Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(6)
Around the chapel he’d built the synagogue itself: the labyrinth of literally infinitely forking hallways; the aranciata-dispensing water fountains, and urinals made of the bones of ivory poachers; the stashes of genuinely loving, nonmisogynistic face-sitting porn in the storage closet in the Men’s Club social hall; the ironic handicapped spot in the stroller parking lot; the Memorial Wall with tiny, never-working bulbs beside the names of those upon whom he wished quick and painless death, but death (former best friends, the people who made acne pads sting on purpose, etc.); various make-out grottoes where tenderhearted and legitimately funny girls, who dressed like American Apparel advertisements and wrote Percy Jackson fan fiction, allowed klutzes to suck their perfect boobs; chalkboards that delivered 600-volt electrical pulses when scratched by the fingernails of smart-ass, dumb-f*ck bullies who were so obviously—except to everyone besides Sam—fifteen short years from being paunchy schmucks with tedious jobs and dumpy wives; small plaques on every surface letting everyone know that it was because of Samanta’s beneficence, her fundamental goodness, her love of mercy and fairness and the benefit of the doubt, her decency, her inherent value, her nontoxic unshittiness, that the ladder to the roof existed, that the roof existed, that the perpetually buffering God existed.
The synagogue was originally at the edge of a community that had developed around a shared love of videos in which guilty dogs express shame. He could watch such videos all day—more than once he did—without going too deep into what he found so appealing about them. The obvious explanation would be that he empathized with the dog, and there was obviously some truth in that. (“Did you do that, Sam? Did you write those words? Were you bad?”) But he was also drawn to the owners. Every single one of the videos was made by someone who loved his dog more than himself; the “shaming” was always funnily overdramatized and good-spirited, and they all ended with reconciliation. (He’d tried making his own such videos, but Argus was too old and tired to do anything other than shit himself, for which no shaming could be good-spirited.) So it had something to do with the sinner, and something with the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again. Maybe in his next life, his feelings would be less than all-consuming and some portion of him would remain for understanding.
There was nothing exactly wrong with the original location, but life was for good-enough, and Other Life was for putting things in the places they longed to be. Sam secretly believed that everything was capable of longing, and more, that everything was always longing. So after the shame-inducing chew-out he got from his mom later that day, he paid some digital movers some digital currency to disassemble the synagogue into the largest parts that would fit into the largest trucks, move them, and reassemble them according to screen grabs.
“We’re going to have to talk when Dad comes home from his meeting, but I need to say something. It is required.”
“Fine.”
“Stop saying ‘fine.’?”
“Sorry.”
“Stop saying ‘sorry.’?”
“I thought the whole point was that I was supposed to be apologizing?”
“For what you did.”
“But I didn’t—”
“I’m very disappointed in you.”
“I know.”
“That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say? Like maybe, ‘I did it and I’m sorry’?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Clean up this mess. It’s disgusting.”
“It’s my room.”
“But it’s our house.”
“I can’t move that board. We’re only halfway done with the game. Dad said we could finish after I’m not in trouble anymore.”
“You know why you always beat him?”
“Because he lets me win.”
“He hasn’t let you win in years.”
“He goes easy.”
“He doesn’t. You beat him because it excites him to capture pieces, but you’re always thinking four moves ahead. It makes you good at chess, and it makes you good at life.”
“I’m not good at life.”
“You are when you’re thoughtful.”
“Is Dad bad at life?”
It went almost perfectly, but movers are less almost-perfect than the rest of humankind, and there were mishaps, hardly any of them noticeable—who but Sam would know that a Jewish star was dinged and hung upside down?—especially when hardly any of it was noticed in the first place. The tiny distance from perfect rendered it shit.
Sam’s dad had given him an article about a boy in a concentration camp who observed his bar mitzvah by digging an imaginary synagogue and filling it with upright twigs to serve as a silent congregation. Of course, his dad never would have guessed that Sam actually read it, and they never spoke about it, and does it count as recalling something if you are thinking of it constantly?
It was all for the occasion—the entire edifice of organized religion conceived of, built, and tended to simply for a brief ritual. Despite the incomprehensible vastness of Other Life, there was no synagogue. And despite his profound reluctance ever to step foot in an actual synagogue, there had to be a synagogue. He didn’t long for one, he needed one: you can’t destroy what doesn’t exist.