Taipei (13 page)

“We would talk about food,” said Maggie.

“I feel like people are staring at me,” said Paul.

“Me too, a little,” said Erin.

“I wish I could see how Erin and I are like on mushrooms now,” said Paul.

“Me too,” said Erin.

“I was going to bring my camera but didn’t want to get it wet,” said Maggie.

“People are staring at me weird, except Erin,” said Paul. “I wish someone was recording us.”

“Just ask me later and I’ll tell you,” said Maggie.

“Later,” said Paul, confused. “When?”

Calvin said it was time for Maggie to go home and they left seemingly instantly. Paul was aware of having waved at them and of having meekly said “bye, Maggie,” to himself, he realized, as he continued staring at where they had gone out of view—to postpone interacting with Erin, who’d been abnormally quiet most of the night, he uncertainly realized with increasing anxiety. Maggie should have stayed longer, because he and Erin were only visiting a few days, he thought earnestly for a few seconds before realizing, with only a little sheepishness, that Maggie had her own desires, separate from those of anyone else, which she expressed through her actions. Paul knew that, because he kept thinking about
Maggie, his demeanor and behavior, when he finally acknowledged Erin, would appear, if not obviously feigned, to convey “I want to be elsewhere” or “I want to be doing things in service of being elsewhere,” which Erin would easily discern, if she hadn’t already. Paul moved his mouth to where water was bubbling and, partly facing away from Erin, said something about it feeling “nice.” Erin moved her mouth to a different area of similar bubbling. After ten to fifteen minutes Calvin appeared and said “you guys can come inside now, Maggie went home,” seeming to have assumed they had been waiting for his approval to go inside. Paul had begun feeling comfortable and was confused why they couldn’t—and weren’t asked if they wanted to—stay in the hot tub.

After showering in separate bathrooms Paul and Erin sat on Calvin’s carpeted floor. Calvin, covered by blankets up to his underarms, with his upper body propped by pillows, seemed like he was cautiously testing an unexpected feeling of health and energy while on his “death bed.” Maggie, he said in a worried and slightly fascinated voice, had wanted to perform oral sex on him, but he hadn’t been aroused, which had upset her maybe. Erin said it was normal for sexual desire to leave sometimes. Calvin said he and Maggie hadn’t had sex in four months. Paul said that seemed normal because they’d been together three years and that Calvin’s drug use—Percocet, Codeine, Klonopin, Adderall—the past few months, based on their emails and texts, seemed high, which probably had an effect. Then they discussed what to do now, for an activity, but couldn’t decide—each person seemed committed to not deciding—and became locked into what felt like a three-way staring contest, which they mutely sustained, each person alternating between the other two, for thirty to forty seconds, until Paul bluntly said he wanted to “go for a walk with
only Erin, outside,” and, after mumbling something incoherent about mushrooms—vaguely wanting to convey it was uncomfortable while on mushrooms to be around people not on mushrooms—quickly gained Erin’s assent and repeatedly positioned himself to displace, or push, her toward where he was going, until both were outside the room, in a dark hallway, where they huddled together and maneuvered grinning to winding stairs, which they descended holding hands, toward the front door.

They walked down the driveway into the upper-middle-class neighborhood with their inside arms folded up and against each other. Most front yards had one or two fashionably sculpted trees and two or more colorful Boy Scouts–like patches of flowers and plants in independent organization. Paul saw, in a side yard, a pale fence with the colorless, palatially melancholy glow of unicorns and remembered how in Florida, in the second of his family’s three houses of increasing size, both his neighbors had built fences—rows of vertical, triangular-topped slats of wood that had seemed huge, medieval—around their backyards. Paul said he felt like he was in
Edward Scissorhands
and they sat on a concrete embankment facing the street with their feet on a sidewalk. Paul slightly looked away as he said “there’s so many stars here” without much interest.

Erin pointed and asked if one was moving.

“In place, maybe,” said Paul uncertainly.

“It looks like it’s vibrating,” said Erin.

“It’s, um, what thoughts do you have about UFOs?” said Paul looking away, as if not wanting Erin to hear him clearly. “I’m doing it . . . I’m saying stereotypical things that people say while on mushrooms.”

“That’s okay. UFOs are interesting.”

“I know it’s okay,” said Paul, and asked if Erin had experienced “any UFO things.” Erin said she wore purple and put
glitter on her eyes every Friday in fourth grade because she thought, if she did, aliens would notice and take her away.

“That seems really good,” said Paul feeling emotional. “All purple?”

“No. It just had to be one thing that was purple.”

“Where did you think they would take you?”

“I don’t think I thought about that,” said Erin. “Just ‘away.’ Anywhere.”

“What . . . did your classmates, or other people, think?”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“Really? But . . . it’s been so long.”

“I didn’t have anyone to tell, really.”

“You haven’t told anyone except me?”

“No. Let me think. No, I haven’t.”

Paul had begun to vaguely feel that he already knew of a similar thing—something about purple glitter and fourth grade, maybe from a children’s book—or was he remembering what he just heard? His voice sounded bored, he thought, as he told Erin about when, as a fourth or fifth grader, he really wanted to see a UFO and was on a plane and saw a brown dot and, without any excitement or sensation of discovery, repeatedly thought to himself that he’d seen a UFO. “I think I was aware at first that I was ‘faking’ it,” said Paul uncertainly. “But . . . I think I convinced myself so hard that I made myself forget that part . . . when I was aware, and I think I really believed I saw a UFO.”

“Whoa. Did you tell anyone you saw a UFO?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone. I don’t think I cared if anyone knew. I was just like, ‘I saw a UFO.’ I think I was extremely bored. I was like a bored robot.”

The next night Erin and Paul met Cristine, 22—a mutual acquaintance from the internet—and Cristine’s friend Sally,
22, in a public park that was closed for the night. Cristine sold Paul eight 36mg Ritalin and ten psilocybin chocolates, wrapped in tinfoil, like little hockey pucks. They each ate a chocolate and walked through the park, to the end of a beach, where they sat in the gently fluorescent light of a half moon that looked like a jellyfish photographed, from far below, in mid-propulsion, its short tentacles momentarily inside itself.

In the distance, Cleveland’s three tallest buildings, each with a different shape and style of architecture and lighting, were spaced oddly far apart, like siblings in their thirties, in a zany sitcom. After spending their lives “hating” one another, in a small town, they moved to different cities and were happy, but then got coincidentally transferred by their employers to the same medium-size city. They were all named Frank. Paul felt reluctant to say anything weird because Cristine and Sally were behaving normally, with earnest expressions, as if pretending they weren’t on mushrooms, except sometimes one would mention seeing beautiful colors, increasing Paul’s apprehension because earlier he and Erin had bonded over feeling alienated by people who focused on visuals, instead of people, while on hallucinogens. Deciding, after around fifteen minutes, to drive somewhere in two cars, they walked on the beach toward the parking lot. The clear moonlight sometimes fleetingly appeared, on Lake Erie, to their left, as thin layers of snow, resting on the surface of the water, as if painted on, or briefly riding the shoreward, foamy fronts of tiny waves before vanishing. Sally’s car, on the highway, got a flat tire. Paul and Erin couldn’t stop grinning, due to the mushrooms, sitting on a sidewalk in downtown Cleveland, waiting for AAA, as a frowning Sally, whose car had a missing window covered by a garbage bag, persistently bemoaned her situation without looking at anyone. Cristine, grinning sometimes at Paul and Erin, drove everyone, in Erin’s car, to Kent State University, where Paul and Erin walked far behind
Cristine and Sally, on a slightly uphill sidewalk. “When you said that thing about glitter and purple clothing I felt vaguely like I already knew about it,” said Paul. “You really haven’t told anyone?”

“The only person I’ve told is my friend Jennika.”

“You said I was the only person you’ve told.”

“I know,” said Erin. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Did you forget? Yesterday?”

“No, I knew. I was nervous—I thought I was talking too much.”

“But I was asking you about it.”

“I thought I was boring you.”

“You weren’t,” said Paul. “At all.”

“I just wanted to, like, ‘move on.’ ”

“Don’t do that. If I ask something I really want to know.”

“I know. I don’t want to do that.”

“You lied . . . to me,” said Paul, and felt dramatic and self-conscious. “Wait, let me think. I’m thinking if I were you . . . if I would lie about that. I think . . . yeah, I would, if I didn’t want to talk about it.” He would if he didn’t anticipate becoming close to the other person, or talking to them again. “I understand, I think.” He imagined Erin’s inattentive, half-hearted view of him as “vaguely, unsatisfactorily desirable,” like how he viewed most people. “I would lie, like that, in that situation. Are you sure you haven’t written it somewhere? Like on your blog maybe?”

“I’m really sure. I’m ninety percent sure.”

“Only ninety percent? That’s, like, ‘unsure,’ I feel.”

“I’m really sure. I’m ninety-five percent sure.”

“You can tell—”

“Paul,” said Erin, and grasped his forearm. They stopped walking. More aware of Erin’s perspective, looking at his face ( and not knowing what expression she saw or what he wanted to express), than of his own, Paul didn’t know what
to do, so went “afk,” he felt, and remained there—away from the keyboard of the screen of his face—as Erin, looking at the inanimate object of his head, said “if I did I would tell you” and, emphatically, “I’m not lying to you right now.”

“Okay,” said Paul, and they continued walking.

Sprinklers could be heard in the distance.

“I believe you,” said Paul.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I haven’t not believed you. I was just saying . . . maybe you got the idea or something similar to it from somewhere else, like a children’s book we’ve both read, but we forgot about it, or something like that.”

“I don’t think I did,” said Erin.

“I feel like I do that a lot.”

“Maybe,” said Erin quietly.

Around 1:30 a.m., after Cristine and Sally had left, Paul and Erin were walking in downtown Cleveland trying to find any open restaurant when they entered a hotel through an “employees only” door and ascended on an escalator and walked through dark corridors into an auditorium-like area, encountering no people. Paul imagined the building omni-directionally expanding at a rate exceeding their maximum running speed, so that this goalless, enjoyably calm exploration of a temperature-controlled, tritely uncanny interior would replace his life, with its book tour and Gmail and, he thought after a few seconds, “food.” Would he agree to that? “Yes,” he thought “meaninglessly,” he knew, because he’d still be inside himself, the only place he’d ever be, that he could imagine, though maybe he didn’t know—not knowing seemed more likely.

At a Denny’s near the airport Paul ordered a steak and minestrone soup. Erin ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and
cheese sticks. They shared a 30mg Adderall and drove to the airport, listening to a ’90s station, both immediately recognizing Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” whose lyrics, to a degree that Paul couldn’t stop grinning, seemed to be a near-unbroken series of borderline non sequitur clichés. Erin had a public-speaking class in Baltimore, eight hours away, in nine and a half hours. At the airport Paul left eight psilocybin chocolates with Erin, who said she would bring them to his reading in Manhattan in four weeks, if not earlier. They hugged tightly, and Paul, whose flight to Minnesota was in four hours, said he wished they had more time to listen to ’90s songs together and that he “had a lot of fun,” with Erin, the past few days.

The next three days they texted regularly and, Paul felt, with equal attentiveness. Paul texted a photo of a display in the Mall of America of books titled
I Can Make You Confident
and
I Can Make You Sleep
with the author grinning on each cover. Erin texted a blurry photo of what seemed to be a headless mannequin wearing a white dress and said she was in Las Vegas at a cousin’s wedding. Then she texted less, and with less attention, and one night didn’t respond to a photo Paul sent from a café in Chicago, where he was staying for four days, of a
Back to the Future
poster—

He was never in time
for his classes . . .

He wasn’t in time
for his dinner . . .

Then one day . . .
he wasn’t in his
time at all.

—until morning, when she texted “lol” and that she’d been asleep, but she didn’t reciprocate a photo, or ask a question, so they stopped texting. Paul sensed she was busy with college and maybe one or more vague relationships, but allowed himself to become “obsessed,” to some degree, with her, anyway, reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago’s Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends’ photos to find any she might’ve untagged.

In a café in Ann Arbor around 10:30 p.m., two days later, Paul realized, when he remembered Erin’s existence by seeing her name in Gmail, he’d forgotten about her that entire day (over the next three weeks, whenever more than two or three days passed since they last communicated, which they did by email, every five to ten days, in a thread Erin began the day she dropped him off at the airport, Paul would have a similar realization of having forgotten about her for an amount of time). Around midnight he drove his rental car to a row of fast-food restaurants near the airport and slept in a McDonald’s parking lot. When he woke, around 2:45 a.m., he bought and ate a Filet-O-Fish from the McDonald’s drive-thru. While trying to discern what, from which fast-food restaurant, to buy and eat next, he idly imagined himself for more than ten minutes as the botched clone of himself, parked outside the mansion of the scientist who the original Paul paid to clone himself and paid again to “destroy all information” regarding “[censored].” He drove across the street to a Checkers drive-thru and bought two apple pies, which he ate with little to no pleasure, almost unconsciously, while distractedly considering how once a bite of it was in his mouth, then chewed once or twice, there seemed to be no choice, at that point, but to swallow. He slept three hours, drove past McDonald’s and Arby’s, returned the rental car,
rode a van as the only passenger to the airport, boarded the earliest flight to Boston.