All This Life (29 page)

Jake approaches a laptop, opens a browser, but at the same time he's looking around the store for chargers. He spies them on the back wall. He's going to need to retrieve one, conceal it, walk through the store, and exit without any zealots noticing.

For inspiration, Jake takes the laptop to YouTube, searches for lunar landing. Any astronaut has nerves before a big mission. There's so much that can go wrong.

One of the videos cued for him is entitled
Magnificent Desolation
. It's a documentary and he watches the beginning, learns that one of the astronauts had called the moon “magnificent desolation” after seeing it up close, and copyright be damned, Jake poaches it and brands his own mission with the same moniker.

Jake's moon won't have any parents or bullies or hanging meringues or almost-dead batteries. They are persona non grata, or whatever the plural is. Jake would know the god-damn plural if Latin hadn't jumped off a bridge, too. Siri has the answer. He'd ask his friend if the battery situation weren't so dire.

That will be his next live-tweet:
This is my magnificent desolation.

In fact, why not tweet now? Jake opens up Twitter and transforms into TheGreatJake and tells his legion of followers what's what.

He's up to 200,000 of them.

Immediately, nine of them favorite it.

That makes Jake feel good for like two seconds, but here comes more anxiety, getting more nervous, feels like he's throwing a 404 error message, experiencing a disconnect between himself and the server he's normally tethered to. Because if the world is a search
engine, then every human being is a webpage, and URLs are our fingerprints.

It all makes perfect sense.

“How are you liking your experience with this machine?” a red-shirted employee asks him, right by his side. The man is Asian, thirty and change, and has a ton of gel in his hair, twisted mats of it sticking into barbs. Jake could snap one off like an icicle.

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.

19.

K
athleen 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.

“You,” she says, aghast.

“You,” he says back, smiling.

Kathleen stares in his young face, thinks about her old one. She thinks about how he and his ilk are running Kat out of San Francisco, pricing out all the oddballs. She wonders if he shouted “You're evicted!” when he came.

He makes a couple hyperbolic puckering sounds, waiting for that smooch.

Kathleen sits up and places her feet on the floor, her back turned to him. “Oh, my head,” she says. “How much did we drink?”

“How much did
you
drink,” he says. “I only had a couple beers. You were already cross-eyed when I got there.”

“Did I call the shop or something?”

“Dumb luck,” he says. Kathleen hears the bed creak, the guy standing up. He walks around and he's naked, though not completely naked: He's wearing his amphibian shoes. If he wore those during sex, Kathleen might have to kill herself. “I stopped in the bar for a quick pint, and there you were,” he says. “Lucky, huh?”

This might turn out to be a good thing
, she thinks. And she means it. That urge to run to the refrigerator for a morning beer and soon after tossing shots down her throat, washing away what she's learned this morning—
sex with a webbed-foot techie!
—instead of muffling her woes with liquor she should go to a meeting. Call Deb. Tell her the truth.

“Sorry to be rude,” he says, fumbling on his desk with a pair of aviator sunglasses, putting them on his face, “but I need to check my email.”

“Why are you wearing sunglasses?”

“These are my computer.”

“Of course,” she says. She's heard of this wearable Google computer, has seen a few around the Mission. There are stories, lovely legends, of people getting their asses kicked just for donning them—for what they represent, for how they're dismantling every bit of the strangeness that made San Francisco extraordinary in the name of face computers.

“I need to go,” she says.

“Send email to Lindsay,” he says.

“What?”

“I'm not talking to you.”

“Oh.”

“Glass, send a message to Lindsay Johnson,” he says to the sunglasses.

Kathleen hates to ask this next question, doesn't want to admit to him that she had blacked out long before they got here, but she needs to know if calling a cab is in order: “What neighborhood are we in?”

“Mission. Those new luxury condos on 20th Street.”

“Of course.”

Kathleen can't help but wonder why he would have sex with her. Yes, she's mortified at spending a night with him, but he should be, too. He's young and rich and attractive, and she's none of those things. She is a relapsed alcoholic.

That desire to go to a meeting wilts. She doesn't want to stand up in front of all those people and admit that she threw three years away. Doesn't want to confide in them. Doesn't want to do anything that will require processing or analyzing. Doesn't want to confront the shame that's thinning out her blood, right along with the booze.