Tao Lin - Taipei

“Nice,” said Paul. “Thank you for driving here.”

“No problem,” said Android in his normal voice. “Give me a call if you want some stuff over the holidays.”

“We did it,” said Paul in a monotone to Erin in his room, and they hugged. Peanut texted he was ten minutes away. Paul read a text from his brother and went outside and opened the bronze gate. Paul’s brother followed Paul into the house, where Erin stood in the hallway outside Paul’s apartment.

“Erin, right? Nice to finally meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” said Erin.

After a pause, during which they all grinned at one another, Paul’s brother gave Paul a duffel bag and a check and, due to pressure from their mother, Paul assumed, a winter coat, and said “this is for Mom and Dad, you have to remember to give it to them,” indicating a department store bag inside the duffel bag.

“Okay,” said Paul looking in the duffel bag.

“You have to remember.”

“I will,” said Paul.

“You can’t forget. Okay?”

“I won’t,” said Paul.

“Okay,” said Paul’s brother in a slightly child-like voice, then looked at a vacantly grinning Erin and hastily said “we’ll have a formal dinner later on together, all of us,” with a scrunched expression conveying he knew that she obviously already knew this information, which he was saying aloud as a kind of indulgence to himself. Peanut texted five minutes later when Paul was sitting on his yoga mat, absently organizing his drugs in his six-compartment plastic container.

Paul got in the backseat of a car that, relative to Android’s, did not seem expensive. The same middle-aged woman as the previous four or five times Paul bought from Peanut, the past few months, was driving. Paul distractedly imagined himself asking if the woman was Peanut’s mother as he bought two strips of LSD and thirty ecstasy — half blue, half red — from Peanut, who was in the front passenger seat.

Paul and Erin, sitting on Paul’s mattress, were wearing earphones and doing things on their MacBooks, an hour later, after each ingesting “double-dipped” capsules of MDMA and 10mg Adderall and sharing a zero-calorie energy drink. They’d decided to use drugs throughout the night and sleep on the plane. Paul, worried because he didn’t feel like talking even after the MDMA and Adderall should’ve taken effect, inspected the capsules and asked Erin on Gmail chat if they seemed less full than in the past; they didn’t, to her, but she also wasn’t feeling a strong effect. They concluded the problem was their tolerance levels and each ingested a blue ecstasy and continued doing things separately. “I feel something now, but I’m not sure if I feel like talking,” thought Paul looking at his Gmail account. “But I think I’ll be okay.”

The next four hours they had sex (and showered) three times, shared 50oz kale-celery-apple-lemon juice and 30mg Adderall, typed accounts of a cold and sunny afternoon one week ago when they walked around SoHo on MDMA shouting and screaming iterations of Charles’ name (initials, first, first and last, full) at each other while holding hands. Paul packaged a strip of LSD, four MDMA, twelve ecstasy inside the CD case for Nirvana’s second “greatest hits” album, which he wrapped in transparent tape, then in four issues of Seattle’s leading alt weekly with his face on the cover, which his mother had requested he bring, then in a shirt, which he fit snugly inside a shoebox.

Around 4:30 a.m., after deciding to use all their cocaine before leaving for the airport, they recorded Erin licking cocaine off Paul’s testicles and serving cocaine off an iPhone to Paul reading a purple-covered Siddhartha while seated on a high chair he found on a sidewalk in August and until now had used only as a clothing rack; Erin snorting cocaine off her MacBook screen; Paul snorting cocaine off Erin’s face; both snorting cocaine off vacuum-wrapped Omaha Steaks, which Calvin’s father had ordered for Paul for Thanksgiving. They discussed, relative to Adderall, not liking cocaine, which was inferior in price, effect, length of effect, after effect, convenience, availability but fun to have in group situations, in terms of thinking of funny places to snort it from. Paul said he wanted to shower before finishing the cocaine and walking to Variety, a café four blocks away, to relax, drink iced coffee, wait for their airport taxi.

After showering Paul dried himself and put on clothes and, while Erin was showering, stood in a corner and stared at his room without thinking anything or, he realized after a vague amount of time, moving his eyeballs. He sat on his yoga mat and stared at his Gmail account, remembering after a few minutes that he’d wanted to stand in a corner and look at his room to double-check he’d packed everything. When Erin, looking at herself in the wall mirror, finished blow-drying her hair, around fifteen minutes later, Paul looked up from where he’d remained on his yoga mat — absently scrolling through bohemianism’s Wikipedia page after clicking “bohemian” on Kurt Cobain’s page, which he’d looked at, while rereading emails from his mother, to see if he died at 26 or 27—and asked if Erin was “ready,” with what felt like a self-consciously neutral expression, vaguely sensing his question to be antagonistic, because he didn’t know exactly what it referenced.

“Yeah,” said Erin with a blank expression.

“No,” said Paul pointing at her MacBook and small pile of miscellany by her red backpack, which he felt aversion toward, in a manner that would become a problem, for him, in the future, he realized, with aversion toward himself, because it always seemed dirty.

“What,” said Erin.

“You’re not finished packing.”

“I thought we were doing that first?” said Erin pointing at the cocaine.

Paul felt himself blinking. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah. I forgot. Sorry.” He stood and stepped carefully over his yoga mat and kneeled by the low table and asked with unfocused eyes and a controlled voice if Erin wanted to use the remaining cocaine at Variety — to extend their usage and, he vaguely thought, soften their forthcoming “depletion,” or “depleted serotonin levels,” as they had, with a kind of feigned affection, been referencing their periods, after feeling good on drugs, of feeling bad.

“Okay,” said Erin after a pause. “But we should cut it first.”

“We can do it there,” said Paul after a long pause.

“It’ll be easier to do it here,” said Erin.

Paul stared at her tired, confident expression.

“I don’t want to do it there,” she said.

“Okay. But we’ll have to put it back in, after taking it out, if we do it here. We have to take it out and put it all back in again.”

“That’s fine. We aren’t in a hurry. . are we?”

“No,” said Paul after a few seconds, and heard himself thinking, in a voice like he was practicing a speech, that an amount, even if only a trace, of cocaine would remain outside the vial — and it would all just clump together again, when back inside. There was also the risk of sneezing or otherwise uncontrollably disrupting the cocaine. “But we’ll lose some, when you take it out,” he said slowly. “It just. . seems inconvenient.” Erin said she could “cut it really fast” and that she’d done it many times, arguably referencing, for the second or third time, a somewhat mysterious period of her life, when she did cocaine with Beau and other people every night or something. Paul felt aversion toward himself for feeling bothered by how Erin, or the situation itself, seemed to be indicating that, by not defaulting to Erin’s greater experience in cutting cocaine, Paul was behaving irrationally. “It just seems inconvenient,” he was saying. “It’s just inconvenient.”