Taipei

3

Eight people were in Erin’s five-seat car, which had gotten lost on its way from Paul’s book-release reading in Brooklyn to DuMont Burger, also in Brooklyn, when it was stopped by a police car, in Manhattan, around two hundred feet from the Williamsburg Bridge. The officer shined a flashlight through the driver’s window at the backseat without bending to see what was there, then asked Erin, 24, who had driven four hours that day from Baltimore to attend Paul’s reading and visit friends, to step outside the car. Paul, in the front passenger seat, hadn’t seen Fran, who was sitting partly on him, or Daniel, in the backseat, in five or six weeks, except once, briefly and separately, at a Bret Easton Ellis reading three weeks ago, when they’d avoided each other, and Fran, without context, had shown Paul a text from Daniel insulting her in a strangely formal, almost aristocratic tone. Paul had communicated regularly, the past month, only with Charles, by email or Gmail chat, mostly about what food they had eaten, or were thinking about eating, to “console” themselves. After being more social, April to July, than any other period of his life, Paul had returned to his default lifestyle, which varied, to some degree, but generally entailed (1) avoiding most social situations (2) not wanting to sleep most nights and not knowing why — he’d wanted since 2006 to title one of his books I Don’t Want to Sleep but I Don’t Know What I’m Waiting For—resulting usually in four to ten hours of looking at the internet, reading, masturbating, etc. until morning, when he would eat something and sleep until night.

Erin, back in her car, said the officer had looked at her two-months-expired, out-of-state driver’s license an abnormally long time, like he’d forgotten what he was doing, before quietly saying “be careful” and allowing her to continue driving, in what seemed to be an egregious oversight, without a ticket or decreasing passengers.

Paul first learned of Erin twenty months ago, in January 2009, when she commented on his blog and he clicked her profile and read her pensive, melancholy, amusing accounts, on her blog, of her vague relationships and part-time bookstore job and nights drinking beer while looking at the internet and classes at the University of Baltimore, where she’d reenrolled after a two-year break. Paul found and read — and reread, with high levels of interest — three long stories, each focused on an unrequited or failed relationship, that she had published in online magazines. Erin, being an attractive and adventurous-seeming person, was probably almost always, Paul imagined, entering or leaving — or, in some way, maneuvering — one or more relationships, but probably, between relationships, as a person who seemed to enjoy being alone sometimes, would become more active on the internet, for weeks or months, which over months and years would overlap with Paul’s nearly continuously high levels of internet activity. They would gradually communicate more and maybe begin emailing and — if neither died, entered long relationships, or left the internet — eventually meet in person. Paul viewed this process as self-fulfilling, not something he wanted to track or manipulate, so after one or two weeks had mostly internalized Erin’s existence — as a busy person with a separate life, in a different city — and had stopped thinking about her by mid-February, when he met Michelle, with whom he was in a relationship both times, before tonight, that he met Erin in person.

The first time was in July, when Erin visited New York City for the release of Charles’ poetry book. The day after the release Paul was amused and excited for them, at a BBQ, when Charles said he had kissed Erin.

The second time was in September, one year ago, when Erin attended Paul’s reading in Baltimore. At a restaurant, with a large group of people, but talking only to each other, Paul asked about Charles, whom Erin had visited in August. Erin said she had changed her plane ticket and left earlier than planned because Charles had become gradually less affectionate, culminating with a night when, after sex, he said he didn’t feel anything for her, then consoled her, as she cried, in his kitchen. Paul liked Erin’s forthright, unhesitant, nonjudgmental answers and that she was able — already, despite what seemed like strong disappointment — to view and describe what had happened as at least partly amusing. When Erin asked about Michelle, as they walked to her car, Paul automatically said Michelle was “good” while distinctly recalling a recent night when he complained he always offered her food or drink before himself, then after Michelle said she’d be happy to do that, now that she knew it mattered to him, said it didn’t matter to him and she shouldn’t change. Exiting Erin’s car, at the hotel he was staying in for one night, because a mysterious Johns Hopkins professor, whose Face-book name was “Cloud Bat,” had bought him a room, Paul thought that if he weren’t in a relationship with Michelle he would ask Erin upstairs, where they would, he vaguely imagined, continue talking.

As Erin’s car slowly accelerated away from the police car, onto the Williamsburg Bridge, one person, then another, said they were illegally carrying drugs. After a peculiarly awkward, car-wide silence that became comical when someone asked if every person in the car was illegally carrying drugs, eliciting three affirmations and a sort of confirmatory announcement that every person — Erin, Paul, Daniel, Fran, Mitch, Juan, Jeannie, Jeremy — was illegally carrying drugs, there was the immediately space-filling noise of a small crowd laughing, which continued for around five seconds, during which Paul (who, in sharing his seat with Fran, was partly turned toward the driver’s window) watched the police car, or a police car, zoom past in the left lane, with emergency lights on and sirens off, quick and soundless as an apparition or the hologram of itself.

In DuMont Burger’s bathroom Paul swallowed half of half a 30mg Oxycodone and.5mg Xanax, feebly amused to be already deviating, in moderate excess, from his plans to ingest specific amounts of drugs at certain times during his book tour, September 7 to November 4. To determine what amount of what drugs — MDMA, LSD, any benzodiazepine, amphetamine, opiate — he should ingest, on what days, to minimize anxiety and boredom for himself and others, he’d edited the seven-page itinerary from his publisher to fit on one page and, in an idle process he’d enjoyed, the past few weeks, studied each event in context, writing notes on the paper. He’d printed a final draft, currently in his pocket, that said he should ingest something — specified, in most instances, by type and amount — before twenty-two of his twenty-five events and some miscellaneous things such as the day a writer from BlackBook was writing an article about “hanging out” with him while doing that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?” said Erin. “I feel. .”

“I don’t know,” said Paul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” said Paul after a few seconds.

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

“Let’s just go,” said Paul.

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

“I want to be here now.”

“If you. . are you sure?”

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

“Are you sure?”

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

“Jesus,” said Paul. “Why?”

“Percocet. And a little Codeine.”

“I didn’t know you’ve been on those.”

“I told you. . at the house.”

“Jesus,” said Paul. “I remember now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We would talk about food,” said Maggie.

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

“Me too, a little,” said Erin.

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

“Me too,” said Erin.

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

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

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

“Later,” said Paul, confused. “When?”

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

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

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

Erin pointed and asked if one was moving.

“In place, maybe,” said Paul uncertainly.

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

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

“That’s okay. UFOs are interesting.”

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

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

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

“Where did you think they would take you?”

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

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

“I’ve never told anyone.”

“Really? But. . it’s been so long.”

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

“You haven’t told anyone except me?”

“No. Let me think. No, I haven’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you forget? Yesterday?”

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

“But I was asking you about it.”

“I thought I was boring you.”

“You weren’t,” said Paul. “At all.”

“I just wanted to, like, ‘move on.’ ”

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

“I know. I don’t want to do that.”

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

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

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

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

“You can tell—”

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

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

Sprinklers could be heard in the distance.

“I believe you,” said Paul.

“Really?”

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

“I don’t think I did,” said Erin.

“I feel like I do that a lot.”

“Maybe,” said Erin quietly.

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

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

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

He was never in time

for his classes. .

He wasn’t in time

for his dinner. .

Then one day. .

he wasn’t in his

time at all.

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

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

Around two weeks later, in early October, he stayed for eight days in San Francisco in his own room, on the second floor of a house, which Daniel’s ex-girlfriend and exgirlfriend’s sister shared. An employee at Twitter invited him to its headquarters, where he ate from two different buffets. Daniel’s ex-girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend sold him MDMA and mushrooms, which he ate a medium-large dose of before his reading at the Booksmith, which was livestreamed on the internet. His publisher left him a voice mail the next afternoon, asking him to call them to discuss “some problems.” He emailed them late that night apologizing for missing their call and said he was available by email. He met someone from Facebook and ingested LSD, which she declined, before watching Dave Eggers interview Judd Apatow for almost two hours in an auditorium. On her full-size mattress, three hours after the interview, they watched a forty-minute DVD of a Rube Goldberg machine and kissed a few minutes, then Paul “fingered” her and, after seeming to orgasm, she rolled over and slept.

In Los Angeles, the night before a panel discussion at UCLA on the topic of hipsters, after privately ingesting a little LSD, half a capsule of MDMA, a Ritalin — the combination of which, at Paul’s tolerance levels, had the effect of slightly distorting and energizing his base feeling of depression, so that he also felt many of its related emotions, such as despair and aggravation — he was designated, for some reason, to drive an NPR contributor’s car to a house party on the steepest street he had ever seen in person. After the house party, in a bar staffed by Asians, with Chinese and Vietnamese food, Paul saw and approached Taryn, who seemed happy to see him, to his mild surprise (they’d only met once and vaguely, at the party where Paul put on “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins). Taryn and a younger, sibling-like man, who at times seemed to be her boyfriend, but remained at a distance most of the night, went with Paul and the moderator of the next day’s panel discussion and other people to an apartment whose only purpose, someone kept saying, was for partying in when bars had closed. Paul felt the same mysterious, vague attraction to Taryn he felt in Brooklyn but unlike then, when they’d spoken probably three sentences to each other, they talked continuously, energetically. Taryn said she moved here a month ago after securing a full-time job as a copywriter for a fashion website, where her coworkers did, or did not — Paul became confused which, at some point, after realizing he’d laughed at both — know she had an MFA in poetry. Paul gradually remembered Taryn was friends with Caroline, that she and Caroline — and many of Paul’s acquaintances, including Shawn Olive, in Brooklyn — had been in the same one to three graduating classes for their MFAs in poetry at the New School and that most, or all, of them, as part of their curriculum, had read Paul’s first poetry book that he wrote the summer after graduating, in 2005, with a BA in journalism. The moderator of the next day’s panel discussion approached Paul and Taryn and said he had bought cocaine for them from a former Olympic soccer player whose father, before recently dying, had operated a major drug cartel. Paul and Taryn were led to a dresser, scattered on which were playing cards. The former Olympic soccer player indicated a six of spades, beneath which was twenty dollars’ worth of cocaine.

On UCLA’s campus the next night Paul photographed a piece of computer paper, taped crudely to a column, that said HIPSTER PANEL with an arrow pointing literally at the sky. In emails with the moderator of the panel discussion the past few weeks Paul had repeatedly half joked that he was going to “dominate the panel” and now, backstage peaking on one and a half capsules of MDMA and two Ritalin and an energy drink, he began openly conveying the same message to the other seven panelists, including a cofounder of Vice, the only person getting paid, everyone seemed to know, who was shirtless with 20oz beer and reacted to Paul’s robot-like extroversion with what seemed like barely suppressed confusion, which Paul tried to resolve by overpowering any possible awkwardness with his temporary charisma, which resulted in what seemed to be intimidation but was maybe an intimidation-based attempt at a non-antagonistic guardianship, which caused Paul, who felt he solely wanted to interact with mutual sincerity, to hesitate a little, which maybe the cofounder of Vice sensed as anxiety because he slapped Paul’s shoulder three times painfully. In his state of medium euphoria, with intensely dull eyes and an overall cyborg-like demeanor, Paul stared briefly at the cofounder of Vice before turning around and moving away with an earnest, uncertain feeling of disappointment. Paul arguably dominated the panel in a private way by multitasking (1) earnestly speaking on the topic of hipsters with uncharacteristic willingness to engage a matter of semantics (2) photographing other panelists and the audience and recording two videos with his iPhone (3) tweeting three times (4) interrupting people two or three times to defend audience members from the cofounder of Vice’s fashion criticisms (5) sustaining text conversations with Mia, who around a year ago had messaged Paul on Facebook, and Taryn, both of whom were alone in the audience of three to four hundred students and twenty to forty journalists (6) being asked the most questions during the Q&A, though almost all were negative and partially rhetorical, including why he kept writing after the “excrement” that was his previous book.

After the Q&A, during which Taryn had left due to a prior obligation, Paul talked a few minutes to Mia, vaguely remembering that she had lived, or something, in Crispin Glover’s “castle,” and wanted to spend more time with her, or Taryn, or the moderator, or the other panelists, at whatever post-panel party was probably beginning, but was driven in a sort of rush to the airport by two UCLA students, who in the front seats, talking to each other in voices Paul couldn’t hear, for some reason, maybe because a window was open, seemed far away and illusory. At the airport Paul saw he had another voice mail from his publisher and felt dread, then realized he was accidentally listening to it and that it was over — a six-second message asking Paul to “please” call them. Paul rested his head on his dining tray, mostly facedown and awake, during the flight to Minnesota, where after six hours of a seven-hour layover, a few minutes after putting his things in his backpack and standing to wait to get on a plane, he got a long email from his mother, saying she knew she had promised she wouldn’t anymore, but felt that she must, as a parent, continue telling Paul that she disapproved of his drug use. Paul could feel his intensely aggravated expression as he typed around three thousand words of stream-of-consciousness information about drugs and why the only way his mother could influence him to use less would be if she didn’t view them as good or bad, but learned about them, as a friend instead of a parent, because he was 27, all of which he’d stated, he knew, clearer and more convincingly, in dozens of emails the past four months to seemingly no lasting effect. His mother replied in a manner like his email — the longest he’d sent from an iPhone — had no effect on her and he replied again, expressing futility, then flew to Philadelphia, where after a bleakly sober reading in a tiny bookstore, which sold only used and rare books, he slept on a mostly empty bus, dropping him off in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, a place he’d forgotten existed.

In his room, around 2:30 a.m., he read a 2:12 a.m. email from Erin that said she’d “been using a lot of mental space to think about definitely ending a yearlong, ‘on-and-off,’ semi-vague relationship and actually did tonight”—in reference to someone named Beau — and that she was aware of the insufficiency of her email, half the length of Paul’s email, from nine days ago, but wanted to say before sleeping that she was still coming, if it was “still okay,” she said, to Paul’s reading tomorrow and would bring the psilocybin chocolates Paul left with her one month ago as previously discussed.

Increasingly, as his memory occupied less of his consciousness, the past four to six months, whenever Paul sensed familiarity in the beginnings of a thought or feeling he would passively focus on intuiting it in entirety, predicting its elaboration and rhetoric in the presence of logic and world-view like a ball’s trajectory and destination in the presence of gravity and weather. If he recognized the thought or feeling, and didn’t want it repeated, he’d end its formation by focusing elsewhere, like how someone searching for a lost dog on a field at night wouldn’t approach the silhouette of a tree. Paul, reading Erin’s email, was vaguely aware of himself considering that, to some degree, Erin was “using him” to make Beau jealous, or to stay busy while Beau was doing other things maybe — that if things had worked with Beau she might not be coming tomorrow.

Without full awareness of what he’d begun to think Paul deliberately stopped thinking and texted: “Yes. Would like if you come, see you tomorrow hopefully.” He called his publisher at 3:04 a.m., leaving a voice mail saying he understood what they probably wanted to say, that he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again — vaguely he remembered that they had, at some point, told him they disapproved of him using mushrooms at a reading — and was available by email, then slept.

Paul was in Bobst Library around 3:30 p.m. and had just ingested a capsule of MDMA when Erin texted that she was around fifty minutes away. Paul walked ten blocks to the bookstore and sat on a tiny bench in the fiction section and tweeted and looked at his Gmail account. Erin texted she was in the store and had eaten a chocolate. Paul was surprised she was with a male friend, whom she introduced as a former coworker named Gary, who lived in Brooklyn.

“He’s gay,” said Erin, and gave Paul a chocolate, which he chewed into a gluey paste and swallowed with lemon water from the bookstore’s café. After the reading Paul, Erin, and Gary walked to a bar for someone’s 33rd birthday. Gary left after around ten minutes and Erin said he had whispered in her ear that he felt sad and wanted to talk. “I told him I couldn’t now, I’m on mushrooms,” said Erin. “Then he asked me for mushrooms. I said I didn’t have any and he probably shouldn’t have them now anyway and I’d call him tomorrow.”

Around three hours later Paul and Erin were stomach-down on Paul’s mattress watching YouTube videos of people answering the same questions sober and on hallucinogens. Paul, who kept clicking new videos, was amused by how he seemed to be comfortably and energetically, with only a little self-consciousness, “having fun,” he kept thinking, in contrast to Erin, who seemed shy in a tired, depressed, distracted manner indicating to Paul that she was maybe thinking about someone else, probably Beau, whom she would probably rather be with, at the moment, instead of Paul, who felt intrigued — and further amused — why he was not affected by this information, which normally would make it impossible for him to enjoy anything. They slept without touching, woke in the afternoon, drove to Manhattan, where they separately “worked on things” (Paul in the library, Erin in a Starbucks) until 9:30 p.m., when they ate chocolates and watched a Woody Allen movie, which ended after midnight, on October 15, Erin’s 25th birthday. Paul said he wanted to buy her an expensive dinner and they went in an Italian restaurant that seemed moderately expensive, sat in a corner booth, ordered medium-rare steaks and a shrimp appetizer. Erin asked if she should answer a call from Beau, who’d been calling and texting all night, she said.

“If you want, yeah,” said Paul looking down a little.

Erin spoke to Beau in a jarringly, briefly absurdly different voice — one of impatient, dominating aggression — than Paul (who recognized the voice as similar to how he spoke, as a child, to his mother) had ever heard her use and which increased his interest in her, knowing she was capable of what to Paul was her opposite. After around fifty seconds, at a moment when she had the opportunity, Paul felt, based on hearing her side of what sounded like a mutual voicing of vague aggravation, to tactfully end the call and unambiguously convey she viewed their relationship as finished, Erin instead prolonged the call by speaking angrily, with sudden emotion indicating she wasn’t indifferent. Paul felt dizzy with the realization, as Erin continued talking in a manner like she’d forgotten his presence, that his view of her was uncontrollably changing, that parts of him were earnestly, if dramatically, no longer viewing her as a romantic possibility. He intuited a hidden intimacy in Erin and Beau’s hostility, a psychic collaboration — unconscious, or maybe conscious for one of them — assembling the structures, located days or weeks from now, where they would meet again to apologize and forgive and, while rescinding their insults, encouraged by the grammar and syntax and psychology of contrasts, near-automatically convey adoration, gratitude, compliments. Was this how people sustained relationships and sanity? By uninhibitedly expressing resentment to unconsciously contrast an amount of future indifference into affection? With quickly metabolized disappointment and a brief, vague, almost feigned restructuring of the mirage-like pile of miscellaneous items of his life Paul acclimated himself to this new reality, in which he would talk to Erin less and never with full attention, always distracted by, if not someone else, the ever-present silhouette of a possible someone else. Erin somewhat abruptly ended the call and asked if it had been entertaining, or interesting, or at least not too boring.

“I was really interested.”

“It was okay? Not boring?”

“No. I felt high levels of interest.”

“Oh,” said Erin. “Good.”

“I was surprised. You sounded angry.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “I was angry.”

“There was one part. . when you started fighting more, instead of stopping, I felt, like, afraid,” said Paul, and Erin said she knew what part he was referencing and that she had specifically considered if he would be entertained, or not, and had felt uncertain. As a waiter served their medium-rare steaks and, on multicolored rice, cooked into fetal positions, eight medium-large shrimp, Paul realized with some confusion that he might have overreacted. Staring at the herbed butter, flecked and large as a soap sample, on his steak, he was unsure what, if he had overreacted, had been the cause. It occurred to him that, in the past, in college, he would have later analyzed this, in bed, with eyes closed, studying the chronology of images — memories, he’d realized at some point, were images, which one could crudely arrange into slideshows or, with effort, sort of GIFs, maybe — but now, unless he wrote about it, storing the information where his brain couldn’t erase it, place it behind a toll, or inadvertently scramble its organization, or change it gradually, by increments smaller than he could discern, without his knowledge, so it became both lost and unrecognizable, he probably wouldn’t remember most of this in a few days and, after weeks or months, he wouldn’t know it had been forgotten, like a barn seen from inside a moving train that is later torn down, its wood carried elsewhere on trucks.

Erin was flying to the College of Coastal Georgia in the morning to read to writing students and stay five to ten days as a kind of vacation. They confirmed to meet in Baltimore in three weeks, at the last reading of Paul’s book tour, to film themselves answering questions, on MDMA and while sober, to edit into videos like they’d seen on YouTube.

In Montreal, three days later, beneath a uniformly cloudy expanse, which glowed with the same intensity and asbestos-y texture everywhere, seeming less like a sky than the cloud-colored surface of a cold, hollowed-out sun, close enough to obstruct its own curvature, Paul walked slowly and aimlessly, sometimes standing in place, like an arctic explorer, noticing almost no other people and that something, on a general level, seemed familiar. He drank coffee and looked at the internet in a café, feeling gloomy and vertiginous when, after three hours, he went outside, where it had gotten significantly colder, to walk to a juice bar, twelve blocks away, near the café where the world’s largest French-language radio station was interviewing him in an hour.

The sky darkened and was now almost cloudless, like it had been gently suctioned from an interplanetary pressure system. As a red truck, clean and bright as a toy, passed on the street, Paul realized Montreal, with its narrower streets and cute beverage sizes and smaller vehicles, reminded him of Berlin. He’d gone alone to Berlin early in his relationship with Michelle for the German edition of his first novel — a year and a half ago, in March 2009, he calculated after two to three minutes of focused effort containing two long pauses without thoughts, but it felt more than five years away, like part of himself, while in Berlin, had gotten lost on its way here, taking more than five years instead of one and a half, a feeling that confused Paul, who stopped thinking, then realized he hadn’t thought about Erin, or maybe any person, today and that he had no romantic prospects. He visualized the black dot of the top of his head — from an aerial view of two blocks — slowing to a standstill and remaining motionless on the sidewalk as other dots passed in either direction and the darkening city gradually brightened with artificial lights, the movie of his life finally ending, the credits scrolling down the screen.

Shivering, he walked with increasing speed toward the juice bar, wanting to stop moving in a way that he’d disappear, which didn’t seem possible. He ingested two capsules of MDMA with a green smoothie, then walked four blocks to a café where he was interviewed by a small, balding, frequently laughing man of indiscernible age for around forty-five minutes, during which Paul smiled uncontrollably, with almost continuously unfocused eyes, unable to discern stillness in the single image of everything, containing him in a sphere of blurrily passing scenery. He felt low in his seat, warming his hands on a cup of tea, and was sometimes aware that his face was arbitrarily pointing in strange directions, as if to consider his thoughts, or the interviewer’s questions, from various perspectives, probably seeming genuinely eccentric or weirdly, insanely pretentious. His teeth chattered and his upper body sometimes “convulsed,” he thought with brief interest, on the walk to the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore, where he sat absently in the audience in the back row with a slouched posture and, with a sensation of entering his body in medias res, at a moment when a decision, approved without his input, was about to actualize, said “is David Foster Wallace really big in America?” at a speaking volume to no one, it seemed.

Five or six people, ahead of him, facing the stage, which he also faced, shifted a little in their seats but didn’t turn around. Paul realized he’d said “America” not “Canada” and, in his state of near immunity from shame and/or anxiety, acknowledged a theoretical embarrassment, which someone not on MDMA, in his situation, might experience. For one or two seconds, with tepid disappointment toward himself, before moving nearer to the stage, Paul dimly believed people had ignored him because they knew he was on drugs and were afraid he might say more things that would humiliate and further expose himself, in a completely non-funny way, as pathetic and troubling and drug-addled and sad. After the reading, then a Q&A — during which someone asked if Paul felt like his life had changed the past few years and he said no, which he qualified by saying it had, then after a pause said he honestly felt unable to answer accurately — the owner of Drawn & Quarterly approached and thanked Paul for coming to Montreal. Paul pitched a children’s book, to be illustrated by a known graphic novelist who’d confirmed interest, based on one of his poems—

when i was five i went

fishing with my family

when i was five

i went fishing with my family

my dad caught a turtle

my mom caught a snapper

my brother caught a crab

i caught a whale

that night we ate crab

the next night we ate turtle

the next night we ate snapper

the next night we ate whale

the next night we ate whale

the next night we ate whale

the next night we ate whale

the next night we ate whale

the next night we ate whale

— with each line on its own page and the last line repeated as many times as needed. Maybe a different artist could illustrate each page to create a sort of anthology. As a children’s book, due to the content, it would appeal to college students and teenagers and be a popular gift choice. It could become “one of those things,” said Paul, who considered, at one point, while talking, if his behavior might be a little tactless and easily concluded it might be to “normal people” but not the owner of Drawn & Quarterly, which had published many books, among Paul’s favorites, sympathetic to socially dysfunctional characters.

When Paul finished talking, the owner, who’d sustained a polite, slightly tense smile and a tired and unblinking gaze, said “thank you” and walked away.

Paul’s main feeling, an hour and a half later, in a café with six to eight strangers, staring at his hands wrapped tightly around his teacup, was an excruciating combination of social anxiety and, as the MDMA stopped working, disintegrating functioning, including tremulous fingers and what felt like an inability to control or predict the volume and pitch of his voice and a helpless sensation that his face — especially if he tried to mollify its severe appearance, which he would need to do if anyone asked him a question — might begin quivering or flinching uncontrollably. His memory of what he now viewed as a “major, egregious faux pas,” his interaction with Drawn & Quarterly’s owner, was vague and nonlinear and dominated by a troubling suspicion that, with his pitch of a book in a genre Drawn & Quarterly didn’t publish, he’d interrupted the owner’s initial greeting.

Hiding in the bathroom, Paul remembered that, when he processed the identity of the owner, approaching from maybe six feet away, he’d felt a sensation not unlike clicking “send” for a finished draft of a long email, setting off his children’s book pitch. He probably had referenced his poem as if it were common knowledge because he didn’t know how he could have conveyed its effect without reciting it in full. He remembered, or thought he remembered, seeing disappointment inside the owner’s eyes — a faint off-coloring, like a woundless scar, a millimeter behind the cornea — which had seemed sad in a manner like his life (operating his publishing company, living in the same apartment for twenty years, accumulating obligations in the bleak world of graphic novels) was a pure, omnipresent, concrete reminder, Paul vaguely imagined while standing in a stall staring at his iPhone, that he was the only entity building and embellishing and imperialistically expanding his own unhappiness.

Around midnight, after everyone in the café had gone to a concert, Paul was alone in the Drawn & Quarterly book-store’s manager’s apartment. He looked at Twitter for what felt like twenty minutes, alternating hands to hold his iPhone ten to fifteen inches above his face. He emailed Charles—

I’m lying in bed on a sofa

Feel strongly like I simply want to relate my feelings of bleakness in this email

My legs feel cold

— with “Feeling bleak” as the subject. He was looking at Twitter again, a few minutes later, when for the fifth or sixth time since getting it in August he dropped his iPhone on his face, which did not register in its expression that anything had happened until after impact. He considered emailing Charles that his iPhone fell on his face. Then he tried to do what he couldn’t specifically remember having done since college — he chose one of his favorite songs and, with a meekly earnest sympathy toward himself, listened to it on repeat at a high volume and tried to focus only on the drums, or bass guitar, until he was drowsy and decontextualized and memoryless, when he would half-unconsciously remove his earphones and turn off the music, careful not to be noticed and assimilated by the world, and disappear into the reachable mirage of sleep.

But he couldn’t focus on the music. He couldn’t ignore a feeling that he wasn’t alone — that, in the brain of the universe, where everything that happened was concurrently recorded as public and indestructible data, he was already partially with everyone else that had died. The information of his existence, the etching of which into space-time was his experience of life, was being studied by millions of entities, billions of years from now, who knew him better than he would ever know himself. They knew everything about him, even his current thoughts, in their exact vagueness, as he moved distractedly toward sleep, studying him in their equivalent of middle school “maybe,” thought some fleeting aspect of Paul’s consciousness, unaware what it was referencing.

Paul arrived in Toronto the next night on a Megabus, then rode two city buses to the apartment of a Type Books employee and his girlfriend and slept on a sofa. In Whole Foods the next day, for around five hours, he ate watermelon and looked at the internet and typed answers to an email interview. He walked to a café near Type Books and asked on one of the two threads on 4chan about him that, for some reason, had appeared the last two days — and, with two to four hundred posts each, 90 to 95 percent derogatory, were the two longest threads on him that he’d ever seen — if anyone in Toronto could sell him MDMA or mushrooms within two hours. Someone named Rodrigo, who’d recently moved here from San Francisco, Paul discerned via Facebook, emailed that he could get mushrooms and maybe MDMA but not until after Paul’s reading.

In Type Books people stood in an encroaching half circle around a nervously grinning Paul, seated on a stool, “completely exposed,” he felt, as an employee read a long, admiring, complicated introduction that seemed like it had incorporated sections of a dissertation. Paul, appearing sometimes openly frightened, honestly answered “I don’t know” for almost every question during the Q&A, then in each ensuing silence, feeling pressure to elaborate, mumbled sentence fragments he knew were untrue or inaccurate before, in closing, reiterating “I don’t know.” Near the end, while saying “but I don’t really know,” he stuttered a little. After the reading he went to a restaurant with four Type Books employees and their friend Alethia, 22, who had published around six hundred articles since leaving college two years ago to write for Toronto’s leading alt weekly. Paul asked if Alethia, whom he felt attracted to and curious about, wanted to interview him while, as a journalistic angle, he was “on MDMA.”

In Rodrigo’s apartment, a few hours later, Paul searched his name in Alethia’s email account — signed in on Rodrigo’s tiny, malformed-looking, non-MacBook laptop — while she was in the bathroom and saw she had pitched an article on him, two months ago, to the Toronto Sun, who had not responded, it seemed. Paul and Rodrigo each swallowed a capsule of MDMA. Paul said he felt “nothing” and swallowed another and, when it began taking effect, repeatedly encouraged Alethia to also ingest MDMA, “for the interview,” but she declined, citing that when she tried LSD she rode a bus around Toronto for five hours. Rodrigo lay with his girlfriend on his bed as Paul and Alethia sat on beanbags on the floor and talked for two and a half hours, during which Paul sometimes wanted to hug or kiss Alethia, whose default expression, it seemed, was “worried,” sometimes in an endearingly doe-like manner and sometimes like it was an effect of her job, as a full-time journalist, with its deadlines and copyediting, Paul thought half sarcastically more than once. Alethia said “you were saying you’ve been doing readings on drugs because it makes you feel more comfortable” and asked why.

“Um, actually, I just think it’s more fun.”

“More fun for you, or the people who are there?”

“In my view it’s more fun for everyone,” said Paul.

“So when you did that reading a few weeks ago on mushrooms. . you stopped after two minutes?”

“Um,” said Paul. “Two minutes?”

“Yeah. Is that what happened?”

“What reading?”

“Oh. I don’t know. . a few weeks ago.”

“The Booksmith?”

“Yeah. In San Francisco.”

“Oh. I was seeing ‘tribal patterns’ on the paper, because I was staring at it on mushrooms, and I felt like I was sweating, and I kept thinking ‘Hunter S. Thompson.’ Then I felt like I couldn’t go on anymore. I was preparing to say something like ‘I’m having a bad drug experience, I need to go home.’ But I looked up, at the people, and regained control.”

An hour later they were discussing a recent trend of Megabus accidents, described by Paul, who was riding a Megabus to Manhattan tomorrow, as “like, twenty people dying five times in the last few days,” when Alethia asked if Paul was worried he’d be “the next to die.”

“No. I don’t care if I die.”

“Um,” said Alethia laughing.

“I feel like I honestly don’t care if I die.”

“Really? You’re not worried about dying?”

“No, I think. I’m ready to die whenever.”

“Because you’ve written enough books?”

“No, no,” said Paul shaking his head a little. “I don’t know. I’m just ready to die. Life just seems like. . it’s fine if I die. Once I’m dead I’m dead.” Rodrigo from his bed said “but in an interview you talk about eating healthy and not smoking because you’ll be more productive.” Paul said health and drugs and being productive were all in service of feeling good. Alethia said she took Ritalin almost every day, from ages 8 to 12, for “attention deficit disorder.” Paul said “that seems horrible” and “that must’ve changed you.”

“Yeah, I think it did,” said Alethia. “I think it did.”

“People who take the most drugs by far are the kids—”

“It’s so true,” said Alethia.

“—who get prescribed them,” said Paul.

“Who’s, like, your closest friend?”

“I just felt, like. . really alone when you said that.”

“Oh no! I’m sorry.”

“Wait, there has to be someone,” said Paul grinning. “I feel like I have close friends but we stop talking. Right now, I guess, what person do I feel closest to?”

“Yeah,” said Alethia.

“Um, I can’t remember right now. I feel close to different people over sets of days. Like if I’ve been texting someone, but then I’ll forget about them.”

“Do you sometimes feel like it sucks — to just, like, live in the world?”

“What do you mean?” said Paul slowly.

“Like, that the world can’t provide us with enough to satisfy us.”

“No,” said Paul after around ten seconds, and covered his face with his hands. “I mean. . the world is good enough, based on evidence, because I haven’t killed myself. Like, if I killed myself. . I could say the world is bad, on average.”

“Like definitively,” said Alethia.

“On average,” said Paul through his hands. “Since the urge to kill myself isn’t so strong that I actually kill myself, the world is worth living in.”

• • •

Alethia left around 4:30 a.m., easily declining Paul’s suggestions, bordering on “pleas,” he felt, that she stay. Rodrigo and his girlfriend seemed asleep. Sitting on a sofa, in the common room, Paul texted Alethia: “This is Paul. Good night, glad we met.” Alethia responded: “Me too. You are wonderful.” Paul lay on the sofa, bristling with wakefulness, for around forty minutes, then put his MacBook in his backpack and wrote a two-sentence note to Rodrigo and walked outside into a silvery, wintry light.

On a Megabus to New York City — for around fifteen hours, due to a two-hour delay in Buffalo — he read all he could find by Alethia on the internet, becoming more “obsessed,” he felt, after each article, lying on his back across two seats with knees bent, twice dropping his iPhone onto his face. His interest in Alethia naturally decreased, the next few days, then they texted a few times and he felt renewed obsession, but he didn’t like her impersonal tone in their emails discussing their interview — which she’d spent eight hours transcribing — and, less than a week after they met, all he felt toward her, to his weak amusement, was an unexamined combination of indifference and vague resentment, which he described in an email to Charles, whose previous knowledge of Alethia was that Paul liked her “a lot,” as “strong aversion,” only half joking. Paul’s next email to Charles said “I feel like I ‘hate’ her” and that it seemed, by the bureaucratic language and curtness of Alethia’s emails, like she also “hated” him, that they “hated” each other.

On Halloween afternoon, in the library, Paul read an account of his Montreal reading, when he was on two capsules of MDMA, describing him as “charismatic, articulate, and friendly.”

He read an account of his Toronto reading, when he’d been sober, describing him as “monosyllabic,” “awkward,” “stilted and unfriendly” within a disapproval of his oeuvre, itself vaguely within a disapproval of contemporary culture and, by way of a link to someone else’s essay, the internet.

After his book tour’s last reading, on November 4, in Baltimore, Paul declined multiple dinner and bar invitations and went with Erin to her apartment — a bedroom, bathroom, tiny kitchen, TV room — where, using iMovie on Erin’s MacBook, they recorded themselves on MDMA answering questions each had prepared for the other, then continued recording, sitting on Erin’s bed, as they showed each other things on the internet, wanting to later be able to see how they behaved while on MDMA. Erin’s iPhone made a noise, at one point, and Paul, who had wrapped himself in a thick blanket, asked if it was Calvin.

“No, Beau,” said Erin.

“Nobo?” said Paul grinning.

“Beau. He said ‘mons pubis.’ Ew.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a part of the body,” said Erin with a worried expression.

“You guys are seeing. . you guys are together again?”

“No, we’re not,” said Erin shaking her head. “This is, like, unacceptable behavior.”

“You’re not together?”

“We were. . but then I broke up with him. . again.”

“Again? After we ate steak on your birthday?”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“So. . you got back together after that?”

“Well, no, but. . he told me he was unemployed, and all this bad stuff was happening to him, and I felt bad.”

Paul made a quiet, ambiguous noise.

“We’ve, like, hung out,” said Erin.

“Oh,” said Paul, unsure if he was confused.

“But we’re not together,” said Erin quietly, then drank a shot of tequila and most of a Four Loko (for a video she’d told someone she would post on her Tumblr) and an hour later, Paul saw after being in the bathroom a few minutes, was asleep with her mouth slightly open and her MacBook open on her stomach. After untangling a cord, then moving the MacBook to the floor, Paul lay beside Erin and meekly pawed her forearm three times, then briefly held some of her fingers, which were surprisingly warm. He lay stomach-down with his arm on her arm, thinking that if she woke, while he was asleep, this contact could be viewed as accidental. Maybe she would roll toward him, resting her arm across his back — they’d both be stomach-down, as if skydiving — in an unconscious or dream-integrated manner she wouldn’t remember, in the morning, when they’d wake in a kind of embrace and begin kissing, neither knowing who initiated, therefore brought together naturally, like plants that join at their roots. After a few motionless minutes, unable to sleep in his increasingly tense position, he rolled over and gathered a blanket into a cushiony bunch, which he held like a stuffed animal of a brain, and slept facing a wall.

The next afternoon, at the University of Baltimore, in a lounge area, bright and warm from sunlight through glass panels, Paul and Erin sat on padded chairs and watched last night’s footage, which they felt was “unseemly” and decided not to edit into a video to put on YouTube. At a soup-and-sandwich restaurant, two blocks away, they discussed what movies they wanted to make—

Heroin,

in which they inject heroin in each other and “work on things” on their MacBooks, recording six perspectives: their faces, their MacBook screens, their positions in the lounge area (from cameras on tripods in the distance) in sunlight on separate padded seats.

Cocaine,

in which a third person records them going to nightclubs and bars on a Friday night in Manhattan without a plan except that they must snort cocaine every ten minutes and will carry knapsacks filled with energy drinks and fried chicken.

Or Something,

in which “or something” is said hundreds of times, in a montage, sometimes with context, to convey a range of meanings: a grinning Erin “luxuriating” in her lack of specificity, a zombie-like Paul “tired” of his commitment in specifying uncertainty, Erin saying “or something, or something,” earnestly to a Paul who has become “tolerant” to “or something.”

— then returned to the lounge area and worked on things separately, until night, when they began texting people and asking on Facebook if anyone within fifty miles wanted to sell them drugs. Someone would walk to Erin’s car to sell her cocaine and heroin, said Beau in a text, if she parked in a specific area of a shopping plaza.

“That’s like. . I don’t know,” said Paul quietly while trying to think about why Erin had texted Beau. Erin was quiet, then said she didn’t want to try that option, then they walked four blocks to her apartment, where they used Xanax and Hydrocodone before driving to an apartment where someone had LSD, which they used with a little cough syrup. They drove to a movie theater and watched Jackass 3D, then couldn’t find an open restaurant, so decided to drive to New York City. They arrived around 8:30 a.m., to an afternoon-like morning, not hungry or tired, due to Adderall.

They decided to film MDMA without a plan, except to use MDMA and go canoeing in Central Park. After showering in Paul’s apartment, then riding the L train to Union Square and using MDMA in Whole Foods, then getting off an uptown 6 train four stops early by accident, they decided to go to Times Square instead of Central Park. They rode the Ferris wheel inside Toys “R” Us, then discovered that on MDMA they could easily speak in an unspecific, aggregate parody of (1) the stereotypical “intellectual” (2) most people in movies (3) most people on TV with a focus on newscasters and National Geographic — style voice-overs. They termed this manner of speaking (almost the opposite, especially for Paul, of the quiet and literal and inflectionless voice they normally used to speak to each other) “the voice,” using it, in Barnes & Noble, with high levels of amusement and stimulation, to feign egregious ignorance, improvise seemingly expert commentary on specific objects, excessively employ academic terms and literary references.

That night, at Pure Food and Wine, an organic raw vegan restaurant near Union Square, seated outside the entrance in a kind of waiting area, they each ate a psilocybin chocolate with their salads. Their plan was to attend an Asian American Writers’ Workshop fund-raiser in an art gallery, after eating, to record part one of Mushrooms. Exiting the restaurant, a woman looked down at Erin’s MacBook with an affectedly bemused expression and asked with a French accent if it was recording.

“Yes,” said Erin smiling.

“You are recording yourself?”

“Yeah,” said Erin grinning.

“That is weird, no?” said the woman, and walked away.

“I feel like I hate everyone,” said Paul a few minutes later, walking toward the art gallery.

“Huh?” said Erin. If she didn’t hear something, Paul had noticed, she would sometimes appear confused in a frightened, child-like way, as if having assumed she’d been insulted.

“I feel like I hate everyone,” said Paul.

“Yeah,” said Erin, and smiled at him.

“Really?” said Paul, a little surprised.

“Yeah. Well, everyone on the street.”

“I feel like I can’t even look at anyone,” said Paul.

They were on their sides facing each other on Paul’s mattress, in his room, dark except for moonlight, around 3:30 a.m. After the fund-raiser, at which a saxophone player had ranted about identity politics until people, after maybe six minutes, actually began booing, they’d walked aimlessly into a gallery across the street, then had eaten dinner, four blocks from Paul’s apartment, at Mesa Coyoacán. Paul scooted toward Erin, and they hugged five to ten seconds and began kissing and removing their clothes. Erin’s eyes, whenever Paul looked, seemed to be tightly closed, which seemed like “not a good sign,” as he’d read on her blog — or somewhere — that she liked sex with “a lot of eye contact.” They were sweating, and their heads were on the opposite side of the mattress from before, when they finished, after around fifty minutes.

That night, in the library, Paul texted Erin, who’d left for Baltimore at 7:40 a.m. for a 12:30 p.m. public-speaking class, asking if she wanted to attend an event—Caked Up! — in two days in an art gallery, where cakes made by graphic designers, including Paul’s brother, would be served buffet style. Paul texted it might not be worth the drive, since they would be driving eight hours the day after to Ohio, where Calvin had organized a reading and they would be staying three nights. When Erin promptly responded yes and that it wouldn’t be inconvenient, because she liked driving, Paul was surprised how relieved he felt — how disappointed he would’ve been if she had declined — and realized, with excitement and a concurrent adjustment of his default mood to “eager and patient,” that he was (or that he now, after Erin’s response, viewed himself as being) in a stable situation of mutual, increasing attraction.

Their last night in Ohio, around midnight, when Calvin’s parents and three brothers and Calvin were asleep, Paul and Erin decided to drink coffee and share a 30mg Adderall and each eat a psilocybin chocolate and, in the five hours before Erin would drive Paul to the airport — Calvin had bought Paul a plane ticket a month ago, as incentive to come — film part two of Mushrooms in the mansion’s basement, which included a room with guitars and amps and a drum set, a game room with four arcade machines, a one-room gym, a billiards table, a home theater, a kitchen. They kissed for twenty minutes in the gym, then shut themselves in a room with two desktop computers and had sex for an hour in the dark, then showered together. They sat on a one-seat sofa in the living room with Erin’s MacBook on their lap. Paul asked if Erin wanted to go with him next week to North Carolina and Louisiana, where he had readings at colleges.

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What? What does?”

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

“I want to come.”

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

“I want to,” said Erin.

“But you have work.”

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

“Then. . what are you going to do?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What did Beau say last night?”

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

“He came over?”

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

“Jesus. What did you scream at him?”

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

“Did he call more after that?”

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

“Seems like a non sequitur.”

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

“Did you respond to that?”

“No,” said Erin. “He’s insane.”

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

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

“That seems good,” said Erin smiling.

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

“Star Wars,” said Paul laughing a little.

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

• • •

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

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

“Sorry,” said Paul with a worried expression.

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

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

“In the future I’ll—” said Erin.

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

The emails during the book tour culminated maybe with a series of emails sent after Paul and Erin posted their “event coverage” of Caked Up! They’d pretended to be from jezebel.com and an uninhibited Paul, on MDMA, had loudly shouted at strangers, at one point, at a volume and with an amount of belligerence that was normal for most people but, for him, was done, he’d felt, for comic effect. Paul’s mother had emailed saying that the Paul in the video was not the Paul she knew and loved and that she was scared and, seeing what Paul “had turned into,” had cried. Paul stopped responding to her emails, at that point, and, at the moment, in the car with Erin, couldn’t remember offhand what he’d last said to her — either that he wasn’t responding to her emails until January, wasn’t responding to any emails mentioning drugs, or wasn’t responding until he believed she had internalized that their relationship would only deteriorate, causing them both to feel worse about everything and probably increase his drug use, if she continued mentioning drugs with intent to influence instead of learn or discuss, as friends, by asking questions. Paul vaguely remembered two or three emails asking when he was coming to Taiwan this year; he’d responded he didn’t want to due to all the emails and broken promises. Paul believed he was doing what was best for them both and that his mother believed she was doing what was best for only Paul and not herself. Paul didn’t want his mother to believe she had failed, as a parent, which he thought she must, on some level, if she was trying to change what she had created and raised, though maybe she was only focused on the task, not on her feelings.

Paul and Erin were walking near Bobst Library, a week and a half later, on a significantly colder night, in a sleet-like drizzle, when one of them said they wished it were warm and the other said they should fly somewhere warm. Las Vegas was the first suggestion. Paul said he wanted to lose all his money — around $1,200—while “peaking on MDMA” after eating at a buffet and relaxing in a hot tub.

In Think Coffee, an hour later, using Erin’s MacBook, they bought a package deal for two round-trip flights and a rental car and four nights at the Tropicana, leaving on November 26, in five days.