All This Life (16 page)

“You know,” Kathleen says to her sponsor, “if you need to head back to the shop, Wes and I can take it from here.”

“You can?”

“I'm prepared to pay both months' rent up front,” Wes says, “and I'll be working excessive hours so you'll barely see me. Is cash okay?”

“There's one thing you need to know about this house,” Deb says.

“What?” he says.

“This is a sober house,” says Deb.

“I listed that in the ad,” Kathleen says.

“I won't give any alcohol to the house,” he says.

“This isn't a joke,” Deb says.

“I understand,” Wes says. “I'll be working the whole time. Your sober house is safe with me.”

“Thank you,” Kathleen says.

“Not a problem,” he says.

“Would you like to go into the kitchen and have some coffee?” Kathleen says. “We can talk and make sure this is a good fit.”

“We are talking now,” he says.

“Right, but let's continue to talk in the kitchen. Would you like some coffee?”

“Sure,” he says, “but can I use the bathroom first?”

“Of course.”

He leaves, and Kathleen hits Deb on the arm. “What are you trying to do?”

“I gave him a test and he passed,” Deb says. “My gut's telling me that he's the one.”

“Assuming he's not shimmying out the window because you scared him.”

“Please.”

“I can take it from here,” Kathleen says. “We'll be fine.”

“Don't come home after curfew,” says Deb, kissing her friend and walking out the front door.

Kathleen goes into the kitchen, puts a kettle on, and gets out her French press. She should have watered the two plants on the counter. They're not dead, but the leaves are droopy. She fills one of the coffee mugs up with water and soaks both plants, hoping for some immediate improvement.

Wes walks in and says, “The bathroom is optimal, as well.”

“I'm glad to hear it. What do you take in your coffee?”

“Black.”

“You're hardcore.”

“All the long hours in the lab,” he says. “Coffee is a man's best friend.”

“I agree,” she says. “I think we'll be a good fit. The room is yours if you want it.”

“I want it,” he says. “Do you mind if I hang something on the wall in the room?”

“What is it?”

“Just a poster of Einstein. His equation is the basis of my research.”

“Sure, you can take down Bob Marley and hang yours right there. I think he'll understand.”

The kettle lets go of its whistle, and Kathleen turns the burner's knob. The whistle slows, stops, and that's what she feels like herself. Meeting Wes had been fraught with so much danger for her, so much faith. It felt so intimate, so unnatural letting someone you don't know stay at your apartment for a couple months, but she likes how the facts have lined up. One, he's here for work and will be in the lab a lot, which means he won't be sitting in the living room, making her feel uncomfortable. Two, he's nice. That's huge. When their paths do cross, she can imagine having a casual conversation with him, maybe a meal or two. It's a temporary situation and Kathleen feels relaxed about the decision.

The plants haven't miraculously perked up. But it doesn't matter. Wes seems lost in his own world. He didn't even take off his lab coat before coming over here.

“You said you take it black, right?” she says, pouring the water in the French press.

“Black, yes. Do you like it here?”

“In this apartment?”

“In general.”

“In San Francisco?” Kathleen says. “Yes, I do. It's changing a lot. It has a lot of history and each year it evolves.”

“We are our history,” says Wes. “That's what makes us.”

Kathleen thinks about the crinkled caricature she drew this morning, thinks about Rodney. She pushes these things from her mind and thinks about the cancer survivor at Deb's shop. Life doesn't always have to end in disaster. Sometimes, there are disasters, sure, and afterward, those scars are turned into something else.

“History is important,” she says, “but so is tomorrow.”

Wes nods his head. “Tomorrow. Indeed. Yes, there is tomorrow to consider.”

She pushes the plunger down on the French press and pours coffee into both their cups. It's a dark roast and she inhales the rich, pungent scent. Kathleen hands the mug to her new roommate, looking at his lab coat, feeling gratitude at her luck.

10.

S
ince the morning of the mass suicide, since Paul and his son saw the band members jump, since Jake posted the clip online, since he saw his boy tearing up his room with a baseball bat, Paul hasn't had a bowel movement. It's like everything is dammed up behind a wall of worry. Fear, concern for his son. For his whole generation, really. Their crass way of publicizing everything. Paul didn't even know how to play fantasy football, so he doesn't know the first thing about Twitter or Instagram and the like, these technologies that make it seem like a good idea to share shrapnel from your life, meaningless slivers of each day:
Here is the frittata I had for breakfast and check out this cloud pattern in the sky and here is a pic of me laughing with old friends having the greatest time ever and isn't this a clever way to decorate cappuccino foam?

None of it made any sense. The whole thing has been easy for Paul to dismiss. They're kids. And kids are stupid. If these inane devices were around when Paul had a full head of hair, he'd probably have pecked his days away, too, mark his every thought with photos or emoticons. Which, if he's being honest, is his least favorite thing about texting with his son. He's accepted that he has to do it. A
phone call is like a unicorn. So he texts like all parents clumsily do, but it would make it so much more digestible if his boy didn't include an infantry of emoticons with every communication.

And what's the deal with all the exclamation points? Why is that the preferred way to punctuate each prosaic phrase? From downstairs, he's texted his son if he'd like a bagel for breakfast, and from upstairs, the boy texts back, “Sesame!”

It all makes Paul feel so old. So irrelevant. He's sexually irrelevant and emotionally irrelevant and socially irrelevant, and if he keeps pretending that certain advancements in the workplace don't exist he'll soon be occupationally irrelevant, and in a few years Jake will go off to college and his wife's already gone, so Paul will be left familially irrelevant, and that will be the end result of his life.

It's not just kids, though. That really bugs him. Paul has to basically police his coworkers, or they'll fiddle around on Facebook all day. He might not have his own account, but he gets the gist of how it works. What's so satisfying about
liking
something? How could that ever fulfill you? Why scroll through posts and pictures and links? Why comment on other human beings' updates when you've walked by twenty people on the street and didn't take the time to talk to any of them?

If he tried to pinpoint his disdain, that would be the bull's-eye—the isolation. He wants to tell his son,
Don't rush to spend time by yourself.
Don't hurry to alienation. It's an inevitable destination. Time will eventually shroud you like velvet curtains, blacking out everything.

You'd think Paul would be a perfect candidate for social media, someone jettisoned from his family, his real-world community, somebody without any outlet, no way to express his feelings except one sour thought at a time, but this loneliness has the opposite effect. It's made him irate at smartphones and computers, and he's convinced that Jake wouldn't be in this current mess if it weren't for the Internet. If it weren't so easy to share things online. Paul
protests its existence by staying as offline as much as he can without getting fired. He pickets each technological advancement by pretending it doesn't exist.

What does exist, and what is currently being digested by Paul, is a laxative. He and Jake stopped by the pharmacy on their way to Jake's therapy. The boy waited in the car, and Paul ran in and asked for “the strongest laxative alive.”

The young lady working the register made a food-poisoning face, shook her head, then said, “Try aisle eight.”

He bought the one with the best copy on the box, and he tore into it in the parking lot.

With the laxative in his system, Paul climbed into the driver's seat with renewed faith that things were about to get better—if not better, at least he'd drop this extra freight—and this assured feeling lasted until he realized that Jake was in the back seat now. He had been up front during the drive over. Paul had squawked about breaking that habit of sitting back there, get up front, act like an adult, etc., and Jake had caved and sat sullenly next to him, listening to music on his iPhone while they drove to the pharmacy.

“This is my reward,” Paul said aloud as they made their way.

Jake didn't hear him, of course, kept bobbing his head to the beat of the song only he could hear, and Paul could only wish that laxative luck—things were bottled up and backing up further with each infuriating second.

So seeing him in the back seat, right behind the driver, he said to his son, “What does it accomplish, sitting back there?”

His ear buds weren't in, so Paul expected an answer.

“Accomplish?” asked Jake.

“Yeah, what do you get from being behind me?”

“Nothing.”

“Am I that embarrassing?” said Paul.

That wasn't what he wanted to say. Not to his son, at least. Yes, it hurt his feelings having his boy prefer the separation. It created
a swollen paradox for Paul: He wanted so badly to help his son, and yet Jake made it so hard to want to help him. Always distant. Always antagonistic. Paul knew that as the adult he had to rise above these petty feelings—he accepted that intellectually—but it was so hard on an emotional level. Not ever getting anything positive from your kid.

Jake hadn't said anything, so Paul said, “Am I embarrassing you?”

“I don't know,” said Jake.

“You don't know if I'm embarrassing?”

Again, he didn't want to do this. He didn't want to feel wounded or go on the offensive. He wanted to be the calmest, most supportive parent ever. He wanted to help his son come back.

“Don't answer me,” Paul said. “Sorry. Forget it. Listen to your music.”

It was almost laughable, how immature, how childish Paul could be. He had to be the one to rise above any squawking. He had to be the one to take care of his son.

Jake stayed in the back seat, put the ear buds in; Paul drove them to the therapist's office. They waited till Jake was ushered in by the doc, leaving Paul alone looking at the closed office door, yet another separation from his son.

He stayed like that for ten minutes. He stayed like that until right now, only staring at the closed door, wondering what it means.

The most important thing is that they're trying to get Jake help. The goal is helping his son. Despite Paul's stillborn dreams or feelings of futility or all the ways he can tally his irrelevancy in life, the only thing that matters is that they are in this office. They are—father and son—here.

Even in such a dull waiting room. A Formica table in the middle of it, decorated with a fan of magazines. A few IKEA chairs, which at these prices seem ludicrous. They should all be lounging in authentic Barcelona chairs.

Paul tries to beat down the worry about money. To allow himself to see only what matters, that closed office door. On the other side are a doctor and Jake. They are making headway. They have to be. They are erasing the damage done by the brass band and the divorce and all other collateral damage that haunts his son. They are in there doing the work and everything else is moot.

Well, he wants it to be moot. But Paul can't help but blame himself for how little he knew about Jake's online life. It never occurred to Paul that things he filmed on his iPhone were ending up on the Internet, and it certainly never crossed his mind that he'd publicize something as awful as a mass suicide. It felt odd to Paul, that mechanism to share pathos. Paul's instinct was to hoard it. To keep it like a baby bird, feed it from a dropper. He figured that since his own sorrow was private, everyone felt the same way. And by everyone, he really means Jake.

Paul doesn't know one thing about the boy's virtual life, which begs the question: What else doesn't he know? He's operating under the assumption that posting the clip of the brass band is the worst thing his son has ever done, but maybe that's untrue. Maybe it's only another upload in a series of dubious, ignominious posts. Maybe his son has a whole cache of public pathos. Maybe his YouTube channel is a hive of sadness, and Paul makes himself a promise in his uncomfortable IKEA chair: He is going to get computer-savvy. He is going to unearth the side of his son that lives in the computer.