Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Max said, “See you on the other side,” and entered the room.

Jacob remembered the night, decades before, when he and Tamir had snuck into the National Zoo.

“You OK?” he called to Max.

“Freaky,” Max said.

“I told you.”

“That’s not what you told me.”

“How does he look?”

“Come see for yourself.”

“I’m comfortable where I am.”

“He looks like he does on Skype, but farther away.”

“He looks OK?”

“I probably wouldn’t put it like that.”

How did he look? Would the body have looked different if he’d died differently?

Isaac had been the embodiment of Jacob’s history; his people’s psychological pantry, the shelves collapsed; his heritage of incomprehensible strength and incomprehensible weakness. But now he was only a body. The embodiment of Jacob’s history was only a body.

They used to take baths together when Jacob slept over as a child, and the long hairs of Isaac’s arms, chest, and legs would float on the surface like pond vegetation.

Jacob remembered watching his grandfather fall asleep under the barber’s cape, how his head slumped forward, how the straight razor mowed a path from the back of his hairline to the limits of the barber’s reach.

Jacob remembered being invited to pull at the loose skin of his grandfather’s elbow until it stretched to a web large enough to hold a baseball.

He remembered the smell after his grandfather used the bathroom: it didn’t disgust him, it terrified him. He was mortally afraid of it.

He remembered how his grandfather wore his belt just below the nipples, and his socks just above the knees; and how his fingernails were as thick as quarters, and his eyelids as thin as tinfoil; and how between claps he turned his palms skyward, as if repeatedly opening and shutting an invisible book, as if unable not to give the book a chance, and unable not to reject it, and unable not to give it another chance.

Once, he fell asleep in the middle of a game of Uno, his mouth half full of black bread. Jacob might have been Benjy’s age. He carefully replaced his grandfather’s mediocre hand with all Wild Draw Fours, but when he shook his grandfather awake and they resumed the game, Isaac showed no wonder at his cards, and on his next turn drew from the stack.

“You don’t have anything?” Jacob asked.

Isaac shook his head and said, “Nothing.”

He remembered watching his grandfather change into a bathing suit wherever happened to be convenient, with no regard for his own privacy or Jacob’s mortification: beside the parked car, in the middle of a men’s room, even on the beach. Did he not know? Did he not care? Once, at the public pool they sometimes went to on Sunday mornings, his grandfather undressed poolside. Jacob could feel the glances of strangers rubbing together inside him, building and tending to a fire of rage: at the strangers for their judgment, at his grandfather for his lack of dignity, at himself for his humiliation.

The lifeguard came over and said, “There’s a changing room behind the vending machines.”

“OK,” his grandfather said, as if he’d been told there was a Home Depot just off the Beltway.

“You can’t change here.”

“Why not?”

Jacob spent decades thinking about that Why not? Why not, because the changing room was over there, and here was right here? Why not, because why are we even talking about this? Why not, because if you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you would also lose your ability to comprehend embarrassment? Why not, because a body is only a body?

A body is only a body. But before he was a body, he was an embodiment. And that, at least for Jacob, was why not: his grandfather’s body couldn’t be only a body.

For how long could this continue?

Irv argued that they should just buy a plot in Judean Gardens, as close to the rest of the family as possible, and get on with death already. Jacob insisted they wait until things cleared up in Israel and then fulfill Isaac’s unambiguous wish for his eternal resting place.

“And what if that takes a couple of months?”

“Then we’ll owe the funeral home that much more rent.”

“And if things never clear up?”

“Then we’ll remember how lucky we were to have this as the biggest of our problems.”

Julia wanted to rehearse the conversation with the kids. Jacob could have argued that it was unnecessary right then, as they weren’t going to have the actual conversation until after the bar mitzvah and burial dust had cleared. But he agreed, hoping that Julia’s ears would hear what her mouth said. And more, he interpreted her desire to rehearse as a desire to role-play — an acknowledgment that she wasn’t sure. Just as she interpreted his willingness to rehearse as a sign that he was, in fact, ready to move forward with the end.

“‘We need to talk about something’?” Julia suggested.

Jacob considered that for a moment, and countered: “‘We need to have a family conversation’?”

“Why is that better?”

“It reaffirms that we’re a family.”

“But we don’t have family conversations. It’ll tip them off that something’s wrong.”

“Something is wrong.”

“The entire point we’re trying to convey with this conversation is that nothing is wrong . Something is different .”

“Not even Benjy will buy that.”

“But I don’t even have money—” Benjy said.

“Benjy?”

“—to buy something.”

“What’s going on, love?”

“What would you wish?”

“What’s that, baby?”

“In school, Mr. Schneiderman asked us what we would wish, and he took our wishes to the Wailing Wall, because he was going to Israel for vacation. I think I made the wrong wish.”

“What did you wish for?” Jacob asked.

“I can’t tell you or it won’t come true.”

“What do you think you should have wished for?”

“I can’t tell you, in case I change my wish.”

“If sharing them means they can’t come true, why are you asking us to tell you our wishes?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, then turned and walked out of the living room.

They waited until they heard his footsteps vanishing up the staircase before continuing.

“And anyway,” Julia said, in a quieter voice than before, “we want to make them feel safe, and then build to the change.”

“‘Can you guys come into the living room for a minute?’ Like that?”

“Not the kitchen?”

“I think here.”

“And then what,” Julia said, “we tell them to sit down?”

“Yeah, that’s going to be a tip-off, too.”

“We could just wait until we’re all in the car at some point.”

“That could work.”

“But then we can’t face them.”

“Except in the rearview mirror.”

“An unfortunate symbol.”

That made Jacob laugh. She was trying to be funny. There was a kindness in her effort. If this were real, Julia would never make a joke.

“During dinner?” Julia suggested.

“That would first require explaining why we’re eating dinner together.”

“We eat dinner together all the time.”

“We briefly assemble at the table occasionally.”

“What’s for dinner?” Max asked, tumbling into the room exactly like Kramer, despite never having seen Seinfeld .

Julia gave Jacob a look he’d seen a million times in a million contexts: What do the children know? What did Sam know when, two years ago, he walked into the room while they were having sex — missionary and under a sheet and without filthy talk, thank goodness. When Max picked up the phone while Jacob was angrily interrogating Julia’s gynecologist about the benignness of a benign lump — what did he hear? When Benjy walked into their kitchen blow-up and said, “Epitome”—what did he know?