Joshua Mohr - All This Life

You follow them to bond. To communicate. To shuck their feelings from their hearts like oysters from shells.

Follow to offer crass and caustic editorials, spoiling any thoughts of a child’s sovereignty with your intrusive monologues.

You follow your children because you love them and you know the world is contagious with depravity, and in one way or another, everyone gets infected.

Despite how adroitly we try to remain pure, it’s impossible. It’s only a chipped tooth but it’s more. Everyone swims in the earth’s dirty broth.

And yet parents do their best to shield children. They follow in every way they can, hoping for happiness and safety, even though those things don’t really exist. They are artifices. Paul knows these things, and someday his son will possess this carnivorous knowledge, but let someday be decades from now. Let it only reveal the despair long after Paul is gone.

And what better way to accept the futility than to become Paul_ Gamache and enter the all-encompassing artifice — what better way to update these historic reasons to follow your kids, rooted in lessons learned in centuries barren of downloaded deities — what better way to follow them than to follow them.

Evolve into a binary detective.

Sleuth their profiles for clues that might tell you who they actually are, where they choose to reside.

No matter how much Paul hates this, it’s the only way he can find his son.

His first tweet: It’s dad, @TheGreatJake. Where are you?

Because Paul only follows one user, he can see no other people’s tweets, has no other posts coursing down his timeline. It’s empty, hollow, lifeless; it’s a socket waiting for a bulb. He needs TheGreatJake to show himself.

And he’ll also need to check his ex’s house. He knows this and isn’t being negligent. He was never negligent. Toward the end of the marriage, back when Paul had no idea they were nearing the end, he’d take walks by himself every night after work. This was 6 or 7 PM. The sun zipping down in the Marin sky. They lived in a circuitous web of residential streets, but if he kept following the forking roads to the left, he arrived at his destination: a yellow dead-end sign.

It never seemed poetic or metaphoric at the time. It was the marker he used on his walk to alert him to turn around, go back home, but with some space, if you spend your free time walking to the dead end, of course, your wife divorces you. Of course, your son leaves. Paul had been walking to the dead end for so many years that what if he actually reached it and didn’t realize? What if he was living it?

Stop it. This isn’t about me , he thinks, though he’s not sure that’s true.

That’s exactly why Jake left; if his mom were here, were around more, with her presence the boy would be better.

Paul decides to scroll through TheGreatJake’s old tweets while he waits, and Paul was right to look for him here. From the time stamps, he knows that there have been three tweets since therapy.

I’d smash this whole fucking place.

I am on my own.

Running away from home. Where 2 go?

There it is. Spelled out. Running away.

Paul winces, feels a stab in his abdomen, his lungs folded up like origami, every breath a labor.

All this could be from the laxative, he hopes. This could be the beginning of things getting back to normal inside of him.

But he knows it’s not. He knows it’s the news — the tweeted confirmation — that Jake is trying to leave. To flee. To be free. To be absent. To be missing. He is doing this on purpose. He is engineering a life away from Paul.

About eight minutes later, Paul gets an answer to his tweet, his plea to know where his son is, TheGreatJake saying to him: I’m here.

Where is here? Paul tweets back.

I’m here, @Paul_Gamache.

About the time Jake answers Paul’s tweet, Sara’s adding more hot water to her bath. She does this with her big toe, moving the dial so the scalding reinforcements pour into the tub. First, her lower legs feel the temperature crank and the sensation slowly moves up her small body, the water working toward her head.

It’s been four days since Sara’s day zero. Her rebirth with a digital, conjoined twin. One without Hank, without a job, a home, a boyfriend. Those desired commodities ripped and replaced by a sex tape.

New Sara is four days old, and this newborn can’t get out of the bath.

She and Rodney drove out of Traurig and made it into California, cruised down the mountain into the foothills, finally entering Sacramento. After five hours on the road, they needed a motel room. The room had two double beds. Pillows so scrawny that they were probably stuffed with creamed spinach. The carpet smelled like a campfire. Under a black light, the bedspread could make a porn star blush.

Right when they got into the room, Sara said, “I need a bath.”

She locked the door, crawled in the tub, scrolled on her phone, reading more about the brass band, the jumper who lived. The article called the woman a survivor, but Sara didn’t buy that. She was the exact opposite. An unsurvivor. If she leaped from the bridge because she thought a better world awaited her, what a tragedy to be fished from the water, wake up restrained in a hospital. She didn’t want this life in the first place, and now the consequences of her actions would make it even worse.

Dead bodies could be survivors. Sara understood that. They were survivors if they escaped their pain. If they were liberated. If they occupied a consciousness swiped clean of appalling memory.

There were lots of things Sara hated about the media, but at the top of the list was their reliance on gaudy alliteration. It was insulting, dismissive. The local press had done it to Rodney right after his accident, naming him Balloon Boy. Such wounding insolence. It was vicious, the calloused practice of shredding someone’s identity to a commodity, to a caricature. And the unsurvivor was the latest victim of this assault, the article referring to her as Jumper Julie.

If the media gave Sara a nickname it would be Slutty Sara, or Skank Sara, or Sex Tape Sara. They’d call her these things without any care of the malice tucked into these syllables, venom folded between consonants and vowels.

Sara lost track of time in the tub, or she knew that time passed and didn’t care. She never expected to spend four days bathing, but honestly, the tub was the safest haven she’d found since her fiasco posted online. It was warm and nobody was talking and Hank wasn’t yelling and decimating her heart and Felix couldn’t kick her car and Moses couldn’t suspend her from work and Nat didn’t know where to find her to post another video, and on the other side of this locked door was sweet Rodney, her only friend left. She expected to spend half an hour in the tub, but being immersed in that womb proved impossible to slide out of — why leave such quiet and warm comfort?

She only exited for quick trips. To eat takeout that Rodney had ordered, Chinese, Thai, pizza. To sleep in spurts, toss and turn, think too much, retreat back to another bath, slipping into solace.

And four days later, they’re still in this god-awful motel room. This is a capricious way to dole out her emergency money, but she can’t find the verve to try. She feels bad for Rodney, trapped out there. She wouldn’t be surprised if he took off on her — she certainly wouldn’t blame him. But every time she briefly emerges from the bathroom, there he is, watching TV, using his own phone to scroll around the globe. He always greets her with a serving of food, something to drink.

“Eat,” he says.