Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  Kay texted, “I think I’m accidentally stoned.” Li realized they’d used the coffee grinder he used for cannabis on the lemongrass that morning for their omelets and that being unwittingly more stoned than normal had led to thoughts on mystery and secrets. He apologized and asked Kay what she was going to do. She said she was in her apartment, reading; she’d told her boss she had a migraine.

  * * *

  —

  Three days later, Li’s divorce confirmation arrived early, freeing him to leave epicentral society. Teaching and pain had kept him there in 2014 and 2015, the nonfiction book and divorce in 2016 and that year. “One of my first thoughts was that I don’t want to leave anymore because of Kay,” he typed in his notes.

  At city hall, he turned in a card to confirm receipt of the confirmation. In a nearby plaza, lying on a strip of grass, breathing deeply while reading Vox, he had a YG. Returning to concrete reality, he realized with excitement and poignant wonder that he was still far from assimilating Kay into his life. He’d been alone for so long.

  The next day, on the urban farm where Rainbow’s girlfriend worked, Li and Kay put their hands into hot compost, played hide-and-seek, and ate koji-fermented steak. On the way home, they entered a pinball arcade and discussed every machine. Before bed, they watched YouTube videos of Kid Icarus and other Nintendo games.

  In the morning, they watched a talk on severe autism, which affected more than a million Americans. The talk included video of an autistic child’s inflamed intestines, photos of boys who’d beaten themselves unconscious while trying to attack their swollen brains, and a home movie of an adult self-protectively wearing a football helmet, which reminded Li of psychic driving, an MKULTRA technique in which people were forced to hear the same statements half a million times from electronic helmets.

  Society seemed to mainly pay attention to functional autists, whose mild symptoms, giving them new perspectives, could be viewed as desirable. Around half of U.S. children with autism couldn’t speak, though, according to the California Department of Education. A third had epilepsy—chronic brain seizures. A fourth harmed themselves. Many would never have a job or partner. Li hadn’t ever been that autistic. For most of his life, he’d been borderline-to-mildly autistic. He was becoming gradually less autistic over years through nutrition, detoxification, practice, and cannabis.

  Li felt himself and Kay watching the talk with their full attention, as seemed to be their style. Days later, they’d learn they’d both cried.

  Li asked if she wanted to watch more. She said no; she wanted to work. She worked at home on Mondays. Li lay stomachdown on a stomachdown Kay and joked it was a strategy to keep her in his room. She said he didn’t need to lie on her for that.

  He accompanied her to 3A, returned to 4K, and typed notes. Since their kiss a month earlier, time had felt faster. His relationship with his mom had been saner and friendlier. His inflammation had regularly reached new lows, which made sense because he’d severely lacked social contact, in-person friendship, hugs, kisses, sex, and other anti-inflammatory, immune-enhancing human trademarks for four years.

  * * *

  —

  In 4K two nights later, they ate six types of eggplant. Kay’s eyes seemed darker and more charged than Li had ever seen them as she talked about psychotherapy, which she’d had at 6:30 a.m. “Deranged?” she said. “No,” said Li. “I liked it.” Kay had started therapy, in which she mostly discussed her mom and work, two months earlier on a recommendation from her brother and was considering stopping. She said talking about therapy had begun to “feel like a schtick.”

  She said the previous night, unable to sleep, she’d read an article titled “Fertility Awareness, Food, and Night-Lighting” and realized her menstrual pains and irregular cycle were healable. The article was by Katie Singer, the author of An Electronic Silent Spring. They decided to read The Garden of Fertility, Singer’s book on fertility awareness, a method of charting temperature, cervical fluid, and cervix changes to prevent pregnancy naturally, next in their book club.

  The next night, they ate cannabis, walked to Carnegie Hall, sat on the fifth floor, and watched an orchestra play Verdi’s sinfonia from Aida. Martha Argerich appeared and sat at a piano. Prokofiev’s third piano concerto began.

  After the first, quiet movement, Li began to feel increasingly worried, struggling to stifle hysterical laughter. Kay seemed to be laughing too.

  Li walked past five people to the aisle and left the hall, laughing. Kay appeared twenty seconds later. They listened to the softened, clarified concerto from the lobby.

  Walking home, they discussed their first times having sex (both in college in their first relationships), her birth-control history (the pill from 2001 to 2011, causing hair loss, dry hands, weight gain, and a darkened face), porn (he used to be addicted to it; she’d only seen it in passing—the idea to find and watch porn had never occurred to her, she said, which made Li laugh), and that it seemed good and rare that they hadn’t had alcohol together.

  In bed in 4K, falling asleep with Kay spooning him from behind, Li bristled with startlingly unambiguous love.

  * * *

  —

  Three days later, on Li’s sofa, they read Koko’s Kitten, a nonfiction picture book on a captive gorilla’s relationship with a cat, then browsed James Mellaart’s book on Çatalhöyük. Cattle pens had surrounded the city’s perimeter. Around 90 percent of Çatalhöyükan meat consumption had been beef. They’d gathered grapes, pears, apples, figs, walnuts, pistachios, acorns, almonds, eggs; grown wheat, emmer, barley, einkorn, lentils, peas; hunted pigs, hares, birds, deer; and fished. Tooth decay had been rare.

  The next day, Li typed a text that began, “My brain was annoyingly telling me that I feel frustrated and alone,” and said, among other things, “I feel we should hang out less so you can rest and have time for yourself instead of me or work. You seem so busy.” He moved it, unsent, to his notes. An hour later, he typed, “Let myself consider not having a long future with Kay and felt calmingly unworried. I feel calm framing low-hope, blame-focused thoughts within expectable times of despair that I shouldn’t trust and am trying to reduce.” He reread his text and was glad he hadn’t sent it.

  In bed, imagining what his novel would be like if the relationship ended, he felt like he was asking a friend for advice. His novel seemed to think the relationship should continue. He dreamed they’d broken up. Kay had gone to Maui, Florida, and, for some reason, Ohio.

  He woke feeling less pessimistic about their relationship, but when he got home from printing his 189,983 words of notes from the Year of Pain in the library, he typed and texted her a variation of the unsent text: “I feel I’m getting a tired you, an increasingly tired you, but I don’t know, I always have a good time with you and you seem very energetic.”

  Kay replied an hour later, and they texted seventy-six times. Li apologized for bothering her at work. He resented himself with a tense, morose expression the next few hours—buying groceries, tidying his room, reading about a form of overunity called cold fusion—until his fifth cannabis hit of the day, when he realized he wasn’t being patient.

  “Patience,” he thought repeatedly, drawing dots on a mandala. “Finally regained control of brain,” he typed in his notes. “Feel good now. Kay texted she saw a mouse in her room. I texted I made eye contact with one in mine.”

  In 4K that night, Kay seemed shy and inhibited, but after a minute things seemed normal again. She said she’d only seen her husband on weekends at first due to her desire for alone time. Li asked how long that had lasted. She couldn’t remember; maybe a year. She said she’d been trying in her texts that morning to say she was scared of how much she liked Li, but he’d kept talking about nutrition. Li apologized and said he felt insane sometimes. Kay gave him a heart-shaped amazonite, a green variety of microcline feldspar.

  In bed, they laughed at a noise
that sounded like the refrigerator was trying to join their conversation in an awkwardly belligerent way.

  “Sometimes I feel like…,” said Kay.

  “What?” said Li.

  Kay was quiet.

  Li asked again.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “What is it?” said Li, ready to reciprocate if she mentioned love. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d told someone in person that he loved them. Maybe it was his mom, when he was small.

  “Uh-uh,” said Kay.

  * * *

  —

  Entering the library the next morning, Li quietly sang, “Feel closer to Kay again.” That night, they walked southeast, past the gas-and-oil power plant, to the East River, smoking spliffs. Li said when he taught MFA students he had to be careful to sufficiently caffeinate and cannabinoid himself to avoid falling into extended stupors. Kay said when she taught “critical reading and writing” to freshman design students, tall male students had treated her like a child.

  The next afternoon, they met Rainbow at her workplace, a stationery store, and gifted her a glass jar of kefir with cacao powder and honey. Rainbow said she’d thought MKULTRA was a brand of beer. Kay had encountered it in the movie Pineapple Express. Li said he’d first heard of it from a poem by Matthew Rohrer and that he felt like it probably still existed under different names, with improved secrecy and funding.

  Walking to the Strand, Rainbow said the closest she’d been to dying was when she got waterboarded for sexual reasons, didn’t struggle, and went unconscious.

  In the Strand, Li read in Why We Sleep that people were sleeping two hours fewer than a century ago, cutting off the last fourth of nightly healing.

  In bed, Kay told Li, “Your face is a really certain way.” Falling asleep, she murmured words in English and Japanese. “Nonfiction,” she enunciated softly. “I woke myself by talking,” she mumbled.

  In the morning, she said she was buying her Hawaii ticket that day. Li was going to meet her on the island of Oahu for a week after he visited Taiwan, where he was going in six days.

  Since July, when his mom suggested he visit for twelve weeks and he decided eleven weeks, he’d reduced the visit to ten and then nine and a half weeks in a remarkably smooth, guilt-free process.

  * * *

  —

  “Excited re many days with Kay,” typed Li the next day, a day apart. They had plans to meet each day until he left.

  The next night, Kay texted she’d be late. In 4K, she said she’d been typing an angry email. She’d been blamed for lateness caused by others’ lateness. She was overwhelmed by her mom, who’d nonsensically said Kay could only be a secretary, and had called her stupid, which she rarely did, though she often called Kay’s brother stupid.

  “I’m afraid something is going to happen to us between now and Hawaii,” said Kay. Hugging her, Li assured her—and felt confident—that nothing would happen.

  He woke in the morning filled with complaints, which he began to share while thinking that he should be asleep, working on the negative feelings privately. He felt that Kay was too busy for a relationship. He lamented their book club; they’d read one book in one month. Kay said work could be an addiction for her.

  In 3A that night, Li said he tried to be positive and helpful, but Kay seemed to want to wallow. “I feel like I’m getting a tired you,” he said, realizing with a sickly pang that he’d already said this in his text messages days earlier.

  They were side by side on her sofa. Li’s arms were folded helplessly across his chest. Diane, Kay’s closest friend, was visiting in an hour. Li said he didn’t feel like meeting Diane that night anymore. He felt tenser than ever before around Kay. It seemed disturbing how quickly things could change.

  Li felt himself ignoring Kay, who was holding her stuffed snowman Frosty, pushing his bonnet back against his round head. She’d had Frosty since she was five.

  Changing to a random-feeling topic, Li said he wanted to talk more, because when he talked more it seemed normal, since other people talked more than he did. He realized Kay might think he was talking about them, since he almost only talked to her. He wondered aloud if excessive tobacco was making him insane.

  They tensely ate a salad. Li stared self-consciously at his turmeric-stained thumb. A compound in turmeric called turmerone stimulated neuron growth in rats, he knew.

  Kay asked if she should return after seeing Diane in her room.

  “If you want to,” said Li, and lay on the floor.

  Kay said she didn’t know when she’d be back. Li said he wanted eight and a half hours of sleep. Kay left.

  Li smoked his cannabis-tobacco mix, sat cross-legged, breathed, and was relieved to begin to generate humble, gracious thoughts. He texted Kay, apologizing for being pushy with time. He worked on his novel, fell asleep, woke to Kay’s return, and murmured that he viewed his brittle mood that night as the second skip of the stone he’d thrown into their relationship eight days earlier with his texts.

  He woke to Kay doing things somewhat loudly with her bag while seemingly talking to herself. “Something’s in the refrigerator,” she said. “I think there’s a mouse in the refrigerator.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Li, dimly endeared.

  “I’m going to my room,” said Kay.

  “You could lie down and try to sleep,” said Li.

  Kay left. Li woke two hours later and went to 3A, where they worked separately, then met on the sofa and talked, facing a wall with various framed art, including an Agnes Martin print and Li’s mandala gift.

  Kay said she’d felt upset since the previous morning, when Li lamented their book club and her workload. Li said complaining was contagious—he’d wanted to complain after she complained about work and her mom. She said she hadn’t been complaining. He said his excitement about nutrition and recovery had been dampened by her response: she’d seemed defensive against his fish oil suggestion for her vitamin D deficiency, which she’d brought up. Kay laughed. Li stared grimly ahead at nothing.

  Two hours later, he met Rainbow at Union Square farmers market. She said someone had overturned a table of root vegetables at Norwich Meadows Farm’s stand, where Li often bought watermelon and tomatoes and greens.

  Three officers were there, talking to the farm’s owners, who were religious Muslims named Zaid and Haifa, Li knew from an article in Gastronomica. After 9/11, customers had formed a “rotating watch group” to protect their Brooklyn farm stand.

  That night, Li and Kay put ingredients into an ice-cream machine. Kay had visited her childhood piano teacher, whom she sometimes viewed as her stable, supportive mom, that day. They’d watched a Japanese documentary on the kidney.

  Kay said she felt bad but wasn’t sure why. Li said maybe she was still affected by when he’d complained upon waking the previous day. Kay said that seemed right. “Sorry,” said Li.

  Kay wanted to leave to be alone in her room, but then the ice cream was ready. Trying it, they began smiling and laughing again. Kay said she got half-hour sugar highs.

  The next day, Li baked cannabis with black pepper, turmeric, and ghee to bring to Taiwan. He put the loamy substance in a tinted-glass bottle for a chocolate-flavored blend of fermented cod liver oil and butter oil.

  Reading his notes, scrolling back months, he realized the past six weeks had felt like a day. “If I keep being busy, my time in Taiwan could feel like a day,” he typed.

  At night, Li and Kay shared a long spliff amid the coastal din of building-funneled sirens and unseen helicopters, looking across the East River at buildings in Brooklyn.

  If the universe was at least a trillion years old, as plasma cosmologists argued, humans were extreme latecomers. Even if the Big Bang theory was accurate, humans had appeared late on the scene: the Milky Way was already around nine billion years old when Earth forme
d—old enough for unnucleated microbes to have invented the internet thrice over.

  In the morning, Li mailed confirmation to his ex-wife that they were divorced. Kay, who was still working on her divorce, notarized a form confirming Li had mailed the confirmation.

  Outside, Kay asked what variation it would be when they met in Hawaii, and Li said, “Tomorrow—I mean the next time we meet—will be thirty-two.”

  He told her about his time realization, and she agreed it would feel like a day had passed when they next met.

  Year of Unknown

  Dudu

  Two days after Li arrived in Taiwan, his parents left on a ten-day trip to visit Mike’s family and attend an eye conference. Dudu seemed to remain calm and content, cuddling with still-surreal friendliness against Li’s thigh as he slept.

  Biking at five a.m., Li saw groups of elders doing languid tai chi. In his room, he worked on organizing his selected notes from the Year of Pain into a loose narrative. After work, he started a greens fermentation, ordered chlorella for Mike’s family, formed a three-week plan to use less caffeine, and took a walk with Dudu. In bed, he missed Kay’s murmured sleep-talking. He dreamed he was with middle school classmates in a swimming pool in Florida, wailing, “I can’t believe we’re all sixty-five!”

  Insects, fish, amphibians, and reptiles didn’t dream, he read the next morning in Why We Sleep. Dreaming had evolved twice, in birds and mammals. Of the primates, humans spent the highest proportion of sleep dreaming. Maybe history would end with people spending increasingly more time in dreams, exploring and acclimating, until slipping permanently out of the universe.

  Around noon, Li watched a talk by pediatrician Helen Caldicott, editor of one of the nuclear radiation books he’d read in the Year of Mercury. She said women were more susceptible to the effects of radioactivity (cancer, genetic mutation, reduced immunity/fertility) than men, children more than adults, and fetuses more than children. She felt a major threat to civilization was a teenage hacker triggering a nuclear war.