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827,192.
The thing that’s happened to him today is that he’s building a personal ranking system of their jumps. He didn’t start off doing this on purpose, but slowly, view after view after view, he found himself looking forward to certain deaths more than others. Found himself being drawn to certain styles of going over the edge. For example, he cherished the saxophonist who launched his instrument like a boomerang, the gold thing shimmering off the bridge and slowly disappearing down, then its player following it.
His favorite, though, is the tall, skinny woman, the one wearing the purple striped pants, the paisley shirt with a butterfly collar. How she hoists her clarinet like a javelin and stands admiring her toss before going after it.
He wouldn’t tell anybody. About his ranking system. About how he’s built a hierarchy of suicides. No one would understand, or maybe they would but Jake won’t share it. He can’t. He’s learned not to open himself up to anybody at school. They already have plenty of ammo to heave at him because he’s always — as his mom says—“acting out.” He’s not, though. He’s not acting; he’s not out. He’s only being himself.
Mom in Bali with Simon, and they probably don’t even know about the brass band. They don’t even know that Jake has captured these suicides, or maybe they’re a couple of his viewers. Maybe they watch it and wonder if the poster, username TheGreatJake, is the great Jake that they know.
Or they’re snorkeling.
Or they’re enjoying some time away from him.
That’s what it feels like since his parents split up, that his parents don’t want him around, even though they show it differently. His mom always going on trips, weekends here, full weeks there, with Simon. Always trips only for adults, his mom says. “Us, honey. Simon and I.”
And his dad, distracted, grunting, moping around, always ordering pizza; Jake is the only teenager in all the Bay Area tired of pizza. His dad is taking the divorce like somebody bucked off a bull, limping to get out of the way before the animal’s horns hit him.
Whatever.
Parents all have horns, he guesses.
It’s nice to see how many people want to interact with him online.
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827,211.
With new comments.
Most of these comments aren’t directed at him, per se. They’re reactions to seeing the suicides. Some are mean-spirited. Some are religious, supportive, tolerant. Some have nothing to do with the video, trolls posting things like “Meet sexy singles in your area.”
But one of the new comments is directed straight at TheGreatJake:
All comments (9,293)
Noah911
I feel SAD for whoever posted this.
This is the one he fixates on. In the thousands of comments on his page — and Jake has read through them all many times — he can’t remember one that incites such an immediate reaction within him. There are others about ethics, about the moral decision to post the video in the first place, but these don’t burrow under Jake’s skin. They are only opinions and he shrugs them off and gets back to his flock.
But I feel sad for whoever posted this is demeaning, like getting made fun of in the hall at school by a couple dudes and everyone else hears them and now the whole crowd is involved and laughing, except here the hallway is the whole Internet and Jake is getting mocked in Ecuador and Madagascar and Morocco and it’s not fair of Noah911 to do that.
But this I feel sad for whoever posted this isn’t going away. It isn’t the usual Internet white noise. Jake feeling impaled by the word sad. People have called him much worse in the comments section, and yet all their pejoratives and hyperboles invalidated them, made them radio static. The simplicity of I feel sad tunnels through his defenses and cuts him, sadness mutating into ire. The boy feeling publicly humiliated, which will no doubt lead to more people disappearing from his life. His parents split up, and his mom’s always off with Simon and his dad is downstairs but there’s no connection between them, he could be down in Mexico and it would feel the same to Jake, and the kids at school don’t care about him and now Noah911 is turning his own flock against him, hitting him in a space that should be all his own, an online world where he is important and happy, this one portal to escape the puckered maw of reality.
An emoji of Jake’s face would be a serrated saw hacking off his scalp and someone jamming a lit candle inside his head so he blazes like a jack-o-lantern.
He wants to break something, which of course he’s going to do, which of course is how these things work when the urge to break something comes on so flagrantly. You do it. You take the nearest weapon (a baseball bat in the corner behind his bedroom door) and you hit the nearest thing (an empty pint glass sitting next to his computer) and sometimes one pint glass is enough to quench the thirst of these violent feelings and sometimes it isn’t and this happens to be one of those non-quenching times and so he swings the bat again, coming down on top of his printer and still it is not enough and Jake finds another target, killing his alarm clock, composing comments back to Noah911 in his head, I’m not so sad, but what makes you think I’m so sad, you have no right to talk to me that way because I’m not so sad, okay!!!
Jake wonders why he has stopped smashing stuff so he sucks up more voltage from the feelings inside him and picks up the bat again, hunting for a target and finding the thing in his room that represents the great disconnect between him and his parents, preparing to swing the bat at a plant his parents had given him the day they told him they were getting divorced.
They had taken Jake into San Francisco that afternoon, into Golden Gate Park. There was someone selling succulents out front of the conservatory of flowers, and they walked past her table with pots of aloe, cacti, agave, yucca. Jake’s mom paid the entrance fee for the conservatory and said, “Back here,” and led the three of them to a room, an indoor butterfly garden, hundreds of butterflies moving through the space.
There were only two other people in there, a young couple, kissing and holding their palms out, coaxing butterflies to land.
Most of the walls were made of windows, and sunlight filled the indoor garden.
“Your dad and I have to make a change, sweetie,” said his mom, and then outlined the separation, the divorce, their plan to split custody. “It has nothing to do with you,” she said. “Right, Paul?”
“It’s between your mom and me,” he said, a butterfly landing on his dad’s chest before he brushed it away.
“Do you have any questions for us?” his mom asked.
“Not yet,” he said.
There was a pause in the conversation while all three of them watched the young couple make out, butterflies swirling around their bodies.
The family left, and once outside the conservatory his mom said, “Let’s get you a plant.”
They walked up to the table of succulents.
“Do you even want a plant?” Paul said to his son.
“We’re buying him a plant!” she said.
“But what if he doesn’t care?”
“He cares.”
Jake said nothing.
“Pick one,” she said.
Jake surveyed the table, all the plants, pointed at a small pot with a cactus in it.
“They don’t need much water,” his mother said, “so it’s easy to keep them alive.”
“Okay,” Jake said, holding the plant up.
“It’s for you to take care of.”
“Why?”
“Good question,” said his father.
“You do a good job taking care of the plant and we’ll get a dog when life normalizes again,” his mom said.