Bed

by Tao Lin

  In his apartment he would lie on his bed and allow himself some fantasies, which led mostly to masturbation, though it would also lead to list making—to brief, abstract moments when he would understand that he needed simply to do things and then his life would be changed.

  Sometimes, unwilling to sleep into the sameness of tomorrow, he would shower and then go out into the night, hoping to fall in love, to be whisked away into that sort of a life. He would buy fey candies, and a sugary drink. When a car came by, he would fear a drive-by shooting or kidnapping. He stayed close to the street-lamps. To discourage hoodlums—there were hoodlums in this neighborhood, it was said—he walked slantly and often turned to cross the street eccentrically.

  It was a little thrilling.

  Eventually, though, he would become tired and disenchanted. He would go back to his room and feel as if an entire month was inside of him. He would feel big and emptied like that. He would have a stomachache. Nothing was going to happen tonight, or ever. He would shower. Brush his teeth. Lie on his bed, and go into a flat and perished kind of sleep, one in which all his dreams were fraught and blotched and melodramatic and loud, like watching a movie from the front row.

  He began to doubt his ability to make friends. He began, as maybe a kind of detachment—or maybe a kind of antisocial sarcasm—to take things literally. What materials did one need in order to make a friend? Was this mostly a DIY thing, or could you pay someone else to do it for you, diligently and in one night, while you slept? He sometimes brought a second mirror into the bathroom and looked at his face from different angles. Was he ugly? How ugly?

  He lay in bed, remembering past things from his life.

  As a teenager, he made screaming noises at night in his room, like a deranged person. He threw his electrical pencil sharpener at the walls. His mother was downstairs in bed, crying a little, mostly asleep. Brian, in his room, felt as if he might explode, might already—in a slow and miniscule and lingering way—be exploding. He needed to explode. He lay there motionless, but he also lay there exploding. He smooshed his head into his mattress, making sounds like, “aaaghh,” and “ngggg,” and then went downstairs. He stood in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom. He started yelling things. His mother woke, warm and puffy from sleep, and—after Brian finished yelling—whispered that she was sorry for being a bad mother. Her face, ensconced in hair and pillow, was dramatic and friendless as something cocooning. She looked like a little girl, and Brian stood there, taking this in—trying to get at the meaning of things, to fit at once into his mind all the false and watery moments of his life. He stood there, and he looked. He looked some more. And then he went back to his room. He wrote down on paper: “Don’t hurt anyone again.”

  But he did. He went on blaming his mother. Yelling at her. About how he couldn’t make friends, how it was because she spoiled him, didn’t ever punish him, didn’t put him into uncomfortable situations, didn’t socialize him, etc.

  “Don’t hurt anyone again.”

  Brian had a little stack of those papers somewhere.

  And, finally, he had, recently, begun to do less of this hurting of other people, this blaming of others, of his mother. Though it was mostly because he did not see anyone anymore. Probably that was the reason.

  At work, he stopped saying hi to people, unless they said hi to him first, at which he would then say hi eagerly back and try to smile. But he was not good at smiling. That ataxic struggle of the mouth, it sometimes felt to Brian like a kind of snarling. He could see it on other people’s faces, that he was not smiling, but probably snarling.

  After a while, people stopped saying hi to him.

  The work atmosphere became foretoken and noir, like a Batman movie.

  Most days now Brian didn’t say anything out loud.

  He took to sitting in parks. Observing people. Sometimes he would see a girl and a boy holding hands and it would make him happy. “How nice,” he would think. “How nice it is for them.” Though most of the time it just made him jealous. He imagined the couples coming up to him and patting his hair, slapping his cheeks, like a baby. Laughing into his face. He would dare them to.

  He bought encrusted nuts from the “Nuts 4 Nuts” people, who were nice people, if a little doomed-seeming.

  He made it a point to say thank you and goodbye whenever buying food or other items.

  Have a good day. Goodnight.

  One day he didn’t go to work.

  And then it became so difficult and useless to go to work that he stopped going.

  There were moments when you knew for sure that you would never be happy. You thought, “Nothing’s going to happen this year. Ten years, sixty years. That’s right. Of course.” And you felt all those years, there, inside of you, wandering the institutional corridors of your bones, playing ping-pong in the unkempt game-room of your heart, not keeping score, not even using the paddles—but playing stupidly a kind of handball-table hockey. But not even doing that, really. Just standing around. All the years, just standing there. Waiting to happen.

  You thought, “Well, then …”

  And you imagined being dead. You imagined it might be something like a gasp. A normal gasp, but sustained, and forever—and maybe outside of you, sucking at your air, the suffocation and discomfort increasing without end. The mouth-faced animal of death—flying, taking, wanting always more, like something intelligent and sane, but delinquent and two-years-old. The mouth-headed gliding lung of death. “Of course,” you thought. Because these things were possible. They were. There was even a thing called anti-matter, Brian knew. And black-matter, which was invisible. Eighty to eighty-five percent of all matter was actually black-matter. Brian had read that in a book. There had been an enormous question mark on the opposite page.

  For a long time, there was the sensation of life becoming smaller.

  Life lost gradually the things of itself. The peripheral items wandered amnesically off, and then flew away, not amnesic at all, just too optimistic and quixotic to stay. You became meeker and less opinionated through all the small maintenances of yourself—the self-aware, mid-day toothbrushing, the splashless handwashing. And the one eye of your soul—the angrysad Cyclops of your soul, with its spiked club, its dark and forsaken cave, its island routine—began to squint, to slowly close.

  Life became a puny, disassembling thing.

  Something that needn’t be paid any attention to—that you could just leave there.

  Brian found that he did not need much to get through each day. Decent Chinese food, a Jean Rhys novel, iced coffee. That was enough for one day. It helped if he stayed in his room and slept more than 14 hours a day, which he did; the peculiar, detached success of being in bed—it was like the padded practice of a thing before the real hurt and triumph of the actual thing.

  His fantasies became less masturbatory and more about time-travel and childhood.

  He grew content in a leveled and agrarian way, like a grass.

  Still, though, once, unable to sleep, he had, in one dilapidated night, allowed himself to search out an adult store and buy two porno magazines and some other items. He read them front to back, stopping carefully for the photos. Later, he looked in his bathroom mirror, pointed at his reflection, and said, “Born alone, die alone.” He was giddy with shame and despair after that. Then he wasn’t giddy anymore, and he went to sleep. When he woke, it was night again. He wrapped the pornography and the other items in three plastic grocery bags, tied it up, put it in a Mercer Street Used Books bag, tied that up, carried it six blocks in a direction he hadn’t been before, and shoved it in someone’s trashcan.

  It was important, he knew, not to become one of those irrecoverable persons.

  One day he was looking out his window, staring at people who were climbing onto each other’s backsides laughing—and he began to think that if he got a job, he could meet people. He seemed to realize this. He needed a job. He needed also to join clubs. Water polo, yoga. Bowling.

  In Manhattan, h
e had a coffee.

  He walked up Sixth Avenue. He turned toward Union Square. The streets seemed to have recently been blasted clean. “Nice job,” Brian thought. He was impressed. He felt good. He went through the park, looking and smirking—not in an unfriendly way—at people, and continued uptown.

  Around 33rd street there was a strip club or something. It had a sexy-lady sticker on the door. It said, “Live Girls.” Brian thought of maybe going in. Maybe not, though. He would no doubt affect gauntness, perversity, desperation, and condescension. The other patrons would somehow affect virtue and dignity, a kind of Nordic diplomacy. They would be enterprising and pressed for time.

  Brian walked into Times Square.

  There was a Brazilian steak place here that he liked. He used to go all the time with Chrissy.

  He walked back downtown. He didn’t feel at all good anymore. “Because of the coffee,” he thought. The caffeine was no longer doing what it would do. He sat in Washington Square Park. He had never liked Chrissy, he guessed. Had never really liked anyone, probably. “That’s it,” he thought. His shoulders and neck were cramped from trying too hard for good posture, which he knew was important for confidence, bones, self-esteem, mood, attractiveness, etc. A young man wanted to sell Brian some drugs. Brian shook his head, and looked at the ground. The young man stayed to talk. He sat. He made some distinctions between psychologists and psychiatrists, and then complimented Brian’s teeth. “He says that to everyone,” Brian thought. Next, your teeth would be pulverized to a fine powder. “Thank you,” Brian said, and the young man left.

  It had become very dark outside.

  Brian stood and walked in some vague direction, into a bookstore.

  He moved himself around the aisles. He tried not to look too lonely. He opened a book but could not concentrate. Everyone else, he felt, was on a choicer plane of existence. They all seemed very confident that the world was a good and auspicious place. Brian’s face had gone hot and severe. The clam-meat of his face. People could see. His neck tremored a little. That kind of inchoate weeping that would always happen to him if he stayed in public too long, it happened now.

  “This is … unreasonable,” he thought.

  He bought and ate a cookie the size of his hand. He felt like vomiting. He went out into the city. It seemed louder than before. Trucks the size of small buildings were coming consecutively down the street. A team of men were jackhammering the street. There was a group of drunken people with glossy heads.

  Brian walked slowly around, then came to a stop. His mind went blank. Time moved around him, like a crowd. “Walk,” he thought. “Move, go.…”

  He thought that he would see a movie, then.

  He bought a ticket for 12:45 a.m. at the Union Square Theatre. He had one hour. He walked in a direction, but saw an acquaintance across the street and turned and walked in another direction.

  From a deli, he bought a 16 oz. beer and a soy drink that was also a tea drink.

  Outside, he made sure to look far into the distance. If an acquaintance confronted him, started questioning him, he would have no choice but to run away. He sat in a dark area of Union Square Park.

  He drank his tea drink.

  He looked absently at the label. “2000% Vitamin C,” it said.

  In the movie theatre there were a few other solitary people. Some had a kind of space-time enlightened gaze, a beatific vacancy about their eyes that made them look very confident, but in a bionic way, as if they were truly—scientifically—simultaneously in the future, at home, eating something with a large spoon. The others, including Brian, blinked a lot. After each blink their focus would be on a different area outside of their heads. They looked as if under attack, which was because they felt as if under attack.

  Brian went into the bathroom and stood in a stall.

  He locked the door. He took his beer out of his bag, looked at his beer, put his beer back in his bag. He stood there until a few minutes past the start-time of the movie. He splashed water to his face, left the bathroom, went in the theatre, and sat in the back row.

  After a while, he took his beer out of his bag and opened it. The beer said, “Kuhchshhh.” It was tall, silvery, and cold. On the screen, a beautiful girl who was Natalie Portman was taking an aggressive interest in a depressed, monotone man whose mother had recently passed away.

  Brian almost shouted, “Bullshit,” but was able to control himself.

  “My hair is blowing in the wind,” said Natalie Portman, whose name was Sam.

  Brian began to think, “If I were as beautiful as her …” He stopped himself and drank his beer. His face soon became warm. There was an asphyxiative pleasure to it, like a kind of choking or crying. His heart was beating fast. The movie was wide and calm on the screen. Cool air was coming down. Brian leaned back into his seat and put his feet up. There were moments when you were not afraid of anything anymore. These moments it became clear that all things were arbitrary, that everything was just made of atoms, or whatever, and therefore everything was, firstly, one same, connected thing, a kind of amorphous mass wherein areas of consciousness moved from place to same place—or maybe did not even move, but, because all places were the same, were just there. Guilt, fear, meaning, love, loneliness, death. These words, you realized, were all the same. Everything was all the same. There was what there was, and that was what all there was; there was you, and you were everything. These moments would last seconds, minutes, or maybe an hour, and they were euphoric. They could happen from reading, looking at a painting, from music—from any kind of art, really, or from witnessing or experiencing something startling or strange; but never from other people. These moments you could almost cry. Life was simply, obviously, and beautifully meaningless.

  Brian in the theatre that night, drinking beer, felt this.

  These moments would end, though, when you realized that all that amorphous mass stuff was, well—bullshit. Was good on paper, maybe, but in real life was impossible. Unlivable. Something only a philosopher, a paid one—a philosopher that received cash for what he or she did—would benefit from. Things weren’t connected. Not really. You were one person alive and your brain was encased inside a skull. There were other people out there. It took an effort to be connected. Some people were better at this than others. Some people were bad at it. Some people were so bad at it that they gave up.

  Sasquatch

  Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and expectant as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood—an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts—and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.

  This wasn’t sadness—there were no feelings of desperation or disaster, nothing like depression with its one slowed-down realization of having been badly and untraceably misunderstood—but rather a plain, artless form of loneliness; something uninteresting, factual, and teachable, perhaps, to children or adults, with flashcards of household items (toothbrush, pillow), coloring books of fleeting, unaccompanied things (hailstones that melt midair; puddles formed and unseen and gone; illusions of friends in the periphery), and a few real-world assignments (post-nap trip to the pet store in the early, breezy evening; Halloween night asleep on the sofa; Saturday night dinner in the parking lot, looking through the windshield at the pizza buffet restaurant you just got take-out from).

  “I don’t want to serve those guys,” Chelsea said at Denny’s to her manager Bernadette. “You do it please?” Around a person like Bernadette, who once said to a plate of pancakes she was going to fire it, then went around telling everyone, including patrons, about that—“I fired some pancakes earlier, so watch out”—Chelsea could get pleading and playful a bit; around most other people she just fel
t surreally retarded or else profoundly insane all the time.

  “I’m going to fire you,” Bernadette said. “Wait. I’m going to promote you.”

  “Then I can fire myself,” Chelsea said. “Yeah. I’ll just fire myself.” She’d get a job wearing a hot dog suit, roadside—dancing, losing weight, holding up a vaguely controversial sign: Juicy, tender, cheap; so eat me. Teenagers would drive by and assault her. “But yeah; they went to high school with me. But we pretended no one knew each other. They wouldn’t look at me. Even them two pretended they didn’t know each other. That’s how bad it got.”

  “You take big head, then. The big-headed guy. I’ll do the losers you went to high school with.”

  “I hate it when people call people losers,” Chelsea said.

  “Look at me. I manage a chain restaurant that sells pancakes at night. I tell my boyfriend he’s a loser every day. I did that today. Who wants to succeed in life? No one.”

  “Um, I’m a waitress at Denny’s, and you’re my manager. And you’re like one year older than me, and way more successful.” Though she knew while saying it that it wasn’t going to make much sense, she said it anyway, with a sort of conviction, even, because she was not good at functioning in real-time, especially when distracted, like she was now, by how tiny and beautiful Bernadette was, like a child, almost, whereas Chelsea herself was homelier, medium-sized, and, in an obscure way that she sometimes—usually after coffee—thought, but never really believed, might be mysterious and therefore attractive, disproportioned, like a vitamin-deficient, softly-mutated, childlike sort of adult. “Why are you calling that guy ‘big head’?” she said.

  Bernadette moved toward Chelsea—who, as always, when approached, began like a blowfish to feel growing and more sensitive—and hugged her. “Calm down, girl,” Bernadette said, and something behind Chelsea’s ribs that had been swinging, black and heavy like a pendulum, swung a little more, then detached and fell away, and in the unoccupied moment that followed—it was one of those moments you could go away from and relax a little and then come back as how you yourself wanted to be, rather than what the world wanted you to be—Chelsea had the thought that Bernadette was a good person, and felt like she might cry, or at least say something. But Bernadette stepped back and Chelsea hesitated, then went to the big-headed man and looked at him, the secret reality of his skull, thinking that if it wasn’t so large he would’ve made more friends as a child, wouldn’t now be eating alone on a Friday night. She took his order, wandered around—always felt like she was ‘wandering around,’ even at work, which seemed wrong in some deep-brained way—served him, and, while seating an elderly couple, then, watched as her old high school classmates left without paying.