Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  Reading his notes before bed, he thought of a way to end his novel. Within the nested fluctuations of gradual, fractal change—rising, falling; rising, falling, like in a stock market for life—he could end on an uptick.

  Momo

  On a walk six days later, they encountered Momo’s owner, a woman in her sixties. She removed Momo, her Dudu-sized dog, from a spacious pram stroller.

  “No shoes today?” said Li’s dad. “Oh—haven’t put them on yet.”

  “How old is yours?” said Momo’s owner after shoeing Momo.

  “Nine,” said Li’s mom. “Yours?”

  “Seven. Any problems with her heart?”

  “No,” said Li’s mom. “How about Momo?”

  “Today he got X-rayed. The vet said his heart was too big.”

  “They always say that,” said Li’s mom.

  “They do?” said Momo’s owner, who seemed quieter than normal. Usually, her greeting began with bellicose criticisms of Dudu’s hair—dirty, yellow, too long, too sparse. Once, when Li’s mom had lost weight due to excessive Thyro-Gold, Momo’s owner had said, “Ayooo! You became so skinny! So frightening!”

  “Heart too big—that’s nonsense,” said Li’s dad. “They lie! They want your money!”

  Momo stood unsteadily in place, seeming so far away from making eye contact with anyone that it was like he had no eyes. The effect reminded Li of his teenage self.

  It was April 10, and he was returning to New York in six days. Three days earlier, he’d finished his nonfiction book’s second draft, which was 24.1 percent shorter than the first draft. To conserve his cannabis, he’d reduced his daily dose again, this time by two-thirds. His dreams, previously siphoned into life, had become vivid and riveting—in one, as cars fell from the sky, he told his mom he was willing to kill people to save them; then she was gone and he was teleporting into a series of airborne planes, calmly amazed—but concrete reality had gotten duller and bleaker.

  “They’re small,” said Li’s mom. “Of course their hearts are crowded.”

  Li’s dad said when Dudu was five a vet had said her heart was too big. Li’s dad had asked what size it should be, and the vet had produced a diagram of a big dog. Li’s dad had berated the vet, questioning his understanding of proportionality.

  “I spent five thousand NT today,” said Momo’s owner, around 140 dollars.

  “Heart too big, liver too big, everything is too big,” said Li’s mom.

  “They say things to scare us,” said Momo’s owner. “Today, Momo got a shot, an X-ray, a new medication, and his blood taken.”

  Momo took a few stiff steps, looking down.

  “Can still walk,” said Li’s dad positively.

  In one dream, Li had repeatedly time-traveled backward to stay in the same day, catalyzing an incoherent-seeming protest on a college campus with notes-assisted feedback loops until many people had special powers, were levitating and telekinesing in a library.

  Momo peed a red puddle.

  Dudu walked toward it.

  “Du,” said Li’s mom jitterily.

  “That’s dirty,” said Momo’s owner. “Don’t.”

  Li’s mom picked up Dudu with a nervous laugh.

  “Medication is no use, medication and whatever,” said Li’s dad, seeming to restrain himself because he knew Momo was on multiple drugs.

  Momo’s owner put Momo in the stroller and left.

  “The color wasn’t right,” said Li’s mom.

  “Reddish,” said Li’s dad.

  Dudu sneezed twice, snapping her head.

  “Momo’s mom was quiet today,” said Li.

  “She was worried about her dog,” said Li’s mom.

  “She didn’t criticize Du this time,” said Li.

  “Her dog is sick, so she doesn’t criticize ours,” said Li’s dad.

  “She just loves Momo a lot,” said Li’s mom.

  * * *

  —

  In a dream that night, Li’s mom, Auntie, and Thin Uncle ate Reese’s Pieces while watching TV. Li’s dad showed Li his mom’s notebook; she’d drawn two heads connected, meaning she was getting surgery for cancer. Li threw something heavy through an open window, dimly aware he could hurt someone. Police arrived. Li jumped away in frustratingly slow, tall, wide arcs; his dream jumps were wonky and unrealistic like this, maybe because most of the jumps he’d seen as a child had been in video games.

  He woke sweating. He removed his wet shirt, dried himself with it, and put on a different shirt. It was 4:42 a.m. Did the sweat wake him or the nightmare? Were nightmares interrupted dreams? Most stories could seem nightmarish if they ended too early. Maybe night sweats and nightmares were mutually causative. Intermittently researching night sweats over the past decade, Li hadn’t been able to learn much about them. They seemed to be one of the body’s more desperate ways to detoxify itself.

  * * *

  —

  Five days later, Li and his parents rode a train and two buses to Yangmingshan National Park. The entrance was dominated by eight people repeatedly hitting tennis balls connected to elastic strings and stable bases in continuous demonstration of their product, but Li felt only theoretically amused. He’d run out of cannabis the previous day. He feebly asked his dad if tennis had anything to do with Yangmingshan.

  “No,” said Li’s dad. “Heh.”

  Walking past beautiful mosses, grasses, ferns, herbs, trees, and vines, Li couldn’t stop frowning. He felt anguished in an undefinable, helpless way that he knew indicated complex problems with his psyche. Previously, Yangmingshan had been a fun topic; it was the site of one of the earliest known instances of cannabis use by humans; for weeks, Li and his parents had discussed finding cannabis, harvesting some, and photographing the location for future harvests, but now they were there and hadn’t mentioned cannabis at all.

  Li privately berated himself for running out of cannabis and LSD for the third consecutive visit. In the Year of Mercury, he’d only brought LSD and had run out twice. In the Year of Pain, he’d run out of both cannabis and LSD due to pain but had ordered more LSD. That year, which he’d begun to think of as the Year of Mountains, he’d run out due to miscalculation and to prioritizing his nonfiction book: he could’ve started to use less earlier but had wanted to stay on the same, stable dose while working on it.

  At an especially lush area by a river, Li started a timer on his phone and breathed while standing in place flapping. He thought about the millions of anions he was inhaling. He thought about Dao, which the Daodejing likened to water—gentle, yielding, humble, persistent, and powerful, nourishing and smoothing all things. If Dao was change, was it part of the mystery, since the mystery was everything besides what humans—and other life-forms—made? Or did Dao, which was sometimes translated as “the way,” create the mystery?

  Li remembered feeling deeply moved by an epic dream in which he was a neuron trying to reach a neuron-friend in another brain. Lately, dream-emotions—the kind he might feel all the time after he died or history ended, whichever came first—seemed more affecting and substantial than life-emotions.

  Leaving Yangmingshan, Li apologized to his mom for his bad mood. He considered and rejected saying he was quiet and irritable due to cannabis mismanagement. His parents had asked him ten to fifteen times in the past two and a half years if he’d brought cannabis to Taiwan. Not wanting to spread worry, he’d always said no.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, despite having warned himself in his notes not to get upset on the last day, he got upset when his mom made him hard-boiled eggs to bring onto the plane.

  That night, on the train to the airport, accompanied by his parents and Dudu, Li felt distant and troubled in a self-loathing, fluctuatingly ashamed way. At the airport, he hugged his parents and Dudu bye.

  “Th
e visit passed quickly,” he typed on the plane. “I spent every night with parents for the first time. They laughed a lot and seemed stoned sometimes. We mountain-climbed a lot. Dudu became my friend.”

  He began to draft an email to his mom that he hoped would shift the focus away from the bleak last week to the unprecedentedly happy eleven weeks before that.

  Resonance

  Back in 4K, Li smoked cannabis, lay on his floor, and realized what might’ve been a major factor in his mom’s decision to get cosmetic surgery in the Year of Mercury: dietary changes he’d introduced that year. She was the only family member until Li was in college who’d promoted health—without it and family, there was nothing, she’d often said. She was like Schopenhauer, who wrote “the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.” Li cried, imagining how she must have felt, learning from him and other sources that she’d unwittingly fed her family less-than-ideal and toxic food.

  In the morning, he sent her a six-paragraph email titled “Thank you,” saying that her family was lucky to have her (his dad’s post-China cough always healed at home, as he ate her healthy, varied food, for example); that she and her husband’s mutual harshness had softened over months into something friendlier, which made him happy; and that in 2014 when he got to Taiwan for his Year of Mercury visit he wouldn’t have predicted that by 2017 he’d look forward to eating dinner with his parents every night.

  “I cried reading your email,” replied Li’s mom. “I must have done something good in my last life to have a son so good in this life. Yes, we did so many good things. Ate healthy, exercised, climbed mountains, and most importantly we were together, we communicated, shared our thoughts and feelings. You have become so mature and knowledgeable. Stay calm, open your heart. I have learned a lot from you.”

  The next day, on his way to Mike’s for Alan’s fifth birthday, Li heard the subway intercom say, “Assaulting an MTA employee is punishable by up to seven years in prison,” and it sounded, after three months away, like a non sequitur. New Yorkers boarded trains in impatient groups, bumping into alighters, instead of queuing calmly as people did in Taipei. Alan spoke rapidly, showing Li his abstractly vehicular LEGO creations. Li gifted him more LEGOs. Alan’s parents were at the hospital with his new brother, born days earlier.

  In late April, after finishing the third, 4.5 percent pruned draft of his book, Li remembered microfireflies. In Washington Square Park, he saw the tiny, lumine orbs, which hadn’t been in Taiwan. Maybe the new property would start in the States, where consciousness had been moiled by decades of larger witting and unwitting doses and mixtures of pesticides, psychedelics, and pharmaceuticals than in any other country. Ten percent of Americans were polypharmaconic, taking five or more psychiatric drugs a day, Li had been surprised to learn from Anatomy of an Epidemic.

  * * *

  —

  Two weeks later, in May, Li’s parents visited for five days, staying at Mike’s. Mike drove Li and their parents to his wife Julie’s parents’ home in New Jersey. Alan slept in a rear-facing child seat in the SUV’s front passenger seat because he’d wanted to be near his dad. “Is it normal for kids his age to snore?” said Mike, scrunching his face. No one responded.

  In New Jersey, Li grinned widely at Mike and Julie’s new son, who stared at Li with a stunned expression. Mike said Julie’s family was ordering pizza but that he’d drive Li and their parents to Whole Foods. Li thanked him. That night, sleeping in a guest room with his parents, Li recorded them both snoring.

  Three days later, after their parents left for an eye conference in New Orleans, Li emailed Mike saying that Alan’s snoring was maybe caused by his jaw and nasal cavity being undersized, like most people, due to deficiencies in vitamins K2, A, and D. “I was deficient too, so I had buckteeth, as you used to say,” said Li. “You were too (we got headgear and braces), but less than me, maybe because you were in Taiwan until you were two.” He recommended fish liver oil and ghee, and Mike thanked him.

  * * *

  —

  A week later, Li visited Kay in 3A, where she’d lived for nine months, during which they’d seen each other twice—before going to Taiwan, he’d given her his mailbox key and gifted her a green mandala; when he returned, five weeks earlier, he’d gotten his key and bong, which she’d been using on Friday nights to get stoned before reading.

  Li asked if he could have her large cardboard box for his forthcoming move. He’d been researching Santa Cruz and other places in Northern California. Kay said yes and gave him a novel from 2000 that she was reissuing. She’d recently become editor in chief of a small publishing company.

  They carried the box to 4K, which seemed to Kay like a Montessori school, with its pull-up bar, mattresslessness, and tables—drawing, writing, inversion, fermentation. Li lent her The Twenty-Four Hour Mind by Rosalind Cartwright, a sleep researcher who called sleep “a built-in physician” and dreams “an internal psychotherapist.”

  * * *

  —

  In June, after finishing the fourth, 2.4 percent trimmed draft of his book, Li began to feel overwhelmed despite having no social commitments, non-self-directed responsibilities, or job with a boss. He emailed his mom, whom he’d been emailing many times per day, saying he felt overwhelmed by her emails. “If you notice I email less, it’s because I’m not used to emailing so much and it doesn’t feel good sometimes, feels like constantly checking in, but then I feel restricted when I want to stop because I feel you’ll worry.”

  “I am sorry I let you feel pressure,” she replied.

  “You have no need to apologize, you didn’t give me pressure, I gave myself pressure,” said Li. “My email was, in a way, unnecessary.”

  Walking home from the library, he felt troubled by “in a way.” Had the email been necessary or not?

  That night, he unexpectedly scrawled a crude, schematic, scary-looking face ruiningly over the intricate patterns of a near-finished mandala, then sobbed while drawing the face repeatedly over itself, pushing down hard with a brown-colored pencil. He walked three steps to his computer, sat, and typed what had happened, briefly wondering what would’ve happened if he hadn’t stopped to type.

  Other signs of “insanity,” as he thought of it, that week: He kept feeling his leg touched at night, making him twitch fractionally awake. He found himself involuntarily sighing and closing his eyes while engaged in mundane tasks, like checking his email. He couldn’t, in a way that felt somehow psychological, seem to sate his breath. His glasses made him feel insectile and like he needed to whimper or scream. He attributed the disturbances to four main reasons.

  1. Toxins in the city and his body. He was eating one meal a day, so maybe his body, given the time and energy to clean itself, was unstoring, metabolizing, and trying to excrete plastics, pesticides, phthalates, PFOAs (surfactants he’d learned were in 99 percent of Americans), flame retardants, heavy metals, brake dust, and other toxins. Evidence for this: one night he got a headache that peaked over three hours and was gone two hours later, like a dose of poison.

  2. Insomnia due to caffeine (climaxing that month), pain (which returned some nights in a way that he often forgot by morning), computers (whose screens emitted sleep-disrupting blue light), mosquitos (around ten had flown down from the ceiling for two nights, biting him seemingly in tandem, before he noticed them, having misattributed his itchiness to rashes and/or bedbugs), and a probably barely functioning pineal gland: glyphosate, aluminum, fluoridated water, Wi-Fi, artificial light, and sunlight deficiency confused and damaged the gland, which made melatonin, DMT, beta-carbolines, and other sleep-related compounds. Disturbed sleep meant disturbed dreams.

  Normally, Li knew from The Twenty-Four Hour Mind, one’s mood reliably improved from night to morning. The mind accomplished this by telling itself around two hours of stories in the form of three to five dreams, which contained difficult
information but grew increasingly positive, dream to dream, so that the overall effect was calming and enlivening. Cartwright and other researchers had found this by waking and interviewing sleepers in labs. Minds, like bodies, were self-healing systems that urban society seemed almost designed to break.

  3. Unstable mood. He often felt bloblike and doomed, prostrate on his floor. He’d drink coffee and/or smoke cannabis, hang on his pull-up bar, and still felt bleak and uninspired; then, noticing he was unconsciously stretching in new ways, he’d realize with chagrined relief that he’d toggled, again, from sluggish despair to energetic creativity in less than ten minutes.

  4. Isolation. When not immersed in book-writing, he functioned better, he knew, when he was in one social situation per five to eight days, but he was letting himself go longer. Since visiting Kay seven weeks earlier, he’d been in two social situations, after ten and sixteen days alone. He’d begun to feel isolated even virtually because of an old problem he had where he fantasized about sending an email, mentally drafted it, and lost interest.

  But he didn’t go insane. He bought new glasses lenses; reduced his daily caffeine; killed the mosquitos, standing on furniture and hitting them with books; and continued having his most wonder-filled, least inflamed, fullest yet quickest-passing days ever, though not without near-constant inner conflict: as he removed his broken AC from his window one day, surprised that procrastination on the task was ending after two years, doubling his view of his fire escape, four tall trees, and the side of a brick building, he could hear a disquietingly clear voice in his mind say, “You can’t do it. You lack energy. Stop. Do it later. Later!”

  He laughed one night from delight at his low inflammation, flapping so intensely that it felt unseemly and almost spooky. He tracked inflammation daily by timing how long he stayed aloft on his pull-up bar, hanging by various combinations of his arms and legs, using his hands, chelidons, and houghs. Hanging upside down one day, he unconsciously cracked his thumbs for the first time, noticing the novelty as it ingressed.