Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(126)

> Look at you, Bar Mitzvah.



He was by the window. The cousins were on PlayStation, killing representations. The adults were upstairs, eating the disgusting, smelly, smoked, and gelatinous foods Jews suddenly need in times of reflection. No one noticed him, which was what he wanted, even if it wasn’t what he needed.

He wasn’t crying about anything in front of him—not the death of his great-grandfather or the death of Noam’s avatar, not the collapse of his parents’ marriage, or the collapse of his bar mitzvah, or the collapsed buildings in Israel. His tears were reaching back. It took Noam’s moment of kindness to reveal the yawning absence of kindness. His dad had slept on the floor for thirty-eight days. (The extra week to play it safe.) Was it easier to extend such kindness to a dog because it didn’t risk rejection? Or because the needs of animals are so animalistic, whereas the needs of humans are so human?

He might never become a man, but crying at that window—his great-grandfather completely alone in the earth twenty minutes away; an avatar returning to pixelated dust in some refrigerated data storage center somewhere near nothing; his parents just on the other side of the ceiling, but a ceiling without edges—Sam was reborn.





JUST THE WAILING


Judaism gets death right, Jacob thought. It instructs us what to do when we know least well what to do, and feel an overwhelming need to do something. You should sit like this. We will. You should dress like this. We will. You should say these words at these moments, even if you have to read from transliteration. Na-ah-seh.

Jacob had stopped crying more than an hour ago, but he still had what Benjy called “after-crying breath.” Irv brought him a glass of peach schnapps, said, “I told the rabbi he was welcome to come, but I doubt he’ll come,” and went back to his windowsill citadel.

The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and “salads”—Jews apply the word salad to anything that can’t be held in one’s hand: cucumber salad, whitefish and tuna and baked salmon salad, lentil salad, pasta salad, quinoa salad. And there was purple soda, and black coffee, and Diet Coke, and black tea, and enough seltzer to float an aircraft carrier, and Kedem grape juice—a liquid more Jewish than Jewish blood. And there were pickles, a few kinds. Capers don’t belong in any food, but the capers that every spoon had tried to avoid had found their way into foods in which they really didn’t belong, like someone’s half-empty half-decaf. And at the center of the table, impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them. It was too much food by a factor of ten. But it had to be.

Relatives exchanged stories about Isaac while they piled their plates toward the ceiling of the floor above. They laughed about how funny he was (on purpose, and by accident), what an obstinate pain in the ass he could be (on purpose, and by accident). They reflected on what a hero he had been (on purpose, and by accident). There was a bit of crying, there were some awkward silences, there was gratitude for having had an occasion to gather as a family (some of the cousins hadn’t seen each other since Leah’s bat mitzvah, some not since Great-Aunt Doris’s death), and everyone looked at his phone: to check on the war, the score of the game, the weather.

The kids, having already forgotten about any first-person sadness they might have felt over Isaac’s death, were playing first-person video games in the basement. Max’s pulse doubled as he spectated at an assassination attempt by someone he thought was a second cousin. Sam sat off to the side with his iPad, wandering in a virtual lemon grove. This was how it always went, this vertical segregation. And inevitably, the adults with enough sense to escape the adult world would migrate down. Which is what Jacob did.

There were at least a dozen cousins—many from Deborah’s side, a few from Julia’s. The younger ones unpacked all the board games, one at a time—not to play them, but to unpack them and commingle the small pieces. Every now and then one would spontaneously freak out. The older cousins were surrounding Barak as he performed virtuosic acts of extreme violence on a TV so large one had to sit against the opposite wall to see its edges.

Benjy was on his own, stuffing crumpled Monopoly money between the venetian blinds.

“You’re being very generous with the window,” Jacob said.

“It’s not real money.”

“No?”

“I know you’re joking.”

“You haven’t seen Mom around, have you?”

“No.”

“Hey?”

“What?”

“Have you been crying, buddy?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You look like you have.”

“Holy shit!” a cousin shouted.

“Language!” Jacob shouted back.

“I haven’t,” Benjy said.

“Are you sad about Great-Grandpa?”

“Not really.”

“So what’s upsetting you?”

“Nothing.”

“Dads know these things.”

“Then why don’t you know what’s upsetting me?”