by Tao Lin
* * *
—
The next day was the National Day of Catalonia. Stores were closed. At a beachside casino, Li won four hundred dollars on blackjack. His dad lost one hundred dollars. Li walked on the beach, thinking about his novel. Maybe it could end in Florida, where he was going in two months, or in Taiwan, where he was returning in three months.
Maybe after Taiwan he’d move to California and his novel could end there, with him starting a garden. He’d planned to move the previous year but had gotten occupied with the possible chest surgery, then had stayed to teach.
He floated in the sea, thinking about his mom’s recovering upper face. It made her seem vulnerable and childlike, reminding him she had struggles outside family.
In the hotel, he fell facedown onto a bed.
“Du is tired,” said Li’s dad. “Li is tired.” Li’s parents somewhat often called Li “Du” by accident. They seemed to have a category, represented by Dudu, for “beloved other.”
“Are you tired, Li?” said Li’s mom.
“No,” said Li, bouncing into a sit.
At dinner in a busy restaurant, Li’s mom praised an elder who was eating alone, with wine and a book. She said she liked doing things alone, unless with family or close friends. She was a “loner,” she said in English. Li said he was even more of a loner.
On La Rambla, he asked his mom if she could crack her knuckles. He demonstrated with his hands. She couldn’t.
“I couldn’t until weed,” said Li. His inflamed hands had felt achy and doughy. “Weed is good for inflammation.”
“I know,” said Li’s mom. Li had praised weed, as they called cannabis, many times to her by email, saying it had helped him stop the other, destructive drugs.
“Dad might like weed very much,” said Li.
“Will it make me sleepy or energetic?” said Li’s dad.
“It can do both. It might make you want to exercise.”
“I want to smoke it, then do work,” said Li’s dad.
“You can do that,” said Li, becoming increasingly stoned. He walked away a little and said, “Barcelona,” to himself in an Italian accent. He said it louder, laughing.
Swinging his arms, he sensed the controllability of certain of his pelvic muscles for what felt like the first time. The muscles seemed unconsciously tensed. He realized he was subconsciously reluctant to move in ways that had once hurt because he’d internalized the worst of his pain.
He felt lost in stimulating contentment, inner space twinkling with capturable insights. He made himself half a foot taller by walking on the fronts of his feet, amusing himself and his parents.
“Why do you have so much energy?” said Li’s mom.
“Did you eat weed?” said Li’s dad, torquing suddenly toward Li to see his face.
“No,” said Li, turning away, grinning widely.
“He’s laughing,” said Li’s dad, smiling. “You can’t bring it on planes. Police will get you.”
“I didn’t,” Li lied. “Don’t worry.”
“Police will snatch you up,” said Li’s dad.
“No need to worry,” said Li.
“Snatch you up,” said Li’s dad.
In the hotel room, Li smiled with unfocused eyes, glad he’d been helpful and calm regarding his mom’s surgery—asking questions, having a sense of humor, listening.
“What happened?” said Li’s mom.
“Nothing,” said Li, moving away.
* * *
—
At the airport the next day, Li was chosen to have his luggage searched. He didn’t have anything illegal because he’d swallowed his last cannabis capsule that morning.
Back in apartment 4K, upside down on his inversion table, he felt happy and moved that he missed his parents. He fantasized about ending his novel in Barcelona, smiling in the hotel room.
Florida
Two months later, in November, Li flew to Orlando for a five-day vacation with his parents, Mike, and Mike’s three-year-old son, Alan. On day two, in a rental SUV in Cocoa Beach’s parking lot, Li gave Alan, the ostensible main reason for the vacation, a carrot.
“What did you give him?” said Mike.
“Carrot,” said Li.
“Don’t let him eat it. It hasn’t been washed.”
“Some people think soil bacteria can be good,” said Li, retrieving the carrot. He’d been eating unwashed organic produce for years, so had overlooked that Mike might disapprove.
“When you have a child you can raise it however you want,” said Mike.
“Okay,” said their mom. “There’s no need to say that.”
* * *
—
As the others ate lunch in a restaurant on a pier, a moderately stoned Li absorbed electrons through his feet on the beach.
In London fourteen months earlier, on their previous whole-family vacation, he’d ordered just a salad at dinner in a restaurant, and Mike had said, “You always have to be different,” in a disgusted-sounding voice. Li had leaned across the table and lightly slapped Mike’s cheek—a technique he’d gotten from Mike, who, as a teenager, in jolly moods, had slapped Li while saying “Don’t be a baby” or “Turn that frown upside down,” snapping Li sometimes out of dour grumpiness. It hadn’t worked in London in part because Li, peaking on back pain, hadn’t felt jolly. Mike had left dinner, cabbing back to the hotel. Their parents had seemed unbothered and even energized, agreeing with each other that fraternal conflict was normal.
* * *
—
Li joined the others in the pier restaurant. His dad was eating fried shrimp from a red plastic cup. His mom was pouring thick dressing onto a crouton-heavy salad. Mike and Alan had tacos and milk.
Li looked at pelicans on the pier and remembered how weird they were, with their handbag-like beaks. As a child, he and his parents had fished on the pier almost every weekend. Mike had been busy skateboarding with friends.
After Mike and Alan left for the pier, Li reminded his mom about their family-vacation agreement. In July, he’d emailed her, “I want to go to Orlando, but I would like to choose where we and Dad eat. Mike can choose everything else.” She’d emailed Mike, “Li agrees to go, but was worried you and him might disagree again on his diet. Thin Uncle changed his diet, no more trembling. My blood sugar is near normal. It really works.” Mike had said, “I will make sure not to mention anything about food.”
* * *
—
On the pier, Li’s dad caught three small fish. Alan reeled in the third one and held it for a photo. A plan formed to buy fish at Cape Canaveral to cook in the hotel for dinner.
In the SUV, Mike, the only family member with a driver’s license, seemed to ignore the plan. Maybe he didn’t know about it. He was driving in the other direction.
“We’re going to Whole Foods at some point,” said Li from the third, backmost row of seats, next to Alan, who was strapped into a rear-facing child seat.
“We aren’t going to Whole Foods,” said Mike, sounding and appearing, Li saw in the rearview mirror, offended.
Li moved to the middle row, crowding his parents. “Do you know what someone with diabetes should eat?” he said. “Mom is prediabetic. Have you researched diabetes? I have.” He gabbled disjunctively on blood sugar and diet. He saw disbelief on the side of Mike’s face and felt self-conscious of how upset he’d suddenly gotten.
Mike parked on the side of the highway.
“What are you doing?” said their mom.
Mike got out of the car. “Get out,” he said.
“Why?” said Li.
“Don’t yell in front of Alan. Get out.”
“I shouldn’t have done that. Sorry.”
“Get out of the car now,” said Mike.
Li retreated to the third row, where Ala
n seemed asleep, but might have been pretending, and apologized again.
Mike continued driving. No one knew where he was going. Born in Taiwan in 1977, he was six months old when his mom left for the United States, where his dad had been for a year, working on a physics doctorate. Auntie’s family had cared for him until he was two, when his mom brought him to Rochester, New York, where he met his dad.
Li stared out his window at the ocean, thinking about his microbiome. It was hard to change his microbiome because the first microbes to colonize his body had formed biofilms—microbial communities protected by self-produced polymer matrices. The past was like a biofilm, he thought experimentally. It couldn’t be destroyed or suppressed. It had to be replaced gradually, with emotion-charged information, story-embedded ideas, memorable stories.
Mike parked in front of a Bonefish Grill. He and Alan went inside and ate as the others waited in the SUV.
Back at the hotel after a stop at Whole Foods, Li and his mom made a dinner of beef, bok choy, and fish soup.
* * *
—
At Disney World the next day, they parked in “Villains: Hook,” got checked for weapons, and entered the Magic Kingdom. “Here, find Winnie the Pooh,” said Mike, holding a map toward Li without eye contact. Li unfolded the map, located the ride, and silently began walking there, feeling disgruntled.
As his mom, brother, and nephew queued for the Winnie ride, and his dad stood in place using his phone, Li walked around eating celery, carrots, and almonds. If imaginary entities could read lives like books, who, he wondered, was reading his life? His post-death self probably wasn’t, he sensed with some surprise. He clamped his nostrils and pushed air into his head.
Visible reality dissolved with a boingy, abstractly tickling, noiselike sensation. He kneeled, touched paved hot ground, didn’t know where or what he was, stood, and felt energized and refreshed. He’d begun fainting in this way—in which, instead of losing consciousness, he seemed to ride the untethered vessel of it elsewhere, like in a smoked-DMT trip—around a year earlier.
The first time it happened, he’d been in 4K on his hands and knees after doing ten crude handstand push-ups on his sofa with his heels against a wall. He’d learned to trigger it by forcing air into his head, breathing deep and corseting his torso, and other simple methods. In Taiwan, it had happened regularly during yoga, so he’d termed it “YG.” Compared to his painful, unpredictable malfunctions, YGs seemed safe and friendly, allowing him to inconspicuously leave culture and matter whenever.
On the It’s a Small World ride, seated by his mom in a boat, Li noticed they were in a giant room whose ceiling panels reminded him of middle school, which made him think of asbestos—the toxic building material that was in a third of U.S. schools and that caused asbestosis, a long-term inflammation and scarring of the lungs.
After two more rides, Li and his mom sat in muggy heat, eating brought food. Li’s mom wondered if always-happy people existed; she thought not. Li said modern people should feel unhappy, due in part to toxification. A 2005 study by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit with the motto “Everything Is Connected,” had found an average of two hundred types of industrial compounds, including car emissions and banned pesticides, in the umbilical cord blood of American babies, he told his mom.
Li had suspected since middle school that he was constantly being poisoned and/or that he was cursed. Tracing his feelings back to things and culture, to molecules and ideas, the past two years, he’d sometimes felt a surreal wonder, realizing that both and more seemed to be true—he was radioactive, malnourished, dysbiotic, degenerate, brainwashed, brain damaged.
The others emerged from the food court. Mike pushed Alan in a covered stroller. Alan began crying. Mike asked if he wanted to return to Under the Sea, where it was cooler. Alan didn’t seem to know, but after being asked more times seemed to convey he did. On the way there, he started crying again. “Where do you want to go?” said Mike. Alan stopped crying, seeming dazed. Mike asked if he wanted to return to the food court. Alan seemed to nod. Mike pushed. Alan cried.
Watching this, Li realized it was impossible for small children to know they existed in an uncomfortable phase-shift called history—a period of time, beginning with permanent settlements and ending with immateriality, that humans hadn’t adapted to function well in—and so they absorbed the misattribution of their discomfort by adults around them to location, temperature, the lack of certain things or food, and, later in life, themselves, others, or life itself.
* * *
—
An hour later, on Tom Sawyer Island, Li’s dad and Alan seemed entranced in the same aloof, mollified way while eating chocolate-coated frozen bananas.
“Is this real?” said Li’s dad. “Did Tom Sawyer live here?”
“None of this is real,” said Li.
Alan repeatedly crossed a shaky drawbridge, laughing.
“Children naturally seek complexity and novelty,” thought Li.
Pointing at a yellow leaf, Alan said it’d become a banana.
“Alan,” said Li, holding a leaf. “Look how tiny this is.”
“Tiny,” said Alan, giggling. “What is it?”
“A leaf,” said Li, startled by his nephew’s gleaming eye contact. “It’s just a tiny leaf. It’s smaller than the others.”
* * *
—
At Animal Kingdom the next morning, Mike politely, with a friendly smirk, asked Li if he’d navigate again that day. Li said yes. He liked good-mood Mike.
Walking to the “Africa” area of the theme park, Li and his mom recalled Mike’s shoplifting arrest at age sixteen. Li, who’d stolen thousands of batteries in his twenties to sell on eBay, learned that Mike had stolen batteries, not, as he’d somehow believed, pants. After a night in jail, Mike had been grounded for a week, during which, one day, he and Li had gone fishing at a pond near their house. When they got home, their mom had asked Li if they’d spoken to each other. They hadn’t.
In line for a safari simulation, Li felt unsettled, seeing his mom zoom in and out of her face in photos on her phone, as she’d been doing compulsively that trip, seemingly due to the surgery she’d gotten months earlier. He remembered staring at his own face and head with self-conscious despair as a teenager and older while alone in bathrooms, using multiple mirrors when available.
Later, petting a chained cow across a fence, Li thought, “Nature minimizes cruelty.” For four eons, life had been riveting and blissful. Earthlings had enjoyed nested cycles of flowing variety, linked in ancient webs of mutual benefit, before dying, usually in awe-saturated, euphoric shock, as perfect food for grateful others.
History was the cruelest phase—life increasingly endured pain from known, unknown, and misattributed sources before dying confused, with many people burying their corpses in expensive containers, away from the natural cycles—and so the briefest. If Earth were seventy instead of 4.54 billion years old, history at fifteen millennia would be the last twelve minutes.
* * *
—
At Altamonte Mall the next day, Li’s parents asked Li if Barnes & Noble had his books. Usually, with Mike present, Li would demur, not wanting the potentially envy-inducing attention, but, freshly caffeinated, he blithely ignored Mike’s feelings while also suspecting his normal meekness was misguided.
The store didn’t have his books.
“Where’s Dad?” said Li’s mom. “Go find Dad.”
Li’s dad was browsing a book on ancient Egypt.
Li asked if he knew what “mainstream” meant.
“The masses,” said Li’s dad. “Most people.”
“The mainstream is wrong about the pyramids,” said Li. “They weren’t tombs. There were no bodies in them.”
“Then what were they for?” said Li’s dad.
“I don’t remember,” sa
id Li after a moment.
Li’s dad was looking at a photo of the Sphinx, which Li had read was at least 12,000 years old, not 4,500 years old.
“Many mainstream beliefs are wrong,” said Li, vaguely recalling his dad expressing similar rhetoric in the past.
Li’s dad opened The Mind of God at random with a focused expression. Li recognized the book. As a teenager, he’d spent many days and nights in bookstores’ philosophy and supernatural sections, seeking a way out of his life. Many books had included “God” in the title, which had alienated him. Nature, continuously transcending itself, was supernatural, he’d since learned. No one knew how far it had already gone.
Li found his mom browsing a picture book of dogs with funny haircuts. He told her the bottom half of his head was undersized due to malnutrition, giving him a long face, unlike his parents, Thin Uncle, and Auntie, who had square faces.
“Americans have sharp faces,” said Li’s mom.
“I know,” said Li. “It’s due to malnutrition.”
“I thought it was from sleeping on one’s side.”
“No. How could it be that? Pillows are so soft.”
“It’s what I thought,” said Li’s mom, walking away.
Li said modern people had to get their wisdom teeth removed due to facial degeneration, which had once been attributed to interracial breeding, as he and his mom had read in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration a year earlier.
“Seems like you’re not listening to me,” said Li, amused to feel like an annoyingly didactic character. He wanted to talk about how the deeper humans got into history, the more deformed their bodies, the stranger their malfunctions, the weirder-seeming and actually weirder their realities.