“Well, now I’ll have an answer,” Irv said, with a self-satisfied nod that resembled davening or Parkinson’s. He and his forty-three-year-old son, Jacob, and eleven-year-old grandson, Max, were on their way to Washington National to pick up their Israeli cousins. (The Blochs would sooner have renounced air travel than refer to it as Reagan National.) NPR was on, and, to Irv’s extreme revulsion, they had just listened to a balanced segment on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Irv loathed NPR. It was not only the wretched politics but the flamboyantly precious, out-of-no-closet sissiness, the wide-eyed wonder coming from the you-wouldn’t-hit-a-guy-with-glasses voice. And all of them—men, women, young and old—seemed to share the same voice, passing it from one throat to another as necessary.
“Answer to what?” Jacob asked, unable to swim past the bait.
“When someone asks me what was the most factually erroneous, morally repugnant, and just plain boring radio segment I’ve ever heard.”
Irv’s knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob’s brain’s knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers—arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.
“And anyway,” Jacob said, when he felt that they’d taken things far enough, “it was an opinion piece.”
“Well, that stupid idiot’s opinion is wrong—”
Without looking up from his father’s iPad, Max defended National Public Radio—or semantics, in any case—from the back seat: “Opinions can’t be wrong.”
“So here’s why that idiot’s opinion is idiotic. . . .” Irv ticked off each “because” on the fingers of his left hand: “Because only an anti-Semite can be ‘provoked to anti-Semitism’—a hideous phrase; because the mere suggestion of a willingness to talk to these freaks would just be throwing Manischewitz on an oil fire; because their hospitals are filled with rockets aimed at our hospitals, which are filled with them; because, at the end of the day, we love Kung Pao chicken and they love death; because—and this really should have been my first point—the simple and undeniable fact is . . . we’re _right! _”
Max pointed to the light: “Green is for go.”
But, instead of driving, Irv pressed his point: “Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.” Ignoring the honking coming from behind him, he continued, “Europe . . . now, there’s a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed no tears of sadness over our disappearance. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver, “I’m an asshole, asshole! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob, “Our only reliable friends in Europe are the Germans, and does anyone doubt that they’ll one day run out of guilt and lampshades? And does anyone really doubt that one day, when the conditions are right, America will decide that we’re noisy and pushy and way too smart for anybody else’s good?”
“I do,” Max said, opening up a pinch to zoom in on an image of a gored bullfighter.
“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, pressing the accelerator while trying to catch his grandson’s eye in the rearview mirror, “you gotta hear this. You put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and you get ‘Hamlet.’ Two billion in front of two billion and you get—”
“Jesus, Dad. Watch your lane!”
“The Koran. Funny, right?”
“Racist,” Max muttered.
“Arabs aren’t a race, bubeleh. They’re an ethnicity.”
“What’s a typewriter?”
Irv turned back to Jacob. “The world hates Jews. I know you think the prevalence of Jews in culture is some kind of counterargument, but that’s like saying the world loves pandas because crowds come to see them in zoos.”
“I like pandas,” Max said.
“You don’t,” Irv corrected.
“I would be psyched to have one as a pet.”
“It would eat your face.”
“Awesome.”
“Or at least occupy our house and subject us to its sense of entitlement,” Jacob added.
“The Germans murdered one and a half million Jewish children because they were Jewish children, and they got to host the Olympics thirty years later. And what a job they did with that! The Jews win by a hair a war for our survival and are a permanent pariah state. Why? Why, only a generation after our near-destruction, is the Jewish will to survive considered a will to conquer? Ask yourself, Why?”
“Why what, exactly?”
“The what doesn’t even matter. The answer is the same to every question about us: Because the world hates Jews.”
“What are you saying?”
“Nothing. I’m just saying.”
Jacob was the only one who referred to the Israeli cousins as our Israeli cousins. To his wife, Julia, to Max, and to their older son, Sam, they were the Israeli cousins. Jacob felt no desire for ownership of them, and too much association made him itchy, but he felt that they were owed warmth commensurate with the thickness of blood. Or he felt that he should feel that. It would have been easier if they’d been easier.
He’d known Tamir since they were children. Jacob’s grandfather Isaac and Tamir’s grandfather Benny were brothers in a Galician shtetl of such minuscule size and importance that the Germans didn’t get to it until their second pass through the Pale to wipe up Jewish crumbs. Isaac and Benny had avoided the fate of their five brothers by doing things that were often spoken around but never spoken of. After the war, Benny moved to Israel, where he had a son, Shlomo, who had Tamir. Isaac moved to America, where he had a son, Irv, who had Jacob.
The brothers would visit each other every few years, as if the performance of familial intimacy would retroactively defeat the German people and save everyone. Isaac would lavish Benny and his family with expensive-looking tchotchkes, take them to the “best” second-tier restaurants, close his Jewish bodega for a week to show them the sights of Washington. And when they left he’d spend twice as long as their visit bemoaning how bigheaded and tiny-minded they were, how American Jews were Jews and these Israeli lunatics were Hebrews—people who, given their way, would sacrifice animals and serve kings. Then he’d reiterate how important it was to maintain closeness.
Jacob found the Israeli cousins—his Israeli cousins—curious, at once alien and familiar. He saw his family’s faces in their faces, but also something different, something that could equally well be described as ignorant or unself-conscious, phony or free. Perhaps it was existential constipation, but the Israelis didn’t seem to give a shit about anything. All Jacob’s family ever did was give shits. They were shit-givers.
When Isaac shattered his hip and died, as all Jews who outlive cancer and Gentiles eventually do, Tamir surprised everyone by flying in for the funeral. He and Jacob stayed up late that night, drinking beers at Jacob’s kitchen table.
“He lived a good, long life,” Tamir said, and then took a good, long drink.
“I suppose so, except for the good part,” Jacob said. “He spent his days clipping coupons for things he would never buy, while telling anyone who’d listen that no one listened to him.” A drink. “We once took the kids to a zoo in Berlin—”
“You’ve been to Berlin?”
“For work. It coincided with a school break.”
“You’ve taken your children to Germany 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 parking space, with flora as convincing as a plastic Chinese-food display. He was walking figure eights, over and over, the exact same path. Every time he turned, he’d jerk his head back and squint. Every time. We were mesmerized. Max, who was maybe five, pressed his palms to the glass and asked, ‘When is Great-Grandpa’s birthday?’ What kind of five-year-old asks such a question at such a moment?”
“The kind who worries that his great-grandfather is a depressed panther,” Tamir said.
“Exactly. And he was right. The same routine, day after day after day: instant black coffee and black bread with canteloupe; read 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 cancers and graduations; thaw a brick of chicken soup while flipping through the same photo albums; eat the soup while advancing through another paragraph of the Jewish Week; 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.”
Jacob was ashamed both of the inadequate life he’d tolerated for his grandfather and of judging it inadequate.
“I regret that we didn’t keep in better touch,” he said.
“You and your grandfather?”
“No. Us.” Jacob brought his beer to his lips and said, “Remember that night we snuck out of my parents’ house? Years and years ago?”
“No.”
“When we went to the National Zoo?”
“The National Zoo?”
“You really don’t remember? A few nights before my bar mitzvah?”
“Of course I remember. And it was the night before your bar mitzvah. Not a few nights before.”
“We were so dumb,” Jacob said, chuckling.
“We still are.”
“But we were also romantic.”
“Romantic?”
“About life. Remember what that was like? To believe that you could be in love with life itself?”
Jacob first visited Israel when he was fourteen—an overdue present that he didn’t want for a bar mitzvah he didn’t want. The next generation of Israeli Blochs took the next generation of American Blochs to the Wailing Wall, into whose cracks Jacob inserted prayers for things he didn’t actually care about but knew that he ought to care about, like a cure for AIDS and an unbroken ozone layer. They floated in the Dead Sea together, among the ancient, elephantine Jews reading half-submerged newspapers bleeding Cyrillic. They climbed Masada early in the morning and pocketed rocks that might have been clenched in the fists of Jewish suicides. They watched the windmill break the sunset from the perch of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. They went to the small park named after Jacob’s great-grandfather Gershom Bloch. He had been a beloved rabbi, and his surviving disciples remained loyal to his memory, choosing never to have another rabbi, choosing their own demise.
One morning, while Tamir’s father, Shlomo, was driving them to a hike along the sea, an air-raid siren started blaring. Jacob’s eyes opened to half-dollars and found Irv’s. Shlomo stopped the car. Right there, where it was, on the highway. “Did we break down?” Irv asked, as if the siren might have been indicating a cracked catalytic converter. Shlomo and Tamir got out of the car with the vacant determination of zombies. Everyone on the highway got out of cars and cargo trucks, off motorcycles. They stood, thousands of Jewish undead, perfectly silent. Jacob didn’t know if this was the end (a kind of proud greeting of nuclear winter), a drill, or some national custom. Like dupes in a grand social-psychology experiment, Jacob and his parents did as everyone else was doing, and stood by the car in silence. When the siren stopped, life reanimated. Everyone got back in the car and they were on their way.
Irv was apparently too afraid of revealing ignorance to resolve his ignorance, so Jacob’s mother, Deborah, was left to ask what had just happened.
“Yom HaShoah,” Shlomo said.
“That’s the one for the trees?” Jacob asked.
“For the Jews,” Shlomo said. “Who were chopped down.”
“ ‘Shoah,’ ” Irv said to Jacob, as if he’d understood everything all along, “means ‘Holocaust.’ ”
“But why does everyone stop and stand in silence?”
Shlomo said, “Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do.”
“And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.
Shlomo said, “Himself.”
Jacob was both mesmerized and repulsed by the ritual. The Jewish-American response to the Holocaust was “Never forget,” because there was a possibility of forgetting. In Israel, they blared the air-raid siren for two minutes, because otherwise it would never stop blaring.
What Jacob remembered most tenderly about the trip was the time they spent in Tamir’s home, a two-story Art Deco–ish construction perched on a Haifan hill. There were diagonally sliced cucumbers and cubes of cheese for breakfast and, two hours later, huge spreads of side dishes for lunch—half a dozen salads, dips. At home, the Americans made a point of trying not to turn on the TV. The Israelis made a point of trying not to turn it off.
Tamir, who was a highly significant six months older than Jacob, was obsessed with computers and had a library of RGB porn before Jacob had word processing. (In those days, Jacob concealed “The Art of Sensual Massage” inside “The Big Who of Baseball” at Barnes & Noble, searched lingerie catalogues for pubes with the dedication of a Talmudist searching for God’s will, and listened to the moans of the visually blocked but aurally spread-eagled Spice Channel. The greatest of lewd treats was the three minutes of preview that hotels used to offer for all movies: family, adult, adult. Even as a teen-ager, Jacob recognized the masturbatory tautology: if three minutes of the adult film convinced you that it was a worthy adult film, you would no longer have a need for it.) Tamir’s computer took half a day to download a titty fuck, but what else was time made for? Once, while they watched a pixellated woman jerkily open and close her legs—a “movie” composed of six stills—Tamir asked Jacob if he felt like beating off.
Jacob gave an ironic, Tom Brokaw-voiced “No,” assuming that his cousin was joking.
“Suit yourself,” Tamir said, and proceeded to suit himself, pumping a glob of shea-butter moisturizer into his palm.
Jacob watched him remove his hard penis from his pants and begin to stroke it, transferring the cream to its length. After a minute or two of this, Tamir got up onto his knees, bringing the head of his penis within inches of the screen—close enough for static shock.
“How does it feel?” Jacob asked, while simultaneously reprimanding himself for allowing such a creepy question to escape his mouth.
And then, as if in response, Tamir grabbed a Kleenex from the box on his desk and moaned as he shot a load into it.
Why had Jacob asked that? And why had Tamir come right then? Had Jacob’s question made him come? Had that been Jacob’s (entirely subconscious) intent?
They masturbated side by side a dozen or so times. They certainly never touched each other, but Jacob did wonder if Tamir’s moans were always irrepressible—if there wasn’t something performative about them. They never spoke about these sessions afterward—not three minutes after, and not three decades—but they weren’t a source of shame for either of them. They were young enough, at the time, not to worry about meaning, and then old enough to revere what had been lost.
Pornography was only one example of the chasm between their life experiences. Tamir walked himself to school before Jacob’s parents would leave him at a drop-off birthday party. Tamir cooked his own dinner, while an airplane full of dark-green vegetables searched for a landing strip in Jacob’s mouth. Tamir drank beer before Jacob, smoked pot before Jacob, got a blow job before Jacob, got arrested before Jacob (who would never be arrested). When Tamir was given an M16, Jacob was given a Eurail pass. Tamir tried without success to stay out of risky situations; Jacob tried without success to find his way into them. At nineteen, Tamir was in a half-buried outpost in southern Lebanon, behind four feet of concrete. Jacob was in a dorm in New Haven, whose bricks had been buried for two years before construction so that they would look older than they were. Tamir didn’t resent Jacob—he would have been Jacob, given the choice—but he had lost some of the lightness necessary to appreciate someone as light as his cousin. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that ubiquitous New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one.
After his service, Tamir was finally free to live on his own terms. He became hugely ambitious, in the sense of wanting to make shitloads of money and buy loads of shit. He dropped out of Technion after a year and founded the first of a series of high-tech startups. Almost all of them were flops, but it doesn’t take many non-flops for you to make your first five million. Jacob was too jealous to allow Tamir the pleasure of explaining what his companies did, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that, like most Israeli high tech, they applied military technologies to civilian life.
Tamir’s homes and cars and ego and girlfriends’ breasts got bigger every visit. Jacob put on a respectful face that revealed just the right amount of disapproval, but, in the end, all his emotional dog whistles were rendered pointless by Tamir’s emotional tone-deafness. Why couldn’t Jacob just be happy for his cousin’s happiness? Tamir was as good a person as just about anyone whose great success made his good-enough values increasingly difficult to act on. It’s confusing to have more than you need. Who could blame him?
Jacob could. Jacob could because he had less than he needed—he was an honorable, ambitious, near-broke novelist who barely ever wrote. Nothing was getting bigger in his life—it was a constant struggle to maintain the sizes he’d established—and people without fancy material possessions have their fancy values to flaunt.
Isaac had always favored Tamir. Jacob could never figure out why. Isaac seemed to have serious problems with all his post-bar-mitzvah relatives, very much including those who forced their children to Skype with him once a week, and took him to doctors, and drove him to distant supermarkets where one could buy six tins of baking powder for the price of five. Everyone ignored Isaac, but no one less than Jacob, and no one more than Tamir. Yet Isaac would have traded six Jacobs for five Tamirs.
Maybe it was the distance that Isaac loved. Maybe the absence allowed for a mythology, while Jacob was cursed to be judged by the increments he fell short of perfect menschiness.
Jacob tried to persuade Tamir to come and see Isaac before he moved to the Jewish Home. But Tamir denied the significance of the event. “I’ve moved six times in the last ten years,” he e-mailed, although like this, “iv mvd 6 tms n lst 10 yrs,” as if English were as vowel-less as Hebrew. Or as if there were no possible way for him to give less of a shit.
“Sure,” Jacob wrote back, “but never to an assisted-living facility.”
“I’ll come when he dies, O.K.?”
Tamir managed to pull three rolling suitcases behind him while carrying two duty-free bags overflowing with—what? What dignity-free doodie could he possibly need? A wading pool of cologne? Twenty thousand cigarettes? A massive plastic M&M filled with tiny chocolate M&M’s?
The surprise upon seeing him never diminished. Here was someone with whom Jacob shared more genetic material than just about anyone else on earth, and yet how many passersby would even guess they were related? Tamir’s skin color could be explained by exposure to the sun, and the differences in their builds attributed to diet and exercise and will power, but what about his sharp jaw, his overhanging brow? What about the size of his feet, his perfect eyesight, his ability to grow a full beard while a bagel toasted?
He went right to Jacob, like an Iron Dome interceptor, took him into his arms, kissed him with his full mouth, then held him at arm’s length. He squeezed Jacob’s shoulders and looked him up and down, as if he were contemplating eating or raping him.
“Apparently, we aren’t children anymore!”
“Even our children aren’t children.”
Tamir’s chest was broad and firm. It would have made a good surface on which someone like Jacob could write about someone like Tamir.
“What’s your shirt mean?” Jacob asked.
“Funny, no?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure I get it.”
“ ‘You look like I need a drink.’ You know, you look like I need a drink.”
“What, like, you’re so ugly I need a drink? Or I can see, reflected in your expression, my own need for alcohol?”
Tamir turned to his fourteen-year-old son, Barak, and said, “Didn’t I tell you?”
Barak nodded and laughed, and Jacob didn’t know what that meant, either.
Hugs were exchanged all around. Tamir lifted Irv off the ground, pushing a small fart out of him—an anal Heimlich.
“I made you fart!” Tamir said, pumping a fist.
“Just some gas,” Irv said—a distinction without a difference, as Jacob’s shrink, Dr. Silvers, would say.
“I’m going to make you fart again!”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
Tamir wrapped his arms around Irv and lifted him back into the air with a firmer squeeze. And again it worked, this time even better—if you applied a very specific definition of “better.” Tamir put him down, took a deep breath, then opened his arms once more.
“This time you shit.”
Irv backed away.
Tamir laughed heartily and said, “Joking, joking!”
Everyone who wasn’t Irv laughed.
Then Tamir pulled Barak forward, mussed his hair, and said, “Look at this one. He’s a man, no?”
“Man” was exactly the right word. Barak was towering, cut from Jerusalem stone, with the kind of pecs you could have bounced pocket change off, if it weren’t for the forest of thrice-curled hair so dense that all that entered it was deposited for good.
“Max!” Tamir said, turning his sights on the boy.
“Affirmative.”
Jacob gave an embarrassed chuckle: “Affirmative? Really?”
“It just came out,” Max said, smelling his own blood.
Tamir gave him a once-over and said, “You look like a vegetarian.”
“Pescatarian,” Max said.
“You eat meat,” Jacob said.
“I know. But I look like a pescatarian.”
Barak gave Max a punch to the chest.
“Ouch! What the—”
“Joking,” Barak said. “Joking.”
Max rubbed at his chest. “Your joke fractured my sternum.”
“Food?” Tamir asked, slapping his paunch.
“I thought maybe we’d head to the house and—”
“Let the man eat,” Irv said, creating sides by choosing one of them.
“Why the hell not,” Jacob said, remembering that Kafka quote: “In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.”
Tamir surveyed the airport terminal and clapped his hands. “Panda Express! The best!”
He got sweet-and-sour pork. Irv did everything he could to conceal his displeasure, but his everything wasn’t too formidable.
“You know where you can get the best Italian food in the world right now?” Tamir asked, stabbing a piece of pork.
“Italy?”
“Israel.”
“I’ve heard that,” Irv said.
Jacob couldn’t let such a preposterous statement go unchallenged. “You mean the best Italian food outside of Italy.”
“No,” he said, cracking the knuckles of his forkless hand simply by making a fist and opening it. “I’m telling you the best Italian food being cooked right now is being cooked in Israel.”
“That’s definitionally impossible. Like saying the best German beer is Israeli.”
“It’s called Goldstar.”
“Which I love,” Irv said.
“You don’t even drink beer.”
“But when I do.”
“Let me ask you something,” Tamir said. “Where do they make the best bagels in the world?”
“New York.”
“I agree. The best bagels in the world are being made in New York. Now let me ask you, is a bagel a Jewish food?”
“Depends on what you mean by that.”
“Is a bagel a Jewish food in the same way that pasta is an Italian food?”
“In a similar way.”
“And let me also ask you, is Israel the Jewish homeland?”
“Israel is the Jewish state.”
Tamir straightened in his seat.
“That wasn’t the part of my argument you were supposed to disagree with.”
Irv shot Jacob a look. “Of course it’s the Jewish homeland.”
“It depends on what you mean by ‘homeland,’ ” Jacob said. “If you mean ancestral homeland—”
“What do you mean?” Tamir asked.
“I mean the place my family comes from.”
“Which is?”
“Galicia.”
“But before that.”
“What, Africa? It’s arbitrary. We could go back to the trees, or the ocean, if we wanted. Some go back to Eden. You pick Israel. I pick Galicia.”
“You feel Galician?”
“I feel American.”
“I feel Jewish,” Irv said.
“The truth,” Tamir said to Jacob, winking as he popped the last piece of pork into his mouth, “is you feel Julia’s titties.”
Apropos of nothing, Max asked, “Do you think the bathroom is clean?”
Jacob wondered if Max’s question, his desire to get away, was apropos of some knowledge, or intuition, that his father hadn’t touched his mother’s breasts in months.
“It’s a bathroom,” Tamir said.
“I’ll just wait until we get home.”
“If you have to go, go,” Jacob said. “It’s not good to hold it.”
“Says who?” Irv asked, making and taking a side.
“Says your prostate.”
“You think my prostate speaks to you?”
“I don’t have to go,” Max said.
“It’s good to hold it,” Tamir said. “It’s like a . . . what do you call it? Not a kugel . . .”
“Give it a shot, O.K., Max? Just in case.”
“Let the kid not go,” Irv said. And to Tamir, “A Kegel. And you’re absolutely right.”
“_I _’ll go,” Jacob said. “You know why? Because I care about my prostate.”
“Maybe you should marry it,” Max said.
Jacob didn’t have to go, but he went. He stood there at the urinal, an asshole with an exposed penis, passing a few moments to further his absence of a point, and just in case.
A man his father’s age was urinating beside him. His pee came out in bursts, as if from a lawn sprinkler, and to Jacob’s unaccredited ear it sounded like a symptom. When the man let out a small grunt, Jacob reflexively glanced over, and they exchanged the briefest of smiles before remembering where they were: a place where exactly one extremely fleeting moment of acknowledgment was tolerable. But Jacob had the strong sensation that he knew this person. He often had that feeling at urinals, but this time he was sure, as he always was. Where had he seen that face before? A teacher from grade school? One of the boys’ teachers? One of his father’s friends? He was momentarily convinced that this stranger was a figure in one of Julia’s old family photos from Eastern Europe, and that he had travelled through time to deliver a warning. And then it hit him: Spielberg. Once the thought appeared, there was no doubting or suppressing it. Of course it was him. Jacob was standing, his penis exposed, next to Steven Spielberg, whose penis was exposed. What were the odds?
Jacob had grown up, as had every Jew in the last quarter of the twentieth century, under Spielberg’s wing. Rather, in the shadow of his wing. He had seen “E.T.” four nights in a row, each time through his fingers as the bike chase reached a climax so delicious it was literally unbearable. He had seen “Indiana Jones” and the next one, and the next one. Tried to sit through “Always.” Nobody’s perfect. Not until he makes “Schindler’s List,” at which point he is not even he anymore but representative of them. Them? The murdered millions. No, representative of us. The Unmurdered. But “Schindler” wasn’t for us. It was for them. Not the Murdered, of course. They can’t watch movies. It was for all of them who weren’t us: the goyim. Because thanks to Spielberg, into whose bank account the general public was compelled to make annual deposits, we finally had a way to force them to look at our absence, to rub their noses in the German shepherd’s shit.
Jacob had found the movie schmaltzy and overblown, flirting with kitsch. But he had been profoundly moved. Irv had denounced the impulse to tell an uplifting Holocaust story, to give, for all intents and purposes, a statistically negligible happy ending generated by that statistically negligible of species, the good German. But even he had been moved to his limits. Isaac couldn’t have been more moved: You see, you see what was done to us—to mine parents, to mine brothers, to me, you see? Everyone was moved, and everyone was convinced that being moved was the ultimate aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical experience.
Jacob was going to have to cop a look at Spielberg’s junk. The only question was on what pretext.
Every annual physical ended with Dr. Schlesinger kneeling in front of Jacob, cupping Jacob’s balls, and asking him to turn his head and cough. That experience seemed to be universal, and universally inexplicable, among men. But coughing and turning one’s head had something to do with genitals. The logic wasn’t airtight, but it felt right. Jacob held his balls, coughed, and turned.
The size didn’t make an impression—Spielberg was no longer, shorter, wider, or narrower than most doughy Jewish grandfathers. Neither was he particularly bananaed, pendular, reticulated, light bulbish, reptilian, laminar, mushroomed, varicosey, hook-nosed, or cockeyed. What was notable was what wasn’t missing: his penis was uncircumcised. Jacob had had precious little exposure to the visual atrocity that is an intact penis, and so wouldn’t bet his life on what he saw—and the stakes felt that high—but he knew enough to know that he had to look again. But, though urinal etiquette forgives a greeting, and the cough might have been a passable alibi for the glance, there was simply no way to return to the scene without propositioning sex, and even in a world in which Spielberg hadn’t made “A.I.,” that wasn’t going to happen.
Jacob flushed (his face and the urinal), washed too quickly to accomplish
anything, and scrambled back out to the others.
“You’re never going to believe who I just peed beside.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
“Close. Spielberg.”
“Who’s that?” Tamir asked.
“You’re serious?”
“What?”
“Spielberg. Steven Spielberg.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Give me a break,” Jacob said, unsure, as ever, to what extent Tamir was performing. Whatever else could be said about him, Tamir was smart, worldly, and restless. But, whatever else could be said about him, he was foolish, solipsistic, and self-satisfied. If he had a sense of humor, it was drier than matzo meal. Which enabled him to practice a kind of psychological acupuncture on Jacob: Did a needle just enter me? Does it hurt? Is this complete bullshit? He couldn’t have been serious about Israeli Italian food, could he? About not having heard of Spielberg? Totally impossible, and entirely possible.
“That’s heavy,” Irv said.
“And the heaviest part?” Jacob leaned in and whispered, “He’s not circumcised.”
Max threw his hands into the air. “What, did you kiss his weiner in a bathroom stall?”
“Who is this Spielberg?” Tamir asked.
“We were at urinals, Max.” And just to be clear: “And of course I didn’t kiss his weiner.”
“That simply cannot be right,” Irv said.
“I know. But I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Why were your own eyes checking out another man’s penis?” Max asked.
“Because he’s Steven Spielberg.”
“Why won’t someone tell me who this person is?” Tamir said.
“Because I don’t believe that you don’t know who he is.”
“Why would I pretend?”
“Because it’s your bizarre Israeli way of diminishing the achievements of American Jews.”
“And why would I want to do that?”
“You’d have to tell me.”
“O.K.,” Tamir said, calmly wiping the remnants of six packets of duck sauce from the corners of his mouth. “Whatever you say.” He got up and headed in the direction of the condiments bar.
“You have to go back in and be sure,” Irv said. “Introduce yourself.”
“You will do no such thing,” Max said, exactly as his mother would have.
Irv closed his eyes and said, “My core has been shaken.”
“I know.”
“What are we to believe?”
“I know.”
“All the while we thought his Holocaust schlock was compensating for the Holocaust.”
“Now it’s schlock?”
“It was always schlock,” Irv said. “But it was our schlock.”
“It’s not as if he isn’t Jewi—”
But Jacob couldn’t finish the sentence. Or he didn’t need to. As soon as the fragment of the possibility entered the world, there was no room for anything else.
“I need to sit down,” Irv said.
“You are sitting down,” Max told him.
Irv rested his head in his hands and said, “If God had wanted us to be uncircumcised, he wouldn’t have invented smegma.”
In silence, they watched dozens of people balancing overstuffed trays weave and dodge and never touch. And then, several minutes later, Tamir came back. They’d been too preoccupied by their apocalyptic speculations to notice how long he was gone.
“So here’s the deal,” he said.
“What deal?”
“He has problems with urinary retention.”
“He?”
“Steve.”
Irv clapped his cheeks and squealed as if it were his first visit to the American Girl flagship store.
“I can see why you assumed I would know who he is. Very impressive résumé. What can I say? I don’t watch a lot of movies. There’s no money in watching movies. A lot in making them, though. Do you know that he’s worth more than three billion dollars? Billion with a ‘b’?”
“Really?”
“He had no reason to lie to me.”
“But why did he have reason to share?”
“I asked.”
“How much he’s worth?”
“Yeah.”
“And you probably asked if he’s circumcised, right?”
“I did.”
Jacob embraced Tamir. He hadn’t meant to. His arms simply reached for him. It wasn’t that Tamir had gathered the piece of information. It was that he had all the qualities that Jacob lacked and didn’t want but desperately missed: the brashness, the fearlessness where fear was not required, the fearlessness where fear was required, the giving of no shits.
“Tamir, you are a beautiful human being.”
“So . . . ?” Irv begged.
Tamir turned to Jacob.
“He knows you, by the way. He didn’t recognize you, but when I mentioned your name he said he read your first book. He said he considered optioning it.”
“He did?”
“That’s what he said.”
“If Spielberg had made a film out of that book, I’d—”
“Exhume the lede,” Irv said. “Is he short-sleeved?”
Tamir jiggled his soda cup, freeing the ice cubes from their group hug.
“Tamir?”
“We agreed it would be funnier if I didn’t tell you.”
“We?”
“Steve and I.”
“We’re mishpacha,” Irv pleaded.
“Yes. And if you can’t keep secrets from your family, whom can you keep secrets from?”
“So I emancipate myself from the family. Now tell me.”
Tamir scraped the remaining lo mein from his bowl and said, “I’ll tell Max. An early bar-mitzvah present. What he chooses to do with the information is his own business.”
“You know I’m eleven,” Max said.
“Of course,” he said with a wink. “This is a very early present.”
He put his hands on Max’s shoulders and brought him close. His lips almost touching Max’s ear, he whispered. And Max smiled. He laughed.
As they walked to the parking lot, Irv kept signalling for Jacob to take one of Tamir’s bags, and Jacob kept signalling that Tamir wouldn’t let him. And Jacob signalled to Max that he should talk to Barak, and Max signalled back that his father should—smoke through a stoma?
“I’ll drive,” Jacob said to Irv as they approached the car.
“Why?”
“Because I’ll drive.”
“I thought the highway made you anxious?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jacob said, flashing Tamir a smile of dismissiveness. And then, to Irv, with force, “Give me the keys.”
In the car, Tamir pressed the sole of his right foot against the windshield, parachuting his scrotum for any infrared traffic cameras they might pass. He braided his fingers behind his head—more knuckle-cracking—nodded, and began: “To tell you the truth, I’m making a lot of money.” Here we go, Jacob thought. Tamir impersonating a bad impersonator of Tamir. “High tech has gone crazy, and I was smart enough—I was brave enough—to get into a lot of things at the right moment. That’s the secret to success: the combination of intelligence and bravery. Because there are a lot of intelligent people in the world, and a lot of brave people in the world, but when you go searching for people who are intelligent and brave you don’t find yourself surrounded. And I was lucky. Look, Jake—” Why did he think it was O.K. to capriciously shear Jacob’s name? It was an act of aggression, even if Jacob couldn’t parse it, even if he loved it. “I don’t believe in luck, but only a fool wouldn’t acknowledge the importance of being in the right place at the right time. You make your own luck. That’s what I say.”
“That’s also what everyone else says,” Jacob pointed out.
“What about Israel?” Irv asked from the back seat.
“Israel? Israel is thriving. Walk down the streets of Tel Aviv one night. There’s more culture per square foot than anywhere in the world. Look at our economy. We’re sixty-eight years old—younger than you, Irv. We have only eight million people, no natural resources, and are engaged in perpetual war. All that, and we file more patents every year than any other country, including yours.”
“Things are going well,” Irv confirmed.
“Things have never been better anywhere, at any time, than they are in Israel right now. Look, Rivka and I are in a triplex now—three floors. We have seven bedrooms—”
“Eight,” Barak corrected.
“He’s right. It’s eight. Eight bedrooms, even though we’re only four people now that Noam is in the Army. Two bedrooms a person. But I like the space. It’s not that we have so many guests, although we have a lot, but I like to stretch out: a couple of rooms for my business ventures; Rivka is insane about meditating; the kids have air hockey, gaming systems. They have a foosball table from Germany. I have an assistant who has nothing to do with my business ventures but just helps with life-style things, and I said, ‘Go find me the best foosball table in the world.’ And she did. She has an amazing body, and she knows how to find anything. You could leave this foosball table in the rain for a year and it would be fine.”
“I thought it never rains in Israel,” Jacob said.
“It does,” Tamir said. “But you’re right, the climate is ideal. So when we were walking through the new apartment I turned to Rivka and said, ‘Eh?’ And she said, ‘What do we need with an apartment this big?’ I told her what I’ll tell you now: the more you buy, the more you have to sell.”
“You should really write a book,” Jacob said to Tamir, taking a tiny needle from his back and placing it in Tamir’s.
“So should you,” Irv said, taking that tiny needle from Tamir’s back and placing it in Jacob’s aorta.
“And I told her something else: it’s always going to be rich people who have money, so you want to have what the rich people will want to have. The more expensive something is, the more expensive it will become.”
“But that’s just saying that expensive things are expensive,” Jacob pointed out.
“Exactly.”
“Well,” Jacob’s better angel ventriloquized, “I’d love to see it someday.”
“And the bathrooms . . . The bathrooms would blow your mind. Everything made in Germany.”
Irv groaned.
“My assistant—the personal one, with the body—found me a toilet with a camera that recognizes who is approaching and adjusts to preset settings. Rivka likes a cool seat. I want my ass hairs singed. Barak faces backward.”
“I don’t face backward,” Barak said, punching his father’s shoulder.
“You think I’m crazy,” Tamir said. “You’re probably judging me, even laughing at me in your mind, but I’m the one whose toilet warms itself for me while my refrigerator does the shopping online.”
Jacob didn’t think Tamir was crazy. He thought his need to exhibit and press the case for his happiness was unconvincing and sad. And understandable. That was where the emotional logic broke down. All that should have led Jacob to dislike Tamir brought him closer—not with envy but with love. He loved Tamir’s brazen weakness. He loved his inability—his unwillingness—to hide his ugliness. Such exposure was what Jacob most wanted, and most withheld from himself.
“And what about the situation?” Irv asked.
“What situation?”
“Safety.”
“What? Food safety?”
“The Arabs.”
“Which ones?”
“Iran. Syria. Hezbollah. Hamas. The Islamic State. Al Qaeda.”
“The Iranians aren’t Arabs. They’re Persian.”
“I’m sure that helps you sleep at night.”
“Things could be better, things could be worse. Beyond that, you know what I know.”
“So how does it feel over there?” Irv pressed.
“Would I be happier if Noam were a d.j. for the Army radio station? Sure. But I feel fine. Barak, you feel fine?”
“I feel cool.”
“You think Israel’s going to bomb Iran?”
“I don’t know,” Tamir said. “What do you think?”
“Do you think they should?” Jacob asked.
“Of course they should,” Irv said.
“If there were a way to bomb Iran without bombing Iran, that would be good. Any other course will be bad.”
“So what do you think they should do?” Jacob asked.
“He just told you,” Irv said. “He thinks they should bomb those Stone Age psychopaths back into the pre-Stone Age.”
“I think you should bomb them,” Tamir told Irv.
“America?”
“You specifically. You could use some of those biological weapons you displayed earlier.”
Everyone laughed at that, especially Max.
All Tamir wanted to talk about was money—the average Israeli income, the size of his own easy fortune, the unrivalled quality of life in that fingernail clipping of oppressively hot homeland hemmed in by psychopathic enemies.
All Irv wanted to talk about was the situation—when was Israel going to make us proud by making itself safe? Was there any inside piece of information to be dangled above friends in the dining room at the American Enterprise Institute? Wasn’t it high time we—you—did something about this or that?
All Jacob wanted to talk about was living close to death: Had Tamir killed anyone? Had Noam? Did either have any stories of fellow-soldiers torturing or being tortured? What was the worst thing that either had seen with his own eyes? The Jews Jacob had grown up with adjusted their aviator glasses with only the muscles in their faces while analyzing Fugazi lyrics as they pushed in the lighters of their hand-me-down Volvo wagons. They were miserable at sports but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights but sought arguments. They were defined by, and proud of, their flagrant weakness. Yet they were driven wild by the muscular application of the Jewish brain: Maccabees rolling under the bellies of armored Greek elephants to stab the soft undersides; Mossad missions whose odds, means, and results verged on magic; computer viruses so preternaturally complicated and smart they couldn’t not leave Jewish fingerprints. You think you can mess with us, world? You think you can push us around? You can. But brain beats muscle as surely as paper beats rock, and we’re gonna learn you; we’re gonna sit at our desks and be the last ones standing.
But, for all that Tamir, Irv, and Jacob wanted to talk about, the conversation thinned, or went internal. They drove the George Washington Parkway in silence, A.C. battling the humidity that seeped through the invisible points of entry, past Gravelly Point, where aviation buffs holding radio scanners, and fathers holding sons, could almost reach up and touch the landing gear of jumbo jets; the Capitol on the right, across the brown Potomac. They crossed Memorial Bridge, between the golden horses, circled around the backside of the Lincoln Memorial, the steps that seemed to lead to nothing, and slid into the flow of Rock Creek Parkway. After passing under the terrace of the Kennedy Center and beside the teeth of the Watergate balconies, they followed the curves of the creek away from the outposts of the capital’s civilization.
“The National Zoo,” Tamir said, looking up from his phone.
“The National Zoo,” Jacob echoed.
Jacob searched the rearview mirror for Max—children learn to trust the permanence of their parents, parents learn to doubt the permanence of their children. And there he was, an eleven-year-old boy falling asleep as he had since he was a baby: his body straight, his gaze directly in front of him, his eyes closing so slowly that their movement was imperceptible—only by looking away and looking back could you register any change. The physicality of it, the fragility evoked by such slowness, was perplexing and beautiful.
“I think about that night all the time,” Jacob said, knowing already, in the first hours of Tamir’s visit, that he wouldn’t have whatever human quality was required to tell Tamir that his marriage was failing, or how dishevelled and disappointed he had become, how agnostic—how far from that best night of his life his life had travelled.
Thirty years earlier, Tamir and his parents had come to D.C. for Jacob’s bar mitzvah. The day before the event, the extended Bloch clan had schvitzed through their underwear at the zoo. 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 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 already there, and it was free.
That night, a few hours after going to bed, Tamir shook Jacob into wakefulness.
“What are you doing?” Jacob asked.
“Let’s go,” Tamir whispered.
“What?”
“Come on.”
“I’m asleep.”
“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. 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. 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 that 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 like 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 lions and the large concrete letters: Z-O-O.
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 just 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, he 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 had always been 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?
They reached the lion enclosure. “I haven’t stopped thinking about this since we were here this morning,” Tamir said.
“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.”
“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 seriously fucking crazy person to be able to jump in and then climb back out. He’d obviously found it earlier in the day, maybe even measured it with his eyes, maybe—certainly—let the scene play out 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 Christ.”
“They’re asleep,” he said.
“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 blow job 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.
It happened so quickly, and took forever. Tamir jumped down, landing with a thud he obviously hadn’t anticipated, because his eyes met Jacob’s with a flash of panic. 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 Tamir, and 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.”
“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.”
“But I have glasses and acne.”
That small joke defused nothing, made nothing almost sensible.
Tamir punched Jacob in the chest. He punched hard enough to send Jacob 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 placed 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.”
He did. But he was afraid.
“Come,” Tamir said, leading Jacob to the wall. “It’s easy. It will take only a second. 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.”
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 that he could barely hold on.
“Let go,” Tamir said.
He shook his head and let go.
And then he was on the ground, inside the lions’ den.
This is the opposite of me.
There, on the dirt, in the middle of the simulated savanna, in the middle of the nation’s capital, he felt something so irrepressible and true that it would either save him or ruin his life.
Three years later, he would touch his tongue to the tongue of a girl for whom he would happily have cut off his arms, if only she had let him. The following year, an air bag would tear his retina 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 tag-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 a new life came out of her body—so 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 lions’ 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.
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 up Jacob’s glasses.
Without saying a word, Tamir 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. 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.
Tamir was crying, too.
Thirty years later, at Jacob’s kitchen table, the night after Isaac was buried, 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.
“A lot has happened,” Jacob said, as Tamir opened two beers. “But nothing like that.”
“There are versions of happiness.”
“I know. Don’t expect too much. Learn to love the numbness.”
“Did you ever stop to ask yourself why you put such an emphasis on feeling?”
“What else would one put an emphasis on?”
A wind passed over the house, and deep inside the range hood the damper flapped.
“It was a hard day,” Tamir said.
“Yes, but the day has been decades.”
“But it’s felt like only a few seconds, right?”
“Whenever someone asks me how I’m doing, I find myself saying, ‘I’m going through a passage.’ Everything is a transition, a stop on the way to the destination, turbulence. 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.”
Tamir leaned over and in a low voice, almost whispering, said, “You are innocent.”
“What?” Jacob said.
“You are innocent.”
“Thank you.”
He pulled back and said, “No, like, too trusting. Too childlike.”
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? He 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 who could let such things go.
Julia wasn’t home. His kids were supposed to be asleep in their rooms, but Sam had seven apps open on his iPad, and Max was looking up words from “The Catcher in the Rye” that he didn’t understand—pissed, as Holden had taught him to be, that he wasn’t yet allowed to have a device of his own and 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 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, since 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 per cent water, he’d done as his father had taught him to do, and doubted. Water simply wasn’t heavy enough for that to be true. Then he’d done as his father had taught him to do and sought the truth from his father. Irv filled a trash bin with the garden hose and challenged Jacob to lift it. As Jacob struggled, Irv said, “You should feel blood.” ♦
