Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

When I reached the front of my line, a stocky woman, perhaps seventy, invited me to sit opposite her at a plastic folding table. She took my papers and started filling out a series of forms.

“Atah medaber ivrit?” she asked without looking up.

“Sorry?”

“ Lo medaber ivrit ,” she said, checking a box.

“Sorry?”

“Jewish?”

“Of course.”

“Recite the Sh’ma.”

“Sh ’ ma Yisrael, Adonai—”

“Do you belong to a Jewish community?”

“Adas Israel.”

“How often do you attend services?”

“Maybe twice a year, every other year?”

“What are the two occasions?”

“Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”

“Any languages besides English?”

“A little Spanish.”

“I’m sure that will be very useful. Health conditions?”

“No.”

“No asthma? High blood pressure? Epilepsy?”

“No. I do have some eczema. At the back of my hairline.”

“Have you tried coconut oil?” she asked, still not looking up.

“No.”

“So try it. Military training or experience?”

“No.”

“Have you ever fired a gun?”

“I’ve never held a gun.”

She checked a number of boxes, apparently feeling no need to ask the next sequence of questions.

“Can you function without your glasses?”

“Function highly?”

She checked a box.

“Can you swim?”

“Without my glasses?”

“Do you know how to swim?”

“Of course.”

“Have you ever been a competitive swimmer?”

“No.”

“Do you have any experience with knot tying?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

She checked two boxes.

“Can you read a topographical map?”

“I suppose I know what I’m looking at, but I don’t know if that qualifies as reading.”

She checked a box.

“Do you have any experience with electrical engineering?”

“I once took a—”

“You cannot disarm a simple bomb.”

“I mean, how simple?”

“You cannot disarm a simple bomb.”

“I cannot.”

“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without eating?”

“Yom Kippur, a while ago.”

“What is your tolerance for pain?”

“I don’t even know how one would answer that question.”

“You answered the question,” she said. “Have you ever been in shock?”

“Probably. In fact, yes. Often.”

“Are you claustrophobic?”

“Hugely.”

“What is the greatest load you can carry?”

“Physically?”

“Are you sensitive to extremes of heat or cold?”

“Is anyone not?”

“Allergic to medications?”

“I’m lactose intolerant, but I guess that’s not really what you were asking.”

“Morphine?”

“Morphine?”

“Do you know first aid?”

“I didn’t answer about morphine.”

“Are you allergic to morphine?”

“I have no idea.”

She wrote something down, which I tried, without success, to decipher.

“I don’t want not to get morphine if I need morphine.”

“There are other forms of pain relief.”

“Are they as good?”

“Do you know first aid?”

“Sort of.”

“That will sort of be a comfort to someone sort of in need of first aid.”

While perusing the paperwork I’d filled out in line, she said, “Emergency contact information…”

“It’s there.”

“Julia Bloch.”

“Yes.”

“She’s who?”

“What?”

“You didn’t fill in your relationship.”

“Sure I did.”

“So you used invisible ink on that one.”

“She’s my wife.”

“Most wives prefer permanent marker.”

“I must have—”

“You are an organ donor in America.”

“I am.”

“If you are killed in Israel, would you allow your organs to be used in Israel?”

“Yes,” I said, allowing the s to skid for a hundred feet.

“Yes?”

“Yes, if I’m killed—”

“What is your blood type?”

“Blood type?”

“You have blood?”

“I do.”

“What type? A? B? AB? O?”

“You’re asking for giving , or receiving ?”

Finally, for the first time since we started speaking, she looked me in the eye. “It’s the same blood.”

HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS

For left-handedness, or twins, or red hair, to run in one’s family — as all of those do in mine — there need to be multiple occurrences. For suicide to run in one’s family, there needs to be only one.

I received my grandfather’s death certificate from the Maryland Department of Records. I wanted to know that I knew what I already knew. The coroner’s handwriting was as good as typeset, the opposite of a doctor’s: asphyxiation by hanging . He killed himself at approximately ten in the morning. The certificate said that it was Mr. Kowalski, the next-door neighbor, who made the report. That my grandfather’s name was Isaac Bloch. That he had been born in Poland. That he hanged himself with a belt wedged between his kitchen door and its frame.

But when I was imagining it in bed that night, I saw him outside, hanging by a rope from a tree. The grass in the shadow of his feet slowly died and powdered to a little patch of dirt in an otherwise wild, overgrown garden.

Later in the night, I imagined plants ascending to meet his feet, as if the earth were trying to atone for its gravity. I imagined palm fronds holding him up like hands, the rope slack.

Even later — I barely slept — I imagined walking with my grandfather through a redwood forest. His skin was blue and his fingernails were an inch long, but otherwise he looked like the man at whose kitchen table I used to eat black bread and cantaloupe, the man who, when told not to change into his bathing suit in public, asked, “Why not?” He stopped at a massive overturned tree and pointed at the rings.

“This, here, is my parents’ wedding. It was an arranged marriage. It worked. And here,” he said, pointing at a different ring, “is when Iser fell from a tree and broke his arm.”

“Iser?”

“My brother. You were named for him.”

“I thought I was named for someone named Yakov.”

“No. We just told you that.”

“How does Iser become Jacob?”

“Iser is short for Israel. After wrestling with Jacob through the night, the angel renamed him Israel.”

“How old was he?”

“And here,” he said, pointing at another ring, “is when I left home. With Benny. Everyone else stayed — my grandparents and parents, my other five brothers — and I wanted to stay, but Benny convinced me. He forced me. And here is when Benny and I got on different boats, one for America, one for Israel.” He touched a ring, and let his long fingernail slide outward toward the bark as he spoke. “This, here, is when you were born. Here you were a boy. Here you got married. Here is Sam’s birth, here is Max’s, here is Benjy’s. And here”—he touched his fingernail to the rim of the trunk, like a record needle—“is right now. And out here”—he pointed to a spot in the air, about an inch outside the trunk—“is when you’ll die, and here”—he gestured at the area slightly nearer to the trunk—“is the rest of your life, and here”—he pointed to just outside the trunk—“is what happens next.”

I understood, somehow, that the weight of his hanging body had pulled the tree over, making our history visible.

HOW TO PLAY SEVEN RINGS

I could never anticipate which religious rituals Julia would find beautiful and which misogynistic, morally repugnant, or simply foolish. So I was surprised when she wanted to walk the seven rings around me under the chuppah.