Taipei (12 page)

Paul splashed water on his face, which he dried, then returned to his seat, next to Juan, who was talking to Jeremy about whether a horse could win “best athlete of the year.” Erin, the only person Paul felt like talking to, at the moment, was out of range, so when two acquaintances who didn’t know anyone else arrived Paul sat with them at a four-person table, where he felt self-conscious about the tenuousness of his situation—he hadn’t ordered food because he was nauseated from the Oxycodone and long car ride and he didn’t have anything he wanted to say to anyone. When a friend of the acquaintances arrived, sitting at the table’s fourth seat, Paul fixated on her—maybe partly to justify his increasingly pointless, idle presence—in an exaggerated manner (asking her questions continuously while sustaining a “concentrating expression” with such intensity, muddled by the onset of the drugs he’d used in the bathroom, that he sometimes felt able to sense the weight of the microscopic painting of the restaurant’s interior, decreased by a dimension and scaled down to almost nothing, resting on the top curvature of his right eyeball) that felt conducive to abruptly stopping and leaving,
which he did, after around fifteen minutes of increasingly forced conversation, walking six blocks to his room.

After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same song-like beating—of another, larger, protective heart—inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.

Paul’s book tour’s fourth reading—after another in Brooklyn and one at a Barnes & Noble in the financial district—was in Ohio, on September 11. Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school who’d been friends since middle school and were currently in a relationship, had invited Paul and Erin and other “internet friends” to read at a music festival and stay two nights in Calvin’s parents’ “mansion,” as Paul called it.

The day after the reading Paul and Erin ingested a little LSD and shared a chocolate containing psilocybin mushrooms and sat in sunlight in Calvin’s backyard, which had a hot tub and swimming pool and skateboard ramp and basketball hoop, “working on things” on their MacBooks. When Calvin returned from school they got in his SUV to go to Whole Foods, where Maggie was meeting them after work at American Apparel, and shared another chocolate. Calvin, who hadn’t wanted any, meekly asked if maybe he’d feel good if he ate only a small piece, seeming like he wanted to be encouraged to try.

“We already ate it,” said Paul, and laughed a little, in the backseat.

Erin, in the front passenger seat, was still holding a piece. Hearing Calvin she had seemed to slow its movement toward her mouth. She made a quiet, inquisitive noise and glanced slightly toward Paul, then resumed a normal speed and placed it inside her mouth. Paul lay on his back for most of the drive, sometimes sitting to noncommittally mumble something relevant, including that he liked Stereolab and Rainer Maria, to what he could hear of Calvin and Erin’s conversation. Walking toward Whole Foods, across its parking lot, Paul said he was “beginning to feel the LSD, maybe.”

“Really?” said Erin. “I feel . . .”

“I don’t know,” said Paul.

“I can’t tell what I feel,” said Erin, and automatic doors opened and they entered the produce section, where they held and examined different coconuts. Calvin stood looking back, seeming tired and a little afraid, like a reclusive uncle supervising his unruly niece and outgoing nephew.

“You should get one,” said Paul. “It’s refreshing.”

“I’m . . . allergic,” said Calvin a little nervously.

“Shit,” said Paul grinning. “I forgot. Again. Sorry.”

The next few minutes, while Paul and Erin went to three different sections—butcher, pizza, sushi—to get their coconuts opened, Calvin remained at a far distance, randomly and inattentively picking up and looking at things and sometimes glancing at Paul and Erin with a worried, socially anxious expression. Something about Calvin, maybe a corresponding distance or that they had similar body types, reminded Paul of Michelle, the night of the magazine-release party, waiting with slack posture at a red light, before she touched his arm and leaned on the metal fence. Paul, in line to pay, considered saying the word “Kafkaesque” to describe getting their coconuts opened, but was distracted by an eerily familiar actress’s
smiling face on a magazine cover and remained silent, then paid and maneuvered to a booth and sat by Erin, across from Calvin, who stared at them with wet eyes and a beseeching, insatiable, inhibited expression that alternated between Paul and Erin to keep both, Paul thought, locked into his meekly laser-like gaze. Paul held his left hand like a visor to his forehead and looked down and sometimes said “oh my god.” Whenever he glanced at Erin, who seemed to be enjoyably displaying an unceasing grin, he laughed uncontrollably and, due to the contrast with Calvin’s alienated demeanor, felt more uncomfortable. Unsure how to stop grinning, or what to do, he left the booth for straws. When he returned, after feeling mischievous and Gollum-like for two to three minutes while trying to secretly record Erin and Calvin with his iPhone, he lowered himself skillfully, he felt, in a 180-degree turn, like that of a screw, to a seated position, flinging a straw at Erin while connecting the awning of his left hand to his forehead. He moved his coconut to his lap and heard a partially metallic, imaginary-sounding noise. He stared without comprehension, but also without confusion, at Calvin’s body, which was hunched close to the table with demonically jutting shoulder blades rising and falling in rhythm to what sounded like a computer-generated squawking. The cube of space containing Calvin seemed to be reconfiguring itself, against passive resistance from the preexisting configuration of Calvin, mutating him in a process of computerization. Paul thought he was witnessing a kind of special effect, then realized Calvin was imitating a pterodactyl.

“I feel so much better now,” said Calvin. “Just doing what I want . . . what I want to do . . . yeah. Before, I was holding back, so I felt bad. I feel so much better now.”

“You were making pterodactyl noises,” said Paul in disbelief.

Maggie appeared as a desultory object, rapidly approaching the booth in a horizontal glide, seeming unnaturally small and eerily low to the ground. “LSDs, LSDs,” she was saying in a high-pitched, taunting, witch-like voice. Paul, who was laughing and repeatedly saying “oh my god” and variations of “I can’t believe this is happening,” heard Calvin say “they’re not on LSD.” Maggie said “magic mushrooms” and seemed to be imitating an elf as she entered the booth behind Erin and Paul, who heard Erin say “we’re on LSD and mushrooms,” and briefly visualized the main character from
Willow,
the dwarf with magical powers. Things seemed defectively quiet, like before an explosion in a movie, the five to ten seconds before Maggie rose in the booth behind Paul, who turned and saw a faceless mound: Maggie, with her entire head inside a black beanie, saying “is this the front of me or back.”

In the parking lot Maggie went alone to her car. Calvin was backing out of his parking space when Paul, leaning forward from the backseat, said he wanted to be in Maggie’s car. Calvin braked and asked what to do, alternately looking at Paul and Erin with a helpless, besieged expression. Paul looked down a little, as if to suspend an intensity of visual input, to allow his brain to better focus on the question, but he wasn’t thinking about the question, or anything, except maybe something about how he wasn’t thinking anything, or was having problems thinking.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Calvin incredulously. “Should I call Maggie?”

“No,” said Paul after a few seconds.

“Maggie already left, I think,” said Calvin.

“Let’s just go,” said Paul.

“But . . . if you want to be in Maggie’s car.”

“I want to be here now.”

“If you . . . are you sure?”

“I want to be in this car. Maggie’s car is small.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” said Paul leaning against the front passenger seat, aware of the distant municipality of the SUV’s lighted dashboard. Things seemed darker to him than expected, a few minutes later, on the highway. The unlighted space, all around him—and, outside the SUV, the trees, sky—seemed more visible, by being blacker, or a higher resolution of blackness, almost silvery with detail, than normal, instead of what he’d sometimes and increasingly sensed, the past two months, mostly in his room, since one night when, supine on his yoga mat, his eyes, while open, had felt closed, or farther back in his head, and his room had seemed “literally darker,” he’d thought, as if the bulb attached to his non-working ceiling fan had been secretly replaced, or like he was deeper inside the cave of himself than he’d been before and didn’t know why. “My face . . . it feels like it’s moving backward,” Calvin was saying in a surprised, confused voice. “It keeps floating into me . . . itself . . . repeatedly.”

“Jesus,” said Paul. “Why?”

“Percocet. And a little Codeine.”

“I didn’t know you’ve been on those.”

“I told you . . . at the house.”

“Jesus,” said Paul. “I remember now.”

They began talking about a Lil Wayne documentary that focused on Lil Wayne’s “drug problem,” which Lil Wayne denied. Paul felt it was bleak and depressing that the film-makers superimposed their views onto Lil Wayne. Calvin seemed to agree with the documentary. Paul tried, with Erin, who agreed with him, he felt, to convey (mostly by slowly saying variations of “no” and “I can’t think right now”) that there was no such thing as a “drug problem” or even “drugs”—
unless anything anyone ever did or thought or felt was considered both a drug and a problem—in that each thought or feeling or object, seen or touched or absorbed or remembered, at whatever coordinate of space-time, would have a unique effect, which each person, at each moment of their life, could view as a problem, or not.

In Calvin’s room, supine on carpet, Paul felt circumstantially immobile, like a turtle on its back, and that Calvin and Maggie were pressuring him to decide on an activity. Then he was sitting on the edge of a bed, staring at an area of carpet near his black-socked feet, vaguely aware of his inability to move or think and of people waiting for him to answer a question. He grinned after hearing himself, in his memory of three or four seconds ago, say “I don’t know what to do” very slowly, as if each word had been carefully selected, with attention to accuracy and concision. Erin silently exited Calvin’s bathroom and left the room in a manner, Paul vaguely felt, like she was smuggling herself elsewhere. Paul heard Maggie say “all right, we’re going to the hot tub” and remain in the top left corner of his vision a few seconds before vanishing. Paul walked lethargically into the bathroom, removed his clothes, stood naked in Calvin’s room struggling to insert his left leg into his boxer shorts’ left hole, which kept collapsing shut and distortedly reappearing as part of a slowly rippling infinity symbol, tottering on one leg sometimes and quietly falling once—mostly deliberately, anticipating a brief rolling sensation and a respite on the thick carpet—before succeeding and, after staring catatonically at nothing for a vague amount of time, aware of something simian about his posture and jaw, carefully going downstairs.

In the backyard, a few minutes later, Paul and Erin, holding each other’s arms in an indiscernibly feigned kind of fear,
hesitated before advancing, barefoot on the spiky and yielding grass, into the area of darkness Calvin and Maggie, after testing the swimming pool’s water as too cold, had gone. Paul stopped moving when he saw the disturbing statue of a Greek god wearing a gorilla mask, which Calvin, that afternoon, had said someone put on last Halloween, then abandoned Erin by running ahead, on his toes a little. As he slightly leaped, followed closely by Erin, into the hot tub, he imagined his head shooting like a yanked thing toward concrete. He surfaced after exaggeratedly, unnecessarily allowing the water to absorb his impact, then stared in disbelief at a balled-up Maggie rolling forward and back like a notorious, performing snail. “Oh my god,” he said, aware his and Erin’s feet were deliberately touching. “Look at Maggie. What is she doing?”

“I was doing water sit-ups,” said Maggie.

“I can’t believe . . . that,” said Paul. “Have you ever done that?”

“No,” said Maggie. “What if we were all obese right now?”

“The water would be displaced,” said Paul without thinking, and people laughed. Paul felt surprised he was able to cause authentic laughter at his handicapped level of functioning. The above-water parts of him were waiting patiently, he thought while staring at the soil beneath the bushes a few feet beyond the hot tub and remembering disliking the presence of soil while in swimming pools as a child in Florida, for the laughter to end and something else to begin. He became aware of himself saying “what would we be talking about right now if we were obese?” and, comprehending himself as the extemporaneous source of what seemed to be an immensely interesting question, felt a sensation of awe. He remained motionless, with eyeballs inattentively fixated on the obscure pattern of the bushes behind and to the left of Calvin and an anticipatory nervousness, as he imagined staring at each person, in turn, to confirm—or convey, depending
on the person—that, despite his impaired functioning, he had, unforeseen to anyone, including himself, asked a question of nearly unbelievable insight.

“We would talk about if we were skinny,” said Maggie.

“No, because it would be too depressing,” said Paul, surprised again by the power of his mind but less than before, a little suspicious now of his own enthusiasm.

“You’re right,” said Calvin, and seemed to look at each person in disbelief—which confused Paul because he had imagined doing that himself.