Joshua Mohr - All This Life

He is off the grid. That’s key to being a runaway. Not leaving a footprint. He can’t use his check card or any of that, unless he wants cops surrounding him at the ATM. Hollywood has trained him how to effectively disappear.

Where he spent last night can be categorized as a park. Where he slept was a playground. He hid in a little clubhouse for the kids, sleeping on the wooden floor, and it might seem like such accommodations would be rough, but not if they indicate progress. Neil Armstrong probably wasn’t very comfortable in his rocket before his moonwalk and that didn’t stop him. There was no quit in him and there’s none in Jake. It would be like forgetting your space helmet back home. You can’t let these minor interferences keep you from striking out on your own in the hopes of something better.

Jake decides he has an hour of juice left before the phone gives out. He has $19 in his pocket, not enough to score a new charger, he guesses. He can make it to an Apple Store before his phone gives out entirely. He can steal a new charger.

One small step to an Apple Store, one giant leap for Jake-kind.

Next post: This is how you live-tweet a crime spree.

HE’S TURNED OFFall applications except Twitter. Down to 6 percent on his battery. Good for one more message.

Next live-tweet: Will I get caught when I swipe it? Stay tuned. . #BetterThanTelevision.

Hashtags are like emotions that people can see.

It is 12:27 PM. He’s been a runaway since yesterday at approximately 9:54 AM. He will use it as a commemoration: forever celebrating 9:54 as the time he changed his life.

He powers down his phone, which doesn’t happen that often. See: ever. Jake always has his iPhone armed, his e-security-blanket. He checks texts and email and Twitter and Reddit compulsively, scrolling through new comments on his disaster. Checking for any new porn clips — and there are always new porn clips!

His phone is also his DJ. He never walks down the street with all his senses. He still has vision and smell and taste and touch, but Jake is intentionally audio-impaired, his soundtrack blaring from ear buds, deaf to the noises of the world. Jake likes the randomness of putting his iTunes on shuffle and seeing how well Apple’s algorithms know him. Sometimes he even thinks that it can sense his mood, as crazy as that sounds. But more often than not, if he’s sad, all his sad songs miraculously play, and if he’s feeling sort of reckless — like he is now — blaring rock and roll provides the necessary accompaniment. It’s a transaction of sorts: He downloads these songs and somehow they upload his moods and, thus, they are synced somewhere deep inside of him.

But a powered-off phone means no music. Which makes Jake feel vulnerable. You’d think it would be the opposite: He is less susceptible to his surroundings with all his senses working, but everything feels too visceral. He likes being locked away. Likes listening to the voices he’s bought or pirated. Likes to be in charge of his own hypnosis, conjuring his own singing ghosts.

What he likes doesn’t much matter with only 5 percent battery life left, so he has no choice but to let his ears pick up every sound. Every combustible engine. Every bird. Every scattering conversation. This is Sausalito, California, his hometown. Tourist season. Everywhere he turns is another foreign language or a Midwest accent, macerating English into moaning vowels. He is downtown, waiting at a bus stop. He needs to travel to Corte Madera, a couple towns up; that’s where the closest Apple Store is located. The bus ride won’t take that long once he’s on the road, most of the trip on the freeway. Being stuck here, however, without a soundtrack, without Twitter, is tough. Especially considering his newfound status. He wants to interact with his followers. He wants to be the sort of celebrity who is accessible, treating his audience with respect. Not the high and mighty pretenders who keep themselves sequestered from their fans. Be real. That’s the secret. Jake is real.

IT’S AN AMBUSHas soon as he’s through the front door. Four or five overly eager employees, all wearing the same long-sleeved red shirt with an Apple insignia in the center of their chests, like hearts, all storm up to him with their iPads and smiles and scripted hospitality. They have earpieces and khakis and Nikes and new school credit card machines dangling from clips connected to their pants, and one of them says to Jake, “Welcome! And what can we do for you today?”

Neil Armstrong would hate Apple stores.

“Browsing,” he says, trying to seem nonchalant, trying to channel some poker-face cool, the non-threatening face that would never incite suspicion.

“We can help with that,” the employee says, motioning to his coworkers, who all clutch their iPads like Bibles.

There’s also a security guard, leaning against a wall by the door. She is black, only a few years older than Jake. She’s wearing a navy uniform, with a jacket that would fit someone seven feet tall. There’s a badge that’s really just a patch, sewn onto the breast. She looks disengaged.

“You can help me browse?” Jake says.

“We can help with everything,” he says, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses all nod behind him.

“I’ll let you know if I need anything,” says Jake.

A mother and daughter enter the store and the zealots turn their attention to them, leaving Jake the chance to case the joint. It’s set up like a big rectangle. There’s a table running through the middle of it, with every Apple device you can imagine — computers and tablets and phones, all tied to the table with security chains — ready to be taken for a test drive. The floors are a bleached wood, and crappy corporate pop plays softly.

Jake approaches a laptop, opens a browser, but at the same time he’s looking around the store for chargers. He spies them on the back wall. He’s going to need to retrieve one, conceal it, walk through the store, and exit without any zealots noticing.

For inspiration, Jake takes the laptop to YouTube, searches for lunar landing. Any astronaut has nerves before a big mission. There’s so much that can go wrong.

One of the videos cued for him is entitled Magnificent Desolation . It’s a documentary and he watches the beginning, learns that one of the astronauts had called the moon “magnificent desolation” after seeing it up close, and copyright be damned, Jake poaches it and brands his own mission with the same moniker.

Jake’s moon won’t have any parents or bullies or hanging meringues or almost-dead batteries. They are persona non grata, or whatever the plural is. Jake would know the god-damn plural if Latin hadn’t jumped off a bridge, too. Siri has the answer. He’d ask his friend if the battery situation weren’t so dire.

That will be his next live-tweet: This is my magnificent desolation.

In fact, why not tweet now? Jake opens up Twitter and transforms into TheGreatJake and tells his legion of followers what’s what.

He’s up to 200,000 of them.

Immediately, nine of them favorite it.

That makes Jake feel good for like two seconds, but here comes more anxiety, getting more nervous, feels like he’s throwing a 404 error message, experiencing a disconnect between himself and the server he’s normally tethered to. Because if the world is a search engine, then every human being is a webpage, and URLs are our fingerprints.

It all makes perfect sense.

“How are you liking your experience with this machine?” a red-shirted employee asks him, right by his side. The man is Asian, thirty and change, and has a ton of gel in his hair, twisted mats of it sticking into barbs. Jake could snap one off like an icicle.