Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Irv was apparently too afraid of revealing ignorance to resolve his ignorance, so Deborah was left to ask what had just happened.

“Yom HaShoah,” Shlomo said.

“That’s the one for the trees?” Jacob asked.

“For the Jews,” Shlomo said, “the ones that were chopped down.”

“ Shoah ,” Irv said to Jacob, as if he’d known everything all along, “means ‘Holocaust.’”

“But why does everyone stop and stand in silence?”

Shlomo said, “Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do.”

“And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.

Shlomo said, “Himself.”

Jacob was both mesmerized and repulsed by the ritual. The Jewish American response to the Holocaust was “Never forget,” because there was a possibility of forgetting. In Israel, they blared the air-raid siren for two minutes, because otherwise it would never stop blaring.

Shlomo was as over-the-top a host as Benny had been. He was further over, untethered as he was from the dignity of survival. And dignity was never Irv’s problem. So there were many scenes, especially when the check came at the end of a meal.

“Don’t touch that!”

“Don’t you touch that!”

“Don’t insult me!”

“ Me insult you ?”

“You’re our guests!”

“You’re our hosts!”

“I’ll never eat with you again.”

“Count on it.”

More than once this competitive generosity escalated to genuine insult. More than once — twice — perfectly good money was ripped up. Did everyone win, or did everyone lose? Why so binary?

What Jacob remembered most sharply and tenderly was the time they spent in the Blumenbergs’ home, a two-story Art Deco — ish construction perched on a Haifan hill. Every surface was made of stone and cool enough to be felt through socks at every time of day — an entire house like the bench in Blumenberg Park. There were diagonally sliced cucumbers and cubes of cheese for breakfast. Jaunts to weirdly specific two-room “zoos”: a snake zoo, a small-mammal zoo. Tamir’s mother would make huge spreads of side dishes for lunch — half a dozen salads, half a dozen dips. At home, the Blochs made a point of trying not to turn on the TV. The Blumenbergs made a point of trying not to turn it off.

Tamir was obsessed with computers and had a library of RGB porn before Jacob had word processing. In those days, Jacob concealed dirty magazines inside reference books at Barnes & Noble, searched lingerie catalogs for nipples and pubes with the dedication of a Talmudist searching for God’s will, and listened to the moans of the visually blocked but aurally exposed Spice channel. The greatest of lewd treats was the three minutes of preview that hotels used to offer for all movies: family, adult, adult . Even as a teenager, Jacob recognized the masturbatory tautology: if three minutes of the adult film convinced you that it was a worthy adult film, you would no longer have need of it. Tamir’s computer took half a day to download a titty fuck, but what else was time made for?

Once, while they watched a pixelated woman jerkily spread and close her legs — an animation composed of six frames — Tamir asked if Jacob felt like beating off.

Jacob gave an ironic, Tom Brokaw — voiced “No,” assuming his cousin was joking.

“Suit yourself,” Tamir said, and proceeded to suit himself, pumping a glob of shea butter moisturizer into his palm.

Jacob watched him remove his hard penis from his pants and begin to stroke it, transferring the cream to its length. After a minute or two of this, Tamir got up onto his knees, bringing the head of his penis within inches of the screen — close enough for static shock. His penis was wide, Jacob had to give it that. But he wasn’t convinced it was any longer than his own. He wasn’t convinced that in the dark one would be able to tell the difference between their penises.

“How does it feel?” Jacob asked, while simultaneously reprimanding himself for voicing such a creepy question.

And then, as if in response, Tamir grabbed a Kleenex from the box on his desk and moaned as he shot a load into it.

Why had Jacob asked that? And why had Tamir come right then? Had Jacob’s question made him come? Had that been Jacob’s (totally subconscious) intent?

They masturbated side by side a dozen or so times. They certainly never touched each other, but Jacob did wonder if Tamir’s quiet moans were always irrepressible — if there wasn’t something performative about them. They never spoke about such sessions after — not three minutes after, and not three decades — but they weren’t a source of shame for either of them. They were young enough at the time not to worry about meaning, and then old enough to revere what was lost.

Pornography was only one example of the chasm between their life experiences. Tamir walked himself to school before Jacob’s parents would leave him at a drop-off birthday party. Tamir cooked his own dinner, while an airplane full of dark green vegetables searched for a landing strip in Jacob’s mouth. Tamir drank beer before Jacob, smoked pot before Jacob, got a blowjob before Jacob, got arrested before Jacob (who would never be arrested), traveled abroad before Jacob, had his heart created by having his heart broken before Jacob. When Tamir was given an M16, Jacob was given a Eurail pass. Tamir tried without success to stay out of risky situations; Jacob tried without success to find his way into them. At nineteen, Tamir was in a half-buried outpost in south Lebanon, behind four feet of concrete. Jacob was in a dorm in New Haven whose bricks had been buried for two years before construction so that they would look older than they were. Tamir didn’t resent Jacob — he would have been Jacob, given the choice — but he had lost some of the lightness necessary to appreciate someone as light as his cousin. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that stupid New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one. Tamir tried not to get killed, while Jacob tried not to die of boredom.

After his service, Tamir was finally free to live on his own terms. He became hugely ambitious, in the sense of wanting to make shitloads of money and buy loads of shit. He dropped out of Technion after a year and founded the first of a series of high-tech start-ups. Almost all of them were flops, but it doesn’t take many nonflops to make your first five million. Jacob was too jealous to give Tamir the pleasure of explaining what his companies did, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that, like most Israeli high tech, they applied military technologies to civilian life.

Tamir’s homes and cars and ego and girlfriends’ breasts got bigger every visit. Jacob put on a respectful face that revealed just the right amount of disapproval, but in the end, all his emotional dog whistles were rendered pointless by Tamir’s emotional tone-deafness. Why couldn’t Jacob just be happy for his cousin’s happiness? Tamir was as good a person as just about anyone, whose great success made his good-enough values increasingly difficult to act on. It’s confusing to have more than you need. Who could blame him?

Jacob could. Jacob could because he had less than he needed — he was an honorable, ambitious, near-broke novelist who barely ever wrote — and that wasn’t in any way confusing. Nothing was getting bigger in his life — it was a constant struggle to maintain the sizes he’d established — and people without fancy material possessions have their fancy values to flaunt.

Isaac always favored Tamir. Jacob could never figure out why. His grandfather seemed to have serious problems with all his post — bar mitzvah relatives, very much including those who forced their children to skype with him once a week, and took him to doctors, and drove him to distant supermarkets where one could buy six tins of baking powder for the price of five. Everyone ignored Isaac, but no one less than Jacob, and no one more than Tamir. Yet Isaac would have traded six Jacobs for five Tamirs.