkward stutter. Sam looked at his mother. Her enormous, ancient thumb pushed words up the tiny glass mountain. She looked at Sam.

“What?” he asked.

“What what?”

“Why are you looking at me?”

“Why am I looking at you?”

“Like that?”

Jacob couldn't fall asleep without a podcast. He said the information soothed him, but Julia knew it was the company. She was usually asleep by the time he came to bed—unacknowledged choreography—but every now and then she'd find herself listening alone. One night, her husband snoring beside her, she heard a sleep scientist explain lucid dreaming—a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. The most common technique for bringing on a lucid dream is to get in the habit, in waking life, of looking at texts—a page of a book or magazine, a billboard, a screen—and then looking away, and looking back. In dreams, texts don't remain constant. If you exercise the habit, it becomes a reflex. And if you exercise the reflex, it slips into dreams. The discontinuity of the text will indicate that you're dreaming, at which point you will not only be aware, but also in control.

She looked away from the phone, and looked back.

“I know you don't
play
Other Life. What is it you do?”

“Huh?”

“What's the word for what you do?”

“Live?” he said, trying to understand the change that was coming over his mother's face.

“I mean in Other Life.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You
live
Other Life?”

“I don't usually have to describe what I'm doing there, but sure.”

“You can live Other Life.”

“Right.”

“No, I mean you are allowed to.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I was grounded.”

“You are,” she said, putting the phone in her pocket. “But you can live that now, if you want.”

“We can go get the suit.”

“Another day. There's time.”

Sam looked away from his mother, and looked back.

He'd checked all the devices. He wasn't angry, he just wanted to say what needed to be said, and then flatten the synagogue to rubble. It didn't fit, wasn't home. He'd wired everything double-redundantly, and placed three times as many explosives as were necessary: under each pew, out of sight atop the bookshelf that held the siddurim, buried beneath the hundreds of yarmulkes in their waist-high, octagonal wooden container.

Samanta removed the Torah from the ark. She chanted some memorized nonsense, undressed the Torah, and spread it out in front of her on the bimah. All of those beautiful pitch-black letters. All of those beautiful minimalist sentences, combining to tell all of those beautiful, endlessly echoing stories that should have been lost to history and still might be. The detonator was inside the Torah pointer. Samanta grasped it, found her place on the scroll, and started to chant.