All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  Back to his office, Noah needed to compartmentalize, to paste on his face a convincing façade. There was nothing he could do to alter the day’s events, so why indulge his emotions? It was like playing in a lacrosse tournament in college when he had a torn meniscus in his knee, not smart, not pragmatic, fucking painful, risking more damage, but he wouldn’t hear his coach’s pleas to step aside, to protect himself—he was going to fight to the end and he was going to win and no one could stop him, nobody.

  So Noah didn’t tell anyone at work what had happened. He stayed and emailed and trouble-shot a client package with a colleague and led those two meetings with his team and ate a Cobb salad and even remembered leaving his dumbbell in the men’s room and got it and stowed it back under his desk.

  Compartmentalize and conquer. Get through this. Don’t buckle. He was keeping the world at bay until he went into the kitchen for a bottled water and saw someone’s half-eaten toast on the counter, and his feet tingled and his heart sped up and he saw tie-dyed things in his periphery and he lost track of how long he stood and stared at the toast till another trader said, “What are you looking at?” and Noah said, “What?” and the guy said, “You’re just standing there,” and Noah said, “Oh.”

  His hands ached all day from the scalding water. Tracey was gone. He had to tell their parents, but he was unsure what to tell them. How to tell them. He wondered if he should be like that cop and simply assault them with apologies. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Would that work? Maybe with their mom but certainly not with their father. No, he would not hang up on Noah. He would do the opposite. He’d bully, scold, blame. He’d hide his grief in anger and gift it to his son.

  Noah owed them a phone call and one would come, but first, he and his aching hands sat behind his desk. The workday was over. The office empty again. But Noah did not know where to go—how the hell could he go home? To their house? To their house without her?

  He wished he had a toothbrush, an acrid taste in his mouth, like getting off a fifteen-hour flight, that hangover of recycled air and germs and dehydration. Like the time his whole family went to New Zealand, Noah nineteen, Tracey nine, and once arrived, they both bought Cokes in the airport and raced to see who could finish the fastest, laughing at how many times Tracey had to stop and burp, her eyes watering from all the carbonation. Noah held his empty can and watched her try to finish hers.

  He Googled “brass band+golden gate.”

  One news story he stumbled on had a hyperlink to a YouTube page, TheGreatJake’s. That was how he found it. Creating a new account, settling on the username Noah911 because that was who he was now: He was Noah soldered to emergency. He was the guy with a new limb, a new life. He was the guy with a ghost attached to his person. There was no Noah without Tracey’s tragedy.

  This was his new identity.

  This was him.

  It was almost like the day she was born, a new addition, the quick change to his identity. One minute, he had a new baby sister. One minute, the nurse asked Noah if he wanted to hold her tiny body and he was too scared to stand up with her, fretting a botched handoff and dropping her, hurting her, so he sat in a chair and the nurse handed him the swaddled baby, a beanie on her head, her eyes closed and making a moaning, then a gurgling noise.

  “I’m Noah,” he said, “your brother.”

  He stared down at her shut eyes and asked their mom, “When will she get hair?”

  She was in her hospital bed, exhausted, still doped up on an epidural. “You didn’t have any hair when you were born, either.”

  “Really?”

  “Nope.”

  “So she’ll get lots like me?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared back at her sleeping form.

  “Are you going to be a strong brother for her?” said his mom.

  “Yes.”

  “Promise?”

  He’d hold her dead body right now, if they gave it to him. He’d sit in a chair to protect her from being dropped. He’d rock her. He’d say, “I’m Noah, your brother.”

  He viewed the clip many times in his office. How he hated and loved it. Easily spotting his sister. Tracey was tall. She wore purple pants, a shirt with a gargantuan collar. She had her clarinet. She threw it off the bridge like a pitcher’s fast ball. She held her nose before jumping, the same gesture her brother had seen her do countless times off of high dives.

  Yes, this was who he was now, Noah911.

  And he didn’t need to create the username to watch the video, but he did need to register an account to leave a comment. It took him almost an hour to figure out what to say. His ideas shot the gamut from pure vitriol at the person who could post this, indictments of his scruples, TheGreatJake’s adoration of carnage trumping the feelings of the loved ones left behind, the clip besmirching them with every subsequent view. Noah would break the guy’s nose. He’d hurt him much more than that. He’d make TheGreatJake his own emergency, soldered to whoever loved him the way that Noah911 loved Tracey.

  He finally settled on the comment “I feel sad for whoever posted this,” because he thought that maybe that message had the potential to reach TheGreatJake. If he cyber-screamed at him, Noah would be dismissed as another troll, another lunatic empowered by the Internet. But if he focused on his own sadness, thrusting it at the poster, if he made a simple and clean statement about the callused nature of sharing the video with the world, maybe TheGreatJake would hear him.

  Or maybe he wanted somebody else to hear him because he couldn’t say what he really wanted to say, what he felt in the deepest part of himself: It was his fault she died. His fault for not watching after her diligently enough. His fault for trusting her, or for trusting the world with her. He was the practically minded one; she needed his guidance. He helped her remember all sorts of things. In fact, the only thing he didn’t help her remember to do was practice the clarinet. Noah911 actually thought that maybe the band was teaching her responsibility. He encouraged her music, her involvement. She was growing up, finding her voice. Tracey was changing for the better.

  The memory of that tarred and feathered his heart.

  And he deserved every daub of hot tar for not taking care of her.

  Could he email his parents about Tracey? Was that allowed?

  It wasn’t; he knew that. Knew that but he thought that maybe it was okay, too. He typed in his father’s email, his mother’s.

  The subject was simply: Tracey.

  He stared at the blank body of the message, having no idea what to say. Should he imbed a link to the video? Should they get to see it for themselves, salvage the opportunity to witness her final minutes, or would that be too much for them? Noah didn’t want to hurt them, didn’t know what would help and what would throb with misery so he sat there.

  Cursor flashing.

  Stomach growling.

  He wanted to get drunk.

  His hands were feeling better.

  He changed the subject to this: I’m sorry.

  But he never typed text in the body.

  There would be a phone call but not till later. He needed to find a way to peel himself from this desk, needed to summon the strength to go home. To walk in there. To be there.

  He took a taxi home, the driver wanting to chat but Noah not really participating. The driver’s eyes darted from road to rearview mirror. Noah asked the driver to let him off at the liquor store a block from the apartment. He bought a bottle of vodka and thought of it as a futures commodity that he’d never traded before. Numbness. This was what his future was going to need, and he’d pay anything for it.

  Noah needed to be anesthetized before he saw reminders of her scattered everywhere, too many to tally. He had two long pulls off the vodka bottle and climbed the front stairs.

  The sound his key made opening up the front door was horrid and loud. He could feel each scrape as the key hit the tumbler. He turned the knob and stood there, in the doorway, and didn’t move.

  He walked to where
he saw her last, sleeping on the couch, where he saw her chest move with every breath. The spilling blanket. He saw the grapefruit, uneaten. He saw the toast, the hummus hardened into a brown meringue. There was one bite taken out of it. He could see her teeth marks. Even in the dark, Noah911 would swear that he could see each individual contour on the bread left by every sovereign tooth. He could see her so clearly.

  He could also see the note he left her, Make sure my sister eats this, okay?

  He opened up the vodka bottle and had a huge swig.

  He fished his laptop from his bag and lay down on the couch. In her spot.

  He watched the video clip many times. It’s all that he had left.

  Noah911 made another hurtful and necessary click on replay.

  Taking it all in another time.

  As the video started, Noah didn’t see anything treacherous. They were normal people playing instruments.

  Until the moment they weren’t.

  7.

  Sara would be lying if she didn’t acknowledge a certain pleasure in Hank’s impulsive and violent reaction to Felix kicking her car. It was beautiful medicine, watching her brother being protective of her. Especially after the sex tape. Especially after being suspended from the restaurant. Especially after hearing Felix cussing and screaming at her and bringing a boot to her car. She needed to know there was someone alive who would defend her, someone who cared for Sara even when she couldn’t fathom caring about herself.

  That was Hank. Her brother was stunning in his simplicity. He had no mind to do anything he didn’t feel like. Hank would hit the gym religiously. He’d go to work when he had to. Besides those actions, he sat around watching MMA clips and drinking beer and doing pushups and playing darts in his room. A sound that Sara associated with a cruel lullaby. She tried to sleep through it nightly, each dart’s thwunk into the board, the rip as Hank pulled it back out. So often she lay there staring at the cinderblocks, counting thwunks and rips, thwunks and rips.

  Yet Hank could get his ire up fast. So when she came in the house four minutes ago and found him at the kitchen table cutting his fingernails, he looked up and witnessed the emergency on her face, the wide-eyed panic, and Hank said, “What happened?” and she leaked the whole story out. Well, not the whole tale exactly. Omitted were some need-to-know details. Redacted were the juiciest morsels. Hank had no investment, Sara figured, in the beginning of her day. His question, “What happened?” really meant Tell me why you seem so upset this instant? and thus she snipped the account to what she deemed the meat of the story, cleaving the fat to the butcher’s floor.

  The sex tape, the work suspension, even the fact she sped up the street and almost hit Felix—these were amputated particulars.

  Sara’s story was remixed in a way that emphasized the vulgar and unprovoked malice of the road fisherman, Felix going batshit for no reason and Sara scared that he was going to hit her in the face and he kicked her car, Hank, he ruined her mirror, Hank, he damn near took a swing.

  “He almost clocked you, huh?” Hank said.

  “He lost it.”

  “Did he now.”

  “I’ve always hated him.”

  “Keys,” said Hank.

  “Huh?”

  “Give me your keys.”

  She handed them over and Hank sprinted out, peeled out, and Sara was alone in the kitchen. She is alone now, fixating on the twigs of fingernails on the table. The rusty little clippers next to them. The fingernails in a pile, like dried-out snakes.

  Sara experienced what might be considered remorse. Because it wasn’t only Felix down there. Rodney was in the front yard. The last thing she wanted was for him to get hurt.

  They’d been so close before his accident. He was her first kiss, her first love. It wasn’t fairy tale romantic or anything, that first time they felt each other’s lips behind 7-Eleven, next to a dumpster. They’d bought Slurpees and were playing pinball and Rodney’s lips were purple from his grape Slurpee, which he refused to drink with a straw, a detail that Sara found wildly strange and endearing. Everyone drank Slurpees with straws, but not Rodney, putting his lips on the cup and taking small sips like it was coffee.

  It looked to Sara like purple lipstick. She remembers thinking that: Rodney’s wearing lipstick.

  He was so into the game that he made contorted faces, puckering his purple lips as he manned the machine, about to get multi-ball when for the first time ever Sara got turned on—or at least the first time she could remember. She needed to kiss him. She had a craving for a kiss that had to happen right that second, no matter the setting or their sugared breath or how unreal the temperature was outside, pushing 110˚.

  “Come here,” she said, dragging him from the machine.

  “Wait, I’ve almost got—”

  “Do you want to kiss me?”

  His hands immediately fell from the machine, leaving it beeping and chirping and gloating as the silver ball drained down the middle, and Rodney’s purple lips trailed Sara outside the 7-Eleven, into the side alley, with its smell of humid old hot dogs. They stood right by a dumpster teeming with processed foods and right on top was a cardboard cutout of a Nascar driver holding a glistening bottle of beer with a caption that said, “The one and only.”

  None of these details derailed Sara’s titanium impulse. She would have this kiss and it would be amazing. She could sense it.

  She could also, though, sense that Rodney was nervous, eyes darting all around, fidgeting from foot to foot. He pointed at the cardboard driver and said, “Did you know racecar is a palindrome?”

  “What’s a palindrome?”

  “Something that’s spelled the same way backward.”

  Sara tried spelling racecar the other way in her head, but didn’t care enough to get past the first C, and she said to Rodney, “Kiss me.”

  And he did. He put his purple lips on hers. His mouth was cold. She could not only smell grape but chocolate, left over from a donut they split. The kiss lasted about twenty seconds. Then they pulled back and stared at each other.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Again,” she said.

  They didn’t leave the alley for fifteen more minutes. That Nascar driver watched the whole show.

  Which now that Sara thinks about it is a merciless foreshadowing. Because every perv in the world is kicking back with a cold one and watching her sex tape. Every creep on the planet knows that Sara is the one and only girl in the video.

  She pulls out her phone and sends Nat this text: Why?

  She tries to block out images of Hank pummeling Rodney.

  It’s possible that her brother wouldn’t harm him. Hank knows their history. Knows how close they once were.

  But when his temper cranks up, Hank isn’t thinking about anything rational.

  The feeling in her hands is back. The feeling that she has hands. That she’s aware of having hands. With the sex tape and the suspension and Nat being a total asshole and Felix being mean, Sara’s hands get the vibrating cell phone feeling again; however, it’s worse this time. They feel heavy, like twenty pounds each.

  Nat’s not going to answer her text. It’s over. This is his way of breaking up. That’s who she should sic Hank on, her attack dog and protector. At least, Hank has her back. He’ll always defend her. Without her brother looking out, Sara would have no one knocking the monsters away. She’s lucky to have him, even when he frustrates her so much, even when it’s hours of thwunk and rip.

  She should make Nat explain it to her, decrypt the teasing why of it. Hank can hold him down and Sara can interrogate. Make her understand precisely why he treated her this way.

  There’s no reason not to clip her own fingernails, sitting at the kitchen table. She picks the clippers and only does the pinkie and then she feels a swelling in her hand, like it’s about to burst.

  Deep breaths, Sara. Don’t flip out. Don’t lose it. He’s fine. Hank won’t hurt him. He’s only getting even with Felix.

  Sara puts th
e nail clippers down and decides to use her phone as a diversion, catch up on her celebrity gossip, but everyone’s still talking about the brass band from earlier in the day—the image on MSN’s homepage is the Golden Gate Bridge with a saxophone superimposed on top of it. Caption reading, MURDER MUSIC.

  So much for distraction.

  She sends another note to Nat: Didn’t you like me?

  She paces, worrying about Rodney, wondering why Nat won’t text her back. Paces and almost cries and there’s no way to escape this new life—the one she never asked for—her life with a conjoined twin.

  She realizes she’ll never be able to separate herself from digital Sara, nude and pixilated. Perfectly preserved. Frozen for all time. Sex tape as fossil. Her twin will never age and will always be there. Her twin feels to her like a wholesale tragedy, and from here on out, Sara will never be alone again, always dragging this twin through their life.

  And the mere presence of that thought in her head, the fact that it shuttles around within her, makes Sara hyperventilate, rest her head on the kitchen table, the Formica a bit sticky from one of Hank’s pancake stacks. It’s all a bit sticky. The whole room, the whole house. They should have moved after their parents died. They should have redecorated. They should’ve tried to make it less their parents’ place, but neither of them really wanted to do that. It’s a way of preserving the extravagances of memory, living in the house long after their parents have gone.