Taipei

5

Paul’s father looked the same as last year, Paul thought at the airport, except maybe, as part of a long-term change, a little more child-like, in his mindfully cheerful manner, seeming always slightly distracted by some earnest, interior activity, which Paul sometimes imagined to be the low-level focus required to retain the mysterious, untransferable, necessarily private wisdom that powered his contentment. Paul thought of how, as one aged, more people became comparatively younger, so that, among an increasingly child-like population, one might unconsciously behave more like a child. While buying bus tickets, then waiting for the bus, Paul’s father said he had found Paul’s Taiwanese publisher on the internet and called them — learning it was one person, in his apartment — and arranged for Paul to give a reading for the Taiwanese edition of his first novel on Christmas, its release date.

On the bus Erin slept with her head on Paul’s lap. Paul’s father slept one row behind. It was around 10:30 p.m. Paul stared at the lighted signs, some of which were animated and repeating like GIF files, attached to almost every building to face oncoming traffic — from two-square rectangles like tiny wings to long strips like impressive Scrabble words but with each square a word, maybe too much information to convey to drivers — and sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center, Disney’s future-themed “amusement park,” that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one robot maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008. At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people’s brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life — and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate distraction that was currently death — technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin’s hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans, who receive, over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves.

As the bus moved into denser parts of Taipei, nearing Paul’s parents’ apartment building, Paul felt like he could almost sense the computerization that was happening in this area of the universe, on Earth — could imagine the three- or four-minute simulation, in a documentary that probably existed, of occurrence and eventual, omnidirectional expansion, converting asteroids and rays and stars, then galaxies and clusters of galaxies, as they became elapsed in space, into more of itself. Paul had read about this in high school, lying on the carpet in his room, in The End of Science, with excitement, intuiting that, from the perspective of the computer at the end of everything, which he would be a part of and which would synthetically resemble an undifferentiated oneness, it didn’t matter if he had never kissed a girl, was too anxious to communicate with his peers, had no friends, etc. When Erin woke, seeming depressed and confused, avoiding looking at anything as she sat up, Paul patted his lap and she lay there again. Paul asked if she could think of a newer word for “computer” than “computer,” which seemed outdated and, in still being used, suspicious in some way, like maybe the word itself was intelligent and had manipulated culture in its favor, perpetuating its usage.

“I’m still thinking,” she said after a few minutes.

“I don’t think my question made sense,” said Paul. “There can’t be a newer word. . for the same word.”

• • •

More framed pictures of Paul were on display in his room, it seemed, than last year. Seeing them (two as a baby, four as a small child, one as an adolescent, two as a teenager in his marching band uniform) arranged on shelves, in two corners, Paul imagined his mother placing them strategically to affect him to use less drugs. He gathered all but one (in which he was nine or ten and grinning and holding, for some reason, a Three Musketeers — style sword, with his parents and brother, in a professional studio in Taipei, with an outer-space-themed background, unfurled like a scroll, he vaguely remembered, on the wall, pre — green screen) and stacked them — so many the room had felt like a memorial — facedown on a dresser, saying they made him uncomfortable. Erin asked why and said he looked cute and happy in them. Paul said he would feel uncomfortable seeing that many of anyone’s face.

The next afternoon, walking to a street market, Paul and Erin stopped to look at a two-story McDonald’s with five employees outside speaking into megaphones, sometimes in unison, waving banners and flags. Paul said there were fewer McDonald’s in Taiwan than fifteen years ago, that this was probably a “last-ditch effort,” which seemed to be working (the first floor — they could see through the glass front — was entirely filled with customers). Erin said they should improvise a documentary titled Taiwan’s Last McDonald’s or Taiwan’s First McDonald’s. They walked to the end of the street market and back, on the same route, buying and eating things, then bought and ate egg tarts from two different bakeries, then with nervous grins earnestly discussed eating however many egg tarts it would take for them to not want more, but resisted and returned to the apartment building, where they lay for an hour in the building’s sauna and dog-paddled, in a heated pool, to six different massage stations, including one — partly simulating a waterfall, maybe — where water fell eight to ten feet in pummeling, faucet-like columns onto the tops of their heads.

• • •

“My face won’t stop being red from the thing,” said Erin, an hour later, in Paul’s room, in a voice like she was mostly thinking about something else. Paul was trying to open the taped CD case for Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” collection. He looked at Erin briefly. “It looks good,” he mumbled looking at the CD case. His mother, in the hallway outside the room, whose door was open a few inches, said something in Mandarin.

“What?” said Paul in Mandarin.

“Bring your phone,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.

“Okay.”

“What?”

“Okay,” said Paul in Mandarin. “Don’t worry,” he said in Mandarin in a louder, agitated-sounding voice.

“Okay. Your father and I are going to eat.”

“Okay,” said Paul in Mandarin.

“Do you. . want to come eat together?”

“No,” said Paul in Mandarin.

“They’re leaving,” said Paul after a few seconds.

“Oh,” said Erin in a staccato with a worried expression.

“We’ll wait till they leave.”

“Oh,” said Erin.

“Before we—” said Paul.

Erin nodded attentively.

“They’re going to eat,” said Paul, and walked to a bookshelf and stared at two hardbound Animal Life volumes with the same image of a cheetah climbing a tree on their spines. He opened and closed a drawer, aware he wasn’t thinking anything, then put on black socks and hugged Erin from behind. They looked at themselves, being recorded, on the screen — uniquely neither reflection nor movie, but viewable perspective — of Paul’s MacBook, smiling sarcastically. Their plan for tonight was to ingest MDMA, after Paul’s parents left, and go to a shopping district where the streets, closed off to cars, were used as giant sidewalks. Paul showed Erin its Wikipedia page (“Ximending is the source of Taiwan’s fashion, subculture, and Japanese culture) and typed “ximending” in Google Images.

“Whoa,” said Erin. “Looks like Times Square.”

“We’re leaving,” shouted Paul’s mother a few minutes later, when Paul and Erin were looking at the Wikipedia page for 28 Days Later, which Erin had said was one of her favorite movies. Paul was rereading a sentence (“As he gets hit by a car in his flashback, he simultaneously dies on the operating table”) for the fourth time, in idle confusion, when the apartment’s metal door closed in a loud and distinct but, Paul thought, non-ominous click.

Ten minutes later Paul was at the dining table staring at an email from Calvin (“hi bro. did you get the steaks my dad sent you? lol. .”) while waiting for Erin, who was in the bathroom. Paul typed “hi” and his eyes unfocused. He typed “,” and saved “hi,” as a draft. He minimized Safari and saw his face, which seemed bored and depressed, his default expression. He maximized Safari and imagined millions of windows, positioned to appear like one window. He closed his eyes and thought of the backs of his eyelids as computer screens; both could display anything imaginable, so had infinite depth, but as physical surfaces were nearly depthless. Paul typed “ppl are powerful computers w 2 computer screens & free/fast/reliable access to their own internet” in Twitter, copied it, closed Twitter, pasted it in his Gmail draft of tweet drafts. He was thinking about the fast-food restaurant Arby’s, which he’d always felt a little confused by, when Erin appeared behind him and patted his shoulders with both hands moving up and down.

“Let’s hug as hard as we can,” said Paul, and stood and they did. “I think being squished really hard is what people who cut themselves get. . to feel.”

“Have you cut yourself?”

“No. Have you?”

“No,” said Erin carrying the MacBook toward the front door.

“Why would being squished feel good?” said Paul absently.

“Hm,” said Erin. “Do you have m—”

“Raarrr!” screamed Paul with his mouth open.

“Jesus,” said Erin grinning.

“Does it smell?” said Paul about his breath.

“Maybe like coffee a little bit. But it’s okay.”

Paul jogged to the bathroom, brushed his teeth and tongue, rinsed his mouth, jogged to the front door. Erin asked if he had her “ID thing”—he did — then touched his arm and quickly said “do you feel okay?” in a high-pitched voice. Paul, who’d begun to feel the MDMA, looked at Erin’s hand and imagined feeling utter disbelief, increasing to uncontrollable rage, that she would touch his arm, at a time like this. “Yeah,” he said with a neutral expression. “Do you?”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “Wait, is my—”

“Smells vaguely of barbecue, but it’s good,” said Paul, and patted her shoulder.

“Vaguely of barbecue,” said Erin grinning.

In the mirror-walled elevator they stared at themselves on the screen of Paul’s MacBook, which Erin held waist level. Paul moved in a parody of a robot and lightly slapped Erin twice. Erin slapped Paul once and, after exiting the elevator, yawned audibly, as they approached an atrium of spiral staircases and a gigantic Christmas tree.

“Look,” said Paul with a fish-like expression.

Erin laughed loudly. “Jesus,” she said.

“You made a Jack Nicholson facial expression.”

“Really?” said Erin, and laughed.

“Your eyebrows went,” said Paul demonstrating.

“Whoa,” said Erin loudly. “I made a soundboard laugh.”

“Oh,” said Paul. “Oh,” he said quietly, and moved toward a potted plant and, before reaching it, jumped in place, slightly confused by his own behavior. Erin said she thought Paul was going to “jump on.” There was a suctioned, whooshing noise as they exited automatically opening doors onto a wide sidewalk. Paul turned left — into Erin, who almost dropped the MacBook — and sustained an uninhibited, yelping noise for three or four seconds, imagining himself as a butler in a Disney movie in comically prolonged recovery from almost dropping an elaborately layered tray of desserts and drinks. Paul had an urge to practice the noise repeatedly, with increasing frustration, trying to perfect it — cut-scene to him in a straitjacket.

“Jesus,” said Erin grinning. “Should I get dramatic shots of the street?”

“Whatever you want.”

“Dramatic ass shots,” said Erin.

“It’s your night,” said Paul in vague reference to the Cinderella archetype of a beautiful, oppressed, sympathetic character that experiences a hectic reversal of fortune. “I keep thinking ‘this is our night’ for some reason,” he said a few minutes later, and his eyes felt shiny, and he thought of shyness, acceptance. “I wonder what it’s going to be like for us, for our twenty days here,” he said as they crossed a street. “What are we going to. . do?”

“What if we get divorced by then?”

“It seems possible,” said Paul. “Twenty-eight days.”

“Twenty-eight days,” said Erin grinning. “Twenty-day immersion technique.”

“Have you ever spent twenty straight days—”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“You have?”

“With Jennika. This summer, in Seattle.”

“I mean with a boyfriend,” said Paul, and imagined himself becoming physically faceted by rapidly facing different directions, in 15-degree movements, advancing blurrily ahead as a barely visible, wave-like curvature.

“Oh. Yeah. Probably.”

“Who?”

“First boyfriend. Kent.”

“Sleeping together?” said Paul suppressing an urge to scream it in mock disbelief. Erin said they were together “like every day” in the beginning and that “it seemed okay.” Paul asked what she meant by “okay” and visualized “it seemed” darkening and “okay” brightening colorfully. He mock studied “okay,” which suddenly enlarged and disappeared by “flying” through him, it seemed. Paul felt vaguely, uncertainly amused. Erin was explaining that she and Kent didn’t fight until she used his computer to write a paper and saw a folder of naked girlfriend pictures, which Kent said were from so long ago he couldn’t remember and that the girl lived in Poland and he didn’t talk to her anymore, all of which were lies.

“How do you feel about our fights so far?”

“I feel. . they seem to be okay,” said Erin descending stairs into a powerfully air-conditioned MRT station, marbled and quiet and clean, with the austere plainness of an established museum. “I still feel the same amount of interest toward you. But I think I worry more. I worry like ‘he might actually have a reaction toward this so I’ll think about it more.’ Or something. How do you think about them?”

“They seem fine,” said Paul.

“Is. . this how it usually goes?”

“Yeah,” said Paul with the word extended.

“Like the fights are similar?”

“Um, yeah. . I don’t have the kind of fight where it’s, like, ‘fighting,’ ” said Paul as they passed a bakery where he photographed and ate a crispy, red-bean-paste-filled croissant last year. “Like, yelling at each other and trying to ‘win,’ or something. Or, like, forgetting about it.”

“Or like what?”

“Like ‘winning.’ I don’t have that kind of fight.”

“Oh,” said Erin.

“Ever,” said Paul quietly.

Erin said with Kent she had the kind of fight where it turned into “proving a point,” then escalated into yelling. Paul asked if she fought with Harris, her second boyfriend.

“No,” said Erin.

“You have a curling effect,” said Paul touching her hair. “I like it. Is that what you’re going for?”

“Yeah,” said Erin smiling endearingly.

“You didn’t fight with the second one at all?”

“We had fights like you and I, like discussion-style things,” said Erin. “I don’t think we ever yelled at each other. Except, did we ever, no — no, we never yelled.”

“How do you feel about me compared to your other boyfriends?”

“I like you more,” said Erin.

“Than all of them?”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“I like you—”

“You—” said Erin.

“—more also,” said Paul.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Paul.

“Sweet,” said Erin. “You seem to encompass major things of what I want, in ways I feel like only segments of other people. . have.” She patted Paul’s chest and said “I like you” as they approached an intersection of corridors, wide as four-lane streets, where last year, leaning against a pillar in the left corridor, Paul read the last few pages of Kōbō Abe’s The Face of Another, which ended with the narrator, hiding behind a pillar, about to attack his “imposter.” Paul realized they were walking the wrong direction, and they turned around.

“What do you think your parents think about me?”

“They. . like you,” said Paul, and laughed quietly.

“Do they usually act like. . the way they did?”

“Yeah,” said Paul uncertainly. “I think they’re always focused on me, not the other person. But, yeah.”

“I wondered about that.”

“My mom’s probably thinking about drugs a lot,” said Paul, and Erin laughed and hiccupped, it seemed, at the same time. Paul said “I mean worried about drugs.”

“Is she addicted? Do you think?”

“Yeah,” said Paul grinning.

Erin said she’d noticed that Paul sometimes sounded “really angry” when talking to his mother in Mandarin. Paul said he didn’t feel angry, that he had gotten into a habit, from being a spoiled child, of talking to her like that and that it used to be “way worse.” Until he was 7 or 8 his voice, incomprehensible to anyone outside his family, had been a harmonica-like, almost electronic, squealing-bleating noise, which wholly outsourced the task of articulation, in the form of deciphering, to the listener. Paul’s brother would tell him to “stop screaming” or “stop whining.” Paul’s mother, the listener probably 95 percent of the time, a shy and anxious person herself, probably had strongly encouraged and liked how unrestrained and unself-conscious Paul had been.

“I was surprised,” said Erin. “I’ve never heard you talk like that.”

“I really don’t like it,” said Paul.

“It’s interesting,” said Erin stepping onto a down escalator.

“I’m embarrassed about it.”

“I do it with my parents,” said Erin smiling.

“What have you read by Kōbō Abe?”

“Just The Woman in the Dunes.”

“What else do you think about me?” said Paul, and laughed sarcastically, which Erin also did, then both abruptly stopped and hugged and, stepping off the escalator, approached one of eight automated turnstiles. Paul said “just hold it to the thing” about Erin’s MRT card, then in a deeper voice than normal “wait, wait” and, after a pause, that he was “going to poop.”

Paul could see himself, after exiting the bathroom, shakily enlarging on the screen of his MacBook, which Erin pointed at him, as he maneuvered toward it in a flighty zigzag, perpendicularly against people walking to and from turnstiles, escalators. “I just vomited, like, water,” he said.

“Oh my god. Really? Are you sick?”

“No, I’m just getting the feeling of a lot of emptiness.”

“Oh. I was going to go poop but the—”

“Go, go,” said Paul.

“—like the thing, or, okay,” said Erin.

“Wikipedia? What?”

“The thing in the floor? I wasn’t sure how to use it.”

“You went in there?” said Paul.

“It’s just, like, a hole in the floor, interesting.”

“What if I couldn’t find you?”

“Huh?” said Erin with a confused expression.

“What if I couldn’t find you? You went in the bathroom?”

“I just went in for a second, with the intention of—”

“Go, go,” said Paul patting Erin’s shoulder, and she went. Paul set his MacBook on the floor. His legs moved in and out of view for a few minutes. “Hello?” he said in Mandarin into his iPhone. “Okay, okay, we’re leaving now, okay, bye.” Erin was skipping toward him and, it seemed, flapping her arms. Paul said his mother called to remind them they can’t eat or drink on the train. Erin smiled and said “oh, helpful” sincerely and they passed turnstiles, descended two floors, waited two minutes, sat in a train. Paul asked what Erin hadn’t liked about her other boyfriends.

“Like, things that have just bothered me?”

“Let’s just talk about. . Harris,” said Paul.

“Okay. Um, bothered me that he, like, had a lot of friends and a big social life. And didn’t seem to be okay with how I just had him and one other friend. He’d be like ‘you need to focus on me less and get more friends.’ I felt bothered that that was constant. And I didn’t like it that sometimes he seemed to make insensitive comments. There was one incident where I had to get a. . surgery-type thing on my, like, cervix. . thing.”

“What was it?”

“To remove precancerous cells, or something.”

“Whoa,” said Paul.

“They had to, like, burn—”

“Is that normal?”

“Yeah, relatively, but I couldn’t do anything for three weeks, then finally when we did. . this weird-looking thing came out? And, I don’t know, I felt really self-conscious, and the first thing he was just like ‘ew’ and, like, backed away from me and I was like ‘I can’t help it.’ I don’t know. It bothered me at the time but now. . I don’t know.”

“Are you on birth control right now?”

“No. I haven’t had my period but I’ve also taken three pregnancy tests, I’m not pregnant.”

“When did you take three pregnancy tests?”

“Periodically. One time I didn’t have my period for a year and a half. I feel like I should get on birth control. Because I have my period when I’m on it.”

“Isn’t it healthier to not be on it?”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m not on it.”

“It seems fine,” said Paul vaguely.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” said Paul trying to remember something he wanted to say on the topic of friends. “It. . doesn’t matter to me if I come in you or somewhere else.”

“Okay,” said Erin.

“Um,” said Paul distractedly.

“This is probably the most that a guy has come in me without being on it. But I figure if anything happens we’re probably similarly. . minded.” Erin looked at Paul with an ironic expression and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Because you want to have kids,” she said in a mock-serious voice. “Soon. Right?”

Paul nodded, aware he probably appeared confused.

“That was our goal in getting married,” said Erin.

Paul patted her thigh twice and grinned a little.

“We’re not in sin anymore,” said Erin completing the joke, mostly to herself, it seemed.

“I’ve always, um, felt like. .” said Paul quietly.

“Huh?” said Erin staring at his blank expression.

“Weird about friends,” murmured Paul. “I never hang out with other people if I’m in a relationship.”

Erin nodded rapidly, seeming a little anxious.

“We’re here,” said Paul, and they exited the train as it said XIMEN STATION (and something about Chiang Kai-shek) in Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, English in a female, robot voice. Paul sneezed and looked at his hands rubbing the front of his shirt, aware of Erin also looking, both with neutral expressions. “Um,” said Paul on an up escalator to another train platform. “How did you deal with Harris having that many friends?”

“I would hang out with them. Harris and I were similar in the way we would joke about things, and I liked that his friends seemed to like me. . or, like, they laughed at me, and him, when we were together. But it was weird because it was obvious that I never became friends with any of them. What problems. . do you have?”

“With friends?”

“Girlfriends. The same question you asked me.”

“With. . who?”

“Uh, with Michelle,” said Erin.

“Just. . her friends,” said Paul on an up escalator to the station’s main floor. “She would want to hang out with friends. And I wouldn’t want to. .”

“Is there anything about her? Like, as a person.”

“I feel like we weren’t perfectly — we weren’t, um, optimally excited by each other.”

“How? How?”

“Just, like, she didn’t like the same things that I liked. . as much.”

“Oh,” said Erin. “Like On the Road things?”

“Yeah,” Paul said, who hadn’t liked On the Road as much as Michelle, who had rated one of his favorite books, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which she’d said she “liked,” two out of five stars on Goodreads, after their relationship had ended. “And then, uh, I felt like maybe she. . had a slightly neurotic aversion toward blow jobs, I feel,” said Paul.

“Seriously? I wouldn’t expect that.”

“She would do it, but not as much as I would to her, I think,” said Paul as they reached street level, at an intersection, where two corner buildings seemed armored with layers of billboards and lighted signs and, near the top of one, like a face, a giant screen, showing a movie preview. On a plaza was a donation bucket decorated like a Christmas tree and a grand piano without a player. “Sometimes she would joke about how it was ‘degrading,’ but I feel like she wasn’t completely joking.”

They entered the area blocked off to cars.

“So maybe I wasn’t satisfied with that,” said Paul.

“What other things sexually?”

“Sexually?”

“About her, or about anybody.”

“Uh, I don’t have that many sexual complaints. What about you?”

“With Kent it got really boring and routine.”

“How?”

“It was just the same thing. He would go down on me, then we would have missionary style, and that’s it. . that’s, like, it. Harris, similarly, we never really gave each other oral sex, toward the middle and end. But I really like that, both ways. And it also became sort of the same thing with him, where we would do missionary. Then I would. .”

“Then you would. .”

“. . like, finger myself,” said Erin at a lower pitch with a complicated expression that Paul saw peripherally.

“You would finger yourself? While he was doing it?”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Did you like that?”

“It was okay. Seemed business-oriented. So we could both. .”

Paul made a noise indicating he understood.

“How do you feel about. .”

“What?” said Paul, dimly aware and liking that they’d remained focused on their conversation instead of acknowledging their new, intense environment, which was bright and chaotic and crowded but, without vehicles, relatively quiet, more calming than stressful. Paul felt like he and Erin — and their conversation — were in the backseat of a soundproofed, window-tinted limousine.

“How we have sex?”

“Seems fine,” said Paul.

“Do you have any critiques? Any.”

“Critiques,” said Paul. “Um, no.”

“Really? You can say.”

“Critiques,” said Paul.

“Or anything. Any thoughts.”

“Um, no. I don’t think it’s that big of a thing for me: sex.”

“Yeah,” said Erin vaguely.

“What do you have about that — with me?”

“I have none for you,” said Erin.

“Are you sure? You can say it.”

“No, you’re good at everything—”

“Really?”

“—and you keep it interesting,” said Erin.

“Really?”

“And I have orgasms. . regularly.”

Paul made a quiet noise of acknowledgment.

“Everything’s good,” said Erin.

Paul repeated the noise.

“But I also don’t feel like it’s a big thing. Do you feel thirsty?”

“We’ll get something,” said Paul nodding distractedly. “What else?”

“Hm. For sex?”

“Anything,” said Paul.

“Anything,” said Erin in a child-like voice.

“Um,” said Paul, and from somewhere behind them someone began playing piano. Paul instantly felt a sheen of wetness to his now “horizontally seeking,” it seemed, eyeballs. In the movie of his life, he knew, now would be the moment — like when a character quotes Coleridge in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the screen shows blurry, colorful, festive images of people outside at night — to feel that the world was “beautiful and sad,” which he felt self-consciously and briefly, exerting effort to focus instead on the conversation, which was producing its own, unmediated emotions. “Um,” he said shifting his MacBook.

“I can hold,” said Erin taking the MacBook.

“What else for you?”

“Nothing,” said Erin.

“What other questions do you have?”

“I was mainly wondering about the sexual stuff. I like asking questions like this, though.”

“Ask me,” said Paul mock pleading.

“Do you usually ask questions like this?”

“Um, no. I think it’s — some of it’s — because we’re on drugs.”

“Oh yeah,” said Erin.

“But we also ask questions at other times.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “What do you feel about the drugs thing? In terms of your life, long term.”

“Um. I think it’s sustainable, as long as I’m healthy. Or I think if I’m really healthy I’ll be better off than someone who isn’t healthy and doesn’t do drugs. And doing drugs encourages me to be healthy, which increases productivity, which seems good. What do you think?”

“I feel like this is the most drugs I’ve ever done in a period in life,” said Erin. “But it’s also the healthiest I’ve been, in life. I think similarly about it.”

“In some relationships I would use food to console myself.”

“Me too,” said Erin. “Big-time.”

“There’s not that, with us, so that’s good.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “I’ve done that a lot.”

“Me too. Eating a ton of shitty food. Being excited with the other person about food. . seems depressing. We also don’t drink alcohol, which seems good.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “I did the food thing with Harris. And Beau. When you and I had started hanging out, but not romantically or something, I was eating sushi and Beau got something fried and was like ‘don’t you just want to eat unhealthy things together and bond over that?’ ”

“None of your boyfriends cared about you eating a lot?”

“Kent wanted me to, like, gain some weight. Harris. . quietly resented my body, I think, or something. He was really skinny. And I gained like five or ten pounds in the course of dating him. And—”

“What did he resent?”

“Just that—”

“Was he skinnier than me?”

“Maybe. . yeah. Or, like, less muscular. He was maybe a little bit taller but really small.”

“What did he resent?”

“I think ‘resent’ isn’t the right word. I think. . no, he did resent it because I weighed more than him and I think he didn’t like that he had to put up with it, instead of being with a naturally smaller body.”

“Then wouldn’t he care if you ate a lot?”

“Yeah, but we never stopped eating a lot.”

“Oh,” said Paul.

“Or maybe he would care, but not that much. I don’t know. What is my body. . do you have problems with my body?”

“No. . what problems?”

“Or, do you like it?”

“Yeah,” said Paul at a higher pitch than normal.

“If you don’t you can. . something,” said Erin lightly.

“No, yeah, I do,” said Paul. “What would your ideal body be?”

“For me?”

“For a boyfriend,” said Paul.

“I don’t think I’ve thought that. Just, like, skinny and healthy looking. Like, I’ve never minded if. . hm.”

“Not ‘minded.’ ‘Ideal.’ ”

“Oh. Then yeah.”

“What,” said Paul.

“I guess weigh a little more than me. Enough to not be self-conscious about it. Or just not care. I don’t know. What about—”

“I think my ideal is, like, the same, I think, or—”

“Really?” said Erin.

“Yeah,” said Paul, who was an inch taller than Erin and weighed a little less.

“Oh,” said Erin anxiously.

“Or, like—” said Paul.

“The same,” said Erin.

“But I think overall it doesn’t matter that much.”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Because Michelle. .”

“She seemed really skinny,” said Erin.

“I think what matters to me most, in terms of that, is just that things aren’t getting worse.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “Me too.”

“I think I can get fixated on that neurotically.”

“I do with myself definitely,” said Erin. “You mean for yourself?”

“No,” said Paul. “Other people.”

“How do you mean?”

“I can become fixated on it.”

“On, like, in what way?”

“On what the other person weighs.”

“Oh,” said Erin.

“I feel like it’s neurotic to some degree,” said Paul.

“I don’t care that much,” said Erin ambiguously.

“If they weighed the ideal I would find some other neurotic thing to focus on.”

“You would find something else to focus on?”

“Yeah,” said Paul.

“Like body-wise, or something else — wise?”

“Something else — wise.”

“Oh,” said Erin.

“It’s not a solution, or something, to find someone with the ideal. . but focusing on not getting worse seems fine to me.”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Yeah,” said Paul slowly.

“Yeah,” said Erin. “That seems like. .”

“You have to focus on something, and—”

“7-Eleven,” said Erin pointing.

“Huh?” said Paul, distracted from the conversation for the first time since he heard the piano, and couldn’t remember what he’d wanted to say. He followed Erin into 7-Eleven, feeling imponderable to himself, like his brain was of him, external as a color, shooting away from its source.

“I feel irritated by all the stuff going on,” said Erin on a wide sidewalk parallel to a four-lane street, outside the area of closed-off streets, around twenty minutes later. “Or like I can’t concentrate on talking.” Paul had become quiet after 7-Eleven and had talked slowly and incoherently, he felt, on topics that didn’t interest him, with increasing calmness, and now felt peacefully catatonic, like a person in a photograph, except for a pressure to speak and a vague awareness that he couldn’t remember what Erin had last said.

“Do you feel anything from the MDMA?”

“Yeah,” said Paul in a bored voice.

“How do you feel?”

“About what?” said Paul.

“Do you feel happy? Or do you feel what?”

“Right now?” said Paul, as if stalling.

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Yeah, happy,” said Paul looking down a little, aware his face hadn’t moved in a long time. “Physically uncomfortable a little. I want to poop.”

“You what? What was the last thing?”

“I want to poop,” mumbled Paul.

“I feel like I want to hit people, a little,” said Erin grinning.

“Let’s go in one of those places,” said Paul slowly, with a sensation of not being prepared to speak and not yet knowing what he was saying. He listened to what he’d said and pointed at a building that said PARTY WORLD and, seeing his arm, in his vision, sensed he hadn’t carried his MacBook in a long time and should offer to carry it soon.

“Yeah,” said Erin distractedly.

They walked silently for around forty seconds.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul honestly. “What are you?”

“I thought ‘I wonder what we’re going to do.’ Then I thought ‘we aren’t talking anymore — oh no, why aren’t we talking anymore.’ You’re not upset about anything?”

Paul shook his head repeatedly.

“Okay, okay,” said Erin.

“No,” thought Paul emotionlessly.

“People seem to be looking a lot, at the computer.”

“I haven’t. . noticed anyone,” said Paul.

“Oh,” said Erin uncertainly. “I haven’t—”

“I haven’t been looking at anyone.”

“I haven’t either, really, except sometimes if I look out somebody will be looking. I forgot we’re not in America.”

“I like how quiet it is,” said Paul.

“Me too,” said Erin.

“In New York it would be so loud.”

“Yeah. There would be, like, layers upon layers of noises.”

“I don’t like places. . where everyone working is a minority. . because I feel like there’s too many different. . I don’t know,” said Paul with a feeling like he unequivocally did not want to be talking about what he was talking about, but had accidentally focused on it, like a telescope a child had turned, away from a constellation, toward a wall.

“Like, visually?”

“Um, no,” said Paul. “Just that. . they know they’re minorities. .”

“That they, like, band together?”

“Um, no,” said Paul on a down escalator into the MRT station they exited around an hour ago.

“What are we doing?” said Erin in a quiet, confused voice. Paul felt his diagonal movement as a humorless, surreal activity — a deepening, forward and down.

“Minorities,” said Erin at a normal volume. “What were you saying?”

“Just that. . here, when you see someone, you don’t know. . that. . they live like two hours away and are um. . poor, or whatever,” said Paul very slowly, like he was improvising an erasure poem from a mental image of a page of text.

“Is this the mall? Thing?”

“No, bathroom,” mumbled Paul.

“Huh?” said Erin.

“Bathroom,” said Paul after a few seconds.

• • •

In the MRT station Paul said he tried masturbating and couldn’t and that he was worried he vomited some of his MDMA earlier, because he didn’t feel much. Erin said she felt like she was “feeling it a lot more” than Paul and laughed a little and said Paul should “go back and take more.”

“Really?” said Paul quietly.

“Yeah. Because I feel like if you were also feeling it. .”

“What,” said Paul.

“Now I feel myself being chill, or something. Or I don’t know. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it seemed like you weren’t feeling anything.”

“Really?” said Paul with earnest wonderment.

“Yeah. Let’s just go back and do more, then come back.”

“All right,” said Paul in a voice as if reluctantly acquiescing.

“Do you want that?”

“Yeah. I’ll take two, you take one.”

“Okay,” said Erin.

“But. . now I’m going to have it stronger than you.”

“I’ll take one and a half,” said Erin.

After both ingesting two ecstasy and, almost idly, as sort of afterthoughts, because it had been very weak the past few times, a little LSD, they exited Paul’s room, and Erin went to the bathroom. Paul’s mother asked Paul what clothes he bought. Paul said he didn’t yet and his mother said he should buy thicker clothing and they discussed where, at this time, around 10:30 p.m., to find open stores. When Erin exited the bathroom Paul’s mother asked if she bought any clothes.

“No,” said Erin smiling. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” said Paul in Mandarin. “We’re going now.”

“Cell phone,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.

“I’ve got it,” said Paul in Mandarin.

“Bring a cell phone,” said Paul’s father in Mandarin from out of view, watching TV.

“Why are you bringing your computer?” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.

“We, just,” said Paul in Mandarin.

“Oh, you’re going to record again,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin in a slightly scolding voice, but without worry, it seemed, maybe because she could see that Paul was the same as last year. “The ‘video thing,’ isn’t it better?”

“What video thing?”

“I sent it to you. I bought it for you. For your birthday. Did you already sell it?”

“No. I have it in my room.”

“What’s it called?”

“Flip cam,” said Paul.

“Dad went to many different places asking which was the best. Why don’t you use it?”

“What are you all talking about?” said Paul’s father idly in Mandarin from out of view.

“My mom probably knows we’re on drugs, or something,” said Paul after they’d walked around two minutes without talking. “She sounded suspicious when she saw us recording. But she seemed okay with it. I searched my emails with her earlier and. . she said something like ‘it’s okay to experience new things but don’t overdo it,’ or like ‘it’s probably good for a writer to experiment,’ and she was talking about cocaine, I think.”

“I thought your mom was completely against drugs.”

“Me too,” said Paul. “I forgot an entire period of emails where she seemed okay with it. My brother, I think, told her, at one point, that I had too much self-control to become addicted to anything. My brother told her not to worry, I think. I don’t know.”

“I haven’t swallowed the LSD yet,” said Erin at a red light a few minutes later. “My throat won’t push it down to my stomach, it’s weird.” Paul distractedly pointed at a billboard of disabled people, then looked at Erin’s tattoo of an asterisk behind her earlobe as she looked at the billboard. “In Taiwan only disabled people, I think, can sell lottery tickets,” said Paul slowly while imagining being heard by thousands of readers of a future book, or book-like experience, in which Erin’s name had an asterisk by it, indicating the option of stopping the narrative to learn about Erin, in the form of a living footnote, currently pointing the MacBook at the three-lane street, on which hundreds of scooters and motorcycles passing, in layers, with more than one per lane, at different speeds, appeared like a stationary, patternless shuffling.

“Swarming,” Erin was saying. “Swarm. Swarm.”

“My mom warned against getting hit by a car,” said Paul.

“Does it happen a lot?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul as a car honked. “I don’t know.”

“I kind of have to pee again,” said Erin crossing the street.

“You have to pee? We’ll find somewhere.”

“In my public-speaking class, on the last day, this guy spoke about how he has kidney failure and can’t pee. At all. He poops his pee.”

“He doesn’t even have a tube?”

“No,” said Erin.

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-four,” said Erin.

“Whoa,” said Paul.

“Yeah. And he has a big thing in his arm — his dialysis machine.”

“From drinking alcohol?”

“He didn’t say why,” said Erin, and a man wearing a motorcycle helmet in the near distance walked briskly across the sidewalk, seeming “too comfortable in his motorcycle helmet,” thought Paul with mock disapproval, into a 7-Eleven.

“What if we just moved here,” said Paul.

“Let’s move here,” said Erin with enthusiasm.

“Since we don’t have friends. What would we do all the time?”

“Work on writing,” said Erin. “We’d have to go back, to do promotion things.”

“We can pay people to pretend to be us.”

“Interns,” said Erin.

“Backpacks,” said Paul a few minutes later about a vat-like container of generic-looking backpacks, outside a foot-wear store. “What do you think of these?”

“They seem good. Simple.”

“Your red backpack. . is really dirty,” said Paul, and laughed nervously.

“It only looks dirty. I clean it a lot.”

“Backpack,” said Paul touching a black backpack.

“I would buy one but my mom said she’s buying me one for Christmas,” said Erin.

After peeing in an MRT station they decided to find a McDonald’s and improvise Taiwan’s First McDonald’s. Paul’s MacBook had seventy-two minutes of battery power remaining. They couldn’t find a McDonald’s, after around five minutes, but two Burger Kings were in view, so they decided to do Taiwan’s First Burger King, then crossed a street and saw a McDonald’s, six to ten blocks away. “Let’s not talk until we get there,” said Paul. “But start thinking.”

“Let’s not think of what to say, let’s just do it,” said Erin.

“Just as an experiment, let’s not talk until we get there.”

“Oh,” said Erin. “Okay, okay.”

Paul stared at her with an exaggeratedly disgusted expression, which she reciprocated. They ran diagonally across three lanes to a median and held their open palms out to motorcyclists advancing in the spaces between slow-moving and stopped cars, as if by vacuum suction. Two people on one motorcycle shouted “hey, hey, go, yeah!” and slapped Erin’s palm. Paul and Erin, both smiling widely, crossed to a sidewalk and turned toward McDonald’s. Paul took the MacBook and stared in earnest fascination — feeling almost appalled, but without aversion — as Erin ran and leaped stomach-first onto the front of a parked car, then speed-walked away with arms tight against her sides, crossing Paul’s vision, supernatural and comical as a mysterious creature on YouTube, before calmly taking the MacBook. Paul stared angrily at the sidewalk with his body bent forward, imagining a powerful magnet dragging him by a strip of metal at the top of his forehead. He began hitting his head with balled fists. Erin hit his head, and he instantly stared at her in mock disbelief. Erin grasped the floor of an invisible opening midair with both arms extended, not fully, above her. Paul, staring with earnest astonishment, imagined a ventilation-system-like tunnel and pulled her arms down while trying to feign an expression of “feigned disgust unsuccessfully concealing immense excitement,” as if Erin had unknowingly discovered the entrance to a place Paul had recently stopped trying (after a decade of research, massive debt, the inadvertent nurturing of an antisocial personality) to locate. He laughed and continued ahead and — two blocks later, nearing McDonald’s, which had a suburban-seeming front yard of quadrilaterals of grass, a sidewalk, gigantic Christmas tree, lighted menu, driveway for the drive-thru — he accelerated and entered McDonald’s saying “let’s get a shot with a lot of background activity to lure them back with the rewatches,” and after a few seconds, because the first floor had only an ordering counter, was ascending stairs, to the second floor, where eight to twelve people were in forty to sixty seats.

“Try to find a celebrity face to stand in front of,” said Erin.

“I’m going to wash my face, I can’t appear like this,” said Paul grinning, and went to the bathroom. When he returned Erin was picking at her hair, with elbows locked above her head, hands moving inward in a kind of puppetry, or to cast spells on her head. She left for the bathroom. Christmas music played on a loop, repeating every forty or fifty seconds. Paul looked at what seemed to be a group of mute people in a separate, attached, somewhat private room and thought of a documentary about a woman who became deaf and mute as a teenager and remained on her bed feeling depressed, she said, for fifteen years before devoting her life to traveling across Germany teaching the deaf-mute language and “bringing out” those, born deaf-mute, with whom communication had never been attempted. Paul was absently drumming the table with his hands when Erin returned. He stood and said they should start the documentary outside, pointed at the attached room, said “look, those people are mute, I think.”

Erin seemed confused and slightly frightened.

“Mute,” said Paul. “It’s a group of mute people.”

“Oh, mute. Jesus, I thought I was having a drug thing.”

“Jesus,” said Paul.

“They’re like how we were,” said Erin.

“Oh yeah,” said Paul.

“When we couldn’t talk, I felt like I had to talk,” said Erin descending stairs. “But I had nothing to say. I just felt encompassed by the limits.”

They sat on a grassy area of the median — after deciding to begin Taiwan’s First McDonald’s “in the middle of traffic”—and criticized their own, while complimenting each other’s, hair and faces for three minutes until Paul abruptly stood and said “let’s go inside” with a sensation of “surveying” the premises, though his eyes were unfocused.

“I started feeling things big-time,” said Erin.

“Me too,” said Paul.

“Big-time style,” said Erin, and they ran across the street into McDonald’s, to the second floor. “We’re back. . here. . again,” said Paul, and laughed a little while feeling the situation was hilarious.

“Yeah,” said Erin laughing, and they returned outside.

“You be the host,” said Paul pointing the MacBook at Erin, who stood in front of the lighted menu the size of a blackboard.

“For Bravo,” said Erin.

“Use ‘the voice.’ Just don’t grin.”

“Okay, okay,” said Erin.

“Just don’t grin,” said Paul.

“Well, here’s the flagship, uh, Taipei’s fir—”

“Let me try,” said Paul giving Erin the MacBook.

Erin made noises indicating failure, self-disgust.

“So this is the first McDonald’s to open, in, um, well, Taiwan,” said Paul. “It opened on. . Tuesday. They had the grand opening special of three patties.” He moved his ear to an image of a Double Filet-O-Fish on the menu and said “it doesn’t want to be filmed” to Erin, who said “the camera is not on” with exaggerated enunciation to the Double Filet-O-Fish. “Here is. . this is Hillary Clinton’s hairstyle,” said Paul pointing at lettuce protruding from a chicken sandwich.

“Tactical, um,” said Erin.

“Explosions,” said Paul after a few seconds.

“Well, yeah,” said Erin.

“Jesus,” said Paul, and they both grinned a little. “All right. Now we’ll go inside for a closer look. . at the conflict, the controversy.” Through the glass front a deliveryman, wearing a motorcycle helmet, peeked around a corner at the ordering counter. “It’s been said that he’s actually the founder of McDonald’s,” said Paul. “They stole his idea, now he just looks. I actually just heard someone talking about it over there. That guy!”

Erin pointed the MacBook at a man scurrying away from McDonald’s.

“He won’t go ‘on the record,’ ” said Paul. “He’s too afraid.”

“Let’s move inside,” said Erin, and pointed at a PUSH sticker. “Oh, this is actually—”

“They had to add that. Because people actually were trying to, um—”

“Pull,” said Erin.

“Yeah, pull,” said Paul grinning, and didn’t move for two seconds, unsure if there was more to say about the PUSH sticker, then took the MacBook and entered McDonald’s. “Now, this,” he said about a tall structure obscured by colorful balloons.

“It’s been said that this is actually a performance art piece. It’s meant to represent. . just universal peace,” said Erin, and an employee walked between the structure and the MacBook with an expression like everything but his mouth was grinning.

“I noticed this employee is running a little,” said Paul following him to the second floor. “Does that mean something?”

“Well, it’s sort of characteristic of our times,” said Erin.

“Who are these people?” said Paul pointing at one of four preadolescent Caucasian girls in a blown-up photo on a wall.

“These are all Cameron Diaz’s children,” said Erin.

“Why are there spaces between this one’s teeth?”

“Well, the meat fills in, then they put it into one burger.”

“And the rest is just hair and stuff?”

“That’s — actually, we shouldn’t reveal that,” said Erin.

“And this is for. . ten thousand chicken nuggets?” said Paul pointing at the space of a missing tooth. “The gelatin required from the teeth.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “And actually for some. . if you pay extra you can get a little bit of a tooth, from an actual child, and you can also get it memorialized, in a locket.”

“If a country pays extra, their nuggets get more gelatin?”

“Yes,” said Erin. “The quality is just slightly raised.”

“I heard that Canada did that,” said Paul.

“Um, just the Saskatchewan. They’re the prime testing markets. Because they eat. . they primarily eat teeth there. That’s their diet, I didn’t know if you knew that.”

“The Weakerthans wrote an album about that, right?”

“Yeah, they—” said Erin.

“Fallow?” said Paul.

“Fallow,” said Erin confidently.

“That was about the teeth—” said Paul.

“The Saskatchewan teeth crisis,” said Erin.

“This is where the district managers have their weekly meetings,” said Erin a few minutes later in a circular room — wallpapered with blown-up photos of children on bikes, and pogo sticks, in the foreground of a playground, at dusk — with a padded floor and, at its center, a playground of two slides, monkey bars, a pole, a tiny bridge. Paul said a girl had different eye sizes because she was on a “McFlurry-only diet” and asked Erin about a Hispanic girl wearing giant, padded headphones. “She’s actually producing right now,” said Erin. “She’s a producer.”

“What’s her favorite McDonald’s meal?”

“She just gets a side salad,” said Erin.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, that’s her thing,” said Erin pointing at what seemed like an Ash Wednesday marking on her forehead. “See? She’s Zen.”

“Let’s go to the opposite side of the spectrum: this girl.”

“She gets six Big Macs,” said Erin about a pale, red-haired girl sitting in a sandbox. “She puts it all in the McFlurry machine. And the Oreos come down.”

“Jesus. She puts it in the machine? This girl?”

“She extracts the sauce from the Big Macs, and she puts that in a cup,” said Erin.

“So she brings it home?”

“It’s ‘on the go.’ She’ll just bring it anywhere.”

“Then what?”

“Then her interns are instructed to massage her, because she’s actually a candidate for the next McChicken sandwich.”

“You could be eating her tomorrow,” said Paul to an imagined, future viewer of Taiwan’s First McDonald’s, and turned the MacBook to the girl with giant headphones. “You ate her. Now you might be eating the other one.” He panned the MacBook across half the room. “Or one of these, anyway.”

“Can you talk about him?” said Erin about a chubby, closed-mouth smiling boy on a bike with training wheels, and took the MacBook. “You shouldn’t leave him out.”

“Sure. This is one of the great failures of the Chicken McNugget raising program. This photo is actually. . they told him he was supplying Thailand’s artificial flavoring from 2010 to 2020. He was really happy, which was his mistake.”

“They’re actually going to tell her,” said Erin pointing at a girl, half obscured by a bored-looking dog, midair on a pogo stick. “She’s supplying Thailand until 2020, with a nonexclusive option at extending her contract.”

“Nice,” said Paul.

“She’s Miss Thailand,” said Erin.

“This one doesn’t know he’s also going to be one,” said Paul about a boy on swings at the apex of his backward movement. “They’re all going to be one.”

“Well, yeah. Someday.”

“Even you,” said Paul.

“I’m. . uniquely. .”

“You know you’re going to be a Chicken McNugget.”

“I’ve accepted it,” said Erin.

They approached stairs — blocked by a dry mophead and what seemed to be a traffic cone — to a third floor, a few minutes later, ascending to a small dark room of additional seating, kaleidoscopically lit from outside sources through two windows.

“It took them five years to Photoshop this,” said Paul pointing at the letter M inside a circle on a wall. “They had to wait for Adobe to answer a question they had, on a message board.”

“The mother brain,” said Erin.

“Shh,” whispered Paul tracing the circle with a forefinger.

“Sorry,” whispered Erin. “The brainstorming process is in action.”

“Jesus,” whispered Paul taking the MacBook carefully.

“This is—” said Erin pointing at a pile of plastic-wrapped plastic utensils.

“Leftovers,” said Paul.

“—just the scraps of ideas that get sold to Burger King and Arby’s on eBay.”

“Arby’s needs to update its credit card information.”

“It will, it always does,” said Erin, and approached the darkest part of the room. “And here we have the brainchild, really, of this whole operation,” she said pointing at where the wall, due to lack of light, was indiscernible in color and texture.

• • •

“So, we’ve shown you what it’s about, and what it does, for the country,” said Paul in front of the Christmas tree. “Now let’s go over the main points again: one.”

“Cameron Diaz’s foundation,” said Erin.

“Two?”

“One-A,” said Erin.

“One-A?”

“One-A,” said Erin. “And then one-B.”

“Um,” said Paul grinning, and pointed at the third-floor windows. “We were there.”

“The brainstorm. The conspiracy.”

“And — remember this?” said Paul pointing at the Double Filet-O-Fish.

“Yeah, whoa. Seems like so long ago.”

“And then,” said Paul moving toward the entrance. “The performance art for world peace. Highly suggested.”

“The, um,” said Paul noticing a headset-wearing employee inside McDonald’s, looking at him suspiciously, it seemed. “The arts sector.”

“We didn’t do the drive-thru.”

“Um,” said Paul distractedly.

“One of the first, and worst, in Asia,” said Erin, and someone behind them said something that Paul didn’t comprehend. The person repeated himself. Paul turned around and the headset-wearing employee — a manager, it seemed — repeated himself again, in a sort of pleading voice.

“We aren’t,” said Paul in Mandarin. “We’re only doing video. We finished.”

The employee said “you can’t” in Mandarin and a word Paul didn’t comprehend.

“We won’t,” said Paul in Mandarin. “There’s just us two only.”

“Skype,” said Erin quietly.

“Vacation,” said Paul, and the employee looked at Erin, then Paul. They were standing where cars, after ordering, would pass to get to the pickup window.

“Oh, okay,” said the employee, and smiled a little and, after a pause, moved backward a few steps before turning around, walking away.

“Vacation,” said Paul grinning.

“Skype,” said Erin.

“We’re on vacation,” said Paul.

“Skype,” said Erin grinning, and they entered a dark, quiet, residential area of tall buildings behind McDonald’s, then briefly explored “one of the more glamorous alleyways in Taipei,” said Paul, before returning to McDonald’s “front yard,” where a young man wearing a scratched, black, melon-like helmet and thick-lensed glasses, standing at a bike rack, with two McDonald’s bags in his bike’s basket, stared carelessly into the distance as his hands, below him, fumbled idly with his bike lock, it seemed.

“The binge in action,” said Erin. “Yet another successful binge operation.”

“This is the best part of the binge. He’s imagining the nuggets. He’s already imagining his next trip. So much so that this is it. . this is the next trip.”

“The infinite loop of binge eating,” said Erin.

“We’re looking at his mental projection of himself.”

“We’re inside his brain right now.”

“We’re looking at our creator,” said Paul grinning wildly.

“Shit,” said Erin, and laughed. “That’s why he can’t move.” She noticed a few minutes later that the MacBook was “depleted,” a word they’d begun using to sympathetically reference anything that had temporarily exhausted a replenishable means.

• • •

On the way back to the apartment, to get a charger, they decided instead of a documentary to make a science-fiction movie, on the conceit that they existed because a young man in Taipei, while eating a bag of Chicken McNuggets, allowed himself (despite knowing this would definitely increase his unhappiness) to realistically imagine his next binge, when he would have two bags. Paul and Erin were constructed by the young man’s unconscious, for verisimilitude, as passersby in the peripheral vision of his imaginary next trip to McDonald’s. Their memories were not based on a concrete reality but on the meager imaginative powers — enough for only a very short-term, working memory — allotted for the “artificial intelligence” of peripheral passersby.

Paul and Erin discussed their movie in a dialogue that sometimes overlapped with their inner monologues, which they sometimes introduced to the dialogue, or abandoned to focus on the dialogue, or both externalized, like pets into a shared space, to observe. That the universe was how it was, and that certain things seemed incomprehensible, that Paul couldn’t, without increasingly unexertable amounts of effort, remember what he didn’t store outside himself, as words, in books, that remembering seemed to require as much, or much more, energy as imagining, all seemed, while on LSD, in a context of science fiction, explainable in excitingly interconnected and true-seeming ways.

At the apartment, around 1:30 a.m., they got a charger and Paul wrote a note to his mother that he and Erin were at McDonald’s or downstairs. They somehow didn’t remember they were on LSD, so didn’t discern and attribute the effects of LSD until, on their way to a different McDonald’s, crossing a street, Paul realized he was repeatedly becoming conscious of things in medias res, like the information he received from sensory perception wasn’t being processed immediately, but at a delay sometimes, resulting in microseconds to seconds of partial — but functioning — unconsciousness.

At the McDonald’s where five employees had stood outside with megaphones and banners they sat in a corner on the second floor — the only two customers on the floor — and recorded more footage, using their iPhones, for their science-fiction movie. They regularly reminded each other that the LSD would soon start weakening, as it continued intensifying, to a degree that Paul could sense the presence of a metaphysical distance, from where, if crossed, he would not be able to return, therefore needed to focus, with deliberate effort, against a default drifting in that direction. Around 4:30 a.m. they walked twelve blocks to the apartment, holding hands and concentrating on and reminding each other of the task — to walk to the apartment without getting lost or hit by a car.

They looked at the internet in a downstairs area until Paul’s parents woke, then showered and went outside to a sunny, warm morning. They lay on a suburban area of grass in front of a stadium by the apartment building, no longer excited or interested in their science-fiction movie, having forgotten or become tolerant toward its most exciting, beginning elaborations — discussed most intensely after Paul’s MacBook stopped recording. If they existed only in abstraction, as an unconscious aside in someone’s brain, this forgetting, indicative of decreasing interest, would be exactly what he would predict to happen, he weakly thought with predictably less interest and clarity, on his back, with eyes closed.

• • •

The next two times they ingested ecstasy they both felt what they termed “overdrive,” which for Paul was a whirring, metallic, noise-like presence that induced catatonia and rendered experience toneless — nullifying humor, irony, sarcasm, intimacy, meaning — so that he became like a robot that could discern (but not process, consider, or interrelate) concrete reality. Both times, after forty talkative minutes, Paul became silent and thoughtless and expressionless and suddenly disinterested in Erin and intensely — only sexually — interested in strangers and he tried masturbating in public bathrooms and couldn’t orgasm or feel pleasure, to any degree, as if lacking the concept, but felt continuously aroused “somewhere,” including sometimes, it seemed, outside his body, a few feet in front of him, or far in the distance, in a certain store or area of sky, or in an overlap, shifting in and out of his chest or head or the front of his face.

Their brand of ecstasy, Erin learned from the internet, contained MDA, which they attributed — unconvincingly, because they’d previously enjoyed the same brand — as the cause of “overdrive.”

One night, while sober, they were at a red light at a busy, quiet — unnaturally muffled, it seemed — intersection of a four-lane street and an eight-lane street, into the X of which a two-lane street asymmetrically stopped, as if the intersection had been built to memorialize where a traveler, by choice or not, had stopped going somewhere.

Paul felt an oppressive sensation of being confined by the most distant things he could see in any direction, like after Michelle had walked away and he’d stood motionless in the rain, except then there’d also been a feeling of possibility, a glimmer of eagerness as he walked over the shiny, wet street, to return to the party. In an effort to distract from this feeling he asked, somewhat unexpectedly, what Erin was thinking — they’d stopped asking because it was always something depressing — and, with a slight grin, he saw peripherally, she said she’d been thinking that Paul needed to return her, like a broken appliance to a store, because she needed to be replaced with a newer, upgraded model. Paul stared ahead, wishing she hadn’t said that. “No,” he said grinning vaguely, unsure exactly how — but suspecting strongly that — their relationship due to what she’d said had changed in some notable, irreversible manner.

The next night in a bookstore near Taipei 101, the third-tallest building in the world, an hour after ingesting MDMA, walking aimlessly with held hands, Paul “grimly,” he earnestly felt, asked what Erin was thinking about, and she said she was having paranoid thoughts again, “like maybe it’s not the drugs, maybe we just don’t have anything to talk about anymore.” Paul thought she was right, but argued against her by saying they had been spending too much time together — that, in his other relationships, one or both people would have work or school. They sat holding each other on the floor in the fiction section and decided to not ingest their remaining two ecstasy and to be apart from each other four hours a day. Paul was wearing a striped sweater he and Erin bought, a few days ago, solely because it was comically not his normal style.

Manually descending a down escalator, about an hour later — holding Erin’s hand, leading them past people standing in place — Paul realized he was (and, for an unknown amount of time, had been) rushing ahead in an unconscious, misguided effort to get away from where he was: inside himself. Concurrent with this realization was an awareness of himself from a perspective thousands of feet above, plainly showing he was doing what he logically knew he did not want to do (that he dreaded doing, in the same way he dreaded the remaining seconds on the down escalator, the minutes walking to the MRT station and waiting for the train, the six-minute walk from the station to the apartment, waiting for the elevator and lying in bed until an instantaneous transport to the next day’s minutes — was there no reprieve even in sleep? — he’d always felt comforted by sleep and now felt confused by it) and yet, even now, discerning this, kept doing what caused this realization.

On Christmas Eve, when Erin returned from the bathroom and lay on the bed, ready to sleep, it seemed, Paul asked if she’d had any thoughts, since arriving in Taiwan, about showering.

“Not really,” she said after a few seconds.

“I noticed you don’t shower at night anymore. Or haven’t the last two nights.”

“I don’t shower every night.”

“You did. . before Taiwan.”

“I only shower at night if I noticeably smell,” said Erin. “There’ve been nights I haven’t, with you.”

The next few minutes, sensing something combative and offendable in her — that he hadn’t before — Paul felt increasingly careful of his word choice and tone of voice. Erin stood, at some point, and was moving around the room. Paul said something about an area of the bed smelling bad, and Erin said “I’m stinky, all right, you’re right, I’ll go shower, I have stinky feet” loudly, and left the room, closing the door with force. When she returned, maybe ten minutes later, Paul’s heart was still beating considerably harder than normal and he immediately left the room. In the nearly pitch-black hallway Dudu’s wet nose softly touched the back of Paul’s leg, when they apparently moved in the same direction, toward the bathroom. In the shower Paul earnestly thought about how to extricate himself from the marriage — what to do about their film company, how to behave the next ten days, what he and Erin would separately do each day, what to say to his parents — but when he returned to his room Erin apologized, which he hadn’t expected, and he reiterated that they’d happily agreed, a month ago, that if either person wanted the other to shower or brush their teeth, or anything like that, they’d state it immediately and directly and impersonally, instead of accumulating resentment.

“There are things I’m still sensitive about,” said Erin.

Paul said he had felt most upset by her sarcasm when she said she was stinky and how she left suddenly and sort of slammed the door. Erin said she had been joking, in an effort to downplay the situation, and hadn’t meant to slam the door. Paul said he hadn’t felt — or suspected, at all — that she was joking. Erin slept on her side facing away.

In the morning Paul read an email from his mother, whose bedroom shared a wall with his, asking him to please try to be nicer to Erin, who remained on her side facing away, though she seemed awake. Paul showered for around forty-five minutes, continuing to mentally prepare to be single, and was unaware of the time until, after putting on clothes, his father said the taxi he’d called to drive them to the café hosting Paul’s reading — his mother was already there — was downstairs. Paul expected no response — or a begrudging one, maybe — as he explained to Erin, who was still facing away, in a voice he controlled to sound neutral that a taxi was waiting and that she didn’t have to go to his reading but it would be awkward if she didn’t because reservations had been made for dinner immediately after, in a nice restaurant, with many relatives, to celebrate their marriage. Paul felt emotional and surprised when, after a few seconds, during which her body visibly relaxed, easing a tension Paul hadn’t discerned, Erin stood and softly said she didn’t know the reading was today and, prioritizing the situation, over her feelings, became accommodating and goal oriented, quickly and gracefully getting dressed and preparing to leave.

In the taxi’s backseat, between Erin and his father, Paul pointed at a bright red, metal, pointy roof outside his father’s side’s window. “Look at that roof,” he said in Mandarin, and pushed a blue ecstasy into Erin’s mouth — against teeth, then inside, touching her tongue a little — while his father talked about slanted versus flat roofs. Paul, grinning convolutedly, pointed again and asked how to say “corrugated” in Mandarin and put their last ecstasy in his own mouth.

Dinner, after the reading — with Paul’s parents, uncle, uncle’s girlfriend, uncle-in-law, great-uncle, two aunts, five cousins — was in a restaurant whose interior lighting, circuited into pillars and walls and the ceiling and bathrooms, though probably not in the kitchen, had been coordinated to undulate fluidly and cyclically, as one, yellow to red to purple to blue to green, seeming egregiously LSD themed.

Paul’s father talked the most, by far, usually to no one specific, during the hour-long dinner. When he spoke people became attentive to him, but passively, at their leisure, with neutral expressions, as if watching an infomercial, neither annoyed nor entertained, feeling no obligation to respond or engage. Whenever he finished with a topic, sometimes to the accompaniment of his own laughter, people seemed to uniformly and inhumanly return, like foam mattresses, to how they were before, profoundly unfazed. At one point, in what seemed like a major faux pas, in part because Paul’s cousin’s father, Paul’s uncle, was present and seemed depressed, Paul’s father tried — for maybe five minutes, with no external feedback except two or three grunting noises from his target — to recruit Paul’s cousin, a few years older than Paul, to work for him selling lasers on commission. He’d tried the same, at previous dinners, with both Paul and Erin — and, at dinners last year, just Paul, who suspected his father felt as amused by his behavior, in this regard, as Paul and Erin, who’d said “your dad tried to recruit me to work for him” four or five times the past week.

Paul’s relatives, though somewhat withdrawn and/or alienated from one another, seemed peaceful as a group, maybe because there didn’t appear to be any pressure for anyone to do anything they didn’t want to do, such as talk or smile. Paul’s mother and her older sister, best friends for decades, now seemed like polite, recent acquaintances who secretly disliked each other for admittedly irrational and/or superficial reasons.

After dinner Paul and Erin followed Paul’s uncle and Paul’s uncle’s girlfriend to their car, to be driven, at Paul’s mother’s suggestion, to where young people went to buy clothes. Failing to operate a refrigerator-size parking meter, which Paul had never seen before, Paul’s uncle grinned and said something in Mandarin conveying idle bemusement regarding his decreasing ability to comprehend and maneuver himself through an increasingly surreal environment. In the BMW’s backseat Paul remembered, with embarrassment, when as a child, on the way to Ponderosa, in this car, his uncle suggested to Paul’s mother, his little sister, a restaurant that was the same as Ponderosa but used “fresher ingredients.” Paul’s mother had asked Paul, who had responded with a noise, causing six to ten relatives to eat at Ponderosa.

Paul didn’t notice his uncle had turned around in his seat, and was grinning slightly, until he heard him say “you’re getting out here also” in Mandarin. The car was parked on the side of a street and Paul’s uncle’s girlfriend had gotten out. Paul’s uncle, who spoke English fluently, congratulated Erin then carefully said two sentences to her and maybe Paul, who was remembering how he’d been surprised — and complicatedly moved — once when his uncle talked about buying and liking Michael Jackson’s music, in this car, after asking if Paul, who doesn’t remember what he answered, or how old he’d been, maybe 10 or 11, liked Michael Jackson.

At the airport, after a silent taxi ride, around 7:30 a.m., Paul’s mother stood with Paul and Erin in line to check in luggage. Paul peripherally noticed his mother facing away, a little, with only her neck slightly turned. He looked at her and she turned her neck farther, so that he was looking at her looking elsewhere, then she turned, openly crying, toward him and said in a child-like but controlled voice that she was leaving before she started crying harder. She reflexively opened her mouth in a similar manner as when Paul had “caught” her, last year, putting sugar in her coffee, but the effect now was of further embarrassment, past helplessness, to disengagement, then withdrawal.

Paul, whose eyes had become instantly watery, hadn’t seen her like this before. He thought of her mother, who had died before Paul was born — and was aware, with momentary clarity, which did not elucidate or console, but seemed to pointlessly reiterate, of how, in the entrance-less caves of themselves, everyone was already, always orphaned — and they briefly hugged and she hugged Erin and uncharacteristically left.