by Tao Lin
* * *
—
The next night, Li’s dad entered Li’s room, opened Li’s third novel, and correctly pronounced “Xanax.” He’d read around a hundred pages of Li’s writing in the form of random selections. He was the CEO of two medical laser companies and the inventor of the flying-spot scanning laser technique for LASIK vision correction. He stood reading silently for a minute, then left.
Li was drafting an email to his mom, suggesting she switch from Levoxyl—the synthetic thyroid supplement she’d been on since her thyroidectomy in 2006, the same year she was diagnosed as prediabetic—to natural thyroid, like Hillary Clinton. Convincing her would be a long-term process, he anticipated with some dread.
Li disliked trying to change others. Since college, he’d derived inspiration from a passage in The Book of Disquiet on how people who are concerned about evil and injustice in the world should begin the campaign against those things at their nearest source—themselves—in a task that would take a lifetime.
But he felt differently with his parents, health-wise, because they seemed near dementia and other miserable problems. Li’s dad’s eye twitch, brain functioning, and weight seemed to be worsening. He often said he was carrying ten Dudus of extra weight. Li’s mom was chronically dizzy, tired, and unable to sleep. Her doctor wanted her to take diabetes drugs.
Yoga
Thirty tabs of LSD arrived on day thirty-five. “On first LSD in three weeks while healthier and emotionally stabler than maybe ever,” typed Li on his phone that afternoon, walking to his tenth day of yoga class, which he’d started in part as back-pain therapy. “Sensing new things that superimpose, giving the illusion of distorted perception,” he typed.
He’d been taking notes for his fourth novel, which he wanted to be autobiographical, like his other novels, for more than a year already. For a few months, he’d considered abandoning autobiography, but he liked its self-catalyzing properties too much—how it made life both life and literature, imbuing both with extra meaning.
At the beginning of the yoga class, Li blacked out during a backbend, returning in a kneel. None of the other students seemed to have noticed. Soon, yoga began to seem entirely mental. They weren’t bodies in a room on the eighth floor of a building; they were minds controlling bodies from outside space-time.
Li felt vaguely astonished as he seemed to leave even his mind, as if waking from a thirty-one-year dream. He sensed he was “reading” the life of an organism embedded deep in a history, then reentered the dream with what felt like a complex yet infailable shift of attention.
For mesmerizing minutes, sweating profusely, he seemed aware of only his pleasurable exertion, tirelessly trying harder than in any previous class, gliding in and out of poses in time to the class-patrolling teacher’s voice.
The teacher tightened Li’s yoga band to a degree that normally would’ve felt excruciating but currently just felt different. “Didn’t I just say, ‘[words Li didn’t understand]’?” she said.
Li focused on seeming normal. He noticed a student’s disgusted face and immediately felt it was about him. Was he unconsciously acting offensive or unseemly?
In child’s pose at the end of class, he synesthesiated perspiration as a crunchy, oceanic blare. Leaving the studio, he felt tranquil and a little absent.
Descending in the bright, mirrored elevator, he looked in his mouth to check on his blackening canine. He felt shocked by what he saw. All his teeth seemed porous with cavernous holes. How had he overlooked this?
Focusing on a dark spot atop the canine, he realized with vertiginous relief that it was a dragonfruit-seed fragment and that the other dark areas must also be seed pieces. He tried to fingernail the particle away, but it wouldn’t move.
He felt disappointed and frightened, realizing his teeth were hole-ridden. He recalled that Cure Tooth Decay said general health was determinable via teeth and gums. He began to accept that his teeth and maybe organs were rotting.
Walking home, he typed, “Feel renewed motivation to be healthier after seeing teeth on LSD.” Concrete reality faded in and out of partial transparency. Parts of his mind seemed to be drifting away in undirected exploration, taking the senses with them.
Keycarding open the gate to the ten-story building where his parents lived, Li began to feel like he was in a realistic, many-scened, calmly mystical novel in which he and his parents were sympathetic, amusing characters.
* * *
—
Deshoeing, Li sensed he was perceiving his mom anew due to LSD, which was much stronger after three weeks’ abstinence. She seemed disconcertingly “schizophrenic,” he thought as she asked him about yoga. She seemed less cohesive than he remembered, but also livelier, he acknowledged as she said, “It’s very good you’re doing yoga every day,” twice, the second time to Dudu in a nonsensically pedantic tone.
Li focused on walking to his room.
“Why’d you use that bag today?” said Li’s mom.
“Huh?” said Li, sounding comically oafish to himself.
“Don’t you usually use a green bag?”
“No,” said Li, entering his room. Putting his gray bag in his closet, he saw the green bag. Confident he’d never used it, he thought “schizophrenic” again, then thought “tetched,” a word he often thought about himself but had never said aloud or written.
In the bathroom, he touched the dark spot on his rotting canine with a dental pick. With a slightly sobering recognition that he was very high, he realized he’d already realized it was a seed fragment. His teeth weren’t full of holes.
Showering, he wondered if his mom was on drugs. Five months earlier, at his brother Mike’s apartment in Brooklyn, he’d seen Xanax by her bag and then later had emailed her asking if she remembered warning him against the drug years earlier, saying it caused brain and kidney damage. She’d replied, “I took it for a short time, a long time ago. I remember I emailed you once saying that Thin Uncle”—her brother—“said people should never take drugs for sleep. You were on a drug spree at the time and were angry because you thought I was trying to tell you not to take drugs. I was very scared every minute when you were on drugs. I was afraid your health would be damaged.”
Li had been addicted to amphetamines, benzodiazepines, and other pharmaceutical drugs for three years. He’d ended the increasingly life-threatening phase by isolating himself in his apartment in Manhattan, replacing pills and friends and most of culture with cannabis and books, and finding his new interests: history, nature, psychedelics, the imagination, his parents, and his body—six things he’d previously mostly ignored. When he got to Taiwan for his current ten-week visit, he’d been ensconced in stoned hermitude for fourteen months, during which he’d begun to view himself as recovering not just from pharmaceutical drugs but from nearly everything. Recovery—healing himself from the mental and physical effects of dominator society, which included himself—had become his main focus in life.
After showering, Li stood in the bathtub looking down. He could see his squished, lopsided heart beating against his chest’s dentlike depression. His body lurched a little with each beat. He studied the translucent, question-mark-shaped, inter-eye things drifting inconspicuously across his vision. From their motion, he briefly sensed the curve of his eyeball.
* * *
—
In the kitchen, he blended jalapeño, celery, ginger, and coconut water. He poured the drink into two cups. He handed his mom her cup, then quickly drank his portion, not realizing how bitter it was until his mom, coughing, said he might’ve made it too strong.
“I didn’t mean to make it this strong,” said Li, esophagus burning with a quickly fading spiciness. He laughed, then felt almost unbearably endeared by his mom’s laughter, which sounded uncharacteristically carefree and whole.
For a few startling moments he felt like they were adolescent or t
eenage friends, talking in a kitchen on a Friday night. They decided to go buy Li’s dad, who was in China for business, and whose old, run-down laptop had seemed near irrecoverable breakdown for years, a new computer for Christmas, which was in two weeks.
In Taipei Main Station, they walked past cosmetic-surgery ads. One showed giant, shiny, female faces. One showed a row of smiling doctors in white coats.
At the store, as his mom paid for a MacBook, Li stared at his palms, which kept undefinably and entrancingly shifting while seeming continually about to resolve into the normal, wallpaper-like appearance of human skin.
Dentists
On the first day of 2015, Li’s dad revealed he had a toothache. Li provided peppermint oil. It was his eighth week in Taiwan, and he still didn’t know if his parents had mercury fillings. He’d delayed asking due to having a backlog of health concerns to address—for himself, his parents, and Dudu—and because he dreaded the belligerent process of convincing his parents mercury was toxic if they did have fillings.
His procrastination ended as he realized he could find a dentist for both the ache and the mercury. He emailed his mom, asking if she and his dad had fillings. As he’d worriedly assumed since reading Cure Tooth Decay six weeks earlier, large amounts of mercury had been implanted in his parents’ teeth in Florida in the eighties and nineties.
Over four days, Li showed them a 60 Minutes exposé called “The Hazards of Mercury Fillings,” a video titled “SMOKING TEETH = POISON GAS,” and selected online articles, interspersed with his own emotion-muddled rhetoric, which became fear-based frustratingly often. He stressed he was telling them good, empowering, actionable news.
On a list titled “5 Holistic Dentists in Taipei,” he found the only dentist in Taiwan trained by Hal Huggins, who’d pioneered mercury replacement in Colorado in the seventies.
* * *
—
At the dentist’s office, Li’s dad browsed certificates on the walls. “The dentist is only forty-six,” he said, carrying Dudu. “Acupuncture,” he read.
Li saw the dentist in a hallway. They smiled at each other. She moved out of view, into a side room, seeming kind and gnomish.
Li sat by his mom, who was filling out forms. The dentist’s assistant, who seemed around Li’s age, asked Li’s mom if Li spoke Mandarin.
Li remembered high school, when many of his peers had treated him as if he were mute, telling one another that he didn’t speak.
“Why don’t you ask him?” said Li’s mom.
“I can, but not that good,” said Li, who spoke a crude, ungrammatical Mandarin-English mix with his parents, using the simplest words from each language, though they were fluent in English.
After getting X-rayed in a phone booth–like room, Li’s dad reclined in a dental chair. He asked the dentist if she used lasers.
She made a vague, inward noise.
“My son told me to read a book,” said Li’s dad, who’d read thirty pages of Cure Tooth Decay, which Li’s mom had read in its entirety. “It said modern dentists use lasers.”
“Your son should read more books,” said the dentist, organizing her tools.
“The book only mentions lasers a little,” said Li. “The book and I think like you do. My dad doesn’t believe you. I had to convince him and my mom. I believe you. They don’t. They do now but not before.”
The dentist laughed.
Li’s dad had nine fillings, two crowns, and three fake teeth. Eight months earlier, his dentist had replaced his three front teeth after two of them cracked when he bit into a chicken bone.
“Looks like you’ve been to your dentist too much,” said the dentist. “Hal Huggins said, ‘Never make friends with your dentist.’ ”
As the dentist cleaned Li’s dad’s teeth, Dudu sat on Li’s mom’s lap, though the assistant had said she should stay in her enclosed container, which had wheels and was mandatory on trains and buses.
“Why are poodles called guìbīn?” Li asked his mom.
“That’s just what they’re called here.”
“What does it mean?” said Li.
“ ‘VIP,’ ” said Li’s mom in English. “ ‘VIP’ or ‘honored guest.’ ”
“Hm,” said Li, smiling at Dudu, who’d switched that week from drinking Ensure, a toxic-seeming shake for elder humans that a vet had recommended years earlier, to drinking raw eggs.
Li’s dad’s foreign oral materials were photographed in a special room, and then Li’s mom told Li to distract his dad while she discussed payment with the dentist.
“Let’s go over here,” said Li, leading his dad to the reception area, grinning a little.
* * *
—
Minutes later, Li and his parents entered a small room, where the assistant opened a PowerPoint presentation, which said Li’s dad would need to get blood-tested before the procedure. Depending on the results, he might need to detox first, using supplements sold by the dentist. Li felt his parents’ suspicion toward the safety measure. The assistant skipped two pages.
Four pages later, Li asked about the skipped pages. The assistant scrolled back. The pages said patients should consume organic produce, naturally raised animals, and bone broth (which Li’s mom served nightly), and that lifetime abstinence from seafood was mandatory due to cumulative mercury contamination since the industrial revolution.
Dudu coughed and shifted on Li’s dad’s lap.
The assistant discussed crowns and bridges.
“Generally, most people—the masses—agree that you don’t need to get those replaced, right?” said Li’s dad.
“What?” said the assistant after a moment.
“Can you explain why those should be replaced?” said Li.
She said mouth metals made electrical currents that interfered with brain functioning.
“Does the dentist practice acupuncture?” said Li’s dad.
“That’s not relevant,” said the assistant.
“Is the dentist certified to practice acupuncture?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m a physics professor. I’ve taught at National Taiwan University. I can listen to you on teeth, but when you talk about electricity—no, I need to say something. Do I not make sense?”
“I didn’t make the presentation,” said the assistant, seeming bemused. “Do you want to talk to the dentist?”
The dentist appeared at the entrance to the room, which couldn’t nonawkwardly fit more people, and began arguing with Li’s dad, who asked how it was possible that poison had been implanted into millions of mouths. The dentist said toothpaste, mouthwash, fluoridated water, and root canals were just as unbelievable. They began talking over each other.
“I argue with him every day,” said Li, somewhat exaggerating.
“Many of my patients are like this before mercury removal, very negative,” said the dentist to Li, with “very negative” in English.
“Okay then,” said Li’s mom. “Let’s bicker at home. It’s embarrassing in public.”
As she paid for the visit with the assistant, Li’s dad called the dentist a liar, the dentist said other dentists had lied to Li’s dad, and Li said his dad needed to stop believing lies.
* * *
—
Outside, it was dusk. Forested mountains surrounded the city, which from its side streets could seem benign and serene. Looking closer at the mountains, one saw steel lattice towers, power lines, temples, homes.
“Now what are we going to do?” said Li as they walked toward the main street. He couldn’t stop thinking they’d “stormed out” of the ideal dentist for their needs. He and his dad berated each other. They got in a cab.
“We left halfway through the PowerPoint,” said Li from the front seat after not speaking for a while.
“No,” said Li’s mom.
“We finished it.”
“No,” said Li.
“No?”
“No. I was looking at the scroll bar. Dad started fighting with the dentist halfway through. It’s funny.”
* * *
—
Ten days later, at the office of the only other dentist on “5 Holistic Dentists in Taipei” whose phone number worked, Li’s mom filled out forms for the new dentist as Li’s dad criticized the first dentist’s teeth-cleaning price to the new dentist’s assistant.
“That’s really too expensive,” said the assistant. “Who is she?”
Li’s dad said she’d been trained in the States.
“So has our dentist. What’s this dentist’s name?”
“Don’t need to talk about her,” said Li, standing behind his parents. He’d run out of LSD again the previous day. He’d wanted to be on it all the time—life felt painful and bleak without it—and had quickly developed a tolerance, using around a tab a day in quarter-tab doses.
“It’s in the past,” said Li’s mom.
“So, how did you learn about mercury removal?” said the assistant.
Li’s mom said it was all Li.
“Oh,” said the assistant. “Are you…a dentist?”
“No,” said Li. “It’s because I read some books.”
As his dad got X-rayed again, Li looked at neon toothpaste and fluorescent mouthwash in a glass display, longing for the first dentist. They were lucky, he told himself, to have found another mercury-removing dentist.
He sat, opened Bugs, Bowels, and Behavior on his phone, and read about dysbiosis, a damaged microbiome, which most people had and which led to leaky gut and brain barriers, causing or worsening most-to-all modern diseases. He highlighted “If you suffer from the stomach flu, food poisoning, or other pathogenic illness related to the gut, how well can you function at work?”
