All This Life

An emoji of Jake’s face would be a serrated saw hacking off his scalp and someone jamming a lit candle inside his head so he blazes like a jack-o-lantern.

He wants to break something, which of course he’s going to do, which of course is how these things work when the urge to break something comes on so flagrantly. You do it. You take the nearest weapon (a baseball bat in the corner behind his bedroom door) and you hit the nearest thing (an empty pint glass sitting next to his computer) and sometimes one pint glass is enough to quench the thirst of these violent feelings and sometimes it isn’t and this happens to be one of those non-quenching times and so he swings the bat again, coming down on top of his printer and still it is not enough and Jake finds another target, killing his alarm clock, composing comments back to Noah911 in his head, I’m not so sad, but what makes you think I’m so sad, you have no right to talk to me that way because I’m not so sad, okay!!!

Jake wonders why he has stopped smashing stuff so he sucks up more voltage from the feelings inside him and picks up the bat again, hunting for a target and finding the thing in his room that represents the great disconnect between him and his parents, preparing to swing the bat at a plant his parents had given him the day they told him they were getting divorced.

They had taken Jake into San Francisco that afternoon, into Golden Gate Park. There was someone selling succulents out front of the conservatory of flowers, and they walked past her table with pots of aloe, cacti, agave, yucca. Jake’s mom paid the entrance fee for the conservatory and said, “Back here,” and led the three of them to a room, an indoor butterfly garden, hundreds of butterflies moving through the space.

There were only two other people in there, a young couple, kissing and holding their palms out, coaxing butterflies to land.

Most of the walls were made of windows, and sunlight filled the indoor garden.

“Your dad and I have to make a change, sweetie,” said his mom, and then outlined the separation, the divorce, their plan to split custody. “It has nothing to do with you,” she said. “Right, Paul?”

“It’s between your mom and me,” he said, a butterfly landing on his dad’s chest before he brushed it away.

“Do you have any questions for us?” his mom asked.

“Not yet,” he said.

There was a pause in the conversation while all three of them watched the young couple make out, butterflies swirling around their bodies.

The family left, and once outside the conservatory his mom said, “Let’s get you a plant.”

They walked up to the table of succulents.

“Do you even want a plant?” Paul said to his son.

“We’re buying him a plant!” she said.

“But what if he doesn’t care?”

“He cares.”

Jake said nothing.

“Pick one,” she said.

Jake surveyed the table, all the plants, pointed at a small pot with a cactus in it.

“They don’t need much water,” his mother said, “so it’s easy to keep them alive.”

“Okay,” Jake said, holding the plant up.

“It’s for you to take care of.”

“Why?”

“Good question,” said his father.

“You do a good job taking care of the plant and we’ll get a dog when life normalizes again,” his mom said.

A dog?

What, was he eight years old?

Didn’t they know anything about him?

So the cactus is an easy item for Jake to target, and in fact the plant should have been the first thing he smashed, though it doesn’t have great placement in his room, in a corner on a chair with dirty clothes around it, but now he remembers it and now would be the perfect moment to show his parents he doesn’t want to do a decent job of caring for anything and he doesn’t want a dog and he doesn’t care about their divorce and he’s not so sad and he swings the bat at the cactus and dirt ricochets all over the place and he keeps hammering it with the bat until he’s out of breath.

“What are you doing?” the boy now hears from his doorway, turning and seeing his dad.

No answer from Jake, though he does have the craving to click refresh.

“Jake, what’s going on?” Paul says, looking at the smashed cactus.

“No dog, I guess,” Jake says, moving toward his computer, sitting down in front of it.

“What the hell are you doing?” Paul says, still in the doorway, surveying all the damage.

Jake finally clicking refresh and seeing a gleaming new number.

827,238.

“Look at all of them,” says Jake.

“Are you okay?” Paul says stupidly. He knows that what he’s walked in on isn’t normal, isn’t healthy. He’s tried to be there the best he could the last couple days. He’s been working from home, allowing Jake to play hooky from school. They’ve watched movies together, eaten pizzas. He’s asked Jake countless times if he wanted to talk about the brass band, but the boy never did. Paul has heard “I’m fine” enough to make it hard to keep asking, figured his son would reach out to him when he was ready.