Kung fu suicide
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I have tickets to the Shaolin master kung-fu thing. They cost $45 or something. My girlfriend used her credit card. She has the tickets. I knock on her door.
Things haven’t been good. A few days ago, I stopped talking to her. I still hung out 24 hours a day with her. I just stopped talking. She asked if anything was wrong. She asked about 20 times. At first I said no. Then I said yes, but I didn’t know what. Then I said that I feel like shit, and she stopped asking.
We don’t talk on the subway. We’re on our way to Shaolin. It’s cold out. I start to notice things. Stuff like how trapped I am. How I live in some crappy apartment with roommates and how the city is an island really and how outside the city there’s all these rivers and mountains and god knows what else. And I’m going to college for Undecided. And even that has me trapped. Tuition and everything. And I work at the library. It took weeks to get that job. Weeks I don’t want to do again. So I’m stuck at the library too. And each day it’s more stuck. There’s more stuff in my room. My girlfriend says stuff like, we’ve been together for whatever amount of time so we should try and work things out. Sometimes I want to throw her out the window. I really do. Get it over with. The fourteenth floor. When I was happy a few months ago, I threw a beach ball out her window. Every couple of days, she says that she’s unhappy. This has been going on for a year. She wants to hang out with her friends again, she wants me to be friends with her friends, she wants to have sex more, she wants space, etc.
We’re at the Shaolin thing. Our seats are not too good. The martial art monks look like G.I. Joe figures from here. They flip around and mock fight each other. It’s okay, but I’ve seen Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. My girlfriend’s okay, but there are a hundred other girls who I like more. This is how it is. Nothing is good. Everything is okay. The lights are all out except on the stage. Every once in awhile, everyone claps. The darkness and temperature is comfortable. My girlfriend sits to my left. At intermission, she goes to the bathroom. I do too. I look at her face as she comes back to sit down. I start wishing she was prettier, funnier, not so sentimental, smarter, and more into The Lawrence Arms and Lorrie Moore. Overall, I just wish she could be exactly like me. No one says anything out loud. I talk in me head, to myself. My face is blank as sour cream.
On the subway back, I don’t say anything. Neither does she. I imagine being one of the Shaolin monks. I’d walk down Broadway after midnight when there’s not that many people, only I wouldn’t walk, I’d be doing flips the whole time. I wonder if I’d be happy if that was my life. I’d stand there doing flips, a McDonald’s cup in front for cash donations. Off the subway, I look at my girlfriend and think how much I don’t like her. She lives across the hall in the school dorm building. I look at her. Her head is really big, way too big. I’m just not attracted to her. What if I told her this? She’d probably cry or something. I go in the building. This is in Chinatown. I go stand in front of the elevators. She keeps walking. There are more elevators in back. I say her name. She keeps walking. I accept this. I take the elevator up to my room.
In my room, I masturbate to Internet porn. For a couple of minutes, life is good. I mess around with my computer. The roommate hasn’t come back yet. It’s Winter Break still. I’m bored and lonely. I look around my room. There’s an acoustic guitar, about 40 books, 100 CDs, a snare drum, half a dozen drumsticks, and a whole ton of other crap. I pick up a drumstick and throw it across the room. It hits the wall and lands on the guitar, wedging in its strings. I call my girlfriend. She doesn’t answer. I keep calling her. I get mad that she doesn’t answer. I think she’s not answering just cause she knows I’ll keep calling. I know that I’m not good enough to get another girlfriend. So I keep calling her. Finally, she answers.
She comes over. I let her in. Everything is calm, so calm. We have quiet, hard sex, like robots. After, everything is even more calm. In the shower, I think about the Shaolin monks. I wonder if they ever get sad, if they ever feel the horrible weight of existence pressing down on them, a weight so heavy that they can’t even feel it, that it’s unfeelable, and that’s what makes it so horrible, that there is no weight, and then there’s actually a lessening of weight, a pull away, like you’re becoming sparse and spreading apart and might float away. I wonder what the Shaolin monks do when they feel that. If they have some special jump kick routine that cures it, instantly. Some kind of anti-existential crisis, anti-depression, mood-enhancing roundhouse kick exercise.
Out of the shower. I turn off the lights and lay on my bed, by my girlfriend. I don’t tell her that I’m happy. I don’t say that I never want to fight again. I don’t touch her hair and say that I love her. I lay on my side because the bed is too small and she’s lying on her back taking up all the space. I say I’m going to sleep. She says okay.
I wake up depressed. My stomach hurts for some reason. We go to her room down the hall to make food. I notice how ugly she is in the morning. I follow behind her. Neither of us knows if the other is mad or sad or unsatisfied or what. So we don’t say anything. It takes forever to walk down the hall to her room. I look at the walls. I wish that I was really strong, so I could punch a hole in the wall. Like the Terminator. I’d punch a hole in the wall and rip out some kind of pipe and everything would be okay.
In her room, I think about jumping out her window. Fourteen floors. I don’t care what my parents would feel or what it would do to my girlfriend. I just think that it would be scary falling all that way. I’d get that weird dropped feeling in my stomach. And what would my last words be. Would I try and be funny and say, I’m going to the deli you want anything? Would I be histrionic and lie and tell her I love and will always love her? What if I accidentally mumble and my words come out unclear? What if I jump kicked out the window? I picture this and almost laugh out loud. For one second, I feel good. I sit on her bed.
I lay down on her bed. I tell her that my stomach hurts. It really does. I pull the blanket over everything but my head. I try to sleep. She sits down on the bed with a book. Instead of lying down next to me and holding me or something, she has this book. I think of the word fuck. Fuck her. No, not sex. I try and clarify in my mind. I can’t. Fuck. Fuck everything. I open my eyes a slit, so I can see her and she can’t tell I’m looking. She’s reading. Some pretentious crap. I hate her. I hate how she uses all these fucking technical deconstructionist Derrida Ellis Bloom objectivist appropriation poetry subjectivism terms and thinks she’s so fucking smart. I close my eyes. I secretly hate everyone in the world. Every fucking person. I think I’m better than everyone else. I wonder if anyone else is like this. I hate myself for being like this. I try and close my eyes. But they’re already closed. I feel my face. Brows intense. Angry. I try and relax. In case she’s looking. I feel more trapped here than ever before. Under this blanket that she’s sitting on, in this room in this building in this Manhattan island in this fucking city and in this Earth atmosphere solar system galaxy universe. I scream in my head. I open my eyes. I feel my face all tense. It probably looks angry. I try and relax it. Then I think that I can look mad if I want. I twist my face up even more. Like I’m disgusted. I nudge her. I want her to see my face. My eyes start getting wet. I nudge her again. What, she says. But she doesn’t look. I lose the anger in my face. Now I look sad. I think about pushing her violently off the bed. I nudge her harder. She says, what. Loud, like she’s mad. I push her hard off the bed. I close my eyes hard and try to squeeze out tears. I scrunch it all up. I do everything I can to make my face the meanest and saddest thing ever.
Tao Lin implores you to e-mail him so that you can read his novel entitled One Hundred Billion Years of Infinite Solitude. He needs at least 2 or 3 positive feedbacks a month to keep him going or else he's liable to just give up and get a job delivering pizza or something and go for 40 years and then die destitute and artless and addicted to tylenol cold and flu and caffeine. Thanks.