All This Life

So seeing him in the back seat, right behind the driver, he said to his son, “What does it accomplish, sitting back there?”

His ear buds weren’t in, so Paul expected an answer.

“Accomplish?” asked Jake.

“Yeah, what do you get from being behind me?”

“Nothing.”

“Am I that embarrassing?” said Paul.

That wasn’t what he wanted to say. Not to his son, at least. Yes, it hurt his feelings having his boy prefer the separation. It created a swollen paradox for Paul: He wanted so badly to help his son, and yet Jake made it so hard to want to help him. Always distant. Always antagonistic. Paul knew that as the adult he had to rise above these petty feelings — he accepted that intellectually — but it was so hard on an emotional level. Not ever getting anything positive from your kid.

Jake hadn’t said anything, so Paul said, “Am I embarrassing you?”

“I don’t know,” said Jake.

“You don’t know if I’m embarrassing?”

Again, he didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want to feel wounded or go on the offensive. He wanted to be the calmest, most supportive parent ever. He wanted to help his son come back.

“Don’t answer me,” Paul said. “Sorry. Forget it. Listen to your music.”

It was almost laughable, how immature, how childish Paul could be. He had to be the one to rise above any squawking. He had to be the one to take care of his son.

Jake stayed in the back seat, put the ear buds in; Paul drove them to the therapist’s office. They waited till Jake was ushered in by the doc, leaving Paul alone looking at the closed office door, yet another separation from his son.

He stayed like that for ten minutes. He stayed like that until right now, only staring at the closed door, wondering what it means.

The most important thing is that they’re trying to get Jake help. The goal is helping his son. Despite Paul’s stillborn dreams or feelings of futility or all the ways he can tally his irrelevancy in life, the only thing that matters is that they are in this office. They are — father and son — here.

Even in such a dull waiting room. A Formica table in the middle of it, decorated with a fan of magazines. A few IKEA chairs, which at these prices seem ludicrous. They should all be lounging in authentic Barcelona chairs.

Paul tries to beat down the worry about money. To allow himself to see only what matters, that closed office door. On the other side are a doctor and Jake. They are making headway. They have to be. They are erasing the damage done by the brass band and the divorce and all other collateral damage that haunts his son. They are in there doing the work and everything else is moot.

Well, he wants it to be moot. But Paul can’t help but blame himself for how little he knew about Jake’s online life. It never occurred to Paul that things he filmed on his iPhone were ending up on the Internet, and it certainly never crossed his mind that he’d publicize something as awful as a mass suicide. It felt odd to Paul, that mechanism to share pathos. Paul’s instinct was to hoard it. To keep it like a baby bird, feed it from a dropper. He figured that since his own sorrow was private, everyone felt the same way. And by everyone, he really means Jake.

Paul doesn’t know one thing about the boy’s virtual life, which begs the question: What else doesn’t he know? He’s operating under the assumption that posting the clip of the brass band is the worst thing his son has ever done, but maybe that’s untrue. Maybe it’s only another upload in a series of dubious, ignominious posts. Maybe his son has a whole cache of public pathos. Maybe his YouTube channel is a hive of sadness, and Paul makes himself a promise in his uncomfortable IKEA chair: He is going to get computer-savvy. He is going to unearth the side of his son that lives in the computer.

He has to know that Jake. The avatar. The username. TheGreatJake. He has to know if his son’s username has any concept of morality, needs to see if there’s remorse for sharing the suicides or if TheGreatJake doesn’t see anything wrong with what he did. His son will barely engage him in conversation; hell, he won’t even sit next to him in the car. So getting to know this other son is his chief priority.

Paul has to stop limiting his perceptions of his son based on his own biases. He has to swallow whatever odd clump of pride that keeps Paul from joining the rest of the free world on social media, if not to assuage his own loneliness, then in the name of finding out who his son really is.

It breaks his heart, thinking like that, but perhaps this is what love looks like in the twenty-first century. There’s the heart pumping in our chests and the one that thrums online, beating a binary rhythm, zeroes and ones. Paul has to find that version of his son. He has to interrogate that son and find out if TheGreatJake comprehends how grotesque it is to use these suicides as something captured, something worth sharing, something like entertainment.