Taipei

2

Something staticky and paranormally ventilated about the air, which drifted through a half-open window, late one afternoon, caused a delicately waking Paul, clutching a pillow and drooling a little, to believe he was a small child in Florida, in a medium-size house, on or near winter break. He felt dimly excited, anticipating a hyperactive movement of his body into a standing position, then was mostly unconscious for a vague amount of time until becoming aware of what seemed to be a baffling non sequitur — and, briefly, in its mysterious approach from some eerie distance, like someone else’s consciousness — before resolving plainly as a memory, of having already left Florida, at some point, to attend New York University. After a deadpan pause, during which the new information was accepted by default as recent, he casually believed it was autumn and he was in college, and as he felt that period’s particular gloominess he sensed a concurrent assembling, at a specific distance inside himself, of dozens of once-intimate images, people, places, situations. With a sensation of easily and entirely abandoning a prior context, of having no memory, he focused, as an intrigued observer, on this assembling and was surprised by an urge, which he immediately knew he hadn’t felt in months, or maybe years, to physically involve himself — by going outside and living each day patiently — in the ongoing, concrete occurrence of what he was passively, slowly remembering. But the emotion dispersed to a kind of nothingness — and its associated memories, like organs in a lifeless body, became rapidly indiscernible, dissembling by the metaphysical equivalent, if there was one, of entropy — as he realized, with some confusion and an oddly instinctual reluctance, blinking and discerning his new room, which after two months could still seem unfamiliar, that he was somewhere else, as a different person, in a much later year.

He kept his eyes pressurelessly closed and didn’t move, wanting to return — without yet knowing who or what he was — to sleep, where he could intensify and prolong and explore what he residually felt and was uncontrollably forgetting, but was already alert, in concrete reality, to a degree that his stillness, on his queen-size mattress, felt like a kind of hiding. He stared at the backs of his eyelids with motionless eyeballs, slightly feigning not knowing what he was looking at — which also felt like a kind of hiding — and gradually discerned that he was in Brooklyn, on an aberrantly colder day in late March, in the two-person apartment, in a four-story house, where he had moved, a few weeks after returning from Taiwan, because Kyle and Gabby had wanted more space, to “save their relationship.”

It was spring, not winter or autumn, Paul thought with some lingering confusion. He listened to the layered murmur of wind against leaves, familiarly and gently disorienting as a terrestrial sound track, reminding people of their own lives, then opened his MacBook — sideways, like a hardcover book — and looked at the internet, lying on his side, with his right ear pressed into his pillow, as if, unable to return to sleep, at least in position to hear what, in his absence, might be happening there.

That night — after leaving his room at dusk, then “working on things” in an underground computer lab in Bobst Library, as he did most days — Paul became “completely lost,” he repeatedly thought, in a tundra-like area of Brooklyn for around twenty minutes before unexpectedly arriving at the arts space hosting the panel discussion, on the topic of self-publishing, he’d agreed to attend with his literary acquaintance Anton, 23, who was visiting from Norway. Paul began, at some point, during the ninety-minute discussion, to feel a mocking, sitcom-like conviction that, for him, “too many years had passed” since college — that without education’s season-backed, elaborately subdivided, continuous structure, traceable numerically backward almost to birth, connecting a life in that direction, he was becoming isolated and unexplainable as one of those mysterious phenomena, contained within informational boxes, in picture-heavy books on natural history, which he would’ve felt scared, as a child, if he was alone in a dark room, to think about for too long. After the ninety-minute discussion, which seemed unanimously in favor of self-publishing, the audience was instructed, somewhat anticlimactically, to bring their folding chairs to another room and lean them against a wall, then Paul and Anton stood waiting for Juan, 24, an MFA student in fiction at NYU, who’d wanted to eat with them but was talking to an attractive woman.

“What should we do?” said Paul.

“I don’t know,” said Anton in a quiet monotone.

They decided to leave in three minutes, at 9:01. This was Paul’s second or third social situation involving more than one person, excluding himself, since returning from Taiwan, two months ago. His only regular communication since his relationship with Michelle ended three and a half months ago was emails and Gmail chats with Charles, 25, who lived in Seattle with his girlfriend and who had sold most of his belongings, the past few months, in preparation to leave America indefinitely to travel alone in Mexico — and eventually South America — because he felt “alienated,” he’d said.

“It’s 9:04,” said Anton.

“What should we do?”

“We could wait until 9:10.”

“I don’t know,” said Paul grinning. “I don’t know. Let’s just leave now, I think.” He didn’t move for around ten seconds. “We should go,” he said, and after a few seconds moved toward the exit, feeling slightly oxygen deprived.

“Hey,” said Juan running. “Are you guys going to eat now?”

“Yeah,” said Paul, and glanced, for some reason, at Anton, whose eyes, behind medium-thick lenses, appeared farther away but of higher resolution than the rest of his face.

“Sorry,” said Juan looking at Anton.

“It’s called Pacifico,” said Paul outside. “The address is 97 Smith.”

“I think Pacific is this way,” said Juan.

“Pacifico,” said Paul looking at Anton, who seemed to be grinning.

“This way,” said Juan rolling his bike beside him.

“Wait,” said Paul. “The restaurant is called Pacifico.”

“I kept thinking it was on Pacific,” said Juan with a serious expression.

“No,” said Paul. “But it’s probably near Pacific.”

In Pacifico, a dungeon-like Mexican restaurant, Paul stared at his menu, waiting for his eyes to adjust in the diffuse lighting. He was aware of Anton and Juan, across the table, also holding and staring at menus. When their burritos arrived he noticed, with preemptively suppressed interpretation, that his, of the three, appeared slightly darkest. Then a large group of males from the panel discussion entered and seated themselves in a swarming and disorganized manner, which Paul experienced as a parody of surrounding a heterosexual, single male with a variety of ethnicities and ages of males.

While idly eating the salad-y remains of his burrito with a fork, around twenty minutes later, Paul became aware of himself analyzing when he should’ve left. He vaguely traced back the night and concluded he should’ve left when, on his way to the venue, he had been “completely lost.” He allowed himself to consider earlier opportunities, mostly for something to do, and discerned after a brief sensation of helplessness — like if he’d divided 900 by itself and wanted the calculator to answer 494/494 or 63/63—that, in terms of leaving this social situation, he shouldn’t have been born. He suppressed a grin, then channeled the impulse into the formation of what he thought of as a nervous smile and stood and mumbled “I’m going to sleep now” and “nice seeing you” until he was outside, where it was windy and cold.

He walked toward an F train station, aware of the strangeness of clouds at night — their enveloped flatness and dimensional vagueness, shifting and osmotic as some advanced form of gaseous amoeba — and remembered when he got lodged in an upside-down wood stool, as a small child, in Florida. His father had sawed off two rungs with an enormous, floppy, serrated blade while his mother, alternately grinning and intensely focused, careful not to allow her personal experience of the event impair its documentation, photographed them from different angles, sometimes directing their attention to the camera, like in a photo shoot.

The next two weeks Paul gradually began to view the five months until September, when his second novel would be published and he would go on a two-month book tour, as an “interim period,” during which he would mostly be alone, “calmly organizing things,” he said in an email to his mother. He had already been mostly alone, he knew, since returning from Taiwan, but in a vague way, often wondering if he should’ve gone to whatever social gathering. Now if he felt urges to socialize, to meet a romantic prospect, he would simply relocate them, without further consideration, beyond the “interim period,” when he would be extremely social, he envisioned. Until then he would calmly focus on being productive in a low-level manner, finding to-do lists and unfinished projects in his Gmail account and further organizing, working on, or deleting them, for example.

In early April he got an email from Traci asking if she could email-interview him for a website. After a few emails Paul asked Traci, whom he now reasonably, he felt, viewed as a romantic prospect, if she wanted to meet for dinner. At an Asian fusion restaurant, which Traci had suggested, they talked for around fifteen minutes, during which Paul’s interest steadily increased, before Traci mentioned living with her boyfriend. Paul was aware of the ice hockey game on the flat-screen TV attached to a wall, of the disparity between Thai food and ice hockey, as he slowly said “is, um, is it a studio apartment?”

Walking alone, to his room, an hour later, he realized he was deriving comfort from the existence, in his life, of a “backup prospect.” There was a specific girl he liked who liked him back, but he couldn’t remember who, it seemed. When he realized he’d been thinking of Anton, that he’d unconsciously de-gendered and abstracted Anton into a kind of silhouette, which he’d successfully presented to himself as a romantic prospect, he grinned uncontrollably for around thirty seconds, almost getting hit by a minivan when, rerouting to a darker street to better hide his face, he jogged somewhat recklessly across an intersection.

Paul felt more committed, after that, to viewing the time until September as an interim period, and didn’t have an in-person conversation for more than a week, during which, to his own approval, he seemed to be settling, if precariously, with two days spent mostly eating, into a somewhat productive, loneliness-free routine. He remembered while peeling a banana one night that he had committed, months ago, to a reading in April — in three days, he learned from the internet, in a building near Times Square.

At the reading, after arriving ten minutes early by accident and talking to the organizer, then sitting alone and, to appear occupied, holding a pen and staring down at what he’d printed in the library — an account of his visit to Taiwan, four months ago — where he planned to return immediately after he and Frederick, an author in his early 40s, finished reading, Paul began to feel sleepy, in his seat. Yawning, he looked up and recognized Mitch, 26, a classmate from middle/ high school in Florida, where they had mutual friends but had never spoken to each other, that Paul could remember, approaching from a conspiratorially far distance, like an FBI agent but slower. Mitch had messaged on Facebook, a few weeks ago, that he might attend this reading.

“You look the same. What about me?”

“Taller,” said Mitch seeming a little nervous.

“How can you tell? I’m sitting.”

“The shape of your legs, and your body, I think. Something about your bone structure.”

After the reading Lucie, 23, introduced herself and Amy, 23, and Daniel, 25, to Paul and Mitch, saying something about her and Amy’s online magazine. Paul asked if they had business cards, not thinking they would. Amy, after encouragement from Lucie, reluctantly gave Paul a business card, seeming a little embarrassed. When Paul looked up from the business card, putting it in his back pocket, he was startled by the sudden appearance of Frederick smiling at him with his arm around Lucie in a manner that seemed calculated, but wasn’t, Paul knew, to firmly establish they were “together.” A bewildered-seeming, middle-aged woman with an Italian accent asked Paul something about agave nectar, wanting it for a diabetic friend, it seemed. Paul said he’d actually learned, a few months ago, that it raised blood sugar as intensely as sugar and that he’d mailed his mother unheated, unfiltered honey, which was the healthiest sweetener — for diabetics, or anyone — based on what he currently knew, which could be wrong, he also knew.

In a taxi to a party, forty minutes later, Paul imagined another him walking toward the library and, for a few seconds, visualizing the position and movement of two red dots through a silhouetted, aerial view of Manhattan, felt as imaginary, as mysterious and transitory and unfindable, as the other dot. He visualized the vibrating, squiggling, looping, arcing line representing the three-dimensional movement, plotted in a cubic grid, of the dot of himself, accounting for the different speed and direction of each vessel of which he was a passenger — taxi, Earth, solar system, Milky Way, etc. Adding a fourth dimension, representing time, he visualized the patterned scribbling shooting off in one direction, with a slight wobble, miles from where it was seconds ago. He imagined his trajectory as a vacuum-sealed tube, into which he’d arrived and through which — traveling alone in the vacuum-sealed tube of his own life — he’d be suctioned and from which he’d exit, as a successful delivery to some unimaginable recipient. Realizing this was only his concrete history, his public movement through space-time from birth to death, he briefly imagined being able to click on his trajectory to access his private experience, enlarging the dot of a coordinate until it could be explored like a planet.

At the party, which was mostly people in their 30s and 40s, Paul asked Amy an open-ended question about her parents. When she began, after a pause, to answer, he moved his phone from his pants pocket to his ear. “Hello,” he said in a clear voice, and felt physically isolated, like he was wearing a motorcycle helmet, as he peripherally observed Amy moving her wine, almost spilling it, to her mouth.

“Just kidding,” said Paul. “No one called me.”

Amy had a glassy, disoriented expression.

“I don’t have a phone call,” said Paul.

“That was good,” said Amy looking away.

“Just kidding,” said Paul grinning weakly.

The rest of the party, after briefly talking to Lucie, who invited him and Mitch to a party next week at her apartment, Paul talked mostly to Daniel, who had enough money from selling marijuana in San Francisco that he hadn’t had a job since moving here last autumn. Paul asked if Daniel liked drugs. Daniel said he liked “benzos” and opiates. Paul asked if he liked Rilo Kiley and he became quiet a few seconds, seeming worried, like he might not be able to answer, before saying “um, not really.”

Paul went with Daniel, the next night, to a BBQ-themed party, where their main focus, soon after arriving, was on discerning how to leave tactfully, considering how much food they’d eaten and how little they were contributing to conversation, for a party at Kyle and Gabby’s apartment. Standing in a kitchen, at one point, while Daniel was outside smoking, Paul felt like a shark whose eyes have protectively “glossed over” during a feeding frenzy, as he mechanically ate salad, cheese, a burger, apple pie, chips while vaguely focused on not doing anything to cause others to talk to him.

At Kyle and Gabby’s apartment — his first time back since moving out — Paul uncharacteristically approached an intriguing, attractive stranger named Laura and asked her questions with a serious expression, standing at a maybe too-close distance, as if after an unskillful teleportation he didn’t want to underscore by fixing. Laura was here with her friend Walter, who knew Gabby. Paul could see that Laura, who wasn’t looking at him, didn’t like his presence and was getting annoyed, but due to alcohol he felt unaffected by this information and kept asking questions, including her age and what college, if any, she attended, or had attended. As Laura’s annoyance intensified to a slightly curious disbelief she became extra alert — focusing exclusively on Paul with a challenging, vigilante expression. She asked why he was asking so many questions.

“I’m not. I’m just trying to talk.”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

“I’m just trying to have a conversation.”

“What college did you go to?” said Laura accusatorily.

“New York University. How old are you?”

Laura walked away, somewhat aimlessly, into the room Paul crawled across the first time he saw Michelle cry — around a year ago, he realized. In the room now was a king-size bed, which occupied maybe 80 percent of its surface. Paul was sitting alone, at the snack table, thirty minutes later, when Laura approached with a bored expression, unaware of his presence until he stood and said “I highly recommend the Funyuns” in an exaggeratedly helpful voice, choosing Funyuns — corn in the shape and flavor of fried rings of onion — somewhat randomly from the eight to twelve snacks on the table.

“Oh, really?” said Laura reciprocating his tone.

“Let me help you,” said Paul lifting the giant plastic red bowl toward Laura, who chose and bit a piece, then moved backward a little, with a playful expression, nodding and smiling, before turning around and walking away, reappearing around twenty minutes later at a near distance, moving directly, as if after a search, toward an inattentive Paul, seated in the same chair as earlier, not apparently doing anything. Before he could say anything about Funyuns, or form any thoughts, Laura had told him her full name, which she wanted him to memorize, quizzing him on it twice — crudely, functionally — before abruptly walking away.

Around midnight an aimlessly wandering Gabby, appearing lost in her own kitchen, stopped in front of Daniel and said “you have a nose ring,” with a slightly confused expression to Daniel, who confirmed he did. Gabby, a foot and a half shorter than Daniel, stared up at him a few seconds before saying something that, Paul thought, conveyed she earnestly believed nose rings were objectively bad. She asked where Daniel was from and said “oh, that makes sense, then,” appearing visibly less tense, when Daniel said San Francisco.

Paul, staring at Daniel’s left profile, said “I just realized you look like Hugh Jackman.”

“He looks like Richard Tuttle,” said Gabby.

“I don’t know who that is,” said Daniel.

Gabby said Richard Tuttle was a famous artist. Daniel said when he was young his father only brought him to galleries and museums whenever they went anywhere. Paul heard someone say “sculptor.” Someone who didn’t know Daniel drunkenly said “he got the nose ring so people won’t think he’s Hugh Jackman” to Paul at close range. Gabby mentioned another artist Daniel didn’t know and Paul began to sometimes say “you’re too mainstream for us” in a loud, sarcastic voice while staring at Gabby — thinking that, by underscoring that he and Daniel were obviously too mainstream for her, he was sincerely complimenting her knowledge of the art world — who ignored him easily, with no indication of any awareness of his presence. When Gabby finally looked at him, seeming more confused than agitated, Paul sarcastically sustained a huge grin, which Gabby stared at blankly while appearing to be thinking, very slowly, due to alcohol, about what, if anything, she should do about what was happening. After around five seconds she walked away with a slight, momentary wobble. Kyle appeared around fifteen minutes later and said “leave” to Daniel, who was grinning about something else.

“Huh?” said Daniel.

“Leave,” said Kyle.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” said Kyle, and Paul realized, with a sensation of low-level epiphany, that Gabby, offended by the nose-ring encounter, must have forced Kyle to tell Daniel to leave. Paul said this aloud a few times, to seemingly no one, then asked why Kyle was “being mean.” Daniel said he would leave after he finished his drink and Kyle said “that’s fine” and walked away.

“Jesus,” said Paul. “Gabby hates nose rings.”

“I didn’t think she was angry when we talked,” said Daniel.

“You’re probably benefiting this party the most out of anyone,” said Paul. “You’re standing in one place, occasionally saying something witty, causing people passing by to laugh. You’re not even eating anything.”

“I planned to go to another party anyway,” said Daniel.

Almost half the party, thirty minutes later, was on the wide sidewalk outside the apartment building, grinning drunk-enly or looking at one another with openly bored or neutral expressions, waiting for directions to the other party. Paul, who was grinning uncontrollably, had approached groups of acquaintances asking if they wanted to go to a different party while a cheerful-seeming Daniel, standing in place in the kitchen, sometimes assumed the role of an unruly tyrant, saying things like “get every single person” and “we aren’t leaving until you get every person.” Paul had wanted to tell Daniel he shouldn’t want so much from life but couldn’t remember the stock phrase for “don’t want too much in life” and, after a long pause, had said “you shouldn’t want so much in life.” Mitch had repeatedly held shots of tequila toward Paul, who drank two and, at one point, entered the small room where Kyle and Gabby slept and interrupted Gabby and Jeremy and Juan by asking if “anyone” wanted to go to “a different party,” aware he was unaffected, due to alcohol, by Gabby’s presence.

Someone said it probably wasn’t a good idea to stand “in a giant mass blocking the entire sidewalk” in front of the party they’d just abandoned, and the group of twelve to fifteen people began walking in a direction, led vaguely by Daniel, who was talking into his phone. Laura slung an arm around Paul’s shoulder and said “Paul” loudly and that she was going to slap him if the party wasn’t good and asked for a cigarette. Paul said he didn’t smoke and Laura walked away. After around ten blocks Daniel moved his phone away from his head and told Paul — and three or four other people within range — that they’d walked in the wrong direction. Paul said someone needed to make an announcement because the group, which wasn’t stopping, was too large for information to spread naturally to itself. “We walked the wrong way,” shouted Mitch. “Stop walking. We walked the wrong way.”

People scattered a little, on the sidewalk, looking at their phones, seeming confused but surprisingly calm, except Laura’s friend Walter, who was moving an unopened Red Bull Soda in arcs through the air, as if wielding it, while sometimes saying “what’s the address of the party?” to seemingly no one, with an agitated expression, then abruptly walked away, followed by Laura.

“Wait,” said Paul, and hit her shoulder with a chopping motion while intending to touch it lightly. Laura briefly turned only her head — she was frowning — while continuing to walk away. Paul went with Daniel and Mitch to the other party, which they found after around forty minutes, when everyone else had gone home, to bars, or sheepishly back to Kyle and Gabby’s party.

• • •

When Paul woke, the next afternoon, Laura, 28, had already friended and messaged him on Facebook. She had a MySpace page, as an unsigned rapper, with six songs, including one whose music video, in which she rubs pizza on her face and feeds pizza to her cat, Paul remembered feeling highly amused and impressed by when he first saw it, when it had “gone viral,” to some degree, one or two years ago. In the library, that night, Paul discovered Gabby had defriended him on Facebook and was surprised that Kyle, his closest friend the past two years, except the nine months he was with Michelle, had also defriended him and that both had unfollowed him on Twitter.

The next night, outside Taco Chulo, a Mexican restaurant in Williamsburg, Laura apologized for being late and said she’d gotten lost on the walk from her apartment, eight blocks away. Paul asked if she wanted to eat at Lodge, which had “good chicken fingers,” or Taco Chulo, as they’d previously agreed, and she seemed confused. In Taco Chulo a waiter said to sit “anywhere.” Paul watched Laura move very slowly, in a kind of exploring, it seemed, as if through darkness, to arrive at a four-person table, where once seated, with a slightly desperate expression, not looking at Paul, she focused on signaling a waiter. Paul also focused on signaling a waiter. Laura ordered a margarita, then sometimes turned her head 90 degrees, to her right, to stare outside — at the sidewalk, or the quiet street — with a self-consciously worried expression, seeming disoriented and shy in a distinct, uncommon manner indicating to Paul an underlying sensation of “total yet failing” (as opposed to most people’s “partial and successful”) effort, in terms of the social interaction but, it would often affectingly seem, also generally, in terms of existing. Paul had gradually recognized this demeanor, the past few years, as characteristic, to some degree, of every person, maybe since middle school, with whom he’d been able to form a friendship or enter a relationship (or, it sometimes seemed, earnestly interact and not feel alienated or insane). After finishing a second margarita Laura became attentive and direct, like she’d been at the party, when she had been probably very drunk, Paul realized.

“You have a girlfriend?” said Laura, surprised.

“No,” said Paul, confused. “Why?”

“You said ‘my girlfriend.’ ”

Paul said he meant “ex-girlfriend.” Laura said she’d thought he was “a Gaylord,” because at the party he’d been surrounded by males, which someone had called his “fans.” Paul said the party was “like, seventy percent males” and that he had always thought the word “Gaylord” had been invented by someone in middle school for derogatory purposes by combining “gay” and “lord.” When he showed Laura prints of his art (which, according to StatCounter, she’d already seen on one of his websites), she seemed to reflexively feign seeing them for the first time: her eyes, upon sight, became and remained slightly unfocused and she made a noise indicating she was seeing something new, but when he asked if she’d seen them before she said “yeah,” but seemed to continue feigning “no.” Paul, endeared by her extreme and complicated helplessness, took back his art and focused conversation on other topics. They agreed to leave, but continued talking for around forty-five minutes, inviting each other to parties that weekend. Paul felt a kind of panic when they realized the parties were the same night and said “I don’t know what to do” and “maybe they aren’t on the same night.” Laura said they could go to both parties — which seemed immediately obvious — and asked if Paul wanted to go to K&M, where her friend was DJ-ing. Paul carefully said he did, then went to the bathroom, thinking that for matters involving social interaction he shouldn’t trust himself, at this time, after being mostly alone for around four months.

In K&M — empty except for the DJ, bartender, two other people — they each drank two shots of tequila and sat with glasses of beer in a booth, side by side, facing a giant screen showing Half Baked on mute with subtitles. Laura complimented Paul’s hair and level of “casualness” and, going partially under the table, held a candle toward Paul’s shoes — which from Paul’s above-table perspective felt stationary and storage-oriented as shoe boxes — asking what brand they were.

“iPath,” said Paul.

“I can’t see. What are these?”

“iPath. The brand is iPath.”

“I like them,” said Laura.

“iPath,” said Paul quietly.

Laura said her ex-boyfriend was in a band and used heroin and they already stopped seeing each other, but it was “ongoing,” for example he asked her to a movie last week and she went and it was awkward. “I just wish he would disappear,” she said in a sincere-seeming manner, staring at Half Baked, which Paul saw on her right eye as four to six pixels that sometimes changed colors. Laura said she didn’t want to talk about her ex-boyfriend. Paul asked if she’d tried heroin and she said no, but liked painkillers, then nuzzled his shoulder with her head. When he said he had a headache and drugs in his room and asked if she wanted to go there, she seemed instantly distracted (as a reflexive tactic, Paul felt, to not appear too eager) and expressed indecision a few minutes, then said she also had a headache, then directly stated, more than once — in an openly and uncaringly, Paul felt with amusement, confirmation-seeking manner indicating her previous indecision was at least partly feigned — that she wanted to go to Paul’s room to ingest his drugs.

Outside, after fifteen minutes of failing to get a taxi, they began walking purposelessly, both saying they didn’t know the correct direction to Paul’s apartment, maybe twenty blocks away. Paul’s arms felt more tired, from signaling taxis, than “in five years, maybe,” he estimated aloud. They got in a minivan taxi, which after a few minutes dropped them off near the center of a shadowy, tree-heavy intersection.

The address was correct, according to the street sign, but Paul didn’t recognize anything, even after turning two full circles while dimly aware, in a detached manner reminding him of his drunkenness, that his behavior’s dizzying effects might be counterproductive. He heard Laura, somewhat obligatorily, he thought, say she was scared, then said he was a little scared, then in a louder voice, as if correcting himself, said he was confused. His inability to recognize anything began to feel like a failure of imagination, an inability to process information creatively. His conscious, helpless, ongoing lack of recognition — his shrinking, increasingly vague context — seemed exactly and boringly like how it would feel to die, or to have died. He felt like he was disappearing. He was aware of having said “is there another Humboldt Street, or something,” when he realized he was — already, without a feeling or memory of recognition — looking at the bronze gate, thirty to forty feet away, of the walkway to the four-story house in which, in an apartment on the second floor, he shared a bathroom and kitchen with Caroline, an administrative assistant at the New School with an MFA in poetry.

• • •

In Paul’s room Laura tried to identify some of his fifteen to twenty pills and tablets, mostly from Charles, who had mailed them before leaving for Mexico, with her phone but the internet wasn’t working. Paul’s MacBook, which he’d spilled iced coffee on, was in Kansas being affordably repaired. Laura swallowed two of what Paul knew was Tylenol 3. Paul swallowed a Percocet and, somewhat arbitrarily, he felt, three Advil, then turned off the light, saying it was hurting his headache.

Paul was aware, as they lay kissing in the dark on his mattress, of Laura petting his upper arm in a manner that seemed independent of their kissing (but, he dimly intuited, because they were of the same source, must be discernibly related, on some level, if only as contributors to some larger system). Laura wanted to continue kissing but couldn’t breathe, she said, because her nose was stuffy. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be needy,” she said a few minutes later. “But I can’t sleep without noise, like a fan.” Paul turned on the bathroom vent. Caroline turned it off a few minutes later. Paul turned it on and texted Caroline his situation and that he would pay five dollars to keep it on tonight.

Paul woke on his back, with uncomfortably warm feet, in a bright room, not immediately aware who or where he was, or how he had arrived. Most mornings, with decreasing frequency, probably only because the process was becoming unconscious, he wouldn’t exactly know anything until three to twenty seconds of passive remembering, as if by unzipping a file — newroom.zip — into a PDF, showing his recent history and narrative context, which he’d delete after viewing, thinking that before he slept again he would have memorized this period of his life, but would keep newroom.zip, apparently not trusting himself.

February to November

relationship with Michelle

December

visited parents in Taiwan for first time since they moved back

February

moved from Kyle and Gabby’s apartment to new room

April

unconsciously viewed Anton as romantic prospect met Laura at Kyle and Gabby’s party

May to August

“interim period”

September/October

book tour

December

visit parents again?

Paul’s father was 28 and Paul’s mother was 24 when they alone (out of a combined fifteen to twenty-five siblings) left Taiwan for America. Paul was born in Virginia six years later, in 1983, when his brother was 7. Paul was 3 when the family moved to Apopka, a pastoral suburb near Orlando, Florida.

Paul cried the first day of preschool for around ten minutes after his mother, who was secretly watching and also crying, seemed to have left. It was their first time apart. Paul’s mother watched as the principal cajoled Paul into interacting with his classmates, among whom he was well liked and popular, if a bit shy and “disengaged, sometimes,” said one of the high school students who worked at the preschool, which was called the Discovery Center. Each day, after that, Paul cried less and transitioned more abruptly from crying to interacting with classmates, and by the middle of the second week he didn’t cry anymore. At home, where mostly only Mandarin was spoken, Paul was loud and either slug-like or, his mother would say in English, “hyperactive,” rarely walking to maneuver through the house, only crawling, rolling like a log, sprinting, hopping, or climbing across sofas, counters, tables, chairs, etc. in a game called “don’t touch the ground.” Whenever motionless and not asleep or sleepy, lying on carpet in sunlight, or in bed with eyes open, bristling with undirectionalized momentum, he would want to intensely sprint in all directions simultaneously, with one unit of striving, never stopping. He would blurrily anticipate this unimaginably worldward action, then burst off his bed to standing position, or make a loud noise and violently spasm, or jolt from the carpet into a sprint, flailing his arms, feeling always incompletely satisfied.

Paul’s first grade teacher recommended he be placed in the English-as-second-language program, widely viewed as for “impaired” students, but Paul’s mother kept him in the normal class. His second grade teacher recommended he be tested for the “gifted” program and he was admitted and began going every Friday to gifted, in which most of the twenty-five to thirty students, having begun in first grade, were already friends. Paul felt alone on Fridays, but not lonely or uncomfortable or anxious, only that he was in a new and challenging situation without assistance or consequence for failure — a feeling not unlike playing a difficult Nintendo game alone, with no instruction manual. Paul played chess one Friday with Barry, who suggested Paul’s second move. Barry knew more about chess, so was being helpful, Paul thought, and did as suggested for his third move also, then watched an extremely happy Barry dash through the rectangular classroom telling groups of classmates he’d beaten Paul in a four-move check-mate. Paul told three classmates Barry had “tricked him,” then returned to the floor and put the chess pieces away and, with a sensation of seeing a spider crawl out of view inside his room, felt himself reassimilating Barry into the world as a kind of robot-like presence he would always need to be careful around and would never comprehend. In third grade, one morning, Paul finished telling something to his friend Chris, who was strangely unresponsive for a few seconds, then with an exaggeratedly disgusted expression told Paul his breath smelled “horrible” and “brush your teeth,” then turned 180 degrees, in his seat, to talk to someone else. Paul mechanically committed to always brushing his teeth and adjusted his view of Chris to include him, with Barry and 90 to 95 percent of people he’d met, as separate and unknowable.

In fourth grade, Paul spent two days with Lori, a second grader in his neighborhood. Lori kissed Paul’s cheek in a tree, then in her room showed him a Mickey Mantle card from her father, who’d said Mickey Mantle had the record for most RBIs. Paul, who collected baseball cards, said Hank Aaron had the record for most RBIs. Lori said he was probably right, because he was really smart. At dusk, the next day, rollerblading on the longest street in the neighborhood, Lori said she needed to try harder than Paul to go the same speed, because her legs were shorter, which Paul thought was insightful.

Entering middle school, sixth to eighth grade, Paul wanted to play percussion like three of his friends, including his “best friend,” Hunter, but his piano teacher said percussion would bore him, so he chose trumpet, which he disliked, but continued playing until the summer before high school, when he switched to percussion on the first day of “band camp,” which was ten hours of practice every weekday for two weeks. During lunch break, that day, Paul was practicing alone by silently counting and sometimes tapping a cymbal with a soft-headed mallet when a senior percussionist, the section leader, began teasing him from across the room, saying he was “so cool” and something about his baggy jeans, which his skateboarding brother, at college in Philadelphia, had left in Florida. Paul was unable to think anything, except that he didn’t know what to do, at all, so he committed to doing nothing, which the senior incorporated into his teasing by focusing on how Paul was “too cool” to react, continuing for maybe thirty seconds before commenting briefly on Paul’s hair and leaving the room.

Believing that all the senior’s friends and acquaintances, which included almost every person at band camp, now viewed his main effort in life as wanting to be “cool,” which he did want, to some degree, but which now seemed impossible, Paul became increasingly, physically, exclusively critically, nearly continuously self-conscious, the next few days, in ways he hadn’t been before — but probably had been in latent development since preschool — and which affected his musicianship. His middle school friends, including Hunter, among whom he’d been most fearless and at least equally competent at whatever sport or video game, watched him fail every day to play the simplest parts, usually tambourine or triangle, of each piece. The percussion instructor that year punished everyone with push-ups if one person, usually Paul, played something incorrectly more than once. Paul’s friends — subtly, then openly, with confusion and frustration — began to express disbelief at Paul’s inability to count to a number and hit a cowbell or cymbal. Paul was too embarrassed, by the end of the first week, to speak to his friends — all of whom seemed to have easily befriended the section leader and other upperclassmen — and by the second week had begun committing, in certain situations, to not speaking unless asked a question.

Two months into freshman year he had committed to not speaking in almost all situations. He felt ashamed and nervous around anyone who’d known him when he was popular and unself-conscious. When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he’d sprinted twenty yards. As the beating slowly normalized he’d think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb — and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior — its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself. To avoid awkwardness, and in respect of his apparent aversion to speaking, Paul’s classmates stopped including him in conversations. The rare times he spoke — in classes where no one knew him, or when, without knowing why, for one to forty minutes, he’d become aggressively confident and spontaneous as he’d been in elementary/middle school, about which his friends poignantly would always seem genuinely excited — he’d feel “out of character,” indicating he’d completed a transformation and was now, in a humorlessly surreal way, exactly what he didn’t want to be and wished he wasn’t.

He ate lunch alone, on benches far from the cafeteria, listening to music — his sort of refuge that was like a tunneling in his desolation toward a greater desolation, further from others and himself, closer to the shared source of everything — with portable CD players and earphones, feeling sorry for himself, or vaguely but deeply humbled, though mostly just silent and doomed. Sometimes, thinking of how among fifteen hundred classmates only two others, that he’d noticed, were as socially inept as he — a male in his grade, an obese male one grade lower — Paul would feel a blandly otherworldly excitement, like he must be in some bizarre and extended dream, or lost in the offscreen world of some fictional movie set in an adjacent county.

In Paul’s sophomore or junior year he began to believe the only solution to his anxiety, low self-esteem, view of himself as unattractive, etc. would be for his mother to begin disciplining him on her own volition, without his prompting, as an unpredictable — and, maybe, to counter the previous fourteen or fifteen years of “overprotectiveness,” unfair — entity, convincingly not unconditionally supportive. His mother would need to create rules and punishments exceeding Paul’s expectations, to a degree that Paul would no longer feel in control. To do this, Paul believed, his mother would need to anticipate and preempt anything he might have considered, factoring in that — because Paul was thinking about this almost every day, and between the two of them was the source of this belief — he probably already expected, or had imagined, any rule or punishment she would be willing to instate or inflict, therefore she would need to consider rules and punishments that she would not think of herself as willing to instate or inflict. Paul tried to convey this in crying, shouting fights with his mother lasting up to four hours, sometimes five days a week. There was an inherent desperation to these fights, in that each time Paul, in frustration, told his mother how she could have punished him, in whatever previous situation, to make him feel not in control — to, he believed, help solve his social and psychological problems — it became complicatedly more difficult, in Paul’s view, for his mother to successfully preempt his expectations the next time. Paul cried and shouted more than his mother, who only shouted maybe once or twice. Paul would scream if his mother was downstairs while he was upstairs, in his room, where some nights he would throw his electric pencil sharpener and textbooks — and, once, a six-inch cymbal — at his walls, creating holes, resulting in punishments, but never exceeding what, by imagining their possibilities, he’d already rendered unsurprising, predictable. The intensity of these fights maybe contributed to Paul’s lungs collapsing spontaneously three times his senior year, when he was absent forty-seven days and in hospitals for around four weeks.

One night, standing in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom, when his father was on a months-long business trip, crying while shouting at his mother, who was supine in bed, in the dark, Paul heard her softly and steadily crying, with her blanket up to her chin in a way that seemed child-like. Paul stopped shouting and stood sobbing quietly, dimly aware, as his face twitched and trembled, that he felt intensely embarrassed of himself from the perspective of any person, except his mother, he had ever met. He said he didn’t know what he was talking about, or what he should do, that he was sorry and didn’t want to complain or blame other people anymore, and felt an ambiguous relief, to have reached the end of a thing without resolution and, having tried hard, feeling allowed — and ready — to resign. He didn’t stop blaming his mother, after that, but gradually they fought less — and, after each fight, when he would revert to his belief about discipline, he would apologize and reiterate he didn’t want to blame anyone or complain — and, by the last month of senior year, had mostly stopped fighting.

On one of Paul’s last days of high school he and Lori were both getting rides home from Hunter, who due to a difficulty in refusing requests from people who could see him — in elementary/middle school, whenever a mutual friend rang his doorbell, he and Paul would pretend no one was home— sometimes spent ninety minutes driving classmates home after school. The past eight years, since Lori kissed Paul on the cheek, they’d spoken maybe three times (the day after they rollerbladed together she had begun hanging out with a boy with a “rattail” hairstyle), and the most intimate Paul had been with another girl was a ten-minute conversation, at an “away” high school football game, with another percussionist.

Lori repeatedly asked Paul why he wouldn’t speak and, not receiving an answer, began provoking Paul to “say anything,” seeming as committed to eliciting a response as Paul was to not responding. Lori was loudly asking, with genuine and undistracted and bemused curiosity, which Paul felt affection toward and admired, as he stared away from her, out his window, why he couldn’t speak — and if he could just “make any noise”—when Hunter, who’d been talking to someone in the front passenger seat, sort of forced Lori to stop by aggressively asking about her current boyfriend. As he had consistently, the past eight to ten years, Paul felt endeared by Hunter, who used to be an equal, but now — and for the past three or four years — was like an overworked stepfather or sensitive uncle to Paul, the mentally disabled stepson or silent, troubling nephew.

Paul hadn’t seen Laura since she slept over, five days ago, when he brought a mix CD and Ambien to her room, which was more than half occupied by a full-size bed. She offered him red wine she was drinking from a wineglass and typed “sex tiger woods” into Google and clicked dlisted.com. Adjacent to a photo of Tiger Woods, smiling on a golf course, were blocks of text, in which “Ambien sex haze” was in bold around ten times.

Laura typed “ambient” into Google.

“No,” said Paul grinning. “That’s the music, delete the t.”

Laura laughed and typed “ambien and alcohol and klonopin and” and grinned at Paul and, though she had a Klonopin prescription, Paul knew, and was probably on Klonopin, said “just kidding” and deleted all but “ambien and alcohol.” Every result, it seemed, warned strongly against combining Ambien and alcohol, but Laura said she drank “a lot,” so it would be okay. Paul crawled onto her bed and touched her cat Jeffrey and, after a vague amount of time, became aware of a slight blurriness to his vision, like he was seeing from two perspectives in time, milliseconds apart, and that he felt vaguely sleepy and not nervous. He asked if Laura could turn off the light, which seemed uncomfortably bright. He felt confused, to some degree, by everything, but at a delay, as if continuously realizing past confusions, which could no longer be resolved, so were not problems. They seemed to be watching a foreign movie off her computer, then Paul noticed the light was on and that they were lying against a mound of blankets, kissing lazily, with eyes closed and long pauses, maybe sometimes asleep. He became aware of his mix CD, of some of his favorite songs, sounding unpleasantly, almost nightmarishly, noise-like. Paul realized they were trying to undo his belt and weakly imagined what would happen if his jeans were removed and heard Laura say “we just met” from what seemed like a nearby, inaccessible distance and wondered if he was asleep, or dreaming, but knew he was awake, because he was moving physically. He was trying to remove Laura’s clothing. He felt like he was trying to remove the surface of a glass bottle by pawing at it with oven mitts. He expressed confusion and Laura said “it’s just a skirt. . and tights” and stopped moving completely, it seemed, as Paul continued touching her strange outfit with hands that felt glossy and fingerless, suspecting at one point, with some sarcasm, that she was wearing a corset.

“It’s been two hours, I think,” said Paul after staring at his phone around ten seconds. “Jesus,” he said, and sneezed.

Entering Lucie’s party, an hour and a half later, Paul felt like if he wasn’t careful he would fall in an out-of-control, top-heavy manner toward whomever he was greeting and hurt himself and multiple others by reflexively grabbing people and pulling them down with him in a continuing effort to remain standing. He realized he might be unconsciously hunching his back, to be nearer the floor, when Lucie, though four or five inches shorter, appeared to be above him as she thanked him for linking her magazine on his blog. Paul introduced Lucie and other people to Laura by saying “this is Laura” a few times without looking at anyone’s face, while moving toward areas with less people. “Hey,” said Paul, as he passed Mitch in a crowded space, and mumbled something about “going somewhere,” which in combination with a peremptory nodding was meant to convey they would definitely talk at length, later tonight, since they hadn’t seen each other in a long time — months, maybe.

In an empty kitchen, a few seconds later, Paul realized Mitch, who worked for Zipcar, had driven him and Laura — and others — to this party. Paul stared into a refrigerator, bent at his waist, waiting for himself, it seemed, to think or do something. “Trying to choose two beers,” he thought after a vague amount of time, and chose two at random, then found Laura and went with her through a window, onto a fourth-story roof, where they passed a shadowy area, emanating the language-y noises and phantom heat of four to six people, to a higher area, where they were alone. Paul, dangling his legs briefly off the building, scooted backward, passively cooperative, as a distracted-seeming Laura pulled him away from the edge. They sat facing hundreds of the same type of four-story building, the expanse of which, in most directions, darkened dramatically, creating an illusion that one could see the Earth’s curvature, until blurring, in the distance, into a texture. Sometimes, looking at a city, especially a gray or brown one, at night, Paul would intuitively view it as a small and irreducible thing that arrived one summer and rapidly grew, showing patterns of color on its expanding surface, then was discolored by autumn and removed of its exterior and deadened by winter, in preparation for regrowth, in spring, but was unable, in its form, to enter the natural cycle, so continued growing, in a manner as if faceless and skinless, through summer, autumn, etc., less in belligerence or tyranny, or with some abstruse knowledge of its own rightness, than as a stranded thing, sightless and uninstructed, with an objectless sort of yearning. Seeing the streets and bridges and sidewalks, while living inside a building, locked in a room, one could forget that it was all a single, alien, seeking entity.

Paul realized he and Laura had been staring into the distance — unaware of each other, it seemed — for maybe two or three minutes. He looked at her profile. Without moving her head, in a voice like she was still considering if this was true, she said Paul was “devious” for bringing her to a party where another girl liked him.

“What girl likes me?”

“Lucie,” said Laura after a few seconds, still staring ahead, systematically reinterpreting her and Paul’s prior interactions, it seemed, with this new information.

“Why do you think she likes me?”

“I can tell,” said Laura, and lit a cigarette.

“She has a boyfriend,” said Paul.

Laura said something seemingly unrelated about cooking.

“You should cook for me,” said Paul distractedly.

“You won’t like it — it’ll be dense and unhealthy.”

“I like pasta and lasagna,” said Paul, and thought he heard Laura ask if his computer was in Canada and was nervous she might be confusing him for another person. “What computer?”

“You said your computer was getting fixed in Canada.”

“Oh,” said Paul. “Kansas, not Canada. Yeah, it’s still there.”

On their way back inside Paul and Laura passed the shadowy area, from where an unseen Amy said something implying Laura had stolen her cigarettes, using the word “cute” antagonistically. Paul had an urge to accelerate, but Laura, ahead of him, continued at her leisurely pace, maneuvering carefully through the window, into the kitchen.

Paul followed a slow-moving Laura through a long, dark, almost boomerang-shaped hallway, which felt briefly room-like, as they sort of lingered in it, or like it wanted to be a room, with furniture and guests, but maybe was shy and too afraid of causing disappointment, so impaired itself with two conspicuous openings to conventionally shaped rooms, a sort of recommendation against itself. Paul and Laura entered a large room of sofas and tables and eight to twelve people, including Daniel, who encouraged Paul to “test-drive” a foot-massage machine, which was on the floor, audibly bubbling hot water.

“Take off your shoes and socks,” said Daniel.

“I don’t want to use that,” said Paul, and turned around and distractedly sat on a backless, deeply padded, uncomfortable seat, which yielded at least a foot from Paul’s weight. Laura was ten feet away, in a throne-like chair, facing Paul, but not looking at him, or anyone, it seemed. Paul openly stared at her for around ten seconds, to no response, then moved chips and guacamole onto his lap (partly because he felt anxious about Laura seeming to refuse to look at him) and focused on steadily eating while repeatedly thinking “eating chips and guacamole.” He looked at his hands, and felt his mouth and throat, doing what he was thinking, and felt vaguely confused. Was he instructing his brain? Or was he narrating what he saw and felt?

Laura seemed less distracted, but more worried, than before. Paul moved toward her with what felt like a precariously sustained gliding motion and sat against and above her, on the chair’s sturdy armrest, in a comically awkward manner he hadn’t foreseen and was preparing to reverse, by returning to his seat, when Laura lifted his arm and placed it ungently around her neck — maybe a little disappointed that she had to do it herself — where it remained, independent and heavy as a small boa constrictor, for a vague amount of time, during which Paul, remaining almost completely still, felt increasingly reluctant to move, or speak. At some point, maybe three minutes later, Paul asked if Laura wanted to go to the other party.

“Yes,” she said.

Paul felt like parts of his and Laura’s bodies, as they stood on the front stoop hugging tightly under one umbrella, waiting for Walter’s car, were oppositely charged magnets covered with thick velvet. Paul crawled into Walter’s car’s backseat, spilling red wine; unable to find the cork, he wrapped the bottle in a plastic bag. He faced ahead, seated between two people, and realized no one had cared, or noticed, at all, it seemed, about the wine. Paul thought “I’m in hell” when people began to loudly mimic the guitar parts of the Led Zeppelin playing from a tape deck, resulting mostly in demonic-sounding noises and a kind of metallic, nightmarish screeching. Paul couldn’t discern if they did this regularly, or if it had just been improvised. “Ambien has a negative effect on music for me,” he thought.

At Laura’s friend’s party Paul sat alone at the snacks table, eating crackers and drinking wine, sometimes with unfocused eyes. Then he was sitting on a mattress in a space-module-like bedroom, in which six to ten people, smoking marijuana, watched a video off a MacBook of obese people screaming in pain earnestly while exercising and being screamed at motivationally, in what seemed to be a grotesque parody, or something, of something. Paul felt strong aversion to the video, and also like he’d already experienced this exact situation — he remembered his aversion to the video and the way someone to his right was laughing — and wanted to ask if this already happened, but didn’t know who to ask, then realized he wanted to ask himself. Around an hour later, after more crackers and wine, Paul thought he heard Laura drunkenly say something like “let him through, my new boyfriend,” loud enough for probably ten to fifteen people to have heard, as she beckoned him to sit with her and her three closest friends, including Walter, on a four-seat sofa. Walter drove everyone on the sofa to Laura’s apartment to smoke marijuana, around 3:30 a.m., when the party ended.

On the sidewalk, outside Laura’s apartment, a heavily impaired Paul explained that in high school his lungs collapsed three times and one of the doctors said smoking marijuana would increase the chance of recurrence by 4,200 percent. Laura said he wouldn’t have to smoke. Paul said the smoke would be in the air and that he was allergic to Laura’s cat and had a horrible headache. He hugged Laura, then walked toward the Bedford L train station, half a block away.

• • •

The next night Laura emailed that she wished Paul wasn’t allergic to Jeffrey so he could be with her, in her room, listening to the rain. Paul asked if she wanted to eat dinner together tomorrow night. Laura said she felt like she missed him and “well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” characteristically answering a question indirectly and ending an email casually.

Paul was aware he felt mysteriously less interested in her after reading that she felt like she missed him and realized he hadn’t considered what a relationship between them would be like: probably not sustainable, at all, due to a mutual lack of strong interest. He was aware of not acknowledging her line about missing him in his response, which included a short list of restaurants he liked.

Paul met Laura the next night outside the clothing boutique in SoHo where she worked. “I think this is a bad idea, I always go home after work to nap,” she said with a worried expression, walking slowly away from Paul, who signaled a taxi, which they exited fifteen blocks later at a deli, where they bought a 40oz and two bottles of beer.

Seated, in Angelica Kitchen, they looked at each other directly for the first time that night. Laura seemed anxious and tired. Paul said the restaurant was organic and vegan and Laura said she had been trying to eat better since meeting Paul, who grinned while saying “you’ve been trying to eat butter?” twice, during which Laura began to blush.

“I thought you said ‘butter,’ ” said Paul grinning.

Laura looked at her hand touching a fork on the table.

“I thought you said you’re trying to eat butter.”

“Stop,” said Laura moving the fork slowly toward herself.

“Stop what?”

“You’re making fun of me, I think,” said Laura looking at him tentatively.

“No, I’m not. I wouldn’t do that.”

Laura was motionless, looking at her lap with downcast eyes, like she was waiting for Paul to finish. Paul asked if she believed him and she didn’t respond and he felt stranded and withering and asked again if she believed him, then quietly said “I honestly thought you said ‘butter.’ ” He nervously moved a spoon to his lap and, aware they were both looking down, felt himself absorbing the irresolution of the butter misunderstanding as an irreversible damage. He asked if she wanted to leave, for a different restaurant maybe. Laura poured beer from the 40oz into Paul’s glass, already 95 percent full, and said “let’s just drink more, I just need to drink more” and apologized for “being like this.”

“It’s okay,” said Paul. “I’m sorry about the butter thing.”

Laura blushed and looked down by slowly moving her eyeballs. Paul apologized and said he wouldn’t talk about it anymore and that he liked Laura’s eyebrows, which were black, in contrast to her naturally blond hair. They talked tensely, with a few long pauses, about the difference between Scottish and Irish people and Paul began to worry about the rest of dinner, but after they finished the 40oz and mutely focused on their menus a few minutes they settled into a calm, polite, somewhat resigned manner of leisurely occupying each other. When their mashed potatoes, chili, corn-bread, noodle soup arrived they talked less and Paul began to feel a little sleepy. Laura thanked him for showing her this restaurant, which she wanted to try lunch from soon.

Outside, on the sidewalk, Laura immediately walked toward the 1st Avenue L train station at an unleisurely pace, seeming less rushed than resolutely continuing with a prior, focused, unobstructed momentum. Paul realized, with some confusion, that he’d obliviously assumed they would do something together after dinner; more than once, as they waited for the bill, he’d considered suggesting they see a movie at a theater that was in the opposite direction they were currently walking. Laura was crossing streets and sidewalks at unconventional angles, as if across a field, in a diagonal, it seemed, to get there sooner. Paul wanted to stop moving and sit or lay on the sidewalk, partly as a juvenile tactic to interrupt Laura’s departure.

On the train Laura became significantly more talkative and, it seemed, happier. Paul thought of how at every job he’d had, in movie theaters and libraries and restaurants, almost every employee, probably especially himself, would become predictably friendlier and more generous as closing time neared. At the Bedford station, before exiting the train, Laura apologized again and unsolicitedly said “maybe I’ll feel better and come over later, in a few hours,” which seemed to Paul like a non sequitur, or an extreme example of the “closing time” effect.

In his room, with the light on, Paul lay entirely beneath his blanket, aware that Michelle was the last person who’d affected him this cripplingly — to zero productivity, not even listening to music, motionless between his blanket and mattress like some packaged thing. He heard a ringing noise, or the memory of a ringing noise, which meant another of his limited number of nonregenerative hearing cells had died, though his room was nearly silent. He became aware of himself remembering a night when he and Michelle, alone in her mother’s mansion-like house in Pittsburgh, made salad and pasta for dinner and sat facing each other, bisecting a long wood table like a converted canoe. Paul had begun to feel depressed without knowing why — maybe unconsciously intuiting what life would be like in a giant house with a significant other and a routine, how forty or fifty years, like windows on a computer screen, maximized on top of each other, could appear like a single year that would then need to be lived repeatedly, so that one felt both nearer and withheld from death — and within a few minutes was silent and visibly troubled, staring down at his salad. Michelle had asked what was wrong and Paul had said “nothing,” then she’d asked again and he’d said he felt depressed, but didn’t know why, then at some point she went upstairs, where Paul found her on her bed, in her room that seemed too big for one person, in a fetal position on her side — oval and exposed, on top of her sheets and blanket, as an egg. Paul dreamed something about his cube-shaped room being a storage facility in which he’d been placed by an entity that believed in his resale value. While in storage he could interact with others, look at the internet, go on a book tour, but if he damaged himself he would be moved to a garbage pile, on a different planet. He woke a few times, then remained awake, obstructed from sleep by his own grumpiness and discomfort, the main reasons he wanted to sleep.

He reached outside his blanket and pulled his MacBook “darkly,” he felt, toward himself, like an octopus might. It was 12:52 a.m., almost three hours since leaving Angelica Kitchen. Laura, to Paul’s surprise, had emailed twice — a few sentence fragments apologizing for her awkwardness at 11:43 p.m., a paragraph of elaboration at 12:05 a.m. Paul emailed that he understood and liked her and thought she was “cool.” She responded, a few minutes later, seeming cheerful. After a few more emails she seemed almost “giddy.” They committed — earnestly and enthusiastically, Paul felt — to get tattoos together tomorrow.

• • •

Laura arrived around 4:30 p.m., seeming tired and distracted, with cheese and a bottle of wine and knitting materials in a plastic bag. Paul said they should go to Manhattan before night and Laura asked why and Paul said for tattoos. Laura said she wanted to stay inside to work on her set of a dozen “monster masks,” which she wanted to use in a music video for one of her songs (and which, based on photos Paul had seen on the internet, she seemed to have been knitting for more than a year). They shared a Klonopin, and when it began to get dark outside Paul suggested a restaurant two blocks away, but Laura didn’t want to go outside, so they ordered Chinese food — minnow-size pieces of slippery chicken in a shiny garlic sauce, six fortune cookies — and ate only a little, then shared an Ambien and sat, at a distance from each other, on Paul’s mattress.

Paul patted the area beside him and Laura said “stop trying to make sexy time” in an earnest, slightly annoyed voice. Paul grinned and honestly said he wasn’t and felt confused. Laura, who had finished most of the bottle of wine herself, lay curled in a corner of the mattress and was soon asleep. Paul absently looked at the internet a little, then woke, three hours later, around midnight, to Laura putting her things into her plastic bag. She was going home, she said, because she had to feed Jeffrey and had work in the morning.

The next night Paul was with Mitch and Matt — another classmate from Florida, one year ahead of Mitch and Paul, currently “on vacation” alone — at Barcade, a bar with dozens of arcade machines. After one beer Paul texted Laura “hi, how’s it going” and interpreted her almost instantaneous response of “super” as her wanting to finish an undesirable task as quick as possible. Paul texted he was at Barcade with “high school friends” and if Laura wanted to come. Laura texted “I’m all out of quarters” after five minutes. Paul texted “I have some quarters for you” with a neutral expression and a cringing sensation, then showed Mitch and Matt the texts, saying he felt depressed. Matt’s friend Lindsay (whom he was staying with while on vacation) arrived and everyone walked six blocks to a bar with outdoor Ping-Pong tables. Daniel arrived with his friend Fran, 22, whose intriguing gaze, Paul noticed with interest, seemed both disbelieving and transfixed in discernment, as if meticulously studying what she knew she was hallucinating. Paul looked at his phone — it had been more than an hour since he texted Laura that he had quarters and, as expected, she hadn’t responded — and heard Daniel say “a Mexican place” and something about “six tacos” to Mitch.

“Eight tacos,” said Paul absently.

“I said six tacos,” said Daniel.

“Six tacos,” said Paul. “Was it, like. . a taco platter?”

“No. This place has small tacos.”

“It wasn’t a taco platter?”

“It wasn’t a taco platter,” said Daniel.

“I don’t get it,” said Paul without thinking.

“Bro,” said Daniel grinning.

Paul asked Fran what she had eaten.

“Enchiladas,” said Fran.

“I can never remember what those are,” said Paul, and went to the bathroom. When he returned Lindsay invited everyone to her Cinco de Mayo party — in five days, at her apartment — then everyone, except Fran, who Daniel said was an undergrad at Columbia and had left to do homework, walked eight blocks to a bar called Harefield Road to meet a group of people Paul knew as acquaintances from his involvement in poetry. Seconds after sitting in the outdoor area Paul openly said “I want to comfort myself with food” without looking at anyone, in a relatively loud voice, with a bleak sensation of unsatisfying catharsis from having accurately, he felt, expressed himself. “I’m just going to eat whatever tonight,” he said, and stood, asking if anyone knew about food options at this bar. Two acquaintances said there were, at this time, around 2:30 a.m., only paninis. One of Daniel’s two suitemates, who said she’d written an article about Paul and reviewed books anonymously for Kirkus, went with him to order a panini. Paul asked if she liked a baseball book, which she mentioned having reviewed, and she talked without pause for what seemed like ten minutes, during which Paul, staring at her calmly, thought “she’s definitely drunk” and “normally I would be interested in her, to some degree, but currently I’m obsessed with Laura” and “she seems maybe focused on not appearing drunk, which is maybe affecting her perception of time, of how long and off-topic and incomprehensible her answer has become.” Paul carried his panini outside and “openly exchanged witty banter while feeling severely depressed,” he thought while speaking to various acquaintances. One said she’d met Paul, when he lived with Shawn Olive, at least three times. Paul said he didn’t recognize her, but also had forgotten that he’d once lived with Shawn Olive. He ate half his panini and said it was unsatisfying and left the bar and returned with Tate’s cookies and Fig Newmans, which he offered to each person. He asked Lindsay what her roommate, whom she’d been talking about, was doing. Lindsay said “sleeping, watching TV, or smoking weed” and Paul said “we should go to your apartment,” aware he was somewhat desperately, if maybe sarcastically, trying to direct his interest away from Laura, toward any girl he had not yet, but still could, meet tonight.

“This bar’s special feature: ‘paninis until really late,’ ” said Paul to a drunk-looking acquaintance on the way out.

• • •

In Lindsay’s apartment’s common room Paul sat eating Fig Newmans on one side of a five-seat sofa with Mitch and Daniel on the other side. Lindsay’s roommate was sleeping. Paul was vaguely aware, as he reread texts from Laura, of people pressuring Matt to smoke marijuana. Matt was standing alone in a corner of the room — seeming in Paul’s peripheral vision like a figure in a horror movie — saying things, as explanation for his choice not to smoke marijuana, about his grandfather’s alcoholism. Paul half-unconsciously mumbled something — to himself, he felt — about feeling thirsty and within a few seconds Matt was standing above him asking if he wanted water. After bringing him a glass of water Matt asked if Paul wanted to use his MacBook to look at the internet. Paul felt endeared to a degree that — in combination with his distraught emotional state, and as he dwelled a few seconds on how Matt’s behavior was like the opposite of pressuring someone to smoke marijuana — he felt like crying. Matt returned with a large MacBook from the room he was sleeping in while on vacation.

“Thank you,” said Paul smiling.

“You’re very welcome,” said Matt.

“You’re being really nice to me.”

“You’re the guest here,” said Matt, and Paul gingerly asked if he “by chance” had an iPod cord, sensing he would enjoy further indulging an appreciative subject with his gratuitous helpfulness. Paul accepted Matt’s iPod cord with a sensation, he felt, of daintiness, which remained as he transferred mostly pop-punk songs from Matt’s MacBook to his iPod nano. Around 4:30 a.m., in his room, Paul bit a piece of a 150mg Seroquel and listened to songs he hadn’t heard since high school, mostly the EP Look Forward to Failure by the Ataris. He woke at night fifteen hours later and, while showering, felt like he lived in a module attached to a spaceship far enough from any star to never experience daylight.

Three days later Paul exited the Graham L train station carrying beer and guacamole ingredients in a paper bag from Whole Foods for Lindsay’s Cinco de Mayo party. Sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk against a Thai restaurant was a girl with dyed-black hair. As Paul approached she looked up knowingly with an innocent, wary gaze.

“Hi,” said Paul. “Are you Fran?”

“Yeah,” said Fran.

“I’m Paul.”

“I know,” said Fran, and slowly closed her notebook.

“Are you doing homework?”

“My friend’s homework.”

“Nice,” said Paul staring transfixed at Fran’s delicate and extreme gaze, like that of a skeleton with eyeballs, or a person with their face peeled off. Paul began talking — slowly, before accelerating to a normal speed — about how Daniel had sounded “really drunk” on the phone but had sent witty, insightful, elaborate texts of mostly long, elegant sentences. Fran said Daniel was like that when on Klonopin. Paul asked if he could have a Klonopin and Fran gave him one and looked to his left, where he was surprised to see Daniel standing in place, a few feet away, looking at Fran with the fixed, discerning, earnest gaze of a three-year-old processing information without considering utility or personal relevance. Paul asked Daniel how many Klonopin he had taken.

“Five,” said Daniel.

“Jesus,” said Paul.

• • •

When Paul entered the party, ahead of Daniel and Fran, Lindsay wreathed a plastic snake around his head and pulled him toward a hallway designated for photographs. Paul mumbled the word “bathroom” and walked away grinning into the kitchen, where Matt was standing alone, not apparently doing anything. Paul asked about his vacation. Matt said he drove a rental car without a plan to Maine and ate seafood in a restaurant alone, did other things alone. “It was really good,” he said, and briefly displayed a haunted and irreducibly unenthusiastic expression before reaching for chips. Paul walked out of the kitchen and looked at Fran sitting alone on the sofa where he’d eaten Fig Newmans five days ago and returned to the kitchen and, while peripherally aware of a self-conscious Matt slowly creating guacamole, asked Daniel what he’d meant — in one of his dense, interesting texts — when he said he felt like there’d been “strange occurrences lately.” Daniel said he read all of Paul’s books last autumn while in San Francisco and told his friends he had a feeling that when he came to New York City he would meet Paul and they would become friends. Daniel was alert and expressionless as an advanced cyborg as he explained that he’d gone to Paul and Frederick’s reading because Amy didn’t want to be alone with Lucie and that none of them had known Paul was reading.

“I’ve felt similar things,” said Paul. “Since Kyle’s party, when I met Laura. Or, I mean, actually, the night before that, at the reading near Times Square, when we met.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“About what?”

“It,” said Daniel vaguely.

“It seems good. New things keep happening, which seems good. I just felt right now like it’s going to end tonight.”

“You’re pessimistic about it,” said Daniel as a neutral observation, staring intensely at Paul with a serious, almost grim expression.

“We haven’t referenced it until now.”

“I’m sorry for talking about it and causing you to think it might end,” said Daniel earnestly.

“It’s okay,” said Paul, a little confused. “Maybe it won’t end. But I wonder if we need to make an effort, for it to continue.”

“Well,” said Daniel hesitantly. “Don’t you think it just needs to happen naturally?”

“Yeah,” said Paul.

“Well, then we wouldn’t make an effort, then, huh?”

“I mean if we need to keep doing things, instead of staying inside,” said Paul.

“You said you only go to like one party a month. But you’re at almost every party.”

“This isn’t normal at all,” said Paul. “Before we met I probably did less than one thing a month.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Probably because I met people I like.”

Daniel hesitated. “What people?”

“You, Mitch, Laura. . Amy,” said Paul. “I’m going to the bathroom.” When he returned Fran and Daniel were making guacamole energetically, with spoons and a mashing strategy, adding onion and cilantro and salsa and garlic powder, having apparently replaced Matt, who was very slowly, it seemed, moving a beer toward his mouth. Paul began eating guacamole as it was being made, with chips, to no discernible opposition. In a distracted voice, without looking at anyone, he asked if Daniel and Fran wanted to go to a “book party” tomorrow night at a bookstore in Greenpoint and they seemed interested. Fran gave everyone vodka shots. Matt moved into a position facing more people and, with an earnest but powerless attempt at enthusiasm, resulting in a a weak form of sarcasm, asked if everyone wanted to go to the roof.

On the fourth-story roof Paul said he wanted to run “really fast in a circle,” vaguely aware and mostly unconcerned, though he knew he didn’t want to die — less because he had an urge to live than because dying, like knitting or backgammon, seemed irrelevant to his life — that due to alcohol and Klonopin, in a moment of inattention, he could easily walk off the building. He collided with an unseen Fran — who seemed already confused, before this, standing alone in an arbitrary area of the roof — and felt intrigued by the binary manner that his movement was stopped, though how else, he vaguely realized, could something stop? He texted Laura, inviting her to “come eat Mexican food at a party,” then went downstairs and indiscriminately moved refried beans, guacamole, three kinds of chips, cucumber, salsa, beef onto his plate until he had a roughly symmetrical mound of food, on top of which — on the way out of the kitchen, as a kind of afterthought — he added a fluffy, triangular wedge of cake. After carrying the Mayan-pyramid-shaped plate of food, with some difficulty, up the ladder, onto the roof, where he silently ate it all, he belligerently directed conversation toward Laura-related things, then said he felt cold and was going inside. He descended the ladder until his head was below the opening to the roof and tried to hear what Fran and Daniel — who remained outside smoking — were saying, while unaware of his presence, but couldn’t, and also didn’t know what could possibly be said that he would want to secretly hear, so returned inside the apartment and lay on his back on the sofa in the common room.

He woke to flash photography, then to Lindsay’s voice, in another room, loudly saying “get out.” Lindsay entered the common room and said, to a blearily waking Paul, something about “your friend” looking inside her purse, trying to steal her shoes. Paul stared blankly, a little embarrassed to have slept on his back, for an unknown amount of time, on the apartment’s only sofa. He looked at his phone: no new texts. After saying “sorry” a few times to Lindsay, who seemed unsure if she felt negatively toward Paul, he put a half-eaten onion, beer bottles, other trash into his Whole Foods bag and descended stairs behind Daniel and Fran, who was quietly murmuring things vaguely in her defense. They decided to go to Legion, a bar, one and a half blocks away, with an outdoor area on the sidewalk.

“Were you trying to steal her shoes?” said Daniel.

“No, I wasn’t,” said Fran quietly. “Our shoes look the same.”

“I’m asking because you’ve told me you like to steal things when you’re drunk.”

“I wasn’t stealing her shoes,” said Fran in a loud whisper.

They were walking toward Paul’s room, after ten minutes in Legion, when it became known, in a manner that seemed sourceless, as if they realized simultaneously, that Fran had “accidentally,” she then said, stolen a leather jacket, which she was wearing. They agreed it would be inconvenient for the owner to not have their phone, which was in the jacket, but continued walking and each tried on the jacket, which seemed to best fit Paul, who found two gigantic vitamins in one of its pockets. In his room he put the phone on the table beside his mattress and, saying he didn’t want to be near it, sort of pushed it away. He opened his MacBook and played “Annoying Noise of Death” and saw that Daniel was calmly observing himself, in the full-length wall mirror, as he exercised with Caroline’s five-pound weights that were usually on the floor in the kitchen. Fran said to put on Rilo Kiley. Paul said it was Rilo Kiley and, after a few motionless seconds, Fran slowly turned her head away to rotate her face, like a moon orbiting behind its planet, interestingly out of view. Paul grinned to himself as he lay on his back and propped up his head with a folded pillow, resting his MacBook against the front of his thighs, both knees bent. Daniel sat on the mattress in a position that a robot in a black comedy about a child with two fathers, one of whom was a robot, would assume to recite a bedtime story, looking at Paul however with a slightly, stoically puzzled expression. “When you asked me if I liked Rilo Kiley, the night we met, I thought you were joking,” said Daniel.

“No,” said Paul. “Why did you think that?”

“You’re more earnest than I thought you’d be.”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”

“Like what?” said Daniel.

Paul said he wouldn’t pretend he liked something, or make fun of liking something, or like something “ironically.” Daniel sort of drifted away and began looking at Paul’s books with a patient, scholarly demeanor — in continuation, Paul realized, of a calm inquisitiveness that had characterized most of his behavior tonight, probably due to the five Klonopin he’d ingested, though he was always inquisitive and would continue asking questions, in certain conversations, when others would’ve stopped, which Paul liked. Twenty minutes later Daniel was reading pages of different books and Paul was looking at methadone’s Wikipedia page (“. . developed in Germany in 1937. . an acyclic analog of morphine or heroin. .”) when Fran returned from outside with cuts on her face and neck from a group of girls, she said, that called her a bitch and said she tried to steal shoes and attacked her, pushing her down. Daniel asked how the girls opened the gate to the house’s walkway. Fran repeated, with a vaguely confused expression, that she was attacked. Paul, who hadn’t realized she had left the room, asked how she reentered the gate without a key. Fran stared expectantly at Daniel with her child-like gaze, then quietly engaged herself in a solitary activity elsewhere in the room as Daniel and Paul began pondering the situation themselves, to no satisfying conclusion. Fran said she wanted to go dancing at Legion before it closed in less than an hour and Paul thought he saw her put a number of pills into her mouth in the stereotypically indiscriminate manner he’d previously seen only on TV or in movies. Fran and Daniel did yoga-like stretches on Paul’s yoga mat and snorted two Adderall — crushed into a potion-y blue, faintly neon sand — off a pink piece of construction paper. Daniel briefly hugged a supine Paul, then stood at a distance as Fran lay flat on top of Paul with her head facedown to the right of his head. Fran didn’t move for around forty seconds, during which, at one point, she murmured something that seemed significant but, muffled by the mattress, was not comprehensible. She rolled onto her back and Daniel pulled her to a standing position. Paul was surprised to feel moved in a calming, tearful manner — as if some long-term desire, requiring a tiring amount of effort, had been fulfilled — when, before leaving for Legion, both Daniel and Fran affected slightly friendlier demeanors (rounder eyes, higher-pitched voices, a sort of pleasantness of expression like minor face-lifts) to confirm meeting at the book party Paul mentioned earlier and had forgotten.

Paul realized after they left that he’d gotten what from elementary school through college he often most wanted — unambiguous indications of secure, mutual friendships — but was no longer important to him.

The book party, like algae, feeling its way elsewhere, moved slowly but persistently from the bookstore’s basement to its first floor, to the sidewalk outside, converging finally with other groups at a corner bar, where Paul failed more than five times to recognize or remember the faces or names of recent to long-term acquaintances — and twice introduced people he’d already introduced to each other, including Daniel and Frederick, both of whom however either feigned having not met or had actually forgotten — but due to 2mg Klonopin remained poised, with a peaceful sensation of faultlessness, physiologically calm but mentally stimulated, throughout the night, as if beta testing the event by acting like an exaggerated version of himself, for others to practice against, before the real Paul, the only person without practice, was inserted for the actual event. Fran left for her apartment, which she shared with a low-level cocaine dealer majoring in something art related at Columbia, to prepare a kind of pasta, “with a lot of things in it,” that was her specialty, it seemed. Paul and Daniel arrived ninety minutes later and Fran served a giant platter of cheese-covered, lasagna-like pasta — attractively browned in a mottled pattern of variations of crispiness — in small, colorful plastic bowls with buttered toast on which were thin slices of raw garlic. They ate all of it, then arranged themselves on Fran’s three-seat sofa and watched Drugstore Cowboy on Daniel’s MacBook. Paul was unable to discern the movie as coherent — he kept thinking the same scene, in a motel room, was replaying with minor variations — but was aware of sometimes commenting on the sound track, including that it was “really weird” and “unexpected.”

Before becoming unconscious Paul was aware of a man wearing a cowboy hat being carried out of a drugstore by four people and of himself thinking that, if the people dragging the man were invisible, the man would look like he was gliding feetfirst on a horizontal waterslide, steadily ahead, with out-of-control limbs and a crazed, antagonistic expression, as if by experimentally self-directed telekinesis.

• • •

A week later Paul had organized plans to see Trash Humpers and was waiting for Fran and Daniel at the theater. He had first asked Laura, who seemed to be in a relationship with her ex-boyfriend — pictures had appeared on Facebook in which they looked happily reunited in what seemed to be a faux-expensive hotel — to see the movie and she’d said she wanted to but not tonight. Fran gave Paul six 10mg Adderall for her and Daniel’s tickets and a disoriented-seeming Daniel, who had no money left, asked if Paul had any snacks. Paul gave Daniel a sugar-free Red Bull he got from a Red Bull — shaped car parked outside the library and Daniel drank it in one motion with a neutral expression.

“Fran said she’ll pay you back if you give me one of the Adderall she gave you,” whispered Daniel a few minutes into the movie. “I don’t think I can stay awake without it.” In the movie costumed actors made noises in parking lots and inside houses while destroying and/or “humping” inanimate objects. Paul woke, at one point, to Fran laughing loudly when no one else in the small, sold-out theater was laughing. When Paul wasn’t asleep he felt distracted by a feeling that Daniel had eerily turned his head 90 degrees and was staring at him, but each time he looked Daniel was either asleep or looking at the screen. The last ten minutes of the movie Paul was peripherally aware of Daniel’s unsupported head continually lolling in place and twitching to attention in a manner reminiscent of a middle/high school student struggling and repeatedly failing to remain awake in a morning class. Daniel seemed fully alert seconds after the movie ended. Paul asked how he slept despite Adderall and Red Bull.

“Susie-Q,” said Daniel with a smirk-like grin indicating both earnest disapproval and a kind of fondness toward Seroquel and its intense, often uncomfortable tranquilizing effects — as if, believing Susie-Q wasn’t malicious, he could forgive her every time she induced twelve hours of sleep followed by twelve to twenty-four hours of feeling lost and irritable, therefore she functioned, if inadvertently, as a teacher of forgiveness and acceptance and empathy, for which he was grateful.

They were the last three people, after the movie, to leave the theater. They stood on the sidewalk, unsure what to do next. Fran had planned to go to Coney Island tonight and stay until morning for her birthday, which was today — she’d created a Facebook listing, which Paul remembered seeing — but none of her friends wanted to go, because she didn’t have any, she said. Paul said he also had no friends and that they should celebrate by “eating a lot of food.”

At Lovin’ Cup, a bar-restaurant with live music, Fran and Daniel ordered drinks, went outside to smoke. Paul laid the side of his head on his arms, on the table, and closed his eyes. He didn’t feel connected by a traceable series of linked events to a source that had purposefully conveyed him, from elsewhere, into this world. He felt like a digression that had forgotten from what it digressed and was continuing ahead in a confused, choiceless searching. Fran and Daniel returned and ordered enchiladas, nachos. Paul ordered tequila, a salad, waffles with ice cream on top.

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.

In mid-June, one dark and rainy afternoon, Paul woke and rolled onto his side and opened his MacBook sideways. At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he’d begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle — with an ongoing, affectless, humorless realization that his day “was over”—he noticed with confusion, having thought it was a.m., that it was 4:46 p.m. He slept until 8:30 p.m. and “worked on things” in the library until midnight and was two blocks from his room, carrying a mango and two cucumbers and a banana in a plastic bag, when Daniel texted “come hang out, Mitch bought a lot of coke.”

Daniel and Mitch were outside a bar, discussing where to use the cocaine. Paul said Daniel looked “really tired” and asked if he needed some eggplant, in reference to a joke they had that Daniel was heavily dependent on eggplant and almost always suffering its withdrawal symptoms, which could be horrific. Daniel said he stayed up last night with Fran, currently sleeping, to celebrate, by eating brunch and buying drugs, that she’d quit her job she got three days ago waitressing in a Polish restaurant.

They crossed the street to Mitch’s friend Harry’s apartment, where Harry, whom Mitch had earlier given some cocaine for his birthday, was repeatedly trying to hug more than one person at a time while shouting what one would normally speak. Paul walked aimlessly, into a kitchen, where he stood in darkness at the sink peeling and eating his mango. He washed his hands and walked through the apartment’s main room — two desktop computers and speakers on a corner table, four large windows overlooking Graham Avenue, ten to fifteen people hugging and shouting, two mediumsize dogs — into an institutionally bright hallway, where he heard Daniel in a bathroom whose door wasn’t fully closed. “It’s me,” said Paul, and pushed the door, against resistance, which relented when he said “it’s Paul,” revealing a vaguely familiar girl, who appeared extremely tired, sitting on a bathtub’s outer edge, looking at Daniel and Mitch huddled on the floor around a toilet-seat lid with cocaine on it.

“You’re doing it without me,” said Paul in an exaggerated monotone.

“We thought you left,” said Daniel.

“I wouldn’t just leave,” said Paul.

“Out of anyone I know you’re probably most likely to just leave,” said Daniel crushing cocaine with his debit card.

Paul looked at the girl, who shrugged.

Mitch, who was allergic to Harry’s dogs, sneezed.

“Jesus, be careful,” said Daniel quietly.

“He’s sharing it with us,” said Paul. “And all you can do is berate him.”

“Bro,” said Daniel, and seemed to grin at Paul a little.

At Legion, twenty minutes later, Paul was sitting alone on a padded seat, staring at an area of torsos that were beginning to seem face-like. He texted Daniel that he was going to Khim’s to “stock up on eggplant” and walked six blocks to the large deli below Harry’s apartment, feeling energetic and calm, listening to Rilo Kiley through earphones at a medium volume. He paid for an organic beef patty, two kombuchas, five bananas, alfalfa sprouts, arugula, hempseed oil, a red onion, ginger, toilet paper and carried two paper bags reinforced with plastic bags toward Legion. Harry approached on the sidewalk with a panic-like expression of uncommitted confusion and, staring ahead, passed with a sweating forehead like the person in Go who is abandoned by a friend in an alleyway outside a rave while — due to too much ecstasy — foaming at the mouth.

Mitch and Daniel, in the soundless distance, were outside Legion. As Paul approached, crossing a street, Daniel entered Legion. Mitch said they were openly snorting cocaine off a table in the back room, because the bathroom line was too long, when a security guard approached and Mitch threw the bag of cocaine (which Daniel was currently trying to find) under a table, or somewhere. They crossed the street, went in White Castle, sat in a booth. Paul realized a poster said “chicken rings” not “onion rings” and said it seemed “insane” and speculated on the process that must be required of making the meat into a paste to mold into rings.

“I’m worried about Daniel,” said Mitch.

“He has a warrant for his arrest in Colorado, I think,” said Paul.

“Jesus,” said Mitch.

“It’s probably better if he goes to jail instead of you. He’s unemployed and in debt to like five people. He has a seventy-dollar tab with me. I think he needs six hundred dollars in one week for overdue rent. You have a real job and a nice apartment. If he goes to jail I’ll relinquish his tab.”

Mitch was fidgeting a little.

“We can make a blog about him and mail him letters,” said Paul.

“A blog,” said Mitch. “Jesus.”

“I’m going to look for him,” said Paul.

In Legion’s bathroom Paul read a text from Daniel that said “come outside.” Daniel, on the sidewalk, seeing Paul, began crossing the street, toward White Castle, looking in different directions while saying he knew the bouncers at Legion and that Mitch shouldn’t have panicked. Paul said Mitch had a high-paying job.

“Where is he?”

“White Castle,” said Paul.

“Should I get some of this coke? I could’ve gotten in trouble.”

“Yeah. If that’s what you want.”

“He’s lucky it landed on this little ledge,” said Daniel staring ahead as White Castle passed on their left. “I don’t think any was lost.”

“My groceries are in White Castle. Where are you going?”

“Let’s go to your room to do some of this coke,” said Daniel.

“It’s too far,” said Paul slowing his pace.

“We’ll go there and come back, it won’t take long.”

“It’s way too far,” said Paul. “Just snort it off your hand.”

They were on a dark street with no people, moving cars, or stores. Daniel’s head seemed more elevated than normal — and his neck, swiveling and ostrich-like, more mechanical and controlled — as he looked in different directions while removing cocaine from the bag with what seemed to be his fingers, then somehow maneuvering his hand into a fist, which he put into his jeans pocket. Paul felt unsettled, imagining amounts of cocaine trickling between fingers and slipping off the sides of fingers and the curve of the palm and sticking as powder against Daniel’s hand and pocket interior. Paul ripped a page from his Moleskine journal and said “here, use this.” Daniel continued looking in different directions a few seconds before taking the page and putting it directly in his pants pocket.

“You should snort it off the Lincoln,” said Paul.

“There isn’t a Lincoln here,” said Daniel.

“That looks like a Lincoln,” said Paul pointing.

“That’s a Pontiac,” said Daniel looking elsewhere.

“You should hide between two cars,” said Paul, and Daniel moved slowly toward the street. Paul used his phone to photograph Daniel kneeling between two cars and sent the photo to his own Gmail account and to Daniel’s phone. He imagined them both sprinting in different directions the instant a spotlight appeared, gliding across the street, toward them, from a low-flying helicopter.

“Good job,” said Paul walking toward White Castle.

“You know I don’t usually do this to friends,” said Daniel staring ahead.

“What do you mean?” said Paul grinning.

“I mean, do you think it’s okay I did that?”

“Yeah. You were put in a dangerous situation.”

“I was looking on the ground for it, but it was on this little shelf,” said Daniel in White Castle.

“Jesus,” said Mitch, who seemed distracted in a respiratory manner like, after Paul left, he’d become increasingly worried and hyperventilated a little and was still recovering. Daniel handed Mitch the bag and said “um, it was open, so I don’t know how much fell out,” with, it seemed, slightly averted eyes. Mitch put the bag in his pocket without responding and, with unfocused eyes, said he was going to the bathroom and went.

After snorting cocaine in Paul’s room Daniel and Mitch moved into the kitchen, then into Caroline’s room. Caroline’s door, except when she was sleeping, was always partly open. Paul, whose door was almost always closed, listened from his mattress and when he heard someone say “chicken rings” stood without thinking and went to Caroline’s room. Daniel and Mitch were aggressively looking at Caroline’s shelves and walls, bending at their waists and craning their necks.

“Hi, Paul,” said Caroline.

“Hi. I heard someone say ‘chicken rings.’ ”

“Chicken rings?” said Caroline.

“I think I misheard,” said Paul. “Never mind.”

“Caroline was telling us she went to a Fuck Buttons concert tonight,” said Mitch.

“Someone was talking about them before,” said Paul vaguely. “I feel like. . Daniel. . you were telling me about them. Fuck Buttons.”

“I don’t think so,” said Daniel.

“Last night, maybe,” said Paul.

“Where were we last night?”

“Um,” said Paul looking down with unfocused eyes, aware he looked like he was thinking but wasn’t, an increasingly common deception for him. “I don’t know,” he said after a few seconds, then said “Shawn Olive” as a non sequitur and grinned and said “Daniel knows Shawn Olive” to Caroline, who had gone to school with Shawn Olive.

“Who’s Shawn Olive?” said Mitch.

“I don’t know,” said Paul immediately while laughing a little. “I mean. . seems hard to just answer that.”

“We’re good friends,” said Caroline. “He’s great.”

“We saw Robin Hood last night,” said Daniel.

Paul was alone, a few hours later, stomach-down on his bed, working on things on his MacBook — on 20mg Adderall — after eating most of his organic beef patty with an arugula salad containing flax seeds, alfalfa sprouts, cucumber, tamari, lemon juice, flax oil. He and Daniel, who’d left around 3:30 a.m. with Mitch, had been emailing steadily and were committed to meet at 9:30 a.m. to go to the Museum of Modern Art, where Marina Abramović was performing The Artist Is Present, for which she would be sitting in a chair for 736 hours over 77 days, staring at whoever was next in line to sit and stare back at her from an opposite chair. When Paul emailed Daniel at 9:22 a.m. that he was naked and hadn’t showered Daniel responded that he was also naked and also hadn’t showered. At 9:54 a.m. Paul texted “where the fuck are you.” Daniel responded immediately that he was still naked and hadn’t moved from his bed.

They met, an hour later, at an intersection near the Graham L train stop. One of them said the museum would be crowded on a Sunday and, within seconds, both had strongly committed to not going. They went to the bookstore adjacent Verb. “Shawn Olive,” said Daniel holding the book with a black dot on its cover toward Paul and grinning. “Shawn Olive’s book has the same cover. Almost the same cover.”

“We already showed each other that,” said Paul.

“What do you mean?”

“We showed each other this book. Are you joking?”

“No,” said Daniel. “We talked about this book?”

“We talked about it where we’re standing right now.”

“Damn,” said Daniel looking away. “I don’t remember.”

At Verb they each ingested 10mg Adderall. Daniel removed from his tote bag a glass jar with a peanut butter label and, with a neutral expression, not looking at Paul, poured around 4oz of whiskey into his iced coffee. Paul asked what Daniel was going to do about his financial situation. Daniel said Mitch, a week ago, had mentioned hiring him to write promotional copy for his band but hadn’t mentioned it again. Paul suggested they shoplift things from Best Buy, or some other store, to sell on eBay.

Outside, walking steadily but aimlessly, they entered East River State Park and sat on grass, facing the river and Manhattan, which seemed to Paul like an enormous, unfinished cruise ship that had been disassembled and rearranged by thousands of disconnected organizations. They decided to sell books on the sidewalk, on Bedford Avenue, but continued sitting. Daniel began talking, a few minutes later, in a quiet, earnest voice about his lack of accomplishments in life, staring into the distance with a haunted, slightly puzzled expression, seeming at times like he might begin crying. Paul, grinning anxiously at Daniel’s right profile, unsure what to say, or do, shrugged more than once, thinking that tears would have a restorative effect on the seared dryness of Daniel’s eyes, which looked like they’d been baked at a low heat.

“What were we doing now?” said Paul leaving the park, around twenty minutes later.

Daniel looked distractedly in both directions after walking a few steps onto a street, then turned right on the sidewalk, staring ahead with a worried expression.

“We had a specific goal, I remember,” said Paul. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” said Daniel after a few seconds.

“We were just talking about it.”

“I remember something,” said Daniel absently.

“Oh yeah, selling books,” said Paul.

“Let’s do that,” said Daniel.

“We just actually forgot our purpose, then regained it,” said Paul grinning. “We still kept moving at the same speed, when we had no goal.”

“Jesus,” said Daniel quietly.

On the way to Paul’s room, to get books to sell, they went in a pizza restaurant, because Daniel was hungry. Paul, rereading old texts, saw one he didn’t recognize—“sorry, how was the party”—from Laura, more than a month ago, the morning after the Cinco de Mayo party. Between then and now, maybe two weeks ago, Paul had asked her in an email if she remembered referring to him as “my boyfriend,” the night they attended two parties on Ambien. She’d said no, but was sorry if she did, but was sure she didn’t, then later emailed to say her friends who’d been there confirmed she didn’t. Paul was staring through glass at a pigeon eating specks off the sidewalk when he noticed the approach of what he briefly, with some sarcasm, began to perceive as another pigeon, inside the restaurant, but was Daniel. “Um, so, my debit card, either from cutting so much blow or being maxed out, isn’t working,” he said in a quiet, controlled voice with an earnest expression. “Could I borrow $2.75 for a slice of pizza?”

“Yeah,” said Paul thinking he wasn’t going to mention the pigeon illusion. “I’ll add it to your tab.”

Daniel stood near the center of Paul’s room quietly saying that he felt “fucked” about his financial situation and generally, in terms of his life, then kneeled to a low table to organize two lines of cocaine with the last of what he had from Mitch’s bag. Paul, stomach-down on his mattress, asked what music he should play and clicked “Heartbeats” by the Knife. They both laughed a little and Paul clicked “Last Nite” by the Strokes and said it sounded too depressing. He clicked “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service and said “just kidding.” He clicked “The Peter Criss Jazz” by Don Caballero. He clicked “pause.”

Daniel said to put The Postal Service back on and snorted half his line. Paul moved a rolled-up page of Shawn Olive’s poetry book in his right nostril toward the cocaine and exhaled a little after snorting half his line, causing the rest and some of Daniel’s to spread in a poof on the table. Daniel lightly berated Paul, who sort of rolled toward his mattress’s center, then — liking the feeling of unimpeded motion on a padded surface — moved his MacBook to the floor and lay in a diagonal on his back with his limbs spread out a little, which felt interesting because, he knew, it was probably the second or third time he’d lain on this mattress, while awake and alert and not impatient toward himself, without reading a book, looking at his MacBook, or aware of his MacBook’s screen.

At a certain age, he remembered, he had often lain motionless on carpet, or a sofa, feeling what he probably viewed, at the time, as boredom and what now seemed like ignorance of — or passive disbelief in — his forthcoming death, which would occur regardless of his thoughts, feelings, or actions in the unknown amount of remaining interim, upon a binary absorption from some incomprehensible direction, taking him elsewhere. Briefly, without much interest, Paul intuited that if he were immortal, or believed he was, he might feel what he’d felt as a child, which seemed less enjoyable than obscurely unsatisfying, something he’d want to be distracted from feeling. After a few minutes an out-of-view Daniel continued to say he felt depressed, but in a calmer voice that Paul felt was “soothing,” for him, to hear, from his bed.

They sat facing south at Bedford and North 1st with thirty to forty books on a rollout carpet and, in a few hours, sold around $25 of books and $60 of Paul’s Adderall, which he received monthly by mail at slightly-better-than-drug-dealer price from a graduate student at Boston College. Four fashionable black teenagers appeared and, Paul thought, “the leader,” who was much more interested than the others, asked if he could “sample” Charles’ book.

“I’ll take it,” he said after laughing loudly at something in the book, which included poetry and prose about alienation, boredom, science fiction, depression, confusion.

Daniel asked if the teenager liked Adderall.

“What is it?”

Daniel described it in a few sentences.

“So, it’s like ecstasy?”

“Sort of,” said Daniel. “But without the euphoria. It’s good for doing work. It helps you focus.”

The teenager asked if his friend was “in.”

“No,” said his friend. “But I’ll watch you do it.”

“Do you want your book signed? The author is here,” said Paul pointing at Daniel, who had been pretending he was Charles, with Charles’ approval gained by text.

Daniel wrote “best wishes, from Charles” in the book.

Charles’ six weeks in Mexico and Guatemala, related in emails and Gmail chats, traveling hostel to hostel, spending much of his time in internet cafés feeling alienated from Americans doing what he was doing, but in groups, had taken on the tone and focus, after two weeks, of a comedic sitcom, which he’d named Avoiding Jehan, because his primary concern, most days, was to avoid or endure or try to permanently escape a person named Jehan, who had repeatedly — almost always inadvertently, obliviously — thwarted Charles’ few romantic prospects and, in social situations, caused Charles to become “the third wheel” or “the fifth wheel.” In one email Charles had wished Jehan would “become invisible.” After getting stalled in Guatemala, on the way to South America, two weeks ago, Charles had returned cashless to his girlfriend and Seattle, where they now shared “a smaller, shittier apartment,” he said, than when he left America, around two months ago.

The sky had begun to colorfully darken, a few hours later, with reds and purples and pinks that drifted away, like cotton candy, from an unseen horizon, as if something there was changing and releasing energy, when an Asian girl, who had slowed and passed a minute ago while talking into an iPhone, returned and said she recognized Paul from the internet and distractedly asked if Daniel was a cop.

“No,” said Daniel, and the Asian girl said she was buying marijuana from someone with a business card, which she showed Daniel, at his request. She bought two books and three Adderall and kneeled and asked if Daniel or Paul had a driver’s license, to move her friend’s car from Crown Heights to the Graham L train station for money. They discussed the car for what seemed like fifteen minutes, without resolution, then the girl, whose name was Annie, which Paul heard initially as Addy, removed a Chinese magazine from her bag and asked if Paul was good at translating. Paul said he couldn’t read Chinese or speak Mandarin fluently, and had an American accent sometimes, he’d been told. “I’m going to pee,” he said, and went to Verb, two blocks away. In line, behind two people, he thought that, from a certain point onward — beginning with his book tour, maybe — he would only appear in public if he’d ingested sufficient drugs to not primarily be a source of anxiety, bleakness, awkwardness, etc. for himself and/or others.

When Paul returned to Daniel and Annie they were talking about Annie’s boyfriend, who had attended the same college as Daniel, in Colorado. Annie’s boyfriend had gone to India after college. When he returned to America, three years ago, he died for a reason that Paul, who was thinking of how spring was to summer like a morning was to an entire day, brief and lucid and transitional, didn’t hear. Annie said her boyfriend’s funeral, due to a request he’d made in India, had been organized and promoted like a party and was “weird,” because it had been exactly like a party except everyone was wearing black.

• • •

In mid-July, a few weeks later, at a party that, instead of ending, had moved outside, through a window at the back of someone’s bedroom, onto an eighth-floor roof, Paul and Daniel were on an additionally elevated platform — corner-set, wall-less, square, smooth — like a landing pad for tiny helicopters.

Daniel was standing with limbs and neck uncoordinatedly extended, slightly striding in place — the pre-predatory stance of a chained thing that had broken free and didn’t yet know where to direct its vengeance, or what to do generally. His vision was focused horizontally, as if across a flat expanse. Then, with his back to one of the two edges dropping to the street, he approached an already fearful Paul — sitting cross-legged at the platform’s center, aware Daniel had been drinking steadily for hours and was probably on two or more drugs — who reacted preemptively, against what seemed like a purposeless entity unreasonably desiring his involvement, with defensive movements of his arms and hands, causing the situation, in Paul’s panicked state, to immediately seem like an unrestrained wrestling, though it probably looked more like an exaggeratedly confused handshaking. Paul tried to concentrate on flattening himself — on retaining a low, stable center — while repeatedly telling Daniel to “stop,” because it was “dangerous,” he heard himself say in a gravely serious, faintly humorous voice of uncertainly suppressed fear, but was distracted by how most of his thoughts were based on a reality in which he had fallen off the building. Should he close his eyes? What should he try to see? What would his mother do/feel? Could he grab things to disrupt his fall like in movies? Could one of these be his final thought? What would that mean? Why couldn’t he comprehend this? Should he think other things?