Tao Lin - Taipei

“Damn,” said Daniel looking away. “I don’t remember.”

At Verb they each ingested 10mg Adderall. Daniel removed from his tote bag a glass jar with a peanut butter label and, with a neutral expression, not looking at Paul, poured around 4oz of whiskey into his iced coffee. Paul asked what Daniel was going to do about his financial situation. Daniel said Mitch, a week ago, had mentioned hiring him to write promotional copy for his band but hadn’t mentioned it again. Paul suggested they shoplift things from Best Buy, or some other store, to sell on eBay.

Outside, walking steadily but aimlessly, they entered East River State Park and sat on grass, facing the river and Manhattan, which seemed to Paul like an enormous, unfinished cruise ship that had been disassembled and rearranged by thousands of disconnected organizations. They decided to sell books on the sidewalk, on Bedford Avenue, but continued sitting. Daniel began talking, a few minutes later, in a quiet, earnest voice about his lack of accomplishments in life, staring into the distance with a haunted, slightly puzzled expression, seeming at times like he might begin crying. Paul, grinning anxiously at Daniel’s right profile, unsure what to say, or do, shrugged more than once, thinking that tears would have a restorative effect on the seared dryness of Daniel’s eyes, which looked like they’d been baked at a low heat.

“What were we doing now?” said Paul leaving the park, around twenty minutes later.

Daniel looked distractedly in both directions after walking a few steps onto a street, then turned right on the sidewalk, staring ahead with a worried expression.

“We had a specific goal, I remember,” said Paul. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” said Daniel after a few seconds.

“We were just talking about it.”

“I remember something,” said Daniel absently.

“Oh yeah, selling books,” said Paul.

“Let’s do that,” said Daniel.

“We just actually forgot our purpose, then regained it,” said Paul grinning. “We still kept moving at the same speed, when we had no goal.”

“Jesus,” said Daniel quietly.

On the way to Paul’s room, to get books to sell, they went in a pizza restaurant, because Daniel was hungry. Paul, rereading old texts, saw one he didn’t recognize—“sorry, how was the party”—from Laura, more than a month ago, the morning after the Cinco de Mayo party. Between then and now, maybe two weeks ago, Paul had asked her in an email if she remembered referring to him as “my boyfriend,” the night they attended two parties on Ambien. She’d said no, but was sorry if she did, but was sure she didn’t, then later emailed to say her friends who’d been there confirmed she didn’t. Paul was staring through glass at a pigeon eating specks off the sidewalk when he noticed the approach of what he briefly, with some sarcasm, began to perceive as another pigeon, inside the restaurant, but was Daniel. “Um, so, my debit card, either from cutting so much blow or being maxed out, isn’t working,” he said in a quiet, controlled voice with an earnest expression. “Could I borrow $2.75 for a slice of pizza?”

“Yeah,” said Paul thinking he wasn’t going to mention the pigeon illusion. “I’ll add it to your tab.”

Daniel stood near the center of Paul’s room quietly saying that he felt “fucked” about his financial situation and generally, in terms of his life, then kneeled to a low table to organize two lines of cocaine with the last of what he had from Mitch’s bag. Paul, stomach-down on his mattress, asked what music he should play and clicked “Heartbeats” by the Knife. They both laughed a little and Paul clicked “Last Nite” by the Strokes and said it sounded too depressing. He clicked “Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service and said “just kidding.” He clicked “The Peter Criss Jazz” by Don Caballero. He clicked “pause.”

Daniel said to put The Postal Service back on and snorted half his line. Paul moved a rolled-up page of Shawn Olive’s poetry book in his right nostril toward the cocaine and exhaled a little after snorting half his line, causing the rest and some of Daniel’s to spread in a poof on the table. Daniel lightly berated Paul, who sort of rolled toward his mattress’s center, then — liking the feeling of unimpeded motion on a padded surface — moved his MacBook to the floor and lay in a diagonal on his back with his limbs spread out a little, which felt interesting because, he knew, it was probably the second or third time he’d lain on this mattress, while awake and alert and not impatient toward himself, without reading a book, looking at his MacBook, or aware of his MacBook’s screen.

At a certain age, he remembered, he had often lain motionless on carpet, or a sofa, feeling what he probably viewed, at the time, as boredom and what now seemed like ignorance of — or passive disbelief in — his forthcoming death, which would occur regardless of his thoughts, feelings, or actions in the unknown amount of remaining interim, upon a binary absorption from some incomprehensible direction, taking him elsewhere. Briefly, without much interest, Paul intuited that if he were immortal, or believed he was, he might feel what he’d felt as a child, which seemed less enjoyable than obscurely unsatisfying, something he’d want to be distracted from feeling. After a few minutes an out-of-view Daniel continued to say he felt depressed, but in a calmer voice that Paul felt was “soothing,” for him, to hear, from his bed.

They sat facing south at Bedford and North 1st with thirty to forty books on a rollout carpet and, in a few hours, sold around $25 of books and $60 of Paul’s Adderall, which he received monthly by mail at slightly-better-than-drug-dealer price from a graduate student at Boston College. Four fashionable black teenagers appeared and, Paul thought, “the leader,” who was much more interested than the others, asked if he could “sample” Charles’ book.

“I’ll take it,” he said after laughing loudly at something in the book, which included poetry and prose about alienation, boredom, science fiction, depression, confusion.

Daniel asked if the teenager liked Adderall.

“What is it?”

Daniel described it in a few sentences.

“So, it’s like ecstasy?”

“Sort of,” said Daniel. “But without the euphoria. It’s good for doing work. It helps you focus.”

The teenager asked if his friend was “in.”

“No,” said his friend. “But I’ll watch you do it.”

“Do you want your book signed? The author is here,” said Paul pointing at Daniel, who had been pretending he was Charles, with Charles’ approval gained by text.

Daniel wrote “best wishes, from Charles” in the book.

Charles’ six weeks in Mexico and Guatemala, related in emails and Gmail chats, traveling hostel to hostel, spending much of his time in internet cafés feeling alienated from Americans doing what he was doing, but in groups, had taken on the tone and focus, after two weeks, of a comedic sitcom, which he’d named Avoiding Jehan, because his primary concern, most days, was to avoid or endure or try to permanently escape a person named Jehan, who had repeatedly — almost always inadvertently, obliviously — thwarted Charles’ few romantic prospects and, in social situations, caused Charles to become “the third wheel” or “the fifth wheel.” In one email Charles had wished Jehan would “become invisible.” After getting stalled in Guatemala, on the way to South America, two weeks ago, Charles had returned cashless to his girlfriend and Seattle, where they now shared “a smaller, shittier apartment,” he said, than when he left America, around two months ago.

The sky had begun to colorfully darken, a few hours later, with reds and purples and pinks that drifted away, like cotton candy, from an unseen horizon, as if something there was changing and releasing energy, when an Asian girl, who had slowed and passed a minute ago while talking into an iPhone, returned and said she recognized Paul from the internet and distractedly asked if Daniel was a cop.