Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(91)

“And everything is ready for your bar mitzvah?”

“Pretty much.”

But as he was about to click off—“Mom is waiting for me downstairs, so I should probably go”—Sam felt the expected discomfort, only this time with an urgency, or longing. He wasn’t sure the longing was his.

“Go,” Isaac said. “Go. We’ve already been on for too long.”

“I just wanted you to know that I love you.”

“Yeah, I know, sure. And I love you. OK, now go.”

“And I’m sorry that you’re moving.”

“Go, Sameleh.”

“I don’t see why you can’t just stay.”

“Because I can’t take care of myself anymore.”

“I mean here.”

“Sameleh.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“I couldn’t go up and down the stairs.”

“So we’d get one of those chairlift things.”

“They’re very expensive.”

“I’ll use my bar mitzvah money.”

“I have lots of medicines I need to take.”

“I have lots of vitamins I need to take. Mom is great with things like that.”

“I don’t want to make you upset, but soon I won’t be able to take baths or go to the toilet on my own.”

“Benjy can’t take baths on his own, and we’re constantly cleaning up Argus poop.”

“I am not a child, and I am not a dog.”

“I know, I’m just say—”

“I take care of my family, Sameleh.”

“You take such good care, but—”

“My family doesn’t take care of me.”

“I understand, but—”

“And that is that.”

“I’m gonna ask Dad—”

“No,” Isaac said, with a sternness Sam had never heard.

“Why not? I’m sure he’ll say yes.”

There was a long pause. If it weren’t for Isaac’s blinking eyes, Sam would have wondered if the image had frozen. “I told you no,” Isaac finally said, severely.

The connection weakened, the pixels enlarged.

What had Sam done? Something wrong, something unkind, but what?

Tentatively, in an effort to compensate for whatever hurt he’d accidentally inflicted in his effort to love, he said, “Also, I have a girlfriend.”

“Jewish?” Isaac asked, his face only a handful of pixels.

“Yes,” Sam lied.

“I see you,” Isaac said, and clicked off.

The addition of the I, the only letter that takes up less space than a space, changed everything. The longing was his great-grandfather’s.

Sam’s second synagogue was as he’d left it. He had no avatar with which to explore, so he quickly and crudely made a blocky figure to drop in. The foundation had been poured and the walls were framed, but without the drywall he could have shot an arrow, or his gaze, all the way through it. He—Sam knew that his new avatar was a man—went to one of the walls, gripped the studs like prison bars, and pushed it over. Sam was at once controlling this and witnessing it. He went to another wall and pushed it over.

Sam wasn’t destroying, and he wasn’t Sam. He was carving a space out of a larger space. He didn’t yet know who he was.

The exuberantly branching edifice was shrinking toward its center, like a failing empire that pulls its army back to the capital, like the blackening fingers of a stranded climber. No more social hall, no more basketball court or changing rooms, no more children’s library, no more classrooms, no more offices for any administrator or cantor or rabbi, no more chapel, no more sanctuary.

What remained after all those walls came down?

Half a dozen rooms.

Sam hadn’t intended this configuration, he’d merely created it. And he wasn’t Sam.

A dining room, a living room, a kitchen. A hall. A bathroom, a guest bedroom, a TV room, a bedroom.

Something was missing. It was longing for something.

He went to the ruins of the first synagogue and took the largely intact window of Moses floating down the Nile, as well as a handful of rubble. He replaced one of the kitchen windows with the Moses window and put the rubble in the fridge, among the ginger ale.

But something was still missing. There was still a longing.

A basement. It needed a basement. The sentient synagogue, aware that even as it was being constructed it was being destroyed, longed for an underground. He had no money to buy a shovel, so he used his hands. He dug it like a grave. He dug until he wouldn’t have been able to feel the arms that he couldn’t feel. He dug until a family could have hidden behind the displaced earth.

And then he stood inside his work, like a cave painter inside his painting of a cave.

I see you.

Sam gave himself white hair, restored Firefox to the desktop, and googled: How is bubble wrap made?





THE EARTHQUAKE


When they got to the house, Julia was on the stoop, her arms holding her bent knees to her chest. The sun settled on her hair like yellow chalk dust, shaking free with the tiniest movement. Seeing her there, as she was then, in that moment, Jacob spontaneously shook free the resentment that had settled in his heart like gravel. She wasn’t his wife, not right then, she was the woman he married—a person rather than a dynamic.