Tao Lin - Taipei

“Swarming,” Erin was saying. “Swarm. Swarm.”

“My mom warned against getting hit by a car,” said Paul.

“Does it happen a lot?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul as a car honked. “I don’t know.”

“I kind of have to pee again,” said Erin crossing the street.

“You have to pee? We’ll find somewhere.”

“In my public-speaking class, on the last day, this guy spoke about how he has kidney failure and can’t pee. At all. He poops his pee.”

“He doesn’t even have a tube?”

“No,” said Erin.

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-four,” said Erin.

“Whoa,” said Paul.

“Yeah. And he has a big thing in his arm — his dialysis machine.”

“From drinking alcohol?”

“He didn’t say why,” said Erin, and a man wearing a motorcycle helmet in the near distance walked briskly across the sidewalk, seeming “too comfortable in his motorcycle helmet,” thought Paul with mock disapproval, into a 7-Eleven.

“What if we just moved here,” said Paul.

“Let’s move here,” said Erin with enthusiasm.

“Since we don’t have friends. What would we do all the time?”

“Work on writing,” said Erin. “We’d have to go back, to do promotion things.”

“We can pay people to pretend to be us.”

“Interns,” said Erin.

“Backpacks,” said Paul a few minutes later about a vat-like container of generic-looking backpacks, outside a foot-wear store. “What do you think of these?”

“They seem good. Simple.”

“Your red backpack. . is really dirty,” said Paul, and laughed nervously.

“It only looks dirty. I clean it a lot.”

“Backpack,” said Paul touching a black backpack.

“I would buy one but my mom said she’s buying me one for Christmas,” said Erin.

After peeing in an MRT station they decided to find a McDonald’s and improvise Taiwan’s First McDonald’s . Paul’s MacBook had seventy-two minutes of battery power remaining. They couldn’t find a McDonald’s, after around five minutes, but two Burger Kings were in view, so they decided to do Taiwan’s First Burger King , then crossed a street and saw a McDonald’s, six to ten blocks away. “Let’s not talk until we get there,” said Paul. “But start thinking.”

“Let’s not think of what to say, let’s just do it,” said Erin.

“Just as an experiment, let’s not talk until we get there.”

“Oh,” said Erin. “Okay, okay.”

Paul stared at her with an exaggeratedly disgusted expression, which she reciprocated. They ran diagonally across three lanes to a median and held their open palms out to motorcyclists advancing in the spaces between slow-moving and stopped cars, as if by vacuum suction. Two people on one motorcycle shouted “hey, hey, go, yeah!” and slapped Erin’s palm. Paul and Erin, both smiling widely, crossed to a sidewalk and turned toward McDonald’s. Paul took the MacBook and stared in earnest fascination — feeling almost appalled, but without aversion — as Erin ran and leaped stomach-first onto the front of a parked car, then speed-walked away with arms tight against her sides, crossing Paul’s vision, supernatural and comical as a mysterious creature on YouTube, before calmly taking the MacBook. Paul stared angrily at the sidewalk with his body bent forward, imagining a powerful magnet dragging him by a strip of metal at the top of his forehead. He began hitting his head with balled fists. Erin hit his head, and he instantly stared at her in mock disbelief. Erin grasped the floor of an invisible opening midair with both arms extended, not fully, above her. Paul, staring with earnest astonishment, imagined a ventilation-system-like tunnel and pulled her arms down while trying to feign an expression of “feigned disgust unsuccessfully concealing immense excitement,” as if Erin had unknowingly discovered the entrance to a place Paul had recently stopped trying (after a decade of research, massive debt, the inadvertent nurturing of an antisocial personality) to locate. He laughed and continued ahead and — two blocks later, nearing McDonald’s, which had a suburban-seeming front yard of quadrilaterals of grass, a sidewalk, gigantic Christmas tree, lighted menu, driveway for the drive-thru — he accelerated and entered McDonald’s saying “let’s get a shot with a lot of background activity to lure them back with the rewatches,” and after a few seconds, because the first floor had only an ordering counter, was ascending stairs, to the second floor, where eight to twelve people were in forty to sixty seats.

“Try to find a celebrity face to stand in front of,” said Erin.

“I’m going to wash my face, I can’t appear like this,” said Paul grinning, and went to the bathroom. When he returned Erin was picking at her hair, with elbows locked above her head, hands moving inward in a kind of puppetry, or to cast spells on her head. She left for the bathroom. Christmas music played on a loop, repeating every forty or fifty seconds. Paul looked at what seemed to be a group of mute people in a separate, attached, somewhat private room and thought of a documentary about a woman who became deaf and mute as a teenager and remained on her bed feeling depressed, she said, for fifteen years before devoting her life to traveling across Germany teaching the deaf-mute language and “bringing out” those, born deaf-mute, with whom communication had never been attempted. Paul was absently drumming the table with his hands when Erin returned. He stood and said they should start the documentary outside, pointed at the attached room, said “look, those people are mute, I think.”

Erin seemed confused and slightly frightened.

“Mute,” said Paul. “It’s a group of mute people.”

“Oh, mute. Jesus, I thought I was having a drug thing.”

“Jesus,” said Paul.

“They’re like how we were,” said Erin.

“Oh yeah,” said Paul.

“When we couldn’t talk, I felt like I had to talk,” said Erin descending stairs. “But I had nothing to say. I just felt encompassed by the limits.”

They sat on a grassy area of the median — after deciding to begin Taiwan’s First McDonald’s “in the middle of traffic”—and criticized their own, while complimenting each other’s, hair and faces for three minutes until Paul abruptly stood and said “let’s go inside” with a sensation of “surveying” the premises, though his eyes were unfocused.

“I started feeling things big-time,” said Erin.

“Me too,” said Paul.

“Big-time style,” said Erin, and they ran across the street into McDonald’s, to the second floor. “We’re back. . here. . again,” said Paul, and laughed a little while feeling the situation was hilarious.

“Yeah,” said Erin laughing, and they returned outside.

“You be the host,” said Paul pointing the MacBook at Erin, who stood in front of the lighted menu the size of a blackboard.

“For Bravo,” said Erin.

“Use ‘the voice.’ Just don’t grin.”

“Okay, okay,” said Erin.

“Just don’t grin,” said Paul.

“Well, here’s the flagship, uh, Taipei’s fir—”

“Let me try,” said Paul giving Erin the MacBook.

Erin made noises indicating failure, self-disgust.

“So this is the first McDonald’s to open, in, um, well, Taiwan,” said Paul. “It opened on. . Tuesday. They had the grand opening special of three patties.” He moved his ear to an image of a Double Filet-O-Fish on the menu and said “it doesn’t want to be filmed” to Erin, who said “the camera is not on” with exaggerated enunciation to the Double Filet-O-Fish. “Here is. . this is Hillary Clinton’s hairstyle,” said Paul pointing at lettuce protruding from a chicken sandwich.