Tao Lin - Bed

Nights, nurses came in with painkillers. Mornings, X-ray machines the size of refrigerators were wheeled in. Jed’s dad sat against the wall, straight-backed, below a gray-green window. He watched Jed. The entire time, he had made up going through his head, honed and impervious as something to be launched into orbit.

The third time the plastic tube was taken out, the doctor was athletic and did not sit down. He came in the night, cut the sutures, removed the tape. “This’ll feel a bit strange,” he said. “I’ll count to three.” Jed feared, as he did each time, that the tube might latch onto something on its way out, that his entire insides — his round and oily heart, his brain somehow — might be yanked out. The doctor said, “One—” then flung his arm back and jerked the tube out from Jed.

After that, everything became a lot less compelling. Things were generally more dispersed, a little vanquished-seeming. Birds flew higher in the air, sometimes flapping straight through to outer space. It was mid-December. Jed began to feel a sort of low-level buzz to his perception of things — a buzz, he felt, that meant he was alive and that everything was real, but just barely — a soft and cellular hum that moved him noticeably along.

LJ’s mom phoned Jed’s dad one night. She and LJ were back, had bought another house in the same neighborhood.

She invited Jed and his dad over, for Christmas Eve, which was a week away.

On Christmas Eve, Jed and his dad went to LJ’s mom’s new house. They built a sofa-cushion fort in the living room. There was a giant squid swimming pool float the size of a grown man on top of the TV. LJ’s mom had bought it for Jed. A Christmas tree was flashing from another room, lighting up the walls, dark and middleless and fugue’d as some unpeopled dance of the future.

Outside, it was black and silent, as most everyone, it seemed, had by now moved away.

In the living room, blankets and pillows covered the floor. They were all going to sleep there tonight. The TV was on, showing previews. They were to watch the movie Yi Yi , by Edward Yang, a favorite of LJ’s mom. She was in the kitchen, which was open to the living room. “Cream of broccoli and Swiss cheese,” she was saying. “Everyone will love this. It has the most beautiful color. I always thought it was like what you’d see if you were falling through the sky and went on your back. The wind going across, the trees reflected onto the clouds, all creamy and moving around. The sun glowing somewhere …”

Jed’s dad was in LJ’s room, moving LJ’s mattress out into the living room. He was taking his time. He was thinking that maybe he would begin, now, to long for some outlying aspect of LJ’s mom, to yearn gradually for her, to work towards a real kind of wanting, and finally, then, some day — some breezy February morning, years from now — look at her face or eyes or neck, at whatever would be the most her part of her, and try, with all of slight and glancing life, to love her wholly, truly, and knowingly.

Jed was inside the sofa-cushion fort and so was LJ. They were both ten now. Jed had on his squid suit and LJ had on bunny slippers. “I’d like to disappear one day,” LJ’s mom was saying, in the kitchen. She talked in a soft, uninflected way, like it was just to herself. “I get the feeling sometimes that I can do that. It’s like there’s some place I really want to go to, and I’m not sure where, but I can still go. I think I’d really like that. I’d sit down one afternoon. I’d say, ‘Okay now, Susan, time to go.’ Clasp my hands or something. Then I’d do it. I’d just be gone then. No one would know. I wouldn’t even know.” Jed and LJ were crawling through the fort, which tunneled around and over the sofa. Jed was anticipating the part where he’d go up, onto the sofa, then over, in a drop, to the carpet. LJ was listening to her bunny slippers shuffling behind her — like real bunnies, she was thinking, baby ones.

That night Jed woke up. He was on the floor, on blankets. He saw in the reflection of the TV that LJ’s mom was lying on the sofa, behind him. Her eyes were open. She lay on her side and looked very awake. She looked worried, Jed thought.

She shut her eyes tight and kept them scrunched like that — hard. Then she slowly opened them until they became very wide. She blinked a few times, but kept her eyes large and round, her face a face of surprise. Then she stopped that and looked worried again.

Jed watched her in the TV. He remembered something — his dad and LJ’s mom, one night in the front yard; she was on the grass, crying. He had forgotten. He thought of all the time since then — it seemed so long ago — and that LJ’s mom was still sad, even now. He pushed his blanket off his body and stood up. His dad and LJ were asleep on the floor. He looked at LJ’s mom. Outside, through the sliding glass door, the small, low moon was glowing bright and impressive, like something trying very hard — wanting, maybe, to be a real planet. “You can’t sleep?” Jed said. LJ’s mom was smiling at him. “Jed,” she whispered after a while. “Did you just say something?” She yawned and let her mouth go large and wide and her eyes get watery.

Jed watched that, then lay back down and pulled his blanket over his head, and closed his eyes. From somewhere far away, there was the tired, tortured noise of someone screaming, the human voice of it deadened and decentralized, but there — something of concern and procrastination, wretched and veering and through the throat. Jed felt very awake. His eyes beat lightly against his closed lids. They wouldn’t keep still, and as he concentrated on them, as he tried to stop their trembling, he began to feel that he was going to cry. He didn’t know why, but he was affected suddenly in this way. He was going to cry. But then he didn’t. He felt instead a bit out of breath, felt a kind of anxiety, a quickening, something hollow and neutral moving up through his chest. He felt excited, but in a rushed and terrible way. What he felt, it was less a feeling than a kind of knowledge; it was a subtle knowing, an almost knowing, that he was here — that he was once, and now, here — but that he would someday no longer be; and so here he was, then, leaving, all so fast and calm and without a fight, without a way to fight, but just this haze of departure, steady and always and all so like a dream, this leaving without having ever been there . It was as if he were already gone.

First week of February you began to suspect that, for the rest of your life, nothing might happen. This was one of those years. You mail-ordered a special mattress, and napped too much. In restaurants, people ordered the icecream cake, shoved their hands under their thighs, and talked loudly about death. On TV, politicians began to snack from Ziploc bags, like a provocation. Almonds, raisins. Sour Patch Kids.

Things, you felt, had changed.

There was a new foreboding to the room in which you slept. There was the fear, now, that all your anxieties and disconsolations might keep on escalating and never stop. There was the theoretical chance that if you threw a banana at a wall the banana might go through the wall.

“Oh well,” Brian said. He had begun to order two coffees at once, two different flavors. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t care.”

His girlfriend Chrissy sat opposite him in a padded chair. They were in a coffee place and there was a table between them. This was Manhattan.

“The key to coffee is to not care anymore,” Brian said. “Tolerance and addiction are wrong. They’re just wrong. You drink one cup, two cups, ten. Whatever. You keep going. Maybe in the end you’re up to fifteen cups, but you always feel good, until you die.”