All This Life

He’s finished tidying the room and walks to the door, turning off the light, which only amplifies the presence of Jake’s computer. It is glowing. Paul stomps over to it in a huff, as if it’s that very dog that Naomi had dumbly promised Jake and it had pissed all over the floor, Paul ready to shame the pet, rub its nose in the mess.

This is the computer’s fault, not his boy’s.

No way is it his boy’s.

No way can his boy be blamed.

Paul sits down in front of the computer, lured closer to watch the clip again, but instead he scrolls down a bit.

He can see the comment. He can see, “I feel sad for whoever posted this.”

And Paul bursts into tears. He crumbles under the mass of his own ignorance. Having a kid is the ultimate risk. It creates such a limited perspective. A tube of love. And your vision can be so obscured that you do not understand the dangers on the periphery. You want nothing else but to adore and train and watch them prosper, but the world will have its way with them. Protection is a wicked illusion.

Paul cannot keep Jake safe, even if he spends the rest of his days guarding the boy’s room. He has to let him out. He has to teach his son to fend for himself, and that’s the great paradox of being a parent: He doesn’t want to teach him everything, wants to hold back just enough that Jake needs him. Paul wants to always be needed by his boy, but that greedy motive might prevent Jake from having access to all the tools needed to survive.

Even if you do give them every tool, it’s like indoor rock climbing, Paul’s main source of exercise. You can have everything you need, make it to the top, but what if you’re scaling the wrong wall? Paul himself had all the tools, supportive parents that stayed together, a Stanford education, a trough of options, and yet he still found an existence that perpetually disappoints him.

That’s what he’ll try and focus on, making sure Jake mounts the right wall.

If Paul’s parents were here they’d say, Pay attention. They’d say, It will be the hardest thing you ever accept but you can’t protect him. Teach him to scale the right wall and hope for the best.

The final thing Paul does before going downstairs is close his son’s computer. He unplugs it and carries it away.

6

Before it became that morning, it was any other, yesterday rehydrated. Noah sat at his desk in his office on Montgomery Street, in San Francisco’s financial district. It was a ghost town at 3 AM and Noah had been alone in his walk into the office. There was a street sweeper going by, newspapers being disseminated to various boxes and stands, sidewalks hosed down before the swarm, the explosion when the rest of the working stiffs showed up, pounding the pavement, flooding various cafés for caffeine and carbs.

Like clockwork, Noah arrived at this ungodly hour, putting everyone else in his firm to shame with his hawkish commitment to the details. This was what you have to do to be the best, and Noah was committed to storming the highest echelon. He’d been the best Ugly Duckling his first-grade class had ever seen, a lacrosse midfielder who would take your head off, and he was on his way to being the best futures trader at the firm.

There was something about futures that made sense to Noah. He had an instinct for both short- and long-term commodity trading. He approached the whole thing like an athlete, with the simple philosophy that it took diligent hard work every day. He never rested on one single laurel, but saw every futures contract that paid out — that he won—an opportunity to learn from and be even better for the next. There was no celebrating, no grandstanding, no days off. If you weren’t pushing yourself to improve, then you were getting worse.

A lot of traders used futures to hedge their bets, reducing the overall risk of their clients’ portfolios. But what made Noah so good at it was that he never approached futures in this condescending way. They were the closest thing to an actual competition in the market. Futures contracts either paid out or busted. Win or lose. Period. Noah flourished on the risk.

He cracked open a protein shake and peeked at the clock, 3:48. He could hear his sister, Tracey, ragging him about his early approach to his job: “You’re the oldest thirty-five-year-old in the world,” she’d say. “You’re still pretty young! Go out and have fun!”

“I’m thirty-four, Trace.”

“You’re focusing on the wrong thing,” she’d say, ten years his junior. “Why not enjoy yourself?”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might actually like working?”