Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(142)

“About what?”

“Most things.”

“OK?”

“Rivka and I have been talking about moving.”

“Really?”

“Talking.”

“Moving where?”

“You’re going to make me say it?”

“I guess I am.”

“Here.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Just talking. Just thinking about it. I get job offers every now and then, and a month ago I got a really good one, a great one, with a tech firm. Rivka and I were playing make-believe at the dinner table, imagining what it would be like if I took the job, and then the conversation stopped being make-believe.”

“I thought you were happy there? And all that shit about renting a room in America?”

“Did you hear anything I said before?”

“When you were begging me to make aliyah?”

“So I can make hayila.”

“Which is what?”

“Aliyah backward.”

“You just did that in your head?”

“While you were talking.”

“And what, there’s some sort of Bloch-Blumenberg Constant that has to be maintained?”

“A Jew Constant. Ideally, American Jews and Israeli Jews would just switch places.”

“Is this what we were talking about the whole time? Your guilt about leaving Israel?”

“No, we were talking about your guilt about leaving your marriage.”

“I’m not leaving my marriage,” Jacob said.

“And I’m not leaving Israel,” Tamir said.

“All just talk?”

“Whenever I would turn down an offer of my father’s—for another piece of halvah, an evening walk—he’d say, ‘De zelbe prayz.’ Same price. It was the only time he used Yiddish. He hated Yiddish. But he’d say that. And not only in Yiddish, he’d imitate my grandfather’s voice. It doesn’t cost me anything to talk about leaving Israel. Same price as not talking about it. I can really hear my father imitating my grandfather: de zelbe prayz.”

Tamir woke up his phone and showed Jacob pictures of Noam: from the hospital, first steps, first day of school, first soccer game, first date, first time in his army uniform. “I’ve been obsessed with these pictures,” Tamir said. “Not with looking at them, but seeing that they’re still there. Sometimes I check under the table. Sometimes I go to the bathroom to do it. Remember going to the supermarket with your kids when they were small? That feeling that the second they were out of your sight, they would disappear forever? It’s like that.”

All the dinosaurs were wiped out, but some mammals survived. Most of them were burrowers. Underground, they were protected from the heat that consumed every living thing aboveground. Tamir was burying himself in his phone, in the photos of his son.

“Are we good men?” Tamir asked.

“What a strange question.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t think there’s any higher power judging us,” Jacob said.

“But how should we judge ourselves?”

“With tears, with silence, with—?”

“Even my confession was a lie.”

“I must have given you reasons to lie.”

“I want to leave. Rivka doesn’t.”

“You want to leave Israel? Or you want to leave your marriage?”

“Israel.”

“Did you have an affair?”

“No.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“I’m always tired,” Jacob said. “Always exhausted. I’ve never wondered about it before, but what if this whole time I haven’t been tired at all? What if my tiredness is just a hiding place?”

“There are worse hiding places.”

“And what if I decided that I would never be tired again? If I simply refused to be tired. My body could be tired, but not me.”

“I don’t know, Jacob.”

“Or what if I can’t get out of my hiding place on my own? If it’s too familiar, too safe? And I need to be smoked out?”

“I think you’re smoking yourself out right now.”

“What if I need Julia to smoke me out?”

Jacob looked at the apple between them. He understood what Tamir meant, about wanting to f*ck it. It wasn’t a sexual longing, but an existential one—to enter one’s truth.

“You know what I’d like to do right now?”

“What?” Tamir asked.

“Shave my head.”

“Why?”

“So I can see how bald I really am. And so everyone can see.”

“What if we made some popcorn instead?”

“It would be awful. But I’m ready for it. But it would be awful. But I’m ready for it.”

“You keep saying the same thing over and over.”

“I think I’m falling asleep.”

“So sleep.”

“But…”

“What?”

“I’ve also been lying.”

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I just don’t know which parts.”