by Tao Lin
Maybe more people needed to go to the edges of society, and observe and think from there, looking out and in, for humans to survive long enough to reach the end of history, he thought while reading about a 2011 study on how 43 percent of U.S. children had one of twenty chronic conditions, including autism, asthma, and diabetes.
Li’s dad rinsed with antibiotic mouthwash. The dentist briefly looked in his mouth. The X-ray appeared on a screen. The dentist said everything foreign should be replaced with ceramic. He had a master’s degree in biomaterials from New York University.
Li’s mom asked if he could explain why it wasn’t good to have mercury fillings—a question Li had asked her to ask.
“You already know, or you wouldn’t be here,” said the dentist, seeming suddenly shy and vulnerable. “Right?”
It was “improper and unethical,” according to the American Dental Association, for dentists to extract fillings “for the alleged purpose of removing toxic substances.” Slowly, though, the dentist, who chaired the dental departments at two universities and was sixty-eight, began to answer. He’d seen a video showing that fillings fumed at normal mouth temperatures and that fuming increased with hot liquids, like soup or tea. He had friends with health problems—dizziness, headaches, amnesia, tremors—that had resolved after demercurization.
Li’s dad and the dentist left the exam room laughing and patting each other’s backs. “Go make back our money!” said the dentist, who knew someone who’d help Li’s dad sell dental lasers in China.
“They’re like old friends,” said Li’s mom, and Li smiled.
As Li’s mom paid, Li’s dad criticized the first dentist and praised the new one to Li in a giddy, seemingly gloating manner.
“The first dentist was better,” interrupted Li. “You ruined it.”
“Huh?” said Li’s dad, seeming confused.
“I’ll talk about it outside,” said Li, moving toward the elevators, regretting ruining his dad’s mood and marring the positive dental visit.
* * *
—
Outside, remorse dissolved, revealing self-pity and irritation. “Instead of thanking me you make me feel like I did something wrong by bringing you to the first dentist,” said Li.
“The first dentist was a scammer,” said Li’s dad.
“Without me you might have no teeth in five years,” said Li. “Your teeth were breaking apart!”
“I bit a chicken bone too hard,” said Li’s dad.
“No,” said Li. “You didn’t have enough minerals and vitamins.”
“We’re grateful for your attention and research,” said Li’s mom.
“I just want to help prevent future suffering,” said Li, and talked about Thin Uncle, whose hand had tremored conspicuously at a buffet earlier that week. Neither of Li’s mom’s brothers was thin or fat, but as a child Li had named the shorter one Thin Uncle and the other one Fat Uncle, and the names had endured.
They rushed aboard a packed train. “I’m going home alone,” said Li, glancing at his mom’s face, which looked anguished. He stepped off the train through closing doors.
Alone on the platform, he closed his eyes and told himself it was wise to self-isolate when upset. He was returning to New York in four days.
Barcelona
Back in his small Manhattan studio apartment—number 4K—after twenty hours of travel, Li smoked cannabis, thought about his parents, and cried. With his just-ended ten-week visit, he’d unknowingly entered an annual cycle of, roughly, winter in Taiwan and the other seasons in the United States. It was mid-January.
In early February, he began teaching a weekly craft class on the contemporary short story to MFA students at Sarah Lawrence College. He got too stoned before the first two classes and couldn’t stop laughing, but also taught well, he felt, invoking a vibrant, relatively unawkward environment. His students read about characters with generalized fear, relationship instability, and severe yet calm disillusionment. Li had taught the class once before, years earlier, when he often wished to die instantly, by comet or asteroid impact, while also fearing death—what if it just made things worse?
In 2015, he no longer wanted to die, but also wasn’t averse to dying, which he now feared mostly out of timidity and unreadiness instead of neurotic pessimism, because it had gotten increasingly plausible to him that death was a microcosmic history—a personal untethering from time-paired matter—meaning it might feel like reading a novel’s last sentence, as you involuntarily returned to the more daunting and consequential world of your life.
In late February, Li got an email from his mom that said, “The second dentist was not a good dentist at all. He did not cover Dad’s face or use an oxygen mask when removing Dad’s mercury. On the second visit, we asked him about safety. He got angry and shouted he would not continue to remove Dad’s mercury. He then recommended a third dentist, who did a great job. Dad’s mercury was sucked out today. Mercury-free at last.” She was next. Auntie and Thin Uncle had made appointments.
One night in March, walking to the train after class, Li saw a raccoon using a sidewalk. In 4K, he turned an eight-by-eight-inch paper ninety degrees thrice, seeing four iterations of an in-progress mandala. “Which one makes me feel the least lonely?” he thought with loneliness-reducing amusement and stimulation. He’d been drawing mandalas for fourteen months, transculturally occupying himself for up to ten hours a day, which had been good for recovery.
He remembered in middle school when, before an assembly in a gym, he showed a friend a rare Magic card he’d gotten called “Fork.” His friend had mock-strangled him. His mom had descended the bleachers and scolded the friend. Li had censured her for years, citing the event as overprotection. The way surprising memories arose while drawing made Li suspect he was always subconsciously reviewing his past, seeking details and scenes to insert into the thousands of stories directionalizing his life.
Around midnight, pain in his back and hip became suddenly excruciating. Supine with one leg bent, he played Civilization on his phone for two hours. The game began in 4000 BC, which was when textbooks said civilization began but seemed to be when dominator culture—in which the sexes were ranked with a bias that then, Riane Eisler argued, infected every relationship—emerged.
In the morning, unable to stand without holding on to furniture, Li felt familiarly defeated. His hip-and-back pain, which had gradually worsened since appearing in his early twenties, had always shifted and toggled in severity and location for mysterious reasons.
In April, Thin Uncle emailed, saying he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. “As you may know, there is no cure, all medication is only to try to reduce further degeneration. I have read various websites, as, however, I trust that you may provide more accurate information, I am seeking your help.” He and Li’s mom had studied English in college. Li gave dietary advice, and Thin Uncle said, “I have been much depressed, as if I would live in darkness with panic in the near future, but now I feel warm comfort.” Li forwarded his mom the emails and said they needed to regularly review what they’d learned or else, saturated in the opposite information, they’d forget, then forget they’d forgotten. “Uncle said you are his savior,” she replied.
In May, on the last day of class, Li gave his students wine. They discussed a Lydia Davis story in which an urban woman seemed to go quietly insane over months, feeling surprised one day when her omelet didn’t speak. They discussed a Lorrie Moore story about disenchantment and read an interview with Moore from which Li learned that the last nine words of her story, which he’d read around ten times since college, were literal, not metaphorical—“she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.”
In June and July, Li expanded his notes on his recent Taiwan visit into a hundred pages of a novel, which he sent to his editor along with a pitch for a nonfiction book on psychedelics. They decided to try to combine the two b
ooks into one. Li updated his pitch and sample pages, and his editor said it wasn’t working because it seemed like a collected works.
Li agreed, then made a third pitch that included even more of his works—mandalas, lists, an essay on riding a universe-riding body. His editor said it still wasn’t working. Li reseparated the book into two books, as in the first pitch—two flimsy, inchoate books. He lacked the motivation to write the nonfiction and the material to finish the novel.
A week later, he left space and maybe time for five minutes by inhaling vaporized DMT in 4K. It was the furthest he’d gotten from culture—the deepest into the mystery. When he returned, he was terrified for hours, believing his friend who’d brought the DMT worked for the CIA. He posted an account of the experience on his website.
“How is DMT beneficial to humans?” his mom emailed him, seeming worried, and Li replied he’d think about it. Four years later, when he still hadn’t answered her question, he’d decide to put the answer in his novel’s last chapter.
* * *
—
In September, three weeks after smoking DMT, Li flew to Barcelona for a four-day vacation with his parents, who were there for an eye conference. He swallowed two cannabis capsules, fell asleep in a hotel room, and woke to his parents entering with luggage of unsold lasers.
Hugging his mom, Li felt abstract and surreal. Something seemed different about her face.
“This is very not good,” said Li in the bathroom about Crest toothpaste.
“I know,” said Li’s mom. “It’s Dad’s.”
“It’s much worse to use Crest than water,” said Li.
“Water is better?” murmured Li’s dad.
Seated at a restaurant, Li thought, “Fuck it,” about trying to improve his parents’ health. He would stop pestering them with unfortunate information and just be their friend, like before he read Cure Tooth Decay. He felt conflictedly relieved. Cannabis was lifting him out of the bomb-shelter-like place where he normally existed, carrying him eerily away, into mental wilderness. He stopped wanting to give up.
His mom’s eyebrows seemed higher on her forehead than he’d ever seen them. He told himself to consider what to say and say it later, like maybe the next day.
“Between your eye and eyebrow looks different,” he said a minute later. “Did you do something to it?” Drafting this scene years later, he’d realize he hadn’t noted and didn’t remember his mom’s verbal response. She held her balled fists in front of her cheeks, as if trying to hide.
“What do you think?” Li asked his dad.
Li’s dad said he opposed the surgery. He’d learned of it when he returned from China and saw Li’s mom in bed with a bandaged face.
“She’s gotten surgery before,” said Li’s dad.
“No,” said Li’s mom, seemingly automatically.
“When?” said Li.
“When you were in college,” said Li’s dad.
“He knows about that time,” said Li’s mom, who’d read a story Li had published online in 2006 in which a character suspected his mom had gotten face surgery.
“Now I can’t tell as much what you feel by looking at your face,” said Li, worried about what was happening. His flustered mom seemed helpless and under attack, and he didn’t seem to be helping.
“I’ve felt pressure from you,” said Li’s mom to Li’s dad, who said, “I’ve said you could gain some weight. I haven’t said to do anything to your face.”
“Have other people said anything?” said Li.
“People have told me I look tired,” said Li’s mom.
“I feel you look very energetic and alert,” said Li, and smiled.
“Really?” said Li’s mom, smiling a little.
“Yes. Your eyes look very wide, like you’re surprised.”
“Is that good or not good?” said Li’s mom.
“I don’t know,” said Li, looking away to hide a large grin, relieved and happy to have begun to feel playful and compassionate and friendly, instead of just gloomy and distressed. “I feel it’s good. You seem like you’re paying a lot of attention.”
“Really?” said Li’s mom.
“Really,” said Li.
After their food arrived, Li’s mom said she’d told Auntie she was getting surgery, but hadn’t said what for, and that Thin Uncle had learned afterward; the three siblings met for coffee most days.
“What did they say?” said Li.
“Nothing,” said Li’s mom.
“They didn’t say anything?”
“They said, ‘Ng.’ ”
“Ng,” said Li, and looked down at salmon on his plate. Eating it with a fork, he felt emotional, imagining his mom secretly getting surgery. He privately thanked cannabis, without which he might not have mentioned anything until after the vacation, by email.
* * *
—
After dinner, walking on La Rambla, a wide pedestrian street, Li felt calm and positive and energetic. His back pain, which he’d told his parents was gone—cured by nutrition, yoga, posture control, and rarely sitting—felt more stimulating than bothersome.
“How old do you two think you’ll live until?” he said.
“Eighty-five,” said Li’s dad.
“Don’t know,” said Li’s mom. “What about you?”
“Don’t know,” said Li, who’d reestimated when he’d die from fifty to sixty or seventy due mainly to diet. He’d been confused about what to eat for optimal health, changing in his twenties from vegetarian to vegan to raw vegan, until reading about aboriginal diets in Cure Tooth Decay, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and other books.
Li’s dad approached an international chain ice-cream store. Li said their ice cream, which he’d eaten from 2010 to 2013, was a little healthier than most ice cream.
“Then let him,” said Li’s mom. Until that year, she and Li had merrily encouraged Li’s dad to eat anything, thinking he was protected by statins.
“Wait outside,” said Li to his dad.
In the store, Li and his mom stood in line.
“Get Dad something with nuts,” said Li’s mom.
“He said chocolate and the red one,” said Li.
“Dad likes nuts. Get him nuts.”
“I should get what he said,” said Li.
“Okay.” Li’s mom went outside.
Li tried to invisibly spy on his parents by mentally examining the patch of his peripheral vision in which they moved in and out of view outside the glass storefront. His playful attempt at new behavior made the wispy edges of his consciousness creep into other worlds. He felt nearer “the mystery,” a term referring to the empirical evidence that things existed outside culture—electrons, stars, trees, birds, minds—that couldn’t be explained, in terms of who made them, why, and how.
When Li first heard of the mystery from McKenna two years earlier, it had seemed poetic. Gradually, he’d realized it was literal but hard to understand from inside dominator society, which over six millennia had barricaded itself from the mystery’s two known forms (nature and the imagination) with a radially growing wall of truth-costumed lies. Dissolving the interposition daily with solitude, books, and cannabis, he’d regularly, if tenuously, sensed the mystery as a humbling, friendly, joinable presence.
In bed in the hotel, he thought about his mom’s first face surgery, twelve years earlier. She’d been alone in a large house in Florida with two elderly toy poodles, Binky and Tabby. Li had been at college; Mike at grad school; their dad in prison. She’d endured, holding together the loose, estranged family—in which the others seemed to naturally drift apart from one another—with calls, letters, emails, prison visits.
Was she in a crisis again? Li didn’t seem to know. He told himself to compliment her eyes more, so she wouldn’t think the surgeon had botched it, which could l
ead to more surgery and spiraling despair.
* * *
—
Minutes after waking in the morning, Li began talking to his mom about her face. He reminded her she’d always said to avoid surgery. She said she wouldn’t do it again. She called Li “guāi,” which meant “obedient and well-behaved,” for noticing and mentioning the change.
At Aquarium Barcelona that afternoon, Li’s torso began to feel heavy and sandbaggish. As his dad walked around photographing fish, Li and his mom sat and talked, affirming, as they often did, that they should learn from his dad in terms of being able to do anything with childlike enjoyment, make friends with seemingly anyone, fall asleep whenever, and (except when doing business) not worry.
Later, in a cathedral, Li asked his mom when she’d brought him to church. She said when he was nine or ten. Parents of kids at Chinese school, which he’d attended weekly for two years, had recommended it. They’d gone twice. Li remembered believing in God while there. Seated “Indian style” with around twenty kids, taking orders from a man on a stage, he’d closed his eyes, told himself he believed in God, and asked God and/or Jesus to forgive him for his sins.
Growing up in Florida, reciting “one nation under God” daily at school, seeing God promoted on money, stickers, billboards, and signs, hearing everyone constantly thanking and/or cursing God, he hadn’t realized that God was just one deity out of millions. He’d stayed somewhat confused through his twenties about God, Jesus, Christianity, and the origins of the world. Did things somehow begin at AD 0?
He’d finally gotten less confused by reading Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. God was Yahweh, a god who’d emerged at a time (1500 BC) and in a place (the Near East) where a preexisting supreme deity had already, for five-plus millennia, been “revered as Goddess—much as people think of God,” wrote Stone, who argued that the pagans whom Yahweh targeted when he said, “Destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves” had been Goddess worshippers.
