All This Life

There are other posted videos of the disaster, but no one captured its entirety. Jake got the brass band’s approach, their shuffling along the walkway, their song; he got every person going over the edge. The other clips of it start when one or two of the brass band have already jumped. These are getting hits, too, but nowhere near as many as Jake’s.

He’s a disaster shepherd, and this YouTube page and its contents are his flock. He nurtures them all. He owns this disaster, as any shepherd owns his sheep. Their deaths are his property.

Refresh.

827,192.

The thing that’s happened to him today is that he’s building a personal ranking system of their jumps. He didn’t start off doing this on purpose, but slowly, view after view after view, he found himself looking forward to certain deaths more than others. Found himself being drawn to certain styles of going over the edge. For example, he cherished the saxophonist who launched his instrument like a boomerang, the gold thing shimmering off the bridge and slowly disappearing down, then its player following it.

His favorite, though, is the tall, skinny woman, the one wearing the purple striped pants, the paisley shirt with a butterfly collar. How she hoists her clarinet like a javelin and stands admiring her toss before going after it.

He wouldn’t tell anybody. About his ranking system. About how he’s built a hierarchy of suicides. No one would understand, or maybe they would but Jake won’t share it. He can’t. He’s learned not to open himself up to anybody at school. They already have plenty of ammo to heave at him because he’s always — as his mom says—“acting out.” He’s not, though. He’s not acting; he’s not out. He’s only being himself.

Mom in Bali with Simon, and they probably don’t even know about the brass band. They don’t even know that Jake has captured these suicides, or maybe they’re a couple of his viewers. Maybe they watch it and wonder if the poster, username TheGreatJake, is the great Jake that they know.

Or they’re snorkeling.

Or they’re enjoying some time away from him.

That’s what it feels like since his parents split up, that his parents don’t want him around, even though they show it differently. His mom always going on trips, weekends here, full weeks there, with Simon. Always trips only for adults, his mom says. “Us, honey. Simon and I.”

And his dad, distracted, grunting, moping around, always ordering pizza; Jake is the only teenager in all the Bay Area tired of pizza. His dad is taking the divorce like somebody bucked off a bull, limping to get out of the way before the animal’s horns hit him.

Whatever.

Parents all have horns, he guesses.

It’s nice to see how many people want to interact with him online.

Refresh the page.

827,211.

With new comments.

Most of these comments aren’t directed at him, per se. They’re reactions to seeing the suicides. Some are mean-spirited. Some are religious, supportive, tolerant. Some have nothing to do with the video, trolls posting things like “Meet sexy singles in your area.”

But one of the new comments is directed straight at TheGreatJake:

All comments (9,293)

Noah911

I feel SAD for whoever posted this.

This is the one he fixates on. In the thousands of comments on his page — and Jake has read through them all many times — he can’t remember one that incites such an immediate reaction within him. There are others about ethics, about the moral decision to post the video in the first place, but these don’t burrow under Jake’s skin. They are only opinions and he shrugs them off and gets back to his flock.

But I feel sad for whoever posted this is demeaning, like getting made fun of in the hall at school by a couple dudes and everyone else hears them and now the whole crowd is involved and laughing, except here the hallway is the whole Internet and Jake is getting mocked in Ecuador and Madagascar and Morocco and it’s not fair of Noah911 to do that.

But this I feel sad for whoever posted this isn’t going away. It isn’t the usual Internet white noise. Jake feeling impaled by the word sad. People have called him much worse in the comments section, and yet all their pejoratives and hyperboles invalidated them, made them radio static. The simplicity of I feel sad tunnels through his defenses and cuts him, sadness mutating into ire. The boy feeling publicly humiliated, which will no doubt lead to more people disappearing from his life. His parents split up, and his mom’s always off with Simon and his dad is downstairs but there’s no connection between them, he could be down in Mexico and it would feel the same to Jake, and the kids at school don’t care about him and now Noah911 is turning his own flock against him, hitting him in a space that should be all his own, an online world where he is important and happy, this one portal to escape the puckered maw of reality.