Tao Lin - Taipei

“Tactical, um,” said Erin.

“Explosions,” said Paul after a few seconds.

“Well, yeah,” said Erin.

“Jesus,” said Paul, and they both grinned a little. “All right. Now we’ll go inside for a closer look. . at the conflict, the controversy.” Through the glass front a deliveryman, wearing a motorcycle helmet, peeked around a corner at the ordering counter. “It’s been said that he’s actually the founder of McDonald’s,” said Paul. “They stole his idea, now he just looks. I actually just heard someone talking about it over there. That guy!”

Erin pointed the MacBook at a man scurrying away from McDonald’s.

“He won’t go ‘on the record,’ ” said Paul. “He’s too afraid.”

“Let’s move inside,” said Erin, and pointed at a PUSH sticker. “Oh, this is actually—”

“They had to add that. Because people actually were trying to, um—”

“Pull,” said Erin.

“Yeah, pull,” said Paul grinning, and didn’t move for two seconds, unsure if there was more to say about the PUSH sticker, then took the MacBook and entered McDonald’s. “Now, this,” he said about a tall structure obscured by colorful balloons.

“It’s been said that this is actually a performance art piece. It’s meant to represent. . just universal peace,” said Erin, and an employee walked between the structure and the MacBook with an expression like everything but his mouth was grinning.

“I noticed this employee is running a little,” said Paul following him to the second floor. “Does that mean something?”

“Well, it’s sort of characteristic of our times,” said Erin.

“Who are these people?” said Paul pointing at one of four preadolescent Caucasian girls in a blown-up photo on a wall.

“These are all Cameron Diaz’s children,” said Erin.

“Why are there spaces between this one’s teeth?”

“Well, the meat fills in, then they put it into one burger.”

“And the rest is just hair and stuff?”

“That’s — actually, we shouldn’t reveal that,” said Erin.

“And this is for. . ten thousand chicken nuggets?” said Paul pointing at the space of a missing tooth. “The gelatin required from the teeth.”

“Yeah,” said Erin. “And actually for some. . if you pay extra you can get a little bit of a tooth, from an actual child, and you can also get it memorialized, in a locket.”

“If a country pays extra, their nuggets get more gelatin?”

“Yes,” said Erin. “The quality is just slightly raised.”

“I heard that Canada did that,” said Paul.

“Um, just the Saskatchewan. They’re the prime testing markets. Because they eat. . they primarily eat teeth there. That’s their diet, I didn’t know if you knew that.”

“The Weakerthans wrote an album about that, right?”

“Yeah, they—” said Erin.

“ Fallow ?” said Paul.

“ Fallow ,” said Erin confidently.

“That was about the teeth—” said Paul.

“The Saskatchewan teeth crisis,” said Erin.

“This is where the district managers have their weekly meetings,” said Erin a few minutes later in a circular room — wallpapered with blown-up photos of children on bikes, and pogo sticks, in the foreground of a playground, at dusk — with a padded floor and, at its center, a playground of two slides, monkey bars, a pole, a tiny bridge. Paul said a girl had different eye sizes because she was on a “McFlurry-only diet” and asked Erin about a Hispanic girl wearing giant, padded headphones. “She’s actually producing right now,” said Erin. “She’s a producer.”

“What’s her favorite McDonald’s meal?”

“She just gets a side salad,” said Erin.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, that’s her thing,” said Erin pointing at what seemed like an Ash Wednesday marking on her forehead. “See? She’s Zen.”

“Let’s go to the opposite side of the spectrum: this girl.”

“She gets six Big Macs,” said Erin about a pale, red-haired girl sitting in a sandbox. “She puts it all in the McFlurry machine. And the Oreos come down.”

“Jesus. She puts it in the machine? This girl?”

“She extracts the sauce from the Big Macs, and she puts that in a cup,” said Erin.

“So she brings it home?”

“It’s ‘on the go.’ She’ll just bring it anywhere.”

“Then what?”

“Then her interns are instructed to massage her, because she’s actually a candidate for the next McChicken sandwich.”

“You could be eating her tomorrow,” said Paul to an imagined, future viewer of Taiwan’s First McDonald’s , and turned the MacBook to the girl with giant headphones. “You ate her. Now you might be eating the other one.” He panned the MacBook across half the room. “Or one of these, anyway.”

“Can you talk about him?” said Erin about a chubby, closed-mouth smiling boy on a bike with training wheels, and took the MacBook. “You shouldn’t leave him out.”

“Sure. This is one of the great failures of the Chicken McNugget raising program. This photo is actually. . they told him he was supplying Thailand’s artificial flavoring from 2010 to 2020. He was really happy, which was his mistake.”

“They’re actually going to tell her,” said Erin pointing at a girl, half obscured by a bored-looking dog, midair on a pogo stick. “She’s supplying Thailand until 2020, with a nonexclusive option at extending her contract.”

“Nice,” said Paul.

“She’s Miss Thailand,” said Erin.

“This one doesn’t know he’s also going to be one,” said Paul about a boy on swings at the apex of his backward movement. “They’re all going to be one.”

“Well, yeah. Someday.”

“Even you,” said Paul.

“I’m. . uniquely. .”

“You know you’re going to be a Chicken McNugget.”

“I’ve accepted it,” said Erin.

They approached stairs — blocked by a dry mophead and what seemed to be a traffic cone — to a third floor, a few minutes later, ascending to a small dark room of additional seating, kaleidoscopically lit from outside sources through two windows.

“It took them five years to Photoshop this,” said Paul pointing at the letter M inside a circle on a wall. “They had to wait for Adobe to answer a question they had, on a message board.”

“The mother brain,” said Erin.

“Shh,” whispered Paul tracing the circle with a forefinger.

“Sorry,” whispered Erin. “The brainstorming process is in action.”

“Jesus,” whispered Paul taking the MacBook carefully.

“This is—” said Erin pointing at a pile of plastic-wrapped plastic utensils.

“Leftovers,” said Paul.

“—just the scraps of ideas that get sold to Burger King and Arby’s on eBay.”

“Arby’s needs to update its credit card information.”

“It will, it always does,” said Erin, and approached the darkest part of the room. “And here we have the brainchild, really, of this whole operation,” she said pointing at where the wall, due to lack of light, was indiscernible in color and texture.

• • •

“So, we’ve shown you what it’s about, and what it does, for the country,” said Paul in front of the Christmas tree. “Now let’s go over the main points again: one.”

“Cameron Diaz’s foundation,” said Erin.

“Two?”

“One-A,” said Erin.

“One-A?”

“One-A,” said Erin. “And then one-B.”

“Um,” said Paul grinning, and pointed at the third-floor windows. “We were there.”

“The brainstorm. The conspiracy.”

“And — remember this?” said Paul pointing at the Double Filet-O-Fish.

“Yeah, whoa. Seems like so long ago.”