Jake stayed in the back seat, put the ear buds in; Paul drove them to the therapist’s office. They waited till Jake was ushered in by the doc, leaving Paul alone looking at the closed office door, yet another separation from his son.
He stayed like that for ten minutes. He stayed like that until right now, only staring at the closed door, wondering what it means.
The most important thing is that they’re trying to get Jake help. The goal is helping his son. Despite Paul’s stillborn dreams or feelings of futility or all the ways he can tally his irrelevancy in life, the only thing that matters is that they are in this office. They are — father and son — here.
Even in such a dull waiting room. A Formica table in the middle of it, decorated with a fan of magazines. A few IKEA chairs, which at these prices seem ludicrous. They should all be lounging in authentic Barcelona chairs.
Paul tries to beat down the worry about money. To allow himself to see only what matters, that closed office door. On the other side are a doctor and Jake. They are making headway. They have to be. They are erasing the damage done by the brass band and the divorce and all other collateral damage that haunts his son. They are in there doing the work and everything else is moot.
Well, he wants it to be moot. But Paul can’t help but blame himself for how little he knew about Jake’s online life. It never occurred to Paul that things he filmed on his iPhone were ending up on the Internet, and it certainly never crossed his mind that he’d publicize something as awful as a mass suicide. It felt odd to Paul, that mechanism to share pathos. Paul’s instinct was to hoard it. To keep it like a baby bird, feed it from a dropper. He figured that since his own sorrow was private, everyone felt the same way. And by everyone, he really means Jake.
Paul doesn’t know one thing about the boy’s virtual life, which begs the question: What else doesn’t he know? He’s operating under the assumption that posting the clip of the brass band is the worst thing his son has ever done, but maybe that’s untrue. Maybe it’s only another upload in a series of dubious, ignominious posts. Maybe his son has a whole cache of public pathos. Maybe his YouTube channel is a hive of sadness, and Paul makes himself a promise in his uncomfortable IKEA chair: He is going to get computer-savvy. He is going to unearth the side of his son that lives in the computer.
He has to know that Jake. The avatar. The username. TheGreatJake. He has to know if his son’s username has any concept of morality, needs to see if there’s remorse for sharing the suicides or if TheGreatJake doesn’t see anything wrong with what he did. His son will barely engage him in conversation; hell, he won’t even sit next to him in the car. So getting to know this other son is his chief priority.
Paul has to stop limiting his perceptions of his son based on his own biases. He has to swallow whatever odd clump of pride that keeps Paul from joining the rest of the free world on social media, if not to assuage his own loneliness, then in the name of finding out who his son really is.
It breaks his heart, thinking like that, but perhaps this is what love looks like in the twenty-first century. There’s the heart pumping in our chests and the one that thrums online, beating a binary rhythm, zeroes and ones. Paul has to find that version of his son. He has to interrogate that son and find out if TheGreatJake comprehends how grotesque it is to use these suicides as something captured, something worth sharing, something like entertainment.
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.