Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Jacob sat on Sam’s bed and said, “When I was young, maybe in high school, I used to like to write out the lyrics of all of my favorite songs. I don’t know why. I guess it gave me that feeling of things being in the right place. Anyway, this was long before the Internet. So I’d sit with my boom box—”

“Your boom box ?”

“A tape player with speakers.”

“I was being dismissive.”

“All right … well … I’d sit with my boom box and play a second or two of a song, then write down what I’d heard, then rewind and play it again to make sure I’d gotten it right, then let it play again, and write down a bit more, then rewind for the parts I didn’t quite hear, or wasn’t sure I’d heard, then write them down. Rewinding a tape is really imprecise, so I’d inevitably go back too far, or not far enough. It was incredibly laborious. But I loved it. I loved how careful it felt. I loved the feeling of getting it right. I spent who knows how many thousands of hours doing that. Sometimes a lyric would really stump me, especially when grunge and hip-hop came along. And I wouldn’t accept guessing, because that would undermine the entire point of writing the lyrics out — to get it right. Sometimes I’d have to listen to the same little bit over and over and over, dozens of times, hundreds. I would literally wear through that part of the tape, so that when I listened to the song later, the part I most wanted to get right wasn’t there anymore. I remember a phrase in ‘All Apologies’—you know that song, right?”

“Nope.”

“Nirvana? Great, great, great song. Anyway, Kurt Cobain’s marbles seemed to have migrated to his mouth, and there was one phrase I had a particularly hard time making out. My best guess, after hundreds of listenings, was ‘I can see from shame.’ I didn’t realize I was wrong until many years later, when I sang it, at the top of my lungs, like an idiot, with Mom. Not long after we got married.”

“She pointed out that you were wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s so Mom.”

“I was grateful.”

“But you were singing.”

“Singing wrongly.”

“Still. She should have let it go.”

“No, she did the right thing.”

“So what was the real lyric?”

“Fasten your seat belt. It was: ‘aqua seafoam shame.’”

“No way.”

“Right?”

“What’s that even supposed to mean ?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. That was my mistake. I thought it had to mean something.”

Neither Jacob nor Julia knew what, exactly, was happening in those first two weeks after Julia discovered the phone: what had been agreed to, implied, broached hypothetically, asked for. Neither knew what was real. It felt like there were so many emotional land mines; they moved through the hours and rooms on their hearts’ tiptoes, with large earphones connected to sensitive metal detectors that could pick up traces of buried feeling — if at the expense of blocking out the rest of life.

At a breakfast that might, to a television audience, have seemed in every way happy, Julia said into the fridge, “We’re always running out of milk,” and through his earphones Jacob heard “You have never taken good enough care of us,” but he didn’t hear Max say, “Don’t come to the talent show tomorrow.”

And the next day, at Max’s school, forced to share the small space of the elevator alone together, Jacob said, “The Door Close button isn’t even attached to anything. Purely psychological.” Through her earphones, Julia heard “Let’s get this over with.” But she didn’t hear herself say, “I thought everything was purely psychological.” Which, through Jacob’s earphones, sounded like “All of those years of therapy and no one knows less about happiness.” And he didn’t hear himself say, “There’s pure, and there’s pure.” A probably content parent in a probably unbroken family entered and asked Jacob if he meant to be pressing Door Open.

All that tiptoeing, all that precious overinterpreting and evading, and it wasn’t a minefield at all. It was a Civil War battlefield. Jacob had taken Sam to Antietam, just as Irv had taken Jacob. And he had given a similar speech about what a privilege it is to be American. Sam found a half-buried bullet. The weapons in Jacob and Julia’s earth were as harmless as that — artifacts of old battles, safe to be examined, explored, even valued. If they’d known not to fear them.

The domestic rituals were sufficiently ingrained as to make avoidance fairly easy and inconspicuous. She showered, he got breakfast going. She served breakfast, he showered. He supervised teeth brushing, she laid clothes out on beds, he confirmed the contents of the backpacks, she checked the weather and responded to it with appropriate outer clothing, he got Ed the Hyena going (warmed in the six months of too cold, cooled in the six months of too hot), she brought the boys out and stepped into Newark to look for cars coming down the hill, he reversed.

They found two seats near the front of the auditorium, but after depositing his bag, Jacob said, “I’ll go grab us some coffees.” Which he did. And then waited at the school entrance with them until three minutes of curtain. Halfway through a girl’s talentless rendition of “Let It Go,” Jacob whispered, “I wish she would,” into Julia’s ear. No response. A group of boys reenacted a scene from Avatar . What was probably a girl used different kinds of pasta to explain how the euro works. Neither Jacob nor Julia wanted to admit to not knowing what Max was going to do. Neither could bear the shame of having been too preoccupied with personal hurt to be present for their child. And neither could bear the shame of the other having been a better parent. Each privately guessed that Max would perform the card trick that the magician had taught him after Julia’s fortieth. Two girls did that cup thing while singing “When I’m Gone,” and Jacob whispered, “So go already.”

“What?”

“No. Her. The singer.”

“Be nice.”

For the finale, the drama and music teachers teamed up for a sanitized version of the opener from The Book of Mormon —living out their dreams while reconfirming why they were dreams. Lots of applause, a brief thank-you from the principal, and the kids filed out and back to class.

Jacob and Julia walked back to their cars in silence. And the talent show wasn’t mentioned at home that night. Had Max chickened out? Did he consider himself talentless? Was his abstention an act of aggression or a call for help? If they’d brought any of these questions to him, he would have pointed out that he told them not to go.

Three nights later, when Jacob came to bed, after having waited the requisite hour, Julia was still reading, so he said, “Oh, I forgot something,” and headed back down to not read the paper while not watching another episode of Homeland and regretting, as he often did, that Mandy Patinkin wasn’t ten years older — he’d have made a great Irv.

Two days after that, Julia walked into the pantry, where Jacob was checking to see if a few hundred billion atoms had spontaneously organized themselves into an unhealthy snack in the ten minutes since he last checked. She walked back out. (Unlike Jacob, she never gave an ostensible explanation for moving away from him, she never “forgot something.”) The pantry wasn’t among the unofficially claimed spaces — as the TV room was Jacob’s, and the small sitting room was Julia’s — but it was too small to be shared.

On the tenth day, Jacob opened the bathroom door to see Julia drying off after a bath. She covered herself. He had seen her come out of hundreds of baths, seen three children come out of her body. He had watched her dress and undress thousands and thousands of times, and twice at the inn in Pennsylvania. They’d made love in every position, offering every view of every body part. “Sorry,” he said, not knowing what the word referred to, only that his foot had half depressed a mine’s trigger.