Eugene Lim - Dear Cyborgs: A Novel

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For Joanna and Felix

We are not machines!

JEON TAE-IL

Catch me solving mysteries like Wikipedia Brown.

Its the future get down.

We make a sound even if nobodys around.

DAS RACIST

Dear Cyborgs,

Todays puzzler. Enforced inescapable automatic insidious complicity. On the horizon no viable just alternative and no path toward one. All proposals thus far fanciful, impossible, doomed. Sure, optimism of the will. Buteither from the towers or beyond the grid, in the trenches, amongst the ruins, or burbdwhat to do?

Yours mostly truly,

This is in Ohio. We were eleven, twelve years old, and the teacher asked us to name the number of siblings we had. One, most said, or, Two. Zero, a few said. I said, One. Vu said, Nine.

I burst out laughing because Id been over to Vus house a lot, had read comic books on his bed and kicked the soccer ball in his backyard, and had even eaten his moms grilled cheese sandwiches. Id never once seen the rustle of a brother-like or sister-like figment, ever, and so thought he was mocking the teacher. But Mrs. Clyde just moved on and no one added anything else, and Vu didnt make any adjustments to his claim.

When I asked him about this later, he just shrugged and said it was true, though he added, Three are half. I didnt know how to pursue it and so let it drop and almost forgot about it entirely, except once in a while it would occur to me again and I would stop suddenly in the middle of something and say to myself, Vu has nine invisible siblings. And I did this years and years later, long after Vu had died, and even then Id find myself out of nowhere thinking, Somewhere in the world are Vus nine siblings, and Ill never know them.

***

(After doing it for some time, for years and decades, the habit of protest becomes something else, something apart from, almost irrelevant to, ones initial desires. It becomes, to say it simply, a way of life. Or, to be more accurate if less simple: ones initial ambitions regress into merely a way of living. Especially this is true if one is clever enough or lucky enough or cowardly enoughlets just say lucky Especially when one is lucky enough not to have been crushed. Andthis is the important qualifierit must also be said that the methods of protest one has chosen, if one after a time is not crushed, that these methods of protest must have been entirely pathetic.)

***

I met Vu in a dream. Or rather I met him during a time of my life so separated from what happened before and later that I think of it as a dream. Most people must feel that childhood is that way, scenes that are familiar but irretrievable, a hazy dreambut I think those years in Ohio are for me a bit further removed than is typical. Ill try to explain.

My father was trained as an engineer, but he worked sporadically. He had a thin skin, was a binge drinker, and had a bad tempera result of which was that he kept getting fired. And so the family kept moving. My memory of childhood therefore, before landing in that small town where I met Vu, is less a blur than a handful of orphaned film clips, too short and too few in number to add up to much. I remember only strange bits: the taste of dark chocolate in a neighbors Oldsmobile, pink lotion on a girls sunburn, a teachers stare marked with hatred, a cut to my finger with my mothers razor. Bits with no story to them but my name.

And then at fifteen we moved again, to Chicago, and those small-town years got overwhelmed and momentarily erased by the seizures of adolescence and an immediate addiction to the convulsions of a city. And so, in this analysis, there is this bubble. An in-between time, eleven to fifteen, when Im not quite a child and yet not an adult, where I now think, despite my feelings then of slow death through intricate paroxysms of boredom, I was nonetheless safe . And I knew I was safe, deep in my heart (perhaps crucially because I knew I didnt matter, because we were invisible, insignificant outsiders).

And my focus during this time of boyhood was Vu, whom I worshipped in a way I think not uncommon in boys of that age. I obsessed without acknowledging it but nonetheless with an open and even heady kind of love.

***

He introduced me to comic books. This, not incidentally, was also an introduction to sex and therefore adulthood, because we would gaze intensely at these idealized images, these cartoons of adult men and women in various forms of wish fulfillment or wish embroidering, in swift balletic action that echoed and manifested and were the seeds of our own desires.

Here is one lesson that Vu taught me. It maybe doesnt seem on the surface to be about comic books, but it is. At least if reading comic books was a sort of hedonistic, perhaps onanistic, act of defianceand if one believes that such pursuits are coterminous with living. Id gotten permission to spend the night at Vus house. We would watch TV and read comic books and listen to music and talk. His mom ordered us a pizza but other than that we didnt see her. His father was never at home, and his mom kept to her room, so we had the run of their large and, from my point of view, deliciously shabby home. My own home, thanks to the rule of my father, in addition to the compulsions of my mother, was unforgiving in its order and cleanliness. It gleamed and was breathless and without beauty. So I first was shocked and then bewitched by the mess at the Nguyen home. (And shamefully misread its untidiness as entirely debauched, so once flung my pizza crust at the TV, which, to my confusion, appalled and enraged Vu.)

And in the mornings, when Vu woke up, instead of going directly to the bathroom or kitchen to do the various rituals required to begin the day, he would lazily pick through his comics and read one in bed. That was the revelation: that he could do this, that he was allowed to do it, that he had even conceived of it. It had, in other words, never occurred to me at the age of fourteen that the lounging, pajama-related activity one did in the evenings, after ones so-called homework and chores were done, could be done first thing in the morning, at the very start of the day, or reallyand the extrapolation was immediately clearone could do it whenever one wanted!

I was made suddenly to realizeVu and his home taught this to methat we were more animal than routine.

***

(However, there is a sliver of protest still possible, which you may rightfully accuse of being worse, a reactionary or collaborative tactic, but which nonetheless is a method I have come to subscribe to and furthermore think is the only possible defiance left outside of the terminal possibilities of suicide, the morally corrupting option of guerrilla warfare, or the subtly but fundamentally distinct choice of utter acquiescence. This alone-possible and admittedly vaporous defiance is merely to live and accept ones culpability but to try without going into heroics to participate minimally, as a parasite does, getting ones needs and not much more, not often much more. One tries then to touch only lightly the general degradation but also to become no longer concerned with it. One becomes accepting of powerlessness, is rendered complacent and mute, but tries nonetheless to signal to other like-minded parasites, not in order to gather and foment rebellion, which would be too grandiose a goal, but simply so as to provide reflection, the mirage or actuality of company, that is, simply to make known ones kinds existence as a remaining possibility. In the end this contemptible character Ive sketched, the artist, is all that remains of the initial quest for purity.)