All This Life (3 page)

Jake sits in the backseat. His new emoji would be a head with a can opener spinning around its crown and peeling up the skull and plucking out that brain and whirling it around on an index finger like a basketball.

He keeps reliving the moment, watching his phone as the band slowly travels toward him, serenading the world before leaping off. Once the video ends he starts back at the beginning. Looping. Jake running on this clip like it's a treadmill. Dying to get this to
YouTube, but unable to disconnect his consciousness from it long enough to post.

Start to finish.

Start to finish.

Start.

2.

A
lready 99˚ and not even 10
AM
. Another pointless scorcher in the Nevada desert. Another day for Sara to gaze out the window of her cinderblock bedroom, in her cinderblock house, in her cinderblock life. Sara looks out the window and wonders how these people found such a vulgar conviction, marching to the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and killing themselves.

This morning, Sara is like everyone else learning about the brass band. It's all any of the news hubs talk about. She opens CNN's app on her burner and watches clips, experts retching cranky speculations about what triggered this public display of violence; all these know-it-alls trying to construct psychologies that offer context and meaning, making crazy leaps in logic but none of the talking heads call them on it.

She wishes someone had the brazenness to tell the truth, not just about the brass band, their “reasons” for jumping, etc., but the truth about everything: We'll never know. So stop asking. There are no answers.

Things. Just. Happen.

It all makes Sara laugh a bit. Not at the people who jumped. No way. Sara understands that impulse to explore—the what-if seductions of what may or may not be waiting for us after we die. It's normal to flirt with these things, she thinks, but you never act on it. You don't mortgage tomorrow because today is streaked in shit.

She learned too young how unfair the world can be. How you should under no circumstances wonder if life can get any worse, because it always can. There's no such thing as the bottom. Not really. You might not be able to sink any deeper but you can sprawl down there, exist horizontally.

That's what happened to Sara. First, her junior high school boyfriend, Rodney, her perfect Rodney, lost in a ridiculous mishap. They had been inseparable, kindred spirits, who couldn't stop kissing, couldn't stop laughing and stargazing, sleepovers in a tent outside Sara's house, roughing it on the tough desert floor. But one afternoon in the park changed all that, an accident turning Rodney into someone else, barely able to talk. Sara can remember crying to her parents, using the real F-word, FAIR. Saying to them, “It's not fair! It's not fair!” and they consoled their child, cooed platitudes at her and tried to help her heal, to move on, you can still be his friend, they said, he's still alive. Mother and father tried to help her until they couldn't. Until it was they who weren't alive. A car accident. Both gone. Just like that.

Sara was fifteen when they died, three years ago. Fair had nothing to do with it. Fair has nothing to do with anything. Things happen. Period. And you careen from one event to the next.

These are things you know with certainty when your parents die. When they're taken away and you're fifteen and the courts, in all their voluminous, wide wisdom, give your older brother custody, just because he's eighteen years old. Hank, who's never met a steroid he won't shoot and a fight he won't delight in winning, and he's in charge. Are you absolutely sure that's a good idea?

They were sure. Good enough for the courts, so it had to be good enough for Sara.

So she wouldn't have jumped off the Golden Gate today, but she empathizes with the instinct, that itch to wonder whether things might be better; and if that possibility, no matter how remote, offers a kind of sanctuary you can't crawl inside here, Sara says
So be it, jump
.

She keeps scrolling around CNN, clicking links, following paths. This latest article produces a detail that surprises her:

            
SAN FRANCISCO
(
AP
)—The morning commute turned tragic earlier today when several people jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Multiple witnesses confirmed that twelve people playing musical instruments walked to the middle of the bridge and took turns leaping over the railing.

                 
“They threw their instruments over the side and jumped,” an eyewitness said.

                 
The Coast Guard responded to the scene and found one survivor in the ocean. She is in critical condition at a local hospital.

                 
“She's one of the lucky ones,” a spokesperson said. “Not many people survive that fall.”

                 
The woman's identity has not yet been released.

                 
There have been over 1,500 documented suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge since its opening in 1937.

Sara shakes her head, trying to fathom surviving something like that. You think you're going to some place better. You think your days of being trapped are done. You think you'll come to feel inspired and free and pure. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. But you expect to at least
go
on the journey. This poor jumper has to awaken back here, in this life she tried so desperately to abandon.

No beautiful getaway.

Just things happening.

Sara needs a break from all these doomsday proclamations, so she puts her phone down on the bed next to her, peeks out the window at the desert's long shadows, the sun still making its way to high noon to release its rays in full hellish glory. Sara sees all the scrawny leafless trees, the mesquite, the acacia, sticking out of burned earth. For years, she'd stare at these sad, stuck things and it was obvious that Sara would escape this place; she wasn't going to spend her whole life cooking in Traurig. No way. All she had to do was turn eighteen and she was out, but here's the rub: That eighteenth birthday came and went six months ago, so what's she doing here? Why is Sara still planted here?

She can tell herself next week, next month, can tell herself she's saving up money. And those can all have merit. But this can be equally true: She can wake up and be fifty years old, divorced—at least once—with a child—at least one—still waiting tables, still hoping to flee her cinderblock life but doing nothing to dilute that dream into her reality.

But that jumper—she can't shake that jumper—waking up, thinking she's somewhere fantastic, some place erased of all pain. She comes to, enthralled to understand the complexities of this new reality, but there are restraints on her wrists. There's a nurse in the room. There's a doctor. There's a psych eval. There's a prescription. There's a therapist. There's a battery of consequences for her recklessness. There's a new reality, sure, but not the one she yearned for.

Sara keeps chewing on this, masticating away but not making much progress.

Sara having no idea what a luxury it is to chomp on the story from a safe remove, until that distance dissipated.

Until she's the thing being devoured.

Sara suddenly getting all these texts.

The first one is from her friend Kristine and says:
Um . . . hey, slut?

It's not unheard of for Kristine to call her such names in raunchy camaraderie, so Sara texts back,
Who gave you a UTI this time?

Did you make a sexy vid with Nat?

Why?

Ask the Internet
.

Oh shit.

If there were a customer service center that regulated the whole information superhighway, she would have dialed it immediately. But it's the Wild West. Utter anarchy. No one's really in charge, so long as you're not trying to coerce a kid into bed or buying weapons. No one would help her track down a measly sex tape unless she were famous with mountains of money, lawyers with lockjaw. And without any help hunting the clip down and snatching it away, Sara's helpless. The sex tape rushes and ricochets around, completely out of control.

Their movie is already moving like water, washing over the world. On one site for a few seconds and someone else sharing it, then it's onto another, momentum building between mouse clicks and posts, skywriting Sara's naked body across an online horizon, one that everyone can marvel at simultaneously. No countries. No continents. No time zones. The zeroes and ones of the sex tape coursing through the earth's circulatory system.

The texts keep pouring in:

Sara, what are you doing?

Are you okay, Sara?

Are you crazy, Sara?

What are you thinking, Sara?

What if Hank sees this?

Did you know Nat made this tape of you?

How will you live with this, Sara?

They were asking questions and so was Sara. Why Nat would do this to her,
Why would he hurt me, weren't we falling in love?

And if love is a bit of an overstatement, didn't these types of tapes find their way online only after a couple breaks up? Some sexual retaliation? As far as Sara knows, they're still dating, or had been until he first sent the clip out into the wild.

Because last time she checked, this isn't how love works—or almost-love. Call her a stickler, but she doesn't think it functions on dupes and deceptions. Its engine won't even turn over with only lies in the tank.

But apparently Nat has his own definition of almost-love, and it includes dubious ingredients like malice, selfishness, abject cruelty. That's the only explanation for why he'd post their sex tape. At least he could have asked. And is this his way of breaking up with her?

Sara snatches her cell and asks Nat,
Why?

She stares at it and stares at it.

Nothing coming back.

This is a savage violation, one that Sara should have seen coming: This is what happens when she starts believing in someone. It all turns out to be so much worse than she ever thought possible. And she's right. What Nat did is digital rape, sharing their sex without permission, making it public consumption.

Sara wishes she could claim she had no idea about it. A hidden camera, maybe, the tape made without her knowledge, but those would be hollow claims. She was into it. They were into it. They'd watch it together and have even more amazing sex and what was the harm in that? They were eighteen, their bodies looked the best they'll ever be and, fine, she'll say it: Making the tape turned her on. Granted, one of the major liquors in this aphrodisiac was consent. It was theirs, they owned it, and they shared it, only with each other.

More texts pour in, some people even traveling back to the twentieth century and calling Sara. The point is that people knew about it. People she knew
knew
about it. The whole town of Traurig, every cinderblocked rectangle of it had access to seeing Sara screw, and word of the sex tape spread like a common cold.

She can't say she wasn't warned. Nat liked to phone flirt from the get-go. He was tall and skinny and pale, and Kristine, one of her friends from work, called him Frankenstein. As in, “Are you sexting with Frankenstein's monster again?”

“I think it's hot,” said Sara.

“Are you sending him pics?”

“Only when he sends them first.”

“Dirty ones?”

Sara shot her a look like
Duh, what kind of pictures do you think we'd send each other?

“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.