Bed

by Tao Lin

  “Are you a reporter?” Donnie said. “I’ve had this … bad vibe, that you’re a reporter from USA Today. When I saw you, the headline came into my head, ‘Teenage Terrorism Gangs at Punk Shows,’ and it had a bar graph. I was like, that’s not right, that’s fucked up—the bar graph, I mean.”

  Frank began to eat. He had a damaged, pensive look on his face. He ate rice.

  “I don’t think you are,” Maura said. “Your posture.” She gazed at Colin. “Reporters wouldn’t dare have your posture. Reporters have horse eyes. You have dog … bird eyes. You don’t move your head to look at something, you move your eyes.”

  “I’m going to carpet bomb the Super Bowl with my al Qaeda friend, who lives on Second Avenue and …” Donnie said. He stared at Colin, who was looking down, at all the vegetables that he had moved onto his plate. There was a withered piece of carrot, a mushroom, a pile of baby corn, and an enormous green thing.

  “Reporters aren’t as hungry as you,” Maura said.

  Frank stood up. “I’m going to the bathroom to vomit,” he said, and went there.

  “I like you, Colin,” Donnie said. He looked around. “I mean it. I usually hate all people. You should come to my birthday party next week. I don’t have friends. Just these people here, and they don’t even like me. Frank. Ha. I don’t ever talk this much. I’m probably on anti-anxiety drugs right now. I’m always like, ‘I hate you, what’s the point of talking.’ Or I’m walking around and I’m all like, ‘I’m normal. I’m a normal person. Fuck all these weirdoes.’ Really, I’m probably exactly like you. Exactly. You should see me at school. I stare at the wall. There’s this wall. Anyway.” His voice was wavering a bit. He took out a 3 × 5 note card and set it in front of Colin:

  Donnie’s birthday extravaganza

  No clowns, no presents, no singing, fuck no, no cake, no nothing

  Sure to be a depressing time for everyone involved

  You shouldn’t even come, please

  The waiter came back with his bike and three other people—his twin, a tall and bearded man, and a tiny, wrinkled, peanut-colored woman. They pulled up another table and sat down. The waiter went and got more soup and bowls.

  “These are gargantuan,” the short homeless man said. He held his bowl up to the light and everyone looked. It was a normal-sized bowl.

  The tall man smelled a little sour. He was sitting by Colin, and now stood up. “Thank you, sir,” he said to Colin, and sat down.

  Colin said something shocking yet compassionate, but he wasn’t sure what exactly—or if, even, as he didn’t hear his own voice and also had been thinking about something completely else.

  “Thank you, Colin,” the short man said.

  “Thank you, Colin, sir,” the tall man said.

  The tiny, wrinkled woman was smiling very pleasantly. She had a little teacup in front of her. The waiter’s twin had on a “NASA” hoodie and was talking to Donnie. “We lived in Seattle then moved here. We’ve written four film scripts each, eight in total. We have a shared identity but we also have distinct individual identities. Well, what do you think?”

  Frank came back. His face and hair were wet, his eyes were unfocused, and his seat had been taken. He stood there a while, then focused his eyes, put food on a plate, sat alone at an adjacent table, and ate.

  “You’re trying to say something,” Maura said to the tiny, wrinkled woman, who was moving her lips in an unhurried, fishlike way. Some spit got onto her chin and she coughed a few times. Little coughs, like drops of water. Finally she very clearly and quickly said, “What are your movies about?” She did not have an accent. They were all looking at her.

  “That depends. Wait … do you mean plotwise?” the waiter’s twin said. “Wait,” he said loudly.

  They all continued looking at the tiny woman. She was very wrinkled. She began to cough again, then reached for a napkin and knocked over her teacup, which was filled with something not easily describable. It wasn’t tea. There was food in it, and a small mound of sugar or something. “Oh shit,” she said, softly and without agitation, and then carefully stood and walked slowly out of the restaurant.

  “I think what she meant?” the waiter said, looking at his twin. “Was overall, as in what are our preoccupations?”

  “Life,” the twin said quickly. He stared at his brother, the waiter. “What, you don’t think so? I hesitated earlier. I shouldn’t have. We’re different.”

  Maura stood. “Let’s go help her,” she said, and pulled Colin up. As she and Colin left, the waiter was saying, “She’s not as old as you think. She uses the internet, you know? Friendster?”

  It was snowing outside. Colin felt cold, but in a stony, immune way. He was a marble statue, unearthed after a hundred million years—fascinating. The woman stood on the corner, small and shoulderless as a penguin. The wind lifted her hair above her head, like a small, white flame.

  “We’ll each hold one of her arms,” Maura said. They went and did that.

  Maura leveled her face with the woman’s and asked where they were going, then positioned her ear directly in front of the woman’s mouth. Maura’s nose ring was very bright. Colin stared at it and could hear it shining. It was a noise like a happy person waking from a nap—continually waking from a nice nap.

  The woman pointed across the street. There was a McDonald’s, glowing yellow and red in complex, ongoing, and freakish acknowledgement of itself. As they crossed the street, Colin couldn’t see that well; snow moved elaborately toward his face, in curlicues and from below. But he felt that he could hear better. He could hear their six shoes sloshing against the snow. It was a crumbling noise, he realized, only faster.

  Inside McDonald’s it was very warm. They sat in a booth by the entrance. The woman said she wanted an Oreo McFlurry, but had no money.

  “You don’t need money,” Maura said. “Don’t move.” She stood and went to the back, to the ordering counter.

  The woman began to shiver. Colin took off his jacket and put it on her back. She touched her ears. “It’s cold here,” she said. “These places.” She touched her forehead and eyebrows.

  Colin pulled the jacket up, covering her head completely. It looked like it put an uncomfortable weight on her neck. Colin slid in close, right next to her, and held the jacket up a little.

  “That’s pretty good,” the woman said. “I don’t like the city. No, never. Don’t ask me that.” She began to talk faster and louder. “I’m moving to the Florida Keys. I’m not driving. I’m taking a plane. I’m living in a hut on the beach.” She paused, then coughed.

  “Oh,” Colin said.

  “Everyone’s doing something and that’s what a city is,” the woman said. “I’m old. I don’t want to communicate at the speed of light on Mars. My daughter died in the towers. She didn’t need to be there, typing, doing things at the speed of light. Not my daughter but other daughters. I mean—people. Something. I can’t get at the things in my head. They’re tiny. They move too slow.” She was coughing or sobbing now—or both; there was a sound like two or three hamsters squeaking. Colin leaned over to look at her face, but it was just a shadow under the jacket, an abyss. “Where were you when the towers happened?” she said.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Singing? What?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Oh, that’s good. So don’t wake up. Build a home by a beach. Leave the city and get a bed. Those are important. Beds. Don’t wake up through any of this, ever. Don’t dream about cities or progress. Don’t wake up or dream. That’s what I’m saying. Is that wrong? What should I say then? It’s too late to say anything.”

  “It’s … what time is it?” Colin said inaudibly.

  Maura came back holding a McFlurry and with a McDonald’s manager following her. She set the McFlurry down and sat opposite the woman and Colin. The McFlurry had some ice cream smeared on its outside and no cap on top.

  The manager stood by the booth. “None of you have money?” he said. He was extremely ta
ll and was staring down at Colin. “I believe that. I’m not self-righteous. Listen,” he said. He stared at Colin without blinking. “Okay. Listen. ‘From anyone who takes away your coat, do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you, and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.’ Listen; just keep listening. ‘Students of Buddha should not take pleasure in being honored, but should practice detachment …’ ” He continued on like that.

  Colin’s eyes were very dry. He was staring back at the manager, wide-eyed, and when he finally blinked, both his contact lenses crinkled and fell out, onto his cheeks. He brushed them quickly off his face.

  The manager stopped talking and affected a sudden, neutral expression. He stared at Colin’s contact lenses, which were on the table.

  “Do you need something for those?” the manager said slowly. “Yeah. I think you need alcohol solution to clean them, now that they’re dirty.”

  “It’s good to not wear them sometimes, for a change,” Maura said. “Once a year … week.”

  They were all looking at the contact lenses, which were squirming a little, slowly unfolding.

  The old woman was weeping and coughing very quietly.

  Colin brushed at the contact lenses until they fell off the table. He was blushing hard and was sweating a little in some places. He rested his hands in his lap, and felt them there—light as gloves, gentle and dead as birds.

  The manager took from his pocket a colorful wad of Monopoly money. He stuffed that quickly back in his pocket, then took a five-dollar bill from another pocket. “Here,” he said. He set it on the table, looked at it, flattened it out. “That’s five … real dollars.” He smiled and looked very happy. He smiled less after a while, then renewed his smile, then left.

  “People can be so nice,” Maura said. She was looking at the woman. “Maybe you shouldn’t eat that freezing-cold … you’re shivering. You’re hyperventilating.”

  The woman moved the McFlurry into the dark area below the jacket and the weeping noise stopped.

  Maura climbed over the table and held the woman. She set the side of her head lightly against the woman’s back and closed her eyes. “I’ve wanted to ask about your friend Dana,” she said after a while. It was snowing very hard outside; snow was flying against the glass then vanishing, quiet and rescued as the tiny ghosts of baby doves. Everything else outside was a lucid and excited black. “What do I want to know?” Maura said. “I don’t know. Something.” She began to hum loudly.

  Colin had been thinking about the week after September 11th, had been thinking about that for a long time—but wasn’t anymore. He wasn’t thinking anything anymore. He was the effect of some inception. There was the first thing, and then so on, all the rest being effect, and there was nothing Colin could do about that. If he was going to feel this way, then he was going to feel this way. Feelings were a part of the effect too. The effect was everything, and forever. It couldn’t be changed or gotten out of.

  But Colin wasn’t thinking or feeling any of this, really.

  It was all just there, in him—what he’d think or feel if he were to. It was a leaf, waiting for him. His heart was a leaf. A white leaf, inside a gigantic noise.

  September 11th, that Tuesday, Colin had called Dana’s room and left a message. He called again the next day and left another. It was the second week of college and Colin didn’t know anyone. He spent that week lying awake in his room, listening to music, not eating barely anything. Mostly just thinking about Dana. Waiting for her call.

  By Friday, Colin had convinced himself that Dana hadn’t called because she had left the city; a lot of people had—his roommate had. Though, really, he wasn’t sure, as he’d been thinking about when they last hung out. It had been different than the times before. They hadn’t had fun really—not nearly as much as at first—and hadn’t made plans. But then maybe she had just left the city.

  It wasn’t until a few months later—after Dana met her boyfriend—that Colin found out she had been across Washington Square Park all that week; she hadn’t left, hadn’t called.

  But that was later.

  On Friday, Colin could still feel a little less lonely thinking about Dana.

  That night they were showing movies for free at Union Square, and Colin went. There were many homeless people, all of them alone. No one wanted to sit by a homeless person—with their puffy, Godless coats; their animal largeness—but then every seat filled, and some people had to. Colin was a little dazed, watching this, and had stopped, for a time, feeling sorry for himself, but for everyone else—everything. The movie was very independent and very sad. Outside, the streets were closed to cars. People walked on them. Missing-person flyers were taped over ads and poles. It was very quiet without any cars. Colin felt vast and detailless and disembodied; it was the same tired and endless feeling everywhere, he felt, inside of him and out—in the stung and ashen air, the buildings tall and pale as apparitions, the strange and lowered sky. Colin didn’t want to go back to his room. He walked around for a very long time, looking down at the sidewalks and streets, and thought of the things he and Dana might say to each other if she were with him. And every once in a while he would catch himself smiling and laughing a little, and it was those moments right after—as, having lapsed into fantasy, there was a correction, a moment of nothing and then a loose and sudden rush, back into the real world in a trick of escape, as if to some new place of possibilities—that he felt at once, and with clarity, most exhilarated, appreciative, disappointed, and accepting.

  Nine, Ten

  People got a bit careless that year. Band-aids were forgone, small wounds allowed to go a little out of control—to infect a bit. Jobs were quit. People woke early-evening or mid-afternoon, fisted ice cream bars, wandered from their homes—only a little bit depressed—and walked diagonally through parking lots. They felt no longer in the midst of things, but in the misty aftermath of things, the quaint and narcotic haze of what comes after. A haze in which nothing, they knew, could ever fully, truly, happen. Anything there was could only yearn for itself, at a distance, behind barricades, could only long for the real self of itself. The core of things—of love and life, of any simple feeling or thought—could no longer be experienced center-on, could no longer be thought of or felt directly, but only in trying, in tics and glimpses, in ways holographic and fleeing.

  And so people stayed inside mostly. Some disappeared. Others called up their local papers, phoned in their own deaths and, next day, read their own obituaries with a strange, hollow sort of longing, a real but feeble passion for their alternate, dead selves. They sat nights in bathtubs, whistling, blow-drying their hair—taking that risk. They began exploring their own houses. Moving things around and touching stuff, as they had begun to sense that there was something with them, unseen and poignant, something slightly alive and, they suspected, relevant, inside the walls or behind the furniture, a thing cloaked and shadowy that approached, in angles, and then vanished—their own lives, they came to realize. It was their own lives, living with them, playing games, tag and hide-and-seek, and—having hid somewhere good, somewhere unfindable, years ago probably—stubborn, wanting to be found, needing that resolution, but just rotting there, then, in whatever godforsaken hiding spot, like some mean, oversweet piece of fruit, spurned, finally, to a crisp—an apple chip.

  In the oceans, sea life grew bold. Sharks leapt into boats, snarling, leapt out. Tuna fish matured to the size of small whales, and packs of seals moved inland, taking the back roads. All along the coasts were suicides, rare and wintry specimens—narwhal, whale sharks, oarfish—beaching themselves, rolling up far (too far, people said), sliding onto the grassier sands, scooting up against the beachfront hotels, the Slurpy huts.

  At Cocoa Beach, there was the oversized squid. It was early summer and Florida, and the squid washed smoothly ashore—forty-feet long and pink-flecked—in one extra-foamy wave.

  “Architeuthis dux,” people said. “The giant squid.”
They were knowledgeable. They had their patterned towels, their wine coolers, and they moved down the beach in a migratory trudge. “First the toe thing, the dog thing,” said one woman, looking around, “last week the toaster, after that the cow, then the ticks, the little apocalypse, the parking lot with the political skater punks, now this squid thing, this squid … thing.”

  Her face had gotten red and she lightly slapped it a few times, after which she looked a little better—mollified.

  Jed, his dad, and his friend LJ were there. LJ was a girl and she and Jed were nine.

  “That’s interesting,” Jed’s dad said. But he wouldn’t look at it—the squid. The three of them had a beach ball, were kicking it, and Jed’s dad just kept kicking. He didn’t know if he was ready for something like that, a thing of such size and agony. He might get obsessed—he was prone to—and also he had lately been practicing, earnestly, a kind of halfhearted Buddhism, with timeouts and the occasional off-day. He was to destroy almost all desires. He wasn’t ready yet to destroy all desires. It scared him, actually, the idea of having no desires—as that in itself was a desire. Or was it? He didn’t know, that was the thing. He was unemployed.

  “Why don’t we look at it from closer?” Jed said quietly. He would go himself, but it could be a trick—Venus flytrap or something. He didn’t want to be mauled, not like some deer.

  They kept kicking the beach ball.

  Between kicks they had to stand there and wait, as the ball, once in the air, seemed to slow down, to take its time up there, enjoying the view.

  The sky was blue until you looked into it, then you saw it was more of a lightly polluted gray.

  “It’s just a giant squid,” LJ said after a while, having zoned out for some time. She now could see it looming, burrito-y and soulless, in her periphery. “It’s just a giant squid,” she said again. She kicked the ball, and then felt stupid. It’s just a giant squid. What did she mean? She was just a little girl, she knew. “Wait,” she whispered. She blushed. A wind came at her face and she had to blink a few times. A wave came, took back the squid, and deposited in its place a clump of dead jellyfish—the squashed, opaque bags of them like mangled eyes, flayed and beaten, swollen to the size of heads.