Here I Am (31 page)

“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 earth-moving 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.

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?