Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

Tamir laughed.

“It’s funny, except that throwing a ball becomes an attitude toward academic achievement, becomes measuring the distance from perfection in units of failure, becomes going to a college that murdered kid would have killed to go to, becomes studying things you aren’t interested in but are good and worthy and remunerative, becomes getting married Jewishly and having Jewish kids and living Jewishly in some demented effort to redeem the suffering that made your increasingly alienating life possible.”

“You should smoke a bit more.”

“The problem is,” Jacob said, taking back the apple, “the fulfillment of the expectations feels amazing, but you only fulfill them once—‘I got an A!’ ‘I’m getting married!’ ‘It’s a boy!’—and then you’re left to experience them. Nobody knows it at the time, and everybody knows it later, but nobody admits it, because it would pull a foundational log from the Jewish tower of Jenga. You trade emotional ambition for companionship, a life of inhabiting a nerve-filled body for companionship, exploration for companionship. There’s a good in commitment, I know. Things have to grow over time, mature, become full. But there’s a price, and just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s endurable. So many blessings, but did anyone ever stop to ask why one would want a blessing?”

“Blessings are just curses that other people envy.”

“You should smoke more pot, Tamir. It turns you into fucking Yoda, or at least Deepak Chopra.”

“Maybe it allows you to listen differently.”

“You see! That’s exactly what I mean.”

“You’re becoming funny,” Tamir said, bringing the apple to his mouth.

“I was always funny.”

“So maybe I’m the one listening differently.”

Tamir took another hit.

“What was Julia’s reaction? To the texts?”

“Not good. Obviously.”

“You’ll stay together?”

“Yeah. Of course. We have the kids. And we’ve had a life together.”

“You’re sure?”

“I mean, we’ve talked about separating.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Jacob took another hit.

“Have I ever told you about my TV show?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean my TV show.”

“I’m high, Jacob. Pretend I’m a six-year-old.”

“I’ve been writing a show about us.”

“You and me?”

“Well, no, not you. Or not yet.”

“I’d be great in a TV show.”

“My family.”

“I’m in your family.”

“My family here . Isaac. My parents. Julia and the kids.”

“Who would want to watch that?”

“Everybody, probably. But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s probably really good, and probably the writing I was born to do, and for the last ten or so years I’ve been pretty singularly devoted to it.”

“Ten years?”

“And I’ve never shared it with anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Well, before Isaac died, it was because I was afraid of betraying him.”

“With?”

“With the truth of who we are, and what we’re like.”

“How would that be a betrayal?”

“I was listening to the radio the other morning, a science podcast I like. They were interviewing a woman who’d lived in that massive geodesic dome for two years — nothing goes in, nothing goes out. That one. It was pretty interesting.”

“Let’s listen to it now.”

“No, I’m just searching for a metaphor.”

“It would make me so happy to listen to it right now.”

“I can’t even tell if you’re serious or making fun of me.”

“Please, Jacob.”

“I still can’t tell. But anyway, she talked about how living in that closed environment made her aware of the interconnectedness of life: this thing eats this thing, then poops, which feeds this thing, which blah blah blah. Then she went on to talk about something I already knew — not because I’m so fucking smart, but because it’s just one of those things that most people know — that with every inhalation, you are likely breathing in molecules that were breathed out by Pol Pot, or Caesar, or even the dinosaurs. I could be wrong about that dinosaur bit. I’ve found myself really interested in dinosaurs recently. I don’t know why. I spent about thirty years not thinking about them at all, and then suddenly I was interested again. I heard, in another podcast—”

“You listen to a lot of podcasts.”

“I know. I really do. It’s embarrassing, right?”

“You’re asking me if you’re embarrassed?”

“It’s humiliating.”

“I don’t know why.”

“What kind of person sneaks off to unoccupied rooms and presses an almost-muted phone to his ear so that he, and only he, will hear a putterer’s exploration of something as irrelevant as echolocation. It’s humiliating. And the humiliation is humiliating.” With his beer bottle, Jacob drew a ring of condensation on the table. “Anyway, this other podcast did this whole thing about how all the dinosaurs — not just most of them, but all of them — were destroyed at once. They roamed the earth for some large number of millions of years, and then, in something like an hour, gone . Why do people always use the word roam when referring to dinosaurs?”

“I don’t know.”

“They do, though. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s weird.”

“It is.”

“ So weird, right?”

“The more I think about it, the weirder it becomes.”

“Jews roamed Europe for thousands of years…”

“And then, in something like a decade…”

“But I was saying something else. About the dome woman … dinosaurs … maybe Pol Pot?”

“Breathing.”

“Right! With each inhalation we take in molecules yada yada. Anyway, my eyes started to roll, because it just sounded like trite cocktail science shit. But then she went further, to say that our exhalations are just as certainly going to be inhaled by our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.”

“And future dinosaurs.”

“And future Pol Pots.”

They laughed.

“But it really upset me, for some reason. I didn’t start crying or anything. I didn’t have to pull over. But I did have to turn off the podcast. It suddenly became too much.”

“Why do you think?”

“Why do I think at all?”

“No. Why do you think it upset you to imagine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren breathing your breath?”

Jacob released a breath that would be inhaled by the last of his line.

“Try,” Tamir said.

“I guess”—another breath—“I guess I was raised to understand that I’m not worthy of all that came before me. But no one ever prepared me for the knowledge that I’m not worthy of all that will come after me, either.”

Tamir lifted the apple from the table, held it so that the chandelier light passed straight through its cored center, and said, “I want to fuck this apple.”

“What?”

“But my cock is too big,” he said. And then, trying to push his hairy-knuckled forefinger into it: “I can’t even finger-fuck it.”

“Put the apple down, Tamir.”

“It’s the Apple of Truth,” Tamir said, ignoring Jacob. “And I want to fuck it.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m serious.”

“You want to fuck the Apple of Truth, but your cock is too big?”

“Yes. That is exactly the predicament.”

“The present predicament? Or the predicament of life?”

“Both.”

“You’re high.”

“So are you.”

“The scientist who was talking about the dinosaurs—”

“What are you talking about?”

“That podcast. The scientist said something so beautiful I thought I would die.”