Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Jacob accepted the brunt of the responsibility, because he considered himself the most able to do so, and because he most strongly wanted to escape other responsibilities. He sat shmira —an expression he’d never heard before he became a choreographer of shmira sitters —at least once a day, usually for several hours at a time. For the first three days, the body was kept on a table, under a sheet, at the Jewish burial home. Then it was moved to a secondary space in the back, and finally, at the end of the week, to Bethesda, where unburied bodies go to die. Jacob never got any closer than ten feet, and dialed the podcasts to hearing-impairing volumes, and tried not to inhale through his nose. He brought books, went through e-mail (he had to stand on the other side of the door to get cell reception), even got some writing done: HOW TO PLAY DISTRACTION; HOW TO PLAY GHOSTS; HOW TO PLAY INCOMMUNICABLE, FELT MEMORIES.

Sunday, mid-morning, when Max’s ritualized complaints of there being nothing to do became intolerably exasperating, Jacob suggested Max come along for some shmira sitting , thinking, This will make you grateful for your boredom . Calling his bluff, Max accepted.

They were greeted at the door by the previous shmira sitter —an ancient woman from the shul who evoked so much chilliness and vacancy she might have been mistaken for one of the dead if her overapplication of makeup had not given her away: only living Jews are embalmed. They exchanged nods, she handed Jacob the keys to the front door, reminded him that absolutely nothing other than toilet paper (and number two, of course) could be flushed down the toilet, and, with somewhat less pomp and circumstance than happens outside Buckingham Palace, the changing of the guard was complete.

“It smells horrible,” Max observed, seating himself at the reception area’s long oak table.

“I breathe through my mouth when I have to breathe.”

“It smells like someone farted into a vodka bottle.”

“How do you know what vodka smells like?”

“Grandpa made me smell it.”

“Why?”

“To prove that it was expensive.”

“Wouldn’t the price do that?”

“Ask him.”

“Chewing gum helps, too.”

“Do you have any gum?”

“I don’t think so.”

They talked about Bryce Harper, and why, despite the genre being too exhausted to raise an original finger, superhero movies were still pretty great, and as often happened, Max asked his dad to recount Argus stories.

“We took him to a dog training class once. Did I ever tell you that?”

“You did. But tell me again.”

“So it was right after we got him. The teacher began by demonstrating a belly rub that would relax a dog when it became agitated. We were sitting in a circle, maybe twenty people, everyone working away at his dog’s belly, and then the room filled with a loud rumbling, like the Metro running beneath the building. It was coming from my lap. Argus was snoring.”

“That’s so cute.”

“So cute.”

“He’s not very well behaved, though.”

“We dropped out. Felt like a waste of time. But a couple of years later, Argus got into the habit of pulling on the leash when we walked. And he’d just stop abruptly and refuse to take another step. So we hired some guy that people in the park were using. I can’t remember his name. He was from Saint Lucia, kind of fat, had a limp. He put a choke collar on Argus and observed as we walked with him. Sure enough, Argus stopped short. ‘Give him a pull,’ the guy said. ‘Show him who’s the alpha dog.’ That made Mom laugh. I gave a pull, because, you know, I’m the alpha dog. But Argus wouldn’t budge. ‘Harder,’ the guy said, so I pulled harder, but Argus pulled back as hard. ‘You got to show him,’ the man said. I pulled again, this time quite hard, and Argus made a little choking noise, but still wouldn’t budge. I looked at Mom. The guy said, ‘You’ve got to teach him, otherwise it’ll be like this forever.’ And I remember thinking: I can live with this forever.

“I couldn’t sleep that night. I felt so guilty about having pulled him so hard that last time, making him choke. And that expanded to guilt about all of the things I’d ever tried to teach him: to heel, offer his paw on command, even to come back. If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t try to teach him anything.”

An hour passed, and then another.

They played a game of Hangman, and then another thousand. Max’s phrases were always inspired, but it was hard to say by what: NIGHT BEFORE NIGHTTIME; ASTHMA THROUGH BINOCULARS; BLOWING A KISS TO AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS.

“That’s what you call a group of ravens,” he said after Jacob had solved it with only a head, torso, and left arm.

“So I’ve heard.”

“A lamentation of swans. A glittering of hummingbirds. A radiance of cardinals.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I like knowing things.”

“Me, too.”

“A minyan of Jews.”

“Excellent.”

“An argument of Blochs.”

“A universe of Max.”

They played a word game called Ghost, in which they took turns adding letters to a growing fragment, trying not to be the one to complete a word, while having a word in mind that the fragment could spell.

“A.”

“A-B.”

“A-B-S.”

“A-B-S-O.”

“A-B-S-O-R.”

“Shit.”

“Absorb.”

“Yeah. I was thinking absolve .”

They played Twenty Questions, Two Truths and a Lie, and Fortunately Unfortunately. Each wished there were a TV to lighten their load.

“Let’s go look at him,” Max said, as casually as if he’d been suggesting they dig into the dried mango they’d brought along.

“Great-Grandpa?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s there.”

“But why?”

“Why not?”

“ Why not isn’t an answer.”

“Neither is why .”

Why not? It wasn’t prohibited. It wasn’t disrespectful. It wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, disgusting.

“I took a philosophy class in college. I can’t remember what it was called, and can’t even remember the professor, but I do remember learning that some prohibitions aren’t ethically grounded, but rather because certain things are not to be done . One could reach for all sorts of reasons that it isn’t right to eat the bodies of humans who died of natural causes, but at the end of the day, it’s just not something we do.”

“I didn’t say eat him.”

“No, I know. I’m just making a point.”

“Who would want to eat a human?”

“It would almost certainly smell and taste good. But we don’t do it, because it’s not to be done.”

“Who decides?”

“Excellent question. Sometimes the not to be done is universal, sometimes it’s particular to a culture, or even to a family.”

“Like how we eat shrimp, but don’t eat pork.”

“We don’t eat shrimp as a practice. We on occasion eat some shrimp. But yes, like that.”

“Except this isn’t like that.”

“What isn’t?”

“Looking at Great-Grandpa.”

He was right; it wasn’t.

Max went on: “We’re here to be with him, right? So why wouldn’t we be with him ? What’s the point of coming all the way here, and spending all this time, just to be in a different room? We might as well have sat at home with popcorn and a streaming video of his body.”

Jacob was afraid. It was a very simple explanation, even if the explanation for that explanation was harder to come by. What was there to be afraid of? The proximity to death? Not exactly. The proximity to imperfection? The embodied proof of reality, in its grotesque honesty? The proximity to life.