Eeeee Eee Eeee

by Tao Lin

  “It’s making fun of us,” the bear said. “How boring we are.”

  “I think I just fell asleep,” the bear’s girlfriend said. “That’s how boring this is right now.”

  “I want to slap a moose,” the bear said.

  Sometimes moose would be sleeping and they would feel something. They woke and were being slapped by a bear. But they were not angry. Moose had no delusions that year. They knew there were facts and that the world itself was a fact and that facts were not good or bad but just there—a worldview that happened sometimes after you suffered for a long time, alone, in your room, physically comfortable and listening to music—and so had no opinions, feelings, fear, or hatred. They saw the bears with the blankets and they said, “Thank you.”

  Sometimes a bear would feel cold.

  And go, “Hrr, hrr.”

  And take a blanket from a moose’s head and slap the moose’s face.

  The moose would say, “Thank you.”

  Moose that year stood alone in shadowy alleyways. They weighed a thousand pounds, which made them not want to have thoughts. Mostly they just watched, from a distance—in blackness and without thinking. If some of the alleyway was bright and some was dark the moose would walk to where it was dark and stare at where it was bright—and not think anything at all. Sometimes an alien would stand with a moose, not because of solidarity but because of accidentally doing it. Aliens usually stood in dark doorways but sometimes got confused and stood in alleyways behind, on top of, or adjacent moose. Sometimes a bear climbed a moose and the moose would feel warm and happy, which made them run. Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn’t be moose there and the moose would fall.

  It was sad to see a moose on the ground with its eyeballs round and looking.

  So a bear would sometimes put a blanket over a moose’s face.

  Bears liked to put blankets on things.

  Sometimes a bear accidentally wished to have Sean Penn there.

  The bear would be watching TV.

  Thinking about the Pulitzer Prize.

  And go blank a little.

  And think, “I wish I could punch Sean Penn in Sean Penn’s face.”

  And Sean Penn would be there.

  Sean Penn would fight the bear when it got there.

  The bear would try to stop Sean Penn but Sean Penn had knives and the bear would crush Sean Penn by accident.

  The bear would think, “Oh god, oh my god.”

  Then put a blanket on Sean Penn’s corpse’s head.

  It was a year, that year, Ellen knew, as she’d noticed from her 10th grade classmates and from observing her family—her new year’s resolution (it was stupid to have one but she was bored in class and made a list, then picked one) had been to be more alert, to think more truthfully about things, and it had affected her, she guessed, with better grades, an increase in self-esteem that was actually just a realization of how dumb everyone was, and nerdy, slightly annoying insights like this one—for doing something not even that exciting or wild and then saying, “Why not?” Or else saying, “Why not?” then doing something sort of forced and meaningless. Mostly people just went around saying, “Why not?” and, later on, when it came time to act, saying, “It’s too hard,” without ever actually doing anything.

  Things still happened that year, of course, like any other year—they were pretty much all the same, Ellen guessed; what was a year, anyway; floating around the sun in the straight line, really, of a circle; it felt sarcastic to keep count—just mostly by accident, or else by momentum, by implication and solution of past things (like a math equation, trying to solve itself, as what was the world, the unstoppable mass of it, but one of those long division problems in seventh grade that went on, annoying and blameless, forever?).

  Ellen herself had knocked down a No U-Turn sign. She was sixteen and didn’t have a permit and didn’t want one—driving was bad for the environment, she had no money for a car, and she didn’t want to stand in line five hours to fail whatever stupid test—but had craved alfalfa sprouts with balsamic vinaigrette one night when everyone else was asleep, and so had washed her face and ran out to the street, to her brother Steve’s Honda Civic, the keys of which were left on the dash (more depressively, Ellen thought in a tic of imposition, than stupidly). After knocking down the No U-Turn sign she panicked and drove for a time on the wrong side of the road, where, after a vision of crash test dummies, she felt a vacuum-sealed sort of calmness—the sound-reducing serenity of breaking a traffic law, of going metaphysically back in time, to a truer place, where every direction was equally legal; probably this was not unlike meditation, Ellen thought gently—then cut across a median, knocking the right rearview mirror against a tree so that it banged shut against the window, and drove back to her neighborhood. At her house, thinking, Destroy the evidence, she parked, put the keys back on the dash, and then was wrenching the damaged rearview mirror off the car, though not without a lot of difficulty—and not without realizing, after a moment, that there wasn’t actually anything wrong with it, it just needed to be adjusted back into position; but continuing, still, with two hands, now, in a sort of rampage—and then was running across the street and lobbing the half-melon of the thing over a fence, into someone’s backyard. Back in her house, she walked around carefully, civil and perceiving as a saint. She saw her brother, Steve, asleep on the sofa. In the kitchen her two little sisters were eating a bowl of something, which they hid as Ellen walked by, into her room, where she crawled onto her bed and lay on her side, and, for a long time, then, until she yawned and closed her eyes and fell asleep, stared, a bit objectively, without mood or judgment—though self-consciously so, feeling while doing it a bit empty and melodramatic—at the other side of her room, where the bookcase, the computer, the desk, and the stereo were.

  That was in the wintertime, and then it was Spring, and some nights, now, in bed, feeling very bored and a little lonely, Ellen would let herself worry that she had hit a person—that the person had looked like a No U-Turn sign; was wearing a cowboy hat, or something—and then have imaginary conversations with kids at school she wished she were friends with, the ones who listened to punk music like she did and who always dressed prettily and had very beautiful and vividly dyed hair.

  “I think I hit a person.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I knocked down a No U-Turn sign. That’s illegal.”

  “You’re being honest right now. You can use that to cancel out the sign.”

  “I’ll tell the judge, ‘We’re even now.’ ”

  “The judge will be like, ‘Fine then. Uh, I mean case dismissed.’ ”

  Alert and awake, under her blanket, having these conversations, she would sometimes feel so yearning and friendless and unhelpable—each moment of being herself, she knew, was a strengthening, an adapting, of who she was; and she didn’t want to be who she was—that she would squeak a little.

  In Ellen’s English class someone said, “I hope those motherfuckers die.” The substitute teacher seemed a little confused then grinned. Someone had overheard her in the parking lot calling her boyfriend a motherfucker. There were eight weeks of 10th grade left.

  Ellen raised her hand. Usually she never spoke in class but no one was paying attention today. A group of kids were playing a board game on four desks pushed together. “We should use nonviolence,” she said.

  “I hope those motherfuckers get really fair trials so they get what they deserve and die.”

  “I guess,” Ellen said. She wasn’t sure. Didn’t the terrorists just want to be happy like everyone else? When people ate at McDonald’s weren’t they killing people—by supporting McDonald’s and enabling it to open more restaurants in places like Japan, where the kids would then grow up fat and diseased and get heart attacks or cancer and die—just like terrorists? Weren’t the terrorists at least less circuitous, a little more honest? Why didn’t the news care t
hat much when all those Africans killed each other in Rwanda? Why didn’t McDonald’s open free restaurants in Africa and save people? Why was the teacher letting everyone say ‘motherfucker’?

  “What is the theme of 1984?” said the teacher. They were discussing 1984.

  Ellen raised her hand. “I think it talks about how the government can trick us and control us. Like they’re doing right now. Because they’re making us think that American lives are worth more than British lives and that British lives are worth more than African lives.” She blushed.

  The teacher nodded a little. She picked up the yardstick and pointed it at someone, who looked blankly at her.

  “In the end they play chess,” someone else said. “After they use the rat on him they play chess.”

  “Chess is boring,” said the teacher. “Does anyone else think chess is boring?” She was just out of graduate school, and she didn’t care. In the parking lot she had called her boyfriend a ‘motherfucker.’

  “People who play chess could be spending their time growing tomatoes in their backyard,” Ellen said. “Remember the news this morning when they said that two people in London died? If I did the news, I’d say that people who play chess killed five hundred people in Africa because of being apathetic and not helping with their own gardens. That’s true. That’s a fact.” She did not want to argue with anyone. She was just saying things that were true.

  “I think if they make the movie—1984, the movie—I think everyone should have long hair and listen to heavy metal,” said the substitute teacher. “And wear those dyed shirts and have holes in their jeans and sit around watching The Breakfast Club.”

  A few kids laughed, and then Ellen raised her hand. “Why are you acting like that?” she said.

  “Like what?” said the substitute teacher.

  “I don’t know,” Ellen said.

  “Speak to me after class,” said the substitute teacher, then drew a caricature of George Orwell on the blackboard. It was pretty good, but the class had lost interest in her, and began to talk to each other about Family Guy, online role-playing games, and how it would be fun to wear football helmets and light fireworks and then hit the fireworks back and forth with tennis rackets at each other’s heads. “If I don’t do that tonight I’m beheading myself looking in the bathroom mirror,” someone said.

  “What’s your name?” said the substitute teacher after class to Ellen.

  “I don’t know,” Ellen said.

  The teacher laughed. She didn’t stop. It seemed like she didn’t stop. Ellen walked out of the classroom. In her next class she drew a picture of a Native American leading an army of turkeys to the White House. The turkeys looked like cupcakes. She drew arrows at the turkeys and wrote, “Turkeys.” After class, a girl wearing a shirt that said “Mineral” approached her. “Hey,” she said. “I like what you drew.” Ellen blushed. “Did you tell that substitute you didn’t know what your name was? That’s good.” Ellen didn’t know what to say. She never knew what to say. “I hate school,” she said. A group of kids walked by and the girl with the “Mineral” shirt went with them. Ellen sat through three more classes. After school she wanted to smash things. She walked home, across a field and a street. At home she sat on her bed. Sometimes she sat thinking, “Ellen … Ellen … Ellen … Ellen … Ellen …” and she did that now. She thought about dying. After a while she lay down. She felt hungry. She stood and a dolphin was there.

  The dolphin quietly went, “Eeeee eee eeee.”

  “Do you want to play with me?” the dolphin said.

  Ellen looked at her feet. “Okay,” she said.

  The dolphin held Ellen’s hand.

  They went in the backyard and the dolphin opened a trapdoor.

  They climbed down a ladder.

  Halfway down a bear was coming up.

  “Use teleport,” the dolphin said.

  “I don’t have it,” the bear said.

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t,” the bear said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yeah. Wait. I forgot that I had the ability to teleport,” the bear said.

  “A sarcastic bear,” the dolphin said.

  “A bear. A sarcastic bear. A bear, a dolphin,” the bear said. “A stupid bear. A fucking moose.”

  “We have two people so you go down,” the dolphin said.

  “Fine,” the bear said. “Life is stupid anyway.”

  The dolphin and Ellen and the bear went down the ladder.

  There was a corridor.

  “Thank you,” the dolphin said to Ellen.

  The dolphin hugged Ellen.

  “I like you,” the dolphin said.

  The dolphin looked at Ellen.

  The bear scratched the wall a little.

  “Thank you for coming, Ellen,” the dolphin said.

  Ellen looked at her feet.

  She had plastic sandals.

  The sandals were green and blue.

  The bear made a quiet high-pitched noise.

  Ellen made eye contact with the bear.

  “Do you want to come?” Ellen said to the bear.

  The bear scratched the wall and looked at the dolphin.

  “No,” the bear said. “I wouldn’t have fun anyway. I can’t have fun in groups of three.”

  The bear knelt and opened a trapdoor and tried to crawl in but didn’t fit.

  The bear stood.

  “I don’t need to go there,” the bear said.

  The bear had a blanket and it folded it neatly.

  “I don’t know,” the bear said. “I’ll go work on my novel I guess.”

  The bear went up the ladder.

  The dolphin and Ellen walked to a cliff.

  The dolphin knelt and opened a trapdoor.

  They crawled through a tunnel.

  There was a room.

  It had a bed, a refrigerator, a Christmas tree.

  The Christmas tree had blinking lights.

  “Are you hungry?” the dolphin said.

  The dolphin gave Ellen a muffin on a plate.

  “A little,” Ellen said.

  The dolphin watched Ellen eat the muffin.

  “Thank you,” Ellen said.

  “Do you want cake?” the dolphin said.

  “I don’t know,” Ellen said.

  The air conditioner went off.

  The room was very quiet.

  The Christmas lights blinked.

  The refrigerator was very quiet.

  “Do you want to come over again?” the dolphin said.

  “Okay.”

  The dolphin held Ellen’s hand and they went to Ellen’s room.

  “I had a lot of fun,” the dolphin said.

  Ellen hugged the dolphin.

  The dolphin cried.

  The dolphin very quietly went, “Eeeee eee eeee.”

  “You are nice,” Ellen said.

  “Did you like the muffin?” the dolphin said.

  “Yes,” Ellen said.

  The dolphin looked at Ellen.

  Ellen sat on her bed and looked at her hands.

  Ellen looked at her sandals.

  The dolphin looked at Ellen’s sandals.

  “Do you want to do something else?” the dolphin said.

  “Okay.”

  The dolphin held Ellen’s hand.

  They went through the trapdoor and the corridor down a ladder into an elevator.

  The elevator had mirrors.

  Ellen looked at herself and the dolphin.

  The dolphin was smoother.

  The dolphin put a blindfold on Ellen.

  They walked across a rope bridge and Ellen heard hamster noises.

  The dolphin took the blindfold off Ellen.

  They crawled through a tunnel.

  There was a playground.

  Ellen walked into the playground and felt very quiet.

  She felt very calm.

  The dolphin went down the slide.

  Ellen climbed onto the sli
de and went down the slide.

  The dolphin went, “EEEEE EEE EEEE.”

  Ellen went to the swings.

  The dolphin and Ellen did the swings.

  “EEEEE EEE EEEE,” went the dolphin.

  Ellen looked at the dolphin’s face.

  The dolphin’s face looked handsome.

  Ellen looked at the dolphin going, “EEEEE EEE EEEE.”

  Dolphins felt top-heavy, that year, most of the time, and wanted to lie down. When their heads weren’t on top they still felt top-heavy, but metaphysically. In public places they felt sad. They went into restrooms, hugged themselves, and quietly went, “Eeeee eee eeee.” Weekends they went to playgrounds alone. They sat in the top of slides—the enclosed part, where it glowed a little because of the colored plastic—and felt very alert and awake but also very sad and immature. Sometimes they fell asleep and a boy’s mother would prod the dolphin with a broom and the dolphin would go down the slide while still asleep. At the bottom they would feel ashamed and go home and lie in bed. They felt so sad that they believed a little that it was their year to be sad, which made them feel better in a devastated, hollowed-out way. Life was too sad and it was beautiful to really feel it for once; to be allowed to feel it, for one year. When dolphins had these thoughts, usually on weekends at night, it was like dreaming, like a pink flower in a soft breeze on a field was lightly dreaming them. The sadness was like a pink forest that got less dense as you went in and then changed into a field, which the dolphins walked into alone. Sometimes the sadness was like a knife against the face. It made the dolphins cry and not want to move. But sometimes a young dolphin would feel very lonely and ugly and it was beautiful how alone it felt, and it would become restless with how perfect and elegant its sadness was and go away for a long time and then return and sit in its room and feel very alone and beautiful.

  Sometimes when dolphins went to playgrounds alone they did the monkeybars and went to the swings and on the swings thought, “I hate this stupid world.”

  They thought, “I hate it.”

  They cried a little with the wind against their face.

  They felt so bad that they went away.

  And found Elijah Wood and told Elijah Wood to go with them and Elijah Wood went—because he thought it was a movie. Elijah Wood and other celebrities like Salman Rushdie rode dolphins in rivers. Salman Rushdie felt proud and famous. And the dolphins swam to islands and beat Elijah Wood and the other famous people with heavy branches. They cried when they murdered human beings, and it was terrible.