Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(146)
“Julia—”
“I’m not finished. You woke me up with this absurd shit, so now I’m entitled to hold the conch. If we were actually to entertain this utterly ridiculous notion of you in combat for a moment, then we would have to acknowledge that any army that would include you among its fighting ranks is desperate, and desperate armies tend not to be in the business of treating every life as if it were all of humankind, and without having any military expertise, I’m guessing you’re not going to be called upon for specialized operations, like bomb defusing or surgical assassinations, but something more like ‘Stand in front of this bullet so your meat will at least slow it before it enters the person we actually value.’ And then you’ll be dead. And your kids will be fatherless. And your father will become a yet more public *. And—”
“And you?”
“What?”
“What will you become?”
“In sickness and in sickness,” Jacob’s mother had said at his wedding. “That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”
Jacob had regained the hearing he’d pretended to lose as a child, and acquired a kind of pet interest in deafness that stayed with him into adulthood. He never shared it with Julia or anyone, as it felt distasteful, wrong. No one, not even Dr. Silvers, knew that he was able to sign, or that he would attend annual conventions for the D.C. chapter of the National Association of the Deaf. He didn’t pretend he was deaf when he went. He pretended he was a teacher at an elementary school for deaf children. He explained his interest by saying he was the child of a deaf father.
“What will you become, Julia?”
“I have no idea what it is you’re trying to get me to say. That contemplating having to raise three kids on my own makes me selfish?”
“No.”
“Are you implying it’s what I secretly want?”
“Is it? That hadn’t even occurred to me, but it obviously occurred to you.”
“Are you serious?”
“What will you become?”
“I have no idea what water it is you’re trying to lead me to, but I’m f*cking tired, and tired of this conversation, so if you have something to say—”
“Why won’t you just tell me you want me to stay?”
“What?”
“I don’t understand why you can’t bring yourself to say that you don’t want me to go.”
“It’s what I’ve been saying for the last five minutes.”
“No, you’ve been saying it’s unfair to the kids. That it’s unfair to you.”
“Unfair is your word.”
“Not once have you said that you—you Julia—don’t want me to go because you don’t want me to go.”
She opened a silence as the rabbi had opened the rip in Irv’s jacket at the funeral.
“A widow,” Jacob said. “That’s what you’ll become. You’re constantly projecting your needs and fears onto the kids, or me, or whoever is within reach. Why can’t you just admit that you—you—don’t want to be a widow?”
He heard, he thought he heard, the springs of a mattress return to their state of rest. What bed was she rising from? How much of her body was uncovered, in what degree of darkness?
“Because I wouldn’t be a widow,” she said.
“Yes, you would.”
“No, Jacob, I wouldn’t. A widow is someone whose spouse has died.”
“And?”
“And you’re not my spouse.”
In the 1970s there was no infrastructure to care for deaf children in Nicaragua—no schools, no educational or informational resources, there wasn’t even a codified sign language. When the first Nicaraguan school for the deaf was opened, the teachers taught the lip-reading of Spanish. But on the playground the children communicated using the signs they had developed in their homes, organically generating a shared vocabulary and grammar. As generations of students moved through the school, the improvised language grew and matured. It is the only documented instance of a language being created entirely from scratch by its speakers. No adult helped, nothing was recorded on paper, there were no models. Only the children’s will to be understood.
Jacob and Julia had tried. They had created signs, and they would spell words in front of the still-young kids, and there were codes. But the language they had created, and were even then creating, made the world smaller rather than clearer.
I’m not your spouse.
Because of those texts? Destroy everything because of the arrangement of a few hundred letters? What did he think was going to happen? And what did he think he was doing? Julia was right: it wasn’t a moment of weakness. He pushed the exchange into sexuality, he bought the second phone, he was forming the words whenever he wasn’t typing them, stealing off to read hers as soon as they came through. He’d more than once put Benjy in front of a movie so he could jerk off to a new message. Why?
Because it was perfect. He was a father to the boys, a son to his father, a husband to his wife, a friend to his friends, but to whom was he himself? The digital veil offered a self-disappearing that made self-expression, finally, possible. When he was no one, he was free to be himself. It’s not that he was bursting with stifled sexuality, though he was. It was the freedom that mattered. Which is why, when she texted, my husband is away this weekend with the kids, come f*ck me for real, she got no response. And why you can’t STILL be jerking off! got no response. And why what happened to you? were the last words to pass between their phones.