Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(63)

“Oh, you just got served,” a boy said to Mark.

“Iceland is fully self-reliant,” Mark said.

“Oh, you just got served!” the same boy said to Julia.

“No one’s getting served,” Mark said. “We’re thinking our way through a very complicated issue.”

“Iceland is a Hooverville,” Julia said.

“Look,” Mark said, “if I’m being an idiot, the only thing my blathering will have cost us is three minutes.”

“I just got a text from Liechtenstein,” Billie said, holding her phone as if it were the torch and she were the Statue of Liberty. “They’re offering us a deal.”

“Now, clearly we have no nuclear program of any kind—”

“Liechtenstein is a country?”

“—and wouldn’t have the means or motives to acquire a nuclear weapon on the black market.”

“Jamaica wants in,” Billie said, holding up another text. “They’re offering three hundred billion dollars.”

“They know we’re talking about a bomb, right? Not a nuclear bong? Can I get a hallelujah!”

“Xenophobic,” someone muttered.

“And yet,” Mark went on, “we suddenly find ourselves nuclear, with the ability, should we choose to exercise it, of entering the league of functionally autonomous nations, nations capable of dictating their own terms, nations that aren’t subservient to other nations, or to the predicaments of their histories.”

“Right,” Julia said, her famous composure now in witness protection. “So we have some gripes, so life hasn’t been a trip to Epcot, and hey hey, as it turns out, we just click our uranium heels and boom, life’s bouncer lets us into the greatest of all parties.”

“That’s not what he was suggesting,” Sam said.

“He’s an unclear suggester.” And then, turning to Mark: “You’re an un-cle-ar bomb, that’s what you are.”

“I was trying to suggest that we explore, if only to dismiss, the potential upsides of having a bomb.”

“Let’s bomb someone!” someone said.

“Let’s!” Julia echoed. “Who? Or does it even matter?”

“Of course it matters,” Billie said, puzzled and upset by Julia’s behavior.

“Mexico?” a girl asked.

“Iran, obviously,” Yarmulke Boy said.

“Maybe,” Julia said, “we should bomb some war-torn, famine-ravaged African country where orphans are so skinny they’re fat?”

That killed the buzz.

“Why would we do that?” Billie asked.

“Because we can,” Julia said.

“Jesus, Mom.”

“Don’t ‘Jesus, Mom’ me.”

“We’re not going to bomb anyone,” Mark said.

“But you see, we are,” Julia said. “That’s how the story always ends. You’re either a country that never bombs, or you’re a country that is open to bombing. And once you make yourself open to bombing, you will bomb.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Julia.”

“Only because you’re a man, Mark.”

The kids looked at one another. A few giggled nervously, Sam not among them.

“OK,” Mark said, calling and raising Julia, “so here’s another idea: let’s bomb ourselves.”

“Why?” Billie asked, confused to the point of anguish.

“Because Julia—”

“Mrs. Bloch.”

“—would rather die than save her life. So why draw it out?”

“See what you did?” Sam said to his mother.

“Jamaica went up to four hundred billion,” Billie said, holding up her phone.

Someone said: “Yah, mon.”

Someone said: “Jamaica doesn’t have four hundred dollars.”

Someone said: “We should be asking for real money. The kind we can take home and buy real stuff with.”

Sam pulled his mother into the hallway by her wrist, as she’d many times pulled him.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“What am I doing?”

“I told Dad I didn’t want you to come on this trip, and you made a big deal when I said don’t make a big deal, and you’re more worried about coming off as a cool mom than actually being a good mom.”

“Excuse me?”

“You make everything about you. Everything is always you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, and neither do you.”

“You’re making me apologize for words I didn’t write, so I can have a bar mitzvah that only you want me to have. You not only check my online search history, you try to hide the fact that you don’t trust me. And do you think I think the pencils on my desk sharpen themselves?”

“I take care of you, Sam. Believe me, it brings me no pleasure to be shamed in front of the rabbi, or to organize your pigsty desk.”

“You’re a nag. And it does bring you pleasure. The only thing that makes you happy is controlling every last tiny detail of our lives, because you have no control over your own.”

“Where’d you learn that word?”