Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  He read a nonfiction poem by Starr Goode in which Goode visited Marija Gimbutas at her home in the Santa Monica Mountains and asked, “What were they, our ancestors?” and Gimbutas said, “They were like us, only happy.”

  Rereading his notes, he realized, not for the first time, that a problem with only noting happy times was that it would always seem like he used to be happier. He was more prone to dwelling on sadness and conflict, making life seem somewhat nightmarish, which had been comforting in his previous worldview, in which despair and confusion were romanticized and so could be amusing and affirming, but was an error, he felt, in his new worldview, in which his goal, in terms of his memory, notes, nonfiction, and model of history, seemed to be to maximize accuracy, while in his novel he seemed to want, not counting its nonfiction parts, to strive for a kind of dream accuracy.

  Besides improving mood, dreams rehearsed coping strategies, reviewed new learning and experiences, and maintained and updated one’s identity, he’d read. The mind’s main technique in dreams, which grew longer and weirder and more complicated each night over an average of four narratives, seemed to be to make connections. It seemed to save the strangest connections for last, easing into them so that they did not startle the person awake and interrupt the process.

  * * *

  —

  Late in June, Li had his first social interaction in nineteen days, walking to the East River with Kay. Notices had appeared in their building from their super that said, “Please refrain from urinating in the stairway, it is very dangerous,” but neither of them had noticed urine.

  They discussed their parents. Kay’s mom’s last cat had died. Kay’s parents had divorced in 2005. Her dad had returned to Japan. Li said his mom had been doing well since switching to natural thyroid, and that he’d noticed from photos that his dad seemed to have visibly aged in the past two and a half years (whiter hair, wrinklier face, droopier eyelids), maybe due to mercury contamination from the second dentist’s interrupted removal, but he seemed younger in other ways—stoned laughter, hiking energy.

  They discussed a study in The Twenty-Four Hour Mind on people with post-divorce clinical depression who didn’t get treatment. The dreams of those who didn’t recover after five months were brief and simple; the dreams of those who recovered had complex plots, many different scenes and emotions, and a blending of images from past, present, and future.

  “I like viewing dreams as healing,” said Kay. “It seems new and good.”

  “I like how, this way, I can just enjoy my dreams instead of analyzing them.”

  “I like what it’s doing to my brain,” said Kay.

  “Imagination-bathing,” thought Li in bed that night. Maybe spending time in the imagination—dreaming, wondering, remembering, reading, making art—was inherently healing, like being in forests and other natural environments.

  * * *

  —

  Three weeks later, they walked and talked again. Rain forest destruction was in the news. Li explained McKenna’s view of history as a natural, inevitable process—the culmination of billions of years of acceleratingly increasing complexity—which like childbirth was painful but purposeful.

  “So he’s not saying all the destruction is bad,” said Kay.

  “No. That was what I first liked about him. He seems positive in a convincing way.”

  Kay wondered if history had to be fast. Maybe it was fraught due to speed. Li resisted the idea, thinking he’d explained history wrong, before remembering that, though their history was violent, chaotic, amnesic, and rushed, there were probably species on other planets who were wending slowly and safely toward discarnation.

  Kay asked Li how he’d been preparing to move. Li said he’d been working on his divorce. He’d triplicately printed fifteen forms, notarized twelve, mailed eleven to his wife with an SASE, gotten them back, and was turning them in soon.

  Li learned Kay was also divorcing. She’d met her husband in 2004 in Brooklyn, moved to London and married in 2010, and moved to Manhattan alone two years earlier in 2015.

  * * *

  —

  At city hall the next day, Li learned double-sided forms were verboten. He had to redo the forms and remail them to his wife to sign again, but he couldn’t notarize forms without his passport, which he’d lost in May, or his ID card, which had been missing for a decade, and he couldn’t get either without his birth certificate, which was in Taiwan.

  He emailed his mom about the certificate. In another email, he said he was almost out of money—the movie money was gone—and asked if she’d financially support him while he worked on his novel and until he got paid again the next year, when his nonfiction book would be published. As expected, she said yes.

  Li’s parents had paid for his undergrad tuition, but he’d otherwise refused their money until then. Now that he had meaningful-seeming tasks—recovery, his two books, caring for his parents—he was glad to accept their money.

  * * *

  —

  On July 24, the day Li finished his book’s final, 1 percent buffered draft, his mom asked him when he was visiting Taiwan and for how long. He said he’d think about it for a week.

  The next day, he returned to working in the library—for the first time since it had closed for Christmas the previous year—despite the radiation because his room had begun to feel bleak again. With his nonfiction book done, he resumed work on his novel. He decided to rewrite the draft he’d sent his editor two years earlier (a hundred pages on his Year of Mercury parent visit) and printed his 123,001 words of notes from that year.

  On July 31, he emailed his mom, proposing that he visit Taiwan for ten weeks, from early November to late December. His mom suggested eleven weeks. He felt frustrated that she’d replied almost immediately after he’d thought about it for a week.

  Part of him felt he should spend more time with his parents now that they were financing his life. Another part of him, aware he’d been living with and writing about them for years, felt he was already paying them a good, balanced amount of attention.

  In the library the next morning, he emailed his mom saying ten and a half weeks. His mom asked if he could stay longer—around twelve weeks. Li said no, and they emailed twenty-something times. “I will think about staying longer but I feel upset now so I will email you my decision tomorrow,” typed Li in a crazed-feeling rush.

  The next three hours—circling parts of his Year of Mercury notes to potentially use in his novel, browsing months-to-years-old email drafts, compiling a third round of divorce forms (the post office had lost the second)—he couldn’t stop worrying about how long to visit Taiwan.

  His worry scattered that afternoon in Tompkins Square Park, where he talked to his friend Rainbow, who was writing a poetry book titled I Fell in Love Today and had recently begun a relationship with an urban farmer, but recondensed that night in 4K.

  * * *

  —

  In bed failing to sleep, eyeballs pulsing against closed lids, Li helplessly cognized recursive, mom-related irrationalia. He felt she was being belligerent, but he knew not to trust his feelings—two nights earlier, he’d noted, “Remember: Mom isn’t the insane, paranoid one. I am!” and had even said aloud, “I’m the one whose brain is broken!”—but he didn’t always know. Sometimes his knowledge was a dreadful mess, which he had to goad into storage, as the body stored toxins in fat, to deal with gradually, before he could think or feel clearly. He punched the wood floor, which he’d never done before.

  Probably there’d been histories even crueler than theirs—grisly ones with no partnership past, surviving aborigines, public parks, legal books, pacifist philosophies, holistic healers, or awareness of psychedelics, just four to six millennia of technology-driven, self-destructing carnage. Doomed histories. Maybe the post–Younger Dryas history was doomed. Maybe a dominator overmind had emerged around 4500 B
C, or maybe Yahweh had disqualified the species. The imagination probably kept insane species out, as eggs kept most sperm out.

  Maybe only a few species per eon per galaxy made it through history, and so histories were platforms mainly for individuals to transcend matter. Maybe only people with keen interests in invisible realities would become immaterial beings. Possibly, civilization was a dead end transcendence-wise, and only aborigines with millennia of animism (believing every stream, plant, and animal had a spiritual counterpart) and shamanism (routinely exploring the intangible half of the mystery with psychedelic plants and fungi) would drift imaginationward at death, in which case for most people life really was it—the only thing.

  At six a.m., Li woke sweating from a nightmare in which people didn’t believe him on glyphosate toxicity. He felt even more worried than the previous night. His eyes and face seemed sprained. He ate half a gram of dried psilocybin mushroom, a gift from Rainbow; went downstairs; saw rain; and returned to 4K, hearing thunder. Seated cross-legged on his floor, he drifted away from the crude home he’d built around his mind and saw how derangingly small it was.

  Finally viewing his finally lapsing despair not as a distressing, random outburst, but as evidence of partial recovery from June’s week-length episode, when he told his mom he felt overwhelmed by her emails, Li teared with relief. He lay on his back and cried just a little, distracted by his mind, which was forming new thoughts for the first time in twenty hours. He realized he hadn’t had a sense of humor in days. He emailed his mom saying he’d visit for eleven weeks, walked south in the post-storm, anionated air, and enjoyed a productive day in the library.

  Biking home on a Citi Bike, he thought about his novel’s structure, alternating between Taiwan and New York. It was like a human night, alternating between quiet and dream sleep. Humans spent a fourth of sleep in dreams, and he’d been spending a fourth of life in Taiwan.

  * * *

  —

  Back in 4K that afternoon, Li watched a documentary that argued against the theory that everything emerged in an explosion 13.8 billion years ago. The documentary seemed compelling, but Li, valleying on cannabis and caffeine, fell asleep. His last thought was that the true version of history seemed harder than ever to know—the past kept growing and the theories about it kept multiplying—while personal histories, archived on computers and the internet, seemed more accessible than ever.

  The next day, Li bought The Big Bang Never Happened by Eric Lerner. First proposed by Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, the Big Bang theory became popular after World War I, wrote Lerner. Society, he observed, influenced cosmology, which in turn influenced society. In a century of chronic, global war, the Big Bang, postulating a finite, decaying, meaningless universe, made sense.

  The theory’s main problem was that structures existed that seemed older than 13.8 billion years. A supercluster complex found in 1986 required a hundred billion years to form, and things up to ten times as big, like the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall, had been found. Another problem was that the theory required ten to a hundred times more gravity than stars, planets, and other known matter produced—gravity that was attributed to “dark matter.”

  The main alternative to the Big Bang was plasma cosmology, whose most known proponent was Hannes Alfvén, a Swedish Nobel laureate. In plasma cosmology, the age of the universe was unknown (it seemed to be at least a trillion years old, and was possibly infinite in space and time); dark matter and dark energy (an antigravity effect the Big Bang also required) were electromagnetic forces; and plasmoids, not black holes, were at the centers of galaxies, which explained why seemingly all galaxies rotated, at their outskirts, once per billion years, like clocks: they were electric motors.

  As belief in the dominator model of social organization had led to quadrillions of dollars of destructionalia, belief in the Big Bang had led to thirty thousand particle accelerators (costing up to five billion dollars each), which collided particles to try to simulate the Big Bang and find dark matter—goals that were possibly hopeless and that seemed, in Lerner’s view, unhelpful to society. Put into plasma cosmology, the same attention and money could, he felt, lead to society-and-nature-helping electromagnetic technologies, like clean energy.

  * * *

  —

  Reading a biography of Nikola Tesla, whom plasma cosmologists respected, Li learned of the term “free energy,” which seemed to have been coined by a journalist in 1896 to describe Tesla’s ideas for obsoleting fossil fuels, including by converting cosmic rays into electricity and transmitting it wirelessly through the ionosphere. Tesla’s funding from J. P. Morgan was cut off when, according to one source, Morgan learned Tesla wanted to give free electricity to everyone. Tesla lived in hotels for the last four decades of his life. When he died in 1943, the FBI confiscated his papers and equipment.

  Researching modern-day Teslas, Li found John Hutchison, a Canadian who began to experiment with electromagnetic radiation in 1951, when he was six. In 1979, on disability for agoraphobia, he discovered, while trying to replicate Tesla’s work on wireless energy transmission, a set of phenomena that became known as the Hutchison Effect: using thirteen tons of equipment powered by a wall socket, he was able to levitate heavy objects, make metal rods wiggle and go transparent, heatlessly combust and melt metal, transmute elements, and create aurora-like clouds of light.

  Hutchison gave around seven hundred demonstrations, including one for the U.S. Army in 1983. Videos of his effects—which seemed to be generated by electromagnetic interferometry, the interfering of beams and fields of photons, and which to Li seemed close to gravity control, time travel, and other potentially history-ending capabilities—were widespread online. In 1990, the Canadian government confiscated most of Hutchison’s lab—millions of dollars’ worth of electrostatic generators, Tesla coils, and other things he’d amassed from junkyards and military surplus stores.

  Hundreds of people, Li read in the Hutchison biography Mindbending and other books, had worked on free energy, inventing Moray devices, Hendershot generators, N-machines, and other overunity systems, which, like mitochondria, generated more energy than they consumed, but none of the inventions had reached mass production. It seemed that four trillion dollars a year in gas, coal, oil, and nuclear power; a century of investments in pipelines, electric grids, and other leaky infrastructure; and the addiction of energy corporations to monthly payments had led to the suppression—or at least the significant slowing of the development and use—of free energy.

  Li didn’t think anymore that he was going down “rabbit holes” when he researched nontrivial topics through individuals, papers, and books. He felt more like he was tunneling up out of the small, underground, man-made hole where he’d been born. Reading around 150 nonfiction books and 250 papers since 2013, he’d continually learned his worldview was too simple and/or vague. His skepticism had turned. He’d begun to distrust what he thought he knew, instead of everything else.

  * * *

  —

  On August 12, Li and Kay walked to Stuyvesant Square Park and sat on a bench. Kay was a little anxious about her press’s relaunch event that she was hosting in five weeks.

  They crossed the street to the other half of the park, which seemed almost tropically lush, and stood in front of a statue of the composer of the New World Symphony.

  “I’ve been reading about something strange,” said Li. They’d emailed near-daily for two weeks—sharing classical music links; discussing a book of essays Kay had divided into four parts and edited based on how much time she had; reminiscing about their childhood piano lessons—but Li hadn’t mentioned any of his recent research.

  “Okay,” said Kay. “What is it?”

  “The Hutchison Effect,” said Li. “Someone named John Hutchison does it.” He explained the effect and its possible uses. It could destroy nuclear weapons midair, protect the planet from natural impacts, transmut
e radioactive waste to inert material, propel spacecraft, and be used to build free energy machines. Li explained free energy.

  “So it’s not really free?” said Kay.

  “No. It’s just cheaper and cleaner and there’d be no power lines or gas pipes or oil spills or blackouts. People could get electricity from small machines in their homes.”

  Kay asked how he’d encountered Hutchison. Li said he’d clicked a documentary on the Big Bang, then had read about plasma cosmology, Tesla, and free energy.

  They walked east, past a twelve-acre gas-and-oil power plant, to the East River.

  Kay pointed at the water, and her pointing seemed to spray invisible things into it, making little splashes.

  “That’s weird,” said Li.

  “It’s the Yoshida Effect,” said Kay, whose last name was Yoshida.

  Li smiled widely.

  Kay did it again, with the splashes happening this time at a delay. Li tried it and nothing happened. Kay tried it again, holding a stick like a wand; nothing happened.

  Li said the Hutchison Effect was also unpredictable. Hutchison had worked on it for years before he could generate it consistently.

  On the walk home, Kay said another aspect of the Yoshida Effect was when trees’ trunks branched to create the letter Y, which seemed funny to Li because of how widespread it was.

  * * *

  —

  They met again two weeks later, when Li had returned to researching himself—organizing his selected notes from the Year of Mercury into scenes and chapters.