by Joshua Mohr
Going over to his old house, to wander unaccompanied through all those memories, is too much. He’ll do it. Of course, he’ll do it. He’ll make it over there soon, for Jake’s sake.
Fact of the matter is that Paul doesn’t want to search inside the computer for him, either, but that somehow seems easier, and if that’s the wrong word here, it seems less bloated with the past, the prowling memories talking shit to him from inside the house’s walls. The failure of the marriage haunting, rattling chains, slamming doors. At least looking for Jake online didn’t have that ghastly baggage. Because he’d never done it before, and that now seems like another failure.
He had told his boy on his voicemail that Paul would meet him anywhere, and that claim will be challenged as Paul goes hunting for TheGreatJake. Paul has to let go of his disdain for social media. This is the only place he can find his son.
The site he hears Jake talk about the most is Twitter, and that’s where the manhunt will commence. Paul opens the page and makes an account, choosing the humdrum username Paul_Gamache.
And he’s in; he’s a part of this; he’s plugged in.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he knows what the hell he’s doing. Paul Googles various things on how to work the user interface, how to track down specific people, and it stuns him how easy it is to navigate, how effortless it is to find the single person you need to locate, and thirty seconds later he’s found TheGreatJake.
He clicks follow.
He follows him.
He is following his son.
He thinks about all the historic reasons to follow your children. The time-tested ones, the traditional, the textbook: following kids for protection. For making sure predators are kept at bay. For ensuring a good life, all the advantages. For a balanced diet. High-fiber foods. Eight glasses of water a day. Shampoo and conditioning. To make sure they’re never too hot or too cold. For sunscreen. For protective eyewear. For cleanliness. For cardiovascular exercise. To make sure they don’t grow up too fast, see the world’s forked tongue. Follow them so they shy away from greed, that god. Teach about the honor in a day’s hard work. To build values. Grow optimism. Cultivate a social conscience. Stoke kindness in them. Shield them from the inevitable dullness and boredom that will grow on their bodies like fat once they’re adults. Once they’ve settled into disappointing realities. Once they themselves are disappointments.
But before that, you protect them from themselves, which is the worst predator of all: the one they never see coming.
Follow children for the various kinds of support. Financial. Emotional. Psychological. Babying these kids way longer than is appropriate. Keeping them reliant on you for your own selfish means. Wanting them to seek out their own experiences but equally wanting them to need you forever. The ultimate Catch-22, because if you raise them right they strike out on their own, leaving you with curdling memories and their student loans.
For forced nurturing. Reminders about a proper night’s rest. You follow and offer unsolicited advice about how to find the right friends and lovers. How to pick a partner. Paul loathes that part of being a parent—how it requires you to act as though you know so much, feigning wisdom, donning a pitiful costume of acumen that Paul knows is bullshit, but these sorts of hypocrisy are always and forever socially acceptable.
You follow them to bond. To communicate. To shuck their feelings from their hearts like oysters from shells.
Follow to offer crass and caustic editorials, spoiling any thoughts of a child’s sovereignty with your intrusive monologues.
You follow your children because you love them and you know the world is contagious with depravity, and in one way or another, everyone gets infected.
Despite how adroitly we try to remain pure, it’s impossible. It’s only a chipped tooth but it’s more. Everyone swims in the earth’s dirty broth.
And yet parents do their best to shield children. They follow in every way they can, hoping for happiness and safety, even though those things don’t really exist. They are artifices. Paul knows these things, and someday his son will possess this carnivorous knowledge, but let someday be decades from now. Let it only reveal the despair long after Paul is gone.
And what better way to accept the futility than to become Paul_ Gamache and enter the all-encompassing artifice—what better way to update these historic reasons to follow your kids, rooted in lessons learned in centuries barren of downloaded deities—what better way to follow them than to follow them.
Evolve into a binary detective.
Sleuth their profiles for clues that might tell you who they actually are, where they choose to reside.
No matter how much Paul hates this, it’s the only way he can find his son.
His first tweet: It’s dad, @TheGreatJake. Where are you?
Because Paul only follows one user, he can see no other people’s tweets, has no other posts coursing down his timeline. It’s empty, hollow, lifeless; it’s a socket waiting for a bulb. He needs TheGreatJake to show himself.
And he’ll also need to check his ex’s house. He knows this and isn’t being negligent. He was never negligent. Toward the end of the marriage, back when Paul had no idea they were nearing the end, he’d take walks by himself every night after work. This was 6 or 7 PM. The sun zipping down in the Marin sky. They lived in a circuitous web of residential streets, but if he kept following the forking roads to the left, he arrived at his destination: a yellow dead-end sign.
It never seemed poetic or metaphoric at the time. It was the marker he used on his walk to alert him to turn around, go back home, but with some space, if you spend your free time walking to the dead end, of course, your wife divorces you. Of course, your son leaves. Paul had been walking to the dead end for so many years that what if he actually reached it and didn’t realize? What if he was living it?
Stop it. This isn’t about me, he thinks, though he’s not sure that’s true.
That’s exactly why Jake left; if his mom were here, were around more, with her presence the boy would be better.
Paul decides to scroll through TheGreatJake’s old tweets while he waits, and Paul was right to look for him here. From the time stamps, he knows that there have been three tweets since therapy.
I’d smash this whole fucking place.
I am on my own.
Running away from home. Where 2 go?
There it is. Spelled out. Running away.
Paul winces, feels a stab in his abdomen, his lungs folded up like origami, every breath a labor.
All this could be from the laxative, he hopes. This could be the beginning of things getting back to normal inside of him.
But he knows it’s not. He knows it’s the news—the tweeted confirmation—that Jake is trying to leave. To flee. To be free. To be absent. To be missing. He is doing this on purpose. He is engineering a life away from Paul.
About eight minutes later, Paul gets an answer to his tweet, his plea to know where his son is, TheGreatJake saying to him: I’m here.
Where is here? Paul tweets back.
I’m here, @Paul_Gamache.
14.
About the time Jake answers Paul’s tweet, Sara’s adding more hot water to her bath. She does this with her big toe, moving the dial so the scalding reinforcements pour into the tub. First, her lower legs feel the temperature crank and the sensation slowly moves up her small body, the water working toward her head.
It’s been four days since Sara’s day zero. Her rebirth with a digital, conjoined twin. One without Hank, without a job, a home, a boyfriend. Those desired commodities ripped and replaced by a sex tape.
New Sara is four days old, and this newborn can’t get out of the bath.
She and Rodney drove out of Traurig and made it into California, cruised down the mountain into the foothills, finally entering Sacramento. After five hours on the road, they needed a motel room. The room had two double beds. Pillows so scrawny that they were probably stuffed with creamed spinach. The carpet smelled like
a campfire. Under a black light, the bedspread could make a porn star blush.
Right when they got into the room, Sara said, “I need a bath.”
She locked the door, crawled in the tub, scrolled on her phone, reading more about the brass band, the jumper who lived. The article called the woman a survivor, but Sara didn’t buy that. She was the exact opposite. An unsurvivor. If she leaped from the bridge because she thought a better world awaited her, what a tragedy to be fished from the water, wake up restrained in a hospital. She didn’t want this life in the first place, and now the consequences of her actions would make it even worse.
Dead bodies could be survivors. Sara understood that. They were survivors if they escaped their pain. If they were liberated. If they occupied a consciousness swiped clean of appalling memory.
There were lots of things Sara hated about the media, but at the top of the list was their reliance on gaudy alliteration. It was insulting, dismissive. The local press had done it to Rodney right after his accident, naming him Balloon Boy. Such wounding insolence. It was vicious, the calloused practice of shredding someone’s identity to a commodity, to a caricature. And the unsurvivor was the latest victim of this assault, the article referring to her as Jumper Julie.
If the media gave Sara a nickname it would be Slutty Sara, or Skank Sara, or Sex Tape Sara. They’d call her these things without any care of the malice tucked into these syllables, venom folded between consonants and vowels.
Sara lost track of time in the tub, or she knew that time passed and didn’t care. She never expected to spend four days bathing, but honestly, the tub was the safest haven she’d found since her fiasco posted online. It was warm and nobody was talking and Hank wasn’t yelling and decimating her heart and Felix couldn’t kick her car and Moses couldn’t suspend her from work and Nat didn’t know where to find her to post another video, and on the other side of this locked door was sweet Rodney, her only friend left. She expected to spend half an hour in the tub, but being immersed in that womb proved impossible to slide out of—why leave such quiet and warm comfort?
She only exited for quick trips. To eat takeout that Rodney had ordered, Chinese, Thai, pizza. To sleep in spurts, toss and turn, think too much, retreat back to another bath, slipping into solace.
And four days later, they’re still in this god-awful motel room. This is a capricious way to dole out her emergency money, but she can’t find the verve to try. She feels bad for Rodney, trapped out there. She wouldn’t be surprised if he took off on her—she certainly wouldn’t blame him. But every time she briefly emerges from the bathroom, there he is, watching TV, using his own phone to scroll around the globe. He always greets her with a serving of food, something to drink.
“Eat,” he says.
“Okay.” But she barely does.
“Be. Nice. To. Sa. Ra,” he says, hoisting a plate of pad thai at her.
It takes him almost twenty seconds to choke it out, but what Sara hadn’t realized until right this second is that who cares how long it takes him to talk. It’s the warmth behind his words that she craves.
“All right.” She takes it, smiles at him, but sets it down somewhere in the room before crawling into another bath.
She can’t believe they’re calling her Jumper Julie. She hops from page to page, trying to learn more about her, details that will help Sara get a sense of who this woman actually is, but not much has been released about her. Details are sparse to guard her identity.
Sure, she gets her privacy protected, thinks Sara, while my white ass shakes online.
Sara should be feeling better. That’s her mantra in the tub. You’ve gotten away, she tries to tell herself. Traurig and all its drama are in the rearview. Rally, Sara. Feel good.
What would really make her feel good is if Sara can pick up the phone and talk to Jumper Julie. Not for any guidance, just empathy. Empathy that spans all across the sky like storm clouds.
Cumulonimbus empathy.
Instead, she’ll have to settle for another bath—the one that started as Jake tweeted back to Paul—and it’s time to do it.
This is the time.
Sara points herself at a certain URL.
She opens the page and watches it load.
There is a still image, Sara on her hands and knees, Nat behind her, a banner above them that says SKANK OF THE WEEK.
And a link that says CLICK HERE FOR ALL THE ACTION!
It might sound like masochism, this impulse to watch what’s ruined her, but Sara remembers some of her mom’s advice. This was when Sara was seven or eight years old and she couldn’t stop singing the song “Frère Jacques.” It had been in her head for weeks and every time there was a lapse in conversation, that’s when Sara started singing. It was in her head when she fell asleep and when she woke up, in her head while she ate and played.
“Here,” her mom said, “let’s listen to the whole song together. That might help get it out of your head.”
She sat on her mom’s lap, and they fired up a CD, hearing the entire track, and it worked. “Frère Jacques” was no more, though it was replaced by another song. Sara’s life had music back then.
So perhaps that logic can be superimposed here. Perhaps watching her whole sex tape can stop its dismal loop in her head.
Her phone is like a hypnotist swinging a pocket watch, entrancing her. She lies in the bath and hopes this viewing purges all the sick congestion rocketing around her brain.
At first, it forms a trance for Sara, a molested daze: She stares at herself, on her knees sucking Nat’s cock, licking down the bottom of his shaft to the balls, gripping him with one hand and playing with her nipple with the other, and she’s barely fifteen seconds into the clip and that’s all she can take. Her hands erupt like vibrating phones again and she puts the real one on the floor, flexes her fingers.
There’s not enough room in the world for both these Saras. If they are conjoined twins, one is a survivor, the other an unsurvivor, and Sara has no idea which she is.
There are discussions that you can have with yourself in a bathtub in a crappy motel room when you feel like no matter what you do your life doesn’t have any hope, any future.
She might not be able to escape in the literal sense, not yet, but escapism is a possibility. She can use her imagination to leave this room, leave the fifteen seconds of the sex tape behind. She can transform this place into something else. Transform her into something else.
Sara surveys the bathroom for props. Props are key. All that’s around Sara are scratchy and cheap motel towels and a baby bar of soap and shampoo that smells like motor oil. All that’s on the floor is a sad paper plate with two pieces of pepperoni pizza that Rodney asked her to eat—“Eat. Sa. Ra.”—and his concern was so heartfelt that she brought the pizza to her bath, knowing she’d never devour them, slices sitting on the floor next to the tub.
Finally she spies something useful. She peeps a prop that can transform even the saddest motel bathroom into something better.
A bucket. A bucket for ice. A bucket so you can get ice from the machine at the end of the hallway and bring the cubes back to chill your bourbon. A bucket can transform into a helmet if you seize the day and quickly move from the tub to the countertop and place it on your head and scurry back to the water. It’s a helmet with superior powers that makes her invisible, which is what Sara most covets right now.
No one can see Sara’s sex tape when she’s wearing that helmet.
She has been erased.
She looks down at the pizza.
She doesn’t see grease. Doesn’t see sustenance. Doesn’t see ingredients.
Sara removes the pepperoni slices and plops them down, and the second they hit the bathwater they morph into lovely lily pads, bobbing on a serene pond, with crows cawing in the distance, and she swims through the pond, undetectable. No one knows where she is. Moving anywhere. Moving anywhere she likes. Moving anywhere she likes and nobody can zero in on her and make Sara self-conscious, feel
like a loser, a slut. She slaloms between these lily pads and now she dives down, experiencing the depth of this serene pond. Swimming lazily through the kelp.
Is there kelp in serene ponds?
There’s kelp in this serene pond.
This serene pond also has other sea amenities too. Such as jellyfish that don’t sting but Sara can reach out and touch their illuminated shapes, tentacles waving in the current. Such as a gentle orca, a docile and mammoth presence that likes to have her belly scratched like she’s the family’s golden retriever. Such as a whole school of sardines, swimming tightly in a swarm, their silvery bodies moving in fast circles, looking like a shimmering tornado, and Sara swims through them into the center. Existing inside the wave of their rolling bodies. Existing and protected from the outside world.
Sara under the water.
Holding her breath.
Holding her breath for a long time.
A true explorer of this pond wants to experience everything, even if it means working to the very bottom. Where there’s a coral reef, and it glimmers with iridescent life. Sara swims and inspects everything. She is invisible and she is happy and there is nothing that can take that away from her.
And languidly hovering by the reef is Jumper Julie. She’s a mermaid, smiling at Sara. Jumper Julie says, “How are you feeling?” and Sara says, “Scared,” and Jumper Julie says, “Your life will get better,” and Sara says, “I didn’t know people could speak underwater,” and Julie says, “We live in a mysterious and wonderful world,” and Sara says, “Why did you jump off a bridge if the world is so mysterious and wonderful?” and Jumper Julie says, “I regretted jumping as soon as my feet left the bridge.”
For a few seconds, she feels wonderful. Like she’s been shot with a happiness bullet. She feels fixed. She is a good person.
“It’s time to go back,” says Jumper Julie.
“I’m okay down here.”
“Please, go back,” Jumper Julie says.
