Here I Am

“He’s walking Argus. And he asked me to.”

  “I’ll come up in a bit and help out,” Jacob said.

  “I’m not sure that’s necessary or, really, wanted. We just kind of need to know what’s meant by apology.”

  “I think an explicit disavowal is required,” Julia said, “but no need for the words I’m sorry.”

  “That was my instinct,” Billie said. “OK. Well, thanks.”

  She turned to leave the room, and Julia called her back: “Billie.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you hear any of the conversation we were having? Or just that Mark is nice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if you heard anything? Or you don’t know if you feel comfortable answering?”

  “The latter.”

  “It’s just that—”

  “I understand.”

  “We haven’t yet spoken with the boys—”

  “I really understand.”

  “And there’s a lot of context,” Jacob chimed in.

  “My parents are divorced. I get it.”

  “We’re just finding our way,” Jacob said, “just figuring things out.”

  “Your parents are divorced?” Julia asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Two years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t blame myself for their divorce, and neither should you.”

  “You’re funny,” Julia said.

  “Thank you.”

  “The divorce obviously didn’t get in the way of you becoming an amazing person.”

  “Well, we’ll never know what I could have been otherwise.”

  “You’re really funny.”

  “I really thank you.”

  “We know this puts you in an awkward position,” Jacob added.

  “It’s fine,” Billie said, and turned to leave once again.

  “Billie?” Julia said.

  “Yes?”

  “Would you describe your parents’ divorce as a loss?”

  “For whom?”

  “I want to change my wish,” Benjy said.

  “Benjy?”

  “I ought to go,” Billie said, turning to leave.

  “You don’t have to go,” Julia said. “Stay.”

  “I wished for you to believe Sam.”

  “Believe him about what?” Jacob said, gathering Benjy onto his knee.

  “I ought to,” Billie said, and headed up.

  “I don’t know,” Benjy said. “I just heard him talking to Max, and he said he wished you believed him. So I made his wish my wish.”

  “It’s not that we don’t believe him,” Jacob said, re-finding his anger at Julia for being unable to take Sam’s side.

  “So what is it?”

  “Do you want to know what Sam and Max were talking about?” Julia asked.

  Benjy nodded.

  “Sam got in trouble in Hebrew school because they found a piece of paper on his desk with some bad words on it. He says he didn’t do it. His teacher is sure that he did.”

  “So why don’t you believe him?”

  “We don’t not believe him,” Jacob said.

  “We always want to believe him,” Julia said. “We always want to take the side of our children. But we don’t think Sam is telling the truth this time. That doesn’t make him a bad person. And it doesn’t make us love him any less. This is how we love him. We’re trying to help him. People make mistakes all the time. I make mistakes all the time. Dad does. And we all count on each other’s forgiveness. But that requires an apology. Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing.”

  Benjy thought about that.

  He craned his neck to face Jacob, and asked, “So why do you believe him?”

  “Mom and I believe the same thing.”

  “You also think he lied?”

  “No, I also think people make mistakes and deserve forgiveness.”

  “But do you think he lied?”

  “I don’t know, Benjy. And neither does Mom. Only Sam knows.”

  “But do you think he lied?”

  Jacob put his palms on Benjy’s thighs and waited for the angel to call out. But no angel. And no ram. Jacob said, “We think he isn’t telling the truth.”

  “Could you call Mr. Schneiderman and ask him to change my note?”

  “Sure,” Jacob said, “we can do that.”

  “But how would you tell him my new wish without saying it?”

  “Why don’t you just write it and give it to him?”

  “He’s already there.”

  “Where?”

  “The Wailing Wall.”

  “In Israel?”

  “I guess.”

  “Oh, then don’t worry. I’m sure his trip was canceled and you’ll have a chance to change your wish.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the earthquake.”

  “What earthquake?”

  “There was an earthquake in Israel last week.”

  “A big one?”

  “You haven’t heard us talking about it?”

  “You talk about lots of things that you don’t talk about to me. Is the Wall going to be OK?”

  “Of course,” Julia said.

  “If anything’s going to be OK,” Jacob added, “it’s the Wall. It’s been OK for more than two thousand years.”

  “Yeah, but there used to be three other walls.”

  “There’s a great story about that,” Jacob said, hoping he would be able to remember what he’d just promised to deliver. The story had lain dormant since he was told it in Hebrew school. He couldn’t remember the telling, and he hadn’t thought about it since, yet there it was, a part of him—a part to be handed down. “When the Roman army conquered Jerusalem, the order was given to destroy the Temple.”

  “It was the Second Temple,” Benjy said, “because the first was destroyed.”

  “That’s right. Good for you for knowing that. Anyway, three of the walls went down, but the fourth one resisted.”

  “Resisted?”

  “Struggled. Fought back.”

  “A wall can’t fight back.”

  “Wouldn’t be destroyed.”

  “OK.”

  “It stood firm against hammers, and pickaxes, and clubs. The Romans had elephants push against the wall, they tried to set fire to it, they even invented the wrecking ball.”

  “Cool.”

  “But nothing, it seemed, would bring the fourth wall down. The soldier in charge of the Temple’s destruction reported back to his commanding officer that they had destroyed three of the Temple’s walls. But instead of admitting that they couldn’t knock down the fourth one, he suggested they leave it up.”

  “Why?”

  “As proof of their greatness.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “When people would see the wall, they would be able to conjure the immensity of the Temple, the foe they defeated.”

  “What?”

  Julia clarified: “They would see how huge the actual Temple must have been.”

  “Right,” Benjy said, taking it in.

  Jacob turned to Julia. “Isn’t there some organization rebuilding destroyed synagogues in Europe from their foundations? It’s like that.”

  “Or the 9/11 Memorial.”

  “There’s a word for it. I heard it once…A shul. Right, shul.”

  “Like synagogue?”

  “Wonderful coincidence, but no. It’s Tibetan.”

  “Where would you have learned a Tibetan word?”

  “No idea,” Jacob said. “But I learned it.”

  “So? Are you going to make us pull down the Tibetan Webster’s?”

  “I could be getting this wrong, but I think it’s a physical impression left behind. Like a footprint. Or the channel where water flowed. Or in Connecticut—the matted grass where Argus had slept.”

  “A snow angel,” Benjy said.

  “T
hat’s a great one,” Julia said, reaching for his face.

  “Only, we don’t believe in angels.”

  Jacob touched Benjy’s knee. “What I said was that while there are angels in the Torah, Judaism doesn’t really encourage—”

  “You’re my angel,” Julia told Benjy.

  “And you’re actually my tooth fairy,” he said.

  Jacob’s wish would have been to have learned his life lessons before it was too late to apply them. But like the wall into which he’d have tucked it, the wish conjured an immensity.

  —

  After Benjy had left the room, and the rehearsal had wrapped up, and Max was fed a second dinner that wasn’t spinach lasagna, and the door separating Sam and Billie from the rest of the world was judged sufficiently cracked, Jacob decided to go run some unnecessary errands at the hardware store: buy a shorter hose that would tuck away less awkwardly, replenish the AAA battery supply, maybe fondle some power tools. On his way, he called his father.

  “I give in,” he said.

  “Are you on Bluetooth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, get off it, so I can hear you.”

  “It’s illegal to hold the phone while driving.”

  “And it gives you cancer, too. Cost of doing business.”

  Jacob brought the phone to his face and repeated, “I give in.”

  “That’s great to hear. With reference to what?”

  “Let’s bury Grandpa here.”

  “Really?” Irv asked, sounding surprised, and pleased, and heartbroken. “What brought that on?”

  The reason—whether he was persuaded by his father’s pragmatism, or was tired of reorganizing his life to spend time with a dead body, or was too preoccupied with the burial of his family to keep up the fight—simply didn’t matter all that much. It took them eight days, but the decision was made: they would bury Isaac in Judean Gardens, a very ordinary, pretty-enough cemetery about thirty minutes outside the city. He would get visitors, and spend eternity among his family, and while it might not be the nonexistent and tarrying Messiah’s first or thousandth stop, He’d get there.

  THE GENUINE VERSION

  Eyesick, the threadbare beginnings of an avatar, was in the middle of a digital lemon grove—the clearly marked and barbed-wire-ringed private property of a lemonade corporation that used kinda funny videos, featuring kinda trustworthy actors, to persuade concerned-but-not-motivated consumers to believe that what they were drinking had something to do with authenticity. Sam hated such corporations nearly half as much as he hated himself for being just another spoon-fed idiot-cog who grinned and whatever the past tense of “bear it” is while hating, and announcing his hatred of, corporations. He would never trespass in life itself. He was too ethical, and too much of a coward. (Sometimes it was hard to differentiate.) But that was one of the many, many great things about Other Life—perhaps the explanation for his addiction to it: it was an opportunity to be a little less ethical, and a little less of a coward.

  Eyesick was trespassing, yes, but he wasn’t there to start a fire, chop down trees, do graffiti (or whatever is the proper way of saying that), or even to trespass, really. He’d gone there to be alone. Among the seemingly infinite columns of trunks, beneath the duvet of lemons, he could be by himself. It’s not like he felt a great need to be alone. Need was a word that Sam’s mom might use.

  “Do you need to get any homework done before we go to dinner?”

  “Finished,” he would say, taking great pleasure in throwing the correction back at her.

  “Do you need to get any homework finished before we go to dinner?”

  “Need?”

  “Yes. Need.”

  He took no pleasure in the great pleasure he seemed to take in being a smart-ass with her. But he needed to do it. He needed to push back against his instinct to cling to her; he needed to alienate what he needed to draw close, but more than anything, he needed not to be the object of her needs. It was bodily. It wasn’t her continued need to kiss him that repulsed him, but her overt efforts to manage that need. He was disgusted—revolted, nauseated—by her stolen touches: fixing his hair for a moment longer than necessary, holding his hand while cutting his fingernails (something he knew how to do himself, but needed her to do, but only in exactly the right and limited way). And her stolen glances: when he was coming out of a pool, or worse, taking off a shirt for an impromptu load of laundry. What she stole was stolen from him, and it inspired not only disgust, and not only auger, but resistance. You can have what you want, but you cannot take it.

  Eyesick was seeking aloneness in a lemon grove because Sam was sitting shiva for Isaac, avoiding conversations with relatives whose central processing units were programmed to shame him. Why else would a second cousin he hadn’t seen in years feel a need to mention acne? To mention voice-dropping? To wink while asking about girlfriends?

  Eyesick was seeking aloneness. Not to be by himself, but to be away from others. It’s different.

  > Sam?

  >…

  > Sam, is that you?

  > Who are you talking to?

  > YOU.

  > Me?

  > You. Sam.

  > Who are you?

  > I KNEW it was you.

  > Who knew?

  > You don’t recognize me?

  Recognize? The avatar addressing Eyesick was a lion with a plush rainbow mane; a brown suede vest with opalescent buttons, largely concealed beneath a white tuxedo with tails down to the end of his tail (which was itself adorned with a cubic zirconia heart); bleached teeth largely concealed by lipsticked lips (insofar as a lion has lips); a snout that was just a bit too moist; ruby pupils (not ruby-colored, but gemstones); and mother-of-pearl claws with peace signs and Stars of David etched into them. If it was good, it was very good. But was it good?

  There was no recognition. Only the surprise of having been discovered in a moment of reflection, and the shame of having been named and known.

  It would be possible, in theory, for someone with sufficient tech savvy and insufficient joie de vivre to trace Eyesick back to Sam. But it would require an effort that he couldn’t imagine anyone he knew—anyone who knew him—making. Except maybe Billie.

  Putting aside his parents’ virtuosically lame and quarter-hearted attempts to “check in” on his computer usage, it never ceased to amaze Sam what he could get away with.

  Proof: he shoplifted from the corner grocery that still had his family name above the door, the store his great-grandfather had opened with more dead brothers than words of English. Sam shoplifted enough junk food—enough bags of Cheetos (punctured with the sharpened end of a bent paper clip to release the air and allow for compression), enough Mentos boners in his pockets—from the earnest Korean immigrants, who kept lemon slices by the register to keep their fingers moist enough to grip cash, to open his own corner store, but this one with a different name, preferably with no name, preferably: STORE. Why did he do all that stealing? Not to eat what he took. He never did, never once. He always, always returned the goods—the returning requiring far more illicit prowess than the stealing. He did it to prove that he could, and to prove that he was horrible, and to prove that no one cared.

  Proof: the volume (in terabytes) of porn he consumed, and the volume (in quarts) of semen he disseminated. Under their noses might be an unfortunate turn of phrase, but how could so-called parents be so completely oblivious to the mass grave being dug and filled with sperm in their own backyard?

  The shiva reminded him of many things—the mortality of his grandparents and parents, his own mortality and Argus’s, how undeniably comforting it can be to perform rituals you don’t understand—but nothing more than the first time he jerked off, also at a shiva. It was his great-aunt Doris’s funeral reception. Though they referred to her as Great-Aunt Doris, her relationship was more distant, involving at least some once-removeds. (And it had been suggested, by his grandfather, after a few glasses of very expensive vodka, that she wasn
’t a blood relative at all.) Whatever the case, she’d never married, and had no children, and flaunted her loneliness to sidle up closer to the trunk of the family tree.

  The familiar gathering of unfamiliar family noshed away, and like Moses receiving the call to a needy bush, Sam galloped to his bathroom. Somehow he understood it was the moment, even if he didn’t understand the method. He used hair gel that day, because it was nearby and viscous. The more he slid his fist up and down his shaft, the stronger was his suspicion that something of genuine significance was happening—not just pleasurable, but mystical. It felt better and better, he squeezed harder, and then it felt even better, and then, with one small thrust for man, mankind leaped giantly across the canyon separating crappy, pathetic, inauthentic life from the unself-conscious, unangry, unawkward realm he wanted to spend the rest of his days and nights on earth inhabiting. Out of his penis gushed a substance he would have to admit he loved more than he loved any person in his life, more than any idea, loved so much that it became his enemy. Sometimes, in less proud moments, he would even talk to his sperm as his semen congealed in his belly button. Sometimes he would look it in the hundred million eyes and say simply: “Enemies.”

  The first time was a revelation. The first several thousand times. He jerked off again that afternoon, and again and again that night. He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure. He used hair gel every time, never questioning the potential dermatological effects of repeatedly applying to his penis a substance intended to sculpt hair. By the third day, his pubes were pipe cleaners and his shaft was leprous.

  So he started jerking off with aloe. But the green was cognitively dissonant, made him feel like he was fucking an alien, but in a bad way. So he switched to moisturizer.

  He was a mad-scientist masturbator, always searching for ways to make his hand more like a vagina. It would have helped to have had a bona fide experience with a bona fide vagina, but his inability not to hear “boner fide” made the chances of that as nugatory as did his use of the word nugatory. Anyway, the Internet was nothing if not a gynecological resource, and anyway, there were things one knew without having had a way to know, like how babies won’t crawl off a cliff—a fact he was ninety-five percent sure of. When, five infinitely and cosmically unjustly long years later, he had his first sexual experience with a corporeal female—not Billie, tragically, but someone merely nice and smart and pretty—he was surprised by just how accurate his imaginings had been. He’d known all along, he’d known everything. Perhaps if he’d known that he’d known, those years would have been slightly easier to endure.