Taipei (9 page)

When the food arrived Paul ordered tater tots and more tequila. They ate silently in the loud bar. Paul felt he would need to scream, or exert an effort that would feel like he was screaming, to be heard. He was aware of Fran, to his left, quietly eating with her mouth near her plate, as if to hide something, or probably to reduce the distance to her enchiladas, which in Paul’s peripheral vision appeared shapeless, almost invisible. After Fran left to “do homework,” she said,
Paul and Daniel decided to try watching
Drugstore Cowboy
again, in Paul’s room.

On the walk to Daniel’s apartment, to get
Drugstore Cowboy
, dozens of elderly, similarly dressed Asian men were standing in a loosely organized row, like a string of Christmas lights, seeming bored but alert, on a wide sidewalk, across from Bar Matchless. Daniel asked one of them what movie they were in and the Asian man seemed confused, then said “Martin Scorsese” without an accent when Daniel asked again.

Around forty minutes later Paul said “that looks like the group of Asians . . . we saw earlier,” realizing with amazement as he saw Bar Matchless that they had unwittingly walked to the same place.

Daniel’s two suitemates were seated at a round, thin, foldable table on chairs Paul immediately viewed as “found on the street,” talking to each other, it seemed, after returning from a concert. Except for a broom and what Daniel confirmed—grimly, Paul felt—was a giant plastic eggplant of unknown origin, there was nothing else in the common room.

Daniel’s room had a dresser, mattress pad, wood chair, tiny desk. Within arm’s reach, outside his window, was a brick wall covered with gradients of gray ash. Daniel showed Paul, who felt self-conscious and crowded, standing in place, a candle shaped like a lightbulb and said it was from his sister. Paul stared at it, unable to comprehend, in a way that made the behavior seem unreal, exactly why Daniel was showing it to him, with a feeling that he’d misheard, or not heard, something Daniel said a few seconds or minutes ago.

Paul woke sitting on his mattress with his back against a wall, beside Daniel, who seemed asleep and was also sitting. The
room was palely lit by a cloudy, faintly pink morning. Paul’s MacBook, in front of them, showed
Drugstore Cowboy
’s menu screen. Paul shifted a little—his right leg was numb—and Daniel began talking in a clear voice, as if he’d been awake a few minutes already. Daniel wanted to ingest Adder-all instead of sleep. Paul, who couldn’t remember if they’d watched the movie, distractedly asked what they would do “all day.”

“What we normally do. Walk around. Fix my computer.”

“I feel . . . sleepy,” said Paul.

Daniel said something about Adderall.

“I feel like I’ll still be sleepy,” said Paul.

“You’ll be awake, trust me.”

“I’m not sure if I want to.”

“I feel like you’re eight years old or my girlfriend,” said Daniel around five minutes later.

“I really don’t know what I want to do,” said Paul grinning.

An hour later, after each showering at his own apartment, they met and ingested Adderall and walked to Verb, a café without internet, where they drank iced coffee and ingested a little more Adderall, then went in an adjacent bookstore, where Daniel showed Paul a translated book of nonfiction with a similar cover—off-center black dot, white background—as Shawn Olive’s poetry book.

“That’s funny,” said Paul grinning, and they got on the L train, then walked to the Apple store on Prince Street. Daniel’s MacBook, which had files he needed for his job as a research assistant to an elderly ghostwriter (of sports autobiographies) who owed him $200, would require two weeks to be fixed. Daniel asked if Paul would go with him to Rhode Island, in three hours, to stay with Fran’s family for a weekend. Paul declined, saying he hadn’t been invited. Daniel
said he confirmed last week but didn’t want to go anymore and that, a few minutes ago, Fran texted she couldn’t, against expectation, get any Oxycodone—without which it was going to be “unbearable,” Daniel felt, for both himself and Fran, to be around Fran’s family. Paul declined again, saying it seemed stressful. It began raining from a partly sunny sky, and they went in an Urban Outfitters. Daniel walked to a table of books and stood without looking at anything, like a tired child waiting for an overbearingly upbeat mother to finish shopping.

“You seem worried,” said Paul.

“Sorry. I’m trying to think of an excuse to tell Fran.”

It was sunny and cloudless, around twenty minutes later, when they sat side by side on a bench in Washington Square Park. Daniel swallowed something and mutely handed Paul a 20mg Adderall, which Paul swallowed. Two preadolescent girls ran around the fountain area repeatedly. Paul said he felt like he hadn’t run as fast as possible in probably five or ten years. When the Adderall took effect Daniel began to praise Paul’s writing without restraint or pause for twenty to thirty minutes and asked about Paul’s IQ. Paul said it was either 139 or 154. Daniel was quiet a few seconds, then with a slightly troubled expression said his IQ was higher, seeming like he felt more complicatedly doomed, as a person, with this information. Paul said his mother always said that his and his brother’s IQs were exactly the same, but sometimes also said she was required, as a parent, to say that.

Daniel said his sister had multiple doctorates, his parents and aunts and uncles were all high-level professors, but he was “not anything.” Paul knew from previous conversations that Daniel, as a teenager, had been on months-long retreats to Buddhist monasteries, culminating in something like a year alone, when he turned 18, in India or Tibet. Daniel walked
away to call Fran and Paul read a text from Laura asking if he wanted to see
Trash Humpers
tonight. Paul texted he already saw it, and they made plans to record a song in his room in two hours. Daniel returned and said he told Fran his computer had to be fixed today, or not for two weeks, and he needed it to do work, because he hadn’t paid last month’s rent, so wasn’t going to Rhode Island, and that “she got really angry.”

“I feel like you did the right thing . . . I mean . . . outside of being honest,” said Paul grinning. “Your relationship with her is more accurate now.”

“Your use of the word ‘accurate’ is interesting.”

“She has a more accurate view of your view of her now probably,” said Paul.

Laura arrived with Walter, whom Paul hadn’t expected, two hours late and reacted to Paul’s agitation, as they walked from the bronze gate to the house, with resentment and dismissiveness, then became a little apologetic in Paul’s room, showing him texts she’d sent to Walter telling him to hurry.

“You can’t blame me,” said Walter, and chuckled. “I don’t even know why I’m here. You suddenly just started texting me to drive you here.”

“Now everyone is turning against me,” said Laura smiling nervously, not looking at anyone. Paul asked Walter if it was true, as he’d thought he’d read on Gawker, that Detroit, where Walter was from, only had seven grocery stores. Walter laughed quietly and said that wasn’t true and that Detroit was comparable, he felt, to Ann Arbor maybe. Paul said he was going to Ann Arbor in September, for his book tour, and asked what size it was, and was peripherally aware of Laura turning away, like she’d observed the interaction and concluded something, as she said “now you’re going to ask Walter a lot of questions.”

“It’s like Berkeley,” said Walter.

“It’s that big?” said Paul in a dreamy voice, and moved, vaguely for privacy, from the mattress to the floor, where he texted Daniel and ingested a Klonopin, weakly thinking “it won’t begin working until I won’t need it as much anymore.” Walter and Laura, who had brought a tambourine and a shaker, talked idly, a few feet from Paul, who thought Walter’s grumpiness after leaving Kyle and Gabby’s party, when he’d wielded a Red Bull Soda, now seemed endearing. Paul noticed Laura looking at his pile of construction paper and said she could have some if she wanted, and she focused self-consciously on wanting some, saying how she would use it and what colors she liked, seeming appreciative in an affectedly sincere manner—the genuine sincerity of a person who doesn’t trust her natural behavior to appear sincere. Paul went outside and opened the bronze gate and laughed a little when Daniel said he should “grow an enormous afro without any warning” for his next author photo and they sat on the front stoop. The late-afternoon sky, in Paul’s peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes—of nature’s vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself—than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block. Walter exited the house and mentioned a party in Chelsea and left. Laura exited a few minutes later, meekly holding her tambourine and shaker and some construction paper. “I see you ‘got in on’ the construction paper,” said Paul in the sarcastic, playful voice he’d used to recommend Funyuns the night they met, but with a serious expression. “Good choices, in terms of colors. Good job.”

“You said I could have some,” said Laura hesitantly.

“I know,” said Paul. “I’m glad you got some.”

“Well, I’m going home now,” said Laura with a shy expression, not looking at anyone.

At a party that night Paul met Taryn, a friend of Caroline and Shawn Olive’s, and became gradually—almost unnoticeably—intrigued by their interactions. They rarely talked and never touched but remained, for some reason, near each other, as if one was the other’s manager or personal assistant, but neither knew their role and could only study the other for clues, which they seemed to do, gazing at each other anthropomorphically, for seconds at a time, surprisingly without awkwardness, then she seemed to disappear and was quickly forgotten. Paul sat with strangers on a crowded staircase and drank a beer while looking at his phone, sometimes staring at its screen for ten to twenty seconds without thinking anything, before maneuvering through a crowded hallway into a medium-size room. Around twenty-five people were dancing to loud music with faces that seemed expressive in an emotionless, hidden, bone-ward manner—the faces of people with the ability to stop clutching the objects of themselves and allow their brains, like independent universes with unique and inconstant natural laws, to react, like trees to wind, with their bodies to music.

Paul walked directly to a two-seat sofa (golden brown and deeply padded as the upturned paw of an enormous stuffed animal) and lay on it, on his side, facing the room, and closed his eyes. After a blip of surprise, which disintegrated in some chemical system of Klonopin and Valium and alcohol instead of articulating into what would’ve startled Paul awake—that he’d fluently, with precision and total calm, entered a room of dozens of people and lain facing outward on a sofa—was asleep. When he woke, an unknown amount of time later—
between five and forty minutes, or longer—he observed neutrally that, though he was drooling a little and probably the only non-dancing person in the room, no one was looking at him, then moved toward the room’s iPod with the goal-oriented, zombie-like calmness of a person who has woken at night thirsty and is walking to his refrigerator and changed the music to “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins. Every person, it seemed, stopped dancing and appeared earnestly annoyed but—as if to avoid encouraging the behavior—didn’t look at Paul or say anything and, when the music was changed back, resumed dancing, like nothing had happened.

In early June, after four more parties, two at which he similarly slept on sofas after walking mutely through rooms without looking at anyone, Paul began attending fewer social gatherings and ingesting more drugs, mostly with Daniel and Fran, or only Daniel, or sometimes alone, which seemed classically “not a good sign,” he sometimes thought, initially with mild amusement, then as a neutral observation, finally as a meaningless placeholder. Due to his staggered benzodiazepine usage and lack of obligations or long-term projects and that he sometimes ingested Seroquel and slept twelve to sixteen hours (always waking, it seemed, at night, uncomfortable and disoriented and unsure what to do, usually returning to sleep) he had gradually become unaware of day-to-day or week-to-week changes in his life—and, when he thought of himself in terms of months and years, he still viewed himself as in an “interim period,” which by definition, he felt, would end when his book tour began—so he viewed the trend, of fewer people and more drugs, as he might view a new waiter at Taco Chulo: “there, at some point,” separate from him, not of his concern, beyond his ability or desire to track or control.

When he wanted to know what happened two days ago, or five hours ago, especially chronologically, he would sense an impasse, in the form of a toll, which hadn’t been there before, payable by an amount of effort (not unlike that required in problem solving or essay writing) he increasingly felt unmotivated to exert. There were times when his memory, like an external hard drive that had been taken from him and hidden inside an unwieldy series of cardboard boxes, or placed at the end of a long and dark and messy corridor, required much more effort than he felt motivated to exert simply to locate, after which, he knew, more effort would be required to gain access. After two to five hours with no memory, some days, he would begin to view concrete reality as his memory—a place to explore idly, without concern, but somewhat pointlessly, aware that his actual existence was elsewhere, that he was, in a way, hiding here, away from where things actually happened, then were stored here, in his memory.

Having repeatedly learned from literature, poetry, philosophy, popular culture, his own experiences, most movies he’d seen, especially ones he liked, that it was desirable to “live in the present,” “not dwell on the past,” etc., he mostly viewed these new obstacles to his memory as friendly and, sometimes, momentarily believing in their viability as a form of Zen, exciting or at least interesting. Whenever he wanted to access his memory (usually to analyze or calmly replay a troubling or pleasant social interaction) and sensed the impasse, which he almost always did, to some degree, or that his memory was currently missing, as was increasingly the case, he would allow himself to stop wanting, with an ease, not unlike dropping a leaf or stick while outdoors, he hadn’t felt before—and, partly because he’d quickly forget what he’d wanted, without a sensation of loss or worry, only an acknowledgment of a different distribution of consciousness than if he’d focused on assembling and sustaining a
memory—and passively continue with his ongoing sensory perception of concrete reality.