Bed

Nine, Ten

People got a bit careless that year. Band-aids were forgone, small wounds allowed to go a little out of control — to infect a bit. Jobs were quit. People woke early-evening or mid-afternoon, fisted ice cream bars, wandered from their homes — only a little bit depressed — and walked diagonally through parking lots. They felt no longer in the midst of things, but in the misty aftermath of things, the quaint and narcotic haze of what comes after. A haze in which nothing, they knew, could ever fully, truly, happen. Anything there was could only yearn for itself, at a distance, behind barricades, could only long for the real self of itself. The core of things — of love and life, of any simple feeling or thought — could no longer be experienced center-on, could no longer be thought of or felt directly, but only in trying, in tics and glimpses, in ways holographic and fleeing.

And so people stayed inside mostly. Some disappeared. Others called up their local papers, phoned in their own deaths and, next day, read their own obituaries with a strange, hollow sort of longing, a real but feeble passion for their alternate, dead selves. They sat nights in bathtubs, whistling, blow-drying their hair—taking that risk. They began exploring their own houses. Moving things around and touching stuff, as they had begun to sense that there was something with them, unseen and poignant, something slightly alive and, they suspected, relevant, inside the walls or behind the furniture, a thing cloaked and shadowy that approached, in angles, and then vanished—their own lives, they came to realize. It was their own lives, living with them, playing games, tag and hide-and-seek, and — having hid somewhere good, somewhere unfindable, years ago probably — stubborn, wanting to be found, needing that resolution, but just rotting there, then, in whatever godforsaken hiding spot, like some mean, oversweet piece of fruit, spurned, finally, to a crisp — an apple chip.

In the oceans, sea life grew bold. Sharks leapt into boats, snarling, leapt out. Tuna fish matured to the size of small whales, and packs of seals moved inland, taking the back roads. All along the coasts were suicides, rare and wintry specimens — narwhal, whale sharks, oarfish — beaching themselves, rolling up far (too far, people said), sliding onto the grassier sands, scooting up against the beachfront hotels, the Slurpy huts.

At Cocoa Beach, there was the oversized squid. It was early summer and Florida, and the squid washed smoothly ashore — forty-feet long and pink-flecked — in one extra-foamy wave.

“Architeuthis dux,” people said. “The giant squid.” They were knowledgeable. They had their patterned towels, their wine coolers, and they moved down the beach in a migratory trudge. “First the toe thing, the dog thing,” said one woman, looking around, “last week the toaster, after that the cow, then the ticks, the little apocalypse, the parking lot with the political skater punks, now this squid thing, this squid … thing.”

Her face had gotten red and she lightly slapped it a few times, after which she looked a little better — mollified.

Jed, his dad, and his friend LJ were there. LJ was a girl and she and Jed were nine.

“That’s interesting,” Jed’s dad said. But he wouldn’t look at it—the squid. The three of them had a beach ball, were kicking it, and Jed’s dad just kept kicking. He didn’t know if he was ready for something like that, a thing of such size and agony. He might get obsessed — he was prone to — and also he had lately been practicing, earnestly, a kind of halfhearted Buddhism, with timeouts and the occasional off-day. He was to destroy almost all desires. He wasn’t ready yet to destroy all desires. It scared him, actually, the idea of having no desires — as that in itself was a desire. Or was it? He didn’t know, that was the thing. He was unemployed.

“Why don’t we look at it from closer?” Jed said quietly. He would go himself, but it could be a trick — Venus flytrap or something. He didn’t want to be mauled, not like some deer.

They kept kicking the beach ball.

Between kicks they had to stand there and wait, as the ball, once in the air, seemed to slow down, to take its time up there, enjoying the view.

The sky was blue until you looked into it, then you saw it was more of a lightly polluted gray.

“It’s just a giant squid,” LJ said after a while, having zoned out for some time. She now could see it looming, burrito-y and soulless, in her periphery. “It’s just a giant squid,” she said again. She kicked the ball, and then felt stupid. It’s just a giant squid. What did she mean? She was just a little girl, she knew. “Wait,” she whispered. She blushed. A wind came at her face and she had to blink a few times. A wave came, took back the squid, and deposited in its place a clump of dead jellyfish — the squashed, opaque bags of them like mangled eyes, flayed and beaten, swollen to the size of heads.

Another wave came and put the squid back on the beach.

That night Jed slept over at one of LJ’s houses — she had two. They both dreamt of giant squid.

In Jed’s dream he was a tiny shrimp, a krill. He floated in blackness and was confused. A giant squid went by slowly. Jed saw the eye, which was jazzy and glowing, like a TV and a moon both. He whispered in his krill’s head, hi. He then felt such a crushing kind of weakness that he began to tremble, as if he might soon cease to exist.

In LJ’s dream she kept saying, “It’s just a giant squid.” Each time she said it, she felt a little stupider. Finally, she started to cry. Jed kept kicking the beach ball, but only at his dad, except once at the giant squid; the ball bounced smoothly off, then back to Jed, who kicked it smoothly to his dad. At one point, also, the squid mimicked LJ — unkindly, she thought. It’s just a giant squid, it said. Then it made a noise. LJ was taken aback because the noise was very unsquidlike.

In the morning, the squid was on the local news.

“Lewly,” LJ’s mom said to LJ. “You went here yesterday?” She looked at Jed. She was in love with Jed’s dad. They were both divorced from unmemorable people, and both had high metabolism. They had dated each other awhile — after she won the lottery a few years back, moved from Canada to Florida, and bought two houses — but it hadn’t worked out. “Jed,” she said. She pointed at the TV, which had an aura of rinky-dink, somehow-charming totalitarianism. “You were here yesterday. Don’t lie to me.”

Jed nodded.

“Veteran seafarers have measured them at 200 feet,” the TV was saying. It showed a veteran seafarer, and the newsman grinned. The screen changed. It showed a prostrate man, a school bus, two giant squid — one 60 feet, one 200 feet. At the bottom, it had a row of exclamation marks.

“I like exclamation marks,” LJ said. She wasn’t so sure, though. She only liked them sometimes. “I don’t like exclamation marks,” she said. She shook her head. “No,” she said. Things could bother LJ in this way. Both she and her mom were readers. Her mom claimed to read not for pleasure, but to confirm her worldview. LJ herself had a questionable way of reading. She would flip through, read a sentence here, a sentence there. If she didn’t like a sentence, she’d pick another. Finally, she’d feel done, and then would look, with confidence, at the cover, to make up her own story. She had read much of Vonnegut, and a third of Kafka.

“Nova Scotia,” Jed said slowly. The night before, he and LJ had looked up giant squid on the internet. “Ink sac,” he mumbled.

“Those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “200 feet! Those damn squid!” She was standing. She stood when watching TV, did stretching exercises, sometimes touched the TV screen — usually with a middle finger. “What do they think they’re doing? Jed, what are they doing?”

Things could do what they wanted, Jed thought. “They’re just growing,” he said very quietly.

“You could feed a small country with one of those squid,” LJ’s mom said. “For a week. I bet you could do that. Maybe not. A small town then. A small, Welsh village.” She looked at LJ and smiled, then back at the TV. “You’ve got to be specific,” she said. “A small, seventeenth-century, Welsh village.”

LJ was staring off to the side, eyes unfocused. She was thinking about Nova Scotia. She liked Nova Scotia. Sometimes, in bed, under the covers and comfy, she’d think that she felt very Nova Scotic. She had dreamed, once, of dining Italian with Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia had a small mouth, was a wind-blown arctic wolf, tall and groomed and soft-spoken, and had ordered something with eggplant. LJ had read a book on Nova Scotia.

The three of them stood there, in front of the TV, which had moved on — it had a lot to get to — was now warning of deadly substances that sometimes dripped from rain gutters. A man had been killed, and some animals, allegedly. It showed a photo of a man, a dog, and a hamster that looked, for a hamster, alarmingly distraught.

“My god!” LJ’s mom said. “That hamster!” She loved TV. She really did. TV excited her, rejuvenated her, entered her like something kindhearted and many-handed that held her up, then hardened into a kind of scaffolding. The TV had segued into hamsters and was showing a slideshow of them, each one badly deranged in the face. It kept showing more and more hamsters, and LJ’s mom began to feel sad. As a child, she had one afternoon been diagnosed—condemned, she sometimes thought — with Asperger Syndrome, social anxiety disorder, bipolar disease, and a few other things. It was a turning point, that day, she knew. Her life had been going in one direction, cruising, windows down, but then had turned, taken a left through a redlight, gunned it; had later run out of gas in a kind of desert outside of town. These days she was staying inside mostly. She had won the lottery, moved from Canada to Florida. She was writing a book, actually.

“What if you could Google your own house?” Jed murmured. “If you lost your keys or TV remote you could just Google it.”

LJ’s mom looked at Jed. She walked to him. “What did you just say? Can you repeat that?” She leaned down and carefully moved her ear to Jed’s mouth.

Jed concentrated on loudness and clarity, and then repeated what he had said.

LJ’s mom stood and smiled. “Oh, Jed,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Oh,” Jed said. It annoyed him that people couldn’t ever understand what he was saying. He looked around for LJ, who had wandered into the kitchen.

LJ’s mom patted Jed’s head and looked outside, through her sliding glass door. The swimming pool was covered — you couldn’t see the water — with mulch, moss, and leaves; it looked very much like a swamp, actually, had large, cage-y branches floating in it, as a tree had fallen through the screen some time ago and LJ’s mom had liked that, the idea of it, so had left it there. There was a squirrel, now, by the pool, standing motionless in that clicked-in way of the lower animals. The sun shone brightly on its handsome face. LJ’s mom stared out there, feeling a bit blighted, here inside, somehow cheated. She was thinking that if she married Jed’s dad and LJ became Jed’s girlfriend, how wonderful that would be. They’d all live together in a little house somewhere, with a shiny roof, atop some green hill. It would be in New Zealand, she thought, feeling precarious, or else Wisconsin.

Jed’s dad began to learn, that year, to enjoy waiting; there was something true and mastered about it, he knew — the casual excellence of waiting — that could induce you, lead you focusedly deathward, like a drug addiction, but without the frenzy or desperation. He felt, at times, that he could wait for anything — a month, a year, a thousand years — for love or friendship or happiness. He could exist like a theory in the place before the real place, could float there in the pigeon flight of pre-ambition, in a kind of gliding, thinking only small things and feeling only small emotions, pre-pathos, so that you could fit your entire life easily in your head, and carry it around, like a pleasant memory from some wholesome childhood, yours or someone else’s, it didn’t matter.

“LJ said Jed was being held back a year,” LJ’s mom said to Jed’s dad on the phone. Jed’s dad had liked her at first. They had gone to the movies, bowling, arcades with the kids. But over time he had seen something selfish in her, something a bit insane. She could be jealous and unreasonable. One night she had thrown a potted plant. And though he now sometimes suspected that she was a good, caring, sane person, that it was he who just hadn’t tried hard enough, who wasn’t accommodating and tolerant enough, he had stopped calling her, then, after the potted plant. But she had kept calling him.

“You shouldn’t let that happen,” LJ’s mom said. “You can’t, responsibility-wise.”

“It’s okay,” Jed’s dad said. In the elementary schools, they had begun to hold back entire ostensible playgroups of children, bunches of them, together, like something tethered and collective-brained. Jed and everyone who seemed to sit nearby this one big-headed kid, seven of them, all the foreboding, quiet kids — you could never tell if they were slow or gifted — were to repeat the fourth grade.

“It’s not okay,” LJ’s mom said. “I know Jed. Jed’s smart. You know this. They, though — they don’t know this. It’s just a misunderstanding, to be corrected.” She began to worry that Jed and LJ would drift apart if LJ advanced to the fifth grade without Jed. “What are you going to do?”

“People are different,” Jed’s dad said. “I think …” He didn’t think anything, but began to feel a little as if everything was futile.

“Have them test him. This isn’t right. I mean — repeating the fourth grade, it can do things. I knew this girl, she was held back. After that she kept getting held back. They got carried away. They pulled her all the way back to Kindergarten, then expelled her from the public school system. Her parents had to pay a series of fines to get her into pre-school.” She laughed a little. Beakers were going through her mind; a hand, calmly placing beakers onto a resplendent oak table. She didn’t know why. Probably something from TV. She had, as usual, taken a caffeine pill half-an-hour before calling Jed’s dad. “It’s strange,” she said, “how they don’t care anymore. People, I mean. Me too. All of us. We’ve no illusions anymore. People need illusions. Do you know what I’m talking about? What do you think?”

“It’s not bad,” Jed’s dad said. He hesitated these days to say anything about the world, to have any opinions or beliefs. Anything spoken was a lie, he knew — anything in the mind was a lie. What was out there was what was true. Once your mind got involved, everything turned to lies. You had just to exist, to be passive and apathetic as a dead thing in the sea, as there was a private, conspiratorial truth to just not doing anything, a kind of coming-to-terms, a loneliness turned contentment, a sort of friendliness towards oneself. Or was there? When was something completely made up and when was something only a little made up? Jed’s dad knew never to trust himself. Think too hard, he knew, and you found that there was no point in saying, thinking, or doing anything.

“It is, though,” LJ’s mom said. “It’s bad. You know it. No one’s planning for the long-term anymore. The generation before us, they said things. They said …” She couldn’t think of anything. “They said a lot of things. Now the Earth is — let’s face it — doomed. I saw on TV, they’re rethinking one of the smaller continents as a garbage dump, reinterpreting it, they said. I mean, wow. And what are they doing with the moon? Shouldn’t we be living on the moon in those space domes by now? Scouting the outer planets? I mean, what year is this? What is the government doing these days? NASA, whatever?” She thought briefly about the Ort Cloud — it was coming, but what was it? “Why don’t you come over?” she said. “I’ll make food. I have new recipes. I’ll cook.” She wanted to talk, just wanted to keep on talking, for hours, forever, wanted to argue and discuss things, any kind of thing, as she couldn’t talk to anyone like this, only to kids, and to Jed’s dad — with other people she just felt alone in the world and nauseated — but he wasn’t saying anything.

“Next week then,” LJ’s mom said. “Saturday. Saturday, okay? Jed and everyone.”

“Okay,” Jed’s dad said. “We’ll see.”

They were in their late twenties, had both married young, to early girl and boyfriends, were both aware of the basic eschatology of things, though in different ways. Jed’s dad could sense the end of life as a place you got to, someplace far away and separate, like Hawaii; could sometimes see it, that it was a nice place, with trees, a king-size bed. LJ’s mom couldn’t sense that place. Hers was the view — the experience — that every moment was a little death, that you were never really alive, because you were always dying. And in this way she sensed, instead, everything swirling around her, felt the slow-fast blur of each moment, the raking of it, the future grinding through her, to the past, and crashing, at times, like a truck, through her skull. Sometimes, walking around the house or doing whatever, she would suddenly feel smashed in the head, with sadness or disbelief or some other disorienting method. Days would go by, then, weeks or months, before she recovered.

The next Saturday Jed’s dad decided to stay home. He sent Jed over to LJ’s. LJ’s mom was quiet. Her face glowed lightly with make-up. They had bok choy with garlic sauce, broiled zucchini, and smoothies. LJ’s mom had set up a table in the driveway, and that’s where they ate. LJ had one piece of zucchini and she put some garlic sauce on it. She was full after that. She couldn’t finish her peach smoothie and was a little embarrassed. “It’s okay,” LJ’s mom said, and petted LJ’s head. After eating, they watched Titanic, the recent remake of it, animated and not so epic, from the point-of-view of an indignant family of bottom-dwelling fish, made further indignant by the leveling of their known world by the Titanic. Jed went home and LJ went to sleep. LJ’s mom cleaned up. She watched Titanic again, wept briefly at the end — where the father fish is mutilated by a plastic six-pack ring — and then went across the street, to her other house.

She hadn’t furnished it yet. The electricity wasn’t working. It was dark and warm and she went soberly through each of the rooms, then upstairs. She took off her sandals. The carpet was nice and thick and soft. “House two,” she said to her feet. It amused her only a little to own two houses. Not nearly enough, she felt. It should amuse her more. She went to a window, looked across the street at her other house. She watched her own front door. She wanted to see herself come out from there, come skipping across the street; wanted to see what she looked like from above; and wanted, then, to meet herself on the stairs — surprise herself — and give herself a hug. “Susan,” she shouted. “Susan Anne Michaels! What are you doing …” She turned and looked at the room she was in. She did a cartwheel across it, into a sit, and sat there, Indian-style. Through the window she could see the space-dried clay of the moon, blanched as deep white space, blemished as a coin. She stood and went downstairs. She heard some noises, became frightened, and then ran home, to her other house.

She lay on her gigantic bed, stomach-down and splay-limbed. She felt plain. She thought of getting drunk or something. Maybe she should dye her hair. She began to adjust the hardness of her mattress; she had bought one of those mattresses. There was a fact out there, she felt, that she didn’t know. This was a fact that you had to know in order to live. There was a knowing to being alive, and she just didn’t know. She closed her eyes, listened to the little mattress motor, working hard, and began to think on her life, tracing it forward and back in a squiggled, redundant way. She thought, without much conviction, that if she concentrated hard enough, if she started, carefully, in her childhood and moved forward, gaining momentum, then when she reached the present moment she might be able to turn it, her life, like a pipe cleaner, might be able to twist it, attitudinally, in some new and pleasant direction.

“Well do it then,” she said loudly, in her head.

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.

LJ began to wrap her hair around her neck. She had very thin smoke-brown hair. She hadn’t been mentally focused for a while now. She had been thinking about … she couldn’t remember what.

“Don’t,” Jason said. “You’ll choke to death.” He went to unwrap LJ’s hair from her neck.

They stopped walking. LJ let Jason unwrap her hair some. What was happening, she thought. She twisted away and fell. She sat and looked at the top of the grass covering the rest of the field, swaying light green and flaxen, a failed and reoriented sea. “You’ll choke to death on a stiff Chinese dumpling,” she said. She grinned at Jed, who was looking down and doing a kind of sideways walk — shifting, it seemed. LJ didn’t understand it.

Jason put a hand out as if to help LJ up. “A stiff Chinese dumpling,” he said. “You don’t know what that means.” He was pointing now. With his other hand he took out an apple and began to nibble at it. “You can’t act this way. You won’t,” he said. “When you know the world ended already you’ll be different.”

“That’s the most meaningless thing I’ve ever heard,” LJ said. She sat Indian-style. She widened her eyes and looked up at Jason and shouted, “What are you looking at?” Her voice was normally small; louder, now, it sounded a little like singing. Jason’s face turned red, and LJ felt bad, and blushed. She had thought she was just playing. She didn’t know.

“A dumpling,” Jason said. “That’s bad. That’s racist.” He threw his apple into the air and it went into the sky. He ran towards McDonald’s.

A cloud moved and blocked the sun.

“Aren’t you afraid of snakes?” Jed said. He spun in place, 360 degrees. One time LJ whispered in his ear that she liked him and he didn’t believe her.

Snakes, LJ thought. She didn’t know what that was. She remembered the squid. She would probably have to apologize soon. It’s just a giant squid. She wasn’t thinking when she said that. They should have gone and looked at it, and sat on it. “Gigantic squid are good,” she said, and lay back into the grass. Jed felt afraid and went and looked down at her.

LJ’s eyes were slowly moving. She was looking at the air, which seemed grayish, a little outer-space-y — but bright, too, because of the little dusts of light that were traveling through it. Her mom had told her that there wasn’t ever any reason to worry about anything or be sad. Her mom had said that everything you ever did was a result of the thing that happened right before, because of cause and effect, and that that went on forever, going back, so that there wasn’t ever a first thing, and there wouldn’t ever be a last thing, and in between there was just the middle, and there you were, always, right in the middle, and you couldn’t stop or change anything — so you didn’t have to.

“It’s dangerous. You’re surrounded,” Jed said, very slowly, concentrating as he spoke. “There are bugs on the ground. It’s dirty.”

LJ began to roll in the grass. She giggled, quietly and forcelessly — the sound of it like something you heard in your head after the first sound from outside.

“Don’t!” Jed said. He thought of anthills and Indian arrowheads. “Stop that!” He felt a little dizzy, being so loud. LJ stood and quickly hugged Jed, then stepped back. “You’re funny,” she said. “You’re weird.” She was smiling.

Jed looked at her. His heart felt tiny and slippery — and sealed, like a marble, like it wouldn’t ever get any bigger, wouldn’t ever be able to pump enough blood. LJ pushed Jed’s shoulder and ran away. After about twenty feet, she stopped and turned around. She took out a bonnet from her pocket and put it on her head. It was a black bonnet. She grinned and widened her eyes. She looked surprised. How pretty she was, it made Jed feel — not good or bad, but just feel, like it was something in him that was opening up, something new and secret, that only he would ever know, and he could fill it with sadness or longing or whatever, but here it was, opening centerless and vacuum-y as something attempting itself, and it would be over soon, and nothing, then, really, would’ve happened.

LJ ran back towards the wall, and it began to rain.

They both had colds for awhile. LJ’s mom phoned Jed’s dad, talked about colds and the flu. Jed’s dad wasn’t saying anything and after a while LJ’s mom said, “What am I even doing right now?” She waited a second then hung up, and didn’t call again until late in July, on a hot Sunday night; Jed answered.

“I’m drunk,” she said, “I’m doing a hundred ten on the highway.”

“LJ?” Jed said. He knew it wasn’t LJ.

“Jed. Oh Jed,” LJ’s mom said. “What’s going to happen to you?”

Jed’s dad picked up on another line. Jed went into his room and sat on the carpet. He was frightened. What was going to happen to him? He took out some computer game magazines and looked at them, but couldn’t concentrate.

“Think about LJ,” Jed’s dad said to LJ’s mom. “Your daughter LJ. Your family.”

“It doesn’t matter,” LJ’s mom said. “That’s nothing, that’s nothingness. I don’t care. What does a nihilist do? That’s what I am, a nihilist. I don’t know things. There isn’t one thing out there that I know. Oh, now what. Now what! My car is shaking, my god, what kind of a car shakes. I’m going ninety, I’m slowing down.” She was only a little drunk. Actually, she had had just one beer. But she hadn’t slept. She hadn’t been sleeping at all.

“I’ll talk to you,” Jed’s dad said. He just didn’t want to be in a relationship. He wanted to live ethereally, intrinsically, not doing anything — like a plant. He just didn’t find people appealing anymore, not LJ’s mom at least. He liked the monosyllabic, deadpan type, he knew, the type that withdrew when angered, became quiet and a bit endearing in the face. LJ’s mom was melodramatic and threw things — large things — when angered. “Just park on the grass,” he said. “Slow down. I’ll come — pick you up. We’ll talk. What about your book?” He knew that he should talk smoother, use more conjunctions — not be so monotone, so funereal. He shouldn’t have brought up the book.

“Yeah, talk about my book!” LJ’s mom shouted. “When have you ever fucking wanted to talk about my book! Okay. Well then! I’m slowing down. Lewly J. Oh god, what am I doing? I won the lottery, moved to Florida. What will I do tomorrow? What will I do once I’m dead? What will happen to us?”

“It will—” He didn’t want to say that it would all be okay, that things would get better. Things would get worse, he knew. There would be old age, cancer, arthritis, global warming, tidal waves, acid rain — life was just a tiny, moonstruck thing, really, and the world was just a small, failed place. “We’ll go out,” he said. He was bad at optimism, at invigoration, at whatever this was right now. “You, me, Jed. LJ. We’ll go to the beach.”

“Yeah right!” LJ’s mom shouted. “The beach,” she screamed. “What bullshit! You think you’re so nice. Sitting at home or whatever.” She paused. She was crying now. “What have you sacrificed? What have you ever done for someone else? Why can’t you—”

Jed’s dad didn’t say anything — he knew she was maybe right, that if he tried hard enough, he could love her, and so why didn’t he? If you had to try hard in life not to hurt people, not to harm others, didn’t you also have to try hard to help people? To love people? Were there limits to this? Some threshold? Could you ever do enough? — and she cried a little and then hung up.

Later that night, she drove onto Jed’s dad’s yard and fell out of her car. Jed’s dad woke up and came outside. She was lying on the grass. She smelled of alcohol and perfume. “This is just a weird dream,” she was saying. “This is all just a weird dream.” She was rolling and she rolled onto the sidewalk, scraping herself, and then was stopped by the mailbox. Jed’s dad pulled her up and she fell back down. “Dream film doesn’t develop in the real world,” she shouted. She put her face into the grass.

“Yes it does,” Jed’s dad said. It seemed to him, then, true — it did develop in the real world, though maybe at a special store. It was 4 a.m.

“It doesn’t,” she said, a bit wanly. “This is … a weird dream.” People had their sprinklers on. The air was a bit misty, and there was a little fog.

“It’s not a dream,” Jed’s dad said. In his periphery, he could see things, vague and kind of buoyily floating about — mailboxes, garbage cans, recycling bins. It was trash night. “This is real,” he said. He looked for the moon, but saw only trees — the trees of his yard, other people’s yards; the leaves pale and spurned as freshwater shells. Something large had been flying about his face and he now slapped it blindly out of the air; against his open palm it made a tiny noise that stayed in his head, pinging there arhythmically, distortedly loud.

LJ’s mom had begun to put grass into her mouth. “I can do anything,” she said. “This is just a stupid dream.” She passed out, then woke up. She began quietly to cry. She looked up at Jed’s dad, opened her mouth, covered her mouth, crawled to a stand, and then ran away. In the morning, her car was still in Jed’s dad’s yard. The inside of the car was very clean. There was a pink bottle of perfume super-glued to the dashboard. Jed’s dad drove it back to her house and walked home. Many of the houses, he noticed, had “For Sale” signs up. Every house, it seemed. One house had been painted a deep, dark, transmogrified green. Another house looked really strange, somehow fundamentally different from all the others. A basketball was rolling down the middle of the street and a boy ran out of a house, picked it up, punted it into someone’s side yard. Jed’s dad began to run after that. As he ran, everything around his head quaked. He ran home.

School began. Jed was held back in the fourth grade, as planned. He didn’t see LJ anymore. She seemed always to be on some kind of fieldtrip. Her fifth-grade teacher encouragd his students to doodle in their textbooks, to talk to their textbooks, to talk back to their textbooks. Homework was mostly pun-orientated. One assignment, a fill-in-the-blank type thing, involved Rambo, Rimbaud, and a ram named Bo. “The world has come and gone,” LJ’s teacher said, quoting his own poetry. “Now is only what is left. A time for leaving, and for cake. The wash and foam of last things, we’ll float it out. We’ll eat fancy cake. We’ll be the wave that goes, and goes, and goes a little more, and then doesn’t go anymore.” Then he took the class on another fieldtrip.

Nationwide there was, at first, a time of increased lawmaking. Things were generally banned. There was no trust anywhere, and nothing was acceptable. A bill outlawing love was reportedly bring drafted. There was a law that, by accident, outlawed itself. Anything there was had a law for or against it. People, having paid fines for whatever infraction, went home, more inspired than outraged, and wrote their own laws, striving for originality and footnotes. “Laissez-faire,” they said stupidly. “Denouement.” Other things were said. As more things were said, people became gradually wittier. “Anarchy, apathy, and—” they said. “The three A’s.”

There was a general drift towards the arbitrary view, the solipsistic and apolitical.

Laws, then, began to be lifted. The drinking age was lowered, then gotten rid of. It became okay to break any of the smaller laws. A large region of the nation acquiesced to some ancient aphorism espousing playfulness. It was shown on TV how you might empty a package of Skittles plus all your prescription pills into a fanny pack and take one mystery pill every four to six hours. People grew amused. Cops covered their helmets and firearms — like guitars — with ironic stickers. “Mitochondria,” said the stickers. “Bernoulli’s law.” Helicopter pilots, having discovered that they could do tricks, took to the skies in waves, cityward from the suburbs, spinning, diving, circling tall buildings — enacting any scene from any movie. When a mistake in copyediting sent an oil liner to the Galapagos Islands, they left it there, crew and all, calling it innovative — a kind of achievement.

Still, it was not all fun and games. That was just the mainstream. More people, actually, were staying home, grim-faced and too well-read. More people were going to bed with a shooting sense of desperation. There were suicides in the night, feral screams from the wall-packed insides of houses. Wolves and bears and other animals, homeless and fed-up, began to use the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings — any kind of infrastructure. Families of possums moved onto front porches, chewed through to living rooms, and cut people off in their own hallways. August, September, many people simply ceased to exist, seemed to be there one day but not the next, but then there they were again, the day after, walking the dog, for an hour, after which they disappeared again, completely—murdered, some said, at last, as it was annoying, this back and forth of being there, not being there.

TV, though, was booming. It was said that there now more channels than there were people. That when you died, when you passed on, it was into TV. “TV for president,” people muttered, sincerely, at their own flat-faced, blueblazing TVs.

LJ’s mom herself no longer watched TV. She bought stuff for LJ — literature, stuffed animals, a typewriter — though LJ was rarely ever home anymore, seemed always to be at school. LJ’s mom actually was not doing too good. She had lost it a bit. She had purchased a vacuum cleaner the size of a lawnmower, the idea of which depressed her enormously. She felt constantly impending. The daily experience of things thwarted her, like some theory of quantum mechanics she just could not understand. She took to eating candy and became sallow and uninspired in the face, like a curry dish. She bought yet more things. People from far away — from TV, she felt — came daily to her front door, sold her stuff. Nights, she lay awake, waiting for morning, for the sun to come and crash her brightly along, which it would do. She sometimes thought dizzily of packing up, taking a trip, entering into TV… or some other place, any yet unsquandered world, as there must be, she felt, somewhere one could go; that if this world was ruined, if one messed up, there would be another place, sympathetic and conciliatory, to leave towards.

The first day of October, a group of her relatives flew down from Canada — six or seven grown-ups — and lived with her. She and LJ moved into the house across the street, but more relatives came, friends of relatives, and soon both houses were filled; the day before Halloween, then, they all flew back to Canada, the relatives, the friends — everyone — including, by force of association or by lack of anything else to do, LJ and her mom.

On Halloween Jed sat on the sofa feeling sorry for himself. He had made plans with LJ. They had not seen each other for a long time, and were to trick-or-treat together, and then stay overnight at Jed’s house.

Jed began, very quietly, to cry.

Jed’s dad had made squid suits for Jed and LJ — they were going to be children giant squid — and Jed, finally, put his on and fell asleep on the sofa, laid across his dad’s lap.

In the morning Jed’s lung collapsed. It was spontaneous, the nurses said, just happened sometimes — maybe because of stress — and was called pneumothorax, all of which sounded, to Jed’s dad, a little absurd, a little made up.

A week later, out of the hospital, Jed’s lung collapsed again. After that, it happened again. On the third time, they did surgery. Each time, also, they made a slit in Jed’s side, between two ribs, held down his body, and forced in a plastic tube, which was connected to a suction machine. The second time, the tube had a point at the end of it — a newer model — and they pushed it in too far, so that it almost pierced through to the other lung. After each chest-tube procedure, Jed would feel lucid, and invulnerable, almost, but also inappreciable, like something momentary and undetectable, and though he wouldn’t remember crying, his face would feel hot and wet and open-pored.

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.