Taipei

by Tao Lin

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

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

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

  “No, Beau,” said Erin.

  “Nobo?” said Paul grinning.

  “Beau. He said ‘mons pubis.’ Ew.”

  “What does that mean?”

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

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

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

  “You’re not together?”

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

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

  “Yeah,” said Erin.

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

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

  Paul made a quiet, ambiguous noise.

  “We’ve, like, hung out,” said Erin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes,” said Erin smiling.

  “You are recording yourself?”

  “Yeah,” said Erin grinning.

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah,” said Erin, and smiled at him.

  “Really?” said Paul, a little surprised.

  “Yeah. Well, everyone on the street.”

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah,” said Erin.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” said Erin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What? What does?”

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

  “I want to come.”

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

  “I want to,” said Erin.

  “But you have work.”

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

  “Then . . . what are you going to do?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What did Beau say last night?”

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

  “He came over?”

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

  “Jesus. What did you scream at him?”

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

  “Did he call more after that?”

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

  “Seems like a non sequitur.”

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

  “Did you respond to that?”

  “No,” said Erin. “He’s insane.”

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

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

  “That seems good,” said Erin smiling.

  • • •

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

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

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