Here I Am

GET BACK TO HAPPINESS

When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home. He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and a half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-decent Poles; in transit, refugee, and displaced persons camps; on a boat with a bottle with a boat that an insomniac agnostic had miraculously constructed inside it; on the other side of an ocean he would never wholly cross; above half a dozen grocery stores he killed himself fixing up and selling for small profits; beside a woman who rechecked the locks until she broke them, and died of old age at forty-two without a syllable of praise in her throat but the cells of her murdered mother still dividing in her brain; and finally, for the last quarter century, in a snow-globe-quiet Silver Spring split-level: ten pounds of Roman Vishniac bleaching on the coffee table; Enemies, A Love Story demagnetizing in the world’s last functional VCR; egg salad becoming bird flu in a refrigerator mummified with photographs of gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren.

German horticulturalists had pruned Isaac’s family tree all the way back to the Galician soil. But with luck and intuition and no help from above, he had transplanted its roots into the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., and lived to see it regrow limbs. And unless America turned on the Jews—until, his son, Irv, would correct — the tree would continue to branch and sprout. Of course, Isaac would be back in a hole by then. He would never unbend his knees, but at his unknown age, with unknown indignities however near, it was time to unball his Jewish fists and concede the beginning of the end. The difference between conceding and accepting is depression.

Even putting aside the destruction of Israel, the timing was unfortunate: it was only weeks before his eldest great-grandson’s bar mitzvah, which Isaac had been marking as his life’s finish line ever since he crossed the previous finish line of his youngest great-grandson’s birth. But one can’t control when an old Jew’s soul will vacate his body and his body will vacate the coveted one-bedroom for the next body on the waiting list. One can’t rush or defer manhood, either. Then again, the purchase of a dozen nonrefundable airplane tickets, the booking of a block of the Washington Hilton, and the payment of twenty-three thousand dollars in deposits for a bar mitzvah that has been on the calendar since the last Winter Olympics are no guarantee that it’s going to happen.

* * *

A group of boys lumbered down the halls of Adas Israel, laughing, punching, blood rushing from developing brains to developing genitals and back again in the zero-sum game of puberty.

“Seriously, though,” one said, the second s getting caught on his palate expander, “the only good thing about blowjobs are the wet handjobs you get with them.”

“Amen to that.”

“Otherwise you’re just boning a glass of water with teeth.”

“Which is pointless,” said a redheaded boy who still got chills from so much as thinking about the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

“Nihilistic.”

If God existed and judged, He would have forgiven these boys everything, knowing that they were compelled by forces outside of themselves inside of themselves, and that they, too, were made in His image.

Silence as they slowed to watch Margot Wasserman lapping water. It was said that her parents parked two cars outside their three-car garage because they had five cars. It was said that her Pomeranian still had its balls, and they were honeydews.

“Goddamn it, I want to be that drinking fountain,” a boy with the Hebrew name Peretz-Yizchak said.

“I want to be the missing part of those crotchless undies.”

“I want to fill my dick with mercury.”

A pause.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You know,” Marty Cohen-Rosenbaum, né Chaim ben Kalman, said, “like … make my dick a thermometer.”

“By feeding it sushi?”

“Or just injecting it. Or whatever. Dude, you know what I mean.”

Four shakes, and their heads achieved an unintended synchronicity, like Ping-Pong spectators.

In a whisper: “To put it in her butt.”

The others were lucky to have twenty-first-century moms who knew that temperatures were taken digitally in the ear. And Chaim was lucky that the boys’ attention was diverted before they had time to slap him with a nickname he would never shed.

Sam was sitting on the bench outside Rabbi Singer’s office, head lowered, eyes on the upturned hands in his lap like a monk waiting to burn. The boys stopped, turning their self-hatred toward him.

“We heard what you wrote,” one said, thrusting a finger into Sam’s chest. “You crossed a line.”

“Some fucked-up shit, bro.”

It was odd, because Sam’s profligate sweat production usually didn’t kick in until the threat had subsided.

“I didn’t write it, and I’m not your”—air quotes—“bro.”

He could have said that, but he didn’t. He also could have explained why nothing was as it seemed. But he didn’t. Instead, he just took it, as he always did in life on the crap side of the screen.

On the other side of the rabbi’s door, on the other side of the rabbi’s desk, sat Sam’s parents, Jacob and Julia. They didn’t want to be there. No one wanted to be there. The rabbi needed to embroider some thoughtful-sounding words about someone named Ralph Kremberg before they put him in the ground at two o’clock. Jacob would have preferred to be working on the bible for Ever-Dying People, or ransacking the house for his missing phone, or at least tapping the Internet’s lever for some dopamine hits. And today was supposed to be Julia’s day off — this was the opposite of off.

“Shouldn’t Sam be in here?” Jacob asked.

“I think it’s best if we have an adult conversation,” Rabbi Singer said.

“Sam’s an adult.”

“Sam is not an adult,” Julia said.

“Because he’s three verses shy of mastering the blessings after the blessings after his haftorah?”

Ignoring Jacob, Julia put her hand on the rabbi’s desk and said, “It’s clearly unacceptable to talk back to a teacher, and we want to find a way to make this right.”

“But at the same time,” Jacob said, “isn’t suspension a bit draconian for what, in the scheme of things, is not really that big a deal?”

“Jacob…”

“What?”

In an effort to communicate with her husband but not the rabbi, Julia pressed two fingers to her brow and gently shook her head while flaring her nostrils. She looked more like a third-base coach than a wife, mother, and member of the community attempting to keep the ocean from her son’s sand castle.

“Adas Israel is a progressive shul,” the rabbi said, eliciting an eye-roll from Jacob as reflexive as gagging. “We have a long and proud history of seeing beyond the cultural norms of any given moment, and finding the divine light, the Ohr Ein Sof, in every person. Using racial epithets here is a very big deal, indeed.”

“What?” Julia asked, finding her posture.

“That can’t be right,” Jacob said.

The rabbi sighed a rabbi’s sigh and slid a piece of paper across his desk to Julia.

“He said these?” Julia asked.

“He wrote them.”

“Wrote what?” Jacob asked.

Shaking her head in disbelief, Julia quietly read the list: “Filthy Arab, chink, cunt, jap, faggot, spic, kike, n-word—”

“He wrote ‘n-word’?” Jacob asked. “Or the actual n-word?”

“The word itself,” the rabbi said.

Though his son’s plight should have taken mental precedence, Jacob became distracted by the fact that this was the only word that could not bear vocalization.

“There must be a misunderstanding,” Julia said, finally handing the paper to Jacob. “Sam nurses animals back to—”

“Cincinnati Bow Tie? That’s not a racial epithet. It’s a sex act. I think. Maybe.”

“They’re not all epithets,” the rabbi said.

“You know, I’m pretty sure ‘Filthy Arab’ is a sex act, too.”

“I would have to take your word for it.”

“My point is, maybe we’re completely misinterpreting this list.”

Ignoring her husband again, Julia said, “What has Sam said about this?”

The rabbi picked at his beard, searching for words as a macaque searches for lice.

“He denied it. Vociferously. But the words weren’t there before class, and he is the only person who sits at that desk.”

“He didn’t do it,” Jacob said.

“It’s his handwriting,” Julia said.

“All thirteen-year-old boys write the same.”

The rabbi said, “He wasn’t able to offer another explanation for how it got there.”

“It’s not his job to,” Jacob said. “And by the way, if Sam were to have written those words, why on earth would he have left them on the desk? The brazenness proves his innocence. Like in Basic Instinct.”

“But she did it in Basic Instinct,” Julia said.

“She did?”

“The ice pick.”

“I guess that’s right. But that’s a movie. Obviously some genuinely racist kid, with a grudge against Sam, planted it.”

Julia spoke directly to the rabbi: “We’ll make sure Sam understands why what he wrote is so hurtful.”

“Julia,” Jacob said.

“Would an apology to the teacher be sufficient to get the bar mitzvah back on its tracks?”

“It’s what I was going to suggest. But I’m afraid word of his words has spread around our community. So—”

Jacob expelled a puff of frustration — a gesture he’d either taught to Sam or learned from him. “And hurtful to whom, by the way? There’s a world of difference between breaking someone’s nose and shadow boxing.”

The rabbi studied Jacob. He asked, “Has Sam been having any difficulties at home?”

“He’s been overwhelmed by homework,” Julia began.

“He did not do this.”

“And he’s been training for his bar mitzvah, which is, at least in theory, another hour every night. And cello, and soccer. And his younger brother Max is going through some existential stuff, which has been challenging for everyone. And the youngest, Benjy—”

“It sounds like he’s got a lot on his plate,” the rabbi said. “And I certainly sympathize with that. We ask a lot of our children. More than was ever asked of us. But I’m afraid racism has no place here.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Julia said.

“Hold on. Now you’re calling Sam a racist?”

“I did not say that, Mr. Bloch.”

“You did. You just did. Julia—”

“I don’t remember his exact words.”

“I said, ‘Racism has no place here.’”

“Racism is what racists express.”

“Have you ever lied, Mr. Bloch?” Jacob reflexively searched his jacket pocket yet again for his phone. “I assume that, like everyone who has ever lived, you have told a lie. But that doesn’t make you a liar.”

“You’re calling me a liar?” Jacob asked, his fingers wrapped around nothing.

“You’re boxing at shadows, Mr. Bloch.”

Jacob turned to Julia. “Yes, the n-word is clearly bad. Bad, bad, very bad. But it was one word among many.”

“You think the larger context of misogyny, homophobia, and perversion makes it better?”

“But he didn’t do it.”

The rabbi shifted in his chair. “If I can speak frankly for a moment.” He paused, thumbing the inside of his nostril with plausible deniability. “It can’t be easy for Sam — being Irving Bloch’s grandson.”

Julia leaned back and thought about sand castles, and the Shinto shrine gate that washed up in Oregon two years after the tsunami.

Jacob turned to the rabbi. “Excuse me?”

“For a child’s role model—”

“This should be good.”

The rabbi addressed Julia. “You must know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“We do not know what you mean.”

“Perhaps if it didn’t seem, to Sam, that saying anything, no matter—”

“You’ve read volume two of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson?”

“I have not.”

“Well, if you were the worldly kind of rabbi, and had read that classic of the genre, you’d know that pages 432 to 435 are devoted to how Irving Bloch did more than anyone else in Washington, or anywhere, to ensure the passage of the Voting Rights Act. A kid could not find a better role model.”

“A kid shouldn’t have to look,” Julia said, facing forward.

“Now … did my father blog something regrettable? Yes. He did. It was regrettable. He regrets it. An all-you-can-eat buffet of regret. But for you to suggest that his righteousness is anything but an inspiration to his grandchildren—”

“With all due respect, Mr. Bloch—”

Jacob turned to Julia: “Let’s get out of here.”

“Let’s actually get what Sam needs.”

“Sam doesn’t need anything from this place. It was a mistake to force him to have a bar mitzvah.”

“What? Jacob, we didn’t force him. We might have nudged him, but—”

“We nudged him to get circumcised. With the bar mitzvah, it was proper force.”

“For the last two years, your grandfather has been saying that the only reason he hangs on is to make it to Sam’s bar mitzvah.”

“All the more reason not to have it.”

“And we wanted Sam to know that he’s Jewish.”

“Was there any chance of him not knowing that?”

“To be Jewish.”

“Jewish, yes. But religious?”

Jacob never knew how to answer the question “Are you religious?” He’d never not belonged to a synagogue, never not made some gesture toward kashruth, never not assumed — not even in his moments of greatest frustration with Israel, or his father, or American Jewry, or God’s absence — that he would raise his children with some degree of Jewish literacy and practice. But double negatives never sustained a religion. Or as Sam’s brother Max would put it in his bar mitzvah speech three years later, “You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.” And as much as Jacob wanted the continuity (of history, culture, thought, and values), as much as he wanted to believe that there was a deeper meaning available not only to him but to his children and their children — light shone between his fingers.

When they had started dating, Jacob and Julia often spoke about a “religion for two.” It would have felt embarrassing if it hadn’t felt ennobling. Their Shabbat: every Friday night, Jacob would read a letter he had written for Julia over the course of the week, and she would recite a poem from memory; and without overhead lighting, the phone unplugged, the watches stowed under the cushion of the red corduroy armchair, they would slowly eat the dinner they’d slowly prepared together; and they would draw a bath and make love while the waterline rose. Wednesday sunrise strolls: the route became unwittingly ritualized, traced and retraced week after week, until the sidewalk bore an impression of their path — imperceptible, but there. Every Rosh Hashanah, in lieu of going to services, they performed the ritual of tashlich: casting breadcrumbs, meant to symbolize the past year’s regrets, into the Potomac. Some sank, some were carried to other shores by the current, some regrets were taken by gulls to feed their still-blind young. Every morning, before rising from the bed, Jacob kissed Julia between the legs — not sexually (the ritual demanded that the kiss never lead to anything), but religiously. They started to collect, when traveling, things whose insides had an aspect of being larger than their outsides: the ocean contained in a seashell, a depleted typewriter ribbon, the world in a mercury-glass mirror. Everything seemed to move toward ritual — Jacob picking Julia up from work on Thursdays, the morning coffee in shared silence, Julia replacing Jacob’s bookmarks with small notes — until, like a universe that has expanded to its limit and then contracts toward its beginning, everything was undone.

Some Friday nights were just too late, and some Wednesday mornings were just too early. After a difficult conversation there would be no kiss between the legs, and if one isn’t feeling generous, how many things really qualify as being larger on the inside than on the outside? (You can’t put resentment on a shelf.) They held on to what they could, and tried not to acknowledge how secular they had become. But every now and then, usually in a moment of defensiveness that, despite the pleas of every better angel, simply could not resist taking the form of blame, one of them would say, “I miss our Shabbats.”

Sam’s birth felt like another chance, as did Max’s and Benjy’s. A religion for three, for four, for five. They ritualistically marked the children’s heights on the doorframe on the first day of every year — secular and Jewish — always first thing in the morning, before gravity did its work of compression. They threw resolutions into the fire every December 31, took Argus on a family walk every Tuesday after dinner, and read report cards aloud on the way to Vace for otherwise forbidden aranciatas and limonatas. Tuck-in happened in a certain order, according to certain elaborate protocols, and on anyone’s birthday everyone slept in the same bed. They often observed Shabbat — as much in the sense of self-consciously witnessing religion as fulfilling it — with a Whole Foods challah, Kedem grape juice, and the tapered wax of endangered bees in the silver candleholders of extinct ancestors. After the blessings, and before eating, Jacob and Julia would go to each of the children, hold his head, and whisper into his ear something of which they were proud that week. The extreme intimacy of the fingers in the hair, the love that wasn’t secret but had to be whispered, sent tremors through the filaments of the dimmed bulbs.

After dinner, they performed a ritual whose origin no one could remember and whose meaning no one questioned: they closed their eyes and walked around their house. It was fine to speak, to be silly, to laugh, but their blindness always became silent. Over time, they developed a tolerance for the dark quiet and could last for ten minutes, then twenty. They would meet back at the kitchen table, and then open their eyes together. Each time it was revelatory. Two revelations: the foreignness of a home the children had lived in their entire lives, and the foreignness of sight.

One Shabbat, as they drove to visit their great-grandfather Isaac, Jacob said, “A person gets drunk at a party, and hits and kills a kid on the way home. Another person gets equally drunk, and makes it home safely. Why does the first one go to jail for the rest of his life, while the second gets to wake up the next morning as if nothing happened?”

“Because he killed a kid.”

“But in terms of what they did wrong, they are equally guilty.”

“But the second one didn’t kill a kid.”

“Not because he was innocent, but because he was lucky.”

“But still, the first one killed a kid.”

“But when we think about guilt, shouldn’t we think about actions and intentions, in addition to outcomes?”

“What kind of party was it?”

“What?”

“Yeah, and what was the kid doing out that late, anyway?”

“I think the point—”

“His parents should have kept him safe. They should be sent to jail. But I guess then the kid wouldn’t have parents. Unless he lived in jail with them.”

“You’re forgetting he’s dead.”

“Oh, right.”

Sam and Max became enthralled by intention. Once, Max ran into the kitchen crying, holding his stomach. “I punched him,” Sam said from the living room, “but not on purpose.” Or when, in retaliation, Max stomped on Sam’s half-finished Lego chalet and said, “It wasn’t on purpose; I only meant to stomp on the rug beneath it.” Broccoli was fed to Argus under the table, “by accident.” Quizzes weren’t studied for, “on purpose.” The first time Max told Jacob “Shut up”—in response to a poorly timed suggestion that he take a break from some Tetris derivative on which he was about to crack the top ten scores of the day but wasn’t supposed to be playing in the first place — he put down Jacob’s phone, ran to him, hugged him, and with fear-glazed eyes, said, “I didn’t mean it.”

When the fingers of Sam’s left hand were crushed in the hinge of the heavy iron door and he screamed, “Why did that happen?” over and over and over, “Why did that happen?” and Julia, holding him against her, blood blooming across her shirt as breast milk used to when she heard a baby cry, said simply, “I love you, and I’m here,” and Jacob said, “We need to go to the emergency room,” Sam, who feared doctors more than anything any doctor could ever treat, pleaded, “We don’t! We don’t! It was on purpose! I did this on purpose!”

Time passed, the world exerted itself, and Jacob and Julia began to forget to do things on purpose. They didn’t refuse to let go, and like the resolutions, and Tuesday walks, and birthday calls to the cousins in Israel, and three overflowing shopping bags of Jewish deli food brought to Great-Grandpa Isaac on the first Sunday of every month, and skipping school for the Nats’ home opener, and singing “Singin’ in the Rain” while riding Ed the Hyena through the automated car wash, and the “gratitude journals,” and “ear inspections,” and annual pumpkin picking and carving and seed roasting and monthlong decomposition, the whispered pride fell away.

The inside of life became far smaller than the outside, creating a cavity, an emptiness. Which is why the bar mitzvah felt so important: it was the final thread of the frayed tether. To snip it, as Sam had so badly wanted, and as Jacob was now suggesting against his own real need, would send not just Sam but the family floating off into that emptiness — more than enough oxygen to last a life, but what kind of life?

Julia turned to the rabbi: “If Sam apologizes—”

“For what?” Jacob asked.

“If he apologizes—”

“To whom?”

“Everyone,” the rabbi said.

“Everyone? Everyone living and dead?”

Jacob assembled that phrase—everyone living and dead—not in the light of all that was about to happen, but in the pitch-blackness of the moment: this was before the folded prayers bloomed from the Wailing Wall, before the Japanese Crisis, before the ten thousand missing children and the March of a Million, before “Adia” became the most searched term in the history of the Internet. Before the devastating aftershocks, before the alignment of nine armies and the distribution of iodine pills, before America never sent F-16s, before the Messiah was too distracted or nonexistent to awake the living or the dead. Sam was becoming a man. Isaac was weighing whether to kill himself or move from a home to a Home.

“We want to put this behind us,” Julia said to the rabbi. “We want to make it right, and go through with the bar mitzvah as planned.”

“By apologizing for everything to everyone?”

“We want to get back to happiness.”

Jacob and Julia silently registered the hope and sadness and strangeness of what she’d said, as the word dissipated through the room and settled atop the stacks of religious books and on the stained carpeting. They’d lost their way, and lost their compass, but not their belief that it was possible to get back — even if neither knew exactly what happiness she was referring to.

The rabbi interwove his fingers, just like a rabbi, and said, “There’s a Hasidic proverb: ‘While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.’”

Jacob rose, folded the paper, tucked it in his pocket, and said, “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

HERE I AMN’T

While Sam waited on the bench outside Rabbi Singer’s office, Samanta approached the bimah. Sam had built it from digital old-growth elm salvaged from the bottom of a digital freshwater lake that he’d dug and in which he’d submerged a small forest a year ago when, like one of those innocent dogs on one of those existence-of-evil electrified floors, he’d learned helplessness.

“It doesn’t matter whether or not you want a bar mitzvah,” his dad had said. “But try to think of that as inspiring.”

Why was he so obsessed with animal cruelty, anyway? Why was he irrepressibly drawn to videos that he knew would only reinforce his convictions about humankind? He spent enormous amounts of time seeking violence: animal cruelty, but also animal fights (organized by humans, and in nature), animals attacking people, bullfighters getting what they deserved, skateboarders getting what they deserved, athletes’ knees bending the wrong way, bum fights, helicopter beheadings, and more: garbage disposal accidents, car antenna lobotomies, civilian victims of chemical warfare, masturbation injuries, Shia heads on Sunni fence posts, botched surgeries, steam-burn victims, instructional videos about cutting away the questionable parts of roadkill (as if there were unquestionable parts), instructional videos about painless suicide (as if that weren’t definitionally impossible), and so on, and on and on. The images were sharp objects he used against himself: there was so much in him that he needed to move to the outside, but the process required wounds.

On the silent drive home, he explored the chapel that he’d built around the bimah: the three-toed claw feet of the weightless two-ton pews; the Gordian-knotted fringes at the ends of the rag-rug runner down the aisle; the prayer books, each word of which was continually refreshed with its synonym: the Lord is One … the Sovereign is Alone … the Absolute is Abandoned … Left to go long enough, the prayers would, if only for an instant, return to their origins. But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it.

The pressure of Sam’s unreleased insides often took the shape of unshared, useless brilliance, and while his dad, brothers, and grandparents ate lunch downstairs, while they were obviously talking about what he’d been accused of and what to do with him, while he was supposed to be memorizing the Hebrew words and Jewish melody of a haftorah whose meaning no one ever bothered with, he created morphing stained-glass windows. The window to Samanta’s right depicted baby Moses being swept down the Nile, between mothers. It was a loop, but stitched together to evoke an endless journey.

Sam thought it would be cool if the chapel’s largest window were an ongoing depiction of the Jewish Present, so instead of learning the idiotic and utterly useless Ashrei, he wrote a script that pulled keywords from a Jewish-related Google News feed, ran them through a jury-rigged video search (which combed out redundancies, red herrings, and anti-Semitic propaganda), ran those results through a jury-rigged video filter (which scaled the images to best conform to the round frame and color-adjusted for continuity), and projected them onto the window. It was better in his head than in reality, but everything was.

Around the chapel he’d built the synagogue itself: the labyrinth of literally infinitely forking hallways; the aranciata-dispensing water fountains, and urinals made of the bones of ivory poachers; the stashes of genuinely loving, nonmisogynistic face-sitting porn in the storage closet in the Men’s Club social hall; the ironic handicapped spot in the stroller parking lot; the Memorial Wall with tiny, never-working bulbs beside the names of those upon whom he wished quick and painless death, but death (former best friends, the people who made acne pads sting on purpose, etc.); various make-out grottoes where tenderhearted and legitimately funny girls, who dressed like American Apparel advertisements and wrote Percy Jackson fan fiction, allowed klutzes to suck their perfect boobs; chalkboards that delivered 600-volt electrical pulses when scratched by the fingernails of smart-ass, dumb-fuck bullies who were so obviously — except to everyone besides Sam — fifteen short years from being paunchy schmucks with tedious jobs and dumpy wives; small plaques on every surface letting everyone know that it was because of Samanta’s beneficence, her fundamental goodness, her love of mercy and fairness and the benefit of the doubt, her decency, her inherent value, her nontoxic unshittiness, that the ladder to the roof existed, that the roof existed, that the perpetually buffering God existed.

The synagogue was originally at the edge of a community that had developed around a shared love of videos in which guilty dogs express shame. He could watch such videos all day — more than once he did—without going too deep into what he found so appealing about them. The obvious explanation would be that he empathized with the dog, and there was obviously some truth in that. (“Did you do that, Sam? Did you write those words? Were you bad?”) But he was also drawn to the owners. Every single one of the videos was made by someone who loved his dog more than himself; the “shaming” was always funnily overdramatized and good-spirited, and they all ended with reconciliation. (He’d tried making his own such videos, but Argus was too old and tired to do anything other than shit himself, for which no shaming could be good-spirited.) So it had something to do with the sinner, and something with the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again. Maybe in his next life, his feelings would be less than all-consuming and some portion of him would remain for understanding.

There was nothing exactly wrong with the original location, but life was for good-enough, and Other Life was for putting things in the places they longed to be. Sam secretly believed that everything was capable of longing, and more, that everything was always longing. So after the shame-inducing chew-out he got from his mom later that day, he paid some digital movers some digital currency to disassemble the synagogue into the largest parts that would fit into the largest trucks, move them, and reassemble them according to screen grabs.

“We’re going to have to talk when Dad comes home from his meeting, but I need to say something. It is required.”

“Fine.”

“Stop saying ‘fine.’”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying ‘sorry.’”

“I thought the whole point was that I was supposed to be apologizing?”

“For what you did.”

“But I didn’t—”

“I’m very disappointed in you.”

“I know.”

“That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say? Like maybe, ‘I did it and I’m sorry’?”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Clean up this mess. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s my room.”

“But it’s our house.”

“I can’t move that board. We’re only halfway done with the game. Dad said we could finish after I’m not in trouble anymore.”

“You know why you always beat him?”

“Because he lets me win.”

“He hasn’t let you win in years.”

“He goes easy.”

“He doesn’t. You beat him because it excites him to capture pieces, but you’re always thinking four moves ahead. It makes you good at chess, and it makes you good at life.”

“I’m not good at life.”

“You are when you’re thoughtful.”

“Is Dad bad at life?”

It went almost perfectly, but movers are less almost-perfect than the rest of humankind, and there were mishaps, hardly any of them noticeable — who but Sam would know that a Jewish star was dinged and hung upside down? — especially when hardly any of it was noticed in the first place. The tiny distance from perfect rendered it shit.

Sam’s dad had given him an article about a boy in a concentration camp who observed his bar mitzvah by digging an imaginary synagogue and filling it with upright twigs to serve as a silent congregation. Of course, his dad never would have guessed that Sam actually read it, and they never spoke about it, and does it count as recalling something if you are thinking of it constantly?

It was all for the occasion — the entire edifice of organized religion conceived of, built, and tended to simply for a brief ritual. Despite the incomprehensible vastness of Other Life, there was no synagogue. And despite his profound reluctance ever to step foot in an actual synagogue, there had to be a synagogue. He didn’t long for one, he needed one: you can’t destroy what doesn’t exist.

HAPPINESS

All happy mornings resemble one another, as do all unhappy mornings, and that’s at the bottom of what makes them so deeply unhappy: the feeling that this unhappiness has happened before, that efforts to avoid it will at best reinforce it, and probably even exacerbate it, that the universe is, for whatever inconceivable, unnecessary, and unjust reason, conspiring against the innocent sequence of clothes, breakfast, teeth and egregious cowlicks, backpacks, shoes, jackets, goodbye.

Jacob had insisted that Julia take her car to the meeting with Rabbi Singer so she could leave straight from there and still get her day off. The walk through the school to the parking lot was severely quiet. Sam had never heard of Miranda rights, but he intuited them. Not that it mattered — his parents didn’t want to talk in front of him before talking behind his back. So they left him at the entrance, among the mustached man-children playing Yu-Gi-Oh! while they went to their cars.

“Did you want me to pick anything up?” Jacob asked.

“When?”

“Now.”

“You have to get home for brunch with your parents.”

“I’m just trying to take some load off your shoulders.”

“We could use sandwich bread.”

“Any particular kind?”

“The particular kind we always get.”

“What?”

“What what?”

“You seem bothered.”

“You aren’t bothered?”

Had she found the phone?

“We’re not going to talk about what just happened in there?”

She hadn’t found the phone.

“Of course we are,” he said. “But not in this parking lot. Not with Sam waiting on the steps for us and my parents waiting at the house.”

“So when?”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight? With a question mark? Or, tonight.”

“Tonight.”

“You promise?”

“Julia.”

“And don’t just let him sulk in his room with his iPad. He should know we’re upset.”

“He knows.”

“Yes, but I want him to know even when I’m not there.”

“He’ll know.”

“You promise?” she asked, this time letting the question descend rather than rise.

“Cross my heart and hope against hope to die.”

She could have said more — given examples from recent history, or explained why it wasn’t the punishment she was worried about, but the reinforcement of their nearly calcified and completely miscast parental roles — but chose instead to offer a gentle, sustained squeeze of the arm.

“I’ll see you this afternoon.”

Touch had always saved them in the past. No matter the anger or hurt, no matter the depth of the aloneness, a touch, even a light and passing touch, reminded them of their long togetherness. A palm on a neck: it all flooded back. A head leaned upon a shoulder: the chemicals surged, the memory of love. At times, it was almost impossible to cross the distance between their bodies, to reach out. At times, it was impossible. Each knew the feeling so well, in the silence of a darkened bedroom, looking at the same ceiling: If I could open my fingers, my heart’s fingers could open. But I can’t. I want to reach across the distance, and I want to be reached. But I can’t.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” he said. “I wanted you to have the whole day.”

“You’re not the one who wrote those words.”

“Neither is Sam.”

“Jacob.”

“What?”

“It cannot, it will not, be the case that one of us believes him and one doesn’t.”

“So believe him.”

“He clearly did it.”

“Believe him anyway. We’re his parents.”

“That’s right. And we need to teach him that actions have consequences.”

“Believing him is more important,” Jacob said, the conversation happening too quickly for him to catch up to his own meaning. Why was he choosing this battle?

“No,” Julia said, “loving him is more important. And on the other side of punishment, he’ll know that our love, which requires causing him pain every now and then, is the ultimate consequence.”

Jacob opened Julia’s car door for her and said, “To be continued.”

“Yes, to be continued. But I need you to tell me we’re on the same page here.”

“That I don’t believe him?”

“That whatever you believe, you’re going to help me make clear that we are disappointed, and that he has to apologize.”

Jacob hated this. He hated Julia for forcing him to betray Sam, and he hated himself for not standing up to her. If there had been any hatred left, it would have been for Sam.

“OK,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” she said, getting into the car. “To be continued tonight.”

“OK,” he said, shutting the door. “And take as long as you want today.”

“What if as long as I want doesn’t fit in a day?”

“And I have that HBO meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“But not until seven. I mentioned it. You probably would’ve come back by then, anyway.”

“We’ll never know.”

“It’s annoying that it’s on a weekend, but it’ll only be an hour or two.”

“That’s fine.”

He gave her arm a squeeze and said, “Take what’s left.”

“What?”

“The day.”

* * *

The drive home was silent, save for NPR, whose omnipresence took on the character of silence. Jacob glanced at Sam in the rearview mirror.

“I went and done ate a can of your tuna fish, Ms. Daisy.”

“Are you having a stroke or something?”

“Movie reference. And might’ve been salmon.”

He knew he shouldn’t let Sam use his iPad in the backseat, but the poor kid had been through enough that morning. A little self-soothing seemed fair. And it deferred the conversation that he didn’t feel like having right then, or ever.

Jacob had planned on preparing an elaborate brunch, but when the call from Rabbi Singer came at nine fifteen, he asked his parents, Irv and Deborah, to come over early to watch Max and Benjy. Now there would be no ricotta-stuffed brioche french toast. There would be no lentil salad, no shaved brussels sprout salad. There would be calories.

“Two pieces of rye with creamy peanut butter, cut diagonally,” Jacob said, handing a plate to Benjy.

Max intercepted the food: “That’s actually mine.”

“Right,” Jacob said, handing a bowl to Benjy, “because you have Honey Nut Cheerios with a splash of rice milk.”

Max examined Benjy’s bowl: “Those are plain Cheerios with honey on them.”

“Yes.”

“So why did you lie to him?”

“Thanks, Max.”

“And I said toasted, not immolated.”

“Imlated?” Benjy asked.

“Destroyed by fire,” Deborah said.

“What’s with Camus?” Irv asked.

“Leave him alone,” Jacob said.

“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, pulling his grandson into him, “someone once told me about the most incredible zoo…”

“Where’s Sam?” Deborah asked.

“Lying is bad,” Benjy said.

Max let out a laugh.

“Good one,” Irv said. “Right?”

“He got into a little trouble at Hebrew school this morning and is doing time up in his room.” And to Benjy: “I didn’t lie.”

Max peered into Benjy’s bowl and told him, “You realize that’s not even honey. It’s agave.”

“I want Mom.”

“We’re giving her a day off.”

“A day off from us?” Benjy asked.

“No, no. She never needs time off from you guys.”

“Time off from you?” Max asked.

“One of my friends, Joey, has two dads. But babies come out of vagina holes. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“No one lied to anyone.”

“I want a frozen burrito.”

“The freezer’s broken,” Jacob said.

“For breakfast?” Deborah asked.

“Brunch,” Max corrected.

“Sí se puede,” Irv said.

“I could run out and get you one,” Deborah offered.

“Frozen.”

Over the previous months, Benjy’s eating habits had veered toward what might be called unrealized foods: frozen vegetables (as in, still frozen when eaten), uncooked oatmeal, unboiled ramen noodles, dough, raw quinoa, dry macaroni with unreconstituted cheese powder sprinkled on top. Beyond adjusting shopping lists, Jacob and Julia never talked about it; it felt too psychological to touch.

“So what did Sammy do?” Irv asked, his mouth full of gluten.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Frozen burrito, please.”

“There might not be a later.”

“Apparently, he wrote some bad words on a piece of paper in class.”

“Apparently?”

“He says he didn’t do it.”

“Well, did he?”

“I don’t know. Julia thinks so.”

“Whatever the reality, and whatever each of you believes, you guys have to approach it together,” Deborah said.

“I know.”

“And remind me what a bad word is?” Irv said.

“You can imagine.”

“In fact I can’t. I can imagine bad contexts—”

“The words and the context of Hebrew school definitely didn’t jibe.”

“Which words?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Of course it really matters.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Deborah said.

“Let’s just say the n-word was featured.”

“I want a frozen— What’s the n-word?”

“Happy now?” Jacob asked his father.

“He used it actively or passively?” Irv asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Max said to his little brother.

“There’s no passive use of that word,” Jacob said to Irv. “And no, you won’t,” he said to Max.

“There might not be a later,” Benjy said.

“Did I really raise a son who refers to a word as that word?”

“No,” Jacob said, “you didn’t raise a son.”

Benjy went to his grandma, who never said no: “If you love me you’ll get me a frozen burrito and tell me what the n-word is.”

“And what was the context?” Irv asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jacob said, “and we’re done talking about it.”

“Nothing could matter more. Without context, we’d all be monsters.”

“N-word,” Benjy said.

Jacob put down his fork and knife.

“OK, since you asked, the context is Sam watching you make a fool of yourself on the news every morning, and watching you being made a fool of on late shows every night.”

“You let your kids watch too much TV.”

“They watch hardly any.”

“Can we go watch TV?” Max asked.

Jacob ignored him and went back at Irv: “He’s suspended until he agrees to apologize. No apology, no bar mitzvah.”

“Apologize to whom?”

“Premium cable?” Max asked.

“Everyone.”

“Why not go all the way and extradite him to Uganda for some scrotal electrocution?”

Jacob handed a plate to Max and whispered something in his ear. Max nodded and left the table.

“He did something wrong,” Jacob said.

“Exercising his freedom of speech?”

“Freedom of hate speech.”

“Have you even banged a teacher’s desk yet?”

“No, no. Absolutely not. We had a talk with the rabbi, and now we’re fully in salvage-the-bar-mitzvah mode.”

“You had a talk? You think talk got us out of Egypt or Entebbe? Uh-uh. Plagues and Uzis. Talk gets you a good place in line for a shower that isn’t a shower.”

“Jesus, Dad. Always?”

“Of course always. ‘Always’ so ‘never again.’”

“Well, what do you say you leave this one to me?”

“Because you’re doing such a great job?”

“Because he’s Sam’s father,” Deborah said. “And you’re not.”

“Because it’s one thing to pick up your dog’s shits,” Jacob said, “and it’s another to pick up your dad’s.”

“Shits,” Benjy echoed.

“Mom, could you go read to Benjy upstairs?”

“I want to be with the adults,” Benjy said.

“I’m the only adult here,” Deborah said.

“Before I blow my top,” Irv said, “I want to be sure I’m understanding. You’re suggesting that there’s a line to be drawn from my misread blog to Sam’s First Amendment problem?”

“No one misread your blog.”

“Radically misconstrued.”

“You wrote that Arabs hate their children.”

“Incorrect. I wrote that Arab hatred for Jews has transcended their love for their own children.”

“And that they are animals.”

“Yes. I wrote that, too. They’re animals. Humans are animals. This is definitional stuff.”

“Jews are animals?”

“It’s not that simple, no.”

“What’s the n-word?” Benjy whispered to Deborah.

“Noodle,” she whispered back.

“No it’s not.” She lifted Benjy in her arms and carried him out of the room. “The n-word is no,” he said, “isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“No it’s not.”

“One Dr. Phil is already one too many,” Irv said. “What Sammy needs is a fixer. This is a bone-dry freedom of speech issue, and as you do or should know, I am not only on the national board of the ACLU, its members tell my story every Passover. If you were me—”

“I’d kill myself to spare my family.”

“—you’d chum the Adas Israel waters for an insanely smart, autistically monomaniacal lawyer who has sacrificed worldly rewards for the pleasure of defending civil liberties. Look, I appreciate the pleasure of bitching about injustice as much as anyone, but you’re capable, Jacob, and he’s your son. No one would condemn you for not helping yourself, but no one would forgive you for not helping your son.”

“You’re romanticizing racism, misogyny, and homophobia.”

“Have you even read Caro’s—”

“I saw the movie.”

“I’m trying to get my grandson out of a bind. That’s so wrong?”

“If he shouldn’t get out of it.”

Benjy trotted back into the room: “Is it married?”

“Is what married?”

“The n-word.”

“That begins with an m.”

Benjy turned and trotted back out.

“What your mother said before, about you and Julia needing to approach this together? That was wrong. You need to defend Sam. Let everyone else worry about what actually happened.”

“I believe him.”

And then, as if noticing her absence for the first time: “Where is Julia, anyway?”

“Taking the day off.”

“Off from what?”

“Off.”

“Thank you, Anne Sullivan, but in fact I heard you. Off from what?”

“From on. Can you just let it be?”

“Sure,” Irv said, nodding. “That’s an option. But let me speak some words of wisdom that not even Mother Mary knows.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you.”

“This too shall—?”

“Solomon wasn’t perfect. In all of human history, nothing has ever gone away on its own.”

“Farts do,” Jacob said, as if to honor Sam’s absence.

“Your house stinks, Jacob. You just can’t smell it, because it’s yours.”

Jacob could have pointed out that there was Argus shit somewhere within a three-room radius. He’d known it as soon as he opened the front door.

Benjy came back into the room. “I remembered my question,” he said, despite having given no indication of trying to remember anything.

“Yes?”

“The sound of time. What happened to it?”

A HAND THE SIZE OF YOURS, A HOUSE THE SIZE OF THIS ONE

Julia liked the eye being led where the body can’t go. She liked irregular brickwork, when one can’t tell if the craftsmanship is careless or masterly. She liked the feeling of enclosure, with the suggestion of expansiveness. She liked it when the view wasn’t centered in the window, but also liked remembering that views are, by nature’s nature, centered. She liked doorknobs that one wants to keep holding. She liked steps up, and steps down. She liked shadows laid upon other shadows. She liked breakfast banquettes. She liked light woods (beech, maple), and didn’t like “masculine” woods (walnut, mahogany), and didn’t care for steel, and hated stainless steel (until it was thoroughly scratched), and imitations of natural materials were intolerable, unless their fakeness was declared, was the point, in which case they could be quite beautiful. She liked textures that the fingers and feet know, even if the eye doesn’t. She liked fireplaces centered in kitchens centered on the main living floor. She liked more bookshelves than are necessary. She liked skylights over showers, but nowhere else. She liked intentional imperfections, but she couldn’t bear nonchalance, but she also liked to remember that there could be no such thing as an intentional imperfection. People are always mistaking something that looks good for something that feels good.

you’re begging me to fuck your tight pussy, but you don’t deserve it yet

She didn’t like uniform textures — they aren’t how things are. She didn’t like rugs centered in rooms. Good architecture should make one feel as if one is in a cave with a view of the horizon. She didn’t like double-height ceilings. She didn’t like too much glass. The function of a window is to bring in light, not to frame a view. A ceiling should be just out of reach of the extended fingers of a raised hand of the tallest occupant standing on tiptoes. She didn’t like carefully placed trinkets — things belong where they don’t. An eleven-foot ceiling is too high. It makes one feel lost, forsaken. A ten-foot ceiling is too high. She felt that everything was out of reach. Nine feet is too high. Something that feels good — safe, comfortable, designed for living — can always be made to look good. She didn’t like recessed lighting, or lamps controlled by wall switches — so sconces, chandeliers, and effort. She didn’t like concealed functions — refrigerators behind panels, toiletries behind mirrors, TVs that descend into cabinets.

you don’t need it enough yet

i want to see you dripping onto your asshole

Every architect has fantasies of building her own home, and so does every woman. For as long as she could remember, Julia had felt a secret thrill whenever she passed a small parking lot or an undeveloped slice of land: potential. For what? To build something beautiful? Intelligent? New? Or simply for a home that might feel like home? Her joys were shared, not fully hers, but her thrills were private.

She had never wanted to become an architect, but she always wanted to make a home for herself. She disposed of the dolls to free the boxes they came in. She spent a summer furnishing the space under her bed. Her clothes covered every surface in her room, because closets shouldn’t be wasted with utility. It wasn’t until she started designing homes for herself — all on paper, each a source of pride and shame — that she came to understand what was meant by “herself.”

“This is so great,” Jacob said while being led through a floor plan. Julia never shared her personal work with him unless he explicitly asked. It wasn’t a secret, but the experience of sharing always seemed to leave her feeling humiliated. He was never enthusiastic enough, or not in the right ways. And when his enthusiasm came, it felt like a gift with too precious a bow. (The so ruined everything.) He was filing away his enthusiasm for future retrieval the next time she said he was never enthusiastic about her work. And it humiliated her, also, to need his enthusiasm, even to want it.

What’s wrong with such wanting and needing? Nothing. And the yawning distance from where you are to what you’d always imagined does not have to suggest failure. Disappointment need not be disappointing. The wanting, the needing, the distance, the disappointment: growing, knowing, committing, aging beside another. Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.

“It’s great,” he said, so close his nose almost touched the two-dimensional rendering of her fantasy. “Amazing, actually. How do you think of these things?”

“I’m not sure I do think of them.”

“This is what, an interior garden?”

“Yeah, the stairs will rise around a light shaft.”

“Sam would say, ‘Shaft…’”

“And you would laugh, and I would ignore it.”

“Or we’d both ignore it. Anyway, this is really, really nice.”

“Thank you.”

Jacob touched his finger to the floor plan, moved it through a series of rooms, always through the doors. “I know I’m no good at reading these things, but where would the kids sleep?”

“What do you mean?”

“Unless I’m misunderstanding something here, which is probably the case, there’s only one bedroom.”

Julia tilted her head, squinted.

Jacob said, “You know the one about the couple who get divorced after eighty years of marriage?”

“No.”

“Everyone asks, ‘Why now? Why not decades ago, when there was still life to live? Or why not just see it through to the end?’ And they respond, ‘We were waiting for the grandchildren to die.’”

Julia liked calculators that printed — the Jews of the office store, having stubbornly out-survived so many more-promising business machines — and while the kids assembled school supplies, she would tap out feet of numbers. Once, she calculated the minutes until Benjy went to college. She left it there, as evidence.

Her homes were just stupid little exercises, a hobby. She and Jacob would never have the money, nor the time and energy, and she’d done enough residential architecture to know that the desire to wring out a few more drips of happiness almost always destroyed the happiness you were so lucky to have, and so foolish never to acknowledge. It happens every time: a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel becomes a seventy-five-thousand-dollar kitchen remodel (because everyone comes to believe that small differences make big differences), becomes a new exit to the garden (to bring more light into the enhanced kitchen), becomes a new bathroom (if you’re already sealing off the floor for work…), becomes stupidly rewiring the house to be smart (so you can control the music in the kitchen with your phone), becomes passive-aggression over whether the new bookshelves should be on legs (to reveal the inlaid floor borders), becomes aggressive-aggression whose origin can no longer be remembered. One can build a perfect home, but not live in it.

do you like my tongue pushing its way between your tight lips?

show me

cum on my mouth

There was a night, early in their marriage, at a Pennsylvania inn. She and Jacob shared a joint — the first time either had smoked since college — and lay in bed naked, and promised to share everything, everything without exception, regardless of the shame or discomfort or potential for hurt. It felt like the most ambitious promise two people could make to each other. Basic truth telling felt like a revelation.

“No exceptions,” Jacob said.

“Even one would undermine everything.”

“Bed-wetting. That kind of thing.”

Julia took Jacob’s hand and said, “Do you know how much I’d love you for sharing something like that?”

“I don’t happen to bed-wet, by the way. I’m just establishing boundaries.”

“No boundaries. That’s the point.”

“Past sexual encounters?” Jacob asked, because he knew it was the address of his greatest vulnerability, and so the place such sharing would have to go. Always, even after he’d lost the desire to touch or be touched by her, he abhorred the thought of her touching or being touched by another man. People she’d been with, pleasure she’d given and received, things she’d moaned. He was not an insecure person in other contexts, but his brain was compelled, with the magnetism of someone unable to escape the perpetual reliving of a trauma, to imagine her being sexually intimate with others. What did she say to them that she also said to him? Why would such repetitions feel like the ultimate betrayal?

“Of course they would be painful,” she said. “But the point isn’t that I want to know everything about you. It’s that I don’t want anything about you withheld.”

“So I won’t.”

“And I won’t.”

They passed the joint back and forth a few times, feeling so brave, so still-young.

“What are you withholding right now?” she asked, almost giddily.

“Right now, nothing.”

“But you have withheld?”

“Therefore I am.”

She laughed. She loved his quickness, the oddly comforting warmth of his mind’s connections.

“What’s the last thing you withheld from me?”

He thought about it. Being stoned made it harder to think, but easier to share thoughts.

“OK,” he said. “It’s a little one.”

“I want all of them.”

“OK. We were in the apartment the other day. It was Wednesday, maybe? And I made breakfast for you. Remember? The goat cheese frittata.”

“Yeah,” she said, resting her hand on his thigh, “that was nice.”

“I let you sleep in, and I secretly made breakfast.”

She exhaled a column of smoke that held its form for longer than seemed possible, and said, “I could eat a lot of that right now.”

“I made it because I wanted to take care of you.”

“I felt that,” she said, moving her hand up his thigh, making him hard.

“And I made it look really nice on the plate. That little salad beside it.”

“Like a restaurant,” she said, taking his cock in her hand.

“And after your first bite—”

“Yes?”

“There’s a reason people withhold.”

“We’re not people.”

“OK. Well, after your first bite, instead of thanking me, or saying it was delicious, you asked me if I’d salted it.”

“So?” she asked, moving her fist up and down.

“So that felt like shit.”

“That I asked if it was salted?”

“Maybe not felt like shit. It annoyed me. Or disappointed me. Whatever I felt, I didn’t share it.”

“But I was just asking a matter-of-fact question.”

“That feels good.”

“Good, love.”

“But can you see how, in the context of the effort I was making for you, asking if it was salted conveyed criticism rather than gratefulness?”

“It feels like an effort to cook breakfast for me?”

“It was a special breakfast.”

“Does this feel good?”

“It feels amazing.”

“So in the future, if I think a food needs more salt, I should keep that to myself?”

“Or it sounds like I should keep my hurt to myself.”

“Your disappointment.”

“I could already come.”

“So come.”

“I don’t want to come yet.”

She slowed down, slowed to a grip.

“What are you withholding right now?” he asked. “And don’t say that you’re slightly hurt, annoyed, and disappointed by my hurt, annoyance, and disappointment, because you’re not withholding that.”

She laughed.

“So?”

“I’m not withholding anything,” she said.

“Dig.”

She shook her head and laughed.

“What?”

“In the car, you were singing ‘All Apologies’ and you kept singing, ‘I can see from shame.’”

“So?”

“So that’s not what it is.”

“Of course that’s what it is.”

“Aqua seafoam shame.”

“What!”

“Yup.”

“Aqua. Seafoam. Shame?”

“My hand upon the Jewish Bible.”

“You’re telling me that my perfectly sensical phrase — sensical on its own, and in its context — is actually just a subconscious expression of my repressed whatever, and that Kurt Cobain intentionally strung together the words aqua seafoam shame?”

“That is what I’m telling you.”

“Well, I cannot believe that. But at the same time, I’m extremely embarrassed.”

“Don’t be.”

“That usually works when someone’s embarrassed.”

She laughed.

“That shouldn’t count,” he said. “Hobbyist withholding. Give me something good.”

“Good?”

“Something really difficult.”

She smiled.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Sure sounds like something.”

“OK,” she said. “I’m withholding something. Something really difficult.”

“Excellent.”

“But I don’t think I’m evolved enough to share.”

“So went the dinosaurs.”

She pressed a pillow over her face and scissored her legs.

“It’s just me,” he said.

“OK,” with a sigh. “OK. Well. Lying here, stoned, our bodies naked, I just had a desire.”

He instinctively reached his hand between her legs, and found that she was already wet.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“I bet you can.”

She laughed.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “It will make it easier.”

She closed her eyes.

“Nope,” she said. “Not easier. Maybe if you close yours?”

He closed his eyes.

“I’m having this desire. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know why I’m having it.”

“But you’re having it.”

“I am.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m having this desire.” She laughed again, and nuzzled her face into his armpit. “I want to spread my legs, and I want you to move your head down and look at me until I come.”

“Only look?”

“No fingers. No tongue. I want your eyes to make me come.”

“Open your eyes.”

“And you open yours.”

He didn’t say a word or make a sound. With enough but not too much force, he rolled her onto her stomach. He intuited that what she wanted involved her inability to see him looking at her, for that final safety to be given over. She moaned, letting him know he was right. He moved his body down her body. He parted her legs, then spread them farther. He tucked his face close enough to smell her.

“You’re looking at me?”

“I am.”

“Do you like what you see?”

“I want what I see.”

“But you can’t touch it.”

“I won’t.”

“But you can jerk yourself off while you look at me.”

“I am.”

“You want to fuck what you’re looking at.”

“I do.”

“But you can’t.”

“No.”

“You want to feel how wet I am.”

“I do.”

“But you can’t.”

“But I can see.”

“But you can’t see how tight I get when I’m about to come.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me what I look like and I’ll come.”

They came together, without touching, and it could have ended there. She could have rolled onto her side, put her head on his chest. They could have fallen asleep. But something happened: she looked at him, held his gaze, and once again closed her eyes. Jacob closed his eyes. And it could have ended there. They could have explored each other in the bed, but Julia rose and explored the room. Jacob didn’t see her — he knew not to open his eyes — but he heard her. Without saying anything, he also got up. They each touched the bench at the foot of the bed, the desk and the cup with its pens, the tassels on the curtain tiebacks. He touched the peephole, she touched the dial that controlled the ceiling fan, he pressed his palm against the mini-fridge’s warm top.

She said, “You make sense to me.”

He said, “You, too.”

She said, “I really love you, Jacob. But please just say ‘I know.’”

He said, “I know,” and felt along the walls, along the mounted quilts, until he came to the light switch. “I think I just made it dark.”

Julia became pregnant with Sam a year later. Then Max. Then Benjy. Her body changed, but Jacob’s desire didn’t. It was their volume of withholding that changed. They continued to have sex, although what had always arisen spontaneously came to require either an impetus (drunkenness, watching Blue Is the Warmest Color on Jacob’s laptop in bed, Valentine’s Day) or muscling through the self-consciousness and fear of embarrassment, which usually led to big orgasms and no kissing. They still occasionally said things that, the moment after coming, felt humiliating to the point of needing to physically remove oneself to get an unwanted glass of water. Each still masturbated to thoughts of the other, even if those fantasies bore no blood relationship to lived life and often included another other. But even the memory of that night in Pennsylvania had to be withheld, because it was a horizontal line on a doorframe: Look at how much we’ve changed.

There were things Jacob wanted, and he wanted them from Julia. But the possibility of sharing desires diminished as her need to hear them increased. It was the same for her. They loved each other’s company, and would always choose it over either aloneness or the company of anyone else, but the more comfort they found together, the more life they shared, the more estranged they became from their inner lives.

In the beginning, they were always either consuming each other or consuming the world together. Every child wants to see the marks ascend the doorframe, but how many couples are able to see progress in simply staying the same? How many can make more money and not contemplate what could be bought with it? How many, approaching the end of child-bearing years, can know that they already have the right number of children?

Jacob and Julia were never ones to resist convention on principle, but neither could they have imagined becoming quite so conventional: they got a second car (and second-car insurance); joined a gym with a twenty-page course offering; stopped doing their taxes themselves; occasionally sent back a bottle of wine; bought a house with side-by-side sinks (and house insurance); doubled their toiletries; had a teak enclosure built for their garbage bins; replaced a stove with one that looked better; had a child (and bought life insurance); ordered vitamins from California and mattresses from Sweden; bought organic clothing whose price, amortized over the number of times it was worn, all but required them to have another child. They had another child. They considered whether a rug would hold its value, knew which of everything was best (Miele vacuum, Vitamix blender, Misono knives, Farrow and Ball paint), consumed Freudian amounts of sushi, and worked harder so they could pay the very best people to care for their children while they worked. They had another child.

Their inner lives were overwhelmed by all the living — not only in terms of the time and energy required by a family of five, but of which muscles were forced to strengthen and which withered. Julia’s unwavering composure with the children had grown to resemble omnipatience, while her capacity to express urgency to her husband had shrunk to texted Poems of the Day. Jacob’s magic trick of removing Julia’s bra without his hands was replaced by the depressingly impressive ability to assemble a Pack ’n Play as he carried it up the stairs. Julia could clip newborn fingernails with her teeth, and breast-feed while making a lasagna, and remove splinters without tweezers or pain, and have the kids begging for the lice comb, and compel sleep with a third-eye massage — but she had forgotten how to touch her husband. Jacob taught the kids the difference between farther and further, but no longer knew how to talk to his wife.

Their inner lives were nurtured in private — Julia designed houses for herself; Jacob worked on his bible, and bought a second phone — and a destructive cycle developed between them: with Julia’s inability to express urgency, Jacob became even less sure that he was wanted, and more afraid of risking foolishness, which furthered the distance between Julia’s hand and Jacob’s body, which Jacob had no language to address. Desire became a threat — an enemy — to their domesticity.

When Max was in kindergarten, he used to give everything away. Any friend who would come over for a playdate would inevitably leave with a plastic car or stuffed animal. Any money that he somehow acquired — change found on the sidewalk, a five-dollar bill from his grandfather for having made a persuasive argument — would be offered to Julia in a checkout line, or to Jacob at a parking meter. He invited Sam to take as much of his dessert as he liked. “Go on,” he would say when Sam demurred. “Take, take.”

Max wasn’t responding to the needs of others, which he seemed as capable of ignoring as any child. And he wasn’t being generous — that would require the knowledge of giving, which was precisely what he lacked. Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max’s conduit wasn’t bigger than anyone else’s, it was simply unclogged.

What had been a source of pride for Jacob and Julia became a source of concern: Max will be left with nothing. Careful not to suggest that there was anything wrong with the way he lived, they gently introduced notions of worth, and the finitude of resources. At first he resisted—“There’s always more”—but as children do, he came to understand that there was something wrong with the way he lived.

He became obsessed with comparative value. “Could you get one house for forty cars?” (“It depends on the house and the cars.”) Or, “Would you rather have a handful of diamonds or a houseful of silver? A hand the size of yours, a house the size of this one.” He started trading compulsively: toys with friends, belongings with Sam, deeds with his parents. (“If I eat half of this kale, will you let me go to bed twenty minutes later?”) He wanted to know if it was better to be a FedEx driver or a music teacher, and became frustrated when his parents challenged his use of better. He wanted to know if it was OK that his dad had to pay for an extra ticket when they took his friend Clive to the zoo. “I’m wasting my life!” he would often exclaim when not engaged in an activity. He crawled into bed with them, too early one morning, wanting to know if that’s what being dead is.

“What’s that, baby?”

“Having nothing.”

The withholding of sexual needs between Jacob and Julia was the most primitive and frustrating kind of withdrawal, but hardly the most damaging. The movement toward estrangement — from each other, and from themselves — took place in far smaller, subtler steps. They were always becoming closer in the realm of doing — coordinating the ever-expanding routines, talking and texting more (and more efficiently), cleaning together the mess made by the children they made — and farther in feeling.

Once, Julia bought some lingerie. She’d placed her palm atop the soft stack, not because she had any interest, but because, like her mother, she couldn’t control the impulse to touch merchandise in stores. She took five hundred dollars out of an ATM so it wouldn’t show up on the credit card bill. She wanted to share it with Jacob, and tried her best to find or create the right occasion. One night, after the kids were asleep, she put on the panties. She wanted to descend the stairs, cap Jacob’s pen, not say a word, but communicate: Look how I can look. But she couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t bring herself to put them on before bed, fearing his not noticing. Just as she couldn’t even lay them on the bed for him to come upon and ask about. Just as she couldn’t return them.

Once, Jacob wrote a line he thought was the best he’d ever written. He wanted to share it with Julia — not because he was proud of himself, but because he wanted to see if it was still possible to reach her as he used to, to inspire her to say something like “You’re my writer.” He took the pages into the kitchen, laid them facedown on the counter.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“It’s going,” he said, in precisely the way he most hated.

“Progress?”

“Yes, just not clear it’s in the right direction.”

“Is there a right direction?”

He wanted to say, “Just say, ‘You’re my writer.’”

But he couldn’t cross the distance that didn’t exist. The vastness of their shared life made sharing their singularity impossible. They needed a distance that wasn’t a withdrawal, but a beckoning. And when Jacob returned to the line the next morning, he was surprised and saddened to see that it was still great.

Once, Julia was washing her hands at the bathroom sink, after having cleaned up yet another Argus shit, and as she observed the soap forming webs between her fingers, the sconce flickered but persisted, and she was unexpectedly overwhelmed by a kind of sadness that didn’t refer to or mean anything, but whose weight was punishing. She wanted to bring that sadness to Jacob — not with the hope of his understanding something that she couldn’t understand, but with the hope that he might help carry something that she couldn’t carry. But the distance that didn’t exist was too great. Argus had shit on his bed, and either didn’t realize it or couldn’t be bothered to move; it got all over his side and tail. While Julia scrubbed it off with human shampoo and a damp T-shirt from some forgotten soccer team that once broke hearts, she told him, “Here we go. It’s OK. Almost finished.”

Once, Jacob considered buying a brooch for Julia. He had wandered into a store on Connecticut Avenue — the kind of place that sells salad bowls turned from reclaimed wood, and salad tongs with horn handles. He wasn’t looking to buy anything, and there was no upcoming occasion for which a gift would have been appropriate. His lunch date had texted that she was stuck behind a garbage truck, he hadn’t thought to bring along a book or newspaper, and every chair in Starbucks was occupied by someone who would finish his thinning life before finishing his thinly veiled memoir, leaving Jacob no place to go deep into his very thin phone.

“Is that one nice?” he asked the woman on the other side of the case. “Dumb question.”

“I love it,” she said.

“Right, of course you do.”

“I don’t like that,” she said, pointing at a bracelet in the case.

“It’s a brooch, right?”

“It is. A silver cast of an actual twig. One-of-a-kind.”

“And those are opals?”

“They are.”

He walked to another section, pretended to examine an inlaid cutting board, then returned to the brooch. “It’s nice, though, right? I can’t tell if it looks costumey.”

“Not at all,” she said, taking it from the case and putting it on a velvet-lined tray.

“Maybe,” Jacob said, not picking it up.

Was it nice? It was risky. Did people wear brooches? Was it cornily figurative? Would it end up in a jewelry box, never to be seen again until it was bequeathed as an heirloom to one of the boys’ brides so that she could put it in a jewelry box until it was one day passed down again? Was seven hundred fifty dollars an appropriate price for such a thing? It wasn’t the money that concerned him, it was the risk of getting it wrong, the embarrassment of trying and failing — an extended limb is far easier to break than a bent one. After lunch, Jacob went back to the store.

“Sorry if I’m being ridiculous,” he said, returning to the woman who had been helping him, “but would you mind putting it on?”

She took it back out of the case and pinned it to her sweater.

“And it’s not heavy? It doesn’t pull on the fabric?”

“It’s quite light.”

“Is it fancy?”

“You could wear it with a dress, or on a jacket, or sweater.”

“And you would be happy if someone gave it to you?”

Distance begets distance, but if the distance is nothing, what is its origin? There was no transgression, no cruelty, not even indifference. The original distance was closeness: the inability to overcome the shame of subterranean needs that no longer had a home aboveground.

give me your cum

then you can have my cock

Only in the privacy of her own mind could Julia wonder what her own home would look like. What she would gain, and what she would lose. Could she live without seeing the kids every morning and evening? And what if she were to admit that she could? In six and a half million minutes, she would have to. No one judges a mother for letting her children go to college. Letting go wasn’t the crime. The crime was choosing to let go.

you don’t deserve to get fucked in the ass

If she built a new life for herself, so would Jacob. He would remarry. Men do. They get over it, and get on with it. Every time. It was easy to imagine him marrying the first person he dated. He deserved someone who didn’t build imaginary homes for one. He didn’t deserve Julia, but he deserved better than Julia. He deserved someone who stretched upon waking, rather than recoiled. Someone who didn’t sniff food before eating it. Someone who didn’t see pets as burdens, who had a pet name for him, and made jokes in front of friends about how much she liked being fucked by him. Some new, unclogged pipeline to a new person, and even if it were doomed to ultimately fail, at least the failure would be preceded by happiness.

now you deserve to get fucked in the ass

She needed a day off. She would have loved the feeling of not knowing how to fill the time, of wandering without a destination in Rock Creek Park, of actually savoring a meal of the kind of food that her kids would never tolerate, and reading something longer and of more substance than a sidebar about how better to organize emotions or spices. But one of her clients needed help selecting door hardware. Of course it had to be a Saturday, because when else could someone who was able to afford bespoke hardware have time to sample it? And of course no one needs help to look at door hardware, but Mark and Jennifer were unusually helpless when it came to negotiating their incompatible lacks of taste, and a doorknob was exactly unimportant and symbolic enough to require mediation.

Compounding Julia’s irritation was the fact that Mark and Jennifer were the parents of one of Sam’s friends, and thought of Jacob and Julia as their friends, and wanted to have a coffee after to “catch up.” Julia liked them and, insofar as she could muster enthusiasm for extrafamilial relations, considered them friends. But she couldn’t muster much. At least not until she could catch up with herself.

Someone needed to invent a way to be close to people without having to see them, or talk to them on the phone, or write (or read) letters, or e-mails, or texts. Was it only mothers who understood the preciousness of time? That there was none of it, ever? And you can’t just have coffee, even and especially not with people you rarely see, because it takes half an hour to reach the café (if you’re lucky), and half an hour to return home (if you’re lucky again), not to mention the twenty-minute tax you pay just to get out the door, and a quick coffee ends up being forty-five minutes in the Olympic scenario. And there was the horrible rigmarole at Hebrew school that morning, and the Israelis were coming in less than two weeks, and the bar mitzvah was saying its goodbyes in the ICU, and while it’s entirely possible to get help, help feels bad, help shames. One can order groceries online and have them delivered, but that feels like a failure, an abdication of motherly duty — motherly privilege. Driving farther to the store with good produce, selecting the avocado that will be perfectly ripe at its moment of use, making sure it doesn’t get crushed in the grocery bag and that the grocery bag doesn’t get crushed in the cart … it’s a mother’s job. Not job, but joy. What if she could accomplish the job but not the joy?

She never knew what to do with the feeling of wanting more for herself: time, space, quiet. Maybe girls would have been different, but she had boys. For a year she held them against her, but after that sleepless holiday she was at the mercy of their physicality: their screaming, wrestling, table drumming, competitive farting, and endless explorations of their scrotums. She loved it, all of it, but needed time, space, and quiet. Maybe if she’d had girls, maybe they’d have been more contemplative, less brutish, more constructive, less animalistic. Even approaching such thoughts made her feel unmotherly, although she always knew she was a good mother. So why was it so complicated? There were women who would spend their last pennies to do the things she resented. Every blessing that was promised the barren heroines of the Bible had fallen into her open hands like rain. And through them.

i want to lick the cum out of your asshole

She met Mark at the hardware gallery. It was elegant, and it was obnoxious, and in a world where the bodies of Syrian children washed up on beaches, it was unethical, or at least vulgar. But her commissions added up.

Mark was already handling samples when she arrived. He looked good: a tightly cropped, gray-dusted beard; clothes that were intentionally snug and not bought in sets of three. He had the physical confidence of someone who doesn’t know within one hundred thousand dollars the contents of his bank account at any given moment. It wasn’t attractive, but it wasn’t ignorable.

“Julia.”

“Mark.”

“We seem not to have Alzheimer’s.”

“What’s Alzheimer’s?”

Innocent flirtation was so revitalizing — the gentle tickling of language that gently tickled one’s ego. She was good at it, and loved it, always had, but grew to feel guilty about it in the course of her marriage. She knew there was nothing wrong with such playfulness; she wanted Jacob to have it in his life. But she also knew of his irrational, uncontainable jealousy. And frustrating as it could be — she never dared to mention a romantic or sexual experience from her past, and needed to overclarify any remotely misinterpretable experience in the present — it was part of him, and so something she wanted to care for.

And it was a part of him that drew her in. His sexual insecurity was so profound, it could only have sprung from a profound source. And even when she felt that she knew everything about him, she never knew what created his insatiable need for reassurance. Sometimes, after deliberately omitting something innocent that she knew would upset his brittle peace, she would look at her husband with love and think, What happened to you?

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, adjusting her collar. “Sam got in some trouble at Hebrew school.”

“Oy vey.”

“Indeed. Anyway, I’m here. Physically and mentally.”

“Maybe we should go get that coffee first?”

“I’m trying to quit.”

“Why?”

“Too dependent on it.”

“That’s only a problem if there isn’t coffee around.”

“And Jacob says—”

“That’s only a problem if Jacob’s around.”

Julia giggled at that, unsure if she was giggling at his joke or her girlish inability to resist his boyish charm.

“Let’s earn the caffeine,” she said, taking a too-distressed bronze knob from his hand.

“So I have some news,” Mark said.

“Me, too. Should we wait for Jennifer?”

“We shouldn’t. And that’s my news.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jennifer and I are getting divorced.”

“What?”

“We’ve been separated since May.”

“You said divorced.”

“We’ve been separated. We’re getting divorced.”

“No,” she said, squeezing the knob, further distressing it, “you haven’t.”

“Haven’t what?”

“Been separated.”

“I would know.”

“But we’ve been together. We went to the Kennedy Center.”

“Yes, we were at a play.”

“You laughed, and touched. I saw.”

“We’re friends. Friends laugh.”

“They don’t touch.”

Mark extended his hand and touched Julia’s shoulder. She reflexively recoiled, eliciting a laugh from each of them.

“We’re friends who were married,” he said.

Julia organized her hair behind her ear and said, “Who still are married.”

“Who are about not to be.”

“I don’t think this is right.”

“Right?”

“Happening.”

He held up his ringless hand: “It’s been happening for at least long enough to erase a tan line.”

A skinny woman approached.

“Anything I can help with today?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Julia said.

“I think we’re OK for now,” Mark said, with a smile that appeared, to Julia, as flirtatious as the one he’d given her.

“I’ll just be over there,” the woman said.

Julia put down the knob with a bit too much force and picked up another, a stainless octagon — ridiculously effortful, repulsively masculine.

“Well, Mark … I don’t know what to say.”

“Congratulations?”

“Congratulations?”

“Sure.”

“That doesn’t feel right at all.”

“But it’s my feelings we’re talking about here.”

“Congratulations? Really?”

“I’m young. Just barely, but still.”

“Not just barely.”

“You’re right. We’re resolutely young. If we were seventy it would be different. Maybe even if we were sixty or fifty. Maybe then I’d say, This is who I am. This is my lot. But I’m forty-four. A huge portion of my life hasn’t happened. And the same is true for Jennifer. We realized we would be happier living other lives. That’s a good thing. Certainly better than pretending, or repressing, or just being so consumed with the responsibility of playing a part that you never question if it’s the part you would choose. I’m still young, Julia, and I want to choose happiness.”

“Happiness?”

“Happiness.”

“Whose happiness?”

“My happiness. Jennifer’s, too. Our happiness, but separately.”

“While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.”

“Well, neither my happiness nor contentment is with her. And her happiness definitely isn’t with me.”

“Where is it? Under a sofa cushion?”

“In fact, under her French tutor.”

“Holy shit,” Julia said, bringing the knob to her forehead harder than she’d intended.

“I don’t know why you’re having this reaction to good news.”

“She doesn’t even speak French.”

“And now we know why.”

Julia looked for the anorexic clerk. Anything to look away from Mark.

“And your happiness?” she asked. “What language are you not learning?”

He laughed. “For now, I’m happy to be alone. I’ve spent my whole life with others — my parents, girlfriends, Jennifer. Maybe I want something different.”

“Loneliness?”

“Aloneness isn’t loneliness.”

“This doorknob is very ugly.”

“Are you upset?”

“Too little distress, too much distress, it isn’t rocket science.”

“That’s why they save rocket scientists for rocket science.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t even mentioned the kids.”

“It’s painful.”

“What this is going to do to them. What seeing them half the time is going to do to you.”

She pressed into the display case, angled herself a few degrees. No amount of adjusting could make this conversation comfortable, but it would at least deflect the blow. She put down the knob and picked up one whose only honest comparison would be the dildo she was given at her bachelorette party, sixteen years before. It had resembled a penis as little as this knob resembled a knob. Her girlfriends laughed, and she laughed, and four months later she came upon it while searching her closet with the hopes of regifting an unopened matcha whisk, and she found herself bored or hormonal enough to give it a shot. It accomplished nothing. Too dry. Too unwillful. But holding the ridiculous doorknob, then, she could think of nothing else.

“I lost my interior monologue,” Mark said.

“Your interior monologue?” Julia asked with a dismissive grin.

“That’s right.”

She handed him the knob: “Mark, it’s your interior monologue calling. He was mugged by your id in Nigeria and needs you to wire it two hundred fifty thousand dollars by the end of the day.”

“Maybe it sounds silly. Maybe I sound selfish—”

“Yes and yes.”

“—but I lost what made me me.”

“You’re an adult, Mark, not a Shel Silverstein character contemplating emotional boo-boos on the stump of a tree whose trunk he used for a dacha, or whatever.”

“The harder you push back,” he said, “the more sure I am that you agree.”

“Agree? Agree with what? We’re talking about your life.”

“We’re talking about the endless clenched-jaw worrying about the kids all day, and the endless replaying of unhad fights with your spouse all night. You wouldn’t be a happier, more ambitious and productive architect if you were alone? You wouldn’t be less weary?”

“What, me weary?”

“The more you joke, the more sure—”

“Of course I would.”

“And vacations? You wouldn’t enjoy them more alone?”

“Not so loud.”

“Or someone would hear that you’re human?”

She ran her thumb over the head of the knob.

“Of course I’d miss my kids,” she said. “You wouldn’t?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yes, I’d prefer to have them with me and them on vacation.”

“Tough sentence to assemble?”

“I would choose their presence. If it were a choice.”

“Is it the never sleeping in, the never enjoying a meal, or the hypervigilance at the edge of a beach chair that your back will never touch?”

“It’s the fulfillment that has no other source. The first thought I have every morning, and the last thought every night, is about my kids.”

“That’s my point.”

“It’s my point.”

“When do you think about yourself?”

“When I think that one day, a few decades from now, which will feel like a few hours from now, I’ll be facing death all alone, except that I won’t be all alone, because I’ll be surrounded by my family.”

“Living the wrong life is far worse than dying the wrong death.”

“No shit! I got the same fortune cookie last night!”

Mark leaned closer to Julia.

“Just tell me,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to have your time and mind back? I’m not asking you to speak badly of your husband or kids. Let’s take it for granted that you’ve never cared about anything half as much, and couldn’t care about anything more. I’m not asking for the answer you want to give, or feel you have to. I know this is hard to think about, much less talk about. But honestly: you wouldn’t be happier alone?”

“You’re assuming happiness is the ultimate ambition.”

“I’m not. I’m just asking if you would be happier alone.”

Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d confronted the question, but it was the first time that it had been posed by someone else. It was the first time she didn’t have the ability to evade it. Would she be happier alone? I am a mother, she thought — not an answer to the question being asked, and no more her ultimate ambition than happiness, but her ultimate identity. She had no lives to compare with her life, no parallel aloneness to measure against her aloneness. She was simply doing what she thought was the right thing to do. Living what she thought was the right life.

“No,” she said. “I would not be happier alone.”

He ran his finger around a platonically spherical knob and said, “Then you have it all. Lucky you.”

“Yes. Lucky me. I do feel lucky.”

A long few seconds of touching cold metal in silence, and then Mark asked, “So?” and placed the knob back on the counter.

“What?”

“So what’s your news?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said you had news.”

“Oh, right,” she said, shaking her head. “No, it isn’t news.”

And it wasn’t. She and Jacob had been talking about thinking about looking for a place in the country. Something dinky that could be reimagined. Not even talking about, really, but allowing the joke to linger for long enough to become unfunny. It wasn’t news. It was process.

The morning after their night in the Pennsylvania inn, a decade and a half before, Julia and Jacob went on a hike through a nature preserve. An unusually chatty welcome sign at the entrance explained that the existing paths weren’t original but were “desire lines,” shortcuts people took that trampled the growth and over time appeared deliberate.

Julia and Jacob’s family life became characterized by process, endless negotiation, tiny adjustments. Maybe we should throw caution to the wind and take off the window screens this year. Maybe fencing is one activity too many for Max, and too conspicuously bourgeois for his parents. Maybe if we replaced the metal spatulas with rubber spatulas, we wouldn’t need to replace all the nonstick pans that are giving us cancer. Maybe we should get a car with a third row of seats. Maybe one of those projection things would be nice. Maybe Sam’s cello teacher was right and he should just be playing songs he loves, even if that means “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae).” Maybe more nature is part of the answer. Maybe having groceries delivered would encourage better cooking, which would relieve the unnecessary but unshakable guilt of having groceries delivered.

Their family life was the sum of nudges and corrections. Infinite tiny increments. News happens in emergency rooms and lawyers’ offices and, apparently, the Alliance Française. It is to be sought and avoided with everything one has.

“Let’s look at hardware another day,” Julia said, slipping the knob into her handbag.

“We’re not going to do the renovation.”

“You’re not?”

“No one even lives there anymore.”

“Right.”

“I’m sorry, Julia. Of course we’ll pay you for—”

“No, right. Of course. I’m just a little slow today.”

“You put in so much work.”

After a snowfall, there are only desire lines. But it always warms, and even if it takes longer than it should, the snow inevitably melts, revealing what was chosen.

i don’t care if you cum, but i’ll make you cum anyway

For their tenth anniversary, they went back to the Pennsylvania inn. They’d stumbled upon it the first time — before GPS, before TripAdvisor, before the rareness of freedom spoiled freedom.

The anniversary visit involved a week of preparations, which began with the most difficult task of locating the inn. (Somewhere in Amish country, quilts on the bedroom walls, red front door, rough-hewn banisters, wasn’t there a tree-lined drive?) They had to find a night when Irv and Deborah could stay over to watch the kids, when neither Jacob nor Julia had any pressing work obligations, when the boys didn’t have anything — teacher conference, doctor’s visit, performance — that would require parental presence, and when that specific room was available. The first night to thread all the needles in the pincushion was three weeks out. Julia didn’t know if that felt near or far.

Jacob made the reservation, and Julia made the itinerary. They wouldn’t arrive until sundown, but they would arrive for sundown. The following day, they would have breakfast at the inn (she called ahead to ask about the menu), repeat the first half of their hike through the nature preserve, visit the oldest barn and the third-oldest church in the northeast, check out a few antiques shops — who knows, maybe find something for the collection.

“Collection?”

“Things with insides larger than their outsides.”

“Great.”

“And then lunch at a small winery I read about on Remodelista. You’ll note I didn’t mention finding a place for tchotchkes to bring home for the boys.”

“Noted.”

“And we’ll make it back for a family dinner.”

“We’ll have time for all of that?”

“Better to have too many options,” Julia said.

(They never made it to the antiques shops, because their vacation’s insides were larger than its outsides.)

As they’d promised themselves, they didn’t write out instructions for Deborah and Irv, didn’t precook dinner or prepack lunches, didn’t tell Sam that he would be the “man of the house” while they were gone. They made clear to everyone that they would not be calling to check in — but that, of course, should any need arise, they’d have their cell phones close and charged the whole time.

On the drive up, they talked — not about the kids — until they had nothing to say. The quiet wasn’t awkward or threatening, but shared, comfortable, and safe. It was the edge of autumn, as it had been a decade before, and they drove north along a color spectrum — a few miles farther, a few degrees colder, a few shades brighter. A decade of autumn.

“Mind if I put on a podcast?” Jacob asked, embarrassed by his desire for both distraction and Julia’s permission.

“That sounds great,” she said, relieving the embarrassment she sensed in him, without knowing its source.

A few seconds in, Jacob said, “Ah, I’ve heard this one.”

“So put on another.”

“No, it’s really great. I want you to hear it.”

She put her hand on his hand on the gearshift and said, “You’re kind,” and the distance from the expected that’s kind to you’re kind was a kindness.

The podcast began with a description of the 1863 World Championship of Checkers, at which every game of the forty-game series ended in a draw and twenty-one of the games were identical, move for move.

“Twenty-one identical games. Every single move.”

“Incredible.”

The problem was that checkers has a relatively limited number of possible combinations, and since some moves are definitively better than others, one could know and remember the “ideal” game. The narrator explained that the term book refers to the sum history of all preceding games. A game is “in book” when the configuration of the board has occurred before. A game is “out of book” or “off book” when the configuration is unprecedented. The book for checkers is relatively small. The 1863 championship demonstrated that checkers had been, in essence, perfected, and its book memorized. So there was nothing left besides monotonous repetition, every game a draw.

Chess, however, is almost infinitely complex. There are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe.

“Think about that. More than atoms in the universe!”

“How could they know how many atoms there are in the universe?”

“Count them, I guess.”

“Think of how many fingers that would take.”

“You make me laugh.”

“Apparently not.”

“On the inside, I am. Silently.”

Jacob slid his five fingers between Julia’s.

The book for chess was created in the sixteenth century, and by the middle of the twentieth century it occupied an entire library in the Moscow Chess Club — hundreds of boxes filled with cards documenting every professional chess game ever played. In the 1980s, chess’s book was put online — many mark that as the beginning of the end of the game, even if the end would never be reached. After that, when two players faced each other, they had the ability to search their opponent’s history: how he responded in different situations, his strengths and weaknesses, what he would be likely to do.

Access to the book has made whole portions of chess games checkers-like — sequences that follow an idealized, memorized pattern — particularly openings. The first sixteen to twenty moves can be hammered out simply by “reciting” the book. Still, in all but the rarest chess games a “novelty” is reached — a configuration of pieces that has never been seen in the history of the universe. In the notation of a chess game, the next move is marked “out of book.” Both sides are now on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by.

Jacob and Julia arrived at the inn as the sun was dipping below the horizon, as they had a decade before. “Slow down just a bit,” she’d told Jacob when they were about twenty minutes away. He thought she wanted to hear the rest of the podcast, which touched him, but she wanted to give him the same arrival they’d had last time, which would have touched him if he’d known.

Jacob brought the car almost all the way into the parking space and left it in neutral. He turned off the stereo and looked at Julia, his wife, for a long time. Earth’s rotation brought the sun under the horizon, and the space fully under the car. It was dark: a decade of sunset.

“Nothing has changed,” Jacob said, running his hand along the drystone wall as they walked the mossy path to the entrance. Jacob wondered, as he’d wondered ten years before, how the hell such a wall was made.

“I remember everything but us,” Julia said with an audible laugh.

They checked in, but before taking the duffel to the room, went to the fire and eased into the coma-inducing leather armchairs that they hadn’t remembered but then couldn’t stop remembering.

“What did we drink when we sat here last time?” Jacob asked.

“I actually remember,” Julia said, “because I was so surprised by your order. Rosé.”

Jacob let out a hearty laugh and asked, “What’s wrong with rosé?”

“Nothing,” Julia laughed. “It was just unexpected.”

They ordered two glasses of rosé.

They tried to remember everything about the first visit, every smallest detail: what was worn (what clothes, what jewelry), what was said when, what music was playing (if any), what was on the TV over the honesty bar, what complimentary appetizers were offered, what jokes Jacob told to impress her, what jokes Jacob told to deflect a conversation he didn’t want to have, what each had been thinking, who had the courage to nudge the still-new marriage onto the invisible bridge between where they were (which was thrilling, but untrustworthy) and where they wanted to be (which would be thrilling and trustworthy), across a chasm of so much potential hurt.

They ran their hands along the rough-hewn banister of the stairs to the dining room and had a candlelit dinner, almost all the food sourced from the property.

“I think it was on that trip that I explained why I don’t fold my glasses before putting them on the bedside table.”

“I think you’re right.”

Another glass of rosé.

“Remember when you came back from the bathroom and it took you like twenty minutes to see the note I’d written in butter on your plate?”

“‘You’re my butter half.’”

“Yeah. I really choked. Sorry about that.”

“If we’d been sitting closer to the fire, you might have been spared.”

“Although hard to explain the puddle. Ah, well. Next time I’ll do butter.”

“Next time is right now,” she said — an offering and a summoning.

“And I’m supposed to just churn them out?” With a wink: “Churn?”

“Yes, I get it.”

“Your stoicism is a butter pill to swallow.”

“So give me something good.”

“I know what you’re thinking: Bad butter puns, how dairy!”

That got a chuckle. She reflexively tried to withhold her laughter (not from him, but herself) and felt an unexpected desire to reach across the table and touch him.

“What? You can’t believe it’s not better?”

Another chuckle.

“Butter precedes essence.”

“That one I don’t get. What do you say we move on to bread puns, or maybe even dialogue?”

“Have I milked it too much?”

“Relent, Jacob.”

“Who ya gonna call? Goat’s Butter!”

“Best yet. Definitely the one to end it on.”

“Just to clear the dairy air, I’m the funniest man you’ve ever known?”

“Only because Benjy isn’t yet a man,” she said, but the combination of her husband’s overwhelming quickness and his overwhelming need to be loved brought waves of love, pulled her into its ocean.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Toasters don’t toast toast, toast toasts toast.”

“Toasters toast bread.”

“The margarine for error is too small!”

What if she’d given him the love he needed, and she needed to give, if she’d said, “Your mind is making me want to touch you”?

What if he’d been able to make the right joke at the right time, or better still, be still?

Another glass of rosé.

“You stole a clock from the desk! I just remembered that!”

“I did not steal a clock.”

“You did,” Julia said. “You totally did.”

The only time in his life he impersonated Nixon: “I am not a crook!”

“Well, you definitely were. It was a tiny, folding, cheap nothing. After we made love. You went to the desk, stopped the clock, and put it in your jacket pocket.”

“Why would I have done that?”

“I think it was supposed to be romantic? Or funny? Or you were trying to show me your spontaneity credentials? I have no idea. Go back and ask yourself.”

“You’re sure you’re thinking of me? And not some other man? Some other romantic night at an inn?”

“I’ve never had a romantic night at an inn with anyone else,” Julia said, which shouldn’t have required saying, and wasn’t true, but she wanted to care for Jacob, especially right then. Neither knew, only a few steps onto that invisible bridge, that it never ended, that the rest of their life together would require steps of trust, which only led to the next step of trust. She wanted to care for him then, but she wouldn’t always.

They stayed at their table until the waiter, in splutters of profuse apology, explained that the restaurant was shutting down for the night.

“What was the name of that movie we didn’t watch?”

They would have to go to the room.

Jacob put the duffel on the bed, just as he had. Julia moved it to the bench at the foot of the bed, just as she had. Jacob removed the toiletry bag.

Julia said, “I know I shouldn’t, but I wonder what the kids are doing right now.”

Jacob chuckled. Julia changed into her “fancy” pajamas. Jacob watched her, unaware of anything that had changed about her body in the decade since they’d last been there, because he’d seen her body nearly every day since. He still stole peeks, like a teenager, at her breasts and ass, still fantasized about what was both real and his. Julia felt herself being watched, and liked it, so took her time. Jacob changed into boxers and a T-shirt. Julia went to the sink and ritually craned her neck back, a worn habit, examining herself as she gently pulled on a lower eyelid — as if she were about to insert a contact lens. Jacob produced both toothbrushes and applied toothpaste to each, resting hers, bristles up, on the sink.

“Thanks,” Julia said.

“Do. Not. Mention. It,” Jacob replied in a funny robot voice whose utterly random arrival could only have been an expression of anxiety about the emotions and actions now expected of them. Or so Julia thought.

Jacob brushed his teeth and thought, What if I don’t get hard? Julia brushed her teeth, searching the mirror for something she didn’t want to see. Jacob applied five seconds of Old Spice to each armpit (despite being an inert and sweatless sleeper), washed his face with Cetaphil Daily Facial Cleanser for Normal to Oily Skin (despite having Normal to Dry Skin), then applied Eucerin Daily Protection Moisturizing Face Lotion, Broad Spectrum SPF 30 (despite the sun having disappeared hours ago, and despite sleeping under a ceiling). He gave an extra squirt of Eucerin to his trouble spots: around the alas (a word he knew only from neurotic Google searches—Alas, poor Yorick, the alas of your missing nose), and between the eyebrows and the tops of the upper eyelids. Julia’s regimen was more complex: a face wash with S.W. Basics Cleanser, application of SkinCeuticals Retinol 1.0 Maximum Strength Refining Night Cream, application of Laneige Water Bank Moisture Cream, gentle tapping application of Lancôme Rénergie Lift Multi-Action Night cream around her eyes. Jacob went to the bedroom and did the stretches that everyone in the family made fun of, despite the chiropractor’s insistence that they were necessary for someone with such a sedentary lifestyle, and the fact that they actually helped. Julia flossed with an Oral-B Glide 3D Floss Pick, which, despite being both an environmental nightmare and a rip-off, spared her from gagging. Jacob returned to the bathroom and flossed with the cheapest thing he could find at CVS, string being string.

“You already brushed?” Julia asked.

Jacob said, “Beside you. Just a minute ago.”

Julia made a dollop of hand cream disappear in her palms.

They moved to the bedroom, and Jacob said, “I have to pee,” as he always did at that moment. He went back into the bathroom, locked the door, performed his nightly solitary ritual, and flushed the unused toilet to complete the charade. When he reentered the bedroom, Julia was propped against the headboard, applying L’Oreal Collagen Re-Plumper Night Cream across the thigh of her bent leg. Jacob often wanted to tell her that it wasn’t necessary, that he would love her as she was, just as she would love him; but wanting to feel attractive was who she was, just as it was who he was, and that, too, should be loved. Julia tied back her hair.

Jacob touched a tapestry, a depiction of a naval battle beneath the bannered words “The American Situation: War of 1812,” and said, “Nice.” Did she remember?

Julia said, “Please tell me not to call the kids.”

“Not to call the kids.”

“Of course I shouldn’t.”

“Or call them. We’re not vacation fundamentalists.”

Julia laughed.

Jacob was never immune to her laughter.

“Come,” she said, patting the bed beside her.

Jacob said, “We have a big day tomorrow,” illuminating several emergency exit paths at once: they needed rest; tomorrow was more important than tonight; it wouldn’t be a disappointment if she acknowledged her tiredness.

“You must be beat,” Julia said, redirecting things slightly by putting the onus on him.

“I am,” he said, almost as a question, almost accepting his role. “And you must be, too,” asking her to accept hers.

“Come,” she said, “hold me.”

Jacob turned off the lights, placed his unfolded glasses on the bedside table, and got into bed, beside his wife of a decade. She turned onto her side, bringing her head into her husband’s armpit. He kissed the North Pole of her head. Now they were on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by.

If they’d said what they were thinking, Jacob would have said, “To be honest, it’s not as nice as I remembered.”

And she would have said, “It couldn’t have been.”

“When I was a boy, I used to ride my bike down a hill behind the house. I’d narrate each run. You know, ‘Jacob Bloch, set to attempt a new land speed record. He grips his handlebars. Can he do it?’ I called it ‘The Huge Hill.’ More than anything else in my childhood, it made me feel brave. I went back the other day. It was on the way to a meeting, and I had a few minutes. I couldn’t find it. I found where it was, or should have been, but it wasn’t there. Only the gentlest slope.”

“You grew,” she would have said.

If they’d said what they were thinking, Jacob would have said, “I’m thinking about how we’re not having sex. Are you?”

And without defensiveness or hurt, Julia would have said, “Yeah, I am.”

“There’s nothing I’m asking you to say here. I promise. I just want to tell you where I am. OK?”

“OK.”

And risking another step onto the invisible bridge, Jacob would have said, “I’m worrying that you don’t want to have sex with me. That you don’t desire me.”

“You don’t need to worry,” Julia would have said as she would have brought her hand to the side of his face.

“I always desire you,” he would have said. “I was watching you undress—”

“I know. I felt it.”

“You look every bit as beautiful as you did ten years ago.”

“That’s plainly untrue. But thank you.”

“It’s true to me.”

“Thank you.”

And Jacob would have found himself in the middle of the invisible bridge, above the chasm of potential hurt, at the farthest point from safety: “Why do you think we aren’t having sex?”

And Julia would have stood beside him and, without looking down, said, “Maybe because the expectation is so great?”

“Could be. And we’re genuinely tired.”

“I know I am.”

“I’m going to say something that isn’t easy to say.”

“You’re safe,” she would have promised.

He would have turned to her and said, “We never talk about how I can’t get hard sometimes. Do you ever think it’s you?”

“I do.”

“It isn’t you.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

“Julia,” he would have said, “it isn’t you.”

But he didn’t say anything, and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld, but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery. Too many small accumulations: wrong words, absences of words, imposed quiet, plausibly deniable attacks on known vulnerabilities, mentions of things that needn’t be mentioned, misunderstandings and accidents, moments of weakness, tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for tiny acts of shitty retribution for an original offense that no one could remember. Or for no offense at all.

They didn’t recede from each other that night. They didn’t roll to opposite sides of the bed, or withdraw into two silences. They held each other and shared a silence in the darkness. But it was silence. Neither suggested they explore the room with their eyes closed, as they’d done the last time they were there. They explored the room independently, in their minds, beside each other. And in Jacob’s jacket pocket was the stopped clock — a decade of 1:43—which he’d been waiting for just the right moment to reveal.

i’ll keep making you cum after you beg me to stop

In the hardware gallery parking lot, she sat in her car — her Volvo like everybody else’s, in a color she knew was wrong the second after it was impossible to change her mind — not knowing what to do with herself, knowing only that she had to do something. She wasn’t sufficiently adept with her phone to waste the kind of time she needed to waste. But she could squander at least a little. She found the company that made her favorite architectural model trees. They weren’t the most realistic, they weren’t even well made. She didn’t like them because they evoked trees but because they evoked the sadness that trees evoke — the way an out-of-focus photograph might best capture its subject’s essence. It was extremely unlikely that the manufacturer intended any of that, but it was possible, and it didn’t matter.

They were featuring a new line of autumn trees. Who could be the market for such things? Orange Maple, Red Maple, Yellow Maple, Autumn Sycamore, Light Orange Aspen, Yellowing Aspen, Turning Maple, Turning Sycamore. She imagined a tiny, younger Jacob, and a tiny, younger Julia, in a tiny, scratched and dinged Saab, driving shoelace roads bordered by an infinity of tiny, turning trees, under an infinity of tiny, massive stars, and like the trees, the tiny young couple weren’t realistic, or well made, and they didn’t evoke their bigger, older selves, but they evoked the sadness that they would grow to evoke.

Mark tapped her window. She tried rolling it down and realized the car needed to be on, but the key wasn’t in the ignition or in her hand, and she didn’t have it in her to go through her bag, so she clumsily opened the door.

“I’ll see you at the Model UN trip.”

“What?”

“In a couple of weeks. I’m the male chaperone.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“So we can continue our talk then.”

“I don’t know how much more there is to say.”

“There’s always more to say.”

“Sometimes not.”

And then, on her day off, wanting only to get as far away from her life as possible, she found herself trampling a desire line home.

it’s enough when i say it’s enough

HERE I AMN’T

> Anyone know how to take a picture of stars?

> Like in the sky, or with their hands in wet sidewalk?

> My phone’s flash makes everything white. I turned it off, but the shutter stays open for so long my tiny movements blur everything. I tried bracing my arm with my other hand, but it was still a blur.

> Phones are useless at night.

> Unless you need to go down a dark hallway.

> My phone is dying.

> Or call someone.

> Just try to make it comfortable.

> Samanta, this place is fucking lit!

> Insane.

> Where are you that there are stars out?

> The guy told me there was nothing wrong with it. I said, “If there’s nothing wrong with it, why is it broken?” And he said, “Why is it broken if there’s nothing wrong with it?” And I tried, again, to show him, but of course it worked again. I almost cried, or killed him.

> What happens at a bat mitzvah, anyway?

At any given time, there are forty times in the world. Another interesting fact: China used to have five time zones, but now it has only one, and for some Chinese people the sun doesn’t rise until after ten. Another: long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there — not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die. On Earth, the sun rises and sets once each day. A spaceship orbits Earth once every ninety minutes, which would require a Shabbat every nine hours. One line of thinking held that Jews simply shouldn’t be in a place that raises doubts about prayer and observance. Another, that one’s earthly obligations are earthbound — what happens in space stays in space. Some argued that a Jewish astronaut should observe the same routine he would on Earth. Others, that Shabbat should be observed by the time set on his instruments, despite the city of Houston being about as Jewish as the Rockets’ locker room. Two Jewish astronauts have died in space. No Jewish astronaut has observed Shabbat.

Sam’s dad gave him an article about Ilan Ramon, the only Israeli ever to go into space. Before leaving, Ramon went to the Holocaust Museum, to find an artifact to take with him. He chose a drawing of Earth by a young, anonymous boy who died in the war.

“Imagine that sweet child scribbling away,” Sam’s dad said. “If an angel had landed on his shoulder and told him, ‘You’re going to be killed before your next birthday, and in sixty years a representative of the Jewish state is going to carry your drawing of Earth as seen from space into space—”

“If there were angels,” Sam said, “he wouldn’t have been killed.”

“If the angels were good angels.”

“Do we believe in bad angels?”

“We probably don’t believe in any angels.”

Sam enjoyed knowledge. The accumulation and distribution of facts gave him a feeling of control, of utility, of the opposite of the powerlessness that comes with having a smallish, underdeveloped body that doesn’t dependably respond to the mental commands of a largish, overstimulated brain.

It was always dusk in Other Life, so once every day the “other time” corresponded to the “real time” of its citizens. Some referred to that moment as “The Harmony.” Some wouldn’t miss it. Some didn’t like to be at their screens when it happened. Sam’s bar mitzvah was still a ways off. Samanta’s bat mitzvah was today. Did the drawing simply immolate when the space shuttle exploded? Are any small pieces of it still orbiting? Did they fall to the water, descend, over hours, to the ocean floor, and veil one of those deep-sea creatures that are so alien they look like they came from outer space?

The pews were filled with everyone Samanta knew, people Sam had never met. They came from Kyoto, Lisbon, Sacramento, Lagos, Toronto, Oklahoma City, and Beirut. Twenty-seven dusks. They were sitting together in the virtual sanctuary of Sam’s creation — they saw the beauty; Sam saw all that was wrong with it, all that was wrong with him. They came for Samanta, a community of her communities. As far as they knew, it was a happy occasion.

> Just take it to someone else. Insist that they open it up.

> Just fucking throw your phone from a bridge.

> Can someone explain to me what’s going to happen here?

> Funnily enough, I’m crossing a bridge right now, but I’m on an Amtrak and you can’t open the windows.

> Send us a picture of the water.

> Today Samanta becomes a woman.

> There’s more than one way to open a window.

> She’s having her period?

> Imagine thousands of phones washed up on the beach.

> Love letters in digital bottles.

> Why imagine? Go to India.

> Today she’s becoming a Jewish woman.

> I’m on an Amtrak, too!

> A Jewish woman how?

> More like hate mail.

> Let’s not figure out if we’re on the same train, OK?

> Israel is the fucking worst.

> Wiki: “When a girl reaches 12 years old she becomes ‘bat mitzvah’—daughter of commandment — and is recognized by Jewish tradition as having the same rights as an adult. She is now morally and ethically responsible for her decisions and actions.”

> Set your camera’s phone on timer and then rest it on the ground, facing up.

> Jewish people are the worst.

> Knock knock.

> Why would you even want to take a picture of stars?

> Who’s there?

> To remember them.

> Not six million Jews!

>?

> Dying laughing.

> Anti-Semite!

> Dying, anyway.

> I’m Jewish!

No one ever asked Sam why he took a Latina as an avatar, because no one, other than Max, knew that he had. The choice might have seemed odd. Some might even have thought it was offensive. They would be wrong. Being Sam was odd and offensive. Having such prolific salivary and sweat glands. Being unable not to think about walking while walking. Backne and buttne. There was no experience more humiliating or existentially dispiriting than shopping for clothes. But how to explain to his mom that he would rather have nothing that properly fit than have it confirmed to him, in a mirrored torture chamber, that nothing ever would fit? Sleeves would never end at the right place. Collars would never not be too pointy, or rise too high, or angle improperly. The buttons of every button-down shirt would always be spaced such that the penultimate one from the top made the neck opening either too constrictive or too revealing. There was a point — literally a single location in space — where a button might be positioned to create the natural feel and effect. But no shirt had ever been made with such button placement, probably because no one’s upper-body proportions were as disproportionate as his.

Because his parents were technological fucktards, Sam knew that they periodically checked his search history, the regular sweeping of which only rubbed his blackheaded nose in the patheticness of being a preteen with a Y chromosome who watched button-sewing tutorials on YouTube. And in those evenings behind his locked bedroom door, when his parents worried that he was researching firearms, or bisexuality, or Islam, he took to moving the penultimate buttons and slits of his loathsome shirts to the only endurable position. Half the things he did were stereotypically gay. In fact, probably a far greater proportion, if you were to remove the activities, such as walking an average-size dog and sleeping, that had no quality of straightness or gayness. He didn’t care. He had not even the smallest issue with gay people, not even aesthetically. But he would have liked to correct the record, because he had the largest of all issues with being misunderstood.

One morning at breakfast, his mom asked if he’d been removing and resewing the buttons on his shirts. He denied it with nonchalant vehemence.

She said, “I think it’s neat.”

And so from then on, the upper half of his daily, all-seasons uniform shifted to American Apparel T-shirts, even though they broadcast the tits mysteriously sprouting from his otherwise collapsed torso.

It felt odd to have hair that never once, despite repeated and generous applications of product, rested properly. It felt odd to walk, and he often found himself slipping into an over- (or under-) stylized catwalk stride, whereby he swung his ass out to each side and pounded his feet into the ground as if trying not only to kill insects but to perpetrate an insect genocide. Why did he walk like that? Because he wanted to walk like nothing, and the extreme effort to do so generated a horrible spectacle of horrible perambulation by someone who was such a human cowlick he actually used the word perambulation. It felt odd to have to sit in chairs, to have to make eye contact, to have to speak with a voice that he knew to be his own but did not recognize, or only recognized as belonging to yet another self-appointed Wikipedia sheriff who would never possess a biographical entry visited, much less edited, by someone who wasn’t him.

He assumed that there were times, other than while masturbating, when he felt at home in his body, but he couldn’t remember them — maybe before he smashed his fingers? Samanta wasn’t his first Other Life avatar, but she was the first whose logarithmic skin fit. He never had to explain the choice to anyone else — Max was wide-eyed or righteous enough not to care — but how did he explain it to himself? He didn’t wish he were a girl. He didn’t wish he were a Latina. Then again, he didn’t not wish he were a Latina girl. Despite the near-constant regret he felt about being himself, he never confused himself for the problem. The problem was the world. It was the world that didn’t fit. But how much happiness has ever resulted from correcting the record on the culpability of the world?

> I was up until 3:00, cruising the Google Street View of my neighborhood, and I saw myself.

> Is there going to be some sort of party after this?

> Does anyone know how to manipulate a PDF? I’m too lazy to figure it out.

> My celebrity memoir title: It Was the Worst of Times, It Was the Worst of Times.

> What kind of PDF?

> We’re going to run out of maple syrup in three years?

> Is this going to be in Hebrew? If so, can someone less lazy than me write a script to stream it through a translator?

> I read that, too.

> Why do I find it so incredibly sad?

> Anyone have a NexTek thumb drive?

> Because you love waffles.

> My celebrity memoir title: “I Did It Your Way.”

> I skipped right over the article about Syrian refugees. I know that shit is horrible, and I know it in theory makes me sad, but I can’t find a way to have an actual emotion about it. But the syrup made me want to hide under my bed.

> They only work for a few weeks.

> So hide and cry your maple tears.

> Samanta, I got you something you’re going to love, if you don’t already have it, which you probably do. Anyway, transferring now.

> I can hear the most beautiful song coming from the earphones of the girl sitting across the aisle from me.

> Today’s most-watched: some kids in Russia with a homemade bungee jump, an alligator biting an electric eel, an old Korean grocer beating the shit out of a burglar, quintuplets laughing, two black girls beating the shit out of each other on a playground …

> What song?

> I want to do something massive, but what?

> Forget it, I figured it out.

> Shit, I didn’t know you’re supposed to bring a gift to a bat mitzvah.

> Transfer is taking forever.

Sam thought about texting Billie, seeing if she might want to join him at a modern dance performance (or show, or whatever they’re called) on Saturday. It sounded cool, as she’d written about it in her diary, which he’d removed from her unattended backpack while she was in gym, concealed behind his far larger, far less interesting chemistry textbook, and perused — a word that means the exact opposite of what most people think it means. He didn’t like texting, because he had to look at his thumb — the finger that got it worst, or healed least well. The one people tried not to notice. Weeks after the other fingers had regained their color and approximate shape, the thumb was black, and askew at the knuckle. The doctor said it wasn’t taking, and would have to be amputated to protect the rest of the hand from infection. He said this in front of Sam. Sam’s dad said, “You’re sure?” His mom insisted they get another opinion. The second opinion was the same, and his dad sighed, and his mom insisted they get another. The third doctor said there was no immediate risk of infection, and kids are almost superhumanly resilient, and “almost always these things just find a way to heal themselves.” His dad didn’t trust the sound of that, but his mom did, and within two weeks, the darkness was receding toward the thumb’s tip. Sam was nearly eight. He doesn’t remember any of the doctors, or even the physical therapy. He barely remembers the accident itself, and sometimes wonders if he’s just remembering his parents’ memories.

Sam doesn’t remember screaming, “Why did that happen?” as loud as he could, not out of terror, or anger, or confusion, but because of the size of the question. There are stories of mothers lifting cars off their trapped children, he remembers that, but he doesn’t remember his mom’s superhuman composure when she met his wild eyes and subdued them, promising, “I love you, and I’m here.” He doesn’t remember being pinned while the doctor reattached the ends of his fingers. He doesn’t remember waking up from his five-hour post-surgery nap to find that his dad had filled his room with the contents of Child’s Play. But he remembers the game they used to play when he was a child: Where is Thumbkin? Where is Thumbkin? Here I am! Here I am! They never played it with Benjy after the injury, not once, and never once acknowledged that they had stopped playing it. His parents were trying to spare Sam, not understanding that the shame suggested by the silence was the one thing he could have been spared.

> Here’s an app that should exist: You point your phone at something and it streams video of what that thing looked like a few seconds before. (Obviously this would depend on pretty much everyone filming and uploading pretty much everything pretty much always, but we’re already pretty much there.) So you would be experiencing the world as it just happened.

> Cool idea. And you could change settings to increase the lag.

>?

> You could see the world of yesterday, or a month ago, or your birthday, or — and this won’t be possible until the future, once enough video has been uploaded — people could move around their childhoods.

> Imagine a dying person, who hasn’t yet been born, one day walking through his childhood home.

> What if it had been torn down?

> And there would be ghosts, too.

> Ghosts how?

> “A dying person who hasn’t yet been born.”

> Is this thing ever gonna start?

Sam was brought back to the other side of the screen by a knocking.

“Go away.”

“Fine.”

“What?” he asked, opening the door for Max.

“Just going away.”

“What’s that?”

“A plate of food.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Toast is food.”

“Why the hell would I want toast?”

“To plug your ears?”

Sam gestured for Max to come into the room.

“They’re talking about me?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Bad things?”

“They definitely aren’t singing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,’ or whatever.”

“Is Dad disappointed?”

“I’d say so.”

Sam went back to his screen, while Max nonchalantly tried to absorb the details of his brother’s room.

“In me?” Sam asked without turning to face his brother.

“What?”

“Disappointed in me?”

“I thought that’s what you meant.”

“He can be such a pussy.”

“Yeah, but Mom can be such a dick.”

Sam laughed. “Absolutely true.” He logged off and spun to face Max. “They’re peeling off the Band-Aid so slowly, new hairs have time to grow and get stuck to it.”

“Huh?”

“I wish they’d just get divorced already.”

“Divorced?” Max asked, his body rerouting blood to the part of the brain that conceals panic.

“Obviously.”

“Really?”

“What are you, ignorant?”

“Is that like stupid?”

“Not-knowing.”

“No.”

“So,” Sam asked, running his finger around the frame of his iPad, around the rectangular tear in the physical world, “who would you choose?”

“For what?”

“Choose. To live with.”

Max didn’t like this.

“Don’t kids just, like, split time, or whatever?”

“Yeah, it would begin like that, but then, you know, it always becomes a choice.”

Max hated this.

“I guess Dad’s more fun,” he said. “And I’d get in trouble a lot less. And probably have more cool stuff and screen time—”

“To enjoy before you die of scurvy, or melanoma from never putting on sunscreen, or just get sent to jail for getting to school late every single day.”

“Do they send you to jail for that?”

“It’s definitely the law that you have to go.”

“I’d also miss Mom.”

“What about her?”

“That she’s her.”

Sam didn’t like this.

“But I’d miss Dad if I went with Mom,” Max said, “so, I guess I don’t know. Who would you choose?”

“For you?”

“For yourself. I’d just want to be where you are.”

Sam hated this.

Max tilted his head up and looked at the ceiling, encouraging the tears to roll back under his eyes. It appeared almost robotic, but his inability to directly face such direct human emotion was what made him human. Or at least his father’s son.

Max put his hands in his pockets — a Jolly Rancher wrapper, a stubby pencil from a mini golf outing, a receipt whose type had vanished — and said, “So I went to a zoo once.”

“You’ve been to the zoo a lot of times.”

“It’s a joke.”

“Ah.”

“So I went to a zoo once, because I’d heard it was like the greatest zoo in the world. And, you know, I wanted to see it for myself.”

“Must have been pretty spectacular.”

“Well, the weird thing is, there was only one animal in the entire zoo.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. And it was a dog.”

“Argus?”

“You just screwed up my timing.”

“Do the last line again.”

“I’ll just start from the beginning.”

“OK.”

“So I went to a zoo once, because I’d heard it was the greatest zoo in the world. But the thing is, there was only one animal in the entire zoo. And it was a dog.”

“Jeez!”

“Yeah, turns out it was a shih tzu. Get it?”

“Really funny,” Sam said, unable to laugh, despite finding it genuinely really funny.

“You get it, though, right? Shih tzu?”

“Yeah.”

“Shih. Tzu.”

“Thanks, Max.”

“Am I being annoying?”

“Not at all.”

“I am.”

“Just the opposite.”

“What’s the opposite of annoying?”

Sam tilted his head up, darted his eyes toward the ceiling, and said, “Thanks for not asking if I did it.”

“Oh,” Max said, rubbing the erased receipt between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s because I don’t care.”

“I know. You’re the only one who doesn’t care.”

“Turns out it was a shit family,” Max said, wondering where he would go after leaving the room.

“That’s not funny.”

“Maybe you don’t get it.”

EPITOME

“Dad?” Benjy said, entering the kitchen yet again, his grandmother in tow. He always said Dad with a question mark, as if asking where his father was.

“Yeah, buddy?”

“When you made dinner last night, my broccoli was touching my chicken.”

“And you were just thinking about that?”

“No. All day.”

“It mixes in your stomach anyway,” Max said from the threshold.

“Where’d you come from?” Jacob asked.

“Mom’s vagina hole,” Benjy said.

“And you’re going to die anyway,” Max continued, “so who cares what touches the chicken, which is dead anyway.”

Benjy turned to Jacob: “Is that true, Dad?”

“Which part?”

“I’m going to die?”

“Why, Max? In what way was this necessary?”

“I’m going to die!”

“Many, many years from now.”

“Does that really make a difference?” Max asked.

“It could be worse,” Irv said. “You could be Argus.”

“Why would it be worse to be Argus?”

“You know, one paw in the oven.”

Benjy let out a plaintive wail, and then, as if carried on a light beam from wherever she’d been, Julia opened the door and rushed in.

“What happened?”

“What are you doing back?” Jacob asked, hating everything about the moment.

“Dad says I’m gonna die.”

“In fact,” Jacob said with a forced laugh, “what I said was, you’re going to live a very, very, very long life.”

Julia brought Benjy onto her lap and said, “Of course you aren’t going to die.”

“Then make that two frozen burritos,” Irv said.

“Hi, darling,” Deborah said to Julia. “It was beginning to feel a bit estrogen-starved in here.”

“Why did I get a boo-boo, Mama?”

“You don’t have a boo-boo,” Jacob said.

“On my knee,” Benjy said, pointing at nothing. “There.”

“You must have fallen,” Julia said.

“Why?”

“There is literally no boo-boo.”

“Because falling is part of life,” Julia said.

“It’s the epitome of life,” Max said.

“Nice vocab, Max.”

“Epitome?” Benjy asked.

“Essence of,” Deborah said.

“Why is falling the epitome of life?”

“It isn’t,” Jacob said.

“The earth is always falling toward the sun,” Max said.

“Why?” Benjy asked.

“Because of gravity,” Max said.

“No,” Benjy said, addressing his question to Jacob. “Why isn’t falling the epitome of life?”

“Why isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure I understand your question.”

“Why?”

“Why am I not sure that I understand your question?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Because this conversation has become confusing, and because I’m just a human with severely limited intelligence.”

“Jacob.”

“I’m dying!”

“You’re overreacting.”

“No I amn’t!”

“No you aren’t.”

“I amn’t.”

“Aren’t, Benjy.”

Deborah: “Kiss it, Jacob.”

Jacob kissed Benjy’s nonexistent boo-boo.

“I can carry our refrigerator,” Benjy said, not quite sure if he was ready to be done with his crying.

“That’s wonderful,” Deborah said.

“Of course you can’t,” Max said.

“Max said of course I can’t.”

“Give the kid a break,” Jacob whispered to Max at conversational volume. “If he says he can lift the fridge, he can lift the fridge.”

“I can carry it far away.”

“I’ve got it from here,” Julia said.

“I can control the microwave with my mind,” Max said.

“No way,” Jacob said to Julia, too casually to be believable. “We’re doing great. We’ve been having a great time. You walked in at a bad moment. Unrepresentative. But everything is cool, and this is your day.”

“Off from what?” Benjy asked his mother.

“What?” Julia asked.

“What do you need a day off from?”

“Who said I needed a day off?”

“Dad just did.”

“I said we were giving you a day off.”

“Off from what?” Benjy asked.

“Exactly,” Irv said.

“Us, obviously,” Max said.

So much sublimation: domestic closeness had become intimate distance, intimate distance had become shame, shame had become resignation, resignation had become fear, fear had become resentment, resentment had become self-protection. Julia often thought that if they could just trace the string back to the source of their withholding, they might actually find their openness. Was it Sam’s injury? The never-asked question of how it happened? She’d always assumed they were protecting each other with that silence, but what if they were trying to injure, to transfer the wound from Sam to themselves? Or was it older? Did the withholding from each other predate meeting each other? Believing that would change everything.

The resentment that was fear, that was resignation, that was shame, that was distance, that was closeness, was too heavy to carry all day, every day. So where to put it down? On the kids, of course. Jacob and Julia were both guilty, but Jacob was guiltier. He’d become increasingly snippy with them, because he knew they would take it. He pushed, because they wouldn’t push back. He was afraid of Julia, but he wasn’t afraid of them, so he gave them what was hers.

“Enough!” he said to Max, his voice rising to a growl. “Enough.”

“Enough yourself,” Max said.

Jacob and Julia met eyes, registering that first act of talking back.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

Jacob let it rip: “I’m not discussing things with you, Max. I’m tired of discussion. We discuss too much in this family.”

“Who’s discussing?” Max asked.

Deborah went to her son and said, “Take a breath, Jacob.”

“I take too many breaths.”

“Let’s go upstairs for a second,” Julia said.

“No. That’s what we do with them. Not what you do with me.” Then, turning back to Max: “Sometimes, in life, in a family, you have to just do the right thing without endlessly parsing and negotiating. You get with the program.”

“Yeah, get with the pogrom,” Irv said, imitating his son.

“Dad, just stop. OK?”

“I can lift the whole kitchen,” Benjy said, touching his father’s arm.

“Kitchens aren’t liftable,” Jacob said.

“They are.”

“No, Benjy. They are not.”

“You’re so strong,” Julia said, her fingers wrapped around each of Benjy’s wrists.

“Immolated,” Benjy said. And then, in a whisper: “I can lift our kitchen.”

Max looked to his mother. She closed her eyes, unwilling or unable to protect him as she did his little brother.

* * *

A godsent dogfight on the street brought everyone to the window. It wasn’t actually a fight, just two dogs barking at a smug squirrel on a branch. Still, godsent. By the time the family reassumed positions in the kitchen, the previous ten minutes felt ten years old.

Julia excused herself and went up to the shower. She never showered in the middle of the day, and was surprised by the force of the hand that guided her there. She could hear sound effects coming from Sam’s room — he was obviously ignoring the first commandment of his exile — but she didn’t stop.

She closed and locked the door of the bathroom, put down her bag, undressed, and examined herself in the mirror. Reaching her arm to the sky, she could follow a vein as it traversed the underside of her right breast. Her chest had sunk, her belly had protruded. These things had happened in tiny, imperceptible increments. The wisps of pubic hair reaching to her belly had darkened — the skin itself seemed to have. None of it was news, but process. She had observed, and felt, the unwanted renovation of her body, at least since Sam was born: the expansion and ultimate shrinking of her breasts, the settling and pockmarking of her thighs, the relaxing of all that was firm. Jacob had told her, on their second visit to the inn, and on other occasions, that he loved her body exactly as it was. But despite believing him, some nights she felt a need to apologize to him.

And then she remembered it. Of course she did: it was put there for her to remember at this moment. She didn’t know it at the time. She didn’t know why she, who had never stolen anything in her life, was stealing. This was why.

She raised one foot onto the sink and held the doorknob to her mouth, warming and wetting it with her breathing. She parted the lips of her pussy and pressed it there, gentle at first, then less so, starting to spin the knob. She felt the first wave of something good go through her, and her legs weakened. She squatted, pulled down the neck of her shirt, and exposed one breast. Then she re-wet the knob with her tongue and found its place between her lips again, pressing tiny circles against her clit, then just tapping it there, liking how the warm metal began to stick to her skin, to pull at it a little each time.

She was on her hands and knees. No. She was standing. Where was she? Outside. Yes. Leaning against her car. In a parking lot. In a field. No, bent, the top half of her body across the car’s backseat, her feet on the earth. Her pants and underwear were pulled down only far enough to expose her ass. She pressed her face into the seat and pushed her ass out. She spread her legs as wide as the pants would allow. She wanted them held together. She wanted it to be difficult. They could be discovered at any moment. You have to be fast, she told him. Him? Just fuck me hard. It was Jacob. Just make me come. Just fuck me how you want, Jacob, and walk away. Just leave me here with your cum dripping down my thighs. Fuck me and go. No. It shifted. Now she was in the bespoke hardware showroom. No men. Only doorknobs. She ground the knob into her clit, licked three fingers, and slid them inside to feel the contractions as she came.

She felt a sudden thud, like the violent landing that would sometimes jerk her from near-sleep. But it wasn’t that — she wasn’t crashing onto the floor; something was crashing onto her. What the hell was going on? Had too much blood rushed to her waist too quickly, causing some kind of neurological event? Masturbation was about mental exertion, but she was suddenly at the mercy of her mind.

Through the ceiling of her pine coffin she could see Sam standing above her, so handsome in his suit, a shovel in hand. She didn’t choose this. It didn’t bring her pleasure. What a beautiful boy. What a beautiful man. It’s OK, love. OK, OK, OK. She moaned, and he wailed, both of them animals. He scooped another shovelful of dirt and tipped it onto her. So this is what it’s like. Now I know, and nothing will be different.

And then Sam left.

And Jacob and Max and Benjy left.

All her men left.

And then more dirt, this time from the shovels of strangers, four at a time.

And then they left.

And she was alone, in the tiniest house of her life.

She was brought back to the world, back to life, by a buzzing — it shook her free from her unchosen fantasy, and she was hit by the full absurdity of what she was doing. Who did she think she was? Her in-laws downstairs, her son down the hall, her IRA bigger than her savings account. She didn’t feel ashamed; she felt stupid.

Another buzz.

She couldn’t place its source.

It was a phone, but not a buzz she’d ever heard before.

Did Jacob get Sam a smartphone to replace the hand-me-down flip phone on which he’d been texting at Joseph Mitchell speed for the last year? They’d discussed the possibility of doing so for his bar mitzvah, but that was still weeks off, and before Sam had gotten into trouble, and anyway, they’d rejected the idea. Too much already pulling everyone too far into the noisy elsewhere. The experiment with Other Life had all but kidnapped Sam’s consciousness.

She heard the buzz.

She searched the wicker basket full of toiletry odds and ends, the medicine cabinet: small and huge bottles of Advil, nail polish remover, organic tampons, Aquaphor, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, Benadryl, Neosporin, Polysporin, children’s ibuprofen, Sudafed, Purell, Imodium, Colace, amoxicillin, aspirin, triamcinolone acetonide cream, lidocaine cream, Dermoplast spray, Debrox drops, saline solution, Bactroban cream, floss, vitamin E lotion … all the things bodies might have a need for. When did bodies develop so many needs? For so many years she needed nothing.

She heard the buzz.

Where was it? She might have been able to convince herself that it was coming from the neighbors’, on the other side of the wall, or even that she’d imagined it, but it buzzed again, and this time she could place the sound in the corner, by the floor.

She got on her hands and knees. In the basket of magazines? Behind the toilet? She reached her hand around the bowl, and no sooner had she touched it than it buzzed again, as if touching her back. Whose phone was this? One final buzz: a missed call from JULIA.

Julia?

But she was Julia.

what happened to you?

T-H-I-S-2-S-H-A-L–L-N-’-T-P-A-S-S

Sam knew that everything would collapse, he just didn’t know exactly how or when. His parents were going to get divorced and ultimately hate each other and spread destruction like that Japanese reactor. That much was clear, if not to them. He tried not to notice their lives, but it was impossible to ignore how often his dad fell asleep in front of the absence of news, how often his mom retreated into pruning the trees of her architectural models, how his dad started serving dessert every night, how his mom told Argus she “needed space” whenever he licked her, how devoted his mom had become to the Travel section, how his dad’s search history was all real estate sites, how his mom would put Benjy on her lap whenever his dad was in the room, the violence with which his dad began to hate spoiled athletes who don’t even try, how his mom gave three thousand dollars to the fall NPR drive, how his dad bought a Vespa in retaliation, the end of appetizers in restaurants, the end of the third bedtime story for Benjy, the end of eye contact.

He saw what they either couldn’t see or couldn’t allow themselves to see, and that only made him more pissed, because being less stupid than one’s parents is repulsive, like taking a gulp from a glass of milk that you thought was orange juice. Because he was less stupid than his parents, he knew it would one day be suggested to him that he wouldn’t have to choose, even though he would. He knew he would begin to lose the desire or ability to fake it in school, and his grades would roll down an inclined plane according to some formula he was supposed to be proficient with, and the expressions of his parents’ love would inflate in response to their sadness about his sadness, and he would be rewarded for falling apart. His parents’ guilt about asking so much of him would get him off the hook for organized sports, and he’d be able to favorably renegotiate his screen time, and dinners would start to look a lot less organic, and soon enough he’d be steering toward the iceberg while his parents played dueling violins at each other.

He loved interesting facts, but was almost always troubled by his strange recurrent thoughts. Like this one: What if he witnessed a miracle? How would he convince anyone that he wasn’t joking? If a newborn told him a secret? If a tree walked away? If he met his older self and learned about all the avoidable catastrophic mistakes he would be unable to avoid? He imagined his conversations with his mom, with his dad, with fake friends at school, with real friends in Other Life. Most of them would just laugh. Maybe one or two could be nudged to a gesture of belief. Max would at least want to believe him. Benjy would believe him, but only because he believed everything. Billie? No. Sam would be alone with a miracle.

There was a knock on his door. Not the sanctuary door, but his bedroom door.

“Scram, fucker.”

“Excuse me?” his mom said, opening and entering.

“Sorry,” Sam said, flipping the iPad facedown on his desk. “I thought you were Max.”

“And you think that’s a good way to talk to your brother?”

“No.”

“Or to anybody?”

“No.”

“So why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe take a moment to question yourself.”

He didn’t know if the suggestion was rhetorical, but he knew this wasn’t the time to take her anything less than literally.

After a moment of questioning himself, the best he could muster was “I guess I’m someone who says things he knows he shouldn’t say.”

“I guess so.”

“But I’ll get better at that.”

She scanned the room. God, did he hate her little stolen surveys: of his homework, his belongings, his appearance. Her constant judgment carved through him like a river, creating two shores.

“What have you been doing up here?”

“Not e-mailing, or texting, or playing Other Life.”

“OK, but what have you been doing?”

“I don’t really know.”

“I’m not sure how that could be possible.”

“Isn’t this your day off?”

“No, it’s not my day off. It’s my day to get some things done that I’ve been putting off. Like breathing and thinking. But then we had to make an unscheduled visit to Adas Israel this morning, as you might remember, and then I had to meet with a client—”

“Why did you have to?”

“Because it’s my job.”

“But why today?”

“I felt that I had to, OK?”

“OK.”

“And then in the car it occurred to me that even though you have almost certainly thwarted it, we should probably continue to act as if your bar mitzvah is going to happen. And among the many, many things that only I would remember to remember is your suit.”

“What suit?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s true. I don’t have a suit.”

“Obvious once stated, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I continually find it amazing how many things are like that.”

“Sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, we need to get you a suit.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“The first three places we go aren’t going to have what we need, and should we find something passable, it’s not going to fit, and the tailor is going to get it wrong twice.”

“Do I have to be there?”

“Where?”

“The suit place.”

“No, no, of course you don’t have to be there. Let’s make things easy and build our own 3-D printer out of popsicle sticks and macaroni, and render a perfectly accurate anatomical model of you that I can schlep to the suit place alone on my day off.”

“Could we teach it my haftorah?”

“I’m not laughing at your jokes right now.”

“That didn’t require saying.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t have to say you aren’t laughing for someone to know you aren’t laughing.”

“That didn’t require saying, either, Sam.”

“Fine. Sorry.”

“We’re going to have to talk when Dad comes home from his meeting, but I need to say something. It is required.”

“Fine.”

“Stop saying ‘fine.’”

“Sorry.”

“Stop saying ‘sorry.’”

“I thought the whole point was that I was supposed to be apologizing?”

“For what you did.”

“But I didn’t—”

“I’m very disappointed in you.”

“I know.”

“That’s it? You don’t have anything else to say? Like maybe, ‘I did it and I’m sorry’?”

“I didn’t do it.”

She put her hands on her waist, forefingers through belt loops.

“Clean up this mess. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s my room.”

“But it’s our house.”

“I can’t move that board. We’re only halfway done with the game. Dad said we could finish after I’m not in trouble anymore.”

“You know why you always beat him?”

“Because he lets me win.”

“He hasn’t let you win in years.”

“He goes easy.”

“He doesn’t. You beat him because it excites him to capture pieces, but you’re always thinking four moves ahead. It makes you good at chess, and it makes you good at life.”

“I’m not good at life.”

“You are when you’re thoughtful.”

“Is Dad bad at life?”

“That’s not the conversation we’re having right now.”

“If he focused, he could beat me.”

“That might very well be true, but we’ll never know.”

“What conversation are we having?”

She took the phone from her pocket. “What is this?”

“That’s a cellular telephone.”

“Is it yours?”

“I’m not allowed to have a smartphone.”

“Which is why it would upset me if it were yours.”

“So you don’t need to be upset.”

“Whose is it?”

“No idea.”

“Phones aren’t like dinosaur bones. They don’t just show up.”

“Dinosaur bones aren’t like that, either.”

“If I were you, I’d tone down the intelligence.” She turned the phone over. And over. “How do I look through it?”

“I assume it has a password.”

“It does.”

“So you’re out of luck.”

“I might as well try this2shallpass, right?”

“I guess.”

Every adult member of the Bloch family used that ridiculous password for everything — from Amazon to Netflix to home alarm systems to phones.

“Nope,” she said, showing Sam the screen.

“Worth a shot.”

“Should I take it to the store, or something?”

“They don’t even open the phones of terrorists.”

“Maybe I’ll try the same password, but with caps.”

“You could.”

“How do you capitalize a letter?”

Sam took the phone. He typed like rain hitting a skylight, but Julia saw only the disfigured thumb, and in slow motion.

“Nope,” he said.

“Try spelling it out.”

“What?”

“T-o-o.”

“That would be pretty stupid.”

“It would be brilliant compared with using the same password that’s used for everything.”

“T-h-i-s-t-o-o-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s … Nope. Sorry. I mean, I’m not sorry.”

“Try spelling it out and capitalizing the first letter.”

“Huh?”

“Capital T, and t-w-o for the numeral.”

This he typed more slowly, carefully. “Hm.”

“It’s open?”

She reached to take the phone, but he held it for just a fraction of a second, enough to create an awkward stutter. Sam looked at his mother. Her enormous, ancient thumb pushed words up the tiny glass mountain. She looked at Sam.

“What?” he asked.

“What what?”

“Why are you looking at me?”

“Why am I looking at you?”

“Like that?”

Jacob couldn’t fall asleep without a podcast. He said the information soothed him, but Julia knew it was the company. She was usually asleep by the time he came to bed — unacknowledged choreography — but every now and then she’d find herself listening alone. One night, her husband snoring beside her, she heard a sleep scientist explain lucid dreaming — a dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. The most common technique for bringing on a lucid dream is to get in the habit, in waking life, of looking at texts — a page of a book or magazine, a billboard, a screen — and then looking away, and looking back. In dreams, texts don’t remain constant. If you exercise the habit, it becomes a reflex. And if you exercise the reflex, it slips into dreams. The discontinuity of the text will indicate that you’re dreaming, at which point you will not only be aware, but also in control.

She looked away from the phone, and looked back.

“I know you don’t play Other Life. What is it you do?”

“Huh?”

“What’s the word for what you do?”

“Live?” he said, trying to understand the change that was coming over his mother’s face.

“I mean in Other Life.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You live Other Life?”

“I don’t usually have to describe what I’m doing there, but sure.”

“You can live Other Life.”

“Right.”

“No, I mean you are allowed to.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I was grounded.”

“You are,” she said, putting the phone in her pocket. “But you can live that now, if you want.”

“We can go get the suit.”

“Another day. There’s time.”

Sam looked away from his mother, and looked back.

* * *

He’d checked all the devices. He wasn’t angry, he just wanted to say what needed to be said, and then flatten the synagogue to rubble. It didn’t fit, wasn’t home. He’d wired everything double-redundantly, and placed three times as many explosives as were necessary: under each pew, out of sight atop the bookshelf that held the siddurim, buried beneath the hundreds of yarmulkes in their waist-high, octagonal wooden container.

Samanta removed the Torah from the ark. She chanted some memorized nonsense, undressed the Torah, and spread it out in front of her on the bimah. All of those beautiful pitch-black letters. All of those beautiful minimalist sentences, combining to tell all of those beautiful, endlessly echoing stories that should have been lost to history and still might be. The detonator was inside the Torah pointer. Samanta grasped it, found her place on the scroll, and started to chant.

> Bar’chu et Adonai Ham’vorach.

> Say what?

> I took my little brother to the zoo and these rhinos started fucking and it was insane. He just stood there looking. He didn’t even know it was funny, which was the funniest part.

> Pay attention!

> It’s funny when someone doesn’t know it’s funny.

> How can I miss someone I never met?

> Baruch Adonai Ham’vorach l’olam va’ed.

> I will always, always, always take dishonesty over faux honesty.

> App: Everything you say will one day be used against you.

> Baruch Atah, Adonai …

> Got it: We praise You …

> I’ve been having this weird thing where I can’t remember what people I know look like. Or I convince myself I can’t. I’ll find myself trying to imagine my brother’s face, and can’t. It’s not that I couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, or that I wouldn’t recognize him. But when I try to think of him, I can’t.

> Eloheynu melech ha’olam …

> Download a program called VeryPDF. It’s pretty straightforward.

> Eternal God, King of the Universe …

> Sorry, I was just eating dinner. I’m in Kyoto. The stars have been out for hours.

> Did anyone see the video of that Jewish reporter getting decapitated?

> asher bachar banu mikol ha’amim …

> VeryPDF has a million bugs.

> You have called us to Your service …

> My iPhone is making me seasick.

> v’natan lanu et Torato …

> You need to lock rotation. Double click on the Home button to bring up the multitasking bar. Swipe right until you get to something that looks like a circular arrow — it enables and disables rotation lock.

> Could you go blind from staring at a movie of the sun?

> Does anybody know anything about this new telescope that the Chinese are talking about building? It’s supposed to see twice as far back in time as any telescope has before.

> Baruch Atah, Adonai …

> I know I sound like I’m high, but shouldn’t we acknowledge the weirdness of what you just said? It can see twice as far back in time?

> I could fit every word I’ve ever written in my life onto a thumb drive.

> Which means?

> We praise You …

> Imagine if they put a massive mirror in space, really far away from us. Couldn’t we, by aiming a telescope at it, see ourselves in the past?

> Meaning?

> The farther away it was, the deeper into our past we could see: our births, our parents’ first kiss, cavemen.

> The dinosaurs.

> My parents never kissed, and fucked exactly once.

> Life crawling out of the ocean.

> notein haTorah.

> And if it were lined up straight, you could look at yourself not being there.

> Giver of the Torah.

Samanta looked up.

What on earth would it take for a fundamentally good human being to be seen? Not noticed, but seen. Not appreciated, not cherished, not even loved. But fully seen.

She looked out upon the congregation of avatars. They were trustworthy, generous, fundamentally nice unreal people. The most fundamentally nice people she would ever meet were people she would never meet.

She looked simultaneously at and through the stained-glass Jewish Present.

Sam had overheard every word from the other side of Rabbi Singer’s door. He knew that his father believed him, and that his mother didn’t. He knew that his mother was trying to do what she thought was best, and that his father was trying to do what he thought was best. But best for whom?

He’d found the phone a full day before his mother had.

Many apologies were due, but he didn’t owe any apology to anyone.

With no throat to clear, Samanta began to speak, to say what needed to be said.

EPITOME

The older one gets, the harder it is to account for time. Children ask: “Are we there yet?” Adults: “How did we get here so quickly?”

Somehow, it was late. Somehow, the hours had gone somewhere. Irv and Deborah had gone home. The boys had eaten an early dinner, taken an early bath. Jacob and Julia had managed to collaborate in avoidance: You walk Argus, while I help Max with his math, while you fold laundry, while I search for the Lego piece on which everything depends, while you pretend to know how to fix a running toilet, and somehow, the day that began as Julia’s to have to herself ended with Jacob ostensibly out at drinks with someone-or-other from HBO and Julia definitively cleaning up the day’s mess. So much mess made by so few people in such little time. She was doing the dishes when Jacob entered the kitchen.

“That went later than I thought,” he said preemptively. And to further compact his guilt: “Very boring.”

“You must be drunk.”

“No.”

“How do you have drinks for four hours without getting drunk?”

“Just a drink,” he said, draping his jacket over the counter stool, “not drinks. And only three-and-a-half.”

“That’s some awfully slow sipping.” Her tone was pointed, but it could have been sharpened by a number of things: her lost day off, the stress from the morning, the bar mitzvah.

She wiped her brow with the first part of her forearm that wasn’t soapy, and said, “We were supposed to talk to Sam.”

Good, Jacob thought. Of the conflicts available, this was the least terrifying. He could apologize, make it right, get back to happiness.

“I know,” he said, tasting the alcohol on his teeth.

“You say ‘I know,’ and yet it’s night and we’re not talking to him.”

“I just walked in. I was going to have a glass of water and then go talk to him.”

“And the plan was to talk to him together.”

“Well, I can spare you from having to be bad cop.”

“Spare him from having a bad cop, you mean.”

“I’ll be both cops.”

“No, you’ll be a paramedic.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You’ll apologize for having to correct him in any way, and the two of you will end up laughing, and I’ll be left as the annoying, nitpicking mother again. You get your seven-minute wink, and I get a month of resentment.”

“None of what you just said is true.”

“Right.”

She scrubbed at the charred residue on a burnt pan.

“Max is asleep?” he asked, aiming his lips at hers and his eyes to the side.

“It’s ten thirty.”

“Sam’s in his room?”

“One drink for four hours?”

“Three and a half. Someone else showed up halfway through, and it just—”

“Yes, Sam is up in his emotional bomb shelter.”

“Playing Other Life?”

“Living it.”

They’d grown so afraid of not having the kids to fill the void. Sometimes Julia wondered if she let them stay up only to protect herself against the quiet, if she called Benjy onto her lap to be a human shield.

“How was Max’s night?”

“He’s depressed.”

“Depressed? No he’s not.”

“You’re right. He must just have mono.”

“He’s only eleven.”

“He’s only ten.”

“Depressed is a strong word.”

“It does a good job of describing a strong experience.”

“And Benjy?” Jacob asked while looking through a drawer.

“Missing something?”

“What?”

“You’re searching around.”

“I’ll go give Benjy a kiss.”

“You’ll wake him up.”

“I’ll be a ninja.”

“It took him an hour to fall asleep.”

“Literally an hour? Or it felt like an hour?”

“Literally sixty minutes thinking about death.”

“He’s an amazing kid.”

“Because he’s obsessed with dying?”

“Because he’s sensitive.”

Jacob looked through the mail while Julia filled the washer: Restoration Hardware’s monthly Yellow Pages of gray furniture, the ACLU’s weekly infringement of privacy, a never-to-be-opened financial appeal from Georgetown Day, a flyer from some broker with orthodontics broadcasting how much he just sold the neighbor’s house for, various paper confirmations of paperless utilities payments, a catalog from a children’s clothing manufacturer whose marketing algorithm wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that toddlerhood is a temporary state.

Julia held up the phone.

Jacob held up his body, although everything inside fell — like one of those bottom-weighted inflatable clowns that keep coming back for more punches.

“Do you know whose this is?”

“It’s mine,” he said, taking it. “I got a new one.”

“When?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“Why?”

“Because … people get new phones.”

She put too much soap in the machine and closed it too firmly.

“There’s a password on it.”

“Yeah.”

“Your old phone didn’t have a password.”

“Yes it did.”

“No it didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because why wouldn’t I?”

“I guess so.”

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

Jacob was busted for plagiarism in college. This was before computer programs that could search for it, so getting caught required flamboyant stealing, which his was. But he wasn’t caught; he accidentally confessed. He’d been called into his “American Epic” professor’s office, asked to take a seat, made to ferment in the halitosis while waiting for the professor to finish reading the last three pages of a book and then clumsily shuffle through papers on his desk in search of Jacob’s work.

“Mr. Bloch.”

Was that a statement? A confirmation that he had the right guy?

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bloch”—shaking the pages like a lulav—“where do these ideas come from?”

But before the professor was given a chance to say, “Because they’re sophisticated far beyond your years,” Jacob said, “Harold Bloom.”

Despite his failing grade, and despite the academic probation, he was grateful to have made the blunder — not because honesty was so important to him in this case, but because there was nothing he hated more than exposed guilt. It made a terrified child out of him, and he would do anything to relieve it.

“New phones ask for a password,” Jacob said. “I think they require one.”

“That’s a funny way of saying no.”

“What was the question?”

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

“There’s always a lot of things I want to tell you.”

“I said need.”

Argus moaned.

“I don’t understand this conversation,” Jacob said. “And what the hell is that smell?”

So many days in their shared life. So many experiences. How had they managed to spend the previous sixteen years unlearning each other? How had all the presence summed to disappearance?

And now, their first baby on the brink of manhood, and their last asking questions about death, they found themselves in the kitchen with things finally worth not talking about.

Julia noticed a small stain on her shirt and starting rubbing at it, despite knowing it was old and permanent.

“I’m guessing you didn’t bring home the dry cleaning.”

The only thing she hated more than feeling like she was feeling was sounding like she was sounding. As Irv had told her Golda Meir had told Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our children, but we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.” She hated the person Jacob forced her to sound like: pissy and aggrieved, unfun, the nagging wife she would have killed herself to avoid becoming.

“I have a bad memory,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I have a bad memory, too, but I don’t forget things.”

“I’m sorry, OK?”

“That would be easier to accept without the OK.”

“You act as if I only ever make mistakes.”

“Help me out,” she said. “What, in this house, do you do well?”

“You’re serious?”

Argus let out a long moan.

Jacob turned to him and gave a bit of what he wasn’t capable of giving to Julia: “Chill the fuck out!” And then, not appreciating the joke he was making at his own expense: “I never raise my voice.”

She appreciated it: “Isn’t that right, Argus?”

“Not at you or the kids.”

“Not raising your voice — or not beating me or molesting the children, for that matter — doesn’t qualify as something you do well. It qualifies as basic decency. And anyway, you don’t raise your voice, because you’re repressed.”

“No I’m not.”

“If you don’t say so.”

“Even if that’s why I don’t raise my voice, and I don’t think it is, it’s still a good thing. A lot of men scream.”

“I’m jealous of their wives.”

“You want me to be an asshole?”

“I want you to be a person.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Are you sure there isn’t something you need to tell me?”

“I don’t understand why you keep asking me that.”

“I’ll rephrase the question: What’s the password?”

“To what?”

“To the phone you’re clenching.”

“It’s my new phone. What’s the big deal?”

“I’m your wife. I’m the big deal.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I don’t have to.”

“What do you want, Julia?”

“Your password.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know what it is you can’t tell me.”

“Julia.”

“Once again, you have correctly identified me.”

Jacob had spent more waking hours in his kitchen than in any other room. No baby knows when the nipple is pulled from his mouth for the last time. No child knows when he last calls his mother “Mama.” No small boy knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story that will ever be read to him. No boy knows when the water drains from the last bath he will ever take with his brother. No young man knows, as he first feels his greatest pleasure, that he will never again not be sexual. No brinking woman knows, as she sleeps, that it will be four decades before she will again awake infertile. No mother knows she is hearing the word Mama for the last time. No father knows when the book has closed on the last bedtime story he will ever read: From that day on, and for many years to come, peace reigned on the island of Ithaca, and the gods looked favorably upon Odysseus, his wife, and his son. Jacob knew that whatever happened, he would see the kitchen again. And yet his eyes became sponges for the details — the burnished handle of the snack drawer; the seam where the slabs of soapstone met; the Special Award for Bravery sticker on the underside of the island’s overhang, given to Max for what no one knew was his last pulled tooth, a sticker Argus saw many times every day, and only Argus ever saw — because Jacob knew he would one day wring them out for the last drops of these last moments; they would come as tears.

“Fine,” Jacob said.

“Fine what?”

“Fine, I’ll tell you the password.”

He put the phone on the counter with a righteous force that might, just might, have jarred loose the workings, and said, “But know that this lack of trust will always be between us.”

“I can live with that.”

He looked at the phone.

“I’m just trying to remember what the password even is. I lost it right after I got it. I don’t even think I’ve used it yet.”

He picked up the phone and stared at it.

“Maybe the password the Blochs use for everything?” she suggested.

“Right,” he said. “That’s definitely what I would have used: t-h-i-s-2-s-h-a-l-l-p-a-s-s. And … nope.”

“Hm. I guess not.”

“I can probably have the store unlock it.”

“Maybe, and this is just a stab in the dark, you could capitalize the first letter, and type t-w-o instead of the numeral?”

“I wouldn’t do it like that,” he said.

“No?”

“No. We always do it the same way.”

“Give it a try.”

He wanted to escape this childish terror, but he wanted to be a child.

“But I wouldn’t do it like that.”

“Who really knows what one would do? Just try it.”

He examined the phone, and his fingers around it, and the house around them, and with an unmediated impulse — as reflexive as the kicked leg of a hammered knee — he hurled it through the window, shattering the glass.

“I thought it was open.”

And then a silence that struck bedrock.

Julia said, “You think I don’t know how to get to our lawn?”

“I—”

“And why wouldn’t you just create a sophisticated password? One Sam wouldn’t be able to guess?”

“Sam looked at the phone?”

“No. But only because you’re incredibly lucky.”

“You’re sure?”

“How could you have written those things?”

“What things?”

“It’s way too late in this conversation for that.”

Jacob knew it was too late, and absorbed the gouges in the cutting board, the succulents between the sink and window, the kids’ drawings blue-taped to the backsplash.

“They didn’t mean anything,” he said.

“I feel sorry for someone who is capable of saying so much and meaning nothing.”

“Julia, give me a chance to explain.”

“Why can’t you mean nothing to me?”

“What?”

“You tell someone who isn’t the mother of your children that you want to lick your cum out of her asshole, and the only person who makes me feel beautiful is the fucking Korean florist at the back of the deli, who isn’t even a florist.”

“I’m disgusting.”

“Don’t you dare do that.”

“Julia, this might be hard to believe, but they were only texts. That’s all that ever happened.”

“First of all, that’s easy to believe. No one knows better than I do that you’re incapable of an actually brave transgression. I know that you’re too big a pussy to actually lick anyone’s asshole, cum-filled or not.”

“Julia.”

“But more important, how much needs to happen? You think you can go around saying and writing whatever you want without consequence? Maybe your father can. Maybe your mother is weak enough to tolerate that kind of piggishness. But I’m not. There’s decency and indecency, and they’re different. Good and bad are different. Do you not know this?”

“Of course I—”

“No, of course you don’t. You wrote to a woman who isn’t your wife that her tight pussy doesn’t deserve you?”

“That’s not really what I wrote. And it was in the context of—”

“And you’re not really a good person, and there is no context that could make such a thing OK to say.”

“It was a moment of weakness, Julia.”

“Are you forgetting that you never deleted any of them? That there is a history to refer to? It wasn’t a moment of weakness, it was a person of weakness. And will you please stop saying my name.”

“It’s over.”

“Do you want to know the worst part? I don’t even care. The saddest thing about this has been confronting my own lack of sadness.”

Jacob didn’t believe that, but neither could he believe that she would say it. The pretense of a loving relationship had made the absence of a loving relationship bearable. But now she was letting go of appearances.

“Listen, I think—”

“Lick the cum out of her asshole?” She laughed. “You? You’re a coward and a germ freak. You just wanted to write it. Which is fine. Which is even great. But acknowledge the make-believe. You want to want some kind of sexually supercharged life, but you actually want the gate-checked stroller, and the Aquaphor, and even your desiccated, blowjobless existence, because it spares you worrying about erections. Jesus, Jacob, you carry a packet of wipes so you’ll never have to use toilet paper. That’s not the behavior of a man who wants to lick cum from anyone’s asshole.”

“Julia, stop.”

“And by the way, even if you found yourself in that situation, with an actual woman’s actual asshole filled with your actual cum and beckoning your tongue? You know what you’d do? You’d get your ridiculous hand tremors, sweat through your shirt, lose the one-quarter, Jell-O mold erection you would have been lucky to achieve in the first place, and probably shuffle off to the bathroom to check the Huffington Post for puerile, unfunny videos or relisten to the Radiolab in praise of tortoises. That’s what would happen. And she’d know you were the joke that you are.”

“I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t sweat through my shirt, because I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt.”

“That’s a fucking mean thing to say.”

“Stop pushing me.”

“You’re serious? You can’t be. You cannot be serious.” She turned on the sink faucet, for no obvious reason. “And you think you’re the only one who wants to act recklessly?”

“You want to have an affair?”

“I want to let things fall apart.”

“I’m not having an affair, and I’m not letting things fall apart.”

“I saw Mark today. He and Jennifer are getting divorced.”

“Great. Or terrible. What am I supposed to say?”

“And Mark was flirting with me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’ve protected you so much. Cared for your pathetic, baby-bird insecurity. Spared you innocent things that you would have had no right to be upset by, but would be crushed by. And you think I’ve never had fantasies? You think every time I masturbate I’m imagining you? Do you?”

“This isn’t going anywhere.”

“Did some part of me want to fuck Mark today? Yes. In fact, every part below the brain. But I didn’t, because I wouldn’t, because I’m not like you—”

“I didn’t fuck anybody, Julia.”

“—but I wanted to.”

Jacob raised his voice for the second time in the conversation: “Goddamn it, what’s that smell?”

“Your dog took another shit in the house.”

“My dog?”

“Yes, the dog that you brought home, despite our explicit agreement not to get a dog.”

“The kids wanted it.”

“The kids want their arms connected to IV drip bags filled with melted Chunky Monkey and their brains in vats of Steve Jobs’s cum. Good parenting has nothing to do with satisfying your children’s wants.”

“They were sad about something.”

“Everybody is sad about something. Stop blaming the kids, Jacob. You needed to be a hero, and you needed to make me a villain—”

“That’s not fair.”

“Not even close to fair. You brought home a dog that we agreed it would be a mistake to get, and you were the superhero and I was the supervillain, and now there’s a stale shit-bâtard on our living room floor.”

“And it didn’t occur to you to clean it up?”

“No. Just like it didn’t occur to you to house-train it—”

“Him. House-train him. And the poor guy can’t help it. He’s—”

“Or walk it, or take it to the vet, or wash its bed, or remember its heartworm pills, or check it for ticks, or buy it food, or feed it. I pick up his shit every single day. Twice a day. Or more. Jesus, Jacob, I hate dogs, and hate this dog, and didn’t and don’t want this dog, but if it weren’t for me, this dog would have been dead years ago.”

“He understands you when you say that.”

“And yet you don’t. Your dog—”

“Our dog.”

“—is smarter than my husband.”

And then he screamed. It was the first time he’d ever raised his voice at her. It was a scream that had been building in him for sixteen years of marriage, and four decades of life, and five millennia of history — a scream that was directed at her, but also at everyone living and dead, but primarily at himself. For years he’d always been elsewhere, always underground behind a twelve-inch door, always taking refuge in an interior monologue to which no one — including himself — had access, or in dialogue trapped in a locked drawer. But this was him.

He took four steps toward her, bringing the lenses of his glasses as close to her eyes as to his own, and screamed: “You are my enemy!”

A few minutes before, she’d told Jacob that the saddest thing had been confronting her own lack of sadness. It was true then, but it wasn’t true anymore. Through the prism of tears, she saw her kitchen: the cracked rubber gasket of the faucet, the casement windows that still looked good but whose frames would crumble if gripped. She saw her dining room and living room: they still looked good, but were two layers of paint over a layer of primer over a decade and a half of slow decay. Her husband: not her partner.

Sam came home from third grade one day and excitedly told Julia, “If Earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the apple’s skin.”

“What?”

“If Earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere would be thinner than the apple’s skin.”

“I might not be smart enough to understand why that’s interesting. Can you explain?”

“Look up,” he said. “Does it seem thin to you?”

“The ceiling?”

“If we were outside.”

The shell was so thin, but she had always felt safe.

They got a dartboard at a yard sale, dozens of Sundays before, and hung it on the door at the end of the hall. The boys missed the board as often as they hit it, and each dart pulled from the door held the door’s previous color on its tip. Julia took the board down after Max came into the living room, blood dripping from his shoulder, saying, “It was nobody’s fault.” What remained was a circle, defined and surrounded by hundreds of holes.

As she stared at the shell of her kitchen, the saddest thing was her knowledge of what was beneath, what a tiny scratch, in a vulnerable place, would reveal.

“Mom?”

They turned to see Benjy standing in the doorway, leaning against the growth chart, his hands searching for pajama pockets that didn’t exist. For how long had he been there?

“Mom and I were just—”

“You mean epitome.”

“What, love?”

“You said enemy, but you meant epitome.”

“You can have your kiss now,” Julia told Jacob as she wiped away her tears, replacing them with soap suds.

Jacob got down on his knees, took Benjy’s hands into his.

“Bad dream, buddy?”

“I’m OK with dying,” Benjy said.

“What?”

“I’m OK with dying.”

“You are?”

“As long as everyone else dies with me, I’m actually OK with dying. I’m just afraid of everyone else not dying.”

“You had a bad dream?”

“No. You were fighting.”

“We weren’t fighting. We—”

“And I heard glass break.”

“We were fighting,” Julia said. “Humans have feelings, sometimes very difficult ones. But it’s OK. Now go on back to bed.”

Jacob carried him, Benjy’s cheek resting on his shoulder. How light he still was. How heavy he was getting. No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time.

Jacob tucked Benjy back under the covers and stroked his hair.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“I agree with you that heaven probably doesn’t exist.”

“I didn’t say that. I said there’s no way to know for sure, and so it’s probably not a great idea to organize our lives around it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I agree with.”

He could forgive himself for withholding his own comfort, but why did he withhold everyone else’s as well? Why couldn’t he just let his kindergartener feel happy and safe in a just and beautiful and unreal world?

“So what do you think we should organize our lives around?” Benjy asked.

“Our families?”

“I think so, too.”

“Good night, buddy.”

Jacob went to the door, but didn’t walk away.

After a few long moments in that silence, Benjy called out: “Dad? I need you!”

“I’m here.”

“Squirrels evolved to have bushy tails. Why?”

“Maybe for balance? Or to keep them warm? Time for sleep.”

“We’ll google it in the morning.”

“OK. But now sleep.”

“Dad?”

“Right here.”

“If the world goes on for long enough, will there be fossils of fossils?”

“Oh, Benjy. That’s a great question. We can talk about it in the morning.”

“Yeah. I need my sleep.”

“Right.”

“Dad?”

Now Jacob was losing his patience: “Benjy.”

“Dad?”

“I’m here.”

He stood in the doorway until he heard his youngest son’s heavy breathing. Jacob was a man who withheld comfort but stood at thresholds long after others would have walked away. He always stood at the open front door until the car pool drove off. Just as he stood at the window until the back wheel of Sam’s bike disappeared around the corner. Just as he watched himself disappear.

HERE I AMN’T

> It is with a sense of history and extreme annoyance that I stand at this bimah today, prepared to fulfill the so-called rite of passage into adulthood, whatever that is. I want to thank Cantor Fleischman, for helping transform me, over the past half year, into a Jewish automaton. On the extreme off chance that I remember any of this a year from now, I still won’t know what it means, and for that I am grateful. I also want to thank Rabbi Singer, who is a sulfuric acid enema. My only living great-grandparent is Isaac Bloch. My dad said that I had to go through with this for him, something my great-grandfather has never, himself, asked of me. There are things he has asked, like not to be forced to move into the Jewish Home. My family cares very much about caring for him, but not enough to actually care, and I didn’t understand a word of my chanting today, but I understand that. I want to thank my grandparents Irv and Deborah Bloch, for being inspirations in my life and always urging me to try a little bit harder, dig a little bit deeper, become rich, and say whatever I want whenever I feel like it. Also my grandparents Allen and Leah Selman, who live in Florida, and whose mortal status I am only aware of thanks to the Hanukkah and birthday checks that haven’t been adjusted for cost-of-living increases since my birth. I want to thank my brothers, Benjy and Max, for requiring great portions of my parents’ attention. I cannot imagine surviving an existence in which I bore the undivided brunt of their love. Also, when I threw up on Benjy on a plane, he said, “I know how bad it feels to throw up.” And Max once offered to get a blood test so I wouldn’t have to. Which brings me to my parents, Jacob and Julia Bloch. The truth is, I didn’t want to have a bat mitzvah. No part of me, not even a little. There aren’t enough savings bonds in the world. We had conversations about it, as if my opinions were of consequence. It was all a charade, a charade to set in motion this charade, itself only a stepping-stone in the charade of my Jewish identity. Which is to say, in the most literal sense, without them this wouldn’t have been possible. I don’t blame them for being who they are. But I do blame them for blaming me for being who I am. That’s enough thanking. So, my Torah portion is Vayeira. It is one of the most well-known and studied portions in the Torah, and I’ve been told it is a great honor to read it. Given my total lack of interest in the Torah, it would have been better to give this to a kid who actually gives a Jewish shit, should such a kid exist, and to give me one of the throwaway portions about rules governing menstruating lepers. Joke’s on everyone, I guess. One more thing: portions of the interpretation that follows were blatantly ripped off. Good thing Jews only believe in collective punishment. OK. God’s test of Abraham is written like this: “Sometime later, God tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham!’ ‘Here I am,’ Abraham replied.” Most people assume that the test is what follows: God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. But I think it could also be read that the test was when He called to him. Abraham didn’t say, “What do you want?” He didn’t say, “Yes?” He answered with a statement: “Here I am.” Whatever God needs or wants, Abraham is wholly present for Him, without conditions or reservations or need for explanation. That word, hineni—here I am — comes up two other times in the portion. When Abraham is taking Isaac up Mount Moriah, Isaac becomes aware of what they are doing, and how fucked up it is. He knows that he is about to be the sacrifice, in the way that all kids always do when it’s about to happen. It says: “And Isaac said to Abraham, his father, ‘My father!’ and he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ And Isaac said, ‘Here is the fire and the wood but where is the sheep for the offering?’ And Abraham said, ‘God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son.’” Isaac doesn’t say, “Father,” he says, “My father.” Abraham is the father of the Jewish people, but he is also Isaac’s father, his personal father. And Abraham doesn’t ask, “What do you want?” He says, “Here I am.” When God asks for Abraham, Abraham is wholly present for God. When Isaac asks for Abraham, Abraham is wholly present for his son. But how can that be possible? God is asking Abraham to kill Isaac, and Isaac is asking his father to protect him. How can Abraham be two directly opposing things at once? Hineni is used one more time in the story, at the most dramatic moment. “And they came to the place that God had said to him, and Abraham built there an altar and laid out the wood and bound Isaac, his son, and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. And Abraham reached out his hand and took the cleaver to his son. And the Lord’s messenger called out to him from the heavens, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ and he said, ‘Here I am.’ And he said, ‘Do not reach out your hand against the boy, and do nothing to him, for now I know that you fear God and you have not held back your son, your only one, from me.’” Abraham does not ask, “What do you want?” He says, “Here I am.” My bat mitzvah portion is about many things, but I think it is primarily about who we are wholly there for, and how that, more than anything else, defines our identity. My great-grandfather, who I mentioned before, has asked for help. He doesn’t want to go to the Jewish Home. But nobody in the family has responded by saying, “Here I am.” Instead, they have tried to convince him that he doesn’t know what is best, and doesn’t even know what he wants. Really, they haven’t even tried to convince him; they’ve just told him what he’s going to do. I was accused of having used some bad language in Hebrew school this morning. I’m not even sure used is the right word — making a list is hardly making use of anything. Anyway, when my parents showed up to speak with Rabbi Singer, they didn’t tell me, “Here we are.” They asked, “What did you do?” I wish I had been given the benefit of the doubt, because I deserve it. Everyone who knows me knows that I make a shitload of mistakes, but also that I am a good person. But it’s not because I’m a good person that I deserve the benefit of the doubt, it’s because I’m their child. Even if they didn’t believe me, they should have acted as if they did. My dad once told me that before I was born, when the only proof of my life was sonograms, he had to believe in me. In other words, being born allows your parents to stop believing in you. OK, thanks for coming, everybody out.

> That’s it?

> No. Not exactly. I’m going to blow this place up.

> What the fuck?

> I set up a reception on the roof of the old color film factory across the street. We’ll watch.

> Run!

> Color film?

> You don’t need to run. No one is going to get hurt.

> Trust her.

> Film for old-fashioned cameras.

> You don’t even need to trust me. Think about it: if you’d needed to run, you’d already be dead.

> That’s some fucked-up logic.

> Last thing, before we go: Does anybody know why airplanes dim their lights at takeoff and landing?

> What the fuck?

> So the pilot can see better?

> Let’s just go, OK?

> To save power?

> I don’t want to die.

> Good guesses, but no. It’s because those are the most critical moments of the flight. More than eighty percent of accidents happen during takeoff and landing. They dim the lights to give your eyes time to adjust to the darkness of a smoke-filled cabin.

> There should be a word for things like that.

> You can follow the lighted path out of the synagogue. It will show you the way. Or you can follow me.

SOMEONE! SOMEONE!

Julia was at her bathroom sink, Jacob at his. Side-by-side sinks: a much-sought-after feature in old Cleveland Park houses, like intricate borders framing the parquet floors, original mantels, and converted gas chandeliers. There were so few differences between the houses that the small differences had to be celebrated, otherwise everyone was working too hard for too little. On the other hand, who actually wants side-by-side sinks?

“You know what Benjy just asked me?” Jacob said, facing the mirror above his sink.

“If the world goes on for long enough, will there be fossils of fossils?”

“How did you—?”

“The monitor knows all.”

“Right.”

Jacob almost always flossed when there was a witness. Forty years of sometimes flossing, and he’d had only three cavities — all that saved time. Tonight, his wife his witness, he flossed. He wanted to spend a little time at those side-by-side sinks. Or spare a little time in that one bed.

“When I was a kid, I created my own postal system. I made a post office out of a refrigerator box. My mom sewed a uniform for me. I even had stamps with my grandfather’s face on them.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, a thread between his two front teeth. “I just thought of it.”

“Why did you just think of it?”

He chuckled: “You sound like Dr. Silvers.”

She didn’t chuckle: “You love Dr. Silvers.”

“I had nothing to deliver,” he said, “so I started writing letters to my mom. It was the system I was drawn to; I didn’t care about the messages. Anyway, the first one said, ‘If you’re reading this, our postal system works!’ I remember that.”

“Our,” she said.

“What?”

“Our. Our postal system. Not my postal system.”

“Maybe I wrote my,” he said, unwinding the thread from his fingers, revealing the impressions of rings. “I can’t remember.”

“You can.”

“I don’t know.”

“You can. And that’s why you’re telling it to me.”

“She was a great mom,” he said.

“I know that. I’ve always known that. She manages to make the boys feel that no one in the world is better than them, and that they aren’t better than anyone. That’s a hard balance.”

“My dad doesn’t strike it.”

“There is no balance that he strikes.”

The impressions were already gone.

Julia picked up a toothbrush and handed it to her husband.

Jacob tried to force something that wouldn’t come, and said, “We’re out of toothpaste.”

“There’s another in the cabinet.”

A moment of quiet while they brushed. If they spent ten minutes every night getting ready for bed — and surely they did, surely at least that much — it would be sixty hours a year. More hours getting ready for bed together than being awake on vacation together. They had been married for sixteen years. In that time, they had spent the equivalent of forty full days getting ready for bed, almost always at the sought-after and lonely side-by-side sinks, almost always quietly.

A few months after moving out, Jacob would create a postal system with the boys. Max was receding. He laughed less, scowled more, always sought the seat closest to the window. Jacob could deny it to himself, but then others started to notice and mention it — Deborah took him aside one brunch and asked, “How does Max seem to you?”

Jacob found vintage hanging mailboxes on Etsy and affixed one to each kid’s bedroom door, and one to his own. He told them they would have their own secret postal system, to be used for those messages that felt impossible to say aloud.

“Like how people used to leave notes in the Wailing Wall,” Benjy suggested.

No, Jacob thought, but he said, “Yes. Kind of like that.”

“Except you’re not God,” Max said, which, although plainly obvious, and the position Jacob would want his children to take (as atheists, and people who don’t fear their parents), still stung.

He checked his mailbox every day. Benjy was the only one who ever wrote: “World peace”; “Snow day”; “Bigger TV.”

So much about parenting alone was difficult: the logistics of getting three kids ready for school with only two hands, the Heathrow control-tower volume of transportation to coordinate, having to multitask the multitasking. But most challenging was finding time to talk intimately with the kids. They were always together, there was always commotion, something always needed to get done, and there was no one with whom to share the load. So when one-on-one situations arose, he felt both a need to make use of them (however unnatural it might be at the time) and a concentrated dose of the old fear of saying too much or too little.

One night a few weeks after the creation of the postal system, Sam was reading to Benjy before bed, and Max and Jacob found themselves peeing into the same toilet.

“Don’t cross the streams, Ray.”

“Huh?”

“From Ghostbusters.”

“I know that’s a movie, but I’ve never seen it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“But I remember watching with—”

“I haven’t seen it.”

“OK. Well, there’s a great scene in which they fire their proton-whatevers for the first time, and Egon says, ‘Don’t cross the streams, Ray,’ because it would result in some sort of apocalyptic moment, and ever since, I’ve always thought about it when peeing in the same toilet with someone. But we both seem to be finished, so now it really makes no sense.”

“Whatever.”

“I noticed you haven’t put anything in my mailbox.”

“Yeah. I will.”

“It’s not an assignment. I just thought it might be a helpful way to get some things off your chest.”

“OK.”

“Everyone holds things in. Your brothers do. I do. Mom does. But it can make life really difficult.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I meant for you. I’ve spent my life making huge efforts to protect myself from the things I most fear, and in the end it wouldn’t be right to say that there was nothing to fear, but maybe the realization of my worst fears wouldn’t have been so bad. Maybe all of my efforts were worse. I remember the night I left for the airport. I kissed you guys like it was any other trip, and said something like ‘See you in a week or two.’ As I was getting ready to go, Mom asked me what I was waiting for. She said it was a big deal so I must be feeling big things, and you guys must be, too.”

“But you didn’t come back and say anything else.”

“I was too afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“There was nothing to be afraid of. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“I know there was nothing actually to be afraid of. But what were you afraid of?”

“Making it real?”

“Going?”

“No. What we had. What we have.”

Julia tucked her toothbrush deep in her cheek and brought her palms to the sink. Jacob spit, and said, “I’m failing my family just like my father failed us.”

“You’re not,” she said. “But it’s not enough to avoid his mistakes.”

“What?”

She removed the brush and said, “You’re not. But it’s not enough to avoid his mistakes.”

“You’re a great mom.”

“What made you say that?”

“I was thinking about how my mom was a great mom.”

She closed the vanity, paused, as if considering whether to speak, then spoke: “You aren’t happy.”

“What made you say that?”

“It’s the truth. You seem happy. Maybe you even think you’re happy. But you aren’t.”

“You think I’m depressed?”

“No. I think you put enormous emphasis on happiness — your own and others’—and find unhappiness so threatening that you would rather go down with the ship than acknowledge a leak.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“And yes, I think you’re depressed.”

“It’s probably just mono.”

“You’re tired of writing a TV show that isn’t yours, and that everyone loves but you.”

“Not everyone loves it.”

“Well, you definitely don’t.”

“I like it.”

“And you hate only liking what you do.”

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know,” she said. “You know there’s something inside of you — a book, or show, or movie, whatever — and if it could only be released, all of the sacrifices you feel you’ve made wouldn’t feel like sacrifices anymore.”

“I don’t feel that I’ve had to make—”

“See how you changed the grammar? I said, the sacrifices you feel you’ve made. You said, had to make. See the difference?”

“Jesus, you should really get some accreditation and a couch.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“I know.”

“And you’re tired of pretending to be happily married—”

“Julia.”

“—and you hate only liking the most important relationship in your life.”

Jacob often resented Julia, sometimes even hated her, but there was never a moment when he wanted to hurt her.

“That isn’t true,” he said.

“You’re too kind or scared to admit it, but it’s true.”

“It’s not.”

“And you’re tired of being a dad and a son.”

“Why are you trying to hurt me?”

“I’m not trying to. And there are worse things than hurting each other.” She arranged the various anti-aging and anti-dying products on the shelf and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

Let’s go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren’t going to find a way to agree, but let’s go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let’s go to bed. It’s the only bed we have. Let’s go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let’s retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?

Sometimes they would go to bed and make one more effort, now horizontal, to work it through. Sometimes going to bed made things possible that weren’t possible in the infinitely large room. The intimacy of being under the same sheet, two furnaces contributing to the shared warmth, but at the same time not having to see each other. The view of the ceiling, and all that ceilings make one think about. Or perhaps it was at the back of the brain, where all the blood then pooled, that the generosity lobe was located.

Sometimes they would go to bed and roll to the edges of the mattress that they independently wished were a king, and independently wish it would all just go away, without having enough bones in their forefingers to hold down the word it. It the night? It the marriage? It the entire predicament of this family’s family life? They went to bed together not because they didn’t have a choice—kein briere iz oich a breire, as the rabbi would say at the funeral in three weeks; not to have a choice is also a choice. Marriage is the opposite of suicide, but is its only peer as a definitive act of will.

Let’s go to bed …

Just before easing himself onto the bed, Jacob gave a puzzled look, patted his boxer briefs’ nonexistent pockets, as if suddenly realizing he didn’t know where his key was, and said, “I’m just going to pee.” Exactly as he did every night at that moment.

He closed and locked the door, opened the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet, lifted the stack of New Yorkers, and removed the box of hydrocortisone acetate suppositories. He laid out a bath towel on the floor, rolled another into a pillow, rested himself on his left side with his right knee bent, thought about Terri Schiavo, or Bill Buckner, or Nicole Brown Simpson, and gently pushed it in. He suspected that Julia knew what he did every night, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her, because that would first require admitting to having an entire human body. Almost all of his body was sharable almost all of the time, as was almost all of hers almost always, but sometimes some parts had to be hidden. They had spent countless hours parsing the bowel movements of their children; directly applied Desitin with bare forefingers; twirled rectal thermometers, at Dr. Donowitz’s instruction, to stimulate the sphincter in an effort to relieve a baby’s constipation. But when it came to each other, some denial was required.

you don’t deserve to get fucked in the ass

The asshole, with which every member of the Bloch family was, in his or her own way, obsessed, was the epicenter of Jacob and Julia’s denial. It was necessary for life, but never to be spoken of. It was what one had, but had to hide. It was where everything came together — the cinch of the human body — and nothing, especially not attention, and especially not a finger or cock, and especially, especially not a tongue, could go. There were enough matches by the toilet to both light and fuel a bonfire.

Every night, Jacob excused himself to pee, and every night Julia waited for him, and she knew he hid the suppository wrappers in balls of toilet paper at the bottom of the lidded can, and she knew that when he flushed he flushed nothing. Those minutes of hiding, of silent shame, had walls and a ceiling. Just as their Shabbats, and those whispered confessions of pride, had made architecture of time. Without having hired any men with lumbar braces, or sent change-of-address cards, or even replaced one key on their heart’s ring with another, they had moved from one house to another.

Max used to love playing hide-and-seek, and no one, not even Benjy, could tolerate it. The house was too well known, too thoroughly explored, the game was as done as checkers. So it was only on special occasions (a birthday, as a reward for an act of extreme menschiness) that Max was able to force a game. And they were always as boring as everyone anticipated: someone was holding his breath behind Julia’s blouses in the closet, someone was flat in the bath or crouched under the sink, someone was hiding with his eyes closed, unable to overcome the instinct that it made him less visible.

Even when the boys weren’t hiding, Jacob and Julia were seeking them — out of fear, out of love. But hours could pass without Argus’s absence being noticed. He’d always turn up when the front door was opened, or the bath was run, or food was put on the table. His return was taken for granted. Jacob tried to stimulate heated discussion at dinner, to help the boys become eloquent, critical thinkers. In the middle of one such debate — should Jerusalem or Tel Aviv be Israel’s capital? — Julia asked if anyone had seen Argus. “His dinner is just sitting there.”

After only a few minutes of gentle calling for him and casual searching, the boys began to panic. They rang the doorbell. They put out a bowl of human food. Max played through Suzuki Book I, which always elicited a whine. Nothing.

The screen door was closed, but the front door was open, so it was conceivable he had gone outside. (Who left the door open? Jacob wondered — angry, but at no one.) They searched the neighborhood, calling for Argus, lovingly then desperately. Some neighbors joined the search. Jacob couldn’t help but wonder — only to himself, of course — if Argus had gone off to die, as some dogs apparently do. It became dark, hard to see.

As it turned out, he’d been in the upstairs guest bathroom. Somehow he’d closed himself in, and was too old, or good, to bark. Or maybe, at least until he became hungry, he preferred it in there. He was allowed to sleep in the bed that night. As were the kids. Because they’d thought they’d lost him, and because he’d been so close all along.

At dinner the next night, Jacob said: “Resolved: Argus should be allowed to sleep in the bed every night.” The boys whooped. Smiling, Jacob said, “I take it you’ll be arguing the affirmative.”

Not smiling, Julia said, “Wait, wait, wait.”

It was the last time those six animals slept under the same cover.

Jacob and Julia hid themselves inside the work that they hid from each other.

They sought happiness that didn’t have to be at the expense of anyone else’s happiness.

They hid behind the administration of family life.

Their purest seeking was on Shabbat, when they closed their eyes and made their home, and themselves, new.

That architecture of minutes, when Jacob excused himself to the bathroom and Julia didn’t read the book she held, was their purest hiding.

now you deserve to get fucked in the ass

They went to bed, Julia in her nightgown, Jacob in his T-shirt and boxers. She slept with a bra on. She said the support made her more comfortable, and maybe that was the entire truth. He said the warmth of the shirt made it easier to sleep, and maybe that was entirely true as well. They turned off the lights, took off their glasses, and stared through the same ceiling, the same roof, with two pairs of flawed eyes that could be compensated for but were never going to get better on their own.

“I wish you’d known me when I was a kid,” Jacob said.

“A kid?”

“Or just … before. Before I became this.”

“You wish I’d known you before you knew me.”

“No. You don’t understand.”

“Find another way to say it.”

“Julia, I am not … myself.”

“Then who are you?”

Jacob wanted to cry, but couldn’t. But he also couldn’t hide his hiding. She stroked his hair. There was nothing that she forgave him for. Nothing. Not the texts, not the years. But she couldn’t not respond to his need. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t not. It was a version of love. But double negatives never sustained a religion.

He said, “I’ve never said what I feel.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“That’s quite an indictment.”

“It’s true.”

“Well,” she said, with her first chuckle since finding the phone, “there are so many other things you do well.”

“That’s the sound of all not being lost.”

“What is?”

“Your chuckle.”

“That? No, that was the sound of appreciated irony.”

Fall asleep, he implored himself. Fall asleep.

“What do I do well?” he asked.

“You’re serious?”

“Just one thing.”

He was hurting. And no matter how much she felt he deserved the hurt, she couldn’t tolerate it. She’d devoted so much of herself — forfeited so much of herself — to protecting him. How many experiences, how many subjects of conversation, how many words, were sacrificed in order to soothe his profound vulnerability? They couldn’t go to a city that she’d been to with a boyfriend twenty years before. She couldn’t make gentle observations about the lack of boundaries at his parents’ house, much less his own parenting choices, which often resembled the absence of choices. She picked up Argus’s shits because Argus couldn’t help it, and because, even if she didn’t choose or want him, and even if it was an unfair burden, Argus was hers.

“You’re kind,” she told her husband.

“No. I’m really not.”

“I could give you a hundred examples…”

“Three or four would be extremely helpful right now.”

She didn’t want to do this, but she couldn’t not. “You always return your grocery cart to the right place. You fold up your Post and leave it for another reader on the Metro. You draw maps for lost tourists…”

“Is that kindness, or conscientiousness?”

“So you’re conscientious.”

Could he tolerate her hurt? She wanted to know, but didn’t trust him to tell her.

She asked, “Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.”

“No, you would say I’m your enemy.”

“I was worked up.”

“I know.”

“I wasn’t meaning what I was saying.”

“I know,” she said. “But you were saying it.”

“I don’t believe that anger reveals truth. Sometimes you just say something.”

“I know. But I don’t believe that any something comes from nowhere.”

“I don’t love the kids more than I love you.”

“You do,” she said. “I do. Maybe we’re supposed to. Maybe evolution forces us to.”

“I love you,” he said, turning to her.

“I know you do. I’ve never doubted that, and I don’t doubt it now. But it’s a different kind of love than the kind I need.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“I don’t know.”

Fall asleep, Jacob.

He said, “You know how novocaine leaves you unsure of where your mouth ends and the world begins?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Or how sometimes you think there’s going to be another stair when there isn’t, and your foot falls through an imaginary stair?”

“Sure.”

Why was it so hard for him to cross the physical space? It shouldn’t have been, but it was.

“I don’t know what I was saying.”

She could feel him struggling.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

He tucked his hand behind her hair, cupping the back of her neck.

“You’re tired,” he said.

“I’m really exhausted.”

“We’re tired. We’ve run ourselves into the ground. We need to find ways to rest.”

“I would understand if you were having an affair. I’d be angry, and I’d be hurt, and I’d probably be moved to do something I don’t even want to do—”

“Like what?”

“I would hate you, Jacob, but at least I’d understand you. I always understood you. Remember how I would tell you that? That you were the only person who made sense to me? Now everything you do confuses me.”

“Confuses you?”

“Your obsession with real estate.”

“I’m not obsessed with real estate.”

“Every time I walk past your laptop, the screen is filled with a house listing.”

“Just curious.”

“But why? And why won’t you tell Sam he’s better than you at chess?”

“I do.”

“You don’t. You let him believe that you let him win. And why are you such a completely different person in different situations? You become passive-aggressively quiet with me, but you snap at the boys, but you let your father walk all over you. You haven’t written me a Friday letter in a decade, but you spend all of your free time working on something that you love but won’t share with anyone, and then you write those texts that you say mean nothing. I walked seven circles around you when we got married. I can’t even find you now.”

“I’m not having an affair.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m not.”

She started to cry.

“I exchanged some horribly inappropriate texts with someone at work.”

“An actress.”

“No.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

“If it matters to me, it matters.”

“One of the directors.”

“Who has my name?”

“No.”

“Is it that woman with the red hair?”

“No.”

“You know, I don’t even care.”

“Good. You shouldn’t. There’s no reason—”

“How did it start?”

“It just … evolved. As things do. It took on a—”

“I don’t even care.”

“It never became anything other than words.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do.”

“Maybe four months.”

“You’re asking me to believe that for four months you’ve been exchanging sexually explicit texts with someone you work with every day and it never led to anything physical?”

“I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m telling you the truth.”

“The sad thing is, I believe you.”

“That’s not sad. It’s hope.”

“No, it’s sad. You are the only person I know, or could even imagine, who would be capable of writing such bold sentences while living so meekly. I actually do believe that you could write to someone that you want to lick her asshole, and have that bluff called, and then sit beside her every day for an entire four months without allowing your hand to wander the six necessary inches to her thigh. Without mustering that bravery. Without even sending the signal that it’s OK for her to take up the slack of your cowardice and move her hand onto your thigh. Think about the signals you must have been sending to keep her pussy wet and her hand away.”

“That’s too far, Julia.”

“Too far? You’re serious? You are the person in this room who doesn’t know what too far means.”

“I know that I went too far in what I wrote.”

“I’m telling you, you didn’t go far enough in what you lived.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You want me to have an affair?”

“No, I want you to write Shabbat letters to me. But if you’re going to write pornographic texts to someone else, then yes, I want you to have an affair. Because then I could respect you.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I’m making perfect sense. I would have respected you so much more if you’d fucked her. It would have proven something to me that I have found harder and harder to believe.”

“Which is?”

“That you’re a human being.”

“You don’t believe I’m human?”

“I don’t believe you’re there at all.”

Jacob opened his mouth, without knowing what would come out. He wanted to return everything she’d given to him, to catalog her neuroses, and irrationalities, and weaknesses, and hypocrisies, and ugliness. He also wanted to acknowledge that everything she’d said was true, but contextualize his monstrousness — not all of it was his fault. He wanted to mortar bricks with one hand while taking a hammer to them with the other.

But instead of his voice, they heard Benjy’s: “I need you! I really need you!”

Julia released a burst of laughter.

“Why are you laughing?”

“It has nothing to do with things not being lost.”

It was the nervous laughter of oppositions. The dark laughter of the knowledge of the end. The religious laughter of scale.

Benjy called out again through the monitor: “Someone! Someone!”

They fell silent.

Julia searched the darkness for her husband’s eyes, wanting to search them.

“Someone!”

THE N-WORD

Julia had fallen asleep by the time Jacob came back down from calming Benjy. Or she did a perfectly believable impression of a sleeping person. Jacob was restless. He didn’t want to read — not a book or a magazine, not even a real estate blog. He didn’t want to watch TV. Writing wasn’t going to happen. Neither was masturbation. No activity appealed to him, anything would feel like an act, an impersonation of a person.

He went to Sam’s room, hoping for a few moments of peace, observing his first child’s sleeping body. A shifting light spread from under the door onto the hallway, then pulled back: waves from the digital ocean on the other side. Sam, ever vigilant of his privacy, heard his father’s heavy steps.

“Dad?”

“The one and lonely.”

“So … Are you standing there? Do you need something?”

“Can I come in?”

Without waiting for an answer he opened the door.

“You were being rhetorical?” Sam asked, not looking away from the screen.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m watching TV.”

“You don’t have a TV.”

“On my computer.”

“So aren’t you watching your computer?”

“Sure.”

“What’s on?”

“Everything.”

“What are you watching?”

“Nothing.”

“You have a second?”

“Yes: one…”

“I was being rhetorical.”

“Ah.”

“How’s it going?”

“Is this a conversation?”

“Just checking in.”

“I’m fine.”

“Does it feel great to feel fine?”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I think I heard it somewhere. So … Sam.”

“The one and bony.”

“Nice one. Anyway, listen. I’m sorry to have to get into this. But. The thing at Hebrew school this morning.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Right. It’s just.”

“Don’t you believe me?”

“It’s not even a question of that.”

“Yes it is.”

“It would be a whole lot easier to get you out of this if you had some other explanation.”

“I don’t.”

“A bunch of those words are really no big deal. Between us, it wouldn’t even bother me if you had written them.”

“I didn’t.”

“But the n-word.”

Sam finally turned his attention to his father.

“What, divorce?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Why did you say that?”

“I didn’t.”

“Are you talking about Mom and me?”

“I don’t know. I can’t even hear myself over the fighting and glass-breaking.”

“Earlier? No, what you heard—”

“It’s OK. Mom came up and we had a talk.”

Jacob glanced at the TV on the computer. He thought about how Guy de Maupassant ate lunch at the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day because it was the only place in Paris without a view of the tower. The Nats were playing the Dodgers, extra innings. With a sudden burst of excitement, he clapped his hands. “Let’s go to the game tomorrow!”

“What?”

“So fun! We could get there early for batting practice. Eat tons of shit.”

“Eat tons of shit?”

“Shitty food.”

“Would it be OK if I just watched this?”

“But I’m having an awesome idea.”

“Are you?”

“Aren’t I?”

“I have soccer, and cello, and bar mitzvah lessons, assuming that’s still on, God forbid.”

“I can get you out of that.”

“My life?”

“I’m afraid I can only bring you into that.”

“And they’re playing in L.A.”

“Right,” Jacob said, and quieter, “I should have realized that.”

That quietness made Sam wonder if maybe he’d hurt his father. He experienced a tremor of a feeling that, despite knowing it was utterly foolish, he would grow to experience more often and more strongly in the coming year: that maybe everything was at least a little bit his fault.

“Finish the chess game?”

“Nah.”

“You’re OK with money?”

“Yeah.”

“And this thing at Hebrew school. It obviously isn’t because of Grandpa, right?”

“Not unless he’s also the grandfather of whoever did it.”

“That’s what I thought. Anyway—”

“Dad, Billie’s black, so how could I be a racist?”

“Billie?”

“The girl I’m in love with.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“I’m confused.”

“She’s the girl I’m in love with.”

“OK. And you said Billie? But a girl, right?”

“Yes. And she’s black. So how could I be racist?”

“I’m not sure that logic quite works.”

“It does.”

“You know who points out that some of his best friends are black? Someone who isn’t comfortable with black people.”

“None of my best friends are black.”

“And for whatever it’s worth, I’m pretty sure African American is the preferred nomenclature.”

“Nomenclature?”

“Terminology.”

“Shouldn’t the guy who’s in love with a black girl be the one establishing the nomenclature?”

“Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle African American?”

“Pot?”

“I’m joking around. It’s an interesting name, that’s all. Not a judgment. You know you were named for a great-great-uncle who perished in Birkenau. With Jews there always has to be some significance attached.”

“Some suffering, you mean.”

“Gentiles pick names that sound nice. Or they just make them up.”

“Billie was named after Billie Holiday.”

“So she’s the exception that proves the rule.”

“Who are you named after?” Sam asked, his interest a small concession in response to the guilt of having forced his dad’s voice into quiet sadness.

“A distant relative named Yakov. Supposedly an amazing, larger-than-life guy. Story goes he crushed a Cossack’s head in his hand.”

“Cool.”

“I’m obviously not strong like that.”

“We don’t even know any Cossacks.”

“And at most, I’m the size of life.”

One of their stomachs grumbled, but neither knew whose.

“Well, bottom line, I think it’s awesome that you have a girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Nomenclature strikes twice. I think it’s awesome that you’re in love.”

“I’m not in love. I love her.”

“Whatever’s going on, this obviously stays between us. You can count on me.”

“I’ve already talked to Mom about it.”

“Really? When?”

“I don’t know. Couple of weeks ago?”

“This is old news?”

“It’s all relative.”

Jacob stared at Sam’s screen. Was this what drew Sam to it? Not the ability to be elsewhere, but to be nowhere?

“What did you tell her?” Jacob asked.

“Who?”

“Your mother?”

“You mean Mom?”

“That’s the one.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, as in you don’t feel like talking about it with me right now?”

“As in that.”

“It’s strange, because she’s convinced you wrote those words.”

“I didn’t.”

“OK. I’m becoming annoying. I’ll go.”

“I didn’t say you were annoying.”

Jacob moved to the door to leave, but paused. “Wanna hear a joke?”

“No.”

“It’s dirty.”

“Then definitely no.”

“What’s the difference between a Subaru and an erection?”

“No means no.”

“Seriously. What’s the difference?”

“Seriously, not interested.”

Jacob leaned forward and whispered, “I don’t have a Subaru.”

Despite himself, Sam released a huge laugh, the kind involving snorting and saliva. Jacob laughed, not at his own joke but at his son’s laughter. They laughed together, vigorously, hysterically.

Sam struggled, without success, to regain his composure, and said, “The funny thing … the really funny thing … is … you do have a Subaru.”

And then they laughed more, and Jacob spit a little, and teared up, and remembered how horrible it was to be Sam’s age, how painful and unfair.

“It’s true,” Jacob said. “I totally have a Subaru. I should have said Toyota. What was I thinking?”

“What were you thinking?”

What was he thinking?

They calmed down.

Jacob gave the sleeves of his shirt another roll — a bit tight, but he wanted them over the elbow.

“Mom feels that you need to apologize.”

“Do you?”

In his pocket, he closed his hand around nothing, around a knife, and said, “I do.”

The one and phony.

“OK, then,” Sam said.

“It won’t be that bad.”

“Yes it will.”

“Yeah,” Jacob said, kissing Sam on the top of his head — the last kissable place. “It’s gonna suck.”

At the threshold, Jacob turned.

“How’s it going in Other Life?”

“Eh.”

“What are you working on?”

“Building a new synagogue.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Because I destroyed the old synagogue.”

“Destroyed? Like with a wrecking ball?”

“Like that.”

“So now you’re going to build one for yourself?”

“I built the old one, too.”

“Mom would love that,” Jacob said, understanding the brilliance and beauty of what Sam never shared. “And she would probably have a million ideas.”

“Please don’t mention it to her.”

That gave Jacob a spike of pleasure that he didn’t want. He nodded and said, “Of course,” then shook his head and said, “I would never.”

“OK,” Sam said, “so, unless there’s something else?”

“And the old synagogue? Why did you build it?”

“So I could blow it up.”

“Blow it up? You know, if I were a different dad, and you were a different kid, I’d probably feel obligated to report you to the FBI.”

“But if you were a different dad, and I were a different kid, I wouldn’t have needed to blow up a virtual synagogue.”

“Touché,” Jacob said. “But isn’t it possible that you weren’t building it to destroy? Or at least not only to destroy?”

“No, that isn’t possible.”

“Like, maybe you were trying to get something exactly right, and when it wasn’t, you needed to destroy it?”

“Nobody believes me.”

“I do. I believe that you want things to be right.”

“You just don’t get it,” Sam said, because there was no way he was going to concede any understanding to his father. But his father got it. Sam hadn’t built the synagogue to destroy it. He wasn’t one of those Tibetan sand-mandala whatevers he’d been forced to hear about during a drive — five silent guys working for thousands of hours on an arts and crafts project whose function was to be functionless. (“And I used to think Nazis were the opposite of Jews,” his dad had said, disconnecting his phone from the car stereo.) No, he built the synagogue with the hope of feeling, finally, comfortable somewhere. It wasn’t simply that he could create it to his own esoteric specifications; he could be there without being there. Not unlike masturbating. But as with masturbating, if it wasn’t exactly right, it was completely and irretrievably wrong. Sometimes, at the worst possible moment, his drunken id would suddenly veer, and in his mental headlights would be Rabbi Singer, or Seal (the singer), or his mom. And there was never any coming back from that. With the synagogue, too, the slightest imperfection — an infinitesimally asymmetrical rotunda, stairs with risers too high for short kids, an upside-down Jewish star — and it all had to go. He wasn’t being impulsive. He was being careful. Couldn’t he simply have fixed what wasn’t right? No. Because he would always know that it had been wrong: “That’s the star that once hung upside down.” To another person, the correction would have made it more perfect than if it had been right the first time. Sam was not another person. Neither was Samanta.

Jacob sat on Sam’s bed and said, “When I was young, maybe in high school, I used to like to write out the lyrics of all of my favorite songs. I don’t know why. I guess it gave me that feeling of things being in the right place. Anyway, this was long before the Internet. So I’d sit with my boom box—”

“Your boom box?”

“A tape player with speakers.”

“I was being dismissive.”

“All right … well … I’d sit with my boom box and play a second or two of a song, then write down what I’d heard, then rewind and play it again to make sure I’d gotten it right, then let it play again, and write down a bit more, then rewind for the parts I didn’t quite hear, or wasn’t sure I’d heard, then write them down. Rewinding a tape is really imprecise, so I’d inevitably go back too far, or not far enough. It was incredibly laborious. But I loved it. I loved how careful it felt. I loved the feeling of getting it right. I spent who knows how many thousands of hours doing that. Sometimes a lyric would really stump me, especially when grunge and hip-hop came along. And I wouldn’t accept guessing, because that would undermine the entire point of writing the lyrics out — to get it right. Sometimes I’d have to listen to the same little bit over and over and over, dozens of times, hundreds. I would literally wear through that part of the tape, so that when I listened to the song later, the part I most wanted to get right wasn’t there anymore. I remember a phrase in ‘All Apologies’—you know that song, right?”

“Nope.”

“Nirvana? Great, great, great song. Anyway, Kurt Cobain’s marbles seemed to have migrated to his mouth, and there was one phrase I had a particularly hard time making out. My best guess, after hundreds of listenings, was ‘I can see from shame.’ I didn’t realize I was wrong until many years later, when I sang it, at the top of my lungs, like an idiot, with Mom. Not long after we got married.”

“She pointed out that you were wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s so Mom.”

“I was grateful.”

“But you were singing.”

“Singing wrongly.”

“Still. She should have let it go.”

“No, she did the right thing.”

“So what was the real lyric?”

“Fasten your seat belt. It was: ‘aqua seafoam shame.’”

“No way.”

“Right?”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. That was my mistake. I thought it had to mean something.”