All This Life

It’s always hectic here on the bridge, always full, always rushing, even in traffic. Because these days you don’t just work at work. Technology, that noose. Everyone is reachable all the time. Including traffic jams. Devices bring emails and conference calls and video chats in an uninterruptable river.

A peek in the window of some cars shows mouths screaming into headsets, forlorn expressions on faces as to-do lists multiply, workdays grow into evenings into all-nighters, weeks into weekends. Life its own traffic jam.

A white Prius houses a father and his fourteen-year-old son. They keep away from each other in the morning. Or Jake keeps away from his dad, his surly chauffeur. Jake knows the sad hierarchy: A Google search of his father’s favorite things would not return the boy as a page one result. Jake has never understood what makes him so moody as they drive in together, and yet there’s really no way his father could explain it. No way for the father to unpack adult disappointment. It’s impossible for the father to convey that he’d expected his life to amount to more than some middling stake in a PR firm, and it’s too late to fix.

How can he tell his only child that commuting is a kind of daily desolation, his mind always flapping to the past even when it’s the last thing he wants to remember? Being young: when he released his potential and passions and possibilities up into the air, freeing them like doves, his whole life ahead to watch all his dreams come true. How can he tell his son that becoming an adult is learning to live with your failures, learning to dodge these dying birds as they thump back to earth?

How do you say that to your boy?

You don’t. You commute. You make your boss happy. You collect those paychecks and keep your eyes peeled for dead doves. The father turns the volume up on an AM sports talk show, the next caller saying, “I’d like to discuss how our quarterback is an effin’ moron,” and the father settles into another unfulfilling distraction.

Jake, never trying to disrupt their frail truce, spends his time filming things out the window with his iPhone. Stealing frames from people’s lives. Poaching and posting them online, his pieces of property. Yesterday, he captured a woman flossing her teeth while steering with her elbows, the day before a guy with little scissors trimming his moustache like a bonsai tree.

So far, today’s material has been a bunch of stinkers. The highlight has been an old lady fighting with a fast food wrapper, frustrated with how it constricts her breakfast sandwich. Jake’s even stooped to trailing some seagulls bouncing along the bridge’s railing, and he hates those nature shots, thinks they’re for old people, the Discovery Channel backwash his mom’s always watching, when she’s in town.

Jake likes capturing real human life, snatching seconds away from those who don’t suspect an audience. The other day, for example, he captured a guy’s catastrophic ponytail waving in a breeze, looking like a windsock; Jake immediately set it to music, Dylan’s
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” then uploaded it to YouTube.

309 views so far.

Not bad.

But today’s turning around for Jake.

Because right as he’s bemoaning all his benign options—the fast food wrapper, the boring gulls pooping and perching on the rail—that’s when he sees the band.

They’re just coming onto the bridge’s walkway on the San Francisco side, by the tollbooths; they’re moving toward Jake. Playing their instruments, forming a roaming pack. Jake counts twelve of them, three trumpet players, two saxophonists, two clarinets, two
trombones, a snare drum, a bass drum, and a tuba player.

They’re all done up in wild outfits, clothed in mismatched prints and patterns and clashing colors. Are they clowns? he wonders. No, their faces aren’t painted. They just have no fashion sense.

He hits record, holding his phone up toward them, zooming in.

The brass band is too far away for Jake to make out their music, but they are all playing. Sort of dancing, shuffling along, moving their instruments back and forth in time with the song. They seem to be all ages, all ethnicities. White, black, and brown. He spots one bald man and two women with gray hair, the rest looking in their thirties or forties. Wait. He spies one girl who doesn’t look that much older than Jake. She’s tall and skinny, wearing purple striped pants with a
paisley shirt, a butterfly collar. She’s playing the clarinet.

The most predominant noise comes from two men banging on the drums, one beating out a quick pattern on a snare, the other producing a slow rumble on a bass drum connected to his chest. It’s the size of a tractor tire, and his mallets hit either side of this musical wheel, deep thunderous booms that remind Jake of dinosaurs walking in the movies.

There are also certain loud notes exploding from the horns—the trumpets—little staccato bursts, punctuating something, but he can’t tell what they’re playing, what all the instruments’ contributions add up to yet, too far away to hear a melody.

Soon, though.

In anticipation, he says, “Turn down the radio, Dad,” kneeing the back of the driver’s seat.

The father, engrossed in a discussion of the 49ers pass defense, just grunts.

“There’s a band out there,” says Jake.

“Not now.”

“I need to hear them.”

“Later.”

At that, the boy loses interest in luring his father into this strange display on the bridge. Jake is a banner ad that the father won’t click. He’s a pop-up. He’s something equally as annoying: He’s a son in the backseat of his father’s car, talking.

Jake rolls down the back window, stretching his arm out, hoping he’ll be able to hear the brass band’s music and not the steady chug of traffic. But he can’t hear them yet, still about forty feet away. He frames the band as they bop and weave with their instruments, the sun glaring off of the horns, refracting little rainbows.

The band stays huddled together, forming an oval, like a lung turned on its side. They take synchronized steps, marching like soldiers, dressed like hipster gypsies. Jake can’t believe his luck finding this, filming this. An emoji of his face would convey an overjoyed anxiety, with the head gritting his teeth with a furrowed brow and flames burning in each eye socket.

Jake’s father lurches the car in small chunks every thirty seconds or so, the bridge even more gridlocked than normal. A couple hours ago, somebody ran out of gas, and the morning commute never recovered; he learned this from a traffic update during a commercial break from his sports talk. The empty car sat there for half an hour until Caltrans removed it, traffic trying to spread around the stalled vehicle like water around a rock. But it really screwed things up. His dad actually admires the stuck car, this idea of stopping, of quitting.

Jake fidgets in his seat.

His arm reaches as far as it can out the window, limb extending his iPhone, trying to get as close as he can.

The outline, the shadow, wisps of the brass band’s music finally reach him. It’s a fast song, something peppy and vivacious. The kind you might hear a marching band play. All major chords with a dance beat.

But it’s the way they move that fascinates Jake. Their oval, their lung. As they get closer, he notices that they move like a breathing entity, a subtlety he couldn’t make out before. They position themselves right next to one another in the oval and then they move away a few steps, the lung expanding, swelling. Then they come together into a mass again and this continues, in and out, this breathing. The brass band does this and still keeps making forward progress.

“What the hell?” his dad says, finally taking notice.

“What song is that they’re playing?”

His dad turns down the sports talk. “Roll up your window.”

Jake pulls his arm in, cranks the window up halfway. Knows better than to tussle with his father so early in the morning. But he keeps filming.

The brass band plays its song and moves in its inhaling and exhaling choreography, and one of the trumpet players, a man, breaks free from the formation, moving over to the bridge’s orange railing. Throwing his trumpet over the side. Climbing the rail. Folding his hands in prayer. Leaping toward the ocean.

Jake watches and records, records and watches, and it’s not really happening, there’s no way this is really happening, so he keeps filming. The brass band stops its forward progress. Jake has to crane his head backward to watch it through the car’s back window because his father’s ride inches toward the toll plaza.

The brass band staying huddled, keeping its music going.

Then another runs from the pack. The paisley shirt, the butterfly collar, throwing her clarinet and heaving her body over the side.

Then another trumpet player jumps.

Then one of the saxophonists.

Then a trombonist.

“They’re jumping, Dad,” says Jake.

The father adjusts the rearview and side mirrors to get a look at the scene. He takes in the huddle. Sees one of them break away, lob a trombone over the railing, following it quickly. The father stops the car, opens his door in the middle of traffic.

He is the first person to do this, standing and gawking. He is the empty car; he is out of gas. He holds everyone up as he hunts his head for an interpretation, a way to understand what he’s witnessing. He twists all these things he’s seeing up into various balloon animals,
attempting to form a shape that makes sense.

Two people behind him honk. He doesn’t acknowledge their protests, only stares at the remaining members of the brass band. A few other honks come and he points toward the musicians, a gesture meaning Are you seeing what I’m seeing and why is this happening and what does it mean?

Other people exit their cars, too, facing the brass band, standing like zombies in the road. The people who had been on the walkway, joggers and bicyclists and tour bus explorers, all stop and give the band a wide berth.

Shouldn’t there be a good Samaritan among them?

Shouldn’t there be at least one hero on the bridge?

But should has no place in a moment like this.

Better reactions don’t matter.

There’s only what happens, what these people do. And the watching.

Nobody feels a calling brought on by adrenaline, by belief, by programming, by fear, compelling them into action.

The bridge still, except for the band.

Another woman tosses her trumpet over the side and follows.

“Are they dying?” Jake says from the backseat.

“Close your eyes,” his dad says.

Several more witnesses hop out of their vehicles. All standing in the middle of the bridge, watching while another band member hoists his tuba, climbs the rail, and springs off backward. The other clarinet launches like a spear. Its player also, falling headfirst toward the Pacific.

There are only three musicians left—one saxophonist, the snare and bass drum players. They keep performing, though their sound is so thin. Their lung almost empty.

Almost all of the commuters are out of their cars, standing transfixed, some still holding travel mugs or half-eaten bagels, some making phone calls to 911.

The person playing the snare drum lets it fly over the railing. It looks like a hatbox.

A man yells out, “Don’t do it.”

The drummer doesn’t answer, follows shortly behind his instrument.

The saxophone flies off the bridge, spinning like a boomerang, but instead of coming back, it arcs down to the sea. So does its player.

The last one left plays the bass drum, the tractor tire; he smacks it a few more times on both sides, beat slowing and finally stopping. Dropping the mallets on the walkway. Disconnecting the drum from his person. Carrying it over to the railing and letting it tumble from his arms.

“Please, don’t,” a woman calls to him, a jogger locked in place about fifteen feet away.

“This is a celebration of life,” he says.

“Stay alive,” a commuter shouts from her stopped vehicle.

“I will be alive even after I do this,” he says, climbing the railing, standing on top of it. He has a good sense of balance and stays there, perched on the rounded guardrail for about seven seconds. Then he folds his hands in prayer, pushes off with his feet, falling toward his band.

Jake gets out of the car and stands next to his father, who’s crying. The boy has never seen his dad weep, and it almost makes him start, too, which surprises Jake because he doesn’t understand what he’d even be crying about.

“What do we do now, Dad?” he asks.

The father doesn’t answer. There are no words to make sense of any of this. He wants to call the whole scene surreal, but does that work? Is this surreal? Standing there on the bridge, it seems to the father that it’s exactly the opposite. It’s real, painfully real, painfully human. Thinking, We’re the only species capable of doing something like this. The father wipes his face, imagines another one of his dead dreams landing at his feet.

Some people get back in their vehicles, sitting with their hands on steering wheels, no idea what to do next. Others climb over the short fence between the road and the walkway to peep over the edge and stare at the ocean. Are they hoping to see the band swimming there? Hoping the members of the brass band have all survived and after retrieving their instruments pick up the song where they left off? Hoping for a happy ending?

“What do we do now, Dad?” Jake says again.

“We go,” he says.

“Can I look over the edge, too?”

The sirens of cop cars and ambulances in the distance.

“No.”

“I want to see.”

“You’ve seen enough,” says the father.

“I want to see over the edge.”

“You have,” the father says.

He ushers the boy into the car’s backseat, trying to sequester his child away from this disaster, but he doesn’t know that the suicides exist in the car, too. Jake fires up his phone and watches the clip again.

Traffic isn’t moving.

Getting out of there is impossible.

Everything is blocked off until the authorities ascertain what happened.

The father calls his office and tries to explain all this to his assistant, though he’s talking to himself mostly, fumbling for a pat interpretation, hoping one might flutter into his mind like a flake of ash.

Jake sits in the backseat. His new emoji would be a head with a can opener spinning around its crown and peeling up the skull and plucking out that brain and whirling it around on an index finger like a basketball.

He keeps reliving the moment, watching his phone as the band slowly travels toward him, serenading the world before leaping off. Once the video ends he starts back at the beginning. Looping. Jake running on this clip like it’s a treadmill. Dying to get this to YouTube, but unable to disconnect his consciousness from it long enough to post.

Start to finish.

Start to finish.

Start.