by Tao Lin
For spring break, they flew to Alicia’s parents’ place in New England.
At dinner, at The Olive Garden, Alicia sat by her brother—who seemed, to Aaron, not handicapped, not at all, just a very shy person—but they did not speak to or look at each other. Alicia’s parents seemed more like grandparents, and they too did not speak. Only Alicia’s sister spoke; she ordered for everyone.
After dinner, in the parking lot, Alicia’s brother fell, somehow, into a tree. His face turned a reddish white as he unwrenched his clothing from the branches. In the car, he looked brutalized and war torn. He sat by Aaron and talked to himself. His voice was small and eerie and Aaron tried not to listen to it.
Late that night, Aaron and Alicia walked around her neighborhood. They did not hold hands, but—feeling wild and young from the airdropped newness of the first night in a different state—walked and sometimes ran a little in erratic, separate directions, over strips of grass and sidewalks. The houses were all dark and large and shoebox-shaped. There was a cool, quick movement to the sky above—a cold-watery moonlight, below the clouds but above the rooftops, as between the houses, on the street and lawns where they walked, it was black and still and breezeless.
Aaron thought of living someplace with Alicia. He was not good at meeting people, did not have the skill of escaping his body and so was always drowned in social situations by his own ducts and glands, thwarted by his own nerve-bundles, which would detach somehow and move stupidly into his bloodstream and bump, then, through his heart, and he doubted that, if Alicia left him, he would be able to meet anyone new. They used to, but hadn’t for a long time now, discuss moving somewhere together after graduating. Maybe he would bring that up tonight, ask her.
He could see them getting MFAs together, then university teaching jobs, being funny and halfhearted and sometimes extraordinary with students, and somewhere in all this taking care of their parents, into old age and death; and, themselves, then, too, growing old and dying.
As one had to expect very little—almost nothing—from life, Aaron knew, one had to be grateful, not always be trying to seize the days, not like some maniac of living, but to give oneself up, be seized by the days, the months and years, be taken up in a froth of sun and moon, some pale and smoothie’d river-cloud of life, a long, drawn-out and gray sort of enlightenment, so that when it was time to die, one did not scream swear words and knock things down, did not make a scene, but went easily, with understanding and tact, and quietly, in a lightly pummeled way, having been consoled—having allowed to be consoled—by the soft and generous worthlessness of it all, having allowed to be massaged by the daily beating of life, instead of just beaten.
And Aaron felt that he could allow this, could give himself up in this way.
He could, with Alicia, accept the stretched and meager thing of life, the little rush of youth and then the slow, vague drift of the rest, until the sidewards tug at the end, into something else, some fluorescent reward-world, perhaps, or just into the bizarre math of nothingness, the distant and sincere art of it—and if he could allow all this, if he could feel okay with all this, then, he guessed, so could Alicia and her parents, and his own parents. But he could not comprehend his parents or anyone else accepting things in this way, could not feel anything vicariously but fear, worry, and regret. And if his parents couldn’t accept, if no one else could, then maybe he couldn’t either. He knew he couldn’t, actually, because though he understood, now, the possibility of such a feeling he did not feel it, and if ever he had felt fine and worriless and accepting in the past it was, he knew, a fleeting, delusional thing. He knew now—knew only—that, in the end, there would be urgency and difficultness, there would be the oncoming and increasingly complicated need to resolve, to be convinced—to be, finally, appreciative, of having once lived, of having at least happened in this sudden and terrific (or was it terrifying?) world.
Aaron went and held Alicia’s hand. There was a helicopter somewhere, and they listened to it; some chopping, flapping noise that maybe was a bird, or a bug—a dragonfly or moth, flying close.
“I’m staying here,” Alicia said. “I’m moving home. I just decided, I’m not going back to school or Florida.”
Aaron thought about their two-year lease. He thought about moving back home, with his own parents. “I like it here,” he said, and waited for Alicia to say something else, but she didn’t. He thought about their plans for spring break, for right now—hadn’t they made plans?
They went back to her house and ate fruit. They watched TV.
“My brother doesn’t even know who I am anymore,” Alicia said in bed. She was crying. “My sister’s said things to him. They hate me. I deserve it. I’m so selfish. Why did I leave? I shouldn’t have majored in English. My sister could have gone to college too. She would’ve double majored in useful things. I wasn’t thinking, ever! What was I even doing? I didn’t think one thing in four years.” She laughed a little, but it was mostly just crying, and she kept talking, and while she talked she moved—she shook a little; her chest, in fits—and Aaron, holding her, felt that moving, the turning of things inside, the loosening of it all, the press and shape of the bones in her back, all of which he was just faintly aware of, as he was thinking hard, thinking of something for both of them, something not to absolve what they were doing, but to absolve what the world was doing, what it was. And in this thinking, then—this incommunicable, impossible thinking; why are there things?—he began to feel a leaving, a vagueness and gravitylessness of self. And from some faraway place, now, from some else and momentary place, he became aware of a strange and bodiless squirming in his arms, a warm and pulsing thing, shifting against him in revisions—in increments and illusions—as he held, carefully, on, and began to fold and pack at himself, so that he might enter, finally, the experience of this thing, and staunch it, at its free and anonymous source, its phantom, nowhere heart that surely must be there; hidden, maybe, but real, and findable—if one wanted enough, and tried hard—as, if not, then where was one to go with all their white and toneless feelings? Where was one to take all their changed and used-up feelings of youth?
Love is the Indifferent God of the Religion in which Universe is Church
Sean had been spending his nights leisurely, with much intuition and very little actual engagement with the real world—the real world outside that was really happening. He was twenty-one. He lived with his older brother, Chris, in Manhattan, and dreamt mostly of love. These were terrible, cloying dreams. They involved prolonged moments of passion, vague and painted colors, and people sitting around in a sort of curtained and euphoric gloom, which was what love, in Sean’s dreams, seemed to be. He slept in the daytime, on the sofa, and would wake, sometimes, with such an awful, spongy feeling of love—the soggy cake of it pressed against his heart like another heart—that he would then move through the apartment, the one long room of it, like a hallway gone wrong, in an unenlightened sort of searching (where was the beloved?), not touching anything, but just moving, between things (piles of clothes, the TV, the low white raft of his brother’s bed), feeling husked and ancient and—sitting, then, back on the sofa—thankless, as what was there, in this cheap and witless world, to be thankful for? Not much, Sean knew. He didn’t like the world, and the world had perhaps grown weary of him.
The world was weary of him!
Though probably it was not even love that Sean dreamed of, but some sleight of love, some trick of crush or inwardly thwarted desire, like a chemical seed; or else some boldly fraudulent expectation—an expectation that leads a fantasy out into the real world, gets it an apartment and, illegally, a job—as Sean had probably never been in love. He’d once told a girlfriend that he loved her, but had then felt suddenly vanquished, as if in swift and arrow-y battle, on some nighttime field; as if the world, in that moment, had thought of him, and mastered him; memorized and set him aside, like a learned thing. The world was maybe finished with Sean. And yet—he remained. Alive, doing things
(eating, writing a novel, moving to Manhattan), as there was still, and always, the feeling—the suspicion—that the world knew him, and loved him, that the world was trying hard to convey this, was forming itself a language, progressing gradually, thoughtwardly, and slowly, along. Which was, perhaps, the sensation of being alive—the reason why Sean existed, kept going—the waiting of that, the faith in it, that there was a big thing of love out there, a mansion of it, and that the world, however incompetent, was trying every day to get Sean there, was thinking of where he should go, and how.
Sean woke up to Annie talking. “I’ve been having the suicide-note dream,” Annie was saying. “I struggle with sentence structure, voice—is this me? is this my true voice?—I line edit, move the adverb around. I die finally of natural causes, which I deserve.” Annie was sitting on the bed, facing Sean, who lay on the sofa, under blankets. Chris lay beside Annie, on his back. He had the New Yorker, which he held above him in an excruciating way.
“Oh,” Annie said. “And sometimes I feel like my life’s out there, in outer space—a spacecraft or moon—and any moment it’s going to move down and smush me, all slow-motion-like.” Annie kept very still for a few seconds. She’s become jaded with herself, Sean thought tolerantly. “God,” she said, “my head aches. It aches with both a love and a longing for the present, changing moment. I can feel it changing.” She slapped a hand down behind her; it hit Chris’s thigh. Annie was Chris’s girlfriend.
“Massage me,” Chris said. He tossed the New Yorker onto a pile of clothes on the floor. He rolled onto his side, toward the window, which overlooked 29th street. There were faraway siren sounds, the rush and voice of city noise, much like a beach shore—a beach shore, though, with cabs instead of waves, buildings instead of gulls. It was late evening, and summertime.
Annie was chopping at Chris’s side. “Okay,” Chris said. “Stop.”
Sean closed his eyes to go back to sleep. He had been dreaming before, something watery and baffling. I want to learn, Sean thought. Swimming, he thought. Time swished and pocked inside of him, like a bowl of water with a fish in it that was also him. He wondered tentatively if he was asleep. He felt something on his legs. Annie had come over and sat on him. “I’ve got a sister,” she said. “Want to meet her?”
Something inside of Sean’s body, something small and squishy, shifted a little—a lymph node, perhaps.
“She’s Maryanne,” Annie said.
“Maryanne,” Sean said. He felt the long bones of Annie’s legs piling against his own.
“Annie,” Chris said. He lay wrapped in his blanket on the floor, which was wood. Annie went to him. “Let’s go to my place,” she said. “To have incredible sex.” Chris unwrapped himself and stood. “There’s no such thing as incredible sex,” he said. Annie beamed at him. She laughed. They went to Annie’s place. Sean fell asleep. When he woke, he drank orange juice. He sat on the sofa in the dark. He was thinking about showering—the hard-tiled attack of it, the soap always slipping away like an unrequited, mocking love. The water would be never-ending. Unstoppable. To take a shower, it seemed a risky, harrowing thing. To build a fire, Sean thought. To build an enormous bonfire. Sean stood up. He lay on his brother’s bed. Love, he thought. Maryanne, he was thinking. He felt wild and agitated. He didn’t like this feeling—it was something of the past, twisting forward and back in knots—as he had recently, and for some time now, been a calmer person, someone with an unsentimental acceptance of things, a discerning and philosophic nature, no teenage angst, no vague desperation; because waking at night, Sean knew, was a changing thing. Each time, you craved less, you forgot a little of the shiny-loud world, the exploding appliance of faces in daytime—the dancing, thrashing equipment of things in the sun. You woke at night and something serene and foliaged gathered behind your eyes—a pale cache of forest—and, waking up, moving out from your mind, a part of you stayed there. In that dimmed place, some fragile, once-hurt part of you said, “What’s this. This is nice. Okay then. Stay here then.”
A few days later Chris came home early in the evening with Chinese food and woke up Sean, who had been dreaming of Maryanne.
“Broccoli and fried tofu,” Chris said. “Extra mayonnaise and lettuce. I know you like that.”
Sean went for the Chinese food. In his dream, he had been outside of himself. He was everything there was except for himself. He was all the pure and unpeopled love of the world. He was God, perhaps. He was also an eye. He saw himself and who he understood to be Maryanne, far below, lounging on a gaseous, Neptunish sort of field, lain rosy as shawls—shadowy and shifting as the insides of a thing.
“Let’s rent a movie tonight,” Chris said. “Mutant turtles. Your favorite. Splinter’s Big Revenge.”
Sean was eating the Chinese food. He was back in his dream, drifting through the outer-planet-y world of it, everything soft and purple and destroyed; unpulsing and beautiful as the bland, sweet skin of an eggplant. Was this love? Sean wondered. He put tofu in his mouth.
“I rented this already,” Chris said. “No turtles for you.” He was looking and grinning at Sean, who was staring down at the Chinese food. Chris tossed the movie on the sofa. Sean stared at the food, then moved—quite gracefully, he thought while doing it—to the movie and sat down beside it. “Can you put it in and rewind it?” Chris said. His voice could go high-pitched sometimes, a little beseeching, like a shy person’s in a moment of extroversion, and it did now. “Sean, fast forward the previews?” Sean put his food down, picked up the movie. He remembered a noisy something from childhood, something brotherly and laughing, and felt the tiniest of sadnesses—the sadness of an ant, a mite, and a mosquito—stamping lightly against his heart, like a little rain.
There was a full-length mirror against the TV, and Chris, as he was moving it, now, dropped it. Sean saw on the floor a patch of glass, dark and unsparkling as leaves. Chris did not move for a few seconds; his eyes, Sean saw, were unfocused; his mouth unmoving and wet, imbedded in his head like a flat and creamy stone.
“It’s just a mirror,” Sean said.
Chris got a broom and swept the glass into a pile of clothes. He carried the broken mirror to his bed, then to the front door. “Don’t worry so much,” Sean said. “It’s a mirror.” Though he often caught himself assuming—wishing, probably—that everyone was the same, Sean knew that he and his brother (and everyone else) were hopelessly, and mysteriously, he felt, different. Chris set the mirror against the TV, back in its original place. The top half of it was intact, in a blade, like a guillotine. Sean felt anxious.
Chris went to his bed and lay on it, facing the window.
“Do you want to watch the movie?” Sean said.
Chris made a noise and sustained it. The noise got louder, then stopped.
Sean put the movie in. My brother deserves to be happy, he thought. What can happen in this world? he wondered nauseously. Can anything ever really happen? He looked at the sofa. He lay on it. The movie was not rewound. Sean watched the end credits and fell asleep.
“Next time I’ll bring Maryanne here,” Annie said to Sean. “What do you think?”
“Okay,” Sean said. He lay under blankets on the sofa. Chris was in the shower; had been singing loudly, but had then stopped.
Annie was jumping, now, on the bed. “Sometimes I think I’m all these different people at once,” she said while jumping. “Like five people. And they all want to use this same brain. And this brain’s tired. This brain says, ‘Four of you need to go,’ and sometimes I start myself to go, because why should I get priority over these other four people?” Annie sat and smiled at Sean.
Sean tried to focus on his own life. “Have you seen Annie Hall?” he said. He had wanted to say something about his own life.
“No. But one time I dreamed I was Woody Allen,” she said. “No one liked me anymore. People chased me in a hotel. Then I jumped out a window. I survived the fall, but there was a nail in my stomach. I walked a little and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll g
o make a movie now.’ ” Annie yawned very slowly and quietly. Her mouth opened wide. Sean looked at her teeth, the private collection of them, packed tightly inside of her small, elegant head, like a secret behind the face, a white and shocking hobby. It made Sean nervous. He felt perilous, then fleeting, and then a little excited.
“Woody Allen’s Annie Hall,” Annie said. “That’s so sad. I mean, I don’t know. Is it sad?”
Sean didn’t remember what that movie was about. He remembered something about tennis, the hardness and slowness of tennis, the incapacitation of it, unmasterable as a bad dream, how the tennis ball would always soar from the racket—like a surface-to-air missile—over fences and walls. “Woody Hall,” Sean said.
Annie laughed. “Annie Flame,” she said. “That should be my pen name. I’ve written a novel.” She stared at Sean. “Annie Flame would be my pen name and in interviews I’d take from a duffel bag a metal spike, one of those railroad ones. I’d say I was thinking of getting my forehead pierced. I’d hold the spike to my forehead, to demonstrate. I’d quote myself constantly. Myself and one other person. Einstein. That would be my career plan. In real life, I’d have this other persona—of sanity and love. It makes me sad, talking like this. I should stop.”
Sean smiled pleasantly, quite naturally, which surprised and pleased him. “What’s your novel called?”
“It’s, ‘Ten Digital Photographs of Eleven Tiny, Tortured Souls.’ ” Annie looked at Sean. “That’s not what it’s called,” she said.
Chris came out of the bathroom in an audible thrust of steam, like an occult appearance—fully dressed. His face was wet. “Annie,” he said. “I feel bad again today.” Annie went to him and hugged him and they went out somewhere.