Joshua Mohr - All This Life

Shouldn’t there be at least one hero on the bridge?

But should has no place in a moment like this.

Better reactions don’t matter.

There’s only what happens, what these people do. And the watching.

Nobody feels a calling brought on by adrenaline, by belief, by programming, by fear, compelling them into action.

The bridge still, except for the band.

Another woman tosses her trumpet over the side and follows.

“Are they dying?” Jake says from the backseat.

“Close your eyes,” his dad says.

Several more witnesses hop out of their vehicles. All standing in the middle of the bridge, watching while another band member hoists his tuba, climbs the rail, and springs off backward.

The other clarinet launches like a spear. Its player also, falling headfirst toward the Pacific.

There are only three musicians left — one saxophonist, the snare and bass drum players. They keep performing, though their sound is so thin. Their lung almost empty.

Almost all of the commuters are out of their cars, standing transfixed, some still holding travel mugs or half-eaten bagels, some making phone calls to 911.

The person playing the snare drum lets it fly over the railing. It looks like a hatbox.

A man yells out, “Don’t do it.”

The drummer doesn’t answer, follows shortly behind his instrument.

The saxophone flies off the bridge, spinning like a boomerang, but instead of coming back, it arcs down to the sea. So does its player.

The last one left plays the bass drum, the tractor tire; he smacks it a few more times on both sides, beat slowing and finally stopping. Dropping the mallets on the walkway. Disconnecting the drum from his person. Carrying it over to the railing and letting it tumble from his arms.

“Please, don’t,” a woman calls to him, a jogger locked in place about fifteen feet away.

“This is a celebration of life,” he says.

“Stay alive,” a commuter shouts from her stopped vehicle.

“I will be alive even after I do this,” he says, climbing the railing, standing on top of it. He has a good sense of balance and stays there, perched on the rounded guardrail for about seven seconds.

Then he folds his hands in prayer, pushes off with his feet, falling toward his band.

Jake gets out of the car and stands next to his father, who’s crying. The boy has never seen his dad weep, and it almost makes him start, too, which surprises Jake because he doesn’t understand what he’d even be crying about.

“What do we do now, Dad?” he asks.

The father doesn’t answer. There are no words to make sense of any of this. He wants to call the whole scene surreal, but does that work? Is this surreal? Standing there on the bridge, it seems to the father that it’s exactly the opposite. It’s real, painfully real, painfully human. Thinking, We’re the only species capable of doing something like this . The father wipes his face, imagines another one of his dead dreams landing at his feet.

Some people get back in their vehicles, sitting with their hands on steering wheels, no idea what to do next.

Others climb over the short fence between the road and the walkway to peep over the edge and stare at the ocean. Are they hoping to see the band swimming there? Hoping the members of the brass band have all survived and after retrieving their instruments pick up the song where they left off? Hoping for a happy ending?

“What do we do now, Dad?” Jake says again.

“We go,” he says.

“Can I look over the edge, too?”

The sirens of cop cars and ambulances in the distance.

“No.”

“I want to see.”

“You’ve seen enough,” says the father.

“I want to see over the edge.”

“You have,” the father says.

He ushers the boy into the car’s backseat, trying to sequester his child away from this disaster, but he doesn’t know that the suicides exist in the car, too. Jake fires up his phone and watches the clip again.

Traffic isn’t moving.

Getting out of there is impossible.

Everything is blocked off until the authorities ascertain what happened.

The father calls his office and tries to explain all this to his assistant, though he’s talking to himself mostly, fumbling for a pat interpretation, hoping one might flutter into his mind like a flake of ash.

Jake sits in the backseat. His new emoji would be a head with a can opener spinning around its crown and peeling up the skull and plucking out that brain and whirling it around on an index finger like a basketball.

He keeps reliving the moment, watching his phone as the band slowly travels toward him, serenading the world before leaping off. Once the video ends he starts back at the beginning. Looping. Jake running on this clip like it’s a treadmill. Dying to get this to YouTube, but unable to disconnect his consciousness from it long enough to post.

Start to finish.

Start to finish.

Start.

Already 99˚ and not even 10 AM. Another pointless scorcher in the Nevada desert. Another day for Sara to gaze out the window of her cinderblock bedroom, in her cinderblock house, in her cinderblock life. Sara looks out the window and wonders how these people found such a vulgar conviction, marching to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and killing themselves.

This morning, Sara is like everyone else learning about the brass band. It’s all any of the news hubs talk about. She opens CNN’s app on her burner and watches clips, experts retching cranky speculations about what triggered this public display of violence; all these know-it-alls trying to construct psychologies that offer context and meaning, making crazy leaps in logic but none of the talking heads call them on it.

She wishes someone had the brazenness to tell the truth, not just about the brass band, their “reasons” for jumping, etc., but the truth about everything: We’ll never know. So stop asking. There are no answers.

Things. Just. Happen.

It all makes Sara laugh a bit. Not at the people who jumped. No way. Sara understands that impulse to explore — the what-if seductions of what may or may not be waiting for us after we die. It’s normal to flirt with these things, she thinks, but you never act on it. You don’t mortgage tomorrow because today is streaked in shit.

She learned too young how unfair the world can be. How you should under no circumstances wonder if life can get any worse, because it always can. There’s no such thing as the bottom. Not really. You might not be able to sink any deeper but you can sprawl down there, exist horizontally.

That’s what happened to Sara. First, her junior high school boyfriend, Rodney, her perfect Rodney, lost in a ridiculous mishap. They had been inseparable, kindred spirits, who couldn’t stop kissing, couldn’t stop laughing and stargazing, sleepovers in a tent outside Sara’s house, roughing it on the tough desert floor. But one afternoon in the park changed all that, an accident turning Rodney into someone else, barely able to talk. Sara can remember crying to her parents, using the real F-word, FAIR. Saying to them, “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!” and they consoled their child, cooed platitudes at her and tried to help her heal, to move on, you can still be his friend, they said, he’s still alive. Mother and father tried to help her until they couldn’t. Until it was they who weren’t alive. A car accident. Both gone. Just like that.

Sara was fifteen when they died, three years ago. Fair had nothing to do with it. Fair has nothing to do with anything. Things happen. Period. And you careen from one event to the next.

These are things you know with certainty when your parents die. When they’re taken away and you’re fifteen and the courts, in all their voluminous, wide wisdom, give your older brother custody, just because he’s eighteen years old. Hank, who’s never met a steroid he won’t shoot and a fight he won’t delight in winning, and he’s in charge. Are you absolutely sure that’s a good idea?