Here I Am (21 page)
Authors: Jonathan Safran Foer
“And you have made some very bad choices.”
“I'm guessing you have a specific choice in mind.”
“Yes, writing for that dumb TV show.”
“That dumb TV show is watched by four million people.”
“A: So what? B:
Which
four million?”
“And is critically acclaimed.”
“Those who can't teach gym, acclaim.”
“And it's my
job
. It's how I support the family.”
“It's how you make money. There are other ways to support a family.”
“I should be a dermatologist? That would be a good use of my talent, feeling, and intellect?”
“You should make something that befits your abilities and expresses your definition of substance.”
“I
am.”
“No, you're dotting the
i
's and crossing the
t
's of the epic dragon adventure of someone who isn't fit to spit shine your hemorrhoids. You weren't put on earth to do that.”
“And now you're going to tell me what I was put on earth to do?”
“That's exactly what I'm going to do.”
Jacob sang:
“Somewhere in my youth, or childhood, I must have done something very bad.”
“As I was about to sayâ”
“High on his horse was my lonely dad, Irv, lay ee old lay ee old lay hee hoo.”
“You're wittyâwe get it, Fraukenstein.”
“Bad advice, bad advice, bless my homeland for never.”
This time leaving no room to fill: “Jacob, you should forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.”
An underwhelmed “Wow.”
“Yes: wow.”
“Would you mind saying that once more, and projecting, for the cheap seats in my brain?”
“You should forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.”
“Didn't the ovens at Auschwitz do that?”
“They destroyed. I'm talking about forging.”
“I appreciate your sudden vote of confidence in meâ”
“I just stuffed the ballot box.”
“âbut my soul's smithy doesn't get that hot.”
“That's because you're so desperate to be loved. Friction generates heat.”
“I don't even know what that means.”
“It's the same with the n-word business at Sam's school.”
“We should probably leave Sam out of this,” Max suggested.
“It's the same everywhere you look in your life,” Irv said. “You're making the same mistake we've been making for thousands of yearsâ”
“We?”
“âbelieving that if we can only be loved, we'll be safe.”
“My conversation GPS is on the fritz. We're back to the hatred of the Jews?”
“Back to?
No. You can't return to something you've never left.”
“The show is
entertainment.”
“I don't believe that you believe that.”
“Well, that sounds like the end of our road.”
“Because I'm ready to give you more credit than you're ready to give yourself?”
“Because as you're often the first to point out, you can't negotiate without a negotiating partner.”
“Who's negotiating?”
“You can't
converse.”
“Really, Jacob. Let down your guard for a second and ask yourself: What is it with the ravenous need for love? You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren't finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren't making you rich. But they were making the
world
rich.”
“And you hated them.”
“Yes, that's right,” he said, switching lanes without checking any of
his mirrors, “I hated them. God forbid you should see my marginalia. But do you know who hates your show?”
“It isn't
my
show.”
“Nobody. You've passed a lot of time for a lot of grateful zombies.”
“So this is an argument against television?”
“That's another argument I could make,” he said, taking the airport exit. “But this is an argument against your show.”
“It isn't
my
show.”
“So get a show.”
“But I have nothing left to offer the tooth fairy in exchange.”
“Have you tried?”
“Have I
tried
?”
No one had tried harder. Not to
get
a showâit wasn't yet the time for thatâbut to write one. For more than a decade Jacob had been breaking his soul's back shoveling coal into the smithy. He'd devoted himself to the secret, utterly futile task of redeeming his people through language. His people? His family. His family? Himself. What self? And
redeeming
might not be quite the right word.
Ever-Dying People
was exactly what his father thought he was hoping forâa shofar blast from a mountaintop. Or at least a silent cry from a basement. But if Irv had ever been given the chance to read it, he would have hated itâa far more expansive hatred than the one he felt for the novels. Jacob's definition of substance could get pretty ugly, but more, there were some essential disagreements about whom the sharp point of the forged conscience should be turned on.
And there was a far bigger problem: the show would kill Jacob's grandfather. Not metaphorically. It would literally commit grand-patricide. He who could survive anything would never survive a mirror. So Jacob held it close to his chest in a locked desk drawer. And the less able he was to share it, the more devoted he felt to it.
The show began with the beginning of the writing of the show. The characters in the show were the characters in the real Jacob's life: an unhappy wife (who didn't want to be described that way); three sons: one on the brink of manhood, one on the brink of extreme self-consciousness, one on the brink of mental independence; a terrified, xenophobic father; a quietly weaving and unweaving mother; a depressed grandfather. Should he one day share it and be asked how autobiographical it was, he would say, “It's not my life, but it's me.” And if someoneâwho else but
Dr. Silvers?âwere to ask how autobiographical his life was, he would say, “It's my life, but it's not me.”
The writing kept pace with the changing events in Jacob's life. Or his life kept pace with the writing. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Jacob wrote about the discovery of his phone months before he even bought a second phoneâpsychology so double-left-handed it didn't justify even one six-dollar minute with Dr. Silvers and was given several dozen hours. But it wasn't just psychological. There were times when Julia would say or do things so eerily similar to what Jacob had written that he had to wonder if she'd read it. The night she discovered the phone, she asked, “Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?” That exact lineâthose words in that orderâhad been in the script for months. Although they were Jacob's.
Save for the moments that most people would do anything to avoid, life is pretty slow and uninteresting and undramatic and uninspiring. Jacob's solution to that problem, or blessing, wasn't to alter the drama of the showâthe authenticity of his work was the only antidote to the inauthenticity of his lifeâbut to generate more and more paraphernalia.
Twenty-four years earlier, around the time that his lack of patience overwhelmed his passion for guitar, Jacob started designing album covers for an imaginary band. He wrote track lists, and lyrics, and liner notes. He thanked people who didn't exist: engineers, producers, managers. He copied copyright language from
Steady Diet of Nothing
. An atlas at his side, he created a U.S. tour, and then a world tour, giving thought to the limits of his physical and emotional endurance: Is Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid too much for one week? Especially after eight months on the road? And even if it were endurable, what good would come from pushing the band toward an irritability that would only jeopardize everything they believed in and worked so hard to achieve? The dates were printed on the backs of T-shirts he designed, and actually produced, and actually wore. But he couldn't play barre chords.
His relationship to the show was something like thatâthe more stunted the reality, the more expansive the related materials.
He created, and perpetually added to, a “bible” for the showâa kind of user's manual for those who would one day work on it. He generated an ever-adjusting dossier of background information on each of the charactersâ
SAM BLOCH
On the brink of 13. The eldest of the Bloch brothers. Spends virtually all of his time in the virtual world of Other Life. Hates the fit of all clothing. Loves watching videos of bullies getting knocked out. Incapable of ignoring, or even not perceiving, sexual double entendres. Would take a body covered with acne scarring in the future for a clear forehead in the present. Longs for his positive qualities to be universally recognized but never mentioned
.
GERSHOM BLUMENBERG
Long dead. Son of Anshel, father of Isaac. Grandfather of Irving. Grandson of someone whose name has been lost forever. Great Rabbi of Drohobycz. Died in a burning synagogue. Namesake of a small park with cool marble benches in Jerusalem. Appears only in nightmares
.
JULIA BLOCH
43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she's never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context
.
âand a catalog of settings, which included short (if always expanding) descriptions of place, hundreds of photographs for a future props department, maps, floor plans, real estate listings, anecdotesâ
2294
NEWARK STREET
Bloch House. Nicer than many, but not the nicest. But nice. If not as nice as it could be. Thoughtful interiors, within the working limits. Some good midcentury furniture, mostly through eBay and Etsy. Some IKEA furniture with cool hacks (leather pulls, faceted cabinet fronts). Pictures hung in clusters (equitably distributed between Jacob's and Julia's families). Almond flour in a Williams-Sonoma glass jar on a
soapstone counter. A too-beautiful-to-use Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Mineral Blue on the back right burner of a double-wide Lacanche range whose potential is wasted on veggie chili. Some books that were bought to be read (or at least dipped into); others to give the impression of a very specific kind of very broad-minded curiosity; others, like the two-volume slipcased edition of
The Man Without Qualities,
because of their beautiful spines. Hydrocortisone acetate suppositories beneath a stack of
New Yorkers
in the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet. A vibrator in the foot of a shoe on a high shelf. Holocaust books behind non-Holocaust books. And running up the kitchen doorframe, a growth chart of the Bloch boys
.
When it was time for me to move, I lingered at this threshold. The doorframe was the only thing I couldn't let go of. Forget the Papa Bear Chair and forget its ottoman. Forget the candlesticks and lamps. Forget
Blind Botanist,
the drawing we bought together, attributed to one of my heroes, Ben Shahn, lacking any provenance. Forget the moody orchid. While Julia was out one afternoon, I jimmied the doorframe loose from the wall with the aid of a flathead screwdriver, slid it down the length of the Subaru (one end against the glass of the hatchback, the other touching the windshield), and drove the record of my children's growth to a new house. Two weeks later, a house-painter painted over it. I redid the lines to the best of my sorry memory
.
âand most ambitiously (or neurotically, or pathetically): the notes to the actors, striving to convey what the scripts on their own could not, because more words were needed:
HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER; HOW TO PLAY “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”; HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS
â¦Each episode was only twenty-seven pages, give or take. Each season only ten episodes. There was room for a little background, a few flashbacks and tangents and clumsy insertions of information that didn't drive the plot but filled out the motivation. So many more words were needed:
HOW TO PLAY THE NEED FOR DISSATISFACTION; HOW TO PLAY LOVE; HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE
â¦The notes were Jewish-motherly in their irrepressibly naggy didacticism, Jewish-fatherly in their need to obscure every emotion in metaphor and deflection.
HOW TO PLAY AMERICAN; HOW TO PLAY THE GOOD BOY; HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME
â¦The bible quickly surpassed the scripts themselves in length and depthâthe explanatory material overwhelmed what it attempted to explain. So Jewish.
Jacob wanted to make something that would redeem everything, and instead he was explaining, explaining, explainingâ¦
HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME
The morning Julia found the phone, my parents were over for brunch. Everything was falling apart around Benjy, although I'll never know what he knew at the time, and neither will he. The adults were talking when he reentered the kitchen and said, “The sound of time. What happened to it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know,” he said, waving his tiny hand about, “the sound of time.”
It took timeâabout five frustrating minutesâto figure out what he was getting at. Our refrigerator was being repaired, so the kitchen lacked its omnipresent, nearly imperceptible buzzing sound. He spent virtually all his home life within reach of that sound, and so had come to associate it with life happening
.
I loved his misunderstanding, because it wasn't a misunderstanding
.
My grandfather heard the cries of his dead brothers. That was the sound of his time
.
My father heard attacks
.
Julia heard the boys' voices
.
I heard silences
.
Sam heard betrayals and the sounds of Apple products turning on
.
Max heard Argus's whining
.
Benjy was the only one still young enough to hear home
.
