Tao Lin - Bed

His fantasies became less masturbatory and more about time-travel and childhood.

He grew content in a leveled and agrarian way, like a grass.

Still, though, once, unable to sleep, he had, in one dilapidated night, allowed himself to search out an adult store and buy two porno magazines and some other items. He read them front to back, stopping carefully for the photos. Later, he looked in his bathroom mirror, pointed at his reflection, and said, “Born alone, die alone.” He was giddy with shame and despair after that. Then he wasn’t giddy anymore, and he went to sleep. When he woke, it was night again. He wrapped the pornography and the other items in three plastic grocery bags, tied it up, put it in a Mercer Street Used Books bag, tied that up, carried it six blocks in a direction he hadn’t been before, and shoved it in someone’s trashcan.

It was important, he knew, not to become one of those irrecoverable persons.

One day he was looking out his window, staring at people who were climbing onto each other’s backsides laughing — and he began to think that if he got a job, he could meet people. He seemed to realize this. He needed a job. He needed also to join clubs. Water polo, yoga. Bowling.

In Manhattan, he had a coffee.

He walked up Sixth Avenue. He turned toward Union Square. The streets seemed to have recently been blasted clean. “Nice job,” Brian thought. He was impressed. He felt good. He went through the park, looking and smirking — not in an unfriendly way — at people, and continued uptown.

Around 33rd street there was a strip club or something. It had a sexy-lady sticker on the door. It said, “Live Girls.” Brian thought of maybe going in. Maybe not, though. He would no doubt affect gauntness, perversity, desperation, and condescension. The other patrons would somehow affect virtue and dignity, a kind of Nordic diplomacy. They would be enterprising and pressed for time.

Brian walked into Times Square.

There was a Brazilian steak place here that he liked. He used to go all the time with Chrissy.

He walked back downtown. He didn’t feel at all good anymore. “Because of the coffee,” he thought. The caffeine was no longer doing what it would do. He sat in Washington Square Park. He had never liked Chrissy, he guessed. Had never really liked anyone, probably. “That’s it,” he thought. His shoulders and neck were cramped from trying too hard for good posture, which he knew was important for confidence, bones, self-esteem, mood, attractiveness, etc. A young man wanted to sell Brian some drugs. Brian shook his head, and looked at the ground. The young man stayed to talk. He sat. He made some distinctions between psychologists and psychiatrists, and then complimented Brian’s teeth. “He says that to everyone,” Brian thought. Next, your teeth would be pulverized to a fine powder. “Thank you,” Brian said, and the young man left.

It had become very dark outside.

Brian stood and walked in some vague direction, into a bookstore.

He moved himself around the aisles. He tried not to look too lonely. He opened a book but could not concentrate. Everyone else, he felt, was on a choicer plane of existence. They all seemed very confident that the world was a good and auspicious place. Brian’s face had gone hot and severe. The clam-meat of his face. People could see. His neck tremored a little. That kind of inchoate weeping that would always happen to him if he stayed in public too long, it happened now.

“This is … unreasonable,” he thought.

He bought and ate a cookie the size of his hand. He felt like vomiting. He went out into the city. It seemed louder than before. Trucks the size of small buildings were coming consecutively down the street. A team of men were jackhammering the street. There was a group of drunken people with glossy heads.

Brian walked slowly around, then came to a stop. His mind went blank. Time moved around him, like a crowd. “Walk,” he thought. “Move, go.…”

He thought that he would see a movie, then.

He bought a ticket for 12:45 a.m. at the Union Square Theatre. He had one hour. He walked in a direction, but saw an acquaintance across the street and turned and walked in another direction.

From a deli, he bought a 16 oz. beer and a soy drink that was also a tea drink.

Outside, he made sure to look far into the distance. If an acquaintance confronted him, started questioning him, he would have no choice but to run away. He sat in a dark area of Union Square Park.

He drank his tea drink.

He looked absently at the label. “2000 % Vitamin C,” it said.

In the movie theatre there were a few other solitary people. Some had a kind of space-time enlightened gaze, a beatific vacancy about their eyes that made them look very confident, but in a bionic way, as if they were truly — scientifically — simultaneously in the future, at home, eating something with a large spoon. The others, including Brian, blinked a lot. After each blink their focus would be on a different area outside of their heads. They looked as if under attack, which was because they felt as if under attack.

Brian went into the bathroom and stood in a stall.

He locked the door. He took his beer out of his bag, looked at his beer, put his beer back in his bag. He stood there until a few minutes past the start-time of the movie. He splashed water to his face, left the bathroom, went in the theatre, and sat in the back row.

After a while, he took his beer out of his bag and opened it. The beer said, “Kuhchshhh.” It was tall, silvery, and cold. On the screen, a beautiful girl who was Natalie Portman was taking an aggressive interest in a depressed, monotone man whose mother had recently passed away.

Brian almost shouted, “Bullshit,” but was able to control himself.

“My hair is blowing in the wind,” said Natalie Portman, whose name was Sam.

Brian began to think, “If I were as beautiful as her …” He stopped himself and drank his beer. His face soon became warm. There was an asphyxiative pleasure to it, like a kind of choking or crying. His heart was beating fast. The movie was wide and calm on the screen. Cool air was coming down. Brian leaned back into his seat and put his feet up. There were moments when you were not afraid of anything anymore. These moments it became clear that all things were arbitrary, that everything was just made of atoms, or whatever, and therefore everything was, firstly, one same, connected thing, a kind of amorphous mass wherein areas of consciousness moved from place to same place — or maybe did not even move, but, because all places were the same, were just there . Guilt, fear, meaning, love, loneliness, death. These words, you realized, were all the same. Everything was all the same. There was what there was, and that was what all there was; there was you, and you were everything. These moments would last seconds, minutes, or maybe an hour, and they were euphoric. They could happen from reading, looking at a painting, from music — from any kind of art, really, or from witnessing or experiencing something startling or strange; but never from other people. These moments you could almost cry. Life was simply, obviously, and beautifully meaningless.

Brian in the theatre that night, drinking beer, felt this.

These moments would end, though, when you realized that all that amorphous mass stuff was, well — bullshit. Was good on paper, maybe, but in real life was impossible. Unlivable. Something only a philosopher, a paid one — a philosopher that received cash for what he or she did — would benefit from. Things weren’t connected. Not really. You were one person alive and your brain was encased inside a skull. There were other people out there. It took an effort to be connected. Some people were better at this than others. Some people were bad at it. Some people were so bad at it that they gave up.