by Tao Lin
Another wave came and put the squid back on the beach.
That night Jed slept over at one of LJ’s houses—she had two. They both dreamt of giant squid.
In Jed’s dream he was a tiny shrimp, a krill. He floated in blackness and was confused. A giant squid went by slowly. Jed saw the eye, which was jazzy and glowing, like a TV and a moon both. He whispered in his krill’s head, hi. He then felt such a crushing kind of weakness that he began to tremble, as if he might soon cease to exist.
In LJ’s dream she kept saying, “It’s just a giant squid.” Each time she said it, she felt a little stupider. Finally, she started to cry. Jed kept kicking the beach ball, but only at his dad, except once at the giant squid; the ball bounced smoothly off, then back to Jed, who kicked it smoothly to his dad. At one point, also, the squid mimicked LJ—unkindly, she thought. It’s just a giant squid, it said. Then it made a noise. LJ was taken aback because the noise was very unsquidlike.
In the morning, the squid was on the local news.
“Lewly,” LJ’s mom said to LJ. “You went here yesterday?” She looked at Jed. She was in love with Jed’s dad. They were both divorced from unmemorable people, and both had high metabolism. They had dated each other awhile—after she won the lottery a few years back, moved from Canada to Florida, and bought two houses—but it hadn’t worked out. “Jed,” she said. She pointed at the TV, which had an aura of rinky-dink, somehow-charming totalitarianism. “You were here yesterday. Don’t lie to me.”
Jed nodded.
“Veteran seafarers have measured them at 200 feet,” the TV was saying. It showed a veteran seafarer, and the newsman grinned. The screen changed. It showed a prostrate man, a school bus, two giant squid—one 60 feet, one 200 feet. At the bottom, it had a row of exclamation marks.
“I like exclamation marks,” LJ said. She wasn’t so sure, though. She only liked them sometimes. “I don’t like exclamation marks,” she said. She shook her head. “No,” she said. Things could bother LJ in this way. Both she and her mom were readers. Her mom claimed to read not for pleasure, but to confirm her worldview. LJ herself had a questionable way of reading. She would flip through, read a sentence here, a sentence there. If she didn’t like a sentence, she’d pick another. Finally, she’d feel done, and then would look, with confidence, at the cover, to make up her own story. She had read much of Vonnegut, and a third of Kafka.
“Nova Scotia,” Jed said slowly. The night before, he and LJ had looked up giant squid on the internet. “Ink sac,” he mumbled.
“Those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “200 feet! Those damn squid!” She was standing. She stood when watching TV, did stretching exercises, sometimes touched the TV screen—usually with a middle finger. “What do they think they’re doing? Jed, what are they doing?”
Things could do what they wanted, Jed thought. “They’re just growing,” he said very quietly.
“You could feed a small country with one of those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “For a week. I bet you could do that. Maybe not. A small town then. A small, Welsh village.” She looked at LJ and smiled, then back at the TV. “You’ve got to be specific,” she said. “A small, seventeenth-century, Welsh village.”
LJ was staring off to the side, eyes unfocused. She was thinking about Nova Scotia. She liked Nova Scotia. Sometimes, in bed, under the covers and comfy, she’d think that she felt very Nova Scotic. She had dreamed, once, of dining Italian with Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia had a small mouth, was a wind-blown arctic wolf, tall and groomed and soft-spoken, and had ordered something with eggplant. LJ had read a book on Nova Scotia.
The three of them stood there, in front of the TV, which had moved on—it had a lot to get to—was now warning of deadly substances that sometimes dripped from rain gutters. A man had been killed, and some animals, allegedly. It showed a photo of a man, a dog, and a hamster that looked, for a hamster, alarmingly distraught.
“My god!” LJ’s mom said. “That hamster!” She loved TV. She really did. TV excited her, rejuvenated her, entered her like something kindhearted and many-handed that held her up, then hardened into a kind of scaffolding. The TV had segued into hamsters and was showing a slideshow of them, each one badly deranged in the face. It kept showing more and more hamsters, and LJ’s mom began to feel sad. As a child, she had one afternoon been diagnosed—condemned, she sometimes thought—with Asperger Syndrome, social anxiety disorder, bipolar disease, and a few other things. It was a turning point, that day, she knew. Her life had been going in one direction, cruising, windows down, but then had turned, taken a left through a redlight, gunned it; had later run out of gas in a kind of desert outside of town. These days she was staying inside mostly. She had won the lottery, moved from Canada to Florida. She was writing a book, actually.
“What if you could Google your own house?” Jed murmured. “If you lost your keys or TV remote you could just Google it.”
LJ’s mom looked at Jed. She walked to him. “What did you just say? Can you repeat that?” She leaned down and carefully moved her ear to Jed’s mouth.
Jed concentrated on loudness and clarity, and then repeated what he had said.
LJ’s mom stood and smiled. “Oh, Jed,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”
“Oh,” Jed said. It annoyed him that people couldn’t ever understand what he was saying. He looked around for LJ, who had wandered into the kitchen.
LJ’s mom patted Jed’s head and looked outside, through her sliding glass door. The swimming pool was covered—you couldn’t see the water—with mulch, moss, and leaves; it looked very much like a swamp, actually, had large, cage-y branches floating in it, as a tree had fallen through the screen some time ago and LJ’s mom had liked that, the idea of it, so had left it there. There was a squirrel, now, by the pool, standing motionless in that clicked-in way of the lower animals. The sun shone brightly on its handsome face. LJ’s mom stared out there, feeling a bit blighted, here inside, somehow cheated. She was thinking that if she married Jed’s dad and LJ became Jed’s girlfriend, how wonderful that would be. They’d all live together in a little house somewhere, with a shiny roof, atop some green hill. It would be in New Zealand, she thought, feeling precarious, or else Wisconsin.
Jed’s dad began to learn, that year, to enjoy waiting; there was something true and mastered about it, he knew—the casual excellence of waiting—that could induce you, lead you focusedly deathward, like a drug addiction, but without the frenzy or desperation. He felt, at times, that he could wait for anything—a month, a year, a thousand years—for love or friendship or happiness. He could exist like a theory in the place before the real place, could float there in the pigeon flight of pre-ambition, in a kind of gliding, thinking only small things and feeling only small emotions, pre-pathos, so that you could fit your entire life easily in your head, and carry it around, like a pleasant memory from some wholesome childhood, yours or someone else’s, it didn’t matter.
“LJ said Jed was being held back a year,” LJ’s mom said to Jed’s dad on the phone. Jed’s dad had liked her at first. They had gone to the movies, bowling, arcades with the kids. But over time he had seen something selfish in her, something a bit insane. She could be jealous and unreasonable. One night she had thrown a potted plant. And though he now sometimes suspected that she was a good, caring, sane person, that it was he who just hadn’t tried hard enough, who wasn’t accommodating and tolerant enough, he had stopped calling her, then, after the potted plant. But she had kept calling him.
“You shouldn’t let that happen,” LJ’s mom said. “You can’t, responsibility-wise.”
“It’s okay,” Jed’s dad said. In the elementary schools, they had begun to hold back entire ostensible playgroups of children, bunches of them, together, like something tethered and collective-brained. Jed and everyone who seemed to sit nearby this one big-headed kid, seven of them, all the foreboding, quiet kids—you could never tell if they were slow or gifted—were to repeat the fourth grade.
“It’s not ok
ay,” LJ’s mom said. “I know Jed. Jed’s smart. You know this. They, though—they don’t know this. It’s just a misunderstanding, to be corrected.” She began to worry that Jed and LJ would drift apart if LJ advanced to the fifth grade without Jed. “What are you going to do?”
“People are different,” Jed’s dad said. “I think …” He didn’t think anything, but began to feel a little as if everything was futile.
“Have them test him. This isn’t right. I mean—repeating the fourth grade, it can do things. I knew this girl, she was held back. After that she kept getting held back. They got carried away. They pulled her all the way back to Kindergarten, then expelled her from the public school system. Her parents had to pay a series of fines to get her into pre-school.” She laughed a little. Beakers were going through her mind; a hand, calmly placing beakers onto a resplendent oak table. She didn’t know why. Probably something from TV. She had, as usual, taken a caffeine pill half-an-hour before calling Jed’s dad. “It’s strange,” she said, “how they don’t care anymore. People, I mean. Me too. All of us. We’ve no illusions anymore. People need illusions. Do you know what I’m talking about? What do you think?”
“It’s not bad,” Jed’s dad said. He hesitated these days to say anything about the world, to have any opinions or beliefs. Anything spoken was a lie, he knew—anything in the mind was a lie. What was out there was what was true. Once your mind got involved, everything turned to lies. You had just to exist, to be passive and apathetic as a dead thing in the sea, as there was a private, conspiratorial truth to just not doing anything, a kind of coming-to-terms, a loneliness turned contentment, a sort of friendliness towards oneself. Or was there? When was something completely made up and when was something only a little made up? Jed’s dad knew never to trust himself. Think too hard, he knew, and you found that there was no point in saying, thinking, or doing anything.
“It is, though,” LJ’s mom said. “It’s bad. You know it. No one’s planning for the long-term anymore. The generation before us, they said things. They said …” She couldn’t think of anything. “They said a lot of things. Now the Earth is—let’s face it—doomed. I saw on TV, they’re rethinking one of the smaller continents as a garbage dump, reinterpreting it, they said. I mean, wow. And what are they doing with the moon? Shouldn’t we be living on the moon in those space domes by now? Scouting the outer planets? I mean, what year is this? What is the government doing these days? NASA, whatever?” She thought briefly about the Ort Cloud—it was coming, but what was it? “Why don’t you come over?” she said. “I’ll make food. I have new recipes. I’ll cook.” She wanted to talk, just wanted to keep on talking, for hours, forever, wanted to argue and discuss things, any kind of thing, as she couldn’t talk to anyone like this, only to kids, and to Jed’s dad—with other people she just felt alone in the world and nauseated—but he wasn’t saying anything.
“Next week then,” LJ’s mom said. “Saturday. Saturday, okay? Jed and everyone.”
“Okay,” Jed’s dad said. “We’ll see.”
They were in their late twenties, had both married young, to early girl and boyfriends, were both aware of the basic eschatology of things, though in different ways. Jed’s dad could sense the end of life as a place you got to, someplace far away and separate, like Hawaii; could sometimes see it, that it was a nice place, with trees, a king-size bed. LJ’s mom couldn’t sense that place. Hers was the view—the experience—that every moment was a little death, that you were never really alive, because you were always dying. And in this way she sensed, instead, everything swirling around her, felt the slow-fast blur of each moment, the raking of it, the future grinding through her, to the past, and crashing, at times, like a truck, through her skull. Sometimes, walking around the house or doing whatever, she would suddenly feel smashed in the head, with sadness or disbelief or some other disorienting method. Days would go by, then, weeks or months, before she recovered.
The next Saturday Jed’s dad decided to stay home. He sent Jed over to LJ’s. LJ’s mom was quiet. Her face glowed lightly with make-up. They had bok choy with garlic sauce, broiled zucchini, and smoothies. LJ’s mom had set up a table in the driveway, and that’s where they ate. LJ had one piece of zucchini and she put some garlic sauce on it. She was full after that. She couldn’t finish her peach smoothie and was a little embarrassed. “It’s okay,” LJ’s mom said, and petted LJ’s head. After eating, they watched Titanic, the recent remake of it, animated and not so epic, from the point-of-view of an indignant family of bottom-dwelling fish, made further indignant by the leveling of their known world by the Titanic. Jed went home and LJ went to sleep. LJ’s mom cleaned up. She watched Titanic again, wept briefly at the end—where the father fish is mutilated by a plastic six-pack ring—and then went across the street, to her other house.
She hadn’t furnished it yet. The electricity wasn’t working. It was dark and warm and she went soberly through each of the rooms, then upstairs. She took off her sandals. The carpet was nice and thick and soft. “House two,” she said to her feet. It amused her only a little to own two houses. Not nearly enough, she felt. It should amuse her more. She went to a window, looked across the street at her other house. She watched her own front door. She wanted to see herself come out from there, come skipping across the street; wanted to see what she looked like from above; and wanted, then, to meet herself on the stairs—surprise herself—and give herself a hug. “Susan,” she shouted. “Susan Anne Michaels! What are you doing …” She turned and looked at the room she was in. She did a cartwheel across it, into a sit, and sat there, Indian-style. Through the window she could see the space-dried clay of the moon, blanched as deep white space, blemished as a coin. She stood and went downstairs. She heard some noises, became frightened, and then ran home, to her other house.
She lay on her gigantic bed, stomach-down and splay-limbed. She felt plain. She thought of getting drunk or something. Maybe she should dye her hair. She began to adjust the hardness of her mattress; she had bought one of those mattresses. There was a fact out there, she felt, that she didn’t know. This was a fact that you had to know in order to live. There was a knowing to being alive, and she just didn’t know. She closed her eyes, listened to the little mattress motor, working hard, and began to think on her life, tracing it forward and back in a squiggled, redundant way. She thought, without much conviction, that if she concentrated hard enough, if she started, carefully, in her childhood and moved forward, gaining momentum, then when she reached the present moment she might be able to turn it, her life, like a pipe cleaner, might be able to twist it, attitudinally, in some new and pleasant direction.
“Well do it then,” she said loudly, in her head.
She would have to start with her first memory. It was a photo of herself, a tiny girl. Her next memory was of being embarrassed—her face red, the world terrible. She moved on. She needed momentum. She couldn’t focus on anything, so she skipped to tonight, to watching Titanic. She went through the movie, went through going to her house across the street, and then thought of what she was doing one minute ago—she was going through Titanic. She began to go through that again. She got confused. She thought of the moment immediately before the present, the confusion, thought of the present, and then thought forcefully ahead. Things got blank. She felt herself lying on the bed.
In the morning Jed went back to LJ’s.
LJ’s mom set two bowls of cereal and soy milk on the counter. She went into the living room, picked up a book, and stood reading in front of the TV.
In the kitchen, Jed and LJ went for pop tarts. LJ licked hers, the frosted front of it. Jed bit his. They watched each other while eating. LJ’s tongue was small and pink, like a puppy’s.
“Listen to this,” LJ’s mom said from the living room. She read aloud from her book. “ ‘Rather than using two dolls to play “dollies have tea,” an autistic child might take the arm off one doll and simply pass it back and forth between her own hands.’ ”
&n
bsp; Jed looked at LJ. She was very beautiful. In bed sometimes Jed would be thinking, Lewly J, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He would sit and fluff his pillow and smooth his blanket. Sometimes he wanted badly to hold her. He’d move close to her and his insides would start going faster, everything spilling and cold against his bones and organs. He wondered sometimes if he had special powers, like the X-men. Not everyone was the same, Jed knew.
LJ heard in her head the unsquidlike noise from her dream. It was abrupt and bovine, and it startled her. She dropped her pop tart. She picked it up. The pop tart was beginning to wetly bend. She wasn’t hungry, she knew. She was never hungry for breakfast or for lunch. It always took until dinner for her to get hungry. She blushed. She put the pop tart in the sink and used a spatula to shove it down the drain.
Jed wandered away, into some other room—the piano room—wanting LJ to follow. Chopin, Jed thought. Chopin was about five feet tall. His head was very big. Jed knew Chopin from his dad. His dad for some time had been obsessed with both Chopin and Glenn Gould. Jed once asked who would win in a fight, Chopin or Glenn Gould. His dad had said it would take three Chopin’s to beat up Glenn Gould. Jed liked Chopin.
LJ followed slowly into the piano room. She was thinking about when she had gotten a thin Chinese noodle accidentally inside of her head, up through her sinuses, out through a space below her eye. Her mom had pulled it out and then everything was okay.
“Let’s go to the church,” Jed said.
“Okay,” LJ said. She was grinning. She ran and pushed Jed and Jed fell on the carpet. Jed stood and went to push LJ, but didn’t know where on her body to. She was very small. Her head was wispy. It seemed almost invisible.