Taipei

by Tao Lin

  “—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 un
comfortable 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.

  “Ye
ah. 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.