Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(26)
“Yeah, but Mom can be such a dick.”
Sam laughed. “Absolutely true.” He logged off and spun to face Max. “They’re peeling off the Band-Aid so slowly, new hairs have time to grow and get stuck to it.”
“Huh?”
“I wish they’d just get divorced already.”
“Divorced?” Max asked, his body rerouting blood to the part of the brain that conceals panic.
“Obviously.”
“Really?”
“What are you, ignorant?”
“Is that like stupid?”
“Not-knowing.”
“No.”
“So,” Sam asked, running his finger around the frame of his iPad, around the rectangular tear in the physical world, “who would you choose?”
“For what?”
“Choose. To live with.”
Max didn’t like this.
“Don’t kids just, like, split time, or whatever?”
“Yeah, it would begin like that, but then, you know, it always becomes a choice.”
Max hated this.
“I guess Dad’s more fun,” he said. “And I’d get in trouble a lot less. And probably have more cool stuff and screen time—”
“To enjoy before you die of scurvy, or melanoma from never putting on sunscreen, or just get sent to jail for getting to school late every single day.”
“Do they send you to jail for that?”
“It’s definitely the law that you have to go.”
“I’d also miss Mom.”
“What about her?”
“That she’s her.”
Sam didn’t like this.
“But I’d miss Dad if I went with Mom,” Max said, “so, I guess I don’t know. Who would you choose?”
“For you?”
“For yourself. I’d just want to be where you are.”
Sam hated this.
Max tilted his head up and looked at the ceiling, encouraging the tears to roll back under his eyes. It appeared almost robotic, but his inability to directly face such direct human emotion was what made him human. Or at least his father’s son.
Max put his hands in his pockets—a Jolly Rancher wrapper, a stubby pencil from a mini golf outing, a receipt whose type had vanished—and said, “So I went to a zoo once.”
“You’ve been to the zoo a lot of times.”
“It’s a joke.”
“Ah.”
“So I went to a zoo once, because I’d heard it was like the greatest zoo in the world. And, you know, I wanted to see it for myself.”
“Must have been pretty spectacular.”
“Well, the weird thing is, there was only one animal in the entire zoo.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah. And it was a dog.”
“Argus?”
“You just screwed up my timing.”
“Do the last line again.”
“I’ll just start from the beginning.”
“OK.”
“So I went to a zoo once, because I’d heard it was the greatest zoo in the world. But the thing is, there was only one animal in the entire zoo. And it was a dog.”
“Jeez!”
“Yeah, turns out it was a shih tzu. Get it?”
“Really funny,” Sam said, unable to laugh, despite finding it genuinely really funny.
“You get it, though, right? Shih tzu?”
“Yeah.”
“Shih. Tzu.”
“Thanks, Max.”
“Am I being annoying?”
“Not at all.”
“I am.”
“Just the opposite.”
“What’s the opposite of annoying?”
Sam tilted his head up, darted his eyes toward the ceiling, and said, “Thanks for not asking if I did it.”
“Oh,” Max said, rubbing the erased receipt between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s because I don’t care.”
“I know. You’re the only one who doesn’t care.”
“Turns out it was a shit family,” Max said, wondering where he would go after leaving the room.
“That’s not funny.”
“Maybe you don’t get it.”
EPITOME
“Dad?” Benjy said, entering the kitchen yet again, his grandmother in tow. He always said Dad with a question mark, as if asking where his father was.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“When you made dinner last night, my broccoli was touching my chicken.”
“And you were just thinking about that?”
“No. All day.”
“It mixes in your stomach anyway,” Max said from the threshold.
“Where’d you come from?” Jacob asked.
“Mom’s vagina hole,” Benjy said.
“And you’re going to die anyway,” Max continued, “so who cares what touches the chicken, which is dead anyway.”
Benjy turned to Jacob: “Is that true, Dad?”
“Which part?”
“I’m going to die?”
“Why, Max? In what way was this necessary?”