Joshua Mohr - All This Life

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sara says.

“Skank of the week!”

“What does that mean, Hank?”

“You are skank of the week on some porno site. Colby says it’s already had over 100,000 hits. It’s viral, Sara. And from the looks of it,” Hank says, coming over and grabbing her panties out of her hands, “you were out making another dirty movie. Did you fuck the town retard, Sara?”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” she says.

“No!” Rodney says, stepping into the room.

Hank takes the panties and throws them right in Rodney’s face, tries to step up to him, but before her brother can get to him, before Hank can hurt him again, Sara stands between them, saying to Rodney, “I need you to leave.”

“No,” he says.

“Leave,” she says. “Please.”

“Ten seconds till I make you leave,” Hank says.

“I’ll be fine,” Sara says and ushers him out, shutting and locking the door, feeling fear — actual fear — she’s scared of her brother. He’s never raised a hand to her, but it doesn’t seem impossible tonight.

She turns to him.

“What’s it feel like to be skank of the week?” he asks.

“Why are you talking to me like this? You knew about the video. Who cares what Colby thinks?”

“It ain’t Colby. It’s everyone, Sara. 100,000 hits in a day. A million in a week. Everyone will see it!”

“Why is this making you so mad?”

“And I no longer care what you think about Nat,” Hank says. “I’m going to destroy him.”

“Please stop, Hank,” Sara says.

It’s almost a whisper, which he can’t hear. His eyes are far away, clomping around the room. His eyes are submerged in violence. They’ve tasted the chum and now need real meat.

Sara doesn’t require his help, anybody’s help hating herself right now. Some website can’t brand her the skank of the week because she’s been tagging that on her skull’s walls all day, with almost every breath.

“What do you want me to do about it?” she asks. “How can I make this better?”

“And then you flit in here holding your panties?” he says. “Rubbing my face in all this? Making me have to see you slut around?”

“You’re breaking my heart,” she says and starts crying and runs to her room, throws the closet open, gets a ratty suitcase and unzips it and stuffs whatever clothes she can fit. Snatches her emergency money. Her hands aren’t only vibrating cell phones on the inside anymore. They’re flat-out shaking. She’s shaking. And crying so hard that saliva runs from the corners of her mouth. To walk in the house and be shamed by her brother is the day’s final disgrace.

Next she takes the suitcase into the bathroom and flings her toothbrush and hairbrush and there are probably ten other things she should grab, but she can’t think of what they might be, zipping it up and turning to the door. She can’t concentrate on any particulars because there are amplifiers blaring in her head, heaving Hank’s shames over and over, playing them like power chords.

All that matters is fleeing this house.

All that matters is speeding outside the city limits.

All that matters is not being here.

“Where are you going?” Hank says in the doorway.

“What do you care if a skank of the week leaves?”

“You’re not going anywhere, Sara.”

“Stop calling me that!” she says, wishing she were strong enough to slam him in the temple and topple him to the ground, telling him, My name is Baby Sis .

“Calling you what?”

“I’m taking a trip,” she says.

“You’re not.”

And she and her ratty suitcase run full speed into Hank. He doesn’t budge. The dog starts barking from the hallway. Obviously, Hank can manhandle her, but he’s not. He’s letting her slam into him and he’s letting her drag the suitcase away and letting her amble through the front door and letting her shut it. Sara can’t tell what would feel worse — him making her stay, or him allowing her to leave — and her thoughts are the loudest they’ve ever been, cranking through those amplifiers and her hands keep buzzing and buzzing and she’s crying harder than she ever has, even more than when her parents died because that at least had shock as a component and there’s none of that numbing here. No, there’s only Hank crunching up her heart like an aluminum can.

Sara’s at her car, looking over her shoulder to see if Hank will come out and stop her, but the house is quiet. Even Bernard has stopped barking. The quiet at the river had felt so peaceful, yet this one feels fickle and cruel.

She throws open the trunk and stows the suitcase and opens the driver’s side door and notices someone’s inside. She jumps back.

“Me,” says Rodney from the passenger seat.

“What are you doing here?”

“You. Oh. Kay?”

“You need to go,” she says. “I’m getting out of here.”

Rodney nods but doesn’t budge.

“I’m leaving now,” she says.

More nodding.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Sara asks.

More nodding.

“What are you doing, Rodney?”

“I’m. Com. Ing.”

“You can’t.”

“Can.”

Sara looks up at the house. Hank hasn’t come outside to stop her. He’s not bellowing Baby Sis from inside. She tries to stifle her sobs, but it’s worse when she sees Rodney, and she surrenders into it, wailing. “He hates me,” she says and crashes into the driver’s seat.

“Shhh,” says Rodney.

He holds his wet trunks toward Sara, presumably for her to use as a hanky, and Sara laughs.

“No thanks,” she says.

“All. I. Need,” he says.

“All you need for what?”

He points out the window, into the distance and darkness.

She’d misread his offering. He wasn’t presenting the boxers as a way to wipe her tears, blow her nose. No, Rodney was suggesting something else entirely: an escape, a copilot, a friend.

“Those are all you need to leave with me?” she asks.

Rodney nods again, and Sara feels a bit better, taking his boxers and running them under her eyes.

“Let’s go find your mom,” she says.

They have no haven here, Albert, they are all password-protected, they all have signs on their hearts that say SLIDE TO UNLOCK. But those four-digit codes have been forgotten and so they can’t get inside themselves, locked out and lost, and in their confusion they will hunt through the ones and zeroes for connection, to find out who they are, they will show their naked bodies for all to see, they will look for the people who made them, they will flounder for some sense of decency or self. It’s all the time on their hands, isn’t that a weird expression? Forget hands. It is the time in their brains, racing through neurotransmitters like mice in mazes. Time cannot be stopped but it is not a predator. Time is our friend, and it’s willing to play nicely if we learn how to ask, if we exchange pleasantries, if we shake hands and kiss cheeks, and you and I know the clandestine language to indulge time in dialogue. Only the two of us can articulate this yet-to-be discovered world. I wish we could wait for them, Albert, I wish there were a way to let them figure it out for themselves but thermometers don’t lie, this planet will face the big burn. It’s fate, it’s science, it’s existential mathematics. Unless we save them. My brain sends a signal to your brain and you send signals to my brain and we are connected, we are the only unlocked devices left. We are connected across time, and soon we’ll be able to bridge space as easily, and once we’ve mastered that advancement, you will be able to beam back. The space-time continuum will be tamed. There will be no such thing as pasts. Even the past tense will be irrelevant, archaic, known only in legend. Everyone across time will be alive at the same moment, all of us collapsing into one shining transcendent community, which will know no heat, no pathos. People born before the common era, people in the Middle Ages, the Victorians, the Huns, the ones who clutch technology like oxygen masks, they will all breathe at the same time, they will all pump blood. There will only be now. And you will be here. The two of us will stand in the ugliest Garden of Eden. No one here believes in anything they can’t find in the search engine but our action will remedy that, we will show them the new religion, we will illustrate the perfect convergence of piety and science. No demagogues or deities or dupes. Just a simple way to solve E = mc despaired. Space and time manipulation means we can remain uncremated, means that so many wrongs might go extinct in the process because people will love their second chances. They’ll love this new life, they’ll rise to the occasion, it’s a way to reenter that passcode, it’s a way to navigate around with a blazing fast connection, to awaken and slough off that residue of cynicism, to reorient their senses of self. We’ll be able to swim through our own nervous systems. Can you imagine? And as we figure out who we are, as we remember that there’s good in our souls, everyone will be fused together into a single bright consciousness and in that moment, we will remember what it is to be happy.