All This Life

It was Naomi, god bless her soul, who saved them from that slow ruin. They were both asleep one night, and out of nowhere she sat up in bed, saying, “I’m being eaten alive here.”

“What?” said a groggy Paul, an Ambien swimming in his bloodstream.

“A mosquito.”

“Huh?”

“I’m almost sucked dry, Paul,” she said. “Do something.”

The light was switched on. A magazine was folded in half and poor Paul danced around the room, trying to smear the bloated mosquito’s corpse all over the cover of The New Yorker, but he couldn’t catch him, the mosquito veering, zigzagging, Paul hopelessly late with every Ambien-slowed swing.

“It’s up by the light,” she said.

“I see it.”

“So hit it.”

“I’m trying.”

Whiff. Whiff.

Paul, embarrassingly, was out of breath.

“When?” she said.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

She nodded and stood up on the bed. He handed her the magazine. Paul lay down on his side and watched her stalk the insect. It took a matter of ten seconds for her to hit it with the magazine, the mosquito landing on their comforter, stunned, still trying to fly. Naomi, careful not to squash it on their duvet, picked the mosquito up and put it inside the magazine, then smushed the pages together.

“Do you want to see?” she said.

She opened the magazine up, showing the bloody smudge over a skyscraper of text.

“I hadn’t finished reading that one,” said Paul.

“You can still read it,” Naomi said.

There was something in that moment, an inherent conversation, scripted lines they were supposed to say. Maybe it’s only Paul’s memory plumping it up, but he swears there was an electricity, the two of them sitting on the bed with the blood smear on the page.

He sat there for what felt like a hundred hours until Naomi said, “We need to make a change.”

“Okay.”

“We forgot how to be married.”

“What?”

“When we had Jake,” she said. “We became parents and stopped being married.”

It was true: The family took on an exclusionary geometry. It had shapes to it: Paul and Jake, Naomi and Jake, Paul and Naomi and Jake. But there was never any time when Paul and Naomi were together, and if they were it was only to discuss logistics, practicalities. They never had fun.

“What can we do about it?” he asked.

But all Naomi did was shake her head.

Paul can still see her so vividly, the finality in her movement. It must have taken her years to work up the courage to quit their marriage, and it was right there in her swiveling face, left to right, right to left, We are through.

The overhead light was turned off; the bloodied copy of The New Yorker was recycled.

That was ten months ago. Now Paul lives in a condo, a sad stucco orphanage for wayward men, shamed divorcés. It’s only a couple miles from his former residence, where Jake lives with his mom. Normally, they share custody, but she’s in Bali for a few weeks with a new boyfriend, some tan asshole with an accent that sends Paul into a murderous rage every time he calls him mate. A murderous rage he’ll, of course, never act on. Unless there’s a fantasy murder league.

Paul has six minutes before the fantasy draft kicks off and keeps Googling, sifting through various strategies, players to target. He has six minutes and there’s another pale ale in the fridge, and for a few seconds he feels like he’s forging these new friendships already — Paul and his pals — just by preparing himself to be an active member of their league, and all of this makes him feel hopeful.

He clicks on a link that says “The perfect plan (for your draft)” and has another sip of beer. He’s not drafting pretend players; he’s drafting real friends.

Paul smiles.

That’s when he hears some strange thumping noises coming from upstairs, from Jake’s room.

SOMETIMES HIS MOM—when she’s actually in town and not traveling with her new boyfriend — says that the world is an oyster. But that’s a stupid expression. That’s the kind of thing that maybe applied back in 1981 or something. Not now. No, oysters have nothing to do with the current state of things, and Jake knows exactly what the world is:

The world is a search engine.

Jake can type anything into the world’s search bar and scroll through pages of results. Limitless returns. Adventures coming in every denomination, every fetish. Any whim he can whip up.

There’s no other conclusion for him to draw. Especially now. Right now. Jake clicks refresh compulsively, watching the views and comments multiply on his video’s YouTube page, all these citizens of the world coming to him. 827,148 people have viewed it already. And that’s not even mentioning how many times Jake personally has replayed it. Maybe he’s watched the brass band 827,148 times, too.

So when he’s not clicking refresh, he clicks replay.

And when he isn’t clicking replay, he simply stares at the scene, reliving it, time-traveling back to that morning on the bridge.

Refresh. . refresh. .

827,176.