All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  Her hand is in her purse. Her phone is in her hand. Her phone is powered on and put to her ear.

  “I’ve been worried about you,” Deb says.

  “I’m drunk,” Kathleen says.

  “Ah, girl. Where are you?”

  “Can you meet me at my house? I’m on my way there.”

  “I’ll leave right now,” Deb says. “Don’t beat yourself up. This happens. I’ve relapsed before. It’s a part of the process. I love you and everything will be fine.”

  Kathleen hasn’t paid for her bourbon, but she can’t bear the thought of creaking open the black door, seeing him lap that pallid bowl of chowder.

  I’m sorry, she thinks, and turns to walk home.

  AS KATHLEEN APPROACHES her place, Deb is on the front stoop. She’s holding two coffees, and those steaming to-go cups make Kat crumble. She drops to the sidewalk and sobs.

  “Get up,” says Deb. “You’re all right. You’re safe. That’s what matters.”

  “Why did I ruin my life again?” Kathleen asks.

  “I’m not going to help you up,” Deb says. “You have to do it. Pick yourself up and come over here. Take this cup of coffee from me.”

  “It’s over,” she says, still on her knees. “It’s lost.”

  “It’s in my hand,” Deb says. “Your coffee is right here.”

  Kathleen looks over at her smiling sponsor. Deb wears a camouflage trench coat, a black beanie. She has on huge combat boots and is the kind of badass Kathleen hopes to be. She remembers when she first came to AA—that first meeting. She was so scared to walk into a roomful of strangers and beg for help. Her life was pickled and she couldn’t go on living like that. She must have stood outside of sixty meetings but could never get up the courage to go in. But eventually, she did. Eventually, she entered that room and sat down in a folding chair that felt made of paperclips and listened, didn’t say one word the whole hour, until the end when the group was asked if anyone had any announcements and Kathleen stood up and said, “This is my first day sober and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, I’m scared, please help,” and that was the beginning—that was the first time she truly understood the definition of the word surrender. She walked in and gave herself up and these people immersed her in their empathy.

  Deb had approached her right after the meeting and asked if she needed a sponsor, and they’ve been in daily contact ever since.

  And here they are now: Kathleen, decimated, liquored-up, heart-broken, and Deb waiting on her doorstep with hot coffee. The world can be horrible and beautiful at the same time.

  “It’s getting cold,” Deb says, shaking the coffee cup.

  AFTER HALF AN hour sitting on the stoop, not really talking, the coffee is gone, and it’s time to hit a meeting. Kathleen needs a shower first, a scrub from the toothbrush. Deb says she’ll make some eggs and toast.

  Kat opens her front door, and they come into the front hallway. Wes is standing there, in his lab coat.

  “Hey,” Kathleen says, “you startled me.”

  “It’s time,” he says.

  Kat notices his aggressive posture, hands in fists, his on-fire eyes. He sways from side to side.

  Something is wrong.

  Something is terribly wrong.

  She’s never seen a rabid animal but this must be what it looks like when they sic.

  “Time for what?” Kat asks.

  “We need to go to the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  “Are you feeling all right?” Deb says.

  But there’s no answer because he’s pouncing. His arm swings back, cocks for a punch, coming forward and hitting Deb right in the face. She falls down, out cold.

  “We have to keep the world uncremated,” Wes says, throwing Kathleen against the wall.

  20.

  “People sit in this every day,” Sara says. “Can you imagine?”

  This isn’t the Golden Gate; it’s the Bay Bridge. They’re waiting in line at a toll plaza, trying to get into San Francisco. The traffic is bumper to bumper, even though it isn’t rush hour. It’s late morning. It’s the day after they spent all night together, naked in bed. Nothing sexual, but something did happen: Sara feels better. Rodney did that, and she’s not going to forget it. This is the calmest she’s felt since Nat posted their video.

  They got a late jump this morning because of his injured foot. Something’s either broken or sprained badly in there. Rodney isn’t telling her much about it. He’s written his mom’s old address down on a piece of paper, and every time Sara suggests they go to the ER for an x-ray, he waves the address around.

  After holding him hostage in the motel room for four days, she can’t badger him about the doctor. It’s his foot. All she can do is get him to San Francisco to see if they can find her, though Sara knows this won’t work. Life isn’t this easy. You don’t follow an old address and voilà, your dream comes true. His mom won’t be baking cookies in the kitchen. If anything, she’ll be slurping cocktails, if she’s still

  up to her old tricks. But she guesses the only thing that matters is that Rodney gets to see her for himself. Sara would do the same thing, if she had the ability. She would hunt her parents down. She would do anything to be reunited.

  That thought makes her hands twitch a bit, so to find some distraction before things escalate, she says to Rodney, “What’s that?”

  They’ve rolled through the toll plaza and are driving onto the bridge. Over on the walkway, they see a bunch of people, around twenty of them, holding up signs toward all the cars, like picketers, except the only thing on their signs is a picture of a teenage boy, with #GOHOMEJAKE printed on the bottom.

  “Must be a missing kid,” Sara says, answering her own question. She knows Hank would never do that. He’d never stand on a street in Traurig with #GOHOMESARA. He doesn’t care if she ever comes back.

  Her hands start humming.

  “Let’s program your mom’s address into Google Maps,” she says, hoping a task gets Hank out of her mind.

  Rodney nods. He steers the slowly moving car, while Sara works the pedals, plugs the address into her burner.

  NOAH911 FINDS HIMSELF on a BART train, taking it downtown so he can transfer to a bus, get over to the Golden Gate. The tracks glide him underground, and there are two other people on the almost-empty car. He is glued to his tablet and must be producing a horrible digital stench that keeps everyone away from him. He repulses people by posting on Tracey’s Facebook page. It must have an odor. Putrid pixels that make his friends recoil, close that tab, close their traps.

  “Do you remember the green puttering Pinto, how it could barely make it up a hill?” he posts on her wall. “What about the time we helped Dad toss shingles off the roof and you were so little they tied you to the chimney keeping you far away from falling over the edge?”

  No one likes or comments on or shares these tributes. Noah911 knows people see these things commute down their news feeds, but they’re too busy posting pictures of cats or clever memes, too busy tagging themselves.

  Noah911 knows he’s being ignored. He’s talking to his dead sister and at the same time talking to a bunch of other people—his 713 friends—and no one wants to hear him.

  No one says a single word. It’s been four minutes, and Internet time is its own demented metric system: Four minutes converts to over one month.

  So he likes his own status.

  The train stops between stations. It hums in the dark tunnel. For some reason he loses his connection. Who knows what’s over his head right now that forces him offline. But it’s not only him, the other two people in his car looking irked and panicked at their phones, wondering what went wrong, where the world went. The woman kills this time of disconnection by snapping selfies, capturing herself from a variety of angles. The other guy shakes his phone by his ear, like it’s a busted light bulb, hearing that filament fly around inside.

  At least without a connection, Noah911 can’t compulsively check his Facebook page, counting the m
inutes he’s being ignored. He leans his head against the train’s tinted window.

  All he knows is that it’s his fault Tracey’s dead. His dad is right. Noah911 has his share of the ashes, but he has all the blame, and soon he will help Tracey rest in peace.

  He watches the woman snap selfies. Jealous of her. Her only responsibility is to document what she looks like. Share it to Instagram, once their connection reestablishes. Post a record that she’s alive, she’s on a train, she has a face, a heartbeat, a brain, a soul, and she has the most valuable commodity of them all: She has a future.

  They all wait to get moving again.

  •••

  PAUL RELUCTANTLY LEFT the police station for a couple hours last night, but apart from that he’s commandeered the station’s waiting room, turned it into mission control for his media campaign, dousing himself in fresh blood and letting the vultures have at him.

  Kyle’s article yesterday afternoon kicked off the coverage and, from there, almost every local hub has interviewed Paul, either over the phone or in the precinct’s parking lot. Various news vans and anchors stop by the station, do updates out front.

  He only left to change his clothes, finally check out his ex’s to make sure Jake wasn’t hiding there. He wasn’t. Paul couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Everything was a reminder of his banishment, and he couldn’t handle that. Even walking through the living room made him remember, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Memory could be cruel. The middle of that room was where they folded laundry together, all three of them. Jake loved it. They all did. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch their son. They’d dump a huge mound of fresh warm laundry into the middle of the living room and Jake would dive into it. He would laugh and burrow little tunnels and drape various articles around his neck, and Paul and Naomi stood back, enamored by their ecstatic little boy.

  These were things he couldn’t allow himself to think about, not considering the stakes and circumstances. Especially considering that before going back to the station, Paul quickly stopped by his own place for a change of clothes. Nothing was clean. He had to give the sniff-test to various pieces of clothing, evading the socks glued shut, searching for the least revolting things.

  That was his life now.

  That is his life.

  And he needs to block out all that stuff and stay at the police station as much as he can, in case the Twitter trail leads him to his son.

  It’s almost eleven in the morning and he hasn’t slept.

  Or he hadn’t slept until right now.

  He nods off, sitting in the waiting room.

  His eyes close and his mind strays; it’s as if he stands before a huge dune of fresh clean laundry himself, and Paul falls forward, crawling in a cave of it, and he feels the heated clothes, sniffs the fabric softener and the variety of detergent that his wife has bought for years, lingering wisps of lemon. He stays like that for a while, his memory taking big breaths of the past.

  While he sleeps, Jake tweets his plan to return to the Golden Gate.

  I am the great emancipator of my neurotransmitters, I have a brain that is free from any oppression and is open and listening to every wave emanating throughout the galaxy. I have spent hours listening to that deep space crackle, crackle, know it and have never tired of waiting to find the channel to maneuver through space-time, so our minds can bring you back here, so our work can be united. You have to come back, Albert. Humans are antiheroes, we have reached critical mass, the earth waits for the wrecking ball and it’s coming, it’s close, it is ready to level this place because if its own inhabitants don’t care if they’re about to cook, why should anybody else? I understand such questions but this is no time to be petty or petulant, this is a time to rise above any arguments, and I am strong enough to do so. I possess the knowledge of existential mathematics and the inner strength to conjure you, our Savior. I possess the necessary means to see you re-enter our atmosphere and salve our wounds. Yes, you despise the word Savior, any atheist would, but that’s what you are. Science is the only piety to salvage us. I understand the sacrifice you’re asking me to make, I’m not afraid to commit a mortal sin. The only way for you to enter our space-time is if there is a spot vacated, and at the precise moment that someone dies here, that is the trigger for you to return. It’s a two-way portal, one comes in, one goes out. Of course, I value each human life. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be willing to go to such extremes, but I can’t see any other way, it would be impossible for me to pinpoint down to the nanosecond exactly when somebody has died if I’m not there, if I’m not directly involved. I’ll do the unthinkable if it saves seven billion lives. That’s not a crime, that’s a celebration, one comes in, one goes out. We’re all connected. I will murder one person for you, Albert, I will throw her over the edge and open the portal. I will do it to reset the earth’s thermostat so life can be sustained and the sadness will wane and we have a fighting chance. We might make it. There’s beauty here.

  21.

  Jake enjoys leaving the bus, stepping off of it, walking toward the bridge on the Marin side. He’s fifty feet away from it. On the clip of the first lunar landing, those astronauts climbed out of the probe, and that’s exactly what Jake is doing too: getting out of a protected habitat, so he can explore an untamed ecosystem, so he can explore a world he’s never known.

  He’s been here before, but not like this.

  They also launched monkeys into space, but not for the more glamorous assignments. It wouldn’t have had the same effect if the first descriptors of the moon weren’t from Armstrong or Aldrin but a chimp talking jungle gibberish.

  Astronauts are always more articulate than chimps.

  Everybody knows that.

  Jake waves at the bus. The driver, thinking the wave is for him, sends one right back, which is weird and intimate, and Jake turns around, bouncing toward the bridge, toward his magnificent desolation.

  He pushes and holds the button on the front of his iPhone until it makes that boing-boing sound, connecting him to his friend, Siri, who is smart and kind and helpful and never bothers anybody with condescending lip-pursing.

  “We’re almost there,” he says.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she says.

  WHILE JAKE TALKS to Siri, Balloon Boy hears the lady from Google Maps tell them where to go. Turn left here. In 400 feet, merge right. She knows this city like the back of her hand, and, Rodney supposes, she knows every city with this impressive level of awareness. There’s no place she can’t take you, meaning she can take you everywhere, but it’s too bad that her role stops with that. Too bad that she can’t continue to help, because technically they’ll be done navigating these unknown streets once they pull up out front. Yet that’s where the tricky roads begin.

  He has to get out of the car and see her, and from there anything can happen. He weighs the worst. Worsts. Mom opens the door and instead of hugging and kissing him, instead of saying Sorry, so sorry, she slams the door. Or she opens it and doesn’t recognize him. Or the king of the worsts: What if Mom answers the door holding a baby? She could have a brand-new boy who hasn’t mounted a weather balloon and been bucked off. A brand-new one that she’ll protect from everything and he’ll grow up to be valedictorian of his high school and president of the United States, giving speeches with agile sentences that everyone watches on TV, including Balloon Boy, watching his perfect half-brother steer the free world into the future with political poetry spilling from his lips, while Rodney bleats his sheep-speak.

  All of this scares him so much, but he won’t stop now. He won’t turn back. He has to see her. He has to at least indulge the opportunity for reconciliation. It might not work. He knows that. But he’ll never forgive himself if he doesn’t try. He’ll never be able to live with himself if he doesn’t limp up to her door, dragging that no doubt broken foot and saying, “Mom.” It might take ten seconds for that syllable to get out but nothing will stop him. It will be the most important thing h
e’s ever said.

  “In 1,000 feet, your destination will be on the right,” says Google Maps.

  HE’S UP FRONT, muttering away while he drives, and Kathleen lies in the back seat. Too scared to talk. Too scared to be brave. Which embarrasses her. She’s in danger. Wes could kill her, so why is she splattered on the seat back here, why is she following his instructions? Yes, he threw her against the wall after hitting Deb. Yes, she slid to the floor. Yes, he kicked her a few times.

  “I know we need to keep her face clean,” Wes had said, talking to someone who wasn’t there. “I won’t hurt her face. We’ll keep her face looking all right to travel outside.”

  He’s not talking to himself. He never was.

  “Stand up,” Wes said in the hall, straightening out his lab coat. So she did. So he punched her in the stomach. “You do exactly as we say, okay?”

  She couldn’t answer.

  “We are meeting Albert,” he said. “We are walking to the car now. Pick up your purse. Act natural.”

  They were outside. She knew it was late morning. She knew mothers and children were at the playground across the street. She knew birds flew and trees had leaves and buses hiss and joggers run and the sky is made of chowder. There were other people around as they moved toward his car. Kathleen’s survival instincts should have been going crazy; she should have been trying to save her life, but she let him lead her, tuck her into the back seat.

  It was the booze, or the shame of relapse. It was seeing Deb unconscious, or the fresh memory of being punched and kicked. There was something keeping her docile. Kathleen had heard the phrase paralyzed by fear but she never knew what it really meant until now. In this back seat, lying in the fetal position, feeling like property. He owns her. She is his. Kat can’t move or talk. She can’t cry. All she can picture is that techie’s webbed feet, and what a stupid thing to remember, what a stupid way to spend these last minutes of her life.