Tao Lin: Bed

The mom text messages Mattie, “Just saw a reporter blown away by wind on TV.” She emails Paul, “This morning I yelled ‘scumbag’ and the dogs came running from their rooms with eyes so big, anticipating, they must think scumbag is something delicious.”

The apricot poodle is found to have diabetes. The mom is to inject her with insulin twice daily, which goes okay for a while, until one morning, when the apricot poodle is dead. The mom has been injecting her with air instead of insulin. She buries the dead poodle in the backyard. She carries around the other poodle — who can barely see anymore and sometimes walks into walls — the rest of that day and forgets to feed him.

The prison doctor one day says that the dad’s kidney is engorged, but it turns out to be nothing.

For a year, no one hears from Paul. Then they hear from Paul. He claims to have lived in Canada for some time. He has read a book called “Into The Wild,” in which a boy graduates college, donates his money to OXFAM, wanders the country alone, hitchhikes into Alaska, writes in his journal that happiness is only real when shared, and, wrapped in a sleeping bag, then, inside an abandoned bus, nearby a frozen river, dies. It’s a non-fiction book and Paul recommends it.

The dad is released.

The remaining poodle has begun to twitch. He has cataracts and his gums bleed. He stops eating. Mattie flies home. They broil a pork chop and set it in front of the poodle. The pork chop smells good. It is hot at first but quickly turns cold. The poodle looks at it but does not move.

They all, except Paul, whose plane is delayed, bring the poodle to the pet hospital and have it put to sleep.

Paul arrives in the night, by taxi. He has gained more weight. He looks generally less effective, as a person. He has a friend with him, Christine, who looks worried, and keeps touching her hair.

The cruise is underbooked and overstaffed. It has the casually terminal feel of a nice retirement home — something of zoo-animal complacency and over-the-counter drug proliferation. The railings and walls are clean and shiny, but in an enforced and afflicted way that seems a little sarcastic.

Still, the food is excellent and the passengers are all very happy.

The staff is inspiriting and Filipino.

At dinner, Christine sits alone at a table on the other side of the dining room. She insists on this, says because she isn’t part of the family. She eats slowly and carefully — in open view of the family’s table — with her face down, and worried. No one seems to know how or when she bought a ticket.

The next day, there is a lunch buffet on the sun deck.

“Let’s take five minutes before we eat to think about death,” says the dad. They are seated adjacent the pool, which is covered, for now, with a gleaming white tarp. “What it is. How to defeat it. Strategies, options. What are we dealing with? After, we’ll share.”

The mom likes this about the dad. As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls. That same day, sitting on the monkeybars, she also had an idea for a movie — a mystery/horror movie. Someone would wake one morning and find that their pillow had been replaced with a dismembered torso!

“Okay,” says the dad. He points at Christine. “You first.”

“Death is a toad,” Christine says loudly. She makes a defeated face. “A toad … in outer space. It has a cape.” She opens her mouth. She seems stunned. “Besides the cape, it’s a normal toad.”

The dad looks at the mom.

“Death is the end of the dream,” says the mom. She blinks. She enunciates carefully. “When you wake up finally, you find that there was nothing real after all.” She brings her fruit punch to her mouth, looks down into it, and sips.

“Death is the plural of deaf,” says Paul. “It’s when everything goes deaf.”

“Oh,” says Christine. She stands up, sits back down.

“Death is an emotion outside all the other emotions,” Mattie says, looking at Christine, who has a worried expression on her face. “A comet, blackblue, fast as ice.” She is quoting one of her poems. The next line is a non-sequitur, the men look two inches into my forehead , as are the next couple of lines, i ask for no receipt / but am given a receipt / forced to take it home / unfurl it / like a scroll / staple a wall to it . There are more lines, a rant on the bronze dirtiness of pennies. It is a long poem. Mattie skips to the end. “Death is a highly polished thought.” She feels dazed and shy and occult.

“Is that one of your poems?” says the mom. She smiles.

Mattie nods carefully. There were more lines, actually, she now remembers, life is the sarcastic joke of death / and death is the sarcastic mouth that eats the ironic food / the organic water / the life that fills with teeth / the pecans you like, the nuts / the hardened brains of smaller animals . It just kept going, that poem.

“Death is the end of the fear of death,” says the dad. “To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.”

They arrive at port in the Bahamas. There are five other gigantic cruise ships. There is the sun-toned city of Nassau, with its conch divers, horse-drawn carriages, cool-black men and women — all in view, yards away — but the tourists are funneled onto a ferry and taken to some other island, where there is a buffet, a pavilion, a long, pragmatic beach, and an inner-tube hut.

They sit facing the ocean. Christine sits straight-backed on the edge of a lounge chair. Mattie lies on an adjacent lounge chair. Paul and the dad are on the pier — there is a low, kid-sized pier — observing some fish. The mom is standing back, on a grassy area, drinking a tropical drink. She is thinking about in her dream, when she was swimming. It was here. Was it here?

“Why are you worried?” Mattie asks Christine. “You seem worried, I mean.”

“I’m …” Christine touches the back of her hand. “The sky … it begins immediately off of our skin. It goes forever, past the stars. Anything beyond can reach down, grab us, pull us off the planet.”

“You’re just improvising, aren’t you?” says Mattie. “When you talk. Each moment, you’re just making up stuff. I mean, that’s what we all do, I guess. I’m not critiquing.” She looks at Christine. A lot of time seems to pass. “It’s okay, It’s good, I like what you say; the toad thing. I’m not attacking. No; not at all.”

Christine stands abruptly up. Her chair makes a noise. She falls to the sand and stands back up. “I’m …” she says. She points wanly in some direction, then goes there, touching her hair and pointing.

That night, they are taken to a hotel that is also a casino and a fish aquarium. There is one wall that is a fish tank of only piranhas. They are the color of mangoes and have flat, koala noses. They all face in one direction, and are all very still, except for a few up top that tremble and look a bit anxious.

“Where’s Christine?” asks the mom. Paul shrugs. No one seems to know. They don’t dwell on it. They play roulette. Paul later says, “Christine told me, she said, ‘I’m not sure, but I might be disappearing into the islands of the Bahamas.’ If anyone’s wondering about that.”