Here I Am Read online

  > Today Samanta becomes a woman.

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

  > She’s having her period?

  > Imagine thousands of phones washed up on the beach.

  > Love letters in digital bottles.

  > Why imagine? Go to India.

  > Today she’s becoming a Jewish woman.

  > I’m on an Amtrak, too!

  > A Jewish woman how?

  > More like hate mail.

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

  > Israel is the fucking worst.

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

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

  > Jewish people are the worst.

  > Knock knock.

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

  > Who’s there?

  > To remember them.

  > Not six million Jews!

  > ?

  > Dying laughing.

  > Anti-Semite!

  > Dying, anyway.

  > I’m Jewish!

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

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

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

  She said, “I think it’s neat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  > What kind of PDF?

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

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

  > I read that, too.

  > Why do I find it so incredibly sad?

  > Anyone have a NexTek thumb drive?

  > Because you love waffles.

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

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

  > They only work for a few weeks.

  > So hide and cry your maple tears.

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

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

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

  > What song?

  > I want to do something massive, but what?

  > Forget it, I figured it out.

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

  > Transfer is taking forever.

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

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

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

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

  > ?

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

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

  > What if it had been torn down?

  > And there would be ghosts, too.

  > Ghosts how?

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

  > Is this thing ever gonna start?

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

  “Go away.”

  “Fine.”

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

  “Just going away.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A plate of food.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Toast is food.”

  “Why the hell would I want toast?”

  “To plug your ears?”

  Sam gestured for Max to come into the room.

  “They’re talking about me?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Bad things?”

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

  “Is Dad disappointed?”

  “I’d say so.”

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

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

  “What?”

  “Disappointed in me?”

  “I thought that’s what you meant.”

  “He can be such a pussy.”

  “Yeah, but Mom can be such a dick.”

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

  “Huh?”

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

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

  “Obviously.”

  “Really?”

  “What are you, ignorant?”

  “Is that like stupid?”

  “Not-knowing.”

  “No.”

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

  “For what?”

  “Choose. To live with.”

  Max didn’t like this.

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

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

  Max hated this.

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

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

  “Do they send you to jail for that?”

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

  “I’d also miss Mom.”

  “What about her?”

  “That she’s her.”

  Sam didn’t like this.

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

  “For you?”

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

  Sam hated this.

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

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

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

  “It’s a joke.”

  “Ah.”

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

  “Must have been pretty spectacular.”

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

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah. And it was a dog.”

  “Argus?”

  “You just screwed up my timing.”

  “Do the last line again.”

  “I’ll just start from the beginning.”

  “OK.”

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

  “Jeez!”

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

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

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

  “Yeah.”

  “Shih. Tzu.”

  “Thanks, Max.”

  “Am I being annoying?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I am.”

  “Just the opposite.”

  “What’s the opposite of annoying?”

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

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

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

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

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Maybe you don’t get it.”

  EPITOME

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

  “Yeah, buddy?”

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

  “And you were just thinking about that?”

  “No. All day.”

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

  “Where’d you come from?” Jacob asked.

  “Mom’s vagina hole,” Benjy said.

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

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

  “Which part?”

  “I’m going to die?”

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

  “I’m going to die!”

  “Many, many years from now.”

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

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

  “Why would it be worse to be Argus?”

  “You know, one paw in the oven.”

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

  “What happened?”

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

  “Dad says I’m gonna die.”

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

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

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

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

  “Why did I get a boo-boo, Mama?”

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

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

  “You must have fallen,” Julia said.

  “Why?”

  “There is literally no boo-boo.”

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

  “It’s the epitome of life,” Max said.

  “Nice vocab, Max.”

  “Epitome?” Benjy asked.

  “Essence of,” Deborah said.

  “Why is falling the epitome of life?”

  “It isn’t,” Jacob said.

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

  “Why?” Benjy asked.