Joshua Mohr - All This Life

“Sexting with monsters is dangerous,” the friend said.

Which at the time seemed funny to Sara. A joke. Some sexual gallows humor — they were young and being controversial and loved every minute of it, consequences seeming too remote to even entertain their fallacies.

The critical problem, at least in terms of chronology, is Sara needs to be at work in half an hour. The job that’s already in precarious standing. Her manager, Moses, has said, “I have a three-strike policy and you’re on your twelfth. But what can I do? When you’re on, you are my best server. It’s that other Sara who shows up every once in a while that I don’t like.”

That other Sara.

So one solution is to call in sick, roll the dice again hoping Moses is of the mind for strike thirteen. That’s risky, though. Jobs don’t grow on trees. Hell, nothing grows on trees in Traurig.

But okay, what if only some pervs saw the sex tape? What if guys like Moses, upstanding citizens and whatnot, probably too old for porn anyway, had no idea about it? What if going to work will not only give her a pocketful of tips but a few hours’ asylum from bridge jumpers and betrayals?

Sara is not high-strung, not prone to panic, but damn if she doesn’t feel weird getting ready for work. Damn if there’s not some odd energy emanating from her chest, her heart, and spreading through her limbs, a low hum in her hands and feet, a few watts making them all sweaty. She’s anxious to get to work and it’s the last place she wants to end up, and her breath is bad, for some reason, despite the fact she just brushed her teeth. So she brushes them again, scrubs that tongue. It’s hard to think of anything other than Nat, still not answering her text, still out there, her unexplained mystery.

Things happen, she tells herself, heartbeat cranking, the hum in her hands getting more volts running into them.

She puts on her uniform. She can’t be late, otherwise why not call in sick? Moses will be equally pissed, late or a no-show.

She gets in her car and motors down the cul-de-sac; it’s not a dirt road, but its pavement has seen better days, charred by the sun and badly creviced. There are about twenty houses, all cinderblock palaces, topped with metal roofs. Front yards are mixtures of scrub brush and cacti, sand and dirt and rocks. The occasional yucca stands up above the rest like a celebrity.

She speeds down the block, notices a couple hillbillies sitting in their yard, tying lures on their fishing poles. She has her music pinned and is driving a little fast and her heart should really slow down, yes, it doesn’t need to beat so many times a minute, please calm down.

She pulls into the diner’s parking lot. She sits there. She notices that she’s breathing, which is something everybody does all the time but you don’t necessarily realize you’re doing it, you breathe — that’s what you do — that’s how people stay alive, and what the hell is she going to tell her brother, Hank, about the sex tape and why the hell did Nat do this in the first place and she should have listened to Kristine’s public service announcement, sexting with monsters is dangerous. Sexting with monsters can kill you.

Her palms pour sweat and she wipes them on her black pants and hears something coming from outside the car. It’s knocking. Someone is knocking on her window, and someone is knocking on her hands from the inside, a tiny little pirate trapped in there looking for treasure.

Sara looks up and sees Moses standing by the driver’s side, pantomiming for her to roll down the window.

In her purse, her phone vibrates and vibrates and vibrates, and actually that’s what her hands and feet feel like, cells set to vibrate.

Every new message about Nat, the sex tape.

Every new message about the end of her life.

She obliges Moses, cranks the window down.

“I don’t need you today,” he says.

“I’m on the schedule.”

“I have to suspend you.”

She shields her eyes and looks up at him for the first time: “You can’t.”

“I can do whatever I want.”

“Isn’t that discrimination?”

“Call the ACLU.”

“When can I come back?”

“This is a small town, Sara. Let’s let this blow over a bit.”

Her phone vibrates again. So do her hands and feet.

“I need tips,” says Sara.

“I’ll call when we’re clear.”

“That doesn’t help me with money.”

“I’m not firing you,” Moses says, walking away, ending the conversation whether Sara has more to add or not.

She speeds off toward home. Cranks the stereo. Driving way too fast. For the first time since she found out about the sex tape, she cries. She’s stupid, so predictably stupid, and what’s she supposed to do with this anguish barreling through her?

Twitching, malicious thoughts race around Sara, and an unequaled loneliness swells and crests and crashes, crushing her down. She’s hyperventilating. She needs to get home. She needs to be alone. She might be dying. This might be a heart attack, an aneurysm, a stroke. She needs to be in her room with its cinderblocks.

She turns onto her street. So close. So almost there. Still speeding. Still crying. Still listening to rock and roll at the top of the stereo’s lungs.

She’d seen a couple of her neighbors tying lures on before, but now one’s in the road, practicing fly-fishing casts, whipping arm sends his line bouncing on the damaged asphalt. Sara slams on the brakes, barely misses hitting him. Here he comes up to her window and kicks her car, the side mirror flying off.

Of course this is happening , she thinks.

Things keep happening.

It’s not even noon and now she must indulge in one more meanness.

The sun is almost to its apex, baking the street, the town.

Sara gets out of the car.

Everybody calls him Balloon Boy. Started calling him that once he fell from the skies. Once he went thump-splat ouch. From that moment on, his real name Rodney was retired, and Balloon Boy was born. Or that’s how he thinks of it, there being two of him: In his head, all the words compose themselves like a hip-hop MC delighting audiences with a nimble tongue, wild rhyming schemes. Maybe a TV minister auctioning off salvation at mach speed. But when Rodney’s perfectly composed thoughts try to cross that threshold and make it out of his mouth, things malfunction. Reduced to speaking in monosyllables.

Reduced to being Balloon Boy.

Today is his eighteenth birthday, and he wakes up feeling ripe for adventure and for a few minutes it feels possible. Somebody like him can be summoned to greatness. Someone like Balloon Boy can do something extraordinary! Just because of his accident, just because he’s lost that connection between the life transpiring in his head — one crackling with consonants, one unctuous with chewy vowels — it doesn’t have to be a death sentence. It doesn’t have to be poor Balloon Boy being his condition. That’s not all he is. Because if in fact he’s poised, ready to be summoned to greatness, that won’t happen if he’s feeling sorry for himself, if he’s mired in a poor-me soup, swimming in it. No, this is a time to feel optimistic, to charge into his adulthood. There will always be a harsh disconnect between what people see — Balloon Boy, the name he detests — and the inner life of Rodney, the diatribes and monologues lobbed eloquently around his skull. It’s like a crowded theater in his head and he stands alone on stage, reciting Shakespeare, getting all the accents and rhythms right. He might not be able to articulate this, might falter trying to share with someone how he’s giving a topnotch soliloquy in the amphitheatre of his consciousness, so don’t go thinking that because his actual out-loud talking is garbled there’s only mud thrumming in his mind.