by Tao Lin
“You can also write about our clashes,” said Li’s dad.
“I know,” said Li. “I am.”
Li’s mom said she’d learned in college that novels needed “conflict.”
“It’s because we bicker that I can write about us,” said Li. Years later, he’d turn against this belief, thinking instead that conflict wasn’t necessary for art, as it didn’t seem to be for culture. Megaliths, agriculture, pottery, metallurgy, textiles, writing, and probably books had been invented when peace was mainstream, he’d read. Riane Eisler called this “one of the best-kept historical secrets”—conflict wasn’t necessary for cultural or technological advancement.
“Do you sometimes bicker on purpose, then?” said Li’s mom.
“No,” said Li honestly. “I’m always trying to not bicker.” It was probably impossible, though, to not be influenced by his wavering belief that maybe conflict was good for his novel.
“That’s good,” said Li’s mom.
“Du, you’re the most obedient,” said Li’s dad, petting Dudu.
“After yoga, I have less control,” said Li, offering some explanation for his outburst. He’d done yoga that day for the first time in eight weeks, causing pain that seemed expected and beneficial, microtears that’d mend stronger.
* * *
—
After dinner, Li and his parents agreed to walk in an hour.
An hour later, at 8:15 p.m., Li left his room.
“You’re always right on time,” said his mom.
“I’m still writing. Can we go at eight forty?”
“We don’t need to walk if you’re tired from yoga.”
“I want to,” said Li. “Let’s go at eight forty-five.”
“You can write for longer if you want.”
“I like time limits. They help me focus.”
At 8:45, Li felt amused and endeared, seeing his dad, wearing magnifying glasses and carrying machine parts, rush from the kitchen, where he stored some of his stuff, to his office, saying, “Two minutes, two minutes.”
* * *
—
On the unusually late walk, Li said he’d written 4,100 words in ninety minutes.
“What did you write about?” said Li’s dad.
“Fighting and dinner,” said Li.
“Bickering,” said Li’s mom, correcting him, as she had many times over decades. They’d disputed verbally (chǎojià), not physically (dǎjià).
“Did you write about picking up my computer?” said Li’s dad.
“Yes,” said Li.
“Did you write about Du hiding in the corner with her tail down?”
“No,” said Li. “I didn’t see that.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t write about Dad hitting Mike,” said Li’s mom. “Child abuse,” she said in English.
“Wasn’t everyone in your generation hit?” said Li.
“I wasn’t,” said Li’s mom. “Only teachers hit me.” Teachers had hit students with a sticklike tool made from rattan, a palm plant, until 2006, when physical punishment was banned in schools. Laughing a little, Li’s mom said her eldest, DDT-using brother—her only sibling out of eight who’d died—had hit her once, but she couldn’t remember why.
“Did your dad hit his children?” said Li to his mom, who sometimes said her mom had loved her more than anyone else in the world.
“No, but he was always yelling,” said Li’s mom. “He had a very not-good temper. I was lucky; he didn’t yell at me. He yelled at Auntie all the time.”
“Were you hit?” Li asked his dad.
“My mom hit me with a stick. She made me kneel on the abacus.” Li’s dad rarely mentioned his mom except to say that after his dad gambled away all their money when he was two, she’d supported the whole family by selling fish.
Li’s mom said Li’s dad always automatically blamed others, even blaming Dudu (in a kind voice) when he couldn’t find the TV remote, because his mom had hit him.
“In other people’s novels, people get murdered,” said Li.
Li’s mom laughed.
“And it’s fine,” said Li. “People like it a lot.”
Li’s dad began to intermittently stop walking to use his phone with an engrossed expression, standing motionless for increasing amounts of time as the others waited at a distance.
“Let’s just keep walking,” said Li. “He’ll run to catch up.”
“Du will stand in the middle,” said Li’s mom.
“That’s okay,” said Li, and they walked toward home.
They stared at Li’s dad from around forty feet away.
“Use your phone at home,” said Li’s mom in a low voice. “Du is waiting. Everyone is waiting.”
Dudu stood in between, looking at one side, then the other.
* * *
—
At two a.m. Li’s dad entered Li’s room and said, “I’m going to sleep; you’re not going to sleep?”
“Ng,” said Li, browsing his notes on his computer.
Li’s dad picked up a book of tweets by Li and Li’s friend and read one of Li’s tweets from his drug phase aloud: “Urge to leave society upon losing cards/keys.”
* * *
—
“Don’t be so fierce!” said Li’s dad the next night after dinner as Dudu barked and howled at a dog in an apartment across the hall. “Du. Ayo. This kind of child is too powerful.”
Li was clearing the table, plateauing on LSD. He entered the bathroom and laughed uncontrollably, remembering his dad saying, “This kind of child is useless,” the previous night.
Li swept the floor, calm and focused.
“Sweeping is good, you can think while doing it,” said Li’s dad from bed.
“You should sweep, then,” said Li.
“I’m thinking while lying here,” said Li’s dad, who was known to push trash or food under furniture even when watched, grunting noncommittally when censured.
“The new mop is better, right?” said Li’s mom as Li scrubbed the floor with peppermint oil and water.
“Yes,” said Li, happy to bond with his mom over the long-handled pad mop with 360-degree rotation.
* * *
—
Li felt scared the next morning when he looked in his mom’s mouth. She seemed to have barely any gums left. Parts of her jawbone seemed visible in a way that made Li picture her skull. The earliest her dentist could see her was in three weeks. She made an appointment with the dentist whose office they’d stormed out of the previous year.
The next day, Li walked for three minutes to Taipei’s largest farmers market, which was open on weekends. He bought turmeric root and made turmeric-ginger-honey drinks for his parents and himself. He theorized his mom’s pain was like his, and she began to refrain from eating rice.
Three days later, she said it was her second painless day. She canceled her appointment with the Huggins-trained dentist and bought turmeric for Auntie and Thin Uncle, but at dinner Li saw her touch her jaw, and she said it felt “cramped.” They affirmed she’d see her dentist in two weeks.
On the bus to the airport the next day, they looked at photos from Barcelona, Florida, and the past eleven weeks. Li’s dad’s neck had reemerged through weight loss. Li’s mom was concerned that she, like Li’s dad, had lost six pounds. Li was more worried about her jaw; he feared cancer.
“When I get home and see that your room is empty, it will be very not good,” she said.
Microfireflies
Back in apartment 4K at one a.m., Li scratched his eyes with his knuckles. He sneezed repeatedly. His nose bled twice before he slept. In the morning, he cleaned rodent poop along his walls, then inhaled cannabis from the device he’d made from a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle to smoke DMT. Despite suspecting he was inhaling aluminum and plastic, he used
it for two more days, until one of the potent hits empowered him to discard it by catalyzing, among other thoughts, “It will be too bleak to return to the plastic bottle.”
On the same hit, he realized language was his metaphysical microbiome. As the trillions of microbes in his gut, brain, eyes, and other parts modulated his feelings, thoughts, and behavior with electrons and molecules, the billions of words he’d thought, said, read, heard, dreamed, and written, his internal literature, influenced him from the other direction. Li suspected his newer, superstratal symbiosis, with meaning, ideas, and stories, was as damaged as his primeval one.
In March, stoned on a lunch break from jury duty, he bought purple potato chips at Union Square farmers market. On the train back to city hall, he realized he’d missed his stop and that he seemed to have blacked out for a few minutes. Ascending to street level with gooey chest pain, he felt paranormal and bemused. His only memory of the train ride was of sustaining mutually blank-faced eye contact with a seated, elderly woman while chain-eating chips—his first starch in two months.
In Brooklyn six days later, he got his mailbox key from his friend who’d gotten his mail while he was in Taiwan. His friend gave him modafinil, a drug he hadn’t tried. On modafinil that night, drinking 250 percent as much coffee as planned, he wrote for five hours and masturbated to online porn, which he hadn’t looked at in five months, for four hours, alternating sessions. “You terrible fucking piece of shit,” he thought throughout the night, sometimes while grinning manically. His inner voice became profane on strong stimulants. “You absolute piece of shit. Jesus.” He blamed modafinil for the regressive binge.
The next day, still awake, he found himself earnestly considering returning to his drug phase’s last third, which had featured the solitary polydrug binge—a late-historical activity with probably millions of practitioners—but by night he didn’t want to anymore.
In the morning, chip-induced pain, which had fluctuated for a week, decreased to almost nothing, and he felt himself trying to attribute the redress to modafinil in what seemed to be a last-ditch effort to lure himself back to the drug phase. He felt more amused than unnerved. Each time, in the past two years, he’d felt like returning to centering his life around the vice-generating use of corporate drugs, the urge had left after minutes to days.
That night, Li’s mom emailed saying her dentist hadn’t found any problems with her jaw, which, with turmeric usage and continued rice abstinence, rarely hurt anymore.
“Got out of it,” sang Li one night after canceling a social interaction. His old hermitude, lacking a contracted, long-term art project, had often felt lonely and demoralizing. His new one, working on his nonfiction book around seven hours a day, felt meaningful and satisfying and sustainable, as if it were his natural lifestyle—scrupulously matched with his DNA over millions of years—which he’d learned was actually to be embedded in nature with five generations of kin.
Life was a novel that he was allowed to read a page per day, and that described a day per page, he thought in bed. If the novel of life began at conception, Li was on page 12,200-something of Li. Some people believed the soul entered the body on page 49. Maybe Li’s soul had browsed Li in a metacosmic library, flipping through it and other novels, before deciding on Li, but he couldn’t remember the reasons for his decision. Maybe he could remember by writing about himself, he thought, falling asleep.
In April, Li went to Mike’s for Alan’s fourth birthday. Alan gregariously showed Li his toys, including Transformers and a fire engine. Li gave him a helicopter LEGO and, while building it together, asked if he remembered reeling in a fish in Florida five months earlier. He did.
On the train back to Manhattan, Li imagined Alan remembering a sentence from page 1,600-something of Alan. The earliest Li remembered of Li was around page 1,470, where he saw a spider in a basement in Taiwan and cried himself to sleep in his mom’s lap, repeatedly moaning, “I don’t want to sleep here.”
* * *
—
In May, in upstate New York with his parents, who were visiting for four days, and his brother, Li learned his mom’s prediabetes had worsened. To improve her general health, they decided to try switching from Levoxyl (pills made from seven toxins) to Thyro-Gold (vegetable capsules of five natural ingredients). Levoxyl, Li had read, provided a molecule one-thousandth the size of the molecule complex that thyroid glands made and that Thyro-Gold contained—an example of modern medicine crudely simplifying natural complexity.
At night in a B & B, Li read an essay by Merlin Stone in which she suggested moving the “church-imposed division” of BC/AD to the start of agriculture to reclaim eight millennia of Goddess worship as part of “our era.” Counting backward at BC took tricky energy, Li had learned, encountering phrases like “last quarter of the third millennium BC” while researching history for his nonfiction book. Considering Stone’s time-repair idea, Li imagined he was in 11617 AR, after (the Younger Dryas) reset.
On the drive back to the city, Li’s mom miscalled Mike “Du,” which made Li smile. Mike said he was driving to Yale, his graduate alma mater, to attend a graphic design conference. He asked his parents if they wanted to go. They declined. Thinking that their parents would go somewhere with him if he asked, Li empathized with Mike.
The next night, walking to Mike’s on a third of a tab of LSD, faraway things seemed easily examinable, as if small and near.
After dinner in an Italian restaurant, Li, Mike, and their parents walked to a Foot Locker. Mike bought shoes for his dad’s sixty-eighth birthday, which was that day.
“We’re going to Whole Foods,” said Li outside about himself and his mom.
“What?” said Mike. “It’s really far.”
“It’s twenty minutes away,” said Li.
“It’s really far,” said Mike.
“I looked it up. It’s a twenty-minute walk.”
“It’s going to rain,” said Mike.
“You don’t have to go,” said Li.
“I know. I’m not. But you need to get an umbrella.”
It didn’t seem to Li like it was going to rain.
At Whole Foods, Li said other older brothers didn’t act like Mike. Li’s mom said Li didn’t know how other brothers related. She said she and Auntie had bickered often when they were younger.
Walking back to Mike’s, where his parents were staying, Li said when he and Auntie had been alone on the train platform three months earlier, he’d asked her about her DDT-using brother.
“How did you choose what to ask?” said Li’s mom.
“All I talk about with you all is health,” said Li, smiling. “So I chose that.” He said Auntie’s hands had been warm. He asked if his mom’s hands were still cold. She said they were. She held his hand; cold on cold, the hands felt normal.
Li said a doctor had installed a defibrillator in Terence McKenna’s eighty-something-year-old dad without asking his family. On his deathbed, revived repeatedly by the machine, he’d died many times.
Li’s mom said Auntie’s husband, ribs broken from CPR, swollen body and head filled with tubes, had looked ghastly when he died.
“There’s no need to worry about death,” said Li, who as a child had habitually feared it, dreading cancer when his dad coughed too much, believing his mom had AIDS, pressuring them to see Dr. Chan, who’d put Li’s dad on statins.
“I’m not worried. I’m just shěbudé to leave you.”
“What is shěbudé?” said Li, thinking it meant “reluctant.”
“It just means I don’t want to be apart from you.”
“We might be together in a new way after we both die,” said Li.
“Dead people can’t return to say what happened,” said Li’s mom.
Li said scientists at NYU had given mushrooms to people with terminal cancer to decrease their fear of death, and that it had worked
.
“Are you still eating mushrooms?” said Li’s mom.
Li said they were tools, which he wanted to use.
“That’s fine. As long as you don’t overdose.”
Li said he viewed nothing as off-limits.
“Just stay away from heroin,” said Li’s mom.
Li said he’d gotten heroin when his lung collapsed. Li’s mom uncertainly said he’d gotten opium. Li admitted he’d gotten morphine, which had nine fewer atoms than heroin, which was called diamorphine. He said millions of American children used amphetamines, which Taiwanese news viewed as a deadly menace, daily in the form of Adderall.
“Too much of anything is not good,” said Li’s mom.
“You should ask me about drugs,” said Li. “Dad knows a lot about lasers, so I wouldn’t give him laser advice. I’d ask questions.”
“Then why don’t you ask Dad about lasers?”
“I don’t know,” said Li after a moment.
“How do you buy weed?” said Li’s mom.
Li said he texted a number, causing someone, usually a different person each time, to ring his doorbell one to six hours later. Imagining his mom viewed dealers as nihilistic killers, Li said he had a friend who became a dealer and liked it, got tipped well.
Li’s mom advised against tipping.
Suppressing mild annoyance, Li said the cannabis he’d smoked since 2013 was probably pesticide-ridden and that he looked forward to buying organic cannabis from stores when he moved to California in four months, after drafting his nonfiction book.
Approaching Mike’s apartment, Li felt moved and a little surreal that part of him wanted to stay outside to keep talking. His parents were going to Chicago for an eye conference the next day.
Li said psychedelics made one closer to people. Li’s mom said she’d noticed him smiling and laughing more—a theme, a valuable one, Li felt, that they seemed to regularly refresh.