Tao Lin - Taipei

“The only person I’ve told is my friend Jennika.”

“You said I was the only person you’ve told.”

“I know,” said Erin. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Did you forget? Yesterday?”

“No, I knew. I was nervous — I thought I was talking too much.”

“But I was asking you about it.”

“I thought I was boring you.”

“You weren’t,” said Paul. “At all.”

“I just wanted to, like, ‘move on.’ ”

“Don’t do that. If I ask something I really want to know.”

“I know. I don’t want to do that.”

“You lied. . to me,” said Paul, and felt dramatic and self-conscious. “Wait, let me think. I’m thinking if I were you. . if I would lie about that. I think. . yeah, I would, if I didn’t want to talk about it.” He would if he didn’t anticipate becoming close to the other person, or talking to them again. “I understand, I think.” He imagined Erin’s inattentive, half-hearted view of him as “vaguely, unsatisfactorily desirable,” like how he viewed most people. “I would lie, like that, in that situation. Are you sure you haven’t written it somewhere? Like on your blog maybe?”

“I’m really sure. I’m ninety percent sure.”

“Only ninety percent? That’s, like, ‘unsure,’ I feel.”

“I’m really sure. I’m ninety-five percent sure.”

“You can tell—”

“Paul,” said Erin, and grasped his forearm. They stopped walking. More aware of Erin’s perspective, looking at his face (and not knowing what expression she saw or what he wanted to express), than of his own, Paul didn’t know what to do, so went “afk,” he felt, and remained there — away from the keyboard of the screen of his face — as Erin, looking at the inanimate object of his head, said “if I did I would tell you” and, emphatically, “I’m not lying to you right now.”

“Okay,” said Paul, and they continued walking.

Sprinklers could be heard in the distance.

“I believe you,” said Paul.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I haven’t not believed you. I was just saying. . maybe you got the idea or something similar to it from somewhere else, like a children’s book we’ve both read, but we forgot about it, or something like that.”

“I don’t think I did,” said Erin.

“I feel like I do that a lot.”

“Maybe,” said Erin quietly.

Around 1:30 a.m., after Cristine and Sally had left, Paul and Erin were walking in downtown Cleveland trying to find any open restaurant when they entered a hotel through an “employees only” door and ascended on an escalator and walked through dark corridors into an auditorium-like area, encountering no people. Paul imagined the building omni-directionally expanding at a rate exceeding their maximum running speed, so that this goalless, enjoyably calm exploration of a temperature-controlled, tritely uncanny interior would replace his life, with its book tour and Gmail and, he thought after a few seconds, “food.” Would he agree to that? “Yes,” he thought “meaninglessly,” he knew, because he’d still be inside himself, the only place he’d ever be, that he could imagine, though maybe he didn’t know — not knowing seemed more likely.

At a Denny’s near the airport Paul ordered a steak and minestrone soup. Erin ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and cheese sticks. They shared a 30mg Adderall and drove to the airport, listening to a ’90s station, both immediately recognizing Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” whose lyrics, to a degree that Paul couldn’t stop grinning, seemed to be a near-unbroken series of borderline non sequitur clichés. Erin had a public-speaking class in Baltimore, eight hours away, in nine and a half hours. At the airport Paul left eight psilocybin chocolates with Erin, who said she would bring them to his reading in Manhattan in four weeks, if not earlier. They hugged tightly, and Paul, whose flight to Minnesota was in four hours, said he wished they had more time to listen to ’90s songs together and that he “had a lot of fun,” with Erin, the past few days.

The next three days they texted regularly and, Paul felt, with equal attentiveness. Paul texted a photo of a display in the Mall of America of books titled I Can Make You Confident and I Can Make You Sleep with the author grinning on each cover. Erin texted a blurry photo of what seemed to be a headless mannequin wearing a white dress and said she was in Las Vegas at a cousin’s wedding. Then she texted less, and with less attention, and one night didn’t respond to a photo Paul sent from a café in Chicago, where he was staying for four days, of a Back to the Future poster—

He was never in time

for his classes. .

He wasn’t in time

for his dinner. .

Then one day. .

he wasn’t in his

time at all.

— until morning, when she texted “lol” and that she’d been asleep, but she didn’t reciprocate a photo, or ask a question, so they stopped texting. Paul sensed she was busy with college and maybe one or more vague relationships, but allowed himself to become “obsessed,” to some degree, with her, anyway, reading all four years of her Facebook wall and, in one of Chicago’s Whole Foods, one night looking at probably fifteen hundred of her friends’ photos to find any she might’ve untagged.

In a café in Ann Arbor around 10:30 p.m., two days later, Paul realized, when he remembered Erin’s existence by seeing her name in Gmail, he’d forgotten about her that entire day (over the next three weeks, whenever more than two or three days passed since they last communicated, which they did by email, every five to ten days, in a thread Erin began the day she dropped him off at the airport, Paul would have a similar realization of having forgotten about her for an amount of time). Around midnight he drove his rental car to a row of fast-food restaurants near the airport and slept in a McDonald’s parking lot. When he woke, around 2:45 a.m., he bought and ate a Filet-O-Fish from the McDonald’s drive-thru. While trying to discern what, from which fast-food restaurant, to buy and eat next, he idly imagined himself for more than ten minutes as the botched clone of himself, parked outside the mansion of the scientist who the original Paul paid to clone himself and paid again to “destroy all information” regarding “[censored].” He drove across the street to a Checkers drive-thru and bought two apple pies, which he ate with little to no pleasure, almost unconsciously, while distractedly considering how once a bite of it was in his mouth, then chewed once or twice, there seemed to be no choice, at that point, but to swallow. He slept three hours, drove past McDonald’s and Arby’s, returned the rental car, rode a van as the only passenger to the airport, boarded the earliest flight to Boston.

Around two weeks later, in early October, he stayed for eight days in San Francisco in his own room, on the second floor of a house, which Daniel’s ex-girlfriend and exgirlfriend’s sister shared. An employee at Twitter invited him to its headquarters, where he ate from two different buffets. Daniel’s ex-girlfriend’s sister’s boyfriend sold him MDMA and mushrooms, which he ate a medium-large dose of before his reading at the Booksmith, which was livestreamed on the internet. His publisher left him a voice mail the next afternoon, asking him to call them to discuss “some problems.” He emailed them late that night apologizing for missing their call and said he was available by email. He met someone from Facebook and ingested LSD, which she declined, before watching Dave Eggers interview Judd Apatow for almost two hours in an auditorium. On her full-size mattress, three hours after the interview, they watched a forty-minute DVD of a Rube Goldberg machine and kissed a few minutes, then Paul “fingered” her and, after seeming to orgasm, she rolled over and slept.