Here I Am

  Save for the twelve-inch-thick door, the room was slow to reveal its oddness. It was moist, the concrete floor sweating. The light was chalky, in color and texture. Sound seemed to gather in clouds above them. There were four gas masks hanging on the wall, even though there were only three people in Tamir’s family. Some sort of four-for-three promotion? Was one for the cleaning lady, or a future child? For Elijah? What would be the protocol if chemical war broke out while Jacob’s family was there? Was it like on a plane—adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their kids? Would Jacob watch himself suffocate in the reflection of his father’s mask? His mother would never allow it. But then, she might be suffocating, too. Surely his dad would give it to her, right? Unless she was wearing Tamir’s mask, in which case that wouldn’t be an issue. Were adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their own children, or all children? If the cleaning lady were there, would she really claim one of the masks from Jacob’s parents? Tamir was older than Jacob by a few months. Did that make him, relatively speaking, the adult of the two? There was no scenario in which Jacob wouldn’t be a victim of chemical warfare.

  “Let’s get out of this dump,” Tamir said to Jacob.

  Jacob didn’t want to go. He wanted to spend his remaining time in Israel exploring every inch of the room, learning it, learning himself in it, simply being there. He wanted to eat lunch down there, bring down his clothes and suitcase and pack, forgo the last drips of sightseeing in order to spend another couple of hours behind those impenetrable walls. And more: he wanted to hear the air-raid siren—not the false alarm for Yom HaShoah, but a siren signaling a complete destruction from which he would be safe.

  “Come on,” Tamir said, pulling on Jacob’s arm with awkward force.

  On the flight back to America, thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic, Jacob dreamed of a shelter beneath the shelter, reached by another set of stairs. But this second shelter was enormous, large enough to be confused for the world, large enough to hold enough people to make war inevitable. And when the bombs started to fall in the world on that side of the thick door, the world on the other side became the shelter.

  Nearly ten years later, Tamir and Jacob split a six-pack at a kitchen table that couldn’t be walked around, in an apartment carved out of an apartment, carved out of a house in Foggy Bottom. “I met someone,” Jacob said, saying it aloud for the first time.

  And nearly twenty years after that, in a Japanese car bisecting the nation’s capital, the Israeli cousin—Jacob’s Israeli cousin—said, “Anyway, it’s not going to come to that.”

  “To what?”

  “To bomb shelters. To war.”

  “Who said war?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Tamir said, as if to himself. “Israel is Hebrew for ‘contingency plan.’ ”

  They drove the next few minutes without speaking. NPR did its best with unreliable news, and Tamir buried himself in his phone, which might have been a tablet, or even a TV. Despite checking his own with manic constancy, Jacob hated all phones—found them to be even worse than the brain tumors they gave their users. Why? Because he hated that his was ruining his life? Or because he knew that it wasn’t ruining his life, but gave him the easy and socially acceptable means to ruin it himself? Or because he suspected that other people were getting more, and more interesting, messages? Or maybe he knew all along that his phone would be his undoing—even if he didn’t know how.

  Tamir’s phone was singularly annoying. Barak’s, too. They were phone SUVs. Jacob didn’t care how vivid their screens were, or how good the reception, or how easy to link with their other miserable devices. Barak had never even been to America, which, if it wasn’t the greatest country in the history of the world, at the very least had a few things to offer eyes that cared to look up. Maybe they were searching for news, although what kind of news site emits “Boom shakalaka!” every few seconds?

  “What about Noam?” Jacob asked.

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he now?”

  “This moment?” Tamir said. “As we speak? I have no idea. Keeping fathers informed is not of national importance.”

  “When you last spoke with him?”

  “Hebron. But I’m sure they were evacuated.”

  “By helicopter?”

  “I don’t know, Jacob. How would I know?”

  “And Yael?”

  “She’s fine. She’s in Auschwitz.”

  Boom shakalaka!

  “What?”

  “School trip.”

  They drove the George Washington Parkway in silence, AC battling the humidity that seeped through the invisible points of entry, small talk between Jacob and Irv battling the awkward silence that pressed against the windows—past Gravelly Point, where aviation buffs holding radio scanners, and fathers holding sons, could almost reach up and touch the landing gears of jumbo jets; the Capitol on the right, across the brown Potomac; the inevitable explanation of why the Washington Monument changes shades of white one-third of the way up. They crossed Memorial Bridge, between the golden horses, circled around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial, the steps that seemed to lead to nothing, and slid into the flow of Rock Creek Parkway. After passing under the terrace of the Kennedy Center and beside the teeth of the Watergate balconies, they followed the curves of the creek away from the outposts of the capital’s civilization.

  “The zoo,” Tamir said, looking up from his phone.

  “The zoo,” Jacob echoed.

  Irv leaned forward: “You know, our favorite primates, Benjy and Deborah, are probably there right now.”

  The zoo was at the epicenter of Tamir and Jacob’s friendship, their familialship; it marked the threshold between their youth and adulthood. And it was at the epicenter of Jacob’s life. Jacob’s mind often traveled to his own deathbed scene, especially when he felt that he was wasting his life. What moments, in his final moments, would he return to? He would remember arriving at the inn with Julia—both times. He would remember carrying Sam into the house after the ER, the tiny hand mummified in layers and layers of bandaging, cartoonishly large: the biggest, most useless fist in the world. He would remember the night at the zoo.

  He wondered if Tamir ever thought about it, if he was thinking about it then.

  And then Tamir let out a deep, subterranean laugh.

  “What’s funny?” Jacob asked.

  “Me. This feeling.”

  “What feeling?”

  He laughed again—his greatest performance yet?

  “Jealousy.”

  “Jealousy? That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

  “It’s not what I was expecting to feel. That’s why it’s funny.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Noam will finally have better stories than me. I’m jealous. But it’s good. It’s as it should be.”

  “As it should be?”

  “Having better stories.”

  Irv said, “Maybe you should call?”

  Jacob said, “ ‘ Once upon a time there was a man whose life was so good there’s no story to tell about it.’ ”

  “I’ll try,” Tamir said, punching a long string of numbers. “It’s not going to work, but for your sake, Irv, I’ll try.” After a few moments, an automated Hebrew message filled the car. Tamir hung up and, this time without Irv’s prompting, tried calling again. He listened. They all listened.

  “Circuits busy.”

  Vey iz mir.

  “Try again in a minute?”

  “No reason.”

  “I don’t mean to be alarmist,” Jacob said, “but do you need to go home?”

  Boom shakalaka!

  “And how would I do that?”

  “We could drive back to the airport and check on flights,” Jacob offered.

  “All flights in and out of Israel are canceled.”

  Vey iz mir.

  “How do you know?”

  Tamir held up his phone and s
aid, “You think I’m playing games?”

  Boom shakalaka!

  THE SECOND SYNAGOGUE

  No synagogue is sentient, but just as Sam believed that all things are capable of longing, so did he believe that all things have some awareness of their imminent end: he would tell fires “It’s OK” as the last embers hummed, and apologize to the three-hundred-million-odd sperm before flushing them on their way to wastewater treatment. No synagogue isn’t sentient.

  When Sam got home from Model UN, he went straight into Other Life, like a smoker racing to get outside Sydney Airport. His iPad awoke with a memo on the screen: Max’s explanation of Samanta’s death, their father’s guilt (as in, culpability), and his own profound guilt (as in, the feeling of culpability). Sam read it twice—for clarification, and to defer the confrontation with reality.

  His failure to spaz upon learning that Max wasn’t playing a sick joke surprised him. Why wasn’t he breaking his iPad over his bedpost, or screaming things that couldn’t be taken back at someone who didn’t deserve them, or at least crying? He wasn’t in any way indifferent to Samanta’s death, and he certainly hadn’t reached some epiphany that it was “only a game.” It wasn’t only a game. What awareness did Samanta have of her imminent end? No avatar isn’t sentient.

  Every Skype session with his great-grandfather began with “I see you” and ended with “See you.” Sam was bothered by the knowledge that one such conversation would be their last, and that there ought to, at some point, be some acknowledgment of some version of that fact. They had skyped early the previous morning, as Sam hastily packed for Model UN—Isaac awoke before the sun rose, and went to bed before it set. They never talked for more than five minutes—despite having had it explained to him a hundred times that skyping doesn’t cost anything ever, Isaac refused to believe that longer conversations didn’t cost more—and this one had been particularly brief. Sam shared the vaguest description of the upcoming school trip, confirmed that he wasn’t sick or hungry and that no, he wasn’t “seeing anyone.”

  “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.

  As he approached, Julia gave a weak smile, the smile of resignation. That morning, before leaving for the airport, he’d read a National Geographic sidebar about a broken weather satellite that could no longer do whatever it had been created to do, but would, because of the great expense and limited need to capture it, orbit the planet doing nothing until it ultimately fell to Earth. Her smile was remote like that.

  “What are you doing here?” Jacob asked. “I thought you weren’t going to be home until later.”

  “We decided to come back a couple of hours early.”

  “Where’s Sam?” Max asked.

  ?
??Is that something you can decide? As the chaperone?”

  “If Mark runs into a problem, I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Jacob hated hearing that fucking name. He felt his heart refilling with gravel and sinking.

  “Sam’s upstairs,” Julia told Max.

  “I suppose you can follow me,” Max said to Barak, and the two went inside.

  “I’m going to defecate,” Irv said, shuffling past, “and then I’ll rejoin the party. Hey, Julia.”

  Tamir emerged from the car and extended his arms.

  “Julie!”

  No one called her Julie. Not even Tamir called her Julie.

  “Tamir!”

  He embraced her in one of his hug dramas: holding her at arm’s length, looking her up and down, then bringing her back into his body, then holding her at arm’s length for another examination.

  “Everyone else gets older,” he said.

  “I’m not getting any younger,” she said, unwilling to return his flirtation, but unwilling to smother it, either.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  They exchanged a smile.

  Jacob wanted to hate Tamir for sexualizing everything, but he wasn’t sure if the habit resulted from free choice or environmental conditioning—how much of Tamir’s way was simply the Israeli way, cultural misinterpretation. And maybe desexualizing everything was Jacob’s own way, even when he was sexualizing everything.

  “We’re so happy to have you for the extra time,” Julia said.

  Why was no one mentioning the earthquake, Jacob wondered. Was Julia afraid that they hadn’t heard about it yet? Did she want to present the news in a thoughtful and controlled way, free of potential interruptions? Or had she not yet heard about it? More puzzling, why wasn’t Tamir, he who mentioned everything, mentioning it?

  “It’s not an easy trip,” Tamir said. “I would say you know, but you don’t. Anyway, I thought we’d come a little early and make the most of it—let Barak get to know his American family.”

  “And Rivka?”

  “She sends her regrets. She very much wanted to come.”