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Eight people were in Erin’s five-seat car, which had gotten lost on its way from Paul’s book-release reading in Brooklyn to DuMont Burger, also in Brooklyn, when it was stopped by a police car, in Manhattan, around two hundred feet from the Williamsburg Bridge. The officer shined a flashlight through the driver’s window at the backseat without bending to see what was there, then asked Erin, 24, who had driven four hours that day from Baltimore to attend Paul’s reading and visit friends, to step outside the car. Paul, in the front passenger seat, hadn’t seen Fran, who was sitting partly on him, or Daniel, in the backseat, in five or six weeks, except once, briefly and separately, at a Bret Easton Ellis reading three weeks ago, when they’d avoided each other, and Fran, without context, had shown Paul a text from Daniel insulting her in a strangely formal, almost aristocratic tone. Paul had communicated regularly, the past month, only with Charles, by email or Gmail chat, mostly about what food they had eaten, or were thinking about eating, to “console” themselves. After being more social, April to July, than any other period of his life, Paul had returned to his default lifestyle, which varied, to some degree, but generally entailed (1) avoiding most social situations (2) not wanting to sleep most nights and not knowing why — he’d wanted since 2006 to title one of his books I Don’t Want to Sleep but I Don’t Know What I’m Waiting For—resulting usually in four to ten hours of looking at the internet, reading, masturbating, etc. until morning, when he would eat something and sleep until night.
Erin, back in her car, said the officer had looked at her two-months-expired, out-of-state driver’s license an abnormally long time, like he’d forgotten what he was doing, before quietly saying “be careful” and allowing her to continue driving, in what seemed to be an egregious oversight, without a ticket or decreasing passengers.
Paul first learned of Erin twenty months ago, in January 2009, when she commented on his blog and he clicked her profile and read her pensive, melancholy, amusing accounts, on her blog, of her vague relationships and part-time bookstore job and nights drinking beer while looking at the internet and classes at the University of Baltimore, where she’d reenrolled after a two-year break. Paul found and read — and reread, with high levels of interest — three long stories, each focused on an unrequited or failed relationship, that she had published in online magazines. Erin, being an attractive and adventurous-seeming person, was probably almost always, Paul imagined, entering or leaving — or, in some way, maneuvering — one or more relationships, but probably, between relationships, as a person who seemed to enjoy being alone sometimes, would become more active on the internet, for weeks or months, which over months and years would overlap with Paul’s nearly continuously high levels of internet activity. They would gradually communicate more and maybe begin emailing and — if neither died, entered long relationships, or left the internet — eventually meet in person. Paul viewed this process as self-fulfilling, not something he wanted to track or manipulate, so after one or two weeks had mostly internalized Erin’s existence — as a busy person with a separate life, in a different city — and had stopped thinking about her by mid-February, when he met Michelle, with whom he was in a relationship both times, before tonight, that he met Erin in person.
The first time was in July, when Erin visited New York City for the release of Charles’ poetry book. The day after the release Paul was amused and excited for them, at a BBQ, when Charles said he had kissed Erin.
The second time was in September, one year ago, when Erin attended Paul’s reading in Baltimore. At a restaurant, with a large group of people, but talking only to each other, Paul asked about Charles, whom Erin had visited in August. Erin said she had changed her plane ticket and left earlier than planned because Charles had become gradually less affectionate, culminating with a night when, after sex, he said he didn’t feel anything for her, then consoled her, as she cried, in his kitchen. Paul liked Erin’s forthright, unhesitant, nonjudgmental answers and that she was able — already, despite what seemed like strong disappointment — to view and describe what had happened as at least partly amusing. When Erin asked about Michelle, as they walked to her car, Paul automatically said Michelle was “good” while distinctly recalling a recent night when he complained he always offered her food or drink before himself, then after Michelle said she’d be happy to do that, now that she knew it mattered to him, said it didn’t matter to him and she shouldn’t change. Exiting Erin’s car, at the hotel he was staying in for one night, because a mysterious Johns Hopkins professor, whose Face-book name was “Cloud Bat,” had bought him a room, Paul thought that if he weren’t in a relationship with Michelle he would ask Erin upstairs, where they would, he vaguely imagined, continue talking.
As Erin’s car slowly accelerated away from the police car, onto the Williamsburg Bridge, one person, then another, said they were illegally carrying drugs. After a peculiarly awkward, car-wide silence that became comical when someone asked if every person in the car was illegally carrying drugs, eliciting three affirmations and a sort of confirmatory announcement that every person — Erin, Paul, Daniel, Fran, Mitch, Juan, Jeannie, Jeremy — was illegally carrying drugs, there was the immediately space-filling noise of a small crowd laughing, which continued for around five seconds, during which Paul (who, in sharing his seat with Fran, was partly turned toward the driver’s window) watched the police car, or a police car, zoom past in the left lane, with emergency lights on and sirens off, quick and soundless as an apparition or the hologram of itself.
In DuMont Burger’s bathroom Paul swallowed half of half a 30mg Oxycodone and.5mg Xanax, feebly amused to be already deviating, in moderate excess, from his plans to ingest specific amounts of drugs at certain times during his book tour, September 7 to November 4. To determine what amount of what drugs — MDMA, LSD, any benzodiazepine, amphetamine, opiate — he should ingest, on what days, to minimize anxiety and boredom for himself and others, he’d edited the seven-page itinerary from his publisher to fit on one page and, in an idle process he’d enjoyed, the past few weeks, studied each event in context, writing notes on the paper. He’d printed a final draft, currently in his pocket, that said he should ingest something — specified, in most instances, by type and amount — before twenty-two of his twenty-five events and some miscellaneous things such as the day a writer from BlackBook was writing an article about “hanging out” with him while doing that.
Paul splashed water on his face, which he dried, then returned to his seat, next to Juan, who was talking to Jeremy about whether a horse could win “best athlete of the year.” Erin, the only person Paul felt like talking to, at the moment, was out of range, so when two acquaintances who didn’t know anyone else arrived Paul sat with them at a four-person table, where he felt self-conscious about the tenuousness of his situation — he hadn’t ordered food because he was nauseated from the Oxycodone and long car ride and he didn’t have anything he wanted to say to anyone. When a friend of the acquaintances arrived, sitting at the table’s fourth seat, Paul fixated on her — maybe partly to justify his increasingly pointless, idle presence — in an exaggerated manner (asking her questions continuously while sustaining a “concentrating expression” with such intensity, muddled by the onset of the drugs he’d used in the bathroom, that he sometimes felt able to sense the weight of the microscopic painting of the restaurant’s interior, decreased by a dimension and scaled down to almost nothing, resting on the top curvature of his right eyeball) that felt conducive to abruptly stopping and leaving, which he did, after around fifteen minutes of increasingly forced conversation, walking six blocks to his room.