Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer Read Free Book Online Page A

kindergarten, he used to give everything away. Any friend who would come over for a playdate would inevitably leave with a plastic car or stuffed animal. Any money that he somehow acquired—change found on the sidewalk, a five-dollar bill from his grandfather for having made a persuasive argument—would be offered to Julia in a checkout line, or to Jacob at a parking meter. He invited Sam to take as much of his dessert as he liked. “Go on,” he would say when Sam demurred. “Take, take.”
    Max wasn’t responding to the needs of others, which he seemed as capable of ignoring as any child. And he wasn’t being generous—that would require the knowledge of giving, which was precisely what he lacked. Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max’s conduit wasn’t bigger than anyone else’s, it was simply unclogged.
    What had been a source of pride for Jacob and Julia became a source of concern: Max will be left with nothing. Careful not to suggest that there was anything wrong with the way he lived, they gently introduced notions of worth, and the finitude of resources. At first he resisted—“There’s always more”—but as children do, he came to understand that there was something wrong with the way he lived.
    He became obsessed with comparative value. “Could you get one house for forty cars?” (“It depends on the house and the cars.”) Or, “Would you rather have a handful of diamonds or a houseful of silver? A hand the size of yours, a house the size of this one.” He started trading compulsively: toys with friends, belongings with Sam, deeds with his parents. (“If I eat half of this kale, will you let me go to bed twenty minutes later?”) He wanted to know if it was better to be a FedEx driver or a music teacher, and became frustrated when his parents challenged his use of
better
. He wanted to know if it was OK that his dad had to pay for an extra ticket when they took his friend Clive to the zoo. “I’m wasting my life!”he would often exclaim when not engaged in an activity. He crawled into bed with them, too early one morning, wanting to know if that’s what being dead is.
    “What’s that, baby?”
    “Having nothing.”
    The withholding of sexual needs between Jacob and Julia was the most primitive and frustrating kind of withdrawal, but hardly the most damaging. The movement toward estrangement—from each other, and from themselves—took place in far smaller, subtler steps. They were always becoming closer in the realm of doing—coordinating the ever-expanding routines, talking and texting more (and more efficiently), cleaning together the mess made by the children they made—and farther in feeling.
    Once, Julia bought some lingerie. She’d placed her palm atop the soft stack, not because she had any interest, but because, like her mother, she couldn’t control the impulse to touch merchandise in stores. She took five hundred dollars out of an ATM so it wouldn’t show up on the credit card bill. She wanted to share it with Jacob, and tried her best to find or create the right occasion. One night, after the kids were asleep, she put on the panties. She wanted to descend the stairs, cap Jacob’s pen, not say a word, but communicate:
Look how I can look
. But she couldn’t. Just as she couldn’t bring herself to put them on before bed, fearing his not noticing. Just as she couldn’t even lay them on the bed for him to come upon and ask about. Just as she couldn’t return them.
    Once, Jacob wrote a line he thought was the best he’d ever written. He wanted to share it with Julia—not because he was proud of himself, but because he wanted to see if it was still possible to reach her as he used to, to inspire her to say something like “You’re my writer.” He took the pages into the kitchen, laid them facedown on the