Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

> What happens at a bat mitzvah, anyway?

At any given time, there are forty times in the world. Another interesting fact: China used to have five time zones, but now it has only one, and for some Chinese people the sun doesn’t rise until after ten. Another: long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there — not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die. On Earth, the sun rises and sets once each day. A spaceship orbits Earth once every ninety minutes, which would require a Shabbat every nine hours. One line of thinking held that Jews simply shouldn’t be in a place that raises doubts about prayer and observance. Another, that one’s earthly obligations are earthbound — what happens in space stays in space. Some argued that a Jewish astronaut should observe the same routine he would on Earth. Others, that Shabbat should be observed by the time set on his instruments, despite the city of Houston being about as Jewish as the Rockets’ locker room. Two Jewish astronauts have died in space. No Jewish astronaut has observed Shabbat.

Sam’s dad gave him an article about Ilan Ramon, the only Israeli ever to go into space. Before leaving, Ramon went to the Holocaust Museum, to find an artifact to take with him. He chose a drawing of Earth by a young, anonymous boy who died in the war.

“Imagine that sweet child scribbling away,” Sam’s dad said. “If an angel had landed on his shoulder and told him, ‘You’re going to be killed before your next birthday, and in sixty years a representative of the Jewish state is going to carry your drawing of Earth as seen from space into space —”

“If there were angels,” Sam said, “he wouldn’t have been killed.”

“If the angels were good angels.”

“Do we believe in bad angels?”

“We probably don’t believe in any angels.”

Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn’t dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain.

It was always dusk in Other Life, so once every day the “other time” corresponded to the “real time” of its citizens. Some referred to that moment as “The Harmony.” Some wouldn’t miss it. Some didn’t like to be at their screens when it happened. Sam’s bar mitzvah was still a ways off. Samanta’s bat mitzvah was today. Did the drawing simply immolate when the space shuttle exploded? Are any small pieces of it still orbiting? Did they fall to the water, descend, over hours, to the ocean floor, and veil one of those deep-sea creatures that are so alien they look like they came from outer space?

The pews were filled with everyone Samanta knew, people Sam had never met. They came from Kyoto, Lisbon, Sacramento, Lagos, Toronto, Oklahoma City, and Beirut. Twenty-seven dusks. They were sitting together in the virtual sanctuary of Sam’s creation — they saw the beauty; Sam saw all that was wrong with it, all that was wrong with him. They came for Samanta, a community of her communities. As far as they knew, it was a happy occasion.

> Just take it to someone else. Insist that they open it up.

> Just fucking throw your phone from a bridge.

> Can someone explain to me what’s going to happen here?

> Funnily enough, I’m crossing a bridge right now, but I’m on an Amtrak and you can’t open the windows.

> Send us a picture of the water.

> Today Samanta becomes a woman.

> There’s more than one way to open a window.

> She’s having her period?

> Imagine thousands of phones washed up on the beach.

> Love letters in digital bottles.

> Why imagine? Go to India.

> Today she’s becoming a Jewish woman.

> I’m on an Amtrak, too!

> A Jewish woman how?

> More like hate mail.

> Let’s not figure out if we’re on the same train, OK?

> Israel is the fucking worst.

> Wiki: “When a girl reaches 12 years old she becomes ‘bat mitzvah’—daughter of commandment — and is recognized by Jewish tradition as having the same rights as an adult. She is now morally and ethically responsible for her decisions and actions.”

> Set your camera’s phone on timer and then rest it on the ground, facing up.

> Jewish people are the worst.

> Knock knock.

> Why would you even want to take a picture of stars?

> Who’s there?

> To remember them.

> Not six million Jews!

>?

> Dying laughing.

> Anti-Semite!

> Dying, anyway.

> I’m Jewish!

No one ever asked Sam why he took a Latina as an avatar, because no one, other than Max, knew that he had. The choice might have seemed odd. Some might even have thought it was offensive. They would be wrong. Being Sam was odd and offensive. Having such prolific salivary and sweat glands. Being unable not to think about walking while walking. Backne and buttne. There was no experience more humiliating or existentially dispiriting than shopping for clothes. But how to explain to his mom that he would rather have nothing that properly fit than have it confirmed to him, in a mirrored torture chamber, that nothing ever would fit? Sleeves would never end at the right place. Collars would never not be too pointy, or rise too high, or angle improperly. The buttons of every button-down shirt would always be spaced such that the penultimate one from the top made the neck opening either too constrictive or too revealing. There was a point — literally a single location in space — where a button might be positioned to create the natural feel and effect. But no shirt had ever been made with such button placement, probably because no one’s upper-body proportions were as disproportionate as his.

Because his parents were technological fucktards, Sam knew that they periodically checked his search history, the regular sweeping of which only rubbed his blackheaded nose in the patheticness of being a preteen with a Y chromosome who watched button-sewing tutorials on YouTube. And in those evenings behind his locked bedroom door, when his parents worried that he was researching firearms, or bisexuality, or Islam, he took to moving the penultimate buttons and slits of his loathsome shirts to the only endurable position. Half the things he did were stereotypically gay. In fact, probably a far greater proportion, if you were to remove the activities, such as walking an average-size dog and sleeping, that had no quality of straightness or gayness. He didn’t care. He had not even the smallest issue with gay people, not even aesthetically. But he would have liked to correct the record, because he had the largest of all issues with being misunderstood.

One morning at breakfast, his mom asked if he’d been removing and resewing the buttons on his shirts. He denied it with nonchalant vehemence.

She said, “I think it’s neat.”

And so from then on, the upper half of his daily, all-seasons uniform shifted to American Apparel T-shirts, even though they broadcast the tits mysteriously sprouting from his otherwise collapsed torso.

It felt odd to have hair that never once, despite repeated and generous applications of product, rested properly. It felt odd to walk, and he often found himself slipping into an over- (or under-) stylized catwalk stride, whereby he swung his ass out to each side and pounded his feet into the ground as if trying not only to kill insects but to perpetrate an insect genocide. Why did he walk like that? Because he wanted to walk like nothing, and the extreme effort to do so generated a horrible spectacle of horrible perambulation by someone who was such a human cowlick he actually used the word perambulation . It felt odd to have to sit in chairs, to have to make eye contact, to have to speak with a voice that he knew to be his own but did not recognize, or only recognized as belonging to yet another self-appointed Wikipedia sheriff who would never possess a biographical entry visited, much less edited, by someone who wasn’t him.