All This Life

by Joshua Mohr

  They move out front of SF General, standing on Potrero Avenue. Traffic whizzes by. A bus hisses and kneels, lowering itself so a woman with a walker can get in. Rodney sits on the curb. Sara stands behind him. She doesn’t want to see his eyes when she asks this next batch of questions. She can’t imagine getting the wrong answer.

  “Are you going to stay here?” she asks.

  He shrugs.

  “I don’t have to go home,” Sara says, thinking about her dead-end job that she might not have and her dead-end love life that she doesn’t want and her dead-end brother who can’t stand her anymore. Why run back to a cinderblock life? “I mean, if you’re going to stay here for a while, I can, if you want.”

  “Please. Stay.” Only four seconds.

  She relaxes and sits on the curb next to him, leans her head on his shoulder. “Have you called your dad?”

  He shakes his head hell no again, then rests his on hers. Not exactly making out, though feeling the warmth of her head on his skin is wonderful. Balloon Boy wishes it were the old days, behind that 7-Eleven, kissing by the dumpster, but he’ll take what he can get.

  “They’re probably fishing in the street anyway,” says Sara.

  THE FOUR OF them arrive at Kathleen’s favorite spot in front of Pier 39. Balloon Boy helps his mom unload her art supplies, his cast still clicking like a spur. Sara and Deb trail behind them, making small talk, both avoiding anything about yesterday.

  “There is a no moping ordinance,” Deb says. “We’re all going to have fun today. This is a mandatory fun zone.” Deb pulls out a pair of binoculars. “I mean, how fun are these?”

  “What are those for?” Kathleen says, setting up her easel.

  “People-watching.”

  There really isn’t anyone out here yet, the tourists trickling out of hotel rooms for designer coffee. By noon, the Embarcadero will be packed.

  “We’re people,” Sara says. She has an urge to mention the sex tape, but she’s not going to. She remembers seeing an old horror movie where a woman is being hunted in her dreams by a madman. The whole movie takes place in her head, really. She spends most of the film screaming, hiding, running away, fighting him off. But by the end, she won’t do any of that anymore. She’s had enough, decides to stand her ground and tell the madman that she takes it all back, every yelp, every stride, every bead of sweat, every tear. And once she stops empowering him by believing, he has no way to kill her. He tries, swinging a metal claw at her face and chest, but it passes right through her like vapor. He is dematerializing. He is powerless without her fear. Sara will work on doing that to the sex tape.

  “How about a picture?” Deb says. “Can you draw us all?”

  “Let me finish setting up and I’ll get on it,” says Kat.

  Deb points her binoculars at the Golden Gate Bridge. Balloon Boy senses that something catches her eye and asks, “What?”

  She hands him the binoculars. Rodney puts them to his eyes and Deb guides him in the right direction with a pointer finger.

  “Do you see that guy?” Deb says. There’s a man working on a scaffold way up near one of the bridge’s towers and Rodney nods. “He’s painting the bridge,” Deb says. “They have to do it all year, every year. The saltwater and fog strip off the paint pretty fast, and they’re always touching it up. They call those spots scars.”

  “Let me see,” says Sara, and Rodney hands her the binoculars. “Do they really call them scars?”

  “Cross my heart,” Deb says.

  “The bridge is so pretty from here,” Sara says. “You’d never know what happened yesterday.”

  Kathleen watches the three of them hand the binoculars back and forth, taking turns peering up as the man erases the scars with new paint. Sara’s right: The bridge is beautiful from here. It is the site of her near-murder not even twenty-four hours ago, yet watching the sun hit its orange beams, the bridge shimmers, postcard perfect. Kathleen can’t see any traffic from this angle, only the huge towers, the tangle of wires like a nest, the arch across the ocean. The sky is clear and the sun hits the ocean and bounces the brightness back up, making it almost too much light to bear.

  Too bad that they can’t point those binoculars and see into the future. Too bad they can’t see Noah three weeks from now, sitting in a tapas restaurant in the Mission, at one of the new chic spots that Kathleen detests. He’s on a first date, his inaugural social outing since Tracey died.

  He had forgotten about his match.com profile until he got this notification email: “Swagga_gurl has winked at you!” He clicked on her page, read all about her, sent a note right back. Here was a woman who knew nothing about him, nothing about his sister, and that sounded fantastic.

  They will go out a few more times, but nothing comes of it. It fizzles; they fizzle. Both will tell people that nothing was wrong with the other, there simply wasn’t a connection. That word! Connection. To be connected. To be bridged across any divides. To be plugged into a network. To be alive.

  It doesn’t matter that they didn’t connect. It only matters that Noah took the time to meet her, that he’s trying, that the rate of vodka bottles being emptied in his apartment is slowing. There are no directions for putting the pieces together, like his dad assembling that chair in the new arts and crafts studio. No, Noah has to make it up as he goes along.

  If the binoculars are pointed in a different direction, they can see Wes’s body being immolated. Nobody claimed him, and six weeks after his death he was shipped to a county facility. To be cooked alone.

  He is loaded into a cardboard casket and slid into the retort. A steel door lowers, the brick walls smeared with the film of thousands of deaths. Black smudges like signatures.

  She was here.

  He was here.

  A few wands jet from the retort’s ceiling, like stalactites. Fire wisps innocently at the ends of these until a worker throws the switch, and these wands are alive with fire. It engulfs the cardboard casket. The lid is the first to lose its solidity; slowly the sides slip away too. There’s a moment when he lies there naked, completely whole. A flash before the fire does what fires do, and Wes starts disappearing. His skin bubbles and pops from the scorch. Skin smoldering. Hair burns and soon skin is torn, huge holes forming and showing his ribcage, see the matter and organs baking and burning, turning to ash. Watch his heart lose its codes of love, watch his heart cave in. The worker throws the switch again to turn off the fire, and he opens the oven’s doors, collecting what remains.

  Pity the binoculars can’t spy Paul and Jake. They sit in the therapist’s office, in the waiting room without any hanging meringue, the one with six chairs, a palm tree, a rickety Formica coffee table with old magazines.

  Jake is dreading what will happen once he’s ushered inside. What he’ll find out. What he’ll have to talk about. What he’ll have to hear. Siri only answers questions that she’s been asked. This doctor will pose anything he wants and sit there practicing his lip-pursing until Jake participates.

  Paul is scared, too. What’s going on in his psyche is a collision of extremes: He wants to know the doctor’s diagnosis, and yet that information is the last thing he can bear hearing.

  Finally, the doctor’s door opens, and he wanders a few steps into the waiting room and asks Jake if he’s ready.

  The boy stands up but doesn’t move toward the office, repulsed by the fact that the doc is already pursing his lips and he hasn’t even asked any of his questions yet. Jake begins an entirely different walk on an entirely different moon.

  “Go ahead,” Paul says, ushering his boy with a supportive shove in the lower back.

  Jake takes three steps and stops. He doesn’t want to have his hard drive opened, doesn’t want anybody running diagnostics and a debugger, doesn’t want his head combed for malware. “Would you like to come in and talk?” the doctor asks.

  Jake hasn’t moved, looks back at his dad. Perhaps that first astronaut peered over his shoulder to the probe, to the others on his team, before
striking out into the magnificent desolation. He’s scared and maybe that’s okay. Jake takes the next three steps, then crosses the threshold into the office before the doctor shuts the door.

  There Paul sits. In the waiting room. In the dark. Trusting this man to help his child. He stares at the closed door, settling in, waiting for the hour to elapse, waiting an impossible amount of time to hear impossible news, hoping, tenderly hoping, that today turns out to be the best day of their lives.

  “YOU ALL READY to be drawn?” Kathleen asks.

  Deb, Sara, and Rodney huddle together, posing for their picture. They make silly faces. Sara, for some unknown reason, hums “Purple Haze.”

  “Remember that you have to draw yourself in this picture, too,” Deb says. “We all have to be in it.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “We all have to be in it,” Deb says.

  Kat’s sponsor knew she’d try to weasel out of putting herself in, and Kathleen is thankful for that. She wants to be accountable, and Deb is the perfect hard-ass to help her do that.

  “Yes, fine,” says Kathleen, “we’re all going to be in it.”

  She starts this caricature, this family portrait of sorts, all the survivors. She puts the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, but doesn’t paint it solid orange. No, she likes the idea of it showing its scars, and she leaves it mottled, gray patches all over it. She draws her boy first, her boy who has shown up at this surreal time, and she captures his face’s likeness flawlessly, the only exaggerated detail is the cast on his leg, which is made of clouds in the picture, something to coddle his injury. Then she gets cracking on Sara, who once said that she was plenty scathed but in ways the naked eye couldn’t see, so Kat evokes that by making Sara’s skin solid gold; there might be something severe swimming under the surface, but Kathleen wants to show Sara that no one cares. She has value. She’s priceless. And it’s easy to draw Deb because Kat wants to show her the same skyscraping respect that she heaps on the cancer survivors in her shop: Kathleen doesn’t draw Deb’s fat lip or swollen cheek or black eye, no, she draws lush vines snaking around her face, looking like a garden nymph.

  There’s only one person left to capture in this caricature, and there are so many ways to distort herself, so many ways to be acerbic and cruel. Take your pick. She’s made so many mistakes. But she decides to take it easy on herself today. Why? She was almost thrown from a bridge, and if that doesn’t buy you a morning of clemency, she’s not sure what does.

  Instead of being masochistic, Kathleen draws herself standing next to Rodney, her arm thrown over his shoulders, draws herself with one-day AA chips for eyes.

  “How do we look?” Deb says.

  “Yeah, are we gorgeous or what?” Sara says.

  “Pret. Tee?” Rodney says.

  Caricatures, avatars, usernames, however humans present themselves, whatever we are, there is one thing Kathleen knows: We are all scared. We are haunted by yesterday and terrified of tomorrow. It’s this life, all this life, and we’re frightened of it. There are addictions and relapses. There are weather balloons and wars, sociopaths and estrangements. There’s climate change, mental illness, mood disorders. There are families assembling and dissembling. There are dubious genes dripping down. There are more strains of violence than the flu. The particulars of human misery are limitless, a rising ocean of humiliations and blues, too-low paychecks and pipe dreams. People cling so hard to so little, everything eroding a little more every day. It’s enough to make you pour whiskey on an open wound or jump off a bridge. But that’s what we have to endure. Kathleen now knows that we need the scars on our skin before the tattoos envelop that ugly. We need those stakes stacked so high that we’re lost in order to understand that it’s okay to be lost. We will always be lost. We are the walking wounded and there’s love in our hearts.

  And then Kathleen turns her portrait around.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First thing’s first: Thanks to the indie booksellers! If it wasn’t for your tireless and often thankless work, indie writers like me wouldn’t have careers. From the bottom of my heart, you are so important. Keep fighting the good fight.

  Thanks to Dan Kirschen and ICM. He endured several remixes of this book, none of which were very good, and he never lost patience with me, and if he did, he was gracious enough to only talk shit behind my back.

  My editor, Dan Smetanka, challenged me in a way I’d never previously been tested. He called it a “tear down,” said that he liked the characters and the plot of “All This Life,” but wanted me to find a much more earnest tone to tell it, which meant writing the whole thing from scratch, basically. And that’s what we did, from August through December 2014. It was brutal and insane and formidable and infuriating, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You are pure talent, Smetanka!

  Cheers to all at Counterpoint/Soft Skull. Charlie Winton and Rolph Blythe. The publicity folks, Megan Fishmann, Sharon Wu, Claire Shalinsky, Corinne Kalasky, all held my hand. Kelly Winton put together a lovely artifact. I mean, this book in your hands is super pretty, right?

  The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto is a rad place to scribble and a much needed artistic sanctuary for me. My colleagues there continue to dazzle and inspire with their own projects.

  The MFA program at the University of San Francisco still lets me teach there sometimes, despite all the weed I sell to the students. And Stanford’s OWS is probably the best job I’ve ever had, except the summer I was a chimney sweeper.

  Every author needs smart readers to help them along the way and huge thanks to the following for their wise eyeballs: Ron Currie, Sean Doyle, Andrew Ervin, Anisse Gross, Calder Lorenz, Tyler McMahon, and Lauren Saft.

  Also, a certain unnamed novelist may or may not have needed someone to swoop in at the last minute and stop an avalanche of public embarrassment for a glaring error in the text, and that savior was Lori Hettler. She’s a generous reader and the mastermind behind The Next Best Book Club. Go to your computer and check out her site right now.

  Thanks to Diane and Sarah, Jess and Katy, Shany and Kerrie and Veronica, Eric and Eliza, Rob and Gina.

  And finally, my girls, Lelo and Ava. It is a beautiful life.