Tao Lin - Bed

Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and expectant as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood — an inside ventilation, like a bacteria of ghosts — and it was sometime in the fall, before her 23rd birthday, that her heart, her small and weary core, neglected now for years, vanished a little, from the center out, took on the strange and hollowed heaviness of a weakly inflated balloon.

This wasn’t sadness — there were no feelings of desperation or disaster, nothing like depression with its one slowed-down realization of having been badly and untraceably misunderstood — but rather a plain, artless form of loneliness; something uninteresting, factual, and teachable, perhaps, to children or adults, with flashcards of household items (toothbrush, pillow), coloring books of fleeting, unaccompanied things (hailstones that melt midair; puddles formed and unseen and gone; illusions of friends in the periphery), and a few real-world assignments (post-nap trip to the pet store in the early, breezy evening; Halloween night asleep on the sofa; Saturday night dinner in the parking lot, looking through the windshield at the pizza buffet restaurant you just got take-out from).

“I don’t want to serve those guys,” Chelsea said at Denny’s to her manager Bernadette. “You do it please?” Around a person like Bernadette, who once said to a plate of pancakes she was going to fire it, then went around telling everyone, including patrons, about that—“I fired some pancakes earlier, so watch out”—Chelsea could get pleading and playful a bit; around most other people she just felt surreally retarded or else profoundly insane all the time.

“I’m going to fire you,” Bernadette said. “Wait. I’m going to promote you.”

“Then I can fire myself,” Chelsea said. “Yeah. I’ll just fire myself.” She’d get a job wearing a hot dog suit, roadside — dancing, losing weight, holding up a vaguely controversial sign: Juicy, tender, cheap; so eat me . Teenagers would drive by and assault her. “But yeah; they went to high school with me. But we pretended no one knew each other. They wouldn’t look at me. Even them two pretended they didn’t know each other. That’s how bad it got.”

“You take big head, then. The big-headed guy. I’ll do the losers you went to high school with.”

“I hate it when people call people losers,” Chelsea said.

“Look at me. I manage a chain restaurant that sells pancakes at night. I tell my boyfriend he’s a loser every day. I did that today. Who wants to succeed in life? No one.”

“Um, I’m a waitress at Denny’s, and you’re my manager. And you’re like one year older than me, and way more successful.” Though she knew while saying it that it wasn’t going to make much sense, she said it anyway, with a sort of conviction, even, because she was not good at functioning in real-time, especially when distracted, like she was now, by how tiny and beautiful Bernadette was, like a child, almost, whereas Chelsea herself was homelier, medium-sized, and, in an obscure way that she sometimes — usually after coffee — thought, but never really believed, might be mysterious and therefore attractive, disproportioned, like a vitamin-deficient, softly-mutated, childlike sort of adult. “Why are you calling that guy ‘big head’?” she said.

Bernadette moved toward Chelsea — who, as always, when approached, began like a blowfish to feel growing and more sensitive — and hugged her. “Calm down, girl,” Bernadette said, and something behind Chelsea’s ribs that had been swinging, black and heavy like a pendulum, swung a little more, then detached and fell away, and in the unoccupied moment that followed — it was one of those moments you could go away from and relax a little and then come back as how you yourself wanted to be, rather than what the world wanted you to be — Chelsea had the thought that Bernadette was a good person, and felt like she might cry, or at least say something. But Bernadette stepped back and Chelsea hesitated, then went to the big-headed man and looked at him, the secret reality of his skull, thinking that if it wasn’t so large he would’ve made more friends as a child, wouldn’t now be eating alone on a Friday night. She took his order, wandered around — always felt like she was ‘wandering around,’ even at work, which seemed wrong in some deep-brained way — served him, and, while seating an elderly couple, then, watched as her old high school classmates left without paying.

“Hey,” she said in back to Bernadette. “Those high school guys just ditched.”

Bernadette filled a soft drink and set it down. “Chase them,” she said. “Now’s your chance to scream at them. I’m serious. It’s an opportunity.” She pushed Chelsea toward the entrance, and Chelsea went there. “Call them names! It’ll feel good.”

Outside, they were across the parking lot, getting into a car, and Chelsea chased after them — vaguely, in a jog. She felt tired, but wanted to scream things. Maybe she should call them shitheads. She kind of wanted to wave at them. The air was warm and things were quiet, and she didn’t want to run anymore, but they’d think she was strange if she just stood there with a blank face — they’d say she stopped because of being too fat. She ran at the car and one of them put his head out a window and screamed something. His voice cracked. His mouth stayed open a moment and Chelsea looked for teeth, but there was just black space there, a hole on the face.

Back in Denny’s, Bernadette said she’d pay.

“I’ll pay,” Chelsea said. “They think I pretended I didn’t know them.”

“What are you talking about? I’ll pay.”

“Fine,” Chelsea said. “You pay.”

“I’ll pay half. But tell me where they live and we’ll vandalize their homes.”

“I don’t know them.”

“We’ll bury their mailbox in the neighbor’s yard,” Bernadette said. “This’ll be good. Causing destruction when it’s justified is good.” Chelsea’s mother left when Chelsea was in middle school. She had written a note, then one morning was standing by her car. She hadn’t ever smiled, really — they’d been a family of grinners and smirkers — but she did, that day, in the driveway, teeth white and glistening as something that in darkness would glow, and it made Chelsea, at the front doorway, smile, too; and she looked up and her dad was also smiling; and her mother drove away. It wasn’t so sad (except maybe in the way that all things are sad), as the three of them had never been close, but just mumbling and monosyllabic all the time, like an inwardly preoccupied people, distracted always by their own supposed alivenesses — how their wet hearts, placed there, behind the breezy hollows of the lungs, in the saunaish chest, warm and pressurized as a yawn, would sometimes (at night or in the afternoons, though sometimes over a few weeks, or seasons, even) feel tired and too hot, and then airy, and dry, and finally a little floating and skyward, as if wanting to leave, having realized, perhaps, wrongly or not, that life was elsewhere; or, rather, that their service was not to these lives, not to these single people, but to some history of people, already gone, faceless and sadder as some ocean in some night somewhere, not touching anything, or existing, even, but feelable, still, sometimes, cold and temperatureless, like a sudden awareness of time, of being actually alive; a sensation of falseness, really, of being lied to.

“You should be a bounty hunter, or something,” Chelsea said. “I don’t know.” In high school she got nervous around people, and spent too much time on the Internet. She began to stutter a little, and one Christmas her dad — who was a card-giver; had never bought Chelsea, or anyone, a present — ordered her tapes for social anxiety disorder and put them in her room. You were supposed to listen to them and do the assignments and become more outgoing and less afraid. Chelsea cried when she saw them. They didn’t talk about it. And though Chelsea listened carefully to all twenty tapes, and tried hard — making small talk with strangers, walking around in malls and making eye-contact with people, calling stores to practice her voice — nothing really changed, and she went to college in New York City, where sometimes, in bed and unsleepy, the rest of her life would quickly assemble and disassemble, as if some faraway eye had glimpsed the entire idea of her, by accident, and had not noticed, really, but subconsciously dismissed it, as an optical illusion; and where, most days, a keen, gray energy (this deadened sort of voltage — something of faux-sophistication, low-grade restlessness, and, in that she often had the urge to stop walking and curl against a building and sleep there and freeze to death, a passive-aggressive sort of suicidal despair) would move through her (though some afternoons around her, uncertainly, like she might be in the way, and then she’d just feel indistinct and hungry).