All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  “You’re not.”

  And she and her ratty suitcase run full speed into Hank. He doesn’t budge. The dog starts barking from the hallway. Obviously, Hank can manhandle her, but he’s not. He’s letting her slam into him and he’s letting her drag the suitcase away and letting her amble through the front door and letting her shut it. Sara can’t tell what would feel worse—him making her stay, or him allowing her to leave—and her thoughts are the loudest they’ve ever been, cranking through those amplifiers and her hands keep buzzing and buzzing and she’s crying harder than she ever has, even more than when her parents died because that at least had shock as a component and there’s none of that numbing here. No, there’s only Hank crunching up her heart like an aluminum can.

  Sara’s at her car, looking over her shoulder to see if Hank will come out and stop her, but the house is quiet. Even Bernard has stopped barking. The quiet at the river had felt so peaceful, yet this one feels fickle and cruel.

  She throws open the trunk and stows the suitcase and opens the driver’s side door and notices someone’s inside. She jumps back.

  “Me,” says Rodney from the passenger seat.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You. Oh. Kay?”

  “You need to go,” she says. “I’m getting out of here.”

  Rodney nods but doesn’t budge.

  “I’m leaving now,” she says.

  More nodding.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Sara asks.

  More nodding.

  “What are you doing, Rodney?”

  “I’m. Com. Ing.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Can.”

  Sara looks up at the house. Hank hasn’t come outside to stop her. He’s not bellowing Baby Sis from inside. She tries to stifle her sobs, but it’s worse when she sees Rodney, and she surrenders into it, wailing. “He hates me,” she says and crashes into the driver’s seat.

  “Shhh,” says Rodney.

  He holds his wet trunks toward Sara, presumably for her to use as a hanky, and Sara laughs.

  “No thanks,” she says.

  “All. I. Need,” he says.

  “All you need for what?”

  He points out the window, into the distance and darkness.

  She’d misread his offering. He wasn’t presenting the boxers as a way to wipe her tears, blow her nose. No, Rodney was suggesting something else entirely: an escape, a copilot, a friend.

  “Those are all you need to leave with me?” she asks.

  Rodney nods again, and Sara feels a bit better, taking his boxers and running them under her eyes.

  “Let’s go find your mom,” she says.

  They have no haven here, Albert, they are all password-protected, they all have signs on their hearts that say SLIDE TO UNLOCK. But those four-digit codes have been forgotten and so they can’t get inside themselves, locked out and lost, and in their confusion they will hunt through the ones and zeroes for connection, to find out who they are, they will show their naked bodies for all to see, they will look for the people who made them, they will flounder for some sense of decency or self. It’s all the time on their hands, isn’t that a weird expression? Forget hands. It is the time in their brains, racing through neurotransmitters like mice in mazes. Time cannot be stopped but it is not a predator. Time is our friend, and it’s willing to play nicely if we learn how to ask, if we exchange pleasantries, if we shake hands and kiss cheeks, and you and I know the clandestine language to indulge time in dialogue. Only the two of us can articulate this yet-to-be discovered world. I wish we could wait for them, Albert, I wish there were a way to let them figure it out for themselves but thermometers don’t lie, this planet will face the big burn. It’s fate, it’s science, it’s existential mathematics. Unless we save them. My brain sends a signal to your brain and you send signals to my brain and we are connected, we are the only unlocked devices left. We are connected across time, and soon we’ll be able to bridge space as easily, and once we’ve mastered that advancement, you will be able to beam back. The space-time continuum will be tamed. There will be no such thing as pasts. Even the past tense will be irrelevant, archaic, known only in legend. Everyone across time will be alive at the same moment, all of us collapsing into one shining transcendent community, which will know no heat, no pathos. People born before the common era, people in the Middle Ages, the Victorians, the Huns, the ones who clutch technology like oxygen masks, they will all breathe at the same time, they will all pump blood. There will only be now. And you will be here. The two of us will stand in the ugliest Garden of Eden. No one here believes in anything they can’t find in the search engine but our action will remedy that, we will show them the new religion, we will illustrate the perfect convergence of piety and science. No demagogues or deities or dupes. Just a simple way to solve E = mcdespaired. Space and time manipulation means we can remain uncremated, means that so many wrongs might go extinct in the process because people will love their second chances. They’ll love this new life, they’ll rise to the occasion, it’s a way to reenter that passcode, it’s a way to navigate around with a blazing fast connection, to awaken and slough off that residue of cynicism, to reorient their senses of self. We’ll be able to swim through our own nervous systems. Can you imagine? And as we figure out who we are, as we remember that there’s good in our souls, everyone will be fused together into a single bright consciousness and in that moment, we will remember what it is to be happy.

  PART 2

  RESET

  13.

  “What was he wearing?” asks the cop.

  “What?”

  “His clothes.”

  “What was he wearing today?”

  “At the time of his disappearance.”

  The two of them stand in the parking lot, in front of the therapist’s office. Paul keeps his phone in his hand, compulsively checking it every few seconds to see if Jake has responded to any of his texts (he hasn’t), while Paul turns in circles every thirty seconds or so to spot his son’s return (no on that front, too).

  The police officer is somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. Barely looks like he needs to shave. It bothers Paul that he’s so young. He wants someone chiseled, battle-tested. Somebody who has worked cases like this his whole career, and yet there’s nothing Paul can do about it. He’ll have to hope that this young man is good at his job.

  Paul is, for all intents and purposes, calm. He’s not raising his voice, no cantering heart, no tears, no hysterics. He’s concerned, but he’s having trouble accepting this as reality: The whole thing feels

  too blasé, too relaxed to be about a missing child. Jake is missing in terms of no one knowing where he’s at this second; however, it’s temporary—Paul knows this is short-term. His son overreacted, much like taking a baseball bat to his room, but his tantrum will wane and he’ll be back, he has to come back.

  There is a suspicion, though, huffing all the air from Paul’s lungs. His breathing grows shorter, so he’s not as composed as he thought. Perhaps Paul wants to collect himself via a flurry of Keep your head and things will all work out platitudes, yet he can’t really nourish himself on those empty calories. Fact: His son is missing. Fact: It happened on Paul’s watch, which plumps him up with blame. Paul has been painted with parental blame plenty of times in Jake’s life. All parents have had this experience, he knows. It’s part of the job. He remembers a time when Jake was two feet away from him—no more than that—and Jake fell down and chipped his front tooth. The boy was only three years old, and the rest of the tooth didn’t fall out until he was seven and Paul had to see the chip, that denunciation, every day for four years, a jagged reminder of his negligence. I was doing the right thing, he always told the chip. I was standing right there. I wasn’t being careless.

  That’s the devastating thing about being a parent—the world doesn’t care about your plans. There’s no tally for intentions. Kids fall, teeth chip, and you live with it.
/>   In the parking lot, Paul checks his phone again for texts.

  He turns in another circle, scrutinizing his surroundings.

  And now Paul has to make eye contact with this young cop and his questions.

  His lungs aren’t pumping out full blasts of air. They’re a garden hose with a kink. Paul pants out the next couple breaths.

  “He had on sneakers,” says Paul. “White and red Nikes.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “I bought them for him about a month ago.”

  “What clothes was he wearing, sir?”

  “Can’t you track his cell signal?”

  “We need to finish this report.”

  “I’ve seen that done on TV, the authorities locating criminals from their cell signals.”

  “That technology exists,” the cops says, “but our priority is to complete the report.”

  “We don’t need a report if we track his cell.”

  “A physical description of what he’s wearing will help spot him, sir.”

  “Well, it was . . . uh . . .”

  “Let’s come back to this.”

  Paul doesn’t want to, though. He doesn’t want to admit that he can’t remember what his son wore today. Doesn’t want to feel the repulsive burden of not knowing because, he guesses, other parents always know what clothes their kids have on. His ex would be able to answer this question with no problem and Paul should as well.

  There are so many things that he doesn’t want to acknowledge, things he can’t bear remembering. Like the feeling of being in the office, he and the therapist barricaded away from Jake. The feeling of being interrogated by the doctor, his questions about the divorce, the separation, the living arrangements. The feeling of being indicted, of being on trial. The feeling of guilt—something Paul didn’t necessarily know he felt about his son’s well-being until that moment. The feeling of sweating on a witness stand. The feeling that a sentence will be handed down shortly.

  The feeling of listening to a therapist express “deep concern”—his words—about Paul’s son. “Deep concern for what?” Paul had asked, and the doctor only got to say, “Jake is at a precarious intersection.”

  Then they heard a loud noise from the waiting room, a door slammed, a woman’s voice calling, “Doctor!”

  Both Paul and the therapist emerged from the office and saw the smashed hand sanitizer dispenser on the floor, clear liquid oozing out, looking like a dead jellyfish.

  “Where’s Jake?” Paul asked the woman, her tablet resting on her lap, a napping child.

  She pointed to the door. Paul ran through it. Paul screamed his son’s name. Paul was down the stairs. He exited the building. He stood in the parking lot and couldn’t spot his son anywhere.

  “Jake!” he yelled, turning in circles. “Jake!”

  Soon he dialed 911. Soon he was alerted by the operator to the fact that this wasn’t an emergency situation. Please call your local authorities, sir. They’ll be happy to assist, sir.

  And ten minutes later, here he is with this police officer asking him a battery of questions, equally if not more defaming than those of the therapist, and Paul wants one thing: to remember what his son was wearing.

  “His weight?” the cop says.

  “Jeans, I think,” Paul says. “Yeah, blue jeans. Baggy.”

  “His weight,” the cop says.

  “You know how they wear them too baggy?”

  “Do you know his weight?”

  “Maybe 130 pounds.”

  “Height?”

  “Probably five-five or five-six or around there.”

  “We need to be as precise as possible.”

  “Five-six then.”

  “What’s his date of birth?”

  “April 24th, 1999,” says Paul proudly. As precise as possible. He can be more precise. He can go down to the minute. 7:18 AM. He can tell the cop all about that morning, can re-create the whole scene, his son with the umbilical cord looped twice around his neck, the doctors getting more anxious and agitated. Every time Paul looked up these doctors multiplied, two of them at first, four, eight, and because they’d administered such a heavy epidural, his wife couldn’t push, not really, and the doctors were now using a vacuum on the baby’s head to suck him out, and the worst part was that they’d broadcast his heartbeat over speakers in the room, and as his wife tried to push the baby’s heartbeat would crank up and between these too-light pushes Jake’s heartbeat would slow to this dismal thump thump thump, and Paul was convinced the baby was going to die. Paul stood next to his wife’s bed, holding her hand, their foreheads touching, saying to her, “We’re all going to be fine; we’re going to be fine,” and the vacuum wasn’t getting the baby out, either, thump thump thump, and the doctors were readying for a C-section if this one final push from his wife and one final yank from the vacuum didn’t work. But it did. Jake finally slid out, his head misshapen from the pressure created by the vacuum, Paul actually thinking the head looked like a layer cake, and the baby was this terrible purple color and he wasn’t crying and the doctors took him away, and Paul stayed right next to his wife, his wife that he loved so much, stayed right with her and whispered, “You did such a great job,” and she said, “How is he?” and he said, “Are you okay?” That was when Jake cried for the first time, sitting on a table a few feet from them, having all the mucus sucked from his airways, and it was Paul who walked over to cut the cord, Jake’s head already returning to a normal shape a few minutes later. Paul stared down at his son and felt relief that this was over, Jake was here now, Jake was safe, and Paul leaned down and kissed his child for the first time and said, “Welcome.”

  Paul could tell this young cop all of these details, and many more, so many more, so stop making it sound like Paul didn’t know anything about his boy.

  “You heard me about the jeans, right?” Paul says.

  “Yes. Does he have braces? Wear glasses?”

  “Neither.”

  “What color was his shirt?”

  “I don’t remember,” Paul says.

  “Jacket?”

  Paul continues to peer all around the parking lot, hoping to see his son flouncing back. He simply needed to wander off, get mad, let his frustration out, something that would explain his departure, that he’s not really running away. He’s not trying to leave. He had been only temporarily carried away.

  “Any other unique identifiers?” the cop asks.

  “He usually has his ear buds in. Always playing music.”

  The cop doesn’t write this detail down.

  “He literally always has them in, so please put that in the report.”

  Sighing, the cop jots down a few words, then says, “I’m going up to the doctor’s office. To get additional information about the boy’s clothing.”

  “I’ll wait here in case he comes back,” Paul says.

  “You should go home. Check and make sure he’s not there. If you have keys, you should also look inside your ex-wife’s residence. Be thorough. Closets. Under beds. The garage. Trunks of vehicles. Any place he can hide.”

  “Who will wait here?”

  The cop looks puzzled. “Why would he come back?”

  The officer meant why would Jake return here, to this parking lot, but his vague and stabbing syntax—Why would he come back?—travels through the skin, the meat, the bone, wedging in Paul’s body, a wound already infected with blame. That parental blame. The way seeing a chipped tooth day in, day out can call into question if you’re even fit to be a parent. The way there are so many reminders that Paul isn’t doing a very good job of it.

  “He’s coming back,” Paul says.

  “I have all the information, and we’ll be in touch,” the cop says. “We’ll also reach out to the FBI, talk about opening a missing person file with them.”

  “He might come back here to find me,” says Paul.

  The cop turns and walks to the building’s front door. “You’re right; we’ll be in touch.”

&nb
sp; “That’s it?”

  “That’s a lot,” says the cop. The door is open, and he’s marching through. “Normally, in these circumstances, the child hides in a familiar place. Go home and be thorough with your search. We’ll be in touch.”

  The door slowly shuts and Paul is alone. He turns in another circle, screaming, “Jake! Jake!”

  He texts his son again. This one says: Let me know that you’re okay, please.

  He even calls him, though he knows there’s no chance that Jake will answer. “It’s me. Where did you go? I’m worried. Please. I’m at the therapist’s still. I’m waiting for you. I can pick you up wherever you are. I’m not mad. Only concerned. I want to help. Please let me help. I will meet you anywhere. Please call. Or text. I love you. We love you, your mom and me. We are here. Please call.”

  OF COURSE, JAKE isn’t in a closet or hiding behind the water heater or buried in a pile of laundry, but Paul does his due diligence anyway, inspecting his condo from top to bottom, both floors, and once that turns up nothing, he knows his son hides in the computer.

  Paul hasn’t gone to his ex’s—the place he used to live, where his alimony and child-support payments still fund the mortgage—but he’ll get there. He’s not dismissing the cop’s advice. It’s just that since Paul knows where his son spends the majority of his time, why not look there first?

  Of course, that’s part of why he’s not champing at the bit to go to his ex’s, but the main deterrent is the barrenness. It’s one thing to be in his own empty apartment, because that’s how a newly divorced bachelor is supposed to live. There’s supposed to be a dearth of any intimacy. The walls should be stark white. The cheap carpet should have a constellation of pizza crumbs, so many of them that walking barefoot is like reading Braille with your feet. There aren’t any throw pillows on the couch. There isn’t a couch. The kitchen cupboards are packed with the slimmest essentials, olive oil and tinfoil. Paul hates all the vacant cupboards, but the idea of buying baking spices or casserole dishes seems devastating. The refrigerator is merely a brief cooling station for his pale ale, and there’s a whole shelf dedicated to half-finished burritos. There isn’t one vegetable on the premises.