Here I Am

HOLDING A PEN, PUNCHING, SELF-LOVE

“This is a joke?” Irv asked as they drove to Washington National — the Blochs would sooner renounce air travel than refer to it as Reagan National. NPR was on, because Irv sought confrontations with what he loathed, and to his extreme revulsion there had been a balanced segment on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Irv loathed NPR. It was not only the wretched politics, but the flamboyantly precious, out-of-no-closet sissiness, the wide-eyed wonder coming from the you-wouldn’t-hit-a-guy-with-glasses voices. (And all of them — men, women, young and old — seem to share the same voice, passing it from one throat to another as necessary.) The virtues of “listener-supported radio” don’t alter the fact that no one with self-respect uses the word satchel, much less an actual satchel, and anyway, how many subscriptions to The New Yorker does a person need?

“Well, now I’ll have an answer,” Irv said, with a self-satisfied nod that resembled davening or Parkinson’s.

“To what?” Jacob asked, unable to swim past the bait.

“When someone asks me what was the most factually erroneous, morally repugnant, and also just boring radio segment I’ve ever heard.”

Irv’s knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob’s brain’s knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers — arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.

“And anyway,” Jacob said, feeling that they’d taken things far enough, “it was a self-described opinion piece.”

“Well, that stupid idiot’s opinion is wrong—”

Without looking up from his iPad, Max defended National Public Radio — or semantics, in any case — from the backseat: “Opinions can’t be wrong.”

“So here’s why that idiot’s opinion is idiotic…” Irv ticked off each “because” on the fingers of his left hand: “Because only an anti-Semite can be provoked to anti-Semitism—a hideous phrase; because the mere suggestion of a willingness to talk to these freaks would just be throwing Manischewitz on an oil fire; because — not for nothing—their hospitals are filled with rockets aimed at our hospitals, which are filled with them; because at the end of the day, we love kung pao chicken and they love death; because — and this really should have been my first point — the simple and undeniable fact is … we’re right!”

“Jesus, watch your lane!”

Irv removed his other hand — balancing the wheel on his knees — to acquire another rhetorical finger: “And because anyway, why should our yarmulkes bunch over a troop of Goy Scouts earning protest patches in front of the Berkeley Co-op, or simians in keffiyehs doing a little urban stone-skipping in Gaza so-called City?”

“At least one hand on the wheel, Dad.”

“I’m getting in an accident?”

“And find a better word than simians.”

Irv turned to face his grandson while continuing to drive with his knees: “You gotta hear this. You put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and you get Hamlet. Two billion in front of two billion and you get—”

“Watch the road!”

“The Koran. Funny, right?”

“Racist,” Max muttered.

“Arabs aren’t a race, bubeleh. They’re an ethnicity.”

“What’s a typewriter?”

“Let me also say this,” Irv said, turning to Jacob and pointing his spare index finger while continuing to hold up the other six fingers. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but people with no homeland really shouldn’t. Because when those stones of theirs start breaking Chagall windows, don’t expect to see us on our knees with a dustpan. Just because we’re smarter than those lunatics doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on insanity. The Arabs have to understand that we’ve got some stones, too, but our slingshot’s in Dimona, and the finger on the button is connected to an arm with a string of numbers tattooed on it!”

“You’re finished?” Jacob asked.

“With what?”

“If I can host you back on the Blue Planet for just a second, I was thinking we should take Tamir around to see Isaac on the way back.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s obviously depressed about the move and—”

“If he were capable of depression, he would have killed himself seventy years ago.”

“Fucking shitcock!” Max said, shaking his iPad like an Etch A Sketch.

“He’s not depressed,” Irv said. “He’s old. Age presents like depression, but isn’t.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said, “I forgot: no one is depressed.”

“No, I’m sorry, I forgot: everyone is depressed.”

“I assume that’s a dig at my therapy?”

“What belt are you up to, anyway? Brown? Black? And you win when it’s around your neck?”

Jacob was weighing whether to give it back or let it go. Dr. Silvers would call that binary thinking, but Dr. Silvers’s reliance on the binary critique was, itself, binary. And this was too demanding a morning to become nuanced with his anvil of a father. So, as always, he let it go. Or rather, he absorbed it.

“It’s a tough change for him,” Jacob said. “It’s ultimate. I’m just saying we should be sensitive—”

“He’s a human callus.”

“He’s an internal bleeder.”

Max pointed to the light: “Green is for go.”

But instead of driving, Irv turned to press the point from which he’d strayed: “Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.” Ignoring the honking coming from behind him, he continued: “Europe … now, there’s a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed no tears of sadness over our disappearance.”

“What are you talking about? Remember what the French prime minister said after the attack on the kosher market? ‘Every Jew who leaves France is a piece of France that is gone.’ Or something like that.”

“Bull-merde. You know he had a bottle of Château Sang de Juif 1942 airing out backstage to toast France’s missing piece. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver: “I’m an asshole, asshole! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob: “Our only reliable friends in Europe are the Germans, and does anyone doubt that they’ll one day run out of guilt and lampshades? And does anyone really doubt that one day, when the conditions are right, America will decide we’re noisy, and smelly, and pushy, and way too smart for anybody else’s good?”

“I do,” Max said, opening up a pinch to zoom in on something.

“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, trying to catch his eye in the rearview mirror, “you know why paleontologists look for bones and not anti-Semitism?”

“Because they’re paleontologists and not the ADL?” Jacob suggested.

“Because they like to dig. Get it?”

“No.”

“Even if everything you say is true,” Jacob said, “which it isn’t—”

“Resolutely is.”

“It isn’t—”

“Is.”

“But even if it were—”

“The world hates Jews. I know you think the prevalence of Jews in culture is some kind of counterargument, but that’s like saying the world loves pandas because crowds come to see them in zoos. The world hates pandas. Wants them dead. Even the cubs. And the world hates Jews. Always has. Always will. Yeah, there are more polite words to use, and political contexts to cite, but the hatred is always hatred and always because we’re Jewish.”

“I like pandas,” Max chimed in.

“You don’t,” Irv corrected.

“I would be psyched to have one as a pet.”

“It would eat your face, Maxy.”

“Awesome.”

“Or at least occupy our house and subject us to its sense of entitlement,” Jacob added.

“The Germans murdered one and a half million Jewish children because they were Jewish children, and they got to host the Olympics thirty years later. And what a job they did with that! The Jews win by a hair a war for our survival and are a permanent pariah state. Why? Why, only a generation after our near-destruction, is the Jewish will to survive considered a will to conquer? Ask yourself: Why?”

His why wasn’t a question, not even a rhetorical one. It was a shove. A stiff arm in a time of forced hands. Everything had an aspect of coercion. Isaac didn’t want to move; they were forcing him to. The singular sense in which Sam wanted to become a man was sexual relations with a person who wasn’t himself, but they were forcing him to apologize for words he said he didn’t write, so that he could be forced to chant memorized words of unknown meaning before family he didn’t believe in, and friends he didn’t believe in, and God. Julia was being forced to shift her focus from ambitious buildings that would never be built to the bathroom and kitchen renovations of disappointed people with resources. And the phone incident was forcing an examination that the marriage might not survive — their relationship, like all relationships, dependent on willful blindness and forgetting. Even Irv’s descent into bigotry was guided by an invisible hand.

Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself. Nobody wants to be a Jewish man, or a dying man.

Jacob didn’t want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do? Allow Sam to snip a ritualistic thread that reached back to kings and prophets, simply because Judaism as they practiced it was boring as hell and overflowed with hypocrisy? Maybe. In the rabbi’s office he’d felt ready to use the scissors.

Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel — the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping. Perhaps that would be a way to do it without doing it. Sam objected on the grounds of it being a terrible idea.

“Terrible why?” Jacob asked, knowing full well why.

“You really don’t see the irony?” Sam said. Jacob saw many ironies, and was curious to hear which one Sam was thinking of. “Israel was created as a place for Jews to escape persecution. We would be going to escape Judaism.” Nicely put.

So the bar mitzvah would be at the synagogue they paid twenty-five hundred dollars per visit to be members of, and officiated by the hip young rabbi who wasn’t, by any reasonable definition, hip, young, or a rabbi. The party would be at the Hilton where Reagan was this close to being put out of our misery, and where Julia and Sam were representing Micronesia. The band would be capable of playing both a good horah and good rock. Of course, such a band has never existed in the history of live music, but Jacob knew that at a certain point you just crunch the capsule you’ve been hiding in your cheek and hope not to feel too much. The theme — handled with delicacy and taste — would be Sam’s Family’s Diaspora. (This was Julia’s idea, and insofar as a bar mitzvah theme could ever be a good idea, it was sufficiently OK.) They would have tables representing each of the countries the family had been dispersed to — America, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Canada — and instead of seating cards, each guest would receive a “passport” to one of the nations. The tables would be designed to reflect regional culture and landmarks — this is where delicacy and taste were most severely challenged — and the centerpieces would include a family tree, and photographs of relatives currently living in those places. The buffet would feature stations of regionally specific foods: Brazilian feijoada, Spanish tapas, Israeli falafel, whatever they eat in Canada, and so on. The party favors would be snow globes of the various locales. There are more wars than snowfalls in Israel, but the Chinese are smart enough to know that Americans are dumb enough to buy anything. Especially Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.

“I asked you a question,” Irv said, bringing Jacob back to the argument that only Irv was having.

“Did you?”

“Yes: Why?”

“Why what?”

“The what doesn’t even matter. The answer is the same to every question about us: Because the world hates Jews.”

Jacob turned to face Max. “You realize that genetics aren’t destiny, right?”

“Whatever you say…”

“In much the same way that I escaped the baldness that ravaged your grandfather’s head, you have a fighting chance of dodging the insanity that transformed a passable human into the man who married my mother.”

Irv gave a deep, dramatic exhale, and then, with the full force of his faux sincerity: “Would it be all right if I offered an opinion?”

Both Jacob and Max laughed at that. Jacob liked that feeling, that spontaneous father-son camaraderie.

“Listen, don’t listen, it’s up to you. But I want to get this off my chest. I think you’re wasting your life.”

“Oh, that’s all?” Jacob said. “I was bracing for something big.”

“I think you are an immensely talented, deeply feeling, profoundly intelligent person.”

“The zayde doth protest too much, methinks.”

“And you have made some very bad choices.”

“I’m guessing you have a specific choice in mind.”

“Yes, writing for that dumb TV show.”

“That dumb TV show is watched by four million people.”

“A: So what? B: Which four million?”

“And is critically acclaimed.”

“Those who can’t teach gym, acclaim.”

“And it’s my job. It’s how I support the family.”

“It’s how you make money. There are other ways to support a family.”

“I should be a dermatologist? That would be a good use of my talent, feeling, and intellect?”

“You should make something that befits your abilities and expresses your definition of substance.”

“I am.”

“No, you’re dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of the epic dragon adventure of someone who isn’t fit to spit shine your hemorrhoids. You weren’t put on earth to do that.”

“And now you’re going to tell me what I was put on earth to do?”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Jacob sang: “Somewhere in my youth, or childhood, I must have done something very bad.”

“As I was about to say—”

“High on his horse was my lonely dad, Irv, lay ee old lay ee old lay hee hoo.”

“You’re witty — we get it, Fraukenstein.”

“Bad advice, bad advice, bless my homeland for never.”

This time leaving no room to fill: “Jacob, you should forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.”

An underwhelmed “Wow.”

“Yes: wow.”

“Would you mind saying that once more, and projecting, for the cheap seats in my brain?”

“You should forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.”

“Didn’t the ovens at Auschwitz do that?”

“They destroyed. I’m talking about forging.”

“I appreciate your sudden vote of confidence in me—”

“I just stuffed the ballot box.”

“—but my soul’s smithy doesn’t get that hot.”

“That’s because you’re so desperate to be loved. Friction generates heat.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“It’s the same with the n-word business at Sam’s school.”

“We should probably leave Sam out of this,” Max suggested.

“It’s the same everywhere you look in your life,” Irv said. “You’re making the same mistake we’ve been making for thousands of years—”

“We?”

“—believing that if we can only be loved, we’ll be safe.”

“My conversation GPS is on the fritz. We’re back to the hatred of the Jews?”

“Back to? No. You can’t return to something you’ve never left.”

“The show is entertainment.”

“I don’t believe that you believe that.”

“Well, that sounds like the end of our road.”

“Because I’m ready to give you more credit than you’re ready to give yourself?”

“Because as you’re often the first to point out, you can’t negotiate without a negotiating partner.”

“Who’s negotiating?”

“You can’t converse.”

“Really, Jacob. Let down your guard for a second and ask yourself: What is it with the ravenous need for love? You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren’t finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren’t making you rich. But they were making the world rich.”

“And you hated them.”

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, switching lanes without checking any of his mirrors, “I hated them. God forbid you should see my marginalia. But do you know who hates your show?”

“It isn’t my show.”

“Nobody. You’ve passed a lot of time for a lot of grateful zombies.”

“So this is an argument against television?”

“That’s another argument I could make,” he said, taking the airport exit. “But this is an argument against your show.”

“It isn’t my show.”

“So get a show.”

“But I have nothing left to offer the tooth fairy in exchange.”

“Have you tried?”

“Have I tried?”

No one had tried harder. Not to get a show — it wasn’t yet the time for that — but to write one. For more than a decade Jacob had been breaking his soul’s back shoveling coal into the smithy. He’d devoted himself to the secret, utterly futile task of redeeming his people through language. His people? His family. His family? Himself. What self? And redeeming might not be quite the right word.

Ever-Dying People was exactly what his father thought he was hoping for — a shofar blast from a mountaintop. Or at least a silent cry from a basement. But if Irv had ever been given the chance to read it, he would have hated it — a far more expansive hatred than the one he felt for the novels. Jacob’s definition of substance could get pretty ugly, but more, there were some essential disagreements about whom the sharp point of the forged conscience should be turned on.

And there was a far bigger problem: the show would kill Jacob’s grandfather. Not metaphorically. It would literally commit grand-patricide. He who could survive anything would never survive a mirror. So Jacob held it close to his chest in a locked desk drawer. And the less able he was to share it, the more devoted he felt to it.

The show began with the beginning of the writing of the show. The characters in the show were the characters in the real Jacob’s life: an unhappy wife (who didn’t want to be described that way); three sons: one on the brink of manhood, one on the brink of extreme self-consciousness, one on the brink of mental independence; a terrified, xenophobic father; a quietly weaving and unweaving mother; a depressed grandfather. Should he one day share it and be asked how autobiographical it was, he would say, “It’s not my life, but it’s me.” And if someone — who else but Dr. Silvers? — were to ask how autobiographical his life was, he would say, “It’s my life, but it’s not me.”

The writing kept pace with the changing events in Jacob’s life. Or his life kept pace with the writing. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Jacob wrote about the discovery of his phone months before he even bought a second phone — psychology so double-left-handed it didn’t justify even one six-dollar minute with Dr. Silvers and was given several dozen hours. But it wasn’t just psychological. There were times when Julia would say or do things so eerily similar to what Jacob had written that he had to wonder if she’d read it. The night she discovered the phone, she asked, “Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?” That exact line — those words in that order — had been in the script for months. Although they were Jacob’s.

Save for the moments that most people would do anything to avoid, life is pretty slow and uninteresting and undramatic and uninspiring. Jacob’s solution to that problem, or blessing, wasn’t to alter the drama of the show — the authenticity of his work was the only antidote to the inauthenticity of his life — but to generate more and more paraphernalia.

Twenty-four years earlier, around the time that his lack of patience overwhelmed his passion for guitar, Jacob started designing album covers for an imaginary band. He wrote track lists, and lyrics, and liner notes. He thanked people who didn’t exist: engineers, producers, managers. He copied copyright language from Steady Diet of Nothing. An atlas at his side, he created a U.S. tour, and then a world tour, giving thought to the limits of his physical and emotional endurance: Is Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid too much for one week? Especially after eight months on the road? And even if it were endurable, what good would come from pushing the band toward an irritability that would only jeopardize everything they believed in and worked so hard to achieve? The dates were printed on the backs of T-shirts he designed, and actually produced, and actually wore. But he couldn’t play barre chords.

His relationship to the show was something like that — the more stunted the reality, the more expansive the related materials.

He created, and perpetually added to, a “bible” for the show — a kind of user’s manual for those who would one day work on it. He generated an ever-adjusting dossier of background information on each of the characters—

SAM BLOCH

On the brink of 13. The eldest of the Bloch brothers. Spends virtually all of his time in the virtual world of Other Life. Hates the fit of all clothing. Loves watching videos of bullies getting knocked out. Incapable of ignoring, or even not perceiving, sexual double entendres. Would take a body covered with acne scarring in the future for a clear forehead in the present. Longs for his positive qualities to be universally recognized but never mentioned.

GERSHOM BLUMENBERG

Long dead. Son of Anshel, father of Isaac. Grandfather of Irving. Grandson of someone whose name has been lost forever. Great Rabbi of Drohobycz. Died in a burning synagogue. Namesake of a small park with cool marble benches in Jerusalem. Appears only in nightmares.

JULIA BLOCH

43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she’s never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

— and a catalog of settings, which included short (if always expanding) descriptions of place, hundreds of photographs for a future props department, maps, floor plans, real estate listings, anecdotes—

2294 NEWARK STREET

Bloch House. Nicer than many, but not the nicest. But nice. If not as nice as it could be. Thoughtful interiors, within the working limits. Some good midcentury furniture, mostly through eBay and Etsy. Some IKEA furniture with cool hacks (leather pulls, faceted cabinet fronts). Pictures hung in clusters (equitably distributed between Jacob’s and Julia’s families). Almond flour in a Williams-Sonoma glass jar on a soapstone counter. A too-beautiful-to-use Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Mineral Blue on the back right burner of a double-wide Lacanche range whose potential is wasted on veggie chili. Some books that were bought to be read (or at least dipped into); others to give the impression of a very specific kind of very broad-minded curiosity; others, like the two-volume slipcased edition of The Man Without Qualities, because of their beautiful spines. Hydrocortisone acetate suppositories beneath a stack of New Yorkers in the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet. A vibrator in the foot of a shoe on a high shelf. Holocaust books behind non-Holocaust books. And running up the kitchen doorframe, a growth chart of the Bloch boys.

When it was time for me to move, I lingered at this threshold. The doorframe was the only thing I couldn’t let go of. Forget the Papa Bear Chair and forget its ottoman. Forget the candlesticks and lamps. Forget Blind Botanist, the drawing we bought together, attributed to one of my heroes, Ben Shahn, lacking any provenance. Forget the moody orchid. While Julia was out one afternoon, I jimmied the doorframe loose from the wall with the aid of a flathead screwdriver, slid it down the length of the Subaru (one end against the glass of the hatchback, the other touching the windshield), and drove the record of my children’s growth to a new house. Two weeks later, a housepainter painted over it. I redid the lines to the best of my sorry memory.

— and most ambitiously (or neurotically, or pathetically): the notes to the actors, striving to convey what the scripts on their own could not, because more words were needed: HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER; HOW TO PLAY “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”; HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS … Each episode was only twenty-seven pages, give or take. Each season only ten episodes. There was room for a little background, a few flashbacks and tangents and clumsy insertions of information that didn’t drive the plot but filled out the motivation. So many more words were needed: HOW TO PLAY THE NEED FOR DISSATISFACTION; HOW TO PLAY LOVE; HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE … The notes were Jewish-motherly in their irrepressibly naggy didacticism, Jewish-fatherly in their need to obscure every emotion in metaphor and deflection. HOW TO PLAY AMERICAN; HOW TO PLAY THE GOOD BOY; HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME … The bible quickly surpassed the scripts themselves in length and depth — the explanatory material overwhelmed what it attempted to explain. So Jewish. Jacob wanted to make something that would redeem everything, and instead he was explaining, explaining, explaining …

HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME

The morning Julia found the phone, my parents were over for brunch. Everything was falling apart around Benjy, although I’ll never know what he knew at the time, and neither will he. The adults were talking when he reentered the kitchen and said, “The sound of time. What happened to it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know,” he said, waving his tiny hand about, “the sound of time.”

It took time — about five frustrating minutes — to figure out what he was getting at. Our refrigerator was being repaired, so the kitchen lacked its omnipresent, nearly imperceptible buzzing sound. He spent virtually all his home life within reach of that sound, and so had come to associate it with life happening.

I loved his misunderstanding, because it wasn’t a misunderstanding.

My grandfather heard the cries of his dead brothers. That was the sound of his time.

My father heard attacks.

Julia heard the boys’ voices.

I heard silences.

Sam heard betrayals and the sounds of Apple products turning on.

Max heard Argus’s whining.

Benjy was the only one still young enough to hear home.

Irv lowered all four windows and told Jacob, “You lack strength.”

“And you lack intelligence. Together we make a fully incomplete person.”

“Seriously, Jacob. What is the ravenous need for love?”

“Seriously, Dad. What is the ravenous need for that diagnosis?”

“I’m not diagnosing you. I’m explaining yourself to you.”

“And you don’t need love?”

“As a grandfather, yes. As a father and son, yes. As a Jew? No. So some fifth-tier British university won’t let us participate in their ridiculous conference on recent advances in marine biology? Who cares? Stephen Hawking won’t come to Israel? I’m not one to punch a quadriplegic with glasses, but I’m sure he won’t mind if we ask for his voice back — you know, the one that was created by Israeli engineers. And while we’re at it, I’ll happily lose my seat at the United-Against-Israel Nations if it means I can keep my ass. Jews have become the smartest weakest people in the history of the world. Look, I’m not always right. I realize that. But I’m always strong. And if our history has taught us anything, it’s that it’s more important to be strong than right. Or good, for that matter. I would rather be alive and wrong and evil. I don’t need Bishop Wears-a-Tutu, or that hydrocephalic peanut farmer president, or the backseat-driving pseudo-sociologist eunichs from the New York Times op-ed page, or anyone, to give me their blessing. I don’t need to be a Light unto the Nations; I need to not be on fire. Life is long when you’re alive, and history has a short memory. America had its way with the Indians. Australia and Germany and Spain … They did what had to be done. And what was the big deal? Their history books have a few regrettable pages? They have to issue weak-tea apologies once a year and pay out some reparations to the unfinished parts of the job? They did what had to be done, and life went on.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying.”

“What? That Israel should commit genocide?”

“That word is yours.”

“It’s what you meant.”

“I said, and meant, that Israel should be a self-respecting, self-defending country like any other.”

“Like Nazi Germany.”

“Like Germany. Like Iceland. Like America. Like every country that’s ever existed and not stopped existing.”

“Sounds inspiring.”

“Wouldn’t be pretty while it was happening, but twenty years from now, with fifty million Jews filling the Land of Israel, from the Suez Canal all the way to the oil fields, with the largest economy between Germany and China—”

“Israel isn’t between Germany and China.”

“—with the Olympics in Tel Aviv and more tourists in Jerusalem than Paris, you think anyone is going to be going on about how the kosher sausage was made?”

Irv took a deep breath and nodded his head, as if in agreement with something only he had access to.

“The world will always hate Jews. On to the next thought, which is: What to do with that hatred? We can deny it, or try to overcome it. We could even choose to join the club and hate ourselves.”

“The club?”

“You know the membership: Jews who would sooner fix their so-called deviated septums than break a nose for their survival; Jews who refuse to acknowledge that Tina Fey isn’t Jewish, or that the IDF is; ersatz-quote Jews like Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz), Winona Ryder (née Horowitz), George Soros, Mike Wallace, pretty much all Jews living in the United Kingdom, Billy Joel, Tony Judt, Bob Silvers—”

“Billy Joel isn’t Jewish.”

“Of course he is.”

“‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’?”

“Chinese restaurant, no?”

“No.”

“Point is, a Jewish fist can do more than masturbate and hold a pen. Slide out the writing implement, you’ve got a punching implement. You understand? We don’t need another Einstein. We need a Koufax who pitches at the head.”

“Did it ever occur to you—” Jacob began.

“Yes, it probably did.”

“—that I don’t include myself in your we?”

“Did it ever occur to you that the meshuggener mullah with the nuclear codes does?”

“So our identity is at the mercy of crazy strangers?”

“If you can’t generate it yourself.”

“What do you want from me? To spy for Israel? To blow myself up in a mosque?”

“I want you to write something that matters.”

“First of all, what I write matters to a lot of people.”

“No, it entertains them.”

Jacob remembered the previous night’s conversation with Max, and considered pointing out that his show generated more revenue than every book published in America that entire year combined. That might not have been true, but he would know how to play false authority.

“I take your silence to mean you understand me,” Irv said.

“How about you stick to the bigoted blogging, and I’ll take care of award-winning television?”

“Hey, Maxy, you know who made the award-winning entertainment in the time of the Maccabees?”

“Pray tell,” he said, blowing dust from his screen.

“I can’t, because we only remember the Maccabees.”

What Jacob really thought: his father was an ignorant, narcissistic, self-righteous pig, too anal-retentive and pussy-whipped to grasp the extreme reaches of his hypocrisy, emotional impotence, and mental infancy.

“So we’re in agreement, then?”

“No.”

“So we’re agreed?”

“No.”

“I’m glad you agree with me.”

But there were arguments for forgiving him, too. There were. Good ones. Beautiful intentions. Wounds.

Jacob’s phone rang. His real phone. It was Julia. The real Julia. He would have leaped through any open or closed window to escape the conversation with his father, but he was afraid of answering.

“Hi?”

“…”

“I bet.”

“…”

“Do they even have room for it?”

“…”

“I figured. Not the bomb part, but—”

“…”

“I’m in the car.”

“…”

“Their flight is arriving early.”

“…”

“Max did.”

“…”

“Max, do you want to say hi to Mom?”

“…”

“Are you in the hotel? I hear nature.”

“…”

“Tell her hi.”

“My dad says hi.”

“…”

“She says hi.”

“And that Benjy had a great time at our house, and didn’t die.”

“He wants you to know that Benjy had a great time at his house.”

“…”

“She says thanks.”

“Tell her I say hi.”

“Max says hi.”

“…”

“She says hi.”

“…”

“Let’s see. Argus is very old. That was reconfirmed. We got some new pills for joint pain, and they upped the dosage on the other one. He’ll live to bark another day.”

“…”

“Nothing to be done. The vet gave the spiel about what an honor it is to care for loved ones, how it only happens once.”

“No she didn’t,” Max said.

Jacob shrugged his shoulders.

“And tell her the vet thinks we should put Argus down.”

“Hold on,” Jacob told Julia, then muted the phone.

“That’s not what the vet said, Max.”

“Tell her.”

Jacob unmuted the phone and said, “Max wants me to communicate that the vet thinks we should put Argus down, although the vet said no such thing.”

“She did, Mom!”

“…”

“She did.”

“…”

“We had a nice conversation about quality of life and so on.”

“…”

“I took him to Fort Reno on the way, told him some stories about when I was a kid.”

“…”

“Ate McDonald’s.”

“…”

“Burritos.”

“…”

“No, microwaved.”

“…”

“Of course. Carrots. Hummus, too.”

With a few movements of his hand, Jacob communicated to Max that Julia had asked if he’d eaten vegetables.

“…”

“Will do.”

“…”

“One other thing is that last night we had a little snafu with Sam’s avatar.”

“…”

“In Other Life. His avatar. We were messing around with it.”

“You were,” Max corrected.

“…”

“No, probably not. Max was fiddling with it—”

“What? Dad, that’s just not true. Mom, it’s not true!”

“And I wanted to, you know, display interest, and we ended up doing it together. Nothing dramatic. Just walking around and exploring. Anyway, we killed her.”

“We didn’t. You did. Mom: Dad killed her!”

“…”

“His avatar. Yes.”

“…”

“Unintended.”

“…”

“You can’t fix death, Julia.”

“…”

“I spent a couple of months on the phone with tech support last night. I can probably get it back to more or less where it was, but it’s going to require sitting at his computer until the Messiah calls me away.”

“…”

“I haven’t spoken to Cory in at least a year.”

“…”

“It would be shitty to call him like this after not having returned his calls.”

“…”

“And I don’t think a computer genius is what we need. I’ll figure it out. But enough about the sickness and death over here. How are you guys? Having fun?”

“…”

“You’ve met the infamous Billie?”

“Infamous Billie?” Irv asked Max in the rearview mirror.

“Sam’s girlfriend,” Max said.

“…”

“And?”

“…”

“What’s he like around her?”

“…”

“I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“…”

“And Mark?”

“…”

“Is it good having him there?”

“…”

“Has he had to flush any pot down the toilet, or break up a French-kissing session?”

“French kissing is with tongues, right?” Max asked Irv.

“Mais oui.”

“…”

“What’s wrong?”

“…”

“What?”

“…”

“Something’s wrong. I can hear it.”

“…”

“Now I know something’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong?” Max asked.

“…”

“OK, but can you at least tell me what it has to do with, so my mind doesn’t spiral wildly for the next six hours?”

“…”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“…”

“Julia. What’s going on?”

“Seriously, what is going on?” Irv said, finally interested.

“…”

“If it were nothing we wouldn’t still be talking about it.”

“…”

“OK, I get it.”

“…”

“Wait, what?”

“…”

“Julia?”

“…”

“Mark did?”

“…”

“Why the fuck did he do that?”

“Language,” Max said.

“…”

“He’s married.”

“…”

“But he was.”

“…”

“What do you want me to do? Stab a voodoo doll of myself?”

Jacob turned up the radio to make his conversation harder for his father and son to listen in on. An English grammarian was sharing her infatuation with auto-antonyms: words that are their own opposites. Oversight means both “to oversee” and “to fail to see.” You dust a cake with sugar, dust crops with pesticides; but when furniture is dusted, something is being removed. The house weathered the storm, but the shingles were weathered.

“…”

“That isn’t fair.”

“…”

“Perhaps. But it’s also what people say when something isn’t fair.”

“…”

“Of course it is.”

“…”

“So this is just the most hysterical coincidence of timing since—”

“…”

“Ah.”

“…”

“So please tell me what it’s about. If not balance, then—?”

“…”

“Great.”

“…”

“Great.”

“…”

“The way I do it, yes.”

“…”

“Both.”

“What happened?” Max asked.

“Nothing,” Jacob said. And then, to Julia: “Max asked me what happened.”

“…”

“But you’re upset,” Max said.

“Life is upsetting,” Irv said. “Like blood is wet.”

“Scabs,” Max pointed out.

Jacob turned the volume yet louder, to the point of aggression. He was fast until his feet were held fast in concrete. The earth was held up by Atlas, and the earth held Atlas up on his way to elsewhere. After she left, no one was left.

“…”

“There is no of course anymore.”

“…”

“Are you coming home?”

“…”

“I don’t understand, Julia. I really don’t.”

“…”

“But you told me, in bed the other night, that it was something you—”

“…”

“You just said you didn’t stop it. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you.”

“Maybe you guys should get a room?” Irv said to Jacob in a whisper.

“…”

“Now I get it. Why you didn’t call last night.”

“…”

“Does Micronesia even have a bomb?”

“…”

Jacob hung up.

They were in battle against each other, and they had served together in battle.

“Jesus,” Irv said. “What the hell was that about?”

“That was about—”

“Dad?”

For only long enough to be able to dismiss it, Jacob considered telling his father and son everything. That would feel good, but at the price of his goodness.

“That. That was about a whole bunch of logistical crap, having to do with when they’re coming home later, and where the Israelis will sleep, and what they’ll eat, and so on.”

Of course Irv didn’t believe him. And of course Max didn’t, either. But Jacob almost believed himself.

He cleaved to the life from which he cleaved himself.

THE L-WORD

Billie was preparing her remarks for the General Assembly — after the unproductive caucus of the Pacific Islands Forum, the Micronesian delegation reconvened in Mark’s room and argued well past their scheduled curfew, narrowly voting to hand the bomb over to whatever competent and trustworthy third party could safely disarm it and dispose of the nuclear material — when her phone sang the first two words of Adele’s “Someone Like You,” just enough to unleash a Charybdis of feelings without revealing to others that she didn’t find the song totally cheesy. It was the special tone for Sam’s texts; she had been holding her phone in her hand since the night before, wanting and not wanting to hear I heard.

are you working on your speech?

what makes you think i want to talk to you?

that you just wrote that

someone should invent an emoji

for the word someone should invent

for how hurt i am

i’m sorry

actually, it’s guernica

…

where’d you go?

had to look up guernica

you could have just asked

nobody is like you, and you are never

like anybody else

did you get that off the side of a tampon box?

???

try harder

emet hi hasheker hatov beyoter

what truth? and what lie?

really, really like …

that’s the lie

and the truth?

love

did you just say the hardest thing?

no, that was the easiest

why were you so mean to me?

can i tell you something?

ok

when i was eight, my left hand got smashed

in the hinge of a heavy iron door

three of my fingers were severed

and had to be reattached

the nails are all mangled

when my hand stops growing i’m going

to have fake nails attached

anyway, i keep my hand in my pocket a lot

and when i’m sitting i’ll

slide it under my thigh

i know

a few times i’ve wanted

to touch your face

really?

many, many times

then why didn’t you?

my hand

you were afraid of me seeing it?

yes

and also of me seeing it

you could have used your other hand

i want to touch you with that hand

that’s the point

that’s the hand i want you to touch me with

really?

…

where’d you go?

i just pressed my phone to my heart

i could hear it beating

even though we’re not on the phone?

yes

you can touch my face if you want to

i text like achilles

but i’m a pussy in real life

i’m a feminist in real life

you know i meant that idiomatically

yes, i know you are not a vagina

then i really have you fooled

i will never write lol

i’m sorry i hurt you

why did you do it?

because it was a cowardly

way to hurt myself

what was so hard about it was that

i always feel like i understand you

but last night i didn’t

it scared me

do you accept my apology?

as franz rosenzweig famously responded

when asked if he was religious …

“not yet”

impressive memory

not yet?

not yet

but you will

did you ever wonder why it even mattered

if achilles was wounded in the heel

because that was the only part of him

that wasn’t immortal

so? so he’d be an immortal with a limp

i’m guessing you know why

i do

i’d really, really, really like to know

really, really, really, really, really

until you broke the word “like”

into a million pieces

into love

so tell me

it’s not just that his heel was

the only mortal part of him

ALL of his mortality was in his heel

— like moving everyone in a skyscraper

into the basement, and then it floods

and people who work on different floors,

and never otherwise would have met,

talk, and decide to go out to dinner,

and keep going out to dinner,

and meet each other’s family,

and celebrate holidays together,

and get married, and have

kids, who have kids, who have kids

but they drowned

so?

MAYBE IT WAS THE DISTANCE

Jacob was the only one who referred to the Israeli cousins as our Israeli cousins. To everyone else in the house, they were the Israeli cousins. Jacob felt no desire for ownership of them, and too much association made him itchy, but he felt that they were owed familial warmth commensurate with the thickness of blood. Or he felt that he should feel that. It would have been easier if they’d been easier.

He’d known Tamir since they were children. Jacob’s grandfather and Tamir’s were brothers in a Galician shtetl of such minuscule size and importance that the German people didn’t get to it until their second pass through the Pale to wipe up Jewish crumbs. There had been seven brothers. Isaac and Benny avoided the fate of the other five by hiding together in a hole for more than two hundred days, and then living in forests. Every story Jacob overheard about this period — Benny could have killed a Nazi; Isaac could have saved a Jewish boy — suggested a dozen stories that he would never overhear.

The brothers spent a year in a displaced persons camp, where they met their wives, who were sisters. Each couple had a child, each a boy: Irv and Shlomo. Benny moved his family to Israel, and Isaac moved his to America. Isaac never understood Benny. Benny understood Isaac, but never forgave him.

Within two years, Isaac and his wife, Sarah, had opened a Jewish bodega in a schwartze neighborhood, learned enough English to begin working the system, and started saving. Irv learned the infield fly rule, learned the alphabetic/syllabic logic of D.C. street naming, learned to be ashamed of his house’s look and smell, and one morning his forty-two-year-old mother went downstairs to open the store, but instead collapsed and died. Died of what? Of a heart attack. Of a stroke. Of surviving. A silence so high and thick was built around her death that not only did no one know any significant details, no one even knew what others knew. Many decades later, at his father’s funeral, Irv would allow himself to wonder if his mother had killed herself.

Everything was something never to remember, or never to forget, and what America had done for them was retold and retold. As Jacob grew, his grandfather would regale him with stories of America’s glory: how the army had fed and clothed him after the war; how at Ellis Island they never asked him to change his name (it was his own choice); how one was limited only by one’s willingness to work; how he’d never experienced anything that carried even the faintest whiff of anti-Semitism — only indifference, which is greater than love, because it’s more reliable.

The brothers would visit each other every few years, as if the performance of familial intimacy would retroactively defeat the German people and save everyone. Isaac would lavish Benny and his family with expensive-looking tchotchkes, take them to the “best” second-tier restaurants, close the market for a week to show them the sights of Washington. And when they left, he’d spend twice as long as their visit bemoaning how big-headed and tiny-minded they were, how American Jews were Jews and these Israeli crackpots were Hebrews — people who, given their way, would sacrifice animals and serve kings. Then he’d reiterate how necessary it was to maintain closeness.

Jacob found the Israeli cousins—his Israeli cousins — curious, at once alien and familiar. He saw his family’s faces in their faces, but also something different, something that could equally well be described as ignorant or unself-conscious, phony or free — hundreds of thousands of years of evolution crammed into one generation. Perhaps it was existential constipation, but the Israelis didn’t seem to give a shit about anything. All Jacob’s family ever did was give shits. They were shit-givers.

Jacob first visited Israel when he was fourteen — an overdue present that he didn’t want for a bar mitzvah he didn’t went. The next generation of Blumenbergs took the next generation of Blochs to the Wailing Wall, into whose cracks Jacob inserted prayers for things he didn’t actually care about but knew he ought to, like a cure for AIDS and an unbroken ozone layer. They floated in the Dead Sea together, among the ancient, elephantine Jews reading half-submerged newspapers bleeding Cyrillic. They climbed Masada early in the morning and pocketed rocks that might have been held in the palms of Jewish suicides. They watched the windmill break the sunset from the perch of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. They went to the small park named after Jacob’s great-grandfather Gershom Blumenberg. He had been a beloved rabbi, and his surviving disciples remained loyal to his memory, choosing never to have another rabbi, choosing their own demise. It was 105 degrees. The marble bench was cool, but the metal plaque with his name was too hot to touch.

One morning, while they were driving to a hike along the sea, an air-raid siren went off. Jacob’s eyes opened to half dollars and found Irv’s. Shlomo stopped the car. Right there, where it was, on the highway. “Did we break down?” Irv asked, as if the siren might have been indicating a cracked catalytic converter. Shlomo and Tamir got out of the car with the vacant determination of zombies. Everyone on the highway got out of cars and cargo trucks, off motorcycles. They stood, thousands of Jewish undead, perfectly silent. Jacob didn’t know if this was the end, a kind of proud greeting of nuclear winter, or a drill, or some national custom. Like dupes in a grand social psychology experiment, Jacob and his parents did as everyone else was doing, and stood by the car in silence. When the siren stopped, life reanimated. Everyone got back in the car and they were on their way.

Irv was apparently too afraid of revealing ignorance to resolve his ignorance, so Deborah was left to ask what had just happened.

“Yom HaShoah,” Shlomo said.

“That’s the one for the trees?” Jacob asked.

“For the Jews,” Shlomo said, “the ones that were chopped down.”

“Shoah,” Irv said to Jacob, as if he’d known everything all along, “means ‘Holocaust.’”

“But why does everyone stop and stand in silence?”

Shlomo said, “Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do.”

“And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.

Shlomo said, “Himself.”

Jacob was both mesmerized and repulsed by the ritual. The Jewish American response to the Holocaust was “Never forget,” because there was a possibility of forgetting. In Israel, they blared the air-raid siren for two minutes, because otherwise it would never stop blaring.

Shlomo was as over-the-top a host as Benny had been. He was further over, untethered as he was from the dignity of survival. And dignity was never Irv’s problem. So there were many scenes, especially when the check came at the end of a meal.

“Don’t touch that!”

“Don’t you touch that!”

“Don’t insult me!”

“Me insult you?”

“You’re our guests!”

“You’re our hosts!”

“I’ll never eat with you again.”

“Count on it.”

More than once this competitive generosity escalated to genuine insult. More than once — twice — perfectly good money was ripped up. Did everyone win, or did everyone lose? Why so binary?

What Jacob remembered most sharply and tenderly was the time they spent in the Blumenbergs’ home, a two-story Art Deco — ish construction perched on a Haifan hill. Every surface was made of stone and cool enough to be felt through socks at every time of day — an entire house like the bench in Blumenberg Park. There were diagonally sliced cucumbers and cubes of cheese for breakfast. Jaunts to weirdly specific two-room “zoos”: a snake zoo, a small-mammal zoo. Tamir’s mother would make huge spreads of side dishes for lunch — half a dozen salads, half a dozen dips. At home, the Blochs made a point of trying not to turn on the TV. The Blumenbergs made a point of trying not to turn it off.

Tamir was obsessed with computers and had a library of RGB porn before Jacob had word processing. In those days, Jacob concealed dirty magazines inside reference books at Barnes & Noble, searched lingerie catalogs for nipples and pubes with the dedication of a Talmudist searching for God’s will, and listened to the moans of the visually blocked but aurally exposed Spice channel. The greatest of lewd treats was the three minutes of preview that hotels used to offer for all movies: family, adult, adult. Even as a teenager, Jacob recognized the masturbatory tautology: if three minutes of the adult film convinced you that it was a worthy adult film, you would no longer have need of it. Tamir’s computer took half a day to download a titty fuck, but what else was time made for?

Once, while they watched a pixelated woman jerkily spread and close her legs — an animation composed of six frames — Tamir asked if Jacob felt like beating off.

Jacob gave an ironic, Tom Brokaw — voiced “No,” assuming his cousin was joking.

“Suit yourself,” Tamir said, and proceeded to suit himself, pumping a glob of shea butter moisturizer into his palm.

Jacob watched him remove his hard penis from his pants and begin to stroke it, transferring the cream to its length. After a minute or two of this, Tamir got up onto his knees, bringing the head of his penis within inches of the screen — close enough for static shock. His penis was wide, Jacob had to give it that. But he wasn’t convinced it was any longer than his own. He wasn’t convinced that in the dark one would be able to tell the difference between their penises.

“How does it feel?” Jacob asked, while simultaneously reprimanding himself for voicing such a creepy question.

And then, as if in response, Tamir grabbed a Kleenex from the box on his desk and moaned as he shot a load into it.

Why had Jacob asked that? And why had Tamir come right then? Had Jacob’s question made him come? Had that been Jacob’s (totally subconscious) intent?

They masturbated side by side a dozen or so times. They certainly never touched each other, but Jacob did wonder if Tamir’s quiet moans were always irrepressible — if there wasn’t something performative about them. They never spoke about such sessions after — not three minutes after, and not three decades — but they weren’t a source of shame for either of them. They were young enough at the time not to worry about meaning, and then old enough to revere what was lost.

Pornography was only one example of the chasm between their life experiences. Tamir walked himself to school before Jacob’s parents would leave him at a drop-off birthday party. Tamir cooked his own dinner, while an airplane full of dark green vegetables searched for a landing strip in Jacob’s mouth. Tamir drank beer before Jacob, smoked pot before Jacob, got a blowjob before Jacob, got arrested before Jacob (who would never be arrested), traveled abroad before Jacob, had his heart created by having his heart broken before Jacob. When Tamir was given an M16, Jacob was given a Eurail pass. Tamir tried without success to stay out of risky situations; Jacob tried without success to find his way into them. At nineteen, Tamir was in a half-buried outpost in south Lebanon, behind four feet of concrete. Jacob was in a dorm in New Haven whose bricks had been buried for two years before construction so that they would look older than they were. Tamir didn’t resent Jacob — he would have been Jacob, given the choice — but he had lost some of the lightness necessary to appreciate someone as light as his cousin. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that stupid New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one. Tamir tried not to get killed, while Jacob tried not to die of boredom.

After his service, Tamir was finally free to live on his own terms. He became hugely ambitious, in the sense of wanting to make shitloads of money and buy loads of shit. He dropped out of Technion after a year and founded the first of a series of high-tech start-ups. Almost all of them were flops, but it doesn’t take many nonflops to make your first five million. Jacob was too jealous to give Tamir the pleasure of explaining what his companies did, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that, like most Israeli high tech, they applied military technologies to civilian life.

Tamir’s homes and cars and ego and girlfriends’ breasts got bigger every visit. Jacob put on a respectful face that revealed just the right amount of disapproval, but in the end, all his emotional dog whistles were rendered pointless by Tamir’s emotional tone-deafness. Why couldn’t Jacob just be happy for his cousin’s happiness? Tamir was as good a person as just about anyone, whose great success made his good-enough values increasingly difficult to act on. It’s confusing to have more than you need. Who could blame him?

Jacob could. Jacob could because he had less than he needed — he was an honorable, ambitious, near-broke novelist who barely ever wrote — and that wasn’t in any way confusing. Nothing was getting bigger in his life — it was a constant struggle to maintain the sizes he’d established — and people without fancy material possessions have their fancy values to flaunt.

Isaac always favored Tamir. Jacob could never figure out why. His grandfather seemed to have serious problems with all his post — bar mitzvah relatives, very much including those who forced their children to skype with him once a week, and took him to doctors, and drove him to distant supermarkets where one could buy six tins of baking powder for the price of five. Everyone ignored Isaac, but no one less than Jacob, and no one more than Tamir. Yet Isaac would have traded six Jacobs for five Tamirs.

Tamir. Now, he’s a good grandson.

Even if he wasn’t all that good, or in any way his grandson.

Maybe it was the distance Isaac loved. Maybe the absence allowed for a mythology, while Jacob was cursed to be judged by the increments he fell short of perfect menschiness.

Jacob tried to persuade Tamir to come see Isaac before the move to the Jewish Home. There were eighteen months of purgatory as they waited for someone to die and free up a room. But Tamir denied the significance of the event.

“I’ve moved six times in the last ten years,” he e-mailed, although like this: “iv mvd 6 tms n lst 10 yrs,” as if English were as vowelless as Hebrew. Or as if there were no possible way for him to give less of a shit about the message.

“Sure,” Jacob wrote back, “but never to an assisted-living facility.”

“I’ll come when he dies, OK?”

“I’m not sure that visit will mean as much to him.”

“And we’ll be there for Sam’s bar mitzvah,” Tamir responded, although at that point it was still a year away and definitively happening.

“I hope he makes it that long,” Jacob wrote.

“You sound like him.”

The year passed, Isaac survived, as was his way, and so did the insolent Jews squatting in the various rooms that were his birthright. But then, finally, the exasperating wait was over: someone shattered his hip and died, bringing Isaac to the top of the list. Sam’s bar mitzvah was finally upon him. And according to Jacob’s phone, the Israelis were in their final descent.

“Listen,” Jacob told Max as Irv pulled into a parking spot, “our Israeli cousins—”

“Your Israeli cousins.”

“Our Israeli cousins are not the easiest people in the world—”

“We’re the easiest people in the world?”

“I’ll tell you the one thing the Arabs get right,” Irv said, annoyed by the angle at which a car was parked. “They don’t give women licenses.”

“We’re the second-most-difficult people in the world,” Jacob told Max. “After your Israeli cousins. But the point I’m trying to make is don’t judge the State of Israel by the stubbornness, arrogance, and materialism of our cousins.”

“Also known as fortitude, righteousness, and ingenuity,” Irv said, turning off the car.

“It’s not their Israeliness,” Jacob said, “it’s just them. And they’re ours.”

IN THE END, ONE’S HOME IS PERFECT

There were rolls of bubble wrap in the basement, like rolls of hay in a field in a painting — dozens of liters of trapped air that had been saved for years for an occasion that would never come.

The walls were bare: the bequeathed awards and diplomas had been taken down, the ketubahs, reproductions of posters for Chagall exhibits, wedding photos and graduation photos and bar mitzvah photos and bris photos and framed sonogram images. So many framed pictures, as if he’d been trying to conceal the walls. And in their absence, so many rectangles of discoloration.

The made-in-China tchotchkes had been removed from the china cabinet’s shelves and put in its drawers.

On the refrigerator, unbleached rectangles indicated where the gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren used to be — all that remained were three class portraits, six closed eyes. The Vishniacs had been touched for the first time in a decade, moved to the floor, and those photos and cards that once covered the fridge now covered the coffee table, each in its own ziplock sandwich bag. It was for this moment that Isaac had saved all those baggies — washed them out after use, slid them over the faucet to dry.

On the bed were more piles of things still to be distributed to loved ones. The last couple of years had been an extended process of giving away everything he owned, and what remained, now, was hardest to let go of — not because of sentimental attachment, but because who would ever want such things? He’d had some genuinely decent silver. Charming porcelain teacups. And if you could imagine going to the trouble and expense of reupholstering, a non-ironic argument could be made to save a few of the chairs. But who would be willing to take home, or even to the nearest dumpster, wrapping paper that still held the creases of the boxes it had once covered?

Who would want the Post-it pads, totes, tiny spiral notebooks, and oversized pens, given as promotional items by pharmaceutical companies and taken because they were there?

That box of petrified jelly beans, pinched from the kiddush honoring the birth of someone who was now an obstetrician. Would anyone want that?

Having no visitors, he had no need for coat storage, so the entry closet was a good place to store more of the bubble wrap he didn’t need. In the summer the bubbles expanded and the closet door strained — the hinge pins turning counterclockwise by thousandths of a degree from the pressure.

Who among the living would want what he had left to give?

And what interruption of the stillness, what sudden disturbance, awakened the fizz of the last ginger ale in the fridge?

HERE COME THE ISRAELIS!

Tamir managed to pull three rolling suitcases behind him while carrying two duty-free bags overflowing with — what? What dignity-free doodie could he possibly need enough of to make his cousins wait that much longer? Swatches? Cologne? A massive plastic M&M filled with tiny chocolate M&M’s?

The surprise upon seeing him never diminished. Here was someone with whom Jacob shared more genetic material than just about anyone else on earth, and yet how many passersby would even guess they were related? His skin color could be explained by exposure to the sun, and the differences in their builds attributed to diet and exercise and willpower, but what about his sharp jaw, his overhanging brow, the hair on his knuckles and head? What about the size of his feet, his perfect eyesight, his ability to grow a full beard while a bagel toasted?

He went right to Jacob, like an Iron Dome interceptor, took him into his arms, kissed him with his full mouth, then held him at arm’s length. He squeezed Jacob’s shoulders and looked him up and down, as if he were contemplating eating or raping him.

“Apparently we aren’t children anymore!”

“Not even our children are children.”

His chest was broad and firm. It would have made a good surface on which someone like Jacob could write about someone like Tamir.

Once again, he held Jacob at arm’s length.

“What’s your shirt mean?” Jacob asked.

“Funny, no?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure I get it.”

“‘You look like I need a drink.’ You know, you look like I need a drink.”

“What, like, you’re so ugly I need a drink? Or, I can see, reflected in your expression, my own need for alcohol?”

Tamir turned to Barak and said, “Didn’t I tell you?”

Barak nodded and laughed, and Jacob didn’t know what that meant, either.

It had been almost seven years since Tamir’s last visit; Jacob hadn’t been to Israel since he was married.

Jacob had sent Tamir only good news, much of it embellished, some of it plainly false. As it turned out, Tamir had been doing his own share of embellishing and lying, but it would take a war to make the truth known.

Hugs were exchanged all around. Tamir lifted Irv from the ground, pushing a small fart out of him — an anal Heimlich.

“I made you fart!” Tamir said, pumping a fist.

“Just some gas,” Irv said — a distinction without a difference, as Dr. Silvers would say.

“I’m going to make you fart again!”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

Tamir wrapped his arms around Irv again, and lifted him back into the air, this time with a firmer squeeze. And again it worked, this time even better — applying a very specific definition of better. Tamir put him down, took a deep breath, then opened his arms once more.

“This time you shit.”

Irv crossed his arms.

Tamir laughed heartily and said, “Joking, joking!”

Everyone who wasn’t Irv laughed. It was the first boisterous laugh that Jacob had heard come from Max in weeks — maybe months.

Then Tamir pulled Barak forward, mussed his hair, and said, “Look at this one. He’s a man, no?”

Man was exactly the right word. He was towering, cut from Jerusalem stone and generously garnished with fur — the kind of pecs you could bounce pocket change off, if there hadn’t been a forest of thrice-curled hair so dense that all that entered it was deposited for good.

Among his brothers, and between haircuts, Max was boy enough. But Barak made him seem small, weak, ungendered. And everyone seemed to recognize it — no one more than Max, who took a meek half step back, in the direction of his mommy’s room at the Washington Hilton.

“Max!” Tamir said, turning his sights on the boy.

“Affirmative.”

Jacob gave an embarrassed chuckle: “Affirmative? Really?”

“It just came out,” Max said, smelling his own blood.

Tamir gave him a once-over and said, “You look like a vegetarian.”

“Pescatarian,” Max said.

“You eat meat,” Jacob said.

“I know. I look like a pescatarian.”

Barak gave Max a punch to the chest, for no obvious reason.

“Ouch! What the—”

“Joking,” Barak said, “joking.”

Max rubbed at his chest. “Your joke fractured my sternum.”

“Food?” Tamir asked, slapping his paunch.

“I thought maybe we’d head by Isaac’s first,” Jacob suggested.

“Let the man eat,” Irv said, creating sides by choosing one of them.

“Why the hell not,” Jacob said, remembering that Kafka quote: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.”

Tamir looked around the airport terminal and clapped his hands. “Panda Express! The best!”

He got pork lo mein. Irv did everything he could to conceal his displeasure, but his everything wasn’t too formidable. If Tamir couldn’t be a character in the Torah, he could at least adhere to it. But Irv was a good host, blood being blood, and bit his tongue until his teeth touched.

“You know where you can get the best Italian food in the world right now?” Tamir asked, stabbing a piece of pork.

“Italy?”

“Israel.”

“I’d heard that,” Irv said.

Jacob couldn’t let such a preposterous statement go.

“You mean the best Italian food outside of Italy.”

“No, I’m telling you the best Italian food being cooked right now is being cooked in Israel.”

“Right. But you’re making the dubious claim that Israel is the country outside of Italy that makes the best Italian food.”

“Including Italy,” he said, cracking the knuckles of his forkless hand simply by making a fist and opening it.

“That’s definitionally impossible. Like saying the best German beer is Israeli.”

“It’s called Goldstar.”

“Which I love,” Irv added.

“You don’t even drink beer.”

“But when I do.”

“Let me ask you something,” Tamir said. “Where do they make the best bagels in the world?”

“New York.”

“I agree. The best bagels in the world are being made in New York. Now let me ask you: Is a bagel a Jewish food?”

“Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Is a bagel a Jewish food in the same way that pasta is an Italian food?”

“In a similar way.”

“And let me also ask you: Is Israel the Jewish homeland?”

“Israel is the Jewish state.”

Tamir straightened in his seat.

“That wasn’t the part of my argument you were supposed to disagree with.”

Irv shot Jacob a look. “Of course it’s the Jewish homeland.”

“It depends on what you mean by homeland,” Jacob said. “If you mean ancestral homeland—”

“What do you mean?” Tamir asked.

“I mean the place my family comes from.”

“Which is?”

“Galicia.”

“But before that.”

“What, Africa?”

Irv let his voice drip like molasses, but not sweet: “Africa, Jacob?”

“It’s arbitrary. We could go back to the trees, or the ocean, if we wanted. Some go back to Eden. You pick Israel. I pick Galicia.”

“You feel Galician?”

“I feel American.”

“I feel Jewish,” Irv said.

“The truth,” Tamir said, popping the last piece of pork into his mouth, “is you feel Julia’s titties.”

Apropos of nothing, Max asked, “Do you think the bathroom is clean?”

Jacob wondered if Max’s question, his desire to be away, was apropos of some knowledge, or intuition, that his father hadn’t touched his mother’s breasts in months?

“It’s a bathroom,” Tamir said.

“I’ll just wait until we get home.”

“If you have to go,” Jacob said, “go. It’s not good to hold it.”

“Says who?” Irv asked.

“Says your prostate.”

“You think my prostate speaks to you?”

“I don’t have to go,” Max said.

“It’s good to hold it,” Tamir said. “It’s like a … what do you call it? Not a kugel…”

“Give it a shot, OK, Max? Just in case.”

“Let the kid not go,” Irv said. And to Tamir: “A kegel. And you’re absolutely right.”

“I’ll go,” Jacob said. “You know why? Because I love my prostate.”

“Maybe you should marry it,” Max said.

Jacob didn’t have to go, but he went. And then he stood there at the urinal, an asshole with an exposed penis, passing a few moments to further his absence of a point, and just in case.

A man his father’s age was urinating beside him. His pee came out in bursts, as if from a lawn sprinkler, and to Jacob’s unaccredited ear it sounded like a symptom. When the man let out a small grunt, Jacob reflexively glanced over, and they exchanged the briefest of smiles before remembering where they were: a place where exactly one extremely brief moment of acknowledgment was tolerable. Jacob had the strong sensation that he knew this person. He often felt that at urinals, but this time he was sure — as he always was. Where had he seen that face before? A teacher from grade school? One of the boys’ teachers? One of his father’s friends? He was momentarily convinced that this stranger was a figure in one of Julia’s old family photos from Eastern Europe, and that he had traveled through time to deliver a warning.

Jacob returned to thoughts of babbling brooks and the slow death of a lower back whose demise, like so much else, he never considered until forced, and it hit him: Spielberg. Once the thought appeared, there was no doubting it. Of course it was him. Jacob was standing, his penis exposed, next to Steven Spielberg, whose penis was exposed. What were the odds?

Jacob had grown up, as had every Jew in the last quarter of the twentieth century, under Spielberg’s wing. Rather, in the shadow of his wing. He had seen E.T. three times in its opening week, all at the Uptown, each time through his fingers as the bike chase reached a climax so delicious it was literally unbearable. He had seen Indiana Jones, and the next one, and the next one. Tried to sit through Always. Nobody’s perfect. Not until he makes Schindler’s List, at which point he is not even he anymore, but representative of them. Them? The murdered millions. No, Jacob thought, representative of us. The Unmurdered. But Schindler wasn’t for us. It was for them. Them? Not the Murdered, of course. They couldn’t watch movies. It was for all of them who weren’t us: the goyim. Because with Spielberg, into whose bank account the general public was compelled to make annual deposits, we finally had a way to force them to look at our absence, to rub their noses in the German shepherd’s shit.

And God, was he loved. Jacob found the movie schmaltzy, overblown, and flirting with kitsch. But he had been profoundly moved. Irv denounced the choice to tell an uplifting Holocaust story, to give, for all intents and purposes, a statistically negligible happy ending generated by that statistically negligible of species, the good German. But even Irv had been moved to his limits. Isaac couldn’t have been more moved: You see, you see what was done to us, to mine parents, to mine brothers, to me, you see? Everyone was moved, and everyone was persuaded that being moved was the ultimate aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical experience.

Jacob was going to have to cop a look at Spielberg’s penis. The only question was on what pretense.

Every annual physical ended with Dr. Schlesinger kneeling in front of Jacob, cupping Jacob’s balls, and asking him to turn his head and cough. That experience seemed to be universal, and universally inexplicable, among men. But coughing and turning one’s head had something to do with genitals. The logic wasn’t airtight, but it felt right. Jacob coughed and snuck a peek.

The size didn’t make an impression — Spielberg was no longer, shorter, wider, or narrower than most doughy Jewish grandfathers. Neither was he particularly bananaed, pendular, reticulated, lightbulb-ish, reptilian, laminar, mushroomed, varicosey, hook-nosed, or cockeyed. What was notable was what wasn’t missing: his penis was uncircumcised. Jacob had had precious little exposure to the visual atrocity that is an intact penis, and so wouldn’t bet his life on what he saw — and the stakes felt that high — but he knew enough to know that he had to look again. But though urinal etiquette forgives a greeting, and the cough might have been a passable alibi for the glance, there was simply no way to return to the scene without propositioning sex, and even in a world in which Spielberg hadn’t made A.I., that wasn’t going to happen.

There were four options: (1) he had misidentified him as Steven Spielberg and misidentified his penis as being uncircumcised; (2) he had misidentified him as Steven Spielberg and correctly identified his penis as being uncircumcised; (3) it was Steven Spielberg, but he had misidentified his penis as being uncircumcised—of course he was circumcised; or (4) Steven Spielberg wasn’t circumcised. If he were a betting man, he’d push his mountain of chips onto (4).

Jacob flushed (his face and the urinal), washed too quickly to accomplish anything, and scrambled back out to the others.

“You’re never going to guess who I just peed beside.”

“Jesus, Dad.”

“Close. Spielberg.”

“Who’s that?” Tamir asked.

“You’re serious?”

“What?”

“Spielberg. Steven Spielberg.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Give me a break,” Jacob said, unsure, as ever, to what extent Tamir was performing. Whatever else could be said about him, Tamir was smart, worldly, and restless. But whatever else could be said about him, he was foolish, solipsistic, and self-satisfied. If he had a sense of humor, it was drier than cornstarch. Which enabled him to practice a kind of psychological acupuncture on Jacob: Did a needle just enter me? Does it hurt? Is this complete bullshit? He couldn’t have been serious about Israeli Italian food, could he? About not having heard of Spielberg? Impossible, and entirely possible.

“That’s heavy,” Irv said.

“And the heaviest part?” Jacob leaned in and whispered, “He’s not circumcised.”

Max threw his hands into the air. “What did you, kiss his wiener in a bathroom stall?”

“Who is this Spielberg?” Tamir asked.

“We were at urinals, Max.” And just to be clear: “And of course I didn’t kiss his wiener.”

“That simply cannot be right,” Irv said.

“I know. But I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Why were your own eyes checking out another man’s penis?” Max asked.

“Because he’s Steven Spielberg.”

“Why won’t someone tell me who this person is?” Tamir said.

“Because I don’t believe that you don’t know who he is.”

“Why would I pretend?” Tamir asked, entirely believably.

“Because it’s your bizarre Israeli way of diminishing the achievements of American Jews.”

“And why would I want to do that?”

“You’d have to tell me.”

“OK,” Tamir said, calmly wiping the remnants of six packets of duck sauce from the corners of his mouth, “whatever you say.” He got up and headed in the direction of the condiments bar.

“You have to go back in and be sure,” Irv said. “Introduce yourself.”

“You will do no such thing,” Max said, exactly as his mother would have.

Irv closed his eyes and said, “My core has been shaken.”

“I know.”

“What are we to believe?”

“I know.”

“All the while we thought his Holocaust schlock was compensating for the Holocaust.”

“Now it’s schlock?”

“It was always schlock,” Irv said. “But it was our schlock. Now … I have to wonder.”

“It’s not as if he isn’t Jewi—”

But Jacob couldn’t finish the sentence. Or he didn’t need to. As soon as the fragment of the possibility entered the world, there was no room for anything else.

“I need to sit down,” Irv said.

“You are sitting down,” Max told him.

“I need to sit on the floor.”

“Don’t,” Jacob said. “It’s filthy.”

“Everything is now filthy,” Irv said.

In silence, they watched dozens of people balancing overstuffed trays weave and dodge and never touch. Presumably, a higher life-form would have its own version of David Attenborough. That “person” could make a great episode of a miniseries about humans featuring such hypnotic observing.

Max whispered something incomprehensible, to no one.

Irv rested his head in his hands and said, “If God had wanted us to be uncircumcised, He wouldn’t have invented smegma.”

“What?” Jacob asked.

“If God had wanted…”

“I’m talking to Max.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Max said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Jaws is such a terrible movie,” Irv said.

And then Tamir came back. They’d been too preoccupied by their apocalyptic speculations to notice how long he’d been gone.

“So here’s the deal,” he said.

“What deal?”

“He has problems with urinary retention.”

“He?”

“Steve.”

Irv clapped his cheeks and squealed like it was his first visit to the American Girl flagship store.

“I can see why you assumed I would know who he is. Very impressive résumé. What can I say? I don’t watch a lot of movies. There’s no money in watching movies. A lot in making them, though. Do you know that he’s worth more than three billion dollars? Billion with a b?”

“Really?”

“He had no reason to lie to me.”

“But why did he have reason to share?”

“I asked.”

“How much he’s worth?”

“Yeah.”

“And you probably asked if he’s circumcised, right?”

“I did.”

Jacob embraced Tamir. He hadn’t meant to. His arms simply reached for him. It wasn’t that Tamir had gathered the piece of information. It was that he had all the qualities that Jacob lacked and didn’t want but desperately missed: the brashness, the fearlessness where fear was not required, the fearlessness where fear was required, the giving of no shits. “Tamir, you are a beautiful human being.”

“So…?” Irv begged.

Tamir turned to Jacob.

“He knows you, by the way. He didn’t recognize you, but when I mentioned your name, he said he read your first book. He said he considered optioning it, whatever that means.”

“He did?”

“That’s what he said.”

“If Spielberg had made a film out of that book, I’d—”

“Exhume the lede,” Irv said. “Is he short-sleeved?”

Tamir jiggled his soda cup, freeing the ice cubes from their group hug.

“Tamir?”

“We agreed it would be funnier if I didn’t tell you.”

“We?”

“Steve and I.”

Jacob gave him a shove, as spontaneous as the hug.

“You’re bullshitting.”

“Israelis never bullshit.”

“Israelis only bullshit.”

“We’re mishpuchah,” Irv pleaded.

“Yes. And if you can’t keep secrets from your family, who can you keep secrets from?”

“So I emancipate myself from the family. Now tell me.”

Tamir scraped the remaining lo mein from his bowl and said, “Before I fly back.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you before I go.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Could he be serious?

“I can.”

Irv banged the table.

“I’ll tell Max,” Tamir said. “An early bar mitzvah present. What he chooses to do with the information is his own business.”

“You know it’s Sam’s bar mitzvah,” Max said. “Not mine.”

“Of course,” he said with a wink. “This is a very early bar mitzvah present.”

He put his hands on Max’s shoulders and brought him close. His lips almost touching Max’s ear, he whispered. And Max smiled. He laughed.

* * *

As they walked to the car, Irv kept signaling for Jacob to take one of Tamir’s bags, and Jacob kept signaling that Tamir wouldn’t let him. And Jacob signaled to Max that he should talk to Barak, and Max signaled back that his father should — smoke through a stoma? There they were, four men and one almost-man, and yet they were making silly hand gestures that communicated almost nothing and fooled almost no one.

“How’s your grandfather?” Tamir asked.

“Compared to what?”

“To how he was last time I saw him.”

“That was a decade ago.”

“So he’s older, probably.”

“He’s moving in a couple of days.”

“Making aliyah?”

“Yup. To the Jewish Home.”

“What’s he got left?”

“Are you asking me how much longer he is expected to live?”

“You find such complicated ways to say such simple things.”

“I can only tell you what his doctor told me.”

“So?”

“He’s been dead for five years.”

“A medical miracle.”

“Among other kinds. I’m sure it would mean the world to him to see you.”

“Let’s go to your house. We’ll drop off the bags, see Julia—”

“She won’t be back until the late afternoon.”

“So we’ll nosh, shoot some baskets. I’d like to see your audiovisual setup.”

“I don’t think we have one. And he usually goes to sleep very early, like—”

“You’re our guest,” Irv said to Tamir, patting his back. “We’ll do whatever you’d like.”

“Of course,” Jacob said, siding with the world in its struggle against his grandfather. “We can always visit later. Or tomorrow.”

“I brought some halvah for him.”

“He’s diabetic.”

“It’s from the souk.”

“Yeah, his diabetes doesn’t really care about sourcing.”

Tamir took the halvah from his carry-on bag, opened the wrapping, removed a piece, and tossed it in his mouth.

“I’ll drive,” Jacob said to Irv as they approached the car.

“Why?”

“Because I’ll drive.”

“I thought the highway made you anxious?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jacob said, flashing Tamir a smile of dismissiveness. And then, to Irv, with force: “Give me the keys.”

In the car, Tamir pressed the sole of his right foot against the windshield, parachuting his scrotum for any infra-red traffic cameras they might pass. He braided his fingers behind his head — more knuckle cracking — nodded, and began: “To tell you the truth, I’m making a lot of money.” Here we go, Jacob thought. Tamir impersonating the bad impersonator of Tamir. “High tech has gone crazy, and I was smart enough — I was brave enough — to get into a lot of things at the right moment. That’s the secret to success: the combination of intelligence and bravery. Because there are a lot of intelligent people in the world, and a lot of brave people in the world, but when you go searching for people who are intelligent and brave, you don’t find yourself surrounded. And I was lucky. Look, Jake—” Why did he think it was OK to capriciously shear Jacob’s name? It was an act of aggression, even if Jacob couldn’t parse it, even if he loved it. “I don’t believe in luck, but only a fool wouldn’t acknowledge the importance of being in the right place at the right time. You make your own luck. That’s what I say.”

“That’s also what everyone says,” Jacob pointed out.

“But still, we don’t control everything.”

“What about Israel?” Irv asked from the backseat.

“Israel?” Here we go. “Israel is thriving. Walk down the streets of Tel Aviv one night. There’s more culture per square foot than anywhere in the world. Look at our economy. We’re sixty-eight years old — younger than you, Irv. We have only seven million people, no natural resources, and are engaged in perpetual war. All of that, and we have more companies on the NASDAQ than any country after America. We have more start-ups than China, India, and the U.K., and file more patents than any country in the world—including yours.”

“Things are going well,” Irv confirmed.

“Things have never been better anywhere at any time than they are in Israel right now.”

“The height of the Roman Empire?” Jacob felt a need to ask.

“Where are they now?”

“That’s what the Romans asked of the Greeks.”

“We live in a different apartment than the one you visited. We’re always moving. It’s good business, and it’s good in the general sense, too. We’re in a triplex now — three floors. We have seven bedrooms—”

“Eight,” Barak corrected.

“He’s right. It’s eight.” This is performance, Jacob reminded himself, or tried to convince himself, as he felt a jealousy surfacing. It’s a routine. He’s not making you smaller. Tamir continued: “Eight bedrooms, even though we’re only four people now that Noam is in the army. Two bedrooms a person. But I like the space. It’s not that we have so many guests, although we have a lot, but I like to stretch out: a couple of rooms for my business ventures; Rivka is insane about meditating; the kids have air hockey, gaming systems. They have a foosball table from Germany. I have an assistant who has nothing to do with my business ventures but just helps with lifestyle things, and I said, ‘Go find me the best foosball table in the world.’ And she did. She has an amazing body, and she knows how to find anything. It’s quite amazing. You could leave this foosball table in the rain for a year and it would be fine.”

“I thought it never rains in Israel,” Jacob said.

“It does,” Tamir said, “but you’re right, the climate is ideal. Anyway, I rest my drinks on it, and do they ever leave a ring? Barak?”

“No.”

“So when we were walking through the new apartment — the most recent apartment — I turned to Rivka and said, ‘Eh?’ and she said, ‘What do we need with an apartment this big?’ I told her what I’ll tell you now: The more you buy, the more you have to sell.”

“You should really write a book,” Jacob said to Tamir, taking a tiny needle from his back and placing it in Tamir’s.

“So should you,” Irv said, taking that tiny needle from Tamir’s back and placing it in Jacob’s aorta.

“And I told her something else: it’s always going to be rich people who have money, so you want to have what the rich people will want to have. The more expensive something is, the more expensive it will become.”

“But that’s just saying that expensive things are expensive,” Jacob pointed out.

“Exactly.”

“Well,” Jacob’s better angel ventriloquized, “I’d love to see it someday.”

“You’d have to come to Israel.”

With a smile: “The apartment can’t come to me?”

“It could, but that would be crazy. And anyway, soon enough it will be another apartment.”

“Well, then I’d love to see that one.”

“And the bathrooms … The bathrooms would blow your mind. Everything made in Germany.”

Irv groaned.

“You can’t find this kind of craftsmanship.”

“Apparently you can.”

“Well, you can’t find it in America. My assistant — the personal one, with the body — found me a toilet with a camera that recognizes who is approaching and adjusts to preset settings. Rivka likes a cool seat. I want my ass hairs singed. Yael wants to be practically standing when she shits. Barak faces backwards.”

“I don’t face backwards,” Barak said, punching his father’s shoulder.

“You think I’m crazy,” Tamir said. “You’re probably judging me, even laughing at me in your mind, but I’m the one with a toilet that knows his name, and I’m the one with a refrigerator that does the shopping online, and you’re the one driving a Japanese go-kart.”

Jacob didn’t think Tamir was crazy. He thought his need to exhibit and press the case for his happiness was unconvincing and sad. And sympathetic. That’s where the emotional logic broke down. All that should have led Jacob to dislike Tamir brought him closer — not with envy, but love. He loved Tamir’s brazen weakness. He loved his inability — his unwillingness — to hide his ugliness. Such exposure was what Jacob most wanted, and most withheld from himself.

“And what about the situation?” Irv asked.

“What situation?”

“Safety.”

“What? Food safety?”

“The Arabs.”

“Which ones?”

“Iran. Syria. Hezbollah. Hamas. The Islamic State. Al-Qaeda.”

“The Iranians aren’t Arabs. They’re Persian.”

“I’m sure that helps you sleep at night.”

“Things could be better, things could be worse. Beyond that, you know what I know.”

”I only know what’s in the papers,” Irv said.

“Where do you think I get my news?”

“So how does it feel over there?” Irv pressed.

“Would I be happier if Noam were a DJ for the army radio station? Sure. But I feel fine. Barak, you feel fine?”

“I feel cool.”

“You think Israel’s going to bomb Iran?”

“I don’t know,” Tamir said. “What do you think?”

“Do you think they should?” Jacob asked. He wasn’t immune to the morbid curiosity, the American Jewish bloodlust at arm’s length.

“Of course they should,” Irv said.

“If there were a way to bomb Iran without bombing Iran, that would be good. Any other course will be bad.”

“So what do you think they should do?” Jacob asked.

“He just told you,” Irv said. “He thinks they should bomb Iran.”

“I think you should bomb Iran,” Tamir told Irv.

“America?”

“That would be good, too. But I meant you specifically. You could use some of those biological weapons you displayed earlier.”

They all laughed at that, especially Max.

“Seriously,” Irv pressed, “what do you think should happen?”

“Seriously, I don’t know.”

“And you’re OK with that?”

“Are you?”

“No, I’m not OK with it. I think we should bomb Iran before it’s too late.”

To which Tamir said, “And I think we should establish who we is before it’s too late.”

All Tamir wanted to talk about was money — the average Israeli income, the size of his own easy fortune, the unrivaled quality of life in that fingernail clipping of oppressively hot homeland hemmed in by psychopathic enemies.

All Irv wanted to talk about was the situation—when was Israel going to make us proud by making itself safe? Was there any inside piece of information to be dangled above friends at the dining room at the American Enterprise Institute, or whose pin might be pulled in his blog and thrown? Wasn’t it high time we — you — did something about this or that?

All Jacob wanted to talk about was living close to death: Had Tamir killed anyone? Had Noam? Did either have any stories of fellow soldiers torturing or being tortured? What’s the worst thing either ever saw with his own eyes?

The Jews Jacob grew up with adjusted their aviator glasses with only the muscles in their faces while parsing Fugazi lyrics while pushing in the lighters of their hand-me-down Volvo wagons. The lighter would pop out, they’d push it back in. Nothing was ever lit. They were miserable at sports, but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights, but sought arguments. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants, of survivors. They were defined by, and proud of, their flagrant weakness.

Yet they were intoxicated by muscle. Not literal muscle — they found that suspicious, foolish, and lame. No, they were driven wild by the muscular application of the Jewish brain: Maccabees rolling under the bellies of armored Greek elephants to stab the soft undersides; Mossad missions whose odds, means, and results verged on magic; computer viruses so preternaturally complicated and smart they couldn’t not leave Jewish fingerprints. You think you can mess with us, world? You think you can push us around? You can. But brain beats muscle as surely as paper beats rock, and we’re gonna learn you; we’re gonna sit at our desks and be the last ones standing.

As they sought the parking lot exit, like a marble in one of Benjy’s OCD Marble Madness creations, Jacob felt inexplicably peaceful. Despite all that had been spilled, was the cup still half full? Or did a crumb of Wellbutrin just lodge free from between his brain’s teeth, offering a morsel of undigested happiness? The cup was half full enough.

Despite his endless smart-ass and legitimate and almost-honorable protestations, Sam showed up for his bar mitzvah lessons. And despite being forced to apologize for a noncrime that he didn’t commit, he would show up at the bimah.

Despite being an insufferable, chauvinistic blowhard, Irv was ever present, and, in his own way, ever loving.

Despite his long history of false promises, and despite his older son being on duty in the West Bank, Tamir showed up. He brought his boy. They were family, and they were being family.

But what about Jacob? Was he there? His mind kept leaping to the supermagnet of Mark and Julia, though not in the ways he would have expected. He’d often imagined Julia having sex with other men. It very nearly destroyed him, but thrilled what was spared. He didn’t want such thoughts, but sexual fantasy wants what is not to be had. He’d imagined Mark fucking her after their meeting at the hardware place. But now that something had happened between them — it was entirely possible they’d already fucked — his mind was released. It’s not that the fantasy was suddenly too painful; it suddenly wasn’t painful enough.

Now, driving a car full of family, his wife in a hotel with a man she’d at least kissed, his fantasy found the bull’s-eye: it was the same car, but different occupants. Julia looks in the rearview mirror and sees Benjy falling asleep in his Benjy way: his body straight, his neck straight, his gaze directly in front of him, his eyes closing so slowly their movement is imperceptible — only by looking away and looking back can you register any change. The physicality of it, the fragility evoked by witnessing such slowness, is perplexing and beautiful. She looks at the road, she looks in the mirror, she looks at the road. Every time she looks at Benjy in the mirror, his eyes have closed another millimeter or two. The process of falling asleep takes ten minutes, the seconds of which have been pulled thin to the translucency of his slowly closing eyelids. And just before his eyes are fully closed, he releases a short puff of breath, as if blowing out his own candle. The rest of the drive is whispering, and each pothole feels like a moon crater, and on the moon is a photograph of a family, left by the Apollo astronaut Charles Duke in 1972. It will remain there, unchanging, for millions of years, outlasting not only the parents and children in the photo, and the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the grandchildren, but human civilization — until the dying sun consumes it. They pull up to the house, cut the engine, unfasten their seat belts, and Mark carries Benjy inside.

That was his new elsewhere, where his mind was as they arrived at the parking lot exit. Tamir reached for his wallet, but Irv was the quicker draw.

“Next time’s on me,” Tamir said.

“Sure,” Irv said. “Next time we’re exiting National Airport I’ll let you pay for the parking.”

The gate rose, and for the first time since they’d gotten in the car, Max spoke up: “Turn on the radio, Dad.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“In the guy’s booth.”

“The cashier?”

“Yeah. The radio.”

“No.”

“Something big happened.”

“What?”

“Do I have to do everything?” Tamir asked, turning on the radio.

Entering in the middle of a report, it was impossible to understand at first what had happened, but it was clear that Max was right about its size. NPR’s back was straight. Reports were coming in from across the Middle East. It was early. Little was known.

Jacob’s mind raced to its place of comfort: the worst possible scenario. The Israelis had launched an attack on Iran, or the other way around. Or the Egyptians had attacked themselves. A bus had exploded. A plane had been hijacked. Someone had sprayed bullets in a mosque or synagogue, swung a knife in a crowded public space. A nuclear blast had vaporized Tel Aviv. But the thing about the worst possible scenario is that by definition it can’t be anticipated.

* * *

Other Life was happening even when no one was present. Just like Life. Sam was in the Model UN’s General Assembly — at that moment, his mom passed him a note: “I can see over the wall. Can you?”—but the ruins of his first synagogue were shimmering beside the foundation of his second synagogue. Scattered among the rubble were the fragments of his stained-glass Jewish Present, each shard illuminated by destruction.

REAL REAL

The Hilton’s International Ballroom was arranged in concentric arcs of tables and chairs to resemble the UN General Assembly. Delegations were dressed in regional garb, and some of the students attempted accents before one of the facilitators called a moratorium on that very bad idea.

The Saudi delegation’s speech was wrapping up. A young, heavily naturally accented Hispanic girl in a hijab spoke with quivering hands and a weak, trembling voice. Julia hated to see nervous children. She wanted to go to her, give her an inspirational talk — explain that life changes, and what is weak becomes strong, and what is a dream becomes a reality that requires a new dream.

“And so it is our hope,” the girl said, clearly grateful to be reaching the end, “that the Federated States of Micronesia comes to its senses and behaves judiciously and with speed to turn over the bomb to the International Atomic Energy Agency. That is all. Thank you. As-salamu alaykum.”

There was some light applause, most of it from Julia. At the front of the room, the chairman — a facilitator with a goatee on his face and a Velcro wallet in his back pocket — spoke.

“Thank you, Saudi Arabia. And now we’ll hear from the Federated States of Micronesia.”

All attention shifted to the Georgetown Day delegation. Billie rose.

“Kind of ironic,” she began, asserting her nonchalant dominance by pretending to sort through her papers as she spoke, “for the Saudi delegate to tell us what to do, when it’s illegal for her to swim in her own country. Just saying.”

Kids laughed. The Saudi delegation shriveled. With affected drama, Billie leveled the pages against the desk and continued.

“Fellow members of the United Nations, on behalf of the Federated States of Micronesia, I would like to address what has become known as the nuclear crisis. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines crisis as”—she swiped her phone into consciousness and read—“‘a difficult or dangerous situation that needs serious attention.’ This is not a crisis. There is nothing difficult or dangerous about our situation. What we have here, in fact, is an opportunity, which Merriam-Webster defines as … just one second…”—the Wi-Fi was crappy, and it took her longer than planned to load the bookmarked page—“Here we go: ‘an amount of time or a situation in which something can be done.’ We didn’t choose our fate, but we don’t intend to shrink from it. For years, for millennia — or for centuries, anyway — the good people of Micronesia accepted things as they were, understanding our diminished existence as our lot, our burden, our fate.”

Julia and Sam sat at opposite ends of the delegation. As Julia drew a brick wall on a yellow pad, she replayed the morning’s phone call with Jacob: her lot, her burden, her fate. Why did she feel a need to do it right then, like that? Not only had she shot from the hip when she should have spoken from the heart or at least held her tongue, she had risked Max and Irv getting caught in the crossfire. What did they hear and understand? What did Jacob have to explain, and how did he do it? Were any of the three going to mention the call to Tamir and Barak? Was that the whole point? Did she want it all to blow up? Her wall now covered three-quarters of the page. Perhaps a thousand bricks.

Billie continued: “Things are about to change, fellow delegates. Micronesia is saying enough. Enough being pushed around, enough subservience, enough eating scraps. Fellow delegates, things are about to change, beginning, but most certainly not ending, with the following list of demands…”

In the remaining space, between the top of the brick wall and the edge of the page, Julia wrote, “I can see over the wall. Can you?” She folded it in half, and folded that in half, and had it passed the length of the delegation. Sam showed no emotion of any kind as he read it. He wrote something on the same page, folded and refolded it, and had it passed back to his mom. She opened it, and at first couldn’t see anything he’d written. Nothing in the space above the wall, where she’d written. She searched the bricks themselves — nothing. She looked to him. He put his open hand in front of him, fingers spread, then flipped it palm-up. She turned over the yellow paper, and Sam had written: “The other side of the wall is no wall.”

As the rest of the delegation was struggling to catch up with her radical departure from the agreed-upon script, Billie was smashing the rhetorical ceiling: “Micronesia shall, henceforth, have a seat on the UN Security Council; be granted NATO membership — yes, we realize we are in the Pacific — and preferential trading status with EU, NAFTA, UNASUR, AU, and EAEC partners; have an appointed member on the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee—”

A facilitator ran into the room.

“I’m sorry to interrupt the proceedings,” he said, “but I have an announcement. There was just a major earthquake in the Middle East.”

“This is real?” one of the chaperones asked.

“Real.”

“How major?”

“They’re calling it historic.”

“But real like the nuclear crisis? Or real real?”

Julia’s phone vibrated with a call; it was Deborah. She shuffled to the corner and answered, while the model crisis gave way to the real real one.

“Deborah?”

“Hi, Julia.”

“Is everything OK?”

“Benjy’s fine.”

“I got scared when I saw your name come up.”

“He’s fine. He’s watching a movie.”

“OK. I got scared.”

“Julia.” She took a long breath, to extend the period of not-knowing. “Something horrible has happened, Julia.”

“Benjy?”

“Benjy is absolutely fine.”

“You’re a mother. You would tell me.”

“Of course I would. He’s fine, Julia. He’s happy.”

“Let me speak with him.”

“This isn’t about Benjy.”

“Oh my God, did something happen to Jacob and Max?”

“No. They’re fine.”

“Do you promise me?”

“You need to go home.”

VEY IZ MIR

Little was known, which made what little was known terrifying. An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 had struck at 6:23 in the evening, its epicenter deep under the Dead Sea, just outside the Israeli settlement of Kalya. Electricity was out in virtually all of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It seemed that the most badly damaged areas were Salt and Amman in Jordan, as well as the West Bank city of Jericho, whose walls crumbled thirty-four hundred years before, many archaeologists have argued, not from Joshua’s trumpeting but from a massive earthquake.

First accounts were coming in from the Old City of Jerusalem: the Crusader-era Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional burial place of Jesus and the holiest site in Christianity, which was badly damaged in a 1927 earthquake, had partially collapsed with an unknown number of tourists and clergymen inside. Synagogues and yeshivas, monasteries, mosques and madrassas, were in ruins. There was no news about the Temple Mount, either because there was no news or because those bearing it withheld it.

A civil engineer was being interviewed on NPR. The host, a sultry-voiced, probably short-and-bald Jew named Robert Siegel, began:

SIEGEL: We apologize, in advance, for the audio quality of this interview. Normally, when phone lines are down, we use cell phones. But cell service has been disabled as well, so Mr. Horowitz is speaking to us by satellite phone. Mr. Horowitz, are you there?

HOROWITZ: Yes, hello. I am here.

SIEGEL: Can you give us your professional assessment of what’s going on right now?

HOROWITZ: My professional assessment, yes, but I can also tell you as a human being standing here that Israel has endured a cataclysmic earthquake. Everywhere you look there is destruction.

SIEGEL: You are safe, though?

HOROWITZ: Safe is a relative term. My family is alive, and as you can hear, so am I. Some are safer. Some are less safe.

Why the fuck can’t Israelis just answer questions? Jacob wondered. Even then, in the midst of cataclysm — the word itself sounded like classic Israeli hyperbole — the Israeli couldn’t just give a straightforward, un-Israeli response.

SIEGEL: Mr. Horowitz, you are an engineer for Israeli civil services, is that correct?

HOROWITZ: An engineer, an adviser on government projects, an academic …

SIEGEL: As an engineer, what can you tell us about the potential effects of an earthquake of this magnitude?

HOROWITZ: It is not good.

SIEGEL: Could you elaborate?

HOROWITZ: Of the six hundred fifty thousand structures in Israel, fewer than half are equipped to deal with such an event.

SIEGEL: Are we going to see skyscrapers topple?

HOROWITZ: Of course not, Robert Siegel. They have been engineered to withstand even more than this. It’s the buildings between three and eight stories I’m most worried about. Many will survive, but few will be habitable. You have to realize that Israel didn’t have a building code until the late 1970s, and it’s never been enforced.

SIEGEL: Why is that?

HOROWITZ: We’ve had other things on our minds.

SIEGEL: The conflict.

HOROWITZ: Conflict? We should have been so lucky to have only one conflict. Most buildings are made of concrete — very rigid, unforgiving engineering. Buildings like Israelis, you might say. It’s served a booming population well, but couldn’t be worse-suited to the current situation.

SIEGEL: What about the West Bank?

HOROWITZ: What about it?

SIEGEL: How will its structures respond to such an earthquake?

HOROWITZ: You’d have to ask a Palestinian civil engineer.

SIEGEL: Well, we’ll certainly try to—

HOROWITZ: But since you’re asking me, I have to imagine it has been completely destroyed.

SIEGEL: I’m sorry, what has?

HOROWITZ: The West Bank.

SIEGEL: Destroyed?

HOROWITZ: All of the structures. Everything. There’s going to be a lot of fatality.

SIEGEL: In the thousands?

HOROWITZ: I’m afraid that as I speak these words, tens of thousands are already dead.

SIEGEL: And I am sure you want to get to your family, but before letting you go, could you offer some possibilities for how this will play out?

HOROWITZ: What time frame are you asking about? Hours? Weeks? A generation?

SIEGEL: Let’s start with hours.

HOROWITZ: The next few hours will be pivotal for Israel. It’s all about prioritizing now. Electricity is out countrywide, and will likely remain out, even in the major cities, for several days. As you can imagine, military needs will be the first priority.

SIEGEL: I’m surprised to hear you say that.

HOROWITZ: You are Jewish?

SIEGEL: I’m not sure why that’s relevant, but yes, I am.

HOROWITZ: I’m surprised that a fellow Jew would be surprised. But then, only an American Jew would question why being Jewish is relevant.

SIEGEL: You’re concerned for Israel’s safety?

HOROWITZ: You aren’t?

SIEGEL: Mr. Horowitz—

HOROWITZ: Israel’s tactical superiority is technological, and that has been greatly diminished by the quake. The destruction will cause desperation and unrest. And this will develop — either organically or deliberately — into violence. If it hasn’t already happened, we’re soon to see masses of people flooding the borders into Israel — from the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. I don’t have to tell you that Syria already has a refugee problem.

SIEGEL: Why would they come to Israel, a country most in the Arab world view as a mortal enemy?

HOROWITZ: Because their mortal enemy has first-rate medical care. Their mortal enemy has food and water. And Israel is going to be presented with a choice: let them in, or don’t. Letting them in will require sharing limited and precious resourses. For others to live, Israelis will have to die. But not letting them in will involve bullets. And of course Israel’s neighbors will have a choice, too: take care of their citizens, or take advantage of Israel’s sudden vulnerability.

SIEGEL: Let’s hope the shared tragedy brings the region together.

HOROWITZ: Yes, but let’s not be naïve while we hope.

SIEGEL: And what about the long term? You mentioned the generational view?

HOROWITZ: Of course, no one can know what will happen, but what Israel is facing here is something far more threatening than ’67, or ’73, or even Iran’s nuclear threat. There is the immediate crisis of needing to secure the country, rescue citizens, get food and medical care to those who need it, repair the electricity, gas, water, and other utilities quickly and safely. Then there is also the work of rebuilding the country. This will be a generational challenge. And finally, and perhaps most daunting, will be the work of keeping Jews here.

SIEGEL: Meaning?

HOROWITZ: A young, ambitious, idealistic Israeli has many reasons to leave Israel. You have an expression, “The straw that broke the camel’s back.”

SIEGEL: Yes.

HOROWITZ: Thousands of buildings have fallen on the back.

JACOB: Vey iz mir.

Jacob hadn’t meant to say anything, and he certainly hadn’t meant to say vey iz mir. But then, no one ever means to say vey iz mir.

“This is bad,” Irv said, shaking his head. “Really, really bad in about a million ways.”

Jacob’s mind teleported to apocalyptic tableaux: the ceiling collapsed onto the trundle in Tamir’s old bedroom; women in wigs trapped under slabs of Jerusalem stone, the ruins of the ruins of Masada. He imagined the marble bench in Blumenberg Park, now shattered stone. It must be a catastrophe, he thought, but he meant it in two entirely different ways: that it certainly had to be, and that he wanted it to be. He couldn’t acknowledge the second meaning, but he couldn’t deny it.

Tamir said, “It’s not good. But it’s not so bad.”

“Do you want to call home?”

“You heard him. The lines are knocked out. And my voice won’t help anyone.”

“Are you sure?”

“They’re fine. Absolutely. We live in a new construction. Like he said, it’s engineered for this kind of thing — better than any of your skyscrapers, believe me. The building has a backup generator — two, I think — and in the bomb shelter there’s enough food for months. The shelter is nicer than that apartment you had in Foggy Bottom. Remember that?”

Jacob remembered the apartment; he had lived there for five years. But even more clearly he remembered the bomb shelter in Tamir’s childhood home, despite having been inside it for less than five minutes. It was the last day of that first trip to Israel. Deborah and Tamir’s mother, Adina, were on a walk to the market, hoping to find some delicacies to bring back for Isaac. Over coffee, with what almost looked like a grin, Irv asked Shlomo if the house had a shelter.

“Of course,” Shlomo said, “it’s the law.”

“Underneath the house?”

“Of course.”

The second of course made clear what should have been clear to Irv with it’s the law: Shlomo wanted his shelter underground when there was bombing, and underground when there wasn’t. But Irv pushed: “Would you show it to us? I’d like Jacob to see.” The I’d like Jacob to see made clear what should have been clear to Shlomo with Underneath the house?: Irv wasn’t going to let it go.

Save for the twelve-inch-thick door, the room was slow to reveal its oddness. It was moist, the concrete floor sweating. The light was chalky, in color and texture. Sound seemed to gather in clouds above them. There were four gas masks hanging on the wall, even though there were only three people in Tamir’s family. Some sort of four-for-three promotion? Was one for the cleaning lady, or a future child? For Elijah? What would be the protocol if chemical war broke out while Jacob’s family was there? Was it like on a plane — adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their kids? Would Jacob watch himself suffocate in the reflection of his father’s mask? His mother would never allow it. But then, she might be suffocating, too. Surely his dad would give it to her, right? Unless she was wearing Tamir’s mask, in which case that wouldn’t be an issue. Were adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their own children, or all children? If the cleaning lady were there, would she really claim one of the masks from Jacob’s parents? Tamir was older than Jacob by a few months. Did that make him, relatively speaking, the adult of the two? There was no scenario in which Jacob wouldn’t be a victim of chemical warfare.

“Let’s get out of this dump,” Tamir said to Jacob.

Jacob didn’t want to go. He wanted to spend his remaining time in Israel exploring every inch of the room, learning it, learning himself in it, simply being there. He wanted to eat lunch down there, bring down his clothes and suitcase and pack, forgo the last drips of sightseeing in order to spend another couple of hours behind those impenetrable walls. And more: he wanted to hear the air-raid siren — not the false alarm for Yom HaShoah, but a siren signaling a complete destruction from which he would be safe.

“Come on,” Tamir said, pulling on Jacob’s arm with awkward force.

On the flight back to America, thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic, Jacob dreamed of a shelter beneath the shelter, reached by another set of stairs. But this second shelter was enormous, large enough to be confused for the world, large enough to hold enough people to make war inevitable. And when the bombs started to fall in the world on that side of the thick door, the world on the other side became the shelter.

Nearly ten years later, Tamir and Jacob split a six-pack at a kitchen table that couldn’t be walked around, in an apartment carved out of an apartment, carved out of a house in Foggy Bottom. “I met someone,” Jacob said, saying it aloud for the first time.

And nearly twenty years after that, in a Japanese car bisecting the nation’s capital, the Israeli cousin — Jacob’s Israeli cousin — said, “Anyway, it’s not going to come to that.”

“To what?”

“To bomb shelters. To war.”

“Who said war?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Tamir said, as if to himself. “Israel is Hebrew for ‘contingency plan.’”

They drove the next few minutes without speaking. NPR did its best with unreliable news, and Tamir buried himself in his phone, which might have been a tablet, or even a TV. Despite checking his own with manic constancy, Jacob hated all phones — found them to be even worse than the brain tumors they gave their users. Why? Because he hated that his was ruining his life? Or because he knew that it wasn’t ruining his life, but gave him the easy and socially acceptable means to ruin it himself? Or because he suspected that other people were getting more, and more interesting, messages? Or maybe he knew all along that his phone would be his undoing — even if he didn’t know how.

Tamir’s phone was singularly annoying. Barak’s, too. They were phone SUVs. Jacob didn’t care how vivid their screens were, or how good the reception, or how easy to link with their other miserable devices. Barak had never even been to America, which, if it wasn’t the greatest country in the history of the world, at the very least had a few things to offer eyes that cared to look up. Maybe they were searching for news, although what kind of news site emits “Boom shakalaka!” every few seconds?

“What about Noam?” Jacob asked.

“What about him?”

“Where is he now?”

“This moment?” Tamir said. “As we speak? I have no idea. Keeping fathers informed is not of national importance.”

“When you last spoke with him?”

“Hebron. But I’m sure they were evacuated.”

“By helicopter?”

“I don’t know, Jacob. How would I know?”

“And Yael?”

“She’s fine. She’s in Auschwitz.”

Boom shakalaka!

“What?”

“School trip.”

They drove the George Washington Parkway in silence, AC battling the humidity that seeped through the invisible points of entry, small talk between Jacob and Irv battling the awkward silence that pressed against the windows — past Gravelly Point, where aviation buffs holding radio scanners, and fathers holding sons, could almost reach up and touch the landing gears of jumbo jets; the Capitol on the right, across the brown Potomac; the inevitable explanation of why the Washington Monument changes shades of white one-third of the way up. They crossed Memorial Bridge, between the golden horses, circled around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial, the steps that seemed to lead to nothing, and slid into the flow of Rock Creek Parkway. After passing under the terrace of the Kennedy Center and beside the teeth of the Watergate balconies, they followed the curves of the creek away from the outposts of the capital’s civilization.

“The zoo,” Tamir said, looking up from his phone.

“The zoo,” Jacob echoed.

Irv leaned forward: “You know, our favorite primates, Benjy and Deborah, are probably there right now.”

The zoo was at the epicenter of Tamir and Jacob’s friendship, their familialship; it marked the threshold between their youth and adulthood. And it was at the epicenter of Jacob’s life. Jacob’s mind often traveled to his own deathbed scene, especially when he felt that he was wasting his life. What moments, in his final moments, would he return to? He would remember arriving at the inn with Julia — both times. He would remember carrying Sam into the house after the ER, the tiny hand mummified in layers and layers of bandaging, cartoonishly large: the biggest, most useless fist in the world. He would remember the night at the zoo.

He wondered if Tamir ever thought about it, if he was thinking about it then.

And then Tamir let out a deep, subterranean laugh.

“What’s funny?” Jacob asked.

“Me. This feeling.”

“What feeling?”

He laughed again — his greatest performance yet?

“Jealousy.”

“Jealousy? That’s not what I was expecting you to say.”

“It’s not what I was expecting to feel. That’s why it’s funny.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Noam will finally have better stories than me. I’m jealous. But it’s good. It’s as it should be.”

“As it should be?”

“Having better stories.”

Irv said, “Maybe you should call?”

Jacob said, “‘Once upon a time there was a man whose life was so good there’s no story to tell about it.’”

“I’ll try,” Tamir said, punching a long string of numbers. “It’s not going to work, but for your sake, Irv, I’ll try.” After a few moments, an automated Hebrew message filled the car. Tamir hung up and, this time without Irv’s prompting, tried calling again. He listened. They all listened.

“Circuits busy.”

Vey iz mir.

“Try again in a minute?”

“No reason.”

“I don’t mean to be alarmist,” Jacob said, “but do you need to go home?”

Boom shakalaka!

“And how would I do that?”

“We could drive back to the airport and check on flights,” Jacob offered.

“All flights in and out of Israel are canceled.”

Vey iz mir.

“How do you know?”

Tamir held up his phone and said, “You think I’m playing games?”

Boom shakalaka!

THE SECOND SYNAGOGUE

No synagogue is sentient, but just as Sam believed that all things are capable of longing, so did he believe that all things have some awareness of their imminent end: he would tell fires “It’s OK” as the last embers hummed, and apologize to the three-hundred-million-odd sperm before flushing them on their way to wastewater treatment. No synagogue isn’t sentient.

When Sam got home from Model UN, he went straight into Other Life, like a smoker racing to get outside Sydney Airport. His iPad awoke with a memo on the screen: Max’s explanation of Samanta’s death, their father’s guilt (as in, culpability), and his own profound guilt (as in, the feeling of culpability). Sam read it twice — for clarification, and to defer the confrontation with reality.

His failure to spaz upon learning that Max wasn’t playing a sick joke surprised him. Why wasn’t he breaking his iPad over his bedpost, or screaming things that couldn’t be taken back at someone who didn’t deserve them, or at least crying? He wasn’t in any way indifferent to Samanta’s death, and he certainly hadn’t reached some epiphany that it was “only a game.” It wasn’t only a game. What awareness did Samanta have of her imminent end? No avatar isn’t sentient.

Every Skype session with his great-grandfather began with “I see you” and ended with “See you.” Sam was bothered by the knowledge that one such conversation would be their last, and that there ought to, at some point, be some acknowledgment of some version of that fact. They had skyped early the previous morning, as Sam hastily packed for Model UN — Isaac awoke before the sun rose, and went to bed before it set. They never talked for more than five minutes — despite having had it explained to him a hundred times that skyping doesn’t cost anything ever, Isaac refused to believe that longer conversations didn’t cost more — and this one had been particularly brief. Sam shared the vaguest description of the upcoming school trip, confirmed that he wasn’t sick or hungry and that no, he wasn’t “seeing anyone.”

“And everything is ready for your bar mitzvah?”

“Pretty much.”

But as he was about to click off—“Mom is waiting for me downstairs, so I should probably go”—Sam felt the expected discomfort, only this time with an urgency, or longing. He wasn’t sure the longing was his.

“Go,” Isaac said. “Go. We’ve already been on for too long.”

“I just wanted you to know that I love you.”

“Yeah, I know, sure. And I love you. OK, now go.”

“And I’m sorry that you’re moving.”

“Go, Sameleh.”

“I don’t see why you can’t just stay.”

“Because I can’t take care of myself anymore.”

“I mean here.”

“Sameleh.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“I couldn’t go up and down the stairs.”

“So we’d get one of those chairlift things.”

“They’re very expensive.”

“I’ll use my bar mitzvah money.”

“I have lots of medicines I need to take.”

“I have lots of vitamins I need to take. Mom is great with things like that.”

“I don’t want to make you upset, but soon I won’t be able to take baths or go to the toilet on my own.”

“Benjy can’t take baths on his own, and we’re constantly cleaning up Argus poop.”

“I am not a child, and I am not a dog.”

“I know, I’m just say—”

“I take care of my family, Sameleh.”

“You take such good care, but—”

“My family doesn’t take care of me.”

“I understand, but—”

“And that is that.”

“I’m gonna ask Dad—”

“No,” Isaac said, with a sternness Sam had never heard.

“Why not? I’m sure he’ll say yes.”

There was a long pause. If it weren’t for Isaac’s blinking eyes, Sam would have wondered if the image had frozen. “I told you no,” Isaac finally said, severely.

The connection weakened, the pixels enlarged.

What had Sam done? Something wrong, something unkind, but what?

Tentatively, in an effort to compensate for whatever hurt he’d accidentally inflicted in his effort to love, he said, “Also, I have a girlfriend.”

“Jewish?” Isaac asked, his face only a handful of pixels.

“Yes,” Sam lied.

“I see you,” Isaac said, and clicked off.

The addition of the I, the only letter that takes up less space than a space, changed everything. The longing was his great-grandfather’s.

Sam’s second synagogue was as he’d left it. He had no avatar with which to explore, so he quickly and crudely made a blocky figure to drop in. The foundation had been poured and the walls were framed, but without the drywall he could have shot an arrow, or his gaze, all the way through it. He — Sam knew that his new avatar was a man — went to one of the walls, gripped the studs like prison bars, and pushed it over. Sam was at once controlling this and witnessing it. He went to another wall and pushed it over.

Sam wasn’t destroying, and he wasn’t Sam. He was carving a space out of a larger space. He didn’t yet know who he was.

The exuberantly branching edifice was shrinking toward its center, like a failing empire that pulls its army back to the capital, like the blackening fingers of a stranded climber. No more social hall, no more basketball court or changing rooms, no more children’s library, no more classrooms, no more offices for any administrator or cantor or rabbi, no more chapel, no more sanctuary.

What remained after all those walls came down?

Half a dozen rooms.

Sam hadn’t intended this configuration, he’d merely created it. And he wasn’t Sam.

A dining room, a living room, a kitchen. A hall. A bathroom, a guest bedroom, a TV room, a bedroom.

Something was missing. It was longing for something.

He went to the ruins of the first synagogue and took the largely intact window of Moses floating down the Nile, as well as a handful of rubble. He replaced one of the kitchen windows with the Moses window and put the rubble in the fridge, among the ginger ale.

But something was still missing. There was still a longing.

A basement. It needed a basement. The sentient synagogue, aware that even as it was being constructed it was being destroyed, longed for an underground. He had no money to buy a shovel, so he used his hands. He dug it like a grave. He dug until he wouldn’t have been able to feel the arms that he couldn’t feel. He dug until a family could have hidden behind the displaced earth.

And then he stood inside his work, like a cave painter inside his painting of a cave.

I see you.

Sam gave himself white hair, restored Firefox to the desktop, and googled: How is bubble wrap made?

THE EARTHQUAKE

When they got to the house, Julia was on the stoop, her arms holding her bent knees to her chest. The sun settled on her hair like yellow chalk dust, shaking free with the tiniest movement. Seeing her there, as she was then, in that moment, Jacob spontaneously shook free the resentment that had settled in his heart like gravel. She wasn’t his wife, not right then, she was the woman he married — a person rather than a dynamic.

As he approached, Julia gave a weak smile, the smile of resignation. That morning, before leaving for the airport, he’d read a National Geographic sidebar about a broken weather satellite that could no longer do whatever it had been created to do, but would, because of the great expense and limited need to capture it, orbit the planet doing nothing until it ultimately fell to Earth. Her smile was remote like that.

“What are you doing here?” Jacob asked. “I thought you weren’t going to be home until later.”

“We decided to come back a couple of hours early.”

“Where’s Sam?” Max asked.

“Is that something you can decide? As the chaperone?”

“If Mark runs into a problem, I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

Jacob hated hearing that fucking name. He felt his heart refilling with gravel and sinking.

“Sam’s upstairs,” Julia told Max.

“I suppose you can follow me,” Max said to Barak, and the two went inside.

“I’m going to defecate,” Irv said, shuffling past, “and then I’ll rejoin the party. Hey, Julia.”

Tamir emerged from the car and extended his arms.

“Julie!”

No one called her Julie. Not even Tamir called her Julie.

“Tamir!”

He embraced her in one of his hug dramas: holding her at arm’s length, looking her up and down, then bringing her back into his body, then holding her at arm’s length for another examination.

“Everyone else gets older,” he said.

“I’m not getting any younger,” she said, unwilling to return his flirtation, but unwilling to smother it, either.

“I didn’t say you were.”

They exchanged a smile.

Jacob wanted to hate Tamir for sexualizing everything, but he wasn’t sure if the habit resulted from free choice or environmental conditioning — how much of Tamir’s way was simply the Israeli way, cultural misinterpretation. And maybe desexualizing everything was Jacob’s own way, even when he was sexualizing everything.

“We’re so happy to have you for the extra time,” Julia said.

Why was no one mentioning the earthquake, Jacob wondered. Was Julia afraid that they hadn’t heard about it yet? Did she want to present the news in a thoughtful and controlled way, free of potential interruptions? Or had she not yet heard about it? More puzzling, why wasn’t Tamir, he who mentioned everything, mentioning it?

“It’s not an easy trip,” Tamir said. “I would say you know, but you don’t. Anyway, I thought we’d come a little early and make the most of it — let Barak get to know his American family.”

“And Rivka?”

“She sends her regrets. She very much wanted to come.”

“Everything’s OK?”

Jacob was surprised by her forthrightness and reminded of his own restraint.

“Of course,” Tamir said. “Just some old obligations she couldn’t rearrange. Now: Jake mentioned you’d prepared some food?”

“Did he?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t even think you were going to be back until later in the afternoon.”

“Don’t lie to your wife,” Tamir said, giving Jacob a wink that Jacob wasn’t positive Julia saw, so he told her, “He winked at me.”

“Let’s put some food together,” Julia said. “Head in. Max will show you where to put your things down, and we’ll catch up around the kitchen table.”

As Tamir entered the house, Julia took Jacob’s hand. “Can we talk for a second?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know.”

“They’re driving me crazy.”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Something else?”

“Yes.”

Years later, Jacob would remember this moment as a vast hinge.

“Something’s happened,” she said.

“I know.”

“What?”

“Mark.”

“No,” Julia said, “not that. Not me.”

And then, with a great flush of relief, Jacob said, “Oh, right. We already heard.”

“What?”

“On the radio.”

“The radio?”

“Yeah, it sounds horrible. And really scary.”

“What does?”

“The earthquake.”

“Oh,” Julia said, at once clear and confused. “The earthquake. Yes.”

It was then that Jacob realized they were still holding hands.

“Wait, what were you talking about?”

“Jacob—”

“Mark.”

“No, not that.”

“I was thinking about it on the drive over. I was thinking about everything. After we got off the phone, I—”

“Stop. Please.”

He felt the blood rush to his face like a tide, then recede as quickly. He’d done something horrible, but he didn’t know what. It wasn’t the phone. There was nothing more to learn there. The money he’d taken out of ATMs over the years? For stupid, harmless things he was embarrassed to admit wanting? What? Had she somehow looked through his e-mails? Seen how he spoke about her to those who might understand or at least sympathize? Had he been stupid enough, or forced by his subconscious, to leave himself signed in on some device?

He put his hand on top of her hand on top of his hand: “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I’m so sorry, Julia.”

He was sorry, so sorry, but for what? There was so much to apologize for.

At his wedding, Jacob’s mother told a story that he had no memory of, and didn’t believe was true, and was hurt by, because even if it wasn’t true, it could have been, and it exposed him.

“You were probably expecting my husband,” Deborah began, eliciting a good laugh. “Perhaps you’ve noticed that he usually does the talking. And talking.”

More laughter.

“But this one I wanted. The wedding of my son, whom I grew in my body, and fed from my body, and gave everything of myself so that one day he would be able to let go of my hand and take the hand of another. To his credit, my husband didn’t argue or complain. He just gave me the silent treatment for three weeks.” More laughter, especially from Irv. “They were the happiest three weeks of my life.”

More laughter.

“Don’t forget our honeymoon!” Irv called.

“Did we go on a honeymoon?” Deborah asked.

More laughter.

“You might have noticed that Jews don’t exchange wedding vows. The covenant is said to be implicit in the ritual. Isn’t that wonderfully Jewish? To stand before one’s life partner, and before one’s god, at what is probably the most significant moment of your life, and to assume it goes without saying? It’s hard to think of anything else that a Jew would assume goes without saying.”

More laughter.

“I’ll never get over what a strange and easily explained people we are. But perhaps some of you are like me, and cannot help but hear the familiar vows: ‘for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.’ They might not be our words, but they are in our collective subconscious.

“There was a year in Jacob’s childhood—” She looked to Irv and said, “Maybe it was even more than a year? A year and a half?” Then she looked back to those gathered. “There was a period of time that felt like longer than it was”—laughter—“when Jacob would pretend he was disabled. It started with the announcement, one morning, that he was blind. ‘But you’re closing your eyes,’ I told him.”

More laughter.

“‘That’s only because there’s nothing to look at,’ he said, ‘so I’m resting them.’ Jacob was a stubborn child. He could keep up a resistance for days, and weeks. Irv, can you imagine from where he might have gotten that?”

A laugh.

Irv called back, “Nature from me, nurture from you!”

Another laugh.

Deborah continued: “He stuck with the blindness for three or four days — a long time for a child, or anyone, to keep his eyes closed — but then came to dinner one night batting lashes and once again adept with silverware. ‘I’m happy to see you’ve recovered,’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his ears. ‘What is it, love?’ He went to the cabinet, got a pen and paper, and wrote, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m deaf.’ Irv said, ‘You aren’t deaf.’ Jacob mouthed the words ‘I am deaf.’

“Maybe a month later, he limped into the living room with a pillow under the back of his shirt. He didn’t say anything, just limped to the shelf, took down a book, and limped back out. Irv called out, ‘Ciao, Quasimodo,’ and went back to his reading. He thought it was a phase among phases. I followed Jacob to his room, sat beside him on his bed, and asked, ‘Did you break your back?’ He nodded yes. ‘That must be incredibly painful.’ He nodded. I suggested we reset his spine by taping a broom to his back. He walked around like that for two days. He recovered.

“I was reading to him in bed a couple of weeks later — his head propped on the pillow that had been the hump on his back — and he pulled up the sleeve of his pajama top and said, ‘Look what happened.’ I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing, only that I was supposed to be seeing it, so I said, ‘That’s looks horrible.’ He nodded. ‘I got a very bad burn,’ he said. ‘So I see,’ I said, very gently touching it. ‘Hold on, I have some ointment in the medicine cabinet.’ I came back with moisturizer. ‘For use on extreme burns,’ I said, pretending to read the directions on the back. ‘Apply liberally across burn. Rub into skin as if massaging. Full recovery expected by morning.’ I rubbed his arm for half an hour, a massage that went through seasons of being pleasurable, and meditative, and intimate, and, apparently, sedating. When he came into our bed the next morning, he showed me his arm and said, ‘It worked.’ I said, ‘A miracle.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘just medicine.’”

More laughter.

“Just medicine. I still think about that all the time. No miracle, just medicine.

“The disabilities and injuries continued to come — a cracked rib, loss of feeling in his left leg, broken fingers — but with less and less frequency. Then, one morning, maybe a year after he’d gone blind, Jacob didn’t come down for breakfast. He often overslept, especially after nights when he and his father stayed up to watch the Orioles. I tapped on his door. No answer. I opened it, and he was perfectly still on his bed, arms and legs straight, with a note balanced in the well of his sternum: ‘I am feeling extremely sick, and think I might die tonight. If you are now looking at me, and I’m not moving, it is because I am dead.’ If it were a game, he’d have won it. But it wasn’t a game. I could rub cream into a burn, I could set a broken back, but there is nothing to be done for the dead. I had loved the intimacy of our secret understanding, but I no longer understood. I looked at him lying there, my stoic child, so still. I started crying. Just as I’m about to do now. I got on my knees beside Jacob’s body, and I cried and cried and cried.”

Irv went to the dance floor and put his arm around Deborah. He whispered something into her ear. She nodded, and whispered something back. He whispered something back.

She collected herself and said, “I cried a lot. I put my head on his chest and made little rivers in the channels between his ribs. You were so skinny, Jacob. No matter how much you ate, you were just bones. Just bones,” she sighed.

“You let me go on for a long time, then coughed, and jerked your legs, and coughed again, and slowly came back to life. I was never more angry than when you put yourself in danger. When you didn’t look both ways, when you ran with scissors — I wanted to hit you. I actually had to stop myself from hitting you. How could you be so careless with the thing I most loved?

“But I wasn’t angry then. Only devastated. ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ I told you. ‘Don’t you ever, ever do that again.’ Still flat on your back, you turned your head to face me — do you remember this? — and you said, ‘But I have to.’”

Deborah started crying again, and handed Irv the page from which she’d been reading.

“In sickness and in health,” he said. “Jacob and Julia, my son and daughter, there is only ever sickness. Some people go blind, some go deaf. Some people break their backs, some get badly burned. But you were right, Jacob: you would have to do it again. Not as a game, or rehearsal, or tortuous effort to communicate something, but for real and forever.”

Irv looked up from the page, turned to Deborah, and said, “Jesus, Deborah, this is depressing.”

More laughter, but now from trembling throats. Deborah laughed, too, and took Irv’s hand.

He kept reading: “In sickness and in sickness. That is what I wish for you. Don’t seek or expect miracles. There are no miracles. Not anymore. And there are no cures for the hurt that hurts most. There is only the medicine of believing each other’s pain, and being present for it.”

After having made love for the first time as husband and wife, Jacob and Julia lay side by side. Side by side, they looked at the ceiling.

Jacob said, “My mom’s speech was great.”

“It was,” Julia said.

Jacob took her hand and said, “But only the deafness part was true. None of the rest.”

Sixteen years later, alone with the mother of his three children, on the stoop of their home and under only the infinite ceiling, Jacob knew that everything his mother had said was true. Even if he couldn’t remember it, even if it hadn’t happened. He chose illness, because he knew of no other way to be seen. Not even by those looking for him.

But then Julia pressed his hand. Not hard. Just enough pressure to communicate love. He felt love. Spousal, co-parental, romantic, friendly, forgiving, devoted, resigned, stubbornly hopeful — the kind didn’t matter. He had spent so much of his life standing at thresholds, parsing love, withholding comfort, forcing happiness. She applied more pressure to her still-husband’s hand, and held his eyes in the fingers of her eyes, and told him, “Your grandfather died.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, words that originated in his spine.

“Sorry?”

“Wait, what? I didn’t hear you.”

“Your grandfather. Isaac. He’s dead.”

“What?”