Taipei (17 page)

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“You’ve said yes to other things you didn’t want to do.”

“Can you give me an example of one of those things?”

“Smoking weed with Calvin,” said Paul about two nights ago, and extended a finger, then another finger. “Inviting Patrick to visit you,” he said about someone Erin met at the College of Coastal Georgia and had spoken to twice on Skype and exchanged mix CDs and who, by Erin’s invitation, had purchased plane tickets to visit her—for six days, in two weeks—but whose Facebook messages Erin had been ignoring. Paul closed his eyes and thought about how Erin seemed like she didn’t want to talk to Beau anymore, but continued texting him and answering his calls.

“Just those two things,” said Paul, and opened his eyes.

“I can explain those two things. Smoking weed with Calvin, I thought it could be a thing that I want to do, but in the moment I didn’t feel like doing. And Patrick . . . I felt, like, bored for a long time . . . with romantic prospects. It seemed exciting that this person in Georgia was interested in me. I thought ‘this could at least be something to do.’ So . . . that’s why. And I thought that maybe once he came it could be fun, or something.”

“So, if it’s just something to do, you’ll still do it.”

“Yeah,” said Erin with the word extended. “But that’s not what it would be like . . . with you. This,” she said, and placed a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Interests me. A lot.”

“But do I interest you enough for you to go through with it,” mumbled Paul.

“With what?” said Erin after a few seconds.

“To go through with it,” said Paul, unsure what he was referencing.

“What? What does?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul quickly. “Never mind. You want to come.”

“I want to come.”

“Okay,” said Paul. “Good.” They saw in Google Calendar
that Erin was scheduled to work two days next week. “So . . . you’re not going with me?”

“I want to,” said Erin.

“But you have work.”

“I’d rather go with you than work,” said Erin noncommittally.

“Then . . . what are you going to do?”

“I think I can get someone to cover my shifts. They don’t really need me there those days.”

“What . . . are you doing?” said Paul, and grinned. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m going with you,” said Erin grinning, and patted his shoulder. “I’m going with you.”

In North Carolina two Duke University students drove Paul and Erin from the airport, where they’d arrived on separate flights, to a hotel, returning at night to drive them to the reading. Paul and Erin talked calmly in the dark backseat, holding half-full cups of hot tea from the hotel lobby, as a college radio station played something fuzzy and instrumental and wistful. Erin said she emailed Patrick last night, while she was in Baltimore and Paul was in Brooklyn, that she started liking someone else and was sorry if he felt bad and would help pay for his plane ticket. Paul asked if Patrick might still visit Baltimore, as a kind of vacation.

“Probably not. He was going to stay in my apartment.”

“What did Beau say last night?”

“He just really wanted to hang out,” said Erin, who had mentioned in an email that she had “screamed” at Beau on the phone. “And I was like, ‘I don’t, really. I have other things to do and you shouldn’t be here.’ ”

“He came over?”

“No, he was like ‘fuck that, I’m coming over now.’ Or like
‘I’m walking there now.’ I was like ‘this is . . . scary,’ ” said Erin, and laughed.

“Jesus. What did you scream at him?”

“I screamed, like, ‘this is done.’ And I hung up on him.”

“Did he call more after that?”

“No. He sent me . . . a mean text, insulting me. He was like, ‘you’re really great, but I’ve always thought your body sucked,’ or something.”

“Seems like a non sequitur.”

“I know,” said Erin, and laughed. “It was weird.”

“Did you respond to that?”

“No,” said Erin. “He’s insane.”

“Do you think you’ll talk to him again?”

Erin said “probably not.” The aquarium, sparsely forested darkness outside the car, on a street sometimes half-bracketed by shopping plazas, reminded Paul of traveling at night in Florida in his family’s minivan. During longer drives he would lay alone, with a blanket and pillow, behind the third row of seats, beyond range of communication—not obligated to respond, he felt, even if he heard his name. In the dark and padded space, on his back, he’d see everything outside, reflected toward him, as one image—squiggling, watery, elemental, synthetic, holographic, layered—in fluid, representational reconfiguration of itself. Until 13 or 14, then sometimes habitually, he never sat in the front seat of cars, even if no one else was, except the five to ten times his brother, home a few weeks or months from college, would say “I’m not your chauffeur” and force Paul, who would feel immature and embarrassed, to sit in front. “I email with Michelle like once every three months,” said Paul. “But in a manner like we’re emailing every day. Like, if someone read our emails it would seem like we were emailing every day.”

“That seems good,” said Erin smiling.

 • • •

In Louisiana, two days later, Paul and Erin were in a Best Buy, early in the afternoon, to buy an external hard drive, because their MacBooks from storing their movies were almost out of memory. Paul was walking aimlessly through the store with a bored expression, holding the Smashing Pumpkins’ double CD below him, at waist level, where he scratched its plastic wrapping in an idle, distracted, privately frustrated manner. After finally tearing it off and lodging it, with difficulty, because it kept clinging to him by static electricity, behind some Beck CDs, he used “brute force,” he thought instructionally, to pry open the locked case and get only the blue CD, which had “Tonight, Tonight” and “Zero” on it, to listen to in the rental car.

In Best Buy’s security room, which was module-like and dimmer than the store, the sheriff of Baton Rouge shook his head in strong, earnest, remarkably unjaded disappointment when Paul, asked why he was here—he had a Florida driver’s license, a New York address—said a college had invited him to speak to them, as an author.

“I felt ashamed,” said Paul in the parking lot to Erin. “I feel like I was on shoplifting autopilot. I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just already doing it.” In Barnes & Noble, a few hours later, he stole Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” collection. They ate watermelon and pineapple chunks in Whole Foods, then drove downtown and rode an elevator to the sixth floor of a darkly tinted building, where Paul read to LSU’s graduate writing program for around twenty minutes (“from a memoir-in-progress that’ll be more than a thousand pages,” he said half earnestly) about a night he watched
Robin Hood
with Daniel at the Union Square theater, then went to a pizza restaurant, where Fran, who had whiskey in a Dr Pepper bottle, got drunker than Paul had ever seen her
and the next day quit her job, after two days, as a waitress in a Polish restaurant. Paul felt self-conscious whenever mentioning a drug, in part because none of his previous books had drugs—except caffeine, alcohol, Tylenol Cold, St. John’s wort—but the audience laughed almost every time a drug was mentioned, seeming delighted, like most of them were on drugs, which was probably true, Paul thought while reading off his MacBook screen. He imagined stopping what he was reading to instead say “Klonopin,” wait three seconds, say “Xanax,” wait three seconds, etc. He didn’t notice until the word “concealment” that he was reading a sentence from something else he’d been working on that had been pasted apparently into the wrong file. He continued reading the sentence—

The transparency and total effort, with none spent on explanation or concealment or experimentation, of what the universe desired—to hug itself as carefully, as violently and patiently, as had been exactly decided upon, at some point, with gravity—was [something].

—until getting to “[something],” which he remembered using as a placeholder after trying combinations of synonyms for “affecting” and “confusing” and longer descriptions like “an actualized ideal, inside of which any combination of parts could never independently attain.” He stared at “[something]” and thought about saying “Klonopin” or “Xanax.” He thought about explaining the bracket usage. “The sentence I just read wasn’t supposed to be there,” he said. “I pasted it there by accident, I think. I’ll stop here, thank you.”

He sat next to Erin in the front row, then Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, a woman in her 60s, whose introduction included that she was married to Richard Tuttle—the artist Gabby said Daniel resembled—read poems for thirty minutes.

 • • •

At a flea market, the next afternoon, after drinking the equivalent of six to eight cups of coffee—in the form of 24x condensed coffee, which they bought from Whole Foods and had never seen before, in containers reminiscent of toilet-cleaning liquid—they pretended to be
Wall Street Journal
reporters and recorded themselves interviewing strangers about
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
. Erin meekly asked a large, young, thuggish-looking man and his smaller friend, both wearing backward caps, if they thought Darth Vader would “die in this one.” After a long pause the large man laughed and said “man, I don’t know,” and looked at his friend, who appeared expressionless, like he hadn’t heard anything that had been said.

“Darth Vader is
Star Trek,
not
Harry Potter,
” said Paul in a weak form of the “the voice,” feigning he was remembering this aloud.

“No, no,” said Erin grinning. “Really?”

“
Star Wars,
” said Paul laughing a little.

“Oh, I don’t know, never mind, never mind, I need to check my notes,” said Erin shaking her head and grinning as she and Paul walked away mumbling to each other, attempting to parody, Paul felt, a stereotypical comedy in which two high-level professionals are egregiously demoted into positions where they struggle to regain their jobs while nurturing between them an unlikely romance and mutually learning the true meaning in life. Erin said she felt “a strong need to be on more drugs.” Without MDMA it was difficult to use “the voice,” without which they felt uncomfortable talking to strangers, improvising, feigning behavior, trying to be witty.

 • • •

After ingesting their remaining Xanax, and more condensed coffee, they decided to drive to New Orleans, an hour away, because their flight to New York, from Baton Rouge, wasn’t until the next morning. It became dark suddenly, it seemed, during the drive. Erin expressed concern about Paul’s driving speed in residential-seeming areas. Paul encouraged her to nap (they’d both said they were sleepy, due to Xanax) and said he would be careful and, a vague amount of time later, became aware of a car that was parked, for some reason, on the street. After a few seconds of vague, unexamined confusion Paul realized the car, in the near distance, was stopped at a red light and abruptly braked hard, then harder, curling his toes with a sensation of clenching a fist. The screeching noise and forward thrust startled Erin awake, but she remained silent, seeming mostly confused. Paul drove sheep-ishly into a shopping plaza and parked near the middle of the mostly empty parking lot and turned off the car.

“I started feeling anxious before like where were we going and we were going fast and it was dark and you were running into things a little bit and I was scared and anxious and afraid,” said Erin in one breath of wildly fluctuating volume and inflection and affect that seemed out of control and arbitrary, then in retrospect like she’d virtuosically sung a popular melody faster than anyone had ever considered trying.

“Sorry,” said Paul with a worried expression.

“And I felt scared,” said Erin with a slight tremble.

“Sorry,” said Paul. “I’m really sorry.” After he apologized more times they walked holding hands across the parking lot. Erin said she only felt slightly interrupted when she woke, that she had been like, “wait, I don’t care, right now, about dying, but in the future I might not want to die.” In a confused, intrigued voice Paul said “in . . . the future?”

“In the future I’ll—” said Erin.

“But if you’re dead you’ll be dead,” said Paul in a loud, murmurred, strangely incredulous voice that he felt aversion toward and confused by.

“What?”

“But if you’re dead you’ll die,” mumbled Paul in a quieter, slurred voice like a stroke victim.

“But I didn’t really want to die right then,” said Erin.

Around midnight, on the drive back to Baton Rouge, Erin said her father seemed to enjoy giving her Xanax and Adderall and that she used to get angry at him for smoking marijuana every night because it affected his memory and he would repeat himself—and, if stopped, would become defensive, argumentative—but now she didn’t try to change him anymore. Paul said his father’s default name for him, what he’d unconsciously say to get Paul’s attention or to reference Paul in conversation, was “baby” until high school, or maybe college, when it became “old baby”—in Taiwanese, where both words were one syllable—which was what he now called almost all people and animals, including Dudu, the toy poodle, Paul remembered, that his parents had bought sometime in the past year, after he visited in December.

Paul talked about the panicked-seeming, alienating emails his mother had sent him the past five months, beginning in June—when he had published nonfiction on the internet mentioning cocaine and Adderall—and increasing during his book tour, when more information connecting him and drugs (tweets soliciting drugs, a “contest” on his blog to discern from the livestreamed video what drug he was on during his San Francisco reading, the interview with Alethia on MDMA) got on the internet. The emails had seemed complicatedly, strategically composed (referencing movies, news articles, celebrities who’ve “ruined their lives,” etc.) to instill mostly fear
and shame and a little guilt to reduce Paul’s drug use, for the exclusive benefit, Paul believed his mother believed, of Paul’s long-term happiness, which however Paul had repeatedly defined as “freedom” to do what he wanted and “trust,” from his friends and family, that he was doing what, based on everything he knew, would result in the happiest results for everyone involved, which was what she also wanted, he’d told her many times. Paul had stated ultimatums like “if you mention drugs one more time I’m not responding to your emails for the rest of the month,” which his mother had repeatedly agreed on and went against, saying she felt an obligation—that it was her duty—as a parent, to continue stating her disapproval. To an increasingly frustrated and, he sometimes suspected of himself, paranoid and distrustful Paul, the emails had begun, at some point, to tactically operate on, at the least, a base of reverse-reverse psychology, which was a cause of despair for Paul, who throughout had tried to stress—but seemed to have failed to convincingly convey—that their relationship would only worsen if they couldn’t communicate directly, without strategy or hyperbole or deception, while aware of himself often not communicating directly.