Bed

by Tao Lin

  Over time, the mom makes herself forget the envelopes, which works, until one day, going through mail, she finds that she has been looking for a very long time at this letter from Nevada with Smurf stickers all over it—Smurfs dressed in pink, Smurfs smooching. She throws a pencil and a wristwatch into the swimming pool. She frowns and paces. She throws a muffin on the floor and doesn’t clean it up. This is her little rampage. She locks herself in her bedroom and sits very still on her bed. The world sits beside her, the size and intelligence and badness of a cupcake. In her head, there is a steady, clear-voiced scream, pitched in middle C. It is not unpleasing. She listens to it for some time and then lies down.

  The dad is made to sleep on the couch. He buys his own blanket from Kmart, a green one, and a pillow that is supposed to be for dogs. He sleeps with a box of sugar cookies on his chest—something, he knows, that he has always wanted. Instead of toothbrushing, he has mints.

  The mom misses the dad. She does not speculate on Scarlet Leysen. She destroys Nevada out of her head, the entire state. She makes it have a lava-y Earthquake. She mostly forgives the dad. Still, though, she knows, the dad should be punished. She begins to make dinner only for herself, Paul, and Mattie. She tries not to look at the dad when they are in the kitchen together. Once, though, she glances and sees that the dad’s mouth is moving and that he is lining up three uncut pickles on a piece of bread. They make eye contact and his mouth keeps moving, noiselessly, and then he loudly says, “—and I’m competent.” The mom looks away. She grins. She leaves the kitchen. She is a little giddy. Control yourself, she thinks. Each day of punishment is a delay of gratification, an investment towards better, future love.

  “Tell your mom to stop being angry at me,” says the dad one night to Paul. He is at the fax machine, on a stool, has his head turned around to Paul, who is on the sofa watching TV.

  “You,” says Paul. He is eleven. He has changed. He is somewhat fat, and his head has grown, he thinks, too big. Some nights, in bed, he spreads his fingers evenly over his skull and pushes inward and counts to one hundred. He has to do something, he knows, contain it—not unlike braces for teeth, which he has. Sometimes he looks in the mirror and imagines a team of dwarves, swarming, smacking at his body. Once, he dreams this. “Hey now,” he says in his dream. There is a doorway and the dwarves keep rushing in. “Hey,” he says. “Why?”

  “She listens to you; not me,” says the dad. He moves his face close to Paul’s. It is a bewildered, distracted face—the face of someone clearly without secrets, but still somehow untrustable. “She doesn’t listen to me,” he says. He has just invented a new laser, that afternoon. “You need to tell her. Say to her—”

  The fax machine begins to make noises and the dad attends to it.

  “You,” says Paul. He bites in half his cream-filled Popsicle. He makes a face. His favorite thing to do, now, is to eat something concocted and sludgy—cherry pie-chocolate syrup pudding, marshmallow-maraschino cherry soup—and then, sweet and sticky mouthed, lie down for a nap. He likes to be sleepy, likes the keen apathy and warm coolness of it.

  After a few weeks the dad is allowed back in the bedroom.

  He is smiling and clear-eyed. “That was terrible,” he says. “You were so angry. I tried to impress you by eating healthy.” He chuckles. “You were so angry!” He smiles and moves to her and hugs her.

  Weekends, the dad puts on swimming trunks, swims two or three laps, then gets distracted and goes, dripping, into the house, to find the poodles. He enforces direction and speed as the poodles are made to swim repeatedly from the deep end to the shallow end. He mock screams at them. The mom has the camcorder. She encourages Paul and Mattie to swim. After the poodles, the dad spends time—too much time, everyone agrees—with the long-handled scrubber, scrubbing at all the fey and faint patches of pool algae.

  For dinner the dad is made to eat a bowl of steamed vegetables. He has high cholesterol and is not allowed to eat shrimp or egg yolk. He sometimes complains, but is generally docile and obedient. “Poodles are natural water dogs,” he says. “In France, they live in the rivers. Caves of them. Lined up and ready. They ascend one by one. They bob skyward, like penguins. They paddle carefully, heads up, barking at a polite and tactful volume and timbre. People toss them food.” The dad chuckles. He has amused himself. “A river crammed with poodles,” he says. “Imagine that. Have salmon, then have poodles instead of salmon.” He falls asleep on the carpet by the television. He sleeps with his mouth open. His teeth are crooked in a lightly shuffled way and smell of hot summer weeds.

  Christmas, the mom has her camcorder. The poodles have their own presents. Neon flea collars, a rubber cheeseburger, a rubber foot! The Christmas tree is plastic and has, mysteriously, over the years, turned from a dark green to a bright and fiery orange. The dad is sheepish and aloof. He has never bought anyone a present. It is just something that he doesn’t do; something about his childhood. He doesn’t seem to understand. He is an inventor. He leaves the room for a moment. He comes back carrying a big gift-wrapped thing. He sets it on the ground. “Hurry,” he says. “Who’s it for?” says Paul. “You,” says the dad. Paul opens it. It is their two toy poodles. The poodles look around, then move carefully away. The dad almost falls to the carpet. He laughs a kind of laugh that none of them have heard before.

  Mattie goes to college in New York City, where she takes too many creative writing courses.

  She dislikes enjambment, symbolism, the Best American Poetry series. She writes indignantly, with a kind of whirlpooling impatience. Though sometimes she imagines that her hair is white and fluffy, and then she writes cutely, with many l’s, as if to a future granddaughter of hers—some mute and dreamy girl, in a future, enchantless world, without trees or sidewalks.

  In Mattie’s head, she critiques other people’s critiques of her work.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing here,” she says to classmates. “In college, I mean. Do you?”—here, she likes to lean in close—“Do you know?” One night, she steps off the curb into the street. There is a breeze and her hair sweeps across her face. The street is calm and quiet; there seem to be no other people around. She closes her eyes. A bus that is two buses, swingy and accordioned, comes at her. The bus does not honk. She very slowly opens and closes her eyes, and then crosses the street. She sometimes wonders if she died that night. She remembers the wind, the lightless blacktop, the phantom bus that does not honk.

  After college, Mattie stays in New York.

  Paul is now in Boston, for his own college education. “I used to walk home to my apartment thinking about crying,” he writes in email to Mattie—the mom has encouraged her children to email one another—“three in the morning. Carrying bags of groceries. Finally, I’d cry a little. It was a long walk. I’d put everything into the refrigerator including the plastic bags and go to sleep. In the morning, I’d eat four bowls of Frosted Flakes, go back to sleep. But that gradually stopped. That time of my life. Today, I am changed. Tolerance, life, it moves you to the center of things. How have you been?”

  “Then it kills you,” writes back Mattie. She likes Paul. They get each other. They do. “It moves you, then it kills you. It says, ‘Move here,’ then kills you. It puts its hands on your shoulders, moves you, kills you.”

  Once, they see each other. In Barnes and Noble by Union Square. Mattie sees Paul first, a passing glimpse, the recognition coming a few seconds later. She becomes confused—Paul should be in Boston—and, for a long while after, does not trust herself, feels vaguely that she has suffered some kind of cosmic accident. Is she in Boston? What does that mean? To be in Boston? Later, Paul sees Mattie as she is going down the escalator and he is going up. They seem to look each other in the face. Mattie has an abstract expression, and Paul thinks of screaming her name, but then thinks that that would be a bit ridiculous. Later, he thinks of just saying her name, at a normal volume. Of course, he thinks. They don’t ever mention this to each other and, over time, begin to doub
t that it happened.

  The dad is one day accused by the government of having released false and misleading press releases. It has to do with the company he has founded for his inventions.

  In the courtroom, the jury is working-class, weary, and stadium seated—to one side, like one of those multiple missile launchers. The dad’s lawyer has not had a good childhood, and now, in adulthood, is often depressed, shy, and nervous—nevertheless the dad trusts him.

  The government lawyer is daunting and loud.

  In low-security federal prison camp, the dad is productive and healthy. He makes many friends. The inmates are sanguine and witty; ninety-percent are in for drugs. They debate, cook, play poker and ping-pong, watch TV, work out, plan future criminal activity, make criminal connections, study law.

  The dad is to be there for seventy months.

  The mom visits twice a week. It is a two-hour drive. “Did you feed the dogs?” says the dad. “Dogs are people too.”

  They talk on the phone. “Don’t tattle,” says the mom. She has written down a list of things that the dad should not do. “Don’t complain, don’t spread rumors.” She goes to sleep very early now. Her dreams undergo change. They begin to occur nightly—fully formed, with beginnings, middles, and ends. They have subtle plotting and good dialogue.

  In the daytime, the mom walks around the house with a new excitement. In emails to her children, she expresses amazement at her own brain. She feels a bit powerful. “I dream every night,” she writes, “how about you?” In one dream, the family goes on a Bahamas cruise, has a great time. The mom swims in the dream, though she cannot swim in real life. At dinner in the dream, the mom glances across the hall, notices a girl who has very small teeth, goes over there, asks the girl to open her mouth, and wow! The girl has many layers of teeth—thousands! The mom tells her so, and everyone laughs.

  In the morning, the mom looks into and buys four cruise tickets, for when the dad is released from prison.

  She and the dogs, walking around the house, sometimes cross paths. They look at one another, make sure not to collide, and continue on to where they are going. Though sometimes the mom blocks the dogs, shunts them into corners—or follows them, at a distance. Mostly, the mom finds, the dogs just walk from one room to another, where they then lie down, sphinx style—a style they have recently taken to for some reason.

  Summer nights, when it is black and hot and humid outside, the mom gets a little confused. She gets a panicked feeling that the dad, Mattie, and Paul have all, a long time ago, run off with Scarlet Leysen. She forgets the names of the days of the week. She feels ageless and illusory. She is afraid that she will wake one night and find that her pillow is a dismembered torso, that she has murdered a person! She fears the poodles, that there are two against her one, fears the team of them, the ready conspiracy of them. One night, she hears noises. She turns on all the lights, moves quickly to the sofa, lies on her side, turns the TV to the Weather Channel—the least scary channel, she knows—and thinks hard about Mattie, Paul, and the dad, gets them all talking in her head, then calls softly for the poodles.

  In prison, the dad has obtained three patents, published eight papers—through collaboration with the mom—and begun to read Chuang Zhu, other Eastern Philosophers, and books on death. He writes to Mattie and Paul. “I am doing an aerobics class two times a week. I am in charge of a team of people. We dig up grass, plant grass, do things with grass. My daily routine is—” and it says his daily routine.

  The mom text messages Mattie, “Just saw a reporter blown away by wind on TV.” She emails Paul, “This morning I yelled ‘scumbag’ and the dogs came running from their rooms with eyes so big, anticipating, they must think scumbag is something delicious.”

  The apricot poodle is found to have diabetes. The mom is to inject her with insulin twice daily, which goes okay for a while, until one morning, when the apricot poodle is dead. The mom has been injecting her with air instead of insulin. She buries the dead poodle in the backyard. She carries around the other poodle—who can barely see anymore and sometimes walks into walls—the rest of that day and forgets to feed him.

  The prison doctor one day says that the dad’s kidney is engorged, but it turns out to be nothing.

  For a year, no one hears from Paul. Then they hear from Paul. He claims to have lived in Canada for some time. He has read a book called “Into The Wild,” in which a boy graduates college, donates his money to OXFAM, wanders the country alone, hitchhikes into Alaska, writes in his journal that happiness is only real when shared, and, wrapped in a sleeping bag, then, inside an abandoned bus, nearby a frozen river, dies. It’s a non-fiction book and Paul recommends it.

  The dad is released.

  The remaining poodle has begun to twitch. He has cataracts and his gums bleed. He stops eating. Mattie flies home. They broil a pork chop and set it in front of the poodle. The pork chop smells good. It is hot at first but quickly turns cold. The poodle looks at it but does not move.

  They all, except Paul, whose plane is delayed, bring the poodle to the pet hospital and have it put to sleep.

  Paul arrives in the night, by taxi. He has gained more weight. He looks generally less effective, as a person. He has a friend with him, Christine, who looks worried, and keeps touching her hair.

  The cruise is underbooked and overstaffed. It has the casually terminal feel of a nice retirement home—something of zoo-animal complacency and over-the-counter drug proliferation. The railings and walls are clean and shiny, but in an enforced and afflicted way that seems a little sarcastic.

  Still, the food is excellent and the passengers are all very happy.

  The staff is inspiriting and Filipino.

  At dinner, Christine sits alone at a table on the other side of the dining room. She insists on this, says because she isn’t part of the family. She eats slowly and carefully—in open view of the family’s table—with her face down, and worried. No one seems to know how or when she bought a ticket.

  The next day, there is a lunch buffet on the sun deck.

  “Let’s take five minutes before we eat to think about death,” says the dad. They are seated adjacent the pool, which is covered, for now, with a gleaming white tarp. “What it is. How to defeat it. Strategies, options. What are we dealing with? After, we’ll share.”

  The mom likes this about the dad. As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls. That same day, sitting on the monkeybars, she also had an idea for a movie—a mystery/horror movie. Someone would wake one morning and find that their pillow had been replaced with a dismembered torso!

  “Okay,” says the dad. He points at Christine. “You first.”

  “Death is a toad,” Christine says loudly. She makes a defeated face. “A toad … in outer space. It has a cape.” She opens her mouth. She seems stunned. “Besides the cape, it’s a normal toad.”

  The dad looks at the mom.

  “Death is the end of the dream,” says the mom. She blinks. She enunciates carefully. “When you wake up finally, you find that there was nothing real after all.” She brings her fruit punch to her mouth, looks down into it, and sips.

  “Death is the plural of deaf,” says Paul. “It’s when everything goes deaf.”

  “Oh,” says Christine. She stands up, sits back down.

  “Death is an emotion outside all the other emotions,” Mattie says, looking at Christine, who has a worried expression on her face. “A comet, blackblue, fast as ice.” She is quoting one of her poems. The next line is a non-sequitur, the men look two inches into my forehead, as are the next couple of lines, i ask for no receipt / but am given a receipt / forced to take it home / unfurl it / like a scroll / staple a wall to it. There are more lines, a rant on the bronze dirtiness of pennies. It is a long poem. Mattie
skips to the end. “Death is a highly polished thought.” She feels dazed and shy and occult.

  “Is that one of your poems?” says the mom. She smiles.

  Mattie nods carefully. There were more lines, actually, she now remembers, life is the sarcastic joke of death / and death is the sarcastic mouth that eats the ironic food / the organic water / the life that fills with teeth / the pecans you like, the nuts / the hardened brains of smaller animals. It just kept going, that poem.

  “Death is the end of the fear of death,” says the dad. “To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.”

  They arrive at port in the Bahamas. There are five other gigantic cruise ships. There is the sun-toned city of Nassau, with its conch divers, horse-drawn carriages, cool-black men and women—all in view, yards away—but the tourists are funneled onto a ferry and taken to some other island, where there is a buffet, a pavilion, a long, pragmatic beach, and an inner-tube hut.

  They sit facing the ocean. Christine sits straight-backed on the edge of a lounge chair. Mattie lies on an adjacent lounge chair. Paul and the dad are on the pier—there is a low, kid-sized pier—observing some fish. The mom is standing back, on a grassy area, drinking a tropical drink. She is thinking about in her dream, when she was swimming. It was here. Was it here?

  “Why are you worried?” Mattie asks Christine. “You seem worried, I mean.”

  “I’m …” Christine touches the back of her hand. “The sky … it begins immediately off of our skin. It goes forever, past the stars. Anything beyond can reach down, grab us, pull us off the planet.”

  “You’re just improvising, aren’t you?” says Mattie. “When you talk. Each moment, you’re just making up stuff. I mean, that’s what we all do, I guess. I’m not critiquing.” She looks at Christine. A lot of time seems to pass. “It’s okay, It’s good, I like what you say; the toad thing. I’m not attacking. No; not at all.”