Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(112)
Eyesick was seeking aloneness in a lemon grove because Sam was sitting shiva for Isaac, avoiding conversations with relatives whose central processing units were programmed to shame him. Why else would a second cousin he hadn’t seen in years feel a need to mention acne? To mention voice-dropping? To wink while asking about girlfriends?
Eyesick was seeking aloneness. Not to be by himself, but to be away from others. It’s different.
> Sam?
>…
> Sam, is that you?
> Who are you talking to?
> YOU.
> Me?
> You. Sam.
> Who are you?
> I KNEW it was you.
> Who knew?
> You don’t recognize me?
Recognize? The avatar addressing Eyesick was a lion with a plush rainbow mane; a brown suede vest with opalescent buttons, largely concealed beneath a white tuxedo with tails down to the end of his tail (which was itself adorned with a cubic zirconia heart); bleached teeth largely concealed by lipsticked lips (insofar as a lion has lips); a snout that was just a bit too moist; ruby pupils (not ruby-colored, but gemstones); and mother-of-pearl claws with peace signs and Stars of David etched into them. If it was good, it was very good. But was it good?
There was no recognition. Only the surprise of having been discovered in a moment of reflection, and the shame of having been named and known.
It would be possible, in theory, for someone with sufficient tech savvy and insufficient joie de vivre to trace Eyesick back to Sam. But it would require an effort that he couldn’t imagine anyone he knew—anyone who knew him—making. Except maybe Billie.
Putting aside his parents’ virtuosically lame and quarter-hearted attempts to “check in” on his computer usage, it never ceased to amaze Sam what he could get away with.
Proof: he shoplifted from the corner grocery that still had his family name above the door, the store his great-grandfather had opened with more dead brothers than words of English. Sam shoplifted enough junk food—enough bags of Cheetos (punctured with the sharpened end of a bent paper clip to release the air and allow for compression), enough Mentos boners in his pockets—from the earnest Korean immigrants, who kept lemon slices by the register to keep their fingers moist enough to grip cash, to open his own corner store, but this one with a different name, preferably with no name, preferably: STORE. Why did he do all that stealing? Not to eat what he took. He never did, never once. He always, always returned the goods—the returning requiring far more illicit prowess than the stealing. He did it to prove that he could, and to prove that he was horrible, and to prove that no one cared.
Proof: the volume (in terabytes) of porn he consumed, and the volume (in quarts) of semen he disseminated. Under their noses might be an unfortunate turn of phrase, but how could so-called parents be so completely oblivious to the mass grave being dug and filled with sperm in their own backyard?
The shiva reminded him of many things—the mortality of his grandparents and parents, his own mortality and Argus’s, how undeniably comforting it can be to perform rituals you don’t understand—but nothing more than the first time he jerked off, also at a shiva. It was his great-aunt Doris’s funeral reception. Though they referred to her as Great-Aunt Doris, her relationship was more distant, involving at least some once-removeds. (And it had been suggested, by his grandfather, after a few glasses of very expensive vodka, that she wasn’t a blood relative at all.) Whatever the case, she’d never married, and had no children, and flaunted her loneliness to sidle up closer to the trunk of the family tree.
The familiar gathering of unfamiliar family noshed away, and like Moses receiving the call to a needy bush, Sam galloped to his bathroom. Somehow he understood it was the moment, even if he didn’t understand the method. He used hair gel that day, because it was nearby and viscous. The more he slid his fist up and down his shaft, the stronger was his suspicion that something of genuine significance was happening—not just pleasurable, but mystical. It felt better and better, he squeezed harder, and then it felt even better, and then, with one small thrust for man, mankind leaped giantly across the canyon separating crappy, pathetic, inauthentic life from the unself-conscious, unangry, unawkward realm he wanted to spend the rest of his days and nights on earth inhabiting. Out of his penis gushed a substance he would have to admit he loved more than he loved any person in his life, more than any idea, loved so much that it became his enemy. Sometimes, in less proud moments, he would even talk to his sperm as his semen congealed in his belly button. Sometimes he would look it in the hundred million eyes and say simply: “Enemies.”
The first time was a revelation. The first several thousand times. He jerked off again that afternoon, and again and again that night. He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure. He used hair gel every time, never questioning the potential dermatological effects of repeatedly applying to his penis a substance intended to sculpt hair. By the third day, his pubes were pipe cleaners and his shaft was leprous.
So he started jerking off with aloe. But the green was cognitively dissonant, made him feel like he was f*cking an alien, but in a bad way. So he switched to moisturizer.
He was a mad-scientist masturbator, always searching for ways to make his hand more like a vagina. It would have helped to have had a bona fide experience with a bona fide vagina, but his inability not to hear “boner fide” made the chances of that as nugatory as did his use of the word nugatory. Anyway, the Internet was nothing if not a gynecological resource, and anyway, there were things one knew without having had a way to know, like how babies won’t crawl off a cliff—a fact he was ninety-five percent sure of. When, five infinitely and cosmically unjustly long years later, he had his first sexual experience with a corporeal female—not Billie, tragically, but someone merely nice and smart and pretty—he was surprised by just how accurate his imaginings had been. He’d known all along, he’d known everything. Perhaps if he’d known that he’d known, those years would have been slightly easier to endure.