Tao Lin - Taipei

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Erin.

“I just feel. . depressed,” said Paul, and weakly grinned.

“Is there anything I can do to make you feel less depressed?”

“I don’t think so,” said Paul. “You’re depressed.”

“What can I do, at this point, to help our relationship?”

“I don’t know,” said Paul feeling that he was more expressing himself than answering a question, and they got off the train.

“Anything at all,” said Erin in a hollow voice.

“I don’t want to tell anyone what to do,” said Paul staring ahead.

“You wouldn’t be. You’d just be answering my question.”

• • •

In Sel De Mer, a seafood restaurant four blocks from Paul’s apartment, seated at the bar, Erin asked if Paul wanted more Xanax and he said “shouldn’t we not ‘go overboard’?”

“What do you mean?”

“We had Ambien and Xanax.”

Erin appeared unresponsive.

“Never mind,” said Paul. “Yes. I want more.” After sharing 2mg Xanax, then ordering, he absently ate all the free bread and butter, and they sat staring ahead, not speaking or moving, until Erin said she felt weird.

“Me too. I don’t know what to say.”

“Let’s just stop fighting,” said Erin.

“Okay,” said Paul.

“Okay,” said Erin after a few seconds.

“Do you want more Xanax? I don’t feel that much.”

“Yeah,” said Erin, and they shared 2mg Xanax.

When Paul’s salad and clam chowder arrived he moved something fried from the salad, with a feeling of efficacy, into the soup, then ate it with a spoon. His steamed lobster with fries and Erin’s broiled monkfish with mesclun salad arrived. He ate his fries using all his butter and ketchup and, at her offer, most of Erin’s butter. “I feel better,” he murmured.

“What?”

“I feel better, due to Xanax, I think. How do you feel?”

“I don’t know,” said Erin. “Okay, I guess.”

At Paul’s apartment they drank green juice and showered, then performed oral sex on each other, showered again, turned off the light to sleep. Paul said they should be on Xanax all the time. Erin said “we’re probably ideal candidates for Xanax prescriptions.”

“I’m sure that we are,” said Paul, and went to the bathroom with his MacBook and, seated on the toilet, looked at lobsters’ Wikipedia page. He typed “immortal animals” in Google and clicked “The Only Immortal Animal on Earth” and saw a jellyfish on a website that looked like it was made in the late ’90s. He copied a sentence, a few minutes later, from Taipei Metro’s Wikipedia page—“The growing traffic problems of the time, compounded by road closures due to TRTS construction led to what became popularly known as the ‘Dark Age of Taipei Traffic”—and emailed it to Erin.

Paul entered his room carrying his open MacBook. “This is what you ate,” he said showing Erin a photo, captioned “a monkfish in a market,” of a glistening, black, mound-shaped mass — grotesque in a melancholy, head-dominated, almost whimsical manner — and she laughed a little.

Ten days later they were on Erin’s bed in Baltimore, around 3:45 a.m., watching a Japanese movie about a woman who tortures and murders men. The past two nights they’d ingested large doses of MDMA and low-to-medium doses of Percocet, Adderall, Xanax and today they’d only used a little Adder-all. Paul began to sometimes leverage himself above Erin, who would roll onto her back, or remain on her side, loosely enclosed by Paul’s arms to either side, as he stared vertically down at her with fixed, impractical, “scary” expressions.

Erin laughed and, the first two times, complimented his effort, then told him to stop, after which he did it again, and thought he wouldn’t anymore, then did again, five minutes later, on an impulse, almost uncontrollably — hovering low, with bent elbows, feeling both insane and, in the private room behind the one-way mirror of his exaggeratedly happy expression, like an experimental psychologist — and she began crying in a helpless and cowering manner, which Paul, to some degree, thought was feigned, so remained motionless, for two seconds, during which Erin’s face appeared unrecognizable, like the irreducible somethingness of her, in the form of a coded overlay, or invisible mask, had abruptly left, revealing the frightening activity — the arbitrarily reconfiguring, look-less chaos — of a personless face. Paul hugged her so she couldn’t see his face and repeatedly said he was sorry and variations of “it’s me” and “it’s okay.” Erin’s eyes appeared strangely collapsed beyond closure, like rubber bands overlapping themselves, for a few seconds, after she stopped crying. “It’s just that my car is broken,” she said earnestly. “I can’t get away.”

“I would have stopped if I knew you were this scared,” said Paul, confused by what she’d been thinking to have imagined escaping in a car.

“You should have stopped when I said stop.”

“But people always say to stop. And you were laughing.”

“I told you to stop,” said Erin. “You did other times and I kept going and you liked it.”

“I know,” said Erin, and described how she’d lately felt depressed in a new and scary way, which Paul also had felt lately and described as a sadness-based fear, immune to tone and interpretation, as if not meant for humans — more visceral than sadness, but unlike fear because it decreased heart rate and impaired the senses, causing everything to seem “darker.” Sometimes it was less of a feeling than a realization that maybe, after you died, in the absence of time, without a mechanism for tolerance, or means of communication, you could privately experience a nightmare state for an eternity. More than once, the past few weeks, Paul had wondered — idly, without thinking past hypothesis — if books and movies he viewed as melodramatic might be accurately depicting what, since before his book tour, he now sometimes felt. They diagnosed themselves with “severely depleted serotonin levels,” caused by forty to eighty doses of MDMA the past three to five months. As Erin’s apartment brightened from the morning sun, through sixth-floor windows, they prepared to sleep. Erin stood at a window eating pink tablets that seemed huge—“disk-like,” thought Paul with a blanket covering all but his head.

They looked at each other neutrally.

“I feel like those aren’t good for you,” said Paul.

Erin said a doctor had recommended them and Paul said something implying it was healthier to never listen to doctors.

“How do you know it’s not good for me?”

“You’ll become dependent, to some degree.”

“No, I won’t, I rarely take it,” said Erin.

“You’ll become dependent to a little degree, I’m just saying.”

“Did you read about that somewhere?”

“Not specifically,” said Paul.

“How do you know, then?”

“Based on what I know, from things I’ve read and experienced, about tolerance, I think your body will be less able to produce something each time you use those.”

“That’s not how everything works,” said Erin.

“I’m not trying to argue with you, based on what I know,” said Paul, aware it was funny to qualify “I’m not trying to argue with you” with “based on what I know,” but not feeling humored. He was standing, around twenty minutes later — and had bought a ticket with his iPhone for a bus leaving in an hour — looking at Erin, sitting on her bed facing away. They were both crying a little. It was below freezing and gusty outside, but Paul declined Erin’s offer of a jacket and multiple offers to drive him to the bus stop — on an unsheltered bridge — and said bye and self-consciously left.