Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(29)
And she was alone, in the tiniest house of her life.
She was brought back to the world, back to life, by a buzzing—it shook her free from her unchosen fantasy, and she was hit by the full absurdity of what she was doing. Who did she think she was? Her in-laws downstairs, her son down the hall, her IRA bigger than her savings account. She didn’t feel ashamed; she felt stupid.
Another buzz.
She couldn’t place its source.
It was a phone, but not a buzz she’d ever heard before.
Did Jacob get Sam a smartphone to replace the hand-me-down flip phone on which he’d been texting at Joseph Mitchell speed for the last year? They’d discussed the possibility of doing so for his bar mitzvah, but that was still weeks off, and before Sam had gotten into trouble, and anyway, they’d rejected the idea. Too much already pulling everyone too far into the noisy elsewhere. The experiment with Other Life had all but kidnapped Sam’s consciousness.
She heard the buzz.
She searched the wicker basket full of toiletry odds and ends, the medicine cabinet: small and huge bottles of Advil, nail polish remover, organic tampons, Aquaphor, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Benadryl, Neosporin, Polysporin, children’s ibuprofen, Sudafed, Purell, Imodium, Colace, amoxicillin, aspirin, triamcinolone acetonide cream, lidocaine cream, Dermoplast spray, Debrox drops, saline solution, Bactroban cream, floss, vitamin E lotion…all the things bodies might have a need for. When did bodies develop so many needs? For so many years she needed nothing.
She heard the buzz.
Where was it? She might have been able to convince herself that it was coming from the neighbors’, on the other side of the wall, or even that she’d imagined it, but it buzzed again, and this time she could place the sound in the corner, by the floor.
She got on her hands and knees. In the basket of magazines? Behind the toilet? She reached her hand around the bowl, and no sooner had she touched it than it buzzed again, as if touching her back. Whose phone was this? One final buzz: a missed call from JULIA.
Julia?
But she was Julia.
what happened to you?
T-H-I-S-2-S-H-A-L-L-N-’-T-P-A-S-S
Sam knew that everything would collapse, he just didn’t know exactly how or when. His parents were going to get divorced and ultimately hate each other and spread destruction like that Japanese reactor. That much was clear, if not to them. He tried not to notice their lives, but it was impossible to ignore how often his dad fell asleep in front of the absence of news, how often his mom retreated into pruning the trees of her architectural models, how his dad started serving dessert every night, how his mom told Argus she “needed space” whenever he licked her, how devoted his mom had become to the Travel section, how his dad’s search history was all real estate sites, how his mom would put Benjy on her lap whenever his dad was in the room, the violence with which his dad began to hate spoiled athletes who don’t even try, how his mom gave three thousand dollars to the fall NPR drive, how his dad bought a Vespa in retaliation, the end of appetizers in restaurants, the end of the third bedtime story for Benjy, the end of eye contact.
He saw what they either couldn’t see or couldn’t allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one’s parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice. Because he was less stupid than his parents, he knew it would one day be suggested to him that he wouldn’t have to choose, even though he would. He knew he would begin to lose the desire or ability to fake it in school, and his grades would roll down an inclined plane according to some formula he was supposed to be proficient with, and the expressions of his parents’ love would inflate in response to their sadness about his sadness, and he would be rewarded for falling apart. His parents’ guilt about asking so much of him would get him off the hook for organized sports, and he’d be able to favorably renegotiate his screen time, and dinners would start to look a lot less organic, and soon enough he’d be steering toward the iceberg while his parents played dueling violins at each other.
He loved interesting facts, but was almost always troubled by his strange recurrent thoughts. Like this one: What if he witnessed a miracle? How would he convince anyone that he wasn’t joking? If a newborn told him a secret? If a tree walked away? If he met his older self and learned about all the avoidable catastrophic mistakes he would be unable to avoid? He imagined his conversations with his mom, with his dad, with fake friends at school, with real friends in Other Life. Most of them would just laugh. Maybe one or two could be nudged to a gesture of belief. Max would at least want to believe him. Benjy would believe him, but only because he believed everything. Billie? No. Sam would be alone with a miracle.
There was a knock on his door. Not the sanctuary door, but his bedroom door.
“Scram, f*cker.”
“Excuse me?” his mom said, opening and entering.
“Sorry,” Sam said, flipping the iPad facedown on his desk. “I thought you were Max.”
“And you think that’s a good way to talk to your brother?”
“No.”
“Or to anybody?”
“No.”
“So why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe take a moment to question yourself.”
He didn’t know if the suggestion was rhetorical, but he knew this wasn’t the time to take her anything less than literally.