All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  Naomi, what to say about her? For years, Paul considered them to be in a state of pre-divorce. No one left but neither of them was happy. Paul thought they’d slog on into retirement, take cruises and ignore each other, embrace every devastating cliché.

  It was Naomi, god bless her soul, who saved them from that slow ruin. They were both asleep one night, and out of nowhere she sat up in bed, saying, “I’m being eaten alive here.”

  “What?” said a groggy Paul, an Ambien swimming in his bloodstream.

  “A mosquito.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m almost sucked dry, Paul,” she said. “Do something.”

  The light was switched on. A magazine was folded in half and poor Paul danced around the room, trying to smear the bloated mosquito’s corpse all over the cover of The New Yorker, but he couldn’t catch him, the mosquito veering, zigzagging, Paul hopelessly late with every Ambien-slowed swing.

  “It’s up by the light,” she said.

  “I see it.”

  “So hit it.”

  “I’m trying.”

  Whiff. Whiff.

  Paul, embarrassingly, was out of breath.

  “When?” she said.

  “Do you want to?” he asked.

  She nodded and stood up on the bed. He handed her the magazine. Paul lay down on his side and watched her stalk the insect. It took a matter of ten seconds for her to hit it with the magazine, the mosquito landing on their comforter, stunned, still trying to fly. Naomi, careful not to squash it on their duvet, picked the mosquito up and put it inside the magazine, then smushed the pages together.

  “Do you want to see?” she said.

  She opened the magazine up, showing the bloody smudge over a skyscraper of text.

  “I hadn’t finished reading that one,” said Paul.

  “You can still read it,” Naomi said.

  There was something in that moment, an inherent conversation, scripted lines they were supposed to say. Maybe it’s only Paul’s memory plumping it up, but he swears there was an electricity, the two of them sitting on the bed with the blood smear on the page.

  He sat there for what felt like a hundred hours until Naomi said, “We need to make a change.”

  “Okay.”

  “We forgot how to be married.”

  “What?”

  “When we had Jake,” she said. “We became parents and stopped being married.”

  It was true: The family took on an exclusionary geometry. It had shapes to it: Paul and Jake, Naomi and Jake, Paul and Naomi and Jake. But there was never any time when Paul and Naomi were together, and if they were it was only to discuss logistics, practicalities. They never had fun.

  “What can we do about it?” he asked.

  But all Naomi did was shake her head.

  Paul can still see her so vividly, the finality in her movement. It must have taken her years to work up the courage to quit their marriage, and it was right there in her swiveling face, left to right, right to left, We are through.

  The overhead light was turned off; the bloodied copy of The New Yorker was recycled.

  That was ten months ago. Now Paul lives in a condo, a sad stucco orphanage for wayward men, shamed divorcés. It’s only a couple miles from his former residence, where Jake lives with his mom. Normally, they share custody, but she’s in Bali for a few weeks with a new boyfriend, some tan asshole with an accent that sends Paul into a murderous rage every time he calls him mate. A murderous rage he’ll, of course, never act on. Unless there’s a fantasy murder league.

  Paul has six minutes before the fantasy draft kicks off and keeps Googling, sifting through various strategies, players to target. He has six minutes and there’s another pale ale in the fridge, and for a few seconds he feels like he’s forging these new friendships already—Paul and his pals—just by preparing himself to be an active member of their league, and all of this makes him feel hopeful.

  He clicks on a link that says “The perfect plan (for your draft)” and has another sip of beer. He’s not drafting pretend players; he’s drafting real friends.

  Paul smiles.

  That’s when he hears some strange thumping noises coming from upstairs, from Jake’s room.

  SOMETIMES HIS MOM—when she’s actually in town and not traveling with her new boyfriend—says that the world is an oyster. But that’s a stupid expression. That’s the kind of thing that maybe applied back in 1981 or something. Not now. No, oysters have nothing to do with the current state of things, and Jake knows exactly what the world is:

  The world is a search engine.

  Jake can type anything into the world’s search bar and scroll through pages of results. Limitless returns. Adventures coming in every denomination, every fetish. Any whim he can whip up.

  There’s no other conclusion for him to draw. Especially now. Right now. Jake clicks refresh compulsively, watching the views and comments multiply on his video’s YouTube page, all these citizens of the world coming to him. 827,148 people have viewed it already. And that’s not even mentioning how many times Jake personally has replayed it. Maybe he’s watched the brass band 827,148 times, too.

  So when he’s not clicking refresh, he clicks replay.

  And when he isn’t clicking replay, he simply stares at the scene, reliving it, time-traveling back to that morning on the bridge.

  Refresh . . . refresh . . .

  827,176.

  There are other posted videos of the disaster, but no one captured its entirety. Jake got the brass band’s approach, their shuffling along the walkway, their song; he got every person going over the edge. The other clips of it start when one or two of the brass band have already jumped. These are getting hits, too, but nowhere near as many as Jake’s.

  He’s a disaster shepherd, and this YouTube page and its contents are his flock. He nurtures them all. He owns this disaster, as any shepherd owns his sheep. Their deaths are his property.

  Refresh.

  827,192.

  The thing that’s happened to him today is that he’s building a personal ranking system of their jumps. He didn’t start off doing this on purpose, but slowly, view after view after view, he found himself looking forward to certain deaths more than others. Found himself being drawn to certain styles of going over the edge. For example, he cherished the saxophonist who launched his instrument like a boomerang, the gold thing shimmering off the bridge and slowly disappearing down, then its player following it.

  His favorite, though, is the tall, skinny woman, the one wearing the purple striped pants, the paisley shirt with a butterfly collar. How she hoists her clarinet like a javelin and stands admiring her toss before going after it.

  He wouldn’t tell anybody. About his ranking system. About how he’s built a hierarchy of suicides. No one would understand, or maybe they would but Jake won’t share it. He can’t. He’s learned not to open himself up to anybody at school. They already have plenty of ammo to heave at him because he’s always—as his mom says—“acting out.” He’s not, though. He’s not acting; he’s not out. He’s only being himself.

  Mom in Bali with Simon, and they probably don’t even know about the brass band. They don’t even know that Jake has captured these suicides, or maybe they’re a couple of his viewers. Maybe they watch it and wonder if the poster, username TheGreatJake, is the great Jake that they know.

  Or they’re snorkeling.

  Or they’re enjoying some time away from him.

  That’s what it feels like since his parents split up, that his parents don’t want him around, even though they show it differently. His mom always going on trips, weekends here, full weeks there, with Simon. Always trips only for adults, his mom says. “Us, honey. Simon and I.”

  And his dad, distracted, grunting, moping around, always ordering pizza; Jake is the only teenager in all the Bay Area tired of pizza. His dad is taking the divorce like somebody bucked off a bull, limping to get out of the way before the animal’s horns hit him.

&n
bsp; Whatever.

  Parents all have horns, he guesses.

  It’s nice to see how many people want to interact with him online.

  Refresh the page.

  827,211.

  With new comments.

  Most of these comments aren’t directed at him, per se. They’re reactions to seeing the suicides. Some are mean-spirited. Some are religious, supportive, tolerant. Some have nothing to do with the video, trolls posting things like “Meet sexy singles in your area.”

  But one of the new comments is directed straight at TheGreatJake:

  All comments (9,293)

  Noah911

  I feel SAD for whoever posted this.

  This is the one he fixates on. In the thousands of comments on his page—and Jake has read through them all many times—he can’t remember one that incites such an immediate reaction within him. There are others about ethics, about the moral decision to post the video in the first place, but these don’t burrow under Jake’s skin. They are only opinions and he shrugs them off and gets back to his flock.

  But I feel sad for whoever posted this is demeaning, like getting made fun of in the hall at school by a couple dudes and everyone else hears them and now the whole crowd is involved and laughing, except here the hallway is the whole Internet and Jake is getting mocked in Ecuador and Madagascar and Morocco and it’s not fair of Noah911 to do that.

  But this I feel sad for whoever posted this isn’t going away. It isn’t the usual Internet white noise. Jake feeling impaled by the word sad. People have called him much worse in the comments section, and yet all their pejoratives and hyperboles invalidated them, made them radio static. The simplicity of I feel sad tunnels through his defenses and cuts him, sadness mutating into ire. The boy feeling publicly humiliated, which will no doubt lead to more people disappearing from his life. His parents split up, and his mom’s always off with Simon and his dad is downstairs but there’s no connection between them, he could be down in Mexico and it would feel the same to Jake, and the kids at school don’t care about him and now Noah911 is turning his own flock against him, hitting him in a space that should be all his own, an online world where he is important and happy, this one portal to escape the puckered maw of reality.

  An emoji of Jake’s face would be a serrated saw hacking off his scalp and someone jamming a lit candle inside his head so he blazes like a jack-o-lantern.

  He wants to break something, which of course he’s going to do, which of course is how these things work when the urge to break something comes on so flagrantly. You do it. You take the nearest weapon (a baseball bat in the corner behind his bedroom door) and you hit the nearest thing (an empty pint glass sitting next to his computer) and sometimes one pint glass is enough to quench the thirst of these violent feelings and sometimes it isn’t and this happens to be one of those non-quenching times and so he swings the bat again, coming down on top of his printer and still it is not enough and Jake finds another target, killing his alarm clock, composing comments back to Noah911 in his head, I’m not so sad, but what makes you think I’m so sad, you have no right to talk to me that way because I’m not so sad, okay!!!

  Jake wonders why he has stopped smashing stuff so he sucks up more voltage from the feelings inside him and picks up the bat again, hunting for a target and finding the thing in his room that represents the great disconnect between him and his parents, preparing to swing the bat at a plant his parents had given him the day they told him they were getting divorced.

  They had taken Jake into San Francisco that afternoon, into Golden Gate Park. There was someone selling succulents out front of the conservatory of flowers, and they walked past her table with pots of aloe, cacti, agave, yucca. Jake’s mom paid the entrance fee for the conservatory and said, “Back here,” and led the three of them to a room, an indoor butterfly garden, hundreds of butterflies moving through the space.

  There were only two other people in there, a young couple, kissing and holding their palms out, coaxing butterflies to land.

  Most of the walls were made of windows, and sunlight filled the indoor garden.

  “Your dad and I have to make a change, sweetie,” said his mom, and then outlined the separation, the divorce, their plan to split custody. “It has nothing to do with you,” she said. “Right, Paul?”

  “It’s between your mom and me,” he said, a butterfly landing on his dad’s chest before he brushed it away.

  “Do you have any questions for us?” his mom asked.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  There was a pause in the conversation while all three of them watched the young couple make out, butterflies swirling around their bodies.

  The family left, and once outside the conservatory his mom said, “Let’s get you a plant.”

  They walked up to the table of succulents.

  “Do you even want a plant?” Paul said to his son.

  “We’re buying him a plant!” she said.

  “But what if he doesn’t care?”

  “He cares.”

  Jake said nothing.

  “Pick one,” she said.

  Jake surveyed the table, all the plants, pointed at a small pot with a cactus in it.

  “They don’t need much water,” his mother said, “so it’s easy to keep them alive.”

  “Okay,” Jake said, holding the plant up.

  “It’s for you to take care of.”

  “Why?”

  “Good question,” said his father.

  “You do a good job taking care of the plant and we’ll get a dog when life normalizes again,” his mom said.

  A dog?

  What, was he eight years old?

  Didn’t they know anything about him?

  So the cactus is an easy item for Jake to target, and in fact the plant should have been the first thing he smashed, though it doesn’t have great placement in his room, in a corner on a chair with dirty clothes around it, but now he remembers it and now would be the perfect moment to show his parents he doesn’t want to do a decent job of caring for anything and he doesn’t want a dog and he doesn’t care about their divorce and he’s not so sad and he swings the bat at the cactus and dirt ricochets all over the place and he keeps hammering it with the bat until he’s out of breath.

  “What are you doing?” the boy now hears from his doorway, turning and seeing his dad.

  No answer from Jake, though he does have the craving to click refresh.

  “Jake, what’s going on?” Paul says, looking at the smashed cactus.

  “No dog, I guess,” Jake says, moving toward his computer, sitting down in front of it.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Paul says, still in the doorway, surveying all the damage.

  Jake finally clicking refresh and seeing a gleaming new number.

  827,238.

  “Look at all of them,” says Jake.

  “Are you okay?” Paul says stupidly. He knows that what he’s walked in on isn’t normal, isn’t healthy. He’s tried to be there the best he could the last couple days. He’s been working from home, allowing Jake to play hooky from school. They’ve watched movies together, eaten pizzas. He’s asked Jake countless times if he wanted to talk about the brass band, but the boy never did. Paul has heard “I’m fine” enough to make it hard to keep asking, figured his son would reach out to him when he was ready.

  Paul could hear Naomi, all the way from Bali, say to him, “It doesn’t matter if he answers us, we have to keep asking. We are the adults and always have to check in with him.”

  Paul shakes her know-it-all timbre out of his head; it’s so easy for her to pop up with aphorisms between trips with Simon, when Paul was doing the heavy lifting of being the day-to-day, default parent right now. It’s like she’s been on spring break since the divorce, parading and partying, sowing her paroled oats, while Paul is still locked up, left to deal with all this.

  In fact, the night after the band died, Paul had sent her an elaborate email of what Jake had seen
on the bridge and all he got back from her was this one measly line: “Can you handle it?”

  His response: “I’ll try.”

  Those sorts of interactions made him remember the mosquito’s blood smudged on the magazine’s page.

  But had he been trying as best he could? Paul wasn’t sure.

  The boy staring straight ahead at his laptop.

  Paul only seeing the back of his head, a haze of blue computer life haloed around it.

  “Jake, tell me what you’re doing,” he says.

  Paul walks across the room, standing directly behind his son, caressing the nape of Jake’s neck, both of them staring at the boy’s computer screen.

  “What is that?” asks Paul.

  “It’s mine.”

  “What is?”

  Paul scours the screen. He notes the URL, then the imbedded video. Holy shit. Paul pieces the chain of events together, and his boy’s refrain of “I’m fine” sounds different now. Jake isn’t slowly processing and soon, once he understands his emotions, they’ll have a heart-to-heart. No, Jake has already processed the event without him; he doesn’t need his father. He has his computer and the video he’s shot on his phone. He has his grieving process shared online, and Paul, poor pathetic Paul, downstairs with his fantasy football draft. He should’ve been up here. He should’ve been up here the whole time.

  “You posted that?” Paul asks his son.

  “I’m in charge of it.”

  “Play it.”

  “You were there.”

  “Click play.”

  Jake starts the video and Paul can’t keep his head right, can’t keep his head here, watching this clip because it’s reminding him of the days after the September attacks, years ago, when he watched those planes destroy the country time and again. There was a kind of pornography to it, a surreptitious yearning to see something vulgar. He knew other people were watching those planes, too, probably at the exact time he was, but he hoarded his viewings.

  Paul hates the thought that Jake is doing the same thing now.

  The brass band walking toward them. Again.

  Playing.

  Dancing.

  Stopping.

  Over the edge.

  One at a time.