Bed

by Tao Lin

  LJ screamed, a bit quietly, “We’re going out!”

  She had trouble opening the front door. Jed helped.

  Outside, it was dewy and warm. LJ felt momentarily underwater, then as if in a sweltering place, a jungle or Africa. She looked around, unsure of things. “What if I climbed this tree?” she said. There was a tree, and they looked at it.

  “It looks hard to,” Jed said after a while.

  “I’m not sure if I should,” LJ said. She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over—she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. “Oh,” she said.

  They began walking. There was an empty lot where you could climb the neighborhood wall, on the other side of which was a fort built by some older kids and then a field, with a church and a McDonald’s on it. They saw Jason, who had a green apple and was eating it. Jason was one grade more than them. “Where are you going?” Jason asked LJ. He looked at Jed.

  “The church,” Jed said.

  Jason turned around and walked with them, adjacent LJ. He was tall. “Do you like me?” he said loudly to LJ. Someone had once told LJ that if asked, if given the choice, you were always to say yes. Probably her mom had said that. Her mom had said that if things ever got too bad it was okay to do drugs, as long as you kept reading Chuang Tzu the entire time. After she said that she had looked very worried.

  “Yes,” LJ said. She had the word insalubrious going through her head. She didn’t know what it meant. Things were always going through her head like this. Things going through her head, herself going through the world; sometimes she got confused. She felt sleepy.

  Jed saw in his periphery that Jason was holding LJ’s hand. He thought that he should have held LJ’s hand first, when they left the house; he was always too slow. But he wasn’t the kind of person to make others uncomfortable, he knew. He felt good about that. But it was a tiny feeling, and not altogether a good one either.

  At the empty lot, Jason ran at the wall and climbed it and stood on top. “Nostradamus predicted the world ended already,” he said. “And it did. I can feel it in my brain. It feels like sand.” He stood on one foot. He almost fell and his face reddened. He helped LJ and they went over.

  Jed moved an empty bucket and used that and got over. He watched LJ and Jason go into the field. He felt like he was vanishing, that he had vanished. But then he was back again. He hadn’t vanished. He went into the fort area. On a board of wood in green marker it said, “You’re a butthead.”

  “I’m a butthead,” Jed whispered. His heart beat a little faster. At the end of fourth grade, some kids had begun to say “Shit” and “Bitch.” Jed didn’t like it. They just said those things to be cool. Jed liked “Moron,” and “Idiot.” There was one kid who said “Moron” all the time and Jed secretly admired him. Jed liked anyone who was weak or quiet. You had to be weak, or else you were mean. You couldn’t be mean, Jed knew. You could only be nice, and if you felt hurt you could only be even more nice.

  It was getting cloudy. Jed picked up a branch and whacked some leaves off a tree. In first grade, he was sitting in the school auditorium and someone had called his name and he had gone to the front and received an award for a painting he had done. In the painting the sun was just a dot, you couldn’t even see it. He was so weird then, he thought. He didn’t know that person, his old self. It was as if for a long time, he didn’t even have thoughts—wasn’t aware of anything.

  He walked outside the fort and saw that LJ and Jason were far away in the field. He wanted to go home. He wanted to teleport home, without having to do any work. You weren’t supposed to be in a field during a storm, he knew. LJ and Jason looked to Jed like husband and wife. Jed always felt younger than his peers, like a baby almost. There was always the feeling that he had to try really hard at everything—smile bigger, talk louder and clearer, argue and fight things behind his eyes more. He thought that tonight he would read PC Gamer magazine and drink fruit punch with ice cubes in it while taking a bath. He liked computer games. He felt better. He ran into the field. As he neared LJ and Jason, he remembered hazily his mother—she had left when Jed was three—and felt almost like he was LJ and Jason’s son. He ran to them.

  “It’s Jed,” Jason said. “Jed head.”

  “Jason,” Jed said inaudibly. He looked at Jason and LJ holding hands and felt very nervous. He looked away. The grass was up to their knees and Jed was afraid of snakes. They seemed to be walking toward McDonald’s and not the church.

  LJ began to wrap her hair around her neck. She had very thin smoke-brown hair. She hadn’t been mentally focused for a while now. She had been thinking about … she couldn’t remember what.

  “Don’t,” Jason said. “You’ll choke to death.” He went to unwrap LJ’s hair from her neck.

  They stopped walking. LJ let Jason unwrap her hair some. What was happening, she thought. She twisted away and fell. She sat and looked at the top of the grass covering the rest of the field, swaying light green and flaxen, a failed and reoriented sea. “You’ll choke to death on a stiff Chinese dumpling,” she said. She grinned at Jed, who was looking down and doing a kind of sideways walk—shifting, it seemed. LJ didn’t understand it.

  Jason put a hand out as if to help LJ up. “A stiff Chinese dumpling,” he said. “You don’t know what that means.” He was pointing now. With his other hand he took out an apple and began to nibble at it. “You can’t act this way. You won’t,” he said. “When you know the world ended already you’ll be different.”

  “That’s the most meaningless thing I’ve ever heard,” LJ said. She sat Indian-style. She widened her eyes and looked up at Jason and shouted, “What are you looking at?” Her voice was normally small; louder, now, it sounded a little like singing. Jason’s face turned red, and LJ felt bad, and blushed. She had thought she was just playing. She didn’t know.

  “A dumpling,” Jason said. “That’s bad. That’s racist.” He threw his apple into the air and it went into the sky. He ran towards McDonald’s.

  A cloud moved and blocked the sun.

  “Aren’t you afraid of snakes?” Jed said. He spun in place, 360 degrees. One time LJ whispered in his ear that she liked him and he didn’t believe her.

  Snakes, LJ thought. She didn’t know what that was. She remembered the squid. She would probably have to apologize soon. It’s just a giant squid. She wasn’t thinking when she said that. They should have gone and looked at it, and sat on it. “Gigantic squid are good,” she said, and lay back into the grass. Jed felt afraid and went and looked down at her.

  LJ’s eyes were slowly moving. She was looking at the air, which seemed grayish, a little outer-space-y—but bright, too, because of the little dusts of light that were traveling through it. Her mom had told her that there wasn’t ever any reason to worry about anything or be sad. Her mom had said that everything you ever did was a result of the thing that happened right before, because of cause and effect, and that that went on forever, going back, so that there wasn’t ever a first thing, and there wouldn’t ever be a last thing, and in between there was just the middle, and there you were, always, right in the middle, and you couldn’t stop or change anything—so you didn’t have to.

  “It’s dangerous. You’re surrounded,” Jed said, very slowly, concentrating as he spoke. “There are bugs on the ground. It’s dirty.”

  LJ began to roll in the grass. She giggled, quietly and forcelessly—the sound of it like something you heard in your head after the first sound from outside.

  “Don’t!” Jed said. He thought of anthills and Indian arrowheads. “Stop that!” He felt a little dizzy, being so loud. LJ stood and quickly hugged Jed, then stepped back. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re weird.” She was smiling.

  Jed looked at her. His heart felt tiny and slippery—and sealed, like a marble, like it wouldn’t ever get any bigger, wouldn’t ever be able to pump enough blood. LJ pushed Jed’s shoulder and ran away. After about twenty feet,
she stopped and turned around. She took out a bonnet from her pocket and put it on her head. It was a black bonnet. She grinned and widened her eyes. She looked surprised. How pretty she was, it made Jed feel—not good or bad, but just feel, like it was something in him that was opening up, something new and secret, that only he would ever know, and he could fill it with sadness or longing or whatever, but here it was, opening centerless and vacuum-y as something attempting itself, and it would be over soon, and nothing, then, really, would’ve happened.

  LJ ran back towards the wall, and it began to rain.

  They both had colds for awhile. LJ’s mom phoned Jed’s dad, talked about colds and the flu. Jed’s dad wasn’t saying anything and after a while LJ’s mom said, “What am I even doing right now?” She waited a second then hung up, and didn’t call again until late in July, on a hot Sunday night; Jed answered.

  “I’m drunk,” she said, “I’m doing a hundred ten on the highway.”

  “LJ?” Jed said. He knew it wasn’t LJ.

  “Jed. Oh Jed,” LJ’s mom said. “What’s going to happen to you?”

  Jed’s dad picked up on another line. Jed went into his room and sat on the carpet. He was frightened. What was going to happen to him? He took out some computer game magazines and looked at them, but couldn’t concentrate.

  “Think about LJ,” Jed’s dad said to LJ’s mom. “Your daughter LJ. Your family.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” LJ’s mom said. “That’s nothing, that’s nothingness. I don’t care. What does a nihilist do? That’s what I am, a nihilist. I don’t know things. There isn’t one thing out there that I know. Oh, now what. Now what! My car is shaking, my god, what kind of a car shakes. I’m going ninety, I’m slowing down.” She was only a little drunk. Actually, she had had just one beer. But she hadn’t slept. She hadn’t been sleeping at all.

  “I’ll talk to you,” Jed’s dad said. He just didn’t want to be in a relationship. He wanted to live ethereally, intrinsically, not doing anything—like a plant. He just didn’t find people appealing anymore, not LJ’s mom at least. He liked the monosyllabic, deadpan type, he knew, the type that withdrew when angered, became quiet and a bit endearing in the face. LJ’s mom was melodramatic and threw things—large things—when angered. “Just park on the grass,” he said. “Slow down. I’ll come—pick you up. We’ll talk. What about your book?” He knew that he should talk smoother, use more conjunctions—not be so monotone, so funereal. He shouldn’t have brought up the book.

  “Yeah, talk about my book!” LJ’s mom shouted. “When have you ever fucking wanted to talk about my book! Okay. Well then! I’m slowing down. Lewly J. Oh god, what am I doing? I won the lottery, moved to Florida. What will I do tomorrow? What will I do once I’m dead? What will happen to us?”

  “It will—” He didn’t want to say that it would all be okay, that things would get better. Things would get worse, he knew. There would be old age, cancer, arthritis, global warming, tidal waves, acid rain—life was just a tiny, moonstruck thing, really, and the world was just a small, failed place. “We’ll go out,” he said. He was bad at optimism, at invigoration, at whatever this was right now. “You, me, Jed. LJ. We’ll go to the beach.”

  “Yeah right!” LJ’s mom shouted. “The beach,” she screamed. “What bullshit! You think you’re so nice. Sitting at home or whatever.” She paused. She was crying now. “What have you sacrificed? What have you ever done for someone else? Why can’t you—”

  Jed’s dad didn’t say anything—he knew she was maybe right, that if he tried hard enough, he could love her, and so why didn’t he? If you had to try hard in life not to hurt people, not to harm others, didn’t you also have to try hard to help people? To love people? Were there limits to this? Some threshold? Could you ever do enough?—and she cried a little and then hung up.

  Later that night, she drove onto Jed’s dad’s yard and fell out of her car. Jed’s dad woke up and came outside. She was lying on the grass. She smelled of alcohol and perfume. “This is just a weird dream,” she was saying. “This is all just a weird dream.” She was rolling and she rolled onto the sidewalk, scraping herself, and then was stopped by the mailbox. Jed’s dad pulled her up and she fell back down. “Dream film doesn’t develop in the real world,” she shouted. She put her face into the grass.

  “Yes it does,” Jed’s dad said. It seemed to him, then, true—it did develop in the real world, though maybe at a special store. It was 4 a.m.

  “It doesn’t,” she said, a bit wanly. “This is … a weird dream.” People had their sprinklers on. The air was a bit misty, and there was a little fog.

  “It’s not a dream,” Jed’s dad said. In his periphery, he could see things, vague and kind of buoyily floating about—mailboxes, garbage cans, recycling bins. It was trash night. “This is real,” he said. He looked for the moon, but saw only trees—the trees of his yard, other people’s yards; the leaves pale and spurned as freshwater shells. Something large had been flying about his face and he now slapped it blindly out of the air; against his open palm it made a tiny noise that stayed in his head, pinging there arhythmically, distortedly loud.

  LJ’s mom had begun to put grass into her mouth. “I can do anything,” she said. “This is just a stupid dream.” She passed out, then woke up. She began quietly to cry. She looked up at Jed’s dad, opened her mouth, covered her mouth, crawled to a stand, and then ran away. In the morning, her car was still in Jed’s dad’s yard. The inside of the car was very clean. There was a pink bottle of perfume super-glued to the dashboard. Jed’s dad drove it back to her house and walked home. Many of the houses, he noticed, had “For Sale” signs up. Every house, it seemed. One house had been painted a deep, dark, transmogrified green. Another house looked really strange, somehow fundamentally different from all the others. A basketball was rolling down the middle of the street and a boy ran out of a house, picked it up, punted it into someone’s side yard. Jed’s dad began to run after that. As he ran, everything around his head quaked. He ran home.

  School began. Jed was held back in the fourth grade, as planned. He didn’t see LJ anymore. She seemed always to be on some kind of fieldtrip. Her fifth-grade teacher encouragd his students to doodle in their textbooks, to talk to their textbooks, to talk back to their textbooks. Homework was mostly pun-orientated. One assignment, a fill-in-the-blank type thing, involved Rambo, Rimbaud, and a ram named Bo. “The world has come and gone,” LJ’s teacher said, quoting his own poetry. “Now is only what is left. A time for leaving, and for cake. The wash and foam of last things, we’ll float it out. We’ll eat fancy cake. We’ll be the wave that goes, and goes, and goes a little more, and then doesn’t go anymore.” Then he took the class on another fieldtrip.

  Nationwide there was, at first, a time of increased lawmaking. Things were generally banned. There was no trust anywhere, and nothing was acceptable. A bill outlawing love was reportedly bring drafted. There was a law that, by accident, outlawed itself. Anything there was had a law for or against it. People, having paid fines for whatever infraction, went home, more inspired than outraged, and wrote their own laws, striving for originality and footnotes. “Laissez-faire,” they said stupidly. “Denouement.” Other things were said. As more things were said, people became gradually wittier. “Anarchy, apathy, and—” they said. “The three A’s.”

  There was a general drift towards the arbitrary view, the solipsistic and apolitical.

  Laws, then, began to be lifted. The drinking age was lowered, then gotten rid of. It became okay to break any of the smaller laws. A large region of the nation acquiesced to some ancient aphorism espousing playfulness. It was shown on TV how you might empty a package of Skittles plus all your prescription pills into a fanny pack and take one mystery pill every four to six hours. People grew amused. Cops covered their helmets and firearms—like guitars—with ironic stickers. “Mitochondria,” said the stickers. “Bernoulli’s law.” Helicopter pilots, having discovered that they could do tricks, took to the sk
ies in waves, cityward from the suburbs, spinning, diving, circling tall buildings—enacting any scene from any movie. When a mistake in copyediting sent an oil liner to the Galapagos Islands, they left it there, crew and all, calling it innovative—a kind of achievement.

  Still, it was not all fun and games. That was just the mainstream. More people, actually, were staying home, grim-faced and too well-read. More people were going to bed with a shooting sense of desperation. There were suicides in the night, feral screams from the wall-packed insides of houses. Wolves and bears and other animals, homeless and fed-up, began to use the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings—any kind of infrastructure. Families of possums moved onto front porches, chewed through to living rooms, and cut people off in their own hallways. August, September, many people simply ceased to exist, seemed to be there one day but not the next, but then there they were again, the day after, walking the dog, for an hour, after which they disappeared again, completely—murdered, some said, at last, as it was annoying, this back and forth of being there, not being there.

  TV, though, was booming. It was said that there now more channels than there were people. That when you died, when you passed on, it was into TV. “TV for president,” people muttered, sincerely, at their own flat-faced, blueblazing TVs.

  LJ’s mom herself no longer watched TV. She bought stuff for LJ—literature, stuffed animals, a typewriter—though LJ was rarely ever home anymore, seemed always to be at school. LJ’s mom actually was not doing too good. She had lost it a bit. She had purchased a vacuum cleaner the size of a lawnmower, the idea of which depressed her enormously. She felt constantly impending. The daily experience of things thwarted her, like some theory of quantum mechanics she just could not understand. She took to eating candy and became sallow and uninspired in the face, like a curry dish. She bought yet more things. People from far away—from TV, she felt—came daily to her front door, sold her stuff. Nights, she lay awake, waiting for morning, for the sun to come and crash her brightly along, which it would do. She sometimes thought dizzily of packing up, taking a trip, entering into TV… or some other place, any yet unsquandered world, as there must be, she felt, somewhere one could go; that if this world was ruined, if one messed up, there would be another place, sympathetic and conciliatory, to leave towards.