Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  * * *

  —

  In October, he spent six days in and around San Francisco with his parents. Walking through Berkeley, he said maybe he’d live in the distant hills. He’d delayed moving again—until after visiting Taiwan from January to April.

  At their hotel room, he learned his dad was back on statins. He reminded his dad the drug broke the body’s ability to synthesize cholesterol, which was vital in mood regulation, brain functioning, hormone production, and tissue repair, and his dad berated his doctor.

  At night, in bed on a sofa, Li read Karen Wetmore’s memoir Surviving Evil, which he’d found by searching “MKULTRA”—the CIA mind-control program that lasted from 1950 to 1972 and stayed covered up until 1975—on Amazon and checking every result. In 1965, when Wetmore was thirteen, she threatened to kill herself or her mom if she was sent home from school. Months later, at Vermont State Hospital, she was given a psychological test called Personality Assessment System; the results, she learned forty years later, were sent to CIA headquarters. “PAS objectives are to control, exploit or neutralize,” said an internal CIA document that she quoted. “These objectives are innately anti-ethical.”

  When Wetmore was eighteen, she was locked in near-continuous, straitjacketed seclusion without a mattress or toilet for eight months, during which, according to hospital records, she was denied food and water for up to three days at a time, put on eight drugs simultaneously, and subjected to abnormally intensive, memory-erasing electroconvulsive therapy. A week after the seclusion, she was given 1,800 milligrams of Metrazol, a drug used on POWs in Soviet gulags to “produce overwhelming terror and doom,” said a CIA document. She was released from the hospital a year later, in 1972.

  The next twenty-five years, in and out of hospitals, she continued to be monitored and experimented upon. During an allergic reaction to Haldol, she was seemingly dosed with LSD. She blacked out in a clinic in a room with a dozen men in suits seated in a circle. Doctors continually tried to label her schizophrenic (“schizophrenic rehabilitation” was a cover for MKULTRA research), and she repeatedly attempted suicide. In the late eighties, compelled by a “strange compulsion,” she rented a car, bought a gun, checked into a motel, held the loaded gun against her temple, and called her psychotherapist.

  * * *

  —

  Li and his parents walked for two hours to the Golden Gate Bridge, where they saw ducks with red faces. Li felt energetic and talkative on Thyro-Gold and half a tab of LSD. His mom began to talk about death, as she seemed to do whenever Li was in especially good moods. She said “if” she died, she wanted her ashes scattered on her mom’s grave. Li would need to contact Thin Uncle’s son to learn how to get there. Li imagined emailing his cousin in fifteen years.

  In 1997, Wetmore’s therapist suggested she write a narrative of her life, Li read in the hotel. Wetmore requested her medical records from the state of Vermont and was denied. Her lawyer was also denied. When they finally got the incomplete records, they realized she’d survived MKULTRA and sued the state. The lawsuit ended after Wetmore’s second heart attack, when her doctor said she’d die if she continued.

  Continuing her research alone (filing Freedom of Information Act requests, contacting researchers, reading books), she uncovered that the CIA seemed to have killed around 1,200 mental patients at Vermont State Hospital, mostly or all women, in three decades of terminal experiments.

  As his parents slept, Li felt tantalizingly scared, mulling over how in modern dominator societies one could at any moment find oneself trapped in abject pain, without memories or other frames of reference, unsure where or who one was—a counter-possibility to being suddenly, after dying or crossing history, in an eternal dream with its own dreamworlds.

  * * *

  —

  In November, back in Manhattan, Li weaned himself off Thyro-Gold, drafted his nonfiction book’s Goddess chapter, and FaceTimed his parents and Dudu for the seventeenth to nineteenth times; they’d talked for twelve, seven, six, ten, thirteen, thirteen, fourteen, fourteen, sixteen, fifteen, eighteen, fourteen, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, seventeen, and seventeen minutes.

  In bed, gazing into closed-lid darkness, Li saw a distant, bluish, holographic bucranium—a symbol of a cow’s head and horns. As it whooshed through him, he felt a light wind on his neck. Bucrania, he knew from Marija Gimbutas, had been Goddess symbols in pre-dominator Europe and Anatolia because the horns modeled the waxing and waning moon, and the head and horns resembled the uterus and fallopian tubes. Anatomy had been known, Gimbutas theorized, through excarnation—placing corpses on wood platforms to be defleshed by birds and insects.

  Born in Lithuania in 1921, Gimbutas emigrated to the United States in 1949 with a doctorate in archaeology. At Harvard, she translated archaeology texts and wrote books on European prehistory. In the sixties, excavating Neolithic sites in southeast Europe, she realized a culture existed in “prehistory”—the BC/AD-like mental partitional term for before 6,000 years ago—that was the opposite of all that came after. In 1968, she named that culture, which lasted from 8,500 to 5,500 years ago, Old Europe.

  The most respected members of Old European society, which was organized around multistory temples in communal towns of up to ten thousand people, seemed to have been elder women. Old Europeans invented writing two millennia before the Sumerians, argued Gimbutas. Their writing appeared 7,500 years ago; looked to Li like a more naturalistic, somehow psychedelic Chinese; and may have been inspired by worship of the Goddess, whom Gimbutas called “nature—nature herself.”

  The untranslated script was based on a core of thirty abstract symbols. The vulva-derived V had at least twenty-five variations, made through repetition, rotation, strokes, crosses, and dots. “The main theme of Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life,” wrote Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess. The symbolism went back at least four hundred thousand years to the Acheulean culture of Homo erectus, who’d sculpted pubic triangles, mother images, and women birthing.

  * * *

  —

  Awe seemed somewhat elusive in urban America, where it had gotten strongly associated with “shock and awe,” the military tactic used in the 2003 televised invasion of Iraq. Li felt it by learning and thinking. He felt it most at night, when, after accumulating cannabinoids all day, he was least culture-bound. He felt it musing on life, which seemed to be a purposeful transition context; death, which was possibly a subtle, dimensional teleportation to a realer place; and increasing complexity.

  He felt it by thinking about how a fetus who predicted nothing existed beyond the womb would be wrong, how a character who believed its eighty-thousand-word world was everything would also be woefully incorrect, how there might be places as unknowable to people as dreams were to electrons, and how entities probably existed who synchronized hundreds of ontologies, not just body and mind.

  He felt it watching an animation on YouTube called “The Central Dogma of Biology,” which showed life building itself in real time—the equivalent of a star using a planet-sized microscope to see hands piecing together LEGOs. Giant, fist-shaped machines called ribosomes, millions of which were in each of his trillions of cells, were intaking small molecules called amino acids and linking them into one-dimensional sequences, which, ticker-taping out, were folding and jiggling and crunching down into three-dimensional, globular objects (receptors, enzymes, and other proteins), which were rushing off to begin their work.

  Researching his physical beginnings online, Li absorbed a two-threaded chapter of backstory in which half of him won a blind race against hundreds of millions of others. Butting into his larger half, he’d gone furiouser ahead, unwittingly completing a genetic dyad. His mitochondriated, elder, spherical half, the self-sustaining imagination to the sputtering, dying universe of his sperm half, had won a longer race through patience and self-preservatio
n, outsurviving millions of other oocytes since 1982.

  Weeks later, Li felt more awe when he read “The Egg and the Sperm,” a paper by Emily Martin on how sperm didn’t race toward and penetrate the egg, as he’d gleaned from memory and brief, Wikipedic research; they were more guided there in feedback-looped partnership. Most accounts of fertilization in pop culture, college textbooks, and medical journals were egregiously inaccurate; dominator ideas on “passive females and heroic males” had been written in at the level of the cell, making them “seem so natural as to be beyond alteration.”

  Sperm wanted to escape. As they shook their heads back and forth, their sideways motion had ten times the force of their forward motion. They proceeded eggward in part through quantity, as an amoebic glob. Thousands reached the fallopian tubes. Hundreds found themselves near the egg, which attracted them with chemicals and trapped one in its coat—“a sophisticated biological security system that screens incoming sperm,” Martin quoted a researcher. The wriggling sperm, still trying to get away, released stored enzymes—millions of long words, a clustered spell—dissolving the zona pellucida to begin a forward escape with the egg into the world.

  * * *

  —

  Li sometimes felt a bleak, almost discouraging awe while reading, like when, researching the mainstream model of history, he realized that Yuval Noah Harari’s 2014 book Sapiens, an international bestseller recommended by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, didn’t mention the Younger Dryas impact theory, which had emerged in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. The lacuna allowed Harari, in his 443-page argument that humans have always been violent, cruel, and male dominated, to confidently promote the “overkill theory,” blaming Native Americans for exterminating billions of megafauna in decades for no reason. “Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature,” wrote Harari.

  From Tending the Wild, a book by M. Kat Anderson on native management of California’s natural resources, Li knew, though, that Native Americans had followed harmony-promoting rules when hunting and gathering, including Do not needlessly kill and Leave some for other animals, and that when Yahweh worshippers reached California in the sixteenth century, they’d found a massive, parklike garden in which flora and fauna seemed unnaturally abundant. Over eleven millennia, the natives had “knit themselves to nature through their vast knowledge base,” wrote Anderson. It was the same, Li knew from other books, when Europeans reached Australia. Aborigines seemed to naturally steward their environments into fecund forest-gardens, in which they lived in optimized symbiosis with thousands of life-forms, catalytically nourishing themselves over tens of millennia, as if to prepare for hundreds of generations of J-curved decline in the one-way trip of history.

  Harari also didn’t mention the thousands of female figurines that had been found across Eurasia from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago, a period with no explicitly male figurines, and to the years 12,000 to 6,000 years ago he devoted only around 250 nonconsecutive words (less than a page), not enough to say that every culture known from then had been egalitarian and Goddess worshipping. He concluded “patriarchy is so universal, it cannot be the product of some vicious cycle” and that there was “some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood”—the opposite of what researchers who seemed to Li better informed on the past argued: for most of human history, mainstream culture had revered women as the ultimate metaphor for nature due to their ability to birth and nourish new life.

  * * *

  —

  In early December, when the European Union announced mercury fillings would be banned in July 2018 for pregnant/nursing women and children under fifteen, Li visited the set of the movie of his third novel in a Chinatown café. He watched a scene, in which newlyweds MacBook-record themselves on MDMA in Taipei acting in a mockumentary, get filmed ten times.

  The director was a friendly young man. Li was finding it easier to like people. He was auto-shit-talking—half-consciously cathecting disapproving thoughts about himself, his family, his friends, and his acquaintances—much less than he had one, two, or three years earlier. “Stop shit-talking [person] and focus on [productive activity],” he’d been saying aloud whenever he became aware of himself doing it.

  Walking home, the urge to return to his drug phase’s first, social half, which had given him social skills while withering his already weak coping and relationship skills, wandered toward his core and loitered there, attracting attention. He felt familiarly heartened as, editing his nonfiction book’s DMT chapter in his room, the urge left.

  Drawing, he considered how he probably wouldn’t smoke DMT again for a long time—it didn’t seem good for stably working on books—and realized millions of people had smoked DMT, but probably no one had read the set of books he’d read. As he walked to a bodega for mineral water, falling snow reminded him of microfireflies.

  Supine in the park the next day, he couldn’t see them at first. After he blurred his vision a little and stopped thinking, translucent, vibrating, meshed hexagons appeared and changed into a teeming layer of curlicuing, light-trailing specks.

  Maybe microfireflies would coalesce into a holographic overlay cognizable into 3D meaning. Already immersed in layered visuals, people would integrate visual language quickly. It could be a transitional ability, something to practice on Earth and take into the imagination.

  * * *

  —

  In An Electronic Silent Spring, Li read about the effects of electromagnetic radiation—the spectrum of frequencies of photons—from CT scans, Wi-Fi, smartphones, cell towers, and smart meters: cancer, diabetes, arthritis, inflammation, rashes, headaches, leaky blood-brain barrier, DNA and ion-channel damage, raised stress hormones, impaired memory and sleep.

  Life had evolved in Earth’s electromagnetic field, the invisible glow made by the fifty or so lightning bolts that occurred globally every second. The field’s main frequency was 7.83 hertz—oscillations per second—with weaker harmonics up to 45 hertz and spikes to more than 100 hertz. Human brain waves oscillated in the same range, except during sleep, when they slowed to below 7.83 hertz, as if to resonate with a different world. The U.S. power grid operated at 60 hertz. Phones and Wi-Fi used microwaves from 0.8 to 2.4 billion hertz. Waves from 400 to 800 trillion hertz were visible to humans as color. CT scans used X-rays, which exceeded 30 quadrillion hertz.

  Li realized the waveringly transauditory buzzing he sometimes heard or felt might be unnatural frequencies and amplitudes of light. He noticed he could parse language, feel emotions, sustain thoughts, discern tone, and remember things better in parks than in 4K, and better in 4K, despite the seventy-plus Wi-Fi routers his MacBook detected, than in the library, where, amid computers and phones, he seemed to regularly go brain-dead.

  * * *

  —

  One night, Li bought six capsules of cayenne pepper from a tea shop. He’d never used cayenne on a headache and was eager to try.

  In the library, he swallowed two capsules at a time with chamomile tea. At 5:52 p.m., minutes after ingesting all six capsules, he stood with increasingly troubling pain. He entered a bathroom, sat on a toilet, put his glasses on the floor, and held his head, moaning. He vomited reddish water. Hacking loudly, he unsuccessfully tried to vomit more. He noticed with surprise that his jacket, over two shirts and a sweater, was sweat soaked.

  He put on his glasses and left the bathroom. Ascending stairs to the first floor, he felt hunchbacked and near-unconscious with pain. He seemed to only have peripheral vision. He staggered outside. It was snowing.

  He crossed the street to Washington Square Park and fell onto a bench into a position he remained in for twenty minutes, grasping his hair with his right hand, groaning.

  He walked elsewhere and dropped onto a bench by NYU’s business school with his right forearm as a pillow and his left hand between his t
highs. Deep-breathing, he began to shiver uncontrollably.

  After a while, he stood and walked into a slow jog. It was 6:43 p.m. Stomach pain and headache were gone. No one seemed to have noticed his problem. He liked Manhattan’s anonymity, allowing him to allow his body to heal itself.

  Strolling home, he felt heightenedly comfortable. He noticed the conspicuous fractalness of naked trees for seemingly the first time. The city’s artificial lights, zooming by on cars, floating past on lamps, seemed pretty and affecting as near, teary stars.

  * * *

  —

  The library, where he’d been standing in the eighth-floor fiction stacks, hand-editing in relatively low-radiation privacy, closed for Christmas, so Li switched to working in his room and in nearby Bellevue South Park. He enjoyed working most on holidays, when people were doing things that alienated him, making him feel closer to himself.

  The first two weeks of 2017, his cannabis intake climaxed. He worked on a mandala for his mom’s birthday and stayed in the world of his book ten to thirteen hours a day, finalizing a first draft with myriad small edits. After sending the draft to his agent and editor, he indulgently reread parts of it at random, then went to visit Mike’s family.

  On Mike’s front steps, Li and a weak, coughing Alan discussed a stair-handle-entwined vine, reminding Li of the tiny leaf they’d discussed on Tom Sawyer Island. Their conversation fell apart after forty seconds. Alan faced the door, waiting for his parents.

  At a Mexican restaurant, Li asked Mike’s wife, Julie, about her pregnancy—her second son was due in April. It was harder this time, she said, because she was older. She gave Li chia-flax-peanut bars she’d made from dates that Li had ordered for her family.