Taipei

4

“This is what the universe created, after whatever billion years,” said Paul gesturing at MGM Grand and Excalibur and Luxor, around 9:30 p.m., on a walkway above the main street of casinos in Las Vegas, which was as cold or colder than New York City, they’d learned, with some amusement, upon arriving four hours ago.

“This is what we came into,” said Erin.

“Look, beautiful,” said Paul earnestly about the hundreds of red lights on the backs of cars, passing beneath the walk-way, into the distance, like rubies in a mining operation.

“Whoa. Pretty.”

“Life sometimes offers beautiful images,” said Paul in a voice like he was in fifth grade reading a textbook aloud.

“But they’re fleeting.”

“Yeah,” said Paul grinning.

“And you can’t do anything with them—”

“Yeah,” said Paul.

“—except look at them,” said Erin.

“Maybe we should get drunk,” said Paul, and they entered the casino at the end of the walkway, and Erin went to the bathroom. Paul sat at a slot machine and lost $20, then stared at two middle-aged men wearing backward caps, holding full glasses of golden beer, as they approached and passed with determined, unhappy expressions. When Erin returned, a few minutes later, she said “I think I feel depleted.”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel kind of tired, depleted.”

“But you shouldn’t even have started feeling it yet.”

“Huh?” said Erin. “We had MDMA like twenty minutes ago.”

Erin laughed. “I forgot.”

“Jesus. You scared me.”

“Sorry,” said Erin grinning, and they sat on the floor of a carpeted hallway — darkly lit from an unseen source that cyclically pulsed from a near-ultraviolet purple to dark red — positioning Erin’s MacBook to record themselves talking about their relationship.

“You go,” said Paul smiling widely. “You go first.”

“Okay, um, well I felt like I first wanted to kiss you when I dropped you off at the airport,” said Erin quickly, with a stricken expression, as if confessing something intensely shameful.

“At the airport? After Denny’s?”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “I wanted to kiss you then.”

“I thought you were hugging me really hard.”

“Uh, I thought you were hugging me hard,” said Erin seeming frightened, then for around five seconds didn’t breathe. Paul laughed, in confusion. Erin said she felt a little nervous. Paul asked if she thought they were going to have sex, when they kissed, on his bed. Erin said no, that she just kept thinking things like “what’s happening?” and “are we really going to do it?” Paul said he thought yes, because they wouldn’t have been able to stop, except by finishing, because neither of them had said no to anything yet.

“We still haven’t,” said Paul. “Right?”

“Um,” said Erin. “Yeah, I think.”

“There was a period of like three days when I was really obsessed with you. But you weren’t responding to my email and I kind of lost the obsessive nature.”

“Whoa,” said Erin. “When?”

“After one of the first times we hung out. We were sending picture messages, then you stopped and didn’t email and I felt really depressed.”

“Damn. Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“What was going on then?”

“I was kind of seeing Beau still then,” said Erin, and as the MDMA took effect Paul began using “the voice” sometimes, including when Erin asked him which of his previous girlfriends he felt closest to and he said “I’m not really sure” in an extreme parody of a stereotypical romantic comedy, and they laughed for maybe ten seconds. Paul had stopped using “the voice,” an hour later, when, during a silence, Erin asked what he was thinking and he said he was thinking why she hadn’t read or mentioned the first-person account of his life from April to July he had emailed her a few weeks ago, at her request, which had, to some degree, been obligatory, he knew. Erin said she felt strange reading about Paul’s romantic interest in other people while she was beginning a relationship with him. “Like, I felt jealous,” she said. “Of the Laura person, reading about her.”

“That makes sense,” said Paul earnestly.

“I also felt a little strange reading about your friendship with Daniel. I was like ‘whoa, they could hang out a lot, then just not anymore; damn, what if that happens with me?’ ”

“Daniel was really interested in how Kyle and I just stopped talking,” said Paul.

“Then you and Daniel stopped talking.”

“You don’t feel fine with that?”

“I do. . I feel fine with that. I just think of all possible situations going into something. . positive or negative. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” said Paul nodding. “When I first met Michelle I was telling her that I’ve had a lot of friends who I’ve just stopped talking to, and she said she was afraid I would do that to her.”

“That seems to be what happens with people.”

“You don’t have to read it at all,” said Paul.

“Okay,” said Erin.

“I trust whatever reasons you have. . for doing anything,” said Paul, and wondered if he had felt this before, or if he already no longer felt it.

The next night, after buying watermelon and salad ingredients from Whole Foods, they couldn’t find a parking spot at the Tropicana, then found one in a different area and walked a different route toward their room. Paul noticed a MARRIAGE CHAPEL sign at the end of the hallway and, after a few seconds, as they approached it silently, said “we should get married.”

“I was going to say that,” said Erin.

“I would get married to you.”

“Me too,” said Erin. “To you.”

“Let’s get married.”

“Let’s do it tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Paul. “I’m confirmed.”

In Whole Foods, the next afternoon, Erin emailed her manager at the used bookstore that she was quitting her job, then scrolled through photos of Elvis standing between grinning, newlywed couples. Elvis appeared more energetic and alive than the couples in almost every photo, including one in which the couple was partially blocked from view by an over-eager Elvis who seemed to have lunged toward the camera, displaying the knuckles side of a peace sign.

“I don’t get it, at all,” said Paul.

“It’s what people do. This is what people want.”

“It really seems insane,” said Paul.

“People are insane,” said Erin.

“We should get an Elvis wedding.”

“I’m fine with an Elvis wedding.”

“Actually, I don’t want an Elvis wedding,” said Paul. “It seems extremely stressful.” Erin made a next-day reservation for a “desk wedding.” They discussed if they wanted to be on MDMA during their marriage ceremony. Erin said they should save it for the day after tomorrow, their last in Las Vegas.

“We might be dead by then,” said Paul.

“They won’t let us get married if we’re on drugs,” said Erin.

“They’ll think we’re on drugs if we’re not on drugs. We’re normal when we’re on drugs.”

Erin laughed weakly.

“We’ll just—” said Paul. “We’ll figure it out.”

“We’re going to be driving after the wedding, let’s just do it after we drive,” said Erin a few minutes later in a slightly pleading tone.

“Okay, okay,” said Paul earnestly while nodding and patting her shoulder, then hugged her briefly.

Across the street from the marriage license office was a billboard that said MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE about used cars and used car parts. In the office, which was bright and quiet and arranged like a post office, while filling out forms, Paul said getting married was like getting a tattoo, in that he just wanted to pay money and receive a service, not make appointments and go places and talk to strangers and be asked to confirm his choice. Erin said she was thinking that also and had been “having the same feeling” as before she got tattoos. Paul noticed a sign that said intoxicated applicants would be TURNED AWAY and focused, as they approached the window, on appearing normal, but realized he didn’t know how.

“Look at the helpers,” he said pointing at six to ten clips, each clasping an impressive seeming amount of paper, magnetized to the side of a cabinet. “I want one.”

“Me too,” said Erin grinning. “Which one do you want?”

“Any of them,” said Paul after a few seconds.

“I want the curvy one,” said Erin.

Paul stared at the identical, brown clips.

“The guy with the stripes,” said Erin. “My own ‘underling.’ ”

“I’m talking about the plastic paper holder things,” said Paul.

• • •

Walking to their rental car they saw a shiny building and an abandoned building side by side, in the near distance. Paul expressed amazement at this second, also obvious, though maybe less egregious metaphor — the first being the used car billboard — and said their marriage would resemble the abandoned building in five years. After a pause, which functioned unintentionally for comic effect, he said “or, like, five days.”

Erin laughed. “Five months, maybe,” she said earnestly.

“Yeah,” said Paul thinking that of the fives — hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades — months was, by far, most likely. “We’ll be that tree,” he said pointing at a tree that appeared healthy and, he thought, dignified.

“The apartments for rent,” said Erin.

“The tree,” said Paul.

“Yeah, the tree.”

“The tree seems good.”

“Nature. Natural.”

“Jesus, look,” said Paul pointing at an eerie building far in the distance, thin and black, like a cursor on the screen of a computer that had become unresponsive. He imagined building-size letters suddenly appearing, left to right, in a rush—wpkjgijfhtetiukgcnlm—across the desert.

The marriage chapel was less than a mile away in a building containing four to six businesses. Paul sat on a two-seat sofa, in a sort of hallway, while Erin used the bathroom. Around ten people, mostly children, surrounding what appeared to be a newlywed couple, passed through Paul’s vision, on their way out of the building, then Erin sat by him, then the pastor (a large man with white hair and a serious but friendly demeanor) sat behind a tiny desk (six feet away, at the opposite wall) and read a prepared statement, completing the marriage, at which point — coincidentally, it seemed — a door opened and a smiling woman, with a tiny dog at her feet, congratulated Paul and Erin, after which, sort of huddled against each other, they moved toward the exit grinning.

“I immediately thought ‘fuck you’ to the stranger congratulating us,” said Paul outside, on a sidewalk. Erin laughed and said she thought “pop-up ad,” because “it went through the door,” and they hugged and jumped repeatedly as one mass, spinning a little and sometimes saying “we did it” quietly. Paul ran suddenly away, onto the parking lot, in a wide arc that curved eventually toward the rental car in a centripetal force, accelerating to a speed that was, at this point in his life, unfamiliarly fast, but not near maximum, before slowing, as he neared the passenger door — and, knowing he would not collide with the car, briefly aware of the dream-like amount of control he had over his body — to a stop.

In Erin’s car, two weeks later, on the way to Brooklyn — from Baltimore, where the past two nights he separately met Erin’s parents, who were married but lived apart — Paul texted two drug dealers, Android and Peanut, to buy MDMA, ecstasy, LSD, cocaine to have in Taiwan, where they were going in the morning. Paul’s parents had invited Paul and Erin to stay with them, as a kind of wedding present, all expenses paid including plane tickets, December 13 to January 2. The marriage, without which Paul likely would not be visiting Taiwan this year, seemed also to have drastically improved his relationship with his mother, who hadn’t mentioned drugs, at all, the past three weeks, now that she had something positive to focus on and nurture.

It was dark out and neither drug dealer had responded, after two hours, when they arrived in Brooklyn and parked by Khim’s. After buying lemons, celery, kale, apples, energy drinks, toilet paper they walked six blocks to Paul’s apartment, then within ten minutes both drug dealers — and Paul’s brother, to give Paul a Christmas present and presents to bring to their parents — texted that they were on their way. Android, named after the smartphone, Paul assumed, arrived first. Paul went outside, past the bronze gate, into Android’s expensive-seeming car.

“How’s it going? You all right?”

“Yeah, good. How are you?”

“I’m good,” said Android.

“Here’s $230,” said Paul, and Android transferred a vial of cocaine and a tiny baggie of capsules into Paul’s left hand. Paul asked if the MDMA was from the same batch as last time. Android said they were and, after a pause, in a voice subtly indicating auspiciousness due to rarity and increased quality, added that they were “double-dipped.” Paul visualized a stock image, composite from movies he’d seen, of ethnic workers apportioning powder into capsules. “Oh, good,” he said, and hesitated, then asked what “double-dipped” meant. Android, in response, seemed to shutdown, as a person, into a dormant state; when, after maybe two seconds, he returned to functioning, he seemed uncharacteristically bored and inattentive, like he wanted to be alone. “They do it twice. . it goes through once, and they dip it again,” he said unenthusiastically, with unfocused eyes and a subtle movement of his upper body that somehow effectively conveyed an additional, unrequired action within the process of an assembly line.

“Nice,” said Paul. “Thank you for driving here.”

“No problem,” said Android in his normal voice. “Give me a call if you want some stuff over the holidays.”

“We did it,” said Paul in a monotone to Erin in his room, and they hugged. Peanut texted he was ten minutes away. Paul read a text from his brother and went outside and opened the bronze gate. Paul’s brother followed Paul into the house, where Erin stood in the hallway outside Paul’s apartment.

“Erin, right? Nice to finally meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” said Erin.

After a pause, during which they all grinned at one another, Paul’s brother gave Paul a duffel bag and a check and, due to pressure from their mother, Paul assumed, a winter coat, and said “this is for Mom and Dad, you have to remember to give it to them,” indicating a department store bag inside the duffel bag.

“Okay,” said Paul looking in the duffel bag.

“You have to remember.”

“I will,” said Paul.

“You can’t forget. Okay?”

“I won’t,” said Paul.

“Okay,” said Paul’s brother in a slightly child-like voice, then looked at a vacantly grinning Erin and hastily said “we’ll have a formal dinner later on together, all of us,” with a scrunched expression conveying he knew that she obviously already knew this information, which he was saying aloud as a kind of indulgence to himself. Peanut texted five minutes later when Paul was sitting on his yoga mat, absently organizing his drugs in his six-compartment plastic container.

Paul got in the backseat of a car that, relative to Android’s, did not seem expensive. The same middle-aged woman as the previous four or five times Paul bought from Peanut, the past few months, was driving. Paul distractedly imagined himself asking if the woman was Peanut’s mother as he bought two strips of LSD and thirty ecstasy — half blue, half red — from Peanut, who was in the front passenger seat.

Paul and Erin, sitting on Paul’s mattress, were wearing earphones and doing things on their MacBooks, an hour later, after each ingesting “double-dipped” capsules of MDMA and 10mg Adderall and sharing a zero-calorie energy drink. They’d decided to use drugs throughout the night and sleep on the plane. Paul, worried because he didn’t feel like talking even after the MDMA and Adderall should’ve taken effect, inspected the capsules and asked Erin on Gmail chat if they seemed less full than in the past; they didn’t, to her, but she also wasn’t feeling a strong effect. They concluded the problem was their tolerance levels and each ingested a blue ecstasy and continued doing things separately. “I feel something now, but I’m not sure if I feel like talking,” thought Paul looking at his Gmail account. “But I think I’ll be okay.”

The next four hours they had sex (and showered) three times, shared 50oz kale-celery-apple-lemon juice and 30mg Adderall, typed accounts of a cold and sunny afternoon one week ago when they walked around SoHo on MDMA shouting and screaming iterations of Charles’ name (initials, first, first and last, full) at each other while holding hands. Paul packaged a strip of LSD, four MDMA, twelve ecstasy inside the CD case for Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” album, which he wrapped in transparent tape, then in four issues of Seattle’s leading alt weekly with his face on the cover, which his mother had requested he bring, then in a shirt, which he fit snugly inside a shoebox.

Around 4:30 a.m., after deciding to use all their cocaine before leaving for the airport, they recorded Erin licking cocaine off Paul’s testicles and serving cocaine off an iPhone to Paul reading a purple-covered Siddhartha while seated on a high chair he found on a sidewalk in August and until now had used only as a clothing rack; Erin snorting cocaine off her MacBook screen; Paul snorting cocaine off Erin’s face; both snorting cocaine off vacuum-wrapped Omaha Steaks, which Calvin’s father had ordered for Paul for Thanksgiving. They discussed, relative to Adderall, not liking cocaine, which was inferior in price, effect, length of effect, after effect, convenience, availability but fun to have in group situations, in terms of thinking of funny places to snort it from. Paul said he wanted to shower before finishing the cocaine and walking to Variety, a café four blocks away, to relax, drink iced coffee, wait for their airport taxi.

After showering Paul dried himself and put on clothes and, while Erin was showering, stood in a corner and stared at his room without thinking anything or, he realized after a vague amount of time, moving his eyeballs. He sat on his yoga mat and stared at his Gmail account, remembering after a few minutes that he’d wanted to stand in a corner and look at his room to double-check he’d packed everything. When Erin, looking at herself in the wall mirror, finished blow-drying her hair, around fifteen minutes later, Paul looked up from where he’d remained on his yoga mat — absently scrolling through bohemianism’s Wikipedia page after clicking “bohemian” on Kurt Cobain’s page, which he’d looked at, while rereading emails from his mother, to see if he died at 26 or 27—and asked if Erin was “ready,” with what felt like a self-consciously neutral expression, vaguely sensing his question to be antagonistic, because he didn’t know exactly what it referenced.

“Yeah,” said Erin with a blank expression.

“No,” said Paul pointing at her MacBook and small pile of miscellany by her red backpack, which he felt aversion toward, in a manner that would become a problem, for him, in the future, he realized, with aversion toward himself, because it always seemed dirty.

“What,” said Erin.

“You’re not finished packing.”

“I thought we were doing that first?” said Erin pointing at the cocaine.

Paul felt himself blinking. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I forgot. Sorry.” He stood and stepped carefully over his yoga mat and kneeled by the low table and asked with unfocused eyes and a controlled voice if Erin wanted to use the remaining cocaine at Variety — to extend their usage and, he vaguely thought, soften their forthcoming “depletion,” or “depleted serotonin levels,” as they had, with a kind of feigned affection, been referencing their periods, after feeling good on drugs, of feeling bad.

“Okay,” said Erin after a pause. “But we should cut it first.”

“We can do it there,” said Paul after a long pause.

“It’ll be easier to do it here,” said Erin.

Paul stared at her tired, confident expression.

“I don’t want to do it there,” she said.

“Okay. But we’ll have to put it back in, after taking it out, if we do it here. We have to take it out and put it all back in again.”

“That’s fine. We aren’t in a hurry. . are we?”

“No,” said Paul after a few seconds, and heard himself thinking, in a voice like he was practicing a speech, that an amount, even if only a trace, of cocaine would remain outside the vial — and it would all just clump together again, when back inside. There was also the risk of sneezing or otherwise uncontrollably disrupting the cocaine. “But we’ll lose some, when you take it out,” he said slowly. “It just. . seems inconvenient.” Erin said she could “cut it really fast” and that she’d done it many times, arguably referencing, for the second or third time, a somewhat mysterious period of her life, when she did cocaine with Beau and other people every night or something. Paul felt aversion toward himself for feeling bothered by how Erin, or the situation itself, seemed to be indicating that, by not defaulting to Erin’s greater experience in cutting cocaine, Paul was behaving irrationally. “It just seems inconvenient,” he was saying. “It’s just inconvenient.”

“We can cut it there,” said Erin with a bored expression. “It doesn’t really matter.”

“We’ll just cut it here,” said Paul, and slowly swiveled his head toward the cocaine. He grasped the cute, orange-capped vial with the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, whose full weight rested on the table. “I don’t care about cutting it. When we put it back in, won’t it, just, like, turn into a clump again?”

“We don’t have to,” said Erin. “I don’t really care.”

“Why cut it, though? Doesn’t it all just go in you?”

“It doesn’t hurt as much,” said Erin, and gestured at the top half of her face and said things about sinuses, that it was “healthier” and that “more of it gets absorbed, instead of going in your stomach,” as Paul thought about referencing Cocaine: A Drug and Its Social Evolution, a book he knew Erin knew he’d been reading. “It all gets absorbed,” he said. “It’s the same if you eat it or snort it.”

“Then why does everyone snort it,” said Erin seeming neither curious nor rhetorical.

“People do a lot of things. I don’t know why, probably a lot of reasons. It’s the same as long as it’s inside of you. I read the book. The cocaine book.”

“That’s true,” said Erin.

“So, you should listen to me,” said Paul grinning slightly.

“The book said it’s the same if you eat it?”

“Yeah, or something,” mumbled Paul looking away. “I don’t remember what it said.”

“What else did the book say?”

“A lot of things. I don’t know. I haven’t finished it yet. I’m going to pee.” Paul stood grinning and went in the bathroom and peed a little. He splashed water onto his face. He dried his face with a hand towel and entered his room. “That was our first ‘drug fight,’ ” he said still grinning a little.

“I was going to say that,” said Erin.

“I feel like we handled it well.”

“It was good,” said Erin absently.

“I tried using the book,” said Paul grinning. “The cocaine book.”

“I noticed,” said Erin with a neutral expression.

At Variety, after snorting the remaining cocaine in Paul’s room, they decided to type accounts of their “drug fight.” Paul finished and left for Union Square to mail drugs to Taiwan. The shoebox, on his lap, felt “like a cat,” he kept thinking on the L train. He walked in a distended circle, like a comet’s orbit, on the wide sidewalk outside FedEx, which at 7:54 a.m. was locked and dark, listening to music through earphones, until an employee, seeming to slightly feign, Paul felt, being rushed, unlocked the door and entered and turned on the lights. Paul’s package would cost $89 to mail, said the employee, then walked out of view, toward the back of the store. Paul slowly filled out a form, then carried the form toward the exit, stood uncertainly in place a few seconds, returned to the counter, walked distractedly toward the exit, put the form in the trash, left FedEx. He rode the L train five stops. He bought two containers of pineapple chunks from a deli. “It would’ve cost $89 to mail,” he said at Variety. “I’m just going to put it in my bag. If I go to jail I’ll just write Infinite Witz,” he said referencing two very long novels, Infinite Jest and Witz.

“What?” said Erin with an inattentive expression.

“If I go to jail I’ll just focus on writing Infinite Witz,” said Paul, and in the time and location of waiting, for himself to repeat what he’d said, he imagined the scenario and was a little surprised at the ease and speed with which he felt he would accept it — and that he would be relieved, to be removed from the confusing, omnidirectional hierarchy of his life. Erin smiled and said “good” and patted his shoulder, and he felt surprised again, as he hugged her, realizing that he wouldn’t be removed from his life — only dying would remove him — so would feel the same probably. He would still be — and be inside — the invulnerable dot of himself, irreducible and unique as a prime number, on or off, there or not, always following itself perfectly. Paul pushed the shoebox toward the bottom of his duffel bag, wedging it between layers of clothing, and they read each other’s “drug fight” accounts while eating pineapple chunks.

“We both wrote it in a Raymond Carver — esque manner.”

“I was thinking that,” said Erin. “The story with the baby.”

In the taxi, at one side of the backseat, Paul felt surreally distant from Erin, at the other side, like he would need to turn his head more than 90 degrees to see her. Through the window, against his face, the early-morning light had the vertical glare and the accumulated, citrus heat of a late-afternoon sun. “I feel really depleted, I’m closing my eyes until we get there,” said Paul in a voice that was agitatedly boring for himself to speak and hear and that seemed to echo inside his mouth, staying where it began.

At the airport, when they got out of the taxi, Erin asked how Paul felt and he murmured “zombie-like” without moving his head. They held hands while standing in line for luggage check-in, but Paul avoided looking at Erin, facing away from her as much as possible, to try to convey, without speaking, that he did not want to be asked any more questions, be looked at, or otherwise feel pressured to do or think anything. Unsure if Erin, at whatever moment, was receiving his communication, or not, or to what degree she was, or was not, Paul felt a constant dread of what might happen next, mostly that Erin might ask him another question. He wanted to hide by shrinking past zero, through the dot at the end of himself, to a negative size, into an otherworld, where he would find a place — in an enormous city, too large to know itself, or some slowly developing suburb — to be alone and carefully build a life in which he might be able to begin, at some point, to think about what to do about himself.

They lay on their backs on a padded seat continuously lining one side of a cafeteria with no restaurants open yet. When Paul woke, drooling a little, he moved into a sitting position with his elbows on a table, and saw that Erin was gone. Before forming any thoughts, or discerning any feelings, he saw her, in the distance, outside the cafeteria, walking parallel to a moving walkway with her iPhone to her ear, becoming out of view. Paul noticed a scrap of paper on his lap, from Erin, saying she was going to the bathroom and calling her friend and would be back by 9:15 a.m. Paul saw her at 9:08 a.m. hurriedly enter a store outside the cafeteria. She approached with pineapple chunks and bottled water, smiling at Paul’s neutral expression. “I got you this,” she said, and Paul mutely held the container of pineapple chunks a few seconds before placing it distractedly on the table.

“Where did you go?” said Paul self-consciously.

“I went to the bathroom and called my friend Jennika. Did you see my note?”

“I didn’t until like five minutes after I woke,” said Paul with aversion toward himself, aware he saw the note within a minute maybe. He asked why Erin didn’t stay within view to talk on the phone. Erin said she hadn’t thought of that and Paul said it was okay and — finally, self-conscious at the delay — thanked her for the pineapple chunks and opened the container and moved a chunk, with a fork, toward Erin’s mouth. Erin shook her head. Paul moved the chunk into his mouth and, after his mouth stopped moving, asked what Erin talked to Jennika about on the phone.

“I told her I got married and was going to Taiwan, and she got angry and just started sobbing and yelling at me,” said Erin, and without noticeable change in her slack posture, facing the empty cafeteria, began crying a little. Paul carefully held her — weakly, tiredly “hating himself,” he felt — and, after she stopped crying, asked why Jennika had been angry. “She was angry I didn’t tell her sooner. She kept saying she would never do that to me and that I was a bad friend.”

Paul continued asking questions and was slightly affected by Erin’s extrasensitivity, it seemed, in not relating unsolicited information. Erin said Jennika had previously always been okay with periods without contact — with respecting the other person’s availability — and that after Jennika she had called her mother to say she felt scared that Paul didn’t want her to go to Taiwan with him.

“Why do you think that?”

“I started feeling paranoid. I felt like you didn’t want me around and I’m bothering you just by being around.”

“No,” said Paul shaking his head.

“You’ve been so quiet,” said Erin.

“I’m quiet from being depleted. I said I felt zombie-like.”

“I know, but I still felt paranoid. I thought ‘what if he’s just tolerating me. I’m going to be around him for the next three weeks.’ And things like that.”

“We’re depleted big-time. Don’t trust what you feel now.”

“I felt all this even after factoring in depletion,” said Erin, and Paul eased her into a lying position, on her side with her head on his lap, and alternated feeding her and himself pineapple chunks.

On the fully booked, thirteen-hour twenty-nine-minute flight to Narita, where they would transfer to a three-hour fifteen-minute flight to Taiwan, they had middle seats in consecutive, three-seat rows. Before takeoff, standing in view of the four relevant passengers, Erin asked if “anyone” wanted to trade seats for $40 so she could sit with her husband and was egregiously ignored except by the middle-aged woman, to Paul’s left, who said “no thanks” cheerfully, as if she’d misconstrued the situation to believe she was doing a favor by declining. Paul sometimes stood to lean forward and hug Erin’s head, massage her shoulders, or grin at her after certain lines of dialogue during Eat, Pray, Love, which they excitedly agreed to watch together and both felt nearly continuously amused by.

After the movie they stood hugging by the “lavatories.” Erin said she felt better than when she’d been paranoid, but seemed reluctant to reciprocate Paul’s enthusiasm when, with a child-like sensation of wanting to be encouraged to believe a fantasy, or that an aberration was the norm, he said, for the third time since getting on the plane, as if stressing the unexpected discovery of something worth living for, in an existence in which most things were endured, not enjoyed, that it seemed good they used “all those drugs and energy drinks” and hadn’t slept and still felt “okay.” Paul was surprised and confused when it occurred to him that if they felt almost anything other than happy, or at least content, Eat, Pray, Love (with its montages and fortune cookie — like monks and unacknowledged but knowing, it had seemed, usage of clichés) would’ve been incredibly depressing. He felt self-consciously, annoyingly optimistic when Erin reacted to this information, which had felt to him like an epiphany, with little interest and no enthusiasm, seeming less glad or curious than troubled, as if the message was to retroactively not enjoy the movie.

Before Paul visited his parents twelve months ago (which had been his first time in Taiwan in almost five years, during which most of the Taipei Metro, or Mass Rapid Transit, had been completed) he had no concept of Taipei’s size or shape or layout, only an unreliable memory of how many minutes by car separated certain relatives’ apartments and department stores. After using the MRT and idly studying its maps on station walls and Wikipedia, then walking between stations — to and from different routes, one night to six continuous stops, some days while far from his parents’ apartment to illuminate a distant area, placing a candle there for perspective, or as a reminder that there was more — he had, with increasing interest, begun to view and internalize Taipei less like a city than its own world, which he could leisurely explore, he imagined, for years, or maybe indefinitely, as it reconfigured and continued to expand, opening new MRT stations until 2018, according to Wikipedia.

To Paul, who’d stayed mostly in his uncle’s sixteenth-floor apartment on previous visits, the vaguely tropical, consummating murmur of Taipei, from his parent’s fourteenth-floor apartment, had sounded immediately and distinctively familiar. The muffled roar of traffic, hazily embellished with beeps and honks and motorcycle engines and the occasional, looping, Doppler-effected jingle from a commercial or political vehicle — had been mnemonic enough (reminding Paul of the 10 to 15 percent of his life on the opposite side of Earth, with a recurring cast of characters and no school and a different language, almost fantastically unlike the other 85 to 90 percent, in suburban Florida) for him to believe, on some level, that if a place existed where he could go to scramble some initial momentum, to disable a setting implemented before birth, or disrupt the out-of-control formation of some incomprehensible worldview, and allow a kind of settling, over time, to occur — like a spaceship that has exhausted its fuel and begun falling toward the nearest star, approaching what it wants at the rate it’s wanted, then easing into the prolonged, perfectly requited appreciation of an orbit — it would be here.