After blearily looking at the internet a little, then peeing and brushing his teeth and washing his face, he lay in darkness on his mattress, finally allowing the simple insistence of the opioid, like an unending chord progression with a consistently unexpected and pleasing manner of postponing resolution, to accumulate and expand, until his brain and heart and the rest of him were contained within the same song-like beating — of another, larger, protective heart — inside of which, temporarily safe from the outside world, he would shrink into the lunar city of himself and feel and remember strange and forgotten things, mostly from his childhood.
Paul’s book tour’s fourth reading — after another in Brooklyn and one at a Barnes & Noble in the financial district — was in Ohio, on September 11. Calvin, 18, and Maggie, 17, seniors in high school who’d been friends since middle school and were currently in a relationship, had invited Paul and Erin and other “internet friends” to read at a music festival and stay two nights in Calvin’s parents’ “mansion,” as Paul called it.
The day after the reading Paul and Erin ingested a little LSD and shared a chocolate containing psilocybin mushrooms and sat in sunlight in Calvin’s backyard, which had a hot tub and swimming pool and skateboard ramp and basketball hoop, “working on things” on their MacBooks. When Calvin returned from school they got in his SUV to go to Whole Foods, where Maggie was meeting them after work at American Apparel, and shared another chocolate. Calvin, who hadn’t wanted any, meekly asked if maybe he’d feel good if he ate only a small piece, seeming like he wanted to be encouraged to try.
“We already ate it,” said Paul, and laughed a little, in the backseat.
Erin, in the front passenger seat, was still holding a piece. Hearing Calvin she had seemed to slow its movement toward her mouth. She made a quiet, inquisitive noise and glanced slightly toward Paul, then resumed a normal speed and placed it inside her mouth. Paul lay on his back for most of the drive, sometimes sitting to noncommittally mumble something relevant, including that he liked Stereolab and Rainer Maria, to what he could hear of Calvin and Erin’s conversation. Walking toward Whole Foods, across its parking lot, Paul said he was “beginning to feel the LSD, maybe.”
“Really?” said Erin. “I feel. .”
“I don’t know,” said Paul.
“I can’t tell what I feel,” said Erin, and automatic doors opened and they entered the produce section, where they held and examined different coconuts. Calvin stood looking back, seeming tired and a little afraid, like a reclusive uncle supervising his unruly niece and outgoing nephew.
“You should get one,” said Paul. “It’s refreshing.”
“I’m. . allergic,” said Calvin a little nervously.
“Shit,” said Paul grinning. “I forgot. Again. Sorry.”
The next few minutes, while Paul and Erin went to three different sections — butcher, pizza, sushi — to get their coconuts opened, Calvin remained at a far distance, randomly and inattentively picking up and looking at things and sometimes glancing at Paul and Erin with a worried, socially anxious expression. Something about Calvin, maybe a corresponding distance or that they had similar body types, reminded Paul of Michelle, the night of the magazine-release party, waiting with slack posture at a red light, before she touched his arm and leaned on the metal fence. Paul, in line to pay, considered saying the word “Kafkaesque” to describe getting their coconuts opened, but was distracted by an eerily familiar actress’s smiling face on a magazine cover and remained silent, then paid and maneuvered to a booth and sat by Erin, across from Calvin, who stared at them with wet eyes and a beseeching, insatiable, inhibited expression that alternated between Paul and Erin to keep both, Paul thought, locked into his meekly laser-like gaze. Paul held his left hand like a visor to his forehead and looked down and sometimes said “oh my god.” Whenever he glanced at Erin, who seemed to be enjoyably displaying an unceasing grin, he laughed uncontrollably and, due to the contrast with Calvin’s alienated demeanor, felt more uncomfortable. Unsure how to stop grinning, or what to do, he left the booth for straws. When he returned, after feeling mischievous and Gollum-like for two to three minutes while trying to secretly record Erin and Calvin with his iPhone, he lowered himself skillfully, he felt, in a 180-degree turn, like that of a screw, to a seated position, flinging a straw at Erin while connecting the awning of his left hand to his forehead. He moved his coconut to his lap and heard a partially metallic, imaginary-sounding noise. He stared without comprehension, but also without confusion, at Calvin’s body, which was hunched close to the table with demonically jutting shoulder blades rising and falling in rhythm to what sounded like a computer-generated squawking. The cube of space containing Calvin seemed to be reconfiguring itself, against passive resistance from the preexisting configuration of Calvin, mutating him in a process of computerization. Paul thought he was witnessing a kind of special effect, then realized Calvin was imitating a pterodactyl.
“I feel so much better now,” said Calvin. “Just doing what I want. . what I want to do. . yeah. Before, I was holding back, so I felt bad. I feel so much better now.”
“You were making pterodactyl noises,” said Paul in disbelief.
Maggie appeared as a desultory object, rapidly approaching the booth in a horizontal glide, seeming unnaturally small and eerily low to the ground. “LSDs, LSDs,” she was saying in a high-pitched, taunting, witch-like voice. Paul, who was laughing and repeatedly saying “oh my god” and variations of “I can’t believe this is happening,” heard Calvin say “they’re not on LSD.” Maggie said “magic mushrooms” and seemed to be imitating an elf as she entered the booth behind Erin and Paul, who heard Erin say “we’re on LSD and mushrooms,” and briefly visualized the main character from Willow, the dwarf with magical powers. Things seemed defectively quiet, like before an explosion in a movie, the five to ten seconds before Maggie rose in the booth behind Paul, who turned and saw a faceless mound: Maggie, with her entire head inside a black beanie, saying “is this the front of me or back.”
In the parking lot Maggie went alone to her car. Calvin was backing out of his parking space when Paul, leaning forward from the backseat, said he wanted to be in Maggie’s car. Calvin braked and asked what to do, alternately looking at Paul and Erin with a helpless, besieged expression. Paul looked down a little, as if to suspend an intensity of visual input, to allow his brain to better focus on the question, but he wasn’t thinking about the question, or anything, except maybe something about how he wasn’t thinking anything, or was having problems thinking.