Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(143)
“I didn’t have an affair.”
“No?”
“Or I did, but I didn’t f*ck her.”
“What did you do?”
“Just a bunch of texts. And not even that many.”
“Why did you lie about it?”
“Because I didn’t want to get caught.”
“To me.”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
“There was a reason.”
“I’m high.”
“But it’s the only thing you lied about.”
“When Julia found my phone and I told her the truth—that nothing actually happened—she believed me.”
“That’s good.”
“But it wasn’t that she trusted me. She said she knew I wasn’t capable of it.”
“And you wanted me to think you were capable of it.”
“That’s my interpretation of myself, yes.”
“Even though you aren’t capable of it.”
“Affirmative.”
“You asked before, what kind of person sneaks around to listen to science podcasts?”
“Yes.”
“The kind of person who uses the same phone to sext a woman he won’t touch.”
“It was a different phone.”
“It was the same hand.”
“So now you’ve shaved my head,” Jacob said, closing his eyes. “Tell me what I can’t see.”
“You’re balder than I thought, and less bald than you think.”
Jacob felt the reflexive jerking, the fall down the elevator shaft that marked the onset of sleep. He couldn’t account for the passage of time, or movement between thoughts, or stretches without thought.
What would happen to the sound of time? If all that he and Julia had rehearsed were performed? If it weren’t the same price to explore an idea? No more candlelit whispering into the boys’ ears. No more dishwashing musings about that afternoon’s birthday party. No more scrape of the rake as the leaves were pulled against the curb so they could be jumped into just one last time. What would he listen for to hear his life? Or would he be deaf to it?
The next thing he was aware of was a hand, a voice. “There’s news,” Tamir said, shaking Jacob by the forearm.
“What?”
“You were asleep.”
“No. I wasn’t. I was just thinking.”
“There’s something big on the news.”
“Gimme a second.”
Jacob blinked away the glazing, rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, and walked to the sofa.
Two hours earlier, while Jacob and Tamir were getting stoned, some Israeli extremists entered the Dome of the Rock and set it on fire. The flames caused hardly any damage, the Israelis claimed, but the effort caused more than enough. The television, which had somehow switched from ESPN to CNN, showed images of rage: men—always men—punching the sky, shooting broken rivers of bullets at the sky, trying to kill the sky. Jacob had seen this before, but the images had always come from the vicinity of the quake, primarily Gaza and the West Bank. Now, however, CNN was bouncing from feed to feed, with a seemingly endless supply of fury: a circle of men burning an Israeli flag in Jakarta; men in Khartoum swinging sticks at an effigy of the Israeli prime minister; men in Karachi, and Dhaka, and Riyadh, and Lahore; men with bandanas over their mouths smashing a Jewish storefront in Paris; a man, whose accent was so thick it’s unlikely he knew one hundred words of English, screaming, “Death to Jews!” into a camera in Tehran.
“This is bad,” Jacob said, transfixed and intoxicated by the images.
“Bad?”
“Very bad.”
“I need to go home.”
“I know,” Jacob said, too groggy to understand, or even to be sure that he wasn’t still asleep. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Now. We need to go to the embassy.”
“Yeah. OK.”
Tamir shook his head and said, “Now, now, now.”
“I get it. Let me put some clothes on.”
But neither moved from the sofa. The television filled with Jewish rage: black-hatted men screaming in Hebrew in London; dark men from one of the last remaining kibbutzim waving fingers at the camera, hysterically repeating words Jacob didn’t understand; Jewish men clashing with Jewish soldiers guarding the Temple Mount.
Tamir said, “You need to come, too.”
“Of course. Give me a minute.”
“No,” Tamir said, grabbing Jacob’s shoulders with the force he used at the zoo three decades before. “You need to come home.”
“I am home. What?”
“To Israel.”
“What?”
“You need to come to Israel with me.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“Tamir, you want to leave Israel.”
“Jacob.”
“Now you want me to go?”
Tamir pointed at the TV. “Are you looking at this?”
“I’ve been looking at that for a week.”
“No. No one has ever seen this before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is how it ends,” he said. “Like this.” And for the first time since Tamir had arrived in D.C., for the first time ever, Jacob saw the family resemblance. He saw the panicked eyes of his boys—the terror he looked into before blood tests and after injuries that drew blood.