Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(183)

“Do you need anything?” she asked.

And he said, “No.”

And she said, “Are you sure?”

And he said, “Yes.”

And she said, “I know.”

And he said, “Ask again.”

And she said, “Come to me,” and saying nothing, he went to her.

He needed the distance to traverse. So she gave it to him. Every night she would go to the guest room. Every night he would come to her.

When Tamir sat with his son’s body, he thought of what Jacob had told him about sitting with Isaac’s body, Max’s desire to be close to it. Noam’s face was misshapen, shades of a purple that appeared nowhere in nature, his cheeks and brow forced together by the swelling. Why isn’t health as shocking as illness, as demanding of prayer? Tamir had been capable of going weeks without speaking to his son, but he wouldn’t willingly leave his son’s unconscious body.

Noam emerged from his coma the day before the cease-fire. It would take time to learn the extent of his injuries: the ways his body would never function as it once did, the psychological damage. He hadn’t been buried alive or burned to death. But he had been broken.

When the cease-fire was signed, there was no celebrating in the streets. There were no fireworks, or passed bottles, or singing from windows. Rivka slept in the bedroom that night. The loving distance they’d found in crisis had closed with peace. Across the country and the world, Jews were already writing editorials blaming other Jews—for lack of preparedness, of wisdom, of ethics, of sufficient force, of help. The prime minister’s coalition collapsed and elections were scheduled. Unable to sleep, Tamir took his phone from the bedside table and wrote a one-sentence text to Jacob: We’ve won, but we’ve lost.

It was nine in the evening in D.C. Jacob was in the Airbnb one-bedroom that he had been renting by the week, three blocks from his sleeping children. He went after putting the kids down and returned before they awoke. They knew he didn’t spend the night at home, and he knew they knew it, but the charade felt necessary. Nothing would be harder for Jacob than this period between houses, which lasted half a year. Everything that was necessary was punishing: the pretending, the extreme early rising, the aloneness.

Jacob’s thumb was constantly pushing his list of contacts, as if some new person might materialize with whom he could share the sadness he couldn’t confess. He wanted to reach out to Tamir, but it was impossible: not after Islip, not after Noam’s injury. So when the text from Tamir came through—We’ve won, but we’ve lost—Jacob was relieved and grateful, but careful about expanding his shame by revealing it.

Won what? Lost what?

Won the war. Lost peace.

But it sounds like everyone is accepting

the conditions of the armistice?

Peace with ourselves.

How is Noam?

He will be OK.

I’m so relieved to hear that.

When we were at your kitchen table,

stoned, you told me something

about a daytime hole in a nighttime sky.

What was that?

The dinosaur thing?

Yes, that.

So it was actually a nighttime hole in a daytime sky.

And how?

Imagine shooting a bullet through water.

That’s all you had to say. Now I remember.

What made you think of it?

I can’t sleep. So instead I think.

I haven’t been sleeping too much, either.

For people who talk about being tired

as much as we do, we don’t do a lot of sleeping.

We’re not going to move.

I didn’t think you were.

We were.

Rivka was coming around.

But not anymore.

What changed?

Everything. Nothing.

Right.

We are who we are.

Admitting that is what changed.

I’m working on that myself.

What if it had been night?

When?

When the asteroid came.

Then they would

have become extinct at night.

But what would they have seen?

A nighttime hole in a nighttime sky?

And what do you think that would look like?

Maybe like nothing?



Over the next few years, they would exchange brief texts and e-mails, all matter-of-fact updates, mostly about the kids, never with any tone or tangents. Tamir didn’t come for Max’s bar mitzvah, or Benjy’s, or Julia’s wedding (despite her kind invitation, and Jacob’s appeal), or either Deborah’s or Irv’s funeral.

After the kids’ first visit to his new house—the first and worst day of the rest of his life—Jacob closed the door, lay with Argus for half an hour, telling him what a good dog he was, the best dog, then sat with a cup of coffee that gave its heat to the room as he wrote a long, never-to-be-sent e-mail to Tamir, then stood up, keys in hand, finally ready to go to the veterinarian. The e-mail began: “We’ve lost, but we’ve lost.”

Some of the losing was giving away. Some was having things taken. Jacob was often surprised by what he found himself clutching, and what he freely released—what he felt was his, what he felt he needed.

What about that copy of Disgrace? He’d bought it—he remembered finding it at the used bookstore in Great Barrington one summer; he even remembered the beautiful set of Tennessee Williams plays he didn’t buy because Julia was there, and he didn’t want to be forced to confront his desire to own books he had no intention of reading.