Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  They ate cannabis, walked to a movie theater, and saw the movie Gook. “I turned in my divorce forms today,” said Li on the walk home. “They said they’ll mail me confirmation in three to six months, so I’m not moving until after that. How is your divorce going?”

  Kay had gotten an initial agreement from her husband. They’d been emailing about taxes and boxes. Her books and CDs were in boxes at her husband’s parents’ house.

  In 3A, Kay sat cross-legged facing Li on her sofa. Li felt himself looking ahead instead of at her, and when they parted they didn’t hug goodbye, unlike every other time.

  * * *

  —

  Four days later, Li woke, drank cold coffee, bused to the library, and emailed his mom, answering a question on what he’d been eating: “Bone broth, fermented cabbage, nuts and seeds, raw eggs, raw-milk cheese, vegetables.”

  “I need to make a new jar of fermented vegetables, probably cabbage, did you make the cabbage yourself?” she replied.

  “I bought it. It’s more convenient and I have more variety. I also have kohlrabi and other fermentations that I made.” Ten minutes later, he sent her an email that he felt sick in his heart and mind while typing: “When I say what I eat, it is to share as friends, not to get negative feedback. Feels like I’m reporting to an authority figure when I say what I eat and you ask questions that make me feel I should change. I ask that you trust I’m eating well and know my diet is always changing since I’m still learning. I know you probably don’t worry about this but I wanted to tell you to make sure.”

  “Li, you misunderstood me, I was just asking questions, of course I know you eat healthy, you need to understand that so you won’t think I mean anything bad.”

  “I knew I probably misunderstood. I often get paranoid and feel you are criticizing me. I know this and have been working on stopping it. Thanks for explaining.”

  “I would never criticize you. You should never fear me or Dad. Okay?”

  “Okay. The reason I said what I did is because whenever I mention fermented vegetables, you ask if I buy or make. I’ve told you that making is better, so I feel I am disappointing us by answering ‘buy.’ But buying can be better, it depends.”

  “Li, please don’t feel I am disappointed in what you do. Don’t worry about what other people might think, it is your life, need to understand that to feel real freedom.”

  “Thanks for telling me that, I agree, I rarely care what others think. With you, I care because I don’t want you to worry. If you are not worried, then good.”

  “You have been teaching us how to be healthy, so it is you who always worry about us, so never worry that I will worry about you.”

  Seated on grass in the park, Li smoked cannabis. “Emailed mom mindlessly while feeling a certain post-caffeine way,” he wrote in a notebook.

  Gazing at a squirrel, he collapsed epochs, seeing it as a stretched rat and, as it scratched its head with a back foot, a shrunken, bigheaded dog.

  Walking home, he watched food-seeking pigeons leap and fly away on sidewalks and streets to narrowly avoid people, bikes, and cars, and imagined putting himself, an animal with metaphysical aspirations, into equivalently risky situations.

  * * *

  —

  In 4K, he termed his malfunction that morning “mild brief insanity,” viewing it as the second resonance of when he felt insane for a full week in June. The first resonance—in July, when he couldn’t stop worrying about how long to visit Taiwan—had lasted a day and a half. Li projected a third lasting minutes or seconds.

  He imagined deteriorating to a season of it. Becoming too worried, agoraphobic, and/or brain damaged to go outside or communicate online. It seemed like he’d need to deteriorate to a week, then a month of unconsciously generating despair to reach season-level insanity, but he could also, he knew, become electrosensitive, making him nonfunctional in cities, or pass a disabling toxification threshold.

  He transcribed his and his mom’s 9:22 a.m.–to–2:22 p.m. email thread from his phone to his computer, whose Wi-Fi wasn’t working. He felt troubled and vaguely amused that he seemed to have acted more insane than he’d felt.

  “Today, I thought that I for sure don’t want to be in a relationship now,” he typed in his notes, thinking of Kay. “I still have too many problems. I want to focus on my recovery and novel.” He wanted to try to compile a draft of its first three parts—

  Year of Mercury: Ten weeks in Taiwan and eleven months in 4K with trips to Barcelona and Florida.

  Year of Pain: Eleven weeks in Taiwan and eleven months drafting his nonfiction book.

  Year of Mountains: Twelve weeks in Taiwan and the seven months he was five months into.

  —before going to Taiwan to live the final part, which he’d begun to think of as the Year of Unknown.

  Variations

  Li went to Kay’s room and she didn’t initiate a hug, which to Li meant, “I see, and that is fine/good,” regarding his not hugging her bye five days earlier.

  They sat on her bed and watched a Science Channel show in which John Hutchison used rocks to make a battery that he said could last for a millennium. Due to a lack of funding and equipment, he’d stopped working on the Hutchison Effect. He was disturbed that the military-industrial complex had the technology. “Mankind tends to want to fight each other all the time with wars, whereas Mother Nature rolls on with great energy and power,” he said.

  Seven days later, on the way to dinner with Rainbow, Rainbow’s girlfriend, and five other people, Kay asked Li if Çatalhöyük, the largest and most advanced Neolithic settlement, where up to eight thousand people had lived from 9,100 to 7,500 years ago, was real. Li had emailed her a passage from his nonfiction book on the partnership-dominator fall, and she’d replied, with other thoughts, “Dominator culture seems like this term and concept that I’ve been unknowingly waiting for.”

  Li said it hadn’t seemed real to him at first either. He’d learned of Çatalhöyük, which archaeologist James Mellaart noticed in 1952 as a distant mound in south-central Turkey, from Terence McKenna in 2014. Excavating 3 percent of the fifty-eight-foot mound from 1961 to 1963, Mellaart had found nine hundred years of peace and equality; the earliest known mirrors, metallurgy, pottery, textiles, and wood vessels; and that, as he wrote in 1967, “a goddess was the principal deity.”

  After dinner, in a concrete gazebo by the East River, Li and Kay encouraged everyone to chant while holding hands in a seated circle. Li held Kay’s right hand and the essayist Kay was publishing’s left hand, and everyone said “om” for five minutes. They varied the activity four ways, chosen by four people; in the fourth, they stood and walked in an omming circle that sometimes contracted, laughing.

  On the way to a reading the next night, Kay wanted gum, and Li suspected he had bad breath. In a dream the previous night, she’d touched his chest and lain on him. In Brooklyn, they smoked cannabis half a block from the bar venue. Li said he felt comfortable smelling of cannabis because people expected him to be stoned and weird. Kay asked how he’d achieved that. Li said it came naturally.

  “Dreamed about Kay again,” he typed in the morning. “Details vague but she was there and I liked it.” Two days later, he typed, “Been thinking about Kay constantly. I’ve been attracted to her hands and eyes. I feel like part of me is turning against my plan to just be friends, but I think I’m still in control with the plan. Seems wise to continue the plan.” But he also typed, “I can advance the story with Kay and other parts of my life like I have with my parents.”

  Three days later, Kay introduced the relaunch event for her press, calling it an alternative to mainstream culture. She wore black. Her wardrobe seemed to feature black, the color of mystery, ink, text, symbols, and other portals—the screen behind closed lids, the background of dreams.

  During the intermission, Li went to h
er and she introduced him to a reader. He found her again and she introduced him to a friend. After the rest of the readings, he found her a third time and she introduced him to three friends. He went to the bathroom, then found her again. She asked if he was leaving. She went to hug him, stopped herself, and they hugged by his initiation.

  Walking home, Li emailed himself, “I’m becoming somewhat and unexpectedly obsessed with Kay.”

  * * *

  —

  Hanging upside down the next night, Li realized a relationship might help and deepen and complexify, not necessarily disrupt or distract from, his recovery-novel-life.

  He picked up his phone from the cardboard box he’d gotten from Kay four months earlier for moving purposes, saw he’d been aloft fourteen minutes, and emailed himself, “Love detour, try relationships again.”

  Six minutes later, he got off the bar, typed brief notes, and lay supine in contemplative excitement. Carefully reintroducing romance into his life after four years without it seemed healthy, rewardingly challenging, and like it was already happening.

  * * *

  —

  “Going to Kay’s room,” he typed the next night. “I wonder what she thinks about my increasing attraction to her. Before, I was openly ‘friends only’ and even distant and slow to respond to emails. So far, I have no plan. Just going to try to stay calm and have fun and see what happens.”

  He went to 3A with radish and raw-milk cheese. Kay asked if the cheese would help her vitamin D deficiency. Li said it would help her K2 deficiency and that fish liver oil would help her D deficiency. They chewed lemongrass, got stoned, and walked in Bellevue South Park.

  Back in 3A, they listened to Chopin’s third piano sonata, which had four movements. Kay’s favorite was the slow, third one.

  They went to 4K’s fire escape and sat in quiet darkness. Kay said when she met her husband, he’d kept emailing her, and she’d eventually started to respond more.

  Li asked why.

  “It felt safe,” said Kay.

  After a long pause, Li asked if she could elaborate. She asked why. He said he was interested in people changing what they felt about other people.

  They ascended to the roof of their six-story building, which was around the height of the central hump of Çatalhöyük’s main mound, which, fractally accreting buildings over many centuries, had grown into a streetless, alleywayless city the area of seven Manhattan blocks, enterable only by ladders, through roofs.

  Li asked Kay if responding to her husband’s emails felt safe, what felt dangerous?

  Kay said something about obsession.

  The Empire State Building, usually lit white, was red that night. Buildings were in all directions under the starless sky. NYC contained 0.011 percent of the planet’s people. Çatalhöyük, which had emerged probably between 1500 and 2500 AR, after the reset, had had around 0.015 percent of its time’s people.

  Li accidentally grazed Kay’s left hand with his right hand, saw her looking at their hands, and held her hand. “How do you feel about this?” he said.

  “Good,” said Kay.

  Çatalhöyük had been founded next to a river, amid grasslands, marshes, and woods with leopards, lions, bears, wolves, pigs, and deer, on a Vermont-sized, volcano-ringed plateau called the Konya Plain, which before 16000 BC had been a shallow lake, and by the sixties, when James Mellaart excavated some of the city-civilization, was a dry plain.

  Li said he felt good too. Kay said she liked when they held hands in the gazebo. Li went to hug her and they kissed. He asked what she felt about the kiss.

  “I liked it,” said Kay.

  Mellaart called 40 of the 139 houses he excavated “shrines” due to their abundance of Goddess symbology—paintings of childbirth and excarnation; sculptures of the female form; reliefs and cutouts of zoomorphized breasts and pregnant deities; rows of bucrania set into benches.

  Li said he hadn’t kissed anyone in four years.

  Kay asked who he’d last kissed.

  Çatalhöyük had been “the spiritual centre of the Konya Plain,” wrote Mellaart, who felt that the city’s U.S.-level diversity (59 percent Eurafrican, 24 percent Alpine, 17 percent Mediterranean) had “contributed greatly” to its “extraordinary vitality.” A fertility rate of 4.2 children per woman meant “a constant stream of emigration,” spreading art, language, religion.

  Prefacing it with, “This is really bad, but,” Li said a prostitute.

  Kay said it wasn’t bad.

  NYC’s population had been rising since the eighties, though its fertility rate averaged around 1.6, and below 2.1 meant population decline. The Big Apple seemed to suck people out of countrysides and suburbs, out of other cities and countries, and toxify their blood and minds, sterilizing and dispiriting them.

  Li said he’d been at the end of a weeklong drug binge on a book tour in the UK for his third novel in August 2013.

  Kay asked if it had been good.

  Çatalhöyükans had decorated their walls with colorful paintings—women carrying fishing nets, flowers with insects, their city and a volcano. Due to the recurrence of patterns and complete repainting of complex scenes, Mellaart suspected they had books of drawings, probably on cloth or felt.

  Li said it had been awkward.

  “Really?” said Kay.

  Li said he hadn’t had an erection. He’d been on cocaine, MDMA, Xanax, caffeine, and probably crystal meth. He said he’d maybe send her his account of the night, which he’d typed immediately after on a hotel-lobby computer.

  Four days before the book tour, he’d eaten psilocybin mushrooms alone in 4K and deleted much of his internet presence in a trip whose main message seemed to be “leave society.” The tour had pulled him back into it, further motivating him to get away.

  A week after the tour, Kay, then an editor at Granta, had emailed him questions for an online interview. A month later, she’d solicited him for Granta’s Japan issue. Over four months and fifty-four emails, they’d produced an essay on his first three times being stoned around his parents, in November 2013, at three restaurants in Brooklyn.

  When Li met Kay in April 2014 at the issue’s New York release, he’d been earnestly focused on recovery, viewing it as an endless, heuristic practice, for eight months. The next day, they’d talked on the High Line. Li had said he wanted his next novel to end with the Granta essay and that maybe his life after that would be “off-limits” to writing. Kay had returned to London, where she and her husband had lived.

  That summer, learning what existed outside society by writing a column on psychedelics, history, and nature, Li had decided to go further into autobiographical writing, using it to help him learn and change. In November, he’d flown to Taiwan, declined chest surgery, and read Cure Tooth Decay. Nine months later, Kay had moved to Manhattan; twelve months later, into his building.

  Thirteen months later, on September 19, 2017, they descended the fire escape; wended through 4K, a hall, a stairway, and another hall; and entered 3A.

  * * *

  —

  Their apartments, decorated with a map of Earth (4K), photos of family and friends (3A), and art by friends and strangers, were around the size of the commonest size of home at Çatalhöyük. Bathroomless, windowless, and chairless, Çatalhöyükan homes had had built-in furniture—one to five platforms for sitting and sleeping, with the largest, bench-attached platform, able to fit two adults, being for the woman of the house.

  On her sofa, Kay said it had been obvious she liked Li when they met in 2014. “Right?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Li. “I feel surprised by what happened. The kiss. This is notable.”

  Kay laughed. “You’ve seemed closed off to more than friendship,” she said.

  Li said he’d liked being alone and also had felt unready for a relationship, and Kay said she had
felt that too.

  Around 3400 AR, or 8,200 years ago, Çatalhöyükans began to build a new mound across the river, deserting the first mound over two centuries. Five centuries later, the west mound was also abandoned for unknown reasons; maybe people, tired of urban life, had moved farther west to live with the Old Europeans.

  Old Europe, by then a millennium old, comprising the Vinča, Varna, Sesklo, and other cultures, continued to expand its non-mound civilization, building five-room houses; multistory temples; and mysterious, hand-sized, inscribed, roofless models of their buildings, while probably beginning to write books on Mother Nature, for another eleven hundred years before groups of horse-riding Indo-Europeans began to invade south and west through Anatolia and Europe—eventually, after spawning Yahweh and crossing the New World, destroying or assimilating almost every culture.

  The dominator invaders were “indifferent to art,” wrote Gimbutas. They supplanted nature worship with war addiction, had only male deities, and ranked men above women. Instead of painting the skulls of their dead and keeping the bones in collective burial under their sleeping platforms, as at Çatalhöyük, where homes contained up to sixty-two ancestors, they practiced suttee, burying sacrificed women and children around the corpse of a dominant male.

  Li and Kay kissed again. Kay kept her eyes closed, like the first time. She said she usually began preparing for bed when her 10:30 p.m. alarm went off. Li said he wanted to stay but felt they should part to absorb and process what had happened.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Wednesday, seated at his desk with his forehead on interdigitated hands, Li sobbed from what felt like gracious joy, listening to the Chopin sonata’s slow movement, which he hadn’t paid much specific attention to before, though he often listened to the fast movements on repeat. He chronically wanted more change and novelty than he got. He was greedy and impatient, troubling qualities balanced by shyness, recurring pain, and alienation from busy society. He seemed to know that change could flow if slowed into a natural resonance, as Kay had reminded him was possible for history, but he somehow felt like there wasn’t enough time to slow down.