by Tao Lin
They sat in front of a restaurant to wait for a car to take them home. Dustwinkling, they realized, could be dust winkling or dus twinkling. “Winkle” meant “to extract with difficulty,” they read on Kay’s phone. “Dus” wasn’t a word in English; according to Urban Dictionary, it was an acronym for “driving under the shrimpfluence.”
In bed, they tried to imagine a fifteen-million-year history. A history modeled more on nature than Yahweh, who’d rushed by a factor of a billion, spending days instead of eons to make everything. After Earth was protected from impacts and powered by clean, inexhaustible energy—was detoxified, denuclearized, undominatored, and sustainable—then what?
History could be like a yearslong stay in a forest-garden, observing and enjoying and learning, instead of a crazed visit, running through in an hour, out of breath and confused, yelling and killing. Maybe slowly was the only way to reach the other side of matter—not crashing through with time machines or electromagnetic interferometry, but crafting a planet-sized art object, a context lasting and magical enough for greater magic to appear.
The final, history-ending spell could be a book or a relationship.
Fruitresting
In the morning, Kay had a bladder infection. Li had mild hip pain. They worked for two hours, then baked kratom-almond cookies and moved to a different Airbnb on a nearby property with five one-room houses, an outdoor kitchen, an avocado grove, a citrus orchard, and a yoga deck.
“I can see dustwinkling with my eyes closed,” said Li, supine on the deck, looking at his ochre-red, sun-backed screen. “Can you? Probably not with your face covered.”
“I don’t want to move my shirt off my face,” said Kay, and they discussed other things for around a minute, then she said, “So that means they can go through your eyelids,” reminding Li they often continued dropped threads.
They discussed opening an Airbnb in Hawaii with a library and a garden. Kay said she should stay at her job until 2019 because equity would be shared then. At first, Li had viewed her as bluffing or wishfully thinking about moving, but she’d seemed increasingly serious. They decided to visit the dog they’d met the previous day.
On the dog’s property, they heard a woman behind a picket fence with three or four children say, “What is wrong with you all today?”
“Hi,” she said through the fence.
“Hi,” said Li and Kay.
“Hi,” said the woman, head appearing over the fence.
“Hi,” said Li and Kay.
“Can I help you?”
“We’re just walking through,” said Kay.
“You can’t walk through here. It’s private property.”
“Sorry,” said Kay.
“Sorry,” said Li, noticing the dog bringing him a new, price-tagged toy, which he threw. The dog ignored it and a thrown stick. He looked at Kay and Li’s hands, which held many flowers, and at their eyes, then led them off his property to the dirt road.
They approached a row of person-height trees, spaced ten feet apart. The dog ran around one. Li copied him. The dog did it again. Li focused exaggeratedly hard on exactly following the dog’s path. Kay laughed and joined the game.
They chased the dog in three increasingly complex patterns before giving up. The dog arced far afield, drawing three more ways, then jogged away.
* * *
—
Back on the property, spooning meat from a coconut, Kay said being in a place like where they were, in an outdoor kitchen in Hawaii, could make her feel existential. Li asked what she meant. She said it made her feel like, “What is the point of life?”
Li said he felt that way sometimes during physical activity; as he focused fully on movement, part of him would still be able to think, “Is this it?” He said winkling coconut meat was making him feel existential, and Kay laughed. Li said maybe they’d feel less existential as they spent more time in nature.
They sat at the counter, ate kratom cookies with coconut meat, and decided to read five two-page spreads of The Forest. Li felt detached from the first, fall-themed spread. They constructively criticized the second—a confusing drawing of varied animals in one landscape showing all four seasons.
On the third spread, which had a photo of a live bird stuck in ice up to its neck, Li began to feel surprised by how much fun he was having reading a forest book with Kay. He felt like an unself-conscious child who was also an adult who was nervous and giddy with requited love. He imagined he felt like Kay had the night she blushed for half an hour.
The fourth spread was on monarch butterflies, which crossed the country annually by working together over four generations. The first three lived around seven weeks, flying southwest from Canada. The fourth, living seven months, reached Mexico, overwintered, and returned to Canada.
The fifth spread was titled “How a Tree Trunk Grows.” Only a microscopically thin, cylindrical layer called the cambium grew; new cells became wood (on the inside) or bark (outside). The cambium was like the present, feeding the accruing wood of the past while maintaining the shedding bark of the future.
After reading, they arranged and photographed fruits and flowers on a picnic bench, then sat.
Kay laid the side of her head on a grapefruit, facing Li, who put his left profile on an avocado.
“I don’t think there’s a fruit I don’t like,” said Kay.
“Me either,” said Li. “This feels good.”
They rested on pomelo, tomato, lime, and four types of oranges. They smelled each fruit, suckled their juice through fingernailed slits, and went to get more limes.
In the orchard, they looked at the moon and the stars. The nearest non-sun star was Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that couldn’t be seen without a telescope.
Back at the bench, they spoke a narrative of their day, taking turns adding to it, sometimes with digressions. They remembered collecting flowers, chasing the dog, reading The Forest, and fruitresting.
In bed, Kay told Li about when she feigned surprise at a surprise party for her that she’d accidentally foreknown. Li fell asleep to her falling-asleep sounds—language fragments, isolated teeth-clomps.
* * *
—
In the morning, they ate eggs, discussed their plan to start an Airbnb as a controllable and satisfying source of income, washed dishes, fed trail mix to chickens, began kissing, and returned to their one-room house, which fit a bed and a dresser. After sex, Kay, then Li, showered. When he got back to the house, Kay was putting on clothes.
“I still don’t feel right,” she said.
“Bladder infection?”
“Yeah,” said Kay.
Li laughed a little.
“What?” said Kay.
“I just imagined if you were saying that about your life.”
“What if I was?”
“I would think you were joking.”
Rubbing clay on Li’s rash for the third time, Kay asked why it was on his butt. He said he’d rarely moved his sacrum from 2005 to 2016, so maybe toxins had accumulated there.
They made a smoothie and walked around eating it with spoons. They fed some to chickens, flinging it on the ground. Kay accidentally covered a chicken’s head in smoothie. Li laughed at the chicken’s confused surprise.
* * *
—
In a cab to Sunset Beach an hour later, as Kay talked to the driver, Li looked out his window at rain and verdure, dwelling on how happy he felt compared to how hopeless he’d been in Taiwan and when he first got to Hawaii.
He thought generally of all the times in the past four years that he’d recovered from wanting, for seconds to weeks, to hide and whimper, to abandon complexity and novelty and drift into another drug phase and/or bleak novel. Realizing he’d probably be able to recover from himself, his nearest source of despair, in the future too, he felt a calming, po
ignant joy, which dilated, touching all parts of him.
At Sunset Beach, they hid under a bridge. Raindrops entering water seemed dustwinklinglike. They bought a purple umbrella from a gas station and sat under it in sun showers on the beach. Around twenty surfers in black wetsuits idled in waveless waters, seated on their surfboards, looking away from land, like a cult waiting for a sign.
When it stopped raining, Li and Kay walked west on the sand, stopping to listen to addictively portentous-sounding waves and to ask a hoodied man to photograph them with a rainbow behind them.
Walking on a bike path, they discussed their plan. Kay said it was an effective motivational strategy for her to tell people she was doing something; she’d told one friend that she wanted to move to Hawaii. They kneeled to examine a large snail crossing the path.
Continuing to walk, Li said he’d write five thousand words on their trip, which he was counting as one variation (#32), to protect himself from convincing himself to stay in New York and to not forget how good it’d been.
They rode a bus to the yellow gate—where the next day, before temporarily parting, Kay would say, “I love you,” and Li would blush and realize he’d reddened from love, not awkwardness, and say, “I love you too”—and walked home.
* * *
—
On the property that night, Li FaceTimed his parents and Dudu. They’d gone to the waterfall at Carp Mountain that day. Li’s dad had caught four fish. Li’s mom said Thin Uncle had decided against Thyro-Gold, somehow fearing he’d get cancer without Levoxyl. Kay said hi to Li’s parents through the phone’s screen. “Bye-bye,” said Li, waving.
They made a fluffy, bitter, kratom-tobacco-egg-almond pancake, which they changed into a pizza by adding tomato and cheese, then read The Forest and watched some YouTube videos, including one in which a man squirmed through an apartment like a worm after smoking Salvia divinorum.
Kay said she wanted to smoke DMT. Li said when he smoked it two and a half years ago, he’d felt like a microbe on a grain of sand inflating into a person on a beach. “My mom read my account of it and emailed me asking how DMT was beneficial to humans,” he said. “She seemed worried. I haven’t responded yet but I want to.”
His still-forming answer was that DMT produced awe and wonder, but so did reading nonfiction books that referenced ideas outside the mainstream, and that reading seemed better for stability and recovery and was maybe even more life-changing and suited to him, as a way to explore and learn, than dimension-rending psychedelics.
* * *
—
Li woke at around three a.m. to Kay saying she’d thought of a plan—they could return to Hawaii the next winter to find a place to live, then move another year later, in 2020.
“That seems too slow,” said Li.
* * *
—
In the morning, they made a garlic-heavy salad for Kay’s bladder infection. They sat eating on the yoga deck. Dustwinkling made clouds seem extradimensionally sparkly. A gecko startled Li, standing on his hand. He said maybe Kay’s plan wasn’t too slow.
“Will this be leaving society?” said Kay.
Li said he’d been viewing leaving as a relative thing. They lived in midtown Manhattan, so almost any change would qualify.
They discussed leaving in parts, leaving mentally and chemically, carefully and gradually. Going beyond, as Kathleen said in a talk, instead of away.
Kay’s ride to the airport was in seventy minutes. Li was staying in Hawaii for another week, which he’d spend writing about the first week.
They decided to visit the dog before walking to the yellow gate for Kay’s ride. Li asked Kay what they should call him. “Lemoncake,” she said after around forty seconds.
Lemoncake led them off his driveway to a clearing with bunches of plants, which he hopped over in an exaggeratedly bunnylike manner, pogoing in various directions. He barked for the first time. A single bark, like a greeting.
Li pet Lemoncake cautiously, remembering when he’d bared his teeth when they met three days earlier. Lemoncake lay and rolled onto his back. Kay rubbed his stomach and he seemed delighted. He stood and walked to the dirt road.
“I feel like running,” said Kay, and Lemoncake followed her as she ran. Li walked and jogged to them.
Lemoncake lingered with his head down, seeming to subtly, without eye contact, direct their attention to a small plant that looked different from the others.
Li took a leaf.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my parents, parents’ dog, brother, nephew, aunt, uncles, friends, partner, editor (Tim O’Connell), agent (Bill Clegg), publicist (Angie Venezia), and publisher.
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