Search History

By Eugene Lim

Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire.

Frank Exit is dead—or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend comes to a shocking realization: Frank has been reincarnated as a dog! This epiphany launches a series of adventures—interlaced with digressions about AI-generated fiction, virtual reality, Asian American identity in the arts, and lost parents—as an unlikely cast of accomplices and enemies pursues the mysterious canine. In elliptical, propulsive prose, Search History plumbs the depths of personal and collective consciousness, questioning what we consume, how we grieve, and the stories we tell ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781566896269

Eugene Lim

Eugene Lim is the author of Fog & Car, The Strangers, and Dear Cyborgs. His writing has appeared in Fence, the Denver Quarterly, Little Star, Dazed, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press and works as a librarian in a high school. He lives in Queens, New York.

Book preview

No Machine Could Do It

I was surprised at the work because it was a well-structured novel. But there are still some problems [to overcome] to win the prize, such as character descriptions.

—SATOSHI HASE

THE DYSTHYMIC ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SCIENTIST WHO WISHED she’d become a poet extracts herself from the story written by the robot named César Aira by putting down her glass of now diluted diet beer and rising from the couch. All goes dark except for a spotlight shining on a hastily constructed pinewood stage. One hears footsteps clacking. She finds her mark, blinking a few times in the harsh light. She says:

Grief has changed me. Various deaths, the death of my best friend, the death of my parents, littler deaths pinging like raindrops around me, other more booming larger and closer deaths—and each a spiritual tremor, some annihilating earthquakes. And only now after digesting them, partially or whole, it seems I might finally begin to acknowledge all the loss that seemed inevitably to come with life. Prior to the deaths of my parents, before I was forever orphaned, in that era of their slow and then sudden decline, the saying that most made sense to me, that most articulated the changeover, was something I had heard years prior. A stranger had said it to me at a bar. Someone had quoted to me an old Yiddish saying: When the father gives to the child, both laugh. And when the child gives to the father, both cry. At the time I remember thinking, What about the mother? When does she laugh and cry? But subtracting the chauvinism, it’s still an accurate description of a certain tide turning. How much delight my daughter used to get from a toy, something cheap and foolish to purchase for her—like a plastic bauble in a bubble from the coin-operated machine in front of the supermarket. Please, Mommy. Pleeeeease, can I have one? Why should I succumb to her importunings for such a stupid and, in fact, detrimental gift—one that inculcates within her not only a toxic materialism, but, like a gambler’s fallacy, incentivizes a future habit of similar whiny requests? Because she calls me her angel when I give her the coins to operate the machine, because she giggles at the clear plastic bubble holding inside it—oh real joy—a plastic pullback motorcycle in the shape of a bumblebee. Look at, she tells strangers, what mommy got me! So the corruption is tied intrinsically with those first joys. Right from the beginning, purity impossible. Which isn’t the problem: purity. No, that’s no longer it, though for some time I admit it drove me. That was the wannabe poet within me, some teenager caught in arrested development, crusading, hardcore, a vision unmuddied by experience. Whom, by the way, I don’t disparage. That’s the spirit that will save us if anything will save us. But now. Now, it’s no longer the vexing question, the day-to-day problem. Now, it’s just a question of the loss. The losing and the loss. Now it’s trying not to die so much every day, to not have the dying happen around me so much, to not see the dying even in that which is coming to life, to not be crushed every moment by the loss the loss the loss. In the city you run into someone at the movies or at a poetry reading or, less often, in line at the DMV, and you think, Hey, there’s my friend! But the sweet, tenuous link between people that we name so easily as friendship can barely be held in the mind. I like to go to lunch one-on-one with a friend. That’s what this is all about, what we’re leading up to. That kind of lunch. That kind of lunch is the best. A casual meal and maybe you’ll do something together after, maybe you’ll spend the whole day and night together, or maybe it’ll be just an hour or so and then you’re both off. In the middle of life I found myself at various times in darkish diners and overheated or undercooled dives and compared notes on relative states of entropy and dissolution with a dozen or so Virgils who ate overdressed Cobb salads, icy mul-naengmyeons, fluffy sandwiches de miga, meaty momos, or hockey-puck cheeseburger deluxes, and we looked across battered and crumbled tables at each other, trying to name the things we could name—particularly the pretty nimbused phantoms we were in the middle of losing, but also the movie stars in something we saw last week as well as the gossip about the wrong turns of others. Hidden in the jibes and tales and joshing, of course, were those things we couldn’t quite name but which we might make a gesture or joke toward, and also we’d laugh at, or call out, each other’s sentimentality and romanticism, and maybe most importantly we would leave unsaid the things we couldn’t bear or care or, for whatever reason, were unable to even think about. Like, for instance, several years ago I met for lunch my friend Jean, who used to go by Gene. Jean had transitioned after I first met her so sometimes I still misgendered her as Gene, which wasn’t so offensive to her, so she claimed, but still it was embarrassing for me when I’d catch myself doing it. Old habits being tough to break. How’s it hanging, Gene? I’d say, and she would smile brightly, as would I, because, in fact, occasions for us to get together were far too rare (though neither of us knew why). We were meeting for lunch near my apartment in Jackson Heights. It was a warm enough spring afternoon that we’d grabbed some empanadas from a Uruguayan bakery, made a second trip for some Vietnamese ice coffees, and taken our paper bags and plastic cups to sit on a park bench in the sun on a little grass-and-dirt half-block that passed for a park in our city. In other words, a perfect lunch. Jean said:

I’D BECOME FRIENDS WITH A PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL.

He handled everything: scandal, sex, politics, political sex scandals, racism, weather, the racism of weather, Japanese cartoons. Everything was under his purview, but his specialty was: The Future. He was a much more successful colleague at the university where I would occasionally adjunct. Several years ago, entirely by accident, when collecting some papers from our department’s office, not knowing who he was, I saw him standing next to the faculty mailboxes with a copy of a book I’d just read. I was younger and new to the place and excitable—and so I started up a brief conversation about the