Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  We spent our lives making livings.

  Sometimes he would go to the airport after work. I asked him to get me papers and magazines. At first this was because I wanted to learn American expressions. But I gave up on that. I still asked him to go. I knew that he needed my permission to go. It was not out of kindness that I sent him.

  We tried so hard. We were always trying to help each other. But not because we were helpless. He needed to get things for me, just as I needed to get things for him. It gave us purpose. Sometimes I would ask him for something that I did not even want, just to let him get it for me. We spent our days trying to help each other help each other. I would get his slippers. He would make my tea. I would turn up the heat so he could turn up the air conditioner so I could turn up the heat. His hands didn’t lose their roughness.

  It was Halloween. Our first in the apartment. The doorbell rang. Your grandfather was at the airport. I opened the door and a child was standing there in a white sheet with holes cut out for her eyes. Trick or treat! she said. I took a step back.

  Who is that?

  I’m a ghost!

  What are you wearing that for?

  It’s Halloween!

  I don’t know what that means.

  Kids dress up and knock on doors, and you give them candy.

  I don’t have any candy.

  It’s Hal-lo-ween!

  I told her to wait. I went to the bedroom. I took an envelope from underneath the mattress. Our savings. Our living. I took out two one-hundred-dollar bills and put them in a different envelope, which I gave to the ghost.

  I was paying her to go away.

  I closed the door and turned off the lights so no more children would ring our bell.

  The animals must have understood, because they surrounded me and pressed into me. I did not say anything when your grandfather came home that night. I thanked him for the papers and magazines. I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

  The days passed one at a time. And sometimes less than one at a time. We looked at each other and drew maps in our heads. I told him my eyes were crummy, because I wanted him to pay attention to me. We made safe places in the apartment where you could go and not exist.

  I would have done anything for him. Maybe that was my sickness. We made love in nothing places and turned the lights off. It felt like crying. We could not look at each other. It always had to be from behind. Like that first time. And I knew that he wasn’t thinking of me.

  He squeezed my sides so hard, and pushed so hard. Like he was trying to push through me to somewhere else.

  Why does anyone ever make love?

  A year passed. Another year. Another year. Another.

  We made livings.

  I never forgot about the ghost.

  I needed a child.

  What does it mean to need a child?

  One morning I awoke and understood the hole in the middle of me. I realized that I could compromise my life, but not life after me. I couldn’t explain it. The need came before explanations.

  It was not out of weakness that I made it happen, but it was not out of strength either. It was out of need. I needed a child.

  I tried to hide it from him. I tried to wait to tell him until it was too late to do anything about it. It was the ultimate secret. Life. I kept it safe inside me. I took it around. Like the apartment was inside his books. I wore loose shirts. I sat with pillows on my lap. I was naked only in nothing places.

  But I could not keep it a secret forever.

  We were lying in bed in the darkness. I did not know how to say it. I knew, but I could not say it. I took one of his daybooks from the bedside table.

  The apartment had never been darker.

  I turned on the lamp.

  It became bright around us.

  The apartment became darker.

  I wrote, I am pregnant.

  I handed it to him. He read it.

  He took the pen and wrote, How could that have happened?

  I wrote, I made it happen.

  He wrote, But we had a rule.

  The next page was a doorknob.

  I turned the page and wrote, I broke the rule.

  He sat up in bed. I don’t know how much time passed.

  He wrote, Everything will be OK.

  I told him OK wasn’t enough.

  Everything will be OK perfect.

  I told him there was nothing left for a lie to protect.

  Everything will be OK perfect.

  I started to cry.

  It was the first time I had ever cried in front of him. It felt like making love.

  I asked him something I had needed to know since we made that first nothing place years before.

  What are we? Something or nothing?

  He covered my face with his hands and lifted them off.

  I did not know what that meant.

  The next morning I woke up with a terrible cold.

  I did not know if the baby was making me sick or if your grandfather was.

  When I said goodbye to him, before he left for the airport, I lifted his suitcase and it felt heavy.

  That was how I knew he was leaving me.

  I wondered if I should stop him. If I should wrestle him to the ground and force him to love me. I wanted to hold his shoulders down and shout into his face.

  I followed him there.

  I watched him all morning. I did not know how to talk to him. I watched him write in his book. I watched him ask people what time it was, although each person just pointed at the big yellow clock on the wall.

  It was so strange to see him from a distance. So small. I cared for him in the world as I could not care for him in the apartment. I wanted to protect him from all of the terrible things that no one deserves.

  I got very close to him. Just behind him. I watched him write, It’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life. I stepped back. I could not be that close. Not even then. From behind a column I watched him write more, and ask for the time, and rub his rough hands against his knees. Yes and No.

  I watched him get in the line to buy tickets.

  I wondered, When am I going to stop him from leaving?

  I didn’t know how to ask him or tell him or beg him.

  When he got to the front of the line I went up to him.

  I touched his shoulder.

  I can see, I said. What a stupid thing to say. My eyes are crummy, but I can see.

  What are you doing here? he wrote with his hands.

  I felt suddenly shy. I was not used to shy. I was used to shame.

  Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want.

  Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

  I know you are leaving, I said.

  You have to go home, he wrote. You should be in bed.

  OK, I said. I did not know how to say what I needed to say. Let me take you home.

  No. I do not want to go home.

  He wrote, You’re being crazy. You’re going to catch a cold.

  I already have a cold.

  You are going to catch a colder.

  I could not believe he was making a joke. And I could not believe I laughed.

  The laughter sent my thoughts to our kitchen table, where we would laugh and laugh. That table was where we were close to each other. It was instead of our bed. Everything in our apartment got confused. We would eat on the coffee table in the living room instead of at the dining room table. We wanted to be near the window. We filled the body of the grandfather clock with his empty daybooks, as if they were time itself. We put his filled daybooks in the bathtub of the second bathroom, because we never used it. I sleepwalk when I sleep at all. Once I turned on the shower. Some of the books floated, and some stayed where they were. When I awoke the next morning I saw what I had done. The water was gray with all of his days.

  I am n
ot being crazy, I told him.

  You have to go home.

  I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can’t bake any more bread.

  You never baked bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.

  Then it’s like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won’t be joking? And what would that look like? And how would that feel? When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.

  I spent my life learning to feel less.

  Every day I felt less.

  Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

  You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

  He hid his face in the covers of his daybook, as if the covers were his hands. He cried. For whom was he crying?

  For Anna?

  For his parents?

  For me?

  For himself?

  I pulled the book from him. It was wet with tears running down the pages, as if the book itself were crying. He hid his face in his hands. Let me see you cry, I told him.

  I do not want to hurt you, he said by shaking his head left to right.

  It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me, I told him. Let me see you cry.

  He lowered his hands. On one cheek it said YES backward. On one cheek it said NO backward. He was still looking down. Now the tears did not run down his cheeks, but fell from his eyes to the ground. Let me see you cry, I said. I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel that I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.

  He raised his head and looked at me.

  I am not angry with you, I told him.

  You must be.

  I am the one who broke the rule.

  But I am the one who made the rule you couldn’t live with.

  My thoughts are wandering, Oskar. They are going to Dresden, to my mother’s pearls, damp with the sweat of her neck. My thoughts are going up the sleeve of my father’s overcoat. His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.

  Why are you leaving me?

  He wrote, I do not know how to live.

  I do not know either, but I am trying.

  I do not know how to try.

  There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

  I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

  My thoughts are going to my childhood, Oskar. To when I was a girl. I am sitting here thinking about fistfuls of pebbles, and the first time I noticed hairs under my arms.

  My thoughts are around my mother’s neck. Her pearls.

  When I first liked the smell of perfume, and how Anna and I would lie in the darkness of our bedroom, in the warmth of our bed.

  I told her one night what I had seen behind the shed behind our house.

  She made me promise never to speak a word about it. I promised her.

  Can I watch you kiss?

  Can you watch us kiss?

  You could tell me where you are going to kiss, and I could hide and watch.

  She laughed, which was how she said yes.

  We woke up in the middle of the night. I do not know who woke up first. Or if we woke up at the same time.

  What does it feel like? I asked her.

  What does what feel like?

  To kiss.

  She laughed.

  It feels wet, she said.

  I laughed.

  It feels wet and warm and very strange at first.

  I laughed.

  Like this, she said, and she grabbed the sides of my face and pulled me into her.

  I had never felt so in love in my life, and I have not felt so in love since.

  We were innocent.

  How could anything be more innocent than the two of us kissing in that bed?

  How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?

  I told him, I will try harder if you will stay.

  OK, he wrote.

  Just please do not leave me.

  OK.

  We never have to mention this.

  OK.

  I am thinking about shoes, for some reason. How many pairs I have worn in my life. And how many times my feet have slipped into and out of them. And how I put them at the foot of the bed, pointing away from the bed.

  My thoughts are going down a chimney and burning.

  Footsteps above. Frying onions. Clinking crystal.

  We were not rich, but there was nothing we wanted. From my bedroom window I watched the world. And I was safe from the world. I watched my father fall apart. The nearer the war came, the farther he went. Was that the only way he knew to protect us? He spent hours in his shed every night. Sometimes he would sleep in there. On the floor.

  He wanted to save the world. That’s what he was like. But he wouldn’t put our family in danger. That’s what he was like. He must have weighed my life against a life he might have been able to save. Or ten. Or one hundred. He must have decided that my life weighed more than one hundred lives.

  His hair turned gray that winter. I thought it was snow. He promised us that everything would be OK. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be OK. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

  It was the morning of the bombing that I decided to write back to the forced laborer. I do not know why I waited for so long, or what made me want to write to him then.

  He had asked me to include a photograph of myself. I did not have any photographs of myself that I liked. I understand, now, the tragedy of my childhood. It wasn’t the bombing. It was that I never once liked a photograph of myself. I couldn’t.

  I decided I would go to a photographer the next day and have a picture taken.

  That night I tried on all of my outfits in front of the mirror. I felt like an ugly movie star. I asked my mother to teach me about makeup. She didn’t ask why.

  She showed me how to rouge my cheeks. And how to paint my eyes. She had never touched my face so much. There had never been an excuse to.

  My forehead. My chin. My temples. My neck. Why was she crying?

  I left the unfinished letter on my desk.

  The paper helped our house burn.

  I should have sent it off with an ugly photograph.

  I should have sent off everything.

  The airport was filled with people coming and going. But it was only your grandfather and me.

  I took his daybook and searched its pages. I pointed at, How frustrating, how pathetic, how sad.

  He searched through the book and pointed at, The way you just handed me that knife.

  I pointed at, If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different.

  He pointed at, Sometimes one simply wants to disappear.

  I pointed at, There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

  He pointed at, How sad.

  I pointed at, And I wouldn’t say no to something sweet.

  He pointed at, Cried and cried and cried.<
br />
  I pointed at, Don’t cry.

  He pointed at, Broken and confused.

  I pointed at, So sad.

  He pointed at, Broken and confused.

  I pointed at, Something.

  He pointed at, Nothing.

  I pointed at, Something.

  Nobody pointed at, I love you.

  There was no way around it. We could not climb over it, or walk until we found its edge.

  I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently.

  I would change my life.

  I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me.

  I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself.

  I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them.

  What are we going to do? he wrote.

  It’s up to you, I said.

  He wrote, I want to go home.

  What is home to you?

  Home is the place with the most rules.

  I understood him.

  And we will have to make more rules, I said.

  To make it more of a home.

  Yes.

  OK.

  We went straight to the jewelry store. He left the suitcase in the back room. We sold a pair of emerald earrings that day. And a diamond engagement ring. And a gold bracelet for a little girl. And a watch for someone on his way to Brazil.

  That night we held each other in bed. He kissed me all over. I believed him. I was not stupid. I was his wife.

  The next morning he went to the airport. I didn’t dare feel his suitcase.

  I waited for him to come home.

  Hours passed. And minutes.

  I didn’t open the store at 11:00.

  I waited by the window. I still believed in him.

  I didn’t eat lunch.

  Seconds passed.

  The afternoon left. The evening came.

  I didn’t eat dinner.

  Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

  Your father kicked in my belly.

  What was he trying to tell me?

  I brought the birdcages to the windows.

  I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages.

  I poured the fish down the drain.

  I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars.

  I released the insects onto the street.

  And the reptiles.

  And the mice.