Here I Am Read Free Page B

pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.’ ”
    Jacob rose, folded the paper, tucked it in his pocket, and said, “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

HERE I AMN’T
    While Sam waited on the bench outside Rabbi Singer’s office, Samanta approached the bimah. Sam had built it from digital old-growth elm salvaged from the bottom of a digital freshwater lake that he’d dug and in which he’d submerged a small forest a year ago when, like one of those innocent dogs on one of those existence-of-evil electrified floors, he’d learned helplessness.
    “It doesn’t matter whether or not you want a bar mitzvah,” his dad had said. “But try to think of that as inspiring.”
    Why was he so obsessed with animal cruelty, anyway? Why was he irrepressibly drawn to videos that he knew would only reinforce his convictions about humankind? He spent enormous amounts of time seeking violence: animal cruelty, but also animal fights (organized by humans, and in nature), animals attacking people, bullfighters getting what they deserved, skateboarders getting what they deserved, athletes’ knees bending the wrong way, bum fights, helicopter beheadings, and more: garbage disposal accidents, car antenna lobotomies, civilian victims of chemical warfare, masturbation injuries, Shia heads on Sunni fence posts, botched surgeries, steam-burn victims, instructional videos about cutting away the questionable parts of roadkill (as if there were unquestionable parts), instructional videos about painless suicide (as if that weren’t definitionally impossible), and so on, and on and on. The images were sharp objects he used against himself: there was so much in him that he needed to move to the outside, but the process required wounds.
    On the silent drive home, he explored the chapel that he’d builtaround the bimah: the three-toed claw feet of the weightless two-ton pews; the Gordian-knotted fringes at the ends of the rag-rug runner down the aisle; the prayer books, each word of which was continually refreshed with its synonym:
the Lord is One…the Sovereign is Alone…the Absolute is Abandoned…
Left to go long enough, the prayers would, if only for an instant, return to their origins. But even if the average life expectancy continued to increase by one year with each passing year, it would take forever for people to live forever, so probably no one would ever see it.
    The pressure of Sam’s unreleased insides often took the shape of unshared, useless brilliance, and while his dad, brothers, and grandparents ate lunch downstairs, while they were
obviously
talking about what he’d been accused of and what to do with him, while he was supposed to be memorizing the Hebrew words and Jewish melody of a haftorah whose meaning no one ever bothered with, he created morphing stained-glass windows. The window to Samanta’s right depicted baby Moses being swept down the Nile, between mothers. It was a loop, but stitched together to evoke an endless journey.
    Sam thought it would be cool if the chapel’s largest window were an ongoing depiction of the Jewish Present, so instead of learning the idiotic and utterly useless Ashrei, he wrote a script that pulled keywords from a Jewish-related Google News feed, ran them through a jury-rigged video search (which combed out redundancies, red herrings, and anti-Semitic propaganda), ran
those
results through a jury-rigged video filter (which scaled the images to best conform to the round frame and color-adjusted for continuity), and projected them onto the window. It was better in his head than in reality, but everything was.
    Around the chapel he’d built the synagogue itself: the labyrinth of literally infinitely forking hallways; the aranciata-dispensing water fountains, and urinals made of the bones of ivory poachers; the stashes of genuinely loving, nonmisogynistic face-sitting porn in the storage closet in the Men’s Club social hall; the ironic handicapped spot in the stroller parking lot; the Memorial