Here I Am (40 page)

It happened so quickly, and took forever. Tamir jumped down, landing with a thud he obviously didn't anticipate, because his eyes met Jacob's with a flash of terror. And as if the ground were lava, he tried to get off it. He wasn't quite able to reach the rail on his first jump, but the second try looked easy. He pulled himself up, Jacob hoisted him over the glass, and together they fell onto the pavement, laughing.

What did Jacob feel, laughing with his cousin? He was laughing at life. Laughing at himself. Even a thirteen-year-old knows the thrill and terror of his own insignificance.
Especially
a thirteen-year-old.

“Now you,” Tamir said as they picked themselves up and brushed themselves off.

“No fucking way.”

This is so unlike me
.

“Come on.”

“I'd rather die.”

“You can have it both ways. Come on, you have to.”

“Because you did it?”

“Because you want to do it.”

“I don't.”

“Come on,” he said. “You'll be so happy. For years you'll be happy.”

“Happiness isn't that important to me.”

And then, firmly: “
Now
, Jacob.”

Jacob tried to laugh off Tamir's flash of aggressiveness.

“My parents would kill me if I died before my bar mitzvah.”

“This will
be
your bar mitzvah.”

“No way.”

And then Tamir got up in Jacob's face. “I'm going to punch you if you don't do it.”

“Give me a break.”

“I am literally going to punch you.”

“But I have glasses and acne.”

That small joke diffused nothing, made nothing almost sensible. Tamir punched Jacob in the chest, hard enough to send him into the railing. It was the first time Jacob had ever been punched.

“What the fuck, Tamir?”

“What are you crying about?”

“I'm not crying.”

“If you're not crying, then stop crying.”

“I'm not.”

Tamir rested a hand on each of Jacob's shoulders, and rested his forehead against Jacob's. Jacob had breast-fed for a year, been given baths in the kitchen sink, fallen asleep on his father's shoulder a thousand times—but this was an intimacy he had never experienced.

“You have to do it,” Tamir said.

“I don't want to.”

“You do, but you're afraid.”

“I don't.”

But he did. But he was afraid.

“Come,” Tamir said, bringing Jacob to the wall. “It's easy. It will take only a second. You saw. You saw that it wasn't a big deal. And you'll remember it forever.”

This is so unlike me
.

“Dead people don't have memories.”

“I won't let you die.”

“No? What will you do?”

“I'll jump in with you.”

“So we die together?”

“Yes.”

“But that doesn't make me any less dead.”

“It does. Now
go.”

“Did you hear something?”

“No, because there was nothing to hear.”

“Seriously: I don't want to die.”

Somehow it happened without happening, without any decision having been made, without a brain sending any signal to any muscle. At a certain point, Jacob was halfway over the glass, without ever having climbed it. His hands were shaking so violently he could only barely hold on.

This is so unlike me
.

“Let go,” Tamir said.

He held on.

This is so unlike me
.

“Let go.”

He shook his head and let go.

And then he was on the ground, inside the lion's den.

This is the opposite of me
.

There, on the dirt, in the middle of the simulated savannah, in the
middle of the nation's capital, he felt something so irrepressible and true that it would either save or ruin his life.

Three years later he would touch his tongue to the tongue of a girl for whom he so happily would have cut off his arms, if only she had let him. And the following year an air bag would tear his cornea and save his life. Two years after that he would gaze with amazement at a mouth around his penis. And later that year he would say
to
his father what for years he had been saying
about
him. He would smoke a bushel of pot, watch his knee bend the wrong way during a stupid touch-football game, be inexplicably moved to tears in a foreign city by a painting of a woman and her baby, touch a hibernating brown bear and an endangered pangolin, spend a week waiting for a test result, pray silently for his wife's life as she screamed as new life came out of her body—many moments when life felt big, precious. But they made up such an utterly small portion of his time on earth: Five minutes a year? What did it sum to? A day? At most? A day of feeling alive in four decades of life?

Inside the lion's den, he felt surrounded and embraced by his own existence. He felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, safe.

But then he heard it, and was brought back. He looked up, met Tamir's eyes, and could see that Tamir heard it, too. A stirring. Flattening foliage. What did they exchange in their glance? Fear? But it felt like laughter. Like the greatest of all jokes had passed between them.

Jacob turned and saw an animal. Not in his mind, but an actual animal in the actual world. An animal that didn't deliberate and expound. An uncircumcised animal. It was fifty feet away, but its hot breath was steaming Jacob's glasses.

Without saying a word, Tamir climbed back over the fence and extended his hand. Jacob leaped for it but couldn't reach. Their fingers touched, which made the distance feel infinite. Jacob jumped again, and again their fingertips brushed, and now the lion was running, halving the distance between them with each stride. Jacob had no time to gather himself or contemplate how he might get an extra inch or two, he simply tried again, and this time—because of the adrenaline, or because of God's sudden desire to prove His existence—he caught hold of Tamir's wrist.

And then Jacob and Tamir were once again sprawled on the pavement, and Tamir started laughing, and Jacob started laughing, and then, or at the same time, Jacob started crying.

Maybe he knew. Maybe he was somehow aware, a teenager laughing
and crying on that pavement, that he would never again feel anything like it. Maybe he saw, from the peak of that mountaintop, the great flatness before him.

Tamir was crying, too.

Thirty years later, they were still on the brink of the enclosure, but despite all the inches they'd grown, it no longer felt possible to enter. The glass had grown, too. It had grown more than they'd grown.

“I've never felt alive since that night,” Jacob said, bringing Tamir another beer.

“Life has been that boring?”

“No. A lot of life has happened. But I haven't felt it.

“There are versions of happiness,” Tamir said.

Jacob paused before opening the bottle and said, “You know, I'm not sure I believe that.”

“You don't want to believe it. You want to believe that your work should have the significance of a war, that a long marriage should offer the same kind of excitement as a first date.”

“I know,” Jacob said. “Don't expect too much. Learn to love the numbness.”

“That's not what I said.”

“I've spent my life clinging to the belief that all the things we spoke about as children had at least a grain of truth to them. That the promise of a felt life isn't a lie.”

“Did you ever stop to ask yourself why you put such an emphasis on feeling?”

“What else would one put an emphasis on?”

“Peace.”

“I've got plenty of peace,” Jacob said. “Too much peace.”

“There are versions of peace, too.”

A wind passed over the house, and deep inside the range hood, the damper flapped.

“Julia thinks I don't believe in anything,” Jacob said. “Maybe she's right. I don't know if this counts as belief or disbelief, but I'm sure that my grandfather isn't somewhere other than in the ground right now. What we've got is what we're going to get. Our jobs, our marriages…”

“You're disappointed?”

“I am. Or devastated. No, something between disappointed and devastated. Dispirited?”

The stubborn recessed light over the sink went dark with a snapping sound. Some connection wasn't quite secure.

“It was a hard day,” Tamir said.

“Yes, but the day has been decades.”

“Even though it only felt like a few seconds?”

“Whenever someone asks me how I'm doing, I find myself saying, ‘I'm going through a passage.' Everything is a transition, turbulence on the way to the destination. But I've been saying it for so long I should probably accept that the rest of my life is going to be one long passage: an hourglass with no bulbs. Always the pinch.”

“Jacob, you really don't have enough problems.”

“I've got enough,” Jacob said while texting Julia again, “believe me. But my problems are so small, so domestic. My kids stare at screens all day. My dog is incontinent. I have an insatiable appetite for porn, but can't count on an erection when there's an analog pussy in front of me. I'm balding—which I know you've noticed, and thank you for not drawing attention to it.”

“You aren't balding.”

“I'm smaller than life.”

Tamir nodded his head and asked, “Who isn't smaller than life?”

“You.”

“What's so big about me? I can't wait to hear.”

“You've fought in wars, and live in the shadow of future wars, and Christ, Noam is in the middle of who-knows-what right now. The stakes of your life reflect the size of life.”

“And that's worth envying?” Tamir asked. “One less beer and I'd be offended by what you just said.” He drank down half the bottle. “One more and I'd be furious.”

“There's no reason to be offended. I'm just saying you've escaped the Great Flatness.”

“You think I want anything more than a boring white house in a boring neighborhood where no one knows each other because everyone's watching TV?”

“Yes,” Jacob said. “I think you'd go as crazy as my grandfather.”

“He wasn't crazy. You're the one who's crazy.”

“I didn't mean—”

The light snapped back on, saving Jacob from having to know what he meant.

“Listen to yourself, Jacob. You think it's all a game, because you're only a fan.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Worse than a fan. You don't even know who you're rooting for.”

“Hey. Tamir. You're running with something I didn't say. What's going on?”

Tamir pointed at the television—Israeli troops holding back an agitated crowd of Palestinians trying to get into West Jerusalem—and said, “That's what's going on. Maybe you haven't noticed?”

“But that's exactly what I'm talking about.”

“The drama. Right. You love the drama. It's who we are that embarrasses you.”

“What?
Who does?”

“Israel.”

“Tamir, stop. I don't know what you're talking about, or why this conversation took this turn. Can't I just bemoan my life?”

“If I can just defend my own.”

With the hope that a bit of empowerment might bring Max out of his funk, Jacob and Julia had started to let him take neighborhood adventures on his own: to the pizza parlor, library, bakery. One afternoon he came back with a pair of cardboard X-ray glasses from the drugstore. Jacob covertly watched him try them on, then read the packaging again, then try them on again, then read the packaging. He wore them around the first floor, becoming increasingly agitated. “These completely suck!” he said, throwing them to the floor. Jacob delicately explained that they were a gag, intended to make other people think you could see through things. “Why wouldn't they make that clear on the packaging?” Max asked, his anger upshifting to humiliation. “And why would it be any less funny if they actually
could
see through things?”

What was going on inside Tamir? Jacob couldn't understand how the warm banter about happiness had downshifted to a heated political argument with only one participant. Something had been touched, but what?

“I work a lot,” Tamir said. “You know that. I've always worked a lot. Some men work to get away from their families. I work to provide for mine. You believe me when I say that, right?”

Jacob nodded, unable to bring himself to say, “Of course I do.”

“I missed a lot of dinners when Noam was young. But I took him to
school every morning. It was important to me. I got to know a lot of the other parents that way. For the most part, I liked them. But there was one father I couldn't stand—a real asshole, like me. And so naturally I hated his child as well. Eitan was his name. So maybe you know where this story is going?”

“I have no idea, actually.”

“When Noam entered the army, who should be in his unit?”

“Eitan.”

“Eitan. His father and I exchange e-mails when one of us has some small bit of news to share. We never spend time together, and never even talk on the phone. But we write back and forth quite a bit. I didn't grow to like him—the more I deal with him, the more I hate him. But I love him.” He wrapped his hand around the empty bottle. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How much money do you give to Israel?”

“How much
money
?” Jacob asked, going to the fridge to get Tamir another beer, and because he needed to move. “That's a funny question.”

“Yes. What do you give to Israel? I'm serious.”

“What, to the UJA? Ben-Gurion University?”

“Sure, include it all. And include your trips to Israel, with your parents, with your own family.”