Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Tamir said, “It’s not good. But it’s not so bad.”

“Do you want to call home?”

“You heard him. The lines are knocked out. And my voice won’t help anyone.”

“Are you sure?”

“They’re fine. Absolutely. We live in a new construction. Like he said, it’s engineered for this kind of thing — better than any of your skyscrapers, believe me. The building has a backup generator — two, I think — and in the bomb shelter there’s enough food for months. The shelter is nicer than that apartment you had in Foggy Bottom. Remember that?”

Jacob remembered the apartment; he had lived there for five years. But even more clearly he remembered the bomb shelter in Tamir’s childhood home, despite having been inside it for less than five minutes. It was the last day of that first trip to Israel. Deborah and Tamir’s mother, Adina, were on a walk to the market, hoping to find some delicacies to bring back for Isaac. Over coffee, with what almost looked like a grin, Irv asked Shlomo if the house had a shelter.

“Of course,” Shlomo said, “it’s the law.”

“Underneath the house?”

“Of course.”

The second of course made clear what should have been clear to Irv with it’s the law : Shlomo wanted his shelter underground when there was bombing, and underground when there wasn’t. But Irv pushed: “Would you show it to us? I’d like Jacob to see.” The I’d like Jacob to see made clear what should have been clear to Shlomo with Underneath the house? : Irv wasn’t going to let it go.

Save for the twelve-inch-thick door, the room was slow to reveal its oddness. It was moist, the concrete floor sweating. The light was chalky, in color and texture. Sound seemed to gather in clouds above them. There were four gas masks hanging on the wall, even though there were only three people in Tamir’s family. Some sort of four-for-three promotion? Was one for the cleaning lady, or a future child? For Elijah? What would be the protocol if chemical war broke out while Jacob’s family was there? Was it like on a plane — adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their kids? Would Jacob watch himself suffocate in the reflection of his father’s mask? His mother would never allow it. But then, she might be suffocating, too. Surely his dad would give it to her, right? Unless she was wearing Tamir’s mask, in which case that wouldn’t be an issue. Were adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their own children, or all children? If the cleaning lady were there, would she really claim one of the masks from Jacob’s parents? Tamir was older than Jacob by a few months. Did that make him, relatively speaking, the adult of the two? There was no scenario in which Jacob wouldn’t be a victim of chemical warfare.

“Let’s get out of this dump,” Tamir said to Jacob.

Jacob didn’t want to go. He wanted to spend his remaining time in Israel exploring every inch of the room, learning it, learning himself in it, simply being there. He wanted to eat lunch down there, bring down his clothes and suitcase and pack, forgo the last drips of sightseeing in order to spend another couple of hours behind those impenetrable walls. And more: he wanted to hear the air-raid siren — not the false alarm for Yom HaShoah, but a siren signaling a complete destruction from which he would be safe.

“Come on,” Tamir said, pulling on Jacob’s arm with awkward force.

On the flight back to America, thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic, Jacob dreamed of a shelter beneath the shelter, reached by another set of stairs. But this second shelter was enormous, large enough to be confused for the world, large enough to hold enough people to make war inevitable. And when the bombs started to fall in the world on that side of the thick door, the world on the other side became the shelter.

Nearly ten years later, Tamir and Jacob split a six-pack at a kitchen table that couldn’t be walked around, in an apartment carved out of an apartment, carved out of a house in Foggy Bottom. “I met someone,” Jacob said, saying it aloud for the first time.

And nearly twenty years after that, in a Japanese car bisecting the nation’s capital, the Israeli cousin — Jacob’s Israeli cousin — said, “Anyway, it’s not going to come to that.”

“To what?”

“To bomb shelters. To war.”

“Who said war?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tamir said, as if to himself. “ Israel is Hebrew for ‘contingency plan.’”

They drove the next few minutes without speaking. NPR did its best with unreliable news, and Tamir buried himself in his phone, which might have been a tablet, or even a TV. Despite checking his own with manic constancy, Jacob hated all phones — found them to be even worse than the brain tumors they gave their users. Why? Because he hated that his was ruining his life? Or because he knew that it wasn’t ruining his life, but gave him the easy and socially acceptable means to ruin it himself? Or because he suspected that other people were getting more, and more interesting, messages? Or maybe he knew all along that his phone would be his undoing — even if he didn’t know how.

Tamir’s phone was singularly annoying. Barak’s, too. They were phone SUVs. Jacob didn’t care how vivid their screens were, or how good the reception, or how easy to link with their other miserable devices. Barak had never even been to America, which, if it wasn’t the greatest country in the history of the world, at the very least had a few things to offer eyes that cared to look up. Maybe they were searching for news, although what kind of news site emits “Boom shakalaka!” every few seconds?

“What about Noam?” Jacob asked.

“What about him?”

“Where is he now?”

“This moment?” Tamir said. “As we speak? I have no idea. Keeping fathers informed is not of national importance.”

“When you last spoke with him?”

“Hebron. But I’m sure they were evacuated.”

“By helicopter?”

“I don’t know, Jacob. How would I know?”

“And Yael?”

“She’s fine. She’s in Auschwitz.”

Boom shakalaka!

“What?”

“School trip.”

They drove the George Washington Parkway in silence, AC battling the humidity that seeped through the invisible points of entry, small talk between Jacob and Irv battling the awkward silence that pressed against the windows — past Gravelly Point, where aviation buffs holding radio scanners, and fathers holding sons, could almost reach up and touch the landing gears of jumbo jets; the Capitol on the right, across the brown Potomac; the inevitable explanation of why the Washington Monument changes shades of white one-third of the way up. They crossed Memorial Bridge, between the golden horses, circled around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial, the steps that seemed to lead to nothing, and slid into the flow of Rock Creek Parkway. After passing under the terrace of the Kennedy Center and beside the teeth of the Watergate balconies, they followed the curves of the creek away from the outposts of the capital’s civilization.

“The zoo,” Tamir said, looking up from his phone.

“The zoo,” Jacob echoed.

Irv leaned forward: “You know, our favorite primates, Benjy and Deborah, are probably there right now.”

The zoo was at the epicenter of Tamir and Jacob’s friendship, their familialship; it marked the threshold between their youth and adulthood. And it was at the epicenter of Jacob’s life. Jacob’s mind often traveled to his own deathbed scene, especially when he felt that he was wasting his life. What moments, in his final moments, would he return to? He would remember arriving at the inn with Julia — both times. He would remember carrying Sam into the house after the ER, the tiny hand mummified in layers and layers of bandaging, cartoonishly large: the biggest, most useless fist in the world. He would remember the night at the zoo.