Joshua Mohr - All This Life

He shuts down Twitter, and YouTube pops up.

“Are those astronauts?” the employee asks.

“I wanted to see how video looks on this,” says Jake.

“Sweet, huh? This one has retina display. Processors that crank. Screen brightness that’s unrivaled. Video quality that looks better than the real world, don’t you think?” he asks, pointing outside.

“I like it,” Jake says.

“And it has all-day battery life.”

Which of course reminds Jake of his current mission: “How much are 5 chargers?”

The Asian man pecks at his iPad and a few seconds later says, “$19.”

Serendipity , thinks Jake. That’s exactly how much money I have.

“Is there tax?”

“Of course.”

“How much then?”

“$20.71. Should I snag you one?”

Serendipity is extinct.

And 404 errors don’t mean you’ll never be connected again. Those messages only tell people that there’s a problem right now, something’s not routing quite right. Refresh the page. You might simply have to clear your browser’s cache and cookies. Or try getting at that site from a different server and see what happens. Point is that if Jake’s page throws an error now, it won’t be an error forever. That’s what his moonwalk is all about. One stolen charger and he can treat his audience to the utmost access.

But there’s the other side of that coin, the one that reminds Jake that if he gets busted, the cops will come, and he’ll be returned to his dad. That will be the end of his celebrity. He’ll be another teenager, and he can’t have that. He should panhandle for the tax money. Or tell the truth to one of the redshirts and see if there’s any mercy in an Apple Store, letting him have half an hour on a charger out of kindness? But that’s far-fetched. Commerce always trumps compassion.

Or he’s talking himself out of acting. He’s beige and safe and boring. This is no time for being smart.

“I’ll let you know if I want to buy one,” says Jake.

“Okay,” the Asian man says, off to stalk someone new.

The thing is that he can’t get pinched. He needs his freedom. He needs to up the ante. The video of the brass band isn’t enough and neither is running away. He knows that the Internet — aka the world — will forget about him in sixty seconds if he doesn’t keep the magic going. There is always another story barreling behind you. One that has no more or less staying power. One that enraptures people for the proverbial fifteen minutes and then it’s chewed.

A pioneer such as Jake can’t let down his audience, has to push and push and push and stay relevant with new content to titillate, and since he’s already tweeted about his crime spree, he can’t back out now. No, once you start lying, or not living up to your promises, the trust bursts like a piñata and your fans find new gods and Jake isn’t ready to relinquish his fame.

So the decision is made.

Steal the charger.

Evade the zealots.

Outrun the security guard.

Which only gets him outside, and what’s he supposed to do then? He has no getaway car, no accomplice, no diversion, no help. He’d still be in the middle of an outdoor mall, and it doesn’t seem like the best plan to run to a bus stop, standing there, casually waiting for a lift. He’d get picked up, all right, not by a bus but a cop, trapped in juvie within the hour.

His only chance is to offer his followers an alternative. Something better than petty theft. Something that makes them forget all about his nonexistent crime spree. Something that keeps their attention fixed on a new commodity, so they forget about his indiscretion.

He opens Twitter again on the laptop: I wonder how many of you would meet me at the Golden Gate Bridge? I have something up my sleeve that you won’t want to miss!

He waits ten seconds and peeks at new notifications. Eight people have favorited it. Five people have retweeted it. One user called AbbyDubz has responded with this: CU there, while another person going by UnhappyCamper says We are with you!

And one celebrity in an Apple Store will give his fans the crescendo they want.

TheGreatJake: Meet me there in an hour for the finale!!!

He is at 4 percent battery life.

He powers the phone down to save juice but still holds it in his hand.

He passes all the customers and the redshirts in their bustling cathedral. He nods at the security guard and makes his way to the bus stop. He’ll be back at the Golden Gate soon.

Not thirty seconds later, reflexively, Jake checks his phone, even though it’s off, like someone scratching a phantom limb, a part of himself that’s missing.

Kathleen is inside a body bag, and she can’t work the zipper from the inside. She is hung-over. She is still a little drunk. She is a relapsed alcoholic.

She can barely make out her surroundings; everything seems filmy to her boozy and dehydrated eyes. This isn’t her room, her apartment. In fact, that’s not her arm thrown across her stomach. That’s not her snoring. That is a man, someone who she can’t remember meeting last night.

Three years of sobriety die, lit on fire, and now here she is, squirming around in its ashes, these sweaty sheets. She took the easy way out last night, she knows that, but what she hadn’t known — and you can’t really understand relapse until you do it yourself — is the visceral and profound shame.

Her head feels like someone is smashing windows in there.

The thing with relapse is that it’s accompanied by suffocating melancholy. So she’s not only dealing with her mistake to dive in all that bourbon; she’s dealing with dismal extrapolations, running through a maze of what this means. Namely, she won’t be able to stop, won’t be able to resist alcohol now that the levee buckled. It’s like she has all these dormant demons living inside her and, once revived, they start galloping around her head, shouting. They have opinions, desires. They have to-do lists, and number one on all of them is to have a morning beer. This will help her head feel better and will dull the shame, tamp it down into a corner of her psyche, something she can ignore.

The man keeps snoring next to her. Kat hasn’t looked at his face, only his forearm thrown across her stomach. There is a mole. There is an impressive amount of hair. She lies there on her back, naked and hopeless.

That’s the thing about being sober. It’s not like the compulsion to get wasted goes away. It’s always lurking inside. Kathleen has not been feeding it liquor, and without any nourishment the impulse goes into suspended animation. These sleeping monsters might not be in charge once you get sober, but they hibernate, bide their time to take over again, waiting for you to be at your weakest moment, and, with soft, fraying defenses, they ruin everything.

She ruins everything.

“Hey you,” a groggy voice says. It’s guttural, baritone.

The fingers on the hand on the arm connected to the body of a man she’s recently screwed but doesn’t remember; these fingers stretch and have too-long fingernails, and then he pats her on the belly, asking, “How did you sleep, mama?”

“Do you have any beer?”

“We bought a six-pack on the walk home. There should be a couple left.”

She still hasn’t looked at him. The room is a disaster, like a teenager lives here. There are posters on the wall of rock and roll bands that Kathleen has never heard of. A desk that only has a pair of sunglasses on it. A snowboard propped in one corner.

“Can I have a morning kiss?” he says.

Okay, it’s time to look him in the face, if not for the simple pleasure of alerting him that there won’t be any kisses. There won’t be anything except a morning beer, getting dressed in a rush, bolting, cringing, crying, dreading, drinking. Kat’s eyes start at the hand and wrist and forearm resting on her and work up the arm, but she doesn’t even need to see his face. She knows exactly who this guy is by the art on his bicep. He has a fresh Celtic cross, the ink intensely black, brand-new and shiny.