Joshua Mohr - All This Life

AFTER HALF ANhour sitting on the stoop, not really talking, the coffee is gone, and it’s time to hit a meeting. Kathleen needs a shower first, a scrub from the toothbrush. Deb says she’ll make some eggs and toast.

Kat opens her front door, and they come into the front hallway. Wes is standing there, in his lab coat.

“Hey,” Kathleen says, “you startled me.”

“It’s time,” he says.

Kat notices his aggressive posture, hands in fists, his on-fire eyes. He sways from side to side.

Something is wrong.

Something is terribly wrong.

She’s never seen a rabid animal but this must be what it looks like when they sic.

“Time for what?” Kat asks.

“We need to go to the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“Are you feeling all right?” Deb says.

But there’s no answer because he’s pouncing. His arm swings back, cocks for a punch, coming forward and hitting Deb right in the face. She falls down, out cold.

“We have to keep the world uncremated,” Wes says, throwing Kathleen against the wall.

“People sit in this every day,” Sara says. “Can you imagine?”

This isn’t the Golden Gate; it’s the Bay Bridge. They’re waiting in line at a toll plaza, trying to get into San Francisco. The traffic is bumper to bumper, even though it isn’t rush hour. It’s late morning. It’s the day after they spent all night together, naked in bed. Nothing sexual, but something did happen: Sara feels better. Rodney did that, and she’s not going to forget it. This is the calmest she’s felt since Nat posted their video.

They got a late jump this morning because of his injured foot. Something’s either broken or sprained badly in there. Rodney isn’t telling her much about it. He’s written his mom’s old address down on a piece of paper, and every time Sara suggests they go to the ER for an x-ray, he waves the address around.

After holding him hostage in the motel room for four days, she can’t badger him about the doctor. It’s his foot. All she can do is get him to San Francisco to see if they can find her, though Sara knows this won’t work. Life isn’t this easy. You don’t follow an old address and voilà, your dream comes true. His mom won’t be baking cookies in the kitchen. If anything, she’ll be slurping cocktails, if she’s still

up to her old tricks. But she guesses the only thing that matters is that Rodney gets to see her for himself. Sara would do the same thing, if she had the ability. She would hunt her parents down. She would do anything to be reunited.

That thought makes her hands twitch a bit, so to find some distraction before things escalate, she says to Rodney, “What’s that?”

They’ve rolled through the toll plaza and are driving onto the bridge. Over on the walkway, they see a bunch of people, around twenty of them, holding up signs toward all the cars, like picketers, except the only thing on their signs is a picture of a teenage boy, with #GOHOMEJAKE printed on the bottom.

“Must be a missing kid,” Sara says, answering her own question. She knows Hank would never do that. He’d never stand on a street in Traurig with # GOHOMESARA. He doesn’t care if she ever comes back.

Her hands start humming.

“Let’s program your mom’s address into Google Maps,” she says, hoping a task gets Hank out of her mind.

Rodney nods. He steers the slowly moving car, while Sara works the pedals, plugs the address into her burner.

NOAH911 FINDS HIMSELFon a BART train, taking it downtown so he can transfer to a bus, get over to the Golden Gate. The tracks glide him underground, and there are two other people on the almost-empty car. He is glued to his tablet and must be producing a horrible digital stench that keeps everyone away from him. He repulses people by posting on Tracey’s Facebook page. It must have an odor. Putrid pixels that make his friends recoil, close that tab, close their traps.

“Do you remember the green puttering Pinto, how it could barely make it up a hill?” he posts on her wall. “What about the time we helped Dad toss shingles off the roof and you were so little they tied you to the chimney keeping you far away from falling over the edge?”

No one likes or comments on or shares these tributes. Noah911 knows people see these things commute down their news feeds, but they’re too busy posting pictures of cats or clever memes, too busy tagging themselves.

Noah911 knows he’s being ignored. He’s talking to his dead sister and at the same time talking to a bunch of other people — his 713 friends — and no one wants to hear him.

No one says a single word. It’s been four minutes, and Internet time is its own demented metric system: Four minutes converts to over one month.

So he likes his own status.

The train stops between stations. It hums in the dark tunnel. For some reason he loses his connection. Who knows what’s over his head right now that forces him offline. But it’s not only him, the other two people in his car looking irked and panicked at their phones, wondering what went wrong, where the world went. The woman kills this time of disconnection by snapping selfies, capturing herself from a variety of angles. The other guy shakes his phone by his ear, like it’s a busted light bulb, hearing that filament fly around inside.

At least without a connection, Noah911 can’t compulsively check his Facebook page, counting the minutes he’s being ignored. He leans his head against the train’s tinted window.

All he knows is that it’s his fault Tracey’s dead. His dad is right. Noah911 has his share of the ashes, but he has all the blame, and soon he will help Tracey rest in peace.

He watches the woman snap selfies. Jealous of her. Her only responsibility is to document what she looks like. Share it to Instagram, once their connection reestablishes. Post a record that she’s alive, she’s on a train, she has a face, a heartbeat, a brain, a soul, and she has the most valuable commodity of them all: She has a future.

They all wait to get moving again.

•••

PAUL RELUCTANTLY LEFTthe police station for a couple hours last night, but apart from that he’s commandeered the station’s waiting room, turned it into mission control for his media campaign, dousing himself in fresh blood and letting the vultures have at him.

Kyle’s article yesterday afternoon kicked off the coverage and, from there, almost every local hub has interviewed Paul, either over the phone or in the precinct’s parking lot. Various news vans and anchors stop by the station, do updates out front.

He only left to change his clothes, finally check out his ex’s to make sure Jake wasn’t hiding there. He wasn’t. Paul couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Everything was a reminder of his banishment, and he couldn’t handle that. Even walking through the living room made him remember, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Memory could be cruel. The middle of that room was where they folded laundry together, all three of them. Jake loved it. They all did. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch their son. They’d dump a huge mound of fresh warm laundry into the middle of the living room and Jake would dive into it. He would laugh and burrow little tunnels and drape various articles around his neck, and Paul and Naomi stood back, enamored by their ecstatic little boy.

These were things he couldn’t allow himself to think about, not considering the stakes and circumstances. Especially considering that before going back to the station, Paul quickly stopped by his own place for a change of clothes. Nothing was clean. He had to give the sniff-test to various pieces of clothing, evading the socks glued shut, searching for the least revolting things.