All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  “It’s like,” Sara says, “it’s like I’m frozen. The real me doesn’t exist anymore. All that’s left is the girl in the video. My whole life has been erased except for those minutes. That’s all I am.”

  I know exactly what you mean, thinks Balloon Boy.

  “Slow,” says Rodney.

  “What?”

  He points at the speedometer. “Slow.”

  “Sorry.” Sara brings the car back to seventy.

  Rodney snatches the snapped-off side mirror from the floor and holds it so Sara can see her reflection. “Your. Face. Is. Great.”

  It takes him nineteen seconds to get it all out, and he expects Sara to get impatient, to roll her eyes. He expects her to deflect or joke away his sentiments, but all she says is this: “You’re still the same?”

  Rodney turns the mirror around so he can see his own reflection. “This. Guy. Likes. You.”

  Only eleven seconds. That might be a record for four syllables.

  “I’m not going to cry,” says Sara, reaching for the stereo, turning the volume back up.

  They don’t talk the remainder of the trip. They drive over a bridge with the river running underneath it, about forty feet below. Once over, Sara takes a turn off and wends down a dirt path and parks near the shore.

  She gets out of the car and walks toward the water, kicking her shoes off as she gets close. The back of her shorts and shirt are covered in dirt and Rodney wonders why.

  “Come on,” she says. “I want to show you something.”

  9.

  It’s mid-afternoon when Kathleen Curtis flees the real world for the support of her AA sponsor, Deb, who has a tattoo shop in the Mission District. It’s located only a few blocks from where Kathleen lives, so she stops by her apartment to drop off her art supplies—all the elements that tied her to this morning’s unpleasant drawing of the pregnant girl with the black eye. Kathleen has never lashed out at someone like she did in the caricature, and she’s rightfully scared by her actions.

  I guess I’m a psycho now, she’s thought to herself about a thousand times since the incident.

  Deb is in the shop with one other woman, who is stretched out on a table, lying on her back, topless. The walls are painted turquoise, not that they’re easy to see. Almost every inch is covered with pictures of Deb’s artwork. Some are photographs of tattoos already on skin, while others are drawings, ideas for customers to peruse. She has some standards in the back—anchors and hearts and whatnot—but most of the wall space is allocated to her passion projects, the work she does with cancer survivors.

  Deb, wearing a wifebeater and showing her full sleeves of work, two sugar skulls emblazoned on top of each shoulder, sits in a chair next to the woman. With her tattoo gun in hand, Deb dips the needles into an ink cap filled with yellow, then fires up the gun with her foot pedal—the shop filling with that buzzing sound—and colors in a sunflower on the woman’s chest.

  Kathleen looks at the tattoo, sees the whole tableaux, how the sunflower sits on her sternum, flanked by two lush vines that dangle over her puckered scars, a few tendrils of green running down her ribs. It’s a huge piece, and Kat is utterly transfixed.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” Kathleen says.

  “You can tattoo anything,” Deb says, running the gun up against the sunflower’s black outline, then wiping the excess ink and blood off with her rag. “Eyelids. Lips. Don’t even ask where a man once got a barber’s pole tattoo.”

  “Seriously?” the survivor says, then bites her bottom lip in anguish, folds a forearm over her eyes to block out the light.

  “Unfortunately,” says Deb.

  Kathleen still hasn’t stopped staring at the tattoo covering the scars.

  “I started doing breast cancer survivors about five years ago,” says Deb. “After my sister. I wanted to make her chest gorgeous again. Since then, I offer the same service to others.”

  “You look beautiful,” Kathleen says to the woman.

  “It hurts,” she says.

  “We’re almost done,” Deb says, arches an eyebrow. “Only a few more hours.”

  “Great,” she says. “I’ll try not to cry the whole time.”

  “It’s worth it,” Deb says. Then she turns her attention to Kat: “I thought I wasn’t seeing you till later today. What time is the Craigslist guy coming to see the room?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  “Her roommate left the country for a couple months,” Deb says to the survivor, “and the sublettor bugged out at the last minute. Now my friend here has to find a replacement.”

  “That sucks,” the woman says, her arm still covering her eyes. “But this sucks more.”

  “I need a buddy to make sure I don’t get hacked up into little pieces by some creep,” Kathleen says. “Deb will help me vet this guy.”

  “So why are you here so early?” Deb asks and takes her foot off the pedal, tattoo gun going silent, and stares at Kathleen.

  “Well,” says Kat, stalling, not sure she feels like getting into it with the survivor lying there, “it’s sort of private.”

  Deb laughs so hard she snorts.

  “Don’t mind me,” the woman says, finally looking up at Kat. “You’ve already seen my business. Might as well share yours.”

  Kathleen pulls the caricature from her pocket. It’s folded and creased and has a small rip in it from when Tyler balled it up. Kat shows it to both of them—the exaggerated faces, the bruised fetus with the caption “Life beats babies!” coming from Tyler’s mouth—then she tells the whole gruesome story.

  “Let’s take five,” Deb says to the survivor.

  “Let’s take twenty,” she says back, sitting up. “I’m seeing spots in my periphery. My body needs a break.” She throws a shirt on and walks to the front door, props it open and goes outside for some fresh air.

  “So what happened?” Deb asks.

  “It’s Rodney’s birthday, and I guess I’m not handling it too well this year.”

  “You think?” Deb takes the caricature and inspects it closer.

  “I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them hit me in the face,” Kathleen says. “I deserved it.”

  “Stop,” Deb says. “It’s over. What I’m more concerned about is why you did it. What makes this birthday different than his others?”

  Deb and Kathleen have talked about Rodney countless times, especially when working Kat’s step nine. That’s when alcoholics are supposed to make amends to people they’ve hurt over the years—the people they’ve betrayed and trampled. Loving a drunkard is like running with the bulls. But since Kat has already completed step nine, why hasn’t she made amends with Rodney?

  “I’m not ready,” Kathleen always tells Deb.

  Kathleen refuses to reach out to her son, saying that contacting him while he’s still a minor would also open up things with Larry, and she’s not strong enough to deal with that. She knows the first couple years of sobriety are brittle, and she needs to take care of herself. If she relapses, she’ll never right this wrong.

  “It’s his eighteenth birthday,” Kathleen says. “He’s an adult. I’m out of excuses and scared about it.”

  “Scared?”

  “I did the worst thing a mother can do.”

  “But that’s done,” Deb says and keeps scouring the caricature. “So what are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” Kat says.

  And that’s the problem. She’s lost. Kathleen can’t get any grip on the right move. A part of her thinks that he’s her only son and that entitles her to intrude back into his life, despite her unforgiveable behavior since his accident. Another part of her feels that’s selfish—she’s made her miserable bed and she needs to stew in these soiled sheets forever, forget about her son, she’s ruined that relationship and must live with the consequences of her selfishness. Of course, she tries to dismiss the latter interpretation, but it rolls into her mind like fog. She never declares a winner in these warr
ing debates. She hears both sides, then gets frustrated and tired and sad, settling for brackish inaction.

  She had time, damn it. He wasn’t eighteen. Not an adult. Under Larry’s jurisdiction. Now that those excuses have burned off, leaving her free to make a decision, she’s so bent up about it that all she can do is draw the meanest caricature in the world and hate herself.

  “Good thing I have an idea,” Deb says, “and you are going to sit right here in my shop while I finish tattooing that woman. You’re going to watch her take that gnarled fucking scar and have it topped with something wonderful. That’s what you’re going to do. And maybe you’ll feel inspired to get off your ass and contact him, Kat.”

  Deb hands the caricature back to Kathleen and begins to restock her station, filling up the ink caps with what she’ll need to complete the work.

  Kathleen actually relaxes after Deb calls her on all the bullshit. It’s what she adores about her sponsor, her prying right into the matter’s heart. Certainly, Kathleen could keep feeling sorry for herself, what she lost, what she gave away, the resentment she feels about how unfair it was, a child being injured like that. She can’t ever imagine forgiving herself. She might be carting around the caricature that she’d done earlier that day, but she’s been carrying her own since the day she left Traurig.

  Kathleen can remember a time clean of any caricatures, any distortions. She and Larry maybe not fairy-tale-happy but far from mean to each other. When Rodney was first born. Their perfect boy making all the tiredness worth it, all the double shifts for her husband while Kathleen stayed up all night with the baby. She’d swear the first three months of Rodney’s life were one long day—a repeating one, the opposite of a mythology-style punishment. Barely kept track of the time of day besides the dark or light. He would scream if he was set down, demanding to sleep straight on Kathleen’s chest, so she carted him around everywhere. He slept while she listened to him breathe, worrying about SIDS, worrying about things much more practical than a weather balloon.

  She was so sleepy and never changed out of her bathrobe. Covered in leaked breast milk. Smelling of Parmesan cheese that had been quickly aged in her son’s stomach and spit back up, leaving pale stains on the robe that looked like clouds.

  It actually became a joke, Larry saying, “You’ve sprouted another cloud,” and Kat laughing like an overwhelmed but satisfied new mom, feeling a purpose she’d never known.

  They were exhausted parents trying to figure out what they’d gotten themselves into. The loss of any semblance of free time. Loss of freedom and fun. Loss of identity. Loss of sex. Loss of any intimacy between spouses, juggling all these new responsibilities. The house was in shambles and rent was late and they hadn’t grocery-shopped in who knows how long and hygiene was in dubious states, but despite all that they were happy—happy!—rallying together to figure all this out.

  Back then they were portraits, not caricatures. No hyperbolic features. No funhouse remixes. No exaggerated facial details for comic effect.

  Sure, she already had a drinking problem before her son fell off that weather balloon, but it was manageable, socially acceptable, reasonable, if that makes any sense. After his injury, she couldn’t stop: It became an accomplishment—she thought it was an accomplishment—to not drink in the morning. Kathleen is talking about the true nature of craving and how she never knew what that word really meant until after Rodney changed. Craving. It wasn’t simply something you wanted. No, craving in its pure, unpasteurized way was a religious experience. A compulsion that trumped anything else in the world. It became a biorhythm. A part of you. And maybe it started off as a small, controllable part, but that wasn’t going to last. Its contingency will bully all others. Until everything was governed by that same thirst. Pretty soon what you were craving became a god. Jesus Christ, whiskey, whatever. The only reason to live was to worship that deity, and the only way to show your devotion was to consume another drink, and so Kathleen would get up in the morning and think about vodka and she’d scrub her teeth thinking about vodka and she wouldn’t be able to shake these thoughts during her shower or getting dressed or pretending to eat toast, and pretty soon that craving buckled every reason she could think of to stay sober that day—all she saw was a knob to turn the volume down on her son’s tragedy, her grief, never muting them entirely, but beating back the decibel level to a tolerable murmur, so yes, allow yourself one morning cocktail to take the edge off her hangover because she showed her devotion to this false god of craving the night before so why not treat yourself to one little innocuous cocktail and cauterize all the circular thinking, Kathleen, these mean thoughts about her decimated son might hop on a weather balloon all their own and fly off into the sunset and that first screwdriver did feel holy, her god stomping on her disaffections, all the blame her heart hoarded temporarily liquidated, and if the first drink worked, why wouldn’t the second one make her feel even more human, holier, maybe even good, yes, actually good about the state of things, so she made that daily exception to have another morning cocktail but damn the law of diminishing returns and the second one didn’t make her feel any more better, got her mind whirling about Rodney and her marriage and how things were so screwed up nothing was ever going to get fixed and then it was time to have another, chasing that first burst of biblical amnesia again but of course it was gone, and then another cocktail and another and she was an alcoholic piece of shit who couldn’t stay sober one day in a train-wreck marriage with a son who should be in the eighth grade but talked like a toddler again and he will never be normal and will never have any kind of life and that wasn’t fair and her marriage wasn’t fair and Larry’s fists weren’t fair and Traurig wasn’t fair and she couldn’t think of one fair thing in the whole universe and she should leave town, why not, wasn’t like she could actually do anything to help him, all they could do was sit around and watch each other die, Rodney was going to be that terrible toddler for all time with or without Kathleen’s boozy presence, and so she bolted.

  And here she is. Her whole world is a skyscraping caricature. Practically its own continent. Maybe that was her mythology-style punishment. Maybe being a caricaturist day in, day out is the worst fate a god addicted to poetic justice can cook up.

  Kat has a rather convincing piece of evidence in her hand. She examines the girl with the black eye, her baby, and Tyler. She tries to get each crease out of the caricature, but it’s no use. This is the way this family will look.

  She feels so stupid and fragile for lashing out at them. She rubs her hand over it again and it dawns on her that it’s only a drawing. It might represent how unstable she is right now, but the caricature is only a symptom. Deb wants her to deal with the disease—her guilt about abandoning Rodney—and her sponsor is right. She can do that; she has to do that.

  “Let’s get cracking!” Kat calls to the cancer survivor, who stands by the open front door.

  “Do we have to?” she says back. “This doesn’t feel good.”

  “It’s worth it.”

  “Is it?”

  “Carpe diem,” says Deb.

  Slowly and reluctantly, the woman shuffles back, takes off her shirt, and lies down on the table, putting her arm back over her eyes.

  Deb gets the tattoo gun going again, dips her shader into the orange, and starts doing the work.

  Kathleen spends the next three hours watching those scars disappear under a miracle of vibrant color.

  THE GUY WHO found her online should arrive at any minute. All Kat knows about him is his email address, WesEinstein@gmail.com. That was how he’d responded to her online ad, and because he had been the first responder, Kathleen figured it was only fair to give him the initial crack at the room.

  Since this is San Francisco in 2013, the new dot-com boom has pushed the rents sky-high; it’s as bad as Manhattan. Because of that, Kathleen decided to jack the sublettor’s share a few hundred to make some extra money. She rationalized that she deserved some severance for doing the work her room
mate should have done before leaving the country.

  Kat has only lived in the Mission for six years, but even in that small window of time the changes have become noticeable. At first, it was filled with artists and hipsters, college kids and Latino families, and she felt welcomed by all. Here it was okay to eke out a living drawing caricatures. Here it was okay to be poor.

  But more dot-commers flocked in, offering landlords sums over the asking price. And some weren’t interested in inflating rents and just bought the cheap apartment buildings, either converting them to one-house units for themselves, or they used the sale to convert to townhouses or condos and raise rents drastically. Kat knew damn well that if she ever got evicted, there was no way she could afford to stay in the city, maybe migrating over to Oakland, but even over there it was getting steep.

  It wasn’t only techie twentysomethings toting laptops taking over the Mission, though. There was also a steep rise in young, mostly white families, and this population brought Kathleen face to face with mothers of all kinds. Some days, they were all she could see. In all their various stages of development. Pregnant women outside a yoga studio, proud with their mats and hopeful, swelling bellies. Moms with babies bundled to their chests, cooing at them. Moms who took up the whole sidewalk with designer strollers that must have been mounted on Cadillac chassis. Moms who herded frantic kids, paroled from apartments to Dolores Park to tire themselves out.

  In fact, Kat’s apartment was right across the street from that park, and its big playground always sent the kids’ happy shrieking shaking through her windows. All the howls and joys of childhood slapped Kathleen in the face. She couldn’t keep their ecstatic noises out.