Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(71)
And there was a far bigger problem: the show would kill Jacob’s grandfather. Not metaphorically. It would literally commit grand-patricide. He who could survive anything would never survive a mirror. So Jacob held it close to his chest in a locked desk drawer. And the less able he was to share it, the more devoted he felt to it.
The show began with the beginning of the writing of the show. The characters in the show were the characters in the real Jacob’s life: an unhappy wife (who didn’t want to be described that way); three sons: one on the brink of manhood, one on the brink of extreme self-consciousness, one on the brink of mental independence; a terrified, xenophobic father; a quietly weaving and unweaving mother; a depressed grandfather. Should he one day share it and be asked how autobiographical it was, he would say, “It’s not my life, but it’s me.” And if someone—who else but Dr. Silvers?—were to ask how autobiographical his life was, he would say, “It’s my life, but it’s not me.”
The writing kept pace with the changing events in Jacob’s life. Or his life kept pace with the writing. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Jacob wrote about the discovery of his phone months before he even bought a second phone—psychology so double-left-handed it didn’t justify even one six-dollar minute with Dr. Silvers and was given several dozen hours. But it wasn’t just psychological. There were times when Julia would say or do things so eerily similar to what Jacob had written that he had to wonder if she’d read it. The night she discovered the phone, she asked, “Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?” That exact line—those words in that order—had been in the script for months. Although they were Jacob’s.
Save for the moments that most people would do anything to avoid, life is pretty slow and uninteresting and undramatic and uninspiring. Jacob’s solution to that problem, or blessing, wasn’t to alter the drama of the show—the authenticity of his work was the only antidote to the inauthenticity of his life—but to generate more and more paraphernalia.
Twenty-four years earlier, around the time that his lack of patience overwhelmed his passion for guitar, Jacob started designing album covers for an imaginary band. He wrote track lists, and lyrics, and liner notes. He thanked people who didn’t exist: engineers, producers, managers. He copied copyright language from Steady Diet of Nothing. An atlas at his side, he created a U.S. tour, and then a world tour, giving thought to the limits of his physical and emotional endurance: Is Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid too much for one week? Especially after eight months on the road? And even if it were endurable, what good would come from pushing the band toward an irritability that would only jeopardize everything they believed in and worked so hard to achieve? The dates were printed on the backs of T-shirts he designed, and actually produced, and actually wore. But he couldn’t play barre chords.
His relationship to the show was something like that—the more stunted the reality, the more expansive the related materials.
He created, and perpetually added to, a “bible” for the show—a kind of user’s manual for those who would one day work on it. He generated an ever-adjusting dossier of background information on each of the characters—
SAM BLOCH
On the brink of 13. The eldest of the Bloch brothers. Spends virtually all of his time in the virtual world of Other Life. Hates the fit of all clothing. Loves watching videos of bullies getting knocked out. Incapable of ignoring, or even not perceiving, sexual double entendres. Would take a body covered with acne scarring in the future for a clear forehead in the present. Longs for his positive qualities to be universally recognized but never mentioned.
GERSHOM BLUMENBERG
Long dead. Son of Anshel, father of Isaac. Grandfather of Irving. Grandson of someone whose name has been lost forever. Great Rabbi of Drohobycz. Died in a burning synagogue. Namesake of a small park with cool marble benches in Jerusalem. Appears only in nightmares.
JULIA BLOCH
43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she’s never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.
—and a catalog of settings, which included short (if always expanding) descriptions of place, hundreds of photographs for a future props department, maps, floor plans, real estate listings, anecdotes—
2294 NEWARK STREET
Bloch House. Nicer than many, but not the nicest. But nice. If not as nice as it could be. Thoughtful interiors, within the working limits. Some good midcentury furniture, mostly through eBay and Etsy. Some IKEA furniture with cool hacks (leather pulls, faceted cabinet fronts). Pictures hung in clusters (equitably distributed between Jacob’s and Julia’s families). Almond flour in a Williams-Sonoma glass jar on a soapstone counter. A too-beautiful-to-use Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Mineral Blue on the back right burner of a double-wide Lacanche range whose potential is wasted on veggie chili. Some books that were bought to be read (or at least dipped into); others to give the impression of a very specific kind of very broad-minded curiosity; others, like the two-volume slipcased edition of The Man Without Qualities, because of their beautiful spines. Hydrocortisone acetate suppositories beneath a stack of New Yorkers in the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet. A vibrator in the foot of a shoe on a high shelf. Holocaust books behind non-Holocaust books. And running up the kitchen doorframe, a growth chart of the Bloch boys.