Daniel said his sister had multiple doctorates, his parents and aunts and uncles were all high-level professors, but he was “not anything.” Paul knew from previous conversations that Daniel, as a teenager, had been on months-long retreats to Buddhist monasteries, culminating in something like a year alone, when he turned 18, in India or Tibet. Daniel walked away to call Fran and Paul read a text from Laura asking if he wanted to see Trash Humpers tonight. Paul texted he already saw it, and they made plans to record a song in his room in two hours. Daniel returned and said he told Fran his computer had to be fixed today, or not for two weeks, and he needed it to do work, because he hadn’t paid last month’s rent, so wasn’t going to Rhode Island, and that “she got really angry.”
“I feel like you did the right thing. . I mean. . outside of being honest,” said Paul grinning. “Your relationship with her is more accurate now.”
“Your use of the word ‘accurate’ is interesting.”
“She has a more accurate view of your view of her now probably,” said Paul.
Laura arrived with Walter, whom Paul hadn’t expected, two hours late and reacted to Paul’s agitation, as they walked from the bronze gate to the house, with resentment and dismissiveness, then became a little apologetic in Paul’s room, showing him texts she’d sent to Walter telling him to hurry.
“You can’t blame me,” said Walter, and chuckled. “I don’t even know why I’m here. You suddenly just started texting me to drive you here.”
“Now everyone is turning against me,” said Laura smiling nervously, not looking at anyone. Paul asked Walter if it was true, as he’d thought he’d read on Gawker, that Detroit, where Walter was from, only had seven grocery stores. Walter laughed quietly and said that wasn’t true and that Detroit was comparable, he felt, to Ann Arbor maybe. Paul said he was going to Ann Arbor in September, for his book tour, and asked what size it was, and was peripherally aware of Laura turning away, like she’d observed the interaction and concluded something, as she said “now you’re going to ask Walter a lot of questions.”
“It’s like Berkeley,” said Walter.
“It’s that big?” said Paul in a dreamy voice, and moved, vaguely for privacy, from the mattress to the floor, where he texted Daniel and ingested a Klonopin, weakly thinking “it won’t begin working until I won’t need it as much anymore.” Walter and Laura, who had brought a tambourine and a shaker, talked idly, a few feet from Paul, who thought Walter’s grumpiness after leaving Kyle and Gabby’s party, when he’d wielded a Red Bull Soda, now seemed endearing. Paul noticed Laura looking at his pile of construction paper and said she could have some if she wanted, and she focused self-consciously on wanting some, saying how she would use it and what colors she liked, seeming appreciative in an affectedly sincere manner — the genuine sincerity of a person who doesn’t trust her natural behavior to appear sincere. Paul went outside and opened the bronze gate and laughed a little when Daniel said he should “grow an enormous afro without any warning” for his next author photo and they sat on the front stoop. The late-afternoon sky, in Paul’s peripheral vision, panoramic and mostly unobstructed, appeared rural or suburban, more indicative of forests and fields and lakes — of nature’s vast connections, through the air and the soil, to more of itself — than of outer space, which was mostly what Paul thought of when beneath an urban sky, even in daytime, especially in Manhattan, between certain buildings, framing sunless zones of upper atmosphere, as if inviting space down to deoxygenate a city block. Walter exited the house and mentioned a party in Chelsea and left. Laura exited a few minutes later, meekly holding her tambourine and shaker and some construction paper. “I see you ‘got in on’ the construction paper,” said Paul in the sarcastic, playful voice he’d used to recommend Funyuns the night they met, but with a serious expression. “Good choices, in terms of colors. Good job.”
“You said I could have some,” said Laura hesitantly.
“I know,” said Paul. “I’m glad you got some.”
“Well, I’m going home now,” said Laura with a shy expression, not looking at anyone.
At a party that night Paul met Taryn, a friend of Caroline and Shawn Olive’s, and became gradually — almost unnoticeably — intrigued by their interactions. They rarely talked and never touched but remained, for some reason, near each other, as if one was the other’s manager or personal assistant, but neither knew their role and could only study the other for clues, which they seemed to do, gazing at each other anthropomorphically, for seconds at a time, surprisingly without awkwardness, then she seemed to disappear and was quickly forgotten. Paul sat with strangers on a crowded staircase and drank a beer while looking at his phone, sometimes staring at its screen for ten to twenty seconds without thinking anything, before maneuvering through a crowded hallway into a medium-size room. Around twenty-five people were dancing to loud music with faces that seemed expressive in an emotionless, hidden, bone-ward manner — the faces of people with the ability to stop clutching the objects of themselves and allow their brains, like independent universes with unique and inconstant natural laws, to react, like trees to wind, with their bodies to music.
Paul walked directly to a two-seat sofa (golden brown and deeply padded as the upturned paw of an enormous stuffed animal) and lay on it, on his side, facing the room, and closed his eyes. After a blip of surprise, which disintegrated in some chemical system of Klonopin and Valium and alcohol instead of articulating into what would’ve startled Paul awake — that he’d fluently, with precision and total calm, entered a room of dozens of people and lain facing outward on a sofa — was asleep. When he woke, an unknown amount of time later— between five and forty minutes, or longer — he observed neutrally that, though he was drooling a little and probably the only non-dancing person in the room, no one was looking at him, then moved toward the room’s iPod with the goal-oriented, zombie-like calmness of a person who has woken at night thirsty and is walking to his refrigerator and changed the music to “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins. Every person, it seemed, stopped dancing and appeared earnestly annoyed but — as if to avoid encouraging the behavior — didn’t look at Paul or say anything and, when the music was changed back, resumed dancing, like nothing had happened.
In early June, after four more parties, two at which he similarly slept on sofas after walking mutely through rooms without looking at anyone, Paul began attending fewer social gatherings and ingesting more drugs, mostly with Daniel and Fran, or only Daniel, or sometimes alone, which seemed classically “not a good sign,” he sometimes thought, initially with mild amusement, then as a neutral observation, finally as a meaningless placeholder. Due to his staggered benzodiazepine usage and lack of obligations or long-term projects and that he sometimes ingested Seroquel and slept twelve to sixteen hours (always waking, it seemed, at night, uncomfortable and disoriented and unsure what to do, usually returning to sleep) he had gradually become unaware of day-to-day or week-to-week changes in his life — and, when he thought of himself in terms of months and years, he still viewed himself as in an “interim period,” which by definition, he felt, would end when his book tour began — so he viewed the trend, of fewer people and more drugs, as he might view a new waiter at Taco Chulo: “there, at some point,” separate from him, not of his concern, beyond his ability or desire to track or control.
When he wanted to know what happened two days ago, or five hours ago, especially chronologically, he would sense an impasse, in the form of a toll, which hadn’t been there before, payable by an amount of effort (not unlike that required in problem solving or essay writing) he increasingly felt unmotivated to exert. There were times when his memory, like an external hard drive that had been taken from him and hidden inside an unwieldy series of cardboard boxes, or placed at the end of a long and dark and messy corridor, required much more effort than he felt motivated to exert simply to locate, after which, he knew, more effort would be required to gain access. After two to five hours with no memory, some days, he would begin to view concrete reality as his memory — a place to explore idly, without concern, but somewhat pointlessly, aware that his actual existence was elsewhere, that he was, in a way, hiding here, away from where things actually happened, then were stored here, in his memory.