Tao Lin - Bed

I wish I could round these eyes

I don’t like myself but I think I like you

Give me a kiss and shred off my face

Give me a very square farewell look

Colin read it and nodded at Dana. She was blushing. She touched her face, grinned, shouted something, took back her paper. They got off the train in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It was very quiet here. Snow had come down from heaven, swirled about, absorbed all the smoke and dust — all the coppery, spray painted wooziness of a city — and then fallen, thwarted, to the black and coagulated ground, stopped on its way to hell. There was not a deli anywhere, and no buses. A police van was ahead.

“Show’s over,” a policeman in the van said. “Concert’s canceled.” Colin and Dana kept walking toward the venue, a bit quicker. “Turn around and go home,” the policeman said. “There’s nothing here for you two.”

Colin and Dana turned slowly around.

“Just kidding!” the policeman said. “Hey!”

As Colin and Dana walked by, the policeman smiled at Colin. Because of snow, they had to walk within touching distance of the van. All the cops inside, Colin saw, were distinctly different in body size. Maybe a dozen cops, all in jackets. “Have fun,” the policeman said.

The venue was Polish-owned, had an outside area where kids smoked and where three Polish women — a mom, her daughters — sold hot dogs, vegetarian hot dogs, chips, and an orange, potion-y drink, which was in a large punch bowl. A hundred or so kids were out here.

Colin thought of saying something. He hadn’t for a while. But he felt very calm, and a little dizzy; felt as if washed out by some sweet and anesthetic water, as he often did. Kids were moving in and out of shadows, being loud or elusive, eating chips or smoking. They were sad and pretty in their anguished and demonic colors, their piercings, their hands in their pockets. The bassist for Leftover Crack, Colin recognized, stood alone, eating a hot dog that was not vegetarian, drinking the orange drink.

Dana was looking at Colin. “I’m taking a vampire class,” she said. “We just watch vampire movies.”

Something black and warped was rippling through Colin’s head, little voids, and he couldn’t concentrate. Probably it was unacceptable to be distracted in this way, he knew, by nothing — by nothingness. It took him a minute or two to respond. “Is Bram Stoker a vampire?” he finally said.

“Bram Stoker,” Dana said. “Are you a vampire?”

“Yes,” Colin said. Leftover Crack’s bassist was looking down into his orange drink. “I was a cat when I was five, for Halloween. With a cape.” A cat from three to eleven, then a boy with a ghoul mask, then nothing. Halloween quickly became mostly for vandalism; no one dressed up anymore, just destroyed property, attacked one another openly and in teams. It was a different world back then. There were a thousand different worlds in the world, Colin knew. Each had a hundred thousand secrets locked-up in invisible steel rooms in the bright blue sky. Before bedtime, each night, you took a multiple-choice test based on those secrets. You never knew if you failed or what, and each morning you woke with the uncertainty of that. You also woke with a craving for new and requited love. The craving was unrelated to the uncertainty. Both were loyal only to their own causes. You yourself had no cause and seemed, at times, to be simply the effect of something. Fixed, unstoppable. Existing by momentum only, but pretending always otherwise.

“That’s good for five,” Dana said. She touched his elbow. “Colin, you were a vampire cat.”

“Look at the bassist.” Colin extended his arm straight out and pointed, startling himself in a dull and private way — he hadn’t meant to point like this. Some kids saw Colin pointing and looked. The bassist noticed and moved the hot dog down to his side, held it there like it wasn’t a hot dog, but something insurgent — a microphone or pipe bomb.

Dana laughed. “You’re embarrassing him!”

She slowly pulled Colin’s hand down.

“There aren’t enough songs against McDonald’s,” Colin said. “There should be a song called ‘Fuck McDonald’s.’ ” He felt suddenly excited, and looked directly into Dana’s face. He was not afraid. There was her face. At night, it would move through his vision, colorless and behind the eyes, like a phantom, floating bird — a hood of wings, folding away. “Do you think McDonald’s is objectively bad?”

“I think so,” Dana said. “Yeah; I agree with you.”

Colin looked away. Leftover Crack, he knew, had a song called “Fuck America”—it had begun to play in his head. It was catchy. It had rhyming couplets.

McDonald’s will bloom as the major competition

Between Jesus and the Devil for this government’s religion

People so caught up in the freedom that they see

While America’s fucking over every single country

Something Something Chorus Something

Fuck America

Fuck America

Fuck America

Fuck America

(Outro)

Dana was talking about if she were Bill Gates. “I’d do things about McDonald’s,” she was saying. “I’d end the McDonald’s corporation somehow. With Windows software.”

“They’ll sue you.” Colin didn’t feel excited anymore. He felt drugged and indifferent. Something enormous and depressed and on drugs had moved through him; had been watching him, from a distance, and had now come and moved through him.

“I’ll sell them faulty windows that would keep breaking,” Dana said. She laughed. “So their restaurants will look all dilapidated. When they sue me I’ll bribe the Supreme Court. I’ll give them supercomputers. Colin, I really like supercomputers for some reason. They’re so big and sad. I just want to take care of them. I get these urges …”

Colin wondered if Dana talked this way to her boyfriend. He knew nothing about Dana’s boyfriend. Except that his name was Tyson, and all Colin could ever think was Mike Tyson. Colin liked Mike Tyson. He didn’t know much about Dana anymore. They had talked a lot at first, years ago, that first August before school, before September 11th — all day, walking up and down Manhattan, side to side, through parks — but Colin couldn’t remember any specifics unless he tried very hard, and he didn’t feel like trying that hard.

Leftover Crack had a history of inter-band disputes. At a show Colin had attended, the guitarist had left the venue after Stza became depressed and smashed his guitar — the body snapping cleanly and quietly from the neck, as if willingly — and sang a few songs lying flat on his back. Another time, at CBGB, a few months after September 11th, the guitarist had on a fawn-colored sweater over a crisp white shirt for some reason and had said, in a sincere way, that he was proud to be an American, that it really moved him how everyone had come together. Then Stza had said that September 11th was the greatest day of his miserable life. Then they had played “Stop the Insanity (Lets End Humanity),” or something.

On stage now, Leftover Crack’s bassist walked to his bass, picked it up, strapped it on, and stood waiting for the others. His face was expressionless and he did not move his eyes, mouth, head, or legs. His shirt said “NO-CA$H.” The guitarist was asking the crowd for beer. Someone passed up a shiny blue plastic cup, but it wasn’t beer.

“Somebody pass this fucker a beer,” Stza said.

“If I don’t get a beer,” the guitarist said. “I’ll put my guitar down, smoke some crack, drink a forty. Seriously, I don’t care.” He had just done a set with his own band; he had his own band.

“We all know, dude,” Stza said. “We all know.”