by Tao Lin
They entered the house and walked upstairs. Alan was at the top, behind a gate, which he opened.
“He can open it,” said Li’s mom.
“Of course he can,” said Li.
Li’s mom went to tell Mike.
Li and Alan played catch with an avocado. Li focused entirely on the activity—speaking encouragement, watching the avocado fly, making sound effects—and felt impressed by Alan’s easy delight, giggling after almost every toss, catch, or miss.
* * *
—
In bed on his floor in 4K, Li thought positive thoughts about Mike. In restaurants, Mike gave Alan new foods and asked Alan what he thought about them. Mike prepared Alan’s food carefully, providing varied, whole foods when home, Li had noticed.
Two-year-old Mike had played for hours with other toddlers in his dad’s grad school dorm when he got to the United States, speaking only Taiwanese. Adolescent Mike had excelled at soccer, Li thought uncertainly, vaguely recalling a photo of Mike smiling with a soccer ball. Teenage Mike’s main interests had been drawing and skateboarding.
Li remembered Mike skating in their empty garage with the garage door down, sounding troublingly upset when he fell, yelling “God!” or “Oh my God!” Li hadn’t understood back then why Mike was so frustrated, why he didn’t practice calmly, as he seemed to do with drawing. He’d drawn fish and horses, Li remembered with effort.
Mike disliked car-honking, viewed it as belligerent and unnecessary; Li, too. Li had learned of punk music by buying a CD by the Descendents because he recognized the band’s name from one of Mike’s T-shirts, which Li had worn as a nightie after Mike left for college when Li was eleven. Mike had listened to A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang Clan on cassette tape.
Mike might’ve been Li’s first source of doubt against society. Around 1992, he’d begun, whenever he saw Li drinking milk, to say it came from diseased cows filled with antibiotics and growth hormones. Their mom had stopped buying milk, which previously had seemed obviously good. Celebrities on TV had said, “Milk: it does a body good” and “Got milk?,” and at school everyone had gotten milk.
Mike seemed like a good friend. Secretly listening in on Mike’s landline conversation, nine-year-old Li had heard Mike’s skater friend say he’d woken drunk in the driver’s seat of his car at a green light at an intersection to a police car honking behind him—again. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” Mike had said in a concerned yet somewhat detached, maybe slightly amused tone.
In college, Li had emailed Mike one of his short stories, and Mike had given generous praise, seeming to get Li’s writing and to be impressed, which had moved Li. In emails, Mike was remarkably friendly. Except for verbal speech to nuclear kin when not in a good mood, the four of them (Li, Mike, their parents) seemed to be this way—courteous, considerate, positive, sensitive.
Once, Mike had emailed Li asking what he should read. On Li’s recommendation, he’d bought The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams and the Richard Zenith translation of The Book of Disquiet. Li remembered an attentive, solitary Mike at the release events for his three novels—at a tiny bookstore deep in Brooklyn, a Barnes & Noble near Wall Street, powerHouse Arena in DUMBO.
In 2008, a year after his first novel was published, Li had lived with Mike and his French bulldog for two months in 4K, which their parents had helped Mike buy. Li had slept on a mattress pad. Late one night, Mike had said, “You think they care about you?” about Li’s part-time job at an organic vegan restaurant. An incensed Li had walked half an hour to NYU’s twenty-four-hour Bobst Library, staying there until Mike, a graphic designer, was at work the next day. A week later, Li had moved to a place off the Lorimer L station. They’d stayed unfriendly for months or years, during which Mike had met his wife and moved to Brooklyn.
In 2011, at Mike’s offer, Li had returned to 4K to live alone for seven hundred dollars a month—the building’s maintenance fee. They’d been friends, or at least friendly, for two years, until the London vacation, when he slapped Mike, Li realized with surprise.
Remembering they’d once recovered was like learning that the culture leading to world wars, nuclear weapon hoarding, and U.S. patriarchy had begun with at least five millennia of partnership civilizations—gylanies—in which black signified soil, life, fertility, mystery, and the womb; snakes denoted wisdom and regeneration; and deities were compassionate, in control of their emotions, and resonant with nature.
It seemed egregious to have forgotten and auspicious to have remembered, changing the story’s theme from “confused struggle in a grim world” to “recovery toward a former harmony.”
* * *
—
In June, 4K started to feel claustrophobic and bleak, so Li began to work in Bobst Library for five hours each morning, then spend time reading in parks, before going home.
Supine in Washington Square Park one day, he saw flitting, ephemeral, glowing dots that seemed not in the air, the sky, his mind, or his eyes. They weren’t the wormy question-mark shapes he suspected were microbes, or the tadpole-like shadows, drifting past in tugs of movement belying their inter-eyeball nearness; the semi-translucent dots seemed to be in every area of empty space but were only visible against sky. They appeared, squiggled rapidly, and vanished, like densely packed fireflies in fast-forward.
Li could see two to four microfireflies, as he termed them, into their world, as if looking into murky water. He saw them focusing five feet above himself, on a cloud, and on nothing. Blowing air at them and waving his hand through them didn’t seem to affect them. He searched “glowing dots in air” and other phrases online but found nothing. He observed them daily in the park.
Maybe microfireflies were the other-dimensional flickerings of a personal, specieal, or global emergent property. Had humans achieved a sufficient density of interconnection for an overmind to emerge? Individual minds couldn’t exist in the imagination except vaguely and fleetingly, as visitors or observers, but maybe eight billion minds on one planet couldn’t not be volitional and participatory there.
Maybe an infant overmind, made of minds as animals were made of cells, was self-preservationally downloading partnership ideas into society, in part by sprinkling them over urban parks.
* * *
—
In late June and early July, Li spent a week in Northern California for his nonfiction book. He met Kathleen Harrison, whom he’d learned of through Terence McKenna, her ex-husband, and she showed him her garden, which included cannabis, tobacco, peaches, and lemon balm. At night, the rural sky’s latticed, everywhere stars seemed like a structure for generating or reaching other worlds.
Back in the starless city, Li learned his mom weighed less than ever. Her heart had been beating scarily fast. She’d gotten her lungs X-rayed; intestines colonoscopied; pancreas, liver, stomach, and kidneys ultrasounded. Doctors couldn’t find any problems. Li felt guilty and emotional, thinking he’d neglected his mom while in California, even lashing out at her once in an email when he got defensive after she seemed disapproving when he revealed he’d lost his phone.
Telling himself not to transfer his worry about all the tests (medical errors were the third leading cause of death in the States) to his mom, he researched and drafted an email to her over three days.
On the second day, his friend Kay emailed saying she wanted to rent an apartment in his building, which was near her office, but didn’t want him to think she was “stalking” him. Li encouraged her to move in, said she wouldn’t be stalking him because he was moving soon, had a one-way ticket to San Francisco for September.
On the third day, Li left bed at six a.m. after a sleepless night of rampant worry. He drank coffee, smoked cannabis, and tweaked and sent his mom the email, sharing a strategically simple plan of intermittent fasting, staggered Thyro-Gold, raw eggs, and more animal fats. That night, he began to regularly go to sleep be
fore ten p.m. for the first time since grade school.
He became more social for a month, seeing Kay three times.
1. In East River Park, he told her about convincing his parents to get their fillings replaced. Kay said her mom lived on the Upper West Side with three elderly cats, filled her bathtub each day to monitor the water quality, and suspected people entered her apartment when she wasn’t home to steal her documents and poison her cats with mercury. After confirming that neither Kay nor her mom was joking, Li said he related to her mom. He avoided tap water, felt heavy-metal poisoning was a major problem, and had once been framed by his superintendent.
2. In Kay’s 39th Street apartment, where she’d moved a year earlier from London, where her husband still lived, to start a job editing a new online literary magazine, Li bought hash from her dealer and lent her Cure Tooth Decay.
3. Two weeks later, in August, Kay moved into his 29th Street building. They smoked hash and talked in her new home, 3A, a floor down from 4K. She said Cure Tooth Decay had made her feel hopeful and that two of her mom’s cats had died.
Li withdrew back into his world. He began to FaceTime his parents—on a new iPhone that he kept on Airplane Mode most of the time—once a week, in part to better discuss his mom’s health. Tracking her temperature, weight, and thyroid usage daily together in a shared file, they discerned she’d been taking too much Thyro-Gold. They titrated her dose over weeks. She grew warmer and heavier, her heart stopped pounding, and she started sleeping better.
Reading The Art of Seeing by Aldous Huxley, Li realized he’d forgotten, since maybe middle school, how to look at faces. He was prone to staring at one eye, as if the eye were the whole face, leading usually to him looking away. Staring was a greedy, self-defeating attempt to see more than possible, wrote Huxley. A repression of natural movement, it caused mental strain. Vision wanted to glide and dart and skip from nose to cheek, brow to mouth, collecting new data. When one looked in this naturally analytic way, one seemed calmly alert, eyes gleaming from light-reflecting motion.
Li learned of flashing (closing one’s eyes to study one’s memory of a glanced-at image) and sunning (looking near or at the sun with one or both eyes). The sun looked color-shiftingly metallic, like in the Nintendo game Metroid when the protagonist becomes a flashing ball when jumping. Sunning was easier after eating raw liver and when stoned and well rested. The sun appeared to be the same size as the moon because, in an impressive coincidence, it was four hundred times larger and four hundred times farther away.
It could always be the last time anyone clearly saw the sun, Li knew. An impact or supervolcano eruption anywhere could block sunlight for decades everywhere. Li would freeze or starve to death in Manhattan. The global culture would die fast. History would restart millennia later, as it seemed to have at least once before, from the stable, undegenerate substrate of wild humans, who were like a backup team and living library as the others ventured out of nature, into buildings, books, and screens.
* * *
—
“Please do not poop in the stairway, people can slip” notices from Li’s super, typed on computer paper, appeared on each floor. Li invented a practice called chestfeel, putting his hands on his upper body while deep-breathing. He made a broccoli-garlic-cilantro fermentation. He ordered liver capsules for his parents and bought animal organs—the most prized food of his aboriginal ancestors, inexpensive because Americans shunned them—for himself.
Since stopping starches, he’d continued to experiment with diet. Pain had returned after the chips and various other foods, like dried figs, in non-debilitating ways—brief, informative visits from an old acquaintance. Beneath the pain were smaller, more diffuse pains, which he viewed as aches and cramps. He was probably unreachably far from full recovery for any of his problems, which seemed good because, compared to his first three decades, he already felt energetic and powerful.
He learned from a 2015 study that, out of awe, amusement, compassion, contentment, joy, love, and pride, it was awe, somewhat surprisingly, that had the strongest correlation with lower inflammation levels. He decided to feel and note awe or its intellect-grasped variation, wonder, at least once a day, which, with cannabis supplied and pain mostly gone, was easy.
His body had become a reliable source of wonder. Many motions—torquing his hips, turning his neck, rising from supine—surprised him by not hurting. With less pain and inflammation, he seemed to move more effeminately. He used his hips more, rotating his upper body and looking around while walking to and from the library, leveraging his torso by pushing a hip with one hand, alternating sides, half-akimbo, amused.
Resting on his back on grass in the park, he felt like a sheet of paper—thoughtless, two-dimensional, pleased by the sporadic breeze. He fell asleep, became a moxic red energy, rising and fast. When he woke, he kept his lids down and saw dark microfireflies, pinpricks of shadow that seemed slower and sparser than when backdropped by sky.
In bed, he examined different areas of his private screen, looking far left and right to see what was there, and remembered exploring and testing reality with his senses as a child. He’d stopped at some point because public education had taught him that everything was already discovered, that new discoveries would be on the news, and that objective experts were working together to find and spread truth. In his own education, he’d learned things weren’t that simple.
Walking to the library, he noticed he’d unconsciously channeled nail biting into nail cleaning. He danced in a drunken style one night, seeming to mimic Jackie Chan, falling and catching himself repeatedly. Waking from a world of stilts, he realized dreams exercised far vision and that his eyes, staring at screens so much that year, seemed to have been allotted dream time to heal.
Returning from a YG while smoking from a one-hitter south of the library, he saw “…ime Lan…” (the sign for Time Landscape, a strip of land with precolonial plants), felt surprised by the floating image, realized it was the center of his vision, and intuited it was possible to see places on other planets.
Partially YGing in the park while deep-breathing and reading, he watched a printed, stapled paper on Salvia divinorum become transparent for four seconds.
With drugs, he traveled in various metaphysical directions and returned automatically, through his body’s homeostaticity, with new thoughts and feelings, bending his reality, allowing him to sense and do new things. With nutrition and detoxification, he traveled slowly in one direction without returning. With YGs, he teleported away and back.
Post-YG in 4K, he invented “squid arms,” an exercise in which he flung his arms out horizontally with loose fingers. He self-quenched many YGs—instinctively sitting up in a panic, afraid to leave concrete reality. When he YGed while standing or sitting, he lowered himself to the floor to avoid hitting his head.
YGing while flapping on his fire escape, he maneuvered semiconsciously through his window, back into 4K, imagining people blaming his accidental death on suicide.
* * *
—
In late August, Li began using Thyro-Gold, which made him almost frantically energetic all day while deepening his sleep, decreasing the bobbleheadish stiffness of his neck, and dilating his macular and peripheral vision.
On his seventh day on it, walking home listening to Chopin’s fourth ballade for around the hundredth time, he noticed a haunting midsong bass passage for seemingly the first time—entrancing, echo-y near-glissandos beneath the melody.
“Hi,” he said, approaching his super at their building’s entrance. “I left my keys upstairs. Can you let me in?”
The super showed no response.
“This is the first time in a long time,” said Li, who’d locked himself out often during his drug phase. “My brain is getting better.”
“That’s good,” said the super, smiling.
“Yes,” said Li
, smiling. In 2012, his bathroom had flooded, water had dripped into the floor below, and the super had knocked on his door and angrily tossed his towel into the ankle-level water. Weeks later, the super had scattered Li’s discarded mail and other trash in the hall, photographed it, and put a note on Li’s door saying if it happened again he could be evicted. Li had ignored the note. Their relationship had improved gradually since that nadir.
The super opened the door.
“Thank you,” said Li.
“Do you need your room key?”
“Huh?” said Li.
“Your key. To your room.”
“No,” said Li. “It’s not locked.” He ran up the leaden, noxious, paint-peeled stairway, through a musty hall, into 4K. Usually, he took a deep breath outside and held it until he was in his room, which he didn’t lock because the doorknob sometimes fell off, he didn’t want to risk lockouts, and he disliked carrying too many things.
He worked on his divorce. He and his wife had separated in fall 2011 after an eleven-month marriage. In 2013, unable to remember (a typical drug-phase malfunction), he’d emailed her asking if they’d divorced. She’d said no, reminding him she’d researched it and seen it would cost “~$2,600.” In 2015, Li’s mom, who did Li’s taxes, had asked Li for around the tenth time in four years to divorce to avoid tax problems. Li had said his wife had been filing as “single.” Nineteen more months had passed.
It was September 2016. Li had delayed moving until December to finish his nonfiction book and the divorce. The money from his two-book contract was almost gone, but he’d learned he was getting fifty thousand dollars, minus agent fee, soon because his third novel was being made into a movie.
He found a website with $399 divorces, learned he’d already paid $299 for an account at some point, and emailed his wife, who lived in Baltimore, saying he was “finally moving forward with divorce.”