Here I Am (28 page)

“What about Noam?” Jacob asked.

“What about him?”

“Where is he now?”

“This moment?” Tamir said. “As we speak? I have no idea. Keeping fathers informed is not of national importance.”

“When you last spoke with him?”

“Hebron. But I'm sure they were evacuated.”

“By helicopter?”

“I don't know, Jacob. How would I know?”

“And Yael?”

“She's fine. She's in Auschwitz.”

Boom shakalaka!

“What?”

“School trip.”

They drove the George Washington Parkway in silence, AC battling the humidity that seeped through the invisible points of entry, small talk between Jacob and Irv battling the awkward silence that pressed against the windows—past Gravelly Point, where aviation buffs holding radio scanners, and fathers holding sons, could almost reach up and touch the landing gears of jumbo jets; the Capitol on the right, across the brown Potomac; the inevitable explanation of why the Washington Monument changes shades of white one-third of the way up. They crossed Memorial Bridge, between the golden horses, circled around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial, the steps that seemed to lead to nothing, and slid into the flow of Rock Creek Parkway. After passing under the terrace of the Kennedy Center and beside the teeth of the Watergate balconies, they followed the curves of the creek away from the outposts of the capital's civilization.

“The zoo,” Tamir said, looking up from his phone.

“The zoo,” Jacob echoed.

Irv leaned forward: “You know, our favorite primates, Benjy and Deborah, are probably there right now.”

The zoo was at the epicenter of Tamir and Jacob's friendship, their familialship; it marked the threshold between their youth and adulthood. And it was at the epicenter of Jacob's life. Jacob's mind often traveled to his own deathbed scene, especially when he felt that he was wasting his life. What moments, in his final moments, would he return to? He would
remember arriving at the inn with Julia—both times. He would remember carrying Sam into the house after the ER, the tiny hand mummified in layers and layers of bandaging, cartoonishly large: the biggest, most useless fist in the world. He would remember the night at the zoo.

He wondered if Tamir ever thought about it, if he was thinking about it then.

And then Tamir let out a deep, subterranean laugh.

“What's funny?” Jacob asked.

“Me. This feeling.”

“What feeling?”

He laughed again—his greatest performance yet?

“Jealousy.”

“
Jealousy
? That's not what I was expecting you to say.”

“It's not what I was expecting to feel. That's why it's funny.”

“I don't understand.”

“Noam will finally have better stories than me. I'm jealous. But it's good. It's as it should be.”

“As it should be?”

“Having better stories.”

Irv said, “Maybe you should call?”

Jacob said, “ ‘ Once upon a time there was a man whose life was so good there's no story to tell about it.' ”

“I'll try,” Tamir said, punching a long string of numbers. “It's not going to work, but for your sake, Irv, I'll try.” After a few moments, an automated Hebrew message filled the car. Tamir hung up and, this time without Irv's prompting, tried calling again. He listened. They all listened.

“Circuits busy.”

Vey iz mir
.

“Try again in a minute?”

“No reason.”

“I don't mean to be alarmist,” Jacob said, “but do you need to go home?”

Boom shakalaka!

“And how would I do that?”

“We could drive back to the airport and check on flights,” Jacob offered.

“All flights in and out of Israel are canceled.”

Vey iz mir
.

“How do you know?”

Tamir held up his phone and said, “You think I'm playing games?”

Boom shakalaka!

No synagogue is sentient, but just as Sam believed that all things are capable of longing, so did he believe that all things have some awareness of their imminent end: he would tell fires “It's OK” as the last embers hummed, and apologize to the three-hundred-million-odd sperm before flushing them on their way to wastewater treatment. No synagogue isn't sentient.

When Sam got home from Model UN, he went straight into Other Life, like a smoker racing to get outside Sydney Airport. His iPad awoke with a memo on the screen: Max's explanation of Samanta's death, their father's guilt (as in, culpability), and his own profound guilt (as in, the feeling of culpability). Sam read it twice—for clarification, and to defer the confrontation with reality.

His failure to spaz upon learning that Max wasn't playing a sick joke surprised him. Why wasn't he breaking his iPad over his bedpost, or screaming things that couldn't be taken back at someone who didn't deserve them, or at least crying? He wasn't in any way indifferent to Samanta's death, and he certainly hadn't reached some epiphany that it was “only a game.” It wasn't only a game. What awareness did Samanta have of her imminent end? No avatar isn't sentient.

Every Skype session with his great-grandfather began with “I see you” and ended with “See you.” Sam was bothered by the knowledge that one such conversation would be their last, and that there ought to, at some point, be some acknowledgment of some version of that fact. They had skyped early the previous morning, as Sam hastily packed for Model
UN—Isaac awoke before the sun rose, and went to bed before it set. They never talked for more than five minutes—despite having had it explained to him a hundred times that skyping doesn't cost anything ever, Isaac refused to believe that longer conversations didn't cost more—and this one had been particularly brief. Sam shared the vaguest description of the upcoming school trip, confirmed that he wasn't sick or hungry and that no, he wasn't “seeing anyone.”

“And everything is ready for your bar mitzvah?”

“Pretty much.”

But as he was about to click off—“Mom is waiting for me downstairs, so I should probably go”—Sam felt the expected discomfort, only this time with an urgency, or longing. He wasn't sure the longing was his.

“Go,” Isaac said. “Go. We've already been on for too long.”

“I just wanted you to know that I love you.”

“Yeah, I know, sure. And I love you. OK, now go.”

“And I'm sorry that you're moving.”

“Go, Sameleh.”

“I don't see why you can't just stay.”

“Because I can't take care of myself anymore.”

“I mean
here.”

“Sameleh.”

“What? I don't get it.”

“I couldn't go up and down the stairs.”

“So we'd get one of those chairlift things.”

“They're very expensive.”

“I'll use my bar mitzvah money.”

“I have lots of medicines I need to take.”

“I have lots of vitamins I need to take. Mom is great with things like that.”

“I don't want to make you upset, but soon I won't be able to take baths or go to the toilet on my own.”

“Benjy can't take baths on his own, and we're constantly cleaning up Argus poop.”

“I am not a child, and I am not a dog.”

“I know, I'm just say—”

“I take care of my family, Sameleh.”

“You take such good care, but—”

“My family doesn't take care of me.”

“I understand, but—”

“And that is that.”

“I'm gonna ask Dad—”

“No,” Isaac said, with a sternness Sam had never heard.

“Why not? I'm sure he'll say yes.”

There was a long pause. If it weren't for Isaac's blinking eyes, Sam would have wondered if the image had frozen. “I told you no,” Isaac finally said, severely.

The connection weakened, the pixels enlarged.

What had Sam done? Something wrong, something unkind, but what?

Tentatively, in an effort to compensate for whatever hurt he'd accidentally inflicted in his effort to love, he said, “Also, I have a girlfriend.”

“Jewish?” Isaac asked, his face only a handful of pixels.

“Yes,” Sam lied.

“I see you,” Isaac said, and clicked off.

The addition of the
I
, the only letter that takes up less space than a space, changed everything. The longing was his great-grandfather's.

Sam's second synagogue was as he'd left it. He had no avatar with which to explore, so he quickly and crudely made a blocky figure to drop in. The foundation had been poured and the walls were framed, but without the drywall he could have shot an arrow, or his gaze, all the way through it. He—Sam knew that his new avatar was a man—went to one of the walls, gripped the studs like prison bars, and pushed it over. Sam was at once controlling this and witnessing it. He went to another wall and pushed it over.

Sam wasn't destroying, and he wasn't Sam. He was carving a space out of a larger space. He didn't yet know who he was.

The exuberantly branching edifice was shrinking toward its center, like a failing empire that pulls its army back to the capital, like the blackening fingers of a stranded climber. No more social hall, no more basketball court or changing rooms, no more children's library, no more classrooms, no more offices for any administrator or cantor or rabbi, no more chapel, no more sanctuary.

What remained after all those walls came down?

Half a dozen rooms.

Sam hadn't intended this configuration, he'd merely created it. And he wasn't Sam.

A dining room, a living room, a kitchen. A hall. A bathroom, a guest bedroom, a TV room, a bedroom.

Something was missing. It was longing for something.

He went to the ruins of the first synagogue and took the largely intact window of Moses floating down the Nile, as well as a handful of rubble. He replaced one of the kitchen windows with the Moses window and put the rubble in the fridge, among the ginger ale.

But something was still missing. There was still a longing.

A basement. It needed a basement. The sentient synagogue, aware that even as it was being constructed it was being destroyed, longed for an underground. He had no money to buy a shovel, so he used his hands. He dug it like a grave. He dug until he wouldn't have been able to feel the arms that he couldn't feel. He dug until a family could have hidden behind the displaced earth.

And then he stood inside his work, like a cave painter inside his painting of a cave.

I see you
.

Sam gave himself white hair, restored Firefox to the desktop, and googled: How is bubble wrap made?

When they got to the house, Julia was on the stoop, her arms holding her bent knees to her chest. The sun settled on her hair like yellow chalk dust, shaking free with the tiniest movement. Seeing her there, as she was then, in that moment, Jacob spontaneously shook free the resentment that had settled in his heart like gravel. She wasn't his wife, not right then, she was the woman he married—a person rather than a dynamic.

As he approached, Julia gave a weak smile, the smile of resignation. That morning, before leaving for the airport, he'd read a
National Geographic
sidebar about a broken weather satellite that could no longer do whatever it had been created to do, but would, because of the great expense and limited need to capture it, orbit the planet doing nothing until it ultimately fell to Earth. Her smile was remote like that.

“What are you doing here?” Jacob asked. “I thought you weren't going to be home until later.”

“We decided to come back a couple of hours early.”

“Where's Sam?” Max asked.

“Is that something you can decide? As the chaperone?”

“If Mark runs into a problem, I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

Jacob hated hearing that fucking name. He felt his heart refilling with gravel and sinking.

“Sam's upstairs,” Julia told Max.

“I suppose you can follow me,” Max said to Barak, and the two went inside.

“I'm going to defecate,” Irv said, shuffling past, “and then I'll rejoin the party. Hey, Julia.”

Tamir emerged from the car and extended his arms.

“Julie!”

No one called her Julie. Not even Tamir called her Julie.

“Tamir!”

He embraced her in one of his hug dramas: holding her at arm's length, looking her up and down, then bringing her back into his body, then holding her at arm's length for another examination.

“Everyone else gets older,” he said.

“I'm not getting any younger,” she said, unwilling to return his flirtation, but unwilling to smother it, either.

“I didn't say you were.”

They exchanged a smile.

Jacob wanted to hate Tamir for sexualizing everything, but he wasn't sure if the habit resulted from free choice or environmental conditioning—how much of Tamir's way was simply the Israeli way, cultural misinterpretation. And maybe desexualizing everything was Jacob's own way, even when he was sexualizing everything.

“We're so happy to have you for the extra time,” Julia said.

Why was no one mentioning the earthquake, Jacob wondered. Was Julia afraid that they hadn't heard about it yet? Did she want to present the news in a thoughtful and controlled way, free of potential interruptions? Or had she not yet heard about it? More puzzling, why wasn't Tamir, he who mentioned everything, mentioning it?

“It's not an easy trip,” Tamir said. “I would say you know, but you don't. Anyway, I thought we'd come a little early and make the most of it—let Barak get to know his American family.”

“And Rivka?”

“She sends her regrets. She very much wanted to come.”

“Everything's OK?”

Jacob was surprised by her forthrightness and reminded of his own restraint.

“Of course,” Tamir said. “Just some old obligations she couldn't rearrange. Now: Jake mentioned you'd prepared some food?”

“Did he?”

“I didn't. I didn't even think you were going to be back until later in the afternoon.”

“Don't lie to your wife,” Tamir said, giving Jacob a wink that Jacob wasn't positive Julia saw, so he told her, “He winked at me.”

“Let's put some food together,” Julia said. “Head in. Max will show you where to put your things down, and we'll catch up around the kitchen table.”

As Tamir entered the house, Julia took Jacob's hand. “Can we talk for a second?”

“I didn't say that.”

“I know.”

“They're driving me crazy.”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Something else?”

“Yes.”

Years later, Jacob would remember this moment as a vast hinge.

“Something's happened,” she said.

“I know.”

“What?”

“Mark.”

“No,” Julia said, “not that. Not me.”

And then, with a great flush of relief, Jacob said, “
Oh
, right. We already heard.”

“What?”

“On the radio.”

“The
radio
?”

“Yeah, it sounds horrible. And really scary.”

“What does?”

“The earthquake.”

“Oh,” Julia said, at once clear and confused. “The earthquake. Yes.”

It was then that Jacob realized they were still holding hands.

“Wait, what were
you
talking about?”

“Jacob—”

“Mark.”

“No, not that.”

“I was thinking about it on the drive over. I was thinking about everything. After we got off the phone, I—”

“Stop. Please.”

He felt the blood rush to his face like a tide, then recede as quickly.
He'd done something horrible, but he didn't know what. It wasn't the phone. There was nothing more to learn there. The money he'd taken out of ATMs over the years? For stupid, harmless things he was embarrassed to admit wanting? What? Had she somehow looked through his e-mails? Seen how he spoke about her to those who might understand or at least sympathize? Had he been stupid enough, or forced by his subconscious, to leave himself signed in on some device?

He put his hand on top of her hand on top of his hand: “I'm sorry.”

“It's not your fault.”

“I'm so sorry, Julia.”

He was sorry, so sorry, but for what? There was so much to apologize for.

At his wedding, Jacob's mother told a story that he had no memory of, and didn't believe was true, and was hurt by, because even if it wasn't true, it could have been, and it exposed him.

“You were probably expecting my husband,” Deborah began, eliciting a good laugh. “Perhaps you've noticed that he usually does the talking.
And talking.”

More laughter.

“But this one I wanted. The wedding of my son, whom I grew in my body, and fed from my body, and gave everything of myself so that one day he would be able to let go of my hand and take the hand of another. To his credit, my husband didn't argue or complain. He just gave me the silent treatment for three weeks.” More laughter, especially from Irv. “They were the happiest three weeks of my life.”

More laughter.

“Don't forget our honeymoon!” Irv called.

“Did we go on a honeymoon?” Deborah asked.

More laughter.

“You might have noticed that Jews don't exchange wedding vows. The covenant is said to be implicit in the ritual. Isn't that wonderfully Jewish? To stand before one's life partner, and before one's god, at what is probably the most significant moment of your life, and to assume it goes without saying? It's hard to think of
anything else
that a Jew would assume goes without saying.”

More laughter.

“I'll never get over what a strange and easily explained people we are.
But perhaps some of you are like me, and cannot help but hear the familiar vows: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.' They might not be our words, but they are in our collective subconscious.

“There was a year in Jacob's childhood—” She looked to Irv and said, “Maybe it was even more than a year? A year and a half?” Then she looked back to those gathered. “There was a period of time that felt like longer than it was”—laughter—“when Jacob would pretend he was disabled. It started with the announcement, one morning, that he was blind. ‘But you're closing your eyes,' I told him.”

More laughter.

“ ‘That's only because there's nothing to look at,' he said, ‘so I'm resting them.' Jacob was a stubborn child. He could keep up a resistance for days, and weeks. Irv, can you imagine from where he might have gotten that?”

A laugh.

Irv called back, “Nature from me, nurture from you!”

Another laugh.

Deborah continued: “He stuck with the blindness for three or four days—a long time for a child, or anyone, to keep his eyes closed—but then came to dinner one night batting lashes and once again adept with silverware. ‘I'm happy to see you've recovered,' I said. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his ears. ‘What is it, love?' He went to the cabinet, got a pen and paper, and wrote, ‘I'm sorry, I can't hear you. I'm deaf.' Irv said, ‘You aren't deaf.' Jacob mouthed the words ‘I am deaf.'

“Maybe a month later, he limped into the living room with a pillow under the back of his shirt. He didn't say anything, just limped to the shelf, took down a book, and limped back out. Irv called out, ‘Ciao, Quasimodo,' and went back to his reading. He thought it was a phase among phases. I followed Jacob to his room, sat beside him on his bed, and asked, ‘Did you break your back?' He nodded yes. ‘That must be incredibly painful.' He nodded. I suggested we reset his spine by taping a broom to his back. He walked around like that for two days. He recovered.

“I was reading to him in bed a couple of weeks later—his head propped on the pillow that had been the hump on his back—and he pulled up the sleeve of his pajama top and said, ‘Look what happened.' I didn't know what I was supposed to be seeing, only that I was supposed to be seeing it, so I said, ‘That's looks horrible.' He nodded. ‘I got a very bad burn,' he said. ‘So I see,' I said, very gently touching it. ‘Hold on, I have some ointment in the medicine cabinet.' I came back with moisturizer.
‘For use on extreme burns,' I said, pretending to read the directions on the back. ‘Apply liberally across burn. Rub into skin as if massaging. Full recovery expected by morning.' I rubbed his arm for half an hour, a massage that went through seasons of being pleasurable, and meditative, and intimate, and, apparently, sedating. When he came into our bed the next morning, he showed me his arm and said, ‘It worked.' I said, ‘A miracle.' ‘No,' he said, ‘just medicine.' ”

More laughter.

“Just medicine
. I still think about that all the time. No miracle, just medicine.

“The disabilities and injuries continued to come—a cracked rib, loss of feeling in his left leg, broken fingers—but with less and less frequency. Then, one morning, maybe a year after he'd gone blind, Jacob didn't come down for breakfast. He often overslept, especially after nights when he and his father stayed up to watch the Orioles. I tapped on his door. No answer. I opened it, and he was perfectly still on his bed, arms and legs straight, with a note balanced in the well of his sternum: ‘I am feeling extremely sick, and think I might die tonight. If you are now looking at me, and I'm not moving, it is because I am dead.' If it were a game, he'd have won it. But it wasn't a game. I could rub cream into a burn, I could set a broken back, but there is nothing to be done for the dead. I had loved the intimacy of our secret understanding, but I no longer understood. I looked at him lying there, my stoic child, so still. I started crying. Just as I'm about to do now. I got on my knees beside Jacob's body, and I cried and cried and cried.”

Irv went to the dance floor and put his arm around Deborah. He whispered something into her ear. She nodded, and whispered something back. He whispered something back.

She collected herself and said, “I cried a lot. I put my head on his chest and made little rivers in the channels between his ribs. You were so skinny, Jacob. No matter how much you ate, you were just bones. Just bones,” she sighed.

“You let me go on for a long time, then coughed, and jerked your legs, and coughed again, and slowly came back to life. I was never more angry than when you put yourself in danger. When you didn't look both ways, when you ran with scissors—I wanted to hit you. I actually had to stop myself from hitting you. How could you be so
careless
with the thing I most loved?

“But I wasn't angry then. Only devastated. ‘Don't ever do that again,' I told you. ‘Don't you ever,
ever
do that again.' Still flat on your back, you turned your head to face me—do you remember this?—and you said, ‘But I have to.' ”

Deborah started crying again, and handed Irv the page from which she'd been reading.

“In sickness and in health,” he said. “Jacob and Julia, my son and daughter, there is only ever sickness. Some people go blind, some go deaf. Some people break their backs, some get badly burned. But you were right, Jacob: you
would
have to do it again. Not as a game, or rehearsal, or tortuous effort to communicate something, but for real and forever.”

Irv looked up from the page, turned to Deborah, and said, “Jesus, Deborah, this is depressing.”

More laughter, but now from trembling throats. Deborah laughed, too, and took Irv's hand.

He kept reading: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don't seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other's pain, and being present for it.”

After having made love for the first time as husband and wife, Jacob and Julia lay side by side. Side by side, they looked at the ceiling.

Jacob said, “My mom's speech was great.”

“It was,” Julia said.

Jacob took her hand and said, “But only the deafness part was true. None of the rest.”

Sixteen years later, alone with the mother of his three children, on the stoop of their home and under only the infinite ceiling, Jacob knew that everything his mother had said was true. Even if he couldn't remember it, even if it hadn't happened. He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking for him.