by Tao Lin
* * *
—
An hour later, Mike seemed rushed and bored, driving the family through Willow Run and Stonehurst, the subdivisions where they’d lived from 1988 to 2007.
They passed a pizza restaurant where Li in eleventh grade had seen a commercial promoting a drug for social anxiety disorder. He’d been there with the marching band (he played snare drum) after a football game. An extroverted trumpet player, looking around a large table, had said, “That’s what happens to people with social anxiety disorder—the room literally spins. It’s SAD. Really. That’s what it’s called.” Terrified that someone would notice he had social anxiety and confront him about it—the worst thing, it had seemed for years, that could happen—Li had experienced a kind of negative DMT trip, receding into catatonic mortification. The room had almost vanished in darkness. The people too.
At a red light, Mike told Li to call Wekiwa Springs—being commanding again, Li felt. The state park was closed. Mike said he’d told Alan, who was asleep in his child seat, they’d go canoeing.
“Let’s go buy fish at Cocoa Beach,” said Mike and Li’s dad.
“Why would we go to the beach to buy fish?” said Mike in an exasperated, agitated tone, as if his dad had suggested attending a Ku Klux Klan rally.
Li recognized the tone from when Mike had said, “We aren’t going to Whole Foods,” and realized he’d inaccurately thought Mike had used it specifically on him.
Calmed by the realization, Li remembered he’d used the same tone on their parents for most of his life, that he still struggled to avoid it, and that it was the tone their parents usually used on each other.
* * *
—
At the DMV, Li sat by his mom, who wanted to renew her driver’s license, and said, “I’m not going on vacation with Brother anymore. Not until he changes.”
“People don’t change,” said Li’s mom.
“I did,” said Li. “I am.”
“You’re completely different, more at ease, like when you were small. You even smile and laugh now.”
“It’s because I’m healthier and stopped drugs and am more positive now,” said Li, not mentioning the main reason, he felt, for the personality change—being on cannabis or LSD half the time while with his parents the past two years.
“I know,” said Li’s mom. “It’s very good.”
“I’ve also been talking more because I’ve been writing about you and Dad more.”
“You’re much more open now,” said Li’s mom.
“I’m still changing. It takes years to change. I still get upset.”
“Everyone gets upset.”
“I don’t want to,” said Li.
“There’s a Chinese saying—it’s easier to change a dynasty than a personality.”
Year of Pain
Hands
Li returned to Taiwan on December 5, 2015, a month after the Florida trip, with six tabs of LSD and forty-four capsules of baked cannabis. He was back for an eleven-week visit because he liked being out of New York City, which he associated with bleakness and his pharmaceutical drug phase, and because living with his parents felt slightly surreal in a way that was satisfying for both his life and his novel.
“So now you’ll visit every year,” said Li’s mom. “You’ll add a week every year.”
“I don’t know,” said Li, feeling defensive. “We’ll see.”
On day three, he saw the movie Irrational Man, then deep-breathed in a crowded plaza while waiting for his parents, who were in a Frankenstein movie. He’d been habitually doing improvised breathwork to strengthen his chest and lungs—breathing to internal counting, breath-holding during various activities—which had led to regular YGs.
“Du,” said Li’s mom. “Li. Have you been waiting long?”
“I just was right here,” said Li in a distracted slur, returning to a tenuous-seeming reality after briefly losing visual input.
“Your movie just ended?” said Li’s mom.
“Yes,” said Li after a long-feeling pause.
“Did you like it?” said Li’s mom.
“Yes,” said Li, and began to walk. Vehicles, people, colors, and lights wobbled and vibrated along a stable axis, as if they could be turned off to reveal something else.
Li’s dad couldn’t remember Irrational Man, which he’d seen the previous week, even after Li said it was about an unhappy professor who murders a judge with poisoned orange juice.
Li wondered if his mom, who seemed quiet, had noticed his strokelike drawl or general confusion. “Now we’re going to the piano store?” he said.
“Right,” said Li’s mom. “We’re taking the train. We’ll browse today, research at home, and go back another day.”
“We should just buy today,” said Li.
Li’s mom said they should rent.
“Rent,” said Li, troublingly upset.
“You’re here only three months,” said his mom.
“You two are so greedy,” said Li, whose parents often accused each other and themselves, and sometimes Li, of greed.
They descended stairs into the station.
“Then we’ll just not get a piano,” said Li.
“Don’t be like that,” said his mom.
“I’ll go myself, then,” said Li.
“We’ll go together,” said his mom.
“Let’s go tomorrow,” said Li, realizing he was being like Alan when Alan had cried in a stroller at the Magic Kingdom. Instead of tears, he was crying dejected sentences.
“We should go today,” said his mom.
“Okay,” said Li with a softening expression. “Renting is better. I wasn’t thinking before. I thought we were buying, so when the plan changed I felt not good.”
On the train, he apologized for calling his parents greedy. He emailed himself, “Parents seem taken aback by my outburst, and I also feel taken aback. If I saw Mike doing what I did, I would view him as very grumpy and bad.”
They bought an electric piano, then Li’s dad left to buy batteries. His frequent battery trips and Li’s mom’s frequent trips to the bank reminded Li of the protagonist of American Psycho recurrently lying, “I have to return some videotapes.” He’d imagined his parents secretly eating, gambling, having affairs, seeing doctors.
Back in the station, Li flung his palm-up arm around like a tentacle. “Dad used to do this more,” he said. “He does it less now.”
“You’ve noticed that?” said Li’s mom.
“In the past, his whole arm would seem numb after movies.”
“So you’re really good at observing,” said Li’s mom.
“So the fish oil and other things really help,” said Li.
“Of course,” said Li’s mom.
An electronic, jazz-inflected, dreamy variation of the first four bars of Chopin’s second nocturne, written in 1830, played in the station, signaling the train’s arrival.
On the train, Li held his breath and pulled in his stomach, unintentionally cultivating a YG.
Disembarking in an underground station, he felt himself leaving his body. He could still function in physical reality, he noticed with interest as he calmly joined an escalator queue. He seemed fully gone for a moment.
Returning, his first sensation was a strong urge to hold his mom’s hand, which he hadn’t done since he was maybe ten. As his hand glided toward hers to gently clasp it, memory and identity returned. Startled, he pulled his hand back to his side.
Bunun
Li was relatively calm from days four to seventeen, getting significantly upset only twice—when his mom said his favorite grocery store’s frozen organic chicken looked “scary,” and when he said her Neutrogena hand cream smelled toxic and she called him oversensitive.
Dehoarding some of his dad’s cardboard boxes one day, h
e found sheet music from his childhood and inaccurately played Chopin’s second nocturne. Stoned in yoga class for the first time, he felt like a complex rubber band, gently stretching itself. Alone in a park on LSD one night, he emailed himself, “Tell parents not to worry if they start tremoring or have dementia, it can be helped with diet.”
For a day and a half, he fantasized about writing a thousand-page novel based on his growing notes, which had gone from irregular to daily to almost hourly, but otherwise he didn’t think about his novel. He’d decided to write the nonfiction book on psychedelics first, and had been working on it inconsistently. Without a contract, he was somewhat losing interest in both books.
* * *
—
On day eighteen, Li and his parents rode a train and a cab to a B & B on a mountain in southeast Taiwan. The B & B was owned by an elder man with a large garden and three rental apartments. In his office, a TV and three computers showed stock prices. Li’s dad said, “Farm in day, stock at night,” and Li’s mom laughed.
Walking in the garden at dusk, Li tried to hide a nosebleed. His mom noticed and said he should see a doctor if he kept bleeding. Li reminded her that Dr. Chan, their family doctor in Florida, had scalded the inside of his right nostril when he was twelve with hot metal in a dubious procedure that had led to even more nosebleeds.
As a child, his nose had bled near-daily for years. He’d stood aside, clamping his nostrils with tissue paper or a paper towel, as others played. After each nosebleed, reassuringly coagulated globs of blood had oozed into his mouth and throat, private evidence of survival. Nosebleeds had seemed potentially deadly: Dr. Chan had mentioned fatal blood loss. Bleeding had gradually decreased since ninth grade, except during his drug phase, when he’d snorted cocaine and heroin.
Li and his parents ate at a buffet with twenty-two types of greens. They drank a grass-jelly beverage on a moonlit patio. Dudu quarterheartedly chased lizards, staying closely aware of Li’s dad, her favorite person. If he vanished, she’d run to increasingly distant spots with anxious energy, standing briefly in each with darting eyes, emitting squeaky whimpers.
At the B & B that night, only Li’s dad slept well. Li slept for two or three hours, waking repeatedly to his dad’s snores and Dudu’s growls. Li’s mom didn’t sleep, which wasn’t especially unusual.
* * *
—
In the morning, they rode a cab to a place where they biked to a tree that had been in a famous commercial for a Taiwanese airline. Standing under the tree, Li felt emotional, seeing his mom zoom in and out of her face on photos on her phone.
They cabbed up a mountain to an aboriginal village, where they watched a show with dancing and polyphonic singing. The show’s MC joked that they, Taiwan’s fourth-largest indigenous group, were called Bunun, which meant “person” but sounded in Mandarin like “cannot,” because they were incompetent.
Li felt amused but showed no reaction because his midsection had begun to feel bulky and viscous, as if turning into marble. After the show, browsing the village’s store, he walked at half speed to hide the change from his parents.
In a cab, Li’s mom said Li could live with the Bunun for two months—teaching English, learning Bunun, practicing Mandarin. Li said he’d like that.
* * *
—
Back at the B & B, he lay in pain on a hard bench, feeling worried, then returned to his and his parents’ room and saw his mom using SK-II, a brand of noxious cosmetic he thought he’d convinced her to discontinue the previous year. In the bathroom, he found statins, more SK-II products, and a package of teal capsules.
On the MacBook he and his mom had gotten for his dad the previous year but that his mom used because his dad disliked Apple products, Li learned the capsules were Nexium, a proton-pump inhibitor that his mom said Thin Uncle had recommended. It was the fourth-best-selling drug in the United States. The second-best seller was Li’s dad’s brand of statin, which he said his doctor had made him keep taking. First was a brand of the synthetic thyroid compound Li’s mom was still on. Researching statins for the fifth or sixth time in a year, Li slammed the computer on the wood floor.
On the undamaged computer, seated together on a bed, he led his parents on a ninety-minute multimedia research session, guiding them through dystopian data on drugs and corporations. He stressed he was showing them helpful, potentially brain-damage-reducing information. They gave sustained attention—hard to get from his dad on health. The night began to feel productive and intimate.
In the morning, Li helped the B & B owner plant mango seedlings, moving through pain to not seem lazy or disinterested. The B & B owner invited Li to live with him for a month to learn organic farming.
* * *
—
On the train back to Taipei, seated in his own row, Li rested facedown on a tray table. Facedown on arms was probably his commonest sitting position so far in life. He liked its socially acceptable, portable, free privacy. His face, leaking tears and mucus, felt like the low sky of a muggy, cramped world. Inflammation made him emotional.
It was Christmas Eve. Li wondered if his pain had worsened again that day due to sitting in damaging positions the previous night while upset. Pain had returned hard despite his varied efforts, which now included sleeping on the floor, daily inverting and stretching, and the Gokhale Method—aborigine-based techniques for posture and movement he’d begun doing from a book.
At around one a.m., on an inversion table he’d ordered and had sent to Taiwan, he felt sudden, paralyzing pain in his sacrum, as if something had cracked. Holding himself very still, he felt self-conscious disbelief. He dimly remembered feeling similarly confused in high school when his chest would suddenly hurt, indicating his lung had collapsed.
He gingerly dismounted the table and shuffled slowly through the dark apartment, quiet enough to not elicit barks or growls from Dudu, who was in his sleeping parents’ bed.
Wincing and sweating, he lowered himself to his bed—blankets on the wood floor. When his heart stopped pounding, he began to test the pain with tiny, coaxing movements, trying to learn about it.
Hospital
In 2001, when Li was a senior in high school in Florida, his right lung collapsed three times. The first time, he was in his room above a three-car garage. He went downstairs and told his mom his chest hurt. She said to lie down. He returned to his room.
At the hospital, a nurse said he had a “lung scrape,” which happened after colds. Li hadn’t had a cold. Flu? No. A nurse listened to his breath with a stethoscope and walked away. A third nurse approached and said Li had pneumothorax—a spontaneously collapsed lung—and would need a chest tube.
Li was wheeled behind curtains. He asked if anyone had done the chest-tube procedure before. A nurse had seen it done once, but no one had done it before. Li’s mom was told not to watch. The tube’s position needed to be gauged by pain, so only local anesthesia, for slitting Li’s side, would be used.
A nurse asked Li if “a few” interns could watch. He said yes, thinking the nurses would be more careful if watched. A nurse arrived with a plastic-wrapped package that seemed bought from Walmart. Inside was a sharp-tipped tube that looked stiff and thick as a garden hose and was attached to a suction machine.
Li was surprised this was the solution. He lifted his head. Past seven or eight interns and a half-closed curtain, his seated mom was weeping. He focused away from the scalpel, toward a nurse holding his left hand, and felt a searing, raking pain. The tube had to be shoved in gradually.
After, Li’s mom entered with a wet face, as if her pores had opened like tiny faucets. Li had never seen her like that. She held his hand. Li’s own wet face felt peaceful and warm and alert. Normally he looked and felt troubled, aggrieved, or tensely self-conscious.
That night, the tube seemed to expand in his chest as he lay in a hospital bed on intravenous painkille
rs. He propped his body with pillows in slight variations, hoping to reduce the severe pain. Over hours, he found a bearable position, but then the pain returned. He tried to show no reaction because his mom was seated by him.
After a while, he said he needed more painkillers. His mom left the room. A nurse entered with two needles and injected both into Li’s IV. The pain didn’t decrease, so the nurse brought pills. The suction machine gurgled, filling with frothy, bloody fluid.
For a week, Li lay in bed, eating, sleeping, watching TV, and listening to his CDs, most of which were by punk bands who criticized corporations, governments, inequality, and war while promoting creativity and nature.
The day the tube was supposed to be removed, Li and his mom learned their doctor, whom they’d met once, was in Hawaii.
The doctor appeared three days later, said he’d pull out the tube on the count of three, yanked it out on “one,” and tossed a large jumble of tubing, stitches, tape, and suction machine into an uncovered trash can.
Li walked out of the room, aware that he didn’t feel any happier.
* * *
—
At home in their large, sunny house, Li stood at the doorway to his parents’ bedroom, or a few feet inside, two to four times a week, blaming his mom for his unhappiness as she lay in bed trying to sleep. She’d spoiled him too much, he said, parroting his brother, who was at grad school, and his dad, who was rarely home that year.
Sometimes Li stressed it wasn’t her fault, that he knew she loved him and only did things for his benefit. Sometimes she seemed afraid of what they’d become. Sometimes she apologized—usually with sarcasm but also, a few times, while crying and seeming devastated—for being a bad mother.
Sometimes as Li tried to involve her in his tortured reasoning (she could fix him, he felt, by disciplining and punishing him) she became unresponsive with closed eyes, supine with the blanket up to her neck, and Li, usually already crying, would get louder.
