Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

More laughter.

“I’ll never get over what a strange and easily explained people we are. But perhaps some of you are like me, and cannot help but hear the familiar vows: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.’ They might not be our words, but they are in our collective subconscious.

“There was a year in Jacob’s childhood—” She looked to Irv and said, “Maybe it was even more than a year? A year and a half?” Then she looked back to those gathered. “There was a period of time that felt like longer than it was”—laughter—“when Jacob would pretend he was disabled. It started with the announcement, one morning, that he was blind. ‘But you’re closing your eyes,’ I told him.”

More laughter.

“‘That’s only because there’s nothing to look at,’ he said, ‘so I’m resting them.’ Jacob was a stubborn child. He could keep up a resistance for days, and weeks. Irv, can you imagine from where he might have gotten that?”

A laugh.

Irv called back, “Nature from me, nurture from you!”

Another laugh.

Deborah continued: “He stuck with the blindness for three or four days — a long time for a child, or anyone, to keep his eyes closed — but then came to dinner one night batting lashes and once again adept with silverware. ‘I’m happy to see you’ve recovered,’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his ears. ‘What is it, love?’ He went to the cabinet, got a pen and paper, and wrote, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m deaf.’ Irv said, ‘You aren’t deaf.’ Jacob mouthed the words ‘I am deaf.’

“Maybe a month later, he limped into the living room with a pillow under the back of his shirt. He didn’t say anything, just limped to the shelf, took down a book, and limped back out. Irv called out, ‘Ciao, Quasimodo,’ and went back to his reading. He thought it was a phase among phases. I followed Jacob to his room, sat beside him on his bed, and asked, ‘Did you break your back?’ He nodded yes. ‘That must be incredibly painful.’ He nodded. I suggested we reset his spine by taping a broom to his back. He walked around like that for two days. He recovered.

“I was reading to him in bed a couple of weeks later — his head propped on the pillow that had been the hump on his back — and he pulled up the sleeve of his pajama top and said, ‘Look what happened.’ I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing, only that I was supposed to be seeing it, so I said, ‘That’s looks horrible.’ He nodded. ‘I got a very bad burn,’ he said. ‘So I see,’ I said, very gently touching it. ‘Hold on, I have some ointment in the medicine cabinet.’ I came back with moisturizer. ‘For use on extreme burns,’ I said, pretending to read the directions on the back. ‘Apply liberally across burn. Rub into skin as if massaging. Full recovery expected by morning.’ I rubbed his arm for half an hour, a massage that went through seasons of being pleasurable, and meditative, and intimate, and, apparently, sedating. When he came into our bed the next morning, he showed me his arm and said, ‘It worked.’ I said, ‘A miracle.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘just medicine.’”

More laughter.

“ Just medicine. I still think about that all the time. No miracle, just medicine.

“The disabilities and injuries continued to come — a cracked rib, loss of feeling in his left leg, broken fingers — but with less and less frequency. Then, one morning, maybe a year after he’d gone blind, Jacob didn’t come down for breakfast. He often overslept, especially after nights when he and his father stayed up to watch the Orioles. I tapped on his door. No answer. I opened it, and he was perfectly still on his bed, arms and legs straight, with a note balanced in the well of his sternum: ‘I am feeling extremely sick, and think I might die tonight. If you are now looking at me, and I’m not moving, it is because I am dead.’ If it were a game, he’d have won it. But it wasn’t a game. I could rub cream into a burn, I could set a broken back, but there is nothing to be done for the dead. I had loved the intimacy of our secret understanding, but I no longer understood. I looked at him lying there, my stoic child, so still. I started crying. Just as I’m about to do now. I got on my knees beside Jacob’s body, and I cried and cried and cried.”

Irv went to the dance floor and put his arm around Deborah. He whispered something into her ear. She nodded, and whispered something back. He whispered something back.

She collected herself and said, “I cried a lot. I put my head on his chest and made little rivers in the channels between his ribs. You were so skinny, Jacob. No matter how much you ate, you were just bones. Just bones,” she sighed.

“You let me go on for a long time, then coughed, and jerked your legs, and coughed again, and slowly came back to life. I was never more angry than when you put yourself in danger. When you didn’t look both ways, when you ran with scissors — I wanted to hit you. I actually had to stop myself from hitting you. How could you be so careless with the thing I most loved?

“But I wasn’t angry then. Only devastated. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ I told you. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again.’ Still flat on your back, you turned your head to face me — do you remember this? — and you said, ‘But I have to.’”

Deborah started crying again, and handed Irv the page from which she’d been reading.

“In sickness and in health,” he said. “Jacob and Julia, my son and daughter, there is only ever sickness. Some people go blind, some go deaf. Some people break their backs, some get badly burned. But you were right, Jacob: you would have to do it again. Not as a game, or rehearsal, or tortuous effort to communicate something, but for real and forever.”

Irv looked up from the page, turned to Deborah, and said, “Jesus, Deborah, this is depressing.”

More laughter, but now from trembling throats. Deborah laughed, too, and took Irv’s hand.

He kept reading: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”

After having made love for the first time as husband and wife, Jacob and Julia lay side by side. Side by side, they looked at the ceiling.

Jacob said, “My mom’s speech was great.”

“It was,” Julia said.

Jacob took her hand and said, “But only the deafness part was true. None of the rest.”

Sixteen years later, alone with the mother of his three children, on the stoop of their home and under only the infinite ceiling, Jacob knew that everything his mother had said was true. Even if he couldn’t remember it, even if it hadn’t happened. He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking for him.

But then Julia pressed his hand. Not hard. Just enough pressure to communicate love. He felt love. Spousal, co-parental, romantic, friendly, forgiving, devoted, resigned, stubbornly hopeful — the kind didn’t matter. He had spent so much of his life standing at thresholds, parsing love, withholding comfort, forcing happiness. She applied more pressure to her still-husband’s hand, and held his eyes in the fingers of her eyes, and told him, “Your grandfather died.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, words that originated in his spine.

“Sorry?”

“Wait, what ? I didn’t hear you.”

“Your grandfather. Isaac. He’s dead.”

“What?”

DAY 2