by Tao Lin
“Yeah. I’m okay with everything if you are.”
“I am,” said Erin.
“I feel nauseated,” said Paul a few minutes later. “But I’m okay with everything. If I’m not talking it’s because I’m nauseated.”
“Okay,” said Erin. “Thank you for telling me.”
In the large deli below Harry’s apartment Paul walked away, at one point, from everyone else and, alone in an aisle, turned into a barrier-like display of heavily discounted tomato sauce. None fell, or seemed to have been disturbed, or affected, to any degree, and no one saw. After buying beer, fennel, celery, a plastic bag of apples, three lemons and walking six blocks Paul and Erin sat on a sidewalk waiting for Calvin and Maggie to get their sleeping bags from where they’d been staying.
“You’re really quiet suddenly,” said Erin.
“I’m really nauseated,” said Paul, and rested the weight of his head facedown on his open palms, covering his eyes and cheeks and forehead. It began raining lightly, in a mist, as if onto produce, or probably an air conditioner was dripping condensation. Paul weakly tried to remember what month it was, stopping after a few seconds, and moved his shoulders to indicate he didn’t want to be touched when Erin began rubbing his back.
Maggie was in the bathroom and Paul was sitting cross-legged on his mattress, around half an hour later, absently reading descriptions of mutants on X-Men: First Class’s Wikipedia page—“scientist who is transformed into a frightening-looking mutant in an effort to cure himself, but is kind at heart”—when Calvin asked if “anyone” wanted to sit with him on the front stoop while he smoked.
“Me. I will,” said Erin, who had been drying her hair with a towel after showering, and Paul saw her looking at herself in the wall mirror. He clicked “Kevin Bacon” and looked at the words “Kevin Bacon (disambiguation)” without thinking anything for a vague amount of time, until Maggie entered the room, when he stood and went in the bathroom and heard Erin say “actually, I’ll have a beer” and Calvin say “really?” and “cool.” The thick carpet of the bathmat, folded like a soft taco, was in the bathtub, sopping and heavy. Paul thought with some confusion that Maggie must’ve put it there, maybe for slippage prevention. While showering he thought about what he’d done during the filming, last year, August to December, of X-Men: First Class: hid in his room, gone on a book tour, gotten married, visited his parents. He entered his room wearing boxer shorts—Maggie was sitting in a far corner looking at her MacBook with a serious expression—and turned around and put on a shirt, sat on his mattress, placed his MacBook on his lap, stared at the words “Bacon in 2007” with slightly unfocused eyes. Maggie said she had a stomachache and moved onto the mattress asking if Paul wanted beer, which she held toward him and which he mutely held a few seconds before moving it near Maggie, who drank some and put it on the floor and resettled herself on the mattress with the sides of their knees touching.
“Calvin and Erin have been gone so long,” said Paul.
“Maybe they’re watching the sunrise,” said Maggie.
“I don’t think you can see it from here.”
“Maybe they went somewhere.”
“I don’t think you can see it from anywhere near here.”
“I don’t know where they are,” said Maggie.
“Do you feel depressed still?”
“Yeah,” said Maggie.
“Because of you and Calvin?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you end the relationship or him?”
“It was me,” said Maggie. “He didn’t want it to end.” She said she felt depressed because she’d been really close with Calvin, so now something in her life felt missing. Paul asked about the singer, of a punk band he listened to often in high school, who had kissed Maggie, she’d said in an email, in someone’s car after a concert. Maggie said the singer didn’t want to bring her in his hotel room because his friends would think it was weird she was 17 and that he wanted to perform oral sex on her but she didn’t want that and he’d said they could “get naked but not have sex” and Maggie had said she didn’t know what that meant. Then the singer had told intimate secrets about his ex-girlfriend. Paul had idly opened iMovie on his MacBook and they’d been absently looking at it, not recording, as they talked and he accidentally clicked—and quickly closed—one of the movies.
“That might be porn. Erin and I made a porn.”
“What’s that?” said Maggie pointing at “ketamine.”
“A drug we used before going to Urban Outfitters.”
“It seems like you and Erin have a lot of fun together. Is that true?”
Paul said they saw each other once every ten days and usually started “fighting” after one or two days. Maggie asked what they fought about. Paul vaguely remembered when, on a large dose of Xanax, alone one night in his room, he fell on his way to his mattress to sleep—pulling down his high chair and causing his shoulder, he discovered upon waking eleven hours later, to bleed heavily from two places into a dark pile on his mattress—only slightly aware that this was unrelated to Maggie’s question. Paul remembered when he calculated three divided by two as three-fourths regarding an amount of heroin and vomited steadily eight to ten hours, beginning around noon. He and Erin, who’d been resilient, maybe from weeks of Percocet after her car accident, had snorted the miscalculated heroin upon waking and, after riding the L train, he’d begun vomiting—near Union Square on streets and sidewalks, in Pure Food and Wine’s bathroom, while walking thirteen blocks south, in Bobst Library’s bathrooms. When they left the library at night he stopped every ten to fifteen feet to vomit nothing and Erin began expressing a previously suppressed concern, insisting Paul drink water. Paul vomited repeatedly after each sip and sat—and, at one point, briefly, lay—on the sidewalk outside a New York University dorm by Washington Square Park, inaudibly mumbling that he was okay and, when Erin said she wanted to call an ambulance, barely perceptibly shaking his head no with a sensation of reluctantly imparting an ancient wisdom. In his room, an hour later, around 9:30 p.m., Erin wanted Paul, covered by his blanket on his mattress, to drink a glass of water and didn’t think he should be lying with eyes closed because people in his situation died by sleeping. After an increasingly tense exchange culminating with Paul “sarcastically,” he thought, chugging the large glass of water—in a display of functioning that probably seemed unlike that of a dying person—Erin, to some degree spitefully, Paul felt, had said she was driving home to Baltimore and, to Paul’s surprise, had left him to sleep alone.
“Just . . . things,” said Paul, and laughed a little.
Maggie was staring at his MacBook’s screen.
“Different things,” said Paul.
“I’m just curious,” said Maggie in a frustrated voice.
“I know,” said Paul staring at the cursor on the screen, repeatedly disappearing and reappearing in the same place.
“Can I watch some of a movie?”
“Yeah,” said Paul. “Which one?”
“Your favorite one. Not the porn.”
Paul clicked a ninety-two-minute movie beginning in his parents’ apartment, when he and Erin had returned for ecstasy because he’d vomited his MDMA. Paul’s mother was talking about the Flip cam she’d bought for Paul’s birthday. Paul clicked near the end of the movie. Erin was describing, in “the voice,” which they hadn’t used in months, how salmonella was harvested, in the residential area behind McDonald’s. In the movie Paul said something inaudible and Erin said “Android? You’re bringing Android into this? Amateur.” Paul clicked elsewhere and the movie showed solid black as Erin said “and here we have the brainchild, really, of this whole operation.” When Paul described his time in Taiwan as “hellish,” a month or two ago, Erin had been surprised, because she’d enjoyed Taiwan, which had surprised Paul, who had cited “overdrive” and their excessive drug use before the trip as why it had, for him, been “hellish.” Descending to McDonald’s first floor, in the movie, Erin looked different tha
n she did now, Paul thought, and for maybe the eighth time in the past month considered that she had subtly denser bones or unseen scar tissue now that her face had fully healed. Paul stopped the movie and the vanished image, of Erin and the Christmas tree, reappeared instantly in his memory, looking similar, being already memory-like, on the screen, from low resolution. Taipei seemed gothic and lunar, in the movies of that night, with the spare activity and structural density of a fully colonized moon that had been abandoned and was being recolonized; its science-fictional qualities seemed less advanced than ancient, haunted, of a future dark age.
Maggie was showing Paul emails from the punk singer, after showing him writing she’d emailed to a magazine, when Erin and Calvin returned. Calvin asked what they were looking at and Maggie, closing her MacBook, said she was showing Paul writing she’d emailed to a magazine.
“You guys are still awake?” said Erin. “What have you guys been doing?”
“What were you guys doing?” said Paul in a quiet monotone, mentally stressing “you.” Erin went in the bathroom and Paul heard the sink turn on and, when she exited, asked if she had smoked cigarettes. She said Calvin had but she hadn’t. Paul removed his contact lenses and washed his face, and said he was going to sleep and lay facing away from Erin, who asked if he’d set his alarm. Paul said he’d set it for 2:30 p.m. (they’d agreed to be extras, in the movie Calvin and Maggie were in, tomorrow at 4:30 p.m.) and Erin asked if he was upset about something.
“No, I want to sleep. I’m putting earplugs in.”
“If you’re upset, tell me now instead of later.”
“I want to sleep,” said Paul.
“You seem upset. Can you tell me why?”
Calvin and Maggie were unrolling their sleeping bags. Paul turned toward Erin, whose expression he couldn’t see without contact lenses, and loudly whispered “I feel upset you went outside for so long without talking to me first and that you kept asking me if I was okay when I told you I felt nauseated and that you keep asking me if I’m upset after I said I wasn’t” and turned away.
“So you are upset,” said Erin after a few seconds.
“I’m nauseated and want to sleep. I’m putting in earplugs.”
Erin put an arm around him, and he stood and turned off the room’s light and lay facing away. After a few minutes Erin squished an arm under his neck, wrapping it around his chest to hug him tightly with both arms. Paul thought of the monk-fish he’d shown her—the light-absorbing mass of it, a silhouette of itself, Wikipedia’s stock image for monkfish—and felt emotional, and committed to not moving, then woke to his alarm. He kept his eyes closed, feigning sleep. He could faintly hear Maggie saying his name. “Paul, your alarm,” said Maggie louder, and touched his arm.
He turned off the alarm and covered his head with his blanket, feeling tense and uncomfortable. He removed his earplugs, went in the bathroom, showered and moved quickly to his MacBook and looked at the internet sitting cross-legged on his bed, facing away from Erin, who was waking, it seemed. Paul could feel his left eyebrow twitching. Erin, after a few minutes, sat and said “has everyone showered?” in a voice that sounded loud and sleepy, as if contented. Paul, who felt an excruciating dread of being spoken to or looked at, was startled by how Erin was calmly, unself-consciously, nonchalantly directing attention toward herself. Paul emailed Erin while she showered and, after she blow-dried her hair, Calvin and Maggie left, saying they’d see Paul and Erin in an hour. Erin sat at the foot of the bed, facing away from Paul who lay on his back with his MacBook against his thighs, and they communicated by email (they’d agreed to type, not talk, whenever one of them, currently Paul, felt unable to speak in a friendly tone) for around fifty minutes, until Erin said “it seems like you don’t care about me” aloud.
“I don’t,” said Paul. “I don’t right now.”
“It seems that way.”
“I know. I don’t care right now.”
They were quiet a few seconds.
“I’m going to Think Coffee,” said Erin, and went in the bathroom, then back in Paul’s room, then into the kitchen and out of the apartment. Paul slept three hours, then texted “how’s Think Coffee.” Erin responded she’d been wandering aimlessly on Xanax and hadn’t gotten there yet. Paul rode the L train to Union Square and walked toward the library, ten blocks south, to meet Erin for dinner, beneath a membranous and vaguely patterned sky like a faded, inconsistently worn red-and-blue blanket lit from the other side.
If it were a blanket, Paul thought, beneath which existed only his imagination, he wouldn’t want to throw it off and be obliterated by the brightness of a child’s bedroom in daytime, or even peek outside, letting in the substrate of another world. Realizing this, as a medium dose of Xanax began taking effect, he felt a kind of safety in being where he was—inside the confines of what, to him, was everything—instead of “out there.”
In Paul’s room, around 3:30 a.m., after ordering a lot of food at Lodge but eating only a little and talking calmly, then working on things a few hours on Adderall, they decided to eat psilocybin mushrooms Paul had bought a few weeks ago from Peanut. The light was off and they were on Paul’s mattress, forty minutes later, when Paul began asking what Erin, who seemed reluctant to answer, was thinking. She stood and turned on the light and asked where the “bag” of mushrooms was and, because she thought she was feeling it more than Paul, fed him the remaining amount and turned off the light.
“We’re choosing to not talk, which itself is a communication, which seems good,” thought Paul holding Erin. “I’ll continue communicating in this manner, by not.” His steady, controlled petting of one of Erin’s vertebra with the cuticle of his right index finger gradually felt like his only method of remaining in concrete reality, where he and Erin, and other people, shared a world. Sometimes, forgetting what he was doing, his finger would slow or stop and he would become aware of a drifting sensation and realize he was being absorbed—from an indiscernible distance, beyond which he wouldn’t know how to return—and, with some urgency, move his body or open his eyes, seeing grid-like overlays on the walls and holograms of graph paper in the air, to interrupt his being taken. The effort became gradually smaller and more unconscious and, as if for something to do, in place of what was now automatic, Paul began to discern his rhythmic petting as a continuous striving to elicit certain information from Erin by responding or not responding to her rhythms, in a cycle whose goal was to produce momentary equilibriums. He felt increasingly attuned to the speed and quality of her breathing and heart rate, until he felt able to instantly discern changes in her physiology, which in entirety began to seem like an inconstant unit of unique, irreducible information (an ever-changing display of only prime numbers) that was continuously expressed and that bypassed the parts of them that allowed for deliberation or perception or intuition, beginning and ending in the only place where they were exactly together, undifferentiated and unknowable, but couldn’t, in their present form, ever reach, like a thing communicating directly with itself, rendering them both irrelevant.
Paul began to sometimes laugh uncontrollably, with his face at the back of Erin’s neck, unsure what was funny. When he saw her frowning, a few minutes later, she burrowed her head against his chest and he said “what are you thinking about?” and she didn’t answer and, in an increasingly incredulous voice, like he mostly wanted to express how amazingly difficult it was to know—sometimes pausing after each word for emphasis—he repeatedly stated the question. “This isn’t what I expected at all,” he heard himself say, at some point, without knowing what he was referencing. He’d obviously wanted something good to happen, but what was happening wasn’t expected, based on what he’d said, therefore it must be bad. He was yawning, so was factually bored of Erin. “I feel like I can’t breathe,” he said, and suddenly stood and felt confused and unreal. He repeatedly fell onto his mattress, which every time seemed much less substantial than expected, dropping his body with increasing force and desperation, t
hen lay on his back, unsatisfied and worried. “Sleeping, waking,” he said frustratedly. “Is there a difference? Am I dead?”
“You’re not dead,” said Erin.
“I think I’m dead,” said Paul distractedly, and covered his face with a blanket. He was thinking of how people say that when you die you experience your last moments for an eternity, when Erin yanked away the blanket and began tickling him and pulling him from the mattress as he giggled and intensely struggled, with confusion and frustration, to hide beneath the blanket. After succeeding, facedown with Erin sitting on his back, he seemed, while hidden, to not be thinking anything, then when he absently shifted to expose his face, to breathe, he believed he was insane. He asked if he was and Erin said no, which proved he was, because if he were he would ask and Erin would say he was not. He would never be sane, now that he was insane, he knew, then moved directly past that conclusion—unable to stop there, or anywhere—and believed again that he was dead and remembered hearing the word “bag” and thought of heroin and said “did we overdose?” He realized he would be alone if he was dead, even if Erin had also died—death would seal them into their own private afterlives—and, in idle correction, quietly said “did I overdose?”
“I just have to deal with it,” he said in reference to being permanently alone, with only his weak projections of Erin and his room—requiring an amount of effort to sustain that was immense and debilitating, which was probably why, he realized, he couldn’t sate his breath, feel comfortable, think coherently—to occupy himself forever. “It’s okay,” he said, to begin some process of consolation, but felt only more despair and a panicked suspicion that he’d barely comprehended the terribleness of his situation. “This will go on for twenty years,” he said vaguely, and stood and slapped his thighs with both hands, then held the bathroom door’s frame with his arms in a V and his head hung down and repeatedly said “oh my god” while thinking “I can’t believe I OD’d” and failing to view his death—the horrible, inexcusable mistake of it—as interestingly absurd or blackly comic or anything except profoundly troubling. He fell facedown on a mound of blankets and pillows and rolled onto his back, suddenly contemplative. “I don’t remember that at all,” he said of the months, or years, when their drug use increased and they began injecting heroin, crudely visualizing a stereotypical montage of downward-spiraling drug use. “I don’t remember . . . that. But it must have happened . . . I just can’t believe I overdosed.”