All This Life

There Paul sits. In the waiting room. In the dark. Trusting this man to help his child. He stares at the closed door, settling in, waiting for the hour to elapse, waiting an impossible amount of time to hear impossible news, hoping, tenderly hoping, that today turns out to be the best day of their lives.

“YOU ALL READY to be drawn?” Kathleen asks.

Deb, Sara, and Rodney huddle together, posing for their picture. They make silly faces. Sara, for some unknown reason, hums “Purple Haze.”

“Remember that you have to draw yourself in this picture, too,” Deb says. “We all have to be in it.”

“Gotcha.”

“We all have to be in it,” Deb says.

Kat’s sponsor knew she’d try to weasel out of putting herself in, and Kathleen is thankful for that. She wants to be accountable, and Deb is the perfect hard-ass to help her do that.

“Yes, fine,” says Kathleen, “we’re all going to be in it.”

She starts this caricature, this family portrait of sorts, all the survivors. She puts the Golden Gate Bridge in the background, but doesn’t paint it solid orange. No, she likes the idea of it showing its scars, and she leaves it mottled, gray patches all over it. She draws her boy first, her boy who has shown up at this surreal time, and she captures his face’s likeness flawlessly, the only exaggerated detail is the cast on his leg, which is made of clouds in the picture, something to coddle his injury. Then she gets cracking on Sara, who once said that she was plenty scathed but in ways the naked eye couldn’t see, so Kat evokes that by making Sara’s skin solid gold; there might be something severe swimming under the surface, but Kathleen wants to show Sara that no one cares. She has value. She’s priceless. And it’s easy to draw Deb because Kat wants to show her the same skyscraping respect that she heaps on the cancer survivors in her shop: Kathleen doesn’t draw Deb’s fat lip or swollen cheek or black eye, no, she draws lush vines snaking around her face, looking like a garden nymph.

There’s only one person left to capture in this caricature, and there are so many ways to distort herself, so many ways to be acerbic and cruel. Take your pick. She’s made so many mistakes. But she decides to take it easy on herself today. Why? She was almost thrown from a bridge, and if that doesn’t buy you a morning of clemency, she’s not sure what does.

Instead of being masochistic, Kathleen draws herself standing next to Rodney, her arm thrown over his shoulders, draws herself with one-day AA chips for eyes.

“How do we look?” Deb says.

“Yeah, are we gorgeous or what?” Sara says.

“Pret. Tee?” Rodney says.

Caricatures, avatars, usernames, however humans present themselves, whatever we are, there is one thing Kathleen knows: We are all scared. We are haunted by yesterday and terrified of tomorrow. It’s this life, all this life, and we’re frightened of it. There are addictions and relapses. There are weather balloons and wars, sociopaths and estrangements. There’s climate change, mental illness, mood disorders. There are families assembling and dissembling. There are dubious genes dripping down. There are more strains of violence than the flu. The particulars of human misery are limitless, a rising ocean of humiliations and blues, too-low paychecks and pipe dreams. People cling so hard to so little, everything eroding a little more every day. It’s enough to make you pour whiskey on an open wound or jump off a bridge. But that’s what we have to endure. Kathleen now knows that we need the scars on our skin before the tattoos envelop that ugly. We need those stakes stacked so high that we’re lost in order to understand that it’s okay to be lost. We will always be lost. We are the walking wounded and there’s love in our hearts.

And then Kathleen turns her portrait around.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First thing’s first: Thanks to the indie booksellers! If it wasn’t for your tireless and often thankless work, indie writers like me wouldn’t have careers. From the bottom of my heart, you are so important. Keep fighting the good fight.

Thanks to Dan Kirschen and ICM. He endured several remixes of this book, none of which were very good, and he never lost patience with me, and if he did, he was gracious enough to only talk shit behind my back.

My editor, Dan Smetanka, challenged me in a way I’d never previously been tested. He called it a “tear down,” said that he liked the characters and the plot of “All This Life,” but wanted me to find a much more earnest tone to tell it, which meant writing the whole thing from scratch, basically. And that’s what we did, from August through December 2014. It was brutal and insane and formidable and infuriating, and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You are pure talent, Smetanka!