Joshua Mohr - All This Life

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“Look at all of them,” says Jake.

“Are you okay?” Paul says stupidly. He knows that what he’s walked in on isn’t normal, isn’t healthy. He’s tried to be there the best he could the last couple days. He’s been working from home, allowing Jake to play hooky from school. They’ve watched movies together, eaten pizzas. He’s asked Jake countless times if he wanted to talk about the brass band, but the boy never did. Paul has heard “I’m fine” enough to make it hard to keep asking, figured his son would reach out to him when he was ready.

Paul could hear Naomi, all the way from Bali, say to him, “It doesn’t matter if he answers us, we have to keep asking. We are the adults and always have to check in with him.”

Paul shakes her know-it-all timbre out of his head; it’s so easy for her to pop up with aphorisms between trips with Simon, when Paul was doing the heavy lifting of being the day-to-day, default parent right now. It’s like she’s been on spring break since the divorce, parading and partying, sowing her paroled oats, while Paul is still locked up, left to deal with all this.

In fact, the night after the band died, Paul had sent her an elaborate email of what Jake had seen on the bridge and all he got back from her was this one measly line: “Can you handle it?”

His response: “I’ll try.”

Those sorts of interactions made him remember the mosquito’s blood smudged on the magazine’s page.

But had he been trying as best he could? Paul wasn’t sure.

The boy staring straight ahead at his laptop.

Paul only seeing the back of his head, a haze of blue computer life haloed around it.

“Jake, tell me what you’re doing,” he says.

Paul walks across the room, standing directly behind his son, caressing the nape of Jake’s neck, both of them staring at the boy’s computer screen.

“What is that?” asks Paul.

“It’s mine.”

“What is?”

Paul scours the screen. He notes the URL, then the imbedded video. Holy shit. Paul pieces the chain of events together, and his boy’s refrain of “I’m fine” sounds different now. Jake isn’t slowly processing and soon, once he understands his emotions, they’ll have a heart-to-heart. No, Jake has already processed the event without him; he doesn’t need his father. He has his computer and the video he’s shot on his phone. He has his grieving process shared online, and Paul, poor pathetic Paul, downstairs with his fantasy football draft. He should’ve been up here. He should’ve been up here the whole time.

“You posted that?” Paul asks his son.

“I’m in charge of it.”

“Play it.”

“You were there.”

“Click play.”

Jake starts the video and Paul can’t keep his head right, can’t keep his head here, watching this clip because it’s reminding him of the days after the September attacks, years ago, when he watched those planes destroy the country time and again. There was a kind of pornography to it, a surreptitious yearning to see something vulgar. He knew other people were watching those planes, too, probably at the exact time he was, but he hoarded his viewings.

Paul hates the thought that Jake is doing the same thing now.

The brass band walking toward them. Again.

Playing.

Dancing.

Stopping.

Over the edge.

One at a time.

Father and son not saying a word.

Again.

“Why did you post this?” Paul asks.

“I never wanted to get a dog,” Jake says.

“Let’s get you out of here,” says Paul, tugging on Jake’s shoulders. He has to get his boy out of there now, right now. Jake’s too young to understand self-preservation, to value sparing yourself from seeing things you don’t have to endure. Paul should have been more present at the moment on the bridge, should have told his son to put down his phone. Don’t film this. Don’t capture any of this.

And it’s inexcusable that Paul is only finding out now that Jake posted it. He should have known right away. He should have stood guard outside his door, poked his head in every five minutes, if only to say to his son, “I’m here. I’m right here if you need me.”

There’s no need for fantasy sports when the real competition had been going on upstairs, Jake versus his own confusion, his naïveté, his limited understanding of consequences. Paul has let down Jake, and that stops now.

“I don’t know why you thought I wanted a dog in the first place,” Jake says.

“Are you hungry?”

“This is my favorite,” says Jake, pointing to the screen, the tall woman in the purple pants throwing her clarinet then leaping.

“Come on,” Paul says, “we need to go.”

“Did you see how she holds her nose right before she jumps? Isn’t that strange?” asks Jake.

“How about some pizza?”

“I like how she holds her nose like that.”

“Pizza?”

“No.”

“Macaroni and cheese?”

“Okay.”

“Go downstairs and put on a pot of water. I’ll be down as soon as I clean this up.”

But the boy simply sits there, awash in the computer’s light.

“Jake, move it.”

Finally, he gets up and slinks out of the room.

Paul fishes his cell phone from his pocket, calling to set up an appointment with a psychologist. No one answers and he listens to the long litany of various instructions. He leaves a detailed voice-mail, asking for an appointment in the next couple days.

He assesses the damage, begins cleaning things up.

He starts with the printer, unplugging it and collecting the scattered pieces of plastic. Paul goes to the hall closet and gets a vacuum, sucking up all the dirt. He puts the pieces of the alarm clock on top of the printer. The terra-cotta shards from the succulent’s pot are the last thing he collects. Loads it all into a garbage bag. Remembering all those butterflies whirling around the garden as they dismembered their family.

He’s finished tidying the room and walks to the door, turning off the light, which only amplifies the presence of Jake’s computer. It is glowing. Paul stomps over to it in a huff, as if it’s that very dog that Naomi had dumbly promised Jake and it had pissed all over the floor, Paul ready to shame the pet, rub its nose in the mess.

This is the computer’s fault, not his boy’s.

No way is it his boy’s.

No way can his boy be blamed.

Paul sits down in front of the computer, lured closer to watch the clip again, but instead he scrolls down a bit.

He can see the comment. He can see, “I feel sad for whoever posted this.”

And Paul bursts into tears. He crumbles under the mass of his own ignorance. Having a kid is the ultimate risk. It creates such a limited perspective. A tube of love. And your vision can be so obscured that you do not understand the dangers on the periphery. You want nothing else but to adore and train and watch them prosper, but the world will have its way with them. Protection is a wicked illusion.

Paul cannot keep Jake safe, even if he spends the rest of his days guarding the boy’s room. He has to let him out. He has to teach his son to fend for himself, and that’s the great paradox of being a parent: He doesn’t want to teach him everything, wants to hold back just enough that Jake needs him. Paul wants to always be needed by his boy, but that greedy motive might prevent Jake from having access to all the tools needed to survive.

Even if you do give them every tool, it’s like indoor rock climbing, Paul’s main source of exercise. You can have everything you need, make it to the top, but what if you’re scaling the wrong wall? Paul himself had all the tools, supportive parents that stayed together, a Stanford education, a trough of options, and yet he still found an existence that perpetually disappoints him.