by Tao Lin
“Look at the helpers,” he said pointing at six to ten clips, each clasping an impressive seeming amount of paper, magnetized to the side of a cabinet. “I want one.”
“Me too,” said Erin grinning. “Which one do you want?”
“Any of them,” said Paul after a few seconds.
“I want the curvy one,” said Erin.
Paul stared at the identical, brown clips.
“The guy with the stripes,” said Erin. “My own ‘underling.’ ”
“I’m talking about the plastic paper holder things,” said Paul.
• • •
Walking to their rental car they saw a shiny building and an abandoned building side by side, in the near distance. Paul expressed amazement at this second, also obvious, though maybe less egregious metaphor—the first being the used car billboard—and said their marriage would resemble the abandoned building in five years. After a pause, which functioned unintentionally for comic effect, he said “or, like, five days.”
Erin laughed. “Five months, maybe,” she said earnestly.
“Yeah,” said Paul thinking that of the fives—hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades—months was, by far, most likely. “We’ll be that tree,” he said pointing at a tree that appeared healthy and, he thought, dignified.
“The apartments for rent,” said Erin.
“The tree,” said Paul.
“Yeah, the tree.”
“The tree seems good.”
“Nature. Natural.”
“Jesus, look,” said Paul pointing at an eerie building far in the distance, thin and black, like a cursor on the screen of a computer that had become unresponsive. He imagined building-size letters suddenly appearing, left to right, in a rush—wpkjgijfhtetiukgcnlm—across the desert.
The marriage chapel was less than a mile away in a building containing four to six businesses. Paul sat on a two-seat sofa, in a sort of hallway, while Erin used the bathroom. Around ten people, mostly children, surrounding what appeared to be a newlywed couple, passed through Paul’s vision, on their way out of the building, then Erin sat by him, then the pastor (a large man with white hair and a serious but friendly demeanor) sat behind a tiny desk (six feet away, at the opposite wall) and read a prepared statement, completing the marriage, at which point—coincidentally, it seemed—a door opened and a smiling woman, with a tiny dog at her feet, congratulated Paul and Erin, after which, sort of huddled against each other, they moved toward the exit grinning.
“I immediately thought ‘fuck you’ to the stranger congratulating us,” said Paul outside, on a sidewalk. Erin laughed and said she thought “pop-up ad,” because “it went through the door,” and they hugged and jumped repeatedly as one mass, spinning a little and sometimes saying “we did it” quietly. Paul ran suddenly away, onto the parking lot, in a wide arc that curved eventually toward the rental car in a centripetal force, accelerating to a speed that was, at this point in his life, unfamiliarly fast, but not near maximum, before slowing, as he neared the passenger door—and, knowing he would not collide with the car, briefly aware of the dream-like amount of control he had over his body—to a stop.
In Erin’s car, two weeks later, on the way to Brooklyn—from Baltimore, where the past two nights he separately met Erin’s parents, who were married but lived apart—Paul texted two drug dealers, Android and Peanut, to buy MDMA, ecstasy, LSD, cocaine to have in Taiwan, where they were going in the morning. Paul’s parents had invited Paul and Erin to stay with them, as a kind of wedding present, all expenses paid including plane tickets, December 13 to January 2. The marriage, without which Paul likely would not be visiting Taiwan this year, seemed also to have drastically improved his relationship with his mother, who hadn’t mentioned drugs, at all, the past three weeks, now that she had something positive to focus on and nurture.
It was dark out and neither drug dealer had responded, after two hours, when they arrived in Brooklyn and parked by Khim’s. After buying lemons, celery, kale, apples, energy drinks, toilet paper they walked six blocks to Paul’s apartment, then within ten minutes both drug dealers—and Paul’s brother, to give Paul a Christmas present and presents to bring to their parents—texted that they were on their way. Android, named after the smartphone, Paul assumed, arrived first. Paul went outside, past the bronze gate, into Android’s expensive-seeming car.
“How’s it going? You all right?”
“Yeah, good. How are you?”
“I’m good,” said Android.
“Here’s $230,” said Paul, and Android transferred a vial of cocaine and a tiny baggie of capsules into Paul’s left hand. Paul asked if the MDMA was from the same batch as last time. Android said they were and, after a pause, in a voice subtly indicating auspiciousness due to rarity and increased quality, added that they were “double-dipped.” Paul visualized a stock image, composite from movies he’d seen, of ethnic workers apportioning powder into capsules. “Oh, good,” he said, and hesitated, then asked what “double-dipped” meant. Android, in response, seemed to shutdown, as a person, into a dormant state; when, after maybe two seconds, he returned to functioning, he seemed uncharacteristically bored and inattentive, like he wanted to be alone. “They do it twice . . . it goes through once, and they dip it again,” he said unenthusiastically, with unfocused eyes and a subtle movement of his upper body that somehow effectively conveyed an additional, unrequired action within the process of an assembly line.
“Nice,” said Paul. “Thank you for driving here.”
“No problem,” said Android in his normal voice. “Give me a call if you want some stuff over the holidays.”
“We did it,” said Paul in a monotone to Erin in his room, and they hugged. Peanut texted he was ten minutes away. Paul read a text from his brother and went outside and opened the bronze gate. Paul’s brother followed Paul into the house, where Erin stood in the hallway outside Paul’s apartment.
“Erin, right? Nice to finally meet you.”
“Nice to meet you too,” said Erin.
After a pause, during which they all grinned at one another, Paul’s brother gave Paul a duffel bag and a check and, due to pressure from their mother, Paul assumed, a winter coat, and said “this is for Mom and Dad, you have to remember to give it to them,” indicating a department store bag inside the duffel bag.
“Okay,” said Paul looking in the duffel bag.
“You have to remember.”
“I will,” said Paul.
“You can’t forget. Okay?”
“I won’t,” said Paul.
“Okay,” said Paul’s brother in a slightly child-like voice, then looked at a vacantly grinning Erin and hastily said “we’ll have a formal dinner later on together, all of us,” with a scrunched expression conveying he knew that she obviously already knew this information, which he was saying aloud as a kind of indulgence to himself. Peanut texted five minutes later when Paul was sitting on his yoga mat, absently organizing his drugs in his six-compartment plastic container.
Paul got in the backseat of a car that, relative to Android’s, did not seem expensive. The same middle-aged woman as the previous four or five times Paul bought from Peanut, the past few months, was driving. Paul distractedly imagined himself asking if the woman was Peanut’s mother as he bought two strips of LSD and thirty ecstasy—half blue, half red—from Peanut, who was in the front passenger seat.
Paul and Erin, sitting on Paul’s mattress, were wearing earphones and doing things on their MacBooks, an hour later, after each ingesting “double-dipped” capsules of MDMA and 10mg Adderall and sharing a zero-calorie energy drink. They’d decided to use drugs throughout the night and sleep on the plane. Paul, worried because he didn’t feel like talking even after the MDMA and Adderall should’ve taken effect, inspected the capsules and asked Erin on Gmail chat if they seemed less full than in the past; they didn’t, to her, but she also wasn’t feeling a strong effect. They concluded the problem was their tolerance levels and each ingested a blue e
cstasy and continued doing things separately. “I feel something now, but I’m not sure if I feel like talking,” thought Paul looking at his Gmail account. “But I think I’ll be okay.”
The next four hours they had sex (and showered) three times, shared 50oz kale-celery-apple-lemon juice and 30mg Adderall, typed accounts of a cold and sunny afternoon one week ago when they walked around SoHo on MDMA shouting and screaming iterations of Charles’ name (initials, first, first and last, full) at each other while holding hands. Paul packaged a strip of LSD, four MDMA, twelve ecstasy inside the CD case for Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” album, which he wrapped in transparent tape, then in four issues of Seattle’s leading alt weekly with his face on the cover, which his mother had requested he bring, then in a shirt, which he fit snugly inside a shoebox.
Around 4:30 a.m., after deciding to use all their cocaine before leaving for the airport, they recorded Erin licking cocaine off Paul’s testicles and serving cocaine off an iPhone to Paul reading a purple-covered Siddhartha while seated on a high chair he found on a sidewalk in August and until now had used only as a clothing rack; Erin snorting cocaine off her MacBook screen; Paul snorting cocaine off Erin’s face; both snorting cocaine off vacuum-wrapped Omaha Steaks, which Calvin’s father had ordered for Paul for Thanksgiving. They discussed, relative to Adderall, not liking cocaine, which was inferior in price, effect, length of effect, after effect, convenience, availability but fun to have in group situations, in terms of thinking of funny places to snort it from. Paul said he wanted to shower before finishing the cocaine and walking to Variety, a café four blocks away, to relax, drink iced coffee, wait for their airport taxi.
After showering Paul dried himself and put on clothes and, while Erin was showering, stood in a corner and stared at his room without thinking anything or, he realized after a vague amount of time, moving his eyeballs. He sat on his yoga mat and stared at his Gmail account, remembering after a few minutes that he’d wanted to stand in a corner and look at his room to double-check he’d packed everything. When Erin, looking at herself in the wall mirror, finished blow-drying her hair, around fifteen minutes later, Paul looked up from where he’d remained on his yoga mat—absently scrolling through bohemianism’s Wikipedia page after clicking “bohemian” on Kurt Cobain’s page, which he’d looked at, while rereading emails from his mother, to see if he died at 26 or 27—and asked if Erin was “ready,” with what felt like a self-consciously neutral expression, vaguely sensing his question to be antagonistic, because he didn’t know exactly what it referenced.
“Yeah,” said Erin with a blank expression.
“No,” said Paul pointing at her MacBook and small pile of miscellany by her red backpack, which he felt aversion toward, in a manner that would become a problem, for him, in the future, he realized, with aversion toward himself, because it always seemed dirty.
“What,” said Erin.
“You’re not finished packing.”
“I thought we were doing that first?” said Erin pointing at the cocaine.
Paul felt himself blinking. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I forgot. Sorry.” He stood and stepped carefully over his yoga mat and kneeled by the low table and asked with unfocused eyes and a controlled voice if Erin wanted to use the remaining cocaine at Variety—to extend their usage and, he vaguely thought, soften their forthcoming “depletion,” or “depleted serotonin levels,” as they had, with a kind of feigned affection, been referencing their periods, after feeling good on drugs, of feeling bad.
“Okay,” said Erin after a pause. “But we should cut it first.”
“We can do it there,” said Paul after a long pause.
“It’ll be easier to do it here,” said Erin.
Paul stared at her tired, confident expression.
“I don’t want to do it there,” she said.
“Okay. But we’ll have to put it back in, after taking it out, if we do it here. We have to take it out and put it all back in again.”
“That’s fine. We aren’t in a hurry . . . are we?”
“No,” said Paul after a few seconds, and heard himself thinking, in a voice like he was practicing a speech, that an amount, even if only a trace, of cocaine would remain outside the vial—and it would all just clump together again, when back inside. There was also the risk of sneezing or otherwise uncontrollably disrupting the cocaine. “But we’ll lose some, when you take it out,” he said slowly. “It just . . . seems inconvenient.” Erin said she could “cut it really fast” and that she’d done it many times, arguably referencing, for the second or third time, a somewhat mysterious period of her life, when she did cocaine with Beau and other people every night or something. Paul felt aversion toward himself for feeling bothered by how Erin, or the situation itself, seemed to be indicating that, by not defaulting to Erin’s greater experience in cutting cocaine, Paul was behaving irrationally. “It just seems inconvenient,” he was saying. “It’s just inconvenient.”
“We can cut it there,” said Erin with a bored expression. “It doesn’t really matter.”
“We’ll just cut it here,” said Paul, and slowly swiveled his head toward the cocaine. He grasped the cute, orange-capped vial with the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, whose full weight rested on the table. “I don’t care about cutting it. When we put it back in, won’t it, just, like, turn into a clump again?”
“We don’t have to,” said Erin. “I don’t really care.”
“Why cut it, though? Doesn’t it all just go in you?”
“It doesn’t hurt as much,” said Erin, and gestured at the top half of her face and said things about sinuses, that it was “healthier” and that “more of it gets absorbed, instead of going in your stomach,” as Paul thought about referencing Cocaine: A Drug and Its Social Evolution, a book he knew Erin knew he’d been reading. “It all gets absorbed,” he said. “It’s the same if you eat it or snort it.”
“Then why does everyone snort it,” said Erin seeming neither curious nor rhetorical.
“People do a lot of things. I don’t know why, probably a lot of reasons. It’s the same as long as it’s inside of you. I read the book. The cocaine book.”
“That’s true,” said Erin.
“So, you should listen to me,” said Paul grinning slightly.
“The book said it’s the same if you eat it?”
“Yeah, or something,” mumbled Paul looking away. “I don’t remember what it said.”
“What else did the book say?”
“A lot of things. I don’t know. I haven’t finished it yet. I’m going to pee.” Paul stood grinning and went in the bathroom and peed a little. He splashed water onto his face. He dried his face with a hand towel and entered his room. “That was our first ‘drug fight,’ ” he said still grinning a little.
“I was going to say that,” said Erin.
“I feel like we handled it well.”
“It was good,” said Erin absently.
“I tried using the book,” said Paul grinning. “The cocaine book.”
“I noticed,” said Erin with a neutral expression.
At Variety, after snorting the remaining cocaine in Paul’s room, they decided to type accounts of their “drug fight.” Paul finished and left for Union Square to mail drugs to Taiwan. The shoebox, on his lap, felt “like a cat,” he kept thinking on the L train. He walked in a distended circle, like a comet’s orbit, on the wide sidewalk outside FedEx, which at 7:54 a.m. was locked and dark, listening to music through earphones, until an employee, seeming to slightly feign, Paul felt, being rushed, unlocked the door and entered and turned on the lights. Paul’s package would cost $89 to mail, said the employee, then walked out of view, toward the back of the store. Paul slowly filled out a form, then carried the form toward the exit, stood uncertainly in place a few seconds, returned to the counter, walked distractedly toward the exit, put the form in the trash, left FedEx. He rode the L train five stops. He bought two containers of pineapple chunks from a del
i. “It would’ve cost $89 to mail,” he said at Variety. “I’m just going to put it in my bag. If I go to jail I’ll just write Infinite Witz,” he said referencing two very long novels, Infinite Jest and Witz.
“What?” said Erin with an inattentive expression.
“If I go to jail I’ll just focus on writing Infinite Witz,” said Paul, and in the time and location of waiting, for himself to repeat what he’d said, he imagined the scenario and was a little surprised at the ease and speed with which he felt he would accept it—and that he would be relieved, to be removed from the confusing, omnidirectional hierarchy of his life. Erin smiled and said “good” and patted his shoulder, and he felt surprised again, as he hugged her, realizing that he wouldn’t be removed from his life—only dying would remove him—so would feel the same probably. He would still be—and be inside—the invulnerable dot of himself, irreducible and unique as a prime number, on or off, there or not, always following itself perfectly. Paul pushed the shoebox toward the bottom of his duffel bag, wedging it between layers of clothing, and they read each other’s “drug fight” accounts while eating pineapple chunks.
“We both wrote it in a Raymond Carver–esque manner.”
“I was thinking that,” said Erin. “The story with the baby.”
In the taxi, at one side of the backseat, Paul felt surreally distant from Erin, at the other side, like he would need to turn his head more than 90 degrees to see her. Through the window, against his face, the early-morning light had the vertical glare and the accumulated, citrus heat of a late-afternoon sun. “I feel really depleted, I’m closing my eyes until we get there,” said Paul in a voice that was agitatedly boring for himself to speak and hear and that seemed to echo inside his mouth, staying where it began.