All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  She walks down Valencia, sees phalanxes of diners starting to line up outside the posh places, sighing and checking the time on their phones every ten seconds; she sees a mother wearing a Baby Björn, her hands massaging the baby’s head; she sees hipsters smoking outside the bars, which makes her miss being young—back then she could have a drink and it was fun, a cocktail or two, nothing that would ruin her life; she sees a cop tucking a ticket under a parked car’s windshield wiper and sees a woman with tarot cards laid out on the sidewalk, sitting Indian-style, her iPhone playing a gypsy jig, a note on a typed piece of paper with an outstanding font saying KNOW YOUR FUTURE.

  She sees all this and wonders what happened to the homeless in the Mission, the caravan of stolen shopping carts, the currency of empty bottles and cans, the bodies huddled in doorways after the close of business, the handwritten signs—not typed with pompous fonts—that asked for help, any help, any human grace? They used to be everywhere, and she assumes the police were ordered to kick them out. Obviously, San Francisco is trying to clean up the Mission; they’re doing it to the whole city and she’s heard the project being called “a reboot,” which makes it so much worse, using the parlance of the industry that’s taking over.

  She sees the construction cranes downtown, looming across the skyline like huge prehistoric birds. The development is driving out all the character, and sometimes Kathleen imagines these cranes scooping up artists and plopping down tech employees in their place. She knows it’s only a matter of time until she’s ladled up, too, replaced by a twentysomething making six figures for speaking computer code, the only foreign language that matters. What happens, she wonders, to a city—especially one like San Francisco, a place that has always been composed of immigrants and outcasts and transients and artists, a whole surrogate family of people who weren’t wanted other places—what happens when it becomes as homogenous as a suburb?

  She doesn’t want to leave this town, even though she doesn’t like what’s happening. But she likes even less the prospect of being forced out. This is her home, and she’ll do all she can to stay.

  She enters the tattoo shop, and Deb is there listening to an old Cramps record. She looks up at Kathleen, but doesn’t turn off the tattoo gun, only holds it a couple inches off her client’s skin.

  “Permission to come aboard the bridge, captain,” Kathleen calls.

  “Permission granted,” says Deb.

  Her client is a young white man, one of the enemy. Kathleen’s eyes dart to his laptop bag, his hilarious T-shirt that says CTRL+ALT+DELETE. He’s even wearing those douchey shoes that have individual toes, making his feet look webbed. His oversized, probably cosmetic black eyeglasses are the perfect way to tie all his trying-too-hard together.

  “We’ll be done in fifteen minutes,” Deb says to her.

  “Pretty sweet, huh?” the man says to Kathleen, nodding at the tattoo on his bicep. “It’s an Irish cross.”

  “Celtic,” Deb says.

  “Same thing,” he says, wiggling his webbed toes.

  “It’s not,” she says. “This is on your body. You’re going to wear it forever; you should know what it means.”

  “It means that it looks cool,” he says and alerts Deb that their conversation is over by picking up and fiddling with his phone.

  Deb purses her lips and nods at Kathleen. “And how are you?”

  “I have incredible news.”

  “What?”

  “This.”

  Kathleen shows the picture of Rodney. “This is how I’m going to contact him.”

  “I could get the phone.”

  “I’ll mail him a letter once you tattoo this picture on me.”

  Deb takes her foot of the tattoo gun’s pedal, shop going silent, the guy still mesmerized by his phone. “The pony express went belly up. It’s a post-mail world.”

  “I’ll mail him a letter and a picture of my tattoo.” Kathleen hands Deb the portrait. “Would you put this on my back?”

  Deb takes and studies it. “This will make a good tattoo.”

  “Let’s do it once you’re done with him.”

  “Let’s wait. I never tattoo someone who’s emotional. That’s one of my rules. Like I don’t tattoo drunk guys.”

  “Why not?”

  “Drunk guys bleed too much.”

  “I mean why not me?” Kathleen asks.

  “Don’t push me, or when I finally do it I’ll add a Chinese character that means ‘farter.’”

  The man looks up from his phone. “Do you really think they have a character for that?”

  “People fart all over,” Deb says. “I’m sure there’s a Celtic word for it too. I can add it on your arm if you want.”

  The guy smirks sarcastically, goes back to his phone. Deb hands the picture back to Kathleen and fires up the gun again.

  “I need your help,” says Kathleen, the photo in her hand uselessly. “I want him to know how much I’ve been thinking of him.”

  “What’s wrong with email?” Deb says.

  “Why can’t you be more supportive?”

  Deb starts laughing, looks at her client. “She says to her AA sponsor.”

  The guy flashes that techie smirk again.

  “Right now you’re just my friend,” Kathleen says. “Not my sponsor.”

  “I’m always your sponsor, sugar. If I wasn’t, I’d be a shitty one.”

  Kathleen has a plan to instigate contact with her son again, and it’s a good one. She’d banked on Deb’s eyes and ink and needles, banked on a portrait to show her son, his likeness forever on her flesh. Look, she’ll be able to tell him through the tattoo, I’ve always loved you and I’m sorry and let’s start over.

  That’s impossible, she knows. There’s no such thing as starting over. It’s a ruse. Memories are time machines, zooming us through our experiences, and because of this, people are never clean of their yesterdays. There is no transcendence. One minute, we’re forty, then six, and ten, and twenty, and twelve. We remember our shames and humiliations. We remember trauma. Rodney might not recall one thing about Kathleen except that she left. All the good she did throughout the first twelve years of his life might be erased, and if not outright expunged, at least painted over. Covered up. It’s the opposite of Deb tattooing cancer survivors, making the damaged skin into art. Kathleen is a breathing scar, her whole life hardened over by that one mistake.

  All of this whizzes through her head as she stands there holding the portrait.

  Deb dips the gun into a glass of water, flushing out her needles, then plunges it into an ink cap full of black, goes back to work. “If you mail him a picture of the tattoo, so what?”

  “So what?” Kathleen asks.

  “Why would that make him feel better?”

  “Because it shows I’m thinking about him.”

  “The tattoo is for you,” Deb says. “Calling and starting the healing process—that would be for him.”

  “I’m finally ready to try and you’re not helping me.”

  “You’re making this harder than it has to be,” says Deb. “Call him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “That brass band that jumped off the Golden Gate?” says Deb. “The one who survived is going to a mental hospital.”

  “She needs help.”

  “That’s my point,” Deb says. “The doctors can help her. The program has helped you; I’ve tried to help you. But you have to face this fear. You have to face him. I’ll be right with you. We’re all survivors, but even we need help, Kat.” Deb takes her foot off the pedal and her gun goes silent. “How about a compromise? You call him now and I’ll tattoo you after I’m done with this Irish cross.”

  “Celtic,” the guy says.

  “Now you’re learning,” she says to him.

  “That’s bribery,” Kathleen says.

  “Only if it works.”

  “Fine,” she says to Deb, who gets the phone and asks, “What are you going to say?”

  Kathleen dials he
r old number. If it’s possible to get an adrenaline rush from a phone call, that’s what’s happening. Heart racing and sweating and all her saliva vanishes. And the crazy thing is how good this all feels. How freeing.

  “Hello?” a man’s voice says.

  “Is Rodney there?”

  One thing about mythological punishments: What if you simply stopped rolling that boulder up the hill? Refused to prop it up anymore? Moved out of the way and let it roll down to who knows where, not caring about the consequences?

  “Who is this?” says the man’s voice.

  “Is this Larry?”

  “Nah, this is Felix.”

  “Hi, Felix. This is Kathleen. I’d like to talk to my son, please.”

  There is a wonderful charge in her, an anticipation, a kinetic thump. Kathleen is about to hear her son’s voice. She’s about to communicate with him. They’re about to talk. To begin, not from scratch but from a place that looks forward, not back. This is the first step toward healing, reconciliation.

  “Cunt!” Felix screams.

  The miserable syllable shoves through the phone and into her ear, worming around her body and kicking her in the heart.

  Then the line goes dead.

  That’s all she gets.

  And in a way, that’s what she deserves.

  She’s earned someone calling “Cunt!”

  It’s stitched onto her.

  Burned on the skin, its own scar.

  Kathleen doesn’t know what to do after hearing that fetid word. She’s standing in the tattoo shop with the phone to her ear and Deb is looking at her and the guy with webbed feet is looking at her and she’s been called that name, the noise of it still clanging, and she hands the phone back to Deb.

  “What happened?”

  Kathleen utters that wicked word and her sponsor sighs. Even the guy with webbed feet averts his eyes. The whole moment feels like a caricature Kat could draw. She could exaggerate the idiosyncrasies in such a perfect way: It would be easy to turn the guy’s shoes into huge amphibian feet, the size of surfboards, and it would be easy to show Deb with tattoo guns for hands; it would be so easy to show Kathleen, stupid Kathleen, with a phone to her ear, her high hopes being speared by Felix’s dismal syllable. The phone would have fangs. It would bite her ear, chew on her, chew her right up.

  “Well, it’s the start,” says Deb. “Congrats on making that first call.”

  “I have to go.”

  “No. You have to stay.”

  Kathleen almost sprints to the front door: “I can’t.”

  “Don’t isolate,” Deb says. “Be around people who care about you when—”

  But she can’t hear the end of the sentence. She can’t hear anything except Felix’s syllable, over and over, and she’s off, not running, but not walking, somewhere between these two, as though she can’t out-hustle the syllable, leave it at the shop. And there’s still the various clogs of yuppies out front of three-star restaurants, still the mothers ambushing her with their babies and toddlers, and Kathleen sees the gypsy with her sign, its perfect font, KNOW YOUR FUTURE.

  Kathleen already does.

  Her future is in a bar.

  Her immediate future starts right this second in a bar. Yes. Starts with pushing past the smoking hipsters out front and opening the door and bellying up and looking around at all the bottles and beer taps and hearing Jack White singing about a girl who had no faith in medicine. It starts with someone saying, “What would you like?” and this somebody happens to be the bartender, and she happens to be talking to Kathleen, who happens to answer with this: “Bourbon.”

  The bartender is young and Asian, and Kat pines for the simplicities of youth, yearns for an existence that hasn’t marred so much that forgiving yourself is impossible.

  “Any preference?” says the bartender.

  “I don’t care.”

  “We got Old Crow in the well.”

  “Fine.”

  Kathleen meant what she said before, about starting over being impossible. She cannot have this one drink without reliving all the ones she already had, without tasting every spirit that ever traveled down her throat, experiencing the aftershocks of every hangover, the shame she already feels and the bourbon hasn’t hit her lips yet. She knows she shouldn’t do this, knows that this won’t solve anything, not really, but who said she was interested in a solution? Who said this was an exercise in making things better? No, this isn’t about improvement. It’s not about making things worse, either. It’s just about this one moment and she wants a drink. She hasn’t been rewarded for all her sober days; in fact, her life’s been harder living clean, all that pure access to her mistakes. Her whole prison break fantasy is phony and faraway and pointless, and her palms are on that boulder again, the calluses ready for another shove. She feels that greedy eagle land on her stomach, ready to feast on her liver for the umpteenth time, appetite never tiring of the same square meal.

  The bartender hasn’t put the drink down in front of her yet. There’s time. There’s time to walk away, Kathleen. Go to a meeting. Tell them what happened and let their empathy wash over you. Be around other people who have disfigured their lives, amputated all kinds of happiness. They’ve died in a million ways and glowed electric with embarrassments and somehow lived to tell. Let them talk you out of this. Let them say Don’t give up.

  She hates that she’s so easily rattled. That she’s fragile. She thought her years in the program and working the steps would have given her the tools to deal with life when it reaches out and calls you a cunt, but here she is, one syllable from Felix, one phone call, and now she’s watching the bartender put a shot of Old Crow down in front of her.

  “Six bucks,” the bartender says.

  Kathleen throws down ten and tells her to keep the change.

  She’s alone. She has a picture of her son in her pocket, the boy she’ll never see again. She has a caricature of the girl with the black eye and her hopeful baby. She has bourbon in front of her. She has a hand for grabbing the glass. She has a mouth and a tongue.

  She should have stayed in the tattoo shop. With Deb. She should call her, text her; she should say, “I’m about to do something dumb,” giving her sponsor the opportunity to crank some clarity. She should shove herself onto her feet and flee outside and ask the gypsy, “Will I ever see him again?”

  She should do any of these options, but she can’t.

  She’s trapped in the bourbon’s gravitational pull. It’s too close to her, or she’s too close to it. There’s no escape. She can feel her head being yanked toward the bar. She can feel her hand clutching the glass, can feel the bourbon reaching her face, the smell of it making her salivate. She can feel the shot pour over her teeth, puddle at the back of her throat, and she swallows, welcomes it into her system. She can feel her mouth moving and telling the bartender, “One more.” She can feel the lid of a coffin close, blocking out the awful light of the world.

  16.

  Noah911 had imagined Tracey’s funeral being the worst part of the trip—he’d pictured the whole parish casting eyes his way—whispers of the absentee brother, her bodyguard. He even conjured some confrontations after the service concluded: a couple people hopped up on the amphetamine of grief, unable to keep their heartache stowed away, telling Noah911, “We know this is your fault! We all know you did this!”

  But truthfully, the whole visit has been a series of escalating invasions. It started at the airport. His mother picked him up and started crying as soon as she saw his beaten-up mug.

  “Oh, sweetie, are you okay?” Her hands rushed up to his face, almost touching him, stopping a few inches away, like he was a dish fresh from the oven.

  His body felt devoid of moisture. He was arid and achy and tired. He’d flown from San Francisco to Chicago, then after a three-hour layover, from 2 AM to 5, he’d taken the first flight of the morning from O’Hare to Little Rock.

  “What are you connected to?” he heard the gate agent say in Chicago.
But that couldn’t be right. No doubt he had a concussion. His nose was broken. He knew at least one rib was fractured, knew that agony from a lacrosse check years back. He knew that breathing would be anguish, like it should be.

  “What did you say?” he asked the gate agent.

  “Where are you connecting to?” she said.

  “Arkansas.”

  After an hour and forty-four minutes in the air, he arrived at Clinton Airport, stood in front of his mother as she took stock of his damaged face.

  “Where’s Dad?” he said.

  “At home.”

  “Of course.”

  “Can I carry your bag?” she asked.

  “Of course you can’t,” he said.

  They didn’t talk much as they walked to the car, or during the thirty-minute drive home. They didn’t speak because there was nothing to say, and if there were, the words would only slide him back in the oven, baking Noah911 to ash.

  His father didn’t meet him outside, or at the front door for a greeting. His dad didn’t seek him out as Noah911 entered his old room. It was the son who had to find his father, who was in Tracey’s room. Or what used to be Tracey’s room. Now, it looked staged, a fake room set up at IKEA to give consumers an idea what the furniture would look like in a home. The yellow paint on the walls was fresh, making the space smell sour. The carpet had been ripped up for hardwood. There was a desk, stained deep brown, with nothing on it. A big shelving unit was situated against the wall, its doors open, not one thing inside. The only other item was a potted plant with a braided stalk; it was young, only a few leaves, too small for the size of its pot, plenty of room to grow.

  The father sat on the floor assembling a leather chair, the instructions splayed on his lap. “These directions are horrible.”

  “What’s all this then?” Noah911 said.