Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(141)

“Please, Jacob.”

“I still can’t tell. But anyway, she talked about how living in that closed environment made her aware of the interconnectedness of life: this thing eats this thing, then poops, which feeds this thing, which blah blah blah. Then she went on to talk about something I already knew—not because I’m so f*cking smart, but because it’s just one of those things that most people know—that with every inhalation, you are likely breathing in molecules that were breathed out by Pol Pot, or Caesar, or even the dinosaurs. I could be wrong about that dinosaur bit. I’ve found myself really interested in dinosaurs recently. I don’t know why. I spent about thirty years not thinking about them at all, and then suddenly I was interested again. I heard, in another podcast—”

“You listen to a lot of podcasts.”

“I know. I really do. It’s embarrassing, right?”

“You’re asking me if you’re embarrassed?”

“It’s humiliating.”

“I don’t know why.”

“What kind of person sneaks off to unoccupied rooms and presses an almost-muted phone to his ear so that he, and only he, will hear a putterer’s exploration of something as irrelevant as echolocation. It’s humiliating. And the humiliation is humiliating.” With his beer bottle, Jacob drew a ring of condensation on the table. “Anyway, this other podcast did this whole thing about how all the dinosaurs—not just most of them, but all of them—were destroyed at once. They roamed the earth for some large number of millions of years, and then, in something like an hour, gone. Why do people always use the word roam when referring to dinosaurs?”

“I don’t know.”

“They do, though. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s weird.”

“It is.”

“So weird, right?”

“The more I think about it, the weirder it becomes.”

“Jews roamed Europe for thousands of years…”

“And then, in something like a decade…”

“But I was saying something else. About the dome woman…dinosaurs…maybe Pol Pot?”

“Breathing.”

“Right! With each inhalation we take in molecules yada yada. Anyway, my eyes started to roll, because it just sounded like trite cocktail science shit. But then she went further, to say that our exhalations are just as certainly going to be inhaled by our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.”

“And future dinosaurs.”

“And future Pol Pots.”

They laughed.

“But it really upset me, for some reason. I didn’t start crying or anything. I didn’t have to pull over. But I did have to turn off the podcast. It suddenly became too much.”

“Why do you think?”

“Why do I think at all?”

“No. Why do you think it upset you to imagine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren breathing your breath?”

Jacob released a breath that would be inhaled by the last of his line.

“Try,” Tamir said.

“I guess”—another breath—“I guess I was raised to understand that I’m not worthy of all that came before me. But no one ever prepared me for the knowledge that I’m not worthy of all that will come after me, either.”

Tamir lifted the apple from the table, held it so that the chandelier light passed straight through its cored center, and said, “I want to f*ck this apple.”

“What?”

“But my cock is too big,” he said. And then, trying to push his hairy-knuckled forefinger into it: “I can’t even finger-f*ck it.”

“Put the apple down, Tamir.”

“It’s the Apple of Truth,” Tamir said, ignoring Jacob. “And I want to f*ck it.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m serious.”

“You want to f*ck the Apple of Truth, but your cock is too big?”

“Yes. That is exactly the predicament.”

“The present predicament? Or the predicament of life?”

“Both.”

“You’re high.”

“So are you.”

“The scientist who was talking about the dinosaurs—”

“What are you talking about?”

“That podcast. The scientist said something so beautiful I thought I would die.”

“Don’t die.”

“He asked the listener to imagine a bullet being fired through water, and how it would leave a conical wake of emptiness behind it—a hole in the water—before the water had time to come back together. He said that an asteroid would create a similar wake—a rip in the atmosphere—and that a dinosaur looking at the asteroid would see a nighttime hole in a daytime sky. That’s what he would see just before being destroyed.”

“Maybe it’s not that you wanted to die, but that you became like the dinosaur.”

“Huh?”

“It saw something incredibly beautiful before it was destroyed. You heard about it, and thought it was incredibly beautiful, and so assumed you would be destroyed.”

“They give MacArthurs to all the wrong people.”

“I lied.”