Joshua Mohr - All This Life

Deb hands the caricature back to Kathleen and begins to restock her station, filling up the ink caps with what she’ll need to complete the work.

Kathleen actually relaxes after Deb calls her on all the bullshit. It’s what she adores about her sponsor, her prying right into the matter’s heart. Certainly, Kathleen could keep feeling sorry for herself, what she lost, what she gave away, the resentment she feels about how unfair it was, a child being injured like that. She can’t ever imagine forgiving herself. She might be carting around the caricature that she’d done earlier that day, but she’s been carrying her own since the day she left Traurig.

Kathleen can remember a time clean of any caricatures, any distortions. She and Larry maybe not fairy-tale-happy but far from mean to each other. When Rodney was first born. Their perfect boy making all the tiredness worth it, all the double shifts for her husband while Kathleen stayed up all night with the baby. She’d swear the first three months of Rodney’s life were one long day — a repeating one, the opposite of a mythology-style punishment. Barely kept track of the time of day besides the dark or light. He would scream if he was set down, demanding to sleep straight on Kathleen’s chest, so she carted him around everywhere. He slept while she listened to him breathe, worrying about SIDS, worrying about things much more practical than a weather balloon.

She was so sleepy and never changed out of her bathrobe. Covered in leaked breast milk. Smelling of Parmesan cheese that had been quickly aged in her son’s stomach and spit back up, leaving pale stains on the robe that looked like clouds.

It actually became a joke, Larry saying, “You’ve sprouted another cloud,” and Kat laughing like an overwhelmed but satisfied new mom, feeling a purpose she’d never known.

They were exhausted parents trying to figure out what they’d gotten themselves into. The loss of any semblance of free time. Loss of freedom and fun. Loss of identity. Loss of sex. Loss of any intimacy between spouses, juggling all these new responsibilities. The house was in shambles and rent was late and they hadn’t grocery-shopped in who knows how long and hygiene was in dubious states, but despite all that they were happy — happy! — rallying together to figure all this out.

Back then they were portraits, not caricatures. No hyperbolic features. No funhouse remixes. No exaggerated facial details for comic effect.

Sure, she already had a drinking problem before her son fell off that weather balloon, but it was manageable, socially acceptable, reasonable , if that makes any sense. After his injury, she couldn’t stop: It became an accomplishment — she thought it was an accomplishment — to not drink in the morning. Kathleen is talking about the true nature of craving and how she never knew what that word really meant until after Rodney changed. Craving. It wasn’t simply something you wanted. No, craving in its pure, unpasteurized way was a religious experience. A compulsion that trumped anything else in the world. It became a biorhythm. A part of you. And maybe it started off as a small, controllable part, but that wasn’t going to last. Its contingency will bully all others. Until everything was governed by that same thirst. Pretty soon what you were craving became a god. Jesus Christ, whiskey, whatever. The only reason to live was to worship that deity, and the only way to show your devotion was to consume another drink, and so Kathleen would get up in the morning and think about vodka and she’d scrub her teeth thinking about vodka and she wouldn’t be able to shake these thoughts during her shower or getting dressed or pretending to eat toast, and pretty soon that craving buckled every reason she could think of to stay sober that day — all she saw was a knob to turn the volume down on her son’s tragedy, her grief, never muting them entirely, but beating back the decibel level to a tolerable murmur, so yes, allow yourself one morning cocktail to take the edge off her hangover because she showed her devotion to this false god of craving the night before so why not treat yourself to one little innocuous cocktail and cauterize all the circular thinking, Kathleen, these mean thoughts about her decimated son might hop on a weather balloon all their own and fly off into the sunset and that first screwdriver did feel holy, her god stomping on her disaffections, all the blame her heart hoarded temporarily liquidated, and if the first drink worked, why wouldn’t the second one make her feel even more human, holier, maybe even good, yes, actually good about the state of things, so she made that daily exception to have another morning cocktail but damn the law of diminishing returns and the second one didn’t make her feel any more better , got her mind whirling about Rodney and her marriage and how things were so screwed up nothing was ever going to get fixed and then it was time to have another, chasing that first burst of biblical amnesia again but of course it was gone, and then another cocktail and another and she was an alcoholic piece of shit who couldn’t stay sober one day in a train-wreck marriage with a son who should be in the eighth grade but talked like a toddler again and he will never be normal and will never have any kind of life and that wasn’t fair and her marriage wasn’t fair and Larry’s fists weren’t fair and Traurig wasn’t fair and she couldn’t think of one fair thing in the whole universe and she should leave town, why not, wasn’t like she could actually do anything to help him, all they could do was sit around and watch each other die, Rodney was going to be that terrible toddler for all time with or without Kathleen’s boozy presence, and so she bolted.

And here she is. Her whole world is a skyscraping caricature. Practically its own continent. Maybe that was her mythology-style punishment. Maybe being a caricaturist day in, day out is the worst fate a god addicted to poetic justice can cook up.

Kat has a rather convincing piece of evidence in her hand. She examines the girl with the black eye, her baby, and Tyler. She tries to get each crease out of the caricature, but it’s no use. This is the way this family will look.

She feels so stupid and fragile for lashing out at them. She rubs her hand over it again and it dawns on her that it’s only a drawing. It might represent how unstable she is right now, but the caricature is only a symptom. Deb wants her to deal with the disease — her guilt about abandoning Rodney — and her sponsor is right. She can do that; she has to do that.

“Let’s get cracking!” Kat calls to the cancer survivor, who stands by the open front door.

“Do we have to?” she says back. “This doesn’t feel good.”

“It’s worth it.”

“Is it?”

“Carpe diem,” says Deb.

Slowly and reluctantly, the woman shuffles back, takes off her shirt, and lies down on the table, putting her arm back over her eyes.

Deb gets the tattoo gun going again, dips her shader into the orange, and starts doing the work.

Kathleen spends the next three hours watching those scars disappear under a miracle of vibrant color.

THE GUY WHOfound her online should arrive at any minute. All Kat knows about him is his email address, WesEinstein@gmail.com. That was how he’d responded to her online ad, and because he had been the first responder, Kathleen figured it was only fair to give him the initial crack at the room.

Since this is San Francisco in 2013, the new dot-com boom has pushed the rents sky-high; it’s as bad as Manhattan. Because of that, Kathleen decided to jack the sublettor’s share a few hundred to make some extra money. She rationalized that she deserved some severance for doing the work her roommate should have done before leaving the country.