“He might come back here to find me,” says Paul.
The cop turns and walks to the building’s front door. “You’re right; we’ll be in touch.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s a lot,” says the cop. The door is open, and he’s marching through. “Normally, in these circumstances, the child hides in a familiar place. Go home and be thorough with your search. We’ll be in touch.”
The door slowly shuts and Paul is alone. He turns in another circle, screaming, “Jake! Jake!”
He texts his son again. This one says: Let me know that you’re okay, please.
He even calls him, though he knows there’s no chance that Jake will answer. “It’s me. Where did you go? I’m worried. Please. I’m at the therapist’s still. I’m waiting for you. I can pick you up wherever you are. I’m not mad. Only concerned. I want to help. Please let me help. I will meet you anywhere. Please call. Or text. I love you. We love you, your mom and me. We are here. Please call.”
OF COURSE, JAKE isn’t in a closet or hiding behind the water heater or buried in a pile of laundry, but Paul does his due diligence anyway, inspecting his condo from top to bottom, both floors, and once that turns up nothing, he knows his son hides in the computer.
Paul hasn’t gone to his ex’s — the place he used to live, where his alimony and child-support payments still fund the mortgage — but he’ll get there. He’s not dismissing the cop’s advice. It’s just that since Paul knows where his son spends the majority of his time, why not look there first?
Of course, that’s part of why he’s not champing at the bit to go to his ex’s, but the main deterrent is the barrenness. It’s one thing to be in his own empty apartment, because that’s how a newly divorced bachelor is supposed to live. There’s supposed to be a dearth of any intimacy. The walls should be stark white. The cheap carpet should have a constellation of pizza crumbs, so many of them that walking barefoot is like reading Braille with your feet. There aren’t any throw pillows on the couch. There isn’t a couch. The kitchen cupboards are packed with the slimmest essentials, olive oil and tinfoil. Paul hates all the vacant cupboards, but the idea of buying baking spices or casserole dishes seems devastating. The refrigerator is merely a brief cooling station for his pale ale, and there’s a whole shelf dedicated to half-finished burritos. There isn’t one vegetable on the premises.
Going over to his old house, to wander unaccompanied through all those memories, is too much. He’ll do it. Of course, he’ll do it. He’ll make it over there soon, for Jake’s sake.
Fact of the matter is that Paul doesn’t want to search inside the computer for him, either, but that somehow seems easier, and if that’s the wrong word here, it seems less bloated with the past, the prowling memories talking shit to him from inside the house’s walls. The failure of the marriage haunting, rattling chains, slamming doors. At least looking for Jake online didn’t have that ghastly baggage. Because he’d never done it before, and that now seems like another failure.
He had told his boy on his voicemail that Paul would meet him anywhere, and that claim will be challenged as Paul goes hunting for TheGreatJake. Paul has to let go of his disdain for social media. This is the only place he can find his son.
The site he hears Jake talk about the most is Twitter, and that’s where the manhunt will commence. Paul opens the page and makes an account, choosing the humdrum username Paul_Gamache.
And he’s in; he’s a part of this; he’s plugged in.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he knows what the hell he’s doing. Paul Googles various things on how to work the user interface, how to track down specific people, and it stuns him how easy it is to navigate, how effortless it is to find the single person you need to locate, and thirty seconds later he’s found TheGreatJake.
He clicks follow.
He follows him.
He is following his son.
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 alclass="underline" 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.