Here I Am

THE I-WORD

“Good afternoon. I want to extend to the people of the region affected by yesterday’s earthquake the deep condolences and unwavering support of the American people. The full extent of the devastation is still unknown, but the images that we’ve seen of entire neighborhoods in ruins, of fathers and mothers searching the rubble for their children, are heartbreaking. Indeed, for a region that is no stranger to suffering, this tragedy seems especially cruel and incomprehensible. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of the Middle East, and also with all of those around our country who do not yet know the fates of loved ones back home.

“I have directed my administration to respond with the full resources of the United States in the urgent task of rescuing those still trapped beneath the rubble, and to deliver the humanitarian relief that will be needed in the coming days and weeks. In that effort, our government, especially USAID and the Departments of State and Defense, is working closely with our partners in the region and around the world.

“There are several urgent priorities. First, we’re working quickly to account for U.S. embassy personnel and their families in Tel Aviv, Amman, and Beirut, as well as the many American citizens who live and work in the region. Americans trying to locate family members are encouraged to contact the State Department at 299-306-2828.”

“Say it,” Tamir told the screen.

“Second,” the president continued, ignoring Tamir, “we’ve mobilized resources to help rescue efforts. In disasters such as this, the first days are absolutely critical to saving lives and avoiding even greater tragedy, so I have directed my teams to be as forward-leaning as possible in getting help on the ground and coordinating with our international partners as well.”

“Say the word!”

“Third, given the many different resources that are needed, we are taking steps to ensure that assisting governments act in a unified way. I’ve designated the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Philip Shaw, to be our unified disaster coordinator.

“Now, this rescue and recovery effort will be complex and challenging. As we move resources into the Middle East, we will be working closely with partners on the ground, including local government agencies, as well as the many NGOs, the United Nations missions — which appear to have suffered their own losses — and our partners in the region and around the world. This must truly be an international effort.”

“Say the word!”

For the first time in decades, perhaps ever, Jacob remembered the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell he’d had as a child. He brought it to the beach one summer; it melted onto a picnic table and wouldn’t stop repeating “Say it,” not even when it was turned off — like a ghost: “Say it, say it, say it…”

“And, finally, let me just say that this is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share. Despite the fact that many are experiencing tough times here at home, I would encourage those Americans who want to support the urgent humanitarian efforts to go to WhiteHouse.gov, where you can learn how to contribute. This is not a time to withdraw behind borders, but to extend ourselves — our compassion and our resources — to the people of the Middle East. We must be prepared for difficult hours and days ahead as we learn about the scope of the tragedy. We will keep the victims and their families in our prayers. We will be aggressive and resolute in our response. And I pledge to the region that you will have a friend and partner in the United States of America, today and going forward. May God bless you, and those working on your behalf. Thank you very much.”

“He just couldn’t bring himself to say it.”

“Neither can you, apparently.”

Tamir gave Jacob that most annoying of all looks: the put-on assumption that Jacob must be joking — surely he was joking.

“What? Military? Aid?”

Tamir muted the television, which had moved on to images of fighter jets coring massive apples of smoke, and said: “Israel.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Don’t you.”

“Of course he said it.”

“Of course he didn’t.”

“He did. He said, the people of Israel.”

“Of the region.”

“Well, he definitely said Tel Aviv.”

“But he definitely didn’t say Jerusalem.”

“He did. But if he didn’t — and I’m sure he did — it’s only for all of the perfectly reasonable reasons you know.”

“Remind me of what I know.”

Tamir’s phone started ringing, and as with every call he’d received since the earthquake, it didn’t have to ring twice. It might be news from Rivka or Noam. It might be a response to one of his dozen attempts to get home. E-mail had come back early that morning, so he knew they were safe. But there were innumerable unaccounted-for family and friends.

It was Barak calling from upstairs, asking if he could use the iPad.

“What’s wrong with yours?”

“We want two.”

Tamir hung up.

“It’s a regional catastrophe,” Jacob resumed, “not an Israeli one. It’s geological, not political.”

“Nothing is not political,” Tamir said.

“This isn’t political.”

“Give it a few minutes.”

“And if you were somewhat less insistent on hearing your name, it would be somewhat easier to say.”

“Ah…”

“What?”

“It’s our fault.”

“That came out wrong.”

“And can I ask you,” Tamir went on, “who you is? When you say, ‘If you were somewhat less insistent,’ who is the you?”

“You.”

“Me, Tamir?”

“Yeah. Israelis.”

“Israelis. OK. I just wanted to be sure you didn’t mean Jews.”

“Look, it was a statement, and he was being careful.”

“But this isn’t political.”

“He didn’t want to make it political.”

“So what’s the plan?” Julia asked, walking into the room.

“Dumbarton Oaks,” Jacob said.

“Julia,” Tamir said, turning to face her, “let me ask you. Do you feel a need to be careful when one of your friends is injured?”

“Theoretically?”

“No, in life.”

“What kind of injury?”

“Something serious.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever had a seriously injured friend.”

“Some life.”

“Theoretically? Yes, I’d be careful. If it were necessary.”

“And you?” Tamir asked Jacob.

“Of course I would be careful.”

“We’re different in that way.”

“You’re reckless?”

“I’m loyal.”

“Loyalty doesn’t require recklessness,” Julia said, as if she were taking Jacob’s side, which she didn’t feel like doing, especially without knowing what they were talking about.

“Yes, it does.”

“And no one is helped by a loyalty that makes the situation worse,” Jacob said, wanting Julia to feel that he had her back.

“Unless the situation is going to get worse anyway. Your father would agree with me.”

“Which only proves the sanity of my argument.”

Tamir laughed at that. And with his laugh, the rising temperature was halved, the pressure relieved.

“What’s the best sushi in Washington?” Tamir asked.

“I don’t know,” Jacob said, “but I know it isn’t as good as the worst sushi in Israel, which is better than the best sushi in Japan.”

“I’ll probably stick around here while you guys go out today,” Julia said. “I’ve got some things to catch up on.”

“What kind of things?” Tamir asked, as only an Israeli would.

“Bar mitzvah stuff.”

“I thought it was canceled.”

Julia looked at Jacob. “You told him it was canceled?”

“I did not.”

“Don’t lie to your wife,” Tamir said.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“He keeps saying it?” Julia asked.

“You can’t see it,” Jacob told Julia, “but he’s nudging me right now. So you know.”

Tamir gave Jacob another invisible nudge and said, “You told me that with Isaac’s death, the earthquake, and what happened between the two of you—”

“I did not say anything,” Jacob said.

“Don’t lie to your wife, Jacob.”

“What, about Mark?” Julia asked. “And did you tell him about your phone?”

“I hadn’t told him about anything that you just told him about.”

“And it’s none of my business,” Tamir said.

Addressing only Julia, Jacob said, “What I told him was that we were talking about how to modify the bar mitzvah, in light of, you know, everything.”

“Modify what?” Sam asked.

How do children do that? Jacob wondered. Not only enter rooms silently, but at the worst possible moment.

“Your bar mitzvah,” Max said. And where did he come from?

“Mom and I were talking about how to make sure the bar mitzvah feels good within the context of, you know.”

“The earthquake?”

“What earthquake?” Benjy asked, without looking up from the maze he was drawing. Had he always been there?

“And Great-Grandpa,” Jacob said.

“Dad and I—”

“You can just say we,” Sam said.

“We don’t think we can have a band,” Jacob said, taking over the parental side of the conversation in an effort to demonstrate to Julia that he was also capable of delivering difficult news.

“Fine,” Sam said. “They sucked shit anyway.”

It’s very hard to have a productive dialogue with a thirteen-year-old boy, as every gently broached subject becomes an Ultimate Conversation, requiring defense systems and counterattacks to attacks that were never launched. What begins as an innocent observation about his habit of leaving things in the pockets of dirty clothes ends with Sam blaming his parents for his twenty-eighth-percentile height, which makes him want to commit suicide on YouTube.

“They didn’t suck,” Jacob said.

Still focusing on his maze, Benjy said, “When Mom parked the car, it wasn’t right, so I picked it up and put it in the right place.”

“Thank you for that,” Julia said to Benjy. And then, to Sam: “There’s a nicer way to put it.”

“Jesus,” Sam said, “I’m not allowed to have an opinion anymore?”

“Now, hold on a minute,” Jacob said. “You chose them. Mom didn’t. I didn’t. You did. You watched the videos of half a dozen bands, and it was your opinion that Electric Brigade should be the band for your bar mitzvah.”

“They were the least pathetic of three totally pathetic options, and I chose them under duress. That’s not the same as being a groupie.”

“What duress?”

“The duress of being forced to have a bar mitzvah when you know I find all of this shit to be bullshit.”

Jacob tried to spare Julia from having to be the one, yet again, to object to bad language: “Shit to be bullshit, Sam?”

“Is that poor usage?”

“Impoverished. And try to believe me when I tell you I would have been every bit as happy not to pay the utterly mediocre Electric Brigade five thousand dollars to play bad covers of bad songs.”

“But the rite of passage is nonnegotiable,” Sam confirmed.

“Yes,” Jacob said, “that’s correct.”

“Because it was nonnegotiable for you, because it was nonnegotiable for—”

“Correct again. That’s what Jewish people do.”

“Not negotiate?”

“Have bar mitzvahs.”

“Ah … I’d completely misunderstood the whole thing. And now that I realize we have bar mitzvahs because we have bar mitzvahs, what I really feel moved to do is marry a Jewish woman and have Jewish children.”

“You need to slow down,” Julia said.

“And I definitely don’t want to be buried,” Sam said, the Ultimate now within sight. “Especially if Jewish law requires it.”

“So be cremated like me,” Max said.

“Or don’t die,” Benjy suggested.

Like a conductor zipping up a piece of music, Julia gave a quick and stern “Enough,” and that was it. What was so scary about her? What about that five-foot-four woman, who never inflicted physical or emotional violence, or even saw a punishment all the way through, terrified her husband and children to the point of unconditional surrender?

Jacob broke down the breakdown: “The thing we want to be sensitive to is the appearance of enjoying life too much in the face of Great-Grandpa’s death. Not to mention the earthquake. It would be in poor taste, and also just feel bad.”

“The appearance of enjoying life?” Sam asked.

“I’m just saying that some sensitivity is required.”

“Let me tell you the right way to think about it,” Tamir began.

“Maybe later,” Jacob said.

“So no band,” Sam said. “Is that enough to make sure we don’t appear to enjoy life?”

“In Israel we don’t even have bar mitzvah parties,” Tamir said.

“Mazel tov,” Jacob told him. And then, to Sam: “I might also skip the sign-in board.”

“Which I always wanted to skip,” Sam said.

“Which I spent three weeks making for you,” Julia said.

“You made it over the course of three weeks,” Jacob corrected.

“What?”

“You didn’t spend three weeks making it.”

“Why do you think that’s an important clarification?”

He all of a sudden didn’t, so he changed course: “I think we should also consider editing the centerpieces.”

“Why?” Julia asked, beginning to understand that he was taking things from her, not Sam.

“I’ve never understood the desire of American Jews to speak words you don’t understand,” Tamir said. “Finding meaning in the absence of meaning — I don’t get it.”

“They’re … festive,” Jacob said.

“They’re elegant.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam said, “what’s left?”

“What’s left?”

“Exactly,” Tamir said.

“What’s left,” Jacob said, resting his hand on Sam’s shoulder for the instant before Sam recoiled, “is you becoming a man.”

“What’s left,” Julia said, “is being with your family.”

“You are the luckiest people in the history of the world,” Tamir said.

“We’re trying,” Jacob said to Sam, who lowered his eyes and said, “This sucks.”

“It won’t,” Julia said. “We’ll make it really special.”

“I didn’t say it will suck. I said it sucks. Presently.”

“You’d rather be in a fridge like Great-Grandpa?” Jacob asked, as surprised as anyone by his words. How could he have thought them, much less vocalized them? Or these: “You’d rather be trapped under a building in Israel?”

“Those are my choices?” Sam asked.

“No, but they are your much-needed perspective. Look at that,” Jacob said, pointing to the muted TV, which showed images of massive earthmoving machines, tires with ladders built into them, pulling apart rubble.

Sam took this in, nodded, averted his eyes to a place yet farther from where they would have met his parents’.

“No flowers,” he said.

“No flowers?”

“Too beautiful.”

“I’m not sure beauty is the problem,” Julia said.

“The problem,” Tamir said, “is that—”

“It’s part of the problem,” Sam said, talking over Tamir, “so lose ’em.”

“Well, I don’t know about losing them,” Jacob said, “as they’ve already been paid for. But we can ask if it’s still possible to shift the design toward something more in keeping with—”

“And let’s ditch the monogrammed yarmulkes, too.”

“Why?” Julia asked, hurt as only someone who had spent six hours choosing a font, palette, and material for monogrammed yarmulkes could be.

“They’re decorative,” Sam said.

“OK,” Jacob said, “maybe they’d be a bit gauche, considering.”

“Gauche they are not,” Julia said.

“The problem—” Tamir began, again.

“And it probably goes without saying,” Sam said, as he always did when he was about to say something that did not go without saying, “that we’re not going to have party favors.”

“I’m sorry, I have to draw a line,” Julia said.

“I actually think he’s right,” Jacob said.

“You do?” Julia said. “Actually?”

“I do,” Jacob said, not liking that mimicked actually, actually. “Party favors imply a party.”

“The problem—”

“Of course they don’t.”

“Party favor, Julia.”

“They imply a social convention, the lack of whose fulfillment would imply extreme rudeness. Jacob.”

“Social convention at the conclusion of a party.”

“So we punish his friends for plate tectonics and the death of Sam’s great-grandfather?”

“Punishing thirteen-year-old children is encumbering them with garbage bags full of tourist tchotchkes from places Sam’s distant and uncared-about relatives live and calling it a favor.”

“You imply an asshole,” Julia said.

“Whoa,” Barak said.

Where had he come from?

“Excuse me?” Jacob said, exactly as Julia would have.

“I’m not chanting Torah,” Julia said. “We know what these words mean.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

“It was always there.”

The television filled with tiny flashes, like fireflies trapped in a jar.

“The problem,” Tamir said, standing up, “is that you don’t have nearly enough problems.”

“Can I state the obvious?” Sam asked.

“No,” his parents said simultaneously — a rare unity.

There was a woman on TV, of unknown ethnicity or nationality, pulling at her hair as she wailed, pulling with enough force to yank her head left and right. There was no ticker across the bottom of the screen. There was no commentary. There was no cause offered for her suffering. There was only the suffering. Only the woman, her hair gathered in the fists she beat against her chest.

ABSORB OR ABSOLVE

When Isaac should have been well into his decomposition in the ground, he was still maintaining freshness in a human crisper in Bethesda. Only for Isaac could the end of misery be the extension of misery. His final wish — made known both in his will and in far too many conversations with Irv, Jacob, and whoever else might be entrusted with the task — was to be buried in Israel.

“But why?” Jacob had asked.

“Because that’s where Jews go.”

“On Christmas break. Not for eternity.”

And when Sam, who was along for the visit, pointed out that he would get far fewer visitors over there, Isaac pointed out that “the dead are dead” and visits are the last things on their brain-dead minds.

“You don’t want to be buried with Grandma and the rest of the family?” Jacob asked.

“We’ll all meet when the moment is right.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jacob didn’t ask, because there are times when meaning itself means very little. A dying wish is such a time. Isaac had arranged the plot two decades before — it was expensive even then, but he didn’t mind being grave-poor — so all that was required in order to fulfill his last and most lasting wish was to get his body on a plane and work out the logistics on the other side.

But when the time came to drop Isaac’s body in the mailbox, the logistics were impossible: all flights were grounded, and when the airspace reopened, the only bodies the country allowed in were of those prepared to die.

Once the ritually mandated window for a burial-in-one-day had passed, there was no great rush to figure out a solution. But that’s not to say that the family was indifferent to Jewish ritual. Someone had to be with the body at all times between death and burial. The synagogue had a crew for this, but as the days passed, enthusiasm for babysitting the cadaver waned, and more and more responsibility fell to the Blochs. And that responsibility had to be negotiated with the responsibility of hospitably hosting the Israelis: Irv could take them to Georgetown while Jacob sat with Isaac’s body, and then in the afternoon Jacob could take them to the Air and Space Museum to see To Fly! on the perspective-swallowing IMAX while Deborah had the exact opposite experience with Isaac’s body. The patriarch with whom they begrudgingly skyped for seven minutes once a week was now someone they visited daily. By some uniquely Jewish magic, the transition from living to dead transformed the perpetually ignored into the never to be forgotten.

Jacob accepted the brunt of the responsibility, because he considered himself the most able to do so, and because he most strongly wanted to escape other responsibilities. He sat shmira—an expression he’d never heard before he became a choreographer of shmira sitters—at least once a day, usually for several hours at a time. For the first three days, the body was kept on a table, under a sheet, at the Jewish burial home. Then it was moved to a secondary space in the back, and finally, at the end of the week, to Bethesda, where unburied bodies go to die. Jacob never got any closer than ten feet, and dialed the podcasts to hearing-impairing volumes, and tried not to inhale through his nose. He brought books, went through e-mail (he had to stand on the other side of the door to get cell reception), even got some writing done: HOW TO PLAY DISTRACTION; HOW TO PLAY GHOSTS; HOW TO PLAY INCOMMUNICABLE, FELT MEMORIES.

Sunday, mid-morning, when Max’s ritualized complaints of there being nothing to do became intolerably exasperating, Jacob suggested Max come along for some shmira sitting, thinking, This will make you grateful for your boredom. Calling his bluff, Max accepted.

They were greeted at the door by the previous shmira sitter—an ancient woman from the shul who evoked so much chilliness and vacancy she might have been mistaken for one of the dead if her overapplication of makeup had not given her away: only living Jews are embalmed. They exchanged nods, she handed Jacob the keys to the front door, reminded him that absolutely nothing other than toilet paper (and number two, of course) could be flushed down the toilet, and, with somewhat less pomp and circumstance than happens outside Buckingham Palace, the changing of the guard was complete.

“It smells horrible,” Max observed, seating himself at the reception area’s long oak table.

“I breathe through my mouth when I have to breathe.”

“It smells like someone farted into a vodka bottle.”

“How do you know what vodka smells like?”

“Grandpa made me smell it.”

“Why?”

“To prove that it was expensive.”

“Wouldn’t the price do that?”

“Ask him.”

“Chewing gum helps, too.”

“Do you have any gum?”

“I don’t think so.”

They talked about Bryce Harper, and why, despite the genre being too exhausted to raise an original finger, superhero movies were still pretty great, and as often happened, Max asked his dad to recount Argus stories.

“We took him to a dog training class once. Did I ever tell you that?”

“You did. But tell me again.”

“So it was right after we got him. The teacher began by demonstrating a belly rub that would relax a dog when it became agitated. We were sitting in a circle, maybe twenty people, everyone working away at his dog’s belly, and then the room filled with a loud rumbling, like the Metro running beneath the building. It was coming from my lap. Argus was snoring.”

“That’s so cute.”

“So cute.”

“He’s not very well behaved, though.”

“We dropped out. Felt like a waste of time. But a couple of years later, Argus got into the habit of pulling on the leash when we walked. And he’d just stop abruptly and refuse to take another step. So we hired some guy that people in the park were using. I can’t remember his name. He was from Saint Lucia, kind of fat, had a limp. He put a choke collar on Argus and observed as we walked with him. Sure enough, Argus stopped short. ‘Give him a pull,’ the guy said. ‘Show him who’s the alpha dog.’ That made Mom laugh. I gave a pull, because, you know, I’m the alpha dog. But Argus wouldn’t budge. ‘Harder,’ the guy said, so I pulled harder, but Argus pulled back as hard. ‘You got to show him,’ the man said. I pulled again, this time quite hard, and Argus made a little choking noise, but still wouldn’t budge. I looked at Mom. The guy said, ‘You’ve got to teach him, otherwise it’ll be like this forever.’ And I remember thinking: I can live with this forever.

“I couldn’t sleep that night. I felt so guilty about having pulled him so hard that last time, making him choke. And that expanded to guilt about all of the things I’d ever tried to teach him: to heel, offer his paw on command, even to come back. If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t try to teach him anything.”

An hour passed, and then another.

They played a game of Hangman, and then another thousand. Max’s phrases were always inspired, but it was hard to say by what: NIGHT BEFORE NIGHTTIME; ASTHMA THROUGH BINOCULARS; BLOWING A KISS TO AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS.

“That’s what you call a group of ravens,” he said after Jacob had solved it with only a head, torso, and left arm.

“So I’ve heard.”

“A lamentation of swans. A glittering of hummingbirds. A radiance of cardinals.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I like knowing things.”

“Me, too.”

“A minyan of Jews.”

“Excellent.”

“An argument of Blochs.”

“A universe of Max.”

They played a word game called Ghost, in which they took turns adding letters to a growing fragment, trying not to be the one to complete a word, while having a word in mind that the fragment could spell.

“A.”

“A-B.”

“A-B-S.”

“A-B-S-O.”

“A-B-S-O-R.”

“Shit.”

“Absorb.”

“Yeah. I was thinking absolve.”

They played Twenty Questions, Two Truths and a Lie, and Fortunately Unfortunately. Each wished there were a TV to lighten their load.

“Let’s go look at him,” Max said, as casually as if he’d been suggesting they dig into the dried mango they’d brought along.

“Great-Grandpa?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s there.”

“But why?”

“Why not?”

“Why not isn’t an answer.”

“Neither is why.”

Why not? It wasn’t prohibited. It wasn’t disrespectful. It wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, disgusting.

“I took a philosophy class in college. I can’t remember what it was called, and can’t even remember the professor, but I do remember learning that some prohibitions aren’t ethically grounded, but rather because certain things are not to be done. One could reach for all sorts of reasons that it isn’t right to eat the bodies of humans who died of natural causes, but at the end of the day, it’s just not something we do.”

“I didn’t say eat him.”

“No, I know. I’m just making a point.”

“Who would want to eat a human?”

“It would almost certainly smell and taste good. But we don’t do it, because it’s not to be done.”

“Who decides?”

“Excellent question. Sometimes the not to be done is universal, sometimes it’s particular to a culture, or even to a family.”

“Like how we eat shrimp, but don’t eat pork.”

“We don’t eat shrimp as a practice. We on occasion eat some shrimp. But yes, like that.”

“Except this isn’t like that.”

“What isn’t?”

“Looking at Great-Grandpa.”

He was right; it wasn’t.

Max went on: “We’re here to be with him, right? So why wouldn’t we be with him? What’s the point of coming all the way here, and spending all this time, just to be in a different room? We might as well have sat at home with popcorn and a streaming video of his body.”

Jacob was afraid. It was a very simple explanation, even if the explanation for that explanation was harder to come by. What was there to be afraid of? The proximity to death? Not exactly. The proximity to imperfection? The embodied proof of reality, in its grotesque honesty? The proximity to life.

Max said, “See you on the other side,” and entered the room.

Jacob remembered the night, decades before, when he and Tamir had snuck into the National Zoo.

“You OK?” he called to Max.

“Freaky,” Max said.

“I told you.”

“That’s not what you told me.”

“How does he look?”

“Come see for yourself.”

“I’m comfortable where I am.”

“He looks like he does on Skype, but farther away.”

“He looks OK?”

“I probably wouldn’t put it like that.”

How did he look? Would the body have looked different if he’d died differently?

Isaac had been the embodiment of Jacob’s history; his people’s psychological pantry, the shelves collapsed; his heritage of incomprehensible strength and incomprehensible weakness. But now he was only a body. The embodiment of Jacob’s history was only a body.

They used to take baths together when Jacob slept over as a child, and the long hairs of Isaac’s arms, chest, and legs would float on the surface like pond vegetation.

Jacob remembered watching his grandfather fall asleep under the barber’s cape, how his head slumped forward, how the straight razor mowed a path from the back of his hairline to the limits of the barber’s reach.

Jacob remembered being invited to pull at the loose skin of his grandfather’s elbow until it stretched to a web large enough to hold a baseball.

He remembered the smell after his grandfather used the bathroom: it didn’t disgust him, it terrified him. He was mortally afraid of it.

He remembered how his grandfather wore his belt just below the nipples, and his socks just above the knees; and how his fingernails were as thick as quarters, and his eyelids as thin as tinfoil; and how between claps he turned his palms skyward, as if repeatedly opening and shutting an invisible book, as if unable not to give the book a chance, and unable not to reject it, and unable not to give it another chance.

Once, he fell asleep in the middle of a game of Uno, his mouth half full of black bread. Jacob might have been Benjy’s age. He carefully replaced his grandfather’s mediocre hand with all Wild Draw Fours, but when he shook his grandfather awake and they resumed the game, Isaac showed no wonder at his cards, and on his next turn drew from the stack.

“You don’t have anything?” Jacob asked.

Isaac shook his head and said, “Nothing.”

He remembered watching his grandfather change into a bathing suit wherever happened to be convenient, with no regard for his own privacy or Jacob’s mortification: beside the parked car, in the middle of a men’s room, even on the beach. Did he not know? Did he not care? Once, at the public pool they sometimes went to on Sunday mornings, his grandfather undressed poolside. Jacob could feel the glances of strangers rubbing together inside him, building and tending to a fire of rage: at the strangers for their judgment, at his grandfather for his lack of dignity, at himself for his humiliation.

The lifeguard came over and said, “There’s a changing room behind the vending machines.”

“OK,” his grandfather said, as if he’d been told there was a Home Depot just off the Beltway.

“You can’t change here.”

“Why not?”

Jacob spent decades thinking about that Why not? Why not, because the changing room was over there, and here was right here? Why not, because why are we even talking about this? Why not, because if you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you would also lose your ability to comprehend embarrassment? Why not, because a body is only a body?

A body is only a body. But before he was a body, he was an embodiment. And that, at least for Jacob, was why not: his grandfather’s body couldn’t be only a body.

For how long could this continue?

Irv argued that they should just buy a plot in Judean Gardens, as close to the rest of the family as possible, and get on with death already. Jacob insisted they wait until things cleared up in Israel and then fulfill Isaac’s unambiguous wish for his eternal resting place.

“And what if that takes a couple of months?”

“Then we’ll owe the funeral home that much more rent.”

“And if things never clear up?”

“Then we’ll remember how lucky we were to have this as the biggest of our problems.”

WHAT DO THE CHILDREN KNOW?

Julia wanted to rehearse the conversation with the kids. Jacob could have argued that it was unnecessary right then, as they weren’t going to have the actual conversation until after the bar mitzvah and burial dust had cleared. But he agreed, hoping that Julia’s ears would hear what her mouth said. And more, he interpreted her desire to rehearse as a desire to role-play — an acknowledgment that she wasn’t sure. Just as she interpreted his willingness to rehearse as a sign that he was, in fact, ready to move forward with the end.

“‘We need to talk about something’?” Julia suggested.

Jacob considered that for a moment, and countered: “‘We need to have a family conversation’?”

“Why is that better?”

“It reaffirms that we’re a family.”

“But we don’t have family conversations. It’ll tip them off that something’s wrong.”

“Something is wrong.”

“The entire point we’re trying to convey with this conversation is that nothing is wrong. Something is different.”

“Not even Benjy will buy that.”

“But I don’t even have money—” Benjy said.

“Benjy?”

“—to buy something.”

“What’s going on, love?”

“What would you wish?”

“What’s that, baby?”

“In school, Mr. Schneiderman asked us what we would wish, and he took our wishes to the Wailing Wall, because he was going to Israel for vacation. I think I made the wrong wish.”

“What did you wish for?” Jacob asked.

“I can’t tell you or it won’t come true.”

“What do you think you should have wished for?”

“I can’t tell you, in case I change my wish.”

“If sharing them means they can’t come true, why are you asking us to tell you our wishes?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, then turned and walked out of the living room.

They waited until they heard his footsteps vanishing up the staircase before continuing.

“And anyway,” Julia said, in a quieter voice than before, “we want to make them feel safe, and then build to the change.”

“‘Can you guys come into the living room for a minute?’ Like that?”

“Not the kitchen?”

“I think here.”

“And then what,” Julia said, “we tell them to sit down?”

“Yeah, that’s going to be a tip-off, too.”

“We could just wait until we’re all in the car at some point.”

“That could work.”

“But then we can’t face them.”

“Except in the rearview mirror.”

“An unfortunate symbol.”

That made Jacob laugh. She was trying to be funny. There was a kindness in her effort. If this were real, Julia would never make a joke.

“During dinner?” Julia suggested.

“That would first require explaining why we’re eating dinner together.”

“We eat dinner together all the time.”

“We briefly assemble at the table occasionally.”

“What’s for dinner?” Max asked, tumbling into the room exactly like Kramer, despite never having seen Seinfeld.

Julia gave Jacob a look he’d seen a million times in a million contexts: What do the children know? What did Sam know when, two years ago, he walked into the room while they were having sex — missionary and under a sheet and without filthy talk, thank goodness. When Max picked up the phone while Jacob was angrily interrogating Julia’s gynecologist about the benignness of a benign lump — what did he hear? When Benjy walked into their kitchen blow-up and said, “Epitome”—what did he know?

“We were just talking about dinner,” Jacob said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“You heard?”

“I thought you were calling us for dinner.”

“It’s only four thirty.”

“I thought—”

“You’re hungry?”

“What’s for dinner?”

“What’s that have to do with your hunger?” Jacob asked.

“Just wondering.”

“Lasagna and some veggie or another,” Julia said.

“Plain lasagna?”

“Spinach.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, you have an hour to work up an appetite for spinach lasagna.”

“I think Argus needs a walk.”

“I just gave him a walk,” Jacob said.

“Did he poo?”

“I can’t remember.”

“You would remember if he’d pooed,” Max said. “He needs to poo. He’s doing that thing where he licks at the beginning of a poo that needs to come out.”

“Why are you telling us this, instead of just walking him?”

“Because I’m working on my speech for Great-Grandpa’s funeral, and I need to concentrate.”

“You’re giving a speech?” Jacob asked.

“You aren’t?”

Julia was touched by Max’s charmingly narcissistic initiative. Jacob was ashamed by his own narcissistic thoughtlessness.

“I’ll say a few words. Or actually, Grandpa will probably speak on our behalf.”

“Grandpa doesn’t speak on my behalf,” Max said.

“Work on your speech,” Julia said. “Dad will walk Argus.”

“I did walk Argus.”

“Until he poos.”

Max went to the kitchen and came out with a box of unhealthy organic cereal, which he took back to his room.

Julia called up: “Cereal should be in your mouth or in the box. Nowhere else.”

Max called down: “I can’t swallow it?”

“Maybe it’s a mistake to talk to all of them at once,” Jacob said, careful with his volume. “Maybe we should talk to Sam first.”

“I suppose I could see the—”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

Jacob gestured at the TV that was now always on. There were images from a soccer stadium in Jerusalem, a stadium in which Jacob and Tamir had seen a game more than two decades before. There were a dozen bulldozers. It wasn’t clear what they were doing, or why Israel would allow such images to be broadcast, and that not-knowing was terrifying. Could they be preparing a military site? Digging a mass grave?

The news that reached America was scattershot, unreliable, and alarmist. The Blochs did what they did best: balanced overreaction with repression. If in their hearts they believed they were safe, they overworried, talked and talked, whipped themselves, and one another, into foams of anguish. From the comfort of the living room, they followed the unfolding news like a sporting event, and at times caught themselves rooting for drama. There were even small, shameful disappointments when estimates of destruction were revised downward, or when what appeared to be an act of aggression turned out to be only an accident. It was a game whose unreal danger was to be talked up and savored, so long as the outcome was fixed. But if there was an inkling of any real danger, if the shit started to thicken — as it was soon to do — they dug until the blades of their shovels threw sparks: It’ll be fine, it’s nothing.

Tamir was largely absent. He spent part of every day trying to find a way home, but never with any success. If he talked with Rivka or Noam, he did so privately and didn’t share anything. And to Jacob’s amazement, he still wanted to sightsee, schlepping an unenthusiastic Barak from monument to monument, museum to museum, Cheesecake Factory to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. It was so easy for Jacob to see in Tamir what he couldn’t see in himself: a refusal to acknowledge reality. He sightsaw so he wouldn’t have to look.

The scene at the stadium was replaced with the face of Adia, the young Palestinian girl whose entire family had been killed in the earthquake and who was found wandering the streets by an American photojournalist. The story touched the world, and kept touching it. Maybe it was as simple as her beautiful face. Maybe it was how they held hands. It was a feel-good piece amid the tragedy, but it was a tragedy, Jacob thought, or at least inauspicious, that the good feeling was between a Palestinian and an American. At some point, Max started sleeping with a newspaper photo of Adia under his pillow. When her orphanage collapsed and she went missing, Max went missing, too. Everyone knew where he was — it was only his voice, gaze, and teeth that were hidden — but no one knew how to find him.

“Hello?” Julia asked, shaking her hand in front of Jacob’s face.

“What?”

“You’ve been watching while we’ve been talking?”

“Out of the corner of my eye.”

“I realize the Middle East is collapsing, and that the entire world will get sucked into the vortex, but this is actually more important right now.”

She got up and turned off the TV. Jacob thought he heard it sigh in relief.

“Go walk Argus, then let’s finish this.”

“He’ll go to the door and whine when he really needs it.”

“Why make him really need it?”

“When it’s time, I mean.”

“You think we should talk to Sam first? Before the others?”

“Or Sam and Max. Just in case one of them starts crying. Benjy is going to follow their lead, so we should give them a chance to digest and gather themselves.”

“Or just let them all cry together,” Julia said.

“Maybe just Sam first. He’s probably going to have the strongest reaction — whatever that reaction will be — but he’s also the most able to process it.”

Julia touched one of the art books on the coffee table.

“What if I cry?” she asked.

The question embodied Jacob, made him want to touch her — grasp her shoulder, press his palm to her cheek, feel the ridges and valleys of their fingerprints align — but he didn’t know if that was acceptable anymore. Her stillness throughout the conversation didn’t feel standoffish, but it did create a space around her. What if she cried? Of course she would cry. They would all cry. They’d wail. It would be horrible. The kids’ lives would be ruined. Tens of thousands of people would die. Israel would be destroyed. He wanted all of that, not because he craved horror, but because imagining the worst kept him safe from it — focusing on doomsday allowed for the day to day.

On a drive to visit Isaac many years before, Sam had asked from the backseat, “God is everywhere, right?”

Jacob and Julia exchanged yet another where-the-hell-did-that-come-from look.

Jacob handled it: “That’s what people who believe in God tend to think, yes.”

“And God has always been everywhere?”

“I suppose so.”

“So here’s what I can’t figure out,” he said, watching the early moon follow them as they drove. “If God was everywhere, where did He put the world when He made it?”

Jacob and Julia exchanged another look, this one of awe.

Julia turned to face Sam, who was still looking out the window, his pupils constantly returning, like a typewriter carriage, and said, “You are an amazing person.”

“OK,” Sam said, “but where did He put it?”

That night, Jacob did a bit of research and learned that Sam’s question had inspired volumes of thought over thousands of years, and that the most prevalent response was the kabbalistic notion of tzimtzum. Basically, God was everywhere, and as Sam surmised, when He wanted to create the world, there was nowhere to put it. So He made Himself smaller. Some refered to it as an act of contraction, others a concealment. Creation demanded self-erasure, and to Jacob, it was the most extreme humility, the purest generosity.

Sitting with her now, rehearsing the horrible conversation, Jacob wondered if maybe, all those years, he had misunderstood the spaces surrounding Julia: her quiet, her steps back. Maybe they weren’t buffers of defense, but of the most extreme humility, the purest generosity. What if she wasn’t withdrawing, but beckoning? Or both at the same time? Withdrawing and beckoning? And more to the point: making a world for their children, even for Jacob.

“You won’t cry,” he told her, trying to enter the space.

“Would it be bad to?”

“I don’t know. I suppose, all things being equal, it would be best not to impose that on them. Impose isn’t the right word. I mean … You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

He was surprised, and further embodied, by her I do. “We’ll go over this a few dozen times and it’ll feel different.”

“It will never not destroy me.”

“And the adrenaline in the moment will help hold the tears back.”

“You’re probably right.”

You’re probably right. It had been a long time — it had felt like a long time, Dr. Silvers would correct — since she’d deferred to his emotional judgment in any way. Since she hadn’t reflexively bucked against it. There was a kindness in those words—you’re probably right—that disarmed him. He didn’t need to be right, but he needed that kindness. What if, all those times she reflexively bucked against, or simply dismissed, his perspective, she’d given him a you’re probably right? He would have found it very easy to concede inside that kindness.

“And if you cry,” Jacob said, “you cry.”

“I just want to make it easy on them.”

“No chance of that.”

“As easy as it can be.”

“Whatever happens, we’ll find our way.”

We’ll find our way. What an odd assurance, Julia thought, when the point of the conversation they were rehearsing was precisely that they couldn’t find their way. Not together. And yet the assurance took the form of togetherness: we.

“Maybe I’ll get a glass of water,” she said. “Do you want one?”

“I’ll go to the door and whine when I really need it.”

“You think the kids are losing?” she asked as she walked to the kitchen. Jacob wondered if the water was just an excuse to face away when asking that question.

“I’m just going to turn on the TV for one second. On mute. I just need to see what’s happening.”

“What about what’s happening here?”

“I’m here. You asked if I think the kids are losing. Yes, I think that’s the only way to describe it.”

A map of the Middle East, swooping arrows indicating the movements of various armies. There had been skirmishes, mostly with Syria and Hezbollah in the north. The Turks were taking an increasingly hostile tone, and the newly formed Transarabia was amassing planes and troops in what had been Jordan. But it was containable, controllable, plausibly deniable.

Jacob said, “Rest assured, I’ll be crying.”

“What?”

“I’ll have some water.”

“I didn’t hear what you said.”

“I said, even if you don’t see me crying, I’ll be crying.”

That was something — that felt like something — he needed to say. He’d always known — always felt—that Julia believed she had a stronger emotional engagement with the children, that being a mother, or a woman, or simply herself, created a bond that a father, man, or Jacob was incapable of. She’d subtly suggest it all the time — it felt like she was subtly suggesting it — and would every now and then outright say it, although it was always couched in talk of all the things that were special to his relationship with them, like having fun.

Her perception of their parental identities generally broke that way: depth and fun. Julia breast-fed them. Jacob made them crack up with over-the-top versions of airplane-into-the-mouth feeding. Julia had a visceral, uncontrollable need to check in on them while they slept. Jacob woke them up if the game went into extra innings. Julia taught them words like nostalgia, angst, and pensive. Jacob liked to say, “There’s no bad language, only bad usage,” as a way of justifying the supposedly good usage of words like douche and shitty, which Julia hated as much as the kids loved.

There was another way of looking at that dichotomy of depth and fun, one that Jacob had spent innumerable hours considering with Dr. Silvers: heaviness and lightness. Julia brought weight to everything, opening up a space for every intimated emotion, urging a fleshed-out conversation about each passing remark, perpetually suggesting the value of sadness. Jacob felt that most problems weren’t problems, and those that were could be resolved with distraction, food, physical activity, or the passage of time. Julia always wanted to give the kids a life of gravity: culture, trips abroad, black-and-white movies. Jacob saw no problem with — saw the great good in — bubblier, dumber activities: water parks, baseball games, terrible superhero movies that brought great pleasure. She understood childhood as the period of soul formation. He understood it as life’s only opportunity to feel safe and happy. Each saw the myriad shortcomings and absolute necessity of the other.

“Do you remember,” Julia asked, “however many years ago, when my friend Rachel came to our seder?”

“Rachel?”

“From architecture school? Remember, she came with her twins?”

“And no husband.”

“Right. He’d had a heart attack at the gym.”

“Cautionary tale.”

“You remember?”

“Sure, that year’s sympathy invite.”

“I guess she went to yeshiva as a girl, or had some kind of rigorous Jewish education. I hadn’t realized that, and ended up feeling so embarrassed.”

“By what?”

“What illiterate Jews we are.”

“But she had a great time, didn’t she?”

“She did.”

“So save your embarrassment.”

“It was years ago.”

“Embarrassment is the Parmalat of emotions.”

That got a great laugh — it felt great to Jacob — from Julia. An irrepressible laugh in the midst of so much tactical strategizing.

“What made you remember her now?”

Silence can be as irrepressible as laughter. And it can accumulate, like weightless snowflakes. It can collapse a ceiling.

“I’m not sure,” Julia said.

Jacob tried to pitch the conversation’s roof: “Maybe you were remembering how it felt to be judged.”

“Maybe. I don’t think she was judging. But I felt judged.”

“And you’re afraid of feeling judged?” Jacob asked.

A few nights before, Julia had awoken as if from a nightmare, although she had no memory of any dream. She went down to the kitchen, found the Georgetown Day student directory in the “crap drawer,” and confirmed that Benjy would be the only child in his class with two addresses.

“I’m afraid of our family being judged,” she said.

“Do you judge yourself?”

“Don’t you?”

“I’m going to be the sympathy invite this year, aren’t I?”

Julia smiled, grateful for the deflection.

“Why should this year be different from all other years?”

Their first shared laugh in weeks.

Jacob wasn’t used to this warmth, and it confused him. This was not what he was expecting when rehearsing for this rehearsal of a conversation. He’d anticipated something subtly passive-aggressive. He assumed he’d have to sample a buffet of shit, never having the guts — never finding justification in the cost-benefit analysis of self-defense — to draw upon the small arsenal of retorts he’d prepared.

Dr. Silvers had urged him simply to be present, to sit with his pain (rather than send it back), and to resist the desire for certain outcomes. But Jacob felt the situation would call for some very un-Eastern responsiveness. He would have to avoid saying things that could be used against him at any future point, as everything would be entered into the permanent record. He would have to appear to yield (with gentle affirmations, and declared reversals to positions he already secretly held), without giving an inch. He would have to have the cunning of someone too cunning to read a book about the cunning of samurai.

But as the conversation took shape, Jacob felt no need for control. There was nothing to win; there was only losing to protect against.

“‘There are many different kinds of families,’” Julia said. “Doesn’t that seem like a good way to go?”

“It does.”

“‘Some families have two dads. Some have two moms.’”

“‘Some families live in two houses’?”

“At which point Max will infer we’re buying a vacation house, and get excited.”

“A vacation house?”

“A house on the ocean. ‘Some families live in two houses: one in the city, one by the ocean.’”

A vacation house, Julia thought, willfully confusing herself as completely as Max would. She and Jacob had talked about it — not a house on the ocean, they could never afford that, but something cozy and elsewhere. It was the big news she was going to mention to Mark that day, before he reminded her how newsless her life was. A vacation house would be nice. Maybe even nice enough to make things work for a while, or to simulate a functioning family until the next temporary solution could be found. The appearance of happiness. If they could sustain the appearance — not to others, but how life appeared to themselves — it might be a close-enough approximation of the experience of actual happiness to make things work.

They could travel more. The planning of a trip, the trip, the decompression: that would buy them some time.

They could go to couples therapy, but Jacob had implied a bizarre loyalty to Dr. Silvers, which would have made seeing someone else a transgression (a greater transgression, apparently, than requesting a shot of fecal cum from a woman who was not his wife); and when Julia faced the prospect of opening everything up, the time and expense of twice-a-week visits that would end in either painful silence or endless talking, she couldn’t rouse herself to the necessary hopefulness.

They could have done exactly what she’d spent her professional life facilitating and her personal life condemning: a renovation. There was so much that could be improved in their house: revamp the kitchen (new hardware, at minimum, but why not new countertops, new appliances, ideally a reconfiguration for better flow and lines of sight); new master bath; new closets; open up the back of the house to the garden; punch in a couple of skylights above the top-floor showers; finish the basement.

“‘One house where Mom will live, and one house where Dad will live.’”

“OK,” Jacob said, “let me be Sam for a minute.”

“OK.”

“You’re going to move at the same time?”

“We’re going to try to, yes.”

“And I’m going to have to carry my stuff back and forth every day?”

“We’re going to live within walking distance of each other,” Julia said, “and it won’t be every day.”

“Is that really something you can promise? I’m being me now.”

“I think it’s an OK promise for the situation.”

“And how will we divide time?”

“I don’t know,” Julia said, “but not every day.”

“And who’s going to live here? I’m being Sam again.”

“Hopefully a nice family.”

“We’re a nice family.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Did one of you have an affair?”

“Jacob.”

“What?”

“He’s not going to ask that.”

“First of all, of course he might. Second, it’s one of those things that, however unlikely, we absolutely need to have a prepared answer for.”

“OK,” Julia said, “so I’ll be Sam.”

“OK.”

“Did one of you have an affair?”

“Who am I?” Jacob asked. “Me? Or you?”

“You.”

“No. That’s not what’s going on here.”

“But I saw your phone.”

“Wait, did he?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? Or he didn’t?”

“I don’t believe that he did.”

“So why are you saying it?”

“Because the kids know things that we don’t think they know. And when he helped me to unlock it—”

“He helped you unlock it?”

“I didn’t know whose it was.”

“And he saw—?”

“No.”

“Did you tell him—”

“Of course not.”

Jacob got back into the character of himself.

“What you saw was an exchange with one of the other writers on my show. We were sending lines back and forth for a scene in which, well, two people say some pretty inappropriate things to each other.”

“Convincing,” Julia said, herself.

“And you, Mom?” Jacob asked. “Did you have an affair?”

“No.”

“Not with Mark Adelson?”

“No.”

“You didn’t kiss him at Model UN?”

“Is this really productive, Jacob?”

“Here, I’ll be you.”

“You’ll be me?”

“Yes, Sam, I did kiss Mark at Model UN. It wasn’t premeditated—”

“Not a word I would ever use.”

“It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t even enjoyable. It simply happened. I am sorry that it happened. I have asked your father to accept my apology, and he has. Your father is a very good man—”

“We get the picture.”

“Really, though,” Jacob said, “how are we going to explain our reasoning?”

“Reasoning?”

They never used the word divorce. Jacob could bring himself to say it, because it wasn’t going to happen. But he didn’t want it aboveground. Julia couldn’t say it, because she wasn’t so sure. She didn’t know where to put it.

If Julia were to be fully honest, she couldn’t easily say her reasons for doing what they couldn’t say. She was unhappy, although unconvinced that her unhappiness wouldn’t be someone else’s happiness. She felt unfulfilled desire — profound amounts of it — but presumably so did every other married and unmarried person. She wanted more, but didn’t know if there was more to be found. Not knowing used to feel inspiring. It felt like faith. Now it felt agnostic. Like not knowing.

“What if they want to know if we’re going to get remarried?” Julia asked.

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Definitely not,” she said. “No chance.”

“You’re awfully sure.”

“There is nothing I’m more sure of.”

“You used to be so unsure of everything, in the best way.”

“I suppose I used to have less evidence.”

“The only thing you have evidence of is that our specific way of doing things didn’t work for the specific person you are.”

“I’m ready for the next chapter.”

“Spinsterhood?”

“Maybe.”

“What about Mark?”

“What about him?”

“He’s nice. Handsome. Why not give that a try?”

“How can you be so ready to give me away?”

“No. No, it’s just you seem to have a connection with him, and—”

“You don’t need to worry about me, Jacob. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m not worried about you.”

That didn’t sound right.

He tried again: “I’m not any more worried about you than you are about me.”

Also not right.

“Mark is a mensch,” Billie said at the edge of the room. Do they spontaneously generate from the upholstery, like maggots from rotting meat?

“Billie?”

“Hello,” she said, extending her hand to Jacob. “We haven’t actually met, although I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Precisely what? Jacob wanted to ask, but instead took her hand and said, “And I’ve heard a lot about you.” A lie. “All good things, by the way.” The truth.

“I was upstairs helping Sam with his bar mitzvah apology, and it occurred to us that we don’t know what, exactly, qualifies as an apology. Does an apology require an explicit disavowal?”

Jacob shot Julia a look of check out the vocabulary on this one.

“Could he simply describe what happened and explain? Are the words I’m sorry strictly necessary?”

“Why isn’t Sam asking?”

“He’s walking Argus. And he asked me to.”

“I’ll come up in a bit and help out,” Jacob said.

“I’m not sure that’s necessary or, really, wanted. We just kind of need to know what’s meant by apology.”

“I think an explicit disavowal is required,” Julia said, “but no need for the words I’m sorry.”

“That was my instinct,” Billie said. “OK. Well, thanks.”

She turned to leave the room, and Julia called her back: “Billie.”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear any of the conversation we were having? Or just that Mark is nice?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you heard anything? Or you don’t know if you feel comfortable answering?”

“The latter.”

“It’s just that—”

“I understand.”

“We haven’t yet spoken with the boys—”

“I really understand.”

“And there’s a lot of context,” Jacob chimed in.

“My parents are divorced. I get it.”

“We’re just finding our way,” Jacob said, “just figuring things out.”

“Your parents are divorced?” Julia asked.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Two years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t blame myself for their divorce, and neither should you.”

“You’re funny,” Julia said.

“Thank you.”

“The divorce obviously didn’t get in the way of you becoming an amazing person.”

“Well, we’ll never know what I could have been otherwise.”

“You’re really funny.”

“I really thank you.”

“We know this puts you in an awkward position,” Jacob added.

“It’s fine,” Billie said, and turned to leave once again.

“Billie?” Julia said.

“Yes?”

“Would you describe your parents’ divorce as a loss?”

“For whom?”

“I want to change my wish,” Benjy said.

“Benjy?”

“I ought to go,” Billie said, turning to leave.

“You don’t have to go,” Julia said. “Stay.”

“I wished for you to believe Sam.”

“Believe him about what?” Jacob said, gathering Benjy onto his knee.

“I ought to,” Billie said, and headed up.

“I don’t know,” Benjy said. “I just heard him talking to Max, and he said he wished you believed him. So I made his wish my wish.”

“It’s not that we don’t believe him,” Jacob said, re-finding his anger at Julia for being unable to take Sam’s side.

“So what is it?”

“Do you want to know what Sam and Max were talking about?” Julia asked.

Benjy nodded.

“Sam got in trouble in Hebrew school because they found a piece of paper on his desk with some bad words on it. He says he didn’t do it. His teacher is sure that he did.”

“So why don’t you believe him?”

“We don’t not believe him,” Jacob said.

“We always want to believe him,” Julia said. “We always want to take the side of our children. But we don’t think Sam is telling the truth this time. That doesn’t make him a bad person. And it doesn’t make us love him any less. This is how we love him. We’re trying to help him. People make mistakes all the time. I make mistakes all the time. Dad does. And we all count on each other’s forgiveness. But that requires an apology. Good people don’t make fewer mistakes, they’re just better at apologizing.”

Benjy thought about that.

He craned his neck to face Jacob, and asked, “So why do you believe him?”

“Mom and I believe the same thing.”

“You also think he lied?”

“No, I also think people make mistakes and deserve forgiveness.”

“But do you think he lied?”

“I don’t know, Benjy. And neither does Mom. Only Sam knows.”

“But do you think he lied?”

Jacob put his palms on Benjy’s thighs and waited for the angel to call out. But no angel. And no ram. Jacob said, “We think he isn’t telling the truth.”

“Could you call Mr. Schneiderman and ask him to change my note?”

“Sure,” Jacob said, “we can do that.”

“But how would you tell him my new wish without saying it?”

“Why don’t you just write it and give it to him?”

“He’s already there.”

“Where?”

“The Wailing Wall.”

“In Israel?”

“I guess.”

“Oh, then don’t worry. I’m sure his trip was canceled and you’ll have a chance to change your wish.”

“Why?”

“Because of the earthquake.”

“What earthquake?”

“There was an earthquake in Israel last week.”

“A big one?”

“You haven’t heard us talking about it?”

“You talk about lots of things that you don’t talk about to me. Is the Wall going to be OK?”

“Of course,” Julia said.

“If anything’s going to be OK,” Jacob added, “it’s the Wall. It’s been OK for more than two thousand years.”

“Yeah, but there used to be three other walls.”

“There’s a great story about that,” Jacob said, hoping he would be able to remember what he’d just promised to deliver. The story had lain dormant since he was told it in Hebrew school. He couldn’t remember the telling, and he hadn’t thought about it since, yet there it was, a part of him — a part to be handed down. “When the Roman army conquered Jerusalem, the order was given to destroy the Temple.”

“It was the Second Temple,” Benjy said, “because the first was destroyed.”

“That’s right. Good for you for knowing that. Anyway, three of the walls went down, but the fourth one resisted.”

“Resisted?”

“Struggled. Fought back.”

“A wall can’t fight back.”

“Wouldn’t be destroyed.”

“OK.”

“It stood firm against hammers, and pickaxes, and clubs. The Romans had elephants push against the wall, they tried to set fire to it, they even invented the wrecking ball.”

“Cool.”

“But nothing, it seemed, would bring the fourth wall down. The soldier in charge of the Temple’s destruction reported back to his commanding officer that they had destroyed three of the Temple’s walls. But instead of admitting that they couldn’t knock down the fourth one, he suggested they leave it up.”

“Why?”

“As proof of their greatness.”

“I don’t get it.”

“When people would see the wall, they would be able to conjure the immensity of the Temple, the foe they defeated.”

“What?”

Julia clarified: “They would see how huge the actual Temple must have been.”

“Right,” Benjy said, taking it in.

Jacob turned to Julia. “Isn’t there some organization rebuilding destroyed synagogues in Europe from their foundations? It’s like that.”

“Or the 9/11 Memorial.”

“There’s a word for it. I heard it once … A shul. Right, shul.”

“Like synagogue?”

“Wonderful coincidence, but no. It’s Tibetan.”

“Where would you have learned a Tibetan word?”

“No idea,” Jacob said. “But I learned it.”

“So? Are you going to make us pull down the Tibetan Webster’s?”

“I could be getting this wrong, but I think it’s a physical impression left behind. Like a footprint. Or the channel where water flowed. Or in Connecticut — the matted grass where Argus had slept.”

“A snow angel,” Benjy said.

“That’s a great one,” Julia said, reaching for his face.

“Only, we don’t believe in angels.”

Jacob touched Benjy’s knee. “What I said was that while there are angels in the Torah, Judaism doesn’t really encourage—”

“You’re my angel,” Julia told Benjy.

“And you’re actually my tooth fairy,” he said.

Jacob’s wish would have been to have learned his life lessons before it was too late to apply them. But like the wall into which he’d have tucked it, the wish conjured an immensity.

* * *

After Benjy had left the room, and the rehearsal had wrapped up, and Max was fed a second dinner that wasn’t spinach lasagna, and the door separating Sam and Billie from the rest of the world was judged sufficiently cracked, Jacob decided to go run some unnecessary errands at the hardware store: buy a shorter hose that would tuck away less awkwardly, replenish the AAA battery supply, maybe fondle some power tools. On his way, he called his father.

“I give in,” he said.

“Are you on Bluetooth?”

“Yes.”

“Well, get off it, so I can hear you.”

“It’s illegal to hold the phone while driving.”

“And it gives you cancer, too. Cost of doing business.”

Jacob brought the phone to his face and repeated, “I give in.”

“That’s great to hear. With reference to what?”

“Let’s bury Grandpa here.”

“Really?” Irv asked, sounding surprised, and pleased, and heartbroken. “What brought that on?”

The reason — whether he was persuaded by his father’s pragmatism, or was tired of reorganizing his life to spend time with a dead body, or was too preoccupied with the burial of his family to keep up the fight — simply didn’t matter all that much. It took them eight days, but the decision was made: they would bury Isaac in Judean Gardens, a very ordinary, pretty-enough cemetery about thirty minutes outside the city. He would get visitors, and spend eternity among his family, and while it might not be the nonexistent and tarrying Messiah’s first or thousandth stop, He’d get there.

THE GENUINE VERSION

Eyesick, the threadbare beginnings of an avatar, was in the middle of a digital lemon grove — the clearly marked and barbed-wire-ringed private property of a lemonade corporation that used kinda funny videos, featuring kinda trustworthy actors, to persuade concerned-but-not-motivated consumers to believe that what they were drinking had something to do with authenticity. Sam hated such corporations nearly half as much as he hated himself for being just another spoon-fed idiot-cog who grinned and whatever the past tense of “bear it” is while hating, and announcing his hatred of, corporations. He would never trespass in life itself. He was too ethical, and too much of a coward. (Sometimes it was hard to differentiate.) But that was one of the many, many great things about Other Life — perhaps the explanation for his addiction to it: it was an opportunity to be a little less ethical, and a little less of a coward.

Eyesick was trespassing, yes, but he wasn’t there to start a fire, chop down trees, do graffiti (or whatever is the proper way of saying that), or even to trespass, really. He’d gone there to be alone. Among the seemingly infinite columns of trunks, beneath the duvet of lemons, he could be by himself. It’s not like he felt a great need to be alone. Need was a word that Sam’s mom might use.

“Do you need to get any homework done before we go to dinner?”

“Finished,” he would say, taking great pleasure in throwing the correction back at her.

“Do you need to get any homework finished before we go to dinner?”

“Need?”

“Yes. Need.”

He took no pleasure in the great pleasure he seemed to take in being a smart-ass with her. But he needed to do it. He needed to push back against his instinct to cling to her; he needed to alienate what he needed to draw close, but more than anything, he needed not to be the object of her needs. It was bodily. It wasn’t her continued need to kiss him that repulsed him, but her overt efforts to manage that need. He was disgusted — revolted, nauseated — by her stolen touches: fixing his hair for a moment longer than necessary, holding his hand while cutting his fingernails (something he knew how to do himself, but needed her to do, but only in exactly the right and limited way). And her stolen glances: when he was coming out of a pool, or worse, taking off a shirt for an impromptu load of laundry. What she stole was stolen from him, and it inspired not only disgust, and not only auger, but resistance. You can have what you want, but you cannot take it.

Eyesick was seeking aloneness in a lemon grove because Sam was sitting shiva for Isaac, avoiding conversations with relatives whose central processing units were programmed to shame him. Why else would a second cousin he hadn’t seen in years feel a need to mention acne? To mention voice-dropping? To wink while asking about girlfriends?

Eyesick was seeking aloneness. Not to be by himself, but to be away from others. It’s different.

> Sam?

> …

> Sam, is that you?

> Who are you talking to?

> YOU.

> Me?

> You. Sam.

> Who are you?

> I KNEW it was you.

> Who knew?

> You don’t recognize me?

Recognize? The avatar addressing Eyesick was a lion with a plush rainbow mane; a brown suede vest with opalescent buttons, largely concealed beneath a white tuxedo with tails down to the end of his tail (which was itself adorned with a cubic zirconia heart); bleached teeth largely concealed by lipsticked lips (insofar as a lion has lips); a snout that was just a bit too moist; ruby pupils (not ruby-colored, but gemstones); and mother-of-pearl claws with peace signs and Stars of David etched into them. If it was good, it was very good. But was it good?

There was no recognition. Only the surprise of having been discovered in a moment of reflection, and the shame of having been named and known.

It would be possible, in theory, for someone with sufficient tech savvy and insufficient joie de vivre to trace Eyesick back to Sam. But it would require an effort that he couldn’t imagine anyone he knew — anyone who knew him—making. Except maybe Billie.

Putting aside his parents’ virtuosically lame and quarter-hearted attempts to “check in” on his computer usage, it never ceased to amaze Sam what he could get away with.

Proof: he shoplifted from the corner grocery that still had his family name above the door, the store his great-grandfather had opened with more dead brothers than words of English. Sam shoplifted enough junk food — enough bags of Cheetos (punctured with the sharpened end of a bent paper clip to release the air and allow for compression), enough Mentos boners in his pockets — from the earnest Korean immigrants, who kept lemon slices by the register to keep their fingers moist enough to grip cash, to open his own corner store, but this one with a different name, preferably with no name, preferably: STORE. Why did he do all that stealing? Not to eat what he took. He never did, never once. He always, always returned the goods — the returning requiring far more illicit prowess than the stealing. He did it to prove that he could, and to prove that he was horrible, and to prove that no one cared.

Proof: the volume (in terabytes) of porn he consumed, and the volume (in quarts) of semen he disseminated. Under their noses might be an unfortunate turn of phrase, but how could so-called parents be so completely oblivious to the mass grave being dug and filled with sperm in their own backyard?

The shiva reminded him of many things — the mortality of his grandparents and parents, his own mortality and Argus’s, how undeniably comforting it can be to perform rituals you don’t understand — but nothing more than the first time he jerked off, also at a shiva. It was his great-aunt Doris’s funeral reception. Though they referred to her as Great-Aunt Doris, her relationship was more distant, involving at least some once-removeds. (And it had been suggested, by his grandfather, after a few glasses of very expensive vodka, that she wasn’t a blood relative at all.) Whatever the case, she’d never married, and had no children, and flaunted her loneliness to sidle up closer to the trunk of the family tree.

The familiar gathering of unfamiliar family noshed away, and like Moses receiving the call to a needy bush, Sam galloped to his bathroom. Somehow he understood it was the moment, even if he didn’t understand the method. He used hair gel that day, because it was nearby and viscous. The more he slid his fist up and down his shaft, the stronger was his suspicion that something of genuine significance was happening — not just pleasurable, but mystical. It felt better and better, he squeezed harder, and then it felt even better, and then, with one small thrust for man, mankind leaped giantly across the canyon separating crappy, pathetic, inauthentic life from the unself-conscious, unangry, unawkward realm he wanted to spend the rest of his days and nights on earth inhabiting. Out of his penis gushed a substance he would have to admit he loved more than he loved any person in his life, more than any idea, loved so much that it became his enemy. Sometimes, in less proud moments, he would even talk to his sperm as his semen congealed in his belly button. Sometimes he would look it in the hundred million eyes and say simply: “Enemies.”

The first time was a revelation. The first several thousand times. He jerked off again that afternoon, and again and again that night. He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure. He used hair gel every time, never questioning the potential dermatological effects of repeatedly applying to his penis a substance intended to sculpt hair. By the third day, his pubes were pipe cleaners and his shaft was leprous.

So he started jerking off with aloe. But the green was cognitively dissonant, made him feel like he was fucking an alien, but in a bad way. So he switched to moisturizer.

He was a mad-scientist masturbator, always searching for ways to make his hand more like a vagina. It would have helped to have had a bona fide experience with a bona fide vagina, but his inability not to hear “boner fide” made the chances of that as nugatory as did his use of the word nugatory. Anyway, the Internet was nothing if not a gynecological resource, and anyway, there were things one knew without having had a way to know, like how babies won’t crawl off a cliff — a fact he was ninety-five percent sure of. When, five infinitely and cosmically unjustly long years later, he had his first sexual experience with a corporeal female — not Billie, tragically, but someone merely nice and smart and pretty — he was surprised by just how accurate his imaginings had been. He’d known all along, he’d known everything. Perhaps if he’d known that he’d known, those years would have been slightly easier to endure.

He used his dry fist, his fist lubricated with: honey, or shampoo, or Vaseline, or shaving cream, or rice pudding, or toothpaste (only once), or the remnants of the tube of A&D that his parents couldn’t bring themselves to throw away, despite being able to throw away everything that actually mattered. He made an artificial vagina out of a toilet paper roll, covering one end with Saran wrap (held down with rubber bands), filling the tube with maple syrup, then covering the other end with Saran wrap (and more rubber bands) and giving it a slit. He fucked pillows, blankets, swimming pool vacuums, stuffed animals. He jerked off to the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and the back-page ads in the City Paper, and JCPenney bra advertisements in Parade magazine, and basically anything that could, with the far reaches of his all-powerful and highly motivated imagination, be construed to be an asshole, vagina, nipple, or mouth (in that order). Of course, he had unlimited access to more free porn than could be watched over the course of the lifetimes of every citizen of China, but even an anus-crazed twelve-year-old appreciates the correlation between the mental work required and the magnitude of the nut, hence his ultimate fantasy of intercepting some Arab virgin on her way to get fucked by an actual martyr, tucking his head under her burka, and, in that deep-space, sensory-deprived blackness, licking orbits around Heranus. Would anyone ever believe that this had nothing to do with religion, or ethnicity, or even taboo?

He tied rubber bands around his wrist — rubber bands being to masturbation what flour is to baking — to make his fingers go numb so he would no longer recognize them as his own. It worked terrifically well, and he almost lost his hand. He angled mirrors in such a way as to see his asshole without the rest of his body, and was able to convince himself that it was the asshole of a woman who wanted him in her asshole. He masturbated with his dominant and his recessive hand — his intact and his mangled hand — and rubbed Indian burns into his shaft with both hands at once. For several months he favored what he called — called to no one, of course — the “Roger Ebert grip”: a half twist of the wrist, so that the thumb was pointing down. (For reasons he didn’t understand, and felt no need to understand, this also gave the impression of his hand being someone else’s hand.) He closed his eyes and held his breath until he started to black out. He fucked the soles of his feet like some kind of horndog maharishi. If he were actually trying to detach his penis from his body, he couldn’t have squeezed or pulled it any harder, and it’s a miracle he never actually hurt himself, although even when he was pleasuring himself, he felt that, in some deep and irreparable way, he was hurting himself, that it had to be so, and that that was another elemental bit of knowledge with which he was born.

He masturbated in Amtrak bathrooms, plane bathrooms, the bathrooms of his school and Hebrew school, bookstore bathrooms, Gap and Zara and H&M bathrooms, restaurant bathrooms, the bathrooms of every house he’d been in since gaining the ability to come into a toilet. If it flushed, he fucked it.

How many times did he try to suck his own dick? (Like Tantalus, as he reached, so did the fruit pull away.) He tried to fuck his own asshole, but that required pushing his boner in the direction it most didn’t want to go, like a drawbridge being forced to touch the water. He was able to rub his scrotum around his asshole, but that only made him melancholy.

He once stumbled upon a sufficiently compelling argument, in an analingus community, for sticking his finger into his butt while jerking off. Once he’d trained his sphincter to stop reflexively impersonating a Chinese finger trap, it felt pretty good, if pretty strange. It felt like being a bowl whose rim was being wiped clean of cookie batter by the finger of someone — namely: him—who couldn’t wait. He was, indeed, able to find his prostate, and as promised, he saw through walls when he came. But there was nothing to see except the next crappy room. It was the removal of his finger that ruined everything. First of all, immediately after coming, everything that seemed not only good but logical, necessary, and inevitable before coming instantly seems inexplicable, deranged, and repugnant. It’s possible to play down, or even deny, almost anything you just said or did, but a finger in one’s butthole cannot be played down or denied. It can only be left there or removed. And it cannot be left there.

Sam never felt comfortable in his body — not in clothing that never fit, not when performing his ridiculous impression of a nonspastic walker — except when masturbating. When masturbating, he both owned and existed in his body. He was effortless, a natural, himself.

> It’s ME.

> That doesn’t help. And stop abusing caps.

> it’s me.

> Billie?

> Billie?

> Max?

> No.

> Great-Grandpa?

> NOAM.

> Stop shouting.

> noam. your cousin.

> My Israeli cousin Noam?

> No, your Swedish cousin Noam.

> Funny.

> And Israeli.

> Your dad and little brother are here.

> I know. My dad sent me an e-mail from the cemetery.

> That’s weird. He said he couldn’t contact you guys.

> He probably meant by phone. We e-mail all the time.

> We’re sitting shiva at my grandfather’s house.

> Yes, I know that, too. He e-mailed me a picture of the salmon.

> Why?

> Because it was there. And because the world lacks reality for him until he photographs it with his phone.

> You speak English better than me.

> “Better than I do.”

> Right.

> Anyway, I wanted to tell you whatever is the genuine version of “I am sorry for your loss.”

> I don’t believe in genuine versions.

> I wish you less sadness. How about that?

> How did you find me?

> The same way you would have found me if you were looking. Not hard.

> I didn’t know you were in Other Life.

> I used to spend most of every day here. But I’ve never been in this grove before.

> I’ve never been in this grove before, either.

> Do you like it when people unnecessarily repeat bits of speech? Like you just did? You could have said, “Me, neither,” but you took what I said and made it your own. I said, “I’ve never been in this grove before,” and you said, “I’ve never been in this grove before, either.”

> I do like it when people unnecessarily repeat bits of speech.

> If I used emoticons, I would have used one here.

> I’m glad you don’t.

> There isn’t time for Other Life in the army.

> Too much real life?

> I don’t believe in real life.

>;)

> I really let myself go. Look at my nails.

> Look at you? Look at me! I still have placenta on my face.

>???

> My dad committed avataricide.

> Why?

> He accidentally sniffed a Bouquet of Fatality.

> Why?

> Because he wears his sphincter like a necklace, and it choked blood flow to his brain. Anyway, I’m in the process of rebuilding myself, and I’m not exactly satisfied with my progress.

> You look … old.

> Yeah. I kinda became my great-grandfather.

> Why?

> Same reason I will in real life, I guess? I mean, this life.

> Do you need some resilience fruit?

> A few hundred thousand wouldn’t hurt.

> I can give you mine.

> I was kidding.

> I wasn’t.

> Why would you do that?

> Because you need them and I don’t. Do you want 250,000?

> 250,000!

> Stop shouting.

> That must have taken you a year.

> Or three.

> I can’t accept that.

> Sure you can. A bar mitzvah present.

> I don’t even know if I’m having one.

> A bar mitzvah isn’t something you have. It’s something you become.

> I don’t even know if I’m becoming one.

> Do babies know they’re born?

> They cry.

> So cry.

> Where are you?

> At home for another couple of hours.

> I thought you were somewhere dangerous.

> You’ve met my mother.

> Your dad said you were in the West Bank.

> I was. But I came back the day before the earthquake.

> Shit, I can’t believe we’ve talked for this long and I haven’t yet asked how you’re doing. I suck. I’m sorry.

> It’s OK. Remember, I found you.

> I suck.

> I’m safe. We’re all safe.

> What would have happened if you’d still been in the West Bank?

> I really don’t know.

> Guess.

> Why?

> Because I’m curious.

> Well, if we’d been stuck there during the earthquake, I suppose we would have had to create a temporary base of some kind and wait to be rescued.

> What kind of base?

> Whatever kind we could put together. Maybe occupy a building.

> Surrounded by people who want to kill you?

> What else is new?

> They would have lobbed shit at you?

> Shit?

> Grenades or whatever.

> There is no “grenades or whatever.” Weapons are precise.

> Right.

> Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they would have been preoccupied with their own problems.

> It wouldn’t have been good.

> There is no scenario in which it would have been good.

> What scenario would have been worst?

Like his dad, Sam was drawn to worst-case scenarios. It was obvious why they thrilled him, but hard to explain the comfort they offered. Perhaps they mapped a distance from his own safe life. Or perhaps coming to terms with the most horrible outcomes allowed for a kind of mental preparation and resignation. Maybe they were just more sharp objects — like the videos he hated and needed — to allow his insides out.

When he was in sixth grade, his Hebrew school class was made to watch a documentary about the concentration camps. It was never clear to him if this was because his teacher was lazy (an acceptable way to get rid of a couple of hours), or unable or unwilling to teach the material, or felt the impossibility of teaching it in any way other than simply showing it. Even at the time, Sam felt that he was too young to be seeing such a thing.

They sat at chipboard desks for righties, and the teacher — whose name they will all be able to remember for the rest of their lives — muttered a few unmemorable words of context and inspiration and disclaimer, and pressed Play. They watched lines of naked women, many pressing children to their chests. They were crying — the mothers and the children — but why were they only crying? Why were they so orderly? So good? Why didn’t the mothers run? Why didn’t they try to save their children’s lives? Why didn’t they protect their children? Better to get shot running away than simply walk to one’s death. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance.

The still-children watched from their desks; they saw men digging their own mass graves and then kneeling in them, their fingers interlaced behind their heads. Why did they dig their own graves? If you’re going to be killed anyway, why help with the killing? For the few extra moments of life? That might make sense. But how did they maintain that composure? Because they thought it might buy them a few extra moments of life? Maybe. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance, but a moment of life is an eternity. Be a good Jewish boy and dig a good Jewish grave and kneel like a mensch and, as Sam’s nursery school teacher, Judy Shore, used to say, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”

They saw grainy montages of humans who had become science experiments — dead twins, Sam could not not remember, still clutching each other on a table. Did they cling like that in life? He could not not wonder.

They saw images from the liberated camps: piles of hundreds or thousands of skeletal bodies, knees and elbows bending the wrong way, arms and legs at wrong angles, eyes so deeply sunken they could not be seen. Hills of bodies. Bulldozers testing a child’s belief that a dead body doesn’t feel anything.

What was he left with? The knowledge that Germans were—are—evil, evil, evil, not only capable of ripping children from their mothers and then ripping their small bodies apart, but eager to; that had non-Germans not intervened, the Germans would have murdered every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the planet; and that of course his grandfather was absolutely right, even if he sounded insane, when he said a Jewish person should never buy a German product of any kind or size, never put money into a German pocket, never visit Germany, never not cringe at the sound of that vile language of savages, never have any more interaction than what simply could not be avoided with any German of any age. Inscribe that on the doorpost of your house and on your gate.

Or he was left with the knowledge that everything that has happened once can happen again, is likely to happen again, must happen again, will.

Or the knowledge that his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between his life and their deaths.

Or no knowledge, but a feeling. What feeling? What was that feeling?

Sam didn’t mention to his parents what he’d seen. Didn’t seek explanation, or comfort. And he was given plenty of guidance — almost all of it unintentional and extremely subtle — never to ask about it, never even to acknowledge it. So it was never mentioned, always never talked about, the perpetual topic of nonconversation. Everywhere you looked, there it wasn’t.

His dad was obsessed with displays of optimism, and the imagined accumulation of property, and joke-making; his mom, with physical contact before saying goodbye, and fish oil, and outer garments, and “the right thing to do”; Max, with extreme empathy and self-imposed alienation; Benjy, with metaphysics and basic safety. And he, Sam, was always longing. What was that feeling? It had something to do with loneliness (his own and others’), something with suffering (his own and others’), something with shame (his own and others’), something with fear (his own and others’). But also something with stubborn belief, and stubborn dignity, and stubborn joy. And yet it wasn’t really any of those things, or the sum of them. It was the feeling of being Jewish. But what was that feeling?

THERE ARE THINGS THAT ARE HARD TO SAY TODAY

Israel continued to describe the situation as manageable, but it also continued to close off its airspace, which left tens of thousands of Israelis stranded on vacation and prevented Jews who wanted to help from coming. Tamir tried hitching a ride on a Red Cross cargo plane, tried getting special clearance through the military attaché at the embassy, looked into chaperoning a shipment of construction equipment. But there was no way home. He might have been the only person grateful to be at the funeral — it gave him a few hours to rest in peace.

Sam wore his ill-fitting bar mitzvah suit to the cemetery. Wearing it was the only thing he hated more than the process of getting it: the torture chamber of mirrors, his mother’s unhelpful help, the functionally pedophiliac survivor tailor who not once, not twice, but three times groped at Sam’s crotch with his Parkinsonian fingers and said, “Plenty of room.”

Tamir and Barak wore slacks with short-sleeve button-up shirts — their uniform for every occasion, whether it was going to synagogue, the grocery store, a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball game, or the funeral of the family patriarch. They viewed any kind of formality — in dress, in speech, in affect — as some kind of gross infringement on a God-given right to at all times be oneself. Jacob found it obnoxious, and enviable.

Jacob wore a black suit with a box of Altoids in the pocket: artifacts of a time when he cared enough about how his breath smelled to attempt to echo it off his palm for sniffs.

Julia wore a vintage A.P.C. dress she’d found on Etsy for the equivalent of nothing. It wasn’t exactly funeral attire, but she never had occasion to wear it, and she wanted to wear it, and since the neutering of the bar mitzvah, a funeral was as glamorous an occasion as she was going to get.

“You look beautiful, Julia,” she said to Jacob, hating herself for saying it.

“Very beautiful,” Jacob said, hating her for saying it, but also surprised that his assessment of her beauty continued to matter to her.

“The impact is lessened by it having been prompted.”

“It’s a funeral, Julia. And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For saying I look handsome.”

Irv wore the same suit he’d been wearing since the Six-Day War.

Isaac wore the shroud in which he had been married, the shroud he’d worn once a year on the Day of Atonement, the chest of which he’d beaten with his fist: For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance on the lips … For the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly … For the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart … The shroud had no pockets, as the dead are required to be buried without any encumbrances.

A small — in number and physical stature — army from Adas Israel had passed through the grief like a breeze: they brought stools, covered the mirrors, took care of the platters, and sent Jacob an un-itemized bill that he was unable to question without requiring Jewish seppuku. There would be a small service, followed by burial at Judean Gardens, followed by a small kiddush at Irv and Deborah’s, followed by eternity.

* * *

All the local cousins were at the funeral, and a few older, zanier Jews came in from New York, Philly, and Chicago. Jacob had met these people throughout his life, but only at rites of passage — bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals. He didn’t know their names, but their faces evoked a kind of Pavlovian existentialism: if you’re here, if I see you, something significant must be happening.

Rabbi Auerbach, who’d known Isaac for several decades, had a stroke a month earlier and so left the officiating to his replacement: a young, disheveled, smart, or maybe dumb recent product of wherever rabbis are made. He wore unlaced sneakers, which felt, to Jacob, like a shabby tribute to someone who had probably eaten sneakers in the skyless forests of Poland. Then again, it might have been some kind of religious display of reverence, like sitting on stools or covering mirrors.

He approached Jacob and Irv before the service began.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, cupping his hands in front of him, as if they contained empathy, or wisdom, or emptiness.

“Yeah,” Irv said.

“There are a few ritualistic—”

“Save your words. We’re not a religious family.”

“It probably depends on what is meant by religious,” the rabbi said.

“It probably doesn’t,” Jacob corrected him, either in his dad’s defense or in the absence of God’s.

“And our stance is a choice,” Irv said. “Not laziness, not assimilation, not inertia.”

“I respect that,” the rabbi said.

“We’re as good as any Jews.”

“I’m sure you’re better than most.”

Irv went right back at the rabbi: “What you do or don’t respect isn’t of great importance to me.”

“I respect that, too,” the rabbi said. “You’re a man of strongly held beliefs.”

Irv turned to Jacob: “This guy really can’t take an insult.”

“Come on,” Jacob said. “It’s time.”

The rabbi walked the two of them through a few of the small rituals that, while entirely voluntary, they would be expected to perform in order to ensure Isaac’s proper passage into whatever Jews believe in. After his initial reluctance, Irv seemed not only willing, but wanting, to cross his chets and dot his zayins — as if stating his resistance was resistance enough. He didn’t believe in God. He couldn’t, even if opening himself to that foolishness might have opened him to badly needed comfort. There had been a few moments — not of belief, but religiosity — every one of them involving Jacob. When Deborah went into labor, Irv prayed to no one that she and the baby would be safe. When Jacob was born, he prayed to no one that his son long outlive him, and acquire more knowledge and self-knowledge than him, and experience greater happiness. At Jacob’s bar mitzvah, Irv stood at the ark and said a prayer of gratitude to no one that trembled, then broke, then exploded into something so beautifully unrestrained and full-throated that he was left with no voice to deliver his speech at the party. When he and Deborah didn’t read the books they were staring at in the waiting room of George Washington Hospital, and Jacob almost pushed the doors off the hinges, his face covered in tears, his scrubs covered in blood, and did his best to form the words “You have a grandson,” Irv closed his eyes, but not to darkness, and said a prayer to no one without any content, only force. The sum of those no ones was the King of the Universe. He’d spent enough of his life wrestling foolishness. Now, at the cemetery, all the wrestling felt foolish.

The rabbi said a small prayer, offering no translation or approximate sense of the meaning, and took a razor blade to Irv’s lapel.

“I need this suit for my grandson’s bar mitzvah.”

Because he didn’t hear Irv, or because he did, the young rabbi made a tiny incision, and directed Irv to open it — to create the actual rip — with his forefingers. It was ridiculous, this gesture. It was witchcraft, a relic from the time of stoning women for having their periods the wrong way, and it was an unconscionable thing to do to a Brooks Brothers suit. But Irv wanted to bury his father according to Jewish law and tradition.

He inserted his fingers into the incision, as if into his own chest, and pulled. And as the fabric tore, Irv’s tears were released. Jacob hadn’t seen his father cry in years. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father cry. It suddenly seemed possible that he’d never seen him cry.

Irv looked at his son and whispered, “I don’t have parents anymore.”

The rabbi said that now was the moment, before the casket was taken from the hearse, for Irv to forgive his father, and to ask for forgiveness.

“It’s OK,” Irv said, dismissing the offer.

“I know,” the rabbi said.

“We’ve said everything that needed to be said.”

“Do it anyway,” the rabbi suggested.

“I think it’s foolish to speak to a dead person.”

“Do it anyway. I wouldn’t want you to regret missing this last chance.”

“He’s dead. It doesn’t matter to him.”

“You’re living,” the rabbi said.

Irv shook his head, and continued to shake it, but the object of the dismissiveness shifted: from the ritual to his inability to participate.

He turned to Jacob and said, “I’m sorry.”

“You realize I’m not the dead one.”

“Yeah. But both of us will be at some point. And here we are.”

“Sorry for what?”

“An apology is only an apology if it’s complete. I’m sorry for everything that I need to apologize for. No context.”

“I thought we’d be monsters without context.”

“We’re monsters either way.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a schmuck, too.”

“I didn’t say I was a schmuck.”

“OK, so I’m the schmuck.”

Irv put his hand on Jacob’s cheek and almost smiled.

“Let’s get this party started,” he said to the rabbi, and approached the back of the hearse.

He tentatively put his hands on the casket and lowered his covered head. Jacob heard some of the words — he wanted to hear everything — but he couldn’t make out the meaning.

The whispering went on — past “Forgive me,” past “I forgive you.” What was he saying? Why did the Blochs find it so hard to talk to one another while alive? Why couldn’t Jacob lie in a casket long enough to hear his family’s unspeakable feelings, but then return to the world of the living with what he’d learned? All the words were for those who couldn’t respond to them.

* * *

It was way too humid, and one extemporaneous speech would have been way too many. The men sweated through their underwear, through their white shirts and black suits, sweated all the way into the folds of the handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. They were losing their body weight in sweat, as if trying to become salt, like Lot’s wife, or become nothing, like the man they were there to bury.

While most of the cousins felt obliged to say a few words, none had felt obliged to prepare a few words, so everyone was made to endure, in that humidity, more than an hour of rambling generalities. Isaac was courageous. He was resilient. He loved. And the embarrassing inversion of what the goyim say about their guy: he survived for us.

Max told the story of the time his great-grandfather took him aside and, apropos of no birthday, Hanukkah, glowing report card, recital, or rite of passage, said, “What do you want? Anything. Tell me. I want you to have the thing that you want.” Max told him he wanted a drone. The next time Max visited, Isaac again took him aside, and presented him with a board game called Reversi — either a knockoff of Othello, or what Othello knocked off. Max pointed out to the mourners that if one were to try to think of the word that sounded least like drone, it might be Reversi. Then he nodded, or bowed, and returned to his mother’s side. No moral, consolation, or meaning.

Irv, who’d been working on his speech since long before Isaac’s death, chose silence.

Tamir stood at a distance. It was hard to tell if he was trying to repress emotion or generate some. More than once, he used his phone. His casualness knew no limits, there was nothing he couldn’t shrug off: death, natural catastrophe. It was something else about him that angered Jacob and that Jacob almost certainly envied. Why couldn’t Tamir be more like Jacob? That was the question. And why couldn’t Jacob be more like Tamir? That was the other question. If they could meet halfway, they’d form a reasonable Jew.

Finally, the rabbi stepped forward. He cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose, and took a small spiral-bound pad from his pocket. He flipped through a few pages, then put it back, having either committed the contents to memory or realized he’d accidentally brought the wrong pad.

“What can we say about Isaac Bloch?”

He left enough pause to generate some rhetorical uncertainty. Was he actually asking a question? Admitting that he didn’t know Isaac well enough to know what to say?

What can we say about Isaac Bloch?

Quickly, the wet cement of annoyance that Jacob felt at the hearse dried into something to break fists against. He hated this man. Hated his lazy righteousness, his bullshit affectations, his obsessive beard-stroking and Central Casting hand gestures, his too-tight collar and untied shoelaces and off-center yarmulke. This feeling sometimes subsumed Jacob, this unnuanced, swift, and eternal loathing. It happened with waiters, with David Letterman, with the rabbi who accused Sam. More than once he had come home from lunch with an old friend, someone with whom he had been through dozens of seasons of life, and casually said to Julia, “I think we reached the end.” In the beginning, she didn’t know what he meant—the end of what? why the end? — but after years of living beside such a binary, unforgiving person, someone so agnostic about his own worth he was compelled to a religious certainty about others’, she came to know him, if not understand him.

“What can we say about someone about whom there is too much to say?”

The rabbi put his hands in his jacket pockets, closed his eyes, and nodded.

“Words don’t fail us, time does. There isn’t time — not from now until time’s end — to recount the tragedy, and heroism, and tragedy of Isaac Bloch’s life. We could stand here speaking about him until our own funerals, and it wouldn’t be enough. I visited Isaac the morning of his death.”

Wait, what? Was this possible? Wasn’t he just the schmuck rabbi, here because half of the actually good rabbi’s mouth had stopped functioning? If they’d stopped at Isaac’s on the way back from the airport, would they have crossed this man’s path?

“He called, and he asked me to come over. I heard no urgency in his voice. I heard no desperation. But I heard need. So I went. It was my first time in his home. We’d only met once or twice at shul, and always in passing. He had me sit at his kitchen table. He poured me a glass of ginger ale, served me a plate of sliced pumpernickel, some cantaloupe. Many of you have had that meal at that table.”

A gentle chuckle of recognition.

“He spoke slowly, and with effort. He told me about Sam’s bar mitzvah, and Jacob’s show, and Max’s early long division, and Benjy’s bike-riding, and Julia’s projects, and Irv’s mishegas — that was his word.”

A chuckle. He was winning.

“And then he said, ‘Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.’”

This was either the most audacious heaping and steaming mountain of Jewshit ever shoveled by a rabbi or anyone, or a revelatory glimpse into Isaac Bloch’s consciousness. Only the rabbi knew for sure — what was accurately recounted, what was embellished, what was fabricated out of whole tallis. Had anyone ever heard Isaac use the word despair? Or gratitude? He’d have said, “It was horrible, but it could have been worse.” But would he have said that? Thankful for what? And what were all these miracles he’d witnessed?

“Then he asked me if I spoke Yiddish. I told him no. He said, ‘What kind of rabbi doesn’t speak Yiddish?’”

A proper laugh.

“I told him my grandparents spoke Yiddish to my parents, but my parents would never let me hear it. They wanted me to learn English. To forget Yiddish. He told me he’d done the same, that he was the last Yiddish-speaker in his family, that the language would be in the casket, too. And then he put his hand on my hand and said, ‘Let me teach you a Yiddish expression.’ He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Kein briere iz oich a breire.’ I asked him what it meant. He took back his hand and said, ‘Look it up.’”

Another laugh.

“I did look it up. On my phone, in his bathroom.”

Another laugh.

“Kein briere iz oich a breire. It means ‘Not to have a choice is also a choice.’”

No, those words couldn’t have been his. They were too faux-enlightened, too content with circumstance. Isaac Bloch was many things, and resigned was not one of them.

If having no choice were a choice, Isaac would have run out of choices once a day after 1938. But the family needed him, especially before the family existed. They needed him to turn his back on his grandparents, his parents, and five of his brothers. They needed him to hide in that hole with Benny, to walk with rigid legs toward Russia, eat other people’s garbage at night, hide, steal, forage. They needed him to forge documents to board the boat, and tell the right lies to the U.S. immigration officer, and work eighteen-hour days to keep the grocery profitable.

“Then,” the young rabbi said, “he asked me to pick up toilet paper for him at the Safeway, because they were having a sale.”

Everyone chuckled.

“I told him he didn’t need to buy toilet paper anymore. It would be taken care of by the Jewish Home. He gave me a knowing smile and said, ‘But that price…’”

A louder, freer laugh.

“‘That’s it?’ I asked. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Was there something you wanted to hear? Something you wanted to say?’ He said, ‘There are two things that everybody needs. The first is to feel that he is adding to the world. Do you agree?’ I told him I did. ‘The second,’ he said, ‘is toilet paper.’”

The loudest laugh yet.

“I’m thinking about a Hasidic teaching that I learned as a rabbinical student. There are three ascending levels of mourning: with tears, with silence, and with song. How do we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tears, with silence, or with song? How do we mourn the end of his life? The end of the Jewish epoch that he participated in and exemplified? The end of Jews who speak in that music of broken instruments; who arrange their grammar counterclockwise and miss the point of every cliché; who say mine instead of my, the German people instead of Nazis, and who implore their perfectly healthy relatives to be healthy instead of feeling silent gratitude for health? The end of hundred-and-fifty-decibel kisses, of that drunken European script. Do we shed tears for their disappearance? Silently grieve? Or sing their praises?

“Isaac Bloch was not the last of his kind, but once gone, his kind will be gone forever. We know them — we have lived among them, they have shaped us as Jews and Americans, as sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters — but our time of knowing them is nearly complete. And then they will be gone forever. And we will only remember them. Until we don’t.

“We know them. We know them with tears for their suffering, with silence for all that cannot be said, and with song for their unprecedented resilience. There will be no more old Jews who interpret a spot of good news as the guarantee of imminent apocalypse, who treat buffets like grocery stores before blizzards, who touch a finger to the bottom lip before turning a page of their people’s Maxwell House epic.”

Jacob’s hatred was softening — not evaporating, not even melting, but losing its shape.

The rabbi paused, brought his hands together, and sighed. “As we stand at Isaac Bloch’s grave, there is a war going on. There are two wars. One is on the brink of breaking out. The other has been happening for seventy years. The imminent war will determine the survival of Israel. The old war will determine the survival of the Jewish soul.

“Survival has been the central theme and imperative of Jewish existence since the beginning, and not because we chose it to be that way. We have always had enemies, always been hunted. It’s not true that everyone hates Jews, but in every country we’ve ever lived, in every decade of every century, we have encountered hatred.

“So we’ve slept with one eye open, kept packed suitcases in the closet and one-way train tickets in the breast pockets of our shirts, against our hearts. We’ve made efforts not to offend or be too noisy. To achieve, yes, but not to draw undue attention to ourselves in the process. We’ve organized our lives around the will to perpetuate our lives — with our stories, habits, values, dreams, and anxieties. Who could blame us? We are a traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma’s power to deform the mind and heart.

“If you were to ask one hundred Jews what was the Jewish book of the century, you would get one answer: The Diary of Anne Frank. If you were to ask what was the Jewish work of art of the century, you would get the same answer. This despite it having been created neither as a book nor as a work of art, and not in the century in which the question was asked. But its appeal — symbolically, and on its own terms — is overpowering.”

Jacob looked around to see if anyone else was as surprised by the direction this was taking. No one seemed fazed. Even Irv, whose head only ever rotated on the axis of disagreement, was nodding.

“But is it good for us? Has it been good to align ourselves with poignancy over rigor, with hiding over seeking, victimization over will? No one could blame Anne Frank for dying, but we could blame ourselves for telling her story as our own. Our stories are so fundamental to us that it’s easy to forget that we choose them. We choose to rip certain pages from our history books, and coil others into our mezuzot. We choose to make life the ultimate Jewish value, rather than differentiate the values of kinds of life, or, more radically, admit that there are things even more important than being alive.

“So much of Judaism today — regarding Larry David as anything beyond very funny, the existence and persistence of the Jewish American Princess, the embrace of klutziness, the fear of wrath, the shifting emphasis from argument to confession — is the direct consequence of our choice to have Anne Frank’s diary replace the Bible as our bible. Because the Jewish Bible, whose purpose is to delineate and transmit Jewish values, makes it abundantly clear that life itself is not the loftiest ambition. Righteousness is.

“Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom because of the righteousness of its citizens. Not because life is inherently deserving of saving, but because righteousness should be spared.

“God destroys the earth with a flood, sparing only Noah, who was ‘righteous in his own time.’

“Then there is the concept of the Lamed Vovniks — the thirty-six righteous men of every generation, because of whose merit the entire world is spared destruction. Humankind is saved not because it is worth saving, but because the righteousness of a few justifies the existence of the rest.

“A trope from my Jewish upbringing, and perhaps from yours, was this line from the Talmud: ‘And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.’ This is a beautiful idea, and one worth living by. But we shouldn’t ascribe more meaning to it than it contains.

“How much greater the Jewish people might be today if instead of not dying, our ambition was living righteously. If instead of ‘It was done to me,’ our mantra was ‘I did it.’”

He paused. He held a long blink and bit at his lower lip.

“There are things that are hard to say today.”

He almost smiled, as Irv had almost smiled when touching Jacob’s face.

“Judaism has a special relationship with words. Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. ‘Let there be light,’ God said, and there was light. No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is perhaps the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: expression is generative.

“It’s the same with marriage. You say, ‘I do,’ and you do. What is it, really, to be married?”

Jacob felt a burning across his scalp. Julia needed to move her fingers.

“To be married is to say you are married. To say it not only in front of your spouse, but in front of your community, and, if you are a believer, in front of God.

“And so it is with prayer, with true prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that would otherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.”

He bit again at his lower lip and shook his head.

“There are things that are hard to say today.

“It is often the case that everyone says what no one knows. Today, no one says what everyone knows.

“As I think about the wars in front of us — the war to save our lives, and the war to save our souls — I think about our greatest leader, Moses. You might remember that his mother, Jochebed, hides him in a reed basket, which she releases into the current of the Nile, as a last hope of sparing his life. The basket is discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. ‘Look!’ she says. ‘A crying Hebrew baby.’ But how did she know that he was a Hebrew?”

The rabbi paused, and held the agitated silence in place, as if forcefully saving the life of a bird that only wanted to fly away.

Max spoke up: “Probably because Hebrews were trying to keep their kids from getting killed, and only someone in that situation would ever put her baby in a basket and send it down the river.”

“Perhaps,” the rabbi said, showing no condescending pleasure in Max’s confidence, only admiration for his thought. “Perhaps.”

And again he forced silence.

Sam spoke up: “So, I say this fully seriously: maybe she saw that he was circumcised? Right? She says, ‘Look.’”

“That could be,” the rabbi said, nodding.

And he dug a silence.

“I don’t know anything,” Benjy said, “but maybe he was crying in Jewish?”

“How would one cry in Jewish?” the rabbi asked.

“I don’t know anything,” Benjy said again.

“Nobody knows anything,” the rabbi said. “So let’s try to learn together. How would one cry in Jewish?”

“I guess babies don’t really speak.”

“Do tears?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s strange,” Julia said.

“What is?”

“Wouldn’t she have heard him crying? That’s how it works. You hear them crying, and you go to them.”

“Yes, yes.”

“She said, ‘Look! A crying Hebrew baby.’ Look. She saw that he was crying, but didn’t hear.”

“So tell me what that implies,” he said — no patronizing, no self-righteousness.

“She knew he was a Hebrew because only Jews cry silently.”

For an instant, for a stitch, Jacob was overwhelmed by the terror that he had managed to lose the most intelligent person on earth.

“Was she right?” the rabbi asked.

“Yes,” Julia said. “He was a Hebrew.”

“But was she right that Jews cry silently?”

“Not in my experience,” Julia said, with a chuckle that drew a depressurizing chuckle from the others.

Without moving, the rabbi stepped into the grave of silence. He looked at Julia, almost unbearably directly, as if they were the only two living people left, as if the only thing that distinguished those buried from those standing was ninety degrees.

He looked into her and said, “But in your experience, do Jews cry silently?”

She nodded.

“And now I’d like to ask you a question, Benjy.”

“OK.”

“Let’s say we have two choices, as Jews: to cry silently, as your mother has said, or to cry in Jewish, as you said. What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows, so you can’t be wrong.”

“I don’t even have a guess.”

“Maybe like laughing?” Max suggested.

“Like laughing?”

“I don’t know. That’s what we do.”

For an instant, for a stitch, Jacob was overwhelmed by the terror that he had managed to ruin the three most beautiful human beings on earth.

He remembered when Sam was young, how every time he got a scrape, cut, or burn, after every blood test, every fall from every tree branch that was forever after deemed “too high,” Jacob would urgently pick him up, as if the ground were suddenly on fire, and say, “You’re fine. It’s OK. It’s nothing. You’re fine.” And Sam would always believe him. And Jacob would be thrilled by how well it worked, and ashamed by how well it worked. Sometimes, if a greater lie was needed, if there was visible blood, Jacob would even say, “It’s funny.” And his son would believe him, because sons have no choice. But sons do feel pain. And the absence of the expression of pain is not the absence of pain. It is a different pain. When Sam’s hand was crushed, he said, “It’s funny. It’s funny, right?” That was his inheritance.

The columns of Jacob’s legs couldn’t bear the weight of his heavy heart. He felt himself buckling, in weakness or genuflection.

He put his arm on Julia’s shoulder. She didn’t turn to him, she showed no acknowledgment of his touch, but she kept him standing.

“So,” the rabbi said, reassuming his authority, “what can we say about Isaac Bloch, and how should we mourn him? There are only two kinds of Jews of his generation: those who perished and those who survived. We swore our allegiance to the victims, were good on our promise never to forget them. But we turned our backs on those who endured, and forgot them. All our love was for the dead.

“But now the two kinds of Jews have equal mortal standing. Isaac might not be with his brothers in an afterlife, but he is with his brothers in death. So what can we now say about him, and how should we mourn him? It was not because they lacked strength that his brothers died, but it was because of his strength that Isaac lived and died. Kein briere iz oich a breire. Not to have a choice is also a choice. How will we tell the story of he who never had no choice? At stake is our notion of righteousness, of a life worth saving.

“What was Moses crying about? Was he crying for himself? Out of hunger or fear? Was he crying for his people? Their bondage, their suffering? Or were they tears of gratitude? Perhaps Pharaoh’s daughter didn’t hear him crying because he wasn’t crying until she opened the wicker basket.

“How should we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tears — what kind of tears? With silence — what silence? Or with what kind of song? Our answer will not save him, but it might save us.”

With all three, of course. Jacob could see the rabbi’s moves from five thousand years away. With all three, because of the tragedy, because of our reverence, because of our gratitude. Because of everything that was necessary to bring us to this moment, because of the lies that lie ahead, because of the moments of joy so extreme they have no relation to happiness. With tears, with silence, with song, because he survived so we could sin, because our religion is as gorgeous, and opaque, and brittle, as the stained glass of Kol Nidre, because Ecclesiastes was wrong: there isn’t time for every purpose.

What do you want? Anything. Tell me. I want you to have the thing that you want.

Jacob cried.

He wailed.

THE NAMES WERE MAGNIFICENT

Jacob carried the casket with his cousins. It was so much lighter than he’d imagined it would be. How could someone with such a heavy life weigh so little? And the job was surprisingly awkward: they nearly fell over a few times, and Irv was only a half teeter from tumbling into the grave with his father.

“This is the worst cemetery ever,” Max said to no one in particular, but loud enough for everyone to hear.

Finally, they were able to position the simple pine coffin on the broad strips of fabric that eased it into the grave.

And there it was: the fact of it. Irv bore the responsibility — the privilege of the mitzvah — of shoveling the first dirt onto his father’s coffin. He took a heaping mound, turned his body to the hole, and tipped the shovel, letting it fall. It was louder than it should have been, and more violent, as if every particle of soil hit the wood at once, and as if it had been dropped from a far greater height. Jacob winced. Julia and the boys winced. Everyone winced. Some were thinking of the body in the coffin. Some were thinking of Irv.

HOW TO PLAY EARLY MEMORIES

My earliest memories are hidden around my grandfather’s final house like afikomens: dish-soap bubble baths; knee-football games in the basement with the grandchildren of survivors — they always ended in injury; the seemingly moving eyes of Golda Meir’s portrait; instant-coffee crystals; pearls of grease on the surface of every liquid; games of Uno at his kitchen table, just us two humans, just yesterday’s bagel, last week’s Jewish Week, and juice from concentrate from whenever in history was the last significant sale. I always beat him. Sometimes we’d play one hundred games a night, sometimes both nights of the weekend, sometimes three weekends a month. He always lost.

What I think of as my earliest memory couldn’t possibly be my earliest memory — it’s too far into my life. I am confusing foundational with earliest, in the same way that, as Julia used to point out, the first floor of a house is usually the second, and sometimes the third.

This is my earliest memory: I was raking the leaves in front of the house when I saw something against the side door. Ants were beginning to envelop a dead squirrel. For how long had it been there? Had it eaten poison? What poison? Had a neighborhood dog killed it and then, full of a dog’s remorse, delivered his shame? Or perhaps his pride? Or had the squirrel died trying to get in?

I ran inside and told my mother. Her glasses were steamed over; she was stirring a pot she couldn’t see. Without looking up she said, “Go tell Dad to take care of it.”

Through the open door — on the safe side of the threshold — I watched my father cover his hand with the clear plastic bag that the morning’s Post had come in, pick up the squirrel, and then pull his hand out, turning the bag inside out with the squirrel in it. While my father washed his hands in the bathroom sink, I stood at his side and asked him question after question. I was always being taught lessons, and so came to assume that everything conveyed some necessary piece of information, some moral.

Was it cold? When do you think it died? How do you think it died? Didn’t it bother you?

“Bother me?” my father asked.

“Gross you out.”

“Of course.”

“But you just went out there and did it like it was nothing.”

He nodded.

I followed his wedding ring through the soap.

“Did you think it was disgusting?”

“I did.”

“It was so gross.”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t have done it.”

He laughed a father’s laugh and said, “One day you’ll do it.”

“What if I can’t?”

“When you’re a dad, there’s no one above you. If I don’t do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?”

“I still couldn’t do it.”

“The more you won’t want to do it, the more of a dad you’ll be.”

The closet was filled with hundreds of plastic bags. He had chosen a clear one to teach me a lesson.

I obsessed over that squirrel for a few days, and then didn’t think about it again for a quarter century, until Julia was pregnant with Sam, at which point I started having a recurrent dream of dead squirrels lining the streets of our neighborhood. There were thousands of them: pushed against curbs, filling public garbage cans, prone in final poses while automatic sprinkler systems soaked through their fur. In the dream I was always returning home from somewhere, always walking up our street, it was always the end of the day. The window shades of the house were illuminated like TV screens. We didn’t have a working fireplace, but smoke poured from the chimney. I had to walk on tiptoes to avoid stepping on squirrels, and sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. I apologized — to whom? There were squirrels on the windowsills, and on stoops, and pouring from the gutters. I could see their silhouettes on the undersides of awnings. They hung halfway out of mail slots, in apparent attempts to find food or water, or simply to die inside — like that squirrel that had wanted to die inside my childhood home. I knew I was going to have to take care of all of them.

Jacob wanted to go to his father’s side, as he had as a child, and ask him how he managed to shovel dirt into his father’s grave.

Did you think it was disgusting?

I did, his father would have said.

I couldn’t have done it.

His father would have laughed a father’s laugh and said, One day you’ll do it.

What if I can’t?

Children bury their dead parents, because the dead need to be buried. Parents do not need to bring their children into the world, but children need to bring their parents out of it.

Irv handed the shovel to Jacob. Their eyes met. The father whispered into the son’s ear: “Here we are and will be.”

When Jacob imagined his children surviving him, he felt no version of immortality, as it’s sometimes unimaginatively put, usually by people who are trying to encourage others to have children. He felt no contentment or peace or satisfaction of any kind. He felt only the overwhelming sadness of missing out. Death felt less fair with children, because there was more to miss. Whom would Benjy marry? (Despite himself, Jacob couldn’t shake his Jewish certainty that of course he would want to marry, and would marry.) To what ethical and lucrative profession would Sam be drawn? What odd hobbies would Max indulge? Where would they travel? What would their children look like? (Of course they would want to have children, and have children.) How would they cope and celebrate? How would each die? (At least he would miss their deaths. Maybe that was the compensation for having to die himself.)

Before returning to the car, Jacob went for a walk. He read the gravestones like pages in an enormous book. The names were magnificent — because they were Jewish haiku, because they traveled in time machines while those they identified were left behind, because they were as embarrassing as pennies collected in paper rolls, because they were as beautiful as boats in bottles brought over on boats, because they were mnemonics: Miriam Apfel, Shaindel Potash, Beryl Dressler … He wanted to remember them, to use them later. He wanted to remember all of it, to use it all: the rabbi’s shoelaces, the untied melodies of grief, the hardened footprints of a visitor in the rain.

Sidney Landesman, Ethel Keiser, Lebel Alterman, Deborah Fischbach, Lazer Berenbaum …

He would remember the names. He wouldn’t lose them. He would use them. He would make something of the no longer anything.

Seymour Kaiser, Shoshanna Ostrov, Elsa Glaser, Sura Needleman, Hymie Rattner, Simcha Tisch, Dinah Perlman, Ruchel Neustadt, Izzie Reinhardt, Ruben Fischman, Hindel Schulz …

Like listening to a Jewish river. But you can step in it twice. You can — Jacob could; he believed he could — take all that was lost and re-find it, reanimate it, breathe new life into the collapsed lungs of those names, those accents, those idioms and mannerisms and ways of being. The young rabbi was right: no one would ever have such names again. But he was wrong.

Mayer Vogel, Frida Walzer, Yussel Offenbacher, Rachel Blumenstein, Velvel Kronberg, Leah Beckerman, Mendel Fogelman, Sarah Bronstein, Schmuel Gersh, Wolf Seligman, Abner Edelson, Judith Weisz, Bernard Rosenbluth, Eliezer Umansky, Ruth Abramowicz, Irving Perlman, Leonard Goldberger, Nathan Moskowitz, Pincus Ziskind, Solomon Altman …

Jacob had once read that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if everyone were dead. And for all the individuality — for the extreme idiosyncrasy of the names of those extremely idiosyncratic Jews — there was only one fate.

And then he found himself where two walls met, at the corner of the vast cemetery, at the corner of the vast everything.

He turned to face the immensity, and only then did it occur to him, or only then was he forced to acknowledge what he’d forced himself not to: He was standing among suicides. He was in the ghetto for those unfit to be buried with the rest. This corner was where the shame was cordoned off. This was where the unspeakable shame was put beneath the ground. Milk on one set of plates, meat on the other: never the two should meet.

Miriam Apfel, Shaindel Potash, Beryl Dressler …

He had some vague awareness of the prohibition against taking one’s own life, and the price — beyond death — for having done so. The punishment wasn’t for the criminal, but the victims: those left behind and now forced to bury their dead in the other-earth. He remembered it like he remembered the prohibition against tattoos — something about desecrating the body — which would also land you in the other-earth. And — less spiritual, but every bit as religious — the prohibition against drinking Pepsi, because Pepsi chose to market to Arab countries and not Israel. And the prohibition against touching a shiksa in any of the ways one was dying to, because it was a shanda. And the prohibition against resisting when elders touched any part of your body they wanted, in any way they wanted, because they were dying, perpetually dying, and it was a mitzvah.

Standing in that unwalled ghetto, he thought about eruvs — a wonderfully Jewish loophole that Julia had shared, before he even knew the prohibition it was circumventing. She’d learned about them not in the context of a Jewish education, but in architecture school: an example of a “magical structure.”

Jews can’t “carry” on Shabbat: no keys, no money, no tissues or medicine, no strollers or canes, not even children who can’t yet walk. The prohibition against carrying is technically against carrying from private to public domains. But what if large areas were made to be private? What if an entire neighborhood were a private domain? A city? An eruv is a string or wire that encloses an area, making it private, and thus permitting carrying. Jerusalem is enclosed by an eruv. Virtually all of Manhattan is enclosed by an eruv. There is an eruv in nearly every Jewish community in the world.

“In D.C.?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“You’ve never looked for it.”

She took him to the intersection of Reno and Davenport, where the eruv turned a corner and was most easy to see. There it was, like dental floss. They followed it down Davenport to Linnean, and Brandywine, and Broad Branch. They walked beneath the string as it ran from street sign to lamppost to power pole to telephone pole.

As he stood among the suicides, his pockets were full: a paper clip that Sam had somehow bent into an airplane, a crumpled twenty, Max’s yarmulke from the funeral (apparently acquired at the wedding of two people Jacob had never heard of), the dry-cleaning ticket for the pants he was wearing, a pebble Benjy had taken from a grave and asked Jacob to hold, more keys than there were locks in his life. The older he got, the more he carried, the stronger it should have made him.

Isaac was buried in a pocketless shroud, six hundred yards from his wife of two hundred thousand hours.

Seymour Kaiser: loving brother, loving son; head in the oven. Shoshanna Ostrov: loving wife; wrists slit in the bath. Elsa Glaser: loving mother and grandmother; hanging from the ceiling fan. Sura Needleman: loving wife, mother, and sister; walked into a river, pockets full of stones. Hymie Rattner: loving son; wrists slit over the bathroom sink. Simcha Tisch: loving father, loving brother; steak knife in the gut. Dinah Perlman: loving grandmother, mother, and sister; leaped from the top of the stairs. Ruchel Neustadt: loving wife and mother; letter opener in the neck. Izzie Reinhardt: loving father, husband, and brother; jumped from Memorial Bridge. Ruben Fischman: loving husband; drove his car into a tree at one hundred miles per hour. Hindel Schulz: loving mother; serrated bread knife across the wrist. Isaac Bloch: loving brother, husband, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather; hanging by a belt in his kitchen.

Jacob wanted to pull the thread from his black suit, tie it around the tree in the corner, and walk the perimeter of the suicide ghetto, enclosing it as he unraveled. And then, when the public had been made private, he would carry away the shame. But to where?

Every landmass is surrounded by water. Was every coast an eruv?

Was the equator an eruv around the earth?

Did Pluto’s orbit enclose the solar system?

And the wedding ring still on his finger?

REINCARNATION

> So what’s new?

> You’re the one in the middle of a crisis.

> That isn’t new.

> Everything’s the same here, except my great-grandfather is dead.

> Your family is OK?

> Yeah. I think my dad is pretty upset, but it’s hard to tell, because he always seems a bit upset.

> Right.

> And it’s not like it was his dad, anyway. Just his grandfather. Which is still sad, but less sad. Far less sad.

> Right.

> I really do like it when people repeat bits of language. Why is that?

> I don’t know.

> Your dad and brother seem to be having a good time. They’re worried about you, obviously. They talk about you constantly. But if they can’t be there, it’s good that they’re here.

> Have they found anything?

> What do you mean?

> A house.

> For what?

> To buy.

> Why would they buy a house here?

> My father hasn’t mentioned it?

> Mentioned what?

> Maybe to your dad?

> You guys are moving?

> He’s been talking about it for a few years, but when it was time for me to join the army, he started looking. Just on websites, and maybe with the help of some brokers over there. I thought it was just talk, but when I was deployed to the West Bank, he started searching more seriously. I think he found a few places that seemed promising, and that’s why he’s over there now. To see them in person.

> I thought it was for my bar mitzvah.

> That’s why he’s staying more than a few days.

> I had no idea.

> He might be embarrassed.

> I didn’t know he was capable of feeling embarrassment.

> Feeling it, yes. Showing it, no.

> Your mom wants to move?

> I don’t know.

> Do you want to move?

> I doubt I’ll live with my parents again. After the army, school. After school, life. I hope.

> But what do you think about it?

> I try not to.

> Do you find it embarrassing?

> No. That’s not the right word.

> Do you think your dad cheats on your mom?

> That’s a strange question.

> Is it?

> Yes.

> Yes, it’s a strange question? Or yes, you think your dad cheats on your mom?

> Both.

> Jesus. Really?

> Someone who asks that question shouldn’t be so surprised by the answer.

> What makes you think he cheats on her?

> What makes you ask the question?

> I don’t know.

> So ask yourself.

> What makes me ask the question?

He was not asking for no reason. He was asking because he’d found his dad’s second phone a day before his mom had. Found is probably not the right word, as coming upon it was the result of snooping through his dad’s favorite hiding places — beneath a pile of socks in the dresser, in a box in the back of the “gift closet,” atop the grandfather clock his grandfather had given them on the occasion of Benjy’s birth. The loot was never anything more salacious than a porno—“Why,” he wanted to ask but could never ask, “why would anyone with a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone pay for pornography?”

He had found a stack of fifties, presumably for some indulgence his dad didn’t want his mom to know about — something perfectly innocent like a power tool he was afraid his mom would point out he would never actually use. He had found a tiny bag of pot, which never, in the year and a half that he would check on it, diminished in size. He’d found a stash of Halloween candy — just sad. He’d found a stack of papers with a cover sheet labeled “Bible for Ever-Dying People”—

HOW TO PLAY DESIRE

Don’t. You have everything you could ever need or want. You are healthy (for now) and it’s great. Do you have any idea how much suffering and toil was necessary to make this moment possible? Possible for you? Reflect on how great it is, how lucky and fully satisfied you are.

— too boring to investigate further.

But then, while nosing around in the drawer of his dad’s bedside table, Sam found a phone. His dad’s phone was an iPhone. Everyone knew that, because everyone suffered his endless complaints about how amazing it was, and how dependent he was on it. (“This is literally ruining my life,” he would say as he performed some utterly unnecessary function, like checking the weather three days out. “Chance of rain. Interesting.”) This was a generic smartphone, the kind they give you for free with a criminally overpriced plan. Maybe a relic that his dad was too nostalgic to throw out? Maybe it was filled with photos of Sam and his brothers, and his dad wasn’t smart enough to transfer them to his iPhone (despite feeling too smart to ask for help at a phone store, or even from his technologically proficient son), so he saved it, and over time the drawer would probably fill with phones filled with photos.

Nothing could have been easier than figuring out how to unlock it — his dad cycled through the same three lamely predictable variations of the family password for all his security needs.

Generic wallpaper: a sunset.

No games. No apps cooler than a calculator. Why even have a smartphone?

It was a mom phone. A private phone between them. It was hard to understand the need for it, but maybe the lack of need was the point. It was actually kind of sweet. Kind of lame, but kind of romantic, which was kind of gross. Unless it had some sort of straightforward justification, as it now-that-he-thought-about-it probably did, like being the phone they took on trips, with prepaid international minutes.

As he scrolled through the messages, it became clear that those explanations were wrong, extremely wrong, and that either his parents weren’t who he thought they were, not even close, or there was more than one Julia in the world, because the Julia that was his mom would never — no, never—move her thumbs in such a way as to form the words take the wetness from my pussy and use it to get my asshole ready for you.

He took the phone to the bathroom, locked the door, and scrolled.

i want two of your fingers in each of my holes

What, like Spock? What the fuck was going on?

on your stomach, legs spread to the corners, your hands behind you, opening your ass as wide as it will go, your pussy dripping onto the sheets …

What the fuck was going on?

But before Sam could ask the question a third time, the front door opened, the phone dropped behind the toilet, his mom said, “I’m home,” and he tried to beat the footsteps on the stairs to his room.

He’d never met Dr. Silvers, but he knew what Dr. Silvers would have said: he left the phone on purpose. Like everyone in the family who wasn’t his dad, Sam loathed Dr. Silvers and was jealous of his dad for having such a confidant, and was jealous of Dr. Silvers for having his dad. What good, of any kind, could come, for anyone, from the discovery of the phone?

> Is your dad cheating on your mom, or something?

Suddenly, back in real unreal life, Eyesick stumbled away a few yards. He limped a bit, walked with a stutter. After making circles around nothing — like a planet around no sun, or a bride around no groom — he picked up the fossil of a bird from one of the earliest generations of Other Life, maybe three years before: the Twitter logo. Eyesick looked at the rock dumbly, then put it down, then picked it up again, then motioned as if to throw it, then tapped it against his head, as if testing his own ripeness.

> Are you seeing this glitch?

> No glitch. I started the transfer.

> Of what?

> Resilience fruit.

> I told you not to.

> You didn’t. And if you had, I would have ignored you.

A flood of digital images, each blooming on the screen and then receding as soon as it could be processed: some were stored moments from Samanta’s other life, conversations she’d had, experiences; others were more impressionistic. He saw screens that he’d looked at, mixed with screens Noam must have looked at: a contrail in a blue sky; crocheted rainbows on Etsy; the shovel of a bulldozer making contact with an old woman; cunnilingus, from behind, in a changing room; a thrashing lab monkey; conjoined twins (one laughing, one crying); satellite photos of the Sinai; unconscious football players; nail polish color wheels; Evander Holyfield’s ear; a dog being euthanized.

> How many are you transferring?

> All of them.

> What?

> 1,738,341.

> HOLY FUCKING SHIT! You have that many banked?

> I’m giving you a total transfusion.

> What?

> Listen, I have to get myself ready to go.

> Where?

> Jerusalem. My unit was mobilized. But don’t tell my father, OK?

> Why not?

> He’ll worry.

> But he should worry.

> But his worrying won’t help him, and it won’t help me.

> I don’t even need all of this. I only had 45,000 when my dad killed me.

> Make yourself great.

> My avatar.

> Your great-grandfather.

> This is too much.

> I should let it rot? Make resilience cider?

> You should use it.

> But I won’t. And you will.

The images came more quickly, so quick they could enter only subliminally; they overlapped, blended, and from the corner a light, bleeding from a few pixels to stain the screen, and spreading, a light like the darkness a broken pipe leaves on the ceiling, a light flooding the perpetually refreshing images, and then more light than image, and then an almost entirely white screen, but brighter than white, vague images as if seen through an avalanche.

In perhaps the purest moment of empathy of Sam’s life, he tried to imagine what Noam was seeing on his screen at that moment. Was a darkness like light spreading? Was he receiving warnings about low levels of vitality? Sam imagined Noam clicking IGNORE to those warnings, over and over, and ignoring the annoying alerts, and clicking CONFIRM when finally prompted to confirm his ultimate choice.

The lion walked to the old man, knelt beside him, laid his immense and proud paws on Eyesick’s stooped shoulders, licked at whatever one calls a white five o’clock shadow (a five o’clock brightness?), licked him over and over, as if to will Eyesick back to life, when in fact he was willing himself back to what comes before life.

> Look at you, Bar Mitzvah.

He rested his massive head on Eyesick’s sunken chest. Eyesick hid his fingers in the lion’s streaming mane.

In the middle of his great-grandfather’s funeral reception, Sam started to cry. He didn’t cry often. He hadn’t cried since Argus returned from his second hip replacement, two years before, his back half shaved to reveal Frankenstein stitches, his eyes lowered in his lowered head.

“It’s just what getting better looks like,” Jacob had said. “In a month, he’ll be his old self.”

“A month?”

“It’ll pass quickly.”

“Not for Argus, it won’t.”

“We’ll spoil him.”

“He can barely walk.”

“And he shouldn’t walk any more than is necessary. The vet said that’s the most important thing for his recovery, to keep him off his leg as much as possible. All walks have to be on-leash. And no stairs. We have to keep him on the first floor.”

“But how will he come up to bed?”

“He’s going to have to sleep down here.”

“But he’ll go up.”

“I don’t think so. He knows how weak his leg is.”

“He’ll go up.”

“I’ll put some books on the stairs to block the way.”

Sam set his alarm for 2:00 a.m., to go down and check on Argus. He snoozed once, and then again, but with the third buzz, his guilt was awakened. He plodded down the stairs, only half aware of being out of bed, nearly paralyzed himself with the help of the stacked Grove Encyclopedia of Art, and found his father on top of a sleeping bag, spooning Argus. That’s when he cried. Not because he loved his dad — although in that moment he certainly did — but because, of the two animals on the floor, it was his dad he felt more sorry for.

> Look at you, Bar Mitzvah.

* * *

He was by the window. The cousins were on PlayStation, killing representations. The adults were upstairs, eating the disgusting, smelly, smoked, and gelatinous foods Jews suddenly need in times of reflection. No one noticed him, which was what he wanted, even if it wasn’t what he needed.

He wasn’t crying about anything in front of him — not the death of his great-grandfather or the death of Noam’s avatar, not the collapse of his parents’ marriage, or the collapse of his bar mitzvah, or the collapsed buildings in Israel. His tears were reaching back. It took Noam’s moment of kindness to reveal the yawning absence of kindness. His dad had slept on the floor for thirty-eight days. (The extra week to play it safe.) Was it easier to extend such kindness to a dog because it didn’t risk rejection? Or because the needs of animals are so animalistic, whereas the needs of humans are so human?

He might never become a man, but crying at that window — his great-grandfather completely alone in the earth twenty minutes away; an avatar returning to pixelated dust in some refrigerated data storage center somewhere near nothing; his parents just on the other side of the ceiling, but a ceiling without edges — Sam was reborn.

JUST THE WAILING

Judaism gets death right, Jacob thought. It instructs us what to do when we know least well what to do, and feel an overwhelming need to do something. You should sit like this. We will. You should dress like this. We will. You should say these words at these moments, even if you have to read from transliteration. Na-ah-seh.

Jacob had stopped crying more than an hour ago, but he still had what Benjy called “after-crying breath.” Irv brought him a glass of peach schnapps, said, “I told the rabbi he was welcome to come, but I doubt he’ll come,” and went back to his windowsill citadel.

The dining table was covered with platters of food: everything and pumpernickel bagels, everything minibagels, everything flagels, bialys, cream cheese, scallion cream cheese, salmon spread, tofu spread, smoked and pickled fish, pitch-black brownies with white chocolate swirls like square universes, blondies, rugelach, out-of-season hamantaschen (strawberry, prune, and poppy seed), and “salads”—Jews apply the word salad to anything that can’t be held in one’s hand: cucumber salad, whitefish and tuna and baked salmon salad, lentil salad, pasta salad, quinoa salad. And there was purple soda, and black coffee, and Diet Coke, and black tea, and enough seltzer to float an aircraft carrier, and Kedem grape juice — a liquid more Jewish than Jewish blood. And there were pickles, a few kinds. Capers don’t belong in any food, but the capers that every spoon had tried to avoid had found their way into foods in which they really didn’t belong, like someone’s half-empty half-decaf. And at the center of the table, impossibly dense kugels bent light and time around them. It was too much food by a factor of ten. But it had to be.

Relatives exchanged stories about Isaac while they piled their plates toward the ceiling of the floor above. They laughed about how funny he was (on purpose, and by accident), what an obstinate pain in the ass he could be (on purpose, and by accident). They reflected on what a hero he had been (on purpose, and by accident). There was a bit of crying, there were some awkward silences, there was gratitude for having had an occasion to gather as a family (some of the cousins hadn’t seen each other since Leah’s bat mitzvah, some not since Great-Aunt Doris’s death), and everyone looked at his phone: to check on the war, the score of the game, the weather.

The kids, having already forgotten about any first-person sadness they might have felt over Isaac’s death, were playing first-person video games in the basement. Max’s pulse doubled as he spectated at an assassination attempt by someone he thought was a second cousin. Sam sat off to the side with his iPad, wandering in a virtual lemon grove. This was how it always went, this vertical segregation. And inevitably, the adults with enough sense to escape the adult world would migrate down. Which is what Jacob did.

There were at least a dozen cousins — many from Deborah’s side, a few from Julia’s. The younger ones unpacked all the board games, one at a time — not to play them, but to unpack them and commingle the small pieces. Every now and then one would spontaneously freak out. The older cousins were surrounding Barak as he performed virtuosic acts of extreme violence on a TV so large one had to sit against the opposite wall to see its edges.

Benjy was on his own, stuffing crumpled Monopoly money between the venetian blinds.

“You’re being very generous with the window,” Jacob said.

“It’s not real money.”

“No?”

“I know you’re joking.”

“You haven’t seen Mom around, have you?”

“No.”

“Hey?”

“What?”

“Have you been crying, buddy?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? You look like you have.”

“Holy shit!” a cousin shouted.

“Language!” Jacob shouted back.

“I haven’t,” Benjy said.

“Are you sad about Great-Grandpa?”

“Not really.”

“So what’s upsetting you?”

“Nothing.”

“Dads know these things.”

“Then why don’t you know what’s upsetting me?”

“Dads don’t know everything.”

“Only God does.”

“Who told you that?”

“Mr. Schneiderman.”

“Who’s that?”

“My Hebrew school teacher.”

“Schneiderman. Right.”

“He said that God knows everything. But that didn’t make sense to me.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me, either.”

“But that’s because you don’t believe in God.”

“I only ever said I was unsure. But if I did believe in God, it still wouldn’t make sense to me.”

“Right, because if God knows everything, why do we have to write notes to put in the Wall?”

“That’s a good point.”

“Mr. Schneiderman said that God knows everything but sometimes forgets. So the notes are to remind him of what’s important.”

“God forgets? Really?”

“That’s what he said.”

“What do you think about that?”

“It’s weird.”

“I think so, too.”

“But that’s because you don’t believe in God.”

“If I believed in God, he would be a remembering God.”

“Mine would, too.”

Despite being as agnostic about God’s existence as he was about the question’s meaning (could any two people really be referring to the same thing when speaking about God?), Jacob wanted Benjy to believe. Or Dr. Silvers did, anyway. For several months, Benjy’s anxiety about death had been slowly and steadily ramping up, and now risked tipping from adorable to problematic. Dr. Silvers said, “He has the rest of his life to form answers to theological questions, but he’ll never get back this time of developing his first relationship to the world. Just make him feel safe.” That struck Jacob as right, even if the thought of evangelizing made him squirm. The next time Benjy raised his fear of death, just when Jacob’s instinct urged him to agree that an eternity of nonexistence was certainly the most horrible of all things to imagine, Jacob remembered Dr. Silvers’s command: Just make him feel safe.

“Well, you know about heaven, right?” Jacob said, causing a nonexistent angel to lose its wings.

“I know that you think it isn’t real.”

“Well, no one knows for sure. I certainly don’t. But you know what heaven is?”

“Not really.”

So Jacob gave his most comforting explanation, sparing neither extravagance nor intellectual integrity.

“And if I wanted to stay up late in heaven?” Benjy asked, now planking on the sofa.

“As late as you want,” Jacob said, “every single night.”

“And I could probably eat dessert before dinner.”

“You wouldn’t have to eat dinner at all.”

“But then I wouldn’t be healthy.”

“Health won’t matter.”

Benjy turned his head to the side: “Birthdays.”

“What about them?”

“What are they like?”

“Well, they’re never-ending, of course.”

“Wait, it’s always your birthday?”

“Yes.”

“You have a party and get presents every day?”

“All day every day.”

“Wait, do you have to write thank-you notes?”

“You don’t even have to say thank you.”

“Wait, does that mean you’re zero, or infinity?”

“What do you want to be?”

“Infinity.”

“Then you’re infinity.”

“Wait, is it always everyone’s birthday?”

“Only yours.”

Benjy rose to his feet, raised his hands above his head, and said, “I want to die right now!”

Just don’t make him feel too safe.

In Irv and Deborah’s basement, facing a more nuanced theological question, Jacob again resisted his instinct for truth in favor of Benjy’s emotional safety: “Maybe God does remember everything but sometimes chooses to forget?”

“Why would he do that?”

“So that we remember,” Jacob said, pleased with his improvisation. “Like the wishes,” he continued. “If God knew what we wanted, we wouldn’t have to.”

“And God wants us to know for ourselves.”

“Could be.”

“I used to think Great-Grandpa was God,” Benjy said.

“You did?”

“Yeah, but he’s dead, so obviously he wasn’t God.”

“That’s one way to think about it.”

“I know Mom isn’t God.”

“How is that?”

“Because she would never forget about me.”

“You’re right,” Jacob said, “she wouldn’t.”

“No matter what.”

“No matter what.”

Another round of expletive mutterings from the cousins.

“Anyway,” Benjy said, “that’s what was making me cry.”

“Mom?”

“My note for the Wailing Wall.”

“Because you were thinking about how God is forgetful?”

“No,” Benjy said, pointing at the TV, which wasn’t displaying a video game, as Jacob had thought, but the effects of the most recent, and most severe, aftershock, “because the Wall crumbled.”

“The Wall?”

They came spilling into the world: every wish tucked into every crevice, but also every wish tucked into every Jew’s heart.

“No more proof of how great they were,” Benjy said.

“What?”

“The thing you told me about the Romans.”

How much do the children know, and how much do they remember?

“Jacob!” Irv called from upstairs.

“The Wailing Wall,” Jacob said, as if by saying its name aloud, it would exist again.

Jacob could make his children feel safe. But could he keep them safe?

Benjy shook his head and said, “Now it’s just the Wailing.”

LOOK! A CRYING HEBREW BABY

Tamir’s presence had not only made a full reckoning impossible, it required Julia to be a buoyant host. And the death of Jacob’s grandfather required her to at least perform love and care, when all she felt was sadness and doubt. She was good enough to manage her blossoming resentment, good enough, even, to suppress her passive-aggression, but at a certain point, the requirements of being a good person inspire hatred for oneself and others.

Like any living person, she had fantasies. (Although her immense guilt about being human required a constant reminder — that she was “like any living person.”) The houses she designed were fantasies, but there were others.

She imagined a week alone in Big Sur. Maybe at the Post Ranch Inn, maybe one of the ocean-facing rooms. Maybe a massage, maybe a facial, maybe a “treatment” that treats nothing. Maybe she’d walk through a redwood tunnel, the growth rings bending around her.

She imagined having a personal chef. Vegans live longer, and are healthier, and have better skin, and she could do that; it would be easy, if someone shopped, cooked, and cleaned for her.

She imagined Mark noticing small things about her that she’d never noticed about herself: lovably misused idioms, what her feet do when she flosses, her funny relationship to dessert menus.

She imagined going for walks without destinations, thinking about things of no logistical importance, like whether Edison bulbs are actually obnoxious.

She imagined a secret admirer anonymously subscribing her to a magazine.

She imagined the disappearance of crow’s feet, like the disappearance of crow’s footprints from a dusty road.

She imagined the disappearance of screens — from her life, from her children’s lives. From the gym, from doctors’ offices and the backs of cabs, hanging behind bars and in the corners of diners, the iWatches of people holding iPads on the Metro.

She imagined the deaths of her air-filled clients and their dreams of heavier and heavier kitchen appliances.

She fantasized about the death of the so-called teacher who chuckled at one of Max’s answers four years ago, requiring a month of bedtime talks to reinstill his enjoyment of school.

Dr. Silvers would have to die at least a couple of times.

She imagined Jacob’s sudden disappearance — from the house, from existence. She imagined him dropping dead at the gym. Which required imagining him going to the gym. Which required imagining him once again possessing a desire to be attractive in ways other than professional success.

Of course, she didn’t actually want him to die, no part of her did, not even subconsciously, and when she fantasized about his death, it was always painless. Sometimes he would panic in awareness as he tried to reach through his chest to grab his stammering heart. Sometimes he would think of the children. The end of sometimes: he would be gone forever. And she would be alone, and finally unalone, and people would grieve for her.

She would cook all the meals (as she already did), do all the cleaning (as she already did), buy the graph paper for Benjy’s solutionless mazes, the teriyaki-roasted seaweed snacks for Max, a cool-but-not-trying-too-hard messenger bag for Sam when the last one she bought for him fell apart. She would dress them in end-of-the-year Zara and Crewcuts sale clothing and get them off to school (as she already did). She would have to support herself (which she couldn’t, with her present lifestyle, but wouldn’t have to, given Jacob’s life insurance policy). Her imagination was strong enough to hurt her. She was weak enough to keep the hurt to herself.

And then came the most hurtful thought, the thought that can never be touched with even the whorls of the fingers of one’s brain: the deaths of her children. She’d had the most horrible thought many times since she became pregnant with Sam: imagined miscarriages; imagined SIDS; imagined tumbles down stairs, trying to shield his body from the treads as they fell; imagined cancer every time she saw a child with cancer. There was the knowledge that every school bus she ever put one of her children on was going to roll down the side of a hill and into a frozen lake, whose ice would re-form around its silhouette. Every time one of her children was put under general anesthesia, she said goodbye to him as if she were saying goodbye to him. She wasn’t naturally anxious, much less apocalyptic, but Jacob was right when, after Sam’s injury, he said it was too much love for happiness.

Sam’s injury. It was the place she was unwilling to go, because there was no road back. And yet the trauma center of her brain was always pushing her there. And she was always never fully returning. She’d found peace with why it happened — there was no why — but not how. It was too painful, because whatever the sequence of events, it wasn’t necessary or inevitable. Jacob never asked her if she had been the one to open the door. (It was far too heavy for Sam to have opened himself.) Julia never asked Jacob if he had closed it on Sam’s fingers. (Maybe Sam could have gotten it moving, and inertia would have taken care of the rest?) It was five years ago, and the journey — the century-long morning in the ER, the twice-a-week visits to the plastic surgeon, the year of rehab — brought them closer than they’d ever been. But it also created a black hole of silence, from which everything had to keep a safe distance, into which so much was swallowed, a teaspoon of which weighed more than a million suns consuming a million photos of a million families on a million moons.

They could talk about how lucky they were (Sam very nearly lost his fingers), but never how unlucky. They could speak in generalities, but never recount the details: Dr. Fred repeatedly sticking needles into Sam’s fingers to test for feeling, while Sam looked into his parents’ eyes and begged, pleaded, for it to stop. When they came home, Jacob put his bloody shirt in a plastic bag and walked it to the garbage can on the corner of Connecticut. Julia put her bloody shirt in an old pillowcase and tucked it halfway into a stack of pants.

Too much love for happiness, but how much happiness was enough? Would she do it all again? She always believed that her ability to endure pain was greater than anyone else’s — certainly than her children’s or Jacob’s. A burden would be easiest carried by her, and regardless, it would ultimately be carried by her anyway. Only men can unhave babies. But if she could do it all again?

She often thought of those retired Japanese engineers who volunteered to go into failing nuclear plants to fix them after the tsunami. They knew they’d be exposed to fatal amounts of radiation, but given that their life expectancies were shorter than the time it would take for the cancer to kill them, they saw no reason not to get the cancer. In the hardware gallery, Mark had said it wasn’t too late in life for happiness. When, in Julia’s life, would it be late enough for honesty?

* * *

It was amazing how little changed as everything changed. The conversation was continually expanding, but it was no longer clear what they were talking about. When Jacob showed her listings for places to which he might move, was it any more real than when he used to show her listings for places to which they might move? When they shared their visions for happy independent lives, was it any less make-believe than when they used to share their visions for living together happily? The rehearsal of how they would tell the kids took on a quality of theater, as if they were trying to get the scene right, rather than get life right. She had the sense that to Jacob it was a kind of game, that he enjoyed it. Or worse, that planning their separation was a new ritual that kept them together.

Domestic life stagnated. They talked about Jacob starting to sleep elsewhere, but Tamir was in the guest room, Barak was on the sofa, and leaving for a hotel after everyone was asleep and arriving before anyone woke up felt both cruel and profligate. They talked and talked about what kind of schedule was most likely to facilitate good stretches with the kids, and good transitions, and as little missing as possible — but they didn’t take any steps either to repair what was broken or to leave it behind.

After the funeral …

After the bar mitzvah …

After the Israelis leave …

After the semester ends …

There was a nonchalance to their desperation, and maybe talking about it was enough for now. It could wait until it couldn’t.

But funerals, like airplane turbulence and fortieth birthdays, force the issue of mortality. Had it been another day, she and Jacob would have found ways to continue living inside their purgatory. They would have created errands to run, diversions, emotional escape hatches, fantasies. The funeral made a conversation almost a crime, but it also inspired an unrelenting questioning in Julia. All that could be deferred on any other day was now urgent. She remembered Max’s obsession with time, how little there was. “I’m wasting my life!”

She went to the bedroom, to the dozens of coats piled on the bed. They looked like dead bodies, like Jewish dead. Those images had imprinted Julia’s childhood, too, and she now found certain resonances impossible to escape. Those images of naked women holding their children to their chests. She hadn’t seen them since she first saw them, but she never stopped seeing them.

The rabbi had looked across the patiently waiting grave and into Julia. He asked, “But in your experience, do Jews cry silently?” Did he see what no one could hear?

She found her coat, put it on. The pockets were filled with receipts, and a small arsenal of candies for bribing, and keys, and business cards, and assorted foreign currency from trips she could remember planning and packing for but not taking. In two fistfuls she transferred all this to the garbage, like tashlich.

She went to the front door without stopping: past the white cabbage salad, black coffee, bluefish, and blondies; past the purple soda and peach schnapps; past the chatter about investments, and Israel, and cancer. She walked past the drone of the Mourner’s Kaddish, past the covered mirrors, past the photos of Isaac on the console: with the Israelis at their last visit; at Julia’s fortieth; on his sofa, looking off into the near distance. When she reached the door, she noticed, for the first time, the sign-in book resting open on an accent table. She flipped through it, looking to see if her boys had written anything.

Sam: I’m sorry.

Max: I’m sorry.

Benjy: I’m sorry.

She was sorry, too, and she touched the mezuzah as she crossed the threshold, but didn’t kiss her fingers. She remembered when Jacob suggested they select their own text to scroll into the mezuzah of the front door of their home. They chose a line from the Talmud: “Every blade of grass has an angel watching over it, whispering, ‘Grow! Grow!’” Would the next family to live in the house even know?

THE LION’S DEN

Tamir and Jacob stayed up late that night. Julia was somewhere, but she wasn’t there. Isaac wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. The kids were supposed to be asleep in their rooms, but Sam was in Other Life while snapchatting with Billie, and Max was looking up words that he didn’t understand in The Catcher in the Rye—pissed, as Holden had taught him to be, that he had to use a paper dictionary. Barak was in the guest room, asleep and expanding. Downstairs, it was only the two cousins — old friends, middle-aged men, the fathers of still-young children.

Jacob got some beers from the gently humming fridge, muted the TV, and with a heavy, affected sigh took a seat across the table from Tamir.

“That was hard today.”

“He lived a good, long life,” Tamir said, and then took a good, long drink.

“I suppose so,” Jacob said, “except for the good part.”

“The great-grandchildren.”

“Whom he referred to as his ‘revenge against the German people.’”

“Revenge is sweet.”

“He spent his days clipping coupons for things he would never buy, while telling anyone who would listen that no one listened to him.” A drink. “I once took the kids to a zoo in Berlin—”

“You’ve been to Berlin?”

“We were shooting there, and it coincided with a school break.”

“You’ve taken your children to Berlin and not to Israel?”

“As I was saying, we went to a zoo in the East, and it was pretty much the most depressing place I’ve ever been. There was a panther, in a habitat the size of a handicapped parking space, with flora about as convincing as a plastic Chinese food display. He was walking figure eights, over and over and over, the exact same path. When he turned, he would jerk his head back and squint. Every time. We were mesmerized. Sam, who was maybe seven, pressed his palms to the glass and asked, ‘When is Great-Grandpa’s birthday?’ Julia and I looked at each other. What kind of seven-year-old asks such a question at such a moment?”

“The kind who worries that his great-grandfather is a depressed panther.”

“Exactly. And he was right. The same routine, day after day after day: instant black coffee and cantaloupe; crawl through the Jewish Week with that enormous magnifying glass; check the house to make sure all the lights are still off; push a walker on tennis balls to shul to have the same Sad Libs conversations with the same macular degenerates, substituting different names into the news about prognoses and graduations; thaw a brick of chicken soup while flipping through the same photo albums; eat the soup with black bread while advancing through another paragraph of the Jewish Week; take a nap in front of one of the same five movies; walk across the street to confirm Mr. Kowalski’s continued existence; skip dinner; check the house to make sure all the lights are still off; go to bed at seven and have eleven hours of the same nightmares. Is that happiness?”

“It’s a version.”

“Not one that anyone would choose.”

“A lot of people would choose that.”

Jacob thought of Isaac’s brothers, of hungry refugees, of survivors who didn’t even have family to ignore them — he was ashamed both of the inadequate life he tolerated for his great-grandfather and of judging it inadequate.

“I can’t believe you took the kids to Berlin,” Tamir said.

“It’s an incredible city.”

“But before Israel?”

Google knew how far Tel Aviv was from Washington, and a tape measure could determine the width of the table, but Jacob couldn’t even approximate his emotional distance from Tamir. He wondered: Do we understand each other? Or are we near-strangers, just assuming and pretending?

“I regret that we didn’t keep in better touch,” Jacob said.

“You and Isaac?”

“No. Us.”

“I suppose if we’d wanted to, we would have.”

“I’m not so sure,” Jacob said. “There are a lot of things I wanted to do, but didn’t.”

“Wanted at the time, or looking back?”

“Hard to say.”

“Hard to know? Or hard to say?”

Jacob swallowed a mouthful of beer and used his palm to dry the ring left on the table, wishing, as he did, that he were the kind of person to let such things go. He thought about all that was happening behind the walls, above the ceiling, and under the floor — how little he understood the workings of his home. What was going on at the outlet when nothing was plugged in? Was there water in the pipes at that moment? There must have been, as it came out as soon as the faucet was opened. So did that mean the house was constantly filled with sitting water? Wouldn’t that weigh an enormous amount? When he’d learned in school that his body was more than sixty percent water, he’d done as his father had taught, and doubted. Water simply wasn’t heavy enough for that to be true. Then he’d done as his father had taught, and sought the truth from his father. Irv filled a trash bin with water and challenged Jacob to lift it. As Jacob struggled, Irv said: “You should feel blood.”

Jacob brought the beer to his lips. There were images of the Wailing Wall on the TV. He leaned back and said, “Remember when we snuck out of my parents’ house? Years and years ago?”

“No.”

“When we went to the National Zoo?”

“The National Zoo?”

“Really?” Jacob asked. “A few nights before my bar mitzvah?”

“Of course I remember. You’re not remembering that I mentioned it in the car on the way from the airport. And it was the night before your bar mitzvah. Not a few nights before.”

“Right. I know. I knew. I don’t know why I changed it like that.”

“What would your Dr. Silvers say?”

“I’m impressed you remember his name.”

“You’ve made it easy.”

“What would Dr. Silvers say? Probably that I was protecting myself with the vagueness.”

“How much do you pay this man?”

“I pay him a preposterous shitload. And insurance pays the other two-thirds.”

“Protecting yourself from what?”

“From caring more?”

“Than I do?”

“I’m not making an argument for my enlightenment here.”

And not only behind the walls, above the ceiling, and under the floor — the room itself was filled with activity of which Jacob had only the dimmest awareness: radio broadcasts, TV stations, cell phone conversations, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, leakage from the microwave, radiation from the oven and lightbulbs, solar rays from the biggest oven and lightbulb of them all. All of it constantly passing through the room, some of it cultivating tumors or killing sperm, none of it noticed.

“We were so dumb,” Tamir chuckled.

“We still are.”

“But we were even dumber then.”

“But we were also romantic.”

“Romantic?”

“About life. Don’t you remember what that was like? To believe that life itself could be the object of love?”

While Tamir went for another beer, Jacob texted Julia: where are you? i called maggie and she said you weren’t there.

“No,” Tamir said into the fridge. “I don’t remember that.”

Their socks had become sweat sponges at the zoo that morning thirty years before. Everything in D.C. in the summer was a purification ritual. They saw the famous pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the elephants and their memories, the porcupines and their shields of writing implements. The parents argued about which city’s weather was less sufferable, D.C.’s or Haifa’s. Each wanted to lose, because losing was how you won. Tamir, who was a highly significant six months older than Jacob, spent most of the time pointing out how little security there was, how easy it would be to sneak in, perhaps not realizing that the zoo was open, and they were there, and it was free.

After the zoo, they took Connecticut Avenue to Dupont Circle — Irv and Shlomo up front, Adina and Deborah in the back, Jacob and Tamir facing backward in the Volvo’s rear — had sandwiches at an unmemorable café, then spent the afternoon at the National Air and Space Museum waiting in line for the twenty-seven glorious minutes of To Fly!

To make up for the crappy lunch, they went to Armand’s that evening for “the best Chicago pizza in D.C.,” then had sundaes at Swensen’s, then watched a dull action movie at the Uptown, just to experience the awe of a screen so big it felt like the opposite of being buried, and maybe even the opposite of dying.

Five hours later, the only light coming from the security system’s keypad, Tamir shook Jacob into wakefulness.

“What are you doing?” Jacob asked.

“Let’s go,” Tamir whispered.

“What?”

“Come on.”

“I’m asleep.”

“Sleeping people don’t talk.”

“It’s called talking in one’s sleep.”

“We’re going.”

“Where?”

“The zoo.”

“What zoo?”

“Come on, shithead.”

“It’s my bar mitzvah tomorrow.”

“Today.”

“Right. And I need to sleep.”

“Sleep during your bar mitzvah.”

“Why would we go to the zoo?”

“To sneak in.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Don’t be a pussy.”

Maybe Jacob’s common sense was still offline, or maybe he actually cared about being a pussy in Tamir’s estimation, but he sat up, rubbed his eyes, and put on his clothes. A phrase formed in his mind—this is so unlike me—that he would find himself repeating throughout the night, until the moment he became his own opposite.

They walked down Newark in the darkness, took a right at the Cleveland Park branch of the public library. Silently, more like sleepwalkers than Mossad agents, they padded down Connecticut, over the Klingle Valley Bridge (which Jacob was incapable of crossing without imagining jumping), past the Kennedy-Warren apartments. They were awake, but it was a dream. They came to the verdigris lion and the large concrete letters: ZOO.

Tamir had been right: nothing could have been easier than hopping the waist-high concrete barrier. It was so easy as to feel like a trap. Jacob would have been happy enough to cross the border, make the transgression official, and turn right back around, newly acquired trespassing badge in trembling hand. But Tamir wasn’t content with the story.

Like a tiny commando, Tamir crouched, searched his field of vision, then gave Jacob a quick beckoning gesture to follow. And Jacob followed. Tamir led him past the welcome kiosk, past the orientation map, farther and farther away from the street, until they lost sight of it, as sailors lose sight of the shore. Jacob didn’t know where Tamir was leading him, but he knew that he was being led, and would follow. This is so unlike me.

The animals, as far as Jacob could tell, were asleep. The only sounds were the wind moving through the copious bamboo, and the ghostly buzzing vending machines. Earlier, the zoo had resembled an arcade on Labor Day. Now it felt like the middle of the ocean.

Animals were always mysteries to Jacob, but never more than when they slept. It felt possible to outline — if only a crude, gross approximation — the consciousness of a waking animal. But what does a rhinoceros dream about? Does a rhinoceros dream? A waking animal never startled into sleep — it happened slowly, peacefully. But a sleeping animal seemed always on the verge of startling into wakefulness, into violence.

They reached the lion enclosure and Tamir stopped. “I haven’t stopped thinking about this since we were here this morning.”

“About what?”

He put his hands on the rail and said, “I want to touch the ground.”

“You are touching the ground.”

“In there.”

“What?”

“For a second.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m serious.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes. I am.”

“Then you’re fucking crazy.”

“Yes. But I’m also fucking serious.”

Tamir had taken them, Jacob then realized, to the only part of the enclosure where the wall was short enough for some DSM-5 exemplar to be able to climb back out. He’d obviously found it earlier in the day, maybe even measured it with his eyes, maybe — certainly — played out the scene in his mind.

“Don’t,” Jacob said.

“Why not?”

“Because you know why not.”

“I don’t.”

“Because you will be eaten by a lion, Tamir. Jesus fucking Christ.”

“They’re asleep,” he said.

“They?”

“There’s three of them.”

“You counted?”

“Yes. And it also says so on the plaque.”

“They’re asleep because nobody is invading their territory.”

“And they’re not even out here. They’re inside.”

“How do you know?”

“Do you see them?”

“I’m not a fucking zoologist. Of all the things that are going on right now, I probably see about none of them.”

“They’re asleep inside.”

“Let’s go home. I’ll tell everyone you jumped in. I’ll tell them you killed a lion, or got a blowjob from a lion, or whatever will make you feel like a hero, but let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Nothing I want here has to do with anyone else.”

Tamir had already begun to hoist himself over.

“You’re going to die,” Jacob said.

“So are you,” Tamir responded.

“What am I supposed to do if a lion wakes up and starts running for you?”

“What are you supposed to do?”

That made Jacob laugh. And his laughter made Tamir laugh. With his small joke, the tension eased. With his small joke, the stupidest of all ideas became reasonable, even almost sensible, maybe even genius. The alternative — sanity — became insane. Because they were young. Because one is young only once in a life lived only once. Because recklessness is the only fist to throw at nothingness. How much aliveness can one bear?

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

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

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

“No fucking way.”

This is so unlike me.

“Come on.”

“I’d rather die.”

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

“Because you did it?”

“Because you want to do it.”

“I don’t.”

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

“Happiness isn’t that important to me.”

And then, firmly: “Now, Jacob.”

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

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

“This will be your bar mitzvah.”

“No way.”

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

“Give me a break.”

“I am literally going to punch you.”

“But I have glasses and acne.”

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

“What the fuck, Tamir?”

“What are you crying about?”

“I’m not crying.”

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

“I’m not.”

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

“You have to do it,” Tamir said.

“I don’t want to.”

“You do, but you’re afraid.”

“I don’t.”

But he did. But he was afraid.

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

This is so unlike me.

“Dead people don’t have memories.”

“I won’t let you die.”

“No? What will you do?”

“I’ll jump in with you.”

“So we die together?”

“Yes.”

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

“It does. Now go.”

“Did you hear something?”

“No, because there was nothing to hear.”

“Seriously: I don’t want to die.”

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

This is so unlike me.

“Let go,” Tamir said.

He held on.

This is so unlike me.

“Let go.”

He shook his head and let go.

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

This is the opposite of me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tamir was crying, too.

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

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

“Life has been that boring?”

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

“There are versions of happiness,” Tamir said.

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

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

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

“That’s not what I said.”

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

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

“What else would one put an emphasis on?”

“Peace.”

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

“There are versions of peace, too.”

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

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

“You’re disappointed?”

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

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

“It was a hard day,” Tamir said.

“Yes, but the day has been decades.”

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

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

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

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

“You aren’t balding.”

“I’m smaller than life.”

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

“You.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t mean—”

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

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

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What? Who does?”

“Israel.”

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

“If I can just defend my own.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I have no idea, actually.”

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

“Eitan.”

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

“Sure.”

“How much money do you give to Israel?”

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

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

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

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

“You know I haven’t been there with Julia and the boys.”

“That’s right, you went to Berlin. Well, imagine you had gone to Israel. Imagine the hotels you would have stayed in, the cab rides, falafel, the Jerusalem-stone mezuzot you would have brought back.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Well, I know that I give more than sixty percent of my salary.”

“You mean in taxes? You live there.”

“Which is all the more reason you should have to bear the financial burden.”

“I really can’t follow this conversation, Tamir.”

“And it’s not only that you refuse to give your fair share, you take.”

“Take what?”

“Our future. Did you know that more than forty percent of Israelis are considering emigrating? There was a survey.”

“That’s somehow my fault? Tamir, I understand that Israel isn’t a college town, and it must be torture to be away from your family right now, but you’re going after the wrong guy.”

“Come on, Jacob.”

“What?”

“You’re complaining about how fucking dispirited you are, about how small your life is.” Tamir leaned forward. “I’m scared.”

Jacob was moved to speechlessness. It was as if he had entered the kitchen that night with cardboard X-ray glasses and thrown them to the ground in frustration, and instead of explaining that they were only intended to make others think you could see through things, Tamir made himself transparent.

“I’m scared,” he said again. “And I’m sick of bonding with Eitan’s dad.”

“You have more than Eitan’s dad.”

“That’s right: we have the Arabs.”

“Us.”

“Us? Your children are asleep on organic mattresses. My son is in the middle of that,” he said, pointing at the television again. “I give more than half of everything I have, and you give one percent, tops. You want to be part of the epic, and you feel entitled to tell me how to run my house, and yet you give and do nothing. Give more or talk less. But no more referring to us.”

Like Jacob, Tamir preferred not to keep his phone in his pocket and would rest it on tables or counters. Several times, despite it looking nothing like Jacob’s phone, Jacob instinctively picked it up. The first time, the home screen was a photo of Noam as a child, lining up a corner kick. The next time, it was a different photo: Noam in his uniform, saluting. The next time: Noam in Rivka’s arms.

“I understand that you’re worried,” Jacob said. “I’d be losing my mind. And if I were you, I’d probably resent me, too. It’s been a long day.”

“Remember how you were obsessed with our bomb shelter? When you first visited? Your father, too. I practically had to drag you out of there.”

“That’s not true.”

“When we defeated half a dozen Arab armies in ’48—”

“We? You weren’t even born.”

“That’s right, I shouldn’t have said we. It includes you, and you had nothing to do with it.”

“I had as much to do with it as you did.”

“Except that my grandfather risked his life, and therefore risked my life.”

“He had no choice.”

“America has always been a choice for us. Just as Israel has for you. Every year you end your seder with ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ and every year you choose to celebrate your seder in America.”

“That’s because Jerusalem is an idea.”

Tamir laughed and banged the table. “Not for the people who live there, it isn’t. Not when you’re putting a gas mask on your child. What did your father do in ’73, when the Egyptians and Syrians were pushing us toward the sea?”

“He wrote op-eds, led marches, lobbied.”

“You know I love your father, but I hope you can hear yourself, Jacob. Op-eds? My father commanded a tank unit.”

“My father helped.”

“He gave what he could give without sacrificing, or even risking, anything. Do you think he considered getting on a plane and coming to fight?”

“He didn’t know how to fight.”

“It’s not very hard, you just try not to die. In ’48 they gave rifles to skeletons as they got off their boats from Europe.”

“And he had a wife at home.”

“No kidding.”

“And it wasn’t his country.”

“Bingo.”

“America was his country.”

“No, he was homelandless.”

“America was his home.”

“America was where he rented a room. And do you know what would have happened if we’d lost that war, as so many, and so many of us, feared would happen?”

“But you didn’t lose.”

“But if we had? If we had been pushed into the sea, or just slaughtered where we were?”

“What’s your point?”

“Your father would have written op-eds.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this mental exercise. You’re trying to demonstrate that you live in Israel and I don’t?”

“No, that Israel is dispensable to you.”

“Dispensable?”

“Yes. You love it, support it, sing about it, pray for it, even envy the Jews who live there. And you will survive without it.”

“In the sense that I wouldn’t stop breathing?”

“In that sense.”

“Well, in that sense, America is dispensable to me, as well.”

“That’s absolutely right. People think the Palestinians are homelandless, but they would die for their homeland. It’s you who deserves pity.”

“Because I won’t die for a country?”

“You’re right. I’ve said too little. You won’t die for anything. I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings, but don’t pretend it’s unfair or untrue. Julia was right: you don’t believe in anything.”

It would have been the moment for one or both of them to storm off, but Jacob took his phone from the table and calmly said, “I’m gonna take a piss. And when I come back, we’re going to pretend the last ten minutes didn’t happen.” Tamir showed nothing.

Jacob closed himself in the bathroom, but he didn’t pee, and he didn’t pretend the fight hadn’t happened. He took his phone from his pocket. The home screen was a photo taken on Max’s sixth birthday. He and Julia had given Max a suitcase filled with costumes. A clown costume. A fireman costume. An Indian. A bellboy. A sheriff. The first one he tried on, commemorated digitally, was the soldier costume. Jacob flushed nothing down the toilet, went into his phone’s settings, and replaced the photo with one of the stock generic images: a treeless leaf.

He went back to the kitchen and took his seat across from Tamir. He’d decided to try the joke about the difference between a Subaru and an erection, but before he could get the first word out, Tamir said, “I don’t know where Noam is.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was home for a few days. We exchanged some e-mails, and talked. But he was deployed this afternoon. Rivka doesn’t know to where. And I haven’t heard anything. He tried calling, but I stupidly didn’t have my phone on. What kind of father am I?”

“Oh, Tamir. I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine what you’re feeling.”

“You can.”

“Noam will be OK.”

“You can promise me that?”

Jacob scratched at no itch on his arm and said, “I wish I could.”

“I believed a lot of what I said. But a lot of it I didn’t believe. Or I’m not sure I believe.”

“I also said some things I didn’t believe. It happens.”

“Why can’t he send even a one-sentence e-mail? Two letters: O-K.”

Jacob said, “I don’t know where Julia is,” trying to meet Tamir’s realness with his own. “She’s not on a work trip.”

“No?”

“No. And I’m scared.”

“Then we can talk.”

“What have we been doing?”

“Making sounds.”

“It’s all my fault. Julia. The family. I acted as if my home were dispensable.”

“Slow down. Tell me what—”

“She found a phone,” Jacob said, as if that statement needed something to interrupt in order to be spoken. “A secret phone of mine.”

“Shit. Why did you have a secret phone?”

“It was really stupid.”

“You had an affair?”

“I don’t even know what that word means.”

“You would know if it were Julia having an affair.” Which released the emergency brake of Jacob’s mind: Was she having sex with Mark at that moment? Was he fucking her while they talked about her? Tamir asked, “Did you fuck her?”

Jacob paused, as if he needed to consider the question, as if he didn’t even know what the word fuck meant.

“I did.”

“More than once?”

“Yes.”

“Not in the house.”

“No,” Jacob said, as if offended by the suggestion. “In hotels. Once in the office. It was just permission to acknowledge our unhappiness. Julia was probably even grateful that it happened.”

“Everyone is so grateful for the permission that no one wants.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s the same conversation we were just having. The same.”

“I thought it was revealed to be bullshit?”

“Some, yes, but not this part: you can’t say, ‘This is who I am.’ You can’t say, ‘I’m a married man. I have three great kids, a nice house, a good job. I don’t have everything I want, I’m not as respected as I might wish, I’m not as rich or loved or fucked as I might wish, but this is who I am, and choose to be, and admit to being.’ You can’t say that. But neither can you admit to needing more, to wanting more. Forget about other people, you can’t even admit your unhappiness to yourself.”

“I’m unhappy. If that’s what you need to hear me say, there it is. I want more.”

“That’s just making sounds.”

“What isn’t making sounds?”

“Going to Israel. To live.”

“OK, now you’re kidding.”

“I’m saying what you already know.”

“That if I moved to Israel my marriage would improve?”

“That if you were capable of standing up and saying, ‘This is who I am,’ you’d at least be living your own life. Even if who you are is ugly to others. Even if who you are is ugly to you.”

“I’m not living my own life?”

“No.”

“Whose life am I living?”

“Maybe your grandfather’s idea of your life. Or your father’s. Or your own idea. Maybe no life at all.”

Jacob suspected he should take offense, and he had the instinct to strike back at Tamir, but he also felt humbled, and grateful.

“It was a long day,” he said, “and I don’t know that either of us is saying what he means anymore. I like having you here. It reminds me of when we were kids. Let’s cut our losses.”

Tamir took the last third of his beer down in one gulp. He placed the bottle back on the table, more gently than Jacob had seen him do anything, and said, “When do we stop cutting our losses?”

“You and I?”

“Sure.”

“As opposed to what? Losing it all?”

“Or reclaiming what’s ours.”

“Yours and mine?”

“Sure.”

He finished Jacob’s unfinished beer and tossed the two empty bottles in the garbage.

“We recycle,” Jacob said.

“I don’t.”

“You have enough towels upstairs?”

“What do you think I do with towels?”

“Just trying to be a good host.”

“Always trying to be something.”

“Yes. I’m always trying to be something. That says something good about me.”

“OK.”

“And you’re always trying to be something, too. And so is Barak. And Julia and Sam and Max and Benjy. Everybody.”

“What am I trying to be?”

Jacob paused for a beat, careful.

“You’re trying to be bigger than you actually are.”

Tamir’s smile revealed the force of the blow.

“Ah.”

“Everybody is trying to be something.”

“Your grandfather isn’t.”

What was that? A stupid joke? Some kind of lazy stab at wisdom?

“He stopped trying,” Jacob said, “and it killed him.”

“You’re wrong. He’s the only one of us who actually succeeded.”

“At what?”

“At becoming something.”

“Dead?”

“Real.”

Jacob almost said, Now you’ve lost me.

He almost said, I’m heading up.

He almost said, I don’t agree with anything you’ve said, but I understand you.

The night could end, the conversation could close, what was shared could be processed, digested, and expelled, save for the nutrients.

But instead, Jacob asked, “You want another beer? Or is that just going to get us drunk and fat?”

“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Tamir said. “Including drunkenness and fatness.”

“And baldness.”

“No, you’re taking care of that for both of us.”

“You know,” Jacob said, “I have a bag of pot upstairs. Somewhere. It’s probably as old as Max, but pot never goes bad, does it?”

“Not any more than kids do,” Tamir said.

“Shit.”

“What’s the worst that could happen? We don’t get high?”

IN THE HINGE

It took Julia three hours to walk to Mark’s apartment. Jacob texted and called and texted and called, but she didn’t text or call ahead to see if Mark was there. Her finger was releasing the buzzer to his apartment as it was pressing it — the circuit completed for a startling instant, like a bird hitting a window.

“Hello?”

She stood motionless and silent. Could the microphone detect her breathing? Was Mark listening to her exhalations, four floors above?

“I can see you, Julia. There’s a little camera just above the buzzers.”

“It’s Julia,” Julia said, as if she could snip out those last couple of seconds and respond to “Hello?” like a normal human being.

“Yes, I’m looking at you.”

“This is an unpleasant feeling.”

“So get out of the frame and come on up.”

The door opened itself.

And then the elevator doors opened for her, and then opened for her again.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Mark said, ushering her in.

“I wasn’t expecting me, either.”

Reflexively, she scanned the apartment. Everything was new and new-looking: phony moldings, floors glossy enough for bowling, fat plastic dimmer slides.

“As you can see,” Mark said, “it’s a work in progress.”

“What isn’t?”

“A lot of furniture is arriving tomorrow. Tomorrow it will look completely different.”

“Well, then I’m glad I got to see the before.”

“And it’s temporary. I needed a place, and this … was a place.”

“Do you think I’m judging you?”

“No, but I think you’re judging my apartment.”

She looked at Mark, the efforts he made: he worked out, used hair product, bought clothes that someone — in a magazine or store — told him were cool. She looked around the apartment: how high were the ceilings, how tall the windows, how glossy the appliances.

“Where do you eat?”

“Out, usually. Always.”

“Where do you open mail?”

“That sofa is where I do everything.”

“You sleep on it?”

“Everything but sleep.”

Everything but sleep: it was unbearably suggestive. Or so Julia felt. But everything felt unbearably suggestive to her right then, because she was unbearably exposed. Before the skin regrew and healed, some of the inside of Sam’s hand was on the outside, and infection was a constant concern. Childishly, Julia didn’t want to blame her child’s hand for its vulnerability, and so saw him as having stayed the same and the world as having become more threatening. They went straight from the hospital to ice cream. “Every topping?” the server asked. As her hand pressed on the door — the first door she’d opened since the heavy one shut — Julia noticed the back of the OPEN sign. “Look,” she said, finding, in the joke, another reason to hate herself, “the world is closed.”

“No,” Sam said. “Close. Like near.”

Another reason to hate herself.

There were so many things she could have said to Mark. There was so much available small talk. It was at sleepaway camp that she learned how to make a bed with hospital corners. It was at the hospital that she learned how to press tightly folded words between massive seconds. But she didn’t want things to be tidy or concealed right then. But she didn’t want things to be as disheveled and exposed as they felt.

What did she want?

“What do I want?” she asked, quiet as a spacewalk.

She wanted some of her insides on the outside, but which insides and how much?

“What?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know why I’m asking you.”

“I didn’t hear what you asked,” he said, closing the distance between them, perhaps to hear better.

She’d tried everything: juice cleanses, poetry binges, knitting, writing letters by hand to people she’d let go of, moments of the unmediated honesty they’d promised each other in Pennsylvania sixteen years before. She’d tried meditating half a dozen times, but always felt lost when guided to “remember” her body. She knew what was meant, but was incapable, or unwilling.

She took a step toward Mark, closing the distance, perhaps so that all she couldn’t say could be better heard.

But now, and without trying, she remembered her body. She remembered her breasts, which hadn’t been seen by another man, not sexually, since she was young. She remembered their heaviness, that they were the slowly descending weights powering her biological clock. They had appeared too early, but grew too slowly, and were referred to by the only college boyfriend whose birthday she still remembered as “Platonic.” They became so sensitive when she had her period that she held them as she walked around the house. Years after it was turned off for the last time, she still occasionally heard the asthmatic Medela breast pump struggling not to die. She had grown to know her breasts more intimately as there was more to fear, but she looked away when, each of the last three years, they were pressed between mammogram plates — each time the tech made the unsolicited promise that the machine delivered less radiation than she would be exposed to on a transatlantic flight. When Jacob took her to Paris for her forty-first birthday, she imagined the kids searching the sky for her plane, her breasts glowing like poisoned beacons for them.

What did she want?

She wanted everything on the outside.

She wanted something impossible, whose fulfillment would destroy her.

And then she understood Jacob. She had believed him when he said his words were only words, but she never understood him. Now she understood: he needed to stick his hand in the hinge. But he didn’t want to close the door on himself.

“I need to go home,” she said.

She needed something impossible, whose fulfillment would save her.

“That’s what you came here to tell me?”

She nodded.

He stood straight, now taller than he had been. “I get it that you’re on some sort of journey,” he said. “Nobody gets that better than I do. And I’m really glad to have served as a rest stop where you could stretch your legs, get some gas, and pee.”

“Please don’t be mad,” she said, almost like a girl.

Her skin was burning with fear — of his anger, of deserving it, of being, finally, justly punished for her badness. She could be forgiven for allowing her children to be hurt, but there is no punishment great enough for hurting one’s children knowingly. She was going to destroy her family — on purpose, and not because there were no alternatives. She was going to choose not to have a choice.

“I hope I facilitated a lot of growth,” Mark went on, now making no effort to contain his hurt. “I do. I hope you learned something with me that you can apply later with someone else. But if I can offer a little free advice?”

“I just need to go home,” she said, terrified of what he would say next, that by some magical justice it would kill her children.

“You’re not the problem, Julia. Your life is the problem.”

Kindness was worse than what she’d been most afraid of.

He opened the door. “And I say this wishing only for peace for both of us: know that next time I see your face on the screen, I’m not even going to watch you wait.”

“I need to go home,” she said.

“Good luck with that,” he said.

She left.

She took a cab to a hotel whose renovation she’d nearly been hired to oversee.

There was a cartoonishly large, unnaturally symmetrical floral arrangement centered under ten thousand chandelier crystals.

And a bellhop said something into a palmed microphone whose cord ran up his sleeve and down his side to a transmitter clipped to his belt — there had to be a better way to communicate.

And the desk clerk, who could almost have been Sam in fifteen years, but with a perfect left hand, asked, “How many keys will you be needing?”

She thought of saying, “All of them.” She thought of saying, “None.”

WHO’S IN THE UNOCCUPIED ROOM?

By the time Jacob came back downstairs with the pot, Tamir had already turned an apple into a pipe, seemingly without tools.

“Impressive,” Jacob said.

“I am an impressive person.”

“Well, you can certainly turn a piece of fruit into drug paraphernalia.”

“Still smells like pot,” Tamir said, opening the innermost bag. “That’s a good sign.”

They cracked some windows and smoked in a silence broken only by Jacob’s humiliating coughing. They sat back. They waited.

Somehow the station had changed to ESPN. Had the television achieved sentience and will? There was a documentary about the 1988 trade that sent Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the L.A. Kings — the effects it had on Gretzky, Edmonton, L.A., the sport of hockey, planet Earth, and the universe. What at any other time would have compelled Jacob to either smash his TV or blind himself was suddenly the happiest reprieve. Had Tamir put it on?

They lost track of how much time passed — it could have been forty-five seconds or forty-five minutes. It mattered as little to them as it did to Isaac.

“I feel good,” Jacob said, leaning as he’d been told to do at the Passover seders of his childhood, as befits a free man.

“I feel very good,” Tamir said.

“Just basically, fundamentally … good.”

“I know the feeling.”

“But the thing is, my life isn’t good.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, you know? Yeah, yours isn’t, either?”

“Yeah.”

“Childhood is good,” Jacob said, “the rest is pushing things around. If you’re lucky, you give a shit about the things. But it’s different only by degrees.”

“But those degrees matter.”

“Do they?”

“If one thing matters, everything matters.”

“That is a seriously good impersonation of wisdom.”

“Lo mein matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets matter. The Boss matters.”

“The Boss?”

“Springsteen. A heated toilet seat matters. The small things: changing a lightbulb, losing to your child at basketball, driving nowhere. There’s your Great Flatness. And I could go on.”

“Better still, do you think you could go back to the beginning and do that, exactly that, again, and I’ll record it?”

“Chinese food matters. Stupid, dirty jokes matter. Firm mattresses and soft sheets—”

“I’m high.”

“I’m looking at the chandelier from above.”

“Is it dusty?” Jacob asked.

“Another person would ask if it was beautiful.”

“People shouldn’t be allowed to get married until it’s too late to have kids.”

“Maybe you could get enough signatures to make that happen.”

“And having a gratifying career is impossible.”

“For anyone?”

“For good fathers. But it’s so hard to deviate. All these fucking Jewish nails driven through my palms.”

“Jewish nails?”

“Expectations. Prescriptions. Commandments. Wanting to please everyone. And the rest of them.”

“Them?”

“Did you ever have to read that poem, or journal entry, or whatever, by the kid who died in Auschwitz? Or maybe Treblinka? Not really the important detail, I just … The one about ‘Next time you throw a ball, throw it for me’?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Consider yourself lucky. Anyway, I might not be getting it exactly right, but the gist is: don’t mourn for me, live for me. I’m about to get gassed, so do me a favor and have fun.”

“Never heard it.”

“I must have heard it a thousand times. It was the theme song of my Jewish education, and it ruined everything. Not because every time you throw a ball you’re thinking of the corpse of a kid who should have been you, but because sometimes you just want to veg out in front of shitty TV, and instead you think, ‘I should really go throw a ball.’”

Tamir laughed.

“It’s funny, except that throwing a ball becomes an attitude toward academic achievement, becomes measuring the distance from perfection in units of failure, becomes going to a college that murdered kid would have killed to go to, becomes studying things you aren’t interested in but are good and worthy and remunerative, becomes getting married Jewishly and having Jewish kids and living Jewishly in some demented effort to redeem the suffering that made your increasingly alienating life possible.”

“You should smoke a bit more.”

“The problem is,” Jacob said, taking back the apple, “the fulfillment of the expectations feels amazing, but you only fulfill them once—‘I got an A!’ ‘I’m getting married!’ ‘It’s a boy!’—and then you’re left to experience them. Nobody knows it at the time, and everybody knows it later, but nobody admits it, because it would pull a foundational log from the Jewish tower of Jenga. You trade emotional ambition for companionship, a life of inhabiting a nerve-filled body for companionship, exploration for companionship. There’s a good in commitment, I know. Things have to grow over time, mature, become full. But there’s a price, and just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it’s endurable. So many blessings, but did anyone ever stop to ask why one would want a blessing?”

“Blessings are just curses that other people envy.”

“You should smoke more pot, Tamir. It turns you into fucking Yoda, or at least Deepak Chopra.”

“Maybe it allows you to listen differently.”

“You see! That’s exactly what I mean.”

“You’re becoming funny,” Tamir said, bringing the apple to his mouth.

“I was always funny.”

“So maybe I’m the one listening differently.”

Tamir took another hit.

“What was Julia’s reaction? To the texts?”

“Not good. Obviously.”

“You’ll stay together?”

“Yeah. Of course. We have the kids. And we’ve had a life together.”

“You’re sure?”

“I mean, we’ve talked about separating.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Jacob took another hit.

“Have I ever told you about my TV show?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean my TV show.”

“I’m high, Jacob. Pretend I’m a six-year-old.”

“I’ve been writing a show about us.”

“You and me?”

“Well, no, not you. Or not yet.”

“I’d be great in a TV show.”

“My family.”

“I’m in your family.”

“My family here. Isaac. My parents. Julia and the kids.”

“Who would want to watch that?”

“Everybody, probably. But that’s not the point. The point is, it’s probably really good, and probably the writing I was born to do, and for the last ten or so years I’ve been pretty singularly devoted to it.”

“Ten years?”

“And I’ve never shared it with anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Well, before Isaac died, it was because I was afraid of betraying him.”

“With?”

“With the truth of who we are, and what we’re like.”

“How would that be a betrayal?”

“I was listening to the radio the other morning, a science podcast I like. They were interviewing a woman who’d lived in that massive geodesic dome for two years — nothing goes in, nothing goes out. That one. It was pretty interesting.”

“Let’s listen to it now.”

“No, I’m just searching for a metaphor.”

“It would make me so happy to listen to it right now.”

“I can’t even tell if you’re serious or making fun of me.”

“Please, Jacob.”

“I still can’t tell. But anyway, she talked about how living in that closed environment made her aware of the interconnectedness of life: this thing eats this thing, then poops, which feeds this thing, which blah blah blah. Then she went on to talk about something I already knew — not because I’m so fucking smart, but because it’s just one of those things that most people know — that with every inhalation, you are likely breathing in molecules that were breathed out by Pol Pot, or Caesar, or even the dinosaurs. I could be wrong about that dinosaur bit. I’ve found myself really interested in dinosaurs recently. I don’t know why. I spent about thirty years not thinking about them at all, and then suddenly I was interested again. I heard, in another podcast—”

“You listen to a lot of podcasts.”

“I know. I really do. It’s embarrassing, right?”

“You’re asking me if you’re embarrassed?”

“It’s humiliating.”

“I don’t know why.”

“What kind of person sneaks off to unoccupied rooms and presses an almost-muted phone to his ear so that he, and only he, will hear a putterer’s exploration of something as irrelevant as echolocation. It’s humiliating. And the humiliation is humiliating.” With his beer bottle, Jacob drew a ring of condensation on the table. “Anyway, this other podcast did this whole thing about how all the dinosaurs — not just most of them, but all of them — were destroyed at once. They roamed the earth for some large number of millions of years, and then, in something like an hour, gone. Why do people always use the word roam when referring to dinosaurs?”

“I don’t know.”

“They do, though. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. It’s weird.”

“It is.”

“So weird, right?”

“The more I think about it, the weirder it becomes.”

“Jews roamed Europe for thousands of years…”

“And then, in something like a decade…”

“But I was saying something else. About the dome woman … dinosaurs … maybe Pol Pot?”

“Breathing.”

“Right! With each inhalation we take in molecules yada yada. Anyway, my eyes started to roll, because it just sounded like trite cocktail science shit. But then she went further, to say that our exhalations are just as certainly going to be inhaled by our great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.”

“And future dinosaurs.”

“And future Pol Pots.”

They laughed.

“But it really upset me, for some reason. I didn’t start crying or anything. I didn’t have to pull over. But I did have to turn off the podcast. It suddenly became too much.”

“Why do you think?”

“Why do I think at all?”

“No. Why do you think it upset you to imagine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren breathing your breath?”

Jacob released a breath that would be inhaled by the last of his line.

“Try,” Tamir said.

“I guess”—another breath—“I guess I was raised to understand that I’m not worthy of all that came before me. But no one ever prepared me for the knowledge that I’m not worthy of all that will come after me, either.”

Tamir lifted the apple from the table, held it so that the chandelier light passed straight through its cored center, and said, “I want to fuck this apple.”

“What?”

“But my cock is too big,” he said. And then, trying to push his hairy-knuckled forefinger into it: “I can’t even finger-fuck it.”

“Put the apple down, Tamir.”

“It’s the Apple of Truth,” Tamir said, ignoring Jacob. “And I want to fuck it.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m serious.”

“You want to fuck the Apple of Truth, but your cock is too big?”

“Yes. That is exactly the predicament.”

“The present predicament? Or the predicament of life?”

“Both.”

“You’re high.”

“So are you.”

“The scientist who was talking about the dinosaurs—”

“What are you talking about?”

“That podcast. The scientist said something so beautiful I thought I would die.”

“Don’t die.”

“He asked the listener to imagine a bullet being fired through water, and how it would leave a conical wake of emptiness behind it — a hole in the water — before the water had time to come back together. He said that an asteroid would create a similar wake — a rip in the atmosphere — and that a dinosaur looking at the asteroid would see a nighttime hole in a daytime sky. That’s what he would see just before being destroyed.”

“Maybe it’s not that you wanted to die, but that you became like the dinosaur.”

“Huh?”

“It saw something incredibly beautiful before it was destroyed. You heard about it, and thought it was incredibly beautiful, and so assumed you would be destroyed.”

“They give MacArthurs to all the wrong people.”

“I lied.”

“About what?”

“Most things.”

“OK?”

“Rivka and I have been talking about moving.”

“Really?”

“Talking.”

“Moving where?”

“You’re going to make me say it?”

“I guess I am.”

“Here.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Just talking. Just thinking about it. I get job offers every now and then, and a month ago I got a really good one, a great one, with a tech firm. Rivka and I were playing make-believe at the dinner table, imagining what it would be like if I took the job, and then the conversation stopped being make-believe.”

“I thought you were happy there? And all that shit about renting a room in America?”

“Did you hear anything I said before?”

“When you were begging me to make aliyah?”

“So I can make hayila.”

“Which is what?”

“Aliyah backward.”

“You just did that in your head?”

“While you were talking.”

“And what, there’s some sort of Bloch-Blumenberg Constant that has to be maintained?”

“A Jew Constant. Ideally, American Jews and Israeli Jews would just switch places.”

“Is this what we were talking about the whole time? Your guilt about leaving Israel?”

“No, we were talking about your guilt about leaving your marriage.”

“I’m not leaving my marriage,” Jacob said.

“And I’m not leaving Israel,” Tamir said.

“All just talk?”

“Whenever I would turn down an offer of my father’s — for another piece of halvah, an evening walk — he’d say, ‘De zelbe prayz.’ Same price. It was the only time he used Yiddish. He hated Yiddish. But he’d say that. And not only in Yiddish, he’d imitate my grandfather’s voice. It doesn’t cost me anything to talk about leaving Israel. Same price as not talking about it. I can really hear my father imitating my grandfather: de zelbe prayz.”

Tamir woke up his phone and showed Jacob pictures of Noam: from the hospital, first steps, first day of school, first soccer game, first date, first time in his army uniform. “I’ve been obsessed with these pictures,” Tamir said. “Not with looking at them, but seeing that they’re still there. Sometimes I check under the table. Sometimes I go to the bathroom to do it. Remember going to the supermarket with your kids when they were small? That feeling that the second they were out of your sight, they would disappear forever? It’s like that.”

All the dinosaurs were wiped out, but some mammals survived. Most of them were burrowers. Underground, they were protected from the heat that consumed every living thing aboveground. Tamir was burying himself in his phone, in the photos of his son.

“Are we good men?” Tamir asked.

“What a strange question.”

“Is it?”

“I don’t think there’s any higher power judging us,” Jacob said.

“But how should we judge ourselves?”

“With tears, with silence, with—?”

“Even my confession was a lie.”

“I must have given you reasons to lie.”

“I want to leave. Rivka doesn’t.”

“You want to leave Israel? Or you want to leave your marriage?”

“Israel.”

“Did you have an affair?”

“No.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“I’m always tired,” Jacob said. “Always exhausted. I’ve never wondered about it before, but what if this whole time I haven’t been tired at all? What if my tiredness is just a hiding place?”

“There are worse hiding places.”

“And what if I decided that I would never be tired again? If I simply refused to be tired. My body could be tired, but not me.”

“I don’t know, Jacob.”

“Or what if I can’t get out of my hiding place on my own? If it’s too familiar, too safe? And I need to be smoked out?”

“I think you’re smoking yourself out right now.”

“What if I need Julia to smoke me out?”

Jacob looked at the apple between them. He understood what Tamir meant, about wanting to fuck it. It wasn’t a sexual longing, but an existential one — to enter one’s truth.

“You know what I’d like to do right now?”

“What?” Tamir asked.

“Shave my head.”

“Why?”

“So I can see how bald I really am. And so everyone can see.”

“What if we made some popcorn instead?”

“It would be awful. But I’m ready for it. But it would be awful. But I’m ready for it.”

“You keep saying the same thing over and over.”

“I think I’m falling asleep.”

“So sleep.”

“But…”

“What?”

“I’ve also been lying.”

“I know that.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I just don’t know which parts.”

“I didn’t have an affair.”

“No?”

“Or I did, but I didn’t fuck her.”

“What did you do?”

“Just a bunch of texts. And not even that many.”

“Why did you lie about it?”

“Because I didn’t want to get caught.”

“To me.”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

“There was a reason.”

“I’m high.”

“But it’s the only thing you lied about.”

“When Julia found my phone and I told her the truth — that nothing actually happened — she believed me.”

“That’s good.”

“But it wasn’t that she trusted me. She said she knew I wasn’t capable of it.”

“And you wanted me to think you were capable of it.”

“That’s my interpretation of myself, yes.”

“Even though you aren’t capable of it.”

“Affirmative.”

“You asked before, what kind of person sneaks around to listen to science podcasts?”

“Yes.”

“The kind of person who uses the same phone to sext a woman he won’t touch.”

“It was a different phone.”

“It was the same hand.”

“So now you’ve shaved my head,” Jacob said, closing his eyes. “Tell me what I can’t see.”

“You’re balder than I thought, and less bald than you think.”

Jacob felt the reflexive jerking, the fall down the elevator shaft that marked the onset of sleep. He couldn’t account for the passage of time, or movement between thoughts, or stretches without thought.

What would happen to the sound of time? If all that he and Julia had rehearsed were performed? If it weren’t the same price to explore an idea? No more candlelit whispering into the boys’ ears. No more dishwashing musings about that afternoon’s birthday party. No more scrape of the rake as the leaves were pulled against the curb so they could be jumped into just one last time. What would he listen for to hear his life? Or would he be deaf to it?

The next thing he was aware of was a hand, a voice. “There’s news,” Tamir said, shaking Jacob by the forearm.

“What?”

“You were asleep.”

“No. I wasn’t. I was just thinking.”

“There’s something big on the news.”

“Gimme a second.”

Jacob blinked away the glazing, rolled his head from shoulder to shoulder, and walked to the sofa.

Two hours earlier, while Jacob and Tamir were getting stoned, some Israeli extremists entered the Dome of the Rock and set it on fire. The flames caused hardly any damage, the Israelis claimed, but the effort caused more than enough. The television, which had somehow switched from ESPN to CNN, showed images of rage: men — always men — punching the sky, shooting broken rivers of bullets at the sky, trying to kill the sky. Jacob had seen this before, but the images had always come from the vicinity of the quake, primarily Gaza and the West Bank. Now, however, CNN was bouncing from feed to feed, with a seemingly endless supply of fury: a circle of men burning an Israeli flag in Jakarta; men in Khartoum swinging sticks at an effigy of the Israeli prime minister; men in Karachi, and Dhaka, and Riyadh, and Lahore; men with bandanas over their mouths smashing a Jewish storefront in Paris; a man, whose accent was so thick it’s unlikely he knew one hundred words of English, screaming, “Death to Jews!” into a camera in Tehran.

“This is bad,” Jacob said, transfixed and intoxicated by the images.

“Bad?”

“Very bad.”

“I need to go home.”

“I know,” Jacob said, too groggy to understand, or even to be sure that he wasn’t still asleep. “We’ll figure it out.”

“Now. We need to go to the embassy.”

“Yeah. OK.”

Tamir shook his head and said, “Now, now, now.”

“I get it. Let me put some clothes on.”

But neither moved from the sofa. The television filled with Jewish rage: black-hatted men screaming in Hebrew in London; dark men from one of the last remaining kibbutzim waving fingers at the camera, hysterically repeating words Jacob didn’t understand; Jewish men clashing with Jewish soldiers guarding the Temple Mount.

Tamir said, “You need to come, too.”

“Of course. Give me a minute.”

“No,” Tamir said, grabbing Jacob’s shoulders with the force he used at the zoo three decades before. “You need to come home.”

“I am home. What?”

“To Israel.”

“What?”

“You need to come to Israel with me.”

“I do?”

“Yes.”

“Tamir, you want to leave Israel.”

“Jacob.”

“Now you want me to go?”

Tamir pointed at the TV. “Are you looking at this?”

“I’ve been looking at that for a week.”

“No. No one has ever seen this before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This is how it ends,” he said. “Like this.” And for the first time since Tamir had arrived in D.C., for the first time ever, Jacob saw the family resemblance. He saw the panicked eyes of his boys — the terror he looked into before blood tests and after injuries that drew blood.

“How it ends?”

“How Israel is destroyed.”

“Because Muslims are screaming in Jakarta and Riyadh? What are they going to do, walk to Jerusalem?”

“Yes. And ride horses, and drive shitty cars, and be bussed, and take boats. And it’s not only them. Look at us.”

“It will pass.”

“It won’t. This is how it will all end.”

Neither the images on the screen nor Tamir’s words scared Jacob as much as the terror he saw in his children’s eyes in Tamir’s eyes.

“If you really believe that, Tamir, you need to get your family out of Israel.”

“I can’t!” he said, and then Jacob saw, in Tamir’s clenched teeth, Irv’s fury — the deep inner sadness that knew no expression but directionless rage.

“Why?” Jacob asked. “What could possibly be more important than your family’s safety?”

“I can’t get them out, Jacob. There are no flights in or out. Don’t you think I’ve tried? What do you think I do all day? Go to museums? Go shopping? I’m trying to keep my family safe. I can’t get them out, so I have to go. And you have to go, too.”

Jacob was now too awake for nonchalant bravery.

“Israel isn’t my home, Tamir.”

“That’s only because it hasn’t been destroyed yet.”

“No, it’s because it isn’t my home.”

“But it’s my home,” he said, and now Jacob saw Julia. He saw the pleading he hadn’t been able to see when her home still could have been saved. He saw his own blindness.

“Tamir, you—”

But the words wouldn’t form, because there was no thought for them to express. It didn’t matter: Tamir had stopped listening. He was angled away and texting. Rivka? Noam? Jacob didn’t ask, because he felt it wasn’t his place.

His place was the unoccupied room, typing: you’re begging me to fuck your tight pussy, but you don’t deserve it yet.

His place was the unoccupied room, the same hand pressing a different phone to his ear so that he, and only he, could hear: “Blind people can see. It’s true. Making clicking sounds in their mouths, they can orient themselves by the echoes returning from nearby objects. Doing this, blind people are able to go on hikes in rocky terrain, navigate city streets, even ride bikes. But is that seeing? Brain scans of people echolocating show activity in the same visual centers as in the brains of people with sight; they are simply seeing through their ears, instead of their eyes.”

His place was the unoccupied room, reading: my husband is away this weekend with the kids, come fuck me for real.

His place was the unoccupied room, hearing: “‘So why aren’t more blind people on bikes? According to David Spellman, the preeminent teacher of echolocation, it’s because few are given the necessary freedom to learn how.’

“‘It’s the rare parent, maybe one in a hundred, probably fewer, who is able to watch her blind child approach an intersection and not grab his arm. It’s with love that they’re holding him back from danger, but they’re also holding him back from sight. When I teach children to ride bikes, there are inevitably crashes, just as there are with sighted children. But parents of blind children almost always take it as proof that too much is being asked of their child, and they step in to protect him. The more the parents want their children to see, the less possible they make it, because that love gets in the way.’

“‘How were you able to overcome that and learn?’

“‘My father left before I was born, and my mother had three jobs. The absence of love allowed me to see.’”

DE ZELBE PRAYZ

Tamir went upstairs, and Jacob sat there, trying to replay the last few moments, and the last two hours, and the last two weeks, and the last thirteen, and sixteen, and forty-two years. What had happened?

Tamir had said Jacob wouldn’t die for anything. Even if that were true, why would it matter? What’s so inherently good about such ultimate devotion? What’s so wrong with making good-enough money, eating good-enough food, living in a nice-enough house, striving to be as ethical and ambitious as circumstances allow? He had tried, he had come up short every single time, but against what measure? He had given his family a good-enough life. It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?

Years before, in the time when he and Julia would still share their work with each other, Julia came to the basement with a mug of tea in each hand and asked how it was going.

Jacob leaned back in his Aeron and said, “Well, it’s nowhere near as good as it could be, but I suppose it’s as good as I can make it right now.”

“Then it’s as good as it could be.”

“No,” Jacob said, “it could be a lot better.”

“How? If someone else wrote it? If you wrote it at a different time in your life? We’d be talking about something else.”

“If I were a better writer.”

“But you’re not,” she said, putting a mug on his desk, “you’re only perfect.”

For all that he couldn’t give Julia, he had given her a lot. He wasn’t a great artist, but he worked hard (enough), and was devoted (enough) to his writing. It is not a weakness to acknowledge complexity. It is not a retreat to take a step back. He wasn’t wrong to be envious of those wailing men on prayer mats in the Dome of the Rock, but maybe he was wrong to see reflected in their devotion his own existential pallor. Agnosticism is no less devout than fundamentalism, and maybe he’d destroyed what he loved, blind to the perfection of good-enough.

He called Julia’s cell. She didn’t answer. It was two in the morning, but there was no time of day, those days, when she would answer his call.

Hi, you’ve reached Julia …

But she would see that he had reached for her.

At the beep he said, “It’s me. I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news, but some extremists set fire to the Dome of the Rock, or tried to. Jewish extremists. I suppose they succeeded, technically. It was a very small fire. But, you know, it’s a huge deal. Anyway, you can watch. Or read about it. I don’t even know where you are. Where are you? So—”

The voice mail cut him off. He called again.

Hi, you’ve reached Julia …

“I got cut off. I don’t know how much got through, but I was saying that the Middle East just blew up, and Tamir is totally hysterical, and he wants me to take him to the embassy tonight, like now, at two in the morning, to try to somehow get him on a plane. And the thing is, he says I need to go with him. And at first I just thought he meant—”

The voice mail cut him off. He called again.

Hi, you’ve reached Julia …

“And … it’s me. Jacob. Obviously. Anyway, I was just saying that Tamir is freaking out, and I’m taking him to the embassy — I’ll wake up Sam and let him know that we’re going out, and that he has to—”

The voice mail cut him off. The allowed increments seemed to be shrinking. He called again.

“Jacob?”

“Julia?”

“What time is it?”

“I thought your phone was off.”

“Why are you calling?”

“Well, I basically said it in the messages, but—”

“What time is it?”

“It’s like two or so.”

“Why, Jacob.”

“Where are you?”

“Jacob, why are you calling me at two in the morning?”

“Because it’s important.”

“Are the kids OK?”

“Yes, everyone’s fine. But Israel—”

“Nothing happened—?”

“No. Not to the kids. They’re sleeping. It’s Israel.”

“Tell me in the morning, OK?”

“Julia, I wouldn’t call if it weren’t—”

“If the boys are OK, whatever it is can wait.”

“It can’t.”

“Believe me, it can. Good night, Jacob.”

“Some extremists tried to set fire to the Dome of the Rock.”

“Tomorrow.”

“There’s going to be a war.”

“Tomorrow.”

“A war against us.”

“We have a ton of batteries in the fridge.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m half asleep.”

“I think I’m going to go.”

“Thank you.”

“To Israel. With Tamir.”

He heard her shift, and muffled static.

“You’re not going to Israel.”

“I’m really thinking about it.”

“You’d never let such a dumb sentence slip into one of your scripts.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means let’s talk in the morning.”

“I’m going to Israel,” he said, and this time, removing the I think, expressed something entirely different — a certainty that when spoken aloud revealed to Jacob his lack of certainty. The first time he’d wanted to hear her say, “Don’t go.” But instead she didn’t believe him.

“And why would you do that?”

“To help.”

“What, write for the army paper?”

“Whatever they ask me to do. Fill sandbags, make sandwiches, fight.”

She laughed herself into a fuller wakefulness: “Fight?”

“If that’s what’s necessary.”

“And how would that work?”

“They need men.”

She chuckled. Jacob thought he heard her chuckle.

“I’m not seeking your respect or approval,” he said. “I’m telling you because we’re going to need to figure out what the next couple of weeks will look like. I assume you’ll come home and—”

“I respect and approve of your desire to be a hero, especially right now—”

“What you’re doing sucks.”

“No,” she said, her voice now aggressively clear, “what you’re doing sucks. Waking me up in the middle of the night with this idiotic Kabuki enactment of … I don’t even know what. Resolution? Bravery? Selflessness? You assume I’ll come home? That’s nice. And then what? I’ll single-handedly take care of the kids for however long your paintball adventure lasts? That shouldn’t be any problem: preparing three meals a day for them — make that nine meals, as no two will ever eat the same thing — and chauffeuring to cello lessons, and speech therapy, and soccer, and soccer, and Hebrew school, and various health professionals? Yeah. I want to be a hero, too. I think being a hero would be awesome. But first, before we get measured for capes, let’s see if we can maintain what we already have.”

“Julia—”

“I’m not finished. You woke me up with this absurd shit, so now I’m entitled to hold the conch. If we were actually to entertain this utterly ridiculous notion of you in combat for a moment, then we would have to acknowledge that any army that would include you among its fighting ranks is desperate, and desperate armies tend not to be in the business of treating every life as if it were all of humankind, and without having any military expertise, I’m guessing you’re not going to be called upon for specialized operations, like bomb defusing or surgical assassinations, but something more like ‘Stand in front of this bullet so your meat will at least slow it before it enters the person we actually value.’ And then you’ll be dead. And your kids will be fatherless. And your father will become a yet more public asshole. And—”

“And you?”

“What?”

“What will you become?”

“In sickness and in sickness,” Jacob’s mother had said at his wedding. “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.”

Jacob had regained the hearing he’d pretended to lose as a child, and acquired a kind of pet interest in deafness that stayed with him into adulthood. He never shared it with Julia or anyone, as it felt distasteful, wrong. No one, not even Dr. Silvers, knew that he was able to sign, or that he would attend annual conventions for the D.C. chapter of the National Association of the Deaf. He didn’t pretend he was deaf when he went. He pretended he was a teacher at an elementary school for deaf children. He explained his interest by saying he was the child of a deaf father.

“What will you become, Julia?”

“I have no idea what it is you’re trying to get me to say. That contemplating having to raise three kids on my own makes me selfish?”

“No.”

“Are you implying it’s what I secretly want?”

“Is it? That hadn’t even occurred to me, but it obviously occurred to you.”

“Are you serious?”

“What will you become?”

“I have no idea what water it is you’re trying to lead me to, but I’m fucking tired, and tired of this conversation, so if you have something to say—”

“Why won’t you just tell me you want me to stay?”

“What?”

“I don’t understand why you can’t bring yourself to say that you don’t want me to go.”

“It’s what I’ve been saying for the last five minutes.”

“No, you’ve been saying it’s unfair to the kids. That it’s unfair to you.”

“Unfair is your word.”

“Not once have you said that you — you Julia — don’t want me to go because you don’t want me to go.”

She opened a silence as the rabbi had opened the rip in Irv’s jacket at the funeral.

“A widow,” Jacob said. “That’s what you’ll become. You’re constantly projecting your needs and fears onto the kids, or me, or whoever is within reach. Why can’t you just admit that you—you—don’t want to be a widow?”

He heard, he thought he heard, the springs of a mattress return to their state of rest. What bed was she rising from? How much of her body was uncovered, in what degree of darkness?

“Because I wouldn’t be a widow,” she said.

“Yes, you would.”

“No, Jacob, I wouldn’t. A widow is someone whose spouse has died.”

“And?”

“And you’re not my spouse.”

In the 1970s there was no infrastructure to care for deaf children in Nicaragua — no schools, no educational or informational resources, there wasn’t even a codified sign language. When the first Nicaraguan school for the deaf was opened, the teachers taught the lip-reading of Spanish. But on the playground the children communicated using the signs they had developed in their homes, organically generating a shared vocabulary and grammar. As generations of students moved through the school, the improvised language grew and matured. It is the only documented instance of a language being created entirely from scratch by its speakers. No adult helped, nothing was recorded on paper, there were no models. Only the children’s will to be understood.

Jacob and Julia had tried. They had created signs, and they would spell words in front of the still-young kids, and there were codes. But the language they had created, and were even then creating, made the world smaller rather than clearer.

I’m not your spouse.

Because of those texts? Destroy everything because of the arrangement of a few hundred letters? What did he think was going to happen? And what did he think he was doing? Julia was right: it wasn’t a moment of weakness. He pushed the exchange into sexuality, he bought the second phone, he was forming the words whenever he wasn’t typing them, stealing off to read hers as soon as they came through. He’d more than once put Benjy in front of a movie so he could jerk off to a new message. Why?

Because it was perfect. He was a father to the boys, a son to his father, a husband to his wife, a friend to his friends, but to whom was he himself? The digital veil offered a self-disappearing that made self-expression, finally, possible. When he was no one, he was free to be himself. It’s not that he was bursting with stifled sexuality, though he was. It was the freedom that mattered. Which is why, when she texted, my husband is away this weekend with the kids, come fuck me for real, she got no response. And why you can’t STILL be jerking off! got no response. And why what happened to you? were the last words to pass between their phones.

“I don’t know how I could be any more sorry for what I did,” he said.

“You could start by telling me you’re sorry.”

“I’ve apologized many times.”

“No, many times you’ve told me that you’ve apologized. But you’ve never once apologized to me.”

“I did that night in the kitchen.”

“You didn’t.”

“In bed.”

“No.”

“On the phone in the car, when you were at Model UN.”

“You told me you’d apologized, but you didn’t apologize. I pay attention, Jacob. I remember. Exactly once, since I found the phone, did you say, ‘I’m sorry.’ When I told you your grandfather died. And you weren’t saying it to me. Or to anyone.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter if that’s the case—”

“It is the case, and it does matter.”

“It doesn’t matter if that’s the case, because if you don’t remember an apology, I obviously didn’t apologize fully enough. So hear me now: I’m so sorry, Julia. I’m ashamed, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s not the texts.”

The night Julia found the phone, she told Jacob, “You seem happy, but you aren’t.” And more: “You find unhappiness so threatening that you would rather go down with the ship than acknowledge a leak.” What if she wouldn’t go down with the ship? Because if it wasn’t the texts, then it was everything. What if, when Jacob closed himself in the unoccupied room, he closed Julia in the unoccupied house? What if the thing he needed to apologize for was everything?

“Tell me,” he said, “just tell me, why are you going to destroy this family?”

“Don’t you dare say that.”

“But it’s true. You’re destroying our family.”

“I’m not. I’m ending our marriage.”

He couldn’t believe what she had just dared to say.

“Ending our marriage will destroy our family.”

“No. It won’t.”

“Why? Why are you ending our marriage?”

“Who have I been having all of those conversations with for the last three weeks?”

“We were talking.”

She let that reverberate for a moment, then said, “That’s why.”

“Because we were talking?”

“Because you’re always talking, and your words never mean anything. You hid your greatest secret behind a wall, remember that?”

“No.”

“Our wedding. I walked seven circles around you, and I surrounded you with love, for years I did, and the wall toppled. I toppled it. But you know what I discovered? Your greatest secret is that you’re wall all the way to the centermost stone. There is nothing there.”

And now he had no choice: “I’m going to Israel, Julia.”

And either because of the addition of her name, or a shift in his tone, or more likely because the conversation had reached the point of breakage, the sentence took on a new meaning — one that Julia believed.

“I can’t believe this,” she said.

“I have to.”

“For whom?”

“Our kids. And their kids.”

“Our kids don’t have kids.”

“But they will.”

“So that’s the trade: lose a father, gain a kid?”

“You said it yourself, Julia: they’re going to put me behind a computer.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said they wouldn’t be dumb enough to give me a gun.”

“No, I didn’t say that, either.”

Jacob could hear the click of a lamp. A hotel? Mark’s apartment? How could he ask her where she was in a way that didn’t convey judgment or jealousy or imply that he was going to Israel to punish her for having gone to Mark’s?

More than a thousand “constructed languages” have been invented — by linguists, novelists, hobbyists — each with the dream of correcting the imprecision, inefficiency, and irregularity of natural language. Some constructed languages are based on the musical scale and sung. Some are color-based and silent. The most admired constructed languages were designed to reveal what communication could be, and none of them is in use.

“If you’re going to do this,” Julia said, “if you’re really going to do this, I need two things from you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’re going to go to Israel—”

“I am.”

“—you need to do two things for me.”

“OK.”

“Sam needs to have a bar mitzvah. You can’t leave without helping to see that through.”

“OK. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

“As in, today?”

“Wednesday. And we’ll do it here.”

“Does he even know his whole haftorah yet?”

“He knows enough. We can invite whatever family can make it, whatever friends Sam wants. The Israelis are here. I can get ninety percent of what we need at Whole Foods. We’ll skip the accoutrements, obviously.”

“My parents wouldn’t be able to be there.”

“I’m sorry about that. We could skype with them?”

“And we need a Torah. That’s not an accoutrement.”

“Right. Shit. If Rabbi Singer won’t participate—”

“He won’t.”

“My dad can call in a favor from that shul in Georgetown. He knows a bunch of people there.”

“You’ll take care of it?”

“Yes.”

“OK. I can get the … And if I…” She trailed off into her interior plans, into that never-resting maternal lobe of her brain, the place that scheduled playdates two weeks out, and was vigilant about the food allergies of the kids’ friends, and always knew everyone’s shoe size, and needed no automated reminder to make appointments for biannual dental checkups, and kept track of the outflow of thank-you notes for birthday presents.

“What’s the second thing?” Jacob asked.

“Sorry, what?”

“You said you needed me to do two things.”

“You need to put down Argus.”

“Put him down?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s time, and because he’s yours.”

When Jacob was a boy, he used to stop spinning globes with his finger and imagine what life would be like if he lived in the Netherlands, or Argentina, or China, or Sudan.

When Jacob was a boy, he imagined that his finger brought the actual Earth to momentary rest. No one really noticed it, just as no one really noticed Earth’s rotation, but the sun stayed where it was in the sky, the ocean went flat, and photos fell from fridges.

When Julia said those words—Because it’s time, and because he’s yours—her finger held his life in place.

Because it’s time, and because he’s yours.

The space where those clauses met was his home.

But could he live there?

At the last convention he attended, Jacob met two deaf parents and their eight-year-old deaf son. They’d recently moved to the States from England, the father explained, because the boy had been in a car accident and lost his left hand.

“I’m sorry,” Jacob signed, making a ring around his heart with his fist.

The mother touched four fingers to her bottom lip, then straightened her arm, arcing the fingers down — like blowing a kiss without the kiss.

Jacob asked, “Are there better doctors here?”

The mother signed, “British Sign Language uses both hands for finger spelling. American uses only one. He would have managed in England, but we want to give him every best chance.”

The mother and boy went off to the crafts tent while Jacob and the father hung back. They spoke for an hour, in silence, displacing the air between them with the stories of their lives.

Jacob had read of deaf couples who wanted deaf children. One couple even genetically selected for a deaf child. He found himself thinking about that quite often, the moral implications. Once they had shared enough for it not to feel like prying, Jacob asked the man how he felt when he learned that his son was deaf, like him.

“People would ask me if I was hoping for a boy or a girl,” the father signed. “I told them I just wanted a healthy baby. But I had a very secret preference. Maybe you know that they don’t perform the hearing test until you’re about to leave the hospital?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It works by sending a sound into the ear — if it echoes back, the baby can hear. So they leave as much time as they can for the ear to drain of amniotic fluid.”

“If the sound doesn’t echo back, the child is deaf?”

“That’s right.”

“Where does the sound go?”

“Into the deafness.”

“So there was a period of not knowing?”

“A day. For a day, he was neither deaf nor hearing. When the nurse told us that he was deaf, I cried and cried.”

Jacob once again circled his heart with his fist.

“No,” the father signed. “A hearing baby would have been a blessing. A deaf baby was a special blessing.”

“It was your preference?”

“My very secret preference.”

“But what about giving him every best chance?”

“Can I ask if you’re Jewish?” the man signed.

The question was so unlikely, Jacob wasn’t sure he understood it correctly, but he nodded.

“We’re Jewish as well.” Jacob felt that old, embarrassing, singularly comforting recognition. “Where are your people from?”

“Everywhere. But mostly Drohobycz.”

“We’re landsmen,” the father signed. He actually signed, “We’re from the same place,” but Jacob understood that his hands were speaking Yiddish.

“It’s harder to be Jewish,” the father signed. “It doesn’t give you every best chance.”

“It’s different,” Jacob signed.

The man signed, “I once read a line in a poem: ‘You may find a dead bird; you won’t see a flock of them anywhere.’” The sign for flock is two hands moving like a wave away from the torso.

Jacob returned home from the convention in time for Shabbat dinner. They lit the candles and blessed them. They blessed the wine and drank it. They uncovered the challah, blessed it, tore it, passed it, and ate it. The blessings disappeared into the universe’s deafness, but when Jacob and Julia whispered into their children’s tiny ears, the prayers echoed back. After the meal, Jacob and Julia and Sam and Max and Benjy closed their eyes and moved through their home.