Here I Am (26 page)

“You think I'm crazy,” Tamir said. “You're probably judging me, even laughing at me in your mind, but I'm the one with a toilet that knows his name, and I'm the one with a refrigerator that does the shopping online, and you're the one driving a Japanese go-kart.”

Jacob didn't think Tamir was crazy. He thought his need to exhibit and press the case for his happiness was unconvincing and sad. And sympathetic. That's where the emotional logic broke down. All that should have led Jacob to dislike Tamir brought him closer—not with envy, but love. He loved Tamir's brazen weakness. He loved his inability—his unwillingness—to hide his ugliness. Such exposure was what Jacob most wanted, and most withheld from himself.

“And what about the situation?” Irv asked.

“What situation?”

“Safety.”

“What? Food safety?”

“The
Arabs.”

“Which ones?”

“Iran. Syria. Hezbollah. Hamas. The Islamic State. Al-Qaeda.”

“The Iranians aren't Arabs. They're Persian.”

“I'm sure that helps you sleep at night.”

“Things could be better, things could be worse. Beyond that, you know what I know.”

“I only know what's in the papers,” Irv said.

“Where do you think I get my news?”

“So how does it
feel
over there?” Irv pressed.

“Would I be happier if Noam were a DJ for the army radio station? Sure. But I feel fine. Barak, you feel fine?”

“I feel cool.”

“You think Israel's going to bomb Iran?”

“I don't know,” Tamir said. “What do you think?”

“Do you think they
should
?” Jacob asked. He wasn't immune to the morbid curiosity, the American Jewish bloodlust at arm's length.

“Of course they should,” Irv said.

“If there were a way to bomb Iran without bombing Iran, that would be good. Any other course will be bad.”

“So what
do
you think they should do?” Jacob asked.

“He just told you,” Irv said. “He thinks they should bomb Iran.”

“I think
you
should bomb Iran,” Tamir told Irv.

“America?”

“That would be good, too. But I meant you specifically. You could use some of those biological weapons you displayed earlier.”

They all laughed at that, especially Max.

“Seriously,” Irv pressed, “what do you think should happen?”

“Seriously, I don't know.”

“And you're OK with that?”

“Are you?”

“No, I'm not OK with it. I think we should bomb Iran before it's too late.”

To which Tamir said, “And I think we should establish who
we
is before it's too late.”

All Tamir wanted to talk about was money—the average Israeli income, the size of his own easy fortune, the unrivaled quality of life in that fingernail clipping of oppressively hot homeland hemmed in by psychopathic enemies.

All Irv wanted to talk about was the
situation
—when was Israel going
to make us proud by making itself safe? Was there any inside piece of information to be dangled above friends at the dining room at the American Enterprise Institute, or whose pin might be pulled in his blog and thrown? Wasn't it high time we—you—did something about this or that?

All Jacob wanted to talk about was living close to death: Had Tamir killed anyone? Had Noam? Did either have any stories of fellow soldiers torturing or being tortured? What's the worst thing either ever saw with his own eyes?

The Jews Jacob grew up with adjusted their aviator glasses with only the muscles in their faces while parsing Fugazi lyrics while pushing in the lighters of their hand-me-down Volvo wagons. The lighter would pop out, they'd push it back in. Nothing was ever lit. They were miserable at sports, but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights, but sought arguments. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, of survivors. They were defined by, and proud of, their flagrant weakness.

Yet they were intoxicated by muscle. Not literal muscle—they found that suspicious, foolish, and lame. No, they were driven wild by the muscular application of the Jewish brain: Maccabees rolling under the bellies of armored Greek elephants to stab the soft undersides; Mossad missions whose odds, means, and results verged on magic; computer viruses so preternaturally complicated and smart they couldn't not leave Jewish fingerprints. You think you can mess with us, world? You think you can push us around? You can. But brain beats muscle as surely as paper beats rock, and we're gonna learn you; we're gonna sit at our desks and be the last ones standing.

As they sought the parking lot exit, like a marble in one of Benjy's OCD Marble Madness creations, Jacob felt inexplicably peaceful. Despite all that had been spilled, was the cup still half full? Or did a crumb of Wellbutrin just lodge free from between his brain's teeth, offering a morsel of undigested happiness? The cup was half full enough.

Despite his endless smart-ass and legitimate and almost-honorable protestations, Sam showed up for his bar mitzvah lessons. And despite being forced to apologize for a noncrime that he didn't commit, he would show up at the bimah.

Despite being an insufferable, chauvinistic blowhard, Irv was ever present, and, in his own way, ever loving.

Despite his long history of false promises, and despite his older son
being on duty in the West Bank, Tamir showed up. He brought his boy. They were family, and they were
being
family.

But what about Jacob? Was he there? His mind kept leaping to the supermagnet of Mark and Julia, though not in the ways he would have expected. He'd often imagined Julia having sex with other men. It very nearly destroyed him, but thrilled what was spared. He didn't want such thoughts, but sexual fantasy wants what is not to be had. He'd imagined Mark fucking her after their meeting at the hardware place. But now that something had happened between them—it was entirely possible they'd already fucked—his mind was released. It's not that the fantasy was suddenly too painful; it suddenly wasn't painful enough.

Now, driving a car full of family, his wife in a hotel with a man she'd at least kissed, his fantasy found the bull's-eye: it was the same car, but different occupants. Julia looks in the rearview mirror and sees Benjy falling asleep in his Benjy way: his body straight, his neck straight, his gaze directly in front of him, his eyes closing so slowly their movement is imperceptible—only by looking away and looking back can you register any change. The physicality of it, the fragility evoked by witnessing such slowness, is perplexing and beautiful. She looks at the road, she looks in the mirror, she looks at the road. Every time she looks at Benjy in the mirror, his eyes have closed another millimeter or two. The process of falling asleep takes ten minutes, the seconds of which have been pulled thin to the translucency of his slowly closing eyelids. And just before his eyes are fully closed, he releases a short puff of breath, as if blowing out his own candle. The rest of the drive is whispering, and each pothole feels like a moon crater, and on the moon is a photograph of a family, left by the Apollo astronaut Charles Duke in 1972. It will remain there, unchanging, for millions of years, outlasting not only the parents and children in the photo, and the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, but human civilization—until the dying sun consumes it. They pull up to the house, cut the engine, unfasten their seat belts, and Mark carries Benjy inside.

That was his new elsewhere, where his mind was as they arrived at the parking lot exit. Tamir reached for his wallet, but Irv was the quicker draw.

“Next time's on me,” Tamir said.

“Sure,” Irv said. “Next time we're exiting National Airport I'll let you pay for the parking.”

The gate rose, and for the first time since they'd gotten in the car, Max spoke up: “Turn on the radio, Dad.”

“What?”

“Didn't you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“In the guy's booth.”

“The cashier?”

“Yeah. The radio.”

“No.”

“Something big happened.”

“What?”

“Do I have to do everything?” Tamir asked, turning on the radio.

Entering in the middle of a report, it was impossible to understand at first what had happened, but it was clear that Max was right about its size. NPR's back was straight. Reports were coming in from across the Middle East. It was early. Little was known.

Jacob's mind raced to its place of comfort: the worst possible scenario. The Israelis had launched an attack on Iran, or the other way around. Or the Egyptians had attacked themselves. A bus had exploded. A plane had been hijacked. Someone had sprayed bullets in a mosque or synagogue, swung a knife in a crowded public space. A nuclear blast had vaporized Tel Aviv. But the thing about the worst possible scenario is that by definition it can't be anticipated.

Other Life was happening even when no one was present. Just like Life. Sam was in the Model UN's General Assembly—at that moment, his mom passed him a note: “I can see over the wall. Can you?”—but the ruins of his first synagogue were shimmering beside the foundation of his second synagogue. Scattered among the rubble were the fragments of his stained-glass Jewish Present, each shard illuminated by destruction.

The Hilton's International Ballroom was arranged in concentric arcs of tables and chairs to resemble the UN General Assembly. Delegations were dressed in regional garb, and some of the students attempted accents before one of the facilitators called a moratorium on that very bad idea.

The Saudi delegation's speech was wrapping up. A young, heavily naturally accented Hispanic girl in a hijab spoke with quivering hands and a weak, trembling voice. Julia hated to see nervous children. She wanted to go to her, give her an inspirational talk—explain that life changes, and what is weak becomes strong, and what is a dream becomes a reality that requires a new dream.

“And so it is our hope,” the girl said, clearly grateful to be reaching the end, “that the Federated States of Micronesia comes to its senses and behaves judiciously and with speed to turn over the bomb to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is all. Thank you. As-salamu alaykum.”

There was some light applause, most of it from Julia. At the front of the room, the chairman—a facilitator with a goatee on his face and a Velcro wallet in his back pocket—spoke.

“Thank you, Saudi Arabia. And now we'll hear from the Federated States of Micronesia.”

All attention shifted to the Georgetown Day delegation. Billie rose.

“Kind of ironic,” she began, asserting her nonchalant dominance by pretending to sort through her papers as she spoke, “for the Saudi delegate
to tell us what to do, when
it's illegal for her to swim in her own country
. Just saying.”

Kids laughed. The Saudi delegation shriveled. With affected drama, Billie leveled the pages against the desk and continued.

“Fellow members of the United Nations, on behalf of the Federated States of Micronesia, I would like to address what has become known as the nuclear crisis. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines crisis as”—she swiped her phone into consciousness and read—“ ‘a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention.' This is not a crisis. There is nothing difficult or dangerous about our situation. What we have here, in fact, is an
opportunity
, which Merriam-Webster defines as…just one second…”—the Wi-Fi was crappy, and it took her longer than planned to load the bookmarked page—“Here we go: ‘an amount of time or a situation in which something can be done.' We didn't choose our fate, but we don't intend to shrink from it. For years, for millennia—or for centuries, anyway—the good people of Micronesia accepted things as they were, understanding our diminished existence as our lot, our burden, our fate.”

Julia and Sam sat at opposite ends of the delegation. As Julia drew a brick wall on a yellow pad, she replayed the morning's phone call with Jacob: her lot, her burden, her fate. Why did she feel a need to do it right then, like that? Not only had she shot from the hip when she should have spoken from the heart or at least held her tongue, she had risked Max and Irv getting caught in the crossfire. What did they hear and understand? What did Jacob have to explain, and how did he do it? Were any of the three going to mention the call to Tamir and Barak? Was that the whole point? Did she want it all to blow up? Her wall now covered three-quarters of the page. Perhaps a thousand bricks.

Billie continued: “Things are about to change, fellow delegates. Micronesia is saying
enough
. Enough being pushed around, enough subservience, enough eating scraps. Fellow delegates, things are about to change, beginning, but most certainly not ending, with the following list of demands…”

In the remaining space, between the top of the brick wall and the edge of the page, Julia wrote, “I can see over the wall. Can you?” She folded it in half, and folded that in half, and had it passed the length of the delegation. Sam showed no emotion of any kind as he read it. He wrote something on the same page, folded and refolded it, and had it passed back
to his mom. She opened it, and at first couldn't see anything he'd written. Nothing in the space above the wall, where she'd written. She searched the bricks themselves—nothing. She looked to him. He put his open hand in front of him, fingers spread, then flipped it palm-up. She turned over the yellow paper, and Sam had written: “The other side of the wall is no wall.”

As the rest of the delegation was struggling to catch up with her radical departure from the agreed-upon script, Billie was smashing the rhetorical ceiling: “Micronesia shall, henceforth, have a seat on the UN Security Council; be granted NATO membership—yes, we realize we are in the Pacific—and preferential trading status with EU, NAFTA, UNASUR, AU, and EAEC partners; have an appointed member on the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee—”

A facilitator ran into the room.

“I'm sorry to interrupt the proceedings,” he said, “but I have an announcement. There was just a major earthquake in the Middle East.”

“This is real?” one of the chaperones asked.

“Real.”

“How major?”

“They're calling it historic.”

“But real like the nuclear crisis? Or
real
real?”

Julia's phone vibrated with a call; it was Deborah. She shuffled to the corner and answered, while the model crisis gave way to the real real one.

“Deborah?”

“Hi, Julia.”

“Is everything OK?”

“Benjy's fine.”

“I got scared when I saw your name come up.”

“He's fine. He's watching a movie.”

“OK. I got scared.”

“Julia.” She took a long breath, to extend the period of not-knowing. “Something horrible has happened, Julia.”

“Benjy?”

“Benjy is absolutely fine.”

“You're a mother. You would tell me.”

“Of course I would. He's fine, Julia. He's happy.”

“Let me speak with him.”

“This isn't about Benjy.”

“Oh my God, did something happen to Jacob and Max?”

“No. They're fine.”

“Do you promise me?”

“You need to go home.”