Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

While Sam waited on the bench outside Rabbi Singer’s office, Samanta approached the bimah. Sam had built it from digital old-growth elm salvaged from the bottom of a digital freshwater lake that he’d dug and in which he’d submerged a small forest a year ago when, like one of those innocent dogs on one of those existence-of-evil electrified floors, he’d learned helplessness.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not you want a bar mitzvah,” his dad had said. “But try to think of that as inspiring.”

Why was he so obsessed with animal cruelty, anyway? Why was he irrepressibly drawn to videos that he knew would only reinforce his convictions about humankind? He spent enormous amounts of time seeking violence: animal cruelty, but also animal fights (organized by humans, and in nature), animals attacking people, bullfighters getting what they deserved, skateboarders getting what they deserved, athletes’ knees bending the wrong way, bum fights, helicopter beheadings, and more: garbage disposal accidents, car antenna lobotomies, civilian victims of chemical warfare, masturbation injuries, Shia heads on Sunni fence posts, botched surgeries, steam-burn victims, instructional videos about cutting away the questionable parts of roadkill (as if there were unquestionable parts), instructional videos about painless suicide (as if that weren’t definitionally impossible), and so on, and on and on. The images were sharp objects he used against himself: there was so much in him that he needed to move to the outside, but the process required wounds.

On the silent drive home, he explored the chapel that he’d built around the bimah: the three-toed claw feet of the weightless two-ton pews; the Gordian-knotted fringes at the ends of the rag-rug runner down the aisle; the prayer books, each word of which was continually refreshed with its synonym: the Lord is One … the Sovereign is Alone … the Absolute is Abandoned … Left to go long enough, the prayers would, if only for an instant, return to their origins. But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it.

The pressure of Sam’s unreleased insides often took the shape of unshared, useless brilliance, and while his dad, brothers, and grandparents ate lunch downstairs, while they were obviously talking about what he’d been accused of and what to do with him, while he was supposed to be memorizing the Hebrew words and Jewish melody of a haftorah whose meaning no one ever bothered with, he created morphing stained-glass windows. The window to Samanta’s right depicted baby Moses being swept down the Nile, between mothers. It was a loop, but stitched together to evoke an endless journey.

Sam thought it would be cool if the chapel’s largest window were an ongoing depiction of the Jewish Present, so instead of learning the idiotic and utterly useless Ashrei, he wrote a script that pulled keywords from a Jewish-related Google News feed, ran them through a jury-rigged video search (which combed out redundancies, red herrings, and anti-Semitic propaganda), ran those results through a jury-rigged video filter (which scaled the images to best conform to the round frame and color-adjusted for continuity), and projected them onto the window. It was better in his head than in reality, but everything was.

Around the chapel he’d built the synagogue itself: the labyrinth of literally infinitely forking hallways; the aranciata-dispensing water fountains, and urinals made of the bones of ivory poachers; the stashes of genuinely loving, nonmisogynistic face-sitting porn in the storage closet in the Men’s Club social hall; the ironic handicapped spot in the stroller parking lot; the Memorial Wall with tiny, never-working bulbs beside the names of those upon whom he wished quick and painless death, but death (former best friends, the people who made acne pads sting on purpose, etc.); various make-out grottoes where tenderhearted and legitimately funny girls, who dressed like American Apparel advertisements and wrote Percy Jackson fan fiction, allowed klutzes to suck their perfect boobs; chalkboards that delivered 600-volt electrical pulses when scratched by the fingernails of smart-ass, dumb-fuck bullies who were so obviously — except to everyone besides Sam — fifteen short years from being paunchy schmucks with tedious jobs and dumpy wives; small plaques on every surface letting everyone know that it was because of Samanta’s beneficence, her fundamental goodness, her love of mercy and fairness and the benefit of the doubt, her decency, her inherent value, her nontoxic unshittiness, that the ladder to the roof existed, that the roof existed, that the perpetually buffering God existed.

The synagogue was originally at the edge of a community that had developed around a shared love of videos in which guilty dogs express shame. He could watch such videos all day — more than once he did —without going too deep into what he found so appealing about them. The obvious explanation would be that he empathized with the dog, and there was obviously some truth in that. (“Did you do that, Sam? Did you write those words? Were you bad?”) But he was also drawn to the owners. Every single one of the videos was made by someone who loved his dog more than himself; the “shaming” was always funnily overdramatized and good-spirited, and they all ended with reconciliation. (He’d tried making his own such videos, but Argus was too old and tired to do anything other than shit himself, for which no shaming could be good-spirited.) So it had something to do with the sinner, and something with the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again. Maybe in his next life, his feelings would be less than all-consuming and some portion of him would remain for understanding.

There was nothing exactly wrong with the original location, but life was for good-enough, and Other Life was for putting things in the places they longed to be. Sam secretly believed that everything was capable of longing, and more, that everything was always longing. So after the shame-inducing chew-out he got from his mom later that day, he paid some digital movers some digital currency to disassemble the synagogue into the largest parts that would fit into the largest trucks, move them, and reassemble them according to screen grabs.

“We’re going to have to talk when Dad comes home from his meeting, but I need to say something. It is required .”

“Fine.”

“Stop saying ‘fine.’”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying ‘sorry.’”

“I thought the whole point was that I was supposed to be apologizing?”

“For what you did.”

“But I didn’t —”

“I’m very disappointed in you.”

“I know.”

“That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say? Like maybe, ‘I did it and I’m sorry’?”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Clean up this mess. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s my room.”

“But it’s our house.”

“I can’t move that board. We’re only halfway done with the game. Dad said we could finish after I’m not in trouble anymore.”

“You know why you always beat him?”

“Because he lets me win.”

“He hasn’t let you win in years.”

“He goes easy.”

“He doesn’t. You beat him because it excites him to capture pieces, but you’re always thinking four moves ahead. It makes you good at chess, and it makes you good at life.”