Here I Am

  “Israel, the historical Jewish homeland, literally means ‘wrestles God.’ Not ‘praises God,’ or ‘reveres God,’ or ‘loves God,’ not even ‘obeys God.’ In fact, it is the opposite of ‘obeys God.’ Wrestling is not only our condition, it is our identity, our name.”

  That last sentence sounded a lot like Julia.

  “But what is wrestling?”

  That sounded like Dr. Silvers.

  “There is Greco-Roman wrestling, WWF wrestling, arm wrestling, sumo wrestling, lucha libre wrestling, wrestling with ideas, wrestling with faith…They all have one thing in common: closeness.”

  And there I was, the intended recipient of his speech, sitting so close to my ex-wife that the fabric of our clothing touched, on a pew with children half of whose lives I was missing.

  “You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of,” Max said.

  “A Jewish fist can do more than masturbate and hold a pen,” my dad once said.

  “To see your lifeline you have to let go,” I pulled from a fortune cookie one Christmas.

  Max kept getting smarter and smarter. Julia and I had always assumed that Sam was the brains of the bunch—that Max was the artist and Benjy would be perpetually adorable—but it was Max who took chess seriously (he placed third in the D.C.-area sixteen-and-unders), Max who elected to have a Mandarin tutor twice a week (while his brain was still “supple”), and Max who was accepted to Harvard after his junior year of high school. (Not until he chose to apply a year early did I realize that all that extra credit—those supplemental courses, that summer school—was a way to be away more, and get away sooner.)

  “Closeness,” he said, surveying the congregation. “It’s easy to be close, but almost impossible to stay close. Think about friends. Think about hobbies. Even ideas. They’re close to us—sometimes so close we think they are part of us—and then, at some point, they aren’t close anymore. They go away. Only one thing can keep something close over time: holding it there. Grappling with it. Wrestling it to the ground, as Jacob did with the angel, and refusing to let go. What we don’t wrestle we let go of. Love isn’t the absence of struggle. Love is struggle.”

  That sounded like the person I wanted to be, but couldn’t be. It sounded like Max.

  HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

  I heard the shutter before I saw the photographer. It was the first and only shot of my war.

  “Hey,” I said, stomping toward him. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Why the hell was I so upset?

  “I’m here for the Times,” he said, showing me the press pass hanging from his neck.

  “You’re supposed to be here?”

  “The consulate gave me authorization, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Well, I didn’t give you authorization to take a picture of me.”

  “You want me to delete the photo?” he asked, neither assertive nor conciliatory.

  “It’s fine,” I said, “but don’t take any more.”

  “I don’t want a problem. I’m happy to delete it.”

  “Keep it,” I said. “But no more.”

  He walked off to take pictures of other groups. Some of them posed. Some were either unaware of his presence or unwilling to recognize it. My knee-jerk anger—if that’s even what it was—surprised me. But harder to explain was my insistence that he keep the photo he’d taken but not take any more. What two ways was I trying to have it?

  My mind wandered to all those years of school portraits: the licked palms wrestling cowlicks under the pretense of a loving stroke; letting the boys watch a cartoon while sliding them into handsome, uncomfortable clothes; clumsy efforts to subliminally communicate the value of a “natural” smile. The pictures always came out the same: a forced grin with unparted lips, eyes vacantly gazing into the haze—something from the Diane Arbus scrap pile. But I loved them. I loved the truth they conveyed: that kids aren’t yet able to fake it. Or they aren’t yet able to conceal their disingenuousness. They’re wonderful smilers, the best; but they’re the very worst fake smilers. The inability to fake a smile defines childhood. When Sam thanked me for his room in my new house, he became a man.

  One year Benjy was genuinely disturbed by his school portrait, unwilling to believe that the child in the picture was either him or not him. Max took it upon himself to prod Benjy’s distress, explaining to him that everyone has a living self and a dead self existing in parallel—“kind of like your own ghost”—and that the only time we ever get to see our dead selves is in school portraits. Soon enough, Benjy was crying. In an effort to calm him, I took out my bar mitzvah album. We’d already looked through several dozen photos when Benjy said, “But I thought Sam’s bar mitzvah was in the future.”

  At my bar mitzvah party, relatives, friends of my parents, and complete strangers handed me envelopes with savings bonds. When my suit’s jacket pockets started to strain, I’d give the envelopes to my mother, who put them in the purse under her chair. My father and I tabulated the “righteous plunder” at the kitchen table that night. I can’t remember the figure, but I remember that it was evenly divisible by eighteen.

  I remember the albumin archipelago on the salmon. I remember how the singer smudged ve-nismecha in “Hava Nagila,” like a kid singing the alphabet, believing that l-m-n-o is one letter. I remember being lifted in the chair, high above the Jewish masses, the coronation of the One-Eyed Man. Back on the parquet, my father told me to go spend a few minutes with my grandfather. I venerated him, as I was taught to, but it was never not a chore.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” I said, offering the top of my head for his kiss.

  “I put some money into your college account,” he said, patting the empty chair beside him.

  “Thank you.”

  “Did Dad tell you how much?”

  “No.”

  He looked to both sides, beckoned my ear to his lips, and whispered, “One thousand four hundred forty dollars.”

  “Wow,” I said, reestablishing a comfortable distance. I had no idea if that many dollars justified that presentation, but I knew what was expected of me: “That’s so incredibly generous. Thank you.”

  “But also this,” he said, straining to get a grocery bag from the ground. He placed it on the table and removed something wrapped in a napkin. I assumed it was a roll—he often stashed rolls in napkins in bags—but then I felt its weight. “Go on,” he said. Inside was a camera, a Leica.

  “Thank you,” I said, thinking the gift was a camera.

  “Benny and I went back after the war, in 1946. We thought maybe our family had found a way to survive. At least someone. But there was no one. A neighbor, one of my father’s friends, saw us and brought us to his house. He had kept some of our things, in case we ever came back. He told us that even though the war was over, it wasn’t safe, and that we had to go. So we went. I only took a few things, and this was one of them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I sewed money and photographs into the lining of the jacket I wore on the boat. I was so worried that someone would try to steal my things. I promised myself I wouldn’t take it off, but it was so hot, too hot. I slept with it in my arms, and one morning when I woke up, my suitcase was still at my side, but the jacket was gone. That’s why I don’t blame the person who took it. If he’d been a thief, he would have taken the suitcase. He was just cold.”

  “But you said it was hot.”

  “It was hot for me.” He rested his finger on the shutter release as if it were the trigger of a land mine. “I have only one picture from Europe. It’s of me. It was marking my place in my diary in my suitcase. The pictures of my brothers and parents were sewn into that jacket. Gone. But this is the camera that took them.”

  “Where’s your diary?”

  “I let it go.”

  What would I have seen in those lost pictures? What would I have seen in the diary? Benjy didn’t recognize himself in his school portrait, but what did I see when I looked at it? And what did I see when I look
ed at the sonogram of Sam? An idea? A human? My human? Myself? An idea of myself? I had to believe in him, and I did. I never stopped believing in him, only in myself.

  In his bar mitzvah speech, Sam said, “We didn’t ask for a nuclear weapon, and didn’t want a nuclear weapon, and nuclear weapons are, in pretty much every way, horrible. But there’s a reason people have them, and it’s to never have to use them.”

  Billie shouted something I didn’t understand, but I understood the flicker of happiness in Sam’s eyes. The tension in the room redistributed itself across paper plates and plastic cups; Sam’s speech divided and re-divided into small talk. I brought him some food and told him, “You’re so much better than I was at your age. Or am now.”

  “It’s not a competition,” he said.

  “No, it’s progress. Come with me for a second.”

  “Where?”

  “What do you mean, where? Mount Moriah, of course.”

  I led him upstairs, to my dresser, and took the Leica from the bottom drawer.

  “This was your great-grandpa’s. He brought it over from Europe. He gave it to me on my bar mitzvah and told me that he had no pictures of his brothers or parents, but that this camera had taken pictures of them. I know he wanted you to have it.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No. But I know that—”

  “So you’re the one who wants me to have it.”

  Who was leading whom?

  “I am,” I said.

  He held it in his hands, turned it around a few times. “Does it work?”

  “Gosh, I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s the point.”

  He said, “Shouldn’t it be?”

  Sam had the Leica refurbished; he brought it into the world and it brought him out of Other Life.

  He studied philosophy in college, but only in college.

  He left the Leica on a train in Peru on his honeymoon with his first wife.

  At thirty-eight, he became the youngest judge ever appointed to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit.

  The boys took me to Great Wall Szechuan House for my sixty-fifth birthday. Sam raised his bottle of Tsingtao and gave a beautiful toast, ending with “Dad, you’re always looking.” I didn’t know whether he meant searching or seeing.

  Tamir was sitting on the terminal’s floor, his back against the wall, his eyes on the phone in his hands. I went and sat beside him.

  “I’m having second thoughts,” I said.

  He smiled, nodded.

  “Tamir?”

  He nodded again.

  “Can you stop texting for a second and listen?”

  “I’m not texting,” he said, and turned his phone to face me: a grid of thumbnails of family photos.

  “I’m having second thoughts.”

  “Only second?”

  “Could you talk this through with me?”

  “What is there to talk through?”

  “You’re returning to your family,” I said. “I would be leaving mine.”

  “Would be?”

  “Don’t do that. I’m asking for your help.”

  “I don’t think you are. I think you’re asking for forgiveness.”

  “For what? I haven’t even done anything.”

  “Every thought after the first thought will lead you back to Newark Street.”

  “That’s not necessarily true.”

  “Not necessarily?”

  “I’m here. I said goodbye to my children.”

  “You don’t owe me an apology,” he said. “It’s not your country.”

  “Maybe I’ve been wrong about that.”

  “Apparently you were right.”

  “And like you said, even if it isn’t my home, it’s yours.”

  “Who are you, Jacob?”

  For three consecutive years, Max’s eyes were closed in his school portrait. The first time, it was a small disappointment, but mostly funny. The second year, it was harder to excuse as an accident. We talked about why such photos are nice to have, how much his grandparents and great-grandfather cherished them, how it was a waste of money to spoil them on purpose. The morning of picture day that third year, we asked Max to look us in the eye and promise to keep his eyes open. “I’ll try,” he said, his eyes blinking wildly, as if to flush out a fly. “Don’t try,” Julia said, “do it.” When the photos came back, all three boys had closed their eyes. But I’ve never seen more genuine smiles.

  “Maybe this is who I am,” I said to Tamir.

  “You say that as if you couldn’t choose to be who you wanted to be.”

  “Maybe I choose this.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I don’t know what I should do, and I’m asking you to talk this through with me.”

  “So let’s talk it through. Who are you?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘Maybe this is who I am.’ So who, maybe, are you?”

  “Come on, Tamir.”

  “What? I’m asking you to explain what you meant. Who are you?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing that can be articulated like that.”

  “Try. Who are you?”

  “OK, never mind. I’m sorry I came over here.”

  “Who are you, Jacob?”

  “Who are you, Tamir?”

  “I am someone who goes home, no matter how difficult.”

  “Well then, you took the words out of my mouth.”

  “Maybe. But not out of your heart. Wherever you go, you won’t be going home.”

  When my mother first got sick, she mentioned that my father visited Isaac’s grave once a month. When I asked him about it, he deflected, as if I’d confronted him about a gambling addiction.

  “Penance for burying him in America,” he said.

  “What do you do there?”

  “Just stand around like a jerk.”

  “Can I go with you next time?” I asked my father; I told Tamir, “Stay.”

  “Then who would go?” Tamir asked.

  “No one.”

  “Then what would save it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Just let it go?”

  “Yes.”

  I was right: my father cleaned the site of twigs, leaves, and weeds; he wiped down the gravestone with a wet rag he’d brought in a ziplock in his jacket pocket; and from another ziplock he removed photos.

  “The boys,” he said, turning them toward me for a moment and then laying them on the ground, facedown, above his father’s eyes.

  I’d wanted to make an eruv around the suicides and carry the shame away from them, but how would I bear my own shame? How, coming home from Islip, would I face Julia and the boys?

  “It feels like we were burying him five minutes ago,” I said to my father; I said to Tamir, “It feels like we were picking you up at the airport five minutes ago.”

  My father said, “It feels like everything was five minutes ago.”

  Tamir brought his lips to my ear and whispered, “You are innocent.”

  “What?” I whispered, as if I were looking at stars.

  “You are innocent.”

  “Thank you.”

  He pulled back and said, “No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.”

  “What, gullible?”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Of course Steven Spielberg wasn’t in the men’s room.”

  “You made up that whole thing?”

  “I did.”

  “You knew who he was?”

  “You think we don’t have electricity in Israel?”

  “You’re very good,” I said.

  “I see you,” my grandfather would say from the other side of the glass.

  “You’re very innocent,” Tamir said.

  “See you,” my grandfather would say.

  “And yet we’ve never been older,” my father said, and then chanted the Mourner’s Kaddish.

  HOW TO PLAY THE LAST THING ONE SEES BEFORE
COMMITTING SUICIDE

  Six closed eyes, three genuine smiles.

  HOW TO PLAY THE LAST THING ONE SEES BEFORE BEING REINCARNATED

  The EMERGENCY exit from MacArthur Airport’s terminal; the EMERGENCY entrance to the world.

  HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE

  Unbuckle your belt. Slide it back out the five loops of your pants. Wrap it around your throat and tighten, buckle on the back of your neck. Place the other end of the belt over the door. Close the door, so that the belt is held firmly in place between the top of the door and the doorframe. Look at the refrigerator. Allow full body weight to fall. Eight closed eyes.

  HOW TO PLAY REINCARNATION

  A few months after moving out, on yet another day without a letter in the mailbox on my bedroom door, I was emptying the kids’ hampers and found a poop in a pair of Max’s underwear. He was eleven. I got several such dispatches in the coming weeks. Sometimes I was able to turn the underwear inside out over the toilet, scrub at any stain that was left, and throw them into the wash. Usually they weren’t salvageable.

  I didn’t mention it to Dr. Silvers, for the same reason I didn’t mention my persistent throat pain to my actual doctor: I suspected it was a symptom of something that I didn’t want revealed. I didn’t mention it to Julia, because I didn’t want to hear that Max never did it at her house. And I didn’t mention it to Max, because that was something I could spare him. Spare us.

  As a child, I used to leave bowel movements on the lilac carpet of my grandfather’s bathroom, a few inches from the toilet seat. It was on purpose. Why did I do such a thing? Why did Max?

  I desperately wanted a dog, as a boy, but was told they were dirty. As a boy, I was told to wash my hands before going to the bathroom, because the world was dirty. But I was also told to wash my hands after.

  My grandfather mentioned the poops on his floor only once. He smiled, covered the side of my head with his enormous hand, and said, “It’s OK. It’s great.” Why would he say such a thing?

  Max never mentioned the poops in his hamper, although he came upon me hanging a pair of his hand-washed underwear on the drying rack and said, “Argus died the day we started coming to this house. Do you think this ever would have felt like home to him?”