Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(81)

Apropos of nothing, Max asked, “Do you think the bathroom is clean?”

Jacob wondered if Max’s question, his desire to be away, was apropos of some knowledge, or intuition, that his father hadn’t touched his mother’s breasts in months?

“It’s a bathroom,” Tamir said.

“I’ll just wait until we get home.”

“If you have to go,” Jacob said, “go. It’s not good to hold it.”

“Says who?” Irv asked.

“Says your prostate.”

“You think my prostate speaks to you?”

“I don’t have to go,” Max said.

“It’s good to hold it,” Tamir said. “It’s like a…what do you call it? Not a kugel…”

“Give it a shot, OK, Max? Just in case.”

“Let the kid not go,” Irv said. And to Tamir: “A kegel. And you’re absolutely right.”

“I’ll go,” Jacob said. “You know why? Because I love my prostate.”

“Maybe you should marry it,” Max said.

Jacob didn’t have to go, but he went. And then he stood there at the urinal, an * with an exposed penis, passing a few moments to further his absence of a point, and just in case.

A man his father’s age was urinating beside him. His pee came out in bursts, as if from a lawn sprinkler, and to Jacob’s unaccredited ear it sounded like a symptom. When the man let out a small grunt, Jacob reflexively glanced over, and they exchanged the briefest of smiles before remembering where they were: a place where exactly one extremely brief moment of acknowledgment was tolerable. Jacob had the strong sensation that he knew this person. He often felt that at urinals, but this time he was sure—as he always was. Where had he seen that face before? A teacher from grade school? One of the boys’ teachers? One of his father’s friends? He was momentarily convinced that this stranger was a figure in one of Julia’s old family photos from Eastern Europe, and that he had traveled through time to deliver a warning.

Jacob returned to thoughts of babbling brooks and the slow death of a lower back whose demise, like so much else, he never considered until forced, and it hit him: Spielberg. Once the thought appeared, there was no doubting it. Of course it was him. Jacob was standing, his penis exposed, next to Steven Spielberg, whose penis was exposed. What were the odds?

Jacob had grown up, as had every Jew in the last quarter of the twentieth century, under Spielberg’s wing. Rather, in the shadow of his wing. He had seen E.T. three times in its opening week, all at the Uptown, each time through his fingers as the bike chase reached a climax so delicious it was literally unbearable. He had seen Indiana Jones, and the next one, and the next one. Tried to sit through Always. Nobody’s perfect. Not until he makes Schindler’s List, at which point he is not even he anymore, but representative of them. Them? The murdered millions. No, Jacob thought, representative of us. The Unmurdered. But Schindler wasn’t for us. It was for them. Them? Not the Murdered, of course. They couldn’t watch movies. It was for all of them who weren’t us: the goyim. Because with Spielberg, into whose bank account the general public was compelled to make annual deposits, we finally had a way to force them to look at our absence, to rub their noses in the German shepherd’s shit.

And God, was he loved. Jacob found the movie schmaltzy, overblown, and flirting with kitsch. But he had been profoundly moved. Irv denounced the choice to tell an uplifting Holocaust story, to give, for all intents and purposes, a statistically negligible happy ending generated by that statistically negligible of species, the good German. But even Irv had been moved to his limits. Isaac couldn’t have been more moved: You see, you see what was done to us, to mine parents, to mine brothers, to me, you see? Everyone was moved, and everyone was persuaded that being moved was the ultimate aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical experience.

Jacob was going to have to cop a look at Spielberg’s penis. The only question was on what pretense.

Every annual physical ended with Dr. Schlesinger kneeling in front of Jacob, cupping Jacob’s balls, and asking him to turn his head and cough. That experience seemed to be universal, and universally inexplicable, among men. But coughing and turning one’s head had something to do with genitals. The logic wasn’t airtight, but it felt right. Jacob coughed and snuck a peek.

The size didn’t make an impression—Spielberg was no longer, shorter, wider, or narrower than most doughy Jewish grandfathers. Neither was he particularly bananaed, pendular, reticulated, lightbulb-ish, reptilian, laminar, mushroomed, varicosey, hook-nosed, or cockeyed. What was notable was what wasn’t missing: his penis was uncircumcised. Jacob had had precious little exposure to the visual atrocity that is an intact penis, and so wouldn’t bet his life on what he saw—and the stakes felt that high—but he knew enough to know that he had to look again. But though urinal etiquette forgives a greeting, and the cough might have been a passable alibi for the glance, there was simply no way to return to the scene without propositioning sex, and even in a world in which Spielberg hadn’t made A.I., that wasn’t going to happen.

There were four options: (1) he had misidentified him as Steven Spielberg and misidentified his penis as being uncircumcised; (2) he had misidentified him as Steven Spielberg and correctly identified his penis as being uncircumcised; (3) it was Steven Spielberg, but he had misidentified his penis as being uncircumcised—of course he was circumcised; or (4) Steven Spielberg wasn’t circumcised. If he were a betting man, he’d push his mountain of chips onto (4).