All This Life

He thinks about all the historic reasons to follow your children. The time-tested ones, the traditional, the textbook: following kids for protection. For making sure predators are kept at bay. For ensuring a good life, all the advantages. For a balanced diet. High-fiber foods. Eight glasses of water a day. Shampoo and conditioning. To make sure they’re never too hot or too cold. For sunscreen. For protective eyewear. For cleanliness. For cardiovascular exercise. To make sure they don’t grow up too fast, see the world’s forked tongue. Follow them so they shy away from greed, that god. Teach about the honor in a day’s hard work. To build values. Grow optimism. Cultivate a social conscience. Stoke kindness in them. Shield them from the inevitable dullness and boredom that will grow on their bodies like fat once they’re adults. Once they’ve settled into disappointing realities. Once they themselves are disappointments.

But before that, you protect them from themselves, which is the worst predator of all: the one they never see coming.

Follow children for the various kinds of support. Financial. Emotional. Psychological. Babying these kids way longer than is appropriate. Keeping them reliant on you for your own selfish means. Wanting them to seek out their own experiences but equally wanting them to need you forever. The ultimate Catch-22, because if you raise them right they strike out on their own, leaving you with curdling memories and their student loans.

For forced nurturing. Reminders about a proper night’s rest. You follow and offer unsolicited advice about how to find the right friends and lovers. How to pick a partner. Paul loathes that part of being a parent — how it requires you to act as though you know so much, feigning wisdom, donning a pitiful costume of acumen that Paul knows is bullshit, but these sorts of hypocrisy are always and forever socially acceptable.

You follow them to bond. To communicate. To shuck their feelings from their hearts like oysters from shells.

Follow to offer crass and caustic editorials, spoiling any thoughts of a child’s sovereignty with your intrusive monologues.

You follow your children because you love them and you know the world is contagious with depravity, and in one way or another, everyone gets infected.

Despite how adroitly we try to remain pure, it’s impossible. It’s only a chipped tooth but it’s more. Everyone swims in the earth’s dirty broth.

And yet parents do their best to shield children. They follow in every way they can, hoping for happiness and safety, even though those things don’t really exist. They are artifices. Paul knows these things, and someday his son will possess this carnivorous knowledge, but let someday be decades from now. Let it only reveal the despair long after Paul is gone.

And what better way to accept the futility than to become Paul_ Gamache and enter the all-encompassing artifice — what better way to update these historic reasons to follow your kids, rooted in lessons learned in centuries barren of downloaded deities — what better way to follow them than to follow them.

Evolve into a binary detective.

Sleuth their profiles for clues that might tell you who they actually are, where they choose to reside.

No matter how much Paul hates this, it’s the only way he can find his son.

His first tweet: It’s dad, @TheGreatJake. Where are you?

Because Paul only follows one user, he can see no other people’s tweets, has no other posts coursing down his timeline. It’s empty, hollow, lifeless; it’s a socket waiting for a bulb. He needs TheGreatJake to show himself.

And he’ll also need to check his ex’s house. He knows this and isn’t being negligent. He was never negligent. Toward the end of the marriage, back when Paul had no idea they were nearing the end, he’d take walks by himself every night after work. This was 6 or 7 PM. The sun zipping down in the Marin sky. They lived in a circuitous web of residential streets, but if he kept following the forking roads to the left, he arrived at his destination: a yellow dead-end sign.

It never seemed poetic or metaphoric at the time. It was the marker he used on his walk to alert him to turn around, go back home, but with some space, if you spend your free time walking to the dead end, of course, your wife divorces you. Of course, your son leaves. Paul had been walking to the dead end for so many years that what if he actually reached it and didn’t realize? What if he was living it?

Stop it. This isn’t about me, he thinks, though he’s not sure that’s true.

That’s exactly why Jake left; if his mom were here, were around more, with her presence the boy would be better.

Paul decides to scroll through TheGreatJake’s old tweets while he waits, and Paul was right to look for him here. From the time stamps, he knows that there have been three tweets since therapy.

I’d smash this whole fucking place.