All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  He is in his room, the black suitcase splayed on the bed, totally empty; the clock reads 9 PM and his red-eye departs in a few hours. Noah911 knows what’s expected of him, after the belligerent phone call with his father.

  It had been three days since Tracey’s death and Noah911 finally got the gumption this morning to tell their parents, now only his parents. Pronouns, he is realizing, are going to be tricky from now on.

  He called them even though that was the last thing he wanted to do. Seems like a series of unwanted tasks blossom before him: the call, the trip home, the funeral, the indictments, the life transpiring without Tracey.

  It didn’t take their father five seconds to turn his shock and sadness at the news into high-voltage rage, saying to Noah911, “What did you know about this band?”

  Noah911 could hear his mom crying in the background.

  “Not much, Dad.”

  “Why are you only telling us now?”

  “The band didn’t seem like anything.”

  “What’s going on out there?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Your sister is dead!”

  Like the phone call with the cop, Noah911 hung up then. He couldn’t cope with any more tar painted on his heart. And if he barely made it through that phone call, there was no way he could sit through the funeral. How could he pack for such an experience? How’s he supposed to pick out socks? How can he be expected to coordinate colors? There’s no way. To fill and zip this suitcase. To board a plane. To look his parents in the eyes. He’s never felt this style of guilt before but it’s like a hangover. Head aching. Clammy and sweaty. Nauseated. He can’t sleep and can’t go outside, even though he hates being in their apartment. It’s now like a tomb. Tracey is everywhere. Her smell. Her stuff. The uneaten grapefruit still sits by the couch, flies buzzing around it. The toast and teeth marks and hummus. The note: Make sure my sister eats this, okay?

  Noah911 has hunkered down under that same blanket and watched the YouTube clip over and over. Oddly, it’s the only thing that temporarily conquers his symptoms. Noah911 can’t stop watching it, watching her. In each viewing, he pauses it right before anyone breaks from the pack and jumps. Pauses it right before the moment becomes something else. Pauses it so he can gaze at Tracey, his happy sister, moving along the walkway and playing the clarinet with friends, and there’s nothing wrong, just Tracey and her band doing the thing that makes them feel the most alive in the world.

  Pressing pause: In that way he can stop time. He’s not interested in trading futures; he’s trying to prevent one.

  Noah911 should be watching the video right now, god damn it, but the empty suitcase and the red-eye flight and their—his—parents won’t get out of the way.

  What he needs is an excuse.

  The easiest way to get out of this is a text. It’s so passive, so one-way, so devoid of confrontation. Empty of any opportunity to get talked into anything. Noah911 can type and send and the conversation is over. He talks, then no one talks. Delivering his news free from outside input. It’s a perfect method to disseminate bad news. Flake on a dinner reservation. Blow off a massage. Skip your kid sister’s funeral.

  A few words and he’s free.

  Noah911 still has the programming of an athlete. He sees competition in every direction he looks. It certainly helps him professionally and it helps when he picks up women, not interested in a relationship but securing a one-night stand is its own short-term futures contract. He takes, or had taken before all this, impeccable care of his body, eating all the right stuff, lifting weights, tons of cardio, 7 percent body fat. But somewhere along the way he forgot to take care of Tracey as she needed him to, which reminds him of his senior season on the lacrosse team. A skinny freshman had made varsity. Kid was so quick and elusive, a little water bug out there that no one could keep up with, but the coach knew that other teams would target him, try to outmuscle the kid, render his skills meaningless if he was always being knocked around. Coach asked Noah911 to protect him out there, to take a penalty if he needed to put some people on their asses to alert them that any cheap shots on the kid would be avenged. But being a midfielder kept Noah911 busy in all sorts of ways, and during a particularly contentious game, he forgot about the kid. Or he remembered, but the responsibility to protect him plummeted down his list of priorities, and some muscle-head on the opposing side checked the kid so ferociously that he rocketed to the grass, separating a shoulder, his head hitting the ground so hard he lost consciousness for a few seconds. His parents never let the kid step foot on the field again, and Noah911 carried the taste of that around for a few years, couldn’t shake it. He had been charged to act as the kid’s protector and couldn’t live up to the task. If it took him so long to get over something like that, Tracey’s death will smother him forever. He’ll replay it over and over, the things he could have done differently for her, the ways he could have been more involved, more accessible.

  And if her death represented the end of the most important game of his life, then the funeral and seeing his parents were the post-game press conference, where Noah911 has to stand at a podium and answer for his terrible play. Reporters champing at the bit to skewer him, and the microphone isn’t big enough for Noah911 to hide behind. He cosigned the death of his sister through his slack protection, and he needed to be held accountable for that.

  “Don’t you think Tracey deserved better?” someone will ask.

  And Noah911 would break down crying. Right there at the podium. That would be his answer. That would have to do. Cameras going off, capturing him in this way, putting pictures of it in newspapers and online so everyone can see him for what he truly is: the brother who neglected his sister. Or worse: the brother who let her die.

  Finding the right words to text his parents proves difficult. Or the reason he can’t come home proves impossible to find. An illness will not suffice. This he knows from years of watching him and Tracey with stuffy noses and swollen tonsils, coughing and wheezing on the school bus. His parents won’t accept any sickness as an excuse, their father always prescribing Tylenol as the cure for every ailment.

  He sends this message to both his parents’ phones: I got beat up and can’t travel. Sorry.

  Does his dad even know how to text? His mom certainly does, often lobbing phrases in the third person to make him feel like crap as he reads them: Mothers would sure love hearing from their sons soon. Or: Experts say that sons should call their moms regularly to lead fulfilling lives. A million others like these. She used to do it over email, a cyber-nag, but last year she switched to an exclusive text-only assault. No one can make you want to cut your heart out quicker than your mother.

  But wait.

  He’s already made a mistake.

  Seconds after sending his text to his parents he realizes his error.

  What he should have done is disable the tone that alerts him he’s received a new text, should have minimized any temptations to analyze responses from them.

  He’s still standing in his bedroom, right in front of that splayed suitcase, its black material looking like a filleted seal. He’s wondering what you do with this two-ton guilt and how you’re supposed to live through this suffering and endure a life with constant grief, those sounds wheezing in his head like an old coffee maker, and then his BlackBerry beeps.

  He knows that the text is from one of his parents, probably his mother, and he knows that reading a message from either of them is a bad idea, and he knows that if he reads it he won’t be able to sever the conversation there, and yet he can’t stop himself. He so badly wishes that he could resist this bait, but he’s not strong enough.

  Here’s his mother’s response: What happened, sweetie?

  Got mugged. I was punched and kicked a few times. Broken nose. Cracked ribs. Etc.

  Hold on . . .

  There’s about forty-five seconds of nothing, time for Noah911 to put his phone down. Go outside. Take a shower. Eat something. Do fifty pushups. Don’t re
ad any more of their texts. All these directives whirl around his head and yet he does nothing except sit there.

  Another alert.

  This is your sister’s fucking funeral!

  That’s his father’s foray into the conversation, and it sends a shudder through Noah911. A rictus jimmies onto Noah911’s lips. Finding it funny, actually, reading and rereading the inaugural text from his father; he can’t help but hear the message in his father’s voice. Like he’s in the room. Yelling it. That exclamation point is like a lightning bolt. Many a time in Noah911’s formative years he’s seen his father’s exclamation points in person, punching holes in walls, chucking china. He never put his hands on his wife and kids, but he governed through fear and the possibility of violence.

  Noah911 texts back: What can I do? I’m injured.

  Be injured on the plane. Be hurt here.

  I can’t even walk.

  Get your ass to the airport!

  If he had it to do over again, he might have tried something surgical. An appendectomy. Or an exotic disease, like dengue fever. That’s a thing, right? The kind so contagious that the authorities wouldn’t allow him on a plane for fear of infecting others. He should have thought this through more.

  From his father: Call us.

  My jaw is sprained and broken nose kills when I try to talk.

  Call us!

  My jaw is SEVERELY sprained and nose throbs like crazy.

  From his mom: We’re worried about you.

  And then this from his dad, barely a second later: Prove it.

  Prove what?

  I want to see your beaten-up face.

  Camera on phone is broken.

  Then let’s Skype.

  No response from Noah911 for over a minute.

  From his father: Hellooooo!!!

  Noah911 does what he should have done five minutes ago, before this fiasco started. He puts his phone down, actually placing it in the empty suitcase, if only he can send that as his proxy. He turns and leaves the room, the apartment, and heads out for a drink. A glass of vodka. At the very least it gets him away from the phone and the parents and the press conference and the suitcase and the flies.

  They live—he lives—at 25th and Bryant, in the Mission District. There are a lot of bars on 24th Street, a major thoroughfare through the neighborhood. From what he understands, ten years ago this was a pretty tough stretch, but people like Noah911, rich and white, have been flooding this corridor, corroding its character. People tag sidewalks and walls with pejorative thoughts on gentrification—This city used to celebrate diversity—but it’s too late. It’s already happened. Such comments are as useless as bemoaning the weather from last Thursday. And as Noah911 now understands, once something has happened, there’s nothing you can do about it.

  He stops at the door of a bar, peeks inside. It seems too jovial. The room is filled with young and shiny kids. These people seem like they’re drinking to have fun, and that’s not what he needs. Noah911 seeks the kind of dive bar in which people drink to peel despicable memories from their minds like dirty socks. Is that REM on the jukebox? People still listen to them? The bar has perfect burgundy carpet, stools with shining leather, a bartender actually telling a joke to a gaggle of customers—How many straight San Franciscans does it take to change a light bulb? Both of them!—and Noah911 needs to get away from this cheery scene, sink into some squalor.

  The next saloon he spies is a Latino bar, mariachi music blazing in a near-empty room. There are three guys bellied up, the faces obscured to him from the doorway, thirsty silhouettes resting elbows on the bar. Barren of any furniture. A concrete floor. No tables. This seems like a place to become a shadow, shrouded in blackness, but it’s the music that keeps him from going inside. Mariachi features horns. Trumpets. Tubas. Which brings Noah911’s mind to the brass band and there’s no way he can sit in a room with horns hollering at him.

  He continues his hunt for a just-right bar. Noah911 approaches and rejects five more, before finding the perfect place to slide inside.

  It’s the bar’s color scheme, or lack thereof, that entices him. The place is painted entirely black—floor, walls, and ceiling. Noah911 is reminded of his suitcase, and knows this is what it would be like to climb inside the thing, zip it up, bathe himself in the darkness and quiet, keeping all the guilt away.

  He walks to the center of the room and his eyes are brought up to the ceiling. He’s wrong: It’s not totally black. There are pieces of broken mirror glued up there, shining like stars in the sky, and it seems so beautiful that he chokes up.

  Flies swarm back by the liquor bottles. There’s a TV in the corner, playing the news. Ten guys, no women in the place. An old Jane’s Addiction song hits everyone in the face.

  Noah911 climbs onto a stool and the old man approaches, wearing a T-shirt that says SPANK ME, IT’S MY BIRTHDAY.

  “Happy birthday,” Noah911 says.

  “Lay off, will ya?” he says. “Lost a bet with my niece and have to wear this stupid shirt all week.”

  “What was the bet?”

  “Aren’t you a curious asshole?”

  If there was any debate as to whether or not Noah911 had picked the right spot, this seals the deal. He’s home. This is the perfect pub for what he has to do. “I didn’t mean any offense,” he says.

  “No, it’s not your fault. My fuse is spent. People busting my balls about this shirt the whole time. What will you drink?”

  “Ketel One on the rocks.”

  The bartender limps off to find the right bottle, and Noah911 peeks up and down the other stools. There are a couple men like him, drinking alone, cuddling dejection with every sip. At the far end, though, way over by the TV and its news program, is a group of four guys. They have the look he needs and are pretty brawny, too.

  The Ketel One is placed in front of him and Noah911 says, “Hold on, please,” and the bartender stands there for five seconds and watches Noah911 gulp down the whole drink and order another.

  “I’m liking you more and more,” says the bartender.

  “Be careful or I’ll spank you.”

  He shakes his head at Noah911 and goes to get another vodka, coming back with the bottle and filling up his glass, then pouring himself one as well. No ice in his glass, only warm vodka.

  “That’s hardcore,” Noah911 says, motioning to the tepid vodka.

  “I don’t drink for the taste,” he says. As a toast, the bartender holds up his warm vodka and says, “To being one day closer to death.”

  Noah911 doesn’t say anything and they shoot the vodka.

  The bartender gets summoned by the four men, who are wondering whose dick they gotta suck to get the baseball game turned on.

  Noah911 can feel heat and testosterone pulse from them. It’s written on their faces and wafts off of them, a violent pheromone, and Noah911 loves inhaling it.

  “This ain’t a sports bar,” the bartender says.

  “Just turn the channel, old-timer,” one says.

  “Just go fuck yourself,” the bartender says.

  Another starts clapping and howling. “Oh, snap, Willie. He sure got you!”

  “Hey,” Willie says, adjusting his backward baseball cap, “I like your bite, old man.”

  “You ain’t seen my bite,” the bartender says. “We’re too busy barking.”

  This makes them lose it, cracking up, pounding fists on the bar, shaking their drinks, a few suds jumping out of pint glasses and slowly spilling down the outside.

  Noah911 loses his capacity to follow the conversation, eyes glued to the TV. They’re saying something about the brass band but he can’t hear. They show a few stills from TheGreatJake’s video; Noah911 has memorized every frame. Finally, the screen zooms in on one man’s face, the last person to jump, the guy playing the bass drum. His mug is grainy, pixilated from being blown up this big on the screen, but Noah911 tries to soak up every detail. He’s young, definitely in his thirties. Short brown hair. Sort of handsome. Not an impo
sing face, clean-shaven, not the crazy you can see in the eyes of, say, Ted Bundy or Jim Jones. Noah911 would sit next to this guy on the subway and not worry one bit.

  He has to know what the newscasters are saying. Earlier, he’d been kept out of the mariachi bar, simply from the threat of being triggered to think of Tracey jumping by the horns. This, though, feels like something different—this feels like he might be able to learn. Why are they zeroing in on this man? Is he the leader? Is it his fault, too?

  He asks the bartender to turn the music down, crank up the news. The men buck at this idea, saying, “God no, anything but that. Jesus, what’s wrong with baseball? What do you have against the national pastime?”

  This is the national pastime, thinks Noah911.

  The cranky bartender agrees to Noah911’s request, probably because his suggestion bothers the others so much. He shuts off the music, snatches the remote control, and turns up the news.

  “This is an image of the man thought to be the mastermind behind . . .” the news anchor says, but Noah911 can’t hear the rest of her thought because one of the men whines, “Boring! This is boring! Can we please turn the channel?”

  “We are so bored!” another says.

  “Bor-ing!” they start chanting, all four of them, bisecting the word into two harsh syllables. “Bor-ing! Bor-ing! Bor-ing!”

  They pound their fists on the bar in rhythm with their chants.

  “Will you clowns shut up?” Noah911 says.

  They stop. Look at him. Stand from their stools. Flash greedy smiles. It’s like an antelope has challenged a cackle of hyenas to a fight.

  “I’m trying to listen to the news,” Noah911 says.

  “Mister, you should be listening to the common sense the good lord gave you,” says the bartender.

  “He’s giving you sound advice,” Willie says, readjusting his backward hat, pulling it down snug.

  “I need to hear the news,” Noah911 says, “so put your tampons in and deal with it.”

  “You assholes want to fight, you do it outside,” the bartender says. “I’ll call the cops, though.”