Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

> How many are you transferring?

> All of them.

> What?

> 1,738,341.

> HOLY FUCKING SHIT! You have that many banked?

> I’m giving you a total transfusion.

> What?

> Listen, I have to get myself ready to go.

> Where?

> Jerusalem. My unit was mobilized. But don’t tell my father, OK?

> Why not?

> He’ll worry.

> But he should worry.

> But his worrying won’t help him, and it won’t help me.

> I don’t even need all of this. I only had 45,000 when my dad killed me.

> Make yourself great.

> My avatar.

> Your great-grandfather.

> This is too much.

> I should let it rot? Make resilience cider?

> You should use it.

> But I won’t. And you will.

The images came more quickly, so quick they could enter only subliminally; they overlapped, blended, and from the corner a light, bleeding from a few pixels to stain the screen, and spreading, a light like the darkness a broken pipe leaves on the ceiling, a light flooding the perpetually refreshing images, and then more light than image, and then an almost entirely white screen, but brighter than white, vague images as if seen through an avalanche.

In perhaps the purest moment of empathy of Sam’s life, he tried to imagine what Noam was seeing on his screen at that moment. Was a darkness like light spreading? Was he receiving warnings about low levels of vitality? Sam imagined Noam clicking IGNORE to those warnings, over and over, and ignoring the annoying alerts, and clicking CONFIRM when finally prompted to confirm his ultimate choice.

The lion walked to the old man, knelt beside him, laid his immense and proud paws on Eyesick’s stooped shoulders, licked at whatever one calls a white five o’clock shadow (a five o’clock brightness?), licked him over and over, as if to will Eyesick back to life, when in fact he was willing himself back to what comes before life.

> Look at you, Bar Mitzvah.

He rested his massive head on Eyesick’s sunken chest. Eyesick hid his fingers in the lion’s streaming mane.

In the middle of his great-grandfather’s funeral reception, Sam started to cry. He didn’t cry often. He hadn’t cried since Argus returned from his second hip replacement, two years before, his back half shaved to reveal Frankenstein stitches, his eyes lowered in his lowered head.

“It’s just what getting better looks like,” Jacob had said. “In a month, he’ll be his old self.”

“A month ?”

“It’ll pass quickly.”

“Not for Argus, it won’t.”

“We’ll spoil him.”

“He can barely walk.”

“And he shouldn’t walk any more than is necessary. The vet said that’s the most important thing for his recovery, to keep him off his leg as much as possible. All walks have to be on-leash. And no stairs. We have to keep him on the first floor.”

“But how will he come up to bed?”

“He’s going to have to sleep down here.”

“But he’ll go up.”

“I don’t think so. He knows how weak his leg is.”

“He’ll go up.”

“I’ll put some books on the stairs to block the way.”

Sam set his alarm for 2:00 a.m., to go down and check on Argus. He snoozed once, and then again, but with the third buzz, his guilt was awakened. He plodded down the stairs, only half aware of being out of bed, nearly paralyzed himself with the help of the stacked Grove Encyclopedia of Art , and found his father on top of a sleeping bag, spooning Argus. That’s when he cried. Not because he loved his dad — although in that moment he certainly did — but because, of the two animals on the floor, it was his dad he felt more sorry for.

> Look at you, Bar Mitzvah.

* * *

He was by the window. The cousins were on PlayStation, killing representations. The adults were upstairs, eating the disgusting, smelly, smoked, and gelatinous foods Jews suddenly need in times of reflection. No one noticed him, which was what he wanted, even if it wasn’t what he needed.

He wasn’t crying about anything in front of him — not the death of his great-grandfather or the death of Noam’s avatar, not the collapse of his parents’ marriage, or the collapse of his bar mitzvah, or the collapsed buildings in Israel. His tears were reaching back. It took Noam’s moment of kindness to reveal the yawning absence of kindness. His dad had slept on the floor for thirty-eight days. (The extra week to play it safe.) Was it easier to extend such kindness to a dog because it didn’t risk rejection? Or because the needs of animals are so animalistic, whereas the needs of humans are so human?

He might never become a man, but crying at that window — his great-grandfather completely alone in the earth twenty minutes away; an avatar returning to pixelated dust in some refrigerated data storage center somewhere near nothing; his parents just on the other side of the ceiling, but a ceiling without edges — Sam was reborn.

Judaism gets death right, Jacob thought. It instructs us what to do when we know least well what to do, and feel an overwhelming need to do something . You should sit like this. We will. You should dress like this. We will. You should say these words at these moments, even if you have to read from transliteration. Na-ah-seh.

Jacob had stopped crying more than an hour ago, but he still had what Benjy called “after-crying breath.” Irv brought him a glass of peach schnapps, said, “I told the rabbi he was welcome to come, but I doubt he’ll come,” and went back to his windowsill citadel.

The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and “salads”—Jews apply the word salad to anything that can’t be held in one’s hand: cucumber salad, whitefish and tuna and baked salmon salad, lentil salad, pasta salad, quinoa salad. And there was purple soda, and black coffee, and Diet Coke, and black tea, and enough seltzer to float an aircraft carrier, and Kedem grape juice — a liquid more Jewish than Jewish blood. And there were pickles, a few kinds. Capers don’t belong in any food, but the capers that every spoon had tried to avoid had found their way into foods in which they really didn’t belong, like someone’s half-empty half-decaf. And at the center of the table, impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them. It was too much food by a factor of ten. But it had to be.

Relatives exchanged stories about Isaac while they piled their plates toward the ceiling of the floor above. They laughed about how funny he was (on purpose, and by accident), what an obstinate pain in the ass he could be (on purpose, and by accident). They reflected on what a hero he had been (on purpose, and by accident). There was a bit of crying, there were some awkward silences, there was gratitude for having had an occasion to gather as a family (some of the cousins hadn’t seen each other since Leah’s bat mitzvah, some not since Great-Aunt Doris’s death), and everyone looked at his phone: to check on the war, the score of the game, the weather.

The kids, having already forgotten about any first-person sadness they might have felt over Isaac’s death, were playing first-person video games in the basement. Max’s pulse doubled as he spectated at an assassination attempt by someone he thought was a second cousin. Sam sat off to the side with his iPad, wandering in a virtual lemon grove. This was how it always went, this vertical segregation. And inevitably, the adults with enough sense to escape the adult world would migrate down. Which is what Jacob did.