Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“There’s something big on the news.”

“Gimme a second.”

Jacob blinked away the glazing, rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, and walked to the sofa.

Two hours earlier, while Jacob and Tamir were getting stoned, some Israeli extremists entered the Dome of the Rock and set it on fire. The flames caused hardly any damage, the Israelis claimed, but the effort caused more than enough. The television, which had somehow switched from ESPN to CNN, showed images of rage: men — always men — punching the sky, shooting broken rivers of bullets at the sky, trying to kill the sky. Jacob had seen this before, but the images had always come from the vicinity of the quake, primarily Gaza and the West Bank. Now, however, CNN was bouncing from feed to feed, with a seemingly endless supply of fury: a circle of men burning an Israeli flag in Jakarta; men in Khartoum swinging sticks at an effigy of the Israeli prime minister; men in Karachi, and Dhaka, and Riyadh, and Lahore; men with bandanas over their mouths smashing a Jewish storefront in Paris; a man, whose accent was so thick it’s unlikely he knew one hundred words of English, screaming, “Death to Jews!” into a camera in Tehran.

“This is bad,” Jacob said, transfixed and intoxicated by the images.

“Bad?”

“Very bad.”

“I need to go home.”

“I know,” Jacob said, too groggy to understand, or even to be sure that he wasn’t still asleep. “We’ll figure it out.”

“ Now . We need to go to the embassy.”

“Yeah. OK.”

Tamir shook his head and said, “Now, now, now.”

“I get it. Let me put some clothes on.”

But neither moved from the sofa. The television filled with Jewish rage: black-hatted men screaming in Hebrew in London; dark men from one of the last remaining kibbutzim waving fingers at the camera, hysterically repeating words Jacob didn’t understand; Jewish men clashing with Jewish soldiers guarding the Temple Mount.

Tamir said, “You need to come, too.”

“Of course. Give me a minute.”

“No,” Tamir said, grabbing Jacob’s shoulders with the force he used at the zoo three decades before. “You need to come home.”

“I am home. What?”

“To Israel.”

“What?”

“You need to come to Israel with me.”

“ I do?”

“Yes.”

“Tamir, you want to leave Israel.”

“Jacob.”

“Now you want me to go?”

Tamir pointed at the TV. “Are you looking at this?”

“I’ve been looking at that for a week.”

“No. No one has ever seen this before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is how it ends,” he said. “Like this.” And for the first time since Tamir had arrived in D.C., for the first time ever, Jacob saw the family resemblance. He saw the panicked eyes of his boys — the terror he looked into before blood tests and after injuries that drew blood.

“How it ends ?”

“How Israel is destroyed.”

“Because Muslims are screaming in Jakarta and Riyadh? What are they going to do, walk to Jerusalem?”

“Yes. And ride horses, and drive shitty cars, and be bussed, and take boats. And it’s not only them. Look at us.”

“It will pass.”

“It won’t. This is how it will all end.”

Neither the images on the screen nor Tamir’s words scared Jacob as much as the terror he saw in his children’s eyes in Tamir’s eyes.

“If you really believe that, Tamir, you need to get your family out of Israel.”

“I can’t!” he said, and then Jacob saw, in Tamir’s clenched teeth, Irv’s fury — the deep inner sadness that knew no expression but directionless rage.

“Why?” Jacob asked. “What could possibly be more important than your family’s safety?”

“I can’t get them out, Jacob. There are no flights in or out. Don’t you think I’ve tried? What do you think I do all day? Go to museums? Go shopping? I’m trying to keep my family safe. I can’t get them out, so I have to go. And you have to go, too.”

Jacob was now too awake for nonchalant bravery.

“Israel isn’t my home, Tamir.”

“That’s only because it hasn’t been destroyed yet.”

“No, it’s because it isn’t my home.”

“But it’s my home,” he said, and now Jacob saw Julia. He saw the pleading he hadn’t been able to see when her home still could have been saved. He saw his own blindness.

“Tamir, you—”

But the words wouldn’t form, because there was no thought for them to express. It didn’t matter: Tamir had stopped listening. He was angled away and texting. Rivka? Noam? Jacob didn’t ask, because he felt it wasn’t his place.

His place was the unoccupied room, typing: you’re begging me to fuck your tight pussy, but you don’t deserve it yet.

His place was the unoccupied room, the same hand pressing a different phone to his ear so that he, and only he, could hear: “Blind people can see. It’s true. Making clicking sounds in their mouths, they can orient themselves by the echoes returning from nearby objects. Doing this, blind people are able to go on hikes in rocky terrain, navigate city streets, even ride bikes. But is that seeing? Brain scans of people echolocating show activity in the same visual centers as in the brains of people with sight; they are simply seeing through their ears, instead of their eyes.”

His place was the unoccupied room, reading: my husband is away this weekend with the kids, come fuck me for real.

His place was the unoccupied room, hearing: “‘So why aren’t more blind people on bikes? According to David Spellman, the preeminent teacher of echolocation, it’s because few are given the necessary freedom to learn how.’

“‘It’s the rare parent, maybe one in a hundred, probably fewer, who is able to watch her blind child approach an intersection and not grab his arm. It’s with love that they’re holding him back from danger, but they’re also holding him back from sight. When I teach children to ride bikes, there are inevitably crashes, just as there are with sighted children. But parents of blind children almost always take it as proof that too much is being asked of their child, and they step in to protect him. The more the parents want their children to see, the less possible they make it, because that love gets in the way.’

“‘How were you able to overcome that and learn?’

“‘My father left before I was born, and my mother had three jobs. The absence of love allowed me to see.’”

Tamir went upstairs, and Jacob sat there, trying to replay the last few moments, and the last two hours, and the last two weeks, and the last thirteen, and sixteen, and forty-two years. What had happened?

Tamir had said Jacob wouldn’t die for anything. Even if that were true, why would it matter? What’s so inherently good about such ultimate devotion? What’s so wrong with making good-enough money, eating good-enough food, living in a nice-enough house, striving to be as ethical and ambitious as circumstances allow? He had tried, he had come up short every single time, but against what measure? He had given his family a good-enough life. It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

Years before, in the time when he and Julia would still share their work with each other, Julia came to the basement with a mug of tea in each hand and asked how it was going.

Jacob leaned back in his Aeron and said, “Well, it’s nowhere near as good as it could be, but I suppose it’s as good as I can make it right now.”