by Tao Lin
The first day of October, a group of her relatives flew down from Canada—six or seven grown-ups—and lived with her. She and LJ moved into the house across the street, but more relatives came, friends of relatives, and soon both houses were filled; the day before Halloween, then, they all flew back to Canada, the relatives, the friends—everyone—including, by force of association or by lack of anything else to do, LJ and her mom.
On Halloween Jed sat on the sofa feeling sorry for himself. He had made plans with LJ. They had not seen each other for a long time, and were to trick-or-treat together, and then stay overnight at Jed’s house.
Jed began, very quietly, to cry.
Jed’s dad had made squid suits for Jed and LJ—they were going to be children giant squid—and Jed, finally, put his on and fell asleep on the sofa, laid across his dad’s lap.
In the morning Jed’s lung collapsed. It was spontaneous, the nurses said, just happened sometimes—maybe because of stress—and was called pneumothorax, all of which sounded, to Jed’s dad, a little absurd, a little made up.
A week later, out of the hospital, Jed’s lung collapsed again. After that, it happened again. On the third time, they did surgery. Each time, also, they made a slit in Jed’s side, between two ribs, held down his body, and forced in a plastic tube, which was connected to a suction machine. The second time, the tube had a point at the end of it—a newer model—and they pushed it in too far, so that it almost pierced through to the other lung. After each chest-tube procedure, Jed would feel lucid, and invulnerable, almost, but also inappreciable, like something momentary and undetectable, and though he wouldn’t remember crying, his face would feel hot and wet and open-pored.
Nights, nurses came in with painkillers. Mornings, X-ray machines the size of refrigerators were wheeled in. Jed’s dad sat against the wall, straight-backed, below a gray-green window. He watched Jed. The entire time, he had made up going through his head, honed and impervious as something to be launched into orbit.
The third time the plastic tube was taken out, the doctor was athletic and did not sit down. He came in the night, cut the sutures, removed the tape. “This’ll feel a bit strange,” he said. “I’ll count to three.” Jed feared, as he did each time, that the tube might latch onto something on its way out, that his entire insides—his round and oily heart, his brain somehow—might be yanked out. The doctor said, “One—” then flung his arm back and jerked the tube out from Jed.
After that, everything became a lot less compelling. Things were generally more dispersed, a little vanquished-seeming. Birds flew higher in the air, sometimes flapping straight through to outer space. It was mid-December. Jed began to feel a sort of low-level buzz to his perception of things—a buzz, he felt, that meant he was alive and that everything was real, but just barely—a soft and cellular hum that moved him noticeably along.
LJ’s mom phoned Jed’s dad one night. She and LJ were back, had bought another house in the same neighborhood.
She invited Jed and his dad over, for Christmas Eve, which was a week away.
On Christmas Eve, Jed and his dad went to LJ’s mom’s new house. They built a sofa-cushion fort in the living room. There was a giant squid swimming pool float the size of a grown man on top of the TV. LJ’s mom had bought it for Jed. A Christmas tree was flashing from another room, lighting up the walls, dark and middleless and fugue’d as some unpeopled dance of the future.
Outside, it was black and silent, as most everyone, it seemed, had by now moved away.
In the living room, blankets and pillows covered the floor. They were all going to sleep there tonight. The TV was on, showing previews. They were to watch the movie Yi Yi, by Edward Yang, a favorite of LJ’s mom. She was in the kitchen, which was open to the living room. “Cream of broccoli and Swiss cheese,” she was saying. “Everyone will love this. It has the most beautiful color. I always thought it was like what you’d see if you were falling through the sky and went on your back. The wind going across, the trees reflected onto the clouds, all creamy and moving around. The sun glowing somewhere …”
Jed’s dad was in LJ’s room, moving LJ’s mattress out into the living room. He was taking his time. He was thinking that maybe he would begin, now, to long for some outlying aspect of LJ’s mom, to yearn gradually for her, to work towards a real kind of wanting, and finally, then, some day—some breezy February morning, years from now—look at her face or eyes or neck, at whatever would be the most her part of her, and try, with all of slight and glancing life, to love her wholly, truly, and knowingly.
Jed was inside the sofa-cushion fort and so was LJ. They were both ten now. Jed had on his squid suit and LJ had on bunny slippers. “I’d like to disappear one day,” LJ’s mom was saying, in the kitchen. She talked in a soft, uninflected way, like it was just to herself. “I get the feeling sometimes that I can do that. It’s like there’s some place I really want to go to, and I’m not sure where, but I can still go. I think I’d really like that. I’d sit down one afternoon. I’d say, ‘Okay now, Susan, time to go.’ Clasp my hands or something. Then I’d do it. I’d just be gone then. No one would know. I wouldn’t even know.” Jed and LJ were crawling through the fort, which tunneled around and over the sofa. Jed was anticipating the part where he’d go up, onto the sofa, then over, in a drop, to the carpet. LJ was listening to her bunny slippers shuffling behind her—like real bunnies, she was thinking, baby ones.
That night Jed woke up. He was on the floor, on blankets. He saw in the reflection of the TV that LJ’s mom was lying on the sofa, behind him. Her eyes were open. She lay on her side and looked very awake. She looked worried, Jed thought.
She shut her eyes tight and kept them scrunched like that—hard. Then she slowly opened them until they became very wide. She blinked a few times, but kept her eyes large and round, her face a face of surprise. Then she stopped that and looked worried again.
Jed watched her in the TV. He remembered something—his dad and LJ’s mom, one night in the front yard; she was on the grass, crying. He had forgotten. He thought of all the time since then—it seemed so long ago—and that LJ’s mom was still sad, even now. He pushed his blanket off his body and stood up. His dad and LJ were asleep on the floor. He looked at LJ’s mom. Outside, through the sliding glass door, the small, low moon was glowing bright and impressive, like something trying very hard—wanting, maybe, to be a real planet. “You can’t sleep?” Jed said. LJ’s mom was smiling at him. “Jed,” she whispered after a while. “Did you just say something?” She yawned and let her mouth go large and wide and her eyes get watery.
Jed watched that, then lay back down and pulled his blanket over his head, and closed his eyes. From somewhere far away, there was the tired, tortured noise of someone screaming, the human voice of it deadened and decentralized, but there—something of concern and procrastination, wretched and veering and through the throat. Jed felt very awake. His eyes beat lightly against his closed lids. They wouldn’t keep still, and as he concentrated on them, as he tried to stop their trembling, he began to feel that he was going to cry. He didn’t know why, but he was affected suddenly in this way. He was going to cry. But then he didn’t. He felt instead a bit out of breath, felt a kind of anxiety, a quickening, something hollow and neutral moving up through his chest. He felt excited, but in a rushed and terrible way. What he felt, it was less a feeling than a kind of knowledge; it was a subtle knowing, an almost knowing, that he was here—that he was once, and now, here—but that he would someday no longer be; and so here he was, then, leaving, all so fast and calm and without a fight, without a way to fight, but just this haze of departure, steady and always and all so like a dream, this leaving without having ever been there. It was as if he were already gone.
Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow
First week of February you began to suspect that, for the rest of your life, nothing might happen. This was one of those years. You mail-ordered a special mattress, and napped too much. In restaurants, people ordered
the icecream cake, shoved their hands under their thighs, and talked loudly about death. On TV, politicians began to snack from Ziploc bags, like a provocation. Almonds, raisins. Sour Patch Kids.
Things, you felt, had changed.
There was a new foreboding to the room in which you slept. There was the fear, now, that all your anxieties and disconsolations might keep on escalating and never stop. There was the theoretical chance that if you threw a banana at a wall the banana might go through the wall.
“Oh well,” Brian said. He had begun to order two coffees at once, two different flavors. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t care.”
His girlfriend Chrissy sat opposite him in a padded chair. They were in a coffee place and there was a table between them. This was Manhattan.
“The key to coffee is to not care anymore,” Brian said. “Tolerance and addiction are wrong. They’re just wrong. You drink one cup, two cups, ten. Whatever. You keep going. Maybe in the end you’re up to fifteen cups, but you always feel good, until you die.”
“You’re ignoring the financials of it,” Chrissy said. She had a muffin and an herbal tea side by side in front of her.
“No I’m not. It’s the same,” Brian said. “You keep going into debt, buying whatever. You owe a hundred million dollars. Finally you die.” He was feeling a bit nauseated today. “You can’t argue this,” he said.
“By going into debt,” Chrissy said. “You’re hurting other people.”
“Credit card people aren’t people,” Brian said. “They’re credit card people.”
Chrissy moved her muffin away from her herbal tea. “You think you’re so cool,” she said.
Was she being hostile? Brian couldn’t tell anymore. Their love had been spent. Brian had spent it. There had been a sale at the mall, and Brian had brought coupons. “Buy things; we’ll make her better,” the mall had said. Brian had looked around a bit carelessly, without focusing on any one thing, but just making a vague sweep of it all. “Well, okay,” he’d said.
“You think you’re so wise,” Chrissy said. “You think you know more about life than the Dalai Lama or whoever. You secretly think that.”
“What?” Brian said. “Stop it. I’m just saying things.” He scratched the back of his neck. He looked at the muffin on the table. He began to say something that took a long time to say, but he didn’t know what it was, and no one else heard anything of it. His mouth moved, but no sounds came out, which could sometimes happen—you could speak and no sounds would come out.
There was a rumor that year, that you might not be yourself. That you might actually be someone else. One of those people who refuse antidepressants, who can’t hold down a job, who ends up sleeping, finally, in a hole.
That might be you, was what the rumor said.
People talked. They said, “There’s this rumor.…” Then they pointed out something amusing that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted. Later on, though, in the mouthy dens of their bathrooms, they looked in their mirrors, and they just were not sure. Someone was there; but was it them? And so they believed. They said things like, “What does it even matter. I might not even be myself.” Then they threw themselves off a bridge, or else drank a quart of ice coffee and watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
One night, after sex, Brian had—instead of making the dash through the kitchen, to the bathroom—cleaned himself with paper towels, rolled over, and gone to sleep. Chrissy had shaken her head at that, had made an annoyed noise and then run through the kitchen and showered.
But soon after, she too began to use paper towels. And then when they ran out of paper towels, they started using toilet paper, and a couple of weeks after that they stopped having sex.
It had become, in too many ways, similar to going to the bathroom.
Now they hugged a lot but rarely kissed. They said things like, “Instead of saying ‘good night’ every night, let’s just assume that we want each other to have a good night. That way we don’t have to feel obligated to say it every night.” They looked into each other’s eyes, and they saw contact lenses—the seized UFOs of them, dumb and shunned as plates. They yawned. They yawned wantonly, without covering their mouths.
They were having a fight one morning in their kitchen, in Brooklyn. Chrissy had spilled orange juice on the floor and then tried to kick it under the refrigerator with her sandals. Brian had watched through the hinge-area of the bedroom door. Had then walked in asking Chrissy if she thought this was a farm. Had kept asking that.
“You’re like a cow,” Brian said. “Yeah you are. No, a boar. I mean a pig. You think this is a farm.”
“Brian,” Chrissy said. She tried to look languished and fading-away—something like a corpse sinking into a lake at night—but ended up looking trashy and depraved, like a hooker. “Hey,” she said. “You’ve never given me an orgasm.”
“What?” Brian said. “Listen to me. Same here.”
“What?”
“I never had an orgasm with you,” Brian said.
“You Brian—you idiot, I mean. I’ve seen evidence of it.”
“You believe everything you see? It’s my body and I’m telling you that I didn’t ever orgasm with you.” Brian turned and opened the refrigerator and stuck his head in.
“Fuck you,” Chrissy said. “Yeah you did.” At this point in their relationship, it was overridingly important to win all arguments. Things were somehow at stake. Chrissy picked up Brian’s shoes. “Look at me,” she said. “Hey. Come here.” She went to the window and opened it, held the shoes outside. Brian looked. His head had begun to hurt. “Admit it,” Chrissy said. “Or I’m dropping your shoes.”
“I don’t lie,” Brian said.
“I’m dropping your shoes.”
“Are you going to drop them,” Brian said. “Or just talk about dropping them?”
“No I’m not. I’m not that kind of person. What if I hit someone’s head? See, you don’t even know me.”
“You think you know you?” Brian said. “Chrissy, you might not even be yourself. Remember that homeless woman you wouldn’t give money to? Yeah, I saw that. Well you might be her. So fuck you.” He put his head back in the refrigerator, and grinned. Sometimes you had to be a little bit insane. You had to say, “Give me that. Let me do it.” You had to take things from the world and bend them and then put them back in the world, bent like that.
It had something to do with fear. You had to reverse things. Make the world afraid of you.
Chrissy moved home to the Midwest. They had lived previously in her apartment, paid for by her parents, and Brian now moved to Jersey City, which was the other Brooklyn.
He used his college degree and got a job at a magazine corporation.
There were rooms with desks and rooms with views, and they gave Brian a room with a desk. “All the rooms have desks,” they said. “It’s a joke. So keep your pants on. It’s all a joke. Everything. You, me, this room. This whole damn spinning-swaying, car-crashing world.”
That was the tone of the place.
Each morning, a girl named Jennika would enter Brian’s room with a list of tasks.
“Here’s your tasks for today, Brian,” she would say.
Brian soon developed a crush on Jennika. She had a face, had all the right angles. She was shy and intelligent. Or else conceited and slow. Still, they could be happy together, Brian guessed, if she were only willing.
“That’s a strange name,” Brian said one morning.
“Oh.” Jennika hesitated, then smiled. “Here are your tasks.”
“You usually say, ‘Here’s your tasks for today, Brian,’ ” Brian said. He sometimes had the feeling that he was doing something illegal, something that he might be incarcerated for; or else something illusory, something that produced results, but only in some other, parallel universe, something that, in this universe, just did not produce any results.
“I do. Yeah.” Jennika blushed. She turned t
o leave.
“Wait,” Brian said. “What does this company do exactly? What do we make?” He had been wondering. Had come to one conclusion that they were producing a magazine for robots—because robots, Brian knew, would one day conquer the world. Afterwards they would probably want to read magazines.
“We’re a magazine corporation,” Jennika said. A kind of gluey indecision began in her eyes, a slow and brainward strain—this sort of melancholy distortion. It made it seem like she was very uncomfortable being alive.
“Jennika is a good name.” Brian tried to keep his eyes very wide and friendly, but could feel that the rest of his face was changing. Maybe the strain was in his eyes and not Jennika’s. Moments like these, it was hard to distinguish between yourself and others.
Jennika started to say something. She stopped. Her face became a little grotesque, but she didn’t turn to leave. They looked at each other. There was a long silence. That kind of silence that keeps going, that you then resign yourself to—like taking a step, and your foot going down, going further, not touching floor, your face falling, your thoughts going, “The ground, where’s the ground, oh well, oh well …”
They didn’t talk to each other anymore after that.
After work, Brian would spend a lot of time—too much, he suspected—going around looking for a place to eat. It would often take up the entire night, like some kind of wan and moony quest, something shameful and cheaply existential. He would inevitably be unsatisfied, would regret not eating whatever other food—that eluding food of otherness.
