Taipei

by Tao Lin

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Paul. “Are you?”

  “Maybe a little. Do you want to go?”

  “Yeah,” said Paul, and slowly stood.

  • • •

  On the L train Paul held Erin in a way that her head and upper body were on his lap, but her legs remained as if she were sitting upright, aware he was doing this—was holding her head to his lap—to mitigate pressures to talk to, or look at, each other. Erin sat up, at some point, and Paul began to speak, in vague continuation of their conversation before the movie, slowly and mostly incomprehensibly, unsure what he was trying to say. Gradually, by focusing on what he’d already said, in the past ten to twenty seconds, he learned that he seemed to be trying to convey that both he and Erin were depressed, which he realized they both already knew. He only felt motivated to say anything at all because he was on Xanax, he knew, and remembered he had Ambien in his pocket and shared one, then another, with Erin, who had sat up, then became aware of himself trying to passive-aggressively convey something by directly saying he wanted to feel pressured to concurrently be a depressed writer and fashion model.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Erin.

  “I just feel . . . depressed,” said Paul, and weakly grinned.

  “Is there anything I can do to make you feel less depressed?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Paul. “You’re depressed.”

  “What can I do, at this point, to help our relationship?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul feeling that he was more expressing himself than answering a question, and they got off the train.

  “Anything at all,” said Erin in a hollow voice.

  “I don’t want to tell anyone what to do,” said Paul staring ahead.

  “You wouldn’t be. You’d just be answering my question.”

  • • •

  In Sel De Mer, a seafood restaurant four blocks from Paul’s apartment, seated at the bar, Erin asked if Paul wanted more Xanax and he said “shouldn’t we not ‘go overboard’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We had Ambien and Xanax.”

  Erin appeared unresponsive.

  “Never mind,” said Paul. “Yes. I want more.” After sharing 2mg Xanax, then ordering, he absently ate all the free bread and butter, and they sat staring ahead, not speaking or moving, until Erin said she felt weird.

  “Me too. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Let’s just stop fighting,” said Erin.

  “Okay,” said Paul.

  “Okay,” said Erin after a few seconds.

  “Do you want more Xanax? I don’t feel that much.”

  “Yeah,” said Erin, and they shared 2mg Xanax.

  When Paul’s salad and clam chowder arrived he moved something fried from the salad, with a feeling of efficacy, into the soup, then ate it with a spoon. His steamed lobster with fries and Erin’s broiled monkfish with mesclun salad arrived. He ate his fries using all his butter and ketchup and, at her offer, most of Erin’s butter. “I feel better,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “I feel better, due to Xanax, I think. How do you feel?”

  “I don’t know,” said Erin. “Okay, I guess.”

  At Paul’s apartment they drank green juice and showered, then performed oral sex on each other, showered again, turned off the light to sleep. Paul said they should be on Xanax all the time. Erin said “we’re probably ideal candidates for Xanax prescriptions.”

  “I’m sure that we are,” said Paul, and went to the bathroom with his MacBook and, seated on the toilet, looked at lobsters’ Wikipedia page. He typed “immortal animals” in Google and clicked “The Only Immortal Animal on Earth” and saw a jellyfish on a website that looked like it was made in the late ’90s. He copied a sentence, a few minutes later, from Taipei Metro’s Wikipedia page—“The growing traffic problems of the time, compounded by road closures due to TRTS construction led to what became popularly known as the ‘Dark Age of Taipei Traffic”—and emailed it to Erin.

  Paul entered his room carrying his open MacBook. “This is what you ate,” he said showing Erin a photo, captioned “a monkfish in a market,” of a glistening, black, mound-shaped mass—grotesque in a melancholy, head-dominated, almost whimsical manner—and she laughed a little.

  Ten days later they were on Erin’s bed in Baltimore, around 3:45 a.m., watching a Japanese movie about a woman who tortures and murders men. The past two nights they’d ingested large doses of MDMA and low-to-medium doses of Percocet, Adderall, Xanax and today they’d only used a little Adder-all. Paul began to sometimes leverage himself above Erin, who would roll onto her back, or remain on her side, loosely enclosed by Paul’s arms to either side, as he stared vertically down at her with fixed, impractical, “scary” expressions.

  Erin laughed and, the first two times, complimented his effort, then told him to stop, after which he did it again, and thought he wouldn’t anymore, then did again, five minutes later, on an impulse, almost uncontrollably—hovering low, with bent elbows, feeling both insane and, in the private room behind the one-way mirror of his exaggeratedly happy expression, like an experimental psychologist—and she began crying in a helpless and cowering manner, which Paul, to some degree, thought was feigned, so remained motionless, for two seconds, during which Erin’s face appeared unrecognizable, like the irreducible somethingness of her, in the form of a coded overlay, or invisible mask, had abruptly left, revealing the frightening activity—the arbitrarily reconfiguring, look-less chaos—of a personless face. Paul hugged her so she couldn’t see his face and repeatedly said he was sorry and variations of “it’s me” and “it’s okay.” Erin’s eyes appeared strangely collapsed beyond closure, like rubber bands overlapping themselves, for a few seconds, after she stopped crying. “It’s just that my car is broken,” she said earnestly. “I can’t get away.”

  “I would have stopped if I knew you were this scared,” said Paul, confused by what she’d been thinking to have imagined escaping in a car.

  “You should have stopped when I said stop.”

  “But people always say to stop. And you were laughing.”

  “I told you to stop,” said Erin. “You did other times and I kept going and you liked it.”

  “I know,” said Erin, and described how she’d lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans—more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem “darker.” Sometimes it was less of a feeling than a realization that maybe, after you died, in the absence of time, without a mechanism for tolerance, or means of communication, you could privately experience a nightmare state for an eternity. More than once, the past few weeks, Paul had wondered—idly, without thinking past hypothesis—if books and movies he viewed as melodramatic might be accurately depicting what, since before his book tour, he now sometimes felt. They diagnosed themselves with “severely depleted serotonin levels,” caused by forty to eighty doses of MDMA the past three to five months. As Erin’s apartment brightened from the morning sun, through sixth-floor windows, they prepared to sleep. Erin stood at a window eating pink tablets that seemed huge—“disk-like,” thought Paul with a blanket covering all but his head.

  They looked at each other neutrally.

  “I feel like those aren’t good for you,” said Paul.

  Erin said a doctor had recommended them and Paul said something implying it was healthier to never listen to doctors.

  “How do you know it’s not good for me?”

  “You’ll become dependent, to some degree.”

  “No, I won’t, I rarely take it,” said Erin.

  “You’ll become dependent to a little degree, I’m just saying.”

  “Did you read about that somewhere?”

  “Not specifi
cally,” said Paul.

  “How do you know, then?”

  “Based on what I know, from things I’ve read and experienced, about tolerance, I think your body will be less able to produce something each time you use those.”

  “That’s not how everything works,” said Erin.

  “I’m not trying to argue with you, based on what I know,” said Paul, aware it was funny to qualify “I’m not trying to argue with you” with “based on what I know,” but not feeling humored. He was standing, around twenty minutes later—and had bought a ticket with his iPhone for a bus leaving in an hour—looking at Erin, sitting on her bed facing away. They were both crying a little. It was below freezing and gusty outside, but Paul declined Erin’s offer of a jacket and multiple offers to drive him to the bus stop—on an unsheltered bridge—and said bye and self-consciously left.

  • • •

  In early May, more than two months later, Paul was outside Bobst Library waiting for Peanut—to buy drugs for the next three days, when he and Erin would be in Pittsburgh, for a reading, then in Calvin’s mansion for two nights—when he saw Juan walking past and asked what he was doing. Juan said he was buying a Clif Bar and going to the gym and asked what Paul was doing.

  “I’m meeting someone to buy drugs.”

  “What drugs are you buying?”

  Peanut was approaching on the sidewalk.

  “I’ll tell you after, he’s there, he probably won’t want to see you,” said Paul remembering once when he and Erin got in Peanut’s car and Peanut became very still a few seconds before quietly saying “yo,” and that he’d expected one person.

  “I didn’t know you was a writer,” said Peanut.

  “Yeah,” said Paul.

  “What books you’ve written?”

  “Like five books,” said Paul.

  “A book’s a book,” said Peanut, and Paul got in his car. The middle-aged woman in the driver’s seat was wearing a baseball cap. Paul wasn’t sure if she’d worn it every other time or no other time. Paul asked if Peanut had mushrooms. “No,” said Peanut. “But I’m working on that for you.”

  “What else do you have on you?”

  “On me? I’ve got a bundle of dope.”

  Paul, walking toward Think Coffee, where Erin was working on writing, told Juan he bought Ketamine, MDMA, Xanax. Juan said when he tried Ketamine he felt like he could feel the solar system flying through space and that he had been on his bed and had pointed the top of his head in the same direction. Paul said he also bought heroin and Juan said he knew people when he was in high school (in Kansas, where he had been arrested for selling marijuana, Paul uncertainly knew) who used heroin and one had died.

  “What do you mean?” said Paul vaguely.

  “I think he died,” said Juan, and they slowed to a kind of loitering, as a policeman, behind them, walked past. They stood in place, then continued walking.

  “When did they die?”

  “I’m not really sure,” said Juan.

  “He died,” said Paul grinning. “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did he die?”

  “I don’t know. I just know he died.”

  In the morning, while driving, Paul listened to music through earphones and photographed Erin—asleep with her head, against the passenger window, cushioned by the fluffy, patchwork, faded blanket loosely wrapping all but her face, like an oversize astronaut suit with no visor—around ten times with his iPhone. In Baltimore a few days ago she had been drinking tequila alone while cleaning her apartment—she was moving into her father’s small house, in which a middle-aged couple rented a room—and later while driving had been stopped by the police. Her mother had screamed at her in an out-of-control manner—for the first time in six years—and her father, somewhat unexpectedly, had gone into “nice mode.” Paul remembered a night, eating dinner with Michelle in her mother’s house, when he had said he felt depressed. Michelle had gone upstairs silently—the house had thick, soft carpeting everywhere, even on the stairs, so that people sometimes appeared or disappeared without warning—and cried on her bed. Paul was surprised he’d forgotten that night, and emailed himself with his iPhone—

  Remembered being depressed at dinner w Michelle in empty house

  While driving to Pittsburgh w Erin asleep

  Typed on iPhone in Gmail w right hand

  Listening to P. S. Eliot

  Left hand on steering wheel

  —then vaguely remembered another time when he had remembered the same dinner and had also felt surprised that he’d forgotten.

  Paul and Erin were both upset—their default, while sober, at this point—when they arrived in Pittsburgh and each ingested 2mg Xanax. Paul, on a sidewalk outside Erin’s car, watched Calvin and Maggie, both grinning, as they approached and hid behind a dumpster, then walked to Paul, who had a depressed expression, which he didn’t attempt to hide or mollify.

  “Hi,” said Calvin after a few seconds.

  “We should go to Whole Foods,” said Paul.

  “Is there a Whole Foods here?” said Maggie.

  “Yes, I’ve been there like ten times,” said Paul peripherally aware of Erin exiting her car. “This is where my ex-girlfriend lived. Michelle.” He looked at Calvin and Maggie, unsure if they knew of Michelle. In Whole Foods he walked aimlessly at a quick, undeviating pace, with a sensation of haunting the location. He ladled clam chowder into the largest size soup container, chose a baguette, stood in line.

  • • •

  After the reading, which was on the second floor of a bar, Paul stood in a shadowy room, at a billiards table, eating his baguette and soup. He said “we should have an orgy tonight” to Calvin, who seemed hesitant but curious. Maggie entered the room and stood with them and Paul said “we should have an orgy tonight.”

  “Yeah, seems good,” said Maggie in an uncharacteristic monotone.

  “But we should film it,” said Paul.

  “No, I don’t know,” said Maggie with unfocused eyes.

  “Once we’re on MDMA we won’t care,” said Paul. “About anything.”

  “Maggie’s seventeen,” said Calvin grinning weakly.

  “That’s not underage. We can black out her face.”

  “I’m not doing that,” said Maggie.

  “It’s not worth doing at all if it’s not filmed,” said Paul.

  “I don’t want to be filmed,” said Maggie.

  “She doesn’t want to be filmed,” said Calvin.

  Erin entered the room and began playing catch with Maggie with a billiards ball. Paul sat on a stack of ten to fifteen chairs and continued eating his baguette and soup, feeling distantly like he was avoiding something that would eventually end his life, except it wasn’t avoidable and when it did end his life he wouldn’t know, because he wouldn’t know anything.

  “Should we switch cars, on the drive back?” said Calvin. “Like, Paul and Maggie in Maggie’s car, me and Erin in Erin’s car?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul.

  “Someone else decide, I’m going to my car to get my sandwich,” said Maggie, and went downstairs. Erin was cleaning a stain on the billiards table, it seemed, at the edge of Paul’s peripheral vision. Paul went downstairs, where he sat alone in a booth and texted Maggie, asking what kind of sandwich she was eating.

  At a red light, around half an hour later, Paul threw a clementine at Erin’s car, which was ahead. The light turned green and the clementine missed Erin’s moving car. Paul got back in Maggie’s car, said he wondered what Calvin and Erin were talking about. “I feel sleepy from the food and Percocet,” he said around ten minutes later.

  “I like sleeping when I’m cold rather than when I’m warm.”

  “Me too,” said Paul. “Are you going to be hungry tonight?”

  “Yeah,” said Maggie after a pause.

  “I kind of want to eat spaghetti,” said Paul, and laughed a little. “Or something.”

  “I’ll make spaghetti,”
said Maggie. “No, I don’t want to eat spaghetti,” said Paul. “Oh, I thought you wanted to eat spaghetti.”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul quickly, and a few minutes later Maggie said her brother turned 4 recently and would say things like “my three-year-old self hates cucumbers” but wouldn’t talk about his two-year-old or one-year-old self, which Maggie thought was interesting and wanted to ask why, but kept forgetting.

  At Calvin’s house everyone ingested more Percocet and Xanax and went in the basement, where Maggie and Calvin each ate a bowl of cereal and Paul, ignoring everyone, to a large degree, talked to Charles on Gmail chat, eventually eating three bowls of cereal. In bed, around 1:30 a.m., Erin asked what Paul and Charles had talked about.

  “Nothing,” said Paul automatically. “We just talked about feeling depressed.”

  “What else did you talk about?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Paul.

  “Try to,” said Erin.

  “You can just read it tomorrow.”

  “Can I read it now?”

  “Just read it tomorrow,” said Paul.

  “Why can’t I read it now?”

  “Okay,” said Paul, and opened his MacBook.

  He woke, on his back, to Calvin looking at him from the doorway. He asked if Calvin had used any drugs today. Calvin said he hadn’t, and they looked at each other.

  “You haven’t?” said Paul. “Today?”

  “Well, a Percocet, when I woke up.”

  “When you woke up,” said Paul in a monotone.

  “Oh yeah—your alarm is going off,” said Calvin to Erin. “That’s what I came here, to tell you.”

  “Oh, damn,” said Erin, and left the room.

  “Are . . . you and Erin . . . having problems?”

  “No,” said Paul, and laughed a little.

  Calvin appeared tired, slightly anxious.

  “I mean . . . no,” said Paul looking at the ceiling. “No.”