Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

> That’s it?

> No. Not exactly. I’m going to blow this place up.

> What the fuck?

> I set up a reception on the roof of the old color film factory across the street. We’ll watch.

> Run!

> Color film?

> You don’t need to run. No one is going to get hurt.

> Trust her.

> Film for old-fashioned cameras.

> You don’t even need to trust me. Think about it: if you’d needed to run, you’d already be dead.

> That’s some fucked-up logic.

> Last thing, before we go: Does anybody know why airplanes dim their lights at takeoff and landing?

> What the fuck?

> So the pilot can see better?

> Let’s just go, OK?

> To save power?

> I don’t want to die.

> Good guesses, but no. It’s because those are the most critical moments of the flight. More than eighty percent of accidents happen during takeoff and landing. They dim the lights to give your eyes time to adjust to the darkness of a smoke-filled cabin.

> There should be a word for things like that.

> You can follow the lighted path out of the synagogue. It will show you the way. Or you can follow me.

Julia was at her bathroom sink, Jacob at his. Side-by-side sinks: a much-sought-after feature in old Cleveland Park houses, like intricate borders framing the parquet floors, original mantels, and converted gas chandeliers. There were so few differences between the houses that the small differences had to be celebrated, otherwise everyone was working too hard for too little. On the other hand, who actually wants side-by-side sinks?

“You know what Benjy just asked me?” Jacob said, facing the mirror above his sink.

“If the world goes on for long enough, will there be fossils of fossils?”

“How did you—?”

“The monitor knows all.”

“Right.”

Jacob almost always flossed when there was a witness. Forty years of sometimes flossing, and he’d had only three cavities — all that saved time. Tonight, his wife his witness, he flossed. He wanted to spend a little time at those side-by-side sinks. Or spare a little time in that one bed.

“When I was a kid, I created my own postal system. I made a post office out of a refrigerator box. My mom sewed a uniform for me. I even had stamps with my grandfather’s face on them.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, a thread between his two front teeth. “I just thought of it.”

“ Why did you just think of it?”

He chuckled: “You sound like Dr. Silvers.”

She didn’t chuckle: “You love Dr. Silvers.”

“I had nothing to deliver,” he said, “so I started writing letters to my mom. It was the system I was drawn to; I didn’t care about the messages. Anyway, the first one said, ‘If you’re reading this, our postal system works!’ I remember that.”

“ Our ,” she said.

“What?”

“ Our. Our postal system. Not my postal system.”

“Maybe I wrote my ,” he said, unwinding the thread from his fingers, revealing the impressions of rings. “I can’t remember.”

“You can.”

“I don’t know.”

“You can . And that’s why you’re telling it to me.”

“She was a great mom,” he said.

“I know that. I’ve always known that. She manages to make the boys feel that no one in the world is better than them, and that they aren’t better than anyone. That’s a hard balance.”

“My dad doesn’t strike it.”

“There is no balance that he strikes.”

The impressions were already gone.

Julia picked up a toothbrush and handed it to her husband.

Jacob tried to force something that wouldn’t come, and said, “We’re out of toothpaste.”

“There’s another in the cabinet.”

A moment of quiet while they brushed. If they spent ten minutes every night getting ready for bed — and surely they did, surely at least that much — it would be sixty hours a year. More hours getting ready for bed together than being awake on vacation together. They had been married for sixteen years. In that time, they had spent the equivalent of forty full days getting ready for bed, almost always at the sought-after and lonely side-by-side sinks, almost always quietly.

A few months after moving out, Jacob would create a postal system with the boys. Max was receding. He laughed less, scowled more, always sought the seat closest to the window. Jacob could deny it to himself, but then others started to notice and mention it — Deborah took him aside one brunch and asked, “How does Max seem to you?”

Jacob found vintage hanging mailboxes on Etsy and affixed one to each kid’s bedroom door, and one to his own. He told them they would have their own secret postal system, to be used for those messages that felt impossible to say aloud.

“Like how people used to leave notes in the Wailing Wall,” Benjy suggested.

No , Jacob thought, but he said, “Yes. Kind of like that.”

“Except you’re not God,” Max said, which, although plainly obvious, and the position Jacob would want his children to take (as atheists, and people who don’t fear their parents), still stung.

He checked his mailbox every day. Benjy was the only one who ever wrote: “World peace”; “Snow day”; “Bigger TV.”

So much about parenting alone was difficult: the logistics of getting three kids ready for school with only two hands, the Heathrow control-tower volume of transportation to coordinate, having to multitask the multitasking. But most challenging was finding time to talk intimately with the kids. They were always together, there was always commotion, something always needed to get done, and there was no one with whom to share the load. So when one-on-one situations arose, he felt both a need to make use of them (however unnatural it might be at the time) and a concentrated dose of the old fear of saying too much or too little.

One night a few weeks after the creation of the postal system, Sam was reading to Benjy before bed, and Max and Jacob found themselves peeing into the same toilet.

“Don’t cross the streams, Ray.”

“Huh?”

“From Ghostbusters .”

“I know that’s a movie, but I’ve never seen it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“But I remember watching with—”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“OK. Well, there’s a great scene in which they fire their proton-whatevers for the first time, and Egon says, ‘Don’t cross the streams, Ray,’ because it would result in some sort of apocalyptic moment, and ever since, I’ve always thought about it when peeing in the same toilet with someone. But we both seem to be finished, so now it really makes no sense.”

“Whatever.”

“I noticed you haven’t put anything in my mailbox.”

“Yeah. I will.”

“It’s not an assignment. I just thought it might be a helpful way to get some things off your chest.”

“OK.”

“Everyone holds things in. Your brothers do. I do. Mom does. But it can make life really difficult.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I meant for you. I’ve spent my life making huge efforts to protect myself from the things I most fear, and in the end it wouldn’t be right to say that there was nothing to fear, but maybe the realization of my worst fears wouldn’t have been so bad. Maybe all of my efforts were worse. I remember the night I left for the airport. I kissed you guys like it was any other trip, and said something like ‘See you in a week or two.’ As I was getting ready to go, Mom asked me what I was waiting for. She said it was a big deal so I must be feeling big things, and you guys must be, too.”