Here I Am (42 page)

By the time Jacob came back downstairs with the pot, Tamir had already turned an apple into a pipe, seemingly without tools.

“Impressive,” Jacob said.

“I am an impressive person.”

“Well, you can certainly turn a piece of fruit into drug paraphernalia.”

“Still smells like pot,” Tamir said, opening the innermost bag. “That's a good sign.”

They cracked some windows and smoked in a silence broken only by Jacob's humiliating coughing. They sat back. They waited.

Somehow the station had changed to ESPN. Had the television achieved sentience and will? There was a documentary about the 1988 trade that sent Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the L.A. Kings—the effects it had on Gretzky, Edmonton, L.A., the sport of hockey, planet Earth, and the universe. What at any other time would have compelled Jacob to either smash his TV or blind himself was suddenly the happiest reprieve. Had Tamir put it on?

They lost track of how much time passed—it could have been forty-five seconds or forty-five minutes. It mattered as little to them as it did to Isaac.

“I feel good,” Jacob said, leaning as he'd been told to do at the Passover seders of his childhood, as befits a free man.

“I feel very good,” Tamir said.

“Just basically, fundamentally…
good.”

“I know the feeling.”

“But the thing is, my life isn't good.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, you know? Yeah, yours isn't, either?”

“Yeah.”

“Childhood is good,” Jacob said, “the rest is pushing things around. If you're lucky, you give a shit about the things. But it's different only by degrees.”

“But those degrees matter.”

“Do they?”

“If one thing matters, everything matters.”

“That is a seriously good impersonation of wisdom.”

“Lo mein matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets matter. The Boss matters.”

“The Boss?”

“Springsteen. A heated toilet seat matters. The small things: changing a lightbulb, losing to your child at basketball, driving nowhere. There's your Great Flatness. And I could go on.”

“Better still, do you think you could go back to the beginning and do that,
exactly
that, again, and I'll record it?”

“Chinese food matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets—”

“I'm high.”

“I'm looking at the chandelier from above.”

“Is it dusty?” Jacob asked.

“Another person would ask if it was beautiful.”

“People shouldn't be allowed to get married until it's too late to have kids.”

“Maybe you could get enough signatures to make that happen.”

“And having a gratifying career is impossible.”

“For anyone?”

“For good fathers. But it's so hard to deviate. All these fucking Jewish nails driven through my palms.”

“Jewish nails?”

“Expectations. Prescriptions. Commandments. Wanting to please everyone. And the rest of them.”

“Them?”

“Did you ever have to read that poem, or journal entry, or whatever, by the kid who died in Auschwitz? Or maybe Treblinka? Not really the
important detail, I just…The one about ‘Next time you throw a ball, throw it for me'?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I don't think so.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Anyway, I might not be getting it exactly right, but the gist is: don't mourn for me, live for me. I'm about to get gassed, so do me a favor and have fun.”

“Never heard it.”

“I must have heard it a thousand times. It was the theme song of my Jewish education, and it ruined everything. Not because every time you throw a ball you're thinking of the corpse of a kid who should have been you, but because sometimes you just want to veg out in front of shitty TV, and instead you think, ‘I should really go throw a ball.' ”

Tamir laughed.

“It's funny, except that throwing a ball becomes an attitude toward academic achievement, becomes measuring the distance from perfection in units of failure, becomes going to a college that murdered kid would have killed to go to, becomes studying things you aren't interested in but are good and worthy and remunerative, becomes getting married Jewishly and having Jewish kids and living Jewishly in some demented effort to redeem the suffering that made your increasingly alienating life possible.”

“You should smoke a bit more.”

“The problem is,” Jacob said, taking back the apple, “the fulfillment of the expectations feels amazing, but you only fulfill them once—‘I got an A!' ‘I'm getting married!' ‘It's a boy!'—and then you're left to experience them. Nobody knows it at the time, and everybody knows it later, but nobody admits it, because it would pull a foundational log from the Jewish tower of Jenga. You trade emotional ambition for companionship, a life of inhabiting a nerve-filled body for companionship, exploration for companionship. There's a good in commitment, I know. Things have to grow over time, mature, become full. But there's a price, and just because we don't talk about it doesn't mean it's endurable. So many blessings, but did anyone ever stop to ask why one would want a blessing?”

“Blessings are just curses that other people envy.”

“You should smoke more pot, Tamir. It turns you into fucking Yoda, or at least Deepak Chopra.”

“Maybe it allows you to listen differently.”

“You see! That's exactly what I mean.”

“You're becoming funny,” Tamir said, bringing the apple to his mouth.

“I was always funny.”

“So maybe I'm the one listening differently.”

Tamir took another hit.

“What was Julia's reaction? To the texts?”

“Not good. Obviously.”

“You'll stay together?”

“Yeah. Of course. We have the kids. And we've had a life together.”

“You're sure?”

“I mean, we've
talked
about separating.”

“I hope you're right.”

Jacob took another hit.

“Have I ever told you about my TV show?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean
my
TV show.”

“I'm high, Jacob. Pretend I'm a six-year-old.”

“I've been writing a show about us.”

“You and me?”

“Well, no, not you. Or not yet.”

“I'd be great in a TV show.”

“My family.”

“I'm in your family.”

“My family
here
. Isaac. My parents. Julia and the kids.”

“Who would want to watch that?”

“Everybody, probably. But that's not the point. The point is, it's probably really good, and probably the writing I was born to do, and for the last ten or so years I've been pretty singularly devoted to it.”

“Ten years?”

“And I've never shared it with anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Well, before Isaac died, it was because I was afraid of betraying him.”

“With?”

“With the truth of who we are, and what we're like.”

“How would that be a betrayal?”

“I was listening to the radio the other morning, a science podcast I like. They were interviewing a woman who'd lived in that massive geodesic
dome for two years—nothing goes in, nothing goes out. That one. It was pretty interesting.”

“Let's listen to it now.”

“No, I'm just searching for a metaphor.”

“It would make me so happy to listen to it right now.”

“I can't even tell if you're serious or making fun of me.”

“Please, Jacob.”

“I still can't tell. But anyway, she talked about how living in that closed environment made her aware of the interconnectedness of life: this thing eats this thing, then poops, which feeds this thing, which blah blah blah. Then she went on to talk about something I already knew—not because I'm so fucking smart, but because it's just one of those things that most people know—that with every inhalation, you are likely breathing in molecules that were breathed out by Pol Pot, or Caesar, or even the dinosaurs. I could be wrong about that dinosaur bit. I've found myself really interested in dinosaurs recently. I don't know why. I spent about thirty years not thinking about them at all, and then suddenly I was interested again. I heard, in another podcast—”

“You listen to a lot of podcasts.”

“I know. I really do. It's embarrassing, right?”

“You're asking me if you're embarrassed?”

“It's humiliating.”

“I don't know why.”

“What kind of person sneaks off to unoccupied rooms and presses an almost-muted phone to his ear so that he, and only he, will hear a putterer's exploration of something as irrelevant as echolocation. It's humiliating. And the humiliation is humiliating.” With his beer bottle, Jacob drew a ring of condensation on the table. “Anyway, this other podcast did this whole thing about how all the dinosaurs—not just most of them, but all of them—were destroyed at once. They roamed the earth for some large number of millions of years, and then, in something like an hour,
gone
. Why do people always use the word
roam
when referring to dinosaurs?”

“I don't know.”

“They do, though. Dinosaurs
roamed
the earth. It's weird.”

“It is.”

“
So
weird, right?”

“The more I think about it, the weirder it becomes.”

“Jews roamed Europe for thousands of years…”

“And then, in something like a decade…”

“But I was saying something else. About the dome woman…dinosaurs…maybe Pol Pot?”

“Breathing.”

“Right! With each inhalation we take in molecules yada yada. Anyway, my eyes started to roll, because it just sounded like trite cocktail science shit. But then she went further, to say that our exhalations are just as certainly going to be inhaled by our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.”

“And future dinosaurs.”

“And future Pol Pots.”

They laughed.

“But it really upset me, for some reason. I didn't start crying or anything. I didn't have to pull over. But I did have to turn off the podcast. It suddenly became too much.”

“Why do you think?”

“Why do I think at all?”

“No. Why do you think it upset you to imagine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren breathing your breath?”

Jacob released a breath that would be inhaled by the last of his line.

“Try,” Tamir said.

“I guess”—another breath—“I guess I was raised to understand that I'm not worthy of all that came before me. But no one ever prepared me for the knowledge that I'm not worthy of all that will come after me, either.”

Tamir lifted the apple from the table, held it so that the chandelier light passed straight through its cored center, and said, “I want to fuck this apple.”

“What?”

“But my cock is too big,” he said. And then, trying to push his hairy-knuckled forefinger into it: “I can't even finger-fuck it.”

“Put the apple down, Tamir.”

“It's the Apple of Truth,” Tamir said, ignoring Jacob. “And I want to fuck it.”

“Jesus.”

“I'm serious.”

“You want to fuck the Apple of Truth, but your cock is too big?”

“Yes. That is exactly the predicament.”

“The present predicament? Or the predicament of life?”

“Both.”

“You're high.”

“So are you.”

“The scientist who was talking about the dinosaurs—”

“What are you talking about?”

“That podcast. The scientist said something so beautiful I thought I would die.”

“Don't die.”

“He asked the listener to imagine a bullet being fired through water, and how it would leave a conical wake of emptiness behind it—a hole in the water—before the water had time to come back together. He said that an asteroid would create a similar wake—a rip in the atmosphere—and that a dinosaur looking at the asteroid would see a nighttime hole in a daytime sky. That's what he would see just before being destroyed.”

“Maybe it's not that you wanted to die, but that you became like the dinosaur.”

“Huh?”

“It saw something incredibly beautiful before it was destroyed. You heard about it, and thought it was incredibly beautiful, and so assumed you would be destroyed.”

“They give MacArthurs to all the wrong people.”

“I lied.”

“About what?”

“Most things.”

“OK?”

“Rivka and I have been talking about moving.”

“Really?”

“Talking.”

“Moving where?”

“You're going to make me say it?”

“I guess I am.”

“Here.”

“You're kidding me.”

“Just talking. Just thinking about it. I get job offers every now and then, and a month ago I got a really good one, a great one, with a tech firm. Rivka and I were playing make-believe at the dinner table, imagining
what it would be like if I took the job, and then the conversation stopped being make-believe.”

“I thought you were happy there? And all that shit about renting a room in America?”

“Did you hear anything I said before?”

“When you were begging me to make aliyah?”

“So I can make hayila.”

“Which is what?”

“
Aliyah
backward.”

“You just did that in your head?”

“While you were talking.”

“And what, there's some sort of Bloch-Blumenberg Constant that has to be maintained?”