Here I Am (38 page)

He was not asking for no reason. He was asking because he'd found his dad's second phone a day before his mom had.
Found
is probably not the right word, as coming upon it was the result of snooping through his dad's favorite hiding places—beneath a pile of socks in the dresser, in a box in the back of the “gift closet,” atop the grandfather clock his grandfather had given them on the occasion of Benjy's birth. The loot was never anything more salacious than a porno—“Why,” he wanted to ask but could never ask, “why would anyone with a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone
pay
for pornography?”

He had found a stack of fifties, presumably for some indulgence his dad didn't want his mom to know about—something perfectly innocent like a power tool he was afraid his mom would point out he would never actually use. He had found a tiny bag of pot, which never, in the year and a half that he would check on it, diminished in size. He'd found a stash of Halloween candy—just sad. He'd found a stack of papers with a cover sheet labeled “Bible for
Ever-Dying People”—

—too boring to investigate further.

But then, while nosing around in the drawer of his dad's bedside table, Sam found a phone. His dad's phone was an iPhone. Everyone knew that, because everyone suffered his endless complaints about how amazing it was, and how dependent he was on it. (“This is literally ruining my life,” he would say as he performed some utterly unnecessary function, like checking the weather three days out. “Chance of rain. Interesting.”) This was a generic smartphone, the kind they give you for free with a criminally overpriced plan. Maybe a relic that his dad was too nostalgic to throw out? Maybe it was filled with photos of Sam and his brothers,
and his dad wasn't smart enough to transfer them to his iPhone (despite feeling too smart to ask for help at a phone store, or even from his technologically proficient son), so he saved it, and over time the drawer would probably fill with phones filled with photos.

Nothing could have been easier than figuring out how to unlock it—his dad cycled through the same three lamely predictable variations of the family password for all his security needs.

Generic wallpaper: a sunset.

No games. No apps cooler than a calculator. Why even
have
a smartphone?

It was a mom phone. A private phone between them. It was hard to understand the need for it, but maybe the lack of need was the point. It was actually kind of sweet. Kind of lame, but kind of romantic, which was kind of gross. Unless it had some sort of straightforward justification, as it now-that-he-thought-about-it probably did, like being the phone they took on trips, with prepaid international minutes.

As he scrolled through the messages, it became clear that those explanations were wrong, extremely wrong, and that either his parents weren't who he thought they were, not even close, or there was more than one Julia in the world, because the Julia that was his mom would never—no,
never
—move her thumbs in such a way as to form the words
take the wetness from my pussy and use it to get my asshole ready for you
.

He took the phone to the bathroom, locked the door, and scrolled.

i want two of your fingers in each of my holes

What, like Spock? What the fuck was going on?

on your stomach, legs spread to the corners, your hands behind you, opening your ass as wide as it will go, your pussy dripping onto the sheets…

What the
fuck
was going on?

But before Sam could ask the question a third time, the front door opened, the phone dropped behind the toilet, his mom said, “I'm home,” and he tried to beat the footsteps on the stairs to his room.

He'd never met Dr. Silvers, but he knew what Dr. Silvers would have said: he left the phone on purpose. Like everyone in the family who wasn't
his dad, Sam loathed Dr. Silvers and was jealous of his dad for having such a confidant, and was jealous of Dr. Silvers for having his dad. What good, of any kind, could come, for anyone, from the discovery of the phone?

Suddenly, back in real unreal life, Eyesick stumbled away a few yards. He limped a bit, walked with a stutter. After making circles around nothing—like a planet around no sun, or a bride around no groom—he picked up the fossil of a bird from one of the earliest generations of Other Life, maybe three years before: the Twitter logo. Eyesick looked at the rock dumbly, then put it down, then picked it up again, then motioned as if to throw it, then tapped it against his head, as if testing his own ripeness.

A flood of digital images, each blooming on the screen and then receding as soon as it could be processed: some were stored moments from Samanta's other life, conversations she'd had, experiences; others were more impressionistic. He saw screens that he'd looked at, mixed with screens Noam must have looked at: a contrail in a blue sky; crocheted rainbows on Etsy; the shovel of a bulldozer making contact with an old woman; cunnilingus, from behind, in a changing room; a thrashing lab monkey; conjoined twins (one laughing, one crying); satellite photos of the Sinai; unconscious football players; nail polish color wheels; Evander Holyfield's ear; a dog being euthanized.

The images came more quickly, so quick they could enter only subliminally; they overlapped, blended, and from the corner a light, bleeding from a few pixels to stain the screen, and spreading, a light like the darkness a broken pipe leaves on the ceiling, a light flooding the perpetually refreshing images, and then more light than image, and then an almost entirely white screen, but brighter than white, vague images as if seen through an avalanche.

In perhaps the purest moment of empathy of Sam's life, he tried to imagine what Noam was seeing on his screen at that moment. Was a darkness like light spreading? Was he receiving warnings about low levels of vitality? Sam imagined Noam clicking
IGNORE
to those warnings, over and over, and ignoring the annoying alerts, and clicking
CONFIRM
when finally prompted to confirm his ultimate choice.

The lion walked to the old man, knelt beside him, laid his immense and proud paws on Eyesick's stooped shoulders, licked at whatever one calls a white five o'clock shadow (a five o'clock brightness?), licked him over and over, as if to will Eyesick back to life, when in fact he was willing himself back to what comes before life.

He rested his massive head on Eyesick's sunken chest. Eyesick hid his fingers in the lion's streaming mane.

In the middle of his great-grandfather's funeral reception, Sam started to cry. He didn't cry often. He hadn't cried since Argus returned from his second hip replacement, two years before, his back half shaved to reveal Frankenstein stitches, his eyes lowered in his lowered head.

“It's just what getting better looks like,” Jacob had said. “In a month, he'll be his old self.”

“A
month
?”

“It'll pass quickly.”

“Not for Argus, it won't.”

“We'll spoil him.”

“He can barely walk.”

“And he shouldn't walk any more than is necessary. The vet said that's the most important thing for his recovery, to keep him off his leg as much as possible. All walks have to be on-leash. And no stairs. We have to keep him on the first floor.”

“But how will he come up to bed?”

“He's going to have to sleep down here.”

“But he'll go up.”

“I don't think so. He knows how weak his leg is.”

“He'll go up.”

“I'll put some books on the stairs to block the way.”

Sam set his alarm for 2:00 a.m., to go down and check on Argus. He snoozed once, and then again, but with the third buzz, his guilt was awakened. He plodded down the stairs, only half aware of being out of bed, nearly paralyzed himself with the help of the stacked
Grove Encyclopedia of Art
, and found his father on top of a sleeping bag, spooning Argus. That's when he cried. Not because he loved his dad—although in that moment he certainly did—but because, of the two animals on the floor, it was his dad he felt more sorry for.

He was by the window. The cousins were on PlayStation, killing representations. The adults were upstairs, eating the disgusting, smelly, smoked, and gelatinous foods Jews suddenly need in times of reflection. No one noticed him, which was what he wanted, even if it wasn't what he needed.

He wasn't crying about anything in front of him—not the death of his great-grandfather or the death of Noam's avatar, not the collapse of his parents' marriage, or the collapse of his bar mitzvah, or the collapsed buildings in Israel. His tears were reaching back. It took Noam's moment of kindness to reveal the yawning absence of kindness. His dad had slept on the floor for thirty-eight days. (The extra week to play it safe.) Was it easier to extend such kindness to a dog because it didn't risk rejection? Or because the needs of animals are so animalistic, whereas the needs of humans are so human?

He might never become a man, but crying at that window—his great-grandfather completely alone in the earth twenty minutes away; an avatar returning to pixelated dust in some refrigerated data storage center somewhere near nothing; his parents just on the other side of the ceiling, but a ceiling without edges—Sam was reborn.

Judaism gets death right, Jacob thought. It instructs us what to do when we know least well what to do, and feel an overwhelming need to do
something
. You should sit like this.
We will
. You should dress like this.
We will
. You should say these words at these moments, even if you have to read from transliteration.
Na-ah-seh
.

Jacob had stopped crying more than an hour ago, but he still had what Benjy called “after-crying breath.” Irv brought him a glass of peach schnapps, said, “I told the rabbi he was welcome to come, but I doubt he'll come,” and went back to his windowsill citadel.

The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and “salads”—Jews apply the word
salad
to anything that can't be held in one's hand: cucumber salad, whitefish and tuna and baked salmon salad, lentil salad, pasta salad, quinoa salad. And there was purple soda, and black coffee, and Diet Coke, and black tea, and enough seltzer to float an aircraft carrier, and Kedem grape juice—a liquid more Jewish than Jewish blood. And there were pickles, a few kinds. Capers don't belong in any food, but the capers that every spoon had tried to avoid had found their way into foods in which they
really
didn't belong, like someone's half-empty half-decaf. And at the center
of the table, impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them. It was too much food by a factor of ten. But it had to be.

Relatives exchanged stories about Isaac while they piled their plates toward the ceiling of the floor above. They laughed about how funny he was (on purpose, and by accident), what an obstinate pain in the ass he could be (on purpose, and by accident). They reflected on what a hero he had been (on purpose, and by accident). There was a bit of crying, there were some awkward silences, there was gratitude for having had an occasion to gather as a family (some of the cousins hadn't seen each other since Leah's bat mitzvah, some not since Great-Aunt Doris's death), and everyone looked at his phone: to check on the war, the score of the game, the weather.

The kids, having already forgotten about any first-person sadness they might have felt over Isaac's death, were playing first-person video games in the basement. Max's pulse doubled as he spectated at an assassination attempt by someone he thought was a second cousin. Sam sat off to the side with his iPad, wandering in a virtual lemon grove. This was how it always went, this vertical segregation. And inevitably, the adults with enough sense to escape the adult world would migrate down. Which is what Jacob did.

There were at least a dozen cousins—many from Deborah's side, a few from Julia's. The younger ones unpacked all the board games, one at a time—not to play them, but to unpack them and commingle the small pieces. Every now and then one would spontaneously freak out. The older cousins were surrounding Barak as he performed virtuosic acts of extreme violence on a TV so large one had to sit against the opposite wall to see its edges.

Benjy was on his own, stuffing crumpled Monopoly money between the venetian blinds.

“You're being very generous with the window,” Jacob said.

“It's not real money.”

“No?”

“I know you're joking.”

“You haven't seen Mom around, have you?”

“No.”

“Hey?”

“What?”

“Have you been crying, buddy?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You look like you have.”

“Holy shit!” a cousin shouted.

“Language!” Jacob shouted back.

“I haven't,” Benjy said.

“Are you sad about Great-Grandpa?”

“Not really.”

“So what's upsetting you?”

“Nothing.”

“Dads know these things.”

“Then why don't you know what's upsetting me?”

“Dads don't know everything.”

“Only God does.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mr. Schneiderman.”

“Who's that?”

“My Hebrew school teacher.”

“
Schneiderman
. Right.”

“He said that God knows everything. But that didn't make sense to me.”

“It doesn't make sense to me, either.”

“But that's because you don't believe in God.”

“I only ever said I was unsure. But if I
did
believe in God, it
still
wouldn't make sense to me.”

“Right, because if God knows everything, why do we have to write notes to put in the Wall?”

“That's a good point.”

“Mr. Schneiderman said that God knows everything but sometimes forgets. So the notes are to remind him of what's important.”

“God forgets? Really?”

“That's what he said.”

“What do you think about that?”

“It's weird.”

“I think so, too.”

“But that's because you don't believe in God.”

“If I believed in God, he would be a remembering God.”

“Mine would, too.”

Despite being as agnostic about God's existence as he was about the
question's meaning (could any two people really be referring to the same thing when speaking about God?), Jacob wanted Benjy to believe. Or Dr. Silvers did, anyway. For several months, Benjy's anxiety about death had been slowly and steadily ramping up, and now risked tipping from adorable to problematic. Dr. Silvers said, “He has the rest of his life to form answers to theological questions, but he'll never get back this time of developing his first relationship to the world. Just make him feel safe.” That struck Jacob as right, even if the thought of evangelizing made him squirm. The next time Benjy raised his fear of death, just when Jacob's instinct urged him to agree that an eternity of nonexistence was certainly the most horrible of all things to imagine, Jacob remembered Dr. Silvers's command:
Just make him feel safe
.

“Well, you know about heaven, right?” Jacob said, causing a nonexistent angel to lose its wings.

“I know that you think it isn't real.”

“Well, no one knows for sure. I certainly don't. But you know what heaven is?”

“Not really.”

So Jacob gave his most comforting explanation, sparing neither extravagance nor intellectual integrity.

“And if I wanted to stay up late in heaven?” Benjy asked, now planking on the sofa.

“As late as you want,” Jacob said, “every single night.”

“And I could probably eat dessert before dinner.”

“You wouldn't have to eat dinner at all.”

“But then I wouldn't be healthy.”

“Health won't matter.”

Benjy turned his head to the side: “Birthdays.”

“What about them?”

“What are they like?”

“Well, they're never-ending, of course.”

“Wait, it's
always
your birthday?”

“Yes.”

“You have a party and get presents every day?”

“All day every day.”

“Wait, do you have to write thank-you notes?”

“You don't even have to
say
thank you.”

“Wait, does that mean you're zero, or infinity?”

“What do you want to be?”

“Infinity.”

“Then you're infinity.”

“Wait, is it always everyone's birthday?”

“Only yours.”

Benjy rose to his feet, raised his hands above his head, and said, “I want to die right now!”

Just don't make him feel too safe
.

In Irv and Deborah's basement, facing a more nuanced theological question, Jacob again resisted his instinct for truth in favor of Benjy's emotional safety: “Maybe God does remember everything but sometimes chooses to forget?”

“Why would he do that?”

“So that
we
remember,” Jacob said, pleased with his improvisation. “Like the wishes,” he continued. “If God knew what we wanted,
we
wouldn't have to.”

“And God wants us to know for ourselves.”

“Could be.”

“I used to think Great-Grandpa was God,” Benjy said.

“You did?”

“Yeah, but he's dead, so obviously he wasn't God.”

“That's one way to think about it.”

“I know Mom isn't God.”

“How is that?”

“Because she would never forget about me.”

“You're right,” Jacob said, “she wouldn't.”

“No matter what.”

“No matter what.”

Another round of expletive mutterings from the cousins.

“Anyway,” Benjy said, “that's what was making me cry.”

“Mom?”

“My note for the Wailing Wall.”

“Because you were thinking about how God is forgetful?”

“No,” Benjy said, pointing at the TV, which wasn't displaying a video game, as Jacob had thought, but the effects of the most recent, and most severe, aftershock, “because the Wall crumbled.”

“The
Wall
?”

They came spilling into the world: every wish tucked into every crevice, but also every wish tucked into every Jew's heart.

“No more proof of how great they were,” Benjy said.

“What?”

“The thing you told me about the Romans.”

How much do the children know, and how much do they remember?

“Jacob!” Irv called from upstairs.

“The Wailing Wall,” Jacob said, as if by saying its name aloud, it would exist again.

Jacob could make his children feel safe. But could he keep them safe?

Benjy shook his head and said, “Now it's just the Wailing.”