by Tao Lin
“Really?”
“Yeah. I haven’t not believed you. I was just saying . . . maybe you got the idea or something similar to it from somewhere else, like a children’s book we’ve both read, but we forgot about it, or something like that.”
“I don’t think I did,” said Erin.
“I feel like I do that a lot.”
“Maybe,” said Erin quietly.
Around 1:30 a.m., after Cristine and Sally had left, Paul and Erin were walking in downtown Cleveland trying to find any open restaurant when they entered a hotel through an “employees only” door and ascended on an escalator and walked through dark corridors into an auditorium-like area, encountering no people. Paul imagined the building omni-directionally expanding at a rate exceeding their maximum running speed, so that this goalless, enjoyably calm exploration of a temperature-controlled, tritely uncanny interior would replace his life, with its book tour and Gmail and, he thought after a few seconds, “food.” Would he agree to that? “Yes,” he thought “meaninglessly,” he knew, because he’d still be inside himself, the only place he’d ever be, that he could imagine, though maybe he didn’t know—not knowing seemed more likely.
At a Denny’s near the airport Paul ordered a steak and minestrone soup. Erin ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and cheese sticks. They shared a 30mg Adderall and drove to the airport, listening to a ’90s station, both immediately recognizing Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” whose lyrics, to a degree that Paul couldn’t stop grinning, seemed to be a near-unbroken series of borderline non sequitur clichés. Erin had a public-speaking class in Baltimore, eight hours away, in nine and a half hours. At the airport Paul left eight psilocybin chocolates with Erin, who said she would bring them to his reading in Manhattan in four weeks, if not earlier. They hugged tightly, and Paul, whose flight to Minnesota was in four hours, said he wished they had more time to listen to ’90s songs together and that he “had a lot of fun,” with Erin, the past few days.
The next three days they texted regularly and, Paul felt, with equal attentiveness. Paul texted a photo of a display in the Mall of America of books titled I Can Make You Confident and I Can Make You Sleep with the author grinning on each cover. Erin texted a blurry photo of what seemed to be a headless mannequin wearing a white dress and said she was in Las Vegas at a cousin’s wedding. Then she texted less, and with less attention, and one night didn’t respond to a photo Paul sent from a café in Chicago, where he was staying for four days, of a Back to the Future poster—
He was never in time
for his classes . . .
He wasn’t in time
for his dinner . . .
Then one day . . .
he wasn’t in his
time at all.
—until morning, when she texted “lol” and that she’d been asleep, but she didn’t reciprocate a photo, or ask a question, so they stopped texting. Paul sensed she was busy with college and maybe one or more vague relationships, but allowed himself to become “obsessed,” to some degree, with her, anyway, reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago’s Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends’ photos to find any she might’ve untagged.
In a café in Ann Arbor around 10:30 p.m., two days later, Paul realized, when he remembered Erin’s existence by seeing her name in Gmail, he’d forgotten about her that entire day (over the next three weeks, whenever more than two or three days passed since they last communicated, which they did by email, every five to ten days, in a thread Erin began the day she dropped him off at the airport, Paul would have a similar realization of having forgotten about her for an amount of time). Around midnight he drove his rental car to a row of fast-food restaurants near the airport and slept in a McDonald’s parking lot. When he woke, around 2:45 a.m., he bought and ate a Filet-O-Fish from the McDonald’s drive-thru. While trying to discern what, from which fast-food restaurant, to buy and eat next, he idly imagined himself for more than ten minutes as the botched clone of himself, parked outside the mansion of the scientist who the original Paul paid to clone himself and paid again to “destroy all information” regarding “[censored].” He drove across the street to a Checkers drive-thru and bought two apple pies, which he ate with little to no pleasure, almost unconsciously, while distractedly considering how once a bite of it was in his mouth, then chewed once or twice, there seemed to be no choice, at that point, but to swallow. He slept three hours, drove past McDonald’s and Arby’s, returned the rental car, rode a van as the only passenger to the airport, boarded the earliest flight to Boston.
Around two weeks later, in early October, he stayed for eight days in San Francisco in his own room, on the second floor of a house, which Daniel’s ex-girlfriend and exgirlfriend’s sister shared. An employee at Twitter invited him to its headquarters, where he ate from two different buffets. Daniel’s ex-girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend sold him MDMA and mushrooms, which he ate a medium-large dose of before his reading at the Booksmith, which was livestreamed on the internet. His publisher left him a voice mail the next afternoon, asking him to call them to discuss “some problems.” He emailed them late that night apologizing for missing their call and said he was available by email. He met someone from Facebook and ingested LSD, which she declined, before watching Dave Eggers interview Judd Apatow for almost two hours in an auditorium. On her full-size mattress, three hours after the interview, they watched a forty-minute DVD of a Rube Goldberg machine and kissed a few minutes, then Paul “fingered” her and, after seeming to orgasm, she rolled over and slept.
In Los Angeles, the night before a panel discussion at UCLA on the topic of hipsters, after privately ingesting a little LSD, half a capsule of MDMA, a Ritalin—the combination of which, at Paul’s tolerance levels, had the effect of slightly distorting and energizing his base feeling of depression, so that he also felt many of its related emotions, such as despair and aggravation—he was designated, for some reason, to drive an NPR contributor’s car to a house party on the steepest street he had ever seen in person. After the house party, in a bar staffed by Asians, with Chinese and Vietnamese food, Paul saw and approached Taryn, who seemed happy to see him, to his mild surprise (they’d only met once and vaguely, at the party where Paul put on “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins). Taryn and a younger, sibling-like man, who at times seemed to be her boyfriend, but remained at a distance most of the night, went with Paul and the moderator of the next day’s panel discussion and other people to an apartment whose only purpose, someone kept saying, was for partying in when bars had closed. Paul felt the same mysterious, vague attraction to Taryn he felt in Brooklyn but unlike then, when they’d spoken probably three sentences to each other, they talked continuously, energetically. Taryn said she moved here a month ago after securing a full-time job as a copywriter for a fashion website, where her coworkers did, or did not—Paul became confused which, at some point, after realizing he’d laughed at both—know she had an MFA in poetry. Paul gradually remembered Taryn was friends with Caroline, that she and Caroline—and many of Paul’s acquaintances, including Shawn Olive, in Brooklyn—had been in the same one to three graduating classes for their MFAs in poetry at the New School and that most, or all, of them, as part of their curriculum, had read Paul’s first poetry book that he wrote the summer after graduating, in 2005, with a BA in journalism. The moderator of the next day’s panel discussion approached Paul and Taryn and said he had bought cocaine for them from a former Olympic soccer player whose father, before recently dying, had operated a major drug cartel. Paul and Taryn were led to a dresser, scattered on which were playing cards. The former Olympic soccer player indicated a six of spades, beneath which was twenty dollars’ worth of cocaine.
On UCLA’s campus the next night Paul photographed a piece of computer paper, taped crudely to a column, that said HIPSTER PANEL with an arrow pointing literally at the sky. In emails with the moderator of the panel discussion the past few weeks Paul had repeatedly half jo
ked that he was going to “dominate the panel” and now, backstage peaking on one and a half capsules of MDMA and two Ritalin and an energy drink, he began openly conveying the same message to the other seven panelists, including a cofounder of Vice, the only person getting paid, everyone seemed to know, who was shirtless with 20oz beer and reacted to Paul’s robot-like extroversion with what seemed like barely suppressed confusion, which Paul tried to resolve by overpowering any possible awkwardness with his temporary charisma, which resulted in what seemed to be intimidation but was maybe an intimidation-based attempt at a non-antagonistic guardianship, which caused Paul, who felt he solely wanted to interact with mutual sincerity, to hesitate a little, which maybe the cofounder of Vice sensed as anxiety because he slapped Paul’s shoulder three times painfully. In his state of medium euphoria, with intensely dull eyes and an overall cyborg-like demeanor, Paul stared briefly at the cofounder of Vice before turning around and moving away with an earnest, uncertain feeling of disappointment. Paul arguably dominated the panel in a private way by multitasking (1) earnestly speaking on the topic of hipsters with uncharacteristic willingness to engage a matter of semantics (2) photographing other panelists and the audience and recording two videos with his iPhone (3) tweeting three times (4) interrupting people two or three times to defend audience members from the cofounder of Vice’s fashion criticisms (5) sustaining text conversations with Mia, who around a year ago had messaged Paul on Facebook, and Taryn, both of whom were alone in the audience of three to four hundred students and twenty to forty journalists (6) being asked the most questions during the Q&A, though almost all were negative and partially rhetorical, including why he kept writing after the “excrement” that was his previous book.
After the Q&A, during which Taryn had left due to a prior obligation, Paul talked a few minutes to Mia, vaguely remembering that she had lived, or something, in Crispin Glover’s “castle,” and wanted to spend more time with her, or Taryn, or the moderator, or the other panelists, at whatever post-panel party was probably beginning, but was driven in a sort of rush to the airport by two UCLA students, who in the front seats, talking to each other in voices Paul couldn’t hear, for some reason, maybe because a window was open, seemed far away and illusory. At the airport Paul saw he had another voice mail from his publisher and felt dread, then realized he was accidentally listening to it and that it was over—a six-second message asking Paul to “please” call them. Paul rested his head on his dining tray, mostly facedown and awake, during the flight to Minnesota, where after six hours of a seven-hour layover, a few minutes after putting his things in his backpack and standing to wait to get on a plane, he got a long email from his mother, saying she knew she had promised she wouldn’t anymore, but felt that she must, as a parent, continue telling Paul that she disapproved of his drug use. Paul could feel his intensely aggravated expression as he typed around three thousand words of stream-of-consciousness information about drugs and why the only way his mother could influence him to use less would be if she didn’t view them as good or bad, but learned about them, as a friend instead of a parent, because he was 27, all of which he’d stated, he knew, clearer and more convincingly, in dozens of emails the past four months to seemingly no lasting effect. His mother replied in a manner like his email—the longest he’d sent from an iPhone—had no effect on her and he replied again, expressing futility, then flew to Philadelphia, where after a bleakly sober reading in a tiny bookstore, which sold only used and rare books, he slept on a mostly empty bus, dropping him off in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, a place he’d forgotten existed.
In his room, around 2:30 a.m., he read a 2:12 a.m. email from Erin that said she’d “been using a lot of mental space to think about definitely ending a yearlong, ‘on-and-off,’ semi-vague relationship and actually did tonight”—in reference to someone named Beau—and that she was aware of the insufficiency of her email, half the length of Paul’s email, from nine days ago, but wanted to say before sleeping that she was still coming, if it was “still okay,” she said, to Paul’s reading tomorrow and would bring the psilocybin chocolates Paul left with her one month ago as previously discussed.
Increasingly, as his memory occupied less of his consciousness, the past four to six months, whenever Paul sensed familiarity in the beginnings of a thought or feeling he would passively focus on intuiting it in entirety, predicting its elaboration and rhetoric in the presence of logic and world-view like a ball’s trajectory and destination in the presence of gravity and weather. If he recognized the thought or feeling, and didn’t want it repeated, he’d end its formation by focusing elsewhere, like how someone searching for a lost dog on a field at night wouldn’t approach the silhouette of a tree. Paul, reading Erin’s email, was vaguely aware of himself considering that, to some degree, Erin was “using him” to make Beau jealous, or to stay busy while Beau was doing other things maybe—that if things had worked with Beau she might not be coming tomorrow.
Without full awareness of what he’d begun to think Paul deliberately stopped thinking and texted: “Yes. Would like if you come, see you tomorrow hopefully.” He called his publisher at 3:04 a.m., leaving a voice mail saying he understood what they probably wanted to say, that he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again—vaguely he remembered that they had, at some point, told him they disapproved of him using mushrooms at a reading—and was available by email, then slept.
Paul was in Bobst Library around 3:30 p.m. and had just ingested a capsule of MDMA when Erin texted that she was around fifty minutes away. Paul walked ten blocks to the bookstore and sat on a tiny bench in the fiction section and tweeted and looked at his Gmail account. Erin texted she was in the store and had eaten a chocolate. Paul was surprised she was with a male friend, whom she introduced as a former coworker named Gary, who lived in Brooklyn.
“He’s gay,” said Erin, and gave Paul a chocolate, which he chewed into a gluey paste and swallowed with lemon water from the bookstore’s café. After the reading Paul, Erin, and Gary walked to a bar for someone’s 33rd birthday. Gary left after around ten minutes and Erin said he had whispered in her ear that he felt sad and wanted to talk. “I told him I couldn’t now, I’m on mushrooms,” said Erin. “Then he asked me for mushrooms. I said I didn’t have any and he probably shouldn’t have them now anyway and I’d call him tomorrow.”
Around three hours later Paul and Erin were stomach-down on Paul’s mattress watching YouTube videos of people answering the same questions sober and on hallucinogens. Paul, who kept clicking new videos, was amused by how he seemed to be comfortably and energetically, with only a little self-consciousness, “having fun,” he kept thinking, in contrast to Erin, who seemed shy in a tired, depressed, distracted manner indicating to Paul that she was maybe thinking about someone else, probably Beau, whom she would probably rather be with, at the moment, instead of Paul, who felt intrigued—and further amused—why he was not affected by this information, which normally would make it impossible for him to enjoy anything. They slept without touching, woke in the afternoon, drove to Manhattan, where they separately “worked on things” (Paul in the library, Erin in a Starbucks) until 9:30 p.m., when they ate chocolates and watched a Woody Allen movie, which ended after midnight, on October 15, Erin’s 25th birthday. Paul said he wanted to buy her an expensive dinner and they went in an Italian restaurant that seemed moderately expensive, sat in a corner booth, ordered medium-rare steaks and a shrimp appetizer. Erin asked if she should answer a call from Beau, who’d been calling and texting all night, she said.
“If you want, yeah,” said Paul looking down a little.
Erin spoke to Beau in a jarringly, briefly absurdly different voice—one of impatient, dominating aggression—than Paul (who recognized the voice as similar to how he spoke, as a child, to his mother) had ever heard her use and which increased his interest in her, knowing she was capable of what to Paul was her opposite. After around fifty seconds, at a moment when she had the opportunity, Paul felt, based on hearing her si
de of what sounded like a mutual voicing of vague aggravation, to tactfully end the call and unambiguously convey she viewed their relationship as finished, Erin instead prolonged the call by speaking angrily, with sudden emotion indicating she wasn’t indifferent. Paul felt dizzy with the realization, as Erin continued talking in a manner like she’d forgotten his presence, that his view of her was uncontrollably changing, that parts of him were earnestly, if dramatically, no longer viewing her as a romantic possibility. He intuited a hidden intimacy in Erin and Beau’s hostility, a psychic collaboration—unconscious, or maybe conscious for one of them—assembling the structures, located days or weeks from now, where they would meet again to apologize and forgive and, while rescinding their insults, encouraged by the grammar and syntax and psychology of contrasts, near-automatically convey adoration, gratitude, compliments. Was this how people sustained relationships and sanity? By uninhibitedly expressing resentment to unconsciously contrast an amount of future indifference into affection? With quickly metabolized disappointment and a brief, vague, almost feigned restructuring of the mirage-like pile of miscellaneous items of his life Paul acclimated himself to this new reality, in which he would talk to Erin less and never with full attention, always distracted by, if not someone else, the ever-present silhouette of a possible someone else. Erin somewhat abruptly ended the call and asked if it had been entertaining, or interesting, or at least not too boring.
“I was really interested.”
“It was okay? Not boring?”
“No. I felt high levels of interest.”
“Oh,” said Erin. “Good.”
“I was surprised. You sounded angry.”
“Yeah,” said Erin. “I was angry.”
“There was one part . . . when you started fighting more, instead of stopping, I felt, like, afraid,” said Paul, and Erin said she knew what part he was referencing and that she had specifically considered if he would be entertained, or not, and had felt uncertain. As a waiter served their medium-rare steaks and, on multicolored rice, cooked into fetal positions, eight medium-large shrimp, Paul realized with some confusion that he might have overreacted. Staring at the herbed butter, flecked and large as a soap sample, on his steak, he was unsure what, if he had overreacted, had been the cause. It occurred to him that, in the past, in college, he would have later analyzed this, in bed, with eyes closed, studying the chronology of images—memories, he’d realized at some point, were images, which one could crudely arrange into slideshows or, with effort, sort of GIFs, maybe—but now, unless he wrote about it, storing the information where his brain couldn’t erase it, place it behind a toll, or inadvertently scramble its organization, or change it gradually, by increments smaller than he could discern, without his knowledge, so it became both lost and unrecognizable, he probably wouldn’t remember most of this in a few days and, after weeks or months, he wouldn’t know it had been forgotten, like a barn seen from inside a moving train that is later torn down, its wood carried elsewhere on trucks.