by Tao Lin
Tao Lin
Leave Society
Tao Lin is the author of the memoir Trip; the novels Taipei, Richard Yates, and Eeeee Eee Eeee; the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel; the story collection Bed; and the poetry collections cognitive-behavioral therapy and you are a little bit happier than i am. He was born in Virginia, has a B.A. in journalism from New York University, and is the founder and editor of Muumuu House.
Also by Tao Lin
Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
Selected Tweets
Taipei
Richard Yates
Shoplifting from American Apparel
cognitive-behavioral therapy
Eeeee Eee Eeee
Bed
you are a little bit happier than i am
A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2021
Copyright © 2021 by Tao Lin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Portions of this work first appeared, in different form, in the following publications: “Upset” in NOON (2020) and “Catatonia” in Pets: An Anthology, edited by Jordan Castro, published by Tyrant Books, New York, in 2020.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
Vintage Contemporaries Trade Paperback ISBN 9781101974476
Ebook ISBN 9781101974483
Cover design by Linda Huang
www.vintagebooks.com
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Nothing is as it appears to be. This is not glib.
—Kathleen Harrison
Contents
Year of Mercury
Surgery
Teeth
Yoga
Dentists
Barcelona
Florida
Year of Pain
Hands
Bunun
Hospital
Massage
Machines
Ankylosing
Thyroid
Prison
Conflict
Microfireflies
Year of Mountains
Mediation
Catatonia
Falling
Statins and Coffee
Friendship
Daoism
Momo
Resonance
Variations
Year of Unknown
Dudu
Brain
Upset
Nüwa
Curse
Dustwinkling
Fruitresting
Acknowledgments
Year of Mercury
Surgery
The day Li arrived in Taipei for a ten-week visit, he and his parents went to a surgeon to discuss his chest deformity. The surgeon asked Li what he did. Li said he wrote novels.
“Knows about everything, then?”
“I write novels so I know nothing,” said Li, who normally might’ve replied, “Ng,” a grunted word meaning “yes,” “right,” “okay,” or “I see,” but was on a quarter-tab of LSD.
Li’s mom laughed a little.
The surgeon opened a computer presentation on pectus excavatum, which affected around 1 in 125 people and had no known cause. First described in print in the sixteenth century, it gave one a sunken, undersized chest, crowding and flattening the heart and lungs. Surgical correction began in 1911. This surgeon had done the Nuss procedure, in which curved metal bars were embedded behind the ribs and sternum for up to four years, around six hundred times.
Li had felt deformed since grade school. In Florida, among scant Asians, he’d usually been the smallest boy in each class. His six-years-older brother, Mike, had called him fish lips, buckteeth, mutant, and other names that had made him feel self-conscious and ugly. In high school and college, he’d been a frail, gloomy, awkward, anxious, troublingly shy loner. When he learned at age twenty-three that his chest was deformed, he’d rejected surgery, deciding instead to use the insight as motivation to be healthier, but now, at thirty-one, he was reconsidering. Maybe he’d be happier and stabler, with less back pain, if his chest wasn’t concave. He lacked money and insurance, so had talked to his parents, who’d suggested he, who lived in New York City, fly to Taiwan, where healthcare was inexpensive.
It was November 4, 2014. Li got a CT scan. The surgeon looked at images of his chest and said he’d have a sixty-year-old’s heart when he was forty unless he got surgery. The prognosis seemed uncompelling and somewhat vague to Li, who’d recently estimated he’d live to only around fifty.
* * *
—
That night, at his parents’ fifth-floor apartment, Li read “We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer,” a New York Times article that said CT scans gave up to one thousand times the radiation of an X-ray and that 5 percent of future U.S. cancers could result from “exposure to medical imaging.”
He ordered four ebooks on radiation. Nuclear power plants continually produced waste that stayed radioactive for hundreds of millennia, he read. People didn’t know what to do with the toxic material. Some was put into plastic bags. The best containers lasted for only around a century, and leaks were common.
Li read by holding his phone above his face while supine in bed with bent knees. Back pain had restricted him to a small set of robotic postures, except for when he was on cannabis or LSD, strong anti-inflammatants. He preferred cannabis but had feared getting caught sneaking it into Taiwan, so had brought scentless, tiny LSD instead. It was his only reliable reprieve from pained disillusionment. He used it daily.
After reading for a while, Li realized CT scans emitted electromagnetic radiation and that he’d bought four ebooks on nuclear radiation. He didn’t seem to know the difference, or what the word “radiation” meant, but he felt confident he could learn.
* * *
—
In the past year, inspired by philosopher Terence McKenna to try to understand his own reality, Li had begun to pay less attention to fiction, newspapers, and magazines, and more attention to scientific journals, independent researchers, nonprofit organizations, and nonfiction books. The world seemed more complex, terrible, hopeful, meaningful, and magical than he’d previously thought or heard.
From The Chalice and the Blade, in which Riane Eisler coined the terms “partnership” and “dominator” to describe the two underlying models of society; The Archaic Revival, McKenna’s argument for restoring aboriginal (a word derived from the Latin “ab origine,” meaning “from the source”) values; When God Was a Woman; and other books, he’d read about the global culture’s forgotten backstory: people across Eurasia seemed to have lived in peaceful, egalitarian societies, worshipping nature in the form of female deities, for at least thirty millennia as hunter-gatherers and five millennia as farmers, before the dominator model, introducing war and sexism, emerged in conquering form around 6,500 years ago, nadiring three millennia later with
Yahweh, whose tantrums (punishing women by making them be ruled by men, threatening people with eternal hell) the species was still trying to recover from.
Misogyny, materialism, corporations, and pesticides had supplanted cooperation, animism, nature, and psychedelics, but the grim chaos seemed to be leading somewhere. Humans seemed to be deep into a brief, failable transition called history—a fifteen-millennia release from matter into the imagination, a place that was to the universe as life was to a book: larger, realer, more complicated.
One reason Li liked this worldview was that it asked him not to worry or panic but to stay calm, like a midwife, and try to facilitate the birthlike, surreal, and probably cosmic process. Hundreds of species, possibly, were flashing out of the galaxy every few millennia in an inconspicuous metatwinkling, a shower of lifedrops joining the ocean of immateriality.
* * *
—
Five days after seeing the surgeon, Li and his parents went to a cardiologist, who said, “Some Japanese live in small houses, some in big houses. One’s not better than the other. It’s the same with chests.” Li had below-average cardiopulmonary functioning, according to tests by the surgeon, but below average wasn’t abnormal, said the cardiologist, who recommended push-ups.
Outside, Li and his parents praised the cardiologist. Li’s mom, who was sixty-one and had always stressed avoiding surgery due to the risk of coma or death, seemed happier than Li had seen her in years. She asked Li if he was happy that surgery wasn’t required and that the deformity wouldn’t, according to the cardiologist, shorten his life.
Li said no, not especially, because he’d already suspected those things and had already mostly decided against surgery. He wanted to work on his general health. The CT scan seemed to have given him diarrhea, mouth sores, nausea, and heavier night sweats than normal. He’d been waking filmed in cold sweat multiple times a night.
On the train home, Li continued reading about radiation. He’d finished two of his four ebooks. He’d learned that increasing amounts of radioactive atoms from nuclear, coal, oil, and gas power plants; wars; weapons tests; cars; smoke alarms; TVs, and other societal ephemera were in everyone, ejecting destabilizing particles to attain stabler states.
* * *
—
Drawing in his room that night, Li heard his mom in his dad’s office, which was also the TV-and-dining room, saying she was allotting him some money for stocks. “Write down what you want to buy and bring me the paper,” she said, sounding somewhat annoyed, and returned to her office.
She’d gained control of their finances over the past decade, during which Li’s dad had been imprisoned for money laundering and then gotten repeatedly scammed—delivering gold bars to the family of a man he’d met in prison, flying to Belize and Nigeria to give cash to strangers who’d emailed him.
A minute later, Li heard his dad in his mom’s office, half of which was filled with his dad’s cardboard box hoard, saying which stocks he wanted to buy and how. Despite having no money to invest, Li’s dad followed the stock market obsessively, emitting a near constant stream of bickering-fomenting advice.
* * *
—
In bed at 2:30 a.m., Li reminded himself to merge with nature’s experimental creation of portentously ambitious art, scalarly tunneling through matter on the surfaces of planets, toward the unknown other side, because what else was he going to do?
He didn’t want to specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade, writing existential autofiction. He didn’t want to forget that angle either. It seemed auspicious to have distrusted preconceptions, groups, and ideologies for so long. He had less to unlearn.
“Nature isn’t mute,” he thought in distracted review. Something mute wouldn’t unfurl a universe in which to evolve singularityward. Something mute wouldn’t speak people from atoms. Li wondered when he’d be asleep. His pillow-propped feet felt unpleasantly warm and heavy, as if blood had gathered at the wrong end of him.
Teeth
On his ninth day in Taiwan, Li closely examined his mouth’s interior for the first time in maybe five years. His gums seemed scarily receded. A canine was turning black. Teeth zapped with pain when touched. He hadn’t been to a dentist since the nineties and still didn’t want to go, didn’t want X-rays, etc.
He searched “natural cure tooth decay” on Amazon and bought Cure Tooth Decay: Heal and Prevent Cavities with Nutrition. He read that cavities were caused by malnutrition, not bacteria; that modern humans got less than a fourth of the minerals and a tenth of the fat-soluble vitamins that their aboriginal ancestors had gotten; and that the main service of conventional dentistry, “a profound failure,” was to drill holes in teeth to fill with a half-mercury amalgam of toxic metals.
Li didn’t have any fillings. He’d somehow never gotten a cavity, maybe because they’d been in his eight pulled teeth, or, with 25 percent fewer teeth, each had gotten more nutrients. He suspected his parents had fillings, but he felt unready to ask.
He focused on reading more books and on persuading his parents to use natural toothpaste, soap, and cosmetics; drink green smoothies; and add fish liver oil, ghee, seaweed, chlorella, sprouted seeds and nuts, and fermented vegetables to their diets.
* * *
—
On day fourteen, he ran out of LSD and began to feel grumpy most of the time. Sometimes his frowny face felt like the main problem, brainwardly fuming sullen petulance.
At dinner on day seventeen, Li’s dad couldn’t seem to stop criticizing Li’s mom’s panfried fish. The skin wasn’t crispy—a complaint he’d been making for decades.
“From now on you cook,” said Li’s mom, staring at the TV, which they ate facing. On the news, police cars chased a minivan containing ketamine and amphetamines.
“Need to figure out why the skin sticks,” said Li’s dad.
“Tonight you’re washing dishes,” said Li in the tone he felt his parents were using on each other.
Li’s parents seemed startled, looking at Li.
“You can’t speak like that to Dad,” said Li’s mom.
“You don’t help,” Li told his dad. “You just complain.”
“He can only complain,” agreed Li’s mom.
“So tonight you’ll clear the table and wash dishes,” said Li, and, to his moderate surprise, his dad began clearing the table.
“Once a week, not every night, can’t do it every night,” said Li’s dad.
Li asked his mom when his dad had last washed dishes.
“Never,” she said, and told Li to apologize to his dad.
As Li apologized, his dad averted his eyes and said Li should apologize to Dudu, their seven-year-old, four-pound white poodle, who was seated on the sofa with her right foot turned out, seeming a bit sassy.
Dudu had hair loss on most of her body. Her skin was a grayish pink. Her tassel-like tail resembled a rat’s tail. She had the most hair on her head.
“Sorry for being loud,” said Li. He and his parents liked to imagine that Dudu viewed all human speech as being directed to, or about, her.
Dudu stared at Li with her cloudy, cataracted eyes. She liked only three people—Li’s parents and Auntie, as Li called his mom’s sister.
* * *
—
On a pre-dinner walk three days later, Li talked about statins—a type of cholesterol-lowering drug his dad, who was sixty-six, was on. Statins, he’d read, caused cancer, depression, amnesia, dementia, and other problems, like twitching.
“My eye has twitched for twenty years,” said Li’s dad.
“You’ve used statins for twenty years,” said Li.
“It doesn’t matter what happens to us,” said Li’s dad. “When we’re old, we won’t remember anything. We’ll have no worries.”
“That’s not what happens,” said
Li. “You’ll feel very not good.” In Chinese, people said “not good” instead of “bad.”
“You wish for us to be healthy,” said Li’s mom.
“You won’t be able to do anything,” said Li. “Other people will need to care for you.”
“We’ll hire someone to bathe and feed us,” said Li’s dad.
“How you two are in ten years matters to me because I’m going to take care of you two,” said Li, somewhat blurting something he didn’t feel committed to doing, but which, after saying it, seemed, calmingly and hearteningly, more possible.
* * *
—
That night, Li’s mom emailed Li, “I was very moved by you saying you will take care of us. What more could I ask for from a son? However, we don’t want to become your burden when we get really old. Therefore, I understand it is important to follow the healthy way of living which you have been working to teach us.”
Li woke sweating at 3:30 a.m. He maundered dysphorically through the small apartment, in which most sounds could be heard from anywhere else, finding toxic things to discard. Dudu growled quietly, in her high-pitched voice, from Li’s parents’ bed. She was most awake at night, when she guarded Li’s parents as they slept.
Li carried the microwave into the elevator, down six floors, into the trash room. Back in the apartment, he emailed his mom two articles on the negatives of microwave ovens, including that they leaked radiation. He peed and returned to bed.