Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“I’m unhappy. If that’s what you need to hear me say, there it is. I want more.”

“That’s just making sounds.”

“What isn’t making sounds?”

“Going to Israel. To live.”

“OK, now you’re kidding.”

“I’m saying what you already know.”

“That if I moved to Israel my marriage would improve?”

“That if you were capable of standing up and saying, ‘This is who I am,’ you’d at least be living your own life. Even if who you are is ugly to others. Even if who you are is ugly to you.”

“I’m not living my own life?”

“No.”

“Whose life am I living?”

“Maybe your grandfather’s idea of your life. Or your father’s. Or your own idea. Maybe no life at all.”

Jacob suspected he should take offense, and he had the instinct to strike back at Tamir, but he also felt humbled, and grateful.

“It was a long day,” he said, “and I don’t know that either of us is saying what he means anymore. I like having you here. It reminds me of when we were kids. Let’s cut our losses.”

Tamir took the last third of his beer down in one gulp. He placed the bottle back on the table, more gently than Jacob had seen him do anything, and said, “When do we stop cutting our losses?”

“You and I?”

“Sure.”

“As opposed to what? Losing it all?”

“Or reclaiming what’s ours.”

“Yours and mine?”

“Sure.”

He finished Jacob’s unfinished beer and tossed the two empty bottles in the garbage.

“We recycle,” Jacob said.

“I don’t.”

“You have enough towels upstairs?”

“What do you think I do with towels?”

“Just trying to be a good host.”

“Always trying to be something.”

“Yes. I’m always trying to be something. That says something good about me.”

“OK.”

“And you’re always trying to be something, too. And so is Barak. And Julia and Sam and Max and Benjy. Everybody.”

“What am I trying to be?”

Jacob paused for a beat, careful.

“You’re trying to be bigger than you actually are.”

Tamir’s smile revealed the force of the blow.

“Ah.”

“Everybody is trying to be something.”

“Your grandfather isn’t.”

What was that? A stupid joke? Some kind of lazy stab at wisdom?

“He stopped trying,” Jacob said, “and it killed him.”

“You’re wrong. He’s the only one of us who actually succeeded.”

“At what ?”

“At becoming something.”

“Dead?”

“Real.”

Jacob almost said, Now you’ve lost me .

He almost said, I’m heading up .

He almost said, I don’t agree with anything you’ve said, but I understand you .

The night could end, the conversation could close, what was shared could be processed, digested, and expelled, save for the nutrients.

But instead, Jacob asked, “You want another beer? Or is that just going to get us drunk and fat?”

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Tamir said. “Including drunkenness and fatness.”

“And baldness.”

“No, you’re taking care of that for both of us.”

“You know,” Jacob said, “I have a bag of pot upstairs. Somewhere. It’s probably as old as Max, but pot never goes bad, does it?”

“Not any more than kids do,” Tamir said.

“Shit.”

“What’s the worst that could happen? We don’t get high?”

It took Julia three hours to walk to Mark’s apartment. Jacob texted and called and texted and called, but she didn’t text or call ahead to see if Mark was there. Her finger was releasing the buzzer to his apartment as it was pressing it — the circuit completed for a startling instant, like a bird hitting a window.

“Hello?”

She stood motionless and silent. Could the microphone detect her breathing? Was Mark listening to her exhalations, four floors above?

“I can see you, Julia. There’s a little camera just above the buzzers.”

“It’s Julia,” Julia said, as if she could snip out those last couple of seconds and respond to “Hello?” like a normal human being.

“Yes, I’m looking at you.”

“This is an unpleasant feeling.”

“So get out of the frame and come on up.”

The door opened itself.

And then the elevator doors opened for her, and then opened for her again.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Mark said, ushering her in.

“I wasn’t expecting me, either.”

Reflexively, she scanned the apartment. Everything was new and new-looking: phony moldings, floors glossy enough for bowling, fat plastic dimmer slides.

“As you can see,” Mark said, “it’s a work in progress.”

“What isn’t?”

“A lot of furniture is arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow it will look completely different.”

“Well, then I’m glad I got to see the before .”

“And it’s temporary. I needed a place, and this … was a place.”

“Do you think I’m judging you?”

“No, but I think you’re judging my apartment.”

She looked at Mark, the efforts he made: he worked out, used hair product, bought clothes that someone — in a magazine or store — told him were cool. She looked around the apartment: how high were the ceilings, how tall the windows, how glossy the appliances.

“Where do you eat?”

“Out, usually. Always.”

“Where do you open mail?”

“That sofa is where I do everything.”

“You sleep on it?”

“Everything but sleep.”

Everything but sleep : it was unbearably suggestive. Or so Julia felt. But everything felt unbearably suggestive to her right then, because she was unbearably exposed. Before the skin regrew and healed, some of the inside of Sam’s hand was on the outside, and infection was a constant concern. Childishly, Julia didn’t want to blame her child’s hand for its vulnerability, and so saw him as having stayed the same and the world as having become more threatening. They went straight from the hospital to ice cream. “ Every topping?” the server asked. As her hand pressed on the door — the first door she’d opened since the heavy one shut — Julia noticed the back of the OPEN sign. “Look,” she said, finding, in the joke, another reason to hate herself, “the world is closed.”

“No,” Sam said. “ Close . Like near.”

Another reason to hate herself.

There were so many things she could have said to Mark. There was so much available small talk. It was at sleepaway camp that she learned how to make a bed with hospital corners. It was at the hospital that she learned how to press tightly folded words between massive seconds. But she didn’t want things to be tidy or concealed right then. But she didn’t want things to be as disheveled and exposed as they felt.

What did she want?

“What do I want?” she asked, quiet as a spacewalk.

She wanted some of her insides on the outside, but which insides and how much?

“What?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know why I’m asking you.”

“I didn’t hear what you asked,” he said, closing the distance between them, perhaps to hear better.

She’d tried everything: juice cleanses, poetry binges, knitting, writing letters by hand to people she’d let go of, moments of the unmediated honesty they’d promised each other in Pennsylvania sixteen years before. She’d tried meditating half a dozen times, but always felt lost when guided to “remember” her body. She knew what was meant, but was incapable, or unwilling.

She took a step toward Mark, closing the distance, perhaps so that all she couldn’t say could be better heard.