Tao Lin - Taipei

Their last night in Ohio, around midnight, when Calvin’s parents and three brothers and Calvin were asleep, Paul and Erin decided to drink coffee and share a 30mg Adderall and each eat a psilocybin chocolate and, in the five hours before Erin would drive Paul to the airport — Calvin had bought Paul a plane ticket a month ago, as incentive to come — film part two of Mushrooms in the mansion’s basement, which included a room with guitars and amps and a drum set, a game room with four arcade machines, a one-room gym, a billiards table, a home theater, a kitchen. They kissed for twenty minutes in the gym, then shut themselves in a room with two desktop computers and had sex for an hour in the dark, then showered together. They sat on a one-seat sofa in the living room with Erin’s MacBook on their lap. Paul asked if Erin wanted to go with him next week to North Carolina and Louisiana, where he had readings at colleges.

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” said Erin.

“You’ve said yes to other things you didn’t want to do.”

“Can you give me an example of one of those things?”

“Smoking weed with Calvin,” said Paul about two nights ago, and extended a finger, then another finger. “Inviting Patrick to visit you,” he said about someone Erin met at the College of Coastal Georgia and had spoken to twice on Skype and exchanged mix CDs and who, by Erin’s invitation, had purchased plane tickets to visit her — for six days, in two weeks — but whose Facebook messages Erin had been ignoring. Paul closed his eyes and thought about how Erin seemed like she didn’t want to talk to Beau anymore, but continued texting him and answering his calls.

“Just those two things,” said Paul, and opened his eyes.

“I can explain those two things. Smoking weed with Calvin, I thought it could be a thing that I want to do, but in the moment I didn’t feel like doing. And Patrick. . I felt, like, bored for a long time. . with romantic prospects. It seemed exciting that this person in Georgia was interested in me. I thought ‘this could at least be something to do.’ So. . that’s why. And I thought that maybe once he came it could be fun, or something.”

“So, if it’s just something to do, you’ll still do it.”

“Yeah,” said Erin with the word extended. “But that’s not what it would be like. . with you. This,” she said, and placed a hand on Paul’s shoulder. “Interests me. A lot.”

“But do I interest you enough for you to go through with it,” mumbled Paul.

“With what?” said Erin after a few seconds.

“To go through with it,” said Paul, unsure what he was referencing.

“What? What does?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul quickly. “Never mind. You want to come.”

“I want to come.”

“Okay,” said Paul. “Good.” They saw in Google Calendar that Erin was scheduled to work two days next week. “So. . you’re not going with me?”

“I want to,” said Erin.

“But you have work.”

“I’d rather go with you than work,” said Erin noncommittally.

“Then. . what are you going to do?”

“I think I can get someone to cover my shifts. They don’t really need me there those days.”

“What. . are you doing?” said Paul, and grinned. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m going with you,” said Erin grinning, and patted his shoulder. “I’m going with you.”

In North Carolina two Duke University students drove Paul and Erin from the airport, where they’d arrived on separate flights, to a hotel, returning at night to drive them to the reading. Paul and Erin talked calmly in the dark backseat, holding half-full cups of hot tea from the hotel lobby, as a college radio station played something fuzzy and instrumental and wistful. Erin said she emailed Patrick last night, while she was in Baltimore and Paul was in Brooklyn, that she started liking someone else and was sorry if he felt bad and would help pay for his plane ticket. Paul asked if Patrick might still visit Baltimore, as a kind of vacation.

“Probably not. He was going to stay in my apartment.”

“What did Beau say last night?”

“He just really wanted to hang out,” said Erin, who had mentioned in an email that she had “screamed” at Beau on the phone. “And I was like, ‘I don’t, really. I have other things to do and you shouldn’t be here.’ ”

“He came over?”

“No, he was like ‘fuck that, I’m coming over now.’ Or like ‘I’m walking there now.’ I was like ‘this is. . scary,’ ” said Erin, and laughed.

“Jesus. What did you scream at him?”

“I screamed, like, ‘this is done.’ And I hung up on him.”

“Did he call more after that?”

“No. He sent me. . a mean text, insulting me. He was like, ‘you’re really great, but I’ve always thought your body sucked,’ or something.”

“Seems like a non sequitur.”

“I know,” said Erin, and laughed. “It was weird.”

“Did you respond to that?”

“No,” said Erin. “He’s insane.”

“Do you think you’ll talk to him again?”

Erin said “probably not.” The aquarium, sparsely forested darkness outside the car, on a street sometimes half-bracketed by shopping plazas, reminded Paul of traveling at night in Florida in his family’s minivan. During longer drives he would lay alone, with a blanket and pillow, behind the third row of seats, beyond range of communication — not obligated to respond, he felt, even if he heard his name. In the dark and padded space, on his back, he’d see everything outside, reflected toward him, as one image — squiggling, watery, elemental, synthetic, holographic, layered — in fluid, representational reconfiguration of itself. Until 13 or 14, then sometimes habitually, he never sat in the front seat of cars, even if no one else was, except the five to ten times his brother, home a few weeks or months from college, would say “I’m not your chauffeur” and force Paul, who would feel immature and embarrassed, to sit in front. “I email with Michelle like once every three months,” said Paul. “But in a manner like we’re emailing every day. Like, if someone read our emails it would seem like we were emailing every day.”

“That seems good,” said Erin smiling.

• • •

In Louisiana, two days later, Paul and Erin were in a Best Buy, early in the afternoon, to buy an external hard drive, because their MacBooks from storing their movies were almost out of memory. Paul was walking aimlessly through the store with a bored expression, holding the Smashing Pumpkins’ double CD below him, at waist level, where he scratched its plastic wrapping in an idle, distracted, privately frustrated manner. After finally tearing it off and lodging it, with difficulty, because it kept clinging to him by static electricity, behind some Beck CDs, he used “brute force,” he thought instructionally, to pry open the locked case and get only the blue CD, which had “Tonight, Tonight” and “Zero” on it, to listen to in the rental car.

In Best Buy’s security room, which was module-like and dimmer than the store, the sheriff of Baton Rouge shook his head in strong, earnest, remarkably unjaded disappointment when Paul, asked why he was here — he had a Florida driver’s license, a New York address — said a college had invited him to speak to them, as an author.

“I felt ashamed,” said Paul in the parking lot to Erin. “I feel like I was on shoplifting autopilot. I wasn’t thinking anything. I was just already doing it.” In Barnes & Noble, a few hours later, he stole Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” collection. They ate watermelon and pineapple chunks in Whole Foods, then drove downtown and rode an elevator to the sixth floor of a darkly tinted building, where Paul read to LSU’s graduate writing program for around twenty minutes (“from a memoir-in-progress that’ll be more than a thousand pages,” he said half earnestly) about a night he watched Robin Hood with Daniel at the Union Square theater, then went to a pizza restaurant, where Fran, who had whiskey in a Dr Pepper bottle, got drunker than Paul had ever seen her and the next day quit her job, after two days, as a waitress in a Polish restaurant. Paul felt self-conscious whenever mentioning a drug, in part because none of his previous books had drugs — except caffeine, alcohol, Tylenol Cold, St. John’s wort — but the audience laughed almost every time a drug was mentioned, seeming delighted, like most of them were on drugs, which was probably true, Paul thought while reading off his MacBook screen. He imagined stopping what he was reading to instead say “Klonopin,” wait three seconds, say “Xanax,” wait three seconds, etc. He didn’t notice until the word “concealment” that he was reading a sentence from something else he’d been working on that had been pasted apparently into the wrong file. He continued reading the sentence—