Taipei (23 page)

“People seem to be looking a lot, at the computer.”

“I haven’t . . . noticed anyone,” said Paul.

“Oh,” said Erin uncertainly. “I haven’t—”

“I haven’t been looking at anyone.”

“I haven’t either, really, except sometimes if I look out somebody will be looking. I forgot we’re not in America.”

“I like how quiet it is,” said Paul.

“Me too,” said Erin.

“In New York it would be so loud.”

“Yeah. There would be, like, layers upon layers of noises.”

“I don’t like places . . . where everyone working is a minority . . . because I feel like there’s too many different . . . I don’t know,” said Paul with a feeling like he unequivocally did not want to be talking about what he was talking about, but had accidentally focused on it, like a telescope a child had turned, away from a constellation, toward a wall.

“Like, visually?”

“Um, no,” said Paul. “Just that . . . they know they’re minorities . . .”

“That they, like, band together?”

“Um, no,” said Paul on a down escalator into the MRT station they exited around an hour ago.

“What are we doing?” said Erin in a quiet, confused voice. Paul felt his diagonal movement as a humorless, surreal activity—a deepening, forward and down.

“Minorities,” said Erin at a normal volume. “What were you saying?”

“Just that . . . here, when you see someone, you don’t know . . . that . . . they live like two hours away and are um . . . poor, or whatever,” said Paul very slowly, like he was improvising an erasure poem from a mental image of a page of text.

“Is this the mall? Thing?”

“No, bathroom,” mumbled Paul.

“Huh?” said Erin.

“Bathroom,” said Paul after a few seconds.

 • • •

In the MRT station Paul said he tried masturbating and couldn’t and that he was worried he vomited some of his MDMA earlier, because he didn’t feel much. Erin said she felt like she was “feeling it a lot more” than Paul and laughed a little and said Paul should “go back and take more.”

“Really?” said Paul quietly.

“Yeah. Because I feel like if you were also feeling it . . .”

“What,” said Paul.

“Now I feel myself being chill, or something. Or I don’t know. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it seemed like you weren’t feeling anything.”

“Really?” said Paul with earnest wonderment.

“Yeah. Let’s just go back and do more, then come back.”

“All right,” said Paul in a voice as if reluctantly acquiescing.

“Do you want that?”

“Yeah. I’ll take two, you take one.”

“Okay,” said Erin.

“But . . . now I’m going to have it stronger than you.”

“I’ll take one and a half,” said Erin.

After both ingesting two ecstasy and, almost idly, as sort of afterthoughts, because it had been very weak the past few times, a little LSD, they exited Paul’s room, and Erin went to the bathroom. Paul’s mother asked Paul what clothes he bought. Paul said he didn’t yet and his mother said he should buy thicker clothing and they discussed where, at this time, around 10:30 p.m., to find open stores. When Erin exited the bathroom Paul’s mother asked if she bought any clothes.

“No,” said Erin smiling. “Not yet.”

“Okay,” said Paul in Mandarin. “We’re going now.”

“Cell phone,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.

“I’ve got it,” said Paul in Mandarin.

“Bring a cell phone,” said Paul’s father in Mandarin from out of view, watching TV.

“Why are you bringing your computer?” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin.

“We, just,” said Paul in Mandarin.

“Oh, you’re going to record again,” said Paul’s mother in Mandarin in a slightly scolding voice, but without worry, it seemed, maybe because she could see that Paul was the same as last year. “The ‘video thing,’ isn’t it better?”

“What video thing?”

“I sent it to you. I bought it for you. For your birthday. Did you already sell it?”

“No. I have it in my room.”

“What’s it called?”

“Flip cam,” said Paul.

“Dad went to many different places asking which was the best. Why don’t you use it?”

“What are you all talking about?” said Paul’s father idly in Mandarin from out of view.

“My mom probably knows we’re on drugs, or something,” said Paul after they’d walked around two minutes without talking. “She sounded suspicious when she saw us recording. But she seemed okay with it. I searched my emails with her earlier and . . . she said something like ‘it’s okay to experience new things but don’t overdo it,’ or like ‘it’s probably good for a writer to experiment,’ and she was talking about cocaine, I think.”

“I thought your mom was completely against drugs.”

“Me too,” said Paul. “I forgot an entire period of emails where she seemed okay with it. My brother, I think, told her, at one point, that I had too much self-control to become
addicted to anything. My brother told her not to worry, I think. I don’t know.”

“I haven’t swallowed the LSD yet,” said Erin at a red light a few minutes later. “My throat won’t push it down to my stomach, it’s weird.” Paul distractedly pointed at a billboard of disabled people, then looked at Erin’s tattoo of an asterisk behind her earlobe as she looked at the billboard. “In Taiwan only disabled people, I think, can sell lottery tickets,” said Paul slowly while imagining being heard by thousands of readers of a future book, or book-like experience, in which Erin’s name had an asterisk by it, indicating the option of stopping the narrative to learn about Erin, in the form of a living footnote, currently pointing the MacBook at the three-lane street, on which hundreds of scooters and motorcycles passing, in layers, with more than one per lane, at different speeds, appeared like a stationary, patternless shuffling.

“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.

“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—”