Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(111)
“What?”
Julia clarified: “They would see how huge the actual Temple must have been.”
“Right,” Benjy said, taking it in.
Jacob turned to Julia. “Isn’t there some organization rebuilding destroyed synagogues in Europe from their foundations? It’s like that.”
“Or the 9/11 Memorial.”
“There’s a word for it. I heard it once…A shul. Right, shul.”
“Like synagogue?”
“Wonderful coincidence, but no. It’s Tibetan.”
“Where would you have learned a Tibetan word?”
“No idea,” Jacob said. “But I learned it.”
“So? Are you going to make us pull down the Tibetan Webster’s?”
“I could be getting this wrong, but I think it’s a physical impression left behind. Like a footprint. Or the channel where water flowed. Or in Connecticut—the matted grass where Argus had slept.”
“A snow angel,” Benjy said.
“That’s a great one,” Julia said, reaching for his face.
“Only, we don’t believe in angels.”
Jacob touched Benjy’s knee. “What I said was that while there are angels in the Torah, Judaism doesn’t really encourage—”
“You’re my angel,” Julia told Benjy.
“And you’re actually my tooth fairy,” he said.
Jacob’s wish would have been to have learned his life lessons before it was too late to apply them. But like the wall into which he’d have tucked it, the wish conjured an immensity.
—
After Benjy had left the room, and the rehearsal had wrapped up, and Max was fed a second dinner that wasn’t spinach lasagna, and the door separating Sam and Billie from the rest of the world was judged sufficiently cracked, Jacob decided to go run some unnecessary errands at the hardware store: buy a shorter hose that would tuck away less awkwardly, replenish the AAA battery supply, maybe fondle some power tools. On his way, he called his father.
“I give in,” he said.
“Are you on Bluetooth?”
“Yes.”
“Well, get off it, so I can hear you.”
“It’s illegal to hold the phone while driving.”
“And it gives you cancer, too. Cost of doing business.”
Jacob brought the phone to his face and repeated, “I give in.”
“That’s great to hear. With reference to what?”
“Let’s bury Grandpa here.”
“Really?” Irv asked, sounding surprised, and pleased, and heartbroken. “What brought that on?”
The reason—whether he was persuaded by his father’s pragmatism, or was tired of reorganizing his life to spend time with a dead body, or was too preoccupied with the burial of his family to keep up the fight—simply didn’t matter all that much. It took them eight days, but the decision was made: they would bury Isaac in Judean Gardens, a very ordinary, pretty-enough cemetery about thirty minutes outside the city. He would get visitors, and spend eternity among his family, and while it might not be the nonexistent and tarrying Messiah’s first or thousandth stop, He’d get there.
THE GENUINE VERSION
Eyesick, the threadbare beginnings of an avatar, was in the middle of a digital lemon grove—the clearly marked and barbed-wire-ringed private property of a lemonade corporation that used kinda funny videos, featuring kinda trustworthy actors, to persuade concerned-but-not-motivated consumers to believe that what they were drinking had something to do with authenticity. Sam hated such corporations nearly half as much as he hated himself for being just another spoon-fed idiot-cog who grinned and whatever the past tense of “bear it” is while hating, and announcing his hatred of, corporations. He would never trespass in life itself. He was too ethical, and too much of a coward. (Sometimes it was hard to differentiate.) But that was one of the many, many great things about Other Life—perhaps the explanation for his addiction to it: it was an opportunity to be a little less ethical, and a little less of a coward.
Eyesick was trespassing, yes, but he wasn’t there to start a fire, chop down trees, do graffiti (or whatever is the proper way of saying that), or even to trespass, really. He’d gone there to be alone. Among the seemingly infinite columns of trunks, beneath the duvet of lemons, he could be by himself. It’s not like he felt a great need to be alone. Need was a word that Sam’s mom might use.
“Do you need to get any homework done before we go to dinner?”
“Finished,” he would say, taking great pleasure in throwing the correction back at her.
“Do you need to get any homework finished before we go to dinner?”
“Need?”
“Yes. Need.”
He took no pleasure in the great pleasure he seemed to take in being a smart-ass with her. But he needed to do it. He needed to push back against his instinct to cling to her; he needed to alienate what he needed to draw close, but more than anything, he needed not to be the object of her needs. It was bodily. It wasn’t her continued need to kiss him that repulsed him, but her overt efforts to manage that need. He was disgusted—revolted, nauseated—by her stolen touches: fixing his hair for a moment longer than necessary, holding his hand while cutting his fingernails (something he knew how to do himself, but needed her to do, but only in exactly the right and limited way). And her stolen glances: when he was coming out of a pool, or worse, taking off a shirt for an impromptu load of laundry. What she stole was stolen from him, and it inspired not only disgust, and not only auger, but resistance. You can have what you want, but you cannot take it.