Tao Lin - Bed

Another wave came and put the squid back on the beach.

That night Jed slept over at one of LJ’s houses — she had two. They both dreamt of giant squid.

In Jed’s dream he was a tiny shrimp, a krill. He floated in blackness and was confused. A giant squid went by slowly. Jed saw the eye, which was jazzy and glowing, like a TV and a moon both. He whispered in his krill’s head, hi . He then felt such a crushing kind of weakness that he began to tremble, as if he might soon cease to exist.

In LJ’s dream she kept saying, “It’s just a giant squid.” Each time she said it, she felt a little stupider. Finally, she started to cry. Jed kept kicking the beach ball, but only at his dad, except once at the giant squid; the ball bounced smoothly off, then back to Jed, who kicked it smoothly to his dad. At one point, also, the squid mimicked LJ — unkindly, she thought. It’s just a giant squid , it said. Then it made a noise. LJ was taken aback because the noise was very unsquidlike.

In the morning, the squid was on the local news.

“Lewly,” LJ’s mom said to LJ. “You went here yesterday?” She looked at Jed. She was in love with Jed’s dad. They were both divorced from unmemorable people, and both had high metabolism. They had dated each other awhile — after she won the lottery a few years back, moved from Canada to Florida, and bought two houses — but it hadn’t worked out. “Jed,” she said. She pointed at the TV, which had an aura of rinky-dink, somehow-charming totalitarianism. “You were here yesterday. Don’t lie to me.”

Jed nodded.

“Veteran seafarers have measured them at 200 feet,” the TV was saying. It showed a veteran seafarer, and the newsman grinned. The screen changed. It showed a prostrate man, a school bus, two giant squid — one 60 feet, one 200 feet. At the bottom, it had a row of exclamation marks.

“I like exclamation marks,” LJ said. She wasn’t so sure, though. She only liked them sometimes. “I don’t like exclamation marks,” she said. She shook her head. “No,” she said. Things could bother LJ in this way. Both she and her mom were readers. Her mom claimed to read not for pleasure, but to confirm her worldview. LJ herself had a questionable way of reading. She would flip through, read a sentence here, a sentence there. If she didn’t like a sentence, she’d pick another. Finally, she’d feel done , and then would look, with confidence, at the cover, to make up her own story. She had read much of Vonnegut, and a third of Kafka.

“Nova Scotia,” Jed said slowly. The night before, he and LJ had looked up giant squid on the internet. “Ink sac,” he mumbled.

“Those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “200 feet! Those damn squid!” She was standing. She stood when watching TV, did stretching exercises, sometimes touched the TV screen — usually with a middle finger. “What do they think they’re doing? Jed, what are they doing?”

Things could do what they wanted, Jed thought. “They’re just growing,” he said very quietly.

“You could feed a small country with one of those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “For a week. I bet you could do that. Maybe not. A small town then. A small, Welsh village.” She looked at LJ and smiled, then back at the TV. “You’ve got to be specific,” she said. “A small, seventeenth-century, Welsh village.”

LJ was staring off to the side, eyes unfocused. She was thinking about Nova Scotia. She liked Nova Scotia. Sometimes, in bed, under the covers and comfy, she’d think that she felt very Nova Scotic. She had dreamed, once, of dining Italian with Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia had a small mouth, was a wind-blown arctic wolf, tall and groomed and soft-spoken, and had ordered something with eggplant. LJ had read a book on Nova Scotia.

The three of them stood there, in front of the TV, which had moved on — it had a lot to get to — was now warning of deadly substances that sometimes dripped from rain gutters. A man had been killed, and some animals, allegedly. It showed a photo of a man, a dog, and a hamster that looked, for a hamster, alarmingly distraught.

“My god!” LJ’s mom said. “That hamster!” She loved TV. She really did. TV excited her, rejuvenated her, entered her like something kindhearted and many-handed that held her up, then hardened into a kind of scaffolding. The TV had segued into hamsters and was showing a slideshow of them, each one badly deranged in the face. It kept showing more and more hamsters, and LJ’s mom began to feel sad. As a child, she had one afternoon been diagnosed— condemned , she sometimes thought — with Asperger Syndrome, social anxiety disorder, bipolar disease, and a few other things. It was a turning point, that day, she knew. Her life had been going in one direction, cruising, windows down, but then had turned, taken a left through a redlight, gunned it; had later run out of gas in a kind of desert outside of town. These days she was staying inside mostly. She had won the lottery, moved from Canada to Florida. She was writing a book, actually.

“What if you could Google your own house?” Jed murmured. “If you lost your keys or TV remote you could just Google it.”

LJ’s mom looked at Jed. She walked to him. “What did you just say? Can you repeat that?” She leaned down and carefully moved her ear to Jed’s mouth.

Jed concentrated on loudness and clarity, and then repeated what he had said.

LJ’s mom stood and smiled. “Oh, Jed,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Oh,” Jed said. It annoyed him that people couldn’t ever understand what he was saying. He looked around for LJ, who had wandered into the kitchen.

LJ’s mom patted Jed’s head and looked outside, through her sliding glass door. The swimming pool was covered — you couldn’t see the water — with mulch, moss, and leaves; it looked very much like a swamp, actually, had large, cage-y branches floating in it, as a tree had fallen through the screen some time ago and LJ’s mom had liked that, the idea of it, so had left it there. There was a squirrel, now, by the pool, standing motionless in that clicked-in way of the lower animals. The sun shone brightly on its handsome face. LJ’s mom stared out there, feeling a bit blighted, here inside, somehow cheated. She was thinking that if she married Jed’s dad and LJ became Jed’s girlfriend, how wonderful that would be. They’d all live together in a little house somewhere, with a shiny roof, atop some green hill. It would be in New Zealand, she thought, feeling precarious, or else Wisconsin.

Jed’s dad began to learn, that year, to enjoy waiting; there was something true and mastered about it, he knew — the casual excellence of waiting — that could induce you, lead you focusedly deathward, like a drug addiction, but without the frenzy or desperation. He felt, at times, that he could wait for anything — a month, a year, a thousand years — for love or friendship or happiness. He could exist like a theory in the place before the real place, could float there in the pigeon flight of pre-ambition, in a kind of gliding, thinking only small things and feeling only small emotions, pre-pathos, so that you could fit your entire life easily in your head, and carry it around, like a pleasant memory from some wholesome childhood, yours or someone else’s, it didn’t matter.

“LJ said Jed was being held back a year,” LJ’s mom said to Jed’s dad on the phone. Jed’s dad had liked her at first. They had gone to the movies, bowling, arcades with the kids. But over time he had seen something selfish in her, something a bit insane. She could be jealous and unreasonable. One night she had thrown a potted plant. And though he now sometimes suspected that she was a good, caring, sane person, that it was he who just hadn’t tried hard enough, who wasn’t accommodating and tolerant enough, he had stopped calling her, then, after the potted plant. But she had kept calling him.