Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(77)
One morning, while they were driving to a hike along the sea, an air-raid siren went off. Jacob’s eyes opened to half dollars and found Irv’s. Shlomo stopped the car. Right there, where it was, on the highway. “Did we break down?” Irv asked, as if the siren might have been indicating a cracked catalytic converter. Shlomo and Tamir got out of the car with the vacant determination of zombies. Everyone on the highway got out of cars and cargo trucks, off motorcycles. They stood, thousands of Jewish undead, perfectly silent. Jacob didn’t know if this was the end, a kind of proud greeting of nuclear winter, or a drill, or some national custom. Like dupes in a grand social psychology experiment, Jacob and his parents did as everyone else was doing, and stood by the car in silence. When the siren stopped, life reanimated. Everyone got back in the car and they were on their way.
Irv was apparently too afraid of revealing ignorance to resolve his ignorance, so Deborah was left to ask what had just happened.
“Yom HaShoah,” Shlomo said.
“That’s the one for the trees?” Jacob asked.
“For the Jews,” Shlomo said, “the ones that were chopped down.”
“Shoah,” Irv said to Jacob, as if he’d known everything all along, “means ‘Holocaust.’?”
“But why does everyone stop and stand in silence?”
Shlomo said, “Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do.”
“And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.
Shlomo said, “Himself.”
Jacob was both mesmerized and repulsed by the ritual. The Jewish American response to the Holocaust was “Never forget,” because there was a possibility of forgetting. In Israel, they blared the air-raid siren for two minutes, because otherwise it would never stop blaring.
Shlomo was as over-the-top a host as Benny had been. He was further over, untethered as he was from the dignity of survival. And dignity was never Irv’s problem. So there were many scenes, especially when the check came at the end of a meal.
“Don’t touch that!”
“Don’t you touch that!”
“Don’t insult me!”
“Me insult you?”
“You’re our guests!”
“You’re our hosts!”
“I’ll never eat with you again.”
“Count on it.”
More than once this competitive generosity escalated to genuine insult. More than once—twice—perfectly good money was ripped up. Did everyone win, or did everyone lose? Why so binary?
What Jacob remembered most sharply and tenderly was the time they spent in the Blumenbergs’ home, a two-story Art Deco—ish construction perched on a Haifan hill. Every surface was made of stone and cool enough to be felt through socks at every time of day—an entire house like the bench in Blumenberg Park. There were diagonally sliced cucumbers and cubes of cheese for breakfast. Jaunts to weirdly specific two-room “zoos”: a snake zoo, a small-mammal zoo. Tamir’s mother would make huge spreads of side dishes for lunch—half a dozen salads, half a dozen dips. At home, the Blochs made a point of trying not to turn on the TV. The Blumenbergs made a point of trying not to turn it off.
Tamir was obsessed with computers and had a library of RGB porn before Jacob had word processing. In those days, Jacob concealed dirty magazines inside reference books at Barnes & Noble, searched lingerie catalogs for nipples and pubes with the dedication of a Talmudist searching for God’s will, and listened to the moans of the visually blocked but aurally exposed Spice channel. The greatest of lewd treats was the three minutes of preview that hotels used to offer for all movies: family, adult, adult. Even as a teenager, Jacob recognized the masturbatory tautology: if three minutes of the adult film convinced you that it was a worthy adult film, you would no longer have need of it. Tamir’s computer took half a day to download a titty f*ck, but what else was time made for?
Once, while they watched a pixelated woman jerkily spread and close her legs—an animation composed of six frames—Tamir asked if Jacob felt like beating off.
Jacob gave an ironic, Tom Brokaw—voiced “No,” assuming his cousin was joking.
“Suit yourself,” Tamir said, and proceeded to suit himself, pumping a glob of shea butter moisturizer into his palm.
Jacob watched him remove his hard penis from his pants and begin to stroke it, transferring the cream to its length. After a minute or two of this, Tamir got up onto his knees, bringing the head of his penis within inches of the screen—close enough for static shock. His penis was wide, Jacob had to give it that. But he wasn’t convinced it was any longer than his own. He wasn’t convinced that in the dark one would be able to tell the difference between their penises.
“How does it feel?” Jacob asked, while simultaneously reprimanding himself for voicing such a creepy question.
And then, as if in response, Tamir grabbed a Kleenex from the box on his desk and moaned as he shot a load into it.
Why had Jacob asked that? And why had Tamir come right then? Had Jacob’s question made him come? Had that been Jacob’s (totally subconscious) intent?
They masturbated side by side a dozen or so times. They certainly never touched each other, but Jacob did wonder if Tamir’s quiet moans were always irrepressible—if there wasn’t something performative about them. They never spoke about such sessions after—not three minutes after, and not three decades—but they weren’t a source of shame for either of them. They were young enough at the time not to worry about meaning, and then old enough to revere what was lost.