Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(139)

“I need to go home,” she said.

She needed something impossible, whose fulfillment would save her.

“That’s what you came here to tell me?”

She nodded.

He stood straight, now taller than he had been. “I get it that you’re on some sort of journey,” he said. “Nobody gets that better than I do. And I’m really glad to have served as a rest stop where you could stretch your legs, get some gas, and pee.”

“Please don’t be mad,” she said, almost like a girl.

Her skin was burning with fear—of his anger, of deserving it, of being, finally, justly punished for her badness. She could be forgiven for allowing her children to be hurt, but there is no punishment great enough for hurting one’s children knowingly. She was going to destroy her family—on purpose, and not because there were no alternatives. She was going to choose not to have a choice.

“I hope I facilitated a lot of growth,” Mark went on, now making no effort to contain his hurt. “I do. I hope you learned something with me that you can apply later with someone else. But if I can offer a little free advice?”

“I just need to go home,” she said, terrified of what he would say next, that by some magical justice it would kill her children.

“You’re not the problem, Julia. Your life is the problem.”

Kindness was worse than what she’d been most afraid of.

He opened the door. “And I say this wishing only for peace for both of us: know that next time I see your face on the screen, I’m not even going to watch you wait.”

“I need to go home,” she said.

“Good luck with that,” he said.

She left.

She took a cab to a hotel whose renovation she’d nearly been hired to oversee.

There was a cartoonishly large, unnaturally symmetrical floral arrangement centered under ten thousand chandelier crystals.

And a bellhop said something into a palmed microphone whose cord ran up his sleeve and down his side to a transmitter clipped to his belt—there had to be a better way to communicate.

And the desk clerk, who could almost have been Sam in fifteen years, but with a perfect left hand, asked, “How many keys will you be needing?”

She thought of saying, “All of them.” She thought of saying, “None.”





WHO’S IN THE UNOCCUPIED ROOM?


By the time Jacob came back downstairs with the pot, Tamir had already turned an apple into a pipe, seemingly without tools.

“Impressive,” Jacob said.

“I am an impressive person.”

“Well, you can certainly turn a piece of fruit into drug paraphernalia.”

“Still smells like pot,” Tamir said, opening the innermost bag. “That’s a good sign.”

They cracked some windows and smoked in a silence broken only by Jacob’s humiliating coughing. They sat back. They waited.

Somehow the station had changed to ESPN. Had the television achieved sentience and will? There was a documentary about the 1988 trade that sent Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the L.A. Kings—the effects it had on Gretzky, Edmonton, L.A., the sport of hockey, planet Earth, and the universe. What at any other time would have compelled Jacob to either smash his TV or blind himself was suddenly the happiest reprieve. Had Tamir put it on?

They lost track of how much time passed—it could have been forty-five seconds or forty-five minutes. It mattered as little to them as it did to Isaac.

“I feel good,” Jacob said, leaning as he’d been told to do at the Passover seders of his childhood, as befits a free man.

“I feel very good,” Tamir said.

“Just basically, fundamentally…good.”

“I know the feeling.”

“But the thing is, my life isn’t good.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, you know? Yeah, yours isn’t, either?”

“Yeah.”

“Childhood is good,” Jacob said, “the rest is pushing things around. If you’re lucky, you give a shit about the things. But it’s different only by degrees.”

“But those degrees matter.”

“Do they?”

“If one thing matters, everything matters.”

“That is a seriously good impersonation of wisdom.”

“Lo mein matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets matter. The Boss matters.”

“The Boss?”

“Springsteen. A heated toilet seat matters. The small things: changing a lightbulb, losing to your child at basketball, driving nowhere. There’s your Great Flatness. And I could go on.”

“Better still, do you think you could go back to the beginning and do that, exactly that, again, and I’ll record it?”

“Chinese food matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets—”

“I’m high.”

“I’m looking at the chandelier from above.”

“Is it dusty?” Jacob asked.

“Another person would ask if it was beautiful.”

“People shouldn’t be allowed to get married until it’s too late to have kids.”

“Maybe you could get enough signatures to make that happen.”