Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  Dudu led Li on a busy night walk, inspiring him with her casual fearlessness and focused autonomy, ignoring crowds of farmers market customers while sniffing and peeing at select locations. Over 230 million years, as the sun orbited the center of the galaxy once, lizardlike mammals had evolved into primates and invented computers. In another quarter-turn of the starclock, toy poodles could have their own archaeological digs, meta-autofiction, and forgotten past: miniaturized wolves who’d experienced their doting masters’ two or more falls into history as surreal shrinking periods, in which bites and growls became eerily ineffective.

  To help his body detox, Li began ingesting a gram of powdered zeolite—a volcanic mineral able to adsorb and absorb toxins—each morning with mineral water. He woke in the middle of the night with crusty eyes and an intranostril zit, and remembered often having multiple face-and-mouth sores in different stages of healing as a child.

  Lying on his back in the park, he read a printed draft of Rainbow’s poetry book, which she’d retitled But Did U Die? He underlined “Would u rather be crucified or waterboarded.” He underlined “When I die I will become everything,” put down the paper, and saw microfireflies in Taiwan for the first time. They seemed denser, quicker, and more transient than in New York.

  Maybe the abrupt relocation of metal from the crust to the sky as cities, electronics, militaries, and satellites was visiblizing cosmic rays. Maybe one day the new electromagnetic configuration would chain-reactively destroy everything from the ground to the ionosphere—an instantaneous reset to microbes, plants, insects, subterranean animals, and fish.

  Through psychedelics, dreams, YGs, theories, and metaphors, Li felt somewhat prepared to leave his life whenever. He increasingly viewed death—which in Daoism was “a return home,” according to Ellen Marie Chen—as a zooming out, like putting down a book. Maybe after reading Li, he could read Earth, a life-form in another galaxy, one of his parents, or Dudu.

  In the park, Dudu climbed stairs in vigorous, uniform, pouncing hops. Halfway up, she retracted her right front leg to complete the climb three-legged. Watching this for around the hundredth time, Li finally realized Dudu had leg pain. For years, his mom had said Dudu’s right legs hurt; thinking his mom was being negative, Li had viewed Dudu’s postures and gaits as endearingly eccentric. Now he saw that when she walked fast, jogged, or ran she slanted left and sort of galloped to center her good front leg, and that she sat with her right leg out at a loose angle, crutching herself with a stiff left leg, due to pain, not personality.

  Li woke laughing from a dream in which he snorted cocaine with strangers, then watched someone try to liquefy a watermelon with a weed whacker. He had a wrist rash, a runny nose, itchy eyes, and a fever. He sloughed around with withered posture, bent forward and inward, sneezing onto the floor. He had a pulsing ache behind his eyes, which kept unfocusing as he tried to work on his novel. He woke around fifteen times that night, scratching his throat with tongue undulations that made clucking and froglike noises.

  He halved his daily zeolite. He rode a train three stops to Taipei Main Station with Dudu afore his chest in a shoulder bag, which his parents had gotten to replace her wheeled container. Dudu observed her reality silently, with her head out of the bag, as Li meandered in and around the station. Around 4 percent of people were wearing face masks, probably to filter air pollution. On the train home, Li remembered prickling with love in 4K with Kay.

  On day eight of detox, he couldn’t sate his breath, gulping air through his mouth, obstructed nose dripping like a stalactite. He’d expected detox symptoms but not to this degree. He felt tensely sleepy. He could barely move his neck. His back hurt. He couldn’t seem to stop doubting his relationship. Maybe he wasn’t ready for one. Maybe Kay wasn’t. Maybe no one was—no one in society.

  In the morning, he emailed Kay, “I felt lonely and confused last night. The first words I thought today were ‘despair munchkins’ as a non sequitur.” Online, he read that the States had half a million nuclear-and-other waste sites, around 1,300 of which—Superfund sites—were in line to be cleaned. At night, he texted Kay a photo from 1985. She said his face in it—squished, serious, almost glaring—was like one he still made sometimes. She’d never seen it on a toddler.

  Li woke at three a.m. with a swollen throat and what felt like multiple unfinished dreams, including a seeming flashback to getting antibiotic eyedrops at birth, streaming through his interrupted mind, which had been breaking down his mental Superfunds to absorb as backstory into beneficial narrative threads, or, more likely, due to low-quality sleep, rummaging through them at random, without protection.

  He sat in the bathtub and turned on hot water, scratching pre-rash nodes on his thighs.

  “I couldn’t sleep and now I’m taking a bath,” he texted Kay, who was at work because it was three p.m. in New York. “I have the face in my toddler photo. I feel like I don’t like my thoughts but can’t think anything else.”

  “What are you thinking?” said Kay.

  “That I’ve been feeling alone and don’t know what to do about it. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been alone, with Dudu.”

  “I think it would be hard and destabilizing to be alone and not in your own place.”

  “I feel whiny and doomed,” said Li. “I can’t just tell you to give me more attention.”

  “You can tell me that,” said Kay.

  Li lamented their book club, said it “sucked.”

  “I understand it is quite defunct. Am I supposed to feel guilty, because I do.”

  “I feel guilty for making you feel guilty,” said Li.

  “It was easier to keep up with you when you didn’t like me,” said Kay about the years before their kiss. “It seems hard if I feel like I need space and you feel alone.”

  * * *

  —

  After sleeping six hours, Li listened to an interview with Patrick McKeown, who’d healed his asthma by changing his breathing style. McKeown said most people overbreathed (the opposite of what Li had somehow believed), causing oxygen to bind to hemoglobin, leaving less for the organs.

  Aborigines, yogis, and samurai breathed slowly, through the nose, filtering, warming, and sterilizing their air, while modern people—rhinitic, allergic, air-conditioned, degenerate—increasingly mouth-breathed, inhaling too much air too quickly, Li read in Breathe to Heal.

  He felt surprised, realizing he’d unwittingly sabotaged himself for decades, striving to breathe more after the lung collapses, after deciding against chest surgery, and after other times he’d felt motivated to be healthier.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Dudu greeted Li’s parents by spinning in place, emitting dolphin noises. She followed Li’s dad around, jumping and bleating. He put away his luggage and used the bathroom, then picked her up and said, “Ayo-ayo-ayo!” as she licked his face.

  It was Dudu’s tenth birthday. She settled over an hour into a warm cheerfulness, seeming happier than when alone with Li, when she’d also seemed happy.

  Brain

  On a walk four days later, Li’s dad asked Li how often he and Kay made food. Li said most days. Li’s dad advised against washing dishes; it could become a habit.

  Li said he liked cleaning things. He photographed a majestic-looking, Yoshida Effected tree to send to Kay.

  Li’s dad said he’d dreamed they’d lost Dudu. He’d put up flyers that said two kilograms, white, poodle, and 0.1 concentration, a detail from his equations.

  Momo’s owner was in the distance, strollerless. “Momo died,” said Li’s mom, sounding scared, sympathetic, and, to Li, slightly amused in a nervous, nervine way.

  “The vet said Momo died from a bug bite,” said Momo’s owner. Momo hadn’t been allowed on grass even with shoes, but he’d gone once. Momo’s owner walked away.

  “Momo died from too many shots and drugs,”
said Li’s dad.

  “I think so too,” said Li. “Momo had been bù xíng le for a long time already. Remember when he peed red last year?”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Li and his parents had lunch with Thin Uncle and Auntie. Thin Uncle’s hand tremor had stopped again the previous year after he began taking the liver capsules Li had given him, but had returned again in the past few months. He and Li discussed tobacco being good for Parkinson’s. Li recommended organic tobacco tea.

  On the train home, the quivering right side of Li’s dad’s right eye, combined with his other involuntary movements, distributed across his upper body, seemed for the first time more troubling than Thin Uncle’s tremor, whose unsettlingness had faded with time, and which, compared to the eye twitch, seemed farther from the brain.

  Li looked past his dad’s shuddering right profile to his stable, youthful left eye. He didn’t know if his dad’s twitches and tics—which he’d noticed more due to cannabis, LSD, and notes—had worsened or not in the past few years.

  He reminded himself that his dad was steady and still while writing for hours most mornings in notebooks. Continuous extraneous motion seemed to only emerge in movie theaters, on public transportation, when sleep-deprived, and after trips to China.

  In a dream that night, Li felt alienated at a high school reunion for what felt like hours, seated alone at a picnic bench, until remembering Kay and waking grateful.

  * * *

  —

  The next day was Thanksgiving. Scratching his arm and thighs, Li read an email from Kay, who was with her mom at her brother and brother’s wife’s house in Connecticut, that said she’d tried to send herself through the amazonite. She’d imagined lying next to Li and touching his chest.

  Li emailed her, “Thin Uncle said he sensed our relationship was good. He said it was important to look at someone’s parents, seeming to assume yours were together, maybe because my mom had said you’d gone to Yale and Columbia. Later, I said you were divorcing, and I’d divorced, so it was balanced, and he didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s funny that going to Yale and Columbia might lead to the assumption that my parents were together. I’ve always thought I ended up doing that because I was looking for stability that my family didn’t offer and I didn’t know what else to do.”

  Kay’s parents, like Li’s, had paid for their kids’ undergrad tuitions, but Kay was still paying grad school loans and seemed to have no more financial or emotional support from her parents. She didn’t talk to her dad, and her mom often ranted at her on the phone for hours, criticizing her while wanting more of her attention.

  Li asked Kay about work, and she said it was “extremely busy still and a little embattled-feeling, like a video game where creatures are glomming onto me and making my bars go down as time runs out.”

  * * *

  —

  Five days later, Li and his parents watched Good Time, a movie about a man who robs a bank with his autistic brother, then tries to sell enough LSD to bail his captured brother out of jail. The movie ended with the autistic brother following commands—“Cross the room if you like candy,” “Cross the room if you’ve ever been in love”— in a windowless room with other disabled adults.

  “That movie was terrible,” said Li’s dad outside.

  “You slept through most of it,” said Li, annoyed.

  Surprised after weeks of friendliness, Li’s dad recoiled.

  Li and his mom agreed the movie was good—funny, heartfelt, meaningful, not boring. In one scene, the bank robber had poured liquid LSD, which Li’s mom had thought was alcohol, down the throat of an unconscious security guard, who’d woken hours later to officers arresting him.

  Laughing, Li tried to say the guard had probably been oozing directionlessly in an unrecognizable hyperspace when he woke to upset police voices and began to emit languageless screams. Li’s mom laughed.

  Li and his mom were interacting more intimately than at any time yet that visit. Li had felt especially autistic around her that year, probably because zeolite had loosed toxins out of his body’s unconscious, into circulation. “Feel weird around Mom sometimes,” he’d noted. “Bothered by her looking at me, or trying to talk to me.”

  On the train home, Li’s mom looked around rapidly, unable to find Li’s dad, who was seated down the car, phubbing; public-service ads that said “Don’t be a phubber”—a new term for members of the facedown troupe—had appeared that year at street intersections.

  “You were like Du now,” said Li. “You couldn’t see Dad and panicked.”

  “Heh—I was a little like Du,” said Li’s mom.

  Li sat and unfolded his in-progress draft of the Year of Pain. He opened it to what would become the “Ankylosing” chapter and took a pen from his pants pocket.

  When they got off the train, he said, “I’m editing when we went to the chiropractor before we found out I had AS. Do you remember that?”

  “Of course,” said Li’s mom. “Good thing the rehab center’s doctor knew about AS. The chiropractor was kind of a scammer.”

  “He cost a lot, but at least he didn’t try to put me on drugs,” said Li. “The two doctors we saw wanted me to take drugs.”

  On the walk home, Li’s dad asked Li’s mom if she could please not wake him during movies. He said she’d done it three times. She said two. He said three.

  “I think letting him sleep is good,” said Li. “It feels good to sleep in movies.” His mom seemed fine with the suggestion, and Li felt friendliness resume with his dad.

  At home, Li’s mom said she was going to Cotton Field to buy groceries, then to the bank to pay Li’s dad’s employee. She asked Li to walk Dudu.

  Carrying Dudu to the park, Li quietly told her he’d read that pet dogs at Çatalhöyük had probably been adept with ladders, climbing in and out of homes.

  “It’s my 25th day in Taiwan,” he texted Kay before bed. “Time is going fast for me. What about you?”

  “Time is going so fast that I feel like I’m in a race.”

  * * *

  —

  A week later, at the bottom of Battleship Rock Mountain, Li’s mom repeatedly offered water to a turning-away, annoyed-seeming Dudu.

  “This is not understanding animals,” said Li earnestly. He’d been troublingly grumpy for two or three days. He hadn’t been sleeping well.

  “You know animals best,” said Li’s mom, a bit sarcastic.

  “I know,” said Li, faintly aware he’d grin if he were in a better mood. He’d gotten less congested and dyspneic since changing his breathing style but was still getting itchier. His wrist rash had expanded crescently down his arm. Other rashes were emerging. Ten days alone wasn’t enough to detox—he needed months, seasons.

  On the mountain, he began talking and moving his eyes more.

  “So we just need to get out here,” said Li’s mom, noticing the change.

  Li’s dad kneeled to photograph Dudu as she stretched her back.

  “Here there are phytoncides and anions,” said Li.

  “Nature,” said Li’s mom in English.

  Li photographed a tree whose trunk split into five trunks. He sipped tobacco-honey-turmeric water from a canteen. His mom called the drink a “potion,” which made him smile.

  “Bad mood dissolves in nature,” he thought, swinging his vision across and into fractal montane verdure, feeling like he was scrubbing his eyeballs and parts of his mind clean.

  Before history, life had flowed. Fish, turtles, and birds hadn’t wanted hands to pull plastic off themselves. Animals hadn’t felt misshapen, incapable, meaningless, or bereft. Nothing had been missing: birdsong, starlight, teeth, soil microbes, survival skills, natural scents, clean air.

  “Depression emerges in city,” thought Li on a down escalator on the way home, scr
atching his thighs while inhaling unknown amounts and types of dementogens—forms of matter that caused cognitive decline.

  * * *

  —

  In his room, he read an email from Kay that said she was in “a phase of disorganization and deadlines” and had “fallen asleep without meaning to” half of the past six nights. In therapy, she’d imagined standing and saying, “You’re fired.” Her only dream recently was one in which she thought, “Oh, incest,” after hearing her mom and brother discuss “examining each other’s buttholes.”

  Li responded almost immediately, saying, among other things, “Your dream sounds good. People used to do enemas a lot, it seems, but now they do it less, maybe due to fear of butts/poop. Are you busier than when I was there?”

  Kay, who’d seemed somewhat distant since they parted, said she was working two more hours per day. One of her coworkers had abruptly quit after doing work that was wrong and needed to be fixed.

  “Sympathize with Kay,” typed Li in his notes. “She’s in a disorganization phase. Don’t overwhelm her, so she can feel desire to contact me on her own, maybe.”

  It unnerved him to qualify resolutions with “maybe” or “I think” in his notes, made him feel like he needed to start another file of notes, zoom out more.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Li got upset when his mom seemed automatically against his dad’s desire to fish that weekend.

  “Fishing is good,” said Li. “It isn’t looking at a screen.” Fishing seemed to be the only time when his dad wasn’t distracted by business and his phone.

  Li turned to his dad, who was typing on his computer, and said, “It’s not good for me to be here this much. I don’t have anyone I can talk to.”