Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(144)

“How it ends?”

“How Israel is destroyed.”

“Because Muslims are screaming in Jakarta and Riyadh? What are they going to do, walk to Jerusalem?”

“Yes. And ride horses, and drive shitty cars, and be bussed, and take boats. And it’s not only them. Look at us.”

“It will pass.”

“It won’t. This is how it will all end.”

Neither the images on the screen nor Tamir’s words scared Jacob as much as the terror he saw in his children’s eyes in Tamir’s eyes.

“If you really believe that, Tamir, you need to get your family out of Israel.”

“I can’t!” he said, and then Jacob saw, in Tamir’s clenched teeth, Irv’s fury—the deep inner sadness that knew no expression but directionless rage.

“Why?” Jacob asked. “What could possibly be more important than your family’s safety?”

“I can’t get them out, Jacob. There are no flights in or out. Don’t you think I’ve tried? What do you think I do all day? Go to museums? Go shopping? I’m trying to keep my family safe. I can’t get them out, so I have to go. And you have to go, too.”

Jacob was now too awake for nonchalant bravery.

“Israel isn’t my home, Tamir.”

“That’s only because it hasn’t been destroyed yet.”

“No, it’s because it isn’t my home.”

“But it’s my home,” he said, and now Jacob saw Julia. He saw the pleading he hadn’t been able to see when her home still could have been saved. He saw his own blindness.

“Tamir, you—”

But the words wouldn’t form, because there was no thought for them to express. It didn’t matter: Tamir had stopped listening. He was angled away and texting. Rivka? Noam? Jacob didn’t ask, because he felt it wasn’t his place.

His place was the unoccupied room, typing: you’re begging me to f*ck your tight *, but you don’t deserve it yet.

His place was the unoccupied room, the same hand pressing a different phone to his ear so that he, and only he, could hear: “Blind people can see. It’s true. Making clicking sounds in their mouths, they can orient themselves by the echoes returning from nearby objects. Doing this, blind people are able to go on hikes in rocky terrain, navigate city streets, even ride bikes. But is that seeing? Brain scans of people echolocating show activity in the same visual centers as in the brains of people with sight; they are simply seeing through their ears, instead of their eyes.”

His place was the unoccupied room, reading: my husband is away this weekend with the kids, come f*ck me for real.

His place was the unoccupied room, hearing: “?‘ So why aren’t more blind people on bikes? According to David Spellman, the preeminent teacher of echolocation, it’s because few are given the necessary freedom to learn how.’

“?‘It’s the rare parent, maybe one in a hundred, probably fewer, who is able to watch her blind child approach an intersection and not grab his arm. It’s with love that they’re holding him back from danger, but they’re also holding him back from sight. When I teach children to ride bikes, there are inevitably crashes, just as there are with sighted children. But parents of blind children almost always take it as proof that too much is being asked of their child, and they step in to protect him. The more the parents want their children to see, the less possible they make it, because that love gets in the way.’

“?‘How were you able to overcome that and learn?’

“?‘My father left before I was born, and my mother had three jobs. The absence of love allowed me to see.’?”





DE ZELBE PRAYZ


Tamir went upstairs, and Jacob sat there, trying to replay the last few moments, and the last two hours, and the last two weeks, and the last thirteen, and sixteen, and forty-two years. What had happened?

Tamir had said Jacob wouldn’t die for anything. Even if that were true, why would it matter? What’s so inherently good about such ultimate devotion? What’s so wrong with making good-enough money, eating good-enough food, living in a nice-enough house, striving to be as ethical and ambitious as circumstances allow? He had tried, he had come up short every single time, but against what measure? He had given his family a good-enough life. It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

Years before, in the time when he and Julia would still share their work with each other, Julia came to the basement with a mug of tea in each hand and asked how it was going.

Jacob leaned back in his Aeron and said, “Well, it’s nowhere near as good as it could be, but I suppose it’s as good as I can make it right now.”

“Then it’s as good as it could be.”

“No,” Jacob said, “it could be a lot better.”

“How? If someone else wrote it? If you wrote it at a different time in your life? We’d be talking about something else.”

“If I were a better writer.”

“But you’re not,” she said, putting a mug on his desk, “you’re only perfect.”

For all that he couldn’t give Julia, he had given her a lot. He wasn’t a great artist, but he worked hard (enough), and was devoted (enough) to his writing. It is not a weakness to acknowledge complexity. It is not a retreat to take a step back. He wasn’t wrong to be envious of those wailing men on prayer mats in the Dome of the Rock, but maybe he was wrong to see reflected in their devotion his own existential pallor. Agnosticism is no less devout than fundamentalism, and maybe he’d destroyed what he loved, blind to the perfection of good-enough.