All This Life

Paul feels a low rumble in his stomach; it might be the first showings of some movement. He has no idea how long a laxative takes to kick in, but he wants to see this feeling as progress, the beginning. He has to believe that this might lead to something better.

The therapist’s door opens.

Paul rises, and the IKEA chair creaks.

Out comes Jake, slowly shuffling. He doesn’t even look up at his dad.

Paul sees his son’s whole body but now knows this is only a fraction of him.

The doctor walks out behind the boy, a fiftyish black man. He has a European accent that’s on the cusp of reminding Paul of his ex’s new boyfriend, Simon, but he won’t let himself go there. He has to remain here, to absorb everything that comes from the doctor’s mouth.

Words, though, aren’t Paul’s number-one concern at the moment. It’s body language. Jake’s eyes fixed on the carpet, hands jammed in his jeans, swaying a bit. The doctor has a furrowed brow and motions Paul into his office with a nod.

“Jake, will you give us a couple minutes?” the therapist asks.

Jake takes an IKEA chair far away from the one that Paul had sat in and fires up his iPhone, staring at the thing barely eight inches from his face.

“I’ll be right back, buddy,” Paul says to his son, whose gaze doesn’t budge from the screen. “I’ll be right back!” Paul says again, but it doesn’t prompt anything from the boy.

The last thing Paul sees before the doctor shuts the door is his son, sitting alone, and yet he knows that TheGreatJake is somewhere else entirely.

THE 212, 212TH person to ogle Sara’s porn clip is Jake, who still sits in the waiting room. It’s already been fifteen minutes and no sign of his dad. He has been by himself for the bulk of the time, but a middle-aged woman comes in. She must be the doc’s next download, receiving all the data from her servers so he can find the bug in her system.

The waiting room has a small palm tree in the corner, a coffee table with magazines for old people. There are only four chairs, and Jake is glad that the woman took one across from him. She can’t see his screen. In fact, she fires up her own tablet. He can keep watching his porn in peace.

There’s also a dispenser filled with hand sanitizer mounted on the wall that has a drip hanging off its spout, hardened into a pale meringue.

It is 9:44 in the morning, and the boy’s appointment — only their first time meeting together — ended at 9:30.

He knows they’re talking about him. Jake, the problem. Jake, the strange. He needs fixing. It’s like he’s hacked into their conversation and can hear each indicting thing through the closed door.

Jake watches the porn curled in the uncomfortable chair, and his eyes move to the tally telling him he’s the 212, 212th person to take this clip in.

Lucky me, he thinks, I am a palindrome.

And he might be a palindrome, but there’s one thing he’s not: a virgin. He can’t be considered a virgin anymore, not with all the hours he’s spent watching strangers.

Or that’s how it should work. Watching all the perversions he can, surely he’s no virgin. He thinks of it like a currency exchange, trading in a stack of devalued bills and getting back one gleaming coin of visceral contact.

That doctor and his dad are in there gossiping about him. If he could post a comment on their conversation he’d say, “It’s rude to make me wait out here.”

Thinking about that inspires Jake to post something on Sara’s clip: “Makes me hard!”

Which is a lie.

His penis has been trained to stay soft while watching porn in public. At first, it got hard whenever he indulged. But not lately. Lately, it minds its manners. Unlike Jake.

Pavlov’s penis, thinks Jake, so he laughs.

The laughter startles the woman in the waiting room from her e-haze, forced to avert eyes from her screen, totally interrupted and inconvenienced by this boy’s inconsiderate snickers, and she scowls, then turns her scorched eyeballs back to her media.

Jake doesn’t want to comment on the porn, not really. He wants to comment on his own video, and so he hits YouTube and posts this comment:

TheGreatJake

This is my property and you should do what I say, and I’m looking for Noah911. Where is he? We need to talk about who is SAD and who isn’t.

Refresh, refresh, refresh. .

Nothing.

The problem with this therapist is his lip-pursing. It’s the only emoji he has and he sends it to users after every sentence he speaks, every point he drives down on Jake. Every forming of his important and arrogant words ends with the same annoying expression.

“How are you today, Jake?” he had said at the beginning of the session.

Lip purse.

“I am optimistic about our time together, Jake, how about you?”

Lip purse.

“Will you tell me about what you saw on the bridge that day?”

Lip purse.

“Why did you decide to share what you saw, Jake?”