Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Save for the moments that most people would do anything to avoid, life is pretty slow and uninteresting and undramatic and uninspiring. Jacob’s solution to that problem, or blessing, wasn’t to alter the drama of the show — the authenticity of his work was the only antidote to the inauthenticity of his life — but to generate more and more paraphernalia.

Twenty-four years earlier, around the time that his lack of patience overwhelmed his passion for guitar, Jacob started designing album covers for an imaginary band. He wrote track lists, and lyrics, and liner notes. He thanked people who didn’t exist: engineers, producers, managers. He copied copyright language from Steady Diet of Nothing. An atlas at his side, he created a U.S. tour, and then a world tour, giving thought to the limits of his physical and emotional endurance: Is Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid too much for one week? Especially after eight months on the road? And even if it were endurable, what good would come from pushing the band toward an irritability that would only jeopardize everything they believed in and worked so hard to achieve? The dates were printed on the backs of T-shirts he designed, and actually produced, and actually wore. But he couldn’t play barre chords.

His relationship to the show was something like that — the more stunted the reality, the more expansive the related materials.

He created, and perpetually added to, a “bible” for the show — a kind of user’s manual for those who would one day work on it. He generated an ever-adjusting dossier of background information on each of the characters—

SAM BLOCH

On the brink of 13. The eldest of the Bloch brothers. Spends virtually all of his time in the virtual world of Other Life. Hates the fit of all clothing. Loves watching videos of bullies getting knocked out. Incapable of ignoring, or even not perceiving, sexual double entendres. Would take a body covered with acne scarring in the future for a clear forehead in the present. Longs for his positive qualities to be universally recognized but never mentioned.

GERSHOM BLUMENBERG

Long dead. Son of Anshel, father of Isaac. Grandfather of Irving. Grandson of someone whose name has been lost forever. Great Rabbi of Drohobycz. Died in a burning synagogue. Namesake of a small park with cool marble benches in Jerusalem. Appears only in nightmares.

JULIA BLOCH

43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she’s never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

— and a catalog of settings, which included short (if always expanding) descriptions of place, hundreds of photographs for a future props department, maps, floor plans, real estate listings, anecdotes—

2294 NEWARK STREET

Bloch House. Nicer than many, but not the nicest. But nice. If not as nice as it could be. Thoughtful interiors, within the working limits. Some good midcentury furniture, mostly through eBay and Etsy. Some IKEA furniture with cool hacks (leather pulls, faceted cabinet fronts). Pictures hung in clusters (equitably distributed between Jacob’s and Julia’s families). Almond flour in a Williams-Sonoma glass jar on a soapstone counter. A too-beautiful-to-use Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Mineral Blue on the back right burner of a double-wide Lacanche range whose potential is wasted on veggie chili. Some books that were bought to be read (or at least dipped into); others to give the impression of a very specific kind of very broad-minded curiosity; others, like the two-volume slipcased edition of The Man Without Qualities, because of their beautiful spines. Hydrocortisone acetate suppositories beneath a stack of New Yorker s in the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet. A vibrator in the foot of a shoe on a high shelf. Holocaust books behind non-Holocaust books. And running up the kitchen doorframe, a growth chart of the Bloch boys.

When it was time for me to move, I lingered at this threshold. The doorframe was the only thing I couldn’t let go of. Forget the Papa Bear Chair and forget its ottoman. Forget the candlesticks and lamps. Forget Blind Botanist , the drawing we bought together, attributed to one of my heroes, Ben Shahn, lacking any provenance. Forget the moody orchid. While Julia was out one afternoon, I jimmied the doorframe loose from the wall with the aid of a flathead screwdriver, slid it down the length of the Subaru (one end against the glass of the hatchback, the other touching the windshield), and drove the record of my children’s growth to a new house. Two weeks later, a housepainter painted over it. I redid the lines to the best of my sorry memory.

— and most ambitiously (or neurotically, or pathetically): the notes to the actors, striving to convey what the scripts on their own could not, because more words were needed: HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER; HOW TO PLAY “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”; HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS … Each episode was only twenty-seven pages, give or take. Each season only ten episodes. There was room for a little background, a few flashbacks and tangents and clumsy insertions of information that didn’t drive the plot but filled out the motivation. So many more words were needed: HOW TO PLAY THE NEED FOR DISSATISFACTION; HOW TO PLAY LOVE; HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE … The notes were Jewish-motherly in their irrepressibly naggy didacticism, Jewish-fatherly in their need to obscure every emotion in metaphor and deflection. HOW TO PLAY AMERICAN; HOW TO PLAY THE GOOD BOY; HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME … The bible quickly surpassed the scripts themselves in length and depth — the explanatory material overwhelmed what it attempted to explain. So Jewish. Jacob wanted to make something that would redeem everything, and instead he was explaining, explaining, explaining …

HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME

The morning Julia found the phone, my parents were over for brunch. Everything was falling apart around Benjy, although I’ll never know what he knew at the time, and neither will he. The adults were talking when he reentered the kitchen and said, “The sound of time. What happened to it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know,” he said, waving his tiny hand about, “the sound of time.”

It took time — about five frustrating minutes — to figure out what he was getting at. Our refrigerator was being repaired, so the kitchen lacked its omnipresent, nearly imperceptible buzzing sound. He spent virtually all his home life within reach of that sound, and so had come to associate it with life happening.

I loved his misunderstanding, because it wasn’t a misunderstanding.

My grandfather heard the cries of his dead brothers. That was the sound of his time.

My father heard attacks.

Julia heard the boys’ voices.

I heard silences.

Sam heard betrayals and the sounds of Apple products turning on.

Max heard Argus’s whining.

Benjy was the only one still young enough to hear home.

Irv lowered all four windows and told Jacob, “You lack strength.”

“And you lack intelligence. Together we make a fully incomplete person.”

“Seriously, Jacob. What is the ravenous need for love?”

“Seriously, Dad. What is the ravenous need for that diagnosis?”

“I’m not diagnosing you. I’m explaining yourself to you.”

“And you don’t need love?”