Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Jacob touched a tapestry, a depiction of a naval battle beneath the bannered words “The American Situation: War of 1812,” and said, “Nice.” Did she remember?

Julia said, “Please tell me not to call the kids.”

“Not to call the kids.”

“Of course I shouldn’t.”

“Or call them. We’re not vacation fundamentalists.”

Julia laughed.

Jacob was never immune to her laughter.

“Come,” she said, patting the bed beside her.

Jacob said, “We have a big day tomorrow,” illuminating several emergency exit paths at once: they needed rest; tomorrow was more important than tonight; it wouldn’t be a disappointment if she acknowledged her tiredness.

“You must be beat,” Julia said, redirecting things slightly by putting the onus on him.

“I am,” he said, almost as a question, almost accepting his role. “And you must be, too,” asking her to accept hers.

“Come,” she said, “hold me.”

Jacob turned off the lights, placed his unfolded glasses on the bedside table, and got into bed, beside his wife of a decade. She turned onto her side, bringing her head into her husband’s armpit. He kissed the North Pole of her head. Now they were on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by.

If they’d said what they were thinking, Jacob would have said, “To be honest, it’s not as nice as I remembered.”

And she would have said, “It couldn’t have been.”

“When I was a boy, I used to ride my bike down a hill behind the house. I’d narrate each run. You know, ‘Jacob Bloch, set to attempt a new land speed record. He grips his handlebars. Can he do it?’ I called it ‘The Huge Hill.’ More than anything else in my childhood, it made me feel brave. I went back the other day. It was on the way to a meeting, and I had a few minutes. I couldn’t find it. I found where it was, or should have been, but it wasn’t there. Only the gentlest slope.”

“You grew,” she would have said.

If they’d said what they were thinking, Jacob would have said, “I’m thinking about how we’re not having sex. Are you?”

And without defensiveness or hurt, Julia would have said, “Yeah, I am.”

“There’s nothing I’m asking you to say here. I promise. I just want to tell you where I am. OK?”

“OK.”

And risking another step onto the invisible bridge, Jacob would have said, “I’m worrying that you don’t want to have sex with me. That you don’t desire me.”

“You don’t need to worry,” Julia would have said as she would have brought her hand to the side of his face.

“I always desire you,” he would have said. “I was watching you undress—”

“I know. I felt it.”

“You look every bit as beautiful as you did ten years ago.”

“That’s plainly untrue. But thank you.”

“It’s true to me.”

“Thank you.”

And Jacob would have found himself in the middle of the invisible bridge, above the chasm of potential hurt, at the farthest point from safety: “Why do you think we aren’t having sex?”

And Julia would have stood beside him and, without looking down, said, “Maybe because the expectation is so great?”

“Could be. And we’re genuinely tired.”

“I know I am.”

“I’m going to say something that isn’t easy to say.”

“You’re safe,” she would have promised.

He would have turned to her and said, “We never talk about how I can’t get hard sometimes. Do you ever think it’s you?”

“I do.”

“It isn’t you.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“Julia,” he would have said, “it isn’t you.”

But he didn’t say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery. Too many small accumulations: wrong words, absences of words, imposed quiet, plausibly deniable attacks on known vulnerabilities, mentions of things that needn’t be mentioned, misunderstandings and accidents, moments of weakness, tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for an original offense that no one could remember. Or for no offense at all.

They didn’t recede from each other that night. They didn’t roll to opposite sides of the bed, or withdraw into two silences. They held each other and shared a silence in the darkness. But it was silence. Neither suggested they explore the room with their eyes closed, as they’d done the last time they were there. They explored the room independently, in their minds, beside each other. And in Jacob’s jacket pocket was the stopped clock — a decade of 1:43—which he’d been waiting for just the right moment to reveal.

i’ll keep making you cum after you beg me to stop

In the hardware gallery parking lot, she sat in her car — her Volvo like everybody else’s, in a color she knew was wrong the second after it was impossible to change her mind — not knowing what to do with herself, knowing only that she had to do something. She wasn’t sufficiently adept with her phone to waste the kind of time she needed to waste. But she could squander at least a little. She found the company that made her favorite architectural model trees. They weren’t the most realistic, they weren’t even well made. She didn’t like them because they evoked trees but because they evoked the sadness that trees evoke — the way an out-of-focus photograph might best capture its subject’s essence. It was extremely unlikely that the manufacturer intended any of that, but it was possible, and it didn’t matter.

They were featuring a new line of autumn trees. Who could be the market for such things? Orange Maple, Red Maple, Yellow Maple, Autumn Sycamore, Light Orange Aspen, Yellowing Aspen, Turning Maple, Turning Sycamore. She imagined a tiny, younger Jacob, and a tiny, younger Julia, in a tiny, scratched and dinged Saab, driving shoelace roads bordered by an infinity of tiny, turning trees, under an infinity of tiny, massive stars, and like the trees, the tiny young couple weren’t realistic, or well made, and they didn’t evoke their bigger, older selves, but they evoked the sadness that they would grow to evoke.

Mark tapped her window. She tried rolling it down and realized the car needed to be on, but the key wasn’t in the ignition or in her hand, and she didn’t have it in her to go through her bag, so she clumsily opened the door.

“I’ll see you at the Model UN trip.”

“What?”

“In a couple of weeks. I’m the male chaperone.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“So we can continue our talk then.”

“I don’t know how much more there is to say.”

“There’s always more to say.”

“Sometimes not.”

And then, on her day off, wanting only to get as far away from her life as possible, she found herself trampling a desire line home.

it’s enough when i say it’s enough

> Anyone know how to take a picture of stars?

> Like in the sky, or with their hands in wet sidewalk?

> My phone’s flash makes everything white. I turned it off, but the shutter stays open for so long my tiny movements blur everything. I tried bracing my arm with my other hand, but it was still a blur.

> Phones are useless at night.

> Unless you need to go down a dark hallway.

> My phone is dying.

> Or call someone.

> Just try to make it comfortable.

> Samanta, this place is fucking lit!

> Insane.

> Where are you that there are stars out?

> The guy told me there was nothing wrong with it. I said, “If there’s nothing wrong with it, why is it broken?” And he said, “Why is it broken if there’s nothing wrong with it?” And I tried, again, to show him, but of course it worked again. I almost cried, or killed him.