All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  The next vulture to call gets the story. It doesn’t matter, he suspects. One is the same. And the initial report will lead to follow-ups and he’ll end up talking to multiple hubs and Jake will be spotted, he will be saved, he will be home soon.

  But a text catches Paul’s eye. It’s from his cousin, Kyle, who is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s an easy relation to forget about because they haven’t seen each other in five years. No bad blood, just busy lives. It says: Heard about Jake. Call me first.

  In the game of Choosing-a-Vulture, a blood relation is better than an unknown scrounger. At least Kyle has had Thanksgiving with Jake; granted, that was 2003, but still. At least Kyle has an emotional investment in his son and isn’t simply fueled by his byline, or so Paul hopes.

  He dials Kyle, who answers the call by saying, “Can I come see you?”

  Paul thinks of Esperanto not even wanting him to stay at the precinct, treating Paul as if his ideas are the most absurd ever offered up. And if that’s how the detective feels on this day, if he’s unwilling to work with the motivated attitude that Paul thinks will benefit the search for his son, so be it: He has no choice but to improvise.

  He’ll invite the press. He’ll rev up the real world so it’s as excited about finding Jake as the virtual one is. There’s no reason both these manhunts can’t happen at the same time, until they’re both discovered and merged back into one boy.

  “I’m at the police station,” Paul says.

  “Which one?”

  Paul tells him, starts bitching about Esperanto’s bedside manner when Kyle interrupts him: “Me first, okay? You talk to me first.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Already in the car.”

  TheGreatJake has 8,309 followers. Paul has 901. Almost a thousand people follow Paul, and why, for what? Because his son is missing? Because these voyeurs are feeding off of today’s story?

  That’s why Jake posted the brass band, for one reason, one simple reason: People will watch. Paul is wrong to single out the media as scavengers. Everyone is. And if everybody subsists by eating dead flesh, there have to be enough decaying bodies to go around.

  Paul sits in the empty waiting room, surrounded by all those police posters on the wall. His cell keeps ringing.

  The officer at the front desk gets up and walks into the back, leaving Paul by himself. It reminds him of the therapist’s office. Being alone. Waiting for his son to come out. Waiting for his son to be okay.

  He tweets this to his boy: I am coming in there to save you.

  Paul keeps refreshing his feed, but TheGreatJake is gone.

  Everything has a hum, a pitch, everything is an instrument in an interstellar orchestra and we are all together. Not only people. Inanimate objects make their music, too. Have you ever heard the beautiful vibrations coming from the Golden Gate Bridge? Each rivet, each speck of asphalt, each drop of paint is alive. It is more than a bridge. It is a vortex, an altar, it is paranormal, effervescent. It is our holy site. And once you and I have the opportunity to purify this world, we will all occupy a pristine earth, a cooler one, an inhabitable one, and our brains will work right. Once the congestion of gloom lifts, no more pollutants like sadness and disappointments and grief. We will learn from our mistakes. We can learn, Albert, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the assembly line working toward extinction, we can learn. It’s the mice. That’s where I’m finding hope. In the mice. How scientists have started manipulating their emotions by shining lights in the brains. They can change memories in the mice, physical memories, take something that had been a sad association and make it happy. They electrocute a mouse until it’s scared of that locale, and then they manipulate that memory, they mold it into something positive, and they can map the mouse’s brainwaves to know there’s no fear anymore, there is no anguish, only bliss. We can do the same thing. We can drain pessimism out of people’s perspectives. We can show them that they are capable of more. Capable of actually enjoying their lives. They can feel the pure serotonin of trying, rather than whining or lamenting how things have turned out. They can strike out on their own to make a difference. They can turn off all their melodramatic emissions and experience a thought process naked of pain. We will rewire them, Albert. We will treat them like the mice. We can catalyze change, and the interstellar orchestra can play something different. A melody alive with possibility. It begins with a bridge. It begins with human sacrifice.

  18.

  Hey Twitter, no1 can find me. How RU?

  That’s the next live-tweet.

  Jake is getting confused about the difference between live-tweeting and regular tweeting. Isn’t all tweeting live, seeing as how he’s posting things going on around him?

  No time to fall down that tweet-hole, he guesses, especially since something amazing has happened.

  TheGreatJake has broken 100,000 Twitter followers in the last day. He had a measly 282 and then the explosion happened. An article about him posted on SFGate.com, the Chronicle’s website, and that spurred some interest from local radio and TV and, just like that, Jake is a celebrity.

  He is famous.

  The legend of TheGreatJake has begun.

  To think that yesterday he had been sitting in that therapist’s office with a hanging meringue of hand sanitizer, deciding to bolt. He wanted to shirk those adults and their misunderstandings; he deleted them and downloaded new media.

  To think that he had to beg his scrawny roster of followers for involvement in the immediate aftermath, tweeting things like, Don’t forget to RT my disappearance.

  Which was desperate. He knew that.

  But he had to work with what he had. No retweets meant his disappearance had not gone viral. Which left Jake feeling sad, alone. He so badly wanted not to be alone. He had reached that status on YouTube as a disaster shepherd, but his personal brand hadn’t garnered any hype. He knew this was no time to mope, though. Not after leaving his father and the therapist behind that door. Not after striking out on his own. No moping, Jake, he told himself, wishing he could simply Photoshop his feelings, take the melancholy and anger and alter them, write over them, hide these feelings behind something. Drop a jpeg of, say, a spruce tree with a smiling face carved in its bark.

  What he’s currently experiencing is called nerves. Or being nervous. Or being noosed by nervous energy. If this were a Wikipedia page, Jake would be a perfect example of this state.

  It’s all because of his new status. TheGreatJake has left the pathetic ballpark of under-1,000 Twitter followers. He had briefly found himself under the jurisdiction of five figures of followers, and now he’s breathing hallowed air, with the ballers and players and pioneers.

  That word pioneer inspires Jake to do a YouTube search for the first moon walk, the lunar landing, because he feels a kinship with anyone strong enough to leave the old world. He watches Neil Armstrong walk with his flying strides, moon dust propelling up from his crunching boots. Jake wonders how the astronaut chose a direction to walk, since all directions were unexplored and unmarked and free from anybody telling him what to do or think or feel.

  The terrible thing is that his battery will die soon. No iPhone means no access, no connection. It means staggering through his pristine freedom uninformed and absent. Sneaking to either his father’s or mother’s home to get a charger is too risky. If that astronaut on the moon lost his signal with the people back on earth, he’d have been in the same situation. Disoriented and doomed to die alone.

  A car honks—audio going by with a Doppler slide. Pitch plummeting. Is that what it would sound like blowing a clarinet from the Golden Gate all the way down to the ocean?

  He is off the grid. That’s key to being a runaway. Not leaving a footprint. He can’t use his check card or any of that, unless he wants cops surrounding him at the ATM. Hollywood has trained him how to effectively disappear.

  Where he spent last night can be categorized as a park. Where he slept was a playground. He hid in a little clubhous
e for the kids, sleeping on the wooden floor, and it might seem like such accommodations would be rough, but not if they indicate progress. Neil Armstrong probably wasn’t very comfortable in his rocket before his moonwalk and that didn’t stop him. There was no quit in him and there’s none in Jake. It would be like forgetting your space helmet back home. You can’t let these minor interferences keep you from striking out on your own in the hopes of something better.

  Jake decides he has an hour of juice left before the phone gives out. He has $19 in his pocket, not enough to score a new charger, he guesses. He can make it to an Apple Store before his phone gives out entirely. He can steal a new charger.

  One small step to an Apple Store, one giant leap for Jake-kind.

  Next post: This is how you live-tweet a crime spree.

  HE’S TURNED OFF all applications except Twitter. Down to 6 percent on his battery. Good for one more message.

  Next live-tweet: Will I get caught when I swipe it? Stay tuned . . . #BetterThanTelevision.

  Hashtags are like emotions that people can see.

  It is 12:27 PM. He’s been a runaway since yesterday at approximately 9:54 AM. He will use it as a commemoration: forever celebrating 9:54 as the time he changed his life.

  He powers down his phone, which doesn’t happen that often. See: ever. Jake always has his iPhone armed, his e-security-blanket. He checks texts and email and Twitter and Reddit compulsively, scrolling through new comments on his disaster. Checking for any new porn clips—and there are always new porn clips!

  His phone is also his DJ. He never walks down the street with all his senses. He still has vision and smell and taste and touch, but Jake is intentionally audio-impaired, his soundtrack blaring from ear buds, deaf to the noises of the world. Jake likes the randomness of putting his iTunes on shuffle and seeing how well Apple’s algorithms know him. Sometimes he even thinks that it can sense his mood, as crazy as that sounds. But more often than not, if he’s sad, all his sad songs miraculously play, and if he’s feeling sort of reckless—like he is now—blaring rock and roll provides the necessary accompaniment. It’s a transaction of sorts: He downloads these songs and somehow they upload his moods and, thus, they are synced somewhere deep inside of him.

  But a powered-off phone means no music. Which makes Jake feel vulnerable. You’d think it would be the opposite: He is less susceptible to his surroundings with all his senses working, but everything feels too visceral. He likes being locked away. Likes listening to the voices he’s bought or pirated. Likes to be in charge of his own hypnosis, conjuring his own singing ghosts.

  What he likes doesn’t much matter with only 5 percent battery life left, so he has no choice but to let his ears pick up every sound. Every combustible engine. Every bird. Every scattering conversation. This is Sausalito, California, his hometown. Tourist season. Everywhere he turns is another foreign language or a Midwest accent, macerating English into moaning vowels. He is downtown, waiting at a bus stop. He needs to travel to Corte Madera, a couple towns up; that’s where the closest Apple Store is located. The bus ride won’t take that long once he’s on the road, most of the trip on the freeway. Being stuck here, however, without a soundtrack, without Twitter, is tough. Especially considering his newfound status. He wants to interact with his followers. He wants to be the sort of celebrity who is accessible, treating his audience with respect. Not the high and mighty pretenders who keep themselves sequestered from their fans. Be real. That’s the secret. Jake is real.

  IT’S AN AMBUSH as soon as he’s through the front door. Four or five overly eager employees, all wearing the same long-sleeved red shirt with an Apple insignia in the center of their chests, like hearts, all storm up to him with their iPads and smiles and scripted hospitality. They have earpieces and khakis and Nikes and new school credit card machines dangling from clips connected to their pants, and one of them says to Jake, “Welcome! And what can we do for you today?”

  Neil Armstrong would hate Apple stores.

  “Browsing,” he says, trying to seem nonchalant, trying to channel some poker-face cool, the non-threatening face that would never incite suspicion.

  “We can help with that,” the employee says, motioning to his coworkers, who all clutch their iPads like Bibles.

  There’s also a security guard, leaning against a wall by the door. She is black, only a few years older than Jake. She’s wearing a navy uniform, with a jacket that would fit someone seven feet tall. There’s a badge that’s really just a patch, sewn onto the breast. She looks disengaged.

  “You can help me browse?” Jake says.

  “We can help with everything,” he says, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses all nod behind him.

  “I’ll let you know if I need anything,” says Jake.

  A mother and daughter enter the store and the zealots turn their attention to them, leaving Jake the chance to case the joint. It’s set up like a big rectangle. There’s a table running through the middle of it, with every Apple device you can imagine—computers and tablets and phones, all tied to the table with security chains—ready to be taken for a test drive. The floors are a bleached wood, and crappy corporate pop plays softly.

  Jake approaches a laptop, opens a browser, but at the same time he’s looking around the store for chargers. He spies them on the back wall. He’s going to need to retrieve one, conceal it, walk through the store, and exit without any zealots noticing.

  For inspiration, Jake takes the laptop to YouTube, searches for lunar landing. Any astronaut has nerves before a big mission. There’s so much that can go wrong.

  One of the videos cued for him is entitled Magnificent Desolation. It’s a documentary and he watches the beginning, learns that one of the astronauts had called the moon “magnificent desolation” after seeing it up close, and copyright be damned, Jake poaches it and brands his own mission with the same moniker.

  Jake’s moon won’t have any parents or bullies or hanging meringues or almost-dead batteries. They are persona non grata, or whatever the plural is. Jake would know the god-damn plural if Latin hadn’t jumped off a bridge, too. Siri has the answer. He’d ask his friend if the battery situation weren’t so dire.

  That will be his next live-tweet: This is my magnificent desolation.

  In fact, why not tweet now? Jake opens up Twitter and transforms into TheGreatJake and tells his legion of followers what’s what.

  He’s up to 200,000 of them.

  Immediately, nine of them favorite it.

  That makes Jake feel good for like two seconds, but here comes more anxiety, getting more nervous, feels like he’s throwing a 404 error message, experiencing a disconnect between himself and the server he’s normally tethered to. Because if the world is a search engine, then every human being is a webpage, and URLs are our fingerprints.

  It all makes perfect sense.

  “How are you liking your experience with this machine?” a red-shirted employee asks him, right by his side. The man is Asian, thirty and change, and has a ton of gel in his hair, twisted mats of it sticking into barbs. Jake could snap one off like an icicle.

  He shuts down Twitter, and YouTube pops up.

  “Are those astronauts?” the employee asks.

  “I wanted to see how video looks on this,” says Jake.

  “Sweet, huh? This one has retina display. Processors that crank. Screen brightness that’s unrivaled. Video quality that looks better than the real world, don’t you think?” he asks, pointing outside.

  “I like it,” Jake says.

  “And it has all-day battery life.”

  Which of course reminds Jake of his current mission: “How much are 5 chargers?”

  The Asian man pecks at his iPad and a few seconds later says, “$19.”

  Serendipity, thinks Jake. That’s exactly how much money I have.

  “Is there tax?”

  “Of course.”

  “How much then?”

  “$20.71. Should I snag you one?”

  Sere
ndipity is extinct.

  And 404 errors don’t mean you’ll never be connected again. Those messages only tell people that there’s a problem right now, something’s not routing quite right. Refresh the page. You might simply have to clear your browser’s cache and cookies. Or try getting at that site from a different server and see what happens. Point is that if Jake’s page throws an error now, it won’t be an error forever. That’s what his moonwalk is all about. One stolen charger and he can treat his audience to the utmost access.

  But there’s the other side of that coin, the one that reminds Jake that if he gets busted, the cops will come, and he’ll be returned to his dad. That will be the end of his celebrity. He’ll be another teenager, and he can’t have that. He should panhandle for the tax money. Or tell the truth to one of the redshirts and see if there’s any mercy in an Apple Store, letting him have half an hour on a charger out of kindness? But that’s far-fetched. Commerce always trumps compassion.

  Or he’s talking himself out of acting. He’s beige and safe and boring. This is no time for being smart.

  “I’ll let you know if I want to buy one,” says Jake.

  “Okay,” the Asian man says, off to stalk someone new.

  The thing is that he can’t get pinched. He needs his freedom. He needs to up the ante. The video of the brass band isn’t enough and neither is running away. He knows that the Internet—aka the world—will forget about him in sixty seconds if he doesn’t keep the magic going. There is always another story barreling behind you. One that has no more or less staying power. One that enraptures people for the proverbial fifteen minutes and then it’s chewed.

  A pioneer such as Jake can’t let down his audience, has to push and push and push and stay relevant with new content to titillate, and since he’s already tweeted about his crime spree, he can’t back out now. No, once you start lying, or not living up to your promises, the trust bursts like a piñata and your fans find new gods and Jake isn’t ready to relinquish his fame.