Joshua Mohr - All This Life

But a text catches Paul’s eye. It’s from his cousin, Kyle, who is a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s an easy relation to forget about because they haven’t seen each other in five years. No bad blood, just busy lives. It says: Heard about Jake. Call me first.

In the game of Choosing-a-Vulture, a blood relation is better than an unknown scrounger. At least Kyle has had Thanksgiving with Jake; granted, that was 2003, but still. At least Kyle has an emotional investment in his son and isn’t simply fueled by his byline, or so Paul hopes.

He dials Kyle, who answers the call by saying, “Can I come see you?”

Paul thinks of Esperanto not even wanting him to stay at the precinct, treating Paul as if his ideas are the most absurd ever offered up. And if that’s how the detective feels on this day, if he’s unwilling to work with the motivated attitude that Paul thinks will benefit the search for his son, so be it: He has no choice but to improvise.

He’ll invite the press. He’ll rev up the real world so it’s as excited about finding Jake as the virtual one is. There’s no reason both these manhunts can’t happen at the same time, until they’re both discovered and merged back into one boy.

“I’m at the police station,” Paul says.

“Which one?”

Paul tells him, starts bitching about Esperanto’s bedside manner when Kyle interrupts him: “Me first, okay? You talk to me first.”

“Hurry.”

“Already in the car.”

TheGreatJake has 8,309 followers. Paul has 901. Almost a thousand people follow Paul, and why, for what? Because his son is missing? Because these voyeurs are feeding off of today’s story?

That’s why Jake posted the brass band, for one reason, one simple reason: People will watch. Paul is wrong to single out the media as scavengers. Everyone is. And if everybody subsists by eating dead flesh, there have to be enough decaying bodies to go around.

Paul sits in the empty waiting room, surrounded by all those police posters on the wall. His cell keeps ringing.

The officer at the front desk gets up and walks into the back, leaving Paul by himself. It reminds him of the therapist’s office. Being alone. Waiting for his son to come out. Waiting for his son to be okay.

He tweets this to his boy: I am coming in there to save you.

Paul keeps refreshing his feed, but TheGreatJake is gone.

Everything has a hum, a pitch, everything is an instrument in an interstellar orchestra and we are all together. Not only people. Inanimate objects make their music, too. Have you ever heard the beautiful vibrations coming from the Golden Gate Bridge? Each rivet, each speck of asphalt, each drop of paint is alive. It is more than a bridge. It is a vortex, an altar, it is paranormal, effervescent. It is our holy site. And once you and I have the opportunity to purify this world, we will all occupy a pristine earth, a cooler one, an inhabitable one, and our brains will work right. Once the congestion of gloom lifts, no more pollutants like sadness and disappointments and grief. We will learn from our mistakes. We can learn, Albert, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the assembly line working toward extinction, we can learn. It’s the mice. That’s where I’m finding hope. In the mice. How scientists have started manipulating their emotions by shining lights in the brains. They can change memories in the mice, physical memories, take something that had been a sad association and make it happy. They electrocute a mouse until it’s scared of that locale, and then they manipulate that memory, they mold it into something positive, and they can map the mouse’s brainwaves to know there’s no fear anymore, there is no anguish, only bliss. We can do the same thing. We can drain pessimism out of people’s perspectives. We can show them that they are capable of more. Capable of actually enjoying their lives. They can feel the pure serotonin of trying, rather than whining or lamenting how things have turned out. They can strike out on their own to make a difference. They can turn off all their melodramatic emissions and experience a thought process naked of pain. We will rewire them, Albert. We will treat them like the mice. We can catalyze change, and the interstellar orchestra can play something different. A melody alive with possibility. It begins with a bridge. It begins with human sacrifice.

H ey Twitter, no1 can find me. How RU?

That’s the next live-tweet.

Jake is getting confused about the difference between live-tweeting and regular tweeting. Isn’t all tweeting live, seeing as how he’s posting things going on around him?

No time to fall down that tweet-hole, he guesses, especially since something amazing has happened.

TheGreatJake has broken 100,000 Twitter followers in the last day. He had a measly 282 and then the explosion happened. An article about him posted on SFGate.com, the Chronicle ’s website, and that spurred some interest from local radio and TV and, just like that, Jake is a celebrity.

He is famous.

The legend of TheGreatJake has begun.

To think that yesterday he had been sitting in that therapist’s office with a hanging meringue of hand sanitizer, deciding to bolt. He wanted to shirk those adults and their misunderstandings; he deleted them and downloaded new media.

To think that he had to beg his scrawny roster of followers for involvement in the immediate aftermath, tweeting things like, Don’t forget to RT my disappearance.

Which was desperate. He knew that.

But he had to work with what he had. No retweets meant his disappearance had not gone viral. Which left Jake feeling sad, alone. He so badly wanted not to be alone. He had reached that status on YouTube as a disaster shepherd, but his personal brand hadn’t garnered any hype. He knew this was no time to mope, though. Not after leaving his father and the therapist behind that door. Not after striking out on his own. No moping, Jake , he told himself, wishing he could simply Photoshop his feelings, take the melancholy and anger and alter them, write over them, hide these feelings behind something. Drop a jpeg of, say, a spruce tree with a smiling face carved in its bark.

What he’s currently experiencing is called nerves. Or being nervous. Or being noosed by nervous energy. If this were a Wikipedia page, Jake would be a perfect example of this state.

It’s all because of his new status. TheGreatJake has left the pathetic ballpark of under-1,000 Twitter followers. He had briefly found himself under the jurisdiction of five figures of followers, and now he’s breathing hallowed air, with the ballers and players and pioneers.

That word pioneer inspires Jake to do a YouTube search for the first moon walk, the lunar landing, because he feels a kinship with anyone strong enough to leave the old world. He watches Neil Armstrong walk with his flying strides, moon dust propelling up from his crunching boots. Jake wonders how the astronaut chose a direction to walk, since all directions were unexplored and unmarked and free from anybody telling him what to do or think or feel.

The terrible thing is that his battery will die soon. No iPhone means no access, no connection. It means staggering through his pristine freedom uninformed and absent. Sneaking to either his father’s or mother’s home to get a charger is too risky. If that astronaut on the moon lost his signal with the people back on earth, he’d have been in the same situation. Disoriented and doomed to die alone.

A car honks — audio going by with a Doppler slide. Pitch plummeting. Is that what it would sound like blowing a clarinet from the Golden Gate all the way down to the ocean?