Tao Lin - Bed

“You shouldn’t let that happen,” LJ’s mom said. “You can’t, responsibility-wise.”

“It’s okay,” Jed’s dad said. In the elementary schools, they had begun to hold back entire ostensible playgroups of children, bunches of them, together, like something tethered and collective-brained. Jed and everyone who seemed to sit nearby this one big-headed kid, seven of them, all the foreboding, quiet kids — you could never tell if they were slow or gifted — were to repeat the fourth grade.

“It’s not okay,” LJ’s mom said. “I know Jed. Jed’s smart. You know this. They, though — they don’t know this. It’s just a misunderstanding, to be corrected.” She began to worry that Jed and LJ would drift apart if LJ advanced to the fifth grade without Jed. “What are you going to do?”

“People are different,” Jed’s dad said. “I think …” He didn’t think anything, but began to feel a little as if everything was futile.

“Have them test him. This isn’t right. I mean — repeating the fourth grade, it can do things. I knew this girl, she was held back. After that she kept getting held back. They got carried away. They pulled her all the way back to Kindergarten, then expelled her from the public school system. Her parents had to pay a series of fines to get her into pre-school.” She laughed a little. Beakers were going through her mind; a hand, calmly placing beakers onto a resplendent oak table. She didn’t know why. Probably something from TV. She had, as usual, taken a caffeine pill half-an-hour before calling Jed’s dad. “It’s strange,” she said, “how they don’t care anymore. People, I mean. Me too. All of us. We’ve no illusions anymore. People need illusions. Do you know what I’m talking about? What do you think?”

“It’s not bad,” Jed’s dad said. He hesitated these days to say anything about the world, to have any opinions or beliefs. Anything spoken was a lie, he knew — anything in the mind was a lie. What was out there was what was true. Once your mind got involved, everything turned to lies. You had just to exist, to be passive and apathetic as a dead thing in the sea, as there was a private, conspiratorial truth to just not doing anything, a kind of coming-to-terms, a loneliness turned contentment, a sort of friendliness towards oneself. Or was there? When was something completely made up and when was something only a little made up? Jed’s dad knew never to trust himself. Think too hard, he knew, and you found that there was no point in saying, thinking, or doing anything.

“It is, though,” LJ’s mom said. “It’s bad. You know it. No one’s planning for the long-term anymore. The generation before us, they said things. They said …” She couldn’t think of anything. “They said a lot of things. Now the Earth is — let’s face it — doomed. I saw on TV, they’re rethinking one of the smaller continents as a garbage dump, reinterpreting it, they said. I mean, wow. And what are they doing with the moon? Shouldn’t we be living on the moon in those space domes by now? Scouting the outer planets? I mean, what year is this? What is the government doing these days? NASA, whatever?” She thought briefly about the Ort Cloud — it was coming, but what was it? “Why don’t you come over?” she said. “I’ll make food. I have new recipes. I’ll cook.” She wanted to talk, just wanted to keep on talking, for hours, forever , wanted to argue and discuss things, any kind of thing, as she couldn’t talk to anyone like this, only to kids, and to Jed’s dad — with other people she just felt alone in the world and nauseated — but he wasn’t saying anything.

“Next week then,” LJ’s mom said. “Saturday. Saturday, okay? Jed and everyone.”

“Okay,” Jed’s dad said. “We’ll see.”

They were in their late twenties, had both married young, to early girl and boyfriends, were both aware of the basic eschatology of things, though in different ways. Jed’s dad could sense the end of life as a place you got to, someplace far away and separate, like Hawaii; could sometimes see it, that it was a nice place, with trees, a king-size bed. LJ’s mom couldn’t sense that place. Hers was the view — the experience — that every moment was a little death, that you were never really alive, because you were always dying. And in this way she sensed, instead, everything swirling around her, felt the slow-fast blur of each moment, the raking of it, the future grinding through her, to the past, and crashing, at times, like a truck, through her skull. Sometimes, walking around the house or doing whatever, she would suddenly feel smashed in the head, with sadness or disbelief or some other disorienting method. Days would go by, then, weeks or months, before she recovered.

The next Saturday Jed’s dad decided to stay home. He sent Jed over to LJ’s. LJ’s mom was quiet. Her face glowed lightly with make-up. They had bok choy with garlic sauce, broiled zucchini, and smoothies. LJ’s mom had set up a table in the driveway, and that’s where they ate. LJ had one piece of zucchini and she put some garlic sauce on it. She was full after that. She couldn’t finish her peach smoothie and was a little embarrassed. “It’s okay,” LJ’s mom said, and petted LJ’s head. After eating, they watched Titanic , the recent remake of it, animated and not so epic, from the point-of-view of an indignant family of bottom-dwelling fish, made further indignant by the leveling of their known world by the Titanic. Jed went home and LJ went to sleep. LJ’s mom cleaned up. She watched Titanic again, wept briefly at the end — where the father fish is mutilated by a plastic six-pack ring — and then went across the street, to her other house.

She hadn’t furnished it yet. The electricity wasn’t working. It was dark and warm and she went soberly through each of the rooms, then upstairs. She took off her sandals. The carpet was nice and thick and soft. “House two,” she said to her feet. It amused her only a little to own two houses. Not nearly enough, she felt. It should amuse her more. She went to a window, looked across the street at her other house. She watched her own front door. She wanted to see herself come out from there, come skipping across the street; wanted to see what she looked like from above; and wanted, then, to meet herself on the stairs — surprise herself — and give herself a hug. “Susan,” she shouted. “Susan Anne Michaels! What are you doing …” She turned and looked at the room she was in. She did a cartwheel across it, into a sit, and sat there, Indian-style. Through the window she could see the space-dried clay of the moon, blanched as deep white space, blemished as a coin. She stood and went downstairs. She heard some noises, became frightened, and then ran home, to her other house.

She lay on her gigantic bed, stomach-down and splay-limbed. She felt plain. She thought of getting drunk or something. Maybe she should dye her hair. She began to adjust the hardness of her mattress; she had bought one of those mattresses. There was a fact out there, she felt, that she didn’t know. This was a fact that you had to know in order to live. There was a knowing to being alive, and she just didn’t know. She closed her eyes, listened to the little mattress motor, working hard, and began to think on her life, tracing it forward and back in a squiggled, redundant way. She thought, without much conviction, that if she concentrated hard enough, if she started, carefully, in her childhood and moved forward, gaining momentum, then when she reached the present moment she might be able to turn it, her life, like a pipe cleaner, might be able to twist it, attitudinally, in some new and pleasant direction.

“Well do it then,” she said loudly, in her head.