Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Tamir wrapped his arms around Irv again, and lifted him back into the air, this time with a firmer squeeze. And again it worked, this time even better — applying a very specific definition of better . Tamir put him down, took a deep breath, then opened his arms once more.

“This time you shit.”

Irv crossed his arms.

Tamir laughed heartily and said, “Joking, joking!”

Everyone who wasn’t Irv laughed. It was the first boisterous laugh that Jacob had heard come from Max in weeks — maybe months.

Then Tamir pulled Barak forward, mussed his hair, and said, “Look at this one. He’s a man, no?”

Man was exactly the right word. He was towering, cut from Jerusalem stone and generously garnished with fur — the kind of pecs you could bounce pocket change off, if there hadn’t been a forest of thrice-curled hair so dense that all that entered it was deposited for good.

Among his brothers, and between haircuts, Max was boy enough. But Barak made him seem small, weak, ungendered. And everyone seemed to recognize it — no one more than Max, who took a meek half step back, in the direction of his mommy’s room at the Washington Hilton.

“Max!” Tamir said, turning his sights on the boy.

“Affirmative.”

Jacob gave an embarrassed chuckle: “Affirmative? Really?”

“It just came out,” Max said, smelling his own blood.

Tamir gave him a once-over and said, “You look like a vegetarian.”

“Pescatarian,” Max said.

“You eat meat,” Jacob said.

“I know. I look like a pescatarian.”

Barak gave Max a punch to the chest, for no obvious reason.

“Ouch! What the—”

“Joking,” Barak said, “joking.”

Max rubbed at his chest. “Your joke fractured my sternum.”

“Food?” Tamir asked, slapping his paunch.

“I thought maybe we’d head by Isaac’s first,” Jacob suggested.

“Let the man eat,” Irv said, creating sides by choosing one of them.

“Why the hell not,” Jacob said, remembering that Kafka quote: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.”

Tamir looked around the airport terminal and clapped his hands. “Panda Express! The best!”

He got pork lo mein. Irv did everything he could to conceal his displeasure, but his everything wasn’t too formidable. If Tamir couldn’t be a character in the Torah, he could at least adhere to it. But Irv was a good host, blood being blood, and bit his tongue until his teeth touched.

“You know where you can get the best Italian food in the world right now?” Tamir asked, stabbing a piece of pork.

“Italy?”

“Israel.”

“I’d heard that,” Irv said.

Jacob couldn’t let such a preposterous statement go.

“You mean the best Italian food outside of Italy .”

“No, I’m telling you the best Italian food being cooked right now is being cooked in Israel.”

“Right. But you’re making the dubious claim that Israel is the country outside of Italy that makes the best Italian food.”

“ Including Italy,” he said, cracking the knuckles of his forkless hand simply by making a fist and opening it.

“That’s definitionally impossible. Like saying the best German beer is Israeli.”

“It’s called Goldstar.”

“Which I love,” Irv added.

“You don’t even drink beer.”

“But when I do.”

“Let me ask you something,” Tamir said. “Where do they make the best bagels in the world?”

“New York.”

“I agree. The best bagels in the world are being made in New York. Now let me ask you: Is a bagel a Jewish food?”

“Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Is a bagel a Jewish food in the same way that pasta is an Italian food?”

“In a similar way.”

“And let me also ask you: Is Israel the Jewish homeland?”

“Israel is the Jewish state .”

Tamir straightened in his seat.

“That wasn’t the part of my argument you were supposed to disagree with.”

Irv shot Jacob a look. “Of course it’s the Jewish homeland.”

“It depends on what you mean by homeland,” Jacob said. “If you mean ancestral homeland—”

“What do you mean?” Tamir asked.

“I mean the place my family comes from.”

“Which is?”

“Galicia.”

“But before that.”

“What, Africa?”

Irv let his voice drip like molasses, but not sweet: “ Africa , Jacob ?”

“It’s arbitrary. We could go back to the trees, or the ocean, if we wanted. Some go back to Eden. You pick Israel. I pick Galicia.”

“You feel Galician?”

“I feel American.”

“I feel Jewish,” Irv said.

“The truth,” Tamir said, popping the last piece of pork into his mouth, “is you feel Julia’s titties.”

Apropos of nothing, Max asked, “Do you think the bathroom is clean?”

Jacob wondered if Max’s question, his desire to be away, was apropos of some knowledge, or intuition, that his father hadn’t touched his mother’s breasts in months?

“It’s a bathroom,” Tamir said.

“I’ll just wait until we get home.”

“If you have to go,” Jacob said, “go. It’s not good to hold it.”

“Says who?” Irv asked.

“Says your prostate.”

“You think my prostate speaks to you?”

“I don’t have to go,” Max said.

“It’s good to hold it,” Tamir said. “It’s like a … what do you call it? Not a kugel…”

“Give it a shot, OK, Max? Just in case.”

“Let the kid not go,” Irv said. And to Tamir: “A kegel. And you’re absolutely right.”

“ I’ll go,” Jacob said. “You know why? Because I love my prostate.”

“Maybe you should marry it,” Max said.

Jacob didn’t have to go, but he went. And then he stood there at the urinal, an asshole with an exposed penis, passing a few moments to further his absence of a point, and just in case.

A man his father’s age was urinating beside him. His pee came out in bursts, as if from a lawn sprinkler, and to Jacob’s unaccredited ear it sounded like a symptom. When the man let out a small grunt, Jacob reflexively glanced over, and they exchanged the briefest of smiles before remembering where they were: a place where exactly one extremely brief moment of acknowledgment was tolerable. Jacob had the strong sensation that he knew this person. He often felt that at urinals, but this time he was sure — as he always was. Where had he seen that face before? A teacher from grade school? One of the boys’ teachers? One of his father’s friends? He was momentarily convinced that this stranger was a figure in one of Julia’s old family photos from Eastern Europe, and that he had traveled through time to deliver a warning.

Jacob returned to thoughts of babbling brooks and the slow death of a lower back whose demise, like so much else, he never considered until forced, and it hit him: Spielberg . Once the thought appeared, there was no doubting it. Of course it was him. Jacob was standing, his penis exposed, next to Steven Spielberg, whose penis was exposed. What were the odds?

Jacob had grown up, as had every Jew in the last quarter of the twentieth century, under Spielberg’s wing. Rather, in the shadow of his wing. He had seen E.T. three times in its opening week, all at the Uptown, each time through his fingers as the bike chase reached a climax so delicious it was literally unbearable. He had seen Indiana Jones , and the next one, and the next one. Tried to sit through Always . Nobody’s perfect. Not until he makes Schindler’s List , at which point he is not even he anymore, but representative of them . Them? The murdered millions. No, Jacob thought, representative of us . The Unmurdered. But Schindler wasn’t for us. It was for them . Them? Not the Murdered, of course. They couldn’t watch movies. It was for all of them who weren’t us : the goyim. Because with Spielberg, into whose bank account the general public was compelled to make annual deposits, we finally had a way to force them to look at our absence, to rub their noses in the German shepherd’s shit.