by Tao Lin
* * *
—
On the first day of 2018, Li considered how he’d felt better after the “upset” conversation three and a half weeks earlier, but had somehow habituated himself back into tormented glumness, unable to stop bitterly arguing with imaginary people in his mind.
He began titling each day in his notes “feeling bad is a habit.” After three days of consciously attributing hazy despair, static negativity, and loss of mind control to modern urban society instead of other people, personal failings, or existence itself, he felt stably in a good mood again.
Repeatedly delving to sleep in a Japanese movie with Chinese subtitles, he sensed that one conceptually kaleidoscopic emotion-movie, a single unbroken dream that sometimes almost surfaced to waking life, happened in him from birth to death. He saw Dudu with corgi legs. Waking from a dream yelp, he saw rapid ninjas fighting in the leaf-filtered light, the komorebi, of a forest understory and wished Kay were in the movie.
In his room, he texted her that if she’d appeared on-screen he might’ve thought that the density of human connection had triggered a property in which cities began to seep into the imagination. Kay said she felt ready for a new property and asked how to help. Li said publishing books—extremely long, unique sequences of words—would probably help. Words pointed at things in the universe or the imagination, creating new connections in readers’ minds.
Maybe overminds were made of books, not minds. Hundreds of millions of books had been published since the Younger Dryas. Maybe the overmind would become self-conscious in the imagination when billions of books existed. Maybe an incipient overmind was downloading books into minds to speed the process; most emergent properties involved feedback, with the new property interacting with its generating conditions to catalyze or sustain itself.
Carrying Dudu in the park, Li told her he’d had only one YG since modeling his breathing on his ancestors. He told her about the Hutchison and Yoshida Effects. Gently petting her head, he told her about a Hutchison quote that he wanted to include in his novel: “Every time you run your hand across a piece of metal, you’re taking off several million atoms.”
He told her a little about The Garden of Fertility, which he and Kay had been discussing by email. The birth control pill shut down women’s reproductive systems, making them “available for sex all the time,” wrote Katie Singer, who argued that fertility awareness, in which men yielded to female fertility rhythm, had a “bad reputation” because “many people trust drugs and devices more than a woman’s observations of her own body’s signals.”
On a walk one day, Li’s mom grasped Li’s hand with both her hands, which felt surreally warm. “Your hands are cold,” she said. “Mine are warm. Mine used to be cold.”
“I know,” said Li.
“Are yours always cold?”
“I don’t know,” said Li, holding his right hand with his left hand. He touched his mom’s hand. “Yours really are warm. That’s good. It’s because you have natural thyroid and cholesterol and other things now.”
“We thought it was weird at first, when you started telling us cholesterol is good,” said Li’s mom. “Didn’t quite believe you.”
* * *
—
They visited Flowerface, a county in east Taiwan where face-tattooed aborigines had once lived. In a government-run store, organic oranges were next to genetically modified oranges. Seeing the G-gǎi, literally “G-change,” label, Li’s mom made a fearful noise.
Li said only the United States and Canada didn’t label GMOs. Li’s mom said she’d always thought food was safest in the States. Li said the States allowed up to thirty parts per million of glyphosate in food, while Taiwan allowed only up to 0.1 parts per million.
Later, in a rural area, Li’s mom said when she was on a field trip when she was twelve, she’d been the only student who dared not cross a jittery suspension bridge. She’d closed her eyes. The teacher, holding her hand, had led her across.
Nüwa
Back in Taipei the next morning, Li’s dad began watching a serial show on YouTube of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a fourteenth-century novel in which men warred from AD 169 to 280. The novel was based on the third-century nonfiction book Records of the Three Kingdoms and was as known in East Asia as the Bible in the West.
In his room, Li printed his 189,983 words of notes from the Year of Mountains. Getting a guava from the refrigerator, he heard his dad, who’d been watching Three Kingdoms for four hours, say to himself, about a character portrayed as a villain, “Cao Cao really is very cruel.”
On a pre-dinner walk, Li’s dad said he wanted to live to ninety. He said he’d been “class head” in high school—when the class misbehaved, the teacher had hit his mandatorily shaved head with a metal lock. He said kids needed physical punishment. Li said Kay’s mom had pierced her son’s hand with a pencil once, stabbing down. “Aiyah,” said Li’s dad.
That night, Li’s dad showed Li the website of one of the two eye journals he edited. Li laughed at his dad’s unintentionally vertically stretched photo, which made him look physically degenerate. Li’s dad said he’d recently finished a paper that corrected a decades-old error.
In bed, Li gazed thoughtlessly into organistically shifting darkness. The murky outline of a strolling hamster appeared. Li tried to make it jump ahead, as if over an obstacle, and felt vaguely surprised as it backflipped in low-gravity slowness, disappearing instead of landing. After a minute of nothing, he saw depth and color for around five seconds—farmhouses and fields, scrolling right afore a red sunset.
Before falling asleep, he remembered his parents renting bags of tapes of Three Kingdoms in Florida to watch on weekends.
* * *
—
The next day, Li’s dad woke at 8:30 a.m., his earliest in Li’s sixty-eight days in Taiwan, murmuring that he’d have three papers published that year. He sat on the toilet, using his phone. At 8:58, he began watching Three Kingdoms on his computer.
In his room, Li looked at his dad’s unclaimed Google Scholar page—his dad’s papers had been cited 1,106 times, peaking in 2016 with 87 citations—then browsed his draft of the Year of Pain. He remembered his mom chain-watching a family-based show that year until two a.m. some nights, probably to distract herself from his then-mysterious pain. Li’s dad by contrast seemed happy in his binge, with no undercurrent of despair.
At two p.m., Li sat by his dad and asked how much he’d watched. His dad said twenty-five of forty-six episodes, which were forty-five minutes each. He’d skipped many parts, he said somewhat defensively. Li asked if the show had women or children. It didn’t. Li asked if it showed people eating food. It didn’t. Li said as a child he’d played a Nintendo game based on Three Kingdoms called Destiny of an Emperor.
Before bed, Li read a paper on Nüwa, the oldest known Chinese deity. The Chinese had three basic creation myths, said the paper. According to the oldest, Nüwa, whose name the paper translated as “Snail-maid,” created both the universe and, with clay and river water, people. Liking her creations’ laughter, she formed the sexes and taught them to love and reproduce.
In a later myth that seemed to encode the Younger Dryas reset, the partnership-dominator fall, and the ongoing, species-level recovery, it was said that when two male deities fought at some point in prehistory, causing earthquakes, floods, and fires, Nüwa emerged from her home underground to repair the world.
In the morning, Li read two more papers on Nüwa, who seemed like a partnership Yahweh. One paper said it was unknown when people started to worship her, but that the 5,500-year-old jade-eyed head from the Hongshan Goddess Temple may have depicted her. The other paper argued that Dao was Nüwa unanthropomorphized.
Face masks arrived that afternoon. Li had ordered them after reading that the cabin air of non–B-787 commercial planes contained engine oil because half the air was warmed through
the engines, causing aerotoxic syndrome, which people misattributed to jet lag. Li’s mom recognized the mask model—N-95—from when she’d ordered masks in Florida, fearing terrorism after 9/11.
After dinner, Li’s dad scooted to his right, said, “Watching this is too good,” and started Three Kingdoms on his computer.
* * *
—
Two days later, it was January 12, 2018, Li’s mom’s sixty-fifth birthday. Li gifted her an especially colorful mandala and helped prepare dinner by making a seaweed-cayenne pancake-omelet.
At dinner, Li’s mom said when she got to the States at age twenty-four, she’d transcribed sentences from soap operas and practiced saying them aloud to improve her English.
Li’s dad, whose four-day Three Kingdoms binge had ended the previous day, said, “Reagan,” starting his most-told story that year. Seeing Li’s smile, he laughed a little.
“Seventy years,” said Li, summarizing the story. When Ronald Reagan was seventy-two, he’d said he was two, citing Confucius’s adage that life begins at seventy.
“My life hasn’t begun,” said Li’s dad. “I’m negative one. You’re negative thirty-three,” he said to Li, miscalculating or not knowing Li’s age. Li was thirty-four, making him negative thirty-six.
News finished showing public surveillance video of an intersection car crash and began to report on fried-food wrappers, saying they leached toxins into food.
After dinner, Li’s dad lay on the sofa where he’d been seated and said, “Going to rest before taking out the trash.” He’d agreed to take out the trash for Li’s mom’s birthday.
“Do what you say you’ll do,” said Li’s mom.
Washing dishes, Li was somewhat surprised to see his dad walking to each trash can, saying, “Paper,” and, on the second one, “They’re all paper.”
Li’s dad asked Dudu if she wanted to go to the basement. Dudu looked at him from the sofa. Li’s dad asked four more times, picked her up, and left the apartment.
Li entered his room, lay on his back, breathed slowly with his eyes closed, heard his dad return, stood, and entered his mom’s office. She removed her earphones.
“Happy birthday,” said Li, hugging her. “Dad took out the trash.”
“I know,” said Li’s mom, beaming. She went into the TV room and said, “Hòh”—a spoken, movable, modulatable exclamation mark. “Today you’re the most obedient!”
“Right,” said Li’s dad, looking at his computer.
In his room, Li read an email from his mom—“Can’t believe 65 years already passed, feels so fast, just like a blink.”
“Mom’s birthday was a success,” he typed in his notes.
* * *
—
On a walk with Dudu the next morning, Li realized three years and two months, not “four or five years,” as he’d thought for an unknown amount of time, had passed since the beginning of his novel, when he arrived in Taiwan to see doctors about his chest deformity. The realization—that time was going slower than it felt, and so he had more of it than he’d thought—calmed him.
That night, Li’s mom felt cold and weak, as she used to often feel. Li made her a drink with camu camu—a vitamin C–rich fruit from the Amazon—and said her body might be thinking, “I have all this ghee; I’m strong enough to get rid of some toxins now.”
“The body is so complex,” she said with “complex” in English, and Li said he’d heard from Stephanie Seneff, in a documentary on GMOs, that diseases and infections were sophisticated trade-offs, without which most people in society would be dead.
The flu virus delivered sulfate from muscle cells into circulation, “rescuing the blood from a meltdown,” said Seneff. Heart attacks released taurine. Rheumatoid arthritis produced sulfate. Breast cancer produced estrone sulfate. The body was saying, “Maybe temporary weakness or chronic pain or a tumor is better than a fatal thrombosis or hemorrhage.”
* * *
—
At a lunch buffet two days later, Thin Uncle said he felt suspicious of Levoxyl, which he’d taken since getting his thyroid gland removed a year before Li’s mom got hers removed in 2006, because his friend who also took Levoxyl had also begun to tremor.
Li said he felt it was a factor—everything was connected—and recommended Thyro-Gold. Li’s mom, who felt warm and strong again, said she’d give Thin Uncle some to try.
Li’s dad said Li was meeting Kay in Hawaii in two days.
“Hawaiians say, ‘Aloha,’ ” said Thin Uncle.
Auntie asked Li if he’d wear a lei.
“I don’t know,” said Li. “Maybe.”
Auntie and Li’s mom laughed.
Browsing food at the buffet, Li realized his parents’ laughter had seemed more stoned to him in recent years not just because it was, due to increasing health, but also because, as he got more stoned over years, he sensed more social subtleties. He returned to the table with lychee-and-jujube soup.
Putting down his phone, Li’s dad said, “Calm water flows deep,” quoting someone from Three Kingdoms. Loud, talkative people were shallow, like river rapids, he explained. Deep people were quiet and still.
“I’ve never met anyone who talks as much as you,” said Li’s mom.
“The saying doesn’t apply to me,” said Li’s dad.
Thin Uncle said a Chinese proverb—empty wheat stalks, those who “don’t know,” stand tall, while those heavy with knowledge bend in humility.
As a non sequitur, Auntie asked Li if he was happy in Taiwan.
“Yes,” said Li, smiling.
“You look handsome smiling,” said Auntie. “We’re all very happy to see you. We wish you’d visit more. Your parents are happier when you’re here.”
* * *
—
“Thin Uncle doesn’t know,” said Li’s dad, walking to the train after lunch. “He got two plates of desserts and was still eating when everyone else had finished.”
“He ate a lot,” said Li.
“He doesn’t know: to prevent tremors, one needs to do this,” said Li’s dad, closing, opening, and closing his palm-up hand.
“No,” said Li, surprised.
“No?” said Li’s dad. “Then what do you need to do?”
Li talked about detox, nutrition, exercise.
“Right,” said Li’s dad, remembering.
“If your hands start to tremor, or your mind breaks, you can fix it,” said Li. “So there’s nothing to fear.”
Li’s dad said his hand had tremored once.
“When?” said Li, putting a mix of emotions on hold.
“I was pulling in chips after winning big in poker at a casino. Heh—there were so many chips. My hands tremored.”
* * *
—
That night, seated on the toilet, Li heard his dad in the TV room say, “When Li gets married, he won’t want to come to Taiwan.”
“What?” said Li’s mom.
“If Li has a baby, he won’t come to Taiwan.”
“Will,” said Li’s mom.
* * *
—
Online the next morning, Li found a park they hadn’t visited before. They decided to go at 2:30 p.m. At 2:24 p.m., Li’s dad was ready, walking around, saying it was time to go.
“He’s even rushing us,” said Li.
“It’s a first,” said Li’s mom.
* * *
—
On the train to the airport the next day, Li’s dad moved continuously in his seat—grunting while torquing his neck up and to the left, as if something was in his throat; swinging a hand above his head and patting his hair; nudging Dudu with his face while petting and sniffing her and saying “hair child,” “pig-dog,” and “very beautiful.”
At the airport, Li’s dad kneeled to remove Dudu from her sho
ulder bag. From above, in the glaring light of the chrome terminal, he seemed to barely have eyebrows anymore. Li tried to hold Dudu but she yelped and squirmed away, toward Li’s dad, who put her back in the bag.
“I’ll miss you all,” said Li, looking deliberately at each parent’s face, and they group-hugged. He’d last told his mom he’d miss her when he was maybe ten. He couldn’t remember ever telling his dad.
Curse
On a beach in Honolulu at night with Kay, Li felt withdrawn and sluggish, with a dull headache. He told Kay about his new, slower breathing style and aerotoxic syndrome. He’d worn the face mask for only ten minutes on the plane because it had made breathing uncomfortable.
They returned to their high-rise Airbnb, where they unconsciously re-created their New York setup—seated on the floor at a low table, smoking, eating, and talking.
Later, as they kissed naked on the carpeted floor, Li couldn’t stop thinking that Kay could sense he’d doubted their relationship for a lot of their time apart.
“I feel shy for some reason,” said Kay.
Li stopped moving and looked down.
“I feel stupid now,” said Kay.
“Don’t feel stupid. I feel bad for making you feel stupid.”
“Now we’re doing the thing,” said Kay.
“What thing?” said Li after a pause.
“Making each other feel bad.”
As Kay seemed to sleep, Li missed his parents. Howling winds buffeted the building. Li found himself thinking, “The Curse,” which he’d never thought capitalized before. He was Cursed to be unhappy in relationships. He was going to be alone again. Reclusive, celibate, fixing himself, caring for his parents. He remembered feeling cursed before the relationship too—sending his mom incoherently accusatory emails in the library, cathecting confused despair in 4K.