All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  ALL THIS LIFE

  Copyright © 2015 Joshua Mohr

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Mohr, Joshua.

  All this life : a novel / Joshua Mohr.

  pages ; cm

  1.Internet—Social aspects—Fiction. 2.Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3.Digital media—Fiction.I. Title.

  PS3613.O379A79 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2015005117

  Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Cover design by Debbie Berne

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  109878654321

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-629-2

  Can you feel my heartbeat?

  –NICK CAVE

  Contents

  Part 1: Inside The Search Engine

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part 2: Reset

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  ALL THIS LIFE

  The thing you need to realize about my equation E=mcdespaired is that no one has ever thought about psychology and thermodynamics and existentialism as they relate to mathematics before. Not even you, Albert, though I know technically you were a physicist, and I’m saying all this with the utmost respect to you and your work. For without you as my predecessor, I wouldn’t have been able to take your research to the next level. I never would have developed existential mathematics, which is really what my century needs. See, you were a product of your time, as we all are. Your E=mc2 brought us to nuclear fusion, which is the greatest and most treacherous advancement of your century. Back then, the world was only concerned with science and science and science. Modernity. Technology. Urbanization. And now my generation is paying the price for all that. You should see us now, aspiring to be computers. Machines are man’s best friend. You led us down a lonely road, one you wouldn’t have been able to foresee, but trust me, it’s bad here. It’s burning. We are all about to burn. And the question is: Why are we burning? Why is the earth heating up? Maybe it’s all the fossil fuels, the greenhouse gases. Cow farts are killing us. The methane. None of those are my areas of expertise, and I’m not invalidating those things as contributing forces. What I’m saying is those aren’t the ONLY factors. There’s one gigantic cause that no one talks about, and it’s the foundation of my equation, my E=mcdespaired: Human sadness is what’s heating up the earth. We are so somber, Albert, our lives are squared by despair and thus we all emit such a sad heat that our planet will torch unless we get it under control. Everything adds up. Pretty soon bodies will turn to ash and scribble the sky and mix with other people’s ashes and mix with other people’s and still mix with others, but what if there is a solution, a way to put off our doomsday, a way to repair our sadness? Wouldn’t that be a lovely fate? So I thought of you, thought that if you were to come back, we could work together. As equals. As colleagues. As heroes. I am conjuring you, Albert. This communication proves our minds are connected. I’ve been training for this. I am focused on bringing you back, sending this signal out to find you. I’ve liberated all my neurotransmitters from any societal incarcerations, and I can safely say that I am the only one on the planet capable of seeing this thing through. We need you more than ever. We need your expertise. Otherwise, I fear the worst. I am dedicated to our cause and need only a signal from you, a sign that will alert me to our work. I am blessed with fortitude. Lots of people have convictions yet most lack the resilience to face consequences. I will risk everything, Albert. I will bleed to keep this world uncremated.

  PART 1

  INSIDE THE SEARCH ENGINE

  1.

  It’s another brittle day, all of them inching over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, their typical trek to cluttered desks, schlepping with their hangovers, their NPR, carpools and pod-casts, prescription pills and nicotine patches, their high-def depressions, Lasik so they can see all their designer disaffections, lipstick smeared on bleached teeth, bags under their eyes or Botox time machines, bald spots or slick dye jobs, bellies wedged in pants or carved Pilates bodies, their urges to call in sick, their woulda coulda shouldas.

  More rationalizations and regrets running through the air than cell signals.

  No one wants to get to work. Even those claiming to enjoy their jobs still bristle at the idea of oozing into ergonomic chairs, reviving computer screens, feeling the day’s flickering chaos erupt on their faces.

  A couple extra hours of sleep. A half-day. Telecommuting. Something other than the full slog. The particulars of their jobs don’t even matter because all the variables lead to one delicate plea: Please give us a day off. A day to ourselves. A day to feel free. To be alive.

  But this is a morning without such clemency and so there they sit, in their Hybrids and leased sports cars and family sedans, eeking a couple toes on the accelerator before hitting the brake again.

  Bumper to bumper.

  A Bluetooth chain gang.

  The weather is perfect. No wind. No fog. Well, there is fog hanging out over the Pacific, but it hasn’t pushed in yet. The sun’s out, shining off the bridge’s bright orange paint.

  The posted speed limit is 45, which is a brutal joke at this time of day.

  It should say 4 or 5.

  Someone needs to fix that conjunction-less sign.

  Not only does the speed limit tease, so does the traffic zooming out of San Francisco, motoring next to them, by them, zipping along right at the 45-miles-per-hour clip. That drew some sighs from our commuters, pining for U-turns and quick getaways and sordid adventures.

  The bridge is one level, laid out in such a way that the traffic lanes are flanked by walkways teeming with tourists snapping selfies, joggers in fluorescent kicks, bicyclists in outfits that look like sausage casings. Buses dump out their international passengers so they can run out to the middle of the bridge, oohing and aahing at Alcatraz and Angel Island, the 360˚ view, the ocean gleaming on one side, the Marin headlands looking lush from the north, San Francisco sparkling, immaculate, vibrant.

  It’s always hectic here on the bridge, always full, always rushing, even in traffic. Because these days you don’t just work at work. Technology, that noose. Everyone is reachable all the time. Including traffic jams. Devices bring emails and conference calls and video chats in an uninterruptable river.

  A peek in the window of some cars shows mouths screaming into headsets, forlorn expressions on faces as to-do lists multiply, workdays grow into evenings
into all-nighters, weeks into weekends. Life its own traffic jam.

  A white Prius houses a father and his fourteen-year-old son. They keep away from each other in the morning. Or Jake keeps away from his dad, his surly chauffeur. Jake knows the sad hierarchy: A Google search of his father’s favorite things would not return the boy as a page one result. Jake has never understood what makes him so moody as they drive in together, and yet there’s really no way his father could explain it. No way for the father to unpack adult disappointment. It’s impossible for the father to convey that he’d expected his life to amount to more than some middling stake in a PR firm, and it’s too late to fix.

  How can he tell his only child that commuting is a kind of daily desolation, his mind always flapping to the past even when it’s the last thing he wants to remember? Being young: when he released his potential and passions and possibilities up into the air, freeing them like doves, his whole life ahead to watch all his dreams come true. How can he tell his son that becoming an adult is learning to live with your failures, learning to dodge these dying birds as they thump back to earth?

  How do you say that to your boy?

  You don’t. You commute. You make your boss happy. You collect those paychecks and keep your eyes peeled for dead doves.

  The father turns the volume up on an AM sports talk show, the next caller saying, “I’d like to discuss how our quarterback is an effin’ moron,” and the father settles into another unfulfilling distraction.

  Jake, never trying to disrupt their frail truce, spends his time filming things out the window with his iPhone. Stealing frames from people’s lives. Poaching and posting them online, his pieces of property. Yesterday, he captured a woman flossing her teeth while steering with her elbows, the day before a guy with little scissors trimming his moustache like a bonsai tree.

  So far, today’s material has been a bunch of stinkers. The highlight has been an old lady fighting with a fast food wrapper, frustrated with how it constricts her breakfast sandwich. Jake’s even stooped to trailing some seagulls bouncing along the bridge’s railing, and he hates those nature shots, thinks they’re for old people, the Discovery Channel backwash his mom’s always watching, when she’s in town.

  Jake likes capturing real human life, snatching seconds away from those who don’t suspect an audience. The other day, for example, he captured a guy’s catastrophic ponytail waving in a breeze, looking like a windsock; Jake immediately set it to music, Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” then uploaded it to YouTube.

  309 views so far.

  Not bad.

  But today’s turning around for Jake.

  Because right as he’s bemoaning all his benign options—the fast food wrapper, the boring gulls pooping and perching on the rail—that’s when he sees the band.

  They’re just coming onto the bridge’s walkway on the San Francisco side, by the tollbooths; they’re moving toward Jake. Playing their instruments, forming a roaming pack. Jake counts twelve of them, three trumpet players, two saxophonists, two clarinets, two trombones, a snare drum, a bass drum, and a tuba player.

  They’re all done up in wild outfits, clothed in mismatched prints and patterns and clashing colors.

  Are they clowns? he wonders. No, their faces aren’t painted. They just have no fashion sense.

  He hits record, holding his phone up toward them, zooming in. The brass band is too far away for Jake to make out their music, but they are all playing. Sort of dancing, shuffling along, moving their instruments back and forth in time with the song. They seem to be all ages, all ethnicities. White, black, and brown. He spots one bald man and two women with gray hair, the rest looking in their thirties or forties. Wait. He spies one girl who doesn’t look that much older than Jake. She’s tall and skinny, wearing purple striped pants with a paisley shirt, a butterfly collar. She’s playing the clarinet.

  The most predominant noise comes from two men banging on the drums, one beating out a quick pattern on a snare, the other producing a slow rumble on a bass drum connected to his chest. It’s the size of a tractor tire, and his mallets hit either side of this musical wheel, deep thunderous booms that remind Jake of dinosaurs walking in the movies.

  There are also certain loud notes exploding from the horns—the trumpets—little staccato bursts, punctuating something, but he can’t tell what they’re playing, what all the instruments’ contributions add up to yet, too far away to hear a melody.

  Soon, though.

  In anticipation, he says, “Turn down the radio, Dad,” kneeing the back of the driver’s seat.

  The father, engrossed in a discussion of the 49ers pass defense, just grunts.

  “There’s a band out there,” says Jake.

  “Not now.”

  “I need to hear them.”

  “Later.”

  At that, the boy loses interest in luring his father into this strange display on the bridge. Jake is a banner ad that the father won’t click. He’s a pop-up. He’s something equally as annoying: He’s a son in the backseat of his father’s car, talking.

  Jake rolls down the back window, stretching his arm out, hoping he’ll be able to hear the brass band’s music and not the steady chug of traffic. But he can’t hear them yet, still about forty feet away. He frames the band as they bop and weave with their instruments, the sun glaring off of the horns, refracting little rainbows.

  The band stays huddled together, forming an oval, like a lung turned on its side. They take synchronized steps, marching like soldiers, dressed like hipster gypsies. Jake can’t believe his luck finding this, filming this. An emoji of his face would convey an overjoyed anxiety, with the head gritting his teeth with a furrowed brow and flames burning in each eye socket.

  Jake’s father lurches the car in small chunks every thirty seconds or so, the bridge even more gridlocked than normal. A couple hours ago, somebody ran out of gas, and the morning commute never recovered; he learned this from a traffic update during a commercial break from his sports talk. The empty car sat there for half an hour until Caltrans removed it, traffic trying to spread around the stalled vehicle like water around a rock. But it really screwed things up. His dad actually admires the stuck car, this idea of stopping, of quitting.

  Jake fidgets in his seat.

  His arm reaches as far as it can out the window, limb extending his iPhone, trying to get as close as he can.

  The outline, the shadow, wisps of the brass band’s music finally reach him. It’s a fast song, something peppy and vivacious. The kind you might hear a marching band play. All major chords with a dance beat.

  But it’s the way they move that fascinates Jake. Their oval, their lung. As they get closer, he notices that they move like a breathing entity, a subtlety he couldn’t make out before. They position themselves right next to one another in the oval and then they move away a few steps, the lung expanding, swelling. Then they come together into a mass again and this continues, in and out, this breathing. The brass band does this and still keeps making forward progress.

  “What the hell?” his dad says, finally taking notice.

  “What song is that they’re playing?”

  His dad turns down the sports talk. “Roll up your window.”

  Jake pulls his arm in, cranks the window up halfway. Knows better than to tussle with his father so early in the morning. But he keeps filming.

  The brass band plays its song and moves in its inhaling and exhaling choreography, and one of the trumpet players, a man, breaks free from the formation, moving over to the bridge’s orange railing.

  Throwing his trumpet over the side.

  Climbing the rail.

  Folding his hands in prayer.

  Leaping toward the ocean.

  Jake watches and records, records and watches, and it’s not really happening, there’s no way this is really happening, so he keeps filming. The brass band stops its forward progress. Jake has to crane his head backward to watch it through the car’s back window because his
father’s ride inches toward the toll plaza.

  The brass band staying huddled, keeping its music going.

  Then another runs from the pack. The paisley shirt, the butterfly collar, throwing her clarinet and heaving her body over the side.

  Then another trumpet player jumps.

  Then one of the saxophonists.

  Then a trombonist.

  “They’re jumping, Dad,” says Jake.

  The father adjusts the rearview and side mirrors to get a look at the scene. He takes in the huddle. Sees one of them break away, lob a trombone over the railing, following it quickly.

  The father stops the car, opens his door in the middle of traffic. He is the first person to do this, standing and gawking. He is the empty car; he is out of gas. He holds everyone up as he hunts his head for an interpretation, a way to understand what he’s witnessing. He twists all these things he’s seeing up into various balloon animals, attempting to form a shape that makes sense.

  Two people behind him honk. He doesn’t acknowledge their protests, only stares at the remaining members of the brass band. A few other honks come and he points toward the musicians, a gesture meaning Are you seeing what I’m seeing and why is this happening and what does it mean?

  Other people exit their cars, too, facing the brass band, standing like zombies in the road. The people who had been on the walkway, joggers and bicyclists and tour bus explorers, all stop and give the band a wide berth.

  Shouldn’t there be a good Samaritan among them?

  Shouldn’t there be at least one hero on the bridge?

  But should has no place in a moment like this.

  Better reactions don’t matter.

  There’s only what happens, what these people do. And the watching.

  Nobody feels a calling brought on by adrenaline, by belief, by programming, by fear, compelling them into action.

  The bridge still, except for the band.

  Another woman tosses her trumpet over the side and follows.

  “Are they dying?” Jake says from the backseat.