Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(124)

> I thought it was for my bar mitzvah.

> That’s why he’s staying more than a few days.

> I had no idea.

> He might be embarrassed.

> I didn’t know he was capable of feeling embarrassment.

> Feeling it, yes. Showing it, no.

> Your mom wants to move?

> I don’t know.

> Do you want to move?

> I doubt I’ll live with my parents again. After the army, school. After school, life. I hope.

> But what do you think about it?

> I try not to.

> Do you find it embarrassing?

> No. That’s not the right word.

> Do you think your dad cheats on your mom?

> That’s a strange question.

> Is it?

> Yes.

> Yes, it’s a strange question? Or yes, you think your dad cheats on your mom?

> Both.

> Jesus. Really?

> Someone who asks that question shouldn’t be so surprised by the answer.

> What makes you think he cheats on her?

> What makes you ask the question?

> I don’t know.

> So ask yourself.

> What makes me ask the question?



He was not asking for no reason. He was asking because he’d found his dad’s second phone a day before his mom had. Found is probably not the right word, as coming upon it was the result of snooping through his dad’s favorite hiding places—beneath a pile of socks in the dresser, in a box in the back of the “gift closet,” atop the grandfather clock his grandfather had given them on the occasion of Benjy’s birth. The loot was never anything more salacious than a porno—“Why,” he wanted to ask but could never ask, “why would anyone with a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone pay for pornography?”

He had found a stack of fifties, presumably for some indulgence his dad didn’t want his mom to know about—something perfectly innocent like a power tool he was afraid his mom would point out he would never actually use. He had found a tiny bag of pot, which never, in the year and a half that he would check on it, diminished in size. He’d found a stash of Halloween candy—just sad. He’d found a stack of papers with a cover sheet labeled “Bible for Ever-Dying People”—

HOW TO PLAY DESIRE

Don’t. You have everything you could ever need or want. You are healthy (for now) and it’s great. Do you have any idea how much suffering and toil was necessary to make this moment possible? Possible for you? Reflect on how great it is, how lucky and fully satisfied you are.



—too boring to investigate further.

But then, while nosing around in the drawer of his dad’s bedside table, Sam found a phone. His dad’s phone was an iPhone. Everyone knew that, because everyone suffered his endless complaints about how amazing it was, and how dependent he was on it. (“This is literally ruining my life,” he would say as he performed some utterly unnecessary function, like checking the weather three days out. “Chance of rain. Interesting.”) This was a generic smartphone, the kind they give you for free with a criminally overpriced plan. Maybe a relic that his dad was too nostalgic to throw out? Maybe it was filled with photos of Sam and his brothers, and his dad wasn’t smart enough to transfer them to his iPhone (despite feeling too smart to ask for help at a phone store, or even from his technologically proficient son), so he saved it, and over time the drawer would probably fill with phones filled with photos.

Nothing could have been easier than figuring out how to unlock it—his dad cycled through the same three lamely predictable variations of the family password for all his security needs.

Generic wallpaper: a sunset.

No games. No apps cooler than a calculator. Why even have a smartphone?

It was a mom phone. A private phone between them. It was hard to understand the need for it, but maybe the lack of need was the point. It was actually kind of sweet. Kind of lame, but kind of romantic, which was kind of gross. Unless it had some sort of straightforward justification, as it now-that-he-thought-about-it probably did, like being the phone they took on trips, with prepaid international minutes.

As he scrolled through the messages, it became clear that those explanations were wrong, extremely wrong, and that either his parents weren’t who he thought they were, not even close, or there was more than one Julia in the world, because the Julia that was his mom would never—no, never—move her thumbs in such a way as to form the words take the wetness from my * and use it to get my * ready for you.

He took the phone to the bathroom, locked the door, and scrolled.

i want two of your fingers in each of my holes



What, like Spock? What the f*ck was going on?

on your stomach, legs spread to the corners, your hands behind you, opening your ass as wide as it will go, your * dripping onto the sheets…



What the f*ck was going on?

But before Sam could ask the question a third time, the front door opened, the phone dropped behind the toilet, his mom said, “I’m home,” and he tried to beat the footsteps on the stairs to his room.

He’d never met Dr. Silvers, but he knew what Dr. Silvers would have said: he left the phone on purpose. Like everyone in the family who wasn’t his dad, Sam loathed Dr. Silvers and was jealous of his dad for having such a confidant, and was jealous of Dr. Silvers for having his dad. What good, of any kind, could come, for anyone, from the discovery of the phone?