Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(162)

“What?”

He said, “You know what Lou Gehrig’s final words were, right?”

“?‘I don’t want to die’?”

“?‘Damn, Lou Gehrig’s disease, I should have seen that coming.’?”

“Funny.”

“We should have seen this coming,” he said.

“You did.”

“No, I just said I did.”

Barak rose from his sleep, calmly looked around, and then, perhaps assuming he was in a dream, closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the window.

“You’ll go to the house every day, right?”

“Of course,” my father said.

“And take the kids out. Give Julia a break every now and then.”

“Of course, Jacob.”

“Make sure Mom eats.”

“You’ve traded places.”

“A friend at the Times said it’s nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Israel is intentionally making the situation appear worse than it is with the hopes of getting more American support. He said they’re drawing it out to achieve the most propitious peace.”

“The Times is an anti-Semitic pap smear.”

“I’m just saying don’t be scared.”

As if the knowledge of what to do at that moment had been coiled into me at birth, I bowed. My father put his hands atop my head. I waited. As if the knowledge of what to do at that moment had been coiled into him at my birth, his palms began to close, taking my hair into the grip of his fingers, holding me in place. I waited for a blessing that would never come.


HOW TO PLAY SILENCE

First ask, “What kind of silence is this?” EMBARRASSED SILENCE is not ASHAMED SILENCE. WORDLESS SILENCE is not SPEECHLESS SILENCE, is not SILENCE OF SUBTLE WITHHOLDING. And so on. And on and on.

Then ask, “What kind of suicide or sacrifice is this?”


HOW TO PLAY RAISED VOICES

I’ve raised my voice to a human only twice in my entire life. The first time was when Julia confronted me with the texts and, pushed beyond my self-control, into my self, I shouted: “You are my enemy!” She didn’t remember that she had given me that line. When she was in labor with Sam—her only natural childbirth—she traced a forty-hour spiral into deeper and more isolating pain, until, surrounded by the same four walls, we were in different rooms. The doula said something absurd (something that, at any other moment, Julia would have dismissed with a roll of her eyes), and I said something loving (something that, at any other moment, Julia would have teared up about and thanked me for), and Julia moaned like a nonfemale nonhuman, grabbed the bed rail like it was a roller-coaster safety bar, looked at me with eyes more satanic than in any red-pupilled photograph, and snarled, “You are my enemy!” I hadn’t meant to quote her thirteen years later, and it didn’t even occur to me that I’d done so until I wrote about it after. Like so much that happened during labor, Julia seemed to have no memory of it.

The second time I raised my voice at a human was also at Julia, many years later. I found it so much easier to give what wasn’t asked for or owed. Maybe I learned that from Argus—the only way to get him to drop a fetched ball was to appear indifferent. Maybe Argus learned that from me. Once Julia and I were living separate lives, it was not only possible to push my inner life through our still-shared conduit, I longed to. Because she appeared indifferent to it—appeared, or was.

Julia and I hadn’t spoken in a long time, but she was the person I wanted to talk to. I called, she answered, we shared, just like old times weren’t. I said, “I guess I wanted proof.” She said, “I’m the gentle soul you called, remember?” I said, “Remember how they say the world is uniquely open?” She asked, “What happened to you?” She wasn’t accusing or challenging me. She said it with the indifference necessary for me to give everything.

I’ve raised my voice at a human only twice in my entire life. Both times at the same human. Put differently: I’ve known only one human in my life. Put differently: I’ve allowed only one human to know me.

In a sadness beyond anger, pain, and fear, I screamed at Julia: “Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”


HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE

In the synagogue of my youth—which I left when I went to college and rejoined when Julia became pregnant with Sam—there was a memorial wall with tiny bulbs lit next to the names of those who had died in the given week of the year. As a boy, I rearranged the plastic letters that formed the names into whatever words I could. My father used to tell me that there were no bad words, only bad usage. And then, when I became a father, I told my boys the same thing.

There were more than fourteen hundred congregants of fighting age. Of the sixty-two who went to fight in Israel, twenty-four died. Two ten-watt, candelabra-base, flame-tip bulbs for each name. Only 480 watts of light. Fewer than in my living room chandelier. No one touched those names. But one day they will be rearranged into words. Or so is the hope.

It feels like it’s been centuries since I wandered that building. But I can remember the smells: the siddurim like withered flowers, the must of the basket of yarmulkes, the new-car smell of the ark. And I can remember the surfaces: where the broad strips of linen wallpaper met; the Braille-like plaques affixed to the armrests of every velvet chair, immortalizing the largesse of someone unlikely ever to sit there; the cold steel banister of the plush-carpeted stairs. I can remember the heat of those bulbs, and the roughness of the letters. As I sit at a desk filled with thousands of pages, continuing to comment on the commentary, I wonder how one should judge the usage of words made from the dead. And the living. From everyone living and dead.