Tao Lin - Taipei

“What we normally do. Walk around. Fix my computer.”

“I feel. . sleepy,” said Paul.

Daniel said something about Adderall.

“I feel like I’ll still be sleepy,” said Paul.

“You’ll be awake, trust me.”

“I’m not sure if I want to.”

“I feel like you’re eight years old or my girlfriend,” said Daniel around five minutes later.

“I really don’t know what I want to do,” said Paul grinning.

An hour later, after each showering at his own apartment, they met and ingested Adderall and walked to Verb, a café without internet, where they drank iced coffee and ingested a little more Adderall, then went in an adjacent bookstore, where Daniel showed Paul a translated book of nonfiction with a similar cover — off-center black dot, white background — as Shawn Olive’s poetry book.

“That’s funny,” said Paul grinning, and they got on the L train, then walked to the Apple store on Prince Street. Daniel’s MacBook, which had files he needed for his job as a research assistant to an elderly ghostwriter (of sports autobiographies) who owed him $200, would require two weeks to be fixed. Daniel asked if Paul would go with him to Rhode Island, in three hours, to stay with Fran’s family for a weekend. Paul declined, saying he hadn’t been invited. Daniel said he confirmed last week but didn’t want to go anymore and that, a few minutes ago, Fran texted she couldn’t, against expectation, get any Oxycodone — without which it was going to be “unbearable,” Daniel felt, for both himself and Fran, to be around Fran’s family. Paul declined again, saying it seemed stressful. It began raining from a partly sunny sky, and they went in an Urban Outfitters. Daniel walked to a table of books and stood without looking at anything, like a tired child waiting for an overbearingly upbeat mother to finish shopping.

“You seem worried,” said Paul.

“Sorry. I’m trying to think of an excuse to tell Fran.”

It was sunny and cloudless, around twenty minutes later, when they sat side by side on a bench in Washington Square Park. Daniel swallowed something and mutely handed Paul a 20mg Adderall, which Paul swallowed. Two preadolescent girls ran around the fountain area repeatedly. Paul said he felt like he hadn’t run as fast as possible in probably five or ten years. When the Adderall took effect Daniel began to praise Paul’s writing without restraint or pause for twenty to thirty minutes and asked about Paul’s IQ. Paul said it was either 139 or 154. Daniel was quiet a few seconds, then with a slightly troubled expression said his IQ was higher, seeming like he felt more complicatedly doomed, as a person, with this information. Paul said his mother always said that his and his brother’s IQs were exactly the same, but sometimes also said she was required, as a parent, to say that.

Daniel said his sister had multiple doctorates, his parents and aunts and uncles were all high-level professors, but he was “not anything.” Paul knew from previous conversations that Daniel, as a teenager, had been on months-long retreats to Buddhist monasteries, culminating in something like a year alone, when he turned 18, in India or Tibet. Daniel walked away to call Fran and Paul read a text from Laura asking if he wanted to see Trash Humpers tonight. Paul texted he already saw it, and they made plans to record a song in his room in two hours. Daniel returned and said he told Fran his computer had to be fixed today, or not for two weeks, and he needed it to do work, because he hadn’t paid last month’s rent, so wasn’t going to Rhode Island, and that “she got really angry.”

“I feel like you did the right thing. . I mean. . outside of being honest,” said Paul grinning. “Your relationship with her is more accurate now.”

“Your use of the word ‘accurate’ is interesting.”

“She has a more accurate view of your view of her now probably,” said Paul.

Laura arrived with Walter, whom Paul hadn’t expected, two hours late and reacted to Paul’s agitation, as they walked from the bronze gate to the house, with resentment and dismissiveness, then became a little apologetic in Paul’s room, showing him texts she’d sent to Walter telling him to hurry.

“You can’t blame me,” said Walter, and chuckled. “I don’t even know why I’m here. You suddenly just started texting me to drive you here.”

“Now everyone is turning against me,” said Laura smiling nervously, not looking at anyone. Paul asked Walter if it was true, as he’d thought he’d read on Gawker, that Detroit, where Walter was from, only had seven grocery stores. Walter laughed quietly and said that wasn’t true and that Detroit was comparable, he felt, to Ann Arbor maybe. Paul said he was going to Ann Arbor in September, for his book tour, and asked what size it was, and was peripherally aware of Laura turning away, like she’d observed the interaction and concluded something, as she said “now you’re going to ask Walter a lot of questions.”

“It’s like Berkeley,” said Walter.

“It’s that big?” said Paul in a dreamy voice, and moved, vaguely for privacy, from the mattress to the floor, where he texted Daniel and ingested a Klonopin, weakly thinking “it won’t begin working until I won’t need it as much anymore.” Walter and Laura, who had brought a tambourine and a shaker, talked idly, a few feet from Paul, who thought Walter’s grumpiness after leaving Kyle and Gabby’s party, when he’d wielded a Red Bull Soda, now seemed endearing. Paul noticed Laura looking at his pile of construction paper and said she could have some if she wanted, and she focused self-consciously on wanting some, saying how she would use it and what colors she liked, seeming appreciative in an affectedly sincere manner — the genuine sincerity of a person who doesn’t trust her natural behavior to appear sincere. Paul went outside and opened the bronze gate and laughed a little when Daniel said he should “grow an enormous afro without any warning” for his next author photo and they sat on the front stoop. The late-afternoon sky, in Paul’s peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes — of nature’s vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself — than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block. Walter exited the house and mentioned a party in Chelsea and left. Laura exited a few minutes later, meekly holding her tambourine and shaker and some construction paper. “I see you ‘got in on’ the construction paper,” said Paul in the sarcastic, playful voice he’d used to recommend Funyuns the night they met, but with a serious expression. “Good choices, in terms of colors. Good job.”

“You said I could have some,” said Laura hesitantly.

“I know,” said Paul. “I’m glad you got some.”

“Well, I’m going home now,” said Laura with a shy expression, not looking at anyone.

At a party that night Paul met Taryn, a friend of Caroline and Shawn Olive’s, and became gradually — almost unnoticeably — intrigued by their interactions. They rarely talked and never touched but remained, for some reason, near each other, as if one was the other’s manager or personal assistant, but neither knew their role and could only study the other for clues, which they seemed to do, gazing at each other anthropomorphically, for seconds at a time, surprisingly without awkwardness, then she seemed to disappear and was quickly forgotten. Paul sat with strangers on a crowded staircase and drank a beer while looking at his phone, sometimes staring at its screen for ten to twenty seconds without thinking anything, before maneuvering through a crowded hallway into a medium-size room. Around twenty-five people were dancing to loud music with faces that seemed expressive in an emotionless, hidden, bone-ward manner — the faces of people with the ability to stop clutching the objects of themselves and allow their brains, like independent universes with unique and inconstant natural laws, to react, like trees to wind, with their bodies to music.