All This Life (8 page)

No answer from Jake, though he does have the craving to click refresh.

“Jake, what's going on?” Paul says, looking at the smashed cactus.

“No dog, I guess,” Jake says, moving toward his computer, sitting down in front of it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Paul says, still in the doorway, surveying all the damage.

Jake finally clicking refresh and seeing a gleaming new number.

827,238.

“Look at all of them,” says Jake.

“Are you okay?” Paul says stupidly. He knows that what he's walked in on isn't normal, isn't healthy. He's tried to be there the best he could the last couple days. He's been working from home, allowing Jake to play hooky from school. They've watched movies together, eaten pizzas. He's asked Jake countless times if he wanted to talk about the brass band, but the boy never did. Paul has heard “I'm fine” enough to make it hard to keep asking, figured his son would reach out to him when he was ready.

Paul could hear Naomi, all the way from Bali, say to him, “It doesn't matter if he answers us, we have to keep asking. We are the adults and always have to check in with him.”

Paul shakes her know-it-all timbre out of his head; it's so easy for her to pop up with aphorisms between trips with Simon, when Paul was doing the heavy lifting of being the day-to-day, default parent right now. It's like she's been on spring break since the divorce, parading and partying, sowing her paroled oats, while Paul is still locked up, left to deal with all this.

In fact, the night after the band died, Paul had sent her an elaborate email of what Jake had seen on the bridge and all he got back from her was this one measly line: “Can you handle it?”

His response: “I'll try.”

Those sorts of interactions made him remember the mosquito's blood smudged on the magazine's page.

But had he been trying as best he could? Paul wasn't sure.

The boy staring straight ahead at his laptop.

Paul only seeing the back of his head, a haze of blue computer life haloed around it.

“Jake, tell me what you're doing,” he says.

Paul walks across the room, standing directly behind his son, caressing the nape of Jake's neck, both of them staring at the boy's computer screen.

“What is that?” asks Paul.

“It's mine.”

“What is?”

Paul scours the screen. He notes the URL, then the imbedded video. Holy shit. Paul pieces the chain of events together, and his boy's refrain of “I'm fine” sounds different now. Jake isn't slowly processing and soon, once he understands his emotions, they'll have a heart-to-heart. No, Jake has already processed the event without him; he doesn't need his father. He has his computer and the video he's shot on his phone. He has his grieving process shared online, and Paul, poor pathetic Paul, downstairs with his fantasy football draft. He should've been up here. He should've been up here the whole time.

“You posted that?” Paul asks his son.

“I'm in charge of it.”

“Play it.”

“You were there.”

“Click play.”

Jake starts the video and Paul can't keep his head right, can't keep his head here, watching this clip because it's reminding him of the days after the September attacks, years ago, when he watched those planes destroy the country time and again. There was a kind of pornography to it, a surreptitious yearning to see something vulgar. He knew other people were watching those planes, too, probably at the exact time he was, but he hoarded his viewings.

Paul hates the thought that Jake is doing the same thing now.

The brass band walking toward them. Again.

Playing.

Dancing.

Stopping.

Over the edge.

One at a time.

Father and son not saying a word.

Again.

“Why did you post this?” Paul asks.

“I never wanted to get a dog,” Jake says.

“Let's get you out of here,” says Paul, tugging on Jake's shoulders. He has to get his boy out of there now, right now. Jake's too young to understand self-preservation, to value sparing yourself from seeing things you don't have to endure. Paul should have been more present at the moment on the bridge, should have told his son to put down his phone. Don't film this. Don't capture any of this.

And it's inexcusable that Paul is only finding out now that Jake posted it. He should have known right away. He should have stood guard outside his door, poked his head in every five minutes, if only to say to his son, “I'm here. I'm right here if you need me.”

There's no need for fantasy sports when the real competition had been going on upstairs, Jake versus his own confusion, his naïveté, his limited understanding of consequences. Paul has let down Jake, and that stops now.

“I don't know why you thought I wanted a dog in the first place,” Jake says.

“Are you hungry?”

“This is my favorite,” says Jake, pointing to the screen, the tall woman in the purple pants throwing her clarinet then leaping.

“Come on,” Paul says, “we need to go.”

“Did you see how she holds her nose right before she jumps? Isn't that strange?” asks Jake.

“How about some pizza?”

“I like how she holds her nose like that.”

“Pizza?”

“No.”

“Macaroni and cheese?”

“Okay.”

“Go downstairs and put on a pot of water. I'll be down as soon as I clean this up.”

But the boy simply sits there, awash in the computer's light.

“Jake, move it.”

Finally, he gets up and slinks out of the room.

Paul fishes his cell phone from his pocket, calling to set up an appointment with a psychologist. No one answers and he listens to the long litany of various instructions. He leaves a detailed voice-mail, asking for an appointment in the next couple days.

He assesses the damage, begins cleaning things up.

He starts with the printer, unplugging it and collecting the scattered pieces of plastic. Paul goes to the hall closet and gets a vacuum, sucking up all the dirt. He puts the pieces of the alarm clock on top of the printer. The terra-cotta shards from the succulent's pot are the last thing he collects. Loads it all into a garbage bag. Remembering all those butterflies whirling around the garden as they dismembered their family.

He's finished tidying the room and walks to the door, turning off the light, which only amplifies the presence of Jake's computer. It is glowing. Paul stomps over to it in a huff, as if it's that very dog that Naomi had dumbly promised Jake and it had pissed all over the floor, Paul ready to shame the pet, rub its nose in the mess.

This is the computer's fault, not his boy's.

No way is it his boy's.

No way can his boy be blamed.

Paul sits down in front of the computer, lured closer to watch the clip again, but instead he scrolls down a bit.

He can see the comment. He can see, “I feel sad for whoever posted this.”

And Paul bursts into tears. He crumbles under the mass of his own ignorance. Having a kid is the ultimate risk. It creates such a limited perspective. A tube of love. And your vision can be so obscured that you do not understand the dangers on the periphery. You want nothing else but to adore and train and watch them prosper, but the world will have its way with them. Protection is a wicked illusion.

Paul cannot keep Jake safe, even if he spends the rest of his days guarding the boy's room. He has to let him out. He has to teach his son to fend for himself, and that's the great paradox of being a parent: He doesn't want to teach him everything, wants to hold back just enough that Jake needs him. Paul wants to always be needed by his boy, but that greedy motive might prevent Jake from having access to all the tools needed to survive.

Even if you do give them every tool, it's like indoor rock climbing, Paul's main source of exercise. You can have everything you need, make it to the top, but what if you're scaling the wrong wall? Paul himself had all the tools, supportive parents that stayed together, a Stanford education, a trough of options, and yet he still found an existence that perpetually disappoints him.

That's what he'll try and focus on, making sure Jake mounts the right wall.

If Paul's parents were here they'd say,
Pay attention
. They'd say,
It will be the hardest thing you ever accept but you can't protect him. Teach him to scale the right wall and hope for the best.

The final thing Paul does before going downstairs is close his son's computer. He unplugs it and carries it away.

6.

B
efore it became
that
morning, it was any other, yesterday rehydrated. Noah sat at his desk in his office on Montgomery Street, in San Francisco's financial district. It was a ghost town at 3
AM
and Noah had been alone in his walk into the office. There was a street sweeper going by, newspapers being disseminated to various boxes and stands, sidewalks hosed down before the swarm, the explosion when the rest of the working stiffs showed up, pounding the pavement, flooding various cafés for caffeine and carbs.

Like clockwork, Noah arrived at this ungodly hour, putting everyone else in his firm to shame with his hawkish commitment to the details. This was what you have to do to be the best, and Noah was committed to storming the highest echelon. He'd been the best Ugly Duckling his first-grade class had ever seen, a lacrosse midfielder who would take your head off, and he was on his way to being the best futures trader at the firm.

There was something about futures that made sense to Noah. He had an instinct for both short- and long-term commodity trading. He approached the whole thing like an athlete, with the simple philosophy that it took diligent hard work every day. He
never rested on one single laurel, but saw every futures contract that paid out—that he
won
—an opportunity to learn from and be even better for the next. There was no celebrating, no grandstanding, no days off. If you weren't pushing yourself to improve, then you were getting worse.

A lot of traders used futures to hedge their bets, reducing the overall risk of their clients' portfolios. But what made Noah so good at it was that he never approached futures in this condescending way. They were the closest thing to an actual competition in the market. Futures contracts either paid out or busted. Win or lose. Period. Noah flourished on the risk.

He cracked open a protein shake and peeked at the clock, 3:48. He could hear his sister, Tracey, ragging him about his early approach to his job: “You're the oldest thirty-five-year-old in the world,” she'd say. “You're still pretty young! Go out and have fun!”

“I'm thirty-four, Trace.”

“You're focusing on the wrong thing,” she'd say, ten years his junior. “Why not enjoy yourself?”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might actually like working?”

“If you could see what I see,” she said, shaking her head. Here was his sister with that knowing smile of hers, exposing crooked bottom teeth. She had eyes the color of cucumber peel and she loved to rag her brother. He loved it, too. This was a shtick they'd been perfecting for years, his over-concern, her under-concern. They balanced each other out.

Noah was always the greedy go-getter, a hardwired Type A pit bull. Tracey was flighty, wonderfully flighty—it was one of the things her older brother loved about her so much, all the whimsy she saw in the world, all the life, all the hope. How she could actually enjoy where she was without ruining it with superimpositions about the future.

Noah's therapist once told him that the difference between depression and anxiety was which way you were looking: to your past
or to your future. People who were depressed fixated on the past, while their anxious counterpoints couldn't stop worrying about what was coming next week, next month, next year. A future that might not ever happen.

Noah was staunchly restless, fearful, the future this supernova waiting to blow. He'd always lived that way. And he always won. Captain of the lacrosse team, valedictorian, at the top of his MBA class. Life wasn't a game, per se, but if there were gods out there keeping score, Noah was winning.

Tracey was neither depressed nor anxious. She was there, floating from moment to moment, a leaf on a river.

“You're my Forrest Gump,” Noah joked.

“You laugh, but Forrest had a ton of Buddhist wisdom.”

“I think he was retarded, Trace.”

When he left her that morning, she was asleep on their couch. Noah halved a pink grapefruit and spread hummus on a piece of toast, leaving them on the coffee table in front of her with a note that said,
Make sure my sister eats this, okay?

He kissed her on the forehead and remembers so clearly thinking that she looked happy. She was flat on her back, drooling a little. The blanket was spilling onto the floor and so he fixed it, covering her up.