Bed

by Tao Lin

  “What are you so happy about?” Alicia said.

  “I’m not,” Aaron said. “I’m actually really, really, really worried.” He tickled Alicia until she fell off the bed, onto the carpet, from where she crawled to the bathroom. They were getting lazy. They weren’t trying anymore. Alicia shouldn’t be crawling like that, Aaron thought slowly, that’s strange and unhappy. He waited for her, but fell asleep.

  For some time now Aaron had been writing every day. There were moments when he felt sudden blots of something—truth? serotonin? worse, cholesterol?—in his head, new and startling things, and he’d resolve them into words, and there would be some complicated, ulterior, and life-affirming, he suspected, pleasure in that; and he even felt, sometimes, the somewhat comforting beginnings, maybe, of something like a career. But he had certain disillusionments about writing that he felt he could not ignore. He didn’t like the subjectivity of it. He liked a thing to be perfect and meticulous and all-encompassing and, finally, unchangeable—unworryable. But there were, he knew, only momentary perfections, which were not perfections at all, but delusions. It worried him. Could one delude oneself through a life? Yes, he knew. Probably that was the only way.

  But Aaron was not good at delusion. He had, in his life, he suspected, learned something, grasped some knowledge—in a once and random, adolescent way, like chicken pox, or else in a worked-at way, like a skill; probably somehow both—that prevented him from moving entirely into the delusion of a thing. And he had learned this something very early in his life, he knew, as he could not remember ever having really believed in anything. Not in religion, which made him restless, the cul-de-sac of it, how it turned you around a little, patted you on the head, held block parties in celebration of itself; not in society, with its earnest system of nonexistence, how it existed, really, in the unhappened future, in progress and realization; and not in himself, as what did it mean to believe in oneself—wasn’t that just a sneaky way of proclaiming yourself God? It was, and Aaron especially did not believe in anything as vague and clichéd—and with as many capitalization rules—as God.

  Yet he nevertheless had always been able to play along, to live mostly contently, he guessed, and sanely—as he had a small talent for meaningfulness, for patching together cultural units and other people’s beliefs into his own makeshift sensibilities and short-term convictions. He could take a thing from the world and fold it over, like a handkerchief, make a little wad of it, and then pack it inside of his own heart, as a staunching thing, a temporary absorber of new blood, a thing to pump and pool into—honestly and without too much cynicism—and it was in this way that he was okay, he felt, at living; he was pretty good at it, probably as good as he would ever be.

  In class they discussed Aaron’s story about his parents, which Aaron had given up on, leaving in, among other things that should’ve been cut, a non-sequitur about the mother’s son feeling fluttering and doomed as a hummingbird with a spinal disease and a description of the father’s head that was intended to imply worry but instead implied, if anything, Aaron knew, cold-slice bologna—his pocked and boyish eyes stuck like salt-washed olives in the peppered meat of his face. It was called “Eddy,” which was the name of the son in the story. Aaron had wanted to avoid in the title irony, cleverness, smugness, frivolousness, profundity, melodrama, condescension; and had ended up not with sincerity, he felt, but a woozy, resounding sort of tonelessness and maybe a little—or possibly a lot of—irony.

  “This is a serious story,” Aaron said. It was. Or at least he had wanted it to be. Or rather, he didn’t want the class to assume it was parody, which they would otherwise do. If anything, it was satire. Though truthfully, Aaron knew, it was probably less a story than twenty pages of failed sentences, a few of which worked, if precariously, as jokes.

  “Serious,” said the teacher. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. When I wrote it … I had this mean look on my face. I had a piece of paper taped on the computer screen that had all the synonyms for ‘existence’ written on it.” He didn’t want to talk about his story anymore. He wanted to talk about existence. What was it? What was to be done about it?

  “I looked up existence the other day,” someone said. “A synonym for it—the internet said—was the word ‘something.’ I didn’t get that.”

  “ ‘Something’ can be a synonym for everything,” Alicia said. “Anything.”

  “Good insight,” the teacher said. He smiled a bit wildly at Alicia.

  “Good job, Alicia,” someone said, and began to clap. Other people clapped. Some people stood, and soon everyone was standing and applauding, Aaron the loudest. His story felt puny now; felt, in a distanced and forgiven way, sort of perfected—it was but a moment in all the others, a single squishy, lopsided beating of some imperfect but trying heart; a happened and unfixable thing.

  After the standing ovation, someone said something about D.H. Lawrence and clams and everyone laughed. There was a long and pleasant silence, everyone smiling, and then someone asked Aaron if he had read Antonya Nelson; she wrote about families too. Someone else said something about Nelson Mandela, and then talked about his own life—his crazy life!—for quite some time, which could sometimes happen, usually near the end of a class, and was looked upon by classmates not with contempt, but with sympathy and understanding; sometimes you just needed to talk about yourself for five or ten minutes straight.

  Alicia’s story was workshopped a few weeks later, around Thanksgiving.

  She was a strict autobiographical writer, not even changing names. It made the class alert and, at first, preachy—they could critique her actual life, her flawed and disgusting life!—but then hesitant and depressed, as who in the class knew how to live their own life? Who could say what was better for Alicia, what was wrong and how to change?

  “Why does Aaron stay with Alicia if he doesn’t love her really,” Aaron said. They had become very open with one another recently, had both admitted, among other things that made them nervous, having wished sudden and accidental deaths onto their parents, as they were both fearful and unwanting of what would otherwise happen—their parents would still die, of course, eventually, but what before that? Fifteen years of Alzheimer’s? Dementia? Cancer? Aaron and Alicia felt they would not be able to deal with any of those. It had brought them closer, Aaron felt. In the farness of their worrying—the tedious escape of it, how it shuttled you slowly away from real life, into a sort of deep space—they had come, truly, closer to each other, in an echoed, gaping-expanse-between-them way. Or not. Probably not.

  “He isn’t really staying with her, I think. He’s more just not leaving her,” someone said. “There was that thing about a two-year lease. They signed a two-year lease.”

  “What do people think about Alicia,” Alicia said. “Should she move home?” Before leaving for college, she had helped her sister take care of their brother, who, Aaron learned—with vague recognition—from the story, was a bit abnormal due to sleeping pills he was given as an infant. Alicia felt poisoned and covered in nets, like in a fishing net with poisonous starfish and things in it, said the story. She was not a good writer. Though, actually, Aaron really liked that line. It had an alien, adolescent charm to it.

  “Alicia’s sister should realize that family is arbitrary,” someone said. “Alicia’s realized, so her sister should too. That would solve things. Plus it’s true, objectively. I’m just stating facts right now, like a computer.”

  “What has Alicia realized?” Alicia said. “Be more specific.”

  “I disagree with that,” Aaron said. “Everyone should realize that everything is arbitrary, and so nothing is—which is also true—and so everyone should try and be nice to their family, in the way that everyone should be maximally nice to everyone.” Start with your family, Aaron thought without much conviction, that’s what a person needed to do—that was the given task, probably, the world’s free and weary advice—and from there, then, spread out from family to includ
e, gradually, everyone else. “I’m profound,” he said aloud, by accident, but effectively, as some people laughed.

  “Is it important Alicia’s parents are immigrants?” Alicia said. Her parents, like Aaron’s, had, for whatever reason—neither of them knew exactly why—left (escaped?) their families and friends for a new, relativeless, friendless, equally middle-class, less communicable place; a place, maybe, with less worries?

  “You didn’t explore that,” someone said. “That’s not your focus. Or is it?”—people had gotten more sarcastic and long-winded as the semester went along; without their shyness, actually, Aaron suspected, they were all jerks—“Ignoring it, that may be a political statement. Maybe. Not to say you have an agenda. Not to say you’re running for office.”

  “What do you mean by political?” Alicia said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Politics,” said the teacher. “Social relations involving authority or power.”

  “I meant if it’s important as to what people … should do,” Alicia said. “I’m not talking about social power.” She had changed, Aaron knew. She used to be happy, maybe. Now she was just distracted and incomprehensible all the time.

  “Alicia should do drugs,” someone said. “Then her family can worry about her and she won’t have to worry anymore. And later she can write a raw, unflinching, but ultimately redemptive novel or memoir about it.”

  “Alicia should be like a crustacean whose shell has been bludgeoned,” Aaron said. Everyone laughed, though in an exerted way, with many enunciated “ha-ha’s”; the mollusk thing was getting old. Though maybe Aaron was mocking exactly that. Yeah, he thought, he was.

  “Alicia’s so detached and melodramatic,” someone else said. “She sort of isn’t believable. I don’t believe she exists—as a real person. Why would anyone sign a two-year lease? I don’t believe that. Which is okay, though. I mean, Moby Dick, yeah, that’s really believable. Not that I liked Moby Dick. I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t read it. Never mind though. Sorry. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just … stupid. Please don’t listen to me. Okay.”

  “She’s like a green mussel that’s been eaten so there’s just the shell left,” Aaron said. He was very quietly and completely ignored, which could sometimes happen in a workshop; he was not embarrassed at first, but a little bit proud—his joke was simply too true and complex (too good) to be acknowledged—then he was embarrassed.

  “Do you exist, Alicia?” the teacher said. “If you don’t, then you don’t have to answer that.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Alicia said.

  It was getting uncomfortable. Everyone stared not at Alicia, but at their own hands, or else abstractly at some piece of table or wall, as there had become in the room a feeling of immobilization, something of both nostalgia and doom—a sort of gigantic helplessness that could take affect, sometimes, near the end of class; everyone feeling elderly and pointless from all the criticism and subsequent qualifications and admittances of not knowing anything—an unpleasant urge to stay still for a very long time, for ever, perhaps, not saying or thinking anything, but just accepting one another, entering and absorbing and maybe, finally, somehow—with anonymity, osmosis, conjecture, and luck—then, experiencing one another.

  For winter break they went to Aaron’s house.

  They fought about how Aaron never went to Alicia’s house. “You haven’t been back to your house in two years or whatever,” Aaron said, “am I supposed to go there by myself?” but then immediately apologized and said that they would go to her house, then, for spring break. He had almost no anger these days, and he hugged her and apologized two more times.

  With Aaron’s parents, they went to a theme park, the movies.

  On New Year’s Eve, in a large-windowed restaurant atop a pier at the beach, his parents fought about the stock market. Aaron’s father called Aaron’s mother stupid; she told him to stop acting like a baby. They had spoken English at first, so that Alicia could understand, but had gotten lazy after an hour or so and now spoke only Mandarin.

  “A ten point gain is better than a ten percent gain. That’s what she thinks,” Aaron’s father said to Aaron. “That’s how her mind works.”

  “That’s right, I’m the stupid one,” Aaron’s mother said. “He likes stupid girls of course. It gives him a feeling of superiority, a feeling he can’t live without.” She sat up very straight. “He lost forty-thousand last week,” she said loudly to Aaron. “He’s a day-trader, a professional.”

  “Is a ten point gain better than a ten percent gain?” Aaron’s father said. He looked down, at an angle, toward Aaron’s mother. “Is it?” He had been grinning before, but now his face was red and tense.

  Aaron laughed. He liked his parents, and wished, now, sitting here, that they were all the same age and friends, in middle school or something, hanging out. “Calm down,” he said. “Don’t be so ridiculous. You know she knows it depends on the stock price and is just stubborn to admit you’re right. And she knows you know all that, too. The facts are all known. So there’s nothing to talk about—argue about.” He had just come up with this, but it sounded right, if a bit depressing, as one had, despite falseness or whatever, to be accusatory every once in a while; small talk had to be made, things needed to be said—provocations, sudden risky beliefs and improvisational generalizations—one had to tread water with these preconceptions, these prejudices and quarrels, keep one’s head buoyed and in the sun; kick at the dark, wet, worried meaninglessness below.

  Aaron’s father repeated his question to Aaron’s mother. He was grinning again, though tensely.

  “Yes,” Aaron’s mother finally said. “A ten point gain is always better than a ten percent gain.” Their entrees came. Aaron’s father said something about cooking, at which Aaron’s mother put her fork down loudly. She asked for chopsticks, but it was a Cajun restaurant. She looked at her fork and picked it up. She devoured her catfish and then talked at length—looking around the table in a storytelling way—while everyone else ate at a normal speed. She talked in a formal mandarin that Aaron couldn’t understand that well. “He meets his young, stupid wife—a person so stupid that here she is now. He has big plans, moves to America. He realizes his big plans. Meanwhile he has his house slave, his cook and child raiser, his nice little affair on the side, his very successful career. He makes a lot of money; he is known in his field. But is he happy? He isn’t sure. He wakes in the night. Sweating, panicked. Hungry. But he is a genius and now he is going into retirement, and a genius going into retirement cannot be stopped. I don’t know. Listen to me. I don’t know.” She looked around and then stopped looking around and stared through the window at something outside; a gray and dusty light moved against and off the surface of her eyes, like the wet-dry shine from a cold, unwashed grape. Outside, a gull came into view, floated in place, wobbled, and then pitched back and away, out of control. Aaron laughed a little. Alicia squeezed his hand under the table. Aaron had forgotten she was sitting here, beside him. He had stopped translating for her a long time ago.

  Later, at home, Times Square on TV, Aaron’s mother apologized, said that Aaron was right about them being stubborn and ridiculous. She patted Aaron’s shoulder and smiled at Alicia. On TV, the electrocuted lychee of the New Year’s ball—spiked and radioactive as a child’s depiction of a thing—ticked smoothly down in imperceptible increments.

  The next semester, Aaron—his stories widely rejected by literary magazines—began writing sort of science-fiction conceits for workshop; crude, uncritiqueable things that did not fuck around, but got straight to the point, which was always bafflement. In one, an alien civilization discovers that gravity is the cause of worry, love, and fear, the underlying desire of all things to occupy the same space (to correct the big bang, go against God’s, or whoever’s, big impulse move, that shady decision of somethingness) to again become one final, gravityless, unchangeable thing—and is baffled.

  He thought it might make
a good children’s book one day, a collection of them. Fairy Tales for the Young Disillusionist, or something. Handbook for Doomed and/or Disenchanted Children: a Pop-up Collection.

  “I like you,” Aaron said in bed. He had begun to like Alicia more each day. She had become quieter and nicer—more lifeless. She felt physically softer. They rarely fought anymore, and when they did it was in a mollified and absent-minded way, with many accidental moments of agreement and overlaps of argument. But they laughed less, too—less loudly—and almost never joked or played, as there was, always, now, the danger of an emotion—any emotion, or even too instantaneous a physical activity—losing sense of itself and then recovering too fast and wrongly, asserting itself as sadness; causing, then, a sort of sourceless, disembodied weeping. They had to be careful of that.

  “I like you too,” Alicia said. They talked no longer of love, but only of like. Talk of love made them feel banished and of the dark-ages. Like was beginning and new; like was when you grew wings that made you lithe and interesting; love was when those wings kept growing, became thick and unseemly—tarp-like—and then smothered you; wrapped you up, like a bodybag.

  Though, still, Aaron kind of wanted to say that he loved her.

  “I like you more each day,” he said.

  “Really.”

  “I like you more each day, and a lot, overall.” Lately, Aaron worried that Alicia would leave him. “Yes, really.” She had begun to talk to friends everyday, on her cell phone—friends from high-school. Aaron himself had not kept in touch with friends after high school, though maybe he should have. “I like to hold you,” he said. At night, every night now, for twenty or thirty minutes before sleep, Aaron would hold her, from behind, both of them thinking their own things, round-pupiled in the dark, looking out into their bedroom, at all their unseen but no doubt capering bugs, and sometimes forgetting the other person, the conscious, changing life of them, but just holding on to the warm, DNA heap of them.