Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

He wondered if Tamir ever thought about it, if he was thinking about it then.

And then Tamir let out a deep, subterranean laugh.

“What’s funny?” Jacob asked.

“Me. This feeling.”

“What feeling?”

He laughed again — his greatest performance yet?

“Jealousy.”

“ Jealousy? That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

“It’s not what I was expecting to feel. That’s why it’s funny.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Noam will finally have better stories than me. I’m jealous. But it’s good. It’s as it should be.”

“As it should be?”

“Having better stories.”

Irv said, “Maybe you should call?”

Jacob said, “‘Once upon a time there was a man whose life was so good there’s no story to tell about it.’”

“I’ll try,” Tamir said, punching a long string of numbers. “It’s not going to work, but for your sake, Irv, I’ll try.” After a few moments, an automated Hebrew message filled the car. Tamir hung up and, this time without Irv’s prompting, tried calling again. He listened. They all listened.

“Circuits busy.”

Vey iz mir.

“Try again in a minute?”

“No reason.”

“I don’t mean to be alarmist,” Jacob said, “but do you need to go home?”

Boom shakalaka!

“And how would I do that?”

“We could drive back to the airport and check on flights,” Jacob offered.

“All flights in and out of Israel are canceled.”

Vey iz mir.

“How do you know?”

Tamir held up his phone and said, “You think I’m playing games?”

Boom shakalaka!

No synagogue is sentient, but just as Sam believed that all things are capable of longing, so did he believe that all things have some awareness of their imminent end: he would tell fires “It’s OK” as the last embers hummed, and apologize to the three-hundred-million-odd sperm before flushing them on their way to wastewater treatment. No synagogue isn’t sentient.

When Sam got home from Model UN, he went straight into Other Life, like a smoker racing to get outside Sydney Airport. His iPad awoke with a memo on the screen: Max’s explanation of Samanta’s death, their father’s guilt (as in, culpability), and his own profound guilt (as in, the feeling of culpability). Sam read it twice — for clarification, and to defer the confrontation with reality.

His failure to spaz upon learning that Max wasn’t playing a sick joke surprised him. Why wasn’t he breaking his iPad over his bedpost, or screaming things that couldn’t be taken back at someone who didn’t deserve them, or at least crying? He wasn’t in any way indifferent to Samanta’s death, and he certainly hadn’t reached some epiphany that it was “only a game.” It wasn’t only a game. What awareness did Samanta have of her imminent end? No avatar isn’t sentient.

Every Skype session with his great-grandfather began with “I see you” and ended with “See you.” Sam was bothered by the knowledge that one such conversation would be their last, and that there ought to, at some point, be some acknowledgment of some version of that fact. They had skyped early the previous morning, as Sam hastily packed for Model UN — Isaac awoke before the sun rose, and went to bed before it set. They never talked for more than five minutes — despite having had it explained to him a hundred times that skyping doesn’t cost anything ever, Isaac refused to believe that longer conversations didn’t cost more — and this one had been particularly brief. Sam shared the vaguest description of the upcoming school trip, confirmed that he wasn’t sick or hungry and that no, he wasn’t “seeing anyone.”

“And everything is ready for your bar mitzvah?”

“Pretty much.”

But as he was about to click off—“Mom is waiting for me downstairs, so I should probably go”—Sam felt the expected discomfort, only this time with an urgency, or longing. He wasn’t sure the longing was his.

“Go,” Isaac said. “Go. We’ve already been on for too long.”

“I just wanted you to know that I love you.”

“Yeah, I know, sure. And I love you. OK, now go.”

“And I’m sorry that you’re moving.”

“Go, Sameleh.”

“I don’t see why you can’t just stay.”

“Because I can’t take care of myself anymore.”

“I mean here .”

“Sameleh.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“I couldn’t go up and down the stairs.”

“So we’d get one of those chairlift things.”

“They’re very expensive.”

“I’ll use my bar mitzvah money.”

“I have lots of medicines I need to take.”

“I have lots of vitamins I need to take. Mom is great with things like that.”

“I don’t want to make you upset, but soon I won’t be able to take baths or go to the toilet on my own.”

“Benjy can’t take baths on his own, and we’re constantly cleaning up Argus poop.”

“I am not a child, and I am not a dog.”

“I know, I’m just say—”

“I take care of my family, Sameleh.”

“You take such good care, but—”

“My family doesn’t take care of me.”

“I understand, but—”

“And that is that.”

“I’m gonna ask Dad—”

“No,” Isaac said, with a sternness Sam had never heard.

“Why not? I’m sure he’ll say yes.”

There was a long pause. If it weren’t for Isaac’s blinking eyes, Sam would have wondered if the image had frozen. “I told you no,” Isaac finally said, severely.

The connection weakened, the pixels enlarged.

What had Sam done? Something wrong, something unkind, but what?

Tentatively, in an effort to compensate for whatever hurt he’d accidentally inflicted in his effort to love, he said, “Also, I have a girlfriend.”

“Jewish?” Isaac asked, his face only a handful of pixels.

“Yes,” Sam lied.

“I see you,” Isaac said, and clicked off.

The addition of the I , the only letter that takes up less space than a space, changed everything. The longing was his great-grandfather’s.

Sam’s second synagogue was as he’d left it. He had no avatar with which to explore, so he quickly and crudely made a blocky figure to drop in. The foundation had been poured and the walls were framed, but without the drywall he could have shot an arrow, or his gaze, all the way through it. He — Sam knew that his new avatar was a man — went to one of the walls, gripped the studs like prison bars, and pushed it over. Sam was at once controlling this and witnessing it. He went to another wall and pushed it over.

Sam wasn’t destroying, and he wasn’t Sam. He was carving a space out of a larger space. He didn’t yet know who he was.

The exuberantly branching edifice was shrinking toward its center, like a failing empire that pulls its army back to the capital, like the blackening fingers of a stranded climber. No more social hall, no more basketball court or changing rooms, no more children’s library, no more classrooms, no more offices for any administrator or cantor or rabbi, no more chapel, no more sanctuary.

What remained after all those walls came down?

Half a dozen rooms.

Sam hadn’t intended this configuration, he’d merely created it. And he wasn’t Sam.

A dining room, a living room, a kitchen. A hall. A bathroom, a guest bedroom, a TV room, a bedroom.

Something was missing. It was longing for something.

He went to the ruins of the first synagogue and took the largely intact window of Moses floating down the Nile, as well as a handful of rubble. He replaced one of the kitchen windows with the Moses window and put the rubble in the fridge, among the ginger ale.