All This Life

He watches the woman snap selfies. Jealous of her. Her only responsibility is to document what she looks like. Share it to Instagram, once their connection reestablishes. Post a record that she’s alive, she’s on a train, she has a face, a heartbeat, a brain, a soul, and she has the most valuable commodity of them all: She has a future.

They all wait to get moving again.

•••

PAUL RELUCTANTLY LEFT the police station for a couple hours last night, but apart from that he’s commandeered the station’s waiting room, turned it into mission control for his media campaign, dousing himself in fresh blood and letting the vultures have at him.

Kyle’s article yesterday afternoon kicked off the coverage and, from there, almost every local hub has interviewed Paul, either over the phone or in the precinct’s parking lot. Various news vans and anchors stop by the station, do updates out front.

He only left to change his clothes, finally check out his ex’s to make sure Jake wasn’t hiding there. He wasn’t. Paul couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Everything was a reminder of his banishment, and he couldn’t handle that. Even walking through the living room made him remember, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Memory could be cruel. The middle of that room was where they folded laundry together, all three of them. Jake loved it. They all did. It was beautiful and thrilling to watch their son. They’d dump a huge mound of fresh warm laundry into the middle of the living room and Jake would dive into it. He would laugh and burrow little tunnels and drape various articles around his neck, and Paul and Naomi stood back, enamored by their ecstatic little boy.

These were things he couldn’t allow himself to think about, not considering the stakes and circumstances. Especially considering that before going back to the station, Paul quickly stopped by his own place for a change of clothes. Nothing was clean. He had to give the sniff-test to various pieces of clothing, evading the socks glued shut, searching for the least revolting things.

That was his life now.

That is his life.

And he needs to block out all that stuff and stay at the police station as much as he can, in case the Twitter trail leads him to his son.

It’s almost eleven in the morning and he hasn’t slept.

Or he hadn’t slept until right now.

He nods off, sitting in the waiting room.

His eyes close and his mind strays; it’s as if he stands before a huge dune of fresh clean laundry himself, and Paul falls forward, crawling in a cave of it, and he feels the heated clothes, sniffs the fabric softener and the variety of detergent that his wife has bought for years, lingering wisps of lemon. He stays like that for a while, his memory taking big breaths of the past.

While he sleeps, Jake tweets his plan to return to the Golden Gate.