All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  “This is my reward,” Paul said aloud as they made their way.

  Jake didn’t hear him, of course, kept bobbing his head to the beat of the song only he could hear, and Paul could only wish that laxative luck—things were bottled up and backing up further with each infuriating second.

  So seeing him in the back seat, right behind the driver, he said to his son, “What does it accomplish, sitting back there?”

  His ear buds weren’t in, so Paul expected an answer.

  “Accomplish?” asked Jake.

  “Yeah, what do you get from being behind me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Am I that embarrassing?” said Paul.

  That wasn’t what he wanted to say. Not to his son, at least. Yes, it hurt his feelings having his boy prefer the separation. It created a swollen paradox for Paul: He wanted so badly to help his son, and yet Jake made it so hard to want to help him. Always distant. Always antagonistic. Paul knew that as the adult he had to rise above these petty feelings—he accepted that intellectually—but it was so hard on an emotional level. Not ever getting anything positive from your kid.

  Jake hadn’t said anything, so Paul said, “Am I embarrassing you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jake.

  “You don’t know if I’m embarrassing?”

  Again, he didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to feel wounded or go on the offensive. He wanted to be the calmest, most supportive parent ever. He wanted to help his son come back.

  “Don’t answer me,” Paul said. “Sorry. Forget it. Listen to your music.”

  It was almost laughable, how immature, how childish Paul could be. He had to be the one to rise above any squawking. He had to be the one to take care of his son.

  Jake stayed in the back seat, put the ear buds in; Paul drove them to the therapist’s office. They waited till Jake was ushered in by the doc, leaving Paul alone looking at the closed office door, yet another separation from his son.

  He stayed like that for ten minutes. He stayed like that until right now, only staring at the closed door, wondering what it means.

  The most important thing is that they’re trying to get Jake help. The goal is helping his son. Despite Paul’s stillborn dreams or feelings of futility or all the ways he can tally his irrelevancy in life, the only thing that matters is that they are in this office. They are—father and son—here.

  Even in such a dull waiting room. A Formica table in the middle of it, decorated with a fan of magazines. A few IKEA chairs, which at these prices seem ludicrous. They should all be lounging in authentic Barcelona chairs.

  Paul tries to beat down the worry about money. To allow himself to see only what matters, that closed office door. On the other side are a doctor and Jake. They are making headway. They have to be. They are erasing the damage done by the brass band and the divorce and all other collateral damage that haunts his son. They are in there doing the work and everything else is moot.

  Well, he wants it to be moot. But Paul can’t help but blame himself for how little he knew about Jake’s online life. It never occurred to Paul that things he filmed on his iPhone were ending up on the Internet, and it certainly never crossed his mind that he’d publicize something as awful as a mass suicide. It felt odd to Paul, that mechanism to share pathos. Paul’s instinct was to hoard it. To keep it like a baby bird, feed it from a dropper. He figured that since his own sorrow was private, everyone felt the same way. And by everyone, he really means Jake.

  Paul doesn’t know one thing about the boy’s virtual life, which begs the question: What else doesn’t he know? He’s operating under the assumption that posting the clip of the brass band is the worst thing his son has ever done, but maybe that’s untrue. Maybe it’s only another upload in a series of dubious, ignominious posts. Maybe his son has a whole cache of public pathos. Maybe his YouTube channel is a hive of sadness, and Paul makes himself a promise in his uncomfortable IKEA chair: He is going to get computer-savvy. He is going to unearth the side of his son that lives in the computer.

  He has to know that Jake. The avatar. The username. TheGreatJake. He has to know if his son’s username has any concept of morality, needs to see if there’s remorse for sharing the suicides or if TheGreatJake doesn’t see anything wrong with what he did. His son will barely engage him in conversation; hell, he won’t even sit next to him in the car. So getting to know this other son is his chief priority.

  Paul has to stop limiting his perceptions of his son based on his own biases. He has to swallow whatever odd clump of pride that keeps Paul from joining the rest of the free world on social media, if not to assuage his own loneliness, then in the name of finding out who his son really is.

  It breaks his heart, thinking like that, but perhaps this is what love looks like in the twenty-first century. There’s the heart pumping in our chests and the one that thrums online, beating a binary rhythm, zeroes and ones. Paul has to find that version of his son. He has to interrogate that son and find out if TheGreatJake comprehends how grotesque it is to use these suicides as something captured, something worth sharing, something like entertainment.

  Paul feels a low rumble in his stomach; it might be the first showings of some movement. He has no idea how long a laxative takes to kick in, but he wants to see this feeling as progress, the beginning. He has to believe that this might lead to something better.

  The therapist’s door opens.

  Paul rises, and the IKEA chair creaks.

  Out comes Jake, slowly shuffling. He doesn’t even look up at his dad.

  Paul sees his son’s whole body but now knows this is only a fraction of him.

  The doctor walks out behind the boy, a fiftyish black man. He has a European accent that’s on the cusp of reminding Paul of his ex’s new boyfriend, Simon, but he won’t let himself go there. He has to remain here, to absorb everything that comes from the doctor’s mouth.

  Words, though, aren’t Paul’s number-one concern at the moment. It’s body language. Jake’s eyes fixed on the carpet, hands jammed in his jeans, swaying a bit. The doctor has a furrowed brow and motions Paul into his office with a nod.

  “Jake, will you give us a couple minutes?” the therapist asks.

  Jake takes an IKEA chair far away from the one that Paul had sat in and fires up his iPhone, staring at the thing barely eight inches from his face.

  “I’ll be right back, buddy,” Paul says to his son, whose gaze doesn’t budge from the screen. “I’ll be right back!” Paul says again, but it doesn’t prompt anything from the boy.

  The last thing Paul sees before the doctor shuts the door is his son, sitting alone, and yet he knows that TheGreatJake is somewhere else entirely.

  THE 212, 212TH person to ogle Sara’s porn clip is Jake, who still sits in the waiting room. It’s already been fifteen minutes and no sign of his dad. He has been by himself for the bulk of the time, but a middle-aged woman comes in. She must be the doc’s next download, receiving all the data from her servers so he can find the bug in her system.

  The waiting room has a small palm tree in the corner, a coffee table with magazines for old people. There are only four chairs, and Jake is glad that the woman took one across from him. She can’t see his screen. In fact, she fires up her own tablet. He can keep watching his porn in peace.

  There’s also a dispenser filled with hand sanitizer mounted on the wall that has a drip hanging off its spout, hardened into a pale meringue.

  It is 9:44 in the morning, and the boy’s appointment—only their first time meeting together—ended at 9:30.

  He knows they’re talking about him. Jake, the problem. Jake, the strange. He needs fixing. It’s like he’s hacked into their conversation and can hear each indicting thing through the closed door.

  Jake watches the porn curled in the uncomfortable chair, and his eyes move to the tally telling him he’s the 212, 212th person to take this clip in.

  Lucky me, he thinks, I am a palindrome.

  And he m
ight be a palindrome, but there’s one thing he’s not: a virgin. He can’t be considered a virgin anymore, not with all the hours he’s spent watching strangers.

  Or that’s how it should work. Watching all the perversions he can, surely he’s no virgin. He thinks of it like a currency exchange, trading in a stack of devalued bills and getting back one gleaming coin of visceral contact.

  That doctor and his dad are in there gossiping about him. If he could post a comment on their conversation he’d say, “It’s rude to make me wait out here.”

  Thinking about that inspires Jake to post something on Sara’s clip: “Makes me hard!”

  Which is a lie.

  His penis has been trained to stay soft while watching porn in public. At first, it got hard whenever he indulged. But not lately. Lately, it minds its manners. Unlike Jake.

  Pavlov’s penis, thinks Jake, so he laughs.

  The laughter startles the woman in the waiting room from her e-haze, forced to avert eyes from her screen, totally interrupted and inconvenienced by this boy’s inconsiderate snickers, and she scowls, then turns her scorched eyeballs back to her media.

  Jake doesn’t want to comment on the porn, not really. He wants to comment on his own video, and so he hits YouTube and posts this comment:

  TheGreatJake

  This is my property and you should do what I say, and I’m looking for Noah911. Where is he? We need to talk about who is SAD and who isn’t.

  Refresh, refresh, refresh . . .

  Nothing.

  The problem with this therapist is his lip-pursing. It’s the only emoji he has and he sends it to users after every sentence he speaks, every point he drives down on Jake. Every forming of his important and arrogant words ends with the same annoying expression.

  “How are you today, Jake?” he had said at the beginning of the session.

  Lip purse.

  “I am optimistic about our time together, Jake, how about you?”

  Lip purse.

  “Will you tell me about what you saw on the bridge that day?”

  Lip purse.

  “Why did you decide to share what you saw, Jake?”

  The boy tries to focus on this porn clip. It’s the first time he has watched it. He likes this site because it deals only with amateurs, no actual porn stars with their fake tits and too-big cocks. Jake likes watching real people, what real people do.

  The site also curates its content, helping users find the good stuff without having to scroll through pages and pages of boring material. The clip he’s watching right now is featured at the top of the homepage because it’s the winner of their “Skank of the Week” video contest. That’s why it has so many hits.

  Jake has more hits with the jumpers, but 212,212 views is respectable.

  He isn’t in the habit of rating videos, but if he did, this one would get a solid score. He likes the girl because she’s young and small, like him. He enjoys the sounds she makes. A lot of them try too hard, overselling the sex, making it seem cheap and staged, but this girl remains simple and honest, which is a huge turn-on.

  The rating categories on this site are as follows: Gold Medal, Hot-ToTrot!, Boring, Weirdest Boner Right Now, WTF, Flaccid Central.

  This clip’s called Naughty in Nevada and Jake copies the URL on his master sheet of personal favorites. He keeps this litany handy, ready to peruse his merchandise whenever he gets to steal a few minutes for himself. He doesn’t only shepherd disasters; he has a separate stable for orgasms as well.

  In the waiting room, the middle-aged lady yawns and brushes back her bangs but never takes her eyes off her tablet.

  The clip ends and it’s 9:49 and Jake starts it back at the beginning.

  The simple fact that he knows enough about sex to classify all these clips, ranking them on a spectrum from good to bad, convinces the boy he will be a good lover—or that he already is a good lover but hasn’t yet started using his skills. He thinks all his observances have taught him stamina, technique, positions, postponement, thrilling ways to pleasure someone.

  His father had told him, on a rare day he felt like talking to his son on their commute into the city, about a theory that claims it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get good at anything, which was how the boy arrived at his own conversion.

  Ten thousand hours of watching porn = 1 genuine sexual encounter.

  Therefore, he’s no virgin.

  “You can get good at anything from practice?” the boy had asked.

  “Literally anything.”

  And it isn’t only the constant lip-pursing that makes the therapist terrible, it’s his whole deal, his whole office, his whole face, his whole set of questions and phony way of instilling camaraderie that the boy had seen through immediately. He knew he couldn’t tell the doc the truth, not with his incessant badgering about the clip.

  “Why did you post it?”

  Lip purse.

  “What made you want to share it?”

  Lip purse.

  “How do you feel about putting it online?”

  I can live-tweet this betrayal, thought Jake. I can share our confidentiality with all my 281 followers.

  It will need its own hashtag.

  #ShrinkStink.

  #MeetMyMentalIllness.

  He tried to pull his phone out during the session to tweet, but the doctor wouldn’t allow that, threatened to take it away, and that’s the one thing that can’t happen.

  But there’s no one in the waiting room to tell him what to do. He’s in charge. If he feels like live-tweeting, that’s what he’ll do.

  The real travesty is that hanging meringue from the hand sanitizer dispenser. Looks like a tiny stalactite. Someone should wipe it off. Not the boy. Somebody has this job. They’re supposed to dab and clean the contraption but they might have called in sick, might have seen TheGreatJake’s clip, might have seen the brass band jump, too, and feel too confused to swab.

  Virgins are clumsy lovers. Quick cummers. Make ridiculous faces. Keep their socks on. Only know two positions.

  None of these describe Jake.

  It is 9:51.

  The therapist obviously doesn’t care about this woman, who he makes wait while he’s in the other room talking shit about Jake. Which makes him mad, and feelings are like Spotify, how each user gets to decide on a certain song that he needs to hear right this second! and he searches for it and finds it and clicks play and it’s right there—this thing that you needed—it’s immediately available, faster than sneezing.

  That’s what Jake’s doing right now—he’s streaming anger.

  Good thing there isn’t a baseball bat here, thinks Jake.

  Then he immediately wants to share that thought, wants all his Twitter followers to grip his fury.

  First live-tweet: I’d smash this whole place.

  On the porn clip, they switch positions again, go reverse cowgirl. He is sure that this is the angle that feels the best, and it’s how Jake would like to start his sexual career.

  Here’s the thing he didn’t tell the doctor or his dad or anyone, didn’t utter one syllable of this because he knows that no old person will understand: He didn’t do anything wrong. This is what people do. This is how the world works. This is why we’re smarter now: We share everything with everyone, have access to each sight and sound. We are informed and connected!

  If they stop living in the past, they’d plug into this broadcasting consciousness, synapses firing all over the globe. The world is round like a brain, and we are all cells in it, firing all the time.

  His dad doesn’t get it and thinks that Jake is behaving badly, but he’s totally missing the point, which is that good and bad don’t matter.

  All that matters is content. New content. More content.

  Those are the nutrients that keep the great brain going.

  Content is Jake’s purpose.

  It is everybody’s purpose.

  And each single frame uploaded is a public service.

  He’s
doing what he’s supposed to do, what his generation understands as their responsibility. The time is 9:54, and the woman’s appointment is basically half over and Jake’s day is basically ruined and behind that closed office door are two men talking about nothing, agreeing with each other, so sure that they know what’s right and wrong and just and important, making decisions about Jake that he’s not even being consulted about, and under these circumstances he can’t stomach another second sitting here.

  He puts his iPhone in his pocket and launches himself in the direction of the Purell dispenser and forms a fist and uses it as a tomahawk, bringing the edge of it down and breaking the whole dispenser from the wall and whoever thinks that hiring a cleaning lady who’s too lazy to wipe one bead of hanging meringue gets what’s coming to them.

  An emoji of the boy’s face would be someone plugging a power cord into his ear and the cheeks going a crazed red and bringing his battery to a full charge.

  The woman looks up from her tablet but doesn’t say a word. She’s wearing a quaint yellow dress that reminds Jake of old movies, and for a moment he’s bummed if he’s scared her. That’s not what this is about.

  “Sorry for the disturbance,” Jake says to her.

  He sprints out of the waiting room, down the hall, the stairs, exits the door.

  He’s outside, still going full speed, composing his second live-tweet in his head, which he’ll post once he can safely stop running: I am on my own.

  11.

  Noah911 stands before an empty suitcase, staring into its maw, scared of it like the thing is a pagan god, demanding worship, sacrifice, and in a way that’s exactly what it’s doing, telling Noah911 to go against every instinct of self-preservation he has and fill the suitcase with his belongings, board a plane, attend Tracey’s funeral back home. He’s not sure he can bear witness as his sister is eulogized, remembered, and ultimately put to rest.

  Because one thing he damn well knows won’t be put down is every congregant’s judgment, holding Noah911 responsible for her too-early demise. They know it’s his fault, as he does, and the funeral would be a grueling torture chamber in which he’s slowly eviscerated.