Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Ben-Yehuda’s son, Itamar, was the first native speaker of Hebrew in more than a thousand years. He was raised forbidden to hear or speak any other language. (His father once berated Itamar’s mother for singing a Russian lullaby.) His parents wouldn’t allow him to play with other children — none of them spoke Hebrew — but as a concession to his loneliness they gave him a dog with the name Maher, meaning “fast” in Hebrew. It was a kind of child abuse. And yet it is possible that he is even more responsible than his father for the first time a modern Jew ever told a dirty joke in Hebrew, ever told another Jew to fuck off in Hebrew, ever typed Hebrew into a court stenography machine, ever shouted unmeant words in Hebrew, ever, in Hebrew, moaned in pleasure.

Jacob put the last dried mugs back on the shelf upside down.

“What are you doing?” Julia asked.

“I’m doing it your way.”

“And you’re not hysterically concerned about their ability to dry without proper circulation?”

“No, but neither am I suddenly convinced they’re going to fill with dust. I’m just tired of disagreeing.”

God instructed Moses to put both the intact tablets and the broken tablets in the ark. The Jews carried them — the broken and the whole — for their forty years of wandering, and placed them both in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Why? Why didn’t they just bury them, as would befit a sacred text? Or leave them behind, as would befit a blasphemy?

Because they were ours.

HOW TO PLAY SADNESS

It doesn’t exist, so hide it like a tumor.

HOW TO PLAY FEAR

For a laugh.

HOW TO PLAY CRYING

At my grandfather’s funeral, the rabbi told the story of Moses being discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. “Look!” she said after opening the basket. “A crying Hebrew baby.” He asked the kids to try to explain what Pharaoh’s daughter said. Benjy suggested that Moses was “crying in Jewish.”

The rabbi asked, “What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?”

Max took a step forward, toward the unfilled grave, and said, “Maybe like laughing?”

I took a step back.

HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER

Use humor as aggressively as chemo. Laugh until your hair falls out. There is nothing that can’t be played for a laugh. When Julia says, “It’s just the two of us. Just you and me on the phone,” laugh and say, “And God. And the NSA.”

HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF HAIR

No one has any idea how much hair he has — both because our hair can’t be fully seen with our eyes (not even with multiple mirrors, believe me) and because our eyes are our own.

Sometimes, when they were still young enough not to question the question — and could be trusted not to mention it to others — I would ask the boys how bald I was. I’d bow to them, adjust my hair to reveal where I thought it was thinning, and ask them to describe me to me.

“Looks normal,” they’d usually say.

“What about here?”

“Pretty much the same as everyone else.”

“But it doesn’t seem like there’s less right here?”

“Not really.”

“Not really? Or no?”

“No?”

“I’m asking for your help here. Could you give it a real look and then give me a real answer?”

What there was of my hair was a prop, the product of pharmaceutical intervention — the tiny hands of Aaron and Hur clutching my roots from inside my skull. I blamed my balding on genetics, and I blamed it on stress. In that way, it was no different from anything else.

The Propecia worked by suppressing testosterone. One of the well-documented and widely experienced side effects is decreased libido. That’s a fact, not an opinion or defense. I wish I could have shared it with Julia. But I couldn’t, because I couldn’t let her know about the Propecia, because I couldn’t admit that I cared how I looked. Better to let her think she couldn’t make me hard.

I was taking a bath with Benjy a few months after the kids had started spending time at my house. We were talking about The Odyssey , a children’s version of which we had recently finished, and how painful it must have been for Odysseus to keep his identity secret after finally making it home, but why it was necessary.

“It’s not enough just to get home,” he said. “You have to be able to stay there.”

I said, “You’re so right, Benjy.” I always used his name when I was proud of him.

“You actually are kind of bald,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re kind of bald.”

“I am?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Have you been trying to protect my feelings all this time?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where am I bald?”

“I don’t know.”

“Touch the parts that are bald.”

I bowed to him, but felt no touch.

“Benjy?” I asked, facing the water.

“You’re not bald.”

I lifted my head. “Then why’d you say it?”

“Because I wanted to make you feel good.”

HOW TO PLAY TRUE BALDNESS

We used to go to Great Wall Szechuan House every Christmas, the five of us. We held the kids up to the aquarium until our arms trembled, and ordered every hot appetizer that didn’t involve pork. The last such Christmas, my fortune was “You are not a ghost.” When we read them aloud, as was the ritual, I looked at “You are not a ghost” and said, “There is always a way.”

A dozen years later, I lost all my hair in the course of a month. Benjy showed up unexpectedly that Christmas Eve with enough Chinese food for a family of five.

“You got one of everything?” I asked, laughing out my love of the wonderfully ridiculous abundance.

“One of everything treyf,” he said.

“Are you worried that I’m lonely?”

“Are you worried that I’m worried?”

We ate on the sofa, plates on our laps, the coffee table covered with steaming white boxes. Before refilling, Benjy put his empty plate on the crowded table, took my head between his hands, and angled it down. If it had been any less unexpected, I would have found a way out. But once it was happening, I gave myself over: rested my hands on my knees, closed my eyes.

“You don’t have enough hands, right?”

“I don’t need any.”

“Ah, Benjy.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “Full head of hair.”

“The doctor warned me, however many years ago, that this would happen: as soon as you stop taking the pill, you lose it all at once. I didn’t believe him. Or I thought I’d be the exception.”

“How does it feel?”

“Being able to slice bread with an erection?”

“I’m eating , Dad.”

“Being able to do push-ups with my hands behind my back?”

“Sorry I expressed interest,” he said, unable to pin the corners of his mouth.

“You know, I needed an egg once.”

“Did you?” he asked, playing along.

“Yeah. I was doing some baking—”

“You often bake.”

“All the time. I’m surprised I’m not baking as I tell this joke. Anyway, I was doing some baking, and found that I was one egg short. Isn’t that the worst?”

“There is literally nothing worse.”

“Right?” We were both starting to simmer in anticipation. “So rather than schlep to the store through the snow to buy eleven eggs I didn’t want, I thought I’d see if I could borrow one.”

“And that, right there, is why the 1998 National Jewish Book Award hangs in your office.”

“ Yiddishe kop ,” I said, tapping my forehead.

“I wish you were my real dad,” Benjy said, his eyes moistening with suppressed laughter.

“So I opened the window—” I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the punch line that was still forming as I approached it. “So I opened the window, wrote, directed, and starred in a five-second fantasy for which there aren’t enough X s, and my tumescent glans rang the doorbell of the neighbor across the street.”