Tao Lin - Bed

She would have to start with her first memory. It was a photo of herself, a tiny girl. Her next memory was of being embarrassed — her face red, the world terrible. She moved on. She needed momentum. She couldn’t focus on anything, so she skipped to tonight, to watching Titanic . She went through the movie, went through going to her house across the street, and then thought of what she was doing one minute ago — she was going through Titanic . She began to go through that again. She got confused. She thought of the moment immediately before the present, the confusion, thought of the present, and then thought forcefully ahead. Things got blank. She felt herself lying on the bed.

In the morning Jed went back to LJ’s.

LJ’s mom set two bowls of cereal and soy milk on the counter. She went into the living room, picked up a book, and stood reading in front of the TV.

In the kitchen, Jed and LJ went for pop tarts. LJ licked hers, the frosted front of it. Jed bit his. They watched each other while eating. LJ’s tongue was small and pink, like a puppy’s.

“Listen to this,” LJ’s mom said from the living room. She read aloud from her book. “ ‘Rather than using two dolls to play “dollies have tea,” an autistic child might take the arm off one doll and simply pass it back and forth between her own hands.’ ”

Jed looked at LJ. She was very beautiful. In bed sometimes Jed would be thinking, Lewly J , and he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He would sit and fluff his pillow and smooth his blanket. Sometimes he wanted badly to hold her. He’d move close to her and his insides would start going faster, everything spilling and cold against his bones and organs. He wondered sometimes if he had special powers, like the X-men. Not everyone was the same, Jed knew.

LJ heard in her head the unsquidlike noise from her dream. It was abrupt and bovine, and it startled her. She dropped her pop tart. She picked it up. The pop tart was beginning to wetly bend. She wasn’t hungry, she knew. She was never hungry for breakfast or for lunch. It always took until dinner for her to get hungry. She blushed. She put the pop tart in the sink and used a spatula to shove it down the drain.

Jed wandered away, into some other room — the piano room — wanting LJ to follow. Chopin, Jed thought. Chopin was about five feet tall. His head was very big. Jed knew Chopin from his dad. His dad for some time had been obsessed with both Chopin and Glenn Gould. Jed once asked who would win in a fight, Chopin or Glenn Gould. His dad had said it would take three Chopin’s to beat up Glenn Gould. Jed liked Chopin.

LJ followed slowly into the piano room. She was thinking about when she had gotten a thin Chinese noodle accidentally inside of her head, up through her sinuses, out through a space below her eye. Her mom had pulled it out and then everything was okay.

“Let’s go to the church,” Jed said.

“Okay,” LJ said. She was grinning. She ran and pushed Jed and Jed fell on the carpet. Jed stood and went to push LJ, but didn’t know where on her body to. She was very small. Her head was wispy. It seemed almost invisible.

LJ screamed, a bit quietly, “We’re going out!”

She had trouble opening the front door. Jed helped.

Outside, it was dewy and warm. LJ felt momentarily underwater, then as if in a sweltering place, a jungle or Africa. She looked around, unsure of things. “What if I climbed this tree?” she said. There was a tree, and they looked at it.

“It looks hard to,” Jed said after a while.

“I’m not sure if I should,” LJ said. She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over — she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. “Oh,” she said.

They began walking. There was an empty lot where you could climb the neighborhood wall, on the other side of which was a fort built by some older kids and then a field, with a church and a McDonald’s on it. They saw Jason, who had a green apple and was eating it. Jason was one grade more than them. “Where are you going?” Jason asked LJ. He looked at Jed.

“The church,” Jed said.

Jason turned around and walked with them, adjacent LJ. He was tall. “Do you like me?” he said loudly to LJ. Someone had once told LJ that if asked, if given the choice, you were always to say yes. Probably her mom had said that. Her mom had said that if things ever got too bad it was okay to do drugs, as long as you kept reading Chuang Tzu the entire time. After she said that she had looked very worried.

“Yes,” LJ said. She had the word insalubrious going through her head. She didn’t know what it meant. Things were always going through her head like this. Things going through her head, herself going through the world; sometimes she got confused. She felt sleepy.

Jed saw in his periphery that Jason was holding LJ’s hand. He thought that he should have held LJ’s hand first, when they left the house; he was always too slow. But he wasn’t the kind of person to make others uncomfortable, he knew. He felt good about that. But it was a tiny feeling, and not altogether a good one either.

At the empty lot, Jason ran at the wall and climbed it and stood on top. “Nostradamus predicted the world ended already,” he said. “And it did. I can feel it in my brain. It feels like sand.” He stood on one foot. He almost fell and his face reddened. He helped LJ and they went over.

Jed moved an empty bucket and used that and got over. He watched LJ and Jason go into the field. He felt like he was vanishing, that he had vanished. But then he was back again. He hadn’t vanished. He went into the fort area. On a board of wood in green marker it said, “You’re a butthead.”

“I’m a butthead,” Jed whispered. His heart beat a little faster. At the end of fourth grade, some kids had begun to say “Shit” and “Bitch.” Jed didn’t like it. They just said those things to be cool. Jed liked “Moron,” and “Idiot.” There was one kid who said “Moron” all the time and Jed secretly admired him. Jed liked anyone who was weak or quiet. You had to be weak, or else you were mean. You couldn’t be mean, Jed knew. You could only be nice, and if you felt hurt you could only be even more nice.

It was getting cloudy. Jed picked up a branch and whacked some leaves off a tree. In first grade, he was sitting in the school auditorium and someone had called his name and he had gone to the front and received an award for a painting he had done. In the painting the sun was just a dot, you couldn’t even see it. He was so weird then, he thought. He didn’t know that person, his old self. It was as if for a long time, he didn’t even have thoughts — wasn’t aware of anything.

He walked outside the fort and saw that LJ and Jason were far away in the field. He wanted to go home. He wanted to teleport home, without having to do any work. You weren’t supposed to be in a field during a storm, he knew. LJ and Jason looked to Jed like husband and wife. Jed always felt younger than his peers, like a baby almost. There was always the feeling that he had to try really hard at everything — smile bigger, talk louder and clearer, argue and fight things behind his eyes more. He thought that tonight he would read PC Gamer magazine and drink fruit punch with ice cubes in it while taking a bath. He liked computer games. He felt better. He ran into the field. As he neared LJ and Jason, he remembered hazily his mother — she had left when Jed was three — and felt almost like he was LJ and Jason’s son. He ran to them.

“It’s Jed,” Jason said. “Jed head.”

“Jason,” Jed said inaudibly. He looked at Jason and LJ holding hands and felt very nervous. He looked away. The grass was up to their knees and Jed was afraid of snakes. They seemed to be walking toward McDonald’s and not the church.