All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  “Close your eyes,” his dad says.

  Several more witnesses hop out of their vehicles. All standing in the middle of the bridge, watching while another band member hoists his tuba, climbs the rail, and springs off backward.

  The other clarinet launches like a spear. Its player also, falling headfirst toward the Pacific.

  There are only three musicians left—one saxophonist, the snare and bass drum players. They keep performing, though their sound is so thin. Their lung almost empty.

  Almost all of the commuters are out of their cars, standing transfixed, some still holding travel mugs or half-eaten bagels, some making phone calls to 911.

  The person playing the snare drum lets it fly over the railing. It looks like a hatbox.

  A man yells out, “Don’t do it.”

  The drummer doesn’t answer, follows shortly behind his instrument.

  The saxophone flies off the bridge, spinning like a boomerang, but instead of coming back, it arcs down to the sea. So does its player.

  The last one left plays the bass drum, the tractor tire; he smacks it a few more times on both sides, beat slowing and finally stopping. Dropping the mallets on the walkway. Disconnecting the drum from his person. Carrying it over to the railing and letting it tumble from his arms.

  “Please, don’t,” a woman calls to him, a jogger locked in place about fifteen feet away.

  “This is a celebration of life,” he says.

  “Stay alive,” a commuter shouts from her stopped vehicle.

  “I will be alive even after I do this,” he says, climbing the railing, standing on top of it. He has a good sense of balance and stays there, perched on the rounded guardrail for about seven seconds.

  Then he folds his hands in prayer, pushes off with his feet, falling toward his band.

  Jake gets out of the car and stands next to his father, who’s crying. The boy has never seen his dad weep, and it almost makes him start, too, which surprises Jake because he doesn’t understand what he’d even be crying about.

  “What do we do now, Dad?” he asks.

  The father doesn’t answer. There are no words to make sense of any of this. He wants to call the whole scene surreal, but does that work? Is this surreal? Standing there on the bridge, it seems to the father that it’s exactly the opposite. It’s real, painfully real, painfully human. Thinking, We’re the only species capable of doing something like this. The father wipes his face, imagines another one of his dead dreams landing at his feet.

  Some people get back in their vehicles, sitting with their hands on steering wheels, no idea what to do next.

  Others climb over the short fence between the road and the walkway to peep over the edge and stare at the ocean. Are they hoping to see the band swimming there? Hoping the members of the brass band have all survived and after retrieving their instruments pick up the song where they left off? Hoping for a happy ending?

  “What do we do now, Dad?” Jake says again.

  “We go,” he says.

  “Can I look over the edge, too?”

  The sirens of cop cars and ambulances in the distance.

  “No.”

  “I want to see.”

  “You’ve seen enough,” says the father.

  “I want to see over the edge.”

  “You have,” the father says.

  He ushers the boy into the car’s backseat, trying to sequester his child away from this disaster, but he doesn’t know that the suicides exist in the car, too. Jake fires up his phone and watches the clip again.

  Traffic isn’t moving.

  Getting out of there is impossible.

  Everything is blocked off until the authorities ascertain what happened.

  The father calls his office and tries to explain all this to his assistant, though he’s talking to himself mostly, fumbling for a pat interpretation, hoping one might flutter into his mind like a flake of ash.

  Jake sits in the backseat. His new emoji would be a head with a can opener spinning around its crown and peeling up the skull and plucking out that brain and whirling it around on an index finger like a basketball.

  He keeps reliving the moment, watching his phone as the band slowly travels toward him, serenading the world before leaping off. Once the video ends he starts back at the beginning. Looping. Jake running on this clip like it’s a treadmill. Dying to get this to YouTube, but unable to disconnect his consciousness from it long enough to post.

  Start to finish.

  Start to finish.

  Start.

  2.

  Already 99˚ and not even 10 AM. Another pointless scorcher in the Nevada desert. Another day for Sara to gaze out the window of her cinderblock bedroom, in her cinderblock house, in her cinderblock life. Sara looks out the window and wonders how these people found such a vulgar conviction, marching to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and killing themselves.

  This morning, Sara is like everyone else learning about the brass band. It’s all any of the news hubs talk about. She opens CNN’s app on her burner and watches clips, experts retching cranky speculations about what triggered this public display of violence; all these know-it-alls trying to construct psychologies that offer context and meaning, making crazy leaps in logic but none of the talking heads call them on it.

  She wishes someone had the brazenness to tell the truth, not just about the brass band, their “reasons” for jumping, etc., but the truth about everything: We’ll never know. So stop asking. There are no answers.

  Things. Just. Happen.

  It all makes Sara laugh a bit. Not at the people who jumped. No way. Sara understands that impulse to explore—the what-if seductions of what may or may not be waiting for us after we die. It’s normal to flirt with these things, she thinks, but you never act on it. You don’t mortgage tomorrow because today is streaked in shit.

  She learned too young how unfair the world can be. How you should under no circumstances wonder if life can get any worse, because it always can. There’s no such thing as the bottom. Not really. You might not be able to sink any deeper but you can sprawl down there, exist horizontally.

  That’s what happened to Sara. First, her junior high school boyfriend, Rodney, her perfect Rodney, lost in a ridiculous mishap. They had been inseparable, kindred spirits, who couldn’t stop kissing, couldn’t stop laughing and stargazing, sleepovers in a tent outside Sara’s house, roughing it on the tough desert floor. But one afternoon in the park changed all that, an accident turning Rodney into someone else, barely able to talk. Sara can remember crying to her parents, using the real F-word, FAIR. Saying to them, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” and they consoled their child, cooed platitudes at her and tried to help her heal, to move on, you can still be his friend, they said, he’s still alive. Mother and father tried to help her until they couldn’t. Until it was they who weren’t alive. A car accident. Both gone. Just like that.

  Sara was fifteen when they died, three years ago. Fair had nothing to do with it. Fair has nothing to do with anything. Things happen. Period. And you careen from one event to the next.

  These are things you know with certainty when your parents die. When they’re taken away and you’re fifteen and the courts, in all their voluminous, wide wisdom, give your older brother custody, just because he’s eighteen years old. Hank, who’s never met a steroid he won’t shoot and a fight he won’t delight in winning, and he’s in charge. Are you absolutely sure that’s a good idea?

  They were sure. Good enough for the courts, so it had to be good enough for Sara.

  So she wouldn’t have jumped off the Golden Gate today, but she empathizes with the instinct, that itch to wonder whether things might be better; and if that possibility, no matter how remote, offers a kind of sanctuary you can’t crawl inside here, Sara says So be it, jump.

  She keeps scrolling around CNN, clicking links, following paths. This latest article produces a detail that surprises her:

  SAN FRANCISCO (AP)—The morning co
mmute turned tragic earlier today when several people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Multiple witnesses confirmed that twelve people playing musical instruments walked to the middle of the bridge and took turns leaping over the railing.

  “They threw their instruments over the side and jumped,” an eyewitness said.

  The Coast Guard responded to the scene and found one survivor in the ocean. She is in critical condition at a local hospital.

  “She’s one of the lucky ones,” a spokesperson said. “Not many people survive that fall.”

  The woman’s identity has not yet been released.

  There have been over 1,500 documented suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge since its opening in 1937.

  Sara shakes her head, trying to fathom surviving something like that. You think you’re going to some place better. You think your days of being trapped are done. You think you’ll come to feel inspired and free and pure. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. But you expect to at least go on the journey. This poor jumper has to awaken back here, in this life she tried so desperately to abandon.

  No beautiful getaway.

  Just things happening.

  Sara needs a break from all these doomsday proclamations, so she puts her phone down on the bed next to her, peeks out the window at the desert’s long shadows, the sun still making its way to high noon to release its rays in full hellish glory. Sara sees all the scrawny leafless trees, the mesquite, the acacia, sticking out of burned earth. For years, she’d stare at these sad, stuck things and it was obvious that Sara would escape this place; she wasn’t going to spend her whole life cooking in Traurig. No way. All she had to do was turn eighteen and she was out, but here’s the rub: That eighteenth birthday came and went six months ago, so what’s she doing here? Why is Sara still planted here?

  She can tell herself next week, next month, can tell herself she’s saving up money. And those can all have merit. But this can be equally true: She can wake up and be fifty years old, divorced—at least once—with a child—at least one—still waiting tables, still hoping to flee her cinderblock life but doing nothing to dilute that dream into her reality.

  But that jumper—she can’t shake that jumper—waking up, thinking she’s somewhere fantastic, some place erased of all pain. She comes to, enthralled to understand the complexities of this new reality, but there are restraints on her wrists. There’s a nurse in the room. There’s a doctor. There’s a psych eval. There’s a prescription. There’s a therapist. There’s a battery of consequences for her recklessness. There’s a new reality, sure, but not the one she yearned for.

  Sara keeps chewing on this, masticating away but not making much progress.

  Sara having no idea what a luxury it is to chomp on the story from a safe remove, until that distance dissipated.

  Until she’s the thing being devoured.

  Sara suddenly getting all these texts.

  The first one is from her friend Kristine and says: Um . . . hey, slut?

  It’s not unheard of for Kristine to call her such names in raunchy camaraderie, so Sara texts back, Who gave you a UTI this time?

  Did you make a sexy vid with Nat?

  Why?

  Ask the Internet.

  Oh shit.

  If there were a customer service center that regulated the whole information superhighway, she would have dialed it immediately. But it’s the Wild West. Utter anarchy. No one’s really in charge, so long as you’re not trying to coerce a kid into bed or buying weapons. No one would help her track down a measly sex tape unless she were famous with mountains of money, lawyers with lockjaw. And without any help hunting the clip down and snatching it away, Sara’s helpless. The sex tape rushes and ricochets around, completely out of control.

  Their movie is already moving like water, washing over the world. On one site for a few seconds and someone else sharing it, then it’s onto another, momentum building between mouse clicks and posts, skywriting Sara’s naked body across an online horizon, one that everyone can marvel at simultaneously. No countries. No continents. No time zones. The zeroes and ones of the sex tape coursing through the earth’s circulatory system.

  The texts keep pouring in:

  Sara, what are you doing?

  Are you okay, Sara?

  Are you crazy, Sara?

  What are you thinking, Sara?

  What if Hank sees this?

  Did you know Nat made this tape of you?

  How will you live with this, Sara?

  They were asking questions and so was Sara. Why Nat would do this to her, Why would he hurt me, weren’t we falling in love?

  And if love is a bit of an overstatement, didn’t these types of tapes find their way online only after a couple breaks up? Some sexual retaliation? As far as Sara knows, they’re still dating, or had been until he first sent the clip out into the wild.

  Because last time she checked, this isn’t how love works—or almost-love. Call her a stickler, but she doesn’t think it functions on dupes and deceptions. Its engine won’t even turn over with only lies in the tank.

  But apparently Nat has his own definition of almost-love, and it includes dubious ingredients like malice, selfishness, abject cruelty. That’s the only explanation for why he’d post their sex tape. At least he could have asked. And is this his way of breaking up with her?

  Sara snatches her cell and asks Nat, Why?

  She stares at it and stares at it.

  Nothing coming back.

  This is a savage violation, one that Sara should have seen coming: This is what happens when she starts believing in someone. It all turns out to be so much worse than she ever thought possible. And she’s right. What Nat did is digital rape, sharing their sex without permission, making it public consumption.

  Sara wishes she could claim she had no idea about it. A hidden camera, maybe, the tape made without her knowledge, but those would be hollow claims. She was into it. They were into it. They’d watch it together and have even more amazing sex and what was the harm in that? They were eighteen, their bodies looked the best they’ll ever be and, fine, she’ll say it: Making the tape turned her on. Granted, one of the major liquors in this aphrodisiac was consent. It was theirs, they owned it, and they shared it, only with each other.

  More texts pour in, some people even traveling back to the twentieth century and calling Sara. The point is that people knew about it. People she knew knew about it. The whole town of Traurig, every cinderblocked rectangle of it had access to seeing Sara screw, and word of the sex tape spread like a common cold.

  She can’t say she wasn’t warned. Nat liked to phone flirt from the get-go. He was tall and skinny and pale, and Kristine, one of her friends from work, called him Frankenstein. As in, “Are you sexting with Frankenstein’s monster again?”

  “I think it’s hot,” said Sara.

  “Are you sending him pics?”

  “Only when he sends them first.”

  “Dirty ones?”

  Sara shot her a look like Duh, what kind of pictures do you think we’d send each other?

  “Sexting with monsters is dangerous,” the friend said.

  Which at the time seemed funny to Sara. A joke. Some sexual gallows humor—they were young and being controversial and loved every minute of it, consequences seeming too remote to even entertain their fallacies.

  The critical problem, at least in terms of chronology, is Sara needs to be at work in half an hour. The job that’s already in precarious standing. Her manager, Moses, has said, “I have a three-strike policy and you’re on your twelfth. But what can I do? When you’re on, you are my best server. It’s that other Sara who shows up every once in a while that I don’t like.”

  That other Sara.

  So one solution is to call in sick, roll the dice again hoping Moses is of the mind for strike thirteen. That’s risky, though. Jobs don’t grow on trees. Hell, nothing grows on trees in Traurig.

  But okay, what if only some pervs saw the sex tape? What if guy
s like Moses, upstanding citizens and whatnot, probably too old for porn anyway, had no idea about it? What if going to work will not only give her a pocketful of tips but a few hours’ asylum from bridge jumpers and betrayals?

  Sara is not high-strung, not prone to panic, but damn if she doesn’t feel weird getting ready for work. Damn if there’s not some odd energy emanating from her chest, her heart, and spreading through her limbs, a low hum in her hands and feet, a few watts making them all sweaty. She’s anxious to get to work and it’s the last place she wants to end up, and her breath is bad, for some reason, despite the fact she just brushed her teeth. So she brushes them again, scrubs that tongue. It’s hard to think of anything other than Nat, still not answering her text, still out there, her unexplained mystery.

  Things happen, she tells herself, heartbeat cranking, the hum in her hands getting more volts running into them.

  She puts on her uniform. She can’t be late, otherwise why not call in sick? Moses will be equally pissed, late or a no-show.

  She gets in her car and motors down the cul-de-sac; it’s not a dirt road, but its pavement has seen better days, charred by the sun and badly creviced. There are about twenty houses, all cinderblock palaces, topped with metal roofs. Front yards are mixtures of scrub brush and cacti, sand and dirt and rocks. The occasional yucca stands up above the rest like a celebrity.

  She speeds down the block, notices a couple hillbillies sitting in their yard, tying lures on their fishing poles. She has her music pinned and is driving a little fast and her heart should really slow down, yes, it doesn’t need to beat so many times a minute, please calm down.

  She pulls into the diner’s parking lot. She sits there. She notices that she’s breathing, which is something everybody does all the time but you don’t necessarily realize you’re doing it, you breathe—that’s what you do—that’s how people stay alive, and what the hell is she going to tell her brother, Hank, about the sex tape and why the hell did Nat do this in the first place and she should have listened to Kristine’s public service announcement, sexting with monsters is dangerous. Sexting with monsters can kill you.