by Tao Lin
Finally, she’d say in a blunt voice that she was exhausted and wanted to sleep. Li would stand there weeping with a swollen face and numb throat, nose dripping snot, then wander back to his room, bleary and confused.
Sometimes he’d return to her, blubbering, and say he was wrong and sorry and didn’t know what to do, and she’d tell him to lie down in his room, and he would.
* * *
—
At school, Li wanted to be in the hospital, where the problem had seemed simple and clear. He was in cooking class when his lung collapsed again.
In the hospital, a nurse opened a package containing a tube that seemed half the circumference of the first tube, making Li think the first tube had been the wrong size.
To avoid slicing scar tissue, the slit was made between different ribs that time. The tube somehow wouldn’t go in, even after the slit was enlarged.
Li was held down, and the tube was shouldered in with shockingly hard thrusts, jolting his body. He anticipated the tube piercing his heart. The pain felt disturbing.
When it was done, he still felt the same level of pain. A refrigerator-sized X-ray machine was wheeled in, used on him, and wheeled away.
An hour later, a nurse said the tube was in too far. After two more adjustments and X-rays, Li got IV morphine and was wheeled to the second floor, where a nurse asked if he wanted to watch Survivor or Friends.
* * *
—
His mom was in his hospital room so much, seated in a chair against the wall, that Li felt claustrophobic and annoyed. He asked her to go home. She said no. Someone needed to be there for emergencies.
He said breathing and talking hurt, as she knew, and that being loud was making things worse. He shouted to please give him privacy. She became unresponsive, looking straight ahead.
He began crying. He yelled that if he kept yelling his lung would recollapse (stress, nurses had said, was a big factor) and that it would be her fault. He yelled louder, almost shrieking.
Two days later, they met their new doctor, who said Li’s lung had “relapsed,” which shouldn’t have happened. He looked at Li with a face that seemed to say, “You are a terrible person. There is something deeply wrong with you.”
Antibiotics were injected into his chest one day to obliterate his pleural space so that his lung would adhere to his chest wall. He couldn’t breathe that night. His torso and neck, then parts of his limbs and face, felt both numb and smoldering. He didn’t sleep. Air trickled in somehow.
He was alone one day after the pleurodesis. His mom was feeding the dogs or buying food. He carried the suction machine like a briefcase into the bathroom, looked at his reflection, and thought he looked handsome.
Three years later, when he wrote about his lung collapses in an unpublished short story, he couldn’t remember the one or more times when his dad visited. He remembered liking his dad’s absence. It was one less thing to worry about.
* * *
—
In his room above the three-car garage, he threw his electric pencil sharpener and other things at his walls. He did it in the dark, somewhat experimentally, with irregular pauses. He tossed a splash cymbal at a wall. It bounced off, onto the carpet.
Li’s dad knocked on Li’s locked door. “Li,” he said meekly. “What’s wrong?”
Li stopped moving. He imagined entering one of the holes he’d made in his walls. His things—his drum set, computer, books, CDs—seemed to be watching him. His dad knocked again, then went downstairs.
Li lay on the floor until he felt cold, then moved to his bed. He wrapped his blanket around his head and squeezed it with both hands until he was tired. He felt like a heavy, dirty towel was trying to get somewhere and he was in the way.
He had no friends. He couldn’t stop being debilitatingly shy. His awkwardness and gloominess, his inability to speak and be normal, annoyed people and made people uncomfortable—he could see it on their faces—which made him want to be alone.
Sometimes he thought he could be okay, even happy, as a mute hermit, eating and sleeping and doing small, private things related to art and fantasy, but this didn’t seem like an option because he felt that his mom wouldn’t believe he was fulfilled.
* * *
—
The third time his lung collapsed, he was showering before school. His mom was in bed. Her head, nested in dark hair, looked like a strange, egg-shaped organism. She seemed asleep. She got up.
They tried to talk the nurses out of a chest tube. After the tube was inserted, Li was wheeled to the second floor. Instead of staying in his room this time, his mom wandered the halls. She saw a lung doctor she’d gone to once for a cough. The doctor said Li should get surgery.
Happy the new solution didn’t involve pain (he’d be unconscious), Li became talkative. He and his mom discussed how no one else had mentioned surgery. They criticized the other doctors and praised the new one. They became quiet. News was reporting on a school shooting in California.
Li’s mom asked Li what he wanted to eat. Li said he’d think about it. After a while, he said a McDonald’s fish sandwich and strawberry milkshake. When his mom returned with the food, they continued reveling in how good it was that she’d encountered the lung doctor in the hallway.
Li felt happy that he was happy and that it was making his mom happy. He’d stopped being talkative with her when he was eleven or twelve, except when lecturing and blaming her, but now he was smiling and there was an eagerness to his voice.
* * *
—
Home after the surgery, Li and his mom began to communicate via handwritten notes, which at first seemed better than their verbal arguments, with clearer language, less recursion, and no yelling, but quickly became just as despair drenched.
In writing, Li’s blame-based logic often reached its dubious endpoint: To fix him, she had to force him into difficult situations, and she had to do it convincingly of her own volition. She had to factor in everything he’d said about what to do, then do something transcending all that, something surprising.
Li felt more doomed than ever. He wrote with angry, vexed, and worried expressions, usually through tears. He dramatically slammed down the paper next to his mom, then walked away to wait for a reply. It continued all day and night sometimes. They used notepad paper, writing replies below replies, filling many pages, which Li stapled and referenced and began to tape on doors and in drawers. The notes embarrassed him. He feared other people seeing them.
He increasingly wrote notes to himself. He wrote that he should never blame anyone again. He quickly realized that change was a nonlinear process, destined to fail repeatedly, but he didn’t give up. He wrote more notes, telling himself what he should do, and began to feel empowered to not be a helpless, unhappy, unknown recluse.
* * *
—
A month after the surgery, they visited the lung doctor, who showed them a jar of cloudy liquid and said it contained “blebs,” which he’d excised from Li, creating holes that he’d stapled shut. Li wondered what blebs were—weak areas on the delicate membrane covering the lungs, he’d learn years later—and if he needed them.
At college, the lung collapsed around seven more times. Li felt very worried the first two times, imagining dying alone in bed, not wanting to go to a hospital for a chest tube, which had been the worst pain he’d ever felt, but each time his body healed itself over weeks to months, during which he couldn’t sate his breath.
He began to trust doctors less, and to want to strengthen himself. While searching online for ways to independently reduce depression and anxiety, he learned of “natural health,” which focused on preventing and curing disease through ancient, DIY methods, like food and exercise, instead of on relieving symptoms with expensive surgery and drugs, as in Western medicine. He started to realize his body wasn’t defective; rather, h
is society was damaging.
For three or four years after college, he had bolts of pain in and around his heart that made him stop moving and stay still for minutes, afraid to rupture, tear, or puncture something. Whatever the problem was (the pain was in his left chest, away from the collapses, pleurodesis, surgery, scars, and staples) also healed on its own.
* * *
—
By late 2015, the heart pain became motion-stoppingly severe only around once a year, when it would remind him in a humbling way that his chest problems used to be much worse. Usually, it manifested as a mild, not-unpleasant ache, lasting seconds to hours. He sometimes couldn’t tell if he felt pain, despair, restlessness, or loneliness.
Massage
But now he had a different chronic pain—in and around his back—which had grown through his twenties, as if the chest pain hadn’t left, just migrated and evolved.
He hid the pain for a few days, then told his parents his back had begun to feel “cramped.” After saying for months that he’d healed his back, the truth seemed too disappointing to share.
He decided to get massaged once a week. At his first massage, acute pain felt stimulating and vaguely pleasurable due to cannabis and the belief that the process was therapeutic.
“You should drink milk,” said the masseuse, a young man whose name at work was “21.”
“Milk gives me indigestion,” said Li.
21 admitted milk gave him diarrhea.
At home, Li told his mom, who’d recommended 21, that he would’ve liked to talk less during massage, but otherwise it had been good.
* * *
—
Three days later, on January 2, 2016, Li’s mom said, “Du goes to the elevator to say bye,” and carried Dudu out of the apartment.
“Because she’s elevator dog,” said Li’s dad, who was going to China for four days.
“Bye-bye,” said Li’s mom while making Dudu’s leg wave.
Li felt moved by his parents’ sly, Dudu-mediated tenderness.
On a walk later that day, Dudu seemed strangely relaxed. Normally, she refused to walk without Li’s dad. She sniffed a tree, glanced at Li’s mom, strolled to a concrete bench.
“Her eyes really gleam now,” said Li’s mom.
“They do,” said Li.
“The fish oil is so good,” said Li’s mom, who’d been rubbing it on Dudu’s gums thrice weekly.
“It is,” said Li. “And the raw eggs.”
Dudu stood still with her tail down, seeming to have begun to miss Li’s dad, though when he was there she still often stopped moving during walks.
“Let’s find Happy!” said Li’s mom about another dog. “Happy’s mom will give you chicken!”
Dudu, who’d never worn a leash, resumed walking.
“The good thing about having a dog is that they understand everything you say,” said Li’s mom.
“They can’t understand,” said Li, smirking a little.
“Can,” said Li’s mom.
“Maybe. Right, they can,” said Li, deciding he preferred his mom’s perspective, which made him feel closer to Dudu and also the mystery, which he’d been sensing less due to pain, but also more due to using more LSD and cannabis for pain relief.
* * *
—
At a lunch buffet the next day with Auntie and Thin Uncle, Li’s mom said only she and Thin and Fat Uncle had gone to college. Their other five siblings had only finished grade school. Auntie, the second-youngest sibling, said she’d skipped school by climbing and hiding in trees. Li’s mom, the youngest, said Auntie had skipped school once by hiding in a giant pickling jar.
Li laughed. It was his first time stoned around his mom’s siblings. He asked Auntie what she’d done all day.
“It wasn’t just me. It was a whole group of us. We played in the mountains.”
“That’s good,” said Li. “What’s the biggest animal you saw?”
“Lamb,” said Auntie after a few moments.
“Lamb,” said Li.
“When we did go to school, we often got zeros on tests,” said Auntie, laughing.
Li’s mom said parents of her generation, especially dads, had paid little attention to their children.
Li asked Thin Uncle about his hand. After implementing Li’s dietary advice, beginning to exercise more, and getting his mercury fillings replaced, his hand had stopped tremoring except when he tried to write more than his signature.
“Did you call the language center that I mentioned in my email?” said Thin Uncle about a place where one could practice Mandarin with non-native speakers.
“I haven’t,” said Li.
“You can make friends there,” said Thin Uncle, whose wife had died of breast cancer in 1988, when their kids were in grade school. “You can meet a girlfriend there.”
Li, who was married but separated, said he’d think about it. He refrained from saying he didn’t want to meet any more people, as he’d told his parents.
He wanted to heal his pain, so he could do adventurous, nature-based things, like live with the B & B farmer or the Bunun tribe.
* * *
—
On LSD at his second massage, Li felt amused and increasingly incredulous: 21 seemed to be massaging him with one hand, weakly and floppily, like a moribund fish, while silently using a phone with his other hand.
Had 21 been offended by Li’s mom telling him days earlier not to share “the teachings”—his personalized massage wisdom—with Li but to just massage him?
21 began a set of heavy, unambiguously two-handed massages. “You’re in Taiwan for a few months, right?” he said.
“Ng,” said Li. “Almost three months.” It was his thirty-first day in Taiwan. He was out of LSD and had already used half his cannabis. Due to pain, he’d stopped yoga and returned to sleeping on a mattress. He was prostrate in his room most of the time.
“Whenever you have problems, come to me,” said 21.
“Okay,” said Li, and turned over.
21 manipulated his lower body into various positions, producing intense pain.
* * *
—
Dazedly stoned on a pre-dinner walk the next day, Li told his parents he felt suān (cramped) but not tòng (pained).
Distracted and enervated by pain, then, he began to zone out in the opposite way of a YG (unmysterious, demoralizing, concrete), mumbling curt answers to his mom’s questions about massage. He heard his dad, who’d returned from China that morning, say his mom was jealous of Dudu.
“I wouldn’t be jealous even if you got another wife,” said Li’s mom.
Li’s dad said something Li didn’t hear.
Li’s mom poked him with an umbrella handle.
“Don’t hit me,” said Li’s dad.
“Hmph! That’s called hitting?”
“You’re not allowed to eat pig’s feet tonight,” said Li to his dad, resonating Yahweh with a little conniption of punishment.
Li’s parents laughed, somewhat to Li’s surprise.
Dudu walked onto grass and pooped.
Li’s dad wiped her butt with a paper towel.
“Dad has the most patience for Du and you,” said Li’s mom.
Li said his parents were “bù xíng le”—a term, literally “not able anymore,” his parents used to describe dead or dying businesses, life-forms, and situations in a similar way that Li used “fucked” or “doomed”—in terms of being patient with each other.
“You’re right,” said Li’s mom, smiling at Li, who felt conflicted and nauseated. Usually, he argued against his parents’ pessimism about being more loving to each other.
At dinner, Li saw his mom touch her jaw. He asked if it hurt. She said it had hurt ever since she bit into a spare-rib bone in Florida, two months earlie
r.
* * *
—
The next morning, Li’s dad left for China again, this time for five days. He seemed to leave more when home life got tense.
At dinner, eating broiled fish, brown rice, homemade sauerkraut, and lotus-root soup, Li revealed he had sores at the creases on both sides of his mouth.
Li’s mom implicated the massage table. She said she always asked 21 to use clean towels, which she supplemented with paper towels from the bathroom.
“I’m not getting massaged anymore if you tell 21 to change his behavior again,” said Li.
“You don’t need to threaten,” said Li’s mom. It didn’t make sense, she said, for Li to quit massage to punish her for telling 21 not to share his teachings, which she’d done for his benefit.
“You’re right,” said Li. “Sorry. I’m in a not-good mood.”
After dinner, he ate spoonfuls of sweetened, alcoholic rice that he’d found in the refrigerator.
* * *
—
He woke in the morning in what felt like a warm burrito of pain, surprised. “Ahh,” he said, trying to move.
Crutching himself with walls and furniture, he left his room, traversed the hall, entered the bathroom, and heard his mom say, “Let’s go walk Du.”
“Don’t rush me,” he said, carefully peeing. He heard his mom say, “Don’t be too worried,” to Dudu in a playful, theatrical voice. “We’re leaving for a walk in a moment.”
“I’m not walking today,” said Li after shuffling stiffly into his room. He slept for three hours, then read a note from his mom saying he should stop getting massaged if he felt pain and not just cramped.