Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(94)
Irv went to the dance floor and put his arm around Deborah. He whispered something into her ear. She nodded, and whispered something back. He whispered something back.
She collected herself and said, “I cried a lot. I put my head on his chest and made little rivers in the channels between his ribs. You were so skinny, Jacob. No matter how much you ate, you were just bones. Just bones,” she sighed.
“You let me go on for a long time, then coughed, and jerked your legs, and coughed again, and slowly came back to life. I was never more angry than when you put yourself in danger. When you didn’t look both ways, when you ran with scissors—I wanted to hit you. I actually had to stop myself from hitting you. How could you be so careless with the thing I most loved?
“But I wasn’t angry then. Only devastated. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ I told you. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again.’ Still flat on your back, you turned your head to face me—do you remember this?—and you said, ‘But I have to.’?”
Deborah started crying again, and handed Irv the page from which she’d been reading.
“In sickness and in health,” he said. “Jacob and Julia, my son and daughter, there is only ever sickness. Some people go blind, some go deaf. Some people break their backs, some get badly burned. But you were right, Jacob: you would have to do it again. Not as a game, or rehearsal, or tortuous effort to communicate something, but for real and forever.”
Irv looked up from the page, turned to Deborah, and said, “Jesus, Deborah, this is depressing.”
More laughter, but now from trembling throats. Deborah laughed, too, and took Irv’s hand.
He kept reading: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”
After having made love for the first time as husband and wife, Jacob and Julia lay side by side. Side by side, they looked at the ceiling.
Jacob said, “My mom’s speech was great.”
“It was,” Julia said.
Jacob took her hand and said, “But only the deafness part was true. None of the rest.”
Sixteen years later, alone with the mother of his three children, on the stoop of their home and under only the infinite ceiling, Jacob knew that everything his mother had said was true. Even if he couldn’t remember it, even if it hadn’t happened. He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking for him.
But then Julia pressed his hand. Not hard. Just enough pressure to communicate love. He felt love. Spousal, co-parental, romantic, friendly, forgiving, devoted, resigned, stubbornly hopeful—the kind didn’t matter. He had spent so much of his life standing at thresholds, parsing love, withholding comfort, forcing happiness. She applied more pressure to her still-husband’s hand, and held his eyes in the fingers of her eyes, and told him, “Your grandfather died.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, words that originated in his spine.
“Sorry?”
“Wait, what? I didn’t hear you.”
“Your grandfather. Isaac. He’s dead.”
“What?”
IV
FIFTEEN DAYS OF FIVE THOUSAND YEARS
DAY 2
Asked to estimate how many are trapped in the rubble, the chief of Israel’s recovery effort says, “One is ten thousand too many.” The journalist follows up: “Are you suggesting ten thousand?”
DAY 3
Statement from the Israeli interior minister’s office: “This is not a time for petty squabbling. If the Islamists want control, they can have control. If they want their holy sites preserved, they can have that. But they cannot have both.”
To which the waqf responds: “The Zionists have a history of underestimating Arabs, and of keeping what it borrows.”
To which the interior minister himself responds: “Israel never estimates, and Israel never borrows.”
DAY 4
New York Times public editor: “Many readers have responded to the use of the word ‘disproportionate’ in yesterday’s front-page projection of casualties in the Middle East.”
In Lebanon, the leader of Hezbollah gives a TV address that contains the sentence “The earthquake was not a work of nature, and it was not an earthquake.”
CBS Evening News anchor: “And finally, tonight, a glimmer of hope amid the rubble. Here is the story of young Adia, the three-year-old Palestinian girl who lost her parents and three sisters in Nablus. Wandering amid the ruins, without even a last name, she took the hand of the American photojournalist John Tirr, and refused to release it.”
DAY 5
The Israeli ambassador’s response: “Perhaps we should ask the thirty-six Japanese citizens we ‘unilaterally, clumsily, and brutally’ rescued, at the expense of our own blood, if they would prefer to be airlifted back onto the Temple Mount.”
Military analyst on Fox News, on the subject of Turkey’s uncoordinated use of Israeli airspace for supply transport: “Israel’s nonreaction is either an unprecedented gesture of cooperation or a sign of the unprecedented weakness of the Israeli Air Force.”