Tao Lin - Taipei

Without full awareness of what he’d begun to think Paul deliberately stopped thinking and texted: “Yes. Would like if you come, see you tomorrow hopefully.” He called his publisher at 3:04 a.m., leaving a voice mail saying he understood what they probably wanted to say, that he was sorry and wouldn’t do it again — vaguely he remembered that they had, at some point, told him they disapproved of him using mushrooms at a reading — and was available by email, then slept.

Paul was in Bobst Library around 3:30 p.m. and had just ingested a capsule of MDMA when Erin texted that she was around fifty minutes away. Paul walked ten blocks to the bookstore and sat on a tiny bench in the fiction section and tweeted and looked at his Gmail account. Erin texted she was in the store and had eaten a chocolate. Paul was surprised she was with a male friend, whom she introduced as a former coworker named Gary, who lived in Brooklyn.

“He’s gay,” said Erin, and gave Paul a chocolate, which he chewed into a gluey paste and swallowed with lemon water from the bookstore’s café. After the reading Paul, Erin, and Gary walked to a bar for someone’s 33rd birthday. Gary left after around ten minutes and Erin said he had whispered in her ear that he felt sad and wanted to talk. “I told him I couldn’t now, I’m on mushrooms,” said Erin. “Then he asked me for mushrooms. I said I didn’t have any and he probably shouldn’t have them now anyway and I’d call him tomorrow.”

Around three hours later Paul and Erin were stomach-down on Paul’s mattress watching YouTube videos of people answering the same questions sober and on hallucinogens. Paul, who kept clicking new videos, was amused by how he seemed to be comfortably and energetically, with only a little self-consciousness, “having fun,” he kept thinking, in contrast to Erin, who seemed shy in a tired, depressed, distracted manner indicating to Paul that she was maybe thinking about someone else, probably Beau, whom she would probably rather be with, at the moment, instead of Paul, who felt intrigued — and further amused — why he was not affected by this information, which normally would make it impossible for him to enjoy anything. They slept without touching, woke in the afternoon, drove to Manhattan, where they separately “worked on things” (Paul in the library, Erin in a Starbucks) until 9:30 p.m., when they ate chocolates and watched a Woody Allen movie, which ended after midnight, on October 15, Erin’s 25th birthday. Paul said he wanted to buy her an expensive dinner and they went in an Italian restaurant that seemed moderately expensive, sat in a corner booth, ordered medium-rare steaks and a shrimp appetizer. Erin asked if she should answer a call from Beau, who’d been calling and texting all night, she said.

“If you want, yeah,” said Paul looking down a little.

Erin spoke to Beau in a jarringly, briefly absurdly different voice — one of impatient, dominating aggression — than Paul (who recognized the voice as similar to how he spoke, as a child, to his mother) had ever heard her use and which increased his interest in her, knowing she was capable of what to Paul was her opposite. After around fifty seconds, at a moment when she had the opportunity, Paul felt, based on hearing her side of what sounded like a mutual voicing of vague aggravation, to tactfully end the call and unambiguously convey she viewed their relationship as finished, Erin instead prolonged the call by speaking angrily, with sudden emotion indicating she wasn’t indifferent. Paul felt dizzy with the realization, as Erin continued talking in a manner like she’d forgotten his presence, that his view of her was uncontrollably changing, that parts of him were earnestly, if dramatically, no longer viewing her as a romantic possibility. He intuited a hidden intimacy in Erin and Beau’s hostility, a psychic collaboration — unconscious, or maybe conscious for one of them — assembling the structures, located days or weeks from now, where they would meet again to apologize and forgive and, while rescinding their insults, encouraged by the grammar and syntax and psychology of contrasts, near-automatically convey adoration, gratitude, compliments. Was this how people sustained relationships and sanity? By uninhibitedly expressing resentment to unconsciously contrast an amount of future indifference into affection? With quickly metabolized disappointment and a brief, vague, almost feigned restructuring of the mirage-like pile of miscellaneous items of his life Paul acclimated himself to this new reality, in which he would talk to Erin less and never with full attention, always distracted by, if not someone else, the ever-present silhouette of a possible someone else. Erin somewhat abruptly ended the call and asked if it had been entertaining, or interesting, or at least not too boring.

“I was really interested.”

“It was okay? Not boring?”

“No. I felt high levels of interest.”

“Oh,” said Erin. “Good.”

“I was surprised. You sounded angry.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “I was angry.”

“There was one part. . when you started fighting more, instead of stopping, I felt, like, afraid,” said Paul, and Erin said she knew what part he was referencing and that she had specifically considered if he would be entertained, or not, and had felt uncertain. As a waiter served their medium-rare steaks and, on multicolored rice, cooked into fetal positions, eight medium-large shrimp, Paul realized with some confusion that he might have overreacted. Staring at the herbed butter, flecked and large as a soap sample, on his steak, he was unsure what, if he had overreacted, had been the cause. It occurred to him that, in the past, in college, he would have later analyzed this, in bed, with eyes closed, studying the chronology of images — memories, he’d realized at some point, were images, which one could crudely arrange into slideshows or, with effort, sort of GIFs, maybe — but now, unless he wrote about it, storing the information where his brain couldn’t erase it, place it behind a toll, or inadvertently scramble its organization, or change it gradually, by increments smaller than he could discern, without his knowledge, so it became both lost and unrecognizable, he probably wouldn’t remember most of this in a few days and, after weeks or months, he wouldn’t know it had been forgotten, like a barn seen from inside a moving train that is later torn down, its wood carried elsewhere on trucks.

Erin was flying to the College of Coastal Georgia in the morning to read to writing students and stay five to ten days as a kind of vacation. They confirmed to meet in Baltimore in three weeks, at the last reading of Paul’s book tour, to film themselves answering questions, on MDMA and while sober, to edit into videos like they’d seen on YouTube.

In Montreal, three days later, beneath a uniformly cloudy expanse, which glowed with the same intensity and asbestos-y texture everywhere, seeming less like a sky than the cloud-colored surface of a cold, hollowed-out sun, close enough to obstruct its own curvature, Paul walked slowly and aimlessly, sometimes standing in place, like an arctic explorer, noticing almost no other people and that something, on a general level, seemed familiar. He drank coffee and looked at the internet in a café, feeling gloomy and vertiginous when, after three hours, he went outside, where it had gotten significantly colder, to walk to a juice bar, twelve blocks away, near the café where the world’s largest French-language radio station was interviewing him in an hour.

The sky darkened and was now almost cloudless, like it had been gently suctioned from an interplanetary pressure system. As a red truck, clean and bright as a toy, passed on the street, Paul realized Montreal, with its narrower streets and cute beverage sizes and smaller vehicles, reminded him of Berlin. He’d gone alone to Berlin early in his relationship with Michelle for the German edition of his first novel — a year and a half ago, in March 2009, he calculated after two to three minutes of focused effort containing two long pauses without thoughts, but it felt more than five years away, like part of himself, while in Berlin, had gotten lost on its way here, taking more than five years instead of one and a half, a feeling that confused Paul, who stopped thinking, then realized he hadn’t thought about Erin, or maybe any person, today and that he had no romantic prospects. He visualized the black dot of the top of his head — from an aerial view of two blocks — slowing to a standstill and remaining motionless on the sidewalk as other dots passed in either direction and the darkening city gradually brightened with artificial lights, the movie of his life finally ending, the credits scrolling down the screen.