Leave Society

by Tao Lin

  He felt better the next day. They climbed an umbrella-shaped monkeypod tree and swam in the ocean. They laughed, analyzing a literary figure they adored’s intros to writers on his radio show—“One of my favorite guests, actually”; “I’m extraordinarily overwhelmed”; “All sorts of people tell me they have special ways of knowing whether or not I like the book I’m talking about; you don’t have to wonder today.”

  Walking to a health food store, they noticed half the population was Asian and said maybe they should move to Hawaii. “Dudu would like these wide sidewalks,” said Li, missing Dudu. They bought papaya and kratom and rode a cab to Chinatown, where they sipped kratom water while browsing a grocery store. Outside, people lay on dark sidewalks next to their belongings.

  Busing back to the apartment, Li showed Kay photos on his phone, which he’d somehow felt blocked from doing in their relationship until then. They looked at photos from Taiwan and LA, where Kay had been the past week, attending one of her authors’ events and visiting a friend.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, Kay answered emails and talked to her boss through her computer. Li read his Year of Mountains notes, choosing ideas, details, emotions, scenes, and days that he especially wanted to remember, which was only sometimes obvious.

  Around noon, on their way to Diamond Head, a volcanic tuff cone, Kay walked uphill on disconnected lengths of concrete. Li held her hands from behind, matching her speed, slightly leaping to each new piece of concrete. They switched positions, continuing until a small girl, arms out for balance, approached in the opposite direction, looking down.

  They sat on grass and smoked cannabis and did Bridge Pose, then climbed the tuff cone and picked the last house along the coast as where they wanted to live. On the way down, Kay said on the plane a couple near her had talked the whole time. It had made her happy.

  “How old were they?” said Li.

  “In their thirties,” said Kay.

  Li still felt quiet and somewhat closed off, like on the first day. The Curse and his weeks of doubt were rippling through him, bothersome and mocking, his own creations.

  * * *

  —

  Later that day, they cabbed out of the city to a rural area near the island’s north shore. They put their stuff down at their new Airbnb—a bed-containing tent next to an outdoor kitchen in someone’s backyard.

  Walking toward a mango farm, they saw flower-dotted green in all directions. A giant monkeypod tree cast a shadow across the two-lane road. Kay answered a phone call. A car containing three elders stopped.

  “Get in,” said the front passenger, a woman. “We’ll give you a ride.”

  “Okay,” said Li. “She’s on a business call.”

  They got in the backseat with a man.

  “This is a dangerous road,” said the driver, another woman. “There are no lights on this street. It’s going to be dark soon.”

  “Thank you for picking us up,” said Li.

  “We didn’t want to read that two tourists had been killed on this road,” said the driver.

  “We were going to buy mangoes,” said Li.

  “Mangoes don’t start until March,” said the driver.

  Kay finished her call.

  “We live in New York City,” said Li.

  “We thought you were Japanese tourists,” said the front passenger.

  “Have you tried papayas?” said the driver.

  “We have,” said Kay.

  “With lime,” said Li.

  The driver invited them to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.

  Li said they had plans to cook.

  * * *

  —

  They alighted at a yellow gate and walked on a dirt road toward their tent. Twilit butterflies looked like wayward leaves. A wall-like mountain spanned their whole view, its tallest parts reaching the clouds. A sign said, “No Trespassing. No Exceptions.” Kay said she hadn’t decided if she was stopping therapy or not. She said she’d thought of her therapist as a leech before.

  They took turns using an outdoor shower, then Kay rubbed bentonite clay on Li’s butt rash, which by then rarely itched but was still uncomfortable to sit on. “I think that was my favorite activity we’ve done in Hawaii so far,” she said after finishing, and Li said, “I think it was for me too.”

  In bed, they listened to wavily droning insects, intermittent barks from distant dogs, and the white noise of plants. Different species, played by the changing wind, made subtly different sounds. Together, the grasses, herbs, bushes, and trees sounded a little like an enormous, faraway waterfall.

  Li woke from a dream in which he was in precalculus in high school and needed to pee and hadn’t studied for a crucial test that kept being about to start. He unzipped the tent, walked away, peed into darkness, and returned to bed.

  “I love you,” murmured Kay.

  “Huh?” said Li.

  “I said I love you.”

  “Are you awake?”

  “Yes,” said Kay.

  Li realized he should say, “I love you too,” which, alloyed with steely dreams, he didn’t seem to feel ready, especially after the delays, to say.

  “I love you also,” he said.

  Dustwinkling

  In the morning, Kay read a submission of a novel set at a poetry MFA program. Li read his transcript of the day in the Year of Mountains when Dudu became catatonic and he and his parents discussed the story in Zhuangzi in which Zhuangzi, a student of Laozi, said, “How do you know that I don’t know the fish are happy?”

  After work, Li told Kay about the fish story, and they invented the verb “Zhuangzi”—to present a larger perspective on a situation—then ate starfruit, saw a wild pig, and planted four avocado seeds. Kay said she’d been afraid they’d hate each other in Hawaii. Li said even if they hated each other for a few days, they could remember their nine weeks of near-continuous fun and focus on their high success rate.

  They walked to downtown Waialua, which had around ten stores, including a surf shop and a soap factory. As they paid for a lighter and a hat, Li talked about facial degeneration. Kay said narrow faces were conventionally viewed as more beautiful.

  “Yeah,” said Li. “But now I feel that wide, aboriginal faces are more beautiful.”

  “That’s convenient,” said Kay, who had a less degenerate head than most people.

  “Or actually that both can be beautiful,” said Li. “I’ve realized more the malleability of beauty.”

  In Waialua Public Library, they read the first sentences of romance novels, praising the clarity and flow. They bought a used hardcover book called The Forest for a dollar.

  Outside, they wandered into an area with farm vehicles.

  “Are you guys looking for the beach?” said a man.

  “We are,” said Li.

  They got in the man’s truck, which had another man in front.

  “This is as far as we can take you,” said the driver after ten seconds.

  They got out and saw another “No Trespassing” sign. It began to lightly rain. Crossing a field, they passed a hot-pink thing sticking out of the grass and theorized it was a new species of life that wouldn’t be noticed due to seeming plastic.

  They climbed a fence and walked on a bike path parallel to the road. Li held his wet glasses. It gradually stopped raining.

  They entered an area of houses and saw a bucket labeled “Helpful Bucket.” Kay sang a song she’d improvised as a child about a bucket she’d kept by her bed. She laughed.

  “I just thought of last night,” she said.

  “What happened last night?”

  “When I said…”

  “What?” said Li.

  “I feel embarrassed.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I love y
ou. And you asked me if I was asleep.”

  “You seemed asleep,” said Li.

  * * *

  —

  When they finally found a path to the beach, they walked along the coast, passing a man holding a fishing net, then cautioned and encouraged each other onto a slimy concrete tube going fifty feet into the ocean. Li went sideways like a crab. Kay snailed ahead in a careful crouch. Foamy waves soaked parts of them.

  They sat on a barnacled, algaed square at the end of the tube, amid convolving water. Glimmering solar veils fell through the sky, which was partly dark with storm clouds. Li said he’d care for Kay if she fell and were paralyzed.

  He remembered hospital life. His mom’s wet face. Watching Survivor on morphine. Eating McDonald’s. Listening to music through earphones.

  * * *

  —

  Riding in a car back to the tent, they looked at Kay’s fertility charts. She had three months of partial data on her temperature, bleeding, copulations, and mucus levels spread across three apps. Her cycles the past three months had been fewer than twenty-five days each, not enough for accurate fertility tracking, but she’d grown warmer.

  Walking home from the yellow gate in moonlight, they saw a hazy glow atop the wall-like mountain and imagined John Hutchison being there, working on his effect. Li said he’d friended Hutchison, who was in his seventies, on Facebook.

  After they made and ate dinner, Kay talked to her mom on the phone, then Li tried and failed to remember the evidence against the Big Bang theory. They decided to watch the documentary he’d fallen asleep watching five months earlier.

  In the documentary, Halton Arp, the compiler of Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, recalled being banned from a telescope after finding evidence contradicting the Big Bang. An animation showed a galaxy self-reproducing, like a snail, by ejecting a quasar that would grow into its own galaxy. An astrophysicist named Margaret Burbidge said Big Bang theorists were “worried about their jobs.” Kay said, “I don’t know why I’m getting sleepy.” She curled until her head was in Li’s lap.

  As Kay slept in the tent, Li worked flittingly on his novel, editing paragraphs from his growing draft at random. Working on the novel daily over the next two and a half years, he would sometimes feel almost able to see the final draft, which from somewhere in the future was bidirectionally transmitting meaning and emotion, backward toward him and ahead to the end of his life.

  He got up four times to eat tuna, which was soaking in garlic and vinegar in the refrigerator. He noticed Kay in bed in the tent, seemingly looking at her phone. Minutes later, he saw her phone on a table, not in the tent. He smoked baked cannabis, as he’d learned while in Taiwan was possible. His recent trip was the first when he hadn’t run out of cannabis. He’d deliberately saved some for Hawaii.

  The mystery was revealed through connections, he thought, looking out into moonlit darkness. Mountains, microbes, leaves, and faces had all emerged by joining electrons, protons, and neutrons into around a hundred different types of atoms and then uniting those in various ways. Connections were spells, creating new things with properties that were unexplainable from their parts.

  In the tent, Li said cilantro jostled toxins out of storage, so maybe that plus the mercury in the tuna had made Kay sleepy. “Did the guy who was banned from the telescope write The Big Bang Never Happened?” murmured Kay. Li said no, that was someone else. Rain pattered the tent in a unique pattern, creating new neural pathways in their brains. They imagined being the only two people alive in the morning.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, they lay in bed listening to birds—some sounded like weapons in shooter video games; some were like squeaky toys being squeezed; some seemed to be meekly asking questions—then Kay rubbed clay on Li’s rash again.

  She asked him why he thought it was a detox rash. He said because he’d ingested zeolite and that it matched his other rashes, which had healed over time.

  They worked, ate eggs, and decided to go collect leaves. Traversing a house’s side yard, they noticed a medium-sized brown dog, approaching with a low, scanning head. The dog silently bared his teeth, then led them off his property.

  They accompanied the dog as he sniffed and peed along a dirt road. Li said the dog was refreshing and commenting on websites on the dog internet.

  * * *

  —

  Back at the tent, foliating a square of land with thirty-four leaves, Li began to feel confused and top-heavy. Both his and Kay’s voices sounded strangely mechanical. He went to get something to stand on to photograph the leaves. He found a wooden bookcase by the tent.

  Standing on the bookcase, he photographed the leaves, then said he felt like resting. He held Kay’s hand, leading her into the kitchen, dimly aware his behavior seemed capricious and strange.

  They sat at a table holding hands, looking at each other. Li felt dumbfounded and restless. Kay seemed bored. Li led them to a sofa, where they lay and began kissing, then stopped.

  “I feel weird,” said Li, smiling tightly.

  “How?” said Kay.

  “I don’t know,” said Li, and stood. “I just feel like I’m very stoned, in a mushroomlike manner.” Kay’s face seemed masklike and unamused. Things seemed faintly nightmarish.

  Li sat on the sofa, laughing a little. Maybe he’d ingested aprotinin, a drug injected in surgery to control bleeding. Since 1992, the government had allowed corporations in Hawaii to plant, in undisclosed fields, crops engineered to synthesize new drugs, he knew. Microbes spread genes, and wind carried microbes, so the chance of unknown drugs being in anything had emerged.

  “What do you want to do?” said Li.

  “What do you want to do?” said Kay.

  “I don’t know,” said Li. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “I think I’m thinking too much,” said Li.

  After a few minutes, he began to realize, in an internal thread that had advanced slowly beneath the confused dialogue, that he was indeed very stoned. He remembered putting baked cannabis in the honey-tobacco water he’d made that morning and had almost finished drinking.

  Walking north toward Haleiwa, he felt himself sloughing off multiple curses he hadn’t known were on him—ones for being reserved and repressive, minimizing novelty, viewing everything defensively.

  They talked garrulously on new topics. They skipped and galloped. They saw a monkeypod tree with the Yoshida Effect. Kay described a short story in which a husband brings home a talking female head and tells his wife it’ll help their financial situation. The head was always subtly on the husband’s side.

  Li wasn’t sure if Kay had written the story, partly because she was talking more confidently about her writing than ever before, as if it were someone else’s writing. After inferring she’d written it, he began to feel entranced by her voice and to remember other times he’d gotten lost in her words.

  The story, which she’d written while getting an MFA in fiction, ended with the wife’s sister taking the head away.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, they unexpectedly arrived at a near-empty beach. They lay on cushiony sand, each grain of which contained up to a hundred thousand microbes, and Li said he could feel his feet “resting, in the middle bottom.”

  “The arches?” said Kay.

  “Yeah. It feels good.”

  “My feet are pulsing,” said Kay.

  “Mine are too. In the arches.”

  Clouds formed the mask from Scream, a dragon’s head, a person’s head with the eyeballs bulging out and floating away, Dudu’s head, and the letter Y. The shape-shifting, cloud-colored moon seemed rocklike to Kay. Li felt a demurring awe, sensing Earth flying slowly and exactly around the sun, as if in a bright room, which was actually a small, mo
tioned light in a huge darkness, which zoomed out was actually a part of the brilliant disc of the galaxy.

  Li saw microfireflies, which he hadn’t thought of yet in Hawaii, and which he hadn’t told anyone about. He described them to Kay, calling them “like tiny tadpoles.” She saw black threads, gray spots, and squiggly shapes that seemed to be in her eyes. Li said he saw those too—question-mark worms and other things—but the dots, which he’d first seen in Washington Square Park in the second half of the Year of Pain, when wonder had flowed as pain ebbed, didn’t seem to be in his eyes.

  Kay saw them. Li said maybe no one could see them unless someone else described them. Kay said Li had seen them. They discussed starting a religion around them. Li would write instructions on how to see them. He’d write what had happened minutes earlier. Gazing at the ocean horizon, he saw the lucent dots for the first time as a static, screen-covering “twinkling,” as Kay was describing them.

  Li said the dots might be the first noticeable evidence of a new emergent property. Maybe the whole solar system, starting with subatomic particles, was immaterializing and would soon vanish in a halved twinkle, then reappear elsewhere and casually perish, like most gametes, or survive to reach millions of dimensions.

  Leaving the beach, Li asked Kay what she’d name the dots. She said “dustwinkling” or “microstars.” Li said he’d called them microfireflies in his notes but liked her names more. “Microstars” reminded him that stars could seem and be minuscule from higher dimensions. “Dustwinkling” sounded calm and friendly.

  * * *

  —

  In Haleiwa, wild chickens walked idly around, like Manhattan pigeons. Roosters crowed intermittently, stretching their necks while emitting the comically specific noise. Palm trees—one of the rare types of tree that seemingly never showed the Yoshida Effect—rose vertically out of the ground like tasseled wands. A helicopter passed by loudly in the near distance like a giant, grumbling, zombielike bird.