Joshua Mohr - All This Life

Football, fantasy football, he knows this is dumb and yet it matters. It has to matter. It matters because of what it represents. Of what it can mean moving forward. It matters because it will give Paul something to do.

That’s what makes all this so tragic: Even Paul doesn’t buy his story, his yarn of a life wasted providing for his family. It sounds great, don’t get him wrong, but isn’t that giving him too much credit?

Of course, there was time.

Time for Paul to spend on himself.

Time for him to pursue these mysterious interests — mysterious because even he doesn’t know what they are.

Sure, the first couple years of being a parent are a fugue state, tunnel vision, a staggering lurch forward with blinkers blocking your periphery, but once Jake started school, there was time for Paul to dote on himself. Problem is, he didn’t know what to do with his free time. So he spent it working. He spent it puttering on their house. He spent it with Jake. He spent it with his ex, when she wasn’t yet his ex.

Naomi, what to say about her? For years, Paul considered them to be in a state of pre-divorce. No one left but neither of them was happy. Paul thought they’d slog on into retirement, take cruises and ignore each other, embrace every devastating cliché.

It was Naomi, god bless her soul, who saved them from that slow ruin. They were both asleep one night, and out of nowhere she sat up in bed, saying, “I’m being eaten alive here.”

“What?” said a groggy Paul, an Ambien swimming in his bloodstream.

“A mosquito.”

“Huh?”

“I’m almost sucked dry, Paul,” she said. “Do something.”

The light was switched on. A magazine was folded in half and poor Paul danced around the room, trying to smear the bloated mosquito’s corpse all over the cover of The New Yorker , but he couldn’t catch him, the mosquito veering, zigzagging, Paul hopelessly late with every Ambien-slowed swing.

“It’s up by the light,” she said.

“I see it.”

“So hit it.”

“I’m trying.”

Whiff. Whiff.

Paul, embarrassingly, was out of breath.

“When?” she said.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

She nodded and stood up on the bed. He handed her the magazine. Paul lay down on his side and watched her stalk the insect. It took a matter of ten seconds for her to hit it with the magazine, the mosquito landing on their comforter, stunned, still trying to fly. Naomi, careful not to squash it on their duvet, picked the mosquito up and put it inside the magazine, then smushed the pages together.

“Do you want to see?” she said.

She opened the magazine up, showing the bloody smudge over a skyscraper of text.

“I hadn’t finished reading that one,” said Paul.

“You can still read it,” Naomi said.

There was something in that moment, an inherent conversation, scripted lines they were supposed to say. Maybe it’s only Paul’s memory plumping it up, but he swears there was an electricity, the two of them sitting on the bed with the blood smear on the page.

He sat there for what felt like a hundred hours until Naomi said, “We need to make a change.”

“Okay.”

“We forgot how to be married.”

“What?”

“When we had Jake,” she said. “We became parents and stopped being married.”

It was true: The family took on an exclusionary geometry. It had shapes to it: Paul and Jake, Naomi and Jake, Paul and Naomi and Jake. But there was never any time when Paul and Naomi were together, and if they were it was only to discuss logistics, practicalities. They never had fun .

“What can we do about it?” he asked.

But all Naomi did was shake her head.

Paul can still see her so vividly, the finality in her movement. It must have taken her years to work up the courage to quit their marriage, and it was right there in her swiveling face, left to right, right to left, We are through .

The overhead light was turned off; the bloodied copy of The New Yorker was recycled.

That was ten months ago. Now Paul lives in a condo, a sad stucco orphanage for wayward men, shamed divorcés. It’s only a couple miles from his former residence, where Jake lives with his mom. Normally, they share custody, but she’s in Bali for a few weeks with a new boyfriend, some tan asshole with an accent that sends Paul into a murderous rage every time he calls him mate . A murderous rage he’ll, of course, never act on. Unless there’s a fantasy murder league.

Paul has six minutes before the fantasy draft kicks off and keeps Googling, sifting through various strategies, players to target. He has six minutes and there’s another pale ale in the fridge, and for a few seconds he feels like he’s forging these new friendships already — Paul and his pals — just by preparing himself to be an active member of their league, and all of this makes him feel hopeful.

He clicks on a link that says “The perfect plan (for your draft)” and has another sip of beer. He’s not drafting pretend players; he’s drafting real friends.

Paul smiles.

That’s when he hears some strange thumping noises coming from upstairs, from Jake’s room.

SOMETIMES HIS MOM—when she’s actually in town and not traveling with her new boyfriend — says that the world is an oyster. But that’s a stupid expression. That’s the kind of thing that maybe applied back in 1981 or something. Not now. No, oysters have nothing to do with the current state of things, and Jake knows exactly what the world is:

The world is a search engine.

Jake can type anything into the world’s search bar and scroll through pages of results. Limitless returns. Adventures coming in every denomination, every fetish. Any whim he can whip up.

There’s no other conclusion for him to draw. Especially now. Right now. Jake clicks refresh compulsively, watching the views and comments multiply on his video’s YouTube page, all these citizens of the world coming to him. 827,148 people have viewed it already. And that’s not even mentioning how many times Jake personally has replayed it. Maybe he’s watched the brass band 827,148 times, too.

So when he’s not clicking refresh, he clicks replay.

And when he isn’t clicking replay, he simply stares at the scene, reliving it, time-traveling back to that morning on the bridge.

Refresh. . refresh. .

827,176.

There are other posted videos of the disaster, but no one captured its entirety. Jake got the brass band’s approach, their shuffling along the walkway, their song; he got every person going over the edge. The other clips of it start when one or two of the brass band have already jumped. These are getting hits, too, but nowhere near as many as Jake’s.

He’s a disaster shepherd, and this YouTube page and its contents are his flock. He nurtures them all. He owns this disaster, as any shepherd owns his sheep. Their deaths are his property.

Refresh.

827,192.

The thing that’s happened to him today is that he’s building a personal ranking system of their jumps. He didn’t start off doing this on purpose, but slowly, view after view after view, he found himself looking forward to certain deaths more than others. Found himself being drawn to certain styles of going over the edge. For example, he cherished the saxophonist who launched his instrument like a boomerang, the gold thing shimmering off the bridge and slowly disappearing down, then its player following it.

His favorite, though, is the tall, skinny woman, the one wearing the purple striped pants, the paisley shirt with a butterfly collar. How she hoists her clarinet like a javelin and stands admiring her toss before going after it.

He wouldn’t tell anybody. About his ranking system. About how he’s built a hierarchy of suicides. No one would understand, or maybe they would but Jake won’t share it. He can’t. He’s learned not to open himself up to anybody at school. They already have plenty of ammo to heave at him because he’s always — as his mom says—“acting out.” He’s not, though. He’s not acting; he’s not out. He’s only being himself.