Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“Is Dad bad at life?”

“That’s not the conversation we’re having right now.”

“If he focused, he could beat me.”

“That might very well be true, but we’ll never know.”

“What conversation are we having?”

She took the phone from her pocket. “What is this?”

“That’s a cellular telephone.”

“Is it yours?”

“I’m not allowed to have a smartphone.”

“Which is why it would upset me if it were yours.”

“So you don’t need to be upset.”

“Whose is it?”

“No idea.”

“Phones aren’t like dinosaur bones. They don’t just show up.”

“Dinosaur bones aren’t like that, either.”

“If I were you, I’d tone down the intelligence.” She turned the phone over. And over. “How do I look through it?”

“I assume it has a password.”

“It does.”

“So you’re out of luck.”

“I might as well try this2shallpass , right?”

“I guess.”

Every adult member of the Bloch family used that ridiculous password for everything — from Amazon to Netflix to home alarm systems to phones.

“Nope,” she said, showing Sam the screen.

“Worth a shot.”

“Should I take it to the store, or something?”

“They don’t even open the phones of terrorists.”

“Maybe I’ll try the same password, but with caps.”

“You could.”

“How do you capitalize a letter?”

Sam took the phone. He typed like rain hitting a skylight, but Julia saw only the disfigured thumb, and in slow motion.

“Nope,” he said.

“Try spelling it out.”

“What?”

“T-o-o.”

“That would be pretty stupid.”

“It would be brilliant compared with using the same password that’s used for everything.”

“ T-h-i-s-t-o-o-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s … Nope. Sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry.”

“Try spelling it out and capitalizing the first letter.”

“Huh?”

“Capital T , and t-w-o for the numeral.”

This he typed more slowly, carefully. “Hm.”

“It’s open?”

She reached to take the phone, but he held it for just a fraction of a second, enough to create an awkward stutter. Sam looked at his mother. Her enormous, ancient thumb pushed words up the tiny glass mountain. She looked at Sam.

“What?” he asked.

“What what?”

“Why are you looking at me?”

“Why am I looking at you?”

“Like that?”

Jacob couldn’t fall asleep without a podcast. He said the information soothed him, but Julia knew it was the company. She was usually asleep by the time he came to bed — unacknowledged choreography — but every now and then she’d find herself listening alone. One night, her husband snoring beside her, she heard a sleep scientist explain lucid dreaming — a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. The most common technique for bringing on a lucid dream is to get in the habit, in waking life, of looking at texts — a page of a book or magazine, a billboard, a screen — and then looking away, and looking back. In dreams, texts don’t remain constant. If you exercise the habit, it becomes a reflex. And if you exercise the reflex, it slips into dreams. The discontinuity of the text will indicate that you’re dreaming, at which point you will not only be aware, but also in control.

She looked away from the phone, and looked back.

“I know you don’t play Other Life. What is it you do?”

“Huh?”

“What’s the word for what you do?”

“Live?” he said, trying to understand the change that was coming over his mother’s face.

“I mean in Other Life.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You live Other Life?”

“I don’t usually have to describe what I’m doing there, but sure.”

“You can live Other Life.”

“Right.”

“No, I mean you are allowed to.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I was grounded.”

“You are,” she said, putting the phone in her pocket. “But you can live that now, if you want.”

“We can go get the suit.”

“Another day. There’s time.”

Sam looked away from his mother, and looked back.

* * *

He’d checked all the devices. He wasn’t angry, he just wanted to say what needed to be said, and then flatten the synagogue to rubble. It didn’t fit, wasn’t home. He’d wired everything double-redundantly, and placed three times as many explosives as were necessary: under each pew, out of sight atop the bookshelf that held the siddurim, buried beneath the hundreds of yarmulkes in their waist-high, octagonal wooden container.

Samanta removed the Torah from the ark. She chanted some memorized nonsense, undressed the Torah, and spread it out in front of her on the bimah. All of those beautiful pitch-black letters. All of those beautiful minimalist sentences, combining to tell all of those beautiful, endlessly echoing stories that should have been lost to history and still might be. The detonator was inside the Torah pointer. Samanta grasped it, found her place on the scroll, and started to chant.

> Bar’chu et Adonai Ham’vorach.

> Say what?

> I took my little brother to the zoo and these rhinos started fucking and it was insane. He just stood there looking. He didn’t even know it was funny, which was the funniest part.

> Pay attention!

> It’s funny when someone doesn’t know it’s funny.

> How can I miss someone I never met?

> Baruch Adonai Ham’vorach l’olam va’ed.

> I will always, always, always take dishonesty over faux honesty.

> App: Everything you say will one day be used against you.

> Baruch Atah, Adonai …

> Got it: We praise You …

> I’ve been having this weird thing where I can’t remember what people I know look like. Or I convince myself I can’t. I’ll find myself trying to imagine my brother’s face, and can’t. It’s not that I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, or that I wouldn’t recognize him. But when I try to think of him, I can’t.

> Eloheynu melech ha’olam …

> Download a program called VeryPDF. It’s pretty straightforward.

> Eternal God, King of the Universe …

> Sorry, I was just eating dinner. I’m in Kyoto. The stars have been out for hours.

> Did anyone see the video of that Jewish reporter getting decapitated?

> asher bachar banu mikol ha’amim …

> VeryPDF has a million bugs.

> You have called us to Your service …

> My iPhone is making me seasick.

> v’natan lanu et Torato …

> You need to lock rotation. Double click on the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar. Swipe right until you get to something that looks like a circular arrow — it enables and disables rotation lock.

> Could you go blind from staring at a movie of the sun?

> Does anybody know anything about this new telescope that the Chinese are talking about building? It’s supposed to see twice as far back in time as any telescope has before.

> Baruch Atah, Adonai …

> I know I sound like I’m high, but shouldn’t we acknowledge the weirdness of what you just said? It can see twice as far back in time?

> I could fit every word I’ve ever written in my life onto a thumb drive.

> Which means?

> We praise You …

> Imagine if they put a massive mirror in space, really far away from us. Couldn’t we, by aiming a telescope at it, see ourselves in the past?

> Meaning?

> The farther away it was, the deeper into our past we could see: our births, our parents’ first kiss, cavemen.