Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(128)
“No,” Benjy said, pointing at the TV, which wasn’t displaying a video game, as Jacob had thought, but the effects of the most recent, and most severe, aftershock, “because the Wall crumbled.”
“The Wall?”
They came spilling into the world: every wish tucked into every crevice, but also every wish tucked into every Jew’s heart.
“No more proof of how great they were,” Benjy said.
“What?”
“The thing you told me about the Romans.”
How much do the children know, and how much do they remember?
“Jacob!” Irv called from upstairs.
“The Wailing Wall,” Jacob said, as if by saying its name aloud, it would exist again.
Jacob could make his children feel safe. But could he keep them safe?
Benjy shook his head and said, “Now it’s just the Wailing.”
LOOK! A CRYING HEBREW BABY
Tamir’s presence had not only made a full reckoning impossible, it required Julia to be a buoyant host. And the death of Jacob’s grandfather required her to at least perform love and care, when all she felt was sadness and doubt. She was good enough to manage her blossoming resentment, good enough, even, to suppress her passive-aggression, but at a certain point, the requirements of being a good person inspire hatred for oneself and others.
Like any living person, she had fantasies. (Although her immense guilt about being human required a constant reminder—that she was “like any living person.”) The houses she designed were fantasies, but there were others.
She imagined a week alone in Big Sur. Maybe at the Post Ranch Inn, maybe one of the ocean-facing rooms. Maybe a massage, maybe a facial, maybe a “treatment” that treats nothing. Maybe she’d walk through a redwood tunnel, the growth rings bending around her.
She imagined having a personal chef. Vegans live longer, and are healthier, and have better skin, and she could do that; it would be easy, if someone shopped, cooked, and cleaned for her.
She imagined Mark noticing small things about her that she’d never noticed about herself: lovably misused idioms, what her feet do when she flosses, her funny relationship to dessert menus.
She imagined going for walks without destinations, thinking about things of no logistical importance, like whether Edison bulbs are actually obnoxious.
She imagined a secret admirer anonymously subscribing her to a magazine.
She imagined the disappearance of crow’s feet, like the disappearance of crow’s footprints from a dusty road.
She imagined the disappearance of screens—from her life, from her children’s lives. From the gym, from doctors’ offices and the backs of cabs, hanging behind bars and in the corners of diners, the iWatches of people holding iPads on the Metro.
She imagined the deaths of her air-filled clients and their dreams of heavier and heavier kitchen appliances.
She fantasized about the death of the so-called teacher who chuckled at one of Max’s answers four years ago, requiring a month of bedtime talks to reinstill his enjoyment of school.
Dr. Silvers would have to die at least a couple of times.
She imagined Jacob’s sudden disappearance—from the house, from existence. She imagined him dropping dead at the gym. Which required imagining him going to the gym. Which required imagining him once again possessing a desire to be attractive in ways other than professional success.
Of course, she didn’t actually want him to die, no part of her did, not even subconsciously, and when she fantasized about his death, it was always painless. Sometimes he would panic in awareness as he tried to reach through his chest to grab his stammering heart. Sometimes he would think of the children. The end of sometimes: he would be gone forever. And she would be alone, and finally unalone, and people would grieve for her.
She would cook all the meals (as she already did), do all the cleaning (as she already did), buy the graph paper for Benjy’s solutionless mazes, the teriyaki-roasted seaweed snacks for Max, a cool-but-not-trying-too-hard messenger bag for Sam when the last one she bought for him fell apart. She would dress them in end-of-the-year Zara and Crewcuts sale clothing and get them off to school (as she already did). She would have to support herself (which she couldn’t, with her present lifestyle, but wouldn’t have to, given Jacob’s life insurance policy). Her imagination was strong enough to hurt her. She was weak enough to keep the hurt to herself.
And then came the most hurtful thought, the thought that can never be touched with even the whorls of the fingers of one’s brain: the deaths of her children. She’d had the most horrible thought many times since she became pregnant with Sam: imagined miscarriages; imagined SIDS; imagined tumbles down stairs, trying to shield his body from the treads as they fell; imagined cancer every time she saw a child with cancer. There was the knowledge that every school bus she ever put one of her children on was going to roll down the side of a hill and into a frozen lake, whose ice would re-form around its silhouette. Every time one of her children was put under general anesthesia, she said goodbye to him as if she were saying goodbye to him. She wasn’t naturally anxious, much less apocalyptic, but Jacob was right when, after Sam’s injury, he said it was too much love for happiness.
Sam’s injury. It was the place she was unwilling to go, because there was no road back. And yet the trauma center of her brain was always pushing her there. And she was always never fully returning. She’d found peace with why it happened—there was no why—but not how. It was too painful, because whatever the sequence of events, it wasn’t necessary or inevitable. Jacob never asked her if she had been the one to open the door. (It was far too heavy for Sam to have opened himself.) Julia never asked Jacob if he had closed it on Sam’s fingers. (Maybe Sam could have gotten it moving, and inertia would have taken care of the rest?) It was five years ago, and the journey—the century-long morning in the ER, the twice-a-week visits to the plastic surgeon, the year of rehab—brought them closer than they’d ever been. But it also created a black hole of silence, from which everything had to keep a safe distance, into which so much was swallowed, a teaspoon of which weighed more than a million suns consuming a million photos of a million families on a million moons.