by Tao Lin
“You can’t overdose on mushrooms,” said Erin meekly.
“I forgot we used mushrooms,” said Paul in a curious voice, but didn’t consider the information and immediately forgot again. “I think I am where you were twenty minutes ago, so you need to console me,” he said while thinking “that’s exactly what I would tell a projection to do if I were dead.” He tried to fondly recall a memory of his life, of life generally—he would need to learn to be satisfied with his memories, which was all he had now—and said “kissing is good” and “remember Las Vegas?” He said “Taiwan was good” knowing it hadn’t been, aware he was openly trying to deceive himself, then thought of tracing back his life to determine what caused the sequence of events leading to his overdose. “The book tour . . . after the summer. Two trips to Taiwan. Remember Arby’s? In Florida?” He heard Erin say they never went to Florida and realized he was talking to himself while sustaining an imaginary companion and that he wasn’t saying what he was thinking. “Why do I keep thinking about RBIs, runs batted in? And something about Hank Aaron?” Paul believed again, at some point, that he was in the prolonged seconds before death, in which he had the opportunity to return to life—by discerning some code or pattern of connections in his memory, or remembering some of what had happened with a degree of chronology sufficient to re-enter the shape of his life, or sustaining a certain variety of memories in his consciousness long enough to be noticed as living and relocated accordingly. Lying on his back, on his mattress, he uncertainly thought he’d written books to tell people how to reach him, to describe the particular geography of the area of otherworld in which he’d been secluded.
Paul was on his back on his mattress thinking “faces are circles,” and of cutting a face into four parts, as his room slowly brightened with indirect sunlight. Erin held his hand and he stood and went with her to the window and focused on the metaphysical area where he anticipated hearing her voice, wanting to be surprised, or to hear something consoling—apportioned from himself to his projection, to ventriloquize back to himself—about death. Erin was pointing at the sky, asking if Paul saw “that thing”—a pale, logo-like silhouette of antennae, or leafless plant, rising from a sixth-floor roof ’s corner, foregrounding a pink sky. Paul said he did, and that it looked pretty, he felt like a sleepy child willingly distracted from worries about a lost pet by a mother pointing at a star saying “everything will be okay, just focus on the twinkling—that’s where we came from and where we’ll be again, no matter what happens here, yes, I promise.”
He held Erin’s hand and wandered somewhat aimlessly into the bathroom and picked up a tongue scraper. “You bought me this,” he said with dull, unfocused eyes. “I never used it. But I really appreciated it. I liked getting it. I never told you.” He put it down and disinterestedly thought “it’s not going to work,” as his hand idly turned a knob, and was surprised by the rupture and crackling of water, its instantaneous column of binary variations. He moved his hand into the water and was surprised again. “I didn’t expect that . . . to feel like that,” he said with a serious expression. “That’s really weird.” Realizing he had no concept of what water felt like until he touched it—cold, grasping, meticulous, aware—he felt self-conscious and said he wanted to pee alone. Sitting on the toilet, with the door closed, Paul realized he felt less discomfort and could breathe easier and that the surface of things was shinier and more dimensional from greater pixilation, all of which he viewed as evidence he was successfully convincing himself—through an increasingly elaborate, skillful, unconscious projection of a reality he would eventually believe he was exploring—that he wasn’t dead. With an eternity to practice, he realized, he would forget everything he had thought or felt while dead, including his current thoughts and feelings; he would only believe, as he once had, that he was alive.
He was startled, entering his room, to see Erin already moving, as if independent of his perception. He briefly discerned her movement as incremental—not continuous, but in frames per second—and, like with insects or large predators, unpredictable and dangerous. He wanted to move backward and close the door and be alone again, in the bathroom, but Erin had already noticed him and, after a pause, distracted by her attention, he reciprocated her approach. They hugged a little, near the center of the room, then he turned around and moved toward the kitchen—dimly aware of the existence of other places, on Earth, where he could go—and was surprised when he heard himself, looking at his feet stepping into black sandals, say that he felt “grateful to be alive.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor, Tim O’Connell, and my agent, Bill Clegg.