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A NONLINEAR PROCESS: ON CHANGE IN TAO LIN’s LEAVE SOCIETY by Alan Rossi

October 28, 2021

Tao Lin’s new novel, Leave Society, is a book that embodies what it means to mindfully evolve one’s consciousness while also acknowledging that one’s individuality is tied to a sea of consciousness, myriad beings all evolving toward some unknown destination, what the main character in the novel, Li, might term “the mystery” or possibly “the imagination.” Leave Society is challenging in that it doesn’t have the typical propulsion of a novel: drama isn’t the point, but internal and external, by way of other people, i.e., other consciousnesses, revolution of the mind and experience is. It is, in my opinion, less a novel about leaving society, and more a novel about changing society—one’s own personal society and the society around oneself—through seeing one’s mind states, one’s emotions, and cultivating the positive ones, and caring for, and then carefully (and sometimes clumsily) weeding out the negative ones. Society in this novel is a mental place as well as a physical one, and its main character, Li, attempts a return to the primordial mind that exists in each of us, but that is obscured by a mainstream society mired in ugly politics, mindless entertainment, sexism, oppression, and dangerous drugs.

Leave Society might be a novel of ideas if it weren’t so autobiographically driven, which is another way of saying so character-driven, because it does contain fascinating ideas, playful ideas, whimsical ideas, and very serious ideas. One such idea with a hold on Li is that we live, according to Riane Eisler, in a dominator society based in sexism and racism, and that in the past, ancient societies lived by a generally egalitarian and peaceful “partnership” model; another relates to Li’s exploration of natural health remedies for everything from dentistry to gut biome; and yet another is that Li’s drug use is a compassionate, other-oriented use (so different from typical drug narratives). More than these ideas though, Leave Society embodies a lifelong process of opening and compassioning, which is—and this is a word I haven’t used to describe a novel in as long as I’ve read and thought about novels—completely radical. The hidden implication of the novel is that all beings exist already in a state outside society (and, implicitly, outside political ideologies). Li is simply waking up to this fact and trying to embody it.

Leave Society’s focus—ranging from the individual to the familial to the cosmic—is exciting because it doesn’t play by any rules of our current culture. It eschews easy formulations of attitudes towards everything from medicine to politics. It’s interesting to note that political things do occur in the novel—there’s war on the television, Li’s father has political party affiliations, as does his mother—but these things are observed neutrally, without commentary. Li cares about his parents equally, without regard to political affiliation—it seems weird to note this, but in a culture where families are easily and moronically split along political lines, it’s apt. The events that occur in Leave Society remain unpoliticized, which, in our current literary moment, is akin to not caring. But Leave Society is one of the most care-filled books I’ve read, and that care is, to use a phrase many writers will bristle at, apolitical. This is true not only for the novel as a whole, but for the main character, Li, as well. He doesn’t care where his ideas align on the political spectrum. His notion that we live in a dominator society, and the fact that he thinks we should return to other models provided for us from partnership societies, aligns well with the political left in the United States—sexism is bad after all. On the other hand, his questioning of modern Western medicine and science (everything from dentistry to physics) might seem to align with the political right. For the left, there is no grey area with something like the physical universe—you buy into relativity and quantum mechanics, even though they can’t be unified, or you don’t believe in science at all. But the novel refuses to politicize any of these topics. For writers who believe that “all writing is political,” Li’s character, by seeking novelty, complexity, as well as understanding, will seem incoherent at best and just wrong at worst. But Li is researching and investigating in order to aid his recovery from all society, in order to change himself. Li is not tied to any clear ideology, and for a reader who wishes to read beyond the easy delineation of contemporary culture, in which all things are politicized and then virtue-signaled, the novel is a welcome space of free-thinking that is sometimes playful, as when Li sees what he terms “microfireflies,” a strange property in the sky in New York, and sometimes serious, as when he’s attempting to help his mother’s thyroid problem with a more natural cure.

It’s not the apolitical terrain of the book that is most interesting to me though. It’s Li’s rigorous and complex evolution into a more compassionate person, a person of sincerity, thoughtfulness, and humor, as well as confusion, malaise, and frustration. Li is constantly making progress, regressing, reestablishing how and what and who he wants to be in the world, and trying again. In this way, he’s unlike almost any protagonist I’ve encountered in literature. Rather than caving to ironic self-awareness and self-distance and staying there, rather than succumbing to negative emotions and becoming plagued by depression, anxiety, and a general sense of despair, Li works with his and others’ negativity with a mix of frustration and thoughtfulness. He constantly changes throughout the book.

At the beginning of a section of the novel called “Year of Pain,” Li visits his parents in Taiwan. They watch a movie then the next day go to look for a piano. There’s a discussion of whether to buy or rent a piano, and when Li’s mother suggests buying, he says that both of his parents are “so greedy”. They argue a bit—“bicker” is the word the family uses—and then Li realizes “he was being like Alan [his three-year-old nephew]” in that, rather than tears, “he was crying dejected sentences.” Suddenly, outward bickering leads to internal examination, which Li expresses to his parents: “when the plan changed I felt not good.” On the train back home, he apologizes for calling his parents greedy and emails himself: “Parents seem taken aback by my outburst, and I also feel taken aback.” His demeanor softens, his ideas soften in that he’s able to let his ideas go—especially the thought that his parents are greedy—and then, on the train, he cultivates a YG (a breathing exercise which seems to allow him to expand his consciousness and leave concrete reality for a few moments), and when he returns, after being seemingly disembodied from his self, he finds himself wanting to hold his mother’s hand—a childlike, strange, and yet intimate gesture.

What happens here is this: external conflict leads to internal examination, which leads to internal softening, a softening of ego, which then leads to external softening and feelings of, in this case, wishing to connect—this is typical of the novel. A shorter way of saying it: Negativity examined leads to positivity, which leads to intimacy. Li is not only rewiring his brain through nonfiction books and non-mainstream study (away from our current culture’s emphasis on individuality and separateness and difference as virtues), but also through an examination and then realignment of his own mind states toward intimacy and connection. This intimacy and connection is reminiscent of Zen Buddhism and Daoism, a softening of the ego into a more direct expression of spacious connection. But change is not linear, as the novel—and Li—suggests, and patterns emerge.

In the same section, from days four to seventeen of his trip, Li reports that he is “relatively calm.” He focuses on his parents’ health in helpful ways and deals with his own health issues privately and calmly, but then on day eighteen he gets a worrying nosebleed, a generalized pain returns on day nineteen, and while at a Bed and Breakfast, Li feels worried for his own health and discovers “noxious cosmetic” products and “statins” in his parents’ bathroom, both things Li has warned his parents about. Worry compounds. He gets angry: “researching statins for the fifth or sixth time in a year, Li slammed the computer on the wood floor.” Worry transforms into anger, and Li conducts his parents toward information about the drug and corporations, stressing that he was “showing them helpful, potentially brain-damage-reducing information.” Anger then transforms into controlling behavior, which softens over the course of the night. With his parents’ full attention, “the night began to feel productive and intimate.” It’s this intimacy that is one of the most surprising, exciting, and profound things about Leave Society.

There’s a basic humor to everything Lin writes, but it’s never been so clear that Li (and Lin) care, and it is the close tracking of emotional states, of mind states, that reveals this care. In the space of a few pages and a day and a half, Li moves from relative calmness to feeling emotional as his mother investigates her face in photos (she’s had plastic surgery, which Li has struggled to not feel judgmental about), to worry over his own and his parents’ physical health, to anger, and then to a striking intimacy. Tracking these emotions section by section reveals both Li’s patterned, habituated ways of being, and his increasing awareness that there is a way to steer his mind away from negativity and aggression, toward connection and intimacy.

There’s a way of explaining away Lin’s tracking of Li’s emotions. Don’t all novels do this on some level? And they do, but most novels don’t dedicate their prose to such pointed cataloging of the universals of human experience: calmness, frustration, anger, upset, connection, intimacy. These are basic universal emotions that Lin brings to the surface of his novel. While Li’s days in the particular might look radically unlike the reader’s own days, in the universal Li’s life is like anyone’s: abstract emotions defined, tracked, and patterned. Li lives from deep within himself, and that depth is communicated to the surface of the novel, operating in and as external reality. In other words, Lin lets us see this depth so clearly it becomes impossible not to be moved by a character so devotedly reckoning with their own emotions and thought patterns.

As Li recovers from mainstream society, his progression toward more positive states of mind continues, though not without complications and regressions. Recovery, it should be noted, is synonymous with change. Recovery is transformation. The term, cribbed from the language of addiction, is used to show that we live in a society mired in addiction: to television, the internet, fast food, drugs of all kinds, to everything. Robert Aitken has famously said: “The things of the world are not drugs in themselves. They become drugs by our use of them.” Li (and Lin) understand this, and while Li is recovering from actual drugs, he’s also recovering from an attitude of addiction. Not only was he addicted to drugs, he was addicted to negative ways of being, negative thought patterns. But recovery, change, is difficult. For instance, “bickering” reaches a climax in a section titled “Conflict,” in which Li’s dad proclaims that the three of them—Li, his mom, his dad—will be “bickering for a lifetime,” which is how a negative moment can feel: that it will never end. The family, triggered by Li’s dad not being ready for a walk, enters into a recursive and nearly nonsensical argument about who is to blame for all the bickering, as well as past indiscretions. Li shuts his father’s computer forcefully. Li’s father exclaims “don’t hit me.” Li’s mother asks if Li hit his father. Li looks at her in bewilderment. Li’s father blames Li’s mother for Li’s behavior, the “bickering” culminating with each family member blaming the other as the source of the bickering, leading to a discussion of when Li’s father hit Li’s brother when Li’s brother was an adolescent, which leads Li’s father to pronounce that sometimes it is right for children to be hit, causing Li to shout, “Isn’t hitting things good?” seemingly threatening his father. When Li’s father says, “You dare hit me,” Li responds “You’re so fat…Of course I do.” All while Li’s mom is shouting for them to stop. Li’s father eventually leaves with the dog, Dudu. All of this occurs across two and half pages, ending with Li alone in his room, Li’s mother crying, and Li’s father returning. Eventually, each family member apologizes about some action they took or thing they said during the prolonged bicker. Things calm down—anger and frustration pass.

It’s difficult to convey in an essay how amusing and moving this is at the same time, but it’s that combination of amusing and moving that strikes the reader as incredibly real. This reality comes from the fact that each character is treated as being capable of change, as struggling to make certain changes (at Li’s behest or their own), and attempting to be better communicators. And because Lin is clearly tracking his own family and their interactions—anger flares up, then, in what seems like no time, flames out—there’s an authority regarding each character’s journey that is unlike most novels. Simple, struggling, yet dignified with sincere and often funny attempts at change. The scene ends with Li saying, “I’m trying to stop being like this.”

Later, at dinner, a grander reconciliation occurs:

“So I care for you two,” said Li. “I’m here. I’m here so much.”
[…]
“Li really loves you, right?” said Li’s mom.
“Right,” said Li’s dad.
“Dad counts as a good dad, right?” said Li’s mom.
“Ng,” said Li. “Right.”

One way to think of Leave Society is that it is comprised of these contractions and expansions, defensive aggressions and passive regressions into negative states and then opening up again. The characters collectively form this pattern. The novel is not only tracking Li’s change, but his change in relation to his parents, his parents’ change in relation to him and each other, and eventually Li to his partner, Kay. It suggests that all these minds contribute, collectively, to a larger change. Li is “trying to stop being this way,” and his parents, likewise, are working to bicker less—as separate entities this change is impossible, but as a unit, together, Leave Society suggests, change becomes more possible. Why is that? Because patterns become apparent: Li can see his actions in his father’s—when he slams his father’s computer (an outward, physical aggression), we then learn that Li may have learned this violent petulance from his father, who hit his brother. Li’s worry, likewise, is mirrored in his mother, who worries about her son. In a defensive mood, Li offers this as blame for his neurotic tendencies, but in a more open state, he is open to criticism and correction. For instance, at one point Li says, “When Dad says I need control [referencing the shutting/slamming of the computer and his occasional throwing things], I don’t feel not good … I agree. It’s good to keep reminding me. It’s like me reminding you two all the time about health things.” The characters’ negativities mirror each other in the same way their positivity does, and change is presented as a collective process. The novel then isn’t just like the patterned breath of an individual, but a collective breath of beings tied together, breathing together, changing together, evolving together.

Lin captures the progressions, regressions, and paradoxes of change. To change means to become aware, and to become aware means to inject oneself directly and pointedly into one’s own habitual thoughts and emotions—what I mean here is that one begins to watch and understand one’s patterned existence rather than simply being swept up by the wave of that existence, a “this is just how things are” attitude. But this is not how things are, Leave Society suggests. Late in the novel, Li slips, habituating “himself back into tormented glumness, unable to stop bitterly arguing with imaginary people in his mind.” But shortly after this, as he leaves Taipei the final time, he tells his parents that he’ll miss them, and he looks “deliberately at each parent’s face, and they group-hugged. He’d last told his mom he’d miss her when he was maybe ten. He couldn’t remember ever telling his dad.” The tenderness that has occasionally burst through bickering and confusion levels out in even-tempered care. Likewise, when Li doubts his relationship with Kay, and finds himself feeling “quiet and somewhat closed off” from Kay, he sees that his weeks of uncertainty regarding the relationship “were rippling through him, bothersome and mocking, his own creations,” Li has come to a new place. He recognizes that these mind states are his own creations, that his negative thinking is, as Li also states, a “habit.” The relationship with Kay stabilizes as Li’s doubts drift away. He’s begun to see beyond his negative mind states. He’s begun to see them for what they are: self-created, and though still difficult to manage, he now knows better what to do with them. Rather than being swept by the wave (the negative thought or emotion), the awareness emerges that one is the wave– and when this awareness emerges, it becomes less and less possible to be constantly swept up. In this space, there’s room for consciousness to come together. Toward the end of the novel, with Kay in Hawaii, Li’s world becomes more pointedly not only his, as the singular third-person pronoun dramatically shifts to third person plural: “they smelled each fruit, suckled their juice,” “they made a smoothie,” “they fed some chickens,” “they spoke a narrative about their day,” and “they discussed leaving [society/New York] in parts, leaving mentally and chemically, carefully and gradually. Going beyond.” They’re now changing together. With a message rooted in conscious change, Leave Society is the apolitical novel that we need right now: a book about going beyond politics and society and moving toward an aesthetic of collective being. The process should be careful, gradual—there will be progressions and regressions, suggests Leave Society. It’s a process that is occurring already. Leave Society makes me want to be a part of it, and then the book made me remember that I already am, that we all are.

FOUR STORIES by Joe Aguilar

October 27, 2021

Face Tattoo

I get a tattoo of my face over my face. Now my face looks even more like my face. It’s my face twice over. My wife asks me if I’m in a good mood because today I look brighter than ever. I tell her yes. It’s true. I’m true. My truest face.

The Man with the Tiger’s Head Who Answers Phones

I have a human body and a tiger’s head. People stare at me on the train. I avoid their eyes. I answer phones at the company that makes weapons. Nobody sees me over the phone. My voice is deep and splendid like a purr. I sleep very deeply. In the dream I run through a jungle. The trees are on fire. Somebody’s screaming.

Night Meat

In the cabin we eat meat for nourishment.
Chad leaves to look for more meat. Where is Chad?
Vlad goes to look for Chad. Where are Vlad and Chad?
We are hungry enough to lock the doors. Tad and I knock on Brad’s door. Poor dead Brad!
I wander the woods full of nourishment. The moon tracks me like an eye.

The End of the World

I am out for my morning run when I see the mushroom cloud blossoming over the skyscrapers. Then I hear the explosion and am knocked to my hands and knees. The air smells sweet like ozone. A car alarm is going off. The end is near. I run into a gas station. A microwave beeps. The cashier has hung himself with a red licorice rope. A hotdog turns behind glass. It starts to rain.

CHASE by Frankie McMillan

October 25, 2021

Mr Whippy here and there, up the street, down the street, swerving his pink and cream van to avoid a dog, Mr Whippy his face emperor white, hunched over the wheel wondering what dogs want with Mr Whippy.

Mr Whippy glancing in the rear vision mirror, kids still chasing him on bikes, their heads ducked under the handlebars, a mother jogging with a baby on her hip, ice cream, ice cream but Mr Whippy is wrecked, days leaning out his window, handing out cones with the perfect pointy top, pulling on levers, eyes squinting in the bright sun. his ears ringing.

Mr Whippy turning off his ice cream shaped speakers because Green Sleeves isn’t what he wants to hear right now. He turns into a leafy suburb, checks in the mirror again, sighs with relief. Mr Whippy parks under a tree, eases himself into the back of the van, pours sacks of skim milk into the machine, fondly pats the metal side, re stocks cones, wipes the sticky window sill, tugs on his ear again.

Mrs Whippy shining a torch down his ear canal, slush in his ear she laughs, a cul de sac of sprinkles and Mr Whippy, tired though he is clamps a pale hand on her thigh. Mrs Whippy wriggles loose. Mr Whippy rises.

Out the bedroom door, down the hall, out into the night. Mrs Whippy runs smooth and light as a girl and Mr Whippy follows, his legs pumping, dogs barking, the whole street cheering him on.

MR. DUBECKI’S SECRET MENU by Kyle Seibel

October 22, 2021

Mr. Dubecki is the first person I tell about the people humping in the men’s restroom because he is the franchise owner slash store manager for one thing, but also because he’s the only other person here after Greg went home sick and Rocky’s brother picked him up early and the new girl who’s training on the window would only get in the way, so she got cut and Mr. Dubecki said he’d come by to help me close.

Near the end of the shift I go to clean the facilities and what I find is that it’s a four-legs-under-the-stall kind of situation, which I relay back to Mr. Dubecki, who rubs his face like this is the last thing he needs, people humping in the bathroom, oh perfect. I don’t think this is the only Taco Bell he owns, but I can see from his face that this was the Taco Bell Mr. Dubecki had hoped people would never hump in.

I follow him into the bathroom and you can basically tell from the noises that it’s two guys and they’re not hiding it, not even close. We’re both standing outside the stall and I’m waiting for Mr. Dubecki to lay down the law but he doesn’t. The panting and grunting is coming from the stall but when I look at Mr. Dubecki his face is far away. I nudge him and he clears his throat real loud but that does not stop the humping. Mr. Dubecki knocks on the stall door. Hello, Mr. Dubecki says. The humping stops.

What do you want, a voice says.

Mr. Dubecki sputters without sound, like his mind is grasping for a response that makes sense and cannot find one. I jump in and say, We want you to stop humping in this Taco Bell.

This seems to put the world back together for Mr. Dubecki. He follows up by saying, Yes, please leave this Taco Bell. We allow them a moment of silence to consider our demands.

Fine, okay, whatever, says the voice.

We wait outside while they reorder themselves and Mr. Dubecki holds the door open for them. They’re two pretty regular looking guys. Mr. Dubecki asks them to please not come back to this Taco Bell.

After we close up, when Mr. Dubecki is locking the doors, he says, Thank you for that back there, and nods in the direction of the bathrooms and I tell him, No problem. He says, You’re okay, you know that? When you started, I was eh, not so sure about you. Thought you’d be here through the summer and then go back to school. But hey, you stuck around and I’m happy, really. You’re one of the good ones. He says it like I’ve cleared some bar with him on a personal level and what comes next is going to be a whole new thing between us.

He says, I have two questions for you. I say, Okay. And he says my first question is this: how would you like to make five hundred dollars and my second question is this: do you believe that stealing something back that was yours first, yours to begin with, that someone stole from you, do you believe that has both a legal and moral justification?

I think about it for a second and then say yes to both.

There are some things, Mr. Dubecki explains, some things in the basement of his house that belonged to him and there had been a situation where now he wasn’t allowed back there so much on the order of the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki who was being pretty unreasonable, truth be told. And what he needed, what he really needed, was someone who could keep their cool, just like I did back in the bathroom, just a guy who calls a ball a ball and a strike a strike. Someone who can find a few boxes of stuff the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki would never miss. He says that she hasn’t even been in the basement for a year. Do it during the daytime when she’d be at work and the kid would be at school. There’s a fake rock with a key in it and he says he can draw me a map, so easy. Five hundred bucks. Mr. Dubecki says that he sure could use five hundred bucks, the divorce and all, but this stuff I’m going to get, it means that much to him.

I think about it for a second and then say, Okay, Mr. Dubecki, and he smiles and says, Please call me George, and I say, Okay, George, and we make a plan for the coming Tuesday.

On Tuesday I find the key in the fake stone just like Mr. Dubecki said and when I open the door into the house everything is covered with buttery light from the big windows and it’s all over the white carpet and all over the white furniture.

I find the basement no problem, find the shelves no problem, find the three boxes no problem. They’re pretty heavy so I’m taking them one at a time. I’m on my first trip to the car when I hear a small voice from above say, Hello?

It’s the kid. Mr. Dubecki’s son. He’s standing at the top of the stairs. I say, Hello, and he says, Hello, and I say, I’m one of your dad’s special friends. He says, Okay, and I say, I came to get some of his things, and he says, My mom will be back later, and I say, Okay, and he says, Okay.

He looks like a little Mr. Dubecki. Same moon face and turned-up nose. He sits on the top of the stairs and watches me go back and forth. Supervising.

This is my last one, I say, nodding at the box I’m holding, and the kid says, Okay.

I ask him what grade he’s in and he says third. He asks me what grade I’m in and I say I’m sort of in college. He asks me what that means and I say, Well, I’m supposed to be in college.

Kind of like how you’re supposed to be in school, I say, and he says, Yeah but I got sent home. My mom had to come get me.

Some kind of fight, I say and he shakes his head.

He asks if I’ve ever heard of a game called Charlie Charlie and I say no and he asks me if I want to play, and I say, Does it take very long, and he smiles and runs off and comes back with two pencils and a piece of paper.

We go to the kitchen and he draws a cross in the center of the paper, making four boxes. In the top two boxes he writes YES and then NO and then on the bottom two boxes he writes NO and then YES so that each quadrant contains a word and is reflected diagonally across from the other. He lays one pencil down along the horizontal line and the other one he balances on top except this one is along the vertical line and he asks me what I want to know.

What do you mean, I say.

You ask Charlie what you want to know, he says. Any question, yes or no.

Who’s Charlie, I ask and he says that Charlie is a demon or something and so I think about it for a second and then say, Will I be rich one day?

The kid nods and grabs my hands to make a circle around the piece of paper. He closes his eyes and says, Charlie Charlie, come out to play. We’ve asked our question, now what do you say? We wait a few seconds and sure enough the pencil on top, the one balancing, starts to wobble and then swivels to point at both NOs.

Well shit, I say to the kid, and he asks me if I want to know the trick.

He says you do it with your nose. Just blow with your nose really lightly and it’s enough to move the pencil but not enough for anyone to notice.

Not bad, I tell him. Why’d you get sent home?

The kid looks away. He says, I asked Charlie if everyone was going to die and then I made Charlie say yes we all would. He looks back at me. Some kids started crying, he says.

Jesus, I say.

But it’s true, he says.

I guess, I say. And then, Don’t tell your mom I was here.

Don’t tell my dad I got in trouble.

We shake on it and I give him a little punch on the shoulder. I tell him, You’re okay, you know that, and he shrugs like he doesn’t really believe me and it’s at that moment when the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki walks in the front door with a few bags of groceries to see a strange man in her kitchen who is touching her son.

Hello, I say, and she says, What the fuck is happening, who the fuck are you, get the fuck away from him, what the fuck, what the fuck, I’m calling the police right now, you sick bastard.

The kid says, Mom, stop, he’s one of dad’s special friends, and I say whoa a whole bunch of times in a row while I try to think of what to tell her.

George, I say, stepping back from the kid. George sent me to get some of his things. The basement, the boxes in the basement. The key in the rock. Then I saw the kid. Jesus, please don’t call the police.

The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki looks at me, looks at her phone, looks at the oranges that rolled out of the grocery bag she dropped when she saw me, bends down to pick them up, starts crying, slumps over, and then kind of rolls to prop herself up against the white couch. The kid goes over to her and says I’m sorry and then I say I’m sorry. And because it would be weird if she didn’t, the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki says, I’m sorry. Then we all do it again. Each one of us says sorry again and then I decide to pick up the oranges which breaks the spell.

I put the groceries on the kitchen counter. Mrs. Dubecki watches me. She’s standing up now, assessing me. You’re pretty young, she says, and I say, I guess so, and she suppresses a sob while saying, Are you happy. I don’t know what to say, so I say, I guess so, and she blubbers, Together, with George, you’re happy together at least?

Well, I think he’s doing okay. It’s not like we work together all that much, I say. The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki’s face changes. She puts her hands on her hips and she asks me how I know George and I tell her Taco Bell, and she says, Oh, Jesus, I thought you were his—I don’t know what they call it—boyfriend, I guess.

Oh, I say.

You didn’t know, she says.

No, I say.

Well, she says. Neither did I for a long time.

The kid runs off upstairs. We put the groceries away together, she and I. After, she walks me to the door. I’m not evil, she says. I’m getting my mind around it. Good days and bad days. I mean, there’s a version of myself that’s happy for him and I’m going to be that woman. Really.

I tell her I think that’s a good way to think about it and she asks me if he’s doing okay and I think of Mr. Dubecki’s face in the bathroom, far away.

Ask Charlie, I say.

I’m closing that night at Taco Bell and Mr. Dubecki comes by to get the boxes from me. He counts out five one-hundred-dollar bills. He asks me if I had any issues and I say, Not really.

Mr. Dubecki is putting the last box in his car when he stops and asks me if I want to see inside the boxes and I say, Okay. We’re standing around the trunk of his Camry in the Taco Bell parking and what’s inside the boxes is yearbooks and photos and letters and book reports and birthday cards and school newspaper articles and Christmas lists and dental x-rays and baseball cards and bronze baby shoes and souvenir mugs and swim meet ribbons and playbills and bible camp postcards and wrestling trophies and license plates and standardized test scores and watercolor paintings and Mr. Dubecki takes out each item, gives a one-word description, then passes it to me and I look at it and then put it back in the box. It feels like church. We do it for all three boxes and when we’re done, Mr. Dubecki steps back to take it all in.

Well, he says finally and grabs a box and starts walking toward the dumpster. C’mon, he says to me, and I grab a box and follow him. I ask him if he wants to maybe just keep the photos and he stares at me. Especially not the photos, he says. We throw it all away.

The purge fills Mr. Dubecki with nervous energy and he bounces alongside me as I walk back towards the Taco Bell to finish my shift. He puts his hand on the door before I can open it.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, he tells me, and I say, Okay.

His mouth is pressed into a hard line and his eyes are narrowed to make two deep creases in his forehead. There’s something called the enchirito, he says. It’s not on any menu, but I can teach you how to make one for your shift meal, if you want. It’s basically a smothered burrito if you’ve ever had one of those, but it’s really, really good. I keep asking corporate to put it on the menu, but they always ignore me. Truth is, they’re not ready for everyone to experience the enchirito.

Mr. Dubecki’s face goes far away. Maybe they’re right, he says. He opens the door for me and we go back to the kitchen and he starts gathering the ingredients. Mr. Dubecki’s skin is shiny under the fluorescent lights. He looks brand new, fresh out of the packaging.

Okay, he says, tying an apron on. What I’m about to show you is extremely sensitive information.

I watch him run around and I write down the recipe. I tell him his secrets are safe with me.

LUCID FIRE by Cletus Crow

October 21, 2021

I'm dreaming that our bed is engulfed in flames, but in the waking world either your body lies draped across my torso, or I have a fever, or we forgot to turn the oven off, or someone dropped a burning corpse between us, or we have too many sheets, or I can see the future, or our bed really is engulfed in flames, or God came back when we were sleeping, or global warming works faster than they say, or a Republican tweeted, or there was a gas leak, or the neighbors can tell we aren't just friends, or I'm in the Fantastic Four, or a burglar enjoys a Marlboro, or your ex finally did it, or the thermometer broke, or meteorites collided, or war was declared. When I wake up, you're clinging to me like damp hair. I scan the ceiling for burns.

THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT by David Luntz

October 20, 2021

The weight of light can be measured by my Uncle Kev’s death. But before that, some memories: it’s family dinner and Uncle Kev’s explaining how the bread mashed in his ex-boxer’s sixty-year-old fist represents Pangea and the glass of red wine in his fingers the Tethys Sea. He’s telling us about the earth’s history, Wegener’s theory of continental drift, orogeny, extinct volcanoes, dragonflies in amber, and trilobites. Mom and dad tune him out. So do I. I get enough of that kind of shit at school. But Uncle Kev doesn’t care. He’s relentless, a natural fighter, and won’t stop until he’s educated me properly. Most of his instructing takes place in his car when he’s driving me somewhere. There’s no escaping him there.

When he talks about light, his eyes gleam like wet pebbles. He always smells nice, like Old Spice aftershave. He waves his hands a lot. They’re hairy and tufted, like a coconut. His polished nails blur cyan in the air. One time, he tells me about how light actually dies as it hits our eyes, and says, “Isn’t that beautiful, I mean that light must die so we can see?” I wish I’d really been listening to him, at what he was really trying to tell me, but I thought then that he was just plugging some lame religious metaphor: light is just like Jesus, always sacrificing and always giving, existing in some sublime state of eternal crucifixion and resurrection. And I reply: Maybe light would rather not die. Maybe light doesn’t give a shit about our sight.

It’s the only time I remember him giving me a grieved look. But this was before, and now we’re driving down Route One and Uncle Kev blurts out, “Kinch,” which is what he calls me after reading Ulysses, “Answer me this: How’s the spirit supposed to fecking survive when it’s got to look at this shite every fooking day?” nodding at the strip malls and billboards, a question whose unanswered weight each passing season presses down on me like ten thousand leaves, maybe more, because soon afterward come his limp wrists floating like pale petals in a pink scurf that won't come out of the tiles. And because he still burns and reaches me like light from a dead star, it makes no sense to say he no longer exists, especially when I see him as a child, basking on kilned rocks after swimming in the cold water of Keeley Bay, telling me how much he loves it there, the sunbaked scent of stranded kelp, the wisps of tickling seaweed, and the way light rushes into spaces he never knew about inside him, promising that it will always be there and never leave him. And I wonder too, sometimes, if what he did was his way of giving back the gift, so light could see things it couldn’t otherwise see, and whether somewhere, perhaps not so far off, he still skips up to some sunny attic where he unpacks his sewing machine and stitches a dress from old curtains, hoping that when he hits the streets that night with his new lipstick and pumps, he might get lucky.

(For my uncle who took my education upon himself, since he trusted no school to do it.)

GARY J. SHIPLEY on film with REBECCA GRANSDEN

October 19, 2021

Rebecca Gransden: Your work explores extremity. Extremity of violence yes, and also conceptual extremity, extremity in language use, of idea. I instinctually back away from inquiry into direct influence, seeing it as reductive, although I have noticed trends among artists. To some, influence is a question of attraction to work reflective of, or in kinship with, their work, and to others influence exists as an energising feedback loop. With that in mind, how do you view extremity in cinema and, by extension, its relationship with and influence on your writing?

Gary J. Shipley: Yes, “conceptual extremity” and “extremity in language” are very much the focus for me. The violence is often a means to reinforce, or probe, or otherwise explain, what for me is a conceptual or linguistic problem. In The Unyielding, for instance, the body horror is always permeated by the abstract in order to establish and sustain the immovable wife’s paradoxical being. With extremity in cinema, I suppose I’m invariably trying to see into/through/around it in the same way. But often when films are described as extreme, that’s not my experience: I mean, who are these people still so ripe for shock and umbrage? Nekromantik segues into The Wizard of Oz into The Golden Glove into Sir Henry at Rawlinson End into Angst into My Dinner With Andre into The Poughkeepsie Tapes into Swoon into She’s Allergic to Cats into I Stand Alone and who’s to say who’s going too far, and who fucking cares to listen? Losing your virginity to a warm turd might be considered a trifle immoderate, but then there’s always Sade-the-philosopher at work in the background. I think the notion of extremity in the arts is mostly overblown and outmoded anyway. It’s nothing we’re not daydreaming about in the shower, or somebody somewhere isn’t doing in their bedroom or basement, nothing some poor sod isn’t enduring, or someone else getting off on. What about that video of a puppy being fed to a snake, the footage of industrial farming, the Dog Meat Festival in Yulin…? Violence and extreme cruelty are everywhere, nothing new; it’s the way we gloss over them that’s often extreme to me, and repellent, and potentially dangerous (and therefore interesting).

RG: Repetition and simulation feature prominently in Terminal Park, where you utilise the reenactment of an iconic scene from cinema history, a scene that has been the subject of reinterpretation multiple times and ways. Could you expand upon this choice and your intentions with regard to artistic discourse when it comes to the mutation of meaning inherent in exploration of this kind?

GJS: The Psycho shower scene’s ubiquity and theoretical baggage were essential, with so many useful resources to draw on. Aside from all the Hitchcock plums, you’ll no doubt spot a fair few others as well: Funeral Parade of Roses, Dogville, Body Double… Anyway, I’m clearly playing with some well-trodden ideas in Baudrillard and Deleuze. As Norwegian artist Nikolas Berg puts it in the book, albeit borderline delirious at this point: “Copying feeds on itself and once started can never be finished; and as all moments already exist so too do all copies, and there are perfect copies and less than perfect copies, each again copied regardless of fidelity to their originals, and so the space for original creation shrinks and grows at the same time: to zero on one level and to everything that could ever possibly exist on the other. […] But difference on this model is decay, and it has a long history, and is heading in only one direction: outward and outward to the moment of (self-referential) rupture.” I’d already written my book on Baudrillard, Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard, when I wrote Terminal Park, so I had his body of work acting as a kind of lens. But then I’ve also long enjoyed exploring films with the same narrative core: Wages of Fear/Sorcerer, Le Feu Follet/Oslo, August 31st, all the many takes on Crime and Punishment, from Fear to the brilliant Norte: The End of History, etc. I remember when reading HHhH how when Binet lists all the different film versions there have been about Operation Anthropoid (the events surrounding the assassination of Heydrich), I’d already seen them all. Not that I’d done anything with it. Just for the joy of comparing the different approaches, you know. And then I got the film adaptation of that, so there was another one. There’s Synecdoche, New York as well, which is a film I admire and probably played a part on some level. And The Exterminating Angel, which is always lurking somewhere. I’m also fascinated by the kind of paranoid pattern building that, while respectful of the facts, imposes some speculative and warped order – the kind you see in, to take a recent example, Under the Silver Lake.

RG: There is forensic clarity to your writing, an observational quality that can be as repellent as it is fascinating. When it comes to form, how much of your style is a consequence of natural aptitude and how much calculated to serve your intention for the text?

GJS: Form is crucial to my work, has been from the start. My first book, Theoretical Animals, depicts a world of abstracted cannibalism and cannibalises itself as it does so. This autocannibalisation involves the second half of the book having the exact same letters as the first half, with each section from the second half rearranging the same letters as its corresponding section in the first half. Or Necrology (written with Kenji Siratori) where the structure mirrors a torture method used by Etruscan pirates. With Terminal Park, one of the most obvious formal influences is the extreme shift in focus (from the fission apocalypse to the “PsychoBarn”) that occurs approximately one third in, as it does in Psycho. And like the film, we move from the exterior to the interior. The other books I’ve written that have been most formally influenced by cinema would be 30 Fake Beheadings and You With Your Memory are Dead. With the former, it all started when Rauan Klassnik put the germ in my head (with his idea that I review some unseen films for a magazine he was co-editing) and I couldn’t get it out. But I needed the films to be rooted in the existing reality of the unreal, and so the concocted films, I felt, had to be sequels. And what better way to reinforce the violence of the encounter than by inventing sequels for films that actively militated against that possibility. The book draws on decapitation theory and the post-cephalic nature of the cinematic experience, so it came as no real surprise that documenting the viewer (and his escalating absence to himself) quickly became as important as documenting the invented film itself. And the two fed on each other. “Antichrist 2” was the first in this decollative sequence, but the viewer demanded more and more cuts, and being obliging I obliged. YWYMAD is the result of watching Begotten on a loop for two weeks: ekphrastic writing as ritual, if you like. Warewolff! would be another example of my attempting to marry language-play and formal concept. If we think in terms of invisible forms (à la Kevin Jackson), even the title of W sucked more energy than maybe it should have. To briefly explain: in Finnegans Wake, “warewolff!” (beware wolf) is what the Floras or the Maggies shout to Glug (or Shem), who is the wolf of which we should beware. Glugg fails to see what is hidden (cannot guess the colour of Issy/Izod’s knickers) so becomes hidden, is sent into exile. He is akin to the devil, is self-absorbed and self-absorbing (“he make peace in his preaches and play with esteem”), can only answer the riddle if he can see himself in his entirety (Shem/Glugg and Shaun/Chuff) but cannot bear to do it, is ugly and foul-mouthed, the banished “bold bad bleak boy of the storybooks,” and a language tutor to boot, making it only fitting that when he sneaks back for revenge it is through language that he is revealed: a mocking bard (“mocking birde to micking barde”). Then there’s then all the D&G stuff about becoming-wolf: located at the edge but not outside society, a multiplicity, a hole, a formless form… Anyway, given how perfectly all this aligns with the “creature” in/as the book, it soon became the only title I could imagine.

RG: Your work investigates destruction, whether this is bodily, symbolic, or cultural. With the focus on collapse, and a disintegrating force, your writing often has a desensitising effect. Do you actively use desensitisation for its own sake or do you view your work as in dialogue with it? With this in mind are there examples of desensitisation in cinema that resonate with you or your work?

GJS: That desensitising effect is less a conscious technique and more an honest reflection of where I’m writing from: a felt distance, an unwillingness to participate in so many of the prevalent fabrications of identity. Destruction is not the issue for me, only suffering. And from here to the meaninglessness of suffering (and of meaning itself), and therein a possibility for meaning as esoteric and fervid as it is ruinous. The first film that comes to mind is Peeping Tom, where the desensitisation is itself deeply felt. It’s also there in the work of Lars von Trier and Yorgos Lanthamos, for example. And in Spoorloos, Funny Games, The White Ribbon, and on and on. If you want a film that might just destroy you a little bit (even with everything they had to leave out), try the short Detainment.

RG: As a secular form of Apocalypticism has taken hold in culture, end of the world tropes are more than cliché, but normalised. Do you consider your work to be in dialogue with this trend? Are there examples of apocalyptic cinema you see as particularly successful in reflecting this?

GJS: As I make clear in Terminal Park, the apocalypse is a disclosure, a revealing of something formerly hidden. And while this harps back to its religious origins, it is still present in the secularised versions you mention, and in the best examples of apocalyptic art, literature and film. It is this end as revelation that I find interesting. Not the tired notion of environmental and societal collapse exposing the best and worst of human nature (which is only a faux reveal, I mean who didn’t know this already?) that is the focus of so much mainstream work, but a true reveal of something truly hidden: a seismic shock, a jolt, a complete and utter mindfuck. I also don’t think you can get away from the salvationist implications of this gap.

RG: One area of your work that is especially striking is your representation of the body. Whether objectified, idolised, annihilated, or deconstructed, the body glistens in all its glory. Your work acknowledges the seduction of transgressing fleshly boundaries. Do you take inspiration from body horror in cinema?

GJS: It’s there, of course, along with those from literature and art. And sometimes it’s direct, but more frequently the influence is oblique. There are the usual, I guess, scenes/images that set up home in your head and never leave: the nefarious matter, the stuffs and blobs, the mergings, augmentations and depletions, and the usual cinematic touchstones (Lynch, Cronenberg, Carpenter…), and those scenes implanted in me (and many others) for good, from films as various as Possession, Bug, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, The Human Centipede, Un Chen Andalou, Fiend Without a Face, Blood of the Beasts, and on and on. And I wonder if I ever really escaped those Nightmare on Elm Street films that I lapped up as a kid? Or the Hellraiser, Exorcist, Omen, Evil Dead, Alien franchises? And here comes Udo Kier choking on whore blood and scissoring off a human head. Outside of cinema, Francis Bacon’s the master, and Lispector’s cockroach is my kind of madeleine. And yes, my daydreams are the kind where Charters and Caldicott turn up in Trash Humpers bleating about sandwich fillings, checking cricket scores, vigorously shagging refuse.

RG: Part of what makes your work compelling to read is the sense of being pulled in a certain direction, only to encounter a series of wild juxtapositions. As soon as there is philosophical underpinning, there is a turn to the visceral and experiential, and the alienating and cerebral is punctuated by stark and searing images, often captured in one sentence. Your use of imagery is vivid and electric. Do you see an equivalent in cinema? Does the structure of film have any bearing on your style?

GJS: Cinematic techniques definitely seep in. They’ve doubtless permeated my experience of the world so thoroughly they’d be hard to escape. But then it’s also worth remembering that a lot of these techniques were already there in literature, so it’s in no way exclusively cinematic. I suppose you’re referencing jump cuts or rack focusing, or montage, double/multiple exposures, whatever, which are all over the place. The challenge is to do it without them looking like clunky/inferior versions of their cinematic cousins.

RG: Returning to Terminal Park, I see the glacial intellectualism that characterises some conceptual art, directly invoked by the strange and initially abstruse reenactment that takes centre stage for some sections. Do you make a clear distinction between the use of conceptual art inside the narrative and the narrative itself as a form of conceptual art, or are these lines blurred, non-existent, or for the reader to decide?

GJS: The hope is that they become blurred. Lynch, like Tarkovsky and others before him, wanted to make paintings that moved (which of course he did quite literally in his early shorts), and we see the narrational and visual freedom this affords him; but it’s also there in the detached and sombre weirdness of Roy Andersson’s films, in which everything feels so staged and abiotic that the movement itself becomes a kind of aberration. And then there are the less integrated uses, seen recently in films such as Velvet Buzzsaw, Paint, or The Burnt Orange Heresy. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that there are many ways that writing and art can intersect. For instance, Serial Kitsch (an epic poem I made from the appropriated words of serial killers) was one way of attempting this, and “The Mutant” (which merged the cerebral and abstract practice of creating a work of conceptual art with the artist’s brain cancer) was another. Actually, the novel I’ve just finished revolves around three uncharacteristically dark paintings by René Magritte, so on it goes.

RG: From its origins cinema has illuminated by illusion. What place does art and artifice have in your work? In a time of immense media and information saturation and film as a medium grapples with its context, do you see the density of your work as a response to or reflection of this shift?

GJS: It is central, inescapable. It puts me in mind of Baudrillard’s quip about AI, how because it lacks artifice it therefore lacks intelligence. Or as Lisa Robertson puts it: “artifice is the soul.” Works of realism that are supposedly free of artifice, as if that amounts to some badge of honour, that’s where the contrivance is. Which in itself needn’t be a bad thing, although it all too frequently is. The prodigiously trite as authentic lived experience is quite the gilded shit right now.

RG: Returning to destruction and decay, is it necessary for the screen itself to break down? Should celluloid self-destruct?

GJS: The screen breaks down all the time, it’s the default. The hard thing is to see the screen. And once you’ve seen it, to stop seeing it.

RG: If you could give some recommendations for films that would be enjoyed by those who are fans of your writing that would be great.

GJS: I watch 1-2 films a day, most days, have done for a lot of years now, so if I may I’ll pick in no order from the films rewatched in the last month or so that these fans, if you can ever reach such recherché phenomena, might well enjoy:

A Dark Song, Simon Killer, Tony, Saint Maud, Escape From Tomorrow, The Shout, La femme infidèle, Le Boucher, The Transfiguration, The Night Eats the World, L’humanité, Twentynine Palms, Downloading Nancy, My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, These are the Damned, Uzak, Personal Shopper, Most Beautiful Island, Upstream Color, I Blame Society, Apartment Zero, Possessor, Burning, In the Earth, Alphaville, Bad Timing, Providence…

ON BUILDING A NEST by Stella Lei

October 16, 2021

My mother’s house always looked halfway to collapse. She had paid copious amounts of money to build it this way—its perpetually slouching walls, its staircases that jerked into corners before snarling to the next floor. This was because she preferred things that existed between one state and another. Her philosophy was as follows: you cannot determine something’s worth before it is finished, and most everything finished is bad—corrupted by greed, or rust, or the general incompetence of its maker. And so the house lurched across a river like a lopsided Fallingwater, its unending rush lulling her to the edge of sleep. When she awoke, she stood in the middle of one of her precarious staircases, fingers to her lips, surveying the distance between her body and the floor.

As a child, I bumped into buckled walls and tripped over uneven floorboards. Cuts rusted down my legs in slashes of bronze, and my mother wiped them clean, warning me to be careful with the currency of my blood.

“You see this?” She held up the towel, stained through and sour with disinfectant, “You let all this go. Gone. Wasted.” She believed blood was metal metabolized. Gold lining our veins. “That’s why it tastes like pennies,” she said, and I swiped my finger across the wound, bringing it to my lips to check.

Our ancestors thought drinking gold—untarnishable light—could instill them with youth. Their organs would never rust into disuse, polished instead with health. What they didn’t know, my mother said, was that we were born with gold bottled in our veins. She smoothed a Band-Aid across my knee. “So the real secret to youth is to avoid bleeding. To seam your skin and keep the gold inside.”

For years, I was careful not to bleed. I tiptoed around corners and walls. Climbed the stairs while gripping the banister, unpainted wood strangled in my fist. I weaned my legs off running, teaching them to slide slowly across the floor’s hardwood swells.

My mother said the world was a pipe bomb, people just fuses ready to light. When she was young, her father exploded in her face—fists clenched to grenades—and left her blue as the sea. That was why I was forbidden from going out alone, my flash-paper bones too easily expended into smoke. And so I stayed home, insulated from flames and men, replacing school with the encyclopedias lining the office shelves.

I worked my way through the books in alphabetical order, repeating each word to myself, sculpting my breath against the sound. A for aviation. B for beak. C for critical period: the period of time in which young animals are most likely to acquire learned behavior; when imprinting occurs.

The period of time in which a baby bird’s song crystallizes like rust on steel, its voice molding to that of its parents. The period beyond which the bird can no longer learn to sing, its notes fracturing like a face in warped glass.

I was twelve when the bleeding started. It woke me in a pool of sour warmth, wet against my legs, sticky in my joints. I shouted for my mother, certain my tissues were dissolving, my organs churning to pulp. She scowled as she changed the sheets and soaked them in cold water, but told me I wasn’t dying. What had happened, she said, was I became too close to fully formed—transitioning into a woman who could eventually smoke, and drink, and leave her behind. The solution was to regress to my halfway point. To freeze my body in time so gold would lie snugly in my veins, youth unable to escape.

That evening, when I asked about dinner, she told me if I went long enough without food, I could shrink my stomach into a fist. Exorcise the years from my body, leave only purity. Bone. Calcium scaffolding my shins like pillars of salt. How I could reverse my flesh within myself, surviving off nothing but smooth planes of skin.

From then on, she fed me only feathers so my years could take flight and leave me clean. She boiled them soft and piled them on my plate in quivering puffs of down.

“The body follows a clock of its own,” she said, “You just have to wind it in reverse. Close the hourglass’s waist. Look at each bird through its mouth.”

When I told her I didn’t know what she meant, that all the birds I’d seen were mouthless, roasted in the oven or strewn across my plate in ragged plumes, she pointed out the window and said “Those birds, there. See how each note matures in their throat before they sing it? That’s where it all starts. The throat.”

I flipped through the T encyclopedia until I got to throat. Esophagus. Trachea. Larynx. I traced my finger down the diagrams and taught the page to swallow. Air digested into air.

In the bathroom, I opened my mouth in the mirror and peered inside. My throat was a cavern of darkness rippled with heat—something pulsing and alive. I clawed my fingers in to see if I could retrieve the half-formed notes in my vocal cords, cup their soft vibration in my palms. I retched into the sink, but my stomach had hardened to a pit, too empty to expel anything but breath. Feathers clotted against my teeth.

The bleeding eventually stopped, my uterus rewound into a state that didn’t know time, years resorbed into my body. When I looked in the mirror, my collarbones were arrowheads grafted to skin.

In place of blood, cold permeated through me like a haunting on loop. I wrapped myself in sweaters and coats—molted in reverse—and stood with my mother at the staircase’s head. We held hands and peered down the house’s narrow throat, too scared to fly.

My mother’s New Year’s gift to me was a music box, gilded gold, a lark perched on its crown. An heirloom passed down by her mother by her mother by hers, carried through generations like our coarse hair and heat-shriveled eyes. She wrapped my hands in her own and showed me how to wind it up. How to coax a bird to sing. We cranked the key as far as it would go, the lark shuddering in the anticipation of dance. I tightened my fingers around the knob as it pushed against my palm, fighting to unspool its song—to fly free. The notes stuttered out, slow, splintered into shards.

FULL OF HOLES by Luz Rosales

October 15, 2021

Kylie fingers Martina under the bleachers after school. Martina is warm, and moist, and slippery, and when she cums against Kylie’s palm, she moans so loudly that Kylie thinks everyone on campus must have heard. She hopes this is true.

“I’m so proud of myself,” she says, and Martina laughs her scratchy laugh.

Martina doesn’t come to school the next day, doesn’t answer Kylie’s texts. The day after that, she’s found floating down a river in pieces.

***

Several of their classmates attend her funeral. They crowd together in the church, sniffling, and holding each other, and pretending to cry. None of them were friends with Martina. Some had been the very ones who bullied her and Kylie. They stalked them in the halls, pelted them with water balloons and milk cartons, hurled insults such as “dykes” and “lesbos.”

Kylie hates them all.

She sits near the back, sandwiched between her parents. Her father keeps his hand on her shoulder, though the effect is more suffocating than comforting. She feels like she’s breaking, splintering. The casket is closed. She can’t comprehend that her best friend’s body is in there, wants to demand that they open it so that everyone can see it isn’t Martina, it’s a doll, it’s an impostor.

They had been friends since the first grade, back when they were shy little girls who felt comfortable only around each other, and they grew into awkward teenagers together. They’d known each other for so long their identities had become intertwined. Kylie can’t imagine a Martina-less world, nor can she imagine a Martina-less Kylie. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?

Martina’s mother, Ms. Aguilar, finds her after the service. She’s scowling, and Kylie is reminded of the last time she stayed at Martina’s house, how they hid under the blankets and tried to block out the sounds of her parents fighting.

“This is your fault,” her mother spits. “I wanted her to stop hanging out with you.”

“How is it my fault?” Kylie demands. It’s the fault of whoever killed her, they deserve to rot in Hell, except no one knows who did it. The medical examiner said it didn’t look like the work of a human, nor that of an animal.There were no wounds at all, no blood, it was as if her body unraveled spontaneously, as if she simply couldn’t stay in one piece anymore.

Within a few weeks Ms. Aguilar will be gone, moved to another city.

***

At night Kylie tries to hold onto everything she can remember about Martina: her voice, the smoothness of her skin, the texture of the scar on her arm, the way her tongue felt between her legs. She sucks on her fingers and pretends she can still taste Martina’s wetness, then rubs the part of her shoulder where Martina had given her a hickey once.

In the morning she finds a tiny, pinprick-sized hole on her shoulder. Her mother doesn’t see any hole, says she must be imagining it, but Kylie knows it’s real. She can’t stop thinking about the hole, can’t stop touching it, rubbing and rubbing until it’s wide enough for her to insert the tip of her finger. When she does the pain is so intense she almost screams, but there’s something satisfying about it.

Eventually a gray fluid starts leaking from the hole.

Eventually, other holes appear.

***

Kylie comes to school covered in seeping black holes. Everyone stares at her. They’re shocked, disgusted, even enraged that she showed up like this and is forcing them all to see it.

In class, she does nothing but touch her holes. She leaves stains on the floor and on her desk.

The teacher asks her to leave. “You’re distracting the other students,” he says. He looks at her the way you’d look at a bug. She definitely feels less than human as she plods out of the room. Why is she so heavy all of a sudden? She can barely keep herself upright.

During nutrition she’s accosted by a group of girls who say they want to know more about her. They’ve never seen anything like that, they say, meaning her holes. She tells them to fuck off, but they grab her arms, and the next thing she knows they’re shoving their fingers into her, prying her open further. It hurts so bad. She screams and screams and thrashes and suddenly they let her go. Their mouths are wide open, they’re backing away from her.

Kylie doesn’t know what they’re reacting to. She doesn’t care.

She turns around and runs.

***

She heads to Martina’s house, climbs in through the window. It’s not Martina’s house anymore, she knows, though a part of her still expects that she’ll come if she cries loud enough.

The walls are bare. There is no furniture, no remnants of the people who used to live here. Still she goes to what used to be Martina’s room and collapses.

Time goes by. It could be minutes, it could be hours. She spends it all on her side, lying in a puddle of her own filth. She’s mostly hole now. It’s almost peaceful. She could live like this, she thinks, as a giant hole, no longer a girl.

Right after she has this thought, her hand moves on its own, forming a fist. A few seconds later she’s clawing herself violently, she’s shaking, and crying, and bleeding, and she keeps saying, “Martina,” saying it like a prayer.

Then.

It stops.

Everything stops.

There is darkness and silence, a black void. This lasts only an instant.

Once it’s over, she’s back in Martina’s bedroom. She feels different now, stronger but heavier. Slowly she stands and realizes something is attached to her shin.

She reaches down and touches it: there’s hair, and … is that a nose? Are those eyes?

“I…”

That voice. It can’t be.

“Martina?”

It is.

Martina is back, and she’s alive, and her head is a part of Kylie now, fused to her leg.

“Kylie,” Martina whispers.

Hearing her say her name brings tears to Kylie’s eyes. “What is it?”

“I feel fantastic.”

SPEECH CAPABLE by Elias Chen

October 14, 2021

Changliu and her sister were huddled over the kitchen counter. Between them lay an unopened bowl of instant ramen, shrink wrap intact, the container propped upright on a folded kitchen towel. Changliu and her sister looked directly into the smiling face of the man printed on the lid. The image was animate, blinking, shifting his shoulders, his lips parting now and again like he was about to speak but waiting for a cue. It was their idol, Xiao Tan.

What was supposed to happen? After they opened the package, Xiao Tan was supposed to launch into a ninety-second monologue from the lid of the ramen bowl. Something along these generic cadences: thanks for buying, felicitations, please enjoy your meal. But most importantly, after that, you could talk to him freeform during the final thirty seconds. You’d ask questions and the tiny, animate Xiao Tan would respond, provided the answer wasn’t explicitly NSFW. In order to do this, to answer your questions, the print Xiao Tan was imbued with a bare-bones version of the living Xiao Tan’s personality. Even more crucial, this simulated personality held a selection of the person’s real memories. It knew what Xiao Tan knew.

Changliu held her phone over the packaged ramen. Several pop-up windows flashed on the screen, glowing windows superimposed over the live camera image of Xiao Tan on the lid. There were rapidly changing rows of letters, numbers, lines, and numerals. Changliu’s first task was to override Xiao Tan’s initial ninety-second dialogue, and then she’d ease the parameters of his Q&A script. All this made it possible for her sister to spend two entire minutes just asking him questions.

Now here was a specific endeavor. Changliu, her sister, and hundreds of other sisters all around the country had bought every single ramen bowl in this particular batch just to do this exact procedure with every one of them. Citing production errors, the manufacturer had issued a recall, but between when the announcement was made and when supermarkets had begun to pull stock from the shelves, someone had figured out this hack. It was a miracle. In less than twelve hours, the sisters had mobilized, and they’d bought almost every unit of the defective batch before they were confiscated.

After consulting the experts among themselves, the sisters had collectively engineered the most straightforward way to jailbreak the ramen bowls in order to ask Xiao Tan their questions. The questioning would be done in pairs or in groups, with one sister responsible for jailbreaking the bowls and another sister responsible for asking the questions. The entire session would be recorded for later transcription and analysis.

The questions had been workshopped. Each group of sisters was responsible for asking a specific set of questions, so none of their efforts were redundant. The goal of this vast endeavor was a common, vital, sisterly interest. Changliu and her sisters were going to figure out whether their ship, a pairing of the male idol actors Xiao Tan / Gang Yinbo—They were going to figure out whether it was real.

“Are you ready?” her sister asked.

“Thirty seconds,” replied Changliu.

Changliu tapped the screen of her phone. The shifting rows of letters and numbers began to cohere into legible sequences. They flickered once and then they stopped. On the lid of the bowl, Xiao Tan’s pupils froze in their sockets.

“Five seconds,” said Changliu. She, her sister, and Xiao Tan all blinked in unison, and then her sister tore the shrink wrap away from the bowl. She started asking their questions.

Were you in X place at Y time? Were all the actors housed on the same floor of the hotel when you shot Z drama? How often would you eat dinner with your co-star, Gang Yinbo? Did you become familiar with your co-star’s eating habits? How familiar were you with your co-star’s personal behaviors? Were you generally aware of how much he slept? When he went to bed? Did he prefer the room bright or dark? What was the first thing he did upon waking up?

Xiao Tan answered with the direct concision of a student getting quizzed out loud. But as he spoke, Changliu felt cold dismay settle in her stomach. His replies were single words or phrases, and while knowing the answers was good, the constellation of information they formed seemed almost incoherent. There were any number of reasons why Xiao Tan might know that Gang Yinbo ate one slice of whole grain toast and a hard-boiled egg every morning. When Xiao Tan professed not to know his co-star’s sleeping habits, Changliu remembered an interview where Xiao Tan had said their chaotic filming schedule meant that almost no one slept regular hours. It’d be incredible, delicious, and incendiary if he did know when, where, and how Gang Yinbo slept, but that he didn’t know meant very little. There was no conclusion to draw.

Changliu tried to imagine. Summer in Hengdian, where the drama was filmed, the air stifling and close, the heat of the season undissipated even long after midnight. The hotel’s air conditioning would stick clothes to damp skin, the sharp chill only getting worse between the lobby and the elevator.

“Comrade Gang,” Xiao Tan might say, slouching against the elevator’s chrome handrail, staring at Gang Yinbo with vaguely bloodshot eyes. “I know it’s already two, but we’re not filming until later tomorrow. You only have that interview around lunch, so how about coming to my room to look over the script now? We could practice our lines before bed.”

Changliu imagined Gang Yinbo leaning back, one hand raised to push the hair out of his eyes. She imagined him asking, brows lifted: “Are you sure?”

He’d rake his fingers through his hair. Xiao Tan would grin, and then—

Changliu realized the kitchen was silent. Her sister was looking at her, tense and slightly lost. She was done asking their assigned questions. Changliu glanced at the timer. There were twenty seconds left.

The animate Xiao Tan looked at them with pleasant expectation. Acutely aware of the effort they’d gone through, of the moments sliding past, a single question rushed out of Changliu’s mouth: “You—Do you love Gang Yinbo?”

For the first time, Xiao Tan smiled. Changliu’s scalp went numb, and sweat broke out on her temples.

“Of course I do,” Xiao Tan replied. “I also love Rei-brand Ramen! Remember, just add water, wait two minutes, and it’s ready to enjoy. Thanks for buying! I look forward to seeing you soon~”

With that, Xiao Tan settled back into print, the fine-grain twitches of his animation slowing down until he was an image on the lid. His mouth still curved with the trace of a smile.

Changliu and her sister looked at each other. Without speaking, her sister went over and turned on the kettle. She unsealed the ramen, and once the water was boiled, she poured it inside. They waited two minutes, just like Xiao Tan had said. Afterwards, sharing the same bowl, they ate together in deep, persistent silence.

Once they finished, Changliu indicated that if she wanted, her sister could drink the broth. Her sister raised the bowl to her lips. A trickle of soup leaked out of her mouth, dripping down to stain her collar with a vivid, orangey bloom.

Changliu’s sister slammed the bowl onto the table. She coughed twice, eyes watering, and yelled, “Surely this life is cursed! What the hell did he mean?”

“I know,” said Changliu. “I know.”