Tao Lin - Bed

Michelle led Sean inside. She walked slowly around, holding Sean’s hand. Sean gazed at people with a keen and intensifying indifference. He experienced a distinct moment of nonexistence, and then became aware that he was staring at teriyaki. Who are you? Sean thought. The meat rolled over. It was chicken. It had a sad, slick sauce on it — a savvy dressing that it maybe, Sean thought cautiously, did not want. But it needed that sauce. It wanted to be eaten. Michelle was asking a stranger where the bathroom was. Then Sean opened the bathroom door and Michelle pushed him inside. She went inside. The bathroom was small and dark and Sean turned on the light. “No,” Michelle said. Sean turned off the light. He stared into the darkness. Love, he thought. He was yawning. People outside were laughing. The sound was distorted. “I left my salmon at your house,” someone said excitedly. Cold air was moving down from above and Michelle was talking loudly. “She threw sand at my pet dog. It was Bean. She says things on purpose because she’s an annoying mommy …” I do not know what she is talking about, Sean thought very slowly. Michelle was crying softly, then very loudly. Sean felt that he was somewhere else, a place where he was yet somewhere else. Thanks, Sean thought. Thank you, world. Something inside of him was grabbing at air. Something else was on its way, was moving, steady and brainward, like an inchoate thought, something forming and loving and true — but it was a tiny thing, a distant and tired thing, and it was slowing, giving up, maybe turning around. Michelle was crying and saying, “I don’t even love any real person …” and someone was knocking at the door, from below. It was Chris. “Sean,” he said. “Maryanne.” He kicked the door again, then had the sudden and engrossing thought that tomorrow, and every day after, he might wake up feeling exactly the same as he did right now, which made his body shake a little. No one noticed that, though. No one was looking at Chris. Everyone was looking at the green-haired, red-and-white dressed girl, who was standing next to Chris, and who was saying, “People are staring, Michelle, Sean, right at me, as I’m saying these words they’re staring at my mouth and inside of my mouth and now their faces are changing — as I’m talking, Chris, their faces are changing and changing …” Her voice was loud, but trembling, as if she were going to cry.

Snow was everywhere that Friday, in clumps and hills, glassy and metastasized as SUVs, and none of it white. The sky was a bright and affected gray — lit from some unseen light source, and not really that interesting. People went up and down Sixth Avenue with the word motherfucker in their heads. They felt no emotions, had no sensation of life, love, or the pursuit of happiness, but only the knowledge of being stuck between a Thursday and a Saturday, air and things, this thought and the next, philosophy and action; birth, death, God, the devil, heaven, and hell. There was no escape, ever, was what people felt.

Colin himself was dressed lightly, in dark and enveloping colors. He felt of the same endless machinery and danceless, starless trance of the city at night, if a bit cold. He stood on the perimeter of Washington Square Park, waiting for Dana. They were going to a Leftover Crack show. Leftover Crack was a ska-punk band fronted by a person named Stza; their recent CD was “Fuck World Trade,” Colin knew, as he owned that CD.

Dana crossed the street quickly, as if over water. She wore a yellow beanie, stood with Colin on the sidewalk. They smiled at each other and nothing else happened. The atmosphere was not conducive to talking. Visibility was low because of a fog. In the distance, vague things were falling or rising between the buildings. Bats, flying trash. Werewolves, throwing themselves off of roofs. Dana was holding herself with her own arms, Colin could see. They’d known each other almost four years, beginning with the first college-orientation thing before September 11th, but hadn’t really talked in more than three. A few days ago they’d met on the street and made plans. Tonight, Dana’s boyfriend was at a boxing seminar or something, was unavailable, so here she was with Colin.

In the street, a car idled by, a little off-kilter and without its lights on. An unmanned car, lost in the world. It spun slowly around and continued down the street, backwards and twisting.

It began to snow.

“Sure you want to do this?” Dana finally said.

Colin felt cold. He probably should’ve worn more clothing. The show was in Brooklyn, he knew, and they were in Manhattan. “Um,” he said.

“I want to do something with you still,” Dana said.

Colin looked at her. His eyes were very dry. He could feel his contact lenses there, little walls in front of his eyes. He yawned and Dana went out of focus, a bit wild and diagonal in the air, as if about to travel through time. There was snow on her beanie. Colin brushed at it. But it was just white dots — smiley faces.

“There was this beanie floating through the air the other day,” Dana said. “Minding its own business, and I reached over and plucked it out. Like a flower or something. Not this one I’m wearing now. A different one. This really shitty one.” She smiled, then laughed. “I never say ‘shitty.’ I’ve just been listening to this song. It goes, ‘ the world’s a shitty place / I can’t wait to die,’ and at the end he goes, ‘just kidding world / you know I love you.’ ”

Colin knew that song. There was nothing to say about it. “They should have beanies with beans on it, not smiley faces,” he said.

“Yeah. Anything but smiley faces.”

“When I see a smiley face I feel demented.”

“What if beans were alive and they all had smiley faces,” Dana said.

They talked some more like that. Dana seemed to move closer over time, then began to touch Colin’s shoulder sometimes. Colin didn’t know if this was flirting or what. He knew he didn’t know anything about motivation, the world, the future, the past, or human beings. He knew that Dana was marrying her boyfriend. Actually, he did know many things. But it was maybe too many, and he didn’t care. His knowledge was an indestructible machine, made of a million pieces of metal, and flying — a gigantic, gleaming, peripheral blur that Colin was not at all curious about.

A while ago, one night, Colin had eaten the universe, and from then on had felt black and spacey inside, had felt his heart, tiny and untwinkling, in some faraway center, white and tepid as a dot of Styrofoam.

Dana had changed her mind. She wanted now to see Leftover Crack. Would not do anything else, no matter what.

“I’m doing a film,” she shouted on the train. “I’m filming tomorrow. Want to be in it?”

Colin said, “What did you just say?” Then realized what she had said. Then the train started screeching and someone began to play a saxophone. Colin told himself to ask Dana about the film later. There was a building that was Colin’s future, a tall and glassy place that he’d have to enter, and if he didn’t fill it, he’d end up wandering the floors, wheeling around on an office chair, rolling his own body on the carpet, like a log. But then probably that’d be a lot easier. Him in his empty building. Harmless, mute. Irrelevant.

Dana shouted something but Colin couldn’t hear. He saw her mouth move in a laugh. “I’m going in there with white and green,” a little girl screamed, “and you’re going to choose green!” Dana took a paper from her pocket, gave it to Colin. A drawing of two whales; one with a fishhook in its mouth, a harpoon in its eye; the other with lipstick, squares for eyes — the saddest-looking whale Colin had ever seen — and a thought bubble: